The Greek State and Other Fragments

by Friedrich Nietzsche

This eBook features the unabridged text of ‘The Greek State and Other Fragments by Friedrich Nietzsche - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)’ from the bestselling edition of ‘The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche’.

Having established their name as the leading publisher of classic literature and art, Delphi Classics produce publications that are individually crafted with superior formatting, while introducing many rare texts for the first time in digital print. The Delphi Classics edition of Nietzsche includes original annotations and illustrations relating to the life and works of the author, as well as individual tables of contents, allowing you to navigate eBooks quickly and easily.

eBook features:* The complete unabridged text of ‘The Greek State and Other Fragments by Friedrich Nietzsche - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)’* Beautifully illustrated with images related to Nietzsche’s works* Individual contents table, allowing easy navigation around the eBook* Excellent formatting of the text

Genres: Philosophy

97 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 17, 2017

About the author

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German classical scholar, philosopher, and critic of culture, who became one of the most influential of all modern thinkers. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest person to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at the age of 24, but resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties, with paralysis and probably vascular dementia. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897 and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Nietzsche died in 1900, after experiencing pneumonia and multiple strokes.
Nietzsche's work spans philosophical polemics, poetry, cultural criticism, and fiction while displaying a fondness for aphorism and irony. Prominent elements of his philosophy include his radical critique of truth in favour of perspectivism; a genealogical critique of religion and Christian morality and a related theory of master–slave morality; the aesthetic affirmation of life in response to both the "death of God" and the profound crisis of nihilism; the notion of Apollonian and Dionysian forces; and a characterisation of the human subject as the expression of competing wills, collectively understood as the will to power. He also developed influential concepts such as the Übermensch and his doctrine of eternal return. In his later work, he became increasingly preoccupied with the creative powers of the individual to overcome cultural and moral mores in pursuit of new values and aesthetic health. His body of work touched a wide range of topics, including art, philology, history, music, religion, tragedy, culture, and science, and drew inspiration from Greek tragedy as well as figures such as Zoroaster, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Wagner, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
After his death, Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth became the curator and editor of his manuscripts. She edited his unpublished writings to fit her German ultranationalist ideology, often contradicting or obfuscating Nietzsche's stated opinions, which were explicitly opposed to antisemitism and nationalism. Through her published editions, Nietzsche's work became associated with fascism and Nazism. 20th-century scholars such as Walter Kaufmann, R.J. Hollingdale, and Georges Bataille defended Nietzsche against this interpretation, and corrected editions of his writings were soon made available. Nietzsche's thought enjoyed renewed popularity in the 1960s and his ideas have since had a profound impact on 20th- and early 21st-century thinkers across philosophy—especially in schools of continental philosophy such as existentialism, postmodernism, and post-structuralism—as well as art, literature, music, poetry, politics, and popular culture.

Reviews

[Truls Ljungström · Rating 2 out of 5]

Det är svårt att uttala sig om denna på djupet, eftersom det är en samling kortare introduktioner till olika tankar, men det jag kan säga är att det är en annan del av Nietzsche än vad jag sett i den glada vetenskapen och liknande texter; när han vänder sig till Grekland blir han mystisk och pessimistisk. Det mest intressanta är hans reflektioner över tävlan som fenomen, och nytta. Mitt problem med boken, är att den vältrar sig i (eller möjligen låtsas vältra sig i) humorlös fanatism.

[Dargel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Притворюсь что понял о чем было написано, хотя на деле затруднений в прочтении данного текста(Греческое государство) не было. Скорее всего быстро забуду, ибо сомнительна актуальность на данный момент времени и моего развития.

[Aaron Schuschu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for the Greek State and The Greek Woman

[sahand]

This compilation comprises several essays intended to serve as prefaces for books that were never actualized. It is beneficial to encounter one's own lack of knowledge, and engaging with the works of profound and idiosyncratic intellectuals such as Nietzsche might facilitate this process. Presented below are sections that I found to be intellectually stimulating, to say the least.

Our philosopher attacks the modern ideas of the “dignity of man” and of the “dignity of labour,” because Existence seems to be without worth and dignity. The preponderance of such illusory ideas is due to the political power nowadays vested in the “slaves.” The Greeks saw no dignity in labour. They saw the necessity of it, and the necessity of slavery, but felt ashamed of both. Not even the labour of the artist did they admire, although they praised his completed work."

If the Greeks perished through their slavery, one thing is still more certain: we shall perish through the lack of slavery. To the essence of Culture slavery is innate. It is part of it. A vast multitude must labour and “slave” in order that a few may lead an existence devoted to beauty and art. Strife and war are necessary for the welfare of the State. War consecrates and purifies the State. The purpose of the military State is the creating of the military genius, the ruthless conqueror, the War-lord. There also exists a mysterious connection between the State in general and the creating of the genius."

In THE GREEK WOMAN, Nietzsche, the man who said, “One cannot think highly enough of women,” delineates his ideal of woman. Penelope, Antigone, Electra are his ideal types.

ON MUSIC AND WORDS. Music is older, more fundamental than language. Music is an expression of cosmic consciousness. Language is only a gesture-symbolism."


Probably the most popular of the Essays in this book will prove to be the one on TRUTH AND FALSITY. It is an epistemological rhapsody on the relativity of truth, on “Appearance and Reality,” on “perceptual flux” versus—” conceptual conceit.” Man’s intellect is only a means in the struggle for existence, a means taking the place of the animal’s horns and teeth. It adapts itself especially to deception and dissimulation. There are no absolute truths. Truth is relative and always imperfect. Yet fictitious values fixed by convention and utility are set down as truth. The liar does not use these standard coins of the realm. He is hated; not out of love for truth, no, but because he is dangerous. Our words never hit the essence, the “X” of thing, but indicate only external characteristics. Language is the columbarium of the ideas, the cemetery of perceptions. Truths are metaphors, illusions, anthropomorphisms about which one has forgotten that they are such. There are different truths to different beings. Like a spider man sits in the web of his truths and ideas. He wants to be deceived. By means of error he mostly lives; truth is often fatal. When the liar, the story-teller, the poet, the rhapsodist lie to him without hurting him he — loves them!

WE moderns have an advantage over the Greeks in two ideas, which are given as it were as a compensation to a world behaving thoroughly slavishly and yet at the same time anxiously eschewing the word “slave”: we talk of the “dignity of man” and of the “dignity of labour.” Everybody worries in order miserably to perpetuate a miserable existence; this awful need compels him to consuming labour; man (or, more exactly, the human intellect) seduced by the “Will” now occasionally marvels at labour as something dignified. However in order that labour might have a claim on titles of honour, it would be necessary above all, that Existence itself, to which labour after all is only a painful means, should have more dignity and value than it appears to have had, up to the present, to serious philosophies and religions. What else may we find in the labour-need of all the millions but the impulse to exist at any price, the same all-powerful impulse by which stunted plants stretch their roots through earthless rocks!"

Accordingly we must accept this cruel sounding truth, that slavery is of the essence of Culture; a truth of course, which leaves no doubt as to the absolute value of Existence. This truth is the vulture, that gnaws at the liver of the Promethean promoter of Culture. The misery of toiling men must still increase in order to make the production of the world of art possible to a small number of Olympian men. Here is to be found the source of that secret wrath nourished by Communists and Socialists of all times, and also by their feebler descendants, the white race of the “Liberals,” not only against the arts, but also against classical antiquity."

[Yash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nietzsche is not the leftist hippie you think he is…