Why I Am So Wise

by Nietzsche, Friedrich; Hollingdale, R. J.

• ISBN13: 9780143036340
• ISBN10: 0143036343
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-09-06
• Publisher: Penguin Books

Summary

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Author Biography

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was born in Prussia in 1844. After the death of his father, a Lutheran minister, Nietzsche was raised from the age of five by his mother in a household of women. In 1869 he was appointed Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basel, where he taught until 1879 when poor health forced him to retire. He never recovered from a nervous breakdown in 1889 and died eleven years later. Known for saying that “god is dead,” Nietzsche propounded his metaphysical construct of the superiority of the disciplined individual (superman) living in the present over traditional values derived from Christianity and its emphasis on heavenly rewards. His ideas were appropriated by the Fascists, who turned his theories into social realities that he had never intended.
R. J. Hollingdale has translated eleven of Nietzsche’s books and published two books about him. He has also translated works by, among others, Schopenhauer, Goethe, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Lichtenberg and Theodor Fontane, many of these for the Penguin Classics. He is Honorary President of the British Nietzsche Society, and was for the Australian academic year 1991 Visiting Fellow at Trinity College, Melbourne.

Table of Contents

Why I am So Wise 1. Ecce Homo
How One Becomes What One Is

Foreword
Why I am so Wise
Why I am So Clever
Why I Write Such Good Books
Why I am a Destiny

2. Twilight of the Idols
or How to Philosophize with a Hammer

Maxims and Arrows
The Four Great Errors
The Hammer Speaks

Excerpts

Foreword

Seeing that I must shortly approach mankind with the heaviest demand that has ever been made on it, it seems to me indispensable to saywho I am. This ought really to be known already: for I have not neglected to ‘bear witness' about myself. But the disparity between the greatness of my task and thesmallnessof my contemporaries has found expression in the fact that I have been neither heard nor even so much as seen. I live on my own credit, it is perhaps merely a prejudice that I am alive at all? ... I need only to talk with any of the 'cultured people' who come to the Ober-Engadin in the summer to convince myself that I amnotalive . . . Under these circumstances there exists a duty against which my habit, even more the pride of my instincts revolts, namely to say:Listen to me! for I am thus and thus. Do not, above all, confound me with what I am not!