The Collected Works of Friedrich Nietzsche
Latest release: May 9, 2024
Metaphysics
Series
43
Books
About this ebook series
This is a journal from his earliest years, taken from his autobiographical notes. It is a wistful, deeply nostalgic commentary on his childhood; his memories of going to church, encountering music (sometimes these notes are published as a separate work "On Music"), and his large Protestant family. It is openly theistic, romantic in style, and reminiscent of the Goethe-Schiller age in which the young Nietzsche grew up. In 1858, he wrote an addendum titled "looking back", which is included here. These journals were first published in the volume "Gesammelte Werke" edited by Peter Gast (a pseudonym for Heinrich Köselitz, a close associate of Nietzsche) and Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche (Nietzsche's sister). They were included in the second series of these collected works under the title "Philologica," which was published in 1897 and several editions after that. This was part of the effort to compile and publish Nietzsche's unpublished manuscripts and lecture notes after his death. This critical reader's edition presents a modern translation of the original manuscript, crafted to help the armchair philosopher engage deeply with Nietzsche's works through clean, contemporary language and simplified sentence structures that clarify his complex ideas. Supplementary material enriches the text with autobiographical, historical, and linguistic context, including an afterword by the translator on Nietzsche’s history, impact, and intellectual legacy, an index of the philosophical concepts he employs—emphasizing Existentialism and Phenomenology—a comprehensive chronological list of his published writings, and a detailed timeline of his life, highlighting the personal relationships that shaped his philosophy.
