Jennifer asked:

I have a project for my high school philosophy class due in a month on Nietzsche. The problem is that
when I start to read some of his works, I just get confused. I mean, I feel like I think I might
understand, but his wording is just baffling to me, at least partially due to differing translations I know,
but also because my education in the Bible is limited and when it comes to Greek mythology, I have
utterly Americanized versions that I only vaguely remember. I was wondering if you could help find
any sources (preferably internet) that are informative AND understandable. Especially considering
that I have to do an analysis of one of his major works.

and Casey asked:

I have been learning about Friedrich Nietzsche in school, and I was wondering if someone could
explain his philosophy to me, because I am having trouble understanding it. What does it mean that
he separates everyone into ascending and descending? What is the sign of affects?

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In a nutshell: Nietzsche is a troublesome thinker, because the unsystematic manner of his work
invites the most diverse and conflicting opinions on what his real message is. More than most
philosophers he had his readers importing their own opinions into his writings and therefore reading
them as confirmation of whatever views they held. In consequence he's been accused of being a
mere essayist (i.e. not a full quid as a philosopher) and variously blamed for Nazism and other forms
of disreputable politics, not to mention sundry other evils of society, for which he is supposed to have
furnished an ideology. In truth, however, he was a culture critic and moralist, who saw his task as the
diagnosis of western civilisation,which seemed to him corrupt to the bone.

The consequence he drew from this diagnosis was, that the rot had set in such an extent that it was
irremediable: The type of manrepresentative of western civilisation was malformed (spiritually &
culturally) by a 1000-year hegemony of Christian morals with their enmity for and disgust with life,
which in turn inevitably fostered false ideals and counterfeit values. Not seeing a cure, he preached
the overcomingof this type of man, the revaluation of all valuesand an affirmative attitude to the
sacrifice inevitably demanded by these goals. This is the core of his philosophy.

Let me add that Nietzsche was a passionate philosopher, as none before him; and that philosophy
was for him quite literally a matter of life and death. One needs to know this in reading him — which is
to say, in the study of his works, the microscope reveals too little too close up. In Nietzsche, the larger
context is everything. Although they comprise mostly aphorisms, these add up to the meaning of a
whole book. This is what readers miss out on who content themselves with selections.

Nietzsche is nowadays becoming increasingly recognised as primarily a moralist and attention is
gradually shifting away from the poetic/ prophetic masterpiece Thus Spake Zarathustrato the more
strictly philosophical Genealogy of Morals.If you need to study a principal work, this would be my
recommendation; and there is available an excellent book to help you along, Nietzsche on Morals,
published in the Routledge Philosophy Guides, which gives you a chapter by chapter analysis as you
read.

Jurgen Lawrenz

Sydney