Overview

Volume 4 of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche contains two works originally published separately, Mixed Opinions and Maxims (1879) and The Wanderer and His Shadow (1880), then republished together in the 1886 edition of Nietzsche's collected works. They mingle aphorisms drawn from notebooks of 1875-79, years when worsening health forced Nietzsche toward an increasingly solitary existence. Less structurally organized than its predecessor, Human, All Too Human II turns an increasingly sharply formulated genealogical method of analysis toward Nietzsche's persistent concerns--metaphysics, morality and community, religion, art, style, society, politics, and culture. The notebook entries included here offer a window into the intellectual sources behind Nietzsche's evolution as a philosopher, the reading and self-reflection that nourished his lines of thought. The linking of notebook entries to specific published aphorisms, included in the notes, allows readers of Nietzsche in English to trace for the first time the intensive process of revision through which he transformed raw notebook material into the finely crafted sequences of aphoristic reflection that signal his distinctiveness as a philosophical stylist.

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9781611044102

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Reviews

Stanford University Press is doing Nietzsche studies and readers in the English-speaking world a great service through its support and publication of this series of translations of Nietzsche's texts. The Colli-Montinari (de Gruyter) critical edition of Nietzsche's writings, on which they are based, is the German-language 'gold standard' for Nietzsche scholarship. The Stanford series, as it fills out, will undoubtedly come to hold comparable pride of place for English-speaking readers world-wide. --Richard Schacht, University of Illinois

Author Information

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a 19th-century German philosopher and classical philologist. He wrote critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy and science, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and aphorism. Nietzsche's influence remains substantial within and beyond philosophy, notably in existentialism and postmodernism. His style and radical questioning of the value and objectivity of truth have resulted in much commentary and interpretation, mostly in the continental tradition. His key ideas include the death of God, perspectivism, the Ubermensch, the eternal recurrence, and the will to power. Central to his philosophy is the idea of life-affirmation, which involves an honest questioning of all doctrines that drain life's expansive energies, however socially prevalent those views might be. Nietzsche began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. At the age of 24 he was appointed to the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel (the youngest individual to have held this position), but resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life. In 1889 he became mentally ill, possibly due to atypical general paralysis attributed to tertiary syphilis. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897, then under the care of his sister until his death in 1900.

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