Introduction

ONE OF THE FIRST INTERPRETIVE WORKS about Nietzsche advanced the idea that three periods can be discerned in his writings. Lou Andreas-Salomé's Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken, published in 1894, proposed that Nietzsche's middle period comprises the two volumes of Human, All Too Human (Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, 1878–80), Daybreak (Morgenröthe, 1881), and the first four books of The Gay Science (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 1882). Nietzsche's middle period is thus demarcated at one end by contrast with his early writings and their enthusiasm for Wagner and Schopenhauer, and at the other by Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Also sprach Zarathustra, 1883) and his subsequent writings. Salomé is too subtle a reader of Nietzsche to suggest that each period represents a clean and complete epistemological break with the earlier one. She points out, for example, that in his last phase Nietzsche returns to some of the concerns of his first, but approaches them differently. Thus it is possible to employ Salomé's tripartite periodization while acknowledging that the boundaries between Nietzsche's phases are not rigid, that some of the thoughts elaborated in one period were adumbrated in the previous one, that there are differences within any single phase, and that some concerns pervade his oeuvre.