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Rating: 
Summary: One Size Does Not Fit All
Review: A lot of my theological thinking may derive from the kind of tension reflected early in this book in the contrast between the views expressed in section 38 on the similarity between an "angry holy Jehovah" and some "angry holy prophets" and a more spiritual attitude in section 39 which "came to take ecstasy for the higher goal of life and the standard by which all earthly things stand condemned." By section 191, this book expresses sympathy for the artists who attempt to exhibit blissful exaltation in a way that is "half priestly, half psychiatric." If that isn't more than enough to think about, Nietzsche adds some comments on Schopenhauer in section 193, how "his whole life long he thundered against the spectacle the Germans presented to him, but he was never able to explain it to himself." Don't make me guess what Nietzsche was trying to explain.
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Summary: Neglected, yet stylistically excellent aphoristic work
Review: Both "Human all too human" and this are the best books written by Nietzsche. Of course is different of "Zarathustra" which is no an aforist book.
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Summary: Essential Nietzsche
Review: Daybreak is for readers that want to experience the tremendous efforts that Nietzsche undertook to overcome his training and experiences as an educator and to discover and create his own voice. As with the extraordinary previous work -- Human, All Too Human -- Nietzsche writes in a manner that strongly suggests a very rich series of debate openings. He aims to stimulate, provoke, and establish a literary forum to air his overflowing wealth of ideas, questions, doubts, intuitions. Daybreak, like other works by this incredible writer, is meant for slow readers. You don't just simply sit down and read it from cover to cover like an entertaining best seller. Every other page will contain a notion that will either delight, mystify, irritate, or -- best of all -- provide one of those wonderful ah-hah experiences that only happen when you are immersed in serious thought. It's best to take your time with one section after another and seriously ponder what he is saying, because Nietzsche builds a very startling view of human existence that cannot be appreciated by a quick reading.As emphasized in the extremely well-written introduction by the editors (who do a great job in setting Daybreak in its context among other works by Nietzsche), the main subject of the book is a critique of morality -- what does it really mean to humans when we try to strip it down to its essentials and challenge the many conventions of custom. Nietzsche does not simply treat morality as an interesting subject for a pleasant intellectual dialogue, but rather makes it clear that he is in deadly earnest about how fundamentally important it is, and how our attitudes about it create ourselves and our world. You cannot read this book passively, because Nietzsche writes about difficult concepts that are very much alive today, such as this excerpt from section 149 about the common compulsion to conform to social custom, "The need for little deviant acts": "Sometimes to act against one's better judgment when it comes to questions of custom... many toerably free-minded people regard this, not merely as unobjectionable, but as 'honest', 'humane', 'tolerant', 'not being pedantic', and whatever else those pretty words may be with which the intellectual conscience is lulled to sleep: and thus this person takes his child for Christian baptism though he is an atheist; and that person serves in the army as all the world does, however much he may execrate hatred between nations; and a third marries his wife in church because her relatives are pious and is not ashamed to repeat vows before a priest. ... The thoughtless error! ... it thereby acquires in the eyes of all who come to hear of it the sanction of rationality itself!" There's much more of course, and one of the constantly exciting aspects of reading Nietzsche is to experience the way he interweaves discussions of art with larger philosophical concerns. His insights into literature and music are never trivial, and he provides a series of very startling perspectives. Daybreak is not the best known of Nietzsche's works, but it is essential to anyone who wants to engage seriously with his thought.
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Summary: Brilliant work, lame academic introduction
Review: If you're going to really understand Nietzsche it is of prime importance to understand the development of his ideas as they were written, chronilogicaly. To skip a work or omit one is to alter the perspective he is giving us. This is his first work to undermine the truth of morality, for morality's sake. His tone varies, but to miss out on "the first Christian" is a mistake. Thoroughly entertaining. I would skip the lame intro. Nietzsche would have burned it along with the rest of the systematic analysis of his work. 5 stars for our brilliant anti-nihilist, minus one for the lame academics they picked for the intro. Why not Solomon? Or Schacht or any other articulate academics. In general this series is great. These books are built for abuse. Why can't they make all paperbacks like these.
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Summary: Nietzsche's Early Thoughts on Morality
Review: In Nietzsche's Daybreak we see the beginnings of Nietzsche's complete and exhaustive interrogation of morality with its link to suffering. As with all of N's books, there are real gems here. His tone is calm and sedate, not shrill and inflated as in later works, such as the Anti-Christ or Twilight of the Idols. And it begins with a commencement to undermine our faith in morality. This is a recurrent them of Nietzsche's, who critics have said, gave the criminal back his conscience. Some important points contained in the book include his linking of animal behavior and human morality and comments about the suffering and its consequent blame that become keys to his later works. Also worth mentioning are his comments in 205, Of the people of Israel. Read this section. It is prophetic. Nietzsche saw the Jewish problem in Germany as critical to the coming century. That he became associated with anti-Semitism has been unfair and a travesty. Daybreak is a great primer for Nietzsche's later, more systemic, works such as Genealogy of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil. Many of his later ideas are interrogated here, in some intances, the arguments are even better articulated.
Rating:
Summary: Nietzsche's Early Thoughts on Morality
Review: In Nietzsche's Daybreak we see the beginnings of Nietzsche's complete and exhaustive interrogation of morality with its link to suffering. As with all of N's books, there are real gems here. His tone is calm and sedate, not shrill and inflated as in later works, such as the Anti-Christ or Twilight of the Idols. And it begins with a commencement to undermine our faith in morality. This is a recurrent them of Nietzsche's, who critics have said, gave the criminal back his conscience. Some important points contained in the book include his linking of animal behavior and human morality and comments about the suffering and its consequent blame that become keys to his later works. Also worth mentioning are his comments in 205, Of the people of Israel. Read this section. It is prophetic. Nietzsche saw the Jewish problem in Germany as critical to the coming century. That he became associated with anti-Semitism has been unfair and a travesty. Daybreak is a great primer for Nietzsche's later, more systemic, works such as Genealogy of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil. Many of his later ideas are interrogated here, in some intances, the arguments are even better articulated.
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Summary: At the moment, my favorite Nietzsche
Review: Well, Nietzsche is one of those dudes you don't just read and then put away--no, you have a relationship with Fred your whole life. You go through ups where you think he's a brilliant... sage, you go through downs where you think he's a brilliant... child. Etcetera--thinking that he's brilliant is about the only constancy in the experience of returning to his writings again and again. You think you understand him, you think a bit more, you think you don't understand him... you think a bit more, then you think you understand him again. So it goes.
Right now, I know for sure that I do not understand: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Ecce Homo, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, Birth of Tragedy. And I find The Gay Science too frivolous for me. Again, at the moment... not for all time.
Nietzsche overwhelms me in any large quantity. But these little aphorisms and prose poems in Daybreak are just perfect. They concern the relationships between morality, art, religion, tradition, custom, nationality, society, the individual, history, politics, lies, truth, human motives, and a bunch of other stuff too. Nietzsche knows what he's about: he'll never give you compartmentalized insight. Nietzsche never would have, and never did, write a book just about Aesthetics, or a book just about Morality, or a book just about Sociology. No, he was always aware of the holistic connection between these scholastically divided FACETS of the human condition. Maybe that's my hint to you for enjoying him more.
Daybreak reads like one of those old-style table of contents where they would put little chapter summaries underneath each line... but Daybreak reads like a table of contents for pretty much the entire corpus of 20th century "humanities" literature, plus much stuff that no one's attempted to write yet.
Is it all good? No, but about 95% of it is. So get yourself a cheap copy, head on over to the coffee-house, and dive on in. I'll see you there one of these days.
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