Nietzsche's orientation process in his Lenzerheide notes of june 7, 1887

Authors

  • Werner Stegmaier Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität Greifswald

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7213/1980-5934.34.062.DS11

Abstract

The note-Lenzerheide of June 7, 1887-is considered a central text on Nietzsche's understanding of nihilism. He wrote it on a train, at the station between Chur and Sils Maria, after having completed the fifth book of The Gaia Science, his most courageous, profound and serene book of aphorisms, and thus before having written in Sils Maria, within a few weeks, the three dissertations of For the Genealogy of Morals. Between the two, it seems that he tried to make clear to himself the whole of his thought, and, in the process, particularly the connection of the themes raised in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: the themes of nihilism, the beyond-man, the will to power, the eternal return of the same, and the escalating order (Rangordnung). Mostly, this has been understood in such a way that Nietzsche thereby comes closer to a "system" as, in particular, Alfred Baumler and Martin Heidegger tried to construct it. The new edition of Nietzsche's estate, in the differentiated transcription of Section IX of the complete edition of Nietzsche's works, allows us to know more precisely how Nietzsche orientated himself in his thinking and how he elaborated his thoughts step by step. In this study, Lenzerheide's note is read in view of the process of orientation that takes place in it, and the orientation decisions that Nietzsche makes from paragraph to paragraph are made clear. In the end, no system results from this, but a distancing from the "magic of the extreme", which Nietzsche first follows, over many paragraphs. Nietzsche meditates (besinnt) on the extreme points of his philosophizing, and takes them up again. He only does this here, in the note-Lenzerheide. This means that, also with nihilism, one has to live sparingly (maßvoll).

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Published

2022-08-22

How to Cite

Stegmaier, W. (2022). Nietzsche’s orientation process in his Lenzerheide notes of june 7, 1887 . Revista De Filosofia Aurora, 34(62). https://doi.org/10.7213/1980-5934.34.062.DS11