Classics and the Western Canon discussion

Discussion of translations and editions has already begun in the Planning thread, https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/... but feel free to continue that discussion here. This is also the best place to post background, historical, and biographical information.

Note on the Plan of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil

Don't know if this Kindle version is still in print or not.

I think it's a 'bootleg.'

I know this is really random, but I spent some time studying the hell out of Ovid a few years ago, and I’ve been skimming Nietzsche — I think I intuited certain similarities (something to do with the mouth/ synecdoche, and also Ovid’s own self-presentation of someone who used to be victimized by Cupid/Eros, but then self-overcome and became a teacher of art of love.)

I tried searching but didn’t find anything on the subject — I have to admit I’m not very good at this. My library wants to give me Nietzsche and “provide”, instead of Nietzsche and “Ovid.” Ugh.

If you know of any books or essays that discusse Ovid’s relevance to Nietzsche’s style or arguments or positions, please share!

Lia wrote: "I know this is really random, but I spent some time studying the hell out of Ovid a few years ago, and I’ve been skimming Nietzsche — I think I intuited certain similarities (something to do with t..."

Lia -- Did you try this search string in Google?
"Ovid influence on Nietzsche"

I didn't explore the responses, so can't tell you how valuable or wasted time it might be, but if I wasn't headed for a luncheon, I would have taken the time to explore some of them.

Or try Worldcat, where you may uncover such delectables as "Sanguineous echoes: filiation of the other's voice in R. Barthes, Nietzsche, and Ovid" and Metamorphosis : transformations of the body and the influence of Ovid's Metamorphoses on Germanic literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Remember to tip your librarian!

Thank you Lily, I just tried that but didn’t see anything substantial. Many results have Ovid instead. =__=.

I suppose Nietzsche is known more for his comments on the Greeks and not the Romans. Maybe I was reading too much into it.

Thomas wrote: "Or try Worldcat, where you may uncover such delectables as "Sanguineous echoes: filiation of the other's voice in R. Barthes, Nietzsche, and Ovid" and Metamorphosis : transformations of the body an..."


Oh that looks good, but not in my library. Maybe ... if I bribe tip my Biblioburro... 🥕 🍎 🐴

Edit: the burro delivers! I got the Sanguineous stuff! Always bribe your librarians guise.

It is possible to read Nietzsche as a stand-alone, given a good edition -- or translation -- with some basic commentary on nineteenth-century intellectual life (e.g. Hollingdale, Kaufmann, Norman for "Beyond Good and Evil"), but additional responsible guidance may be desired by some readers.

For those interested in going deeper into Nietzsche, or who would just like some help making sense of him, there are a whole lot of good options -- and a great many bad ones. I won't go into the latter now, if ever.

For the good ones, the late Walter Kaufmann's influential, and now venerable (originally 1950, last revised 1974), "Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist" is available from Amazon in hardcopy and Kindle, the latter reasonably priced by today's standards (especially for a long book not likely to ever have a really large readership):

https://www.amazon.com/Nietzsche-Phil...

Digital editions can also be found on iBooks, Nook (Barnes & Noble), and Kobo: at the moment the prices there are a bit higher.

For more recent work, there are several "Companion" volumes, which may be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=...

I've been using a borrowed copy of the Blackwell "Companion," and have found it useful, or at least interesting, so far, but I can't say anything about the rest, except that they come from very reputable publishers. The "Cambridge Companion" is the most affordable, but it is about to be replaced by a "New Cambridge Companion."

Free (with a free account) on Academia.edu are a vast number of articles and even books, which includes articles on Nietzsche.

Sorting through them is difficult. I would suggest trying the long list those on Nietzsche, or "Nietzsche and X," by Babette Babich:

https://fordham.academia.edu/BabetteB...

They seem to have been published in peer-reviewed journals or well-edited academic press collections. This isn't an absolute guarantee of quality, of course, but it helps avoid the ill-informed or irresponsible enthusiasts who cluster around the philosopher.

If you are interested in them, I would suggest downloading Babich's "List of Publications" (which is in reverse chronological order), and picking out what looks interesting to you, and is most current, rather than just scrolling through the Academia page, in which everything is rather jumbled:
https://www.academia.edu/33724898/Bab...

Again, there are, a great many other articles on Nietzsche to be found on Academia, of varying quality, but, so far as I have noticed, this is a very helpful page. And it has been kept up to date, with new material added as it appears, so the bibliographic references in the more recent articles should be fairly current, if you want to check for yourself something mentioned by Babich (assuming that it is posted an Academia itself, of course, or you have access to a really good library system.)

Lia wrote: "Thank you Lily, I just tried that but didn’t see anything substantial. ...."

Sorry. (I had a decent meeting exploring retirement living options....getting old enough to consider that a necessary investment in some research before a decision must be made. An exceptionally gregarious resident took me under her wing and gave an extended tour beyond the standard pitch.) Should have shelved the google info rather than just handing it along. Thx for reporting what you found (or rather, didn't), Lia.

As per Ian's recommendation (thanks), I've picked up a copy of the Kindle version of Kaufmann's Basic Writings of Neitzsche, which is very reasonably priced here in the UK too (£1.49), so looking forward to joining the discussion.

I found this Five Books article on Nietzsche to be a useful background resource: https://fivebooks.com/best-books/niet...

Lily wrote: "I had a decent meeting exploring retirement living options..."

This sounds like the opening of Menelaus’s narrative to Telemachus. I hope you’re having an epic adventurous quest for Elysium :p

To supplement what Ian said in his dialogue with Genni in the 2018-4th-read thread: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Based on two of Nietzsche’s letters, Lampert (Nietzsche’s Task - an Interpretation of BGE) argues that [BGE as a whole] is “a coherent argument that never lets up: what is discovered about philosophy and religion, about what can be known and what might be believed, necessarily assigns to the philosopher a monumental task or responsibility with respect to morals and politics”. ( This is in the context of Lampert arguing against interpreting BGE as merely a disorganized and incoherent collection of aphorisms.)

The two letters:

(1) to Georg Brandes (8 January 1888), (Sämtliche Briefe. Kritische Studienausgabe 8: 228) comments on readers’ failure to recognize that “they are dealing [in BGE] with a long logic of a completely determinate philosophical sensibility and not with some mishmash of a hundred varied paradoxes and heterodoxies”;

(2) to Jacob Burckhardt (22 September 1886) (Sämtliche Briefe. Kritische Studienausgabe 7: 254) tells us that BGE “says the same things as my Zarathustra but differently, very differently.”

And Lampert concludes: It seems clear that no mere collection of aphorisms could express “a long logic of a completely determinate sensibility” or say differently what is said by the unified narrative of Zarathustra.

Lampert admits that one cannot read this “coherent argument” off of BGE’s surface: to the uninitiated reader, the book seems characterized by disunity, even randomness, and lack of argument. He explains the gulf between this appearance and the reality of Nietzsche’s text by claiming that BGE is written in view of the distinction between the “exoteric and the esoteric”. The view of BGE as random and disorganized is the exoteric view. Nietzsche writes in a way to encourage reading it this way because, “given the sway of the irrational, making a place for the rational in the midst of the irrational requires strategic finesse: it is a task for an artful writer who knows his audience and knows how to appeal to them”. Lampert thus claims that the disorganized, exoteric text is precisely the one that will initially appeal to Nietzsche’s readers. In contrast, the esoteric text is the “coherent argument that never lets up,” which begins to appear to readers as they are educated by BGE itself.

Also, for some reasons, I’ve always thought Burckhardt was Nietzsche’s mentor. I think I got that impression because Nietzsche used to attend Burckhardt’s lectures. Thanks to Ian’s remark I suddenly realized they were actually colleagues / friends.

Dave wrote: "
I found this Five Books article on Nietzsche to be a useful background resource: ..."

Thank you for posting this. I found it very interesting.

I’m looking at Kaufmann’s commentary on translating BGE. He made some remarks about Helen Zimmern: (That’s the free English translation available on Gutenberg and Planet_PDF)

What Nietzsche wrote (September 19, 1886) about [Zimmern] to his mother or sister was: “I had the privilege of introducing this ‘champion of women’s rights’ (Frl. von Salis) to another ‘champion’ who is my neighbor at meals, Miss Helen Zimmern, who is extremely clever, incidentally not an Englishwoman—but Jewish. May heaven have mercy on the European intellect if one wanted to subtract the Jewish intellect from it.”

Not totally sure what to make of the scare-quotes...

Kaufmann’s own judgment (on Zimmern And another translation by Cowan) isn’t as positive:

It was over fifty years after Beyond Good and Evil had originally appeared in 1886 that professional philosophers began to publish studies of Nietzsche’s philosophy in English.
Meanwhile, the Zimmern translation of Beyond Good and Evil found its way into the Modern Library, and it was until 1955 the only version through which myriads of readers knew the book. In preparing the present edition, I hoped at first that I might merely revise her version, modernizing her somewhat Victorian prose and correcting mistakes; but I soon gave up. The mistakes were too numerous, and in Nietzsche’s case nuances are so important that it would be difficult to say at what point an infelicitous rendering becomes downright wrong.

The second translator, Marianne Cowan, is not a philosopher either. Her version is modern and very readable. But the merits are somewhat offset by errors of understanding, and therefore I have pointed out a few such instances in my notes.

Lia wrote: "Miss Helen Zimmern, who is extremely clever, incidentally not an Englishwoman—but Jewish. May heaven have mercy on the European intellect if one wanted to subtract the Jewish intellect from it ..."

For those who don't have an edition providing much in the way of biographical information, or who haven't read about Nietzsche in a reliable source: If Nietzsche was writing to his sister, he was being *at least* mischievous.

She had married a notorious anti-Semite, and fully embraced his beliefs.

The same consideration applies if he assumed that she would read the letter, even if it was addressed to their mother.

In either case, he wasn't just teasing. This was something that remained on his mind.

As Kaufmann points out, Nietzsche's last letter to Jacob Burckhardt, written just after his mental and physical collapse, but while he was still intelligible, had, added in the margins "Abolished [Kaiser] Wilhelm, Bismarck, and all anti-Semites," His last note to his friend Overbeck, from the same period, reported "Just now I am having all anti-Semites shot."

FWIW, Nietzsche here is clearly snarking the anti-Semites: imagine how poor the European intellectual scene (or “the mind of Europe”) would be without Jewish contributions.

The scare-quotes that I’m puzzling over is about women’s right. I think Nietzsche’s anti-anti-Semites stance is clear and unambiguous, he was at one point swept up by the nationalistic movements, but he made clear and unambigous apologies over his own participation / associations (i.e. Wagner) in his mature writings.

But his position regarding feminism and women’s rights is much less clear.

Here’s an interesting biographical note on Nietzsche’s ambiguous relationship with Helen Zimmern source:Julian Young| Friedrich Nietzsche - A Philosophical Biography (available on google play books.)

I've been comparing translations of of "Beyond Good and Evil" -- Kaufmann, Hollingdale, & Norman -- and I have formed an impression of why Kaufmann is considered easier to read, but not as accurate as (at least) Judith Norman's translation for the "Cambridge Nietzsche." (Of course, I haven't taken into account the Oxford World's Classics translation of "Beyond Good and Evil," by Douglas Smith, which I have not seen.)

Or at any rate, an explanation that goes beyond Kaufmann's great skill with English, as displayed in his own books (a view which others may dispute.)

Nietzsche tended to write very long sentences (not unusual for a German philosopher!), which, according to Kaufmann, are pretty clear in German, but hard to make intelligible in English. (Perhaps not impossible: the first sentence of Milton's "Paradise Lost" is an example of how an English sentence can be stretched out with subordinate clauses without loss of clarity -- but not many translators are peers of Milton!)

Kaufmann seems to break up such sentences, turning them into paragraphs, which are a whole lot easier to read. But the tightness of the argument may suffer, or the divisions may obscure some of Nietzsche's points. And Kaufmann's editorial decisions impose themselves on readers as *the* way to understand the passage.

Having paragraphs at all is the other issue on which he differs from the other translators. Contrary to modern norms for written English (imposed on me, at least, by Junior High/Middle School, if not earlier), Nietzsche did not use paragraph breaks.

He relied instead on section numbers and titles to keep parts of his argument distinct. (Again, this apparently was not unusual in nineteenth-century German writers.)

This is fine for most of the (comparatively short) aphorisms in some of the earlier writings (such as "Human, All-Too Human," and "Dawn"), but less so in "Beyond Good and Evil" and the later writings.

("The Will to Power" is different, which at first glance confuses the issue. It was assembled by early editors using Nietzsche's notebooks, full of rough drafts and rejected ideas, and their excerpts were often fairly short. They then passed it off as Nietzsche's magnum opus. The introduction to the Kaufmann & Hollingdale "Will to Power" goes into this at some length.)

(Yes, Hollingdale and Kaufmann did collaborate on some Nietzsche translations.)

In any case, the practice of not paragraphing a translation results in a "wall of text," which is hard to follow, given the lack of the expected visual cues to the reader, or at least the reader of modern English. (Not an unusual problem on-line -- the old Amazon Discussion Boards and Forums used to be littered with appeals to put paragraph breaks in long posts....)

Kaufmann introduces paragraph breaks, which provide a little help for the reader, signaling shifts in Nietzsche' arguments, and generally making the pages less intimidating.

But another translator, following the same practice, might make different decisions on where to put the breaks, again reflecting (or imposing) a different understanding of Nietzsche.

Hollingdale avoided such paragraphing in his Penguin Classics translation of BGE, and so did Judith Norman for the Cambridge translation series. I indeed have found both of them harder to follow than Kaufmann, and this may be one reason.

I concede that leaving the structure (or non-structure) of the sections for the reader to discover is helpful in getting the translator out of the way as much as possible, which is usually considered a good thing. But, added to the long sentences, the practice creates an obstacle, especially to first-time readers.

As a side-note, Hollingdale seems to me to use somewhat more abstract terms, usually loans from Latin or Greek, whereas Kaufmann tended to use more concrete (and shorter) words, often native to English. (For a simple example, Kaufmann's "overman" for *Übermensch* alongside Hollingdale's "superman" -- but this is the traditional English rendering, so it doesn't quite prove my point.)

That is an impression from a decades-old close comparison of their respective translations of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," and I might not be able to support it in a lot of particular cases from other books. And, even if true, it still might not explain why I find his translations less satisfying than Kaufmann's.

I hope we will get into comparisons of translations.

I have to say Zimmern has been beaten down.- She is better than Kaufmann let on.

I hope we can get into a discussion on what Nietzsche is saying that is at least as interesting as this one on how he said it,

How can you tell the dancer from the dance?

Christopher wrote: "How can you tell the dancer from the dance?"

Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

From Among School Children by W.B. Yeats
one of my favorite poems :)

Ian wrote: "I've been comparing translations of of "Beyond Good and Evil" -- Kaufmann, Hollingdale, & Norman -- and I have formed an impression of why Kaufmann is considered easier to read, but not as accurate..."

I haven't got too far in the first chapter of the German version, and you are right, he writes pretty intelligible. He does have long sentences, but so far they are not "verschachtelt", literally meaning "being like nesting boxes", or overly complicated and obtuse. Hume and William James were a whole lot worse.

As for the numbered paragraphs, I am not sure where it originated. It must be quite old. One can find this format in every official document of the Catholic Church (encyclicals, apostolic letters, etc.), and when reading the early Church Fathers their writings starting with Clement of Rome and Ignatius of Antioch, (both of the 1st century), et. al., their writings are divided up like this too.

Lia wrote: "I’m looking at Kaufmann’s commentary on translating BGE. He made some remarks about Helen Zimmern: (That’s the free English translation available on Gutenberg and Planet_PDF)

What Nietzsche wrote ..."


Kaufman's comments on Zimmern's translation are frightening. It is the translation I am using while waiting for Kaufman and Hollingdale to come in. I may have to reread everything..

Ian wrote: "I've been comparing translations of of "Beyond Good and Evil" -- Kaufmann, Hollingdale, & Norman -- and I have formed an impression of why Kaufmann is considered easier to read, but not as accurate..."

Thanks for these details. Because of this post I ordered a copy of Kaufman to go with Hollingdale. Hopefully, between the two of them, the meaning will become clearer.

I’ve been reading the Hollingdale trans, I decided to switch to Kaufmann this weekend as I hunt for quotes to respond to posts.

I don’t know if it’s because I’m rereading and approaching the text less fearfully, or if it’s the language itself, but Kaufmann’s is really fun, really funny, really insulting, really delightful. I keep rolling my eyes at Nietzsche affectionatly, somehow that playfulness (?) didn’t come through for me in Hollingdale’s.

Lia wrote: "I’ve been reading the Hollingdale trans, I decided to switch to Kaufmann this weekend ,,, Kaufmann’s is really fun, really funny, really insulting, really delightful. ..."

Thanks for confirming my opinion of the translations -- I had a lot of fun reading Kaufmann's versions in High School.* His Nietzsche is variously ironic, witty, or downright sarcastic, and likes offering paradoxes.

I can't tell for myself if all of that is really in the original, although there are comments by native speakers of German which suggest that it is the case at least some of the time. Although not, I think, by fellow-philosophers Karl Jaspers, and, perhaps, Martin Heideigger.**

Unfortunately, trying to *explain* Nietzsche's little witticisms at the expense of his predecessors -- or a reader's expectations-- is, as usual with jokes, often a losing game.

*I even signed up for a "Study Hall" period during which I mostly read "The Viking Portable Nietzsche" and "Basic Writings," alongside getting ahead on my homework. (I self-justified the practice on the grounds that I was taking a college level course in philosophy at the time.) I remember that the thick paperback of "Portable Nietzsche" did NOT stand up well to being carried around all day, or stuffed into a locker, unlike the hardcover Modern Library Giant of "Basic Writings."

**There is an English translation of Karl Jaspers' big book on the subject, as "Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity," originally published in 1965, and revised in 1997. The first edition, at least, gave Jasper's Nietzsche quotations without giving their sources, as cited by Jaspers himself, which was maddening -- while reading it (or trying to), I kept suspecting that the "contradictions" Jaspers was always discovering sometimes involved rhetorical questions and the punch-line of jokes. Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity

As for Heidegger, I have never gotten very far into the translation of his four-volume "Nietzsche" -- in English, two volumes. I found it difficult to follow, and, when it appeared in the early 1980s I had passed my first enthusiasm for the topic.

Kaufmann may be right in saying that it is absolutely essential for understanding -- Heidegger.
Nietzsche, Volume 1: The Will to Power as Art

eta: Ian writes:His Nietzsche is variously ironic, witty, or downright sarcastic, and likes offering paradoxes.

I can't tell for myself if all of that is really in the original, although there are comments by native speakers of German which suggest that it is the case at least some of the time.

I place this point of view first and foremost: Wagner's art is diseased. The problems he sets on the stage are all concerned with hysteria; the convulsiveness of his emotions, his over-excited sensitiveness, his taste which demands ever sharper condimentation, his erraticness which he togged out to look like principles, and, last but not least, his choice of heroes and heroines, considered as physiological types (—a hospital ward!—): the whole represents a morbid picture; of this there can be no doubt. Wagner est une névrose.

In my humble opinion, Kaufmann knocked the earlier translators too low. (I know, I know, I say this all the time.)

The Case of Wagner/Nietzsche Contra Wagner/Selected Aphorisms

Bonus quote:

Second Postscript It seems to me that my letter is open to some misunderstanding. On certain faces I see the expression of gratitude; I even hear modest but merry laughter. I prefer to be understood here as in other things. But since a certain animal, the worm of Empire, the famous Rhinoxera, has become lodged in the vineyards of the German spirit, nobody any longer understands a word I say. The Kreus-Zeitung has brought this home to me, not to speak of the Litterarisches Centralblatt. I have given the Germans the deepest books that they have ever possessed—a sufficient reason for their not having understood a word of them.… If in this essay I declare war against Wagner—and incidentally against a certain form of German taste, if I seem to use strong language about the cretinism of Bayreuth, it must not be supposed that I am in the least anxious to glorify any other musician.

I see that we have an unintelligible-Nietzsche snitching party 🎉.

I give you trees from The Gay Science

Like trees we grow – it’s hard to understand, like all life! – not in one place, but everywhere; not in one direction, but upwards and outwards and downwards equally; our energy drives trunk, branches, and roots all at once; we are no longer free to do anything singly, to be something single. (GS 371)

Ian wrote: "As for Heidegger, I have never gotten very far into the translation of his four-volume "Nietzsche" -- in English, two volumes. I found it difficult to follow, and, when it appeared in the early 1980s I had passed my first enthusiasm for the topic.

Kaufmann may be right in saying that it is absolutely essential for understanding -- Heidegger.
Nietzsche, Volume 1: The Will to Power as Art "

Thanks Ian. It’s hard to reconcile the fact that both Nietzsche and Heidegger are German thinkers: one is so funny, the other seems utterly humorless. (And I’ve been reading Sebald, a German who is known to make fun of German humorlessness, LOL.)

So, I’m looking at the introduction (the sample pages) by David Farrell Krell. It’s already looking intensely political — precisely the stuff I’ve been trying to avoid (for now). From the Intro:

The result bodes ill for the matter of thinking that is Heidegger's Nietzsche. Even after Walter Kaufmann's labors to defend Nietzsche against the charge of being the prototypical ideologue of National Socialism-a charge brought by virtually all the Postwar literature on nazism and fascism- Nietzsche's virulence continues to eat away at today's reader. And now the "second wave" of the "Heidegger scandal" (the first came immediately after World War II, carried out in part in Les temps modernes) leaves in its wake the conviction that Heidegger the man and the thinker was embroiled in National Socialism to a far greater extent than we hitherto believed. Nevertheless, Heidegger himself insisted that it was precisely in his Nietzsche, in these volumes the reader now has in hand, that his resistance to National Socialism can most readily be seen...

I’m simultaneously repulsed and fascinated.

Kind of like how Nietzsche is with Socrates, I suppose.

Lia wrote: "I see that we have an unintelligible-Nietzsche snitching party 🎉.

I give you trees from The Gay ScienceLike trees we grow – it’s hard to understand, like all life! – not in one place..."

I was picking (almost at random) clippings from The Case of Wagner which prove Nietzsche was funny and sarcastic BEFORE Walter K.

I missed the best one, or saved it for last:

One pays dearly for having been a follower of Wagner. I contemplate the youthlets who have long been exposed to his infection. The first [pg 041] relatively innocuous effect of it is the corruption of their taste. Wagner acts like chronic recourse to the bottle. He stultifies, he befouls the stomach. His specific effect: degeneration of the feeling for rhythm. What the Wagnerite calls rhythmical is what I call, to use a Greek metaphor, “stirring a swamp.” Much more dangerous than all this, however, is the corruption of ideas. The youthlet becomes a moon-calf, an “idealist”. He stands above science, and in this respect he has reached the master's heights. On the other hand, he assumes the airs of a philosopher, he writes for the Bayreuth Journal; he solves all problems in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Master. But the most ghastly thing of all is the deterioration of the nerves. Let any one wander through a large city at night, in all directions he will hear people doing violence to instruments with solemn rage and fury, a wild uproar breaks out at intervals. What is happening? It is the disciples of Wagner in the act of worshipping him.…

I just saw this

https://leostrausscenter.uchicago.edu...

Leo Strauss’s course on Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, taught at St. John's College (Annapolis) in the 1971-72 school year, audio recording and pdf.

Ooooh!!! Sweet.

From the first lecture

there is a book written on Nietzsche by a very famous man, Karl Jaspers, in which it is shown that it is impossible to speak of any Nietzschean teaching because Nietzsche had contradicted everything he had said

😂

At the risk of coming off as a pervert, I'm in love with Nietzsche's ass! I've been digging around... and I thought this is interesting:

From A Nietzschean Bestiary: Becoming Animal Beyond Docile and Brutal p. 115

the ass serves Nietzsche as a symbol of dogmatism and stupidity and also as a positive symbol of the earth, nature, and humanity’s animal character. But it is important that the ass also represents laughable folly, both as foolish behavior and as an essential stage in spiritual maturation. In this role, the ass is not merely an image for what Nietzsche rejects. The ass also serves as a symbol of transformation. As asses, Lucius and Zarathustra remain laughable until their metamorphosis is complete. Nevertheless, the asinine stage itself has value, both for the insights gained through it and for the comedy it presents to observers.

The moment of transition, Zarathustra suggests, is the point at which one learns to laugh at oneself. Laughing at oneself, one can recognize the comic aspects of being an ass, even though the detachment from oneself this requires reveals that one is already moving beyond the ass stage. Yet it is through being an ass that one learns to laugh, according to Nietzsche, and laughter redeems our “sin.” The only redemption from sin is to move beyond the concept of “sin” itself, restoring to our foolishness the innocence of genuine folly. Innocent foolishness is the condition of the ass. Nietzsche implies that if, as alleged, the early Christians did worship their god through the form of an ass, they would only have been half wrong. The ass, as the symbol of a crucial stage in spiritual development, is ultimately our redeemer.

I know this is mostly a reference to Zarathustra, but Nietzsche also said Z and BGE say the same thing but differently. So perhaps the function of the ass, the need to learn to laugh at ourselves, is the same in BGE.

Lia wrote: "I just saw this

https://leostrausscenter.uchicago.edu...

Leo Strauss’s course on Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, taught at..."

Thanks for sharing, Lia. In the small world department, I was a student at the time and actually sat in on the first few sessions of this completely elective course. I’m curious to see if any thing has stuck in my memory

Susan wrote: "In the small world department, I was a student at the time and actually sat in on the first few sessions of this completely elective course. I’m curious to see if any thing has stuck in my memory"


*gasps*. Are you a SJC grad, Susan? I’ve been looking at the SJC reading list, I think you guise are absolutely mad . (And mad respect from this reader.)

I’ve been skipping ahead to some of the discussions Strauss had with the students, I’m so, so, so jealous. It must be what heaven is like.

I’m hoping for anecdotes. An informant told me the kids at SJC pranked Adler, I hope they didn’t go easy on Strauss.

Lia wrote: "Susan wrote: "In the small world department, I was a student at the time and actually sat in on the first few sessions of this completely elective course. I’m curious to see if any thing has stuck ..."

Yes, I did attend St John’s, Lia. Actually, there are a few other folks in this group who did as well including, most of all, Everyman.

The reading list is great, but it is the conversations about what was read and the idea that everyone can read these works for themselves that has stuck most with me.

We were definitely told it was a privilege to study with Mr Strauss, who was an elderly gentleman at the time. I didn’t hear of any pranks involving him. Mortimer Adler was a different story — the tradition was there was a prank for every lecture he gave, and he probably averaged a lecture a year. He always took them in good humor is what I’ve heard — including the time multiple alarm clocks went off when the students felt his lecture should be over — the story is he just continued on...and on.

I think Strauss got the position at St. John's through his friend Jacob Klein.

This is a rather long post on a simple-looking, and far from urgent, question. It got complicated as soon as I went looking for a quick answer. Feel free to skip it, or just skim it. I've followed my graduate school training in presenting the evidence I could find, which you might well find tedious.

In re-reading Kaufmann's translation of "Beyond Good and Evil" this time, I came upon a phrase in section #44 which might, or might not, be intended to contain a Biblical allusion.

I suspect that I'd been puzzled by it before, but, thanks to the Internet, I've been able to do a little research on it that wasn't easy when I was in High School, or even at UCLA.

The passage in Kaufmann runs "the universal green-pasture happiness of the herd..."

I think that my initial impression of this was that it reflected the opening of the 23rd Psalm, which, in English, in the familiar King James Version, runs:
A Psalm of David.
1. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
2. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.

It seemed pretty clear to me that Kaufmann, at least, had this passage in mind. It is a "familiar quotation" in English, even if some people don't recognize where it comes from. And, if Nietzsche put it there, he is being ironical in its use, which fits with his whole approach.

But did Nietzsche have the psalm in mind? Being from the household of a Lutheran Pastor, as well as being a German-speaker, he was familiar with Luther's Bible. Is the meaning, or phrasing, any different there? Would his initial readers have picked up on it?

This time around I was able to consult an on-line version of Luther's translation, which I found reads:
Ein Psalm Davids. Der HERR ist mein Hirte; mir wird nichts mangeln.
2 Er weidet mich auf grüner Aue und führet mich zum frischen Wasser.

According to the dictionaries I've used, "Aue" means "green meadow" or "pasture" (the former meaning being a bit redundant in conjunction with "grüner"), so the meaning is the same. But there is no verbal identity to serve as a cue.

Helen Zimmern translated the line as" "the universal, green-meadow happiness of the herd". This appears to be dictionary-correct, but her English lacks the immediately familiar reference to "green pastures" -- if it is there in the original, which is the point at issue.

So I took a look at Nietzsche's German text, from a pdf of a Kröner edition of 1921, and from Project Gutenberg's unsourced transcription. In both it reads:
"das allgemeine grüne-Weide-Glück der Heerde"

In the dictionaries I've consulted, "Weide-" is defined as "Pasture, Meadow," a synonym for Luther's "Aue." (And "Heerde" may be a nineteenth-century spelling for the more recent dictionary form of "Herde," meaning both "herd' -- of cattle -- or "flock" -- of sheep or goats.)

So the question is, would the difference in wording make any difference to a native speaker of German recognizing the phrase as an allusion?

If not, Kaufmann may be over-translating, putting in a reference that isn't there.

So I tried the other three English translations to which I have access (which doesn't include Marianne Cowan's version). These differ slightly in punctuation, but otherwise agree verbally with Kaufmann:
Hollingdale translation: the universal green pasture happiness of the herd
Johnston translation: the universal, green, pasture-happiness of the herd
Norman translation: the universal, green pasture happiness of the herd

Either they are just following Kaufmann's lead, or are they recognizing the same apparent allusion -- although none of them, Kaufmann included, seems to note it as such. (And Johnston seems to me quite awkward, in either case.)

Any suggestions? Opinions?

I thought WK's gripe with the earlier translators, one of them, was the constant Biblical echoes. Ha ha, busted. Although I am not so sure about what distinguishes a meadow from a pasture, except that "pasture" implies grazing animals, and meadow just implies a flat expanse... in which case, I believe Weide is more like meadow.

It's like a joke I once heard on NPR.. there are lots of wide open spaces in Texas.. Mostly between people's ears.
(PS- not my personal opinion, if it need be said)

Susan wrote: "The reading list is great, but it is the conversations about what was read and the idea that everyone can read these works for themselves that has stuck most with me..."

Oh, I believe you. Eman was one of the main reasons I became fascinated with SJC. I haven't met a SJC grad that I don't have mad-respects for.

I'm not a fan of Strauss, and there are more analysis on Nietzsche than I have time to read. The most inviting thing about this is the discussion - I love reading how students respond to the text, and how Strauss responded to their questions and guided them.

IMO, great books have limited worth without an interpretive community, like what you have in SJC ... or in this group. As a (somewhat) new participant, thanks for making this group what it is.

Christopher wrote: "I thought WK's gripe with the earlier translators, one of them, was the constant Biblical echoes. Ha ha, busted. Although I am not so sure about what distinguishes a meadow from a pasture, except t..."

It is probably pointless to speculate on exactly why Kaufmann used that exact "green-pasture" translation.

But I know from my own limited experience (with Old English, Latin, and Hebrew) that nothing is more annoying -- or devastating if you are on a deadline, or taking a test -- to find that a word in the original text doesn't quite fit, or make sense, in the English sentence you've just carefully constructed as its equivalent.

Some of the other translators seem unsure of just what "green" is doing there: Kaufmann, whatever the rationale, made it a coherent part of the English statement.

Still, it would have been nice if Nietzsche's German text was a bit closer to Martin Luther's.

I will put this in "background," but I think it represents a modern-day Nietzschean approach:

(Interview with Camille Paglia):

Do you believe that politics and in particular social justice (i.e., anti-racism and feminism) are becoming cults or pseudo-religions? Is politics filling the void left by the receding influence of organized religion?

Paglia: This has certainly been my view for many years now. I said in the introduction to my art book, Glittering Images (2012), that secular humanism has failed. As an atheist, I have argued that if religion is erased, something must be put in its place. Belief systems are intrinsic to human intelligence and survival. They “frame” the flux of primary experience, which would otherwise flood the mind.

But politics cannot fill the gap. Society, with which Marxism is obsessed, is only a fragment of the totality of life. As I have written, Marxism has no metaphysics: it cannot even detect, much less comprehend, the enormity of the universe and the operations of nature. Those who invest all of their spiritual energies in politics will reap the whirlwind. The evidence is all around us—the paroxysms of inchoate, infantile rage suffered by those who have turned fallible politicians into saviors and devils, godlike avatars of Good versus Evil.

https://quillette.com/2018/11/10/cami...

Crickets on my last post.. but here I go again.

Just reading But What If We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past, and Chuck Klosterman is musing on the possible disappearance of football, and incidentally the movie Whiplash. Doesn't mention Nietzsche, but this sounds like the end of "Natural History of Morals."

Only Richard Brody of The New Yorker came close to saying this directly: “To justify his methods,” he writes, “[Simmons] tells [Teller] that the worst thing you can tell a young artist is ‘Good job,’ because self-satisfaction and complacency are the enemies of artistic progress . . . and it’s utter, despicable nonsense. There’s nothing wrong with ‘Good job,’ because a real artist won’t be gulled or lulled into self-satisfaction by it: real artists are hard on themselves, curious to learn what they don’t know and to push themselves ahead.” Socially, this is absolutely the way we have been conditioned to think. The idea that greatness is generated through pain and adversity and fear is not just an unpopular position—when applied to the lives of young people, it’s practically a criminal act. The modern goal is to remove those things from whatever extracurricular pursuit any young person is pursuing.

Now, the logic behind this is hard to criticize: What is the value of a hobby that makes a kid unhappy? The response, I suppose, is that someday that kid will be an adult (and scenarios involving adversity and fear won’t be optional). But I’m not interested in the argument over whether this is positive or negative. I’m simply wondering if the overall state of society is—very slowly, and almost imperceptibly—moving toward a collective condition where team sports don’t have a place.
[...]
It also denies the long-held assumption that physical games are a natural manifestation for a species that is fundamentally competitive, and that team sports are simply adult versions of the same impulse that prompts any two five-year-olds to race across the playground in order to see who’s faster. When I mentioned this theory to a friend who works for ESPN, he thought about it for a long time before saying, “I guess I just can’t imagine a world where sports don’t exist. It would seem like a totally different world.”

Well, he’s right. It would be a totally different world. But different worlds are created all the time, and the world we’re currently building does not reasonably intersect with the darker realities of team sports. We want a pain-free world where everyone is the same, even if they are not. That can’t happen if we’re still keeping score.

Here's your daily hand grenade:



Ep. 346: UPenn Law Professor Says Radical Feminism Has Made Women ‘Dumber’

https://ricochet.com/podcast/daily-si...

(How could I not post this? It jibes perfectly with the section of Nietzsche we've just been reading.)

I came upon a review in *The Guardian* of a new biography of Nietzsche, *I Am Dynamite!*. I haven't yet read the book, but the review discusses major Nietzsche controversies. The author hones in on discrepancies between Neitzsche's life and actions, and his publications. She maintains that important parts of what we read in Nietzsche were inserted there after his death by his sister, Elisabeth, who was herself a fascist and antisemite, unlike Nietzsche.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...