Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- PART ONE Youth
- PART TWO The Reluctant Professor
- PART THREE The Nomad
- Chapter 15 The Wanderer and His Shadow
- Chapter 16 Dawn
- Chapter 17 The Gay Science
- Chapter 18 The Salomé Affair
- Chapter 19 Zarathustra
- Chapter 20 Nietzsche's Circle of Women
- Chapter 21 Beyond Good and Evil
- Chapter 22 Clearing the Decks
- Chapter 23 T he Genealogy of Morals
- Chapter 24 1888
- Chapter 25 Catastrophe
- Chapter 26 The Rise and Fall of The Will to Power
- Chapter 27 The End
- Chapter 28 Nietzsche's Madness
- Chronology
- Notes
- Bibliography of Secondary Literature
- Index
- Plate section
Chapter 23 - T he Genealogy of Morals
from PART THREE - The Nomad
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- PART ONE Youth
- PART TWO The Reluctant Professor
- PART THREE The Nomad
- Chapter 15 The Wanderer and His Shadow
- Chapter 16 Dawn
- Chapter 17 The Gay Science
- Chapter 18 The Salomé Affair
- Chapter 19 Zarathustra
- Chapter 20 Nietzsche's Circle of Women
- Chapter 21 Beyond Good and Evil
- Chapter 22 Clearing the Decks
- Chapter 23 T he Genealogy of Morals
- Chapter 24 1888
- Chapter 25 Catastrophe
- Chapter 26 The Rise and Fall of The Will to Power
- Chapter 27 The End
- Chapter 28 Nietzsche's Madness
- Chronology
- Notes
- Bibliography of Secondary Literature
- Index
- Plate section
Summary
Parsifal, Dostoyevsky, and a ‘Well-Intentioned’ Earthquake
The year 1887 began with a deep freeze: ‘Europe’, Nietzsche wrote Elizabeth, sweltering in Paraguay, ‘has transformed itself into a snow-mountain and polar bear’. Though there was none in Nice itself, the hills surrounding his winter quarters were powdered with snow. In spite of his new, south-facing room in the Rue des Ponchettes (p. 436 above) the ‘blue-finger’ problem persisted, as did a lowering of health and spirits, the cumulative effect, he thought, of two months of frost and rain. Towards the end of January, however, his spirits received a lift from an unexpected quarter: a visit to Monte Carlo to hear the prelude to Parsifal. ‘Leaving aside the question of the use of such music and regarding it purely aesthetically’, he wrote Köselitz,
has Wagner ever done anything better? The highest psychological awareness and definiteness with regard to what should be said, expressed, communicated, the shortest and most direct form thereof, every nuance of feeling reduced to the epigrammatic: a clarity of music as a descriptive art…and a sublime and extraordinary feeling, experience, eventfulness, of the soul at the very heart of the music which honours Wagner to the highest degree.
And in the notebooks he calls it ‘the greatest masterpiece of the sublime that I know’. ‘Nothing else grasps Christianity so deeply or brings one to have such intense sympathy with it’, he writes, adding that ‘no painter had painted such a dark, melancholy vision’ as do its final bars, ‘not Dante, not Leonardo’.
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- Information
- Friedrich NietzscheA Philosophical Biography, pp. 450 - 484Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010