Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-k7p5g Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-08T13:48:54.397Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

13 - Nietzsche’s Critique of the Reason of His Life: On the Interpretation of The Anti-Christ and Ecce Homo

from IV - Religion and Religiosity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2021

Otfried Höffe
Affiliation:
University of Tuebingen
Get access

Summary

Colli and Montinari’s new edition of Nietzsche’s works has confirmed how arbitrarily his sister Elisabeth and friend Peter Gast assembled Nietzsche’s ostensible “major work,” The Will to Power. Montinari, furthermore, has demonstrated convincingly that Nietzsche finally abandoned the plan of writing such a major work.1 With that, our view of Nietzsche’s actual final works was restored, above all The Anti-Christ and Ecce Homo, which he had written in place of the planned major work. As long as The Will to Power was seen as a summary of the philosophical content of his entire oeuvre, The Anti-Christ and Ecce Homo were considered merely as very personal expressions of boundless hatred for Christianity and a self-assessment exaggerated to the point of insanity. After Montinari’s clarifications we now have to ask whether these two works in particular might contain the systematic philosophical content that was previously attributed to The Will to Power and whether, given the latter, this content only summarizes the content of his previous works or goes beyond it. That the two works have a systematic philosophical significance is suggested by the fact that they are not aphoristic but are systematically constructed as are few other works of Nietzsche’s; that they do not summarize his previous writings is obvious. Thus, it remains to be shown that The Anti-Christ and Ecce Homo have yet another far-reaching, systematic importance in Nietzsche’s philosophical oeuvre. We will advance the thesis that in them Nietzsche attempts to perform a critique of the reason of his life. The phrase comes from Nietzsche himself: he had initially considered for the title of Ecce Homo “The Mirror: Attempt at a Self-Assessment,” and for the subtitle, “On the Reason of My Life” (KGW VIII, 24 [5], [8]).

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×