Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- A Note on Editions and Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Link to Nietzsche's Early Writings
- Link to The Birth of Tragedy
- Link to Untimely Meditations
- Link to Human, All Too Human
- Link to Daybreak
- Link to The Gay Science
- Link to Zarathustra
- Link to Beyond Good and Evil
- Link to On the Genealogy of Morals
- Link to The Case of Wagner and Nietzsche contra Wagner
- Link to Twilight of the Idols, The Anti-Christ, and Ecce Homo
- Link to the Nachlass
- Conclusion
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- A Note on Editions and Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Link to Nietzsche's Early Writings
- Link to The Birth of Tragedy
- Link to Untimely Meditations
- Link to Human, All Too Human
- Link to Daybreak
- Link to The Gay Science
- Link to Zarathustra
- Link to Beyond Good and Evil
- Link to On the Genealogy of Morals
- Link to The Case of Wagner and Nietzsche contra Wagner
- Link to Twilight of the Idols, The Anti-Christ, and Ecce Homo
- Link to the Nachlass
- Conclusion
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (1844–1900) IS A FIGURE from the mid-nineteenth century whose influence reached well into the twentieth century and extends beyond, into our own time. Both his professional (and professorial) beginnings and his tragic personal end condition our perception of his philosophical achievement: his appointment, at the extremely young age of twenty-four, to a chair of classical philology, and his final decade of insanity, following his mental collapse in 1889. From a body of writings that went virtually unnoticed when they were first published has arisen a tradition of commentary and analysis that sometimes threatens almost to obscure Nietzsche's philosophical achievement, so extensive has the secondary literature become.
Indeed, Nietzsche has in some ways become so much part of our mental furniture that it would be easy to underestimate the impact of his thought. But according to the German Modernist poet Gottfried Benn (1886–1956), everything that his generation “had discussed, had thought out inside itself, one might say: suffered, one might also say: done to death — all that had already been expressed and exhausted in Nietzsche, had found definitive formulation; all the rest was mere exegesis” (Eigentlich hat alles, was meine Generation diskutierte, innerlich sich auseinanderdachte, man kann sagen: erlitt, man kann auch sagen: breittrat — alles das hatte sich bereits bei Nietzsche ausgesprochen und erschöpft, definitive Formulierung gefunden). To the members of Benn's Nietzsche-influenced generation one might reckon many figures.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A Companion to Friedrich NietzscheLife and Works, pp. 1 - 12Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2012