Ecce Homo (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

By Friedrich Nietzsche and Marc Lucht

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading.   Ecce Homo-"Behold the man" -were the words Pilate used to refer to Jesus when presenting the masses with a choice between saving him or saving Barabbas. They are also the words Friedrich Nietzsche chose as the title for his literary self-portrait, his statement of how he sees himself and wants others to see him. Ecce Homo constitutes a reflection upon Nietzsche's life and career, but also forcefully repudiates those interpretations of his previous works purporting to find support there for imperialism, anti-Semitism, militarism, and Social Darwinism. It will be of great interest to anyone concerned with ethics, nihilism, psychology, and the meaning and cultural significance of religion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Mar 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9781411467842

Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was an acclaimed German philosopher who rose to prominence during the late nineteenth century. His work provides a thorough examination of societal norms often rooted in religion and politics. As a cultural critic, Nietzsche is affiliated with nihilism and individualism with a primary focus on personal development. His most notable books include The Birth of Tragedy, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. and Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche is frequently credited with contemporary teachings of psychology and sociology.

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ECCE HOMO

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

TRANSLATED BY ANTHONY M. LUDOVICI

INTRODUCTION BY MARC LUCHT

Introduction and Suggested Reading © 2006 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

This 2012 edition published by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

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INTRODUCTION

ECCE HOMO—BEHOLD THE MAN (JOHN 19:5). THESE WERE THE WORDS Pilate used to refer to Jesus when presenting the masses with a choice between saving him or saving Barabbas, and these are the words Friedrich Nietzsche chose as the title for his literary self-portrait, his statement of how he sees himself and wants others to see him. Nietzsche is one of the most widely read and most consistently misrepresented of all philosophers. His work provides the foundations for both existentialism and postmodernism, and his critique of Christianity and the moral values lying at the heart of Western culture and philosophy offers a challenge to the prevailing morality that still reverberates today. Many readers have confused his indictment of traditional morality and his championing of the independence of strong individuals with support for German nationalism. Nietzsche was well aware of the ways in which his ideas were mischaracterized. Ecce Homo, his most autobiographical work, constitutes a reflection upon his life and career, but also forcefully repudiates those interpretations of his work purporting to find support there for imperialism, anti-Semitism, militarism, and the Social Darwinist view that it is natural and right for the strong to conquer those who are weaker. Nietzsche was one of the master stylists of the German language; many critics rank his books The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra among the finest pieces of German prose and see the expressionist creation of a literary personality in Ecce Homo as a true artistic achievement. Ecce Homo will be of great interest to anyone concerned with ethics, nihilism, psychology, and the meaning and cultural significance of religion. It also is fascinating for being a great philosopher’s reflections upon his own development and work.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, in Prussian Saxony. His father, a Lutheran pastor who had worked as a tutor to the three daughters of the Duke of Saxe-Altenburg, died when Nietzsche was five years old. Nietzsche was precocious. As a child, he composed poems, plays, and music, and in 1858 he was invited to attend Pforta, the most prestigious classical school in Germany. The great German thinkers and writers Novalis, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and the Schlegel brothers had been students at Pforta, and Nietzsche received an extremely rigorous education in ancient languages and culture. He was often first in his class (one of his teachers thought Nietzsche was the best student he had ever taught), but was not extremely popular, typically preferring to read and drink hot chocolate over carousing with his classmates. In 1864, Nietzsche matriculated at the University of Bonn, where he studied philology and, to appease his pious family, theology. He joined a dueling fraternity and received a scar on his face, but quickly came to think of himself as superior to the shallow materialism of fraternity social life. He was forced to leave Bonn in part for financial reasons after a year, and went to the University of Leipzig planning to study music and philology. In 1865, he discovered the works of Arthur Schopenhauer in a secondhand bookstore owned by his landlord and turned to philosophy. Nietzsche began his military service in an artillery regiment in 1867 and proved to be an excellent horseman, but soon sustained a serious chest injury while riding, was discharged, and returned to Leipzig. He won a prestigious university prize for an essay on the Greek philosopher Diogenes while still away for his military service, and in 1869 at the unusually young age of twenty-four he was offered a position as Chair of Classical Theology at the University of Basel.

In 1868, Nietzsche was invited to meet the great composer and political figure Richard Wagner, and immediately became his disciple and friend. Once in Basel, he was close enough to Tribschen, Wagner’s home overlooking Lake Lucerne, to visit regularly; he frequently was invited for Christmas and was present for the birth of Wagner’s first son. Most likely Nietzsche was in love with Wagner’s wife, Cosima, who before marrying Wagner had lived with him for some years while she was still married to the conductor Hans von Bülow, and Nietzsche dedicated some of his own musical compositions to her. Large portions of Nietzsche’s first published book, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872), champion Wagner’s operas as a revitalization of the spirit of classical Greek art. As Nietzsche was coming into his own as an independent thinker, he became unwilling to play the role of uncritical devotee that the older and more famous man expected of him and grew disillusioned by what he took to be the composer’s pandering to the philistinism and nationalism of the German political elite. He famously broke with Wagner in the late 1870s. Much later, in 1888, Nietzsche explored some of the reasons behind his break in The Case of Wagner; and in Nietzsche contra Wagner; he reflects upon the importance his relationship with Wagner had for him in Ecce Homo.

Serious health problems afflicted Nietzsche throughout his life. As a child, he suffered from what were diagnosed as epileptic seizures, he endured digestive and bronchial problems, and as a twelve-year-old boy he already began experiencing the eye problems and debilitating headaches that would plague him until he died. In 1879, recurring illness forced him to resign his teaching post, and Nietzsche spent much of the rest of his life writing while traveling to places such as Florence, Venice, the Italian and French Riviera, and the Swiss Alps in search of a climate that would prove conducive to his physical well being. In January 1889, after a month or so of increasing mental instability, he experienced a mental breakdown. For the next eleven years, he enjoyed increasingly infrequent periods of lucidity, and was never again willing to talk about his philosophical work. Nietzsche died on August 25, 1900.

Nietzsche’s influence has been immense. His work and life inspired writers and thinkers as diverse as W. B Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Karl Jaspers, Albert Camus, Hermann Hesse, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Franz Kafka, Georges Bataille, and George Bernard Shaw. He has had enormous influence on philosophy, theology, sociology, literary theory, and on art critics and artists. Richard Strauss’ symphony Also sprach Zarathustra was inspired by Nietzsche’s book of the same title (1887), and Gustav Mahler intended originally to name his third symphony after Nietzsche’s The Gay Science (1882). The main character of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus is in part modeled after Nietzsche’s life. Art movements such as expressionism, Dadaism, and symbolism were heavily indebted to his work. The Birth of Tragedy revolutionized the way in which Western scholars understood ancient Greek culture, and set forth the concepts of the Apollinian and the Dionysian, which he took to be psychological drives that find expression in art, and which have informed aesthetic theory ever since. He associates the Apollinian with dreams, cognitive activity, the contemplation of form, emotional restraint, and the urgent psychological need to find order in and thus tame a wild, chaotic world; he connects the Dionysian with irrationality, music, sexuality, loss of individuality, and intoxication. The Greek genius, Nietzsche tells us, was to harness the Dionysian, which left alone threatens to become a destructive force, by integrating it with the Apollinian. This sublimation is the achievement of the art form of tragedy.

Nietzsche’s thought also anticipates Ludwig Wittgenstein’s turn to the philosophy of language as well as many of the ideas of the American pragmatists. His exploration of the idea that we are not fully aware of our own motivations and his analyses of sublimation, the origin of the belief in God, and the psychological and cultural roots of the feeling of guilt were of decisive influence on Sigmund Freud. Freud marveled at the extent to which Nietzsche’s theories anticipated the results of his psychoanalytical research, and claimed that Nietzsche had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any man who ever lived. . . .¹ Indeed, the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society held a discussion of Ecce Homo attended by Freud and Alfred Adler, and Carl Jung conducted a famous seminar on the book. Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel, told his wife that his gift to her of Nietzsche’s work was the finest gift he could give her.

Distortions of Nietzsche’s views were influential on National Socialist thought. Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth was prominent in anti-Semitic circles (in the late 1880s she helped to manage a racially pure Teutonic colony in Paraguay that her husband had founded), and after her brother’s breakdown she acquired the rights to his writings. Because of her exclusive access to his unpublished notes and her willingness to publish forgeries and corrupt versions of her brother’s works, she established herself as the leading authority over the meaning of her brother’s thought and was able to characterize his thinking as providing a philosophical basis for an anti-Semitic German nationalism. Prominent Nazi thinkers such as Alfred Bäumler made great use of these corrupt texts. Since authentic texts appeared in the 1950s, however, there has been no question of Nietzsche’s hostility toward German chauvinism and anti-Semitism. He suggests exiling anti-Semites from the country in Beyond Good and Evil (1886), and, in 1887, Nietzsche wrote to Elisabeth that her "association with an anti-Semitic chief expresses a foreignness to my whole way of life which fills me ever again with ire. . . . It is a matter of honor to me to be absolutely clean and unequivocal regarding anti-Semitism, namely opposed, as I am in my writings."² Ecce Homo, written in 1888, contains Nietzsche’s most vehement published renunciation of the attempt to align his work with the glorification of the German Reich and anti-Semitism (in it he refers to anti-Semites as abortions and to nationalism as a neurosis), but Elisabeth compounded the misunderstandings of her brother’s ideas by withholding its publication until 1908. In general, Nietzsche considers anti-Semitism to be a strategy utilized by mediocre people to blame others for their own weaknesses and sees nationalism as a petty and vulgar attitude lying in the way of a European unity that would promote real cultural greatness. He was well aware of the ways in which an overly strong state depends upon conformity and works against the existence of creative and independent individuals.

Nihilism is the view that the world is indifferent, meaningless-ness, or absurd, and human endeavor ultimately pointless. Nietzsche was the first to recognize fully the devastating impact of nihilism on the modern European consciousness, and he was the first European thinker to develop a systematic attack on traditional Western moral values as hostile to the vitality of human life. Throughout his life, his thinking was devoted to the struggle against nihilism, and his larger project became what he referred to as the revaluation of all values. Ecce Homo discusses a wide range of his most important ideas. It discusses the importance of solitude and struggle in the development of an independent thinker, the courage required by the pursuit of knowledge, the idea that a refined taste is useful as defense against the temptation to react against the vulgar and common, and Nietzsche’s core concept of self-overcoming—the notion that real strength consists in the struggle against and mastery over one’s own passions and drives (whereas the will to subdue those who are weaker is a sign of weakness and generally arises as compensation for the incapacity to impose self-discipline). At the heart of Ecce Homo are the concepts of the Dionysian and amor fati, or