Did Nietzsche want his notes burned? Some reflections on the Nachlass problem

ABSTRACT

The issue of the use of the Nachlass material has been much debated in Nietzsche scholarship in recent decades. Some insist on the absolute interpretative priority of his published writings over those unpublished and suggest that an extensive engagement with the Nachlass is harmful because it is something Nietzsche rejected. To verify this claim, they appeal to the story of Nietzsche asking his landlord in Sils-Maria to burn some of his notes. Since the notes that were ultimately retrieved are purportedly incorporated into the compilation The Will to Power, the story also leads some to conclude that Nietzsche rejected his project on the will to power. However, the reliability of this story has been questioned. In this manuscript I first present the decisive piece of evidence that will settle the controversy over the story’s authenticity. After showing that it is true that in 1888 Nietzsche wanted some of his notes burned, I address the question of what we can conclude from this story. I argue that it neither suggests the abandonment of the will to power project, nor warrants a devaluation of the Nachlass. Finally, I will discuss the methodological problem of the use of Nietzsche’s Nachlass in general.

KEYWORDS:

• Nietzsche
• burning story
• will to power
• Nachlass
• priority principle

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the two anonymous referees and the editors at the British Journal for the History of Philosophy as well as Paul Katsafanas, Paul Loeb and Matthew Meyer for their corrections and suggestions, which helped me improve my paper significantly. I am grateful to Zhan Chen, Sam O'Donnell, Yili Wang and Bo Zhang for their various indispensable support. My thanks also go to the Klassik Stiftung Weimar and especially to Ms Meike Löher for offering me a research fellowship in the summer of 2018 and for allowing me access to their collections in the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv and the Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek. Special thanks are due to my Doktormutter Professor Renate Schlesier for her valuable comments on an earlier draft and for showing me her excellent study of the ‘burning' story of Sigmund Freud (‘Die Sphinx Freud’, in Der schöne Schein der Kunst und seine Schatten, Aisthesis Verlag 2000, 195–209). My deepest debt is to Wei Cheng for many illuminating conversations, from which the present essay has benefited greatly.

ORCID

Jing Huang http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0692-5509

Notes

1 The German word ‘Nachlass’, a compound of ‘nach’ (after) and ‘lassen’ (to leave), is to be understood in a broad sense as to mean estate, or in a more specific sense, as meaning an author’s literary remains, including work manuscripts, notes, diaries, correspondence, collections of material, private library etc. (Fricke, Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft, Band II, 672–4). But in its most usual usage, ‘Nachlass’ is, as The Oxford English Dictionary tells us, ‘writings remaining unpublished at an author’s death’. In the case of Nietzsche, Nachlass refers to his writings remaining unpublished up to the point of his mental collapse, or more precisely, his writings not intended by him for publication (the works that he prepared for publication but did not succeed in publishing because of his breakdown, such as Twilight of the Idols, Ecce homo, and The Anti-Christ, are usually included within the published works). While some Anglophone scholars use this term to refer specifically to unpublished notes, in the present study I insist on the customary usage of ‘Nachlass’, according to which the essay ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’, a seemingly completed and polished essay that Nietzsche nevertheless did not want to publish, for instance, should be subsumed under the category of Nachlass. This classification is crucial for our present discussion. For many scholars protest against the extensive usage of the Nachlass not (merely) on the ground that the materials in the Nachlass are often short, rough or even fragmentary, but mainly because they are not published and therefore not authorized by Nietzsche.

2 For the distinction between ‘splitters’ and ‘lumpers’ see Magnus, ‘Nietzsche’s Philosophy in 1888’, 79–85.

3 Clark and Dudrick’s assertion is representative: ‘We do not mean to deny that the Nachlass can ever be helpful, but we do suggest that in general it does more harm than good’ (Clark and Dudrick, ‘Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology’, 261).

4 Cohen, Science, Culture, and Free Spirits, 25; Hollingdale, Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy, 298 (this part remains unchanged in the revised edition, see Hollingdale, Nietzsche, 250–1); Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality, xvi–xvii, 143–4 (see also Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality, 2nd ed., xvii–xviii, 116).

5 Some argue that Nietzsche is sceptical of the cosmological version of will to power on the grounds that he expresses this doctrine mainly in the unpublished writings. The ‘burning’ story has been invoked to support a more radical thesis: that Nietzsche abandoned both the cosmological and psychological versions.

6 See for example Hill, ‘Introduction’, xv–xvi; Katsafanas, Agency and the Foundations of Ethics, 247–8; Meyer, Reading Nietzsche through the Ancients, 15; Williams, Nietzsche’s Mirror, 65.

7 See note 4.

8 See for example Prideaux, I Am Dynamite!, 361.

9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche#cite_ref-188 (last accessed 9 January 2019).

10 Meyer, Reading Nietzsche through the Ancients, 15 holds a similar view: ‘[…] Leiter goes so far as to claim that Nietzsche “wanted his notebooks destroyed after his death.” The problem with Leiter’s claim is that it depends on and even seems to exaggerate a story for which there is no firsthand evidence’. R. Kevin Hill, though he thinks that Nietzsche very probably left behind manuscripts at Sils-Maria in 1888, insists that ‘[t]o leave them there would not be to abandon them’ because Nietzsche ‘would no doubt return, in the summer of 1889, or so he thought’ (Hill, ‘Introduction’, xvi). Hill argues that ‘it was [Nietzsche’s] unexpected collapse into madness, not careful deliberation, which stranded these texts’ (Hill, ‘Introduction’, xvi). Williams, Nietzsche’s Mirror, 65 also doubts the authenticity of the ‘burning’ story.

11 This visitor is Henry H. Petit, according to Förster-Nietzsche, Das Nietzsche-Archiv, seine Freunde und Feinde, 25–8.

12 Leiter, ‘The Nachlass and “The Will to Power”’. Cohen, Science, Culture, and Free Spirits, 238–9, also takes Bernoulli’s book to be the source of the story.

13 Although Katsafanas is aware of Magnus’ speculation that Bernoulli’s book may be Hollingdale’s source for the ‘burning’ story, he seems to dismiss Bernoulli’s account as saying that Nietzsche wanted page proofs discarded, not his notebook writings (Katsafanas, Agency and the Foundations of Ethics, 248, note 8). However, his discussion of the possible inferences of the ‘burning’ story is very helpful. See Katsafanas, Agency and the Foundations of Ethics, 247–250.

14 Meyer, Reading Nietzsche through the Ancients, 15 indicates this view, as Meyer acknowledges on Leiter’s blog.

15 See also Förster-Nietzsche, The Lonely Nietzsche, 243–4; Förster-Nietzsche, The Young Nietzsche, 41.

16 What we also know is that, along with Heinrich Köselitz, Nietzsche burned the manuscripts of the first three parts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in Venice in 1887, see Schaberg, The Nietzsche Canon, 101.

17 Diederichs writes: ‘Nietzsche ließ in der Regel viele Bücher und Kleidungsstücke bis zum nächsten Aufenthalt zurück, und so hatte er ihn [sc. Durisch] beim Abschied nur noch beauftragt, die am Boden liegenden wertlosen Korrekturen zu verbrennen.’ And we read in Ida’s article from 1907: ‘Ueber die in Sils zurückgebliebenen, von Nietzsche selbst aufgegebenen Konzeptpapiere, von denen der Brief des Herrn Petit berichtet, steht längst fest, daß Herr Durisch sie, statt sie zu verbrennen bis zum Jahr 1893 an interessierte Reisende abgab und nachher, auf die Reklamation Overbecks, die noch vorhandenen Papiere an die Familie zurücksandte’ (Overbeck, ‘Replik’, 143). Bernoulli also maintains that what Nietzsche left behind is ‘Papiere, die am Boden herumlagen und von Nietzsche ausdrücklich als wertlos bezeichnet worden waren’ (Bernoulli, Franz Overbeck und Friedrich Nietzsche, II: 301).

18 Förster-Nietzsche, Das Nietzsche-Archiv, seine Freunde und Feinde, 24 assumes that Overbeck did not ask Durisch to preserve Nietzsche’s manuscripts ‘[n]icht etwa aus Mangel an Gewissenhaftigkeit, sondern weil sein literarisches Urteil bedauerlicherweise Nietzsches Nachlaß gegenüber unbegreiflich geringschätzig war’.

19 This is an ‘Antwort’ to Förster-Nietzsche, ‘Nietzsches Werke und Briefe’. For the campaign against Overbeck launched by Elisabeth and the defense taken up by his widow, Bernoulli, and Diederichs see Hoffmann, Zur Geschichte des Nietzsche-Archivs, 59–78, who, however, omitted this ‘Antwort’.

20 This letter is dated 26 July 1906. See the document of Ida’s lawsuit against Elisabeth, which is preserved in the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv under the signature GSA 72/909, page 61.

21 The gentleman from Bremen is Gustav Pauli. See ‘Nietzsche-Manuskripte’ in Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 10 March 1908; see also Krummel, Nietzsche und der deutsche Geist. Band I, 199.

22 The original German text reads: ‘Auf Ihre Anfrage erkläre ich hiermit ausdrücklich, daß von den 1888 bei mir hinterlassenen Sachen von Professor Friedrich Nietzsche nichts verloren gegangen ist. Alle in meiner Verwahrung befindlichen Effekten und Bücher sind an seine Angehörigen von mir zurückgesandt worden. Bezüglich etwa hinterlassener Manuskripte erkläre ich, daß eine Reihe beschriebener Blätter im Papierkorb von Professor Nietzsche bei seiner Abreise mit der Anweisung hinterlassen wurden, sie zu verbrennen. Einige Blätter davon habe ich einem Bremer Herrn, dessen Namen ich vergessen habe, auf Wunsch überlassen. Dieser Herr hat, scheints, davon Gebrauch gemacht. Da mir von Ihrem Gatten Reklamationen zugegangen sind, habe ich diese Sachen, die ich hätte verbrennen können, auch zugesandt, so daß nichts verloren gegangen ist und nichts mehr hier ist, das dem Herrn Professor Nietzsche gehört hat. Dies bezeuge ich der Wahrheit gemäß. Hochachtend J. R. Durisch’.

23 Note that I do not say that Durisch’s testimony is totally reliable or that Elisabeth and others give full credit to it. Durisch seemingly forgot or concealed the fact that he handed some of Nietzsche’s literary remnants to visitors aside from the gentleman from Bremen (relevant testimonies about him giving away Nietzsche’s writings are: Koegel, ‘Ein ungedrucktes Vorwort zur Götzendämmerung’, 702–3; Petit’s letter to Elisabeth written on 6 August 1905, in: Förster-Nietzsche, Das Nietzsche-Archiv, seine Freunde und Feinde, 25–7; Anna Dunker’s letter to Elisabeth on 26 September 1906, in: Förster-Nietzsche, Das Nietzsche-Archiv, seine Freunde und Feinde, 28; Bernoulli, Franz Overbeck und Friedrich Nietzsche, II, 301 and the anonymous report of 1908 entitled ‘Nietzsche-Manuskripte’). Although Elisabeth does not share Overbeck’s suspicion that Durisch traded Nietzsche’s manuscripts for money, she questions (I think rightly) Durisch’s declaration that nothing from the materials Nietzsche left behind has been lost. Even worse, she claims, Durisch commingled the manuscripts Nietzsche wanted preserved in Sils with those he instructed to burn. Elisabeth denies that Durisch is dishonest, but indicates instead that his memory is fallible—not only due to the considerable span of years between his testimony and Nietzsche’s last stay in Sils, but because of the trauma of having lost his wife and daughter in the interim (Förster-Nietzsche, Das Nietzsche-Archiv, seine Freunde und Feinde, 28–9).

24 Eugenie Galli, ‘Im Wohnhaus Friedrich Nietzsches in Sils-Maria’. Deutsche Zeitung, December 17, 1899. Reprinted in Gilman, Conversations with Nietzsche, 169–72, here 172.

25 ‘He [sc. Durisch] fully understood that for seven years he had had one of the most unusual minds working under his roof’ (Gilman, Conversations with Nietzsche, 170–1).

26 Elisabeth indicates that what Durisch said about the reclamation of Nietzsche’s manuscripts is not accurate: ‘[…] Herr Durisch [hat] Recht, wenn er sagt, daß er die Handschriften auf Reklamation abgegeben habe; leider zuerst im Sommer 1889 oder Juni 1890 an einen ganz Unberechtigten [according to Petit, Durisch first gave a stranger, purportedly on behalf of the publisher C. G. Naumann, some of Nietzsche’s literary remnants, see Förster-Nietzsche, Das Nietzsche-Archiv, seine Freunde und Feinde, 26], dann einen Teil an Overbeck Ende Juni 1890 und schließlich den Rest an mich im Frühjahr 1894’ (Förster-Nietzsche, Das Nietzsche-Archiv, seine Freunde und Feinde, 28).

27 This has become the standard view, after the publication of the original, German-language version of Montinari’s article ‘Nietzsche’s Unpublished Writings from 1885 to 1888; or, Textual Criticism and the Will to Power’ (reprinted in Montinari, Reading Nietzsche, 80–102) in 1976. For the counterarguments, see Brobjer, ‘Nietzsche’s magnum opus’, ‘The Origin and Early Context of the Revaluation Theme in Nietzsche’s Thinking’ and ‘The Place and Role of Der Antichrist in Nietzsche’s Four Volume Project Umwerthung aller Werthe’, which I find more convincing.

28 Prideaux, I Am Dynamite!, 361, for instance, whose source is probably Hollingdale, describes the manuscripts retrieved from Sils as ‘[a]n avalanche of paper’.

29 In Young’s book, the plan is wrongly dated to 1884.

30 Schlechta explicitly used the word ‘refuse (Abfälle)’ to describe Nietzsche’s Nachlass (Schlechta, Der Fall Nietzsche, 95).

31 Koegel reported that in the room where Nietzsche used to live, a visitor (Petit) found some of his literary remnants, ‘meistens Korrekturbogen schon gedruckter Werke’, and ‘der Scharfblick des Nietzschekundigen fand doch ein paar handschriftliche Blätter heraus, die mehr verrieten’ (Koegel, ‘Ein ungedrucktes Vorwort zur Götzendämmerung’, 702–3). This is consistent with what Petit himself said about his discovery: ‘Die größere Mehrzahl bestand in Korrekturen, unter den Manuskripten stellte ich Entwürfe und Variationen fest, die in einzelne mir bekannte Werke hineingehörten’ (Förster-Nietzsche, Das Nietzsche-Archiv, seine Freunde und Feinde, 27).

32 This note, dated to summer 1886-spring 1887, is printed in KGW VIII 1 as 6[22].

33 It is the abandoned preface of Twilight of the Idols which was discovered by Petit, see Koegel, ‘Ein ungedrucktes Vorwort zur Götzendämmerung’, 703–4. The original text, dated to September 1888, is printed in KGW VIII 3 as 19[7]. The editors of GOA 14 splice a part of the note KGW V III 3, 19[1] into it.

34 This note (now in KGW VIII 3 as 23[1]), which is dated to October 1888, is also printed in the 10th volume of the Taschenausgabe as section 734.

35 Part of the note KGW VIII 1, 6[25], dated to summer 1886-spring 1887.

36 The first part of the note KGW VII 4/2, 34[264], dated to spring 1885. For the reason why the KGW editors put this note in the Nachberichtband, see KGW VII 4/2, 64.

37 Dated to beginning-spring 1886, printed in KGW VIII 1 as 4[7].

38 A combination of KGW VII 1, 8[14] (dated to summer 1883) and a part of KGW VII 1, 24[28] (winter 1883–84).

39 Part of KGW VII 4/2, 34[264], dated to spring 1885 (see also KGW VII 4/2, 64).

40 Part of KGW VII 1, 24[28], dated to winter 1883–84.

41 Dated to beginning-spring 1886, printed in KGW VIII 1 as 4[6].

42 Part of KGW VIII 1, 6[26], dated to summer 1886-spring 1887.

43 Part of KGW VIII 3, 18[1], dated to July–August 1888.

44 Part of KGW VII 4/2, 34[260], dated to spring 1885 (see also KGW VII 4/2, 64).

45 The first compilation carrying the title The Will to Power, which was produced by Köselitz and the brothers Horneffer, appeared in 1901 in the 15th volume of the Großoktavausgabe, with only 483 alleged aphorisms. The second version produced by Elisabeth and Köselitz was first published in the Taschenausgabe and then transferred in 1911 to the Großoktavausgabe to supersede the Horneffer-Köselitz edition.

46 They are the following sections in WP: 32, 256, 395, 417, 534, 673, 732, 734, 902, 1040, 1061 (English translations follow the numbering of the 1906 edition). Readers interested in the material retrieved from Sils may also consult the two ‘aphorisms’ published outside the framework of WP, namely sections 338 (p. 174) and 299 (p. 415–7) in the 14th volume of the Großoktavausgabe.

47 Note that Elisabeth insists that not all the retrieved notes were discarded by Nietzsche, since Durisch commingled the manuscripts Nietzsche wanted preserved with those he left behind to be burned (see note 23).

48 I thank Matthew Meyer for this point. 

49 We should note that Nietzsche’s notebooks include more than 9,000 written pages (see the categories C, D and E listed in Magnus, ‘How the “True Text” Finally Became a Fable’, 9).

50 See Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality, 2nd ed., xviii: ‘Given that, in general, Nietzsche culled the books he chose to publish from his notebooks; given that he clearly chose not to publish much of the material that now survives in The Will to Power and the Nachlass; and given that he wanted the remaining notebook material destroyed – surely a plausible explanation for all these facts is precisely that Nietzsche recognized that a lot of this material was of dubious merit’.

51 Even if Nietzsche did not want to work on a draft anymore, we cannot infer that he rejected it as unacceptable. Daniel Breazeale’s discussion of why Nietzsche gave up his project on the Pre-Platonic philosophers is illuminating. According to him, it ‘had more to do with the form than with the content’ of the uncompleted book (Breazeale, ‘Introduction’, xlvii–xlviii). Referring to the development of the style and format of Nietzsche’s publications, he argues: ‘The publication of such a relatively “safe” and traditionally structured book was impossible after the publication of Human, All-too-Human’, which has a ‘much more radical and risky format’ (Breazeale, ‘Introduction’, xlviii). 

52 That Nietzsche sent the Wahnsinnszettel on 3 January 1889 is usually taken as a definitive signal of the onset of his insanity. In 1888 he published The Case of Wagner and prepared the following works for publication: Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche contra Wagner, The Anti-Christ, Ecce homo, and Dionysos Dithyrambs.

53 When Kaufmann infers from the fact that Nietzsche did not publish many late notes, which he could have done quite easily by integrating them into ‘a chapter of aphorisms in Twilight of Idols’, that these notes ‘did not altogether satisfy him’ (Kaufmann, ‘Introduction’, xvi), he simply ignores the possibility that Nietzsche saved these notes for the projects to be developed later.

54 Montinari, Reading Nietzsche, 101; emphasis original. Here Montinari alludes to Nietzsche’s statement in his letter to Carl Fuchs of 11 December 1888 ‘Alles ist fertig’ (KSB 8, 522; emphasis original). However, as Brobjer notes, it does not necessarily mean that ‘everything of my life work is finished;’ Nietzsche may have meant everything in a chapter or everything in a book is finished (Brobjer, ‘The Origin and Early Context of the Revaluation Theme’, 21).

55 For textual evidence see Brobjer, ‘Nietzsche’s magnum opus’, ‘The Origin and Early Context of the Revaluation Theme’, and ‘The Place and Role of Der Antichrist’.

56 Katsafanas and Meyer also make this point on Leiter’s blog.

57 Here is not the place for a comprehensive survey of the Nachlass problem, nor can I discuss fully all the positions in the debate. Suffice it to say that there have been four main approaches, as Wicks, ‘Nietzsche’s Life and Works’ summarizes: The first is to emphasize the interpretative priority of the published writings over the unpublished; the second maintains that the Nachlass is no less significant than the published works; the third proposal tries to judge ‘the priority of published versus unpublished works on a thematic, or case-by-case basis’; the fourth, postmodern position is to stress that ‘any rigid prioritizing between published and private works is impossible, since all of the texts embody a comparable multidimensionality of meaning’. For a fuller discussion of the debate, see Meyer, Reading Nietzsche through the Ancients, 14–18.

58 This tendency can be seen clearly in the reviews of Meyer, Reading Nietzsche through the Ancients, Moore, Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor, and Reginster, The Affirmation of Life. Instead of winning applause, efforts to reconstruct Nietzsche's thinking through painstaking work on numerous, mostly not translated notebook materials are often taken to suffer from a serious methodological defect.

59 See note 3.

60 See Kant’s essay ‘On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy’.

61 Even in cases where different or even contradictory views are voiced in the published works and the Nachlass from the same period, if we accept the premise of Clark and Dudrick’s 2012 study that in the published works Nietzsche is not saying what he actually thinks, it follows, pace Clark and Dudrick, that we should turn to the writings he wrote for himself for his authentic ideas.

62 There are, of course, other important motivations for the devaluation of the Nachlass. As Meyer has astutely pointed out, it is sometimes a strategy to interpret away ‘any views deemed philosophically weak or even silly by contemporary standards’ (Meyer, Reading Nietzsche through the Ancients, 16).

63 Also, as result of this confusion, Montinari, who argues emphatically for the philosophical significance of the Nachlass while insisting on Nietzsche’s rejection of the WP project, has been incorrectly labelled by Magnus and others as one of the so-called splitters, who distinguish sharply between the published and the unpublished writings, tending to devalue the Nachlass (Magnus, ‘Nietzsche’s Philosophy in 1888’, 82). For Montinari’s evaluation of the Nachlass see Montinari, Reading Nietzsche, 80–102, 146–7.

64 When quoting the notorious sentence, we should not ignore that just before saying that ‘Nietzsche’s philosophy proper was left behind as “Nachlaß”’, Heidegger also says that Nietzsche speaks ‘in all the writings he himself published on the basis of his fundamental position, his philosophy proper’, although it has not ripened there to ‘a final form’ (GA 6.1, 6).

65 I am indebted to Wei Cheng for this point.

66 Schrift, ‘Nietzsche’s Nachlass’, 421. I would add that generally speaking, we get more reliable information about Nietzsche’s reading from his Nachlass than from his library, for not all of the books Nietzsche read have been preserved in his posthumous library (there is, for instance, no work of Teichmüller), and it is often impossible to know if the reading marks in the books found in this library, like the underlinings, are Nietzsche’s.

67 See Breazeale, ‘Introduction’; Cox, Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation, 9–11; Meyer, Reading Nietzsche through the Ancients, 14–18; Reginster, The Affirmation of Life, 16–20; Schacht, ‘Beyond Scholasticism’; Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation.

68 See Nietzsche’s letter to his mother, 14 September 1888 (KSB 8, 431).