Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on the texts and abbreviations
- Chronology of Nietzsche's life
- Introduction
- A note on Nietzsche and liberalism
- I THE QUESTION OF NIETZSCHE
- II ANCIENTS AND MODERNS
- III MAN AND OVERMAN
- IV THE QUESTION OF NIETZSCHE NOW
- 8 Nietzsche and contemporary liberalism
- 9 Nietzsche and feminism
- 10 The perfect nihilist
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Guide to further reading
- Index
10 - The perfect nihilist
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on the texts and abbreviations
- Chronology of Nietzsche's life
- Introduction
- A note on Nietzsche and liberalism
- I THE QUESTION OF NIETZSCHE
- II ANCIENTS AND MODERNS
- III MAN AND OVERMAN
- IV THE QUESTION OF NIETZSCHE NOW
- 8 Nietzsche and contemporary liberalism
- 9 Nietzsche and feminism
- 10 The perfect nihilist
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Guide to further reading
- Index
Summary
Animals as critics. – I fear that animals consider man as a being like themselves that has lost in a most dangerous way its sound animal common sense; they consider him the insane animal, the laughing animal, the weeping animal, the miserable animal.
Nietzsche, The Gay Science 224The fairest virtue of the great thinker is the magnanimity with which, as a man of knowledge, he intrepidly, often with embarassment, often with sublime mockery and smiling – offers himself and his life as a sacrifice.
Nietzsche, Daybreak 459I conclude this reading of Nietzsche as political thinker with some suggestions on how best we can understand and appropriate his thought today. The key issue, I believe, is that of how we are to construe the meaning and significance of Nietzsche's description of himself as ‘the first perfect nihilist’. Nietzsche believes that his experience as the first perfect nihilist has an exemplificatory status. His experience of nihilism is to serve as an example, not to be imitated, which would be folly, but as something to learn from and from which new life can grow. He is offering himself to us as a sacrifice: a free offering. He considers himself to be the teacher of our age par excellence, since his thinking reveals both signs of descent (of the decadence of life) and ascent (of the growth and abundance of life), and therefore represents both an end and a new beginning. The meaning of his thinking is fundamentally ambiguous or doublenatured (zweideutig).
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- Information
- An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political ThinkerThe Perfect Nihilist, pp. 199 - 206Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994
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