Nietzsche: Writings from the Late Notebooks (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy)

Rating:
Summary: Nachlass, anyone?
Review: As anyone interested in digging a bit further into the Nietzsche canon than the published material can provide knows, until now, the mass of unpublished material Nietzsche left behind has been unavailable in English. The only glimpse into this vast realm of discarded material we had was "The Will to Power," a meager volume of roughly 500 pages.

We know Nietzsche left behind much more than this. We further know the presentation of the contemporary edition of "The Will to Power" is much the original systematic arrangement, and that this arrangement is not faithful to the handwritten manuscripts.

"Writings from the Late Notebooks," in turn, is a welcome supplement to "The Will to Power," as it serves as "the rest" of the unpublished, and in some cases, suppressed, manuscripts. In short, this volume makes available for the first time in English the majority of what Nietzsche left behind; i.e., taken collectively with "The Will to Power," English readers now have access to almost everything Nietzsche ever wrote.

Rating:
Summary: Nietzsche, Only As Ode As He Felt
Review: Translator Kate Sturge gives us the Nietzsche our times deserve in this, a reconstruction of Karl Schlechta's version of the 1880s *Nachlass* (see above) from the three-volume Colli-Montinari edition. While "KGW" vol. VIII offers both "pomes" and sketches for a reconstruction of society (excerpted liberally by Walter Kaufmann for his extremely rebarbative Vintage editions), Sturge gives us here roughly Heidegger's bewildering mystic and in fine form, too: the passages available here are simply the finest thoughts aus dem years, and this goes a long way towards explaining the hold of Nietzschean phenomenalism on the young Carnap and others rather than the rationalistic preoccupations of formalists. In other words, like the early untranslated book on Homer and Hesiod this offers us Nietzsche the *Zukunftphilologe*, puzzling through the "text of the world" rather than the flotsam of *obiter disjecta* which he foretold. (Safe for rads, even: think of this as a *respectful* homage to *Feel This Book* and you'll have the spirit of the thing, as well as a great deal of prewar intellectual life.)