Walking the Tightrope

The subtitle to Nietzsche's autobiographical work is “How One Becomes What One Is.”  It tells, in often satirical fashion, the story of Nietzsche's philosophical journey; the twists and turns, the mistakes and breakthroughs, that led him to write his 'great task' though, of course, he only completed the first part of the revaluation project.  The rest of it never came to fruition, buried as scattered and unripe thoughts and fragments captured in his private notebooks. These selections from the work should suffice to give readers unfamiliar with Ecce Homo a taste of its potent prose. “The last thing I would promise would be to 'improve' mankind.  I erect no new idols; let the old idols learn what it means to have legs of clay.   To overthrow idols (my word for ideals) – that is rather my business. Reality has been deprived of its value, its meaning, its veracity to the same degree as an ideal world has been fabricated ...The 'real world' and the ...

“ Ecce Homo is Nietzsche's most enigmatic and problematic work, and the student who reads it  must do so with caution.  Much of it self-evidently belongs to the time Nietzsche no longer had control over his fantasies;  on the other hand, much is not only rational but quite consonant with the outlook already familiar from the other post- Zarathustra works. “The extreme claims concerning his own importance in the history of European civilization – 'One day my name will be associated with the recollection of something frightful – with a crisis such as there has never been on the earth before' (EH IV 1)  and so on – may be discounted as examples of the overcompensation...in his letters and personal writings of 1888 and earlier; where he is writing not about himself but about other people, or reiterating his philosophy, Ecce Homo shows no trace of unbalance. There is no intellectual degradation: the mind is as sharp as ever and there is, above all, no decline in the ...