Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~49,500 words · 235 passages
Cite this work
- APANietzsche. (n.d.). Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/early-greek-philosophy-amp-other-essays
- MLANietzsche. "Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/early-greek-philosophy-amp-other-essays.
- ChicagoNietzsche. Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/early-greek-philosophy-amp-other-essays.
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: the catalogue holds two of them, Also sprach Zarathustra and Der Wille zur Macht; for the rest, 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.
We moderns have an advantage over the Greeks in two ideas, which are given as it were as a compensation to a world behaving thoroughly slavishly and yet at the same time anxiously eschewing the word "slave": we talk of the "dignity of man" and of the "dignity of labour." Everybody worries in order miserably to perpetuate a miserable existence; this awful need compels him to consuming labour; man (or, more exactly, the human intellect) seduced by the "Will" now occasionally marvels at labour as something dignified. However in order that labour might have a claim on titles of honour, it would be necessary above all, that Existence itself, to which labour after all is only a painful means, should have more dignity and value than it appears to have had, up to the present, to serious philosophies and religions. What else may we find in the labour-need of all the millions but the impulse to exist at any price, the same all-powerful impulse by which stunted plants stretch their roots through earthless rocks! Out of this awful struggle for existence only individuals can emerge, and they are at once occupied with the noble phantoms of artistic culture, lest they should arrive at practical pessimism, which Nature abhors as her exact opposite. In the modern world, which, compared with the Greek, usually produces only abnormalities and centaurs, in which the individual, like that fabulous creature in the beginning of the Horatian Art of Poetry, is jumbled together out of pieces, here in the modern world in one and the same man the greed of the struggle for existence and the need for art show themselves at the same time: out of this unnatural amalgamation has originated the dilemma, to excuse and to consecrate that first greed before this need for art. Therefore; we believe in the "Dignity of man" and the "Dignity of labour." The Greeks did not require such conceptual hallucinations, for among them