“On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense”
This essay was written very early in Nietzsche’s career, but would not be published after his death. At this point, it has attained the level of the single most significant work by Nietzsche on the subject of the power of rhetorical language. His argument is essential a rejection of any concept of truth being objective, arguing instead that what we view as objective truths—truth as a natural fact—are in reality mere illusions constructed upon an ever-rising tower of metaphor.
The Birth of Tragedy
Nietsche’s first significant published work is a philosophical deconstruction of Greek culture (not merely tragedy). In it, he divides culture into two camps: the Apollonian and Dionysian. Although far more complicated in reality, for the purposes of brevity, this essentially translates into a constant tension between the representation and the non-representation, between order and chaos, between commerce and art. (It really is much more complicated, but extrapolate from that and it’s easy to get to where he wants you to be.)
“Homer’s Contest”
This is another early text and important because it lays down the foundation for what will become the driving theme behind much of what is to follow: what is the meaning of freedom? It is also significant in that it is the first indication of what will be a recurring aspect of Nietzsche’s increasingly idiosyncratic approach to writing philosophical texts: paradox. The essay essentially states that freedom for the individual only arrives by understanding that serves as a tool of the collective, therefore individual freedom can only come as a result of working under the moral constraints of the collective.
Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks
It verges on the woefully inexact to merely term Nietzsche a writer of philosophy. He was also a critic and historian and both those roles serve this never-completed project. What he did manage to complete is an overview of five ancient Greek philosophers we may charitably term as less famous than those big three everyone knows. Thales, Heraclitus, Anaximander, and Anaxgoras are probably only known to students of philosophy. Parmenides may be slightly more familiar since he is routinely referred to as the Father of Metaphysics, but even still, he’s no Plato.
The title of this tome is probably more familiar than its contents because it has entered into the pop culture lexicon. Nietzsche’s reputation has been sketchy to say the least, but not really because of what actually wrote. The problem is that some very bad people have latched onto his ideas and twisted them to suit their purposes. Such is the problem with this text which asserts that society cannot hope to keep moving forward and progressing toward the evolution of the “Superman” until it finally rejects the outmoded, outdated and just plain unsound constitutional morality that has been civilization’s defining modus operandi for millennia.
Thus Spake Zarathustra
Almost irrefutably, Nietzsche’s most famous work, though, again, not so much because people are actually familiar with it. Pop culture appropriated the title of the book as the title of the stirring musical composition more commonly known as the theme to 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is also the book which appropriated Nietzschean’s concept of the next stage in the evolution of man—the Ubermensch—and turned it into the ridiculously off-model idea that people associated with “Superman.” Once again, this is a text revealing the multiple literary agency of Nietzsche: it is really more a work of fiction that is quite atypical from the rest of the author’s works.
