Books by Friedrich Nietzsche

“This is an amazing book. Nietzsche was very young when he became a professor of Classics, and this is the first book he wrote…The Birth of Tragedy is a young Nietzsche still earnestly trying to be a sensible academic. Nietzsche argued that within culture, there are two opposing forces—the Dionysian force and the Apollonian force. On the one hand Dionysus, the ancient Greek god of chaos, passion, and what we’d call the darker aspects of human nature, as well as its most ambiguous and unpredictable aspects. On the other hand Apollo, who in ancient Greek mythology was the God of medicine and sunlight and prophecy, was quite rational. Both sides coexist in a person and in a society.” Read more...

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Mahlet Zimeta, Philosopher

“Nietzsche comes to reject any notion of being: he regards the notion of being as one of the great fictions… He loves Heraclitus’s affirmation of passing away and destroying” Read more...

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Angie Hobbs, Philosopher

“I chose Gay Science because that’s where he really becomes a master of the form: it’s incredibly vivid and incandescent in parts where you get a dazzled by his sheer visionary, aesthetic philosophy of life.” Read more...

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Andrew Hui, Literary Scholar

“The book deals with the two absolutely central questions for Nietzsche, namely what’s wrong with our morality and the problem of suffering. It tells an extremely provocative story about each of these and in the third essay it even connects up with Nietzsche’s interest in questions about the nature of truth and why we value truth. In that sense it really is a mature work, bringing together reflections on topics that span the prior decade...The Genealogy is sort of notorious because it has no footnotes. It makes all kinds of historical claims, etymological claims et cetera, but there are no footnotes because that’s not how Nietzsche does things. But in point of fact he had scholarly sources in mind on almost every one of these issues, and Clark and Swensen compiled them. So they supply the underlying scholarly apparatus for the kind of claims Nietzsche is making, which makes this a very useful text.” Read more...

The Best Nietzsche Books

Brian Leiter,

“You mentioned that Beyond Good and Evil is a good one to dip into for people who are new to Nietzsche books, because it provides a good overview to his thoughts? Yes, I think that’s right. It touches on almost all Nietzsche’s central concerns – on truth, on the nature of philosophy, on morality, on what’s wrong with morality, will to power…in the first chapter of the book…Nietzsche tells us that the great philosophers are basically fakers when they tell you that they arrived at their views because there were good rational arguments in support of them. That’s nonsense, says Nietzsche. Great philosophers, he thinks, are driven by a particular moral or ethical vision. Their philosophy is really a post-hoc rationalisation for the values they want to promote.” Read more...

The Best Nietzsche Books

Brian Leiter,