Basic Writings of Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche

Aug 2009 · Sold by Modern Library

About this ebook

This captivating collection brings together five of Friedrich Nietzche’s most important philosophical works, exploring themes such as nihilism, metaphysics, and the nature of morality—featuring an introduction by Peter Gay and commentary from Martin Heidegger, Albert Camus, and Gilles Deleuze

More than one hundred years after his death, Friedrich Nietzsche remains the most influential philosopher of the modern era. Basic Writings of Nietzsche gathers the complete texts of five of Nietzsche’s most important works, from his first book to his last: The Birth of Tragedy, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, The Case of Wagner, and Ecce Homo. 
 
Edited and translated by the great Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann, this volume also features seventy-five aphorisms, selections from Nietzsche’s correspondence, and variants from drafts for Ecce Homo. It is a definitive guide to the full range of Nietzsche’s thought.

This edition includes a Modern Library Reading Group Guide

Ratings and reviews

Let me first say that I admire Nietzsche and Kaufmann greatly. My criticism is one that could apply to a great many books that are consistently being sold at full price, yet were clearly not vetted for quality control. This book is rife with errors that make it unreadable. For example, (and there are plenty of examples to give) aphorism (or interlude) #87 in Part 4 of BGE says, "...If one tethers one's heart severely arid imprisons it, one can give one's spirit many liberties..." I had to go to my paperback edition to translate it. It then made sense that the OCR (optical character recognition) mistook "arid" for "and". I can see how the 'r' and 'i' combined kind of look like an 'n'. Okay, Mr. Kaufmann certainly is not to blame. Were he still alive, he actually should be as upset as I for they (those given the responsibility to quality control this digital edition (again, at full paperback price, practically)) diminish his scholarship. Please have someone carefully read the book and give everyone who bought this flawed text the chance to download the updated version free of charge. Thanks.

About the author

Peter Gay is Sterling Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University and the former director of the Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library. His works include The Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom and Modernism: The Lure of Heresy.