Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by gemistos
Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is by Friedrich Nietzsche
3.0
This is the first real book by FN that I've actually managed to finish in one go.
As far as philosophical substance is concerned, I don't feel like FN has a lot to offer except for excessive vitalism in a dionysian mode as an antidode to "idealism" (truth, god, justice, morality, etc), all the vehicles of decadence. Otherwise, it is a collection of pithy meditations on the views expressed in his major works. Obviously, Zarathustra, the untimely prophet, seems to hold a special place in his art, as he would come back to it again and again throughout the book. His ex friendship with Wagner also figures prominently- an friendship that was ultimately aborted when Wagner become encolonized by the german culture and according to FN, became a phillistine.
FN's stress is on the here and the now, in the actual world. For instance, he believes the practice of the care of the bodily self (proper nutrition, hygiene and acclimitization) has been unfairly neglected by thinkers who were motivated by decadence, to the detriment of all that is actually good, that is, all that augments the will to power. What is unmasked in the conspiracy of the idealism of the mind and the soul against the actuality of the flesh and the instincts, against life itself.
As an amateur who hasn't read much Nietzsche, I found it difficult in some passages to tell if he's being deliberately playful with his bombastic declarations, or if he's actually lapsing into megalomania or if such a distinction is tenable at all in this case.
Regardless, one has to admire the tremendous extent to which FN was prescient about his own posthumost legacy.
As far as philosophical substance is concerned, I don't feel like FN has a lot to offer except for excessive vitalism in a dionysian mode as an antidode to "idealism" (truth, god, justice, morality, etc), all the vehicles of decadence. Otherwise, it is a collection of pithy meditations on the views expressed in his major works. Obviously, Zarathustra, the untimely prophet, seems to hold a special place in his art, as he would come back to it again and again throughout the book. His ex friendship with Wagner also figures prominently- an friendship that was ultimately aborted when Wagner become encolonized by the german culture and according to FN, became a phillistine.
FN's stress is on the here and the now, in the actual world. For instance, he believes the practice of the care of the bodily self (proper nutrition, hygiene and acclimitization) has been unfairly neglected by thinkers who were motivated by decadence, to the detriment of all that is actually good, that is, all that augments the will to power. What is unmasked in the conspiracy of the idealism of the mind and the soul against the actuality of the flesh and the instincts, against life itself.
As an amateur who hasn't read much Nietzsche, I found it difficult in some passages to tell if he's being deliberately playful with his bombastic declarations, or if he's actually lapsing into megalomania or if such a distinction is tenable at all in this case.
Regardless, one has to admire the tremendous extent to which FN was prescient about his own posthumost legacy.