Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- PART ONE Youth
- PART TWO The Reluctant Professor
- PART THREE The Nomad
- Chapter 15 The Wanderer and His Shadow
- Chapter 16 Dawn
- Chapter 17 The Gay Science
- Chapter 18 The Salomé Affair
- Chapter 19 Zarathustra
- Chapter 20 Nietzsche's Circle of Women
- Chapter 21 Beyond Good and Evil
- Chapter 22 Clearing the Decks
- Chapter 23 T he Genealogy of Morals
- Chapter 24 1888
- Chapter 25 Catastrophe
- Chapter 26 The Rise and Fall of The Will to Power
- Chapter 27 The End
- Chapter 28 Nietzsche's Madness
- Chronology
- Notes
- Bibliography of Secondary Literature
- Index
- Plate section
Chapter 24 - 1888
from PART THREE - The Nomad
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- PART ONE Youth
- PART TWO The Reluctant Professor
- PART THREE The Nomad
- Chapter 15 The Wanderer and His Shadow
- Chapter 16 Dawn
- Chapter 17 The Gay Science
- Chapter 18 The Salomé Affair
- Chapter 19 Zarathustra
- Chapter 20 Nietzsche's Circle of Women
- Chapter 21 Beyond Good and Evil
- Chapter 22 Clearing the Decks
- Chapter 23 T he Genealogy of Morals
- Chapter 24 1888
- Chapter 25 Catastrophe
- Chapter 26 The Rise and Fall of The Will to Power
- Chapter 27 The End
- Chapter 28 Nietzsche's Madness
- Chronology
- Notes
- Bibliography of Secondary Literature
- Index
- Plate section
Summary
Winter in Nice
The year 1888 began, as its predecessor had finished, cold. Sitting in his room in the Pension de Genève, redecorated with his own choice of dark, reddish-brown wallpaper, Nietzsche found the stove imported from Naumburg ‘de rigueur’ with respect to the otherwise intractable ‘blue-finger’ problem. Seated at his large writing table he had begun serious work on what was intended to be the main event of his life, the production of his ‘systematic masterwork’, The Will to Power, to which all his previous works were the mere prelude. This was to be a four-volume work of ‘extreme’ and ‘rigorous seriousness’ that would provide a grounding and synoptic exposition of his entire philosophy. By February 13 he had completed the first detailed plan (with the title now altered to Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values). But though he continued to work steadily, he suffered from diarrhoea and insomnia, with his spirits – not improved by failing to win the half-million-franc prize in the Nice lottery – under the weather.
Since many of his fellow guests were, like him, hoping the Nice climate would ameliorate their various conditions, dinner-table conversation in the pension centred on climate and health. A lady from Berlin, for example, suffering from ‘a kind of melancholic desperation’ at home and scarcely able to leave the house, had, she claimed, been completely cured by the dry air of Nice. A short sharp ‘change of air’, Nietzsche agreed, had much to recommend it.
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- Information
- Friedrich NietzscheA Philosophical Biography, pp. 485 - 527Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010