Penguin has published a new translation by R. Kevin Hill and Michael Scarpitti of Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Will to Power.
In the mid-1880s Nietzsche was extraordinarily productive making and reworking notes for an intended magnum opus. But he did not complete it and turned to publishing the final few short books of his career before his collapse in 1889. Yet collections of his notes were edited and published by Nietzsche’s friend Heinrich Köselitz and his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche under the title The Will to Power. Further complicating matters is that his sister had anti-Semitic and proto-Nazis views, and a generation later Nazi philosophers Alfred Baeumler and Martin Heidegger identified The Will to Power as the essential forerunner to National-Socialist thought.
So the status of the work is of great controversy among Nietzsche scholars. Professor Hill’s discussion of the controversy in his Introduction alone makes the book worth the price.
And 1,067 sections of Nietzsche’s prose in updated, scholarly translation is a treat.
Related:
* My 1999 thoughts on the legitimacy of Nietzsche’s *The Will to Power*.
* Nietzsche and the Nazis (2010).
* A 22-point summary of themes from Genealogy of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil.
* My other posts and publications on Friedrich Nietzsche.