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14 reviews for:
The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche; Thus Spake Zarathustra, Tr. by Thomas Common. 1911
Oscar Levy
3.37 AVERAGE
14 reviews for:
The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche; Thus Spake Zarathustra, Tr. by Thomas Common. 1911
Oscar Levy
3.37 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
funny
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Completed the Twilight of the Idols portion, holding off on The Antichrist for now. Getting the sense I should really read one of the earlier works he brags about in here, he's clearly just going on a tear through his by now well-established contrarianism in this work, occasionally spouting off a good turn of phrase or sticky idea.
funny
medium-paced
"Le plaidoyer en faveur de la chasteté n'est qu'une incitation à la perversité"
His criticism is kinda inseparable from his elitism/at least aesthetic aristocracy. But the Wagner disses every other page are pretty funny.
"On s'apercoit souvent que les "grands hommes" tels qu'on les vénère ne sont, en fin de compte, que des petits poèmes ratés"
His criticism is kinda inseparable from his elitism/at least aesthetic aristocracy. But the Wagner disses every other page are pretty funny.
"On s'apercoit souvent que les "grands hommes" tels qu'on les vénère ne sont, en fin de compte, que des petits poèmes ratés"
It is embarrassing to read Nietzsche, one is supposed to already have read Nietzsche, like Sontag would've....
challenging
reflective
medium-paced
I spent more than 10 hours reading these short essays and looking into the various references and allusions that Nietzsche makes throughout. The Case of Wagner, I take it, is a lamentation about what Nietzsche perceived as the decay of society in general and music in particular, embodied by its decadence and nihilism, of which Wagner and Schopenhauer were the artist and philosopher in chief. Nietzsche believes Wagner is a failure because he is not an authentic or great musician, but instead an actor who cynically absorbs and perpetuates the culture of the masses at the expense of original, individual expression and creativity. Wagner apparently does this through his drama and grandiosity in theatrical arrangement and self-referential use of salvation as subject matter. For Nietzsche, Wagner both represents and cultivates the rise of Germanic ideals including nationalism and obedience to the common cause. He ties all this to his conceptions of master and slave moralities (from earlier works), which made a lot of sense in this context. The desire to formulate history as a science, which thinkers such as Marx, Tolstoy and Trotsky also attempted, does seem quaint and futile now though. There were some genuinely thrilling poetical moments as per the best of Nietzsche, but most of it was quite critical and analytical, and there were many of those confounded inconsistencies which are typical of his later writing. The translation was not a good one. It was inelegant at best and very crude at times.
Niets (my short for Nietzsche) was a bit of a nut case. His theories—although, at times, vague, tunnel-visioned, or nearly self-contradicting—are undeniable. Mencken breaks them down nicely, especially the notion about the inevitable cross-referential clash of philosophy and art; exquisitely depicted by the interesting friendship between a thinker and a composer (Niets and Wagner).
reflective
slow-paced
challenging
funny
informative
tense
medium-paced
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
fast-paced