Nietzsche: Life as Literature
by Alexander Nehamas
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More than eighty years after his death, Nietzsche's writings and his career remain disquieting, disturbing, obscure. His most famous views--the will to power, the eternal recurrence, the Übermensch, the master morality--often seem incomprehensible or, worse, repugnant. Yet he remains a thinker of singular importance, a great opponent of Hegel and Kant, and the source of much that is powerful in figures as diverse as Wittgenstein, Derrida, Heidegger, and many recent American philosophers. show more Alexander Nehamas provides the best possible guide for the perplexed. He reveals the single thread running through Nietzsche's views: his thinking of the world on the model of a literary text, of people as if they were literary characters, and of knowledge and science as if they were literary interpretation. Beyond this, he advances the clarity of the concept of textuality, making explicit some of the forces that hold texts together and so hold us together. Nehamas finally allows us to see that Nietzsche is creating a literary character out of himself, that he is, in effect, playing the role of Plato to his own Socrates. Nehamas discusses a number of opposing views, both American and European, of Nietzsche's texts and general project, and reaches a climactic solving of the main problems of Nietzsche interpretation in a step-by-step argument. In the process he takes up a set of very interesting questions in contemporary philosophy, such as moral relativism and scientific realism. This is a book of considerable breadth and elegance that will appeal to all curious readers of philosophy and literature. show lessTags
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Alexander Nehamas, a Princeton professor, examines Nietzsche's thought by exploring the paradoxes found in his writing and in what is produced by his writing. He investigates Nietzsche's perspectivism in search of how seriously he accepted his own ideas as truth, and how this influences attempts at interpretation of his works. He then analyzes Nietzsche's aestheticism in connection with his perspectivism, and how this leads him to observe and critique the world as if it were a literary text, and discusses within this interpretative framework Nietzsche's ideas of the will to power, the eternal recurrence, and his attack on morality.
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9+ Works 672 Members
Alexander Nehamas is Edmund N. Carpenter II Class of 1943 Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature at Princeton University.
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title*
- Nietzsche. Leben als Literatur
- Original title
- Nietzsche: Life as Literature
- People/Characters
- Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900
- Original language*
- Englisch
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
Classifications
- Genres
- Philosophy, Nonfiction, Literature Studies and Criticism, General Nonfiction, Biography & Memoir
- DDC/MDS
- 193 — Philosophy and Psychology Modern western philosophy Philosophy of Germany and Austria
- LCC
- B3317 .N425 — Philosophy, Psychology and Religion Philosophy (General) By period Modern By region or country
- BISAC
Statistics
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- 274
- Popularity
- 117,325
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (4.06)
- Languages
- 6 — English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Turkish
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 9
- ASINs
- 1
