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In this book of short aphorisms and essays, Friedrich Nietzsche breaks with his earlier admiration for Wagner and Schopenhauer and becomes a cool, scientific…
In this book of short aphorisms and essays, Friedrich Nietzsche breaks with his earlier admiration for Wagner and Schopenhauer and becomes a cool, scientific 'free spirit'. He examines morality, religion, art, the state, women, friendship and the psychology of human motives, arguing that what we call our highest feelings and values often grow from lower, all-too-human sources such as vanity, fear and habit, and can be understood without any appeal to the supernatural.
Context and significance
Nietzsche published the first part in 1878 and dedicated it to the memory of Voltaire on the hundredth anniversary of his death; the book marks the beginning of his mature philosophy. This translation is by Alexander Harvey. Read next Beyond Good and Evil, and see Nietzsche's life.
About the author
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), the son of a Lutheran pastor, was appointed professor of classical philology at Basel at only twenty-four. His friendship with the composer Richard Wagner shaped his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, and its bitter end shaped much of what followed. Ill health forced him to resign in 1879, and he spent ten restless years in Swiss and Italian lodgings, writing book after book.
In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil and his later works he questioned morality, religion and truth itself. He collapsed in Turin in 1889 and never recovered; his sister later bent his work toward nationalist causes he had despised. Few philosophers have been so influential, or so often misread.