Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche – serie

Written on the threshold of Thus Spoke Zarathustra during a high point of social, intellectual and psychic vibrancy, The Joyful Science (frequently translated as The Gay Science) is one of Nietzsche's thematically tighter books. Here he debuts and practices the art of amor fati, love of fate, to explore what is "species preserving" in relation to happiness (Book One); inspiration and the role of art as they keep us mentally fit for inhabiting a world dominated by science (Book Two); the challenges of living authentically and overcoming after the death of God (Book Three); and the crescendo of life affirmation in which Nietzsche revealed the doctrine of eternal recurrence and previewed the figure of Zarathustra (Book Four). Invigorated and motivated by Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche in 1887 added a new preface, an appendix of poems, and Book Five, where he deepened the critique of science and displayed a more genealogical approach. This volume provides the first English translation of the Idylls from Messina and, more importantly, it includes the first English translation of the notebooks of 1881–1882, in which Nietzsche first formulated the eternal recurrence. Structurally and stylistically, The Joyful Science remains Nietzsche's most effective book of aphorisms, immediately after which he took on the voice and alter ego of Zarathustra in order to push beyond the boundaries of even the most liberating prose.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra stands alone among Nietzsche's published works as a poetic and narrative rendering of his most sophisticated ideas through the medium of Zarathustra's uniquely prophetic voice. It is also the first place where Nietzsche proposes his theory of will to power, and it is the only place in his published works where he elaborates his concept of the superhuman and his doctrine of eternal recurrence. Nietzsche himself regarded this book as his most important philosophical contribution because it proposes solutions to the problems he poses but does not resolve in his other works—for example, his cure for the human disposition to vengefulness and his creation of new values as the antidote to nihilism.This translation precisely and consistently renders each element so that readers may experience Nietzsche's phrasing, wit, and wordplay in equivalent English. The extensive editorial notes in this edition include numerous cross-references to earlier drafts and variants that are found in his notebooks, and published in Volumes 14 and 15 of The Complete Works, thus allowing the reader to view the evolution of Nietzsche's thought from first drafts to their final published versions. The Translators' Afterword includes a discussion of translation issues unique to Zarathustra, and a glossary of key terms, as well as a discussion of Nietzsche's views concerning this book's contributions to the development of the German language.

Beyond Good and Evil is Nietzsche's first sustained philosophical treatment of issues important to him. Unlike the expository prose of the essayistic period (1872-76), the stylized forays and jabs of the aphoristic period (1878-82), and the lyrical-philosophical rhetoric of the Zarathustra-period (1882-85), Beyond Good and Evil inscribes itself boldly into the history of philosophy, challenging ancient and modern notions of philosophy's achievements and insisting on a new task for "new philosophers." This is a watershed book for Nietzsche and for philosophy in the modern era. On the Genealogy of Morality applies Nietzsche's celebrated genealogical method, honed in the earlier aphoristic writings, to the problem of morality's influence on the human species. In three treatises that strikingly anticipate insights appearing much later in Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Nietzsche provides an anthropological psychograph of our species, revealing the origins of the concepts of good and evil, the roles played by guilt and bad conscience, and the persistence of ascetic ideals. Manifesting a hopeful yet unsentimental assessment of the human condition, these books resonated throughout the 20th century and continue to exert broad appeal.

The year 1888 marked the last year of Friedrich Nietzsche's intellectual career and the culmination of his philosophical development. In that final productive year, he worked on six books, all of which are now, for the first time, presented in English in a single volume. Together these new translations provide a fundamental and complete introduction to Nietzsche's mature thought and to the virtuosity and versatility of his most fully developed style.The writings included here have a bold, sometimes radical tone that can be connected to Nietzsche's rising profile and growing confidence. In The Antichrist, we are offered an extended critique of Christianity and Christian morality alongside blunt diagnoses of contemporary Europe's cultural decadence. In Dionysus Dithyrambs we are presented with his only work composed exclusively of poetry, and in Twilight of the Idols we find a succinct summary of his mature philosophical views. At times the works are also openly personal, as in The Case of Wagner, which presents Nietzsche's attempt to settle accounts with his former close friend, German composer Richard Wagner, and in his provocative autobiography, Ecce Homo, which sees Nietzsche taking stock of his past and future while also reflecting on many of his earlier texts.Scrupulously edited, this critical volume also includes commentary by esteemed Nietzsche scholar Andreas Urs Sommer. Through this new collection, students and scholars are given an essential introduction to Nietzsche's late thought.

This volume in The Complete Works presents the first English translations of Nietzsche's unpublished notebooks from Winter 1874/1875 through 1878, the period in which he developed the mixed aphoristic-essayistic mode that continued across the rest of his career. These notebooks comprise a range of different materials, including early drafts and near-final versions of aphorisms that would appear in both volumes of Human, All Too Human. Additionally, there are extensive notes for a never-completed Unfashionable Observation that was to be titled "We Philologists," early drafts for the final sections of "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth," plans for other possible publications, and detailed reading notes on philologists, philosophers, and historians of his era, including Friedrich August Wolf, Eugen Dühring, and Jacob Burckhardt. Through this volume, readers gain insight into Nietzsche's emerging sense of himself as a composer of complexly orchestrated, stylistically innovative philosophical meditations—influenced by, but moving well beyond, the modes used by aphoristic precursors such as Goethe, La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, and Schopenhauer. Further, these notebooks allow readers to trace more closely Nietzsche's development of ideas that remain central to his mature philosophy, such as the contrast between free and constrained spirits, the interplay of national, supra-national, and personal identities, and the cultural centrality of the process of Bildung as formation, education, and cultivation. With this latest book in the series, Stanford continues its English-language publication of the famed Colli-Montinari edition of Nietzsche's complete works, which include the philosopher's notebooks and early unpublished writings. Scrupulously edited so as to establish a new standard for the field, each volume includes an Afterword that presents and contextualizes the material it contains.

This volume provides the first English translation of Nietzsche's unpublished notes from late 1879 to early 1881, the period in which he authored Dawn, the second book in the trilogy that began with Human, All Too Human and concluded with The Joyful Science.In these fragments, we see Nietzsche developing the conceptual triad of morals, customs, and ethics, which undergirds his critique of morality as the reification into law or dogma of conceptions of good and evil. Here, Nietzsche assesses Christianity's role in the determination of moral values as the highest values and of redemption as the representation of humanity's highest aspirations. These notes show the resulting tension between Nietzsche's contrasting thoughts on modernity, which he critiques as an unrecognized aftereffect of the Christian worldview, but also views as the springboard to "the dawn" of a transformed humanity and culture. The fragments further allow readers insight into Nietzsche's continuous internal debate with exemplary figures in his own life and culture—Napoleon, Schopenhauer, and Wagner—who represented challenges to hitherto existing morals and culture—challenges that remained exemplary for Nietzsche precisely in their failure. Presented in Nietzsche's aphoristic style, Dawn is a book that must be read between the lines, and these fragments are an essential aid to students and scholars seeking to probe this work and its partners.

With this latest book in the series, Stanford continues its English-language publication of the famed Colli-Montinari edition of Nietzsche's complete works, which include the philosopher's notebooks and early unpublished writings. Scrupulously edited so as to establish a new standard for the field, each volume includes an Afterword that presents and contextualizes the material therein.This volume provides the first English translation of Nietzsche's unpublished notebooks from 1882–1884, the period in which he was composing the book that he considered his best and most important work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Crucial transitional documents in Nietzsche's intellectual development, the notebooks mark a shift into what is widely regarded as the philosopher's mature period. They reveal his long-term design of a fictional tetralogy charting the philosophical, pedagogical, and psychological journeys of his alter-ego, Zarathustra. Here, in nuce, appear Zarathustra's teaching about the death of God; his discovery that the secret of life is the will to power; and his most profound and most frightening thought—that his own life, human history, and the entire cosmos will eternally return. During this same period, Nietzsche was also composing preparatory notes for his next book, Beyond Good and Evil, and the notebooks are especially significant for the insight they provide into his evolving theory of drives, his critical ideas about the nature and history of morality, and his initial thoughts on one of his best-known concepts, the superhuman (Übermensch).

This volume provides the first English translation of Nietzsche's unpublished notes from the spring of 1884 through the winter of 1884–85, the period in which he was composing the fourth and final part of his favorite work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. These notebooks therefore provide special insight into Nietzsche's philosophical concept of superior humans,as well as important clues to the identities of the famous nineteenth-century European figures who inspired Nietzsche's invention of fictional characters such as "the prophet," "the sorcerer," and "the ugliest human."In these notebooks, Nietzsche also further explores ideas that were introduced in the first three parts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Zarathustra's teaching about the death of God; his proclamation that it is time for humankind to overcome itself and create the superhumans; his discovery that the secret of life is the will to power; and his most profound thought—that the entire cosmos will eternally return.Readers will encounter here a wealth of material that Nietzsche would include in his next book, Beyond Good and Evil, as he engages the ideas of Kant and Schopenhauer, challenges cultural icons like Richard Wagner, and mercilessly exposes the foibles of his contemporaries, especially of his fellow Germans. Readers will also discover an extensive collection of Nietzsche's poetry. Richly annotated and accompanied by a detailed translators' afterword, this volume showcases the cosmopolitanism at work in Nietzsche's multifaceted and critical exploration of aesthetic and cultural influences that transcend national (and nationalist) notions of literature, music, and culture.

The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche will publish in its entirety, for the first time, an English translation of the full contents of the Kritische Studienausgabe.This volume of the Complete Works provides the first English translation of Nietzsche's unpublished notes from Summer 1886 through Fall 1887. In these writings we find drafts of new prefaces for the second editions of his earlier works, notes for the soon-to-appear On the Genealogy of Morality, and crucially, fragments and plans for an anticipated "master work" under the title "The Will to Power." This projected work, as is now well-known, was never written by Nietzsche; instead, it was fraudulently assembled by his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and his friend Heinrich Köselitz (a.k.a. Peter Gast) and published under Nietzsche's name after his death. Only now, with the publication of this volume and the ones that precede and follow it, are English readers able to examine for themselves the full set of unpublished writings of the last creative period of Nietzsche's life. Taking into account the latest editorial work on his final notebooks, and including a detailed account by Mazzino Montinari of Nietzsche's decision not to complete a "master work," this volume documents the evolution of Nietzsche's thinking on such important themes as nihilism, eternal recurrence, and the revaluation of all values as it presents his late Nachlass free from the distortions perpetrated against it over a century ago.

This new translation is the first to be published in a twenty-volume English-language edition of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, the first complete, critical, and annotated translation of all of Nietzsche's work. The Stanford edition is based on the Colli-Montinari edition, which has received universal praise: "It has revolutionized our understanding of one of the greatest German thinkers"; "Scholars can be confident for the first time of having a trustworthy text."Under the title Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, Nietzsche collected four essays published separately between 1873 and 1876: "David Strauss the Confessor and the Writer," "On the Utility and Liability of History for Life," "Schopenhauer as Educator," and "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth." The title, newly translated as Unfashionable Observations, spells out the common impulse linking these essays: Nietzsche's inimical attitude toward his "time," understood broadly as all the mainstream and popular movements that constituted contemporary European, but especially German, "culture" in the wake of the Prussian military victory over the French in 1871.The Unfashionable Observations are foundational works for Nietzsche's entire philosophy, prefiguring both his characteristic philosophical style and many of the major ideas he would develop in his later writings. This is the first English translation to include Nietzsche's variants to the published text.

This is the third volume to appear in an edition that will be the first complete, critical, and annotated English translation of all of Nietzsche's work. Volume 2: Unfashionable Observations, translated by Richard T. Gray, was published in 1995; Volume 3: Human, All Too Human (I), translated by Gary Handwerk, was published in 1997. The edition is a new English translation, by various hands, of the celebrated Colli-Montinari edition, which has been acclaimed as one of the most important works of scholarship in the humanities in the last half century.The present volume provides for the first time English translations of all of Nietzsche's unpublished notebooks from the summer of 1872 to the end of 1874. The major works published in this period were the first three Unfashionable Observations: "David Strauss the Confessor and the Writer," "On the Utility and Liability of History for Life," and "Schopenhauer as Educator." Translations of the preliminary notes for these pieces are coordinated with the translations of the published texts printed in Volume 2: Unfashionable Observations.The content of these notebooks goes far beyond the notes and plans for published and unpublished Unfashionable Observations, encompassing numerous sketches related to Nietzsche's major philological project from this period, a book on the pre-Platonic Greek philosophers. The ideas that emerged from Nietzsche's deliberations on these early Greek thinkers are absolutely central to his thought from this period and contribute in significant ways to the development of several of his major themes: the role of the philosopher vis-à-vis his age and the surrounding culture; the relationships among philosophy, art, and culture; the metaphorical nature of language and its relationship to knowledge; the unmasking of the modern drive for absolute "truth" as a palliative against the horror of existence; and Nietzsche's "unfashionable" attack on modern science and modern culture, especially on the Germany of the Bismarck Reich. These notebooks represent important transitional documents in Nietzsche's intellectual development, marking, among other things, the shift away from philological studies toward unabashed cultural criticism.

This is the second volume to appear in an edition that will be the first complete, critical, and annotated English translation of all of Nietzsche's work. Volume 2: Unfashionable Observations, translated by Richard T. Gray, was published in 1995. The edition is a new English translation, by various hands, of the celebrated Colli-Montinari edition, which has been acclaimed as one of the most important works of scholarship in the humanities in the last quarter century. The original Italian edition was simultaneously published in French, German, and Japanese.This volume of Human, All Too Human, the first of two parts, is the earliest of Nietzsche's works in which his philosophical concerns and methodologies can be glimpsed. In this work Nietzsche began to establish the intellectual difference from his own cultural milieu and time that makes him our contemporary. Published in 1878, it marks both a stylistic and an intellectual shift away from Nietzsche's own youthful affiliation with Romantic excesses of German thought and culture typified by Wagnerian opera.

During his early years in Basel, as professor of classical philology, Nietzsche develops an original understanding of ancient Greek poetry, philosophy, and culture, alongside a biting critique of contemporary German society and a call for its reform. These years see him publish his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, where tragic drama is understood as the harmonizing of Apollonian and Dionysian drives. In it, Nietzsche traces the rise of tragedy as an art form, diagnoses its demise at the hands of Socratic rationalism, and champions its revival in Wagnerian music drama, as part of a larger project of German national renewal. The unpublished texts gathered here allow us to see The Birth of Tragedy within the larger context of Nietzsche's concerns at this time and chart the compositional and interpretive development of that first book while revealing some roads not taken. Included also are three book-length projects: On the Future of Our Educational Institutions, a literary presentation of a program for sweeping educational reform in the name of producing the genius; Five Prefaces to Five Unwritten Books, a set of short philosophical, cultural, and historical interventions; and Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, an investigation of early Greek philosophy in its cultural context. The celebrated essay "On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense," and two short pro-Wagner pieces, "Exhortation to the Germans" and "A New Year's Word for the Editor of the Weekly Im neuen Reich," round out this essential collection of early writings. Extensive translators' annotations supply critical background information and context for Nietzsche's comments on ancient Greek and contemporary German culture.

During his early years in Basel, as professor of classical philology, Nietzsche develops an original understanding of ancient Greek poetry, philosophy, and culture, alongside a biting critique of contemporary German society and a call for its reform. These years see him publish his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, where tragic drama is understood as the harmonizing of Apollonian and Dionysian drives. In it, Nietzsche traces the rise of tragedy as an art form, diagnoses its demise at the hands of Socratic rationalism, and champions its revival in Wagnerian music drama, as part of a larger project of German national renewal. The unpublished texts gathered here allow us to see The Birth of Tragedy within the larger context of Nietzsche's concerns at this time and chart the compositional and interpretive development of that first book while revealing some roads not taken. Included also are three book-length projects: On the Future of Our Educational Institutions, a literary presentation of a program for sweeping educational reform in the name of producing the genius; Five Prefaces to Five Unwritten Books, a set of short philosophical, cultural, and historical interventions; and Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, an investigation of early Greek philosophy in its cultural context. The celebrated essay "On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense," and two short pro-Wagner pieces, "Exhortation to the Germans" and "A New Year's Word for the Editor of the Weekly Im neuen Reich," round out this essential collection of early writings. Extensive translators' annotations supply critical background information and context for Nietzsche's comments on ancient Greek and contemporary German culture.

Dawn is the most recent volume to appear in the first complete, critical, and annotated English edition of all of Nietzsche's work. The edition, organized originally by Ernst Behler and Bernd Magnus, is a translation of the celebrated Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden (1980) edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. The book is the first to appear under the editorial direction of Alan D. Schrift, Keith Ansell-Pearson, and Duncan Large, and to incorporate subsequent corrections to the 1980 edition.Continuing the positivistic turn of Human, All Too Human, Dawn is the second installment in the free spirit trilogy that culminated in The Joyful Science. One of Nietzsche's "yes-saying" books, it marks his first significant confrontation with morality and offers glimpses of many of the signature themes in his mature works. Dawn has come to be admired in recent years for its ethical naturalism, psychological observations, and therapeutic insights. Presented in Nietzsche's aphoristic style, it is a text with hidden riches, one that must be read between the lines and one that the discerning reader will admire and cherish.

Volume 4 of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche contains two works, Mixed Opinions and Maxims (1879) and The Wanderer and His Shadow (1880), originally published separately, then republished together in the 1886 edition of Nietzsche's works. They mingle aphorisms drawn from notebooks of 1875-79, years when worsening health forced Nietzsche toward an increasingly solitary existence. Like its predecessor, Human, All Too Human II is above all an act of resistance not only to the intellectual influences that Nietzsche felt called upon to critique, but to the basic physical facts of his daily life. It turns an increasingly sharply formulated genealogical method of analysis toward Nietzsche's persistent concerns—metaphysics, morality, religion, art, style, society, politics and culture. The notebook entries included here offer a window into the intellectual sources behind Nietzsche's evolution as a philosopher, the reading and self-reflection that nourished his lines of thought. The linking of notebook entries to specific published aphorisms, included in the notes, allows readers of Nietzsche in English to trace for the first time the intensive process of revision through which he transformed raw notebook material into the finely crafted sequences of aphoristic reflection that signal his distinctiveness as a philosophical stylist.

Beyond Good and Evil is Nietzsche's first sustained philosophical treatment of issues important to him. Unlike the expository prose of the essayistic period (1872-76), the stylized forays and jabs of the aphoristic period (1878-82), and the lyrical-philosophical rhetoric of the Zarathustra-period (1882-85), Beyond Good and Evil inscribes itself boldly into the history of philosophy, challenging ancient and modern notions of philosophy's achievements and insisting on a new task for "new philosophers." This is a watershed book for Nietzsche and for philosophy in the modern era. On the Genealogy of Morality applies Nietzsche's celebrated genealogical method, honed in the earlier aphoristic writings, to the problem of morality's influence on the human species. In three treatises that strikingly anticipate insights appearing much later in Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Nietzsche provides an anthropological psychograph of our species, revealing the origins of the concepts of good and evil, the roles played by guilt and bad conscience, and the persistence of ascetic ideals. Manifesting a hopeful yet unsentimental assessment of the human condition, these books resonated throughout the 20th century and continue to exert broad appeal.

With this latest book in the series, Stanford continues its English-language publication of the famed Colli-Montinari edition of Nietzsche's complete works, which include the philosopher's notebooks and early unpublished writings. Scrupulously edited so as to establish a new standard for the field, each volume includes an Afterword that presents and contextualizes the material therein.This volume provides the first English translation of Nietzsche's unpublished notebooks from 1882–1884, the period in which he was composing the book that he considered his best and most important work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Crucial transitional documents in Nietzsche's intellectual development, the notebooks mark a shift into what is widely regarded as the philosopher's mature period. They reveal his long-term design of a fictional tetralogy charting the philosophical, pedagogical, and psychological journeys of his alter-ego, Zarathustra. Here, in nuce, appear Zarathustra's teaching about the death of God; his discovery that the secret of life is the will to power; and his most profound and most frightening thought—that his own life, human history, and the entire cosmos will eternally return. During this same period, Nietzsche was also composing preparatory notes for his next book, Beyond Good and Evil, and the notebooks are especially significant for the insight they provide into his evolving theory of drives, his critical ideas about the nature and history of morality, and his initial thoughts on one of his best-known concepts, the superhuman (Übermensch).

This volume of The Complete Works provides the first English translation of all Nietzsche's unpublished notes from April 1885 to the summer of 1886, the period in which he wrote his breakthrough philosophical books Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality. Keen to reinvent himself after Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the philosopher used these unpublished notes to chart his search for a new philosophical voice. The notebooks contain copious drafts of book titles; critical retrospection on his earlier projects; a critique of the feminine; prophetic commentary on Germany; and forays into metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and language. They also reveal his deep concern for Europe and its future and a burgeoning presence of the Dionysian. We learn what Nietzsche was reading and from whom he borrowed, and we find a considerable portion of notes and fragments from the non-book "Will to Power," though here they are unembellished and unmediated. Richly annotated and accompanied by a detailed translator's afterword, this landmark volume sheds light on the controversy surrounding the Nachlass of the 1880s.

The year 1888 marked the last year of Friedrich Nietzsche's intellectual career and the culmination of his philosophical development. In that final productive year, he worked on six books, all of which are now, for the first time, presented in English in a single volume. Together these new translations provide a fundamental and complete introduction to Nietzsche's mature thought and to the virtuosity and versatility of his most fully developed style.The writings included here have a bold, sometimes radical tone that can be connected to Nietzsche's rising profile and growing confidence. In The Antichrist, we are offered an extended critique of Christianity and Christian morality alongside blunt diagnoses of contemporary Europe's cultural decadence. In Dionysus Dithyrambs we are presented with his only work composed exclusively of poetry, and in Twilight of the Idols we find a succinct summary of his mature philosophical views. At times the works are also openly personal, as in The Case of Wagner, which presents Nietzsche's attempt to settle accounts with his former close friend, German composer Richard Wagner, and in his provocative autobiography, Ecce Homo, which sees Nietzsche taking stock of his past and future while also reflecting on many of his earlier texts.Scrupulously edited, this critical volume also includes commentary by esteemed Nietzsche scholar Andreas Urs Sommer. Through this new collection, students and scholars are given an essential introduction to Nietzsche's late thought.

This volume in The Complete Works presents the first English translations of Nietzsche's unpublished notebooks from Winter 1874/1875 through 1878, the period in which he developed the mixed aphoristic-essayistic mode that continued across the rest of his career. These notebooks comprise a range of different materials, including early drafts and near-final versions of aphorisms that would appear in both volumes of Human, All Too Human. Additionally, there are extensive notes for a never-completed Unfashionable Observation that was to be titled "We Philologists," early drafts for the final sections of "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth," plans for other possible publications, and detailed reading notes on philologists, philosophers, and historians of his era, including Friedrich August Wolf, Eugen Dühring, and Jacob Burckhardt. Through this volume, readers gain insight into Nietzsche's emerging sense of himself as a composer of complexly orchestrated, stylistically innovative philosophical meditations—influenced by, but moving well beyond, the modes used by aphoristic precursors such as Goethe, La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, and Schopenhauer. Further, these notebooks allow readers to trace more closely Nietzsche's development of ideas that remain central to his mature philosophy, such as the contrast between free and constrained spirits, the interplay of national, supra-national, and personal identities, and the cultural centrality of the process of Bildung as formation, education, and cultivation. With this latest book in the series, Stanford continues its English-language publication of the famed Colli-Montinari edition of Nietzsche's complete works, which include the philosopher's notebooks and early unpublished writings. Scrupulously edited so as to establish a new standard for the field, each volume includes an Afterword that presents and contextualizes the material it contains.

This volume provides the first English translation of Nietzsche's unpublished notes from the spring of 1884 through the winter of 1884–85, the period in which he was composing the fourth and final part of his favorite work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. These notebooks therefore provide special insight into Nietzsche's philosophical concept of superior humans,as well as important clues to the identities of the famous nineteenth-century European figures who inspired Nietzsche's invention of fictional characters such as "the prophet," "the sorcerer," and "the ugliest human."In these notebooks, Nietzsche also further explores ideas that were introduced in the first three parts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Zarathustra's teaching about the death of God; his proclamation that it is time for humankind to overcome itself and create the superhumans; his discovery that the secret of life is the will to power; and his most profound thought—that the entire cosmos will eternally return.Readers will encounter here a wealth of material that Nietzsche would include in his next book, Beyond Good and Evil, as he engages the ideas of Kant and Schopenhauer, challenges cultural icons like Richard Wagner, and mercilessly exposes the foibles of his contemporaries, especially of his fellow Germans. Readers will also discover an extensive collection of Nietzsche's poetry. Richly annotated and accompanied by a detailed translators' afterword, this volume showcases the cosmopolitanism at work in Nietzsche's multifaceted and critical exploration of aesthetic and cultural influences that transcend national (and nationalist) notions of literature, music, and culture.

Written on the threshold of Thus Spoke Zarathustra during a high point of social, intellectual and psychic vibrancy, The Joyful Science (frequently translated as The Gay Science) is one of Nietzsche's thematically tighter books. Here he debuts and practices the art of amor fati, love of fate, to explore what is "species preserving" in relation to happiness (Book One); inspiration and the role of art as they keep us mentally fit for inhabiting a world dominated by science (Book Two); the challenges of living authentically and overcoming after the death of God (Book Three); and the crescendo of life affirmation in which Nietzsche revealed the doctrine of eternal recurrence and previewed the figure of Zarathustra (Book Four). Invigorated and motivated by Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche in 1887 added a new preface, an appendix of poems, and Book Five, where he deepened the critique of science and displayed a more genealogical approach. This volume provides the first English translation of the Idylls from Messina and, more importantly, it includes the first English translation of the notebooks of 1881–1882, in which Nietzsche first formulated the eternal recurrence. Structurally and stylistically, The Joyful Science remains Nietzsche's most effective book of aphorisms, immediately after which he took on the voice and alter ego of Zarathustra in order to push beyond the boundaries of even the most liberating prose.

This volume provides the first English translation of Nietzsche's unpublished notes from late 1879 to early 1881, the period in which he authored Dawn, the second book in the trilogy that began with Human, All Too Human and concluded with The Joyful Science.In these fragments, we see Nietzsche developing the conceptual triad of morals, customs, and ethics, which undergirds his critique of morality as the reification into law or dogma of conceptions of good and evil. Here, Nietzsche assesses Christianity's role in the determination of moral values as the highest values and of redemption as the representation of humanity's highest aspirations. These notes show the resulting tension between Nietzsche's contrasting thoughts on modernity, which he critiques as an unrecognized aftereffect of the Christian worldview, but also views as the springboard to "the dawn" of a transformed humanity and culture. The fragments further allow readers insight into Nietzsche's continuous internal debate with exemplary figures in his own life and culture—Napoleon, Schopenhauer, and Wagner—who represented challenges to hitherto existing morals and culture—challenges that remained exemplary for Nietzsche precisely in their failure. Presented in Nietzsche's aphoristic style, Dawn is a book that must be read between the lines, and these fragments are an essential aid to students and scholars seeking to probe this work and its partners.

The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche will publish in its entirety, for the first time, an English translation of the full contents of the Kritische Studienausgabe.This volume of the Complete Works provides the first English translation of Nietzsche's unpublished notes from Summer 1886 through Fall 1887. In these writings we find drafts of new prefaces for the second editions of his earlier works, notes for the soon-to-appear On the Genealogy of Morality, and crucially, fragments and plans for an anticipated "master work" under the title "The Will to Power." This projected work, as is now well-known, was never written by Nietzsche; instead, it was fraudulently assembled by his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and his friend Heinrich Köselitz (a.k.a. Peter Gast) and published under Nietzsche's name after his death. Only now, with the publication of this volume and the ones that precede and follow it, are English readers able to examine for themselves the full set of unpublished writings of the last creative period of Nietzsche's life. Taking into account the latest editorial work on his final notebooks, and including a detailed account by Mazzino Montinari of Nietzsche's decision not to complete a "master work," this volume documents the evolution of Nietzsche's thinking on such important themes as nihilism, eternal recurrence, and the revaluation of all values as it presents his late Nachlass free from the distortions perpetrated against it over a century ago.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra stands alone among Nietzsche's published works as a poetic and narrative rendering of his most sophisticated ideas through the medium of Zarathustra's uniquely prophetic voice. It is also the first place where Nietzsche proposes his theory of will to power, and it is the only place in his published works where he elaborates his concept of the superhuman and his doctrine of eternal recurrence. Nietzsche himself regarded this book as his most important philosophical contribution because it proposes solutions to the problems he poses but does not resolve in his other works—for example, his cure for the human disposition to vengefulness and his creation of new values as the antidote to nihilism.This translation precisely and consistently renders each element so that readers may experience Nietzsche's phrasing, wit, and wordplay in equivalent English. The extensive editorial notes in this edition include numerous cross-references to earlier drafts and variants that are found in his notebooks, and published in Volumes 14 and 15 of The Complete Works, thus allowing the reader to view the evolution of Nietzsche's thought from first drafts to their final published versions. The Translators' Afterword includes a discussion of translation issues unique to Zarathustra, and a glossary of key terms, as well as a discussion of Nietzsche's views concerning this book's contributions to the development of the German language.