Nietzsche

[jbor]

----------
>From: Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>


> Nietzsche’s first book was published in 1872: The Birth of
> Tragedy, Out of the
> Spirit of Music (Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der
> Musik). It was
> reissued in 1886 with the title The Birth of Tragedy, Or:
> Hellenism and Pessimism
> (Die Geburt der Tragödie, Oder: Griechentum und
> Pessimismus), and contained a
> prefatory essay -- "An Attempt at Self-Criticism" -- which
> expressed Nietzsche’s
> own critical reflections on his earlier work.
snip
> The seeds of this rebirth Nietzsche
> perceived in the contemporary
> German music of his time, and the concluding part of The
> Birth of Tragedy, in
> effect, adulates the German artistic spirit as the potential
> savior of European culture.

Specifically Wagner. _The Birth of Tragedy_ was written when Nietzsche was
just 24. He was later to become disenchanted with Wagner -- personally, his
ideas, and the music -- and his polemic against the composer, _The Case of
Wagner_ (1888) is nowadays often published alongside the early work.

_The Will to Power_, which you have been quoting from, is a posthumous
compilation from Nietzsche's notebooks. Some commentators argue against the
significance of this 'Nachslass' material, in that it comprises reflections
and 'thought experiments', many of which were jotted by Nietzsche just prior
to, or even perhaps during, his breakdown in 1889.

best


~~~
    "By 1945, the factory system - which, more than
     any piece of machinery, was the real and major
     result of the Industrial Revolution - had been
     extended to include the Manhattan Project, the
     German long-range rocket program and the death
     camps, such as Auschwitz.It has taken no major
     gift of prophecy to see how these three curves
      of development might plausibly converge, and
                before too long. ... "
                                 (T. Pynchon, 1984)
                                                    ~~~