Basic writings of Nietzsche - By Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche & Walter Arnold Kaufmann Page 0,262

or affection; i.e., impartial(ity).

2We strive for the forbidden: Ovid’s Amores, III, 4, 17. Cf. Beyond Good and Evil, section 227.

3Overweening pride—often ascribed to the heroes of Greek tragedies.

4I fight the universal spider.

5Fragwürdiger, würdiger zu fragen.

6The right of the first night.

7Something forbidden, or a prohibition.

8Sittlichkeit der Sitte: see Nietzsche’s Preface, section 4.

9Da? Unsittliche…an sich: an sich (in itself, the very essence of) and überall (everywhere) are not found in The Dawn but added by Nietzsche in the Genealogy. Where morality is identified with the traditional mores or customs, change is eo ipso immoral.

1Cross, nut, light. In one of Nietzsche’s notebooks we find this sketch for a title:

Nux et Crux

A Philosophy for Good Teeth

(Erich Podach, Ein Blick in Notizbücher Nietzsches, Heidelberg, Wolfgang Rothe, 1963 and errata slip).

1This passage throws a great deal of light on Nietzsche’s perspectivism and on his style and philosophical method.

1Dieser Verneinende…und Ja-schaffende: cf. Goethe, Faust, lines 1335ff., where Mephistopheles calls himself: “The spirit that negates [verneint]” and “part of that force which would I Do evil evermore, and yet creates the good.” In the next paragraph, the portrait of “the great experimenter” brings to mind Goethe’s Faust.

1Men of good will.

2“Fortunate and happy”: die Glücklichen. In the next sentence the word is rendered “the fortunate,” and Glück as “good fortune;” but in the next paragraph “happy” and “happiness” have been used, as Nietzsche evidently means both.

3Cf. Goethe’s letter to Frau von Stein, June 8, 1787: “Also, I must say myself, I think it true that humanity will triumph eventually, only I fear that at the same time the world will become a large hospital and each will become the other’s humane nurse.” In a letter to Rée, April 17, 1877, Nietzsche writes, “each the other’s ‘humane nurse.’”

4The dangers of the great nausea and the great pity are among the central motifs of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The theme of nausea is introduced in the chapter “On the Rabble” in Part Two and is encountered again and again in later chapters. Another chapter in Part Two bears the title “On the Pitying,” and the whole of Part Four, which bears a motto from that chapter, is cast in the form of a story: having overcome his nausea at the end of Part Three, Zarathustra’s final temptation is pity.

1The most striking illustration of this sentence is found in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground—and on February 23, 1887, not quite nine months before the publication of the Genealogy, Nietzsche wrote Overbeck about his accidental discovery of Dostoevsky in a bookstore, where he had chanced upon a French translation of that work: “my joy was extraordinary” (Portable Nietzsche.). In 1888 he wrote in section 45 of Twilight of the Idols: “The testimony of Dostoevsky is relevant to this problem—Dostoevsky, the only psychologist, incidentally, from whom I had something to learn; he ranks among the most beautiful strokes of fortune in my life, even more than my discovery of Stendhal….” (ibid.; cf. also pp. 601 and 603). See also note 8, section 24, below.

1Sentimental sorrow over the world’s woes.

2Nietzsche uses the English word “vegetarians.” The reference to Junker Christoph, who is mentioned once more later in this section, is presumably intended to allude to The Taming of the Shrew. “She eat no meat today, nor none shall eat” (IV. 2, line 200) is, of course, said by Petruchio, and in the accepted version of the play Christopher Sly, the drunken tinker who is made to believe that he is a lord, appears only in the “Induction” (or Prologue) and in one subsequent comment. But in The Taming of A (sic) Shrew (1594), which slightly antedates the accepted version and is attributed to Shakespeare by a few scholars, the characters introduced in the Induction make comments from time to time throughout the play.

3The second strategy is introduced at the beginning of section 18.

4One must make oneself stupid: in the famous passage in the Pensées in which Pascal’s wager is found.

5Nietzsche uses the English word; also “training” later in the same sentence and in some later passages.

6A sect of mystics that originated among the monks on Mount Athos in the fourteenth century.

7Paul Deussen (1845–1919) translated sixty Upanishads into German, wrote pioneering works on the Vedanta and on Indian philosophy generally, as well as a multi-volume history of philosophy—and Erinnerungen an Friedrich Nietzsche (Leipzig, Brockhaus, 1901: “Reminiscences of Friedrich Nietzsche”).

1Lack of care of self.

2Self-contempt. Arnold Geulincx (1624–1669) was a Belgian philosopher.

1Here as much as anywhere Freud is Nietzsche’s great heir who did more than anyone else to change the