Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.49 (706 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0393323803 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 416 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-01-17 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
A seminal biography, essential reading for anyone studying the philosophy of history's most enigmatic and fascinating thinker. No other modern philosopher has proved as influential as Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and none is as poorly understood. In the first new biography in decades, Rüdiger Safranski, one of the foremost living Nietzsche scholars, re-creates the anguished life of Nietzsche while simultaneously assessing the philosophical implications of his morality, religion, and art. Struggling to break away from the oppressive burdens of the past, Nietzsche invented a unique philosophy based on compulsive self-consciousness and constant self-revision. As groundbreaking as it will be long-lasting, this biography offers a brilliant, multifaceted portrait of a towering figure.
Another Solid Effort for Safranski I would imagine that one of the toughest subjects for an author today would be Friedrich Nietzsche. Not so much in terms of difficulty, but in terms of previous output. There have been quite a few, to say the least, books on Nietzsche over the past few years. They seem to have left no stone unturned in their quest for material. There have appeared books on almost every aspect of Nietzsche's philosophy and life: Nietzsche as a young man, the later Nietzsche, Nietzsche and the Jews, Nietzsche's last days, Nietzsche and the Nazis, Nietzsche's influence on the French, English, the young, modern thought, what have you. There hav. Paul Carleton said Struggling from belief in God to belief in Life.. Before reading Safranski's "Nietzsche" I had a very limited and distorted understanding of Nietzsche's philosophy based on exposure in my youth to both the Nazi's selective expropriation of Nietzsche's ideas and the Catholic Church's demonization of him. Having now read Safranski's philosophical biography, I still don't feel I have a good understanding. This admittedly is due in part to my limited formal education in philosophy. But it's also due I believe to the author's and translator's sometimes vague descriptions of Nietzsche's ideas, and/or to the vicissitudes of Nietzsche's troubled mind, in a culture more then a cent. unoriginal, uninspired! Captain Kandahar The only thing that makes this book unique is that it organizes Nietzsche's ideas chronologically, according to their development. If not for that, there's nothing that makes this book any better than the hundreds of other books about Nietzsche.
Throughout, certain themes recur, elucidated sympathetically but with "ironic reserve," including the death of God, the divided self, the will to power, eternal recurrence, philosophy as art and truth as power play. To close, there is a chapter on the different ways Nietzsche influenced 20th-century artists, the Nazis, Heidegger, Foucault, Rorty and others. Safranski (Heidegger: Between Good and Evil), in clear English from Rutgers University Germanist Frisch, brings out contradictions and tensions in Nietzsche's thought without dismissing him; on the contrary, Safranski sees Nietzsche as a thinker "who organiz