Start with On the Genealogy of Morality, published in 1887. It is the book in which Nietzsche comes closest to arguing step by step, and it contains the ideas he is most often quoted for. If you read only one of his books, read this one. If you want to keep going, the order below takes you through the rest without stalling.
Why the Genealogy first
Most of Nietzsche's books are collections of short sections, some a paragraph long, that jump from subject to subject. They are brilliant and hard to hold together, because the argument is spread across hundreds of fragments and you are expected to assemble it yourself.
The Genealogy is different. It is three essays, and each one makes a single case.
- The first essay asks where our ideas of good and evil came from. Nietzsche contrasts a morality that begins with the powerful praising themselves as good with one that begins with the weak condemning the powerful as evil. This is where his terms "master morality", "slave morality" and ressentiment come from.
- The second essay traces guilt and conscience back to debt and punishment, and argues that bad conscience is cruelty turned inward when people can no longer turn it outward.
- The third essay asks why so many cultures have honored self-denial, and argues that even the urge to deny oneself is a way of exercising power.
Because each essay argues, you can do what you cannot easily do with the aphorism books: say what he claims and decide whether he is right. That is the best way to meet a thinker for the first time.
For a translation, Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale's is the standard one in English and reads well. It is published together with Ecce Homo. The translation by Maudemarie Clark and Alan Swensen adds notes that help with the references.
What to read next
Once you have the Genealogy, these four books open up in this order:
- Beyond Good and Evil (1886). Written a year before the Genealogy and covering much of the same ground in aphorisms. Nietzsche described the Genealogy as a supplement to it. Having read the essays, you will recognize the arguments the fragments are pointing at.
- The Gay Science (1882, with a fifth book added in 1887). Lighter in tone and wider in range. It contains section 125, the madman who announces that God is dead, which is the most quoted passage he wrote and makes far more sense in context than as a slogan.
- Twilight of the Idols (1889). Short and written fast in 1888, near the end of his working life. It is a summary of his late positions, sharp and funny, and works best once you know what he is attacking.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883 to 1885). He thought it his most important book. Read it now, when you can follow the ideas underneath the prophetic voice.
If you finish all of these, Ecce Homo, his strange late account of his own life and books, makes a good last stop. His first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), is about Greek tragedy and Wagner. It is interesting as the starting point, and Nietzsche himself later added a preface criticizing it.
The two books beginners pick and abandon
Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the most famous title, so it is the most common first choice. It is written as a parody of scripture, in speeches by a prophet, with the ideas wrapped in images and parables. Without the background, most readers cannot tell which images carry an argument and which are decoration, and they give up somewhere in Part One. Read it fourth, not first.
The Will to Power is the other trap. It is not a book Nietzsche wrote. After his collapse in 1889, his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and his friend Peter Gast assembled it from his unpublished notebooks and published it under his name in 1901, with an expanded edition in 1906. The notes are often interesting, but the arrangement is theirs, and you cannot tell from the book which thoughts he kept and which he threw away.
How to read him without slogans
Nietzsche is easy to quote and easy to misuse. His sister controlled his archive and his reputation for decades, presented his work as support for the nationalism and antisemitism he had attacked, and welcomed the Nazis to the archive. The damage to his name lasted long after the war. If you meet a Nietzsche who sounds like a recruiting poster, you have probably met that version.
The better way to read him is to take a passage, say what it claims in a sentence, and then ask what it would mean if it were true. In The Dichotomy of the Self I use the Genealogy this way. Its most useful provocation is to examine not only the argument someone makes but the kind of life that argument permits. A doctrine can protect timidity while calling it purity, or permit revenge while calling it justice.
The book also argues against a common misreading. An account of why a belief appeals to someone does not show that the belief is false. A moral rule can protect the vulnerable and still be right. Admiration for strength is not a substitute for moral judgment, and the capacity to impose a value does not establish that the value is good. Nietzsche is most useful when he unsettles a position you thought was safe, and least useful when he is treated as a manual for becoming someone entitled to ignore everyone else.
Where this fits
If you want a short list rather than a reading order, my earlier piece on the best three Nietzsche books covers The Birth of Tragedy, Beyond Good and Evil and the Genealogy. There are summaries on this site of Beyond Good and Evil, Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the Genealogy, and of Stephen Hicks's book on Nietzsche and the Nazis.
Nietzsche is one of the thinkers in The Dichotomy of the Self. He appears with Darwin, Schopenhauer and Freud in the chapter on what happens to the self when our desires turn out to come from forces older than our decisions.
Sources
- Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, Vintage.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, translated by Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen, Hackett, 1998.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, edited by Walter Kaufmann, Vintage. Kaufmann's introduction explains how the collection was assembled.
- Stephen R. C. Hicks, Nietzsche and the Nazis, 2010.