I understand completely why readers dislike Nietzsche, but it is important to recognize this book not as an aberration but almost a prophecy of the changes that were to come about in the world very soon thereafter. Nietzsche methodically reduces a great deal of historical thinking to dust, all the while insisting that his new world requires new thinking and new inventions by which to create great things. In that sense, perhaps he was right but perhaps it is also beyond the capacity of mankind to actually live with such a weight on his shoulders. Still I regard this book as prophetic in its own right, having great influence on the great minds of the 20th century, including the later ontological studies of Heidegger. Heidegger delivered more lectures on Nietzsche than any other person, not necessarily because he was espousing Nietzsche's point of view, but because, I believe, that he accepted the challenge to discover ontological truths which had heretofore been deficient or lacking.
In some ways, although I regard this as Nietzsche's best book because it is the clearest statement of his important subjects in the most concise manner, this book is frightening to read. I became a devotee of Nietzsche when I was a freshman in college, much like many other innocents who were attracted to his fulminations. It was, in retrospect, the wrong thing to do because one must understand such a great body of work that understanding cannot be accomplished by the novice.
For example, I knew nothing of the pre-Socratics, for the most part, outside a generic course on ancient philosophy until I began to read Greek much later. One can luxuriate with Plato and reason with Aristotle over a long period without understanding how the latter's advantages of reason creates a kind of golden calf which is intolerable for modern thinking, at least according to Nietzsche. he is especially hard on several writers, not the least of which was Spinoza, someone who is oddly not much studied any longer, but one with whom I identified for a long while, at least one year in school. Perhaps Nietzsche is only furious that Spinoza created a world that denied entry to someone like Nietzsche or, as Nietzsche would put it, Spinoza would never open the door of his world to the possibility that irrational things might enter and refuse to make any sense.
One can never take a writer out of his age, any more than one can take a composer or artist, and expect that he or she will make perfect sense or even imperfect sense. We are always understanding what we read or see against the underpinnings of both what we understand about the artist's world and what we understand about our own. The genius of Nietzsche was that he understood the origins and character of his own age, in my estimation, so well that he saw himself as a little more than a speck of dust in the world which was yet to come.
The greatest criticism one must lay at his feet is that if he was a prophet, then he was a prophet without a god or God. Though he may have accurately predicted how our modern world would come to see itself, puffed up, proud deniers of faith in things which failed to stand before the throne of understanding, perhaps Nietzsche had a significant failing which he shares with modern thought. Perhaps in understanding all too well that one has no reason to be called to faith in any given thing because one does not understand the source, he came to believe that faith before understanding is impossible. Then again, God knows we haven't done such a great job of saving ourselves.
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Cramped = hard to read..
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