Nietzsche: A Selected Annotated Bibliography

The Nietzsche Archive

The New York Public Library has facsimiles of all of Nietzsche’s papers (except the letters) held in the Nietzsche Archive in Weimar, Germany.  These unpublished papers are usually referred to as Nietzsche’s Nachlass.  There are 45 bound volumes.   Volumes 1-5 contain the manuscripts for his published works; volumes 6-8 Nietzsche’s lecture notes; volumes 9-32 philosophical notebooks; volumes 33-42 memoranda; volumes 43-45 musical compositions. *KF 2000 (Nietzsche, F. Fotokopien aus dem Nietzsche-Archiv)

As Linda Williams describes it, the “Nachlass can be divided roughly into three different kinds of work.  The first…comprises the works Nietzsche was editing right before his collapse.  These works are Ecce Homo, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and The Antichrist…The second…are Nietzsche’s early, finished pieces that were never published, the so called Schriften-primarily his lectures and writings while he was employed at Basel…The third…consists of Nietzsche’s notes.   These notes vary from near essay length and form, to extremely sketchy outlines of various projects, to single sentences or sentence fragments…there are passages lined out, words jotted in the margins, and some overwriting.” ¹⁴

Although the Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Werke by Colli and Montinari contains more of Nietzsche’s Nachlass than any previous edition of Nietzsche’s works, there is still much that is not included.  Bernd Magnus estimates that “there is perhaps as much as 25% more material-excluding Nietzsche’s letters, letters to him, and personal effects—than exists in even the very best edition of Nietzsche’s works, the monumental Colli-Montinari edition…The reasons for this…may include the following facts…Montinari, often did not produce the pages and the notations Nietzsche himself crossed out in his handwritten manuscripts…Montinari…excluded…matters he considered ‘personal’…and many editors have excluded all marginalia…” ¹⁵

Scholars have taken four basic positions towards the Nachlass.  For Martin Heidegger, the Nachlass is where Nietzsche’s true philosophy is to be found.  “What Nietzsche himself published during his creative life was always foreground…His philosophy proper was left behind as posthumous, unpublished work.” ¹⁶  On the other hand, R.J. Hollingdale argued that the notes in the Nachlass that were never incorporated into the published works, were ideas Nietzsche rejected, as should we.  There are other scholars, like Karl Jaspers, Arthur Danto, and Richard Schacht, who use both the published and unpublished material without differentiating between them, not seeing a problem in giving equal weight to writings that were never published.  That is not a problem for material that appeared in the published writings with only minor revision.  But “writings that did not find their way into publication in any form are problematic.  Are they rough drafts of some future work which Nietzsche was unable to complete due to his illness…Are they ideas that Nietzsche entertained but ultimately rejected?  If so, we should not place them on par with the ideas in his published works.” ¹⁷

Lastly, there is the position of scholars like Bernd Magnus, and Linda Williams who take the “position of carefully differentiating between the two sets of writings….[and] treat the Nachlass entries as thought experiments…they do not advise ignoring the Nachlass entries altogether, but they also do not treat the entries with the same degree of confidence as the works Nietzsche authorized for publication.” ¹⁸  

How much importance is given to the Nachlass has consequences on how Nietzsche is interpreted.   For example, it can lead to differences “over the importance of the concept of the will to power (which is mentioned rarely in published works) and the cosmological version of the doctrine of eternal recurrence (which appears only in unpublished works).” ¹⁹

-------------------

14.  Linda L. Williams.  Nietzsche’s Mirror: The World as Will to Power. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001) 63.

15. Bernd Magnus.  “How the ‘True Text’ Finally Became a Fable: Nietzsche’s Weimar Literary Estate,” Nietzscheana  6 (1997): 14.

16. Martin Heidegger.  Nietzsche, trans. David Krell. (New York: Harper and   Row, 1979), 9.

17.  Linda Williams. “Will to Power in Nietzsche’s Published Works and the Nachlass”, Journal of the History of Ideas 57.3 (1996), 1.

18.  Ibid., 1.

19. Bernd Magnus and Kathleen Higgins. “Nietzsche’s Works and Their Themes,” The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche. (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 58.