Strauss, Leo. "Transcript of Seminar on Nietzsche." University of Chicago, 1967. Leo Strauss Archives. https://leostrausscenter.uchicago.edu

Transcripts of a 1967 seminar course given by Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago on Nietzsche’s works, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals.

Excerpt:

It is customary and justified to some extent to speak of three epochs of Nietzsche’s work. Nietzsche comes first to sight as a classical scholar: that was his field of study. But at that time classical scholarship in Europe, and in particular in Germany, meant at the same time to be an educator, a former of human beings, because the higher form of higher education was the humanistic Gymnasium, as it was called, in which Latin and Greek were the core of the teaching. And therefore Nietzsche was concerned in his early period with classical scholarship, which was at the same time a concern with the formation of men. Furthermore, classical antiquity, which was what guided him, was understood very soon [by Nietzsche] (from the beginning, one could say) in a very unclassical light: in the light of Richard Wagner and of Schopenhauer. And the two documents of this stage of Nietzsche are The Birth of Tragedy and the Considerations or Meditations Out of Season. The implicit difficulty in this position was the fact that Wagner and Schopenhauer were in different ways alien to classical antiquity. There was [a] difficulty intrinsic to classical philology at that time, namely, classical philology—that is, as indicated by the adjective classical, classical antiquity, the model, the classical. And yet in the nineteenth century a new approach had come to the fore, which consisted in undermining the concept of the classical: that was the historical approach, in conflict with the notion of the classical.

So these difficulties led to a break with Wagner and Schopenhauer and up to the so-called second period in Nietzsche: a break with romanticism in all its forms and an apparent surrender to positivism, modern science, and the historical approach. But that surrender was only apparent. The document of this stage is above all Human, All Too Human. Out of this adventure into positivism came the realization that positivism (and quite a few other things) are, in Nietzsche’s words, nihilism; and therefore the problem was raised of how to overcome nihilism. And this led to Nietzsche’s final position, the greatest documents of which are the Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche could not have the importance which he has but for this final epoch. We must therefore limit ourselves entirely to it.

Online:
Leo Strauss Archive (Online and Searchable)
Leo Strauss Archive (PDF format)