Chapter 5 - Nietzsche: Daybreak

Summary

THE PLACE OF DAYBREAK IN THE NIETZSCHEAN CORPUS

Nietzsche began compiling the notes that would comprise Daybreak in January of 1880, finishing the book by May of the following year. Like all of Nietzsche's books, it sold poorly (fewer than 250 copies in the first five years, according to William Schaberg). Unlike most of his other works, however, it has been sadly neglected during the Nietzsche renaissance of the past three decades. Daybreak post-dates his famous, polemical study of classical literature, The Birth of Tragedy (1872) – the book that, at the time, destroyed Nietzsche's professional reputation in classical philology (the subject he taught at the University of Basel, until ill health forced his retirement in 1879). Daybreak also post-dates a somewhat less-neglected prior volume, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (1878–80), the book often said to constitute the highwater mark of Nietzsche's “positivist” phase (in which he accepted, somewhat uncritically, that science was the paradigm of all genuine knowledge).

Daybreak’s relative obscurity, however, is due more to his subsequent writings, which have overshadowed it in both the classroom and the secondary literature: The Gay Science (1882), the four books of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–84), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), and, to a lesser extent, the works of his last sane year (1888): Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, and Ecce Homo. Even the compilation made (against Nietzsche's wishes) from his notebooks after his mental collapse (in January 1889) and subsequently published as The Will to Power (first German edition, 1901) has received more scholarly scrutiny than Daybreak – a book Nietzsche intended to publish, and one that he pronounced (in late 1888) the “book [in which] my campaign against morality begins” (Ecce Homo, “Why I Write Such Good Books,” sub-section 1 of section on Daybreak).