Friedrich Nietzsche - A Nietzsche Reader (Penguin Classics)

A Nietzsche Reader is a compendium of Nietzsches philosophizing; it offers the reader an overview of that terrain in the hope that he/she will afterwards want to explore it. I have selected from Nietzsches writings passages which I think essential for an understanding of him in the knowledge that no selection can do justice to the work as a whole, and that any selection must to a greater or less extent be a simplification and thus to some extent a falsification of it. This selection from Nietzsche is not presented as a substitute for studying all of Nietzsche: its ambition is to lure on to that undertaking.

A generalizing introduction is, I hope, unnecessary: the compendium ought to explain itself. A passage-by-passage commentary ought likewise to be unnecessary: it ought to be its own commentary Nietzsche commenting on himself. But two kinds of explanation are called for: explanation of the method of selection and of the principle of selection. The method first.

Selection is made from Nietzsches philosophical works: that is, from the series Human, All Too Human (1878) to The Anti-Christ (1888), plus the autobiography Ecce Homo (1888). The works published before Human, the Nachlass and all other writings are excluded. The grounds for this limitation seem to me compelling and to reinforce one another. Firstly: the chief purpose of the Nietzsche Reader is to present Nietzsche as a philosopher, and it is in the series of books referred to that his philosophical opinions are primarily to be discovered. Secondly: a subsidiary purpose is to present Nietzsche as a stylist, and again it is in the series referred to that he so appears these are the mature compositions upon which he in a stylistic sense worked. Third: the present book is intended to be readable straight through: if the selection has been made correctly it is only by reading it straight through that you will derive the maximum benefit from it: but the intrusion of any material other than Nietzsches mature writings would act against this intention (the Nachlass especially, being stylistically no more than notes and jottings, would cause the reader constantly to stumble). Fourth: limitation of space makes rigorous selection a necessity, and in this process the writings of the second rank select themselves out. Fifth: I agree with Karl Schlechta that it is a demand of intellectual tact to understand an author primarily as he wanted himself to be publicly understood and in the present context this means limiting oneself to those works Nietzsche published or intended for publication. Sixth and last: the works from Human to Ecce Homo lend themselves well to excerpting; the immature works before Human do not. A volume of representative extracts would presumably have to include something from The Birth of Tragedy: the purpose of the present volume does not require it.

The construction of the book is as slight as the presuppositions behind it permit. In presentation preserves this development); secondly, that a chronological presentation also preserves the development of his style, the final phase of which is so vastly different from the first that their juxtaposition is not to be thought of except for the purpose (not pursued here) of demonstrating this difference. As a natural consequence of the development of his thinking the proportion of later to earlier work within each section gradually increases: so that, although not explicitly ordered chronologically, the book as a whole possesses a chronological movement.