HOLLINGDALE, RJ (& NIETZSCHE) — A Nietzsche Reader

Penguin. 1977. Paperback with dust jacket, 17.5cm. Book, Less than 500g, 286pp The literary career of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) spanned less than twenty years, but no area of intellectual inquiry was left untouched by his iconoclastic genius. The philosopher who announced the death of God in The Gay Science (1882) and went on to challenge the Christian code of morality in Beyond Good and Evil (1886), grappled with the fundamental issues of the human condition in his own intense autobiography, Ecce Homo (1888). Most notorious of all, perhaps, his idea of the triumphantly transgressive übermann ('superman') is developed in the extreme, yet poetic words of Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-92). Whether addressing conventional Western philosophy or breaking new ground, Nietzsche vastly extended the boundaries of nineteenth-century thought. review says >>> Nietzsche yells out that God is dead and he's glad for that. Christianity shuts us down, tells us we are bad and tells us how to be good. Christianity is his primary target, but he's also against our tribal life that creates conformity (the herd mentality). Philosophers are prime targets as well. Plato, Kant and others insist on a universality that buries the individual. The will-to-power is about the will-to-live, to seek what we need and to defend against what we don't need. Collectively, life is "appropriation" and "self-preservation." There is nothing wrong with animal instincts he says, but there is everything wrong with religious, social, and ethical rules that tell us that we are bad beings. Faults? crease on cover, maybe it was the prev owner's repression being expressed. ?? , Good/None issued.