dusio makes a good point about hidden meanings in Nietzsche. He uses puns and play on words a great deal. For instance, he uses the word "agrund" that is translated as "abyss" and literally means the absence of ground or foundation.
The quote is also coupled together with a preceding phrase. *One* english translation of aphorism 146 in
Beyond Good & Evil is:
Quote:
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Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.
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It has also been translated "fight dragons too long, you risk becoming a dragon. And if you stare into the abyss too long, the abyss will stare back at you."
Nietzsche took great pains -- literally -- to polish his aphorisms. He pointed out in
Ecco Homo -- rather immodestly -- that he tries to say in paragraph what others try to say in a book and fail to adequately say. There are many layers and depths in his aphorisms.
And my own conclusions about Nietzsche is to always recall that he was trail-brazing his way through the forests of Western thought and only caught glimpses of the way out. In a number of places he implicitly admits that he hadn't found the answer. (One of this instances is in The Gay Science, aphorism 125 entitled "The Madman", where the "madman" announces "the death of God." At the end of it he says that the meaning of this event will not be understood for quite some time: implicitly acknowledging that he saw the problem but not it's full solution.
He saw the requirement of finding one's own answers or writing one's one table of values as he put it. As to criticisms of him, it's true he was rather misanthropic. And it's rather telling that a correspondance of mine once astutely pointed out that his name can be read as a personal ad: Friedrich Needs-She.
--Jimi Le (a former Nietzsche scholar)