Chapter 11 - Nietzsche: Writings from the late notebooks

Summary

Nietzsche is a writer whose work stands visibly unfinished. Others by and large completed what they had to say, but in Nietzsche's case the gap between the task he envisaged and the writing he carried out grew wider, not smaller, during his active life – and dramatically so in its last few years. Thus, the texts collected in the present volume may be taken to mark Nietzsche's frontier: this is how far he came. In what follows I will look at the history of these texts, their origin and the way they were handed down to us, as well as the way the present selection has been made. Secondly, I will indicate some of the basic lines of argumentation and some of the philosophical import of these texts.

THE TEXTS

All through his life as a writer, Nietzsche recorded his thoughts in notebooks or on sheets of paper he carried with him. In this way he could keep writing virtually anywhere, and indeed he made a point of this habit (see TI Maxims 34). While the notebooks and papers contain some material of a merely occasional nature, such as travelling plans or recipes, by far the largest part deals with substantive issues. Nietzsche normally saved these notes, using them as a basis for the manuscripts of his published works, and so a large number of them were preserved. How many are missing is hard to gauge from what we have, but it would seem that a representative portion of Nietzsche's total production has survived. With a few exceptions, all these papers are now kept in the Goethe-Schiller Archive in Weimar.