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 ...

Nietzsche attacks Christianity and the Christian Church with a vengeance in The Antichrist .  But there is more to his critique than just largely pent-up ravings that are often articulated in previous works. Given the fact that this is the only portion of the grand four-volume revaluation project Nietzsche completed, any hints of what he intended as characteristics of a “free spirit” who actually transforms his or her value system should be highlighted as particularly important.  What select traits does Nietzsche assign to the revaluation? The Antichrist offers glimpses of what are perhaps more established characteristics of his transformed values for cultural health and individual demeanor and style. Some of the brilliance in the use of language previously commended by R. J. Hollingdale (if sometimes excessive as critiqued by Julian Young ) can be found in the following excerpts; much of the phrasing is a perfected blend of philosophy, psychology, and poetry.  For N...

With The Antichrist Nietzsche, at last, gets down to the business of crafting his “great task”, intended as the culminating work of his life. It is almost universally agreed upon that this book was originally intended as the first of a four-volume magnum opus to critique basic western values and advocate a revaluation for higher (elitist) culture with greater personal creative freedom and expression.  As is pointed out below, after its completion Nietzsche came to consider this singular work as the sum and the whole of his masterwork - personally, I see this as indicative of his mental decline and increased delusional thinking.  “Throughout 1888 Nietzsche regards himself as 'at war', engaged in a spiritual 'war to the knife' against 'the present', but more specifically against the German present; against German chauvinism and anti-Semitism and the decay of its culture.  On September 30 he finished fashioning one of his major pieces, The Antichrist (or The A...