Product Description

This volume offers, for the first time, accurate translations of a selection of writings from Nietzsche's late notebooks, dating from his last productive years between 1885 and 1889. Many of them have never before been published in English. They are translated by Kate Sturge from reliable texts in the Colli-Montinari edition, and edited by RÜdiger Bittner, whose introduction analyzes them in the context of Nietzsche's philosophy as a whole. This volume will be widely welcomed by all those working in Nietzsche studies.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #707364 in Books
• Published on: 2003-03-10
• Original language: German
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 332 pages

Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German

About the Author
Rüdieger Bittner is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bielefeld and author of Doing Things for Reasons (OUP 2001).

Kate Sturge is a freelance translator and a visiting lecturer at City University, London.

Customer Reviews

What's not said concerns me
Omissions by editor and translator concern me, and lead to this book's being less useful than it needs be for student use. Perhaps these will be fixed in a 2nd ed.

First, the translator says: "A large part of the present text has been available in English since the 1960's. . . ." Since 1968. That is the so-called "Will to Power" a pastiche of N's notes created by Gast and N's own notorious sister. Kaufmann and Hollingdale translated the WP, going back into N's original notes to clarify where Gast had tidied up too much.

Kaufmann in his notes to the text of WP explicitly indicates where parallel passages in WP have been incorporated into N's published works. In addition, he also identifies those of N's notes which remained unpublished.
Buy instead: The Will to Power

Sturge, the translator of this volume, does neither. Moreover, she nowhere indicates which of her passages do or do not form a part of WP. This makes it very difficult to compare her translation with those in WP. And, we are denied seeing just how many such passages there are. It would have been easy for her to compile such a list.

Second, both translator and editor, Bittner, totally ignore the vast output of work by Walter Kaufmann, both as translator and interpreter of N. Now, this goes beyond oddity. . . and should be corrected at least in the short section on suggested readings. How, for example, can Kaufmann's 4th ed of Nietzsche be passed over in silence.

Kaufmann started the reputable philosophical investigation of N back in the early 1950s at Princeton, where he taught until his death in 1980. A "must read" classic: Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist

Until matters of intellectual honesty get settled, it's pointless to go on to matters concerning N's philosophy itself. Let it be said, though, that Bittner has no ear for N's boundless irony and good humor.

Note: if you read German or Italian, N's Nachlass (the Notebooks) can be read in their entirety, untampered with. The editors in this case were two Italians, Colli and Montinari.

Sturge v. Hollingdale
Kate Sturge's translations are competitive with Hollingdale's, and her rendering of the textual emphases are quite effective; it's a shame she was not contracted to translate the rest of FN's published works starting from where Hollingdale left off for the Cambridge series.

The editor's introduction is academic on par with Maudmarie Clark. It is less helpful than useful, and less useful than accurate: it amounts to a smug repudiation of the WTP, and gloats at FN's 'failure' to translate it into a 'consistent' epistemological-ontological account. Skip it. It can only prejudice a beginner, and those familiar with the material will likely find it to be much ado on next to nothing in terms of thought.

The other reviews are mostly correct regarding the lack of citations as to which passages appeared in the WTP. A non-Kaufmann interfered, existentialised (read: bastardized) translation is much appreciated by this reviewer though. And the excuse for leaving out comments on women is a thoroughly stupid move, not a single thought towards regarding 'them' as an ideogram for Romanticism-Christianity-Socialism ect. and instead following their knee-jerk bourgeois reactions to guide editorial selection.

In short: great translation, reasonable selections of the otherwise yet to be translated into English Nachlass, facile and haughty introduction, access to specifics on Order Of Rank, detailed groundwork for BGE-GOM-AC-TW, and crucial political-economy questions, including those of 'breeding'. A great read and stimulating material, with some minor objections.

Leaves out comments about women, Germans
Modern readers are so picky in what they are willing to read that it is amazing so much has been picked from Nietzsche's late notebooks for our consideration. I even found something that I thought was good because it conforms entirely with my own way of thinking, when I am not thinking about women and Germans.

Just checking in WRITINGS FROM THE LATE NOTEBOOKS, which only has 2 pages mentioned in the index for superman, the idea seemed to apply to anyone whom Nietzsche did not consider part of the herd. It came up in his consideration of beauty:

The beautiful exists as little as does the good, the true. Each separate case is again a matter of the conditions of preservation for a particular kind of man: thus the value feeling of the beautiful will be aroused by different things for the man of the herd and for the exceptional and super-man. (p. 202).

Generally Nietzsche associates the superman with the secretion of a luxurious surplus from mankind, rather like Marx's theory of capitalists living off the surplus value of factory labor made possible by whoever owns the factory. For Nietzsche, the superman is only a metaphor for a stronger species, a higher type. To quote:

To show that an ever more economical use of men and mankind, a `machinery' of interests and actions ever more firmly entwined, necessarily implies a counter-movement. I call this the secretion of a luxurious surplus from mankind, which is to bring to light a stronger species, a higher type, the conditions of whose genesis and survival are different from those of the average man. As is well known, my concept, my metaphor for this type is the word `superman'. (p. 177).
That first path, which can now be perfectly surveyed, gives rise to adaptation, flattening-out, higher Chinesehood, modesty in instincts, contentment with the miniaturization of man -- a kind of standstill in man's level. Once we have that imminent, inevitable total economic administration of the earth, mankind will be able to find its best meaning as a piece of machinery in the administration's service: as a tremendous clockwork of ever smaller, ever more finely `adapted' cogs; as an ever-increasing superfluity of all the dominating and commanding elements; as a whole of tremendous force, whose individual factors represent minimal forces, minimal values. Against this miniaturisation and adaptation of men to more specialised usefulness, a reverse movement is required -- the generation of the synthesising, the summating, the justifying man whose existence depends on that mechanisation of mankind, as a substructure upon which he can invent for himself his higher way of being . . . (p. 177).
Just as much, he needs the antagonism of the masses, of the `levelled-out', the feeling of distance in relation to them; he stands upon them, lives off them. The higher form of aristocratism is that of the future. -- In moral terms, this total machinery, the solidarity of all the cogs, represents a maximum point in the exploitation of man: but it presupposes a kind of men for whose sake the exploitation has meaning. Otherwise, indeed, it would be just the overall reduction, value reduction of the human type -- a phenomenon of retrogression in the grandest style. (p. 177).
It can be seen that what I'm fighting is economic optimism: the idea that everyone's profit necessarily increases with the growing costs to everyone. It seems to me that the reverse is the case: the costs to everyone add up to an overall loss: man becomes less -- so that one no longer knows what this tremendous process was for. A `What for?', a new `What for? -- that is what mankind needs. . . (pp. 177-178).