r/Nietzsche

Can anyone name some specific passages where Nietzsche discusses science, the scientific method, empirical evidence, etc?

In the “‘Reason’ in Philosophy” section of Twilight of the Idols he seems to have an implicitly positive view, associating it with trust in the senses.

He supposedly talks more about it in essay three of On the Genealogy of Morality but I have not read that one yet.

Ihr müsst wissen: Es gibt das Kamel. Dieses erfüllt Pflichten und trägt fremde Werte. Danach kommt der Löwe. Dieser kämpft, er bricht Erwartungen. Dann kommt das Kind. Es beginnt neu, schafft eigene Moral und bricht sich selbst.

Viele erachten Nietzscheaner als egoistisch, da Nietzsches Wortwahl recht radikal wirkt. Kritik am Christentum, Ich-bezogener-Aufstieg, Machtgedanken, etc., etc.

Meine These:

Ein Nietzscheaner ist dann egoistisch, wenn er ein Löwe mit dem Stolz eines Kamels ist. Das macht ihn zu einem Schein-Löwen. Er glaubt daran, dass er bereits einer ist, aber er ist nicht frei, sondern er trotzt. Er sagt nicht ,,Ich will und scheiß auf euch", er sagt lediglich ,,Ich will nicht, was ihr wollt". Er möchte kein Kamel mehr sein, weshalb er den Löwen als Schutzschild verwendet, doch sieht er nicht, dass er keine Unabhängigkeit erreicht hat, sondern immernoch im Rahmen des Kamels ist. Er stagniert in seinem Egoismus und kann nicht das Kind oder erst den richtigen Löwen erreichen.

Er nutzt diese Philosophie nicht, um sich zu überwinden, sondern nur um sich zu rechtfertigen. Und wenn er das nicht sieht, hat er Nietzsche vollkommen missverstanden.

I realised while reading Nietzsche I pick up this habit, it started with the word "Übermensch", now whenever I throw a random German compund word I feel very Nietzschien and philosophical.

"Thucydides and perhaps Machiavelli’s The Prince are most closely related to me, owing to the absolute determination which they show of refusing to deceive themselves and of seeing reason in reality—not in ‘rationality’, and still less in ‘morality’.”

— Twilight of the Idols

Is it fair to categorize Marx with Thucydides and Machiavelli? Darwin and Copernicus? I wouldn't call myself a Marxist, but when I read him he seems to have a "worldly" view of society and systems. And that his approach requires the ability to resist the seductive pull of morality (which a lot of socialists succumb to, including many of his time.)

Nietzschean critique of socialism aside, considering Nietzsche wasn't too familiar with Marx in particular, what do y'all think he would have to say regarding this scientific or "worldy" approach of Marx?

I've been interested in Nietzsche for a few years now, mostly through reading about his ideas, watching lectures/videos, and discussing his philosophy, but I only recently started actually reading his books properly.

I started with The Gay Science and I'm now close to finishing it. I've really enjoyed it, especially the aphoristic style. Some of my favourite sections so far have been The Teachers of Unselfishness, Work and Tedium, The Greatest Weight, Outside the Lecture Hall, What Does It Mean to Live?, The Evil Hour, We Must Learn to Love, and several of the passages dealing with self-overcoming, morality, suffering, and the free spirit.

What interests me most about Nietzsche isn't really the stereotypical "be strong and dominate everyone" interpretation. I'm much more interested in amor fati, self-overcoming, becoming who you are, affirming life despite suffering, the Dionysian, embracing the body and mortality, creativity, and transforming suffering into something life-affirming.

I've spent a lot of time reading pessimistic/existentialist writers and thinking about suffering, meaninglessness, mortality, etc., so Nietzsche's approach feels very different to me. I don't see him as simply denying darkness or suffering. What attracts me is the idea of going through it and somehow coming out the other side with an affirmation of life, rather than escaping from it.

Because of that, I've recently bought Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Birth of Tragedy. Zarathustra has always been one of the Nietzsche books that fascinated me most because of the whole prophetic/poetic style, the Übermensch, self-overcoming, eternal recurrence, the imagery of mountains, solitude, dancing, the earth, etc. And The Birth of Tragedy interests me particularly because of the Apollonian/Dionysian distinction and Nietzsche's treatment of Greek tragedy, art, music, suffering and life-affirmation.

My question is: should I just read these two next, in that order, or would you recommend reading another Nietzsche book before them?

I know the usual advice is sometimes to read Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morality, Twilight of the Idols, etc. first, and I'm definitely interested in those eventually. But right now I'm genuinely most drawn toward Zarathustra and Birth of Tragedy, rather than forcing myself through a recommended reading order.

Since I've already read most of The Gay Science, would going directly into Zarathustra be reasonable? And would it make sense to read Birth of Tragedy afterwards, or should I put something like Genealogy or Beyond Good and Evil between them?

Basically, I'm not trying to read Nietzsche chronologically or academically. I want to follow the parts of Nietzsche that resonate most with me first, then eventually go back and read the rest.

Would love to hear how people who have actually read most of his works would approach this.

Firstly I made this philosophy before I ever even heard of Nietzsche(I never looked into any philosopher) but since I learned of him he has become my favorite philosopher and favorite person. I recognized some "similarities" in our ideas to say the least such as his ubermensch and will to power and so much else I found myself agreeing with almost everything (maybe even everything because he's not exactly clear all the time as you probably know). I'm not a Nietzsche expert so I may be wrong about some stuff if so please correct me. Here's some quotes that show some similarity ."Without music life would be a mistake", "upwards goes our way, from species to over species," "Man is a rope tied between beast and overman, a rope over an abyss", "the overman is the meaning of the earth, "for the creator to appear, suffering itself is needed, and much transformation.” Now here it is.

The universe makes no sense I mean just think about Infinity. Think about the creation of our universe. There's two possibilities either the Universe is infinite or it's finite. Both are terrifying the fact that there are infinite universes infinite versions of you somewhere out there obviously nothing matters right. Then there's finite which is somehow even harder to grasp how could there be a limit to the universe what would that even look like how can there just be nothing beyond and certain point and even more difficult where did the universe come from.

A finite universe doesn't seem feasible to me which leaves infinite so nothing matters right(finite could be just as bad)? Then how can we explain Consciousness? If nothing matters then how can I feel emotions? You will find no scientist that can explain consciousness or infinity. I can only imagine 1 answer as to how our emotions, our lives, have any weight to them and that is that we are in a way like gods. In the same way we often imagine that gods exist through infinity we must also have something like that. Even if there are infinite of us our individual emotions still matter, a paradox of infinity. I have my own experiences that prove this to me for example when I listen to masterpieces I can feel a power as strong or stronger than infinity I lose fear of death and I inherently understand how undeniably significant life is. It's completely different than mere dopamine and pain and it doesn't make any sense that a mere extra clever animal would have evolved the ability to appreciate such divinity. It goes far beyond an animals desire to survive and reproduce. If I couldn't feel this divinity how could I not be a nihilist. This music showed me my mission. To maximize what I call light(life, emotion) and minimize darkness which is the opposite or lack of. What brought me to this belief was the boundless hatred I had toward the state of the world and the pain it caused me. This hatred reached the same level of deepness as the masterpieces I listened to which leads me to believe that it is also has infinite significance(Remember we can have a divine nature to us like gods). The meaning being that we must create "light". (You can skip this next part if you're already onboard with Rational Moral Impartiality

This is a point separate from my philosophy and more a message to regular folk. I shouldn't have to point this out but it seems most everyone hasn't really thought about this rationally. So lots of people have someone they feel they would do anything for then why is it they assume there isn't more people out there that would make you feel the same way if you got to know them. You're just giving the benefit of the doubt that there's nobody else, its the pinnacle of willful ignorance. "Why should I care even if they suffer if I don't know them it's like it never happened". Just imagine the horror on your average persons face who looked far far into space and eventually found one of infinite copies of earth where he never found his wife and maybe in the military he ended up piloting the drone that killed her, or perhaps he ignored her when she was in need of help so he could live his comfortable life(that's everyone reading this).

My ideas may have complexities for example I do have a sexist belief(I can go into why elsewhere and it could bear more thought). I'm mainly talking to men 17+(there may also be exceptions) it's our job to carry out this mission. Until the world is acceptable we can't rest. A common cope I see people use is that their life has been a net positive but that is bad logic if you look far far into space you could see an earth where you gave 100%. In your earth you consciously chose to sacrifice other people for your cowardice or whatever other reason. Yes every minute you aren't working toward the mission people you would have been best friends with in a copy earth are suffering horribly that's the uncomfortable truth. Nietzscheans readers here might say Nietzsche would disagree with living for others but this is just the logical conclusion of his self overcoming. Overcoming you're biological instinct to prioritize yourself when there is no rational reason to unless you really believe you're in a simulation of some sort. Overcoming the instinct that we evolved to stir competition to serve evolution that's what the ubermensch would do.

I'm surprised I had to found this myself considering there's over 8 billion people now. I made a real effort to find someone or group that if not came to the same conclusion at least shared the same goal(really not 1 person out there?). The conclusion I came to seems to me to be the obvious and only possible answer. What other answer could there be as to a meaning in an infinite universe. Perhaps It's a quite rare thing to be able to feel something higher from music or other forms of art. Perhaps people can't shake their animal instinct and never wake up to look for it.

I have become more than an animal trying to be comfortable until I die. Just like the infinite universe we cannot explain with logic we must go beyond logic with Transcendism and realize that we are infinite beings whose experiences are infinitely important. A paradox but one I can assure you is absolutely true. You might ask what is my reward for advancing the mission you just said I am infinitely important already. I don't think it's possible to communicate in words all I can say is we must support the light or suffer the dark. All I know is the mission is what gives life meaning and if you look at what the mission will result in it's evolving or rather Transcending humanity.

I'd like to hear any thoughts and do reach out if you share my goal. I think Nietzsche would agree with me from what I've read so far but if you disagree I'd love to see where I'm wrong.

BAN-1881, 54 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"If one wanted to admire something, one should not admire memory, but forgetting. Memory is possessed by people without many intellectual experiences, by primitive peoples, etc.; it shows that the brain is not immediately capable of a new impression after one. But one might call it admirable that the brain mass is always indefatigable in producing new ideas, after it has previously had strong impressions."

BAN-1881, 54 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"In geniuses, the brain has always been found very fissured and multi-parted. I think that in many brains, activity was taking place at very different points at once. This seems to me to be what genius consists of: activity of the brain at many points at once."

BAN-1881, 54 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"The Schopenhauerian objectivity of genius I have translated for myself as 'woodenness': it is a staring of the external senses, mere activity of the external senses without activity of the deeper brain. Schopenhauer never examined how it goes on in the human brain during aesthetic pleasure; he told himself from his 28th year onward that in objectivity the human being had lost himself entirely in the object, and this simplicity of explanation was enough for him."

BAN-1881, 54 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"A person is unchangeable in character insofar as the impressions of his previous life cannot be taken from him. But he is changeable insofar as he can take in new impressions."

BAN-1881, 65 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"If Rossini had only appeared in 1820, Mayer and Paër would figure in the annals of music in the rank of Leo, Durante, Scarlatti etc., great masters of the first order who only went out of fashion after their death. What thoughts this sentence gives rise to! How relative everything in the world is!"

BAN-1881, 65 — Heinrich Köselitz quoting Voltaire

>"A society where one knew how to amuse oneself without the resource of gambling, where one cultivated belles-lettres without party spirit, where one loved truth more than satire, and where one knew how to praise without flattery."

BAN-1881, 66 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"What should a much-afflicted, small-minded, sometimes irritable person like me do, robbing your thoughts of their power and prestige by saying them with his thin voice as well?"

BAN-1881, 68 — Erwin Rohde to Nietzsche

>"A becoming person is what one should be, as long as one is here; without that, the whole business of life has no interest anymore."

BAN-1881, 68 — Erwin Rohde to Nietzsche

>"That is the curse of professorship: the day forces us again and again to present ourselves as a finished being, where we are not and do not want to be. I don't know how others do it; I have my hands full just fulfilling my lecture and seminar duties."

BAN-1881, 68 — Erwin Rohde to Nietzsche

>"I often feel like a village pond that is slowly being covered with mold. One is not better and not richer in earlier years than in these middle years in which I now stand. But one has not known oneself long enough, has not had enough opportunities to prove oneself."

BAN-1881, 68 — Erwin Rohde to Nietzsche

>"For as long as you, once free from pain, let yourself be carried entirely by your thoughts, you are truly and genuinely the happiest person! For that is certainly the true happiness: to keep one's spirit in the highest, most distinctive activity."

BAN-1881, 69 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"I think that when one tells of the impression the world and other people make on us, one is at the same time telling of our impression on others. Pessimists should remember this; especially their imitators."

BAN-1881, 80 — Jacob Burckhardt to Nietzsche

>"I am especially and particularly grateful for the bold perspectives from which you behold the essence of antiquity; of some things I had the beginnings of an inkling, but you see clearly and, at the same time, much more and further."

BAN-1881, 80 — Jacob Burckhardt to Nietzsche

>"In the other parts of the book, I watch as an old man with some dizziness as you move fearlessly on the highest mountain ridges. Presumably, gradually, a community will gather and grow in the valley that will at the very least be attached to this sight of the daring ridge-walker."

BAN-1881, 86 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"What an inverted pyramid will build itself above you! That only few people pay attention to it now, you will overlook in your continued pursuit of your path."

BAN-1881, 87 — Heinrich Köselitz quoting an Indian proverb

>"Who, if he always looks downward, does not appear great to himself? All who always look upward think themselves poor."

BAN-1881, 92 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"Next to such a wild landscape as Wagner's later music, one cannot endure the Italian cylinder-coat-tail-and-kid-glove music of, say, Verdi. Wagner is a kind of Shakespeare and Michelangelo for music, capable of derailing the entire further development of music from its tracks."

BAN-1881, 93 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"For my taste, every moment of life forms itself in the universe like ice crystals on the window: little star joins little star, the threads shoot further, cross a thousandfold, and the crossing points of two chains of causality man calls coincidences."

BAN-1881, 93 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"The pleasure, sometimes, of writing down a melody is with me nothing other than the Anglican scholar's belief in God: it is the last remnant of my unreason and is probably already whistling its last."

BAN-1881, 97 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"The older I get, the greater becomes for me the contrast between a formerly dreamt-of, ideal earnestness and the very real comedy—so I stand in the middle and see my earnestness dissolve into an unbounded laughter—which is perhaps that earnestness."

BAN-1881, 98 — Ida Overbeck to Nietzsche

>"I enjoy in you the shudders of knowledge—without shuddering, it cannot be done. Why is this mentioned as something special, uncanny? Every one-sided effort and direction of the brain can produce mania; fear of it probably proves nothing but a preconceived opinion or disinclination. You are full of warm life and forms, everything stirs in you from a thousand fibers."

BAN-1882, 100 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"Devil take it! Now I still have to be the traveling salesman of my music!"

BAN-1882, 105 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"I experience Kant's world as constructed of silk paper. He will be run over by physiology; every physiologist now speaks better and more solidly about brain functions. I can't understand how these ten times more valuable works shouldn't immediately make everything Kant wrote be forgotten."

BAN-1882, 105 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"Without nerve stimulations from outside, man is nothing; he is entirely the product of his impressions. And these can come to him, if he is born late, already quite ordered and tested—but even in this good fortune, there is nothing a priori except the inherited organization."

BAN-1882, 106 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"I think that the wise man has such solar eclipses every day, where the nearest disappears and the gaze sweeps out into the immeasurable; and that afterwards he looks differently into the day and the illuminated little piece of earth."

BAN-1882, 108 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"Nowhere, not even in Mozart, have I found such spontaneity as with Rossini. In the Barber, I feel nothing that looks like effort—with others one feels that so often. And these Rossinian crescendi, where the orchestra begins to cook and bubble, I now experience as the most pleasant sound for my ear."

BAN-1882, 112 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"I thank you, dear self-will, that I have the whole day before me like a white sheet of paper, without rubrics and margins; I thank you that in this sanctuary no human being appears to me."

BAN-1882, 118 — Paul Rée to Nietzsche (on Lou von Salomé)

>"She hears everything through and through, so that in an almost annoying way she already knows in advance what is coming and what it's all about."

BAN-1882, 124 — Gustav Dannreuther to Nietzsche

>"Being then engaged as a professional violin-player, I nevertheless found time enough to translate your pamphlet on Schopenhauer no less than three times, not so much with a view to publishing my feeble reproduction, as to that of becoming more intimate with your work and that of exercising myself in the proper use of the Queen's English. But in spite of my efforts, my version fell so far short of an adequate rendition of the original, that I was only too glad for the sake of your reputation to keep the manuscript in my desk. Since then I have quite destroyed it, but the memory of exalted moments remains, and I am sure that my work was at least not wasted upon myself."

BAN-1882, 125 — Lou von Salomé to Nietzsche

>"While Rée's egoist, whom he marches out in the 'last consequences' to the horror of Malwida, says to himself: 'our only goal is a comfortable, happy course of life'—you say somewhere: 'when one must give up a happy life, the heroic life still remains.'"

BAN-1882, 125 — Lou von Salomé to Nietzsche

>"You are both like two prophets, one facing the past and the other the future, of whom one, Rée, uncovers the divine origin and the other destroys the twilight of the gods [Götterdämmerung]."

BAN-1882, 127 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"It really looks as if the mission of Parsifal is: to enhance the rank of Wagner's earlier works. The invention of motives is much more striking there, the contrapuntal calculus not pushed to the extreme as here."

BAN-1882, 127 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"The ground feeling in everything I do is that I do it in vain, or at most that I create new occasions for bitterness."

BAN-1882, 128 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"I had, honestly speaking, the impression that this music was a tinkling charlatanism. Moreover, it struck me that in this, as in all later and proper Wagnerian music, the point is missing; this music has basically no purpose."

BAN-1882, 136 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"A school of your character was your pain. Every person has obstacles, adversities—or if they don't have them, they seek and find them. You have them largely in your pain, thus in yourself; another has them outside himself, and confronts them differently."

BAN-1882, 136 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"Your philosophy is for people who have reached a very high moral state. I am at least still of the perhaps very vulgar opinion that any lower constitution cannot tolerate the translation of the Decalogue into the passive voice—'you shall not let yourself be stolen from, not let yourself be exploited, not let yourself be killed, not let yourself be lied to'—because I still believe that these were more likely to be followed than the original imperative."

BAN-1882, 136 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"The 'eternally perpendicular falling paths' are impossible; in any case, they would not be eternal. I think there is no aimless falling. The cycle, on the other hand, is the most precise expression of all the workings of forces."

BAN-1882, 140 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"Your music sounds Christian to me; yes, if you had sent me the music without text, I would have taken it for a crusaders' march... At the not infrequent shrill dissonances, I have the image of clashing shields."

BAN-1882, 140 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"We Protestants also have a protesting music: this has become clear to me in Wagner, in whose passion the power first becomes perceptible to me as resistance, as striving forward against obstacles, as walking against the storm. The slower one sings Wagner's music, the more the heart swells, the stronger the resistance seems—and thus our resistance."

BAN-1882, 142 — Carl von Gersdorff to Nietzsche

>"Of all your writings, since you entered the path of freedom, this last one pleases me best. There is a mood in it that touches me like the air of a beautiful clear September day, where one likes to sun oneself and no longer avoids the light. Hail to you, that you could continue your path so victoriously."

BAN-1882, 144 — Jacob Burckhardt to Nietzsche

>"What would it yield if you taught history? In the end, you always teach history and have opened up many astonishing historical perspectives in this book. But I mean: if you wanted to illuminate world history entirely ex professo with your kind of lights and under the angles of illumination appropriate to you? How nicely many things would stand on their heads—in contrast to the current consensus populorum!"

BAN-1882, 146 — Gottfried Keller to Nietzsche

>"I have observed among lower or natural classes of people rather the opposite: simple peasant or working people, when entangled not in squalor or meanness but in genuine tragedy of extremity, not infrequently increase in power, chosenness, and appropriateness of expression in their speech, with rising soul-suffering and danger-conflict—without any consciousness or idea of it."

BAN-1882, 147 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"She [Lou] should not forget the idyll alongside heroism, in order to be able to live in your vicinity."

BAN-1882, 147 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche (on Nietzsche's own musical composition)

>"I may reveal it to you: You yourself have not shed your skin on the musical field—it has remained Manfred, great and powerful, but uncanny."

BAN-1882, 152 — Franziska Nietzsche to Nietzsche

>"But when someone points to the forehead and says of you: 'He is a madman who doesn't know what he wants'—a common egoist who wants to exploit my intellect..." (Nietzsche's own mother, Franziska, quoting what Lou von Salomé allegedly said about him.)

BAN-1882, 158 — Erwin Rohde to Nietzsche

>"It is a real confession: that is how you feel; and you say it with incomparable energy and clarity. The dogmatic element of this way of thinking loses itself more and more, and that is good: for it is not suited to dogma. It is the formulation of a way of life that is valid and salutary for you, but it must not and should not make propaganda."

BAN-1882, 158 — Erwin Rohde to Nietzsche

>"If you are not a true master of a thousand arts of self-overcoming, then you must truly have crossed the mountain and found your health again. That is what your book testifies to more than your letter—and for that reason it was a true joy-sending to me."

BAN-1882, 161 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"In the end, all our praise is self-praise, all blame self-blame—our organs express the quality of their capacity for impression. This is a more modest kind of self-praise: to praise one's parents' virtue and understanding, or to show oneself grateful to one's teachers."

BAN-1882, 161 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"I take people as wound-up automata, groping in the dark, bumping into each other, rushing apart, etc. In and between these automata, mechanical forces prevail as between the grains of a shovel of sand that I throw beyond the sphere of earthly attraction into cosmic space—as between the planets."

BAN-1882, 164 — Franz Overbeck to Nietzsche

>"Do not remain alone, and let what you have recently experienced at least for now remain as general experience out of your thoughts. At least do your utmost to achieve this, and let us know of decisions you have made in this regard."

BAN-1882, 164 — Franz Overbeck to Nietzsche

>"And when a matter of this kind falls apart, it tends to cost not only itself but also much that one had before it and alongside it."

BAN-1883, 174 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"I must have stood for half an hour in the pouring rain in the palace courtyard, above the lights, in my imagination the consternation of the family, the strangeness of fate that places me at this spot on this night, the suddenly changed physiognomy of our musical conditions."

BAN-1883, 176 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"In the end, they'll be foolish antics; so Richter and Niemann are said to have sworn at Wagner's grave to remain true to the cause. Basically, the cause would be suspicious if it needed such pathos. Behind everything these people do stands the thought that after Wagner (and besides him, Schopenhauer) there can be nothing more: they entirely lack the imagination for new possibilities."

BAN-1883, 180 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"Mephistopheles said: You see a man like any other—this damned unique being!"

BAN-1883, 182 — Franz Overbeck to Nietzsche

>"To the illness itself also belongs the fact that you consider your life, in its foundations, to be botched [missrathen]. How dare you say that of yourself! How dare a man speak of a botch in Nature! How dare you say it, while you discover a man who speaks of your deep effect on him and gives you proof of it!"

BAN-1883, 183 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"The Italian understands by 'motivo' what is memorable in music; he uses it more in the sense in which we say 'theme,' 'melody.' In Beethoven's very last composition... the Bayreuthians would designate only the first 4 bars as motive, the Italian means the whole. I chose this melody because it best reminds us how clearly and characteristically Beethoven still wrote shortly before his death."

BAN-1883, 185 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"You are not to be accommodated among academic books and learnedness; with types and characters they don't know what to do there, and they always immediately cry 'contradictions' when someone has too little one-sidedness."

BAN-1883, 186 — Malwida von Meysenbug to Nietzsche

>"The Christian went into the desert to become capable of dying for the misery of the world; the Antichrist should, it seems to me, sometimes walk among men to accomplish the work of redemption which did not succeed for the other."

BAN-1883, 191 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"At any rate, you would be very wrong to let such feelings, which do not deserve it, pass through your soul as drag weights on your triumphal chariot. Contempt here, contempt there—what does that have to do with you and world history! But contempt is really too strong an expression for what some may feel at your sight; I believe much more that it is envy and jealousy."

BAN-1883, 191 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"The undisturbed resting-in-oneself irritates others so much that they think of burning. Had the first Christians shown themselves passionate and accessible to the injuries of those others, they would have been tolerated sooner. The indignation of others is the natural counter-reaction to quiet heroism. In every human being there is something to be pitied, and before pity all hostility dissolves, indeed it increases pity. I think one can draw profit from this."

BAN-1883, 192 — Heinrich Köselitz quoting a French newspaper

>"The foreigners admire their great men and honor them. Whoever touches them touches them. With us, great men are cumbersome. They take up too much space. There is a slang word, very widespread, often repeated, to express the special kind of admiration and respect they inspire in us. Do you want to know this word? But you hear it repeated a hundred times a day:—'They bore us!' That simply means, of a poet, a philosopher, a painter, a musician, a dramatist: 'he is too superior, he has too much glory!'"

BAN-1883, 192 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"Being laughed at is moreover a higher honor than being pitied."

BAN-1883, 194 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>I thought Zarathustra was a name you had invented; its etymology probably only acquired its true meaning and significance through your book. — “As for Wagner, I now say, ‘Wagner is dead — long live Wagner!’” Fate was very kind to you when it led you out of the realm of that octopus, hence: “Fate, I follow you —” … although I find this very human ancient phrase difficult to understand.

BAN-1883, 195 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"Now I always say: you have written the most beautiful book of the post-Christian age—and: to establish the morality of the common herd is child's play; to preach Zarathustra's morality was the hardest thing that humans can do."

BAN-1883, 197 — Karl Hillebrand to Nietzsche

>"I wish you would find the strength to give up all self-scrutiny, to forget yourself in the contemplation of things, to take the world as a given, unchangeable and unfathomable thing—then your self would first accomplish and become all the great things for which generous nature has so wonderfully equipped you."

BAN-1883, 200 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"Epikur, without the casein substance in his body, might perhaps not feel inclined to 'leave nature in its divine peace and blessedness' and to feel himself as such nature—but rather: to regulate phenomena like the Sophists and to feel a fair amount of discomfort with himself. One of the most effective models in the history of actual humanity would be missing!"

BAN-1883, 202 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"All untold hindrances multiply the movements of organisms. It seems not impossible to me that suffering creates new nerve arcs, and insofar as nature complicates and refines itself, it becomes, by human standards, more valuable."

BAN-1883, 207 — Jacob Burckhardt to Nietzsche

>"How superficial I have been all my life and with my kind of relative diligence I will probably remain so—for in my years one no longer changes, at most one becomes older and weaker."

BAN-1883, 208 — Heinrich Köselitz to Nietzsche

>"Zarathustra stands there from the same necessity as all things in the world; the conditions under which the recipients want to receive him have nothing to do with him and with you. The main thing remains that you approve of him and rejoice in him. A work and its author—that gives a good consonance; a work and a foreign reader—that gives much dissonance and false harmonic progression."

BAN-1883, 218 — Erwin Rohde to Nietzsche

>"Your "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" has made a far more beneficial impression on me in every respect than many of your recent writings. I congratulate you on this freer form of presenting your views, which is not merely new as form and different from your earlier chains of aphorisms. You are indeed the Persian sage, but it is quite another thing whether one expresses highly personal opinions directly as such, or creates an ideal being so that it may present them as its own opinions; only thus does one truly set them outside oneself and stand, so to speak, above oneself. Surely that is why Plato created his Socrates, and so you your Zarathustra."

BAN-1883, 218 — Erwin Rohde to Nietzsche

>"Whatever you clothe in the form of a didactic poem now enjoys the privileges of a poem; only do not scold the poets—they have the great advantage of being allowed to present the most magnificent and deepest thoughts and intuitions without having to torment themselves with a proof of them, which the 'philosopher' must laboriously patch together afterward."

BAN-1883, 218 — Erwin Rohde to Nietzsche

>"I believe that with the new form—which is capable of many variations and metamorphoses—you have begun to find your true form. Your language too now finds its fullest tones: I find especially the 'Preface,' but also some of the later sections, unsurpassable."

BAN-1883, 218 — Erwin Rohde to Nietzsche

>"Not all [passages]: for in some, the thorough figuration of an idea not taken from life, but brought as if from worldly desolate regions, a ghostly abstract conception, becomes painful to me: especially in the 'pale criminal.'"

BAN-1883, 218 — Erwin Rohde to Nietzsche

>"For example, what you say about "child and marriage" is wonderful. "To build beyond oneself"—certainly, that is what one wants as a father: πατρὸσ δ᾽ὅγε πολλὸν ἀμείνων should be said of the son, and one is truly ashamed only when one is supposed to think of oneself as the chosen model for one's own child. But still—that's not the crux of the matter in the egg of child love and longing. What one actually wants and wishes and longs for and would like to build up—that is a completely unconditional, groundless, and indestructible love for a human being, and that exists only and alone in the relationship to one's own child. Everything else follows only from that: what would one care in itself about 'building beyond oneself,' if it were not precisely in this human child that one would see the best of one's wishes and thoughts take shape—because it is, not abstractly for the sake of the world and humanity."

BAN-1883, 218 — Erwin Rohde to Nietzsche

>"You live, dear friend, on another height of mood and thought: it is as if you had soared above the atmospheric mist in which we all wander and gasp for air, and the earth with its mantle of mist circled beneath you without drawing you along with it. Nothing of the time, of what is now called the saeculum, clings to you."

BAN-1883, 219 — Paul Lanzky to Nietzsche

>"'It would be conceivable that a great spirit would have to depart from existence because he had not understood how to think of his meager bread. However, it would happen with that smile on the lips that said: I have seen enough, my hour has come, the hour of my necessity—so let me sleep!' Dearest friend, I wrote this above five or six months ago, thinking of you; but I think you will still have someone around you who will look after your physical well-being. (...) So now, my dearest friend, keep your spirits up, your old friend and comrade-in-arms—then you won't die, much less be crushed. I can think of nothing better to wish you for tomorrow or for the whole year.

What's Nietzsche's core philosophy?

What he actually saying to the world?