Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Some tanning wear and marking due to age. Hardcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> The aim of this book is not only to sum up briefly Friedrich Nietzsche’s life and work but also to state in as simple terms as possible what Nietzsche still means or might mean to us some seventy years after his death. In the history of modern European thought and culture Nietzsche occupies one of the most provocative and at the same time perplexing positions: provocative because he challenged all the traditional ideas beliefs and values of his age; and perplexing because his work has proved highly stimulat-ing even on account of its inconsistencies and contradic-tions. His personal fate itself was unusual and its dramatic character was increased by the fact that after neglect lasting throughout the whole of his creative life Nietzsche’s work sprang into such vogue that it became for a while something of an ideological battle-cry all over Europe. And although his challenge to the whole of our civilization was misinterpreted by his detractors and often even more so by his followers the passions aroused by his thought set much of the mental and moral climate of our times. Nietzsche emerged at the dead end of an epoch whose inner and external crises made us witness the gradual bankruptcy of our humanistic traditions. He was one of those who refused to be deluded. While one facet of his thought was visionary and prophetic the other was intensely critical and full of ominous warnings. As a critic he gave us one of the most merciless diagnoses of our age. As a visionary again he offered to his contemporaries an ideal which in the end proved to be as impossible in practice as it was daring in theory. Unconventional to the uttermost he fought against any mere theoretical doctrines. What he demanded was a lived and living philosophy – a philosophy which might actively affect our existence. In one of his early essays he jotted down these programmatic. (LL)