Reddit reviews Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche (Hackett Classics)

From Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, edited by Christopher Middleton:

Page 260-261: Letter to Franz Overbeck, February 23, 1887 about a French translation of Notes from the Underground ("L’Esprit souterrain"):

> The instinct of affinity (or what shall I call it?) spoke to me instantaneously -- my joy was beyond bounds; not since my first encounter with Stendhal's Rouge et Noir have I known such joy. (The book consists of two novellas, the first really a piece of music, very foreign, very un-German music; the second a stroke of psychological genius, a sort of self-ridicule of the XX XX.) Incidentally, these Greeks have a great deal on their conscience -- falsification was their real trade; the whole of European psychology is sick with Greek superficialities, and without the modicum of Judaism, and so on, and so on.

It doesn't say XX XX in the text, it says two words in Greek which I can't bother to find out how to write...

Page 317: Letter to Georg Brandes, October 20, 1888:

> I quite believe it when you say that "in Russia one can come to life again"; any Russian book -- above all, Dostoevski (translated into French, for heaven's sake not German!!) -- I count among my greatest moments of pleasurable relief.

Page 327: Letter to Georg Brandes, November 20, 1888:

> I completely believe what you say about Dostoevski; I prize his work, on the other hand, as the most valuable psychological material known to me -- I am grateful to him in a remarkable way, however much he goes against my deepest instincts. Roughly as in my relation to Pascal, whom I almost love because he has taught me such an infinite amount -- the only logical Christian.

From Will to Power, edited by Walter Kaufmann:

Page 389-390:

> 735: There are delicate and sickly inclined natures, so-called idealists, who cannot achieve anything better than a crime, cru, vert: (98) it is the great justification of their little, pale existences, a payment for a protracted cowardice and mendaciousness, a moment at least of strength: afterwards they perish of it. (99)

> 736: In our civilized world, we learn to know almost only the wretched criminal, crushed by the curse and the contempt of society, mistrutful of himself, often belittling and slandering his deed, a miscarried type of criminal; and we resist the idea that all great human beings have been criminals (only in the grand and not in a miserable style), that crime belongs to greatness (-- or that is the experience og those who have tried the reins and of all who have descended deepest into great souls---). To be "free as a bird" from tradition, the conscience of duty --- every great human being knows this danger. But he also desires it: he desires a great goal and therefore also the means to it. (100)

The notes are of course Kaufmann's:

> (98) raw, green
> (99) Possibly a comment on Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. See also the next footnote and section 740 below.
> (100) Cf. Twilight [of the Idols], "Skrimishes," section 45, which deals at greater length with "The criminal and what is related to him" and says: "The testimony of Dostoevsky is relevant... -- Dostoevsky, the only psychologist, incidentally, from whom I had something to learn..." (Portable Nietzsche, pp. 549-51). Cf. also section 740 below. Se also the Appendix, below
Also, If you search for "dosto" here, you'll find more references to Dostoevsky.

Pages 391-393:

> 740: Crime belongs to the concept "revolt against the social order." One does not "punish" a rebel; one suppresses him. A rebel can be a miserable and contemptible man; but there is nothing contemptible in a revolt as such-and to be a rebel in view of contemporary society does not in itself lower the value of a man. There are even cases in which one might have to honor a rebel, because he finds something in our society against which war ought to be waged --he awakens us from our slumber.

> If a criminal perpetrates an individual act against an individual this does not demonstrate that his whole instinct is not in a state of war with the whole order: his deed as a mere symptom.

> One should reduce the concept "punishment" to the concept: suppression of a revolt, security measures against the suppressed (total or partial imprisonment). But one should not express contempt through punishment: a criminal is in any case a man who risks his life, his honor, his freedom-a man of courage. Neither should one take punishment to be a penance; or as a payment, as if an exchange relationship existed between guilt and punishment --punishment does not purify, for crime does not sully.

> One should not deprive the criminal of the possibility of making his peace with society; provided he does not belong to the
race of criminals. In that case one should make war on him even before he has committed any hostile act (first operation as soon as one has him in one's power: his castration).

> One should not hold against the criminal his bad manners or the low level of his intelligence. Nothing is more common than
that he should misunderstand himself (for often his rebellious instinct, the rancor of the déclassé, has not reached consciousness, faute le lecture), (102) that he should slander and dishonor his deed under the influence of fear and failure-quite apart from those cases in which, psychologically speaking, the criminal surrenders to an uncomprehended drive and by some subsidiary action ascribes a false motive to his deed (perhaps by a robbery when what he wanted was blood). (103)

> One should beware of assessing the value of a man according to a single deed. Napoleon warned against this. For our haut-relief deeds are quite especially insignificant. If men like us have no crime, e,g., murder, on our conscience-why is it? Because a few opportune circumstances were lacking. And if we did it, what would that indicate about our value? In a way one would despise us if one thought we had not the strength to kill a man under certain circumstances. In almost all crimes some qualities also find expression which ought not to be lacking in a man. It was not without justification that Dostoevsky said of the inmates of his Siberian prisons that they formed the strongest and most valuable part of the Russian people.''' (104) If with us the criminal is an illnourished and stunted plant, this is to the dishonor of our social relationships; in the age of the Renaissance the criminal throve and acquired for himself his own kind of virtue --virtue in the Renaissance style, to be sure, virtù, moraline-free virtue.

> One can enhance only those men whom one does not treat with contempt; moral contempt causes greater indignity and harm than any crime.

> (102) For lack of reading.
> (103) Cf.. Zarathustra I. "On the Pale Criminal" (Portable Nietzsche, p. 149ff), and Crime and Punishment; but when Nietzsche wrote Zarathustra, he had not even heard of Dostoevsky. For the details concerning his reading of Dostoevsky, see my notes on Genealogy, essay III, sections 15 and 24.
> (104) Cf. Twilight, "Skirmishes," section 45 (Portable Nietzsche, pp. 549-51), and section 736 above.

Page 417:

> 788: To restore a good conscience to the evil man -- has this been my unconscious endeavour? I mean, to the evil man in so far as he is the strong man? (Dostoevsky's judgment on the criminals in prison should be cited here.)



You can also search for "dosto" here and find more references.

Yeah it seems to me a serious work. As a description says this is "the antithesis of the first biographies of the philosopher, all biased". Janz was actually a passionate researcher, he got into philology to follow N. writings, he also helped an exhumation of his musical works and wrote 3 huge biographical volumes despite there was already a huge biography from Richard Blunck at the time. I didn't know they haven't translated it in English, perhaps the epistolary can be useful as well, as Janz's work makes large use of it.

I can't remember who it was (and a very long time ago too) that wrote that Nietzsche's praise of the Jews was really intended to be a read as a warning that they shouldn't be casually dismissed, that they truly are a force to be reckoned with, something to that extent. Not like I agree with that sentiment, but it certainly left my head spinning when I came upon it at the time. "Bizarre, sneaky, grim, but well-argued", I thought. I found it while digging up material myself for a paper I wrote during my undergrad days years ago. It very-well may have been a National Socialist scholar who interpreted Nietzsche that way. Alfred Baeumler, maybe? I came across so many different voices arguing in a ton of varying directions doing that paper, so it's hard to remember. Sorry.

Check this book out, along with this one. The letters are full of a lot of clear examples in which he himself denounces any endorsement of anti-semitism, but the former book can help you balance the scales a bit and go into the ways his work was handled by National Socialists and proto-fascists.