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Nietzsche: Daybreak : Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality

Book Description
Daybreak marks the arrival of Nietzsche's "mature" philosophy and is indispensable for an understanding of his critique of morality and "revaluation of all values." This volume presents the distinguished translation by R. J. Hollingdale, with a new introduction that argues for a dramatic change in Nietzsche's views from Human, All too Human to Daybreak, and shows how this change, in turn, presages the main themes of Nietzsche's later and better-known works such as On the Genealogy of Morality. The edition is completed by a chronology, notes and a guide to further reading.

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Essential Nietzsche
Daybreak is for readers that want to experience the tremendous efforts that Nietzsche undertook to overcome his training and experiences as an educator and to discover and create his own voice. As with the extraordinary previous work -- Human, All Too Human -- Nietzsche writes in a manner that strongly suggests a very rich series of debate openings. He aims to stimulate, provoke, and establish a literary forum to air his overflowing wealth of ideas, questions, doubts, intuitions. Daybreak, like other works by this incredible writer, is meant for slow readers. You don't just simply sit down and read it from cover to cover like an entertaining best seller. Every other page will contain a notion that will either delight, mystify, irritate, or -- best of all -- provide one of those wonderful ah-hah experiences that only happen when you are immersed in serious thought. It's best to take your time with one section after another and seriously ponder what he is saying, because Nietzsche builds a very startling view of human existence that cannot be appreciated by a quick reading.

As emphasized in the extremely well-written introduction by the editors (who do a great job in setting Daybreak in its context among other works by Nietzsche), the main subject of the book is a critique of morality -- what does it really mean to humans when we try to strip it down to its essentials and challenge the many conventions of custom. Nietzsche does not simply treat morality as an interesting subject for a pleasant intellectual dialogue, but rather makes it clear that he is in deadly earnest about how fundamentally important it is, and how our attitudes about it create ourselves and our world. You cannot read this book passively, because Nietzsche writes about difficult concepts that are very much alive today, such as this excerpt from section 149 about the common compulsion to conform to social custom, "The need for little deviant acts":

"Sometimes to act against one's better judgment when it comes to questions of custom... many toerably free-minded people regard this, not merely as unobjectionable, but as 'honest', 'humane', 'tolerant', 'not being pedantic', and whatever else those pretty words may be with which the intellectual conscience is lulled to sleep: and thus this person takes his child for Christian baptism though he is an atheist; and that person serves in the army as all the world does, however much he may execrate hatred between nations; and a third marries his wife in church because her relatives are pious and is not ashamed to repeat vows before a priest. ... The thoughtless error! ... it thereby acquires in the eyes of all who come to hear of it the sanction of rationality itself!"

There's much more of course, and one of the constantly exciting aspects of reading Nietzsche is to experience the way he interweaves discussions of art with larger philosophical concerns. His insights into literature and music are never trivial, and he provides a series of very startling perspectives. Daybreak is not the best known of Nietzsche's works, but it is essential to anyone who wants to engage seriously with his thought. --Reviewer: Dennis M. Clark -from Oakland, CA United States