Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil

LECTURE

Wikipedia on Nietzsche:

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche ( October 15, 1844–August 25, 1900) was a German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist. He wrote critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy, and science, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and aphorism. Nietzsche’s key ideas include the death of God, the Übermensch, the eternal recurrence, the Apollonian and Dionysian dichotomy, and the will to power. Central to his philosophy is the idea of “life-affirmation,” which involves questioning all doctrines that drain life’s expansive energies, however socially prevalent and radical those views might be. His influence remains substantial within philosophy, notably in existentialism, post-modernism and post-structuralism, as well as outside it. His radical questioning of the value and objectivity of truth has been the focus of extensive commentary, especially in the continental tradition. Nietzsche has been called one of the masters of the “school of suspicion,” alongside Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Nietzsche began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. In 1869, at the age of 24 he was appointed to the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel (the youngest individual to have held this position), but resigned in the summer of 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life. In 1889 he suffered a collapse and a complete loss of his mental faculties. The breakdown has been ascribed to an atypical general paralysis attributed to tertiary syphilis, but this diagnosis has since come into question. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897, and then under the care of his sister until his death in 1900.

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RECOMMENDED READING

Friedrich Nietzsche,

Basic Writings of Nietzsche,

Modern Library edition, 2000,

ISBN 9780679783398

Introduction by Peter Gay Translated and edited by Walter Kaufmann Commentary by Martin Heidegger, Albert Camus, and Gilles Deleuze. One hundred years after his death, Friedrich Nietzsche remains the most influential philosopher of the modern era. Basic Writings of Nietzsche gathers the complete texts of five of Nietzsche’s most important works, from his first book to his last: The Birth of Tragedy, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, The Case of Wagner, and Ecce Homo. Edited and translated by the great Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann, this volume also features seventy-five aphorisms, selections from Nietzsche’s correspondence, and variants from drafts for Ecce Homo. It is a definitive guide to the full range of Nietzsche’s thought.