Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~49,500 words · 235 passages
Cite this work
- APANietzsche. (n.d.). Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/early-greek-philosophy-amp-other-essays
- MLANietzsche. Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/early-greek-philosophy-amp-other-essays.
- ChicagoNietzsche. Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/early-greek-philosophy-amp-other-essays.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
The essays on the Presocratics, and On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.
Context and history
The latter is short and decisive: it holds that truth is 'a mobile army of metaphors' whose nature we have forgotten. It is among the most cited texts in twentieth-century philosophy, and Nietzsche never published it in his lifetime. The Presocratic part shows the philologist he was, reading Heraclitus and Anaximander as contemporaries. English translation from the complete edition edited by Oscar Levy (1909-1913), the one in the public domain. It is over a century old and it shows. The original is GERMAN and citation should follow the original, but of this work only the translation is here.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
In face of the political world of the Hellenes, I will not hide those phenomena of the present in which I believe I discern dangerous atrophies of the political sphere equally critical for art and society. If there should exist men, who as it were through birth are placed outside the national-and State-instincts, who consequently have to esteem the State only in so far as they conceive that it coincides with their own interest, then such men will necessarily imagine as the ultimate political aim the most undisturbed collateral existence of great political communities possible, which _they_ might be permitted to pursue their own purposes without restriction. With this idea in their heads they will promote _that_ policy which will offer the greatest security to these purposes; whereas it is unthinkable, that they, against their intentions, guided perhaps by an unconscious instinct, should sacrifice themselves for the State-tendency, unthinkable because they lack that very instinct. All other citizens of the State are in the dark about what Nature intends with her State-instinct within them, and they follow blindly; only those who stand outside this instinct know what _they_ want from the State and what the State is to grant them. Therefore it is almost unavoidable that such men should gain great influence in the State because they are allowed to consider it as a _means,_ whereas all the others under the sway of those unconscious purposes of the State are themselves only means for the fulfilment of the State-purpose. In order now to attain, through the medium of the State, the highest furtherance of their selfish aims, it is above all necessary, that the State be wholly freed from those awfully incalculable war-convulsions so that it may be used rationally; and thereby they strive with all their might for a condition of things in which war is an impossibility.…