See, for example, the cover of the 8 June 1981 issue of Der Spiegel, where it states, “Nietzsche thinker, Hitler doer.”
See Steven Aschheim’s The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
Even talking about being faithful to a text or making Nietzsche internally consistent is problematic and is dependent on dubious presuppositions; see my “On Making Nietzsche Consistent,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 31, no. 1 (spring 1993).
See GS, 13; KGW V/2, 58–60.
WP, 1067; KGW VII/3, 38[12], 338–39.
See particularly R. J. Hollingdale’s Nietzsche (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973) and Harold Alderman’s Nietzsche’s Gift (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1977).
See Walter Kaufmann’s introduction to his translation of The Will to Power (New York: Random House, 1968, xvi) and his Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (New York: World Publishing Co., 1966).
Both Hollingdale and Alderman come to this conclusion.
See especially “On Truth and Lie in the Extramoral Sense,” The Gay Science, 354; Beyond Good and Evil, 17; and On the Genealogy of Morals I, 13. There are, of course, many other places where Nietzsche talks about the limitations of language.
I first encountered this division in Kaufmann’s Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. These divisions have some rhyme and reason to them, although I think there are some “transition” books that make the breaks between periods not as distinct as Kaufmann suggests they are.
See Bernd Magnus’s Nietzsche’s Existential Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), especially chapter 2.
See, especially, D, 432; KGW V/1, 270.
Kaufmann, Nietzsche, 153.
See Linda L. Williams’s “Will to Power in Nietzsche’s Published Works and the Nachlass,” The Journal of the History of Ideas (July 1996), 447–63.
The idea that science rests on cause and effect comes from Schopenhauer. See Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, trans. and ed. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1969), 28–29.
See BGE, 260; KGW VI/2, 218.
See AC, 24; KGW VI/3, 189–91.
GM, preface, 6; KGW VI/2, 264–65.
See GM I, 5; KGW VI/2, 263–64.
See BGE, 32; KGW VI/2, 46-47.
Kaufmann states that ressentiment should not be translated into the English “resentment,” but it is not clear why it should not be. The only reason I can find that Kaufmann provides is that ressentiment now is a fairly technical term in psychology. But “resentment” (albeit sublimated) seems to adequately capture the meaning of Nietzsche’s ressentiment. See Kaufmann’s “Editor’s Introduction” to his translation of On the Genealogy of Morals for his discussion.
Gilles Deleuze makes a similar claim about will to power being both active and reactive in his Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). I independently came to this conclusion in my doctoral dissertation, “Nietzsche’s Doctrines of Will to Power: Some Recent Anglo-American Approaches” (University of California at Riverside, 1983).
See BGE, 263; KGW VI/2, 227–28.
Of course it could be argued that when the acts these words describe are directed toward or involve humans, then the acts are immoral or evil. Ore is one thing; human beings are another. That might be why Nietzsche eventually tinkers with a theory that attempts to eliminate the distinction between animate and inanimate objects in some of the Nachlass entries.
For another interpretation of will to power being active and reactive, see Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy.
This “bulk” consists of approximately thirty aphorisms out of the thousands Nietzsche authorized for publication. More on this subject will be presented in chapter 3.
Note that the tarantula is a metaphor for ressentimient in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
See Maudemarie Clark’s interesting article, “Nietzsche’s Doctrines of the Will to Power,” Nietzsche-Studien 11 (1982), 458–68.
See BGE, 16–17; KGW VI/2, 23–25.
See David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature (London: Oxford University Press,1975), especially part 3.
See Maudemarie Clark’s discussion of Beyond Good and Evil 36 in Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 212–20.
George Stack comes to a similar conclusion from a different analysis of Beyond Good and Evil 36 in Man, Knowledge, and Will to Power (Durango, Colo.: Hollowbrook Press, 1994), especially 271–74.
See George Stack, Lange and Nietzsche (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1983).
Stack makes a similar claim in his book Man, Knowledge, and Will to Power (Durango, Colo.: Hollowbrook, 1994); see especially chapter 8.
WP, 715; KGW VIII/2, 11(73).
See Larry Wright, Teleological Explanations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).
See GS, 344; KGW V/2, 259. See also WP, 1048; KGW VIII/1, 2(186), 157–58.
R. J. Hollingdale, Nietzsche (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973).
See KGW VIII/3, 19(8), 347.
Bernd Magnus, “The Use and Abuse of The Will to Power,” in Reading Nietzsche, ed. Robert Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
Ibid., 220–21.
Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. David Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 8–9.
Stanley Rosen makes a similar claim in The Question of Being: A Reversal of Heidegger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); see especially chapter 6.
Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, “Nietzsches Lehre vom Willen zur Macht,” NietzscheStudien 3 (1974), 1–60.
See WP, 693; KGW VIII/3, 14(80), 52.
Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 210.
See KSA XI, 724–26.
See Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy; Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature; and Reudiger H. Grimm, Nietzsche’s Theory of Knowledge.
For the purposes of this introductory discussion, I will not engage in the more technical philosophical discussion over the fine distinctions among sentences, statements, and propositions. I use sentences and statements interchangeably, but I could also say propositions.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty accuses Descartes of such an oversight when Descartes neglects to doubt language in Meditations on the First Philosophy; see Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), part 3, chapter 1.
The Liar’s Paradox, most succinctly put, begins with me saying that everything I tell you is a lie. I then say that I’m lying. If everything I say is a lie, then my telling you I’m lying must be a lie, but then I am saying something true—I’m (truly) lying. This would be impossible if everything I say is a lie.
See BGE, 2; KGW VI/2, 10.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. Serge Shishkoff (New York: Thomas Crowell Co., 1969), 12.
Laurence Hatab argues that democracy does not entail equality in A Nietzschean Defense of Democracy (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1995).
Arthur Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).
Bernd Magnus, “Self-Consuming Concepts,” International Studies in Philosophy 21, no. 2, 1989.
See especially D, 121, 243, 263, 481; KGW V/1, 113, 204–05, 212, 289–90.
Walter Kaufmann surmises that Nietzsche could be talking about Socrates in the Beyond Good and Evil aphorism but that, by Ecce Homo, Nietzsche is talking about himself.
See Ecce Homo, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” 1; KGW VI/3, 333–35.
Bernd Magnus, Nietzsche’s Existential Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 142.
Ibid., 143.
GM III, 28; KGW VI/2, 430.
Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche’s Teaching (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 149.
Kathleen Higgins, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 187.
I put science in scare quotes because the great human being recognizes that science is also a creative, artistic endeavor in the first place, unlike the typical nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientist, who believes he or she is discovering Truths about the nature of reality.
See GS, 13; KGW V/2, 58–60.
Of course, there are no objectively “terrible” acts. In Nietzsche’s view, acts are good or bad not according to the act itself but only according to who performs the act, and this is not “objectively” determined.
See Erik Parens, “From Philosophy to Politics: On Nietzsche’s Ironic Metaphysics of Will to Power,” Man and World 24 (1991), 169–80.
I am thinking that some deconstructionists, like Jacques Derrida, would have a more playful time with interpreting will to power. See Derrida, Spurs, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). Another way to play with Nietzsche is presented by Luce Irigaray in Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Gilliam C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
See BGE, 211; KGW VI/2, 148–49.
See my “On Making Nietzsche Consistent,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 31, no. 1 (spring 1993).