2
Nietzsche’s Dawn
philosophical project. Rather than treating this text as being no more than a
precursor to Nietzsche’s later writings, or a mere elaboration on themes from his
earlier middle writings, we claim that Dawn itself is a significant work that makes a
distinctive contribution to Nietzsche’s philosophy. While we do trace out important
connections and significant disjunctions between Dawn and Nietzsche’s earlier and
later works in the chapters that follow, our aim throughout is to show why Dawn is
significant and innovative in its own right. Unlike others of Nietzsche’s texts, Dawn
is not focused on a master concept such as “will to power” or “eternal recurrence” or
the “superhuman [Übermensch].” Instead, as we show, Dawn is genuinely exploratory
and experimental, and we contend that the text is worthwhile because of this dimension. It means that Nietzsche’s text is completely free of unnecessary metaphysical
baggage and there is no risk of him doing what he rightly criticizes Schopenhauer of
doing with his doctrine of the will to life, namely, indulging in the philosopher’s rage
for generalization, as that always proves to be a disaster for science (AOM 5).
We argue that Nietzsche’s core critical innovations in Dawn are in identifying why
customary morality (Sittlichkeit der Sitte) (D 9) is a significant problem for humanity, and in developing a sustained critique of this form of morality in order to motivate our critical re-engagement with the ethical.7 In Dawn, Nietzsche attacks the
view that everything that exists has a connection with morality and thus a moral
significance can be projected onto the world (D 3, 90, 100, 197, 563). He voices an
opposition to both “picturesque morality” (D 141) and “petty bourgeois morality”
(D 146), and speaks of his own “audacious morality” (verwegenen Moralität) (D 432).
With regards to the modern prejudice, which is one of the main foci of his polemic
in the book, here there is the presumption that we know “what actually constitutes
morality”:
It seems to do every single person good these days to hear that society is on
the road to adapting the individual to fit the needs of the throng and that
the individual’s happiness as well as his sacrifice consist in feeling himself to
be a useful member of the whole (D 132)
As Nietzsche sees it, then, a particular modern emphasis is on defining the
moral in terms of the sympathetic affects and compassion (Mitleid). We can,
he thinks, explain the modern in terms of a movement toward managing more
cheaply, safely, and uniformly individuals in terms of “large bodies and their
limbs.” This, he says, is “the basic moral current of our age”: “Everything that
in some way supports both this drive to form bodies and limbs and its abetting
drives is felt to be good” (D 132). And, as Nietzsche points out, philosophers
have not been immune to this modern emphasis; the “boundless ambition”
and “jubilation” at being what Nietzsche calls “the unriddler of the world”
have been “the stuff of the thinker’s dreams” because, in the context of
Introduction
customary morality, philosophy has become “a sort of supreme struggle for
the tyrannical rulership of the spirit” (D 547). What this means is that the
scope of Nietzsche’s critique of customary morality is not limited to morality:
it involves inquiry itself. As he writes, “the quest for knowledge, by and large,
has been held back by the moral narrow-mindedness of its disciples”; he
suggests that “in the future it must be pursued with a higher and more magnanimous basic feeling” and that the question, “‘What do I matter?’ stands over the
door of the future thinker.” (D 547).
What we take Nietzsche to be calling into question is morality that is grounded
in dogmatic and uncritical obedience to moral norms that have become deeply
embedded in and expressed through social customs, feelings, and actions. This
carries harmful consequences for individuals and for social groups, since the
demand for obedience inhibits investigating and understanding of oneself and the
world. Yet Nietzsche does affirm the possibility of the ethical, even while he calls
customary morality into question.8 This distinction between a problematic morality
that is based on obedience to moral norms, and the possibility of an ethics that
admits of unbounded inquiry into oneself and the world, is also found in others of
his middle writings, for instance in his call for the practice of “continual selfcommand and self-overcoming … in great things and in the smallest” (WS 45;
212). In Dawn, we suggest, Nietzsche is particularly concerned to address the
unhealthy effects of obedience to customary morality and the way in which it
limits human flourishing, including human intellectual flourishing. He points
out, for example, that we need to develop “new physicians of the soul” who will
expose the “scandalous quackery” with which humanity has been treating its
“diseases of the soul” (D 52). According to Nietzsche, the problem is that we have
mistaken “consolations” for “remedies”; “the human being’s greatest disease,” he
asserts, has grown out of the battle to treat its diseases, and the “apparent remedies”
for our suffering have produced something “much worse than what they were
supposed to eliminate” (D 52).
The emphasis that Nietzsche places on an experimental morality (D 453; see also
WP 260) in which one gives oneself a goal should not be seen as something simply
idiosyncratic or even self-promoting. As Richard Schacht has noted, indifference to
oneself, rather than preoccupation with oneself in the narrow bourgeois sense,
along with hardness toward oneself for the sake of goals that go beyond one’s own
limited existence, are the key features of spiritual superiority for Nietzsche.9 The
ethics that Nietzsche posits for the future therefore might best be described as
“supra-individualistic,” even if it is specific individuals who practice the experimental life and lead the way by offering themselves and their lives as sacrifices to
knowledge (D 146). Here the goal is a new “plowshare” of potential universal benefit
and enrichment that can “cleave the ground, rendering it fruitful for all,” leading to
a strengthening and elevation of the human feeling of power (D 146).10
3
4
Nietzsche’s Dawn
On the one hand, in Dawn, Nietzsche claims that we live in a “moral interregnum,”
in which there is a need to construct anew the laws of life and action; he suggests
that the necessary reconstruction will be inspired by the sciences of physiology,
medicine, sociology, and solitude that will provide the foundation stone for our positing of new ideals, if not the ideals themselves (D 453). On the other hand,
Nietzsche points out that once we become “free of morality” — as a result of our
minds becoming less and less narrow and inhibited by customary morality — then
morality, in the sense of what has become “inherited, handed down, instinctual acting
in accordance with so-called moral feelings,” will decline. The individual virtues
(moderation, justice, repose of the soul, etc.) may well continue to be esteemed in
a revitalized ethics, but for different reasons than would be given from a customary moral perspective; virtues will have a vital role to play in ethical training and
learning the “art of living.”
While we contend that Nietzsche’s project in Dawn focuses on addressing the
presumptions and prejudices of customary morality, we also discuss other important dimensions to Dawn that grow out of this grounding concern, such as
Nietzsche’s thinking on the passion of knowledge and the value that the suffering
of the infirm can bring to knowing (e.g. D 114), his exploration of drive psychology and subjectivity (e.g. D 109, 501), of the effect of language upon human life
(D 47, 115), and his engagements with Christianity (D 58, 76, 89, 321), with human
existence and its relation to death and dying (D 33–36, 211), and with the political
(e.g. D 174, 204, 206). Moreover, as we show, many of the aphorisms that make up
book five of Dawn are ones that Nietzsche writes for the purposes of encouraging
his readers to cultivate the pleasures of learning and knowing, which aim to foster
philosophical meditation and contemplation. We trace out these other important
concerns, and examine their connection to Nietzsche’s wider thinking in Dawn.
We also explore some of the ways in which developing a better understanding of
Dawn as an independent project may help to shed light on problems within
Nietzsche scholarship, and may prove worthwhile to philosophy more broadly.
One of the most significant challenges to understanding the philosophical contribution that Nietzsche makes in Dawn lies with understanding its specific place
and role within the complexity of Nietzsche’s body of writings. Paul S. Loeb has
pointed out that while “scholars usually take it for granted that a philosopher’s
later thinking supersedes his earlier thinking,” things are more complicated in
Nietzsche’s case.11 According to Loeb, Nietzsche privileges Thus Spoke Zarathustra
over later works such as Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morals
(EH Books BGE), as well as privileging it over earlier works such as Dawn.12
A further wrinkle of the complication that Loeb points out in the case of understanding Zarathustra’s significance is an issue of content: like his Zarathustra,
Nietzsche’s middle writings each have distinct areas of contribution and purpose,
as do his post-1886 writings. Nietzsche himself provided a helpful clarification of
Introduction
this issue in his philosophical autobiography, Ecce Homo. There, Nietzsche divides
his main task in the works that he completed between 1878 and 1888 into two
parts: first, an “affirmative” or “Yes-saying part,” and second, a “No-saying” part
(EH Books BGE).13 In the works that he completed between 1878 and 1882, which
are often referred to as his middle writings, Nietzsche focused on developing the
“Yes-saying part” of his task (EH Books BGE). However, in his writings from 1886
onwards, which includes Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morals,
Nietzsche’s focus was redirected toward what he called the “No-saying” and
“No-doing” part of his task, which engaged him in pursuit of a transvaluation of
all values (EH Books BGE).14 And, as Loeb has argued, Zarathustra occupies a
distinct place within Nietzsche’s works.15 Completed between 1882 and 1885,
Nietzsche says that, in Zarathustra, the “Yes-saying part of my task had been
solved” (EH Books BGE).16 While it forms the beginning of his campaign against
morality, and thus might at first glance appear to be No-saying, it is clear that
Dawn should be understood as a part of the Yes-saying aspect of Nietzsche’s
task.17 In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche himself specifically describes Dawn as an “affirmative book” — affirmative not least because it affirms what has previously been
forbidden, despised, or accursed (EH III “Daybreak” 1). Nietzsche further suggests that the text endeavors to restore to “evil things” a good conscience and the
“exalted right and privilege to exist” (EH III “Daybreak” 1). Our analysis examines
the extent to which Nietzsche’s claim for Dawn as a positive, Yes-saying, book,
and his claim that the text essentially transvalues what customary morality deems
to be evil, is borne out in the earlier text of Dawn itself.
The challenge of understanding the philosophical contribution that Dawn
makes is further complicated by Nietzsche’s writing styles: he combines innovative deployment of aphorism and punctuation with use of multiple voices or
characters, and a range of rhetorical devices. Thus, for careful readers of Dawn,
in addition to the question of what Nietzsche is saying, his approach demands
that we ask additional questions of the texts, such as who is speaking, to whom,
when, and from which perspective. As Tracy Strong has pointed out, in 1882, at
the end of his period of focused work on the Yes-saying part of his task, Nietzsche
presented ten principles of style to Lou Salomé under the title, “The Doctrine of
Style.”18 In this piece, Nietzsche’s fourth principle of style reads, “Because many
of the means of those who speak [Vortragenden] are missing to those who write,
the person who writes must have an overall highly developed expressive ability
to present speech as a model: the presentation of that which is written must necessarily turn out as much paler.”19 In presenting our account of Dawn as a coherent philosophical project, we also aim to clarify why the text is comprised of a
collection of aphorisms written in a diverse range of styles. We seek to do justice
to Nietzsche’s unique modes of philosophizing, where he often approaches topics from oblique angles and with enigmatic perspectives. It is Nietzsche the
5
6
Nietzsche’s Dawn
extraordinary, philosophically suggestive, writer that especially interests us and
that characterizes so much of the philosophizing that we encounter in Dawn. We
find wisdom in Milan Kundera’s appreciation of Nietzsche, and that he provides
a more superior insight than Iris Murdoch’s view that Nietzsche is a great writer
but not a philosopher, when Kundera claims that he brings philosophy closer to
the novel and in terms of an immense broadening of theme: “the barriers
between the various philosophical disciplines, which have kept the real world
from being seen in its full range, are fallen and from then on everything human
can become the object of a philosopher’s thought.”20
The original text of Dawn consists of five hundred and seventy-five aphorisms.
The Preface added in 1886 includes an additional five aphorisms. Taken together,
the aphorisms incorporate a range of writing styles, including fictionalized
dialogue, psychological observation, humor, and logical argument. Nietzsche is
explicit about his effort to ensure that his writing provokes his readers; for example,
in Ecce Homo, he characterizes his readers as “guinea pigs who illustrate for me
different reactions to my writings — different in a very instructive manner”
(EH III 3).21 We think that three points about the form of the book are particularly
important in this respect. First, the use of diverse styles within the aphorisms, as
well as the use of aphorism itself, is a key component of the book, rather than
accidental. Second, and relatedly, the strategic purpose of Dawn’s aphoristic
construction is to engage and provoke the reader’s feelings, as well as their intellectual faculties; as Mark Alfano has recently claimed in his analysis of Nietzsche
as an exemplarist virtue theorist, an encounter with an exemplar may prompt
feelings of respect, pride, and emulation, or may prompt feelings of disgust or
contempt and indicate what to avoid.22 For example, Nietzsche discusses four
“supreme exemplars” — “Alexander, Caesar, Mohammed and Napoleon,” along
with Lord Byron — whose impulse to action is, he suggests, at root a flight “from
oneself” (D 549).23 Even beyond exemplars, we may find diverse affects provoked
in ourselves through Nietzsche’s writing, particularly with regard to the case of
our moral feelings; “we must learn to think differently,” he claims, “in order finally,
perhaps very late, to feel differently” (D 103). Nietzsche’s point is that since errors
drive moral judgments, while we cannot deny that people do experience feelings
of morality or immorality, we can challenge why people feel moral or immoral in
specific contexts (D 103). Third, the openness of aphorism to interpretation is not
an objection to the project that Nietzsche undertakes in the book. It has already
been established that Nietzsche deploys a range of writing styles in order to
achieve his philosophical objectives.24 Our contention is that Nietzsche’s use of
aphorism supports his effort to ground his critique of customary morality in the
affects as well as in reason.
Our first chapter examines how Nietzsche’s project in Human, All Too Human
sets the scene for him to commence his project in Dawn. We consider how
Introduction
Nietzsche explores a new and modest pathway for humanity and its future
development in the volumes comprising Human, All Too Human. As part of this,
we consider Nietzsche’s commitment to science and in particular, to the pathos of
truth-seeking, his deployment of “aphoristic” style, his break with Schopenhauer,
and his skepticism, in each case considering how his thinking in the earlier writings supports his work in Dawn. In Chapter 2, we examine why Nietzsche’s campaign in Dawn is to set out an effective challenge a particular form of morality,
customary morality. The significance and power of this form of morality on individual and social behavior and cultural development and innovation is immense,
and underappreciated. Nietzsche’s key innovation is to identify this, to assess the
scope of the problem that customary morality presents, and to provide a means of
responding to it. As we argue, customary morality, according to Nietzsche, is
harmful because it limits our capacity for flourishing and development, and
because it also limits our capacity for inquiry, thus further hampering our capacity to investigate, and respond to, our existential situation. The presuppositions on
which customary morality is based make it very difficult for us to question it, as in
doing so it becomes incumbent upon us to question those foundational moral
presuppositions as well. Raising and responding to critical questions about what
we call “morality” is fundamental work in philosophy — but at the same time,
undertaking this work is psychologically taxing, as well as socially discouraged,
including within many parts of philosophy today.
The challenge that Nietzsche presents to us in Dawn is not only a call to arms for
humanity to explore his campaign against a system of ethics, and to participate as
far as they can in it. He also prompts us to challenge limits that our current conception of morality places on our philosophical and other scholarly inquiries and scientific investigations, and indeed on our way of living. To properly understand and
account for this challenge, in Chapter 3, we further extend and support our analysis of Nietzsche’s initiation of his campaign against morality by examining how the
ethic of compassion counts as one of the chief legacies of the history of Christianity,
and by considering how the campaign against morality prompts and demands our
critical engagement with Christianity, and with religion more generally.
As we go on to discuss in Chapter 4, critical engagement with compassion is particularly pressing for Nietzsche’s project in Dawn. Compassion is often treated as a
fundamental moral value; Nietzsche’s critical engagement with compassion appears
to be highly immoral to us, if his critique is assessed from the perspective of customary morality. The challenge, we suggest, is to understand Nietzsche as critical of the
moral status quo, while open to seeking fresh ethical insight and, in particular, the
development of new ethical agents. He identifies an ethic of compassion as fundamentally flawed given its basis in customary morality, and in contrast, he envisages
new possible ethical agents who are self-legislators, and who are capable of creating
new values and of punishing themselves should they break their own ethical laws.
7
8
Nietzsche’s Dawn
Nietzsche’s critique of customary morality and of an ethic of compassion, we
suggest, also opens up the possibility of a novel account of ethical imagination. As
we argue, Nietzsche’s analysis of compassion in Dawn owes much to his thinking
on drive psychology; we examine Nietzsche’s drive psychology in greater depth in
Chapter 6.
In Chapter 5, we examine the consequences of Nietzsche’s campaign against
morality for the pursuit of knowledge in philosophy, and specifically, on values
and methods of the German Enlightenment. As we show, Nietzsche had to balance his inheritance of the German Enlightenment with his call for affirmation of
the passion for knowledge; in order to do so, he had to develop a new sense of
enlightenment in which knowledge-seeking is tied to overturning old values and
creating new ones, and which therefore involves knowledge-seekers in an experimental, risky, enterprise of inquiry. Since Nietzsche’s campaign against customary morality involves challenging the limits that our current conception of
morality places on inquiry, his campaign also prompts us to analyze our understanding of the subject of the inquirer — and indeed our own self-understanding.
In Chapter 6, we explore Nietzsche’s thinking on subjectivity, in order to assess
the extent to which knowledge or self-knowledge is possible for Nietzsche in
Dawn. We argue that the self that Nietzsche envisages as part of his account of
subjectivity in Dawn is a composite of experiences that counts as an emerging
product of the conditions of natural or material subjectivity, in which subjects are
in a constant state of change and development. We propose that this approach to
subjectivity best explains how a Nietzschean subject as envisaged in Dawn can
plausibly be said to engage in care of the self, and how such selves can be cultivated, (i) individually and (ii) on a species level.
In Chapter 7, we support this account of the Nietzschean subject in Dawn by
considering how care of the self is a fundamental part of the task of experimenting with what the ethical, when freed from the constraints of moral fanaticism,
might mean. As we show, Nietzsche provides a sustained critique of moral fanaticism that also carries important implications for contemporary analysis of security. Another key constraint that customary morality places on inquiry is a limit
on how to respond to the fact of death. As we discuss in Chapter 8, humans have
no direct first-person experience of death itself; when combined with culturally
inherited beliefs surrounding this phenomenon, death very often appears to us to
be the most terrible of all possible punishments, which means that salvation from
death in the form of an afterlife (ideally one in which we are not also punished)
therefore seems highly attractive to us. We argue that Nietzsche deploys Epicurean
thinking strategically, in order to undermine this intense fear of punishment and
of death conceived of as the most terrible punishment.
We acknowledge that Nietzsche is not primarily concerned with the political in
Dawn. Nonetheless, we think it would be a mistake to assume that the political is
Introduction
entirely absent from Nietzsche’s thinking in this text. In Chapter 9, we therefore
examine the remarks that Nietzsche does make with respect to the political in
Dawn, focusing on his concern with the effects on humanity of capital and industrial development. We also provide an assessment of the political consequences
that Nietzsche’s campaign against customary morality entails. As we suggest,
Nietzsche’s remarks in the text add up to a proposal of a minimal politics: specifically, a form of political therapy that is grounded in migration. Unlike accounts
that have tended to emphasize only Nietzsche’s individual thinking on freedom
and the political, our account places greater emphasis on Nietzsche’s attention to
human species freedom and the political consequences arising from treating
species freedom as a political value. Nietzsche’s political therapy fits with his
broader, and more pressing, challenge to customary morality. We also draw attention to some of the concerns that arise with treating migration as a form of political
therapy, such as colonial thinking.25
There has been some recent and innovative discussion of Nietzsche’s thinking
on futurity, and on Nietzsche’s status as a philosopher of the future.26 In
Chapter 10, we examine Nietzsche’s engagement with this theme in the fifth and
final book of Dawn. We discuss how the final aphorism of the text, 575, presents a
vivid and positive vision of humanity as future-oriented and self-cultivating. As
we suggest, this vision has the potential to become a real possibility if humanity
could indeed develop the capacity to free itself from the constraints of customary
morality. Nietzsche’s vision of a future-oriented and self-creating humanity is
supported, we propose, by the preceding aphorisms in book five of the Dawn.
Second, we explore how Nietzsche’s vision of humanity is taken up once again by
him in his later, No-saying, writings. In tracing out this comparison between
Dawn and Nietzsche’s later texts, we show how Dawn may shed light on some key
debates in contemporary Nietzsche scholarship.
The focus on custom, health, and futurity that we suggest is a hallmark of Dawn
was personal for Nietzsche, as well as conceptual. Nietzsche’s letters from 1879 and
1880 suggest that his new project was influenced by his efforts to find a way of living that mitigated his ongoing health problems.27 In a letter to his mother, Nietzsche
commented that a more simple and natural way of living, involving physically tiring labor and very limited psychological exertion, would improve his health (July
21, 1879; KSB 5, 427–28). A few months later, he wrote to Heinrich Köselitz of
improvements in his headaches and some of his other symptoms, which he thought
had been achieved by minimizing his intellectual work (October 5, 1879; KSB 5,
450–52). And early in 1880, in a letter to Malwida von Meysenbug, Nietzsche
remarked that while his health problems were almost enough to make him welcome the prospect of death, he found real satisfaction in producing work that outlined a way to achieve peace of mind (January 14, 1880; KSB 5, 4–6). Nietzsche
discussed the connections he had been exploring between character, virtue, moral
9
10
Nietzsche’s Dawn
emotions, psychology, and health, and characterized the aphorisms he had been
constructing as akin to digging in a moral mine (July 18, 1880; KSB 6, 28–30). He
intimated that while working on Dawn, he had recently been reading Prosper
Mérimée’s The Etruscan Vase; the tone, style, psychological focus, and in particular,
the careful descriptions of the health and physiology of the characters in The
Etruscan Vase, are reflected in Dawn.28 In an appendix to this volume, we include
new translations of Nietzsche’s letters of 1881 by Carol Diethe. These letters also
attest to Nietzsche’s personal, as well as philosophical, concern with health and
futurity as Dawn was in the process of being completed and published.
In these 1881 letters, Nietzsche reports feeling “so wracked by continual pain”
that he “can no longer give an opinion” on the worthiness of Dawn for publication, and even considers whether he “might finally be allowed to throw off the
whole burden” since he is now the same age as his father was when he died. Yet
Nietzsche’s ambition was clearly invested in Dawn: “This is the book that will
probably be clamped to my name,” he wrote to Franz Overbeck (March 18, 1881).
To Gast, he intimates that the “book will at least not have a damaging
effect — except that I myself will have to do penance for it! For I give not just the
highly moral but also all those decent and plucky people an opportunity to enjoy
their morality and pluck at my expense” (March 20, 1881). To his publisher
Schmeitzner, he notes, “The content of my book is so important! It is a question of
honour not to let it fall short in any way, so that it enters the world worthy and
immaculate.” (March 13, 1881). Nietzsche admits his good cheer with regard to
the social risks and benefits of his project: “I want to see how I get away with it;
after all, I know better than everyone else can that everything is still to be done”
(March 20, 1881). On April 10, 1881, he wrote to his sister Elisabeth that, “This is
a decisive book, I cannot think about it without being greatly moved.” Since he
could not stop her reading Dawn, Nietzsche suggested to Elisabeth that she should
read the book “from an entirely personal point of view” and that she should take
particular care to read the fifth book, “where much is written between the lines”
(mid-July 1881). And he asked his friend Gast to take his copy of Dawn to the lido,
“read it as a whole and try to make it into a whole for yourself — in other words,
a passionate state” (June 23, 1881).
In these remarks, we see a personal source of inspiration for the core points that
Nietzsche develops throughout the text of Dawn: that customary morality is worthy of criticism, that the risk of challenging this form of morality is considerable,
yet potentially highly worthwhile — and that readers have an important role to
play in Nietzsche’s engagement in his campaign against morality. Our hope in
writing this book is to clarify these core points, examine what support for them
exists, and in so doing, to reintroduce Dawn to contemporary scholarship as a
fascinating and worthwhile piece of philosophy, that is of continuing relevance to
our efforts to respond to philosophical problems.
Introduction
Notes
1 Christa D. Acampora and Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and
Evil”: A Reader’s Guide (London: Bloomsbury, 2011); Maudemarie Clark and David
Dudrick, The Soul of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2012).
2 Laurence Lampert. Nietzsche’s Teaching: An Interpretation of Thus Spoke
Zarathustra (London: Yale University Press, 1986); Robert Gooding-Williams.
Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001);
Paul S Loeb. The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010).
3 Christopher Janaway, Beyond Selflessness: Reaching Nietzsche’s “Genealogy”
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); David Owen, Nietzsche’s “Genealogy of
Morality” (Acumen 2007); Daniel W. Conway, Nietzsche’s “On the Genealogy of
Morals”: A Reader’s Guide (London: Continuum, 2008); Lawrence J. Hatab,
Nietzsche’s “On the Genealogy of Morality”: An Introduction (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008).
4 Ruth Abbey, Nietzsche’s Middle Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000);
Paul Franco, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment: The Free-Spirit Trilogy of the Middle Period
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche’s
Search for Philosophy: On the Middle Writings (London: Bloomsbury, 2018);
Matthew Meyer, Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Works: A Dialectical Reading (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2019).
5 Jonathan R. Cohen, Science, Culture, and Free Spirits: A Study of Nietzsche’s
Human, All-too-Human (London: Humanity Books, 2010); Kathleen M. Higgins,
Comic Relief: Nietzsche’s Gay Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000);
Monika M. Langer, Nietzsche’s Gay Science: Dancing Coherence (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010); Michael Ure, Nietzsche’s The Gay Science: An Introduction
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
6 Jochen Schmidt, “Kommentar zu Nietzsches Morgenröthe,” in Historischer und
kritischer Kommentar zu Friedrich Nietzsches Werken (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,
2015).
7 Simon Robertson and Brittain Smith have both pointed out various translation
issues with the phrase “Sittlichkeit der Sitte” that affect philosophical analysis of
this concept. Robertson suggests “customary life” or “customary ethic” as
alternatives to “morality of custom.” See Robertson, “The Scope Problem —
Nietzsche, The Moral, Ethical, and Quasi-Aesthetic,” in Nietzsche, Naturalism,
and Normativity, ed. Christopher Janaway and Simon Robertson (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012), 81–110, 83. Smith notes a range of possibilities for
translating “Sitte” including custom, practice, habit, etiquette, and propriety,
and opts to use “morality of custom” with the singular “Sitte” translated as
11
12
Nietzsche’s Dawn
“custom,” and the plural “Sitten” translated as “mores,” with the exception of
D 9, in which he renders “Sitte” as “mores.” See Smith’s note in Dawn: Thoughts
on the Presumptions of Morality, trans. Brittain Smith (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2011), 291. Paul Franco uses “customary morality” and
“morality of custom” interchangeably in Nietzsche’s Enlightenment (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2011), 59, 64, 199. We have chosen to use ‘customary
morality’ throughout. In Dawn, as we will show, Nietzsche is explicitly
concerned with the effects of a particular form of morality, not with the whole of
the ethical. Moreover, as Brian Leiter and Maudemarie Clark have pointed out,
Nietzsche’s engagement with customary morality is not limited to beliefs based
on superstition in early societies; it includes the philosophical–moral sensibilities
of later societies, which are based on moral feelings (D 18, 99, 103). See Clark
and Leiter, “Introduction,” in Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), xxxii–iii.
8 See Robert C. Solomon, Living with Nietzsche: What the Great “Immoralist” Has
to Teach Us (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 25, 138. Solomon points
out that Nietzsche’s thinking on morality is suggested in his middle writings,
and that the work in the middle writings incorporates a theory of virtue, but
that Nietzsche’s thinking on the ethical is spelled out in later texts such as BGE
and GM.
9 See Schacht, Nietzsche (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 469–70.
10 Earlier in Dawn, Nietzsche points out the pleasure and virtue in cruelty that
stems from the sadist’s enjoyment of the feeling of power as forming part of
customary morality (D 18). Franco points out that the first mention of power
[Machtgefuhl] in Dawn here is in the context of customary morality. Franco,
Nietzsche’s Enlightenment, 65. This later aphorism (D 146) indicates that for
Nietzsche, power is not limited to the confines of customary morality.
11 Paul S. Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), 207.
12 Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 207.
13 Keith Ansell-Pearson, “Friedrich Nietzsche: An Introduction to his Thought,
Life, and Work,” in A Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), 15.
14 Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche’s Task: An Interpretation of Beyond Good and Evil
(London: Yale University Press, 2001), 2. Ansell-Pearson, “Friedrich Nietzsche,”
15. See also Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche’s Search for Philosophy, 65.
15 See Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.
16 Lampert, Nietzsche’s Task, 2.
17 Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche’s Search for Philosophy: On the Middle Writings
(London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 65.
Introduction
18 Tracy B. Strong. 2013. “In Defense of Rhetoric: Or How Hard It Is to Take a
Writer Seriously: The Case of Nietzsche.” Political Theory 41(4): 507–32, 514.
19 WKG VII-1, 34; Strong, “In Defense of Rhetoric,” 507–32, 514.
20 Milan Kundera, “Works and Spiders,” in Testaments Betrayed (London: Faber &
Faber, 1995), 147–79; 175–76; Murdoch, “Literature and Philosophy: A
Conversation with Bryan Magee,” in Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics
(London and New York: Penguin, 1999), 3–31, 4.
21 See Rebecca Bamford, “Ecce Homo: Philosophical Autobiography in the Flesh,”
in Nietzsche’s “Ecce Homo,” ed. Duncan Large and Nicholas Martin (Berlin and
New York: de Gruyter, forthcoming), for a more complete discussion of style in
Ecce Homo.
22 Mark Alfano, Nietzsche’s Moral Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2019), 87–88.
23 Alfano, Nietzsche’s Moral Psychology, 111–12.
24 See Richard White, Nietzsche and the Problem of Sovereignty (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1997), 150–73; Jill Marsden, “Nietzsche and the Art of the Aphorism,”
in A Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006), 22–37; Christa Davis Acampora, “Naturalism and Nietzsche’s Moral
Psychology,” in A Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006), 314–33.
25 On Nietzsche and colonialism, see e.g. Rebecca Bamford, “The Liberatory Limits
of Nietzsche’s Colonial Imagination in Dawn §206,” in Nietzsche’s Political
Philosophy, ed. Barry Stocker and Manuel Knoll (Berlin and New York: de
Gruyter, 2014), 59–76.
26 Paul S. Loeb. 2018. “Nietzsche’s Futurism,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 49(2):
253–59; Matthew Meyer, Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Works: A Dialectical Reading
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 241.
27 These examples are also discussed in Rebecca Bamford, “Daybreak,” in
A Companion to the Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Paul C. Bishop, (Rochester,
NY: Boydell & Brewer [Camden House]), 139–57.
28 For a more detailed discussion of Nietzsche’s letters as he worked on the original
aphorisms of Dawn, and key literary influences upon him at this time, see
Bamford, “Daybreak,” 139–57.
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