Save for his raucous, rhapsodical autobiography, Ecce Homo, The Antichrist is the last thing that Nietzsche ever wrote, and so it may be accepted as a statement of some of his most salient ideas in their final form. Of all Nietzsche’s books, The Antichrist comes nearest to conventionality in form. It presents a connected argument with very few interludes, and has a beginning, a middle and an end.

Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche

A searing indictment of concepts like “truth” and “language” Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche is a deeply thought provoking book that forms one of the keystones of modern thought and politics.

In this book, Nietzsche takes the position that our subservience to fixed perspectives that are forced on us by our language and our ideals make us incapable of perceiving reality. He propounds the theory that ideals are not fixed but change over time, often dramatically, and end up becoming the exact opposite of what they originally were. For instance an abstraction like “good” could mean anything depending on who ...

Of The Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche says in Ecce Homo: “If anyone should desire to obtain a rapid sketch of how everything before my time was standing on its head, he should begin reading me in this book. That which is called ‘Idols’ on the title-page is simply the old truth that has been believed in hitherto. In plain English, The Twilight of the Idols means that the old truth is on its last legs.”

Certain it is that, for a rapid survey of the whole of Nietzsche’s doctrine, no book, save perhaps the section entitled “Of Old and New Tables” in Thus Spake Zarathustra, could be of more real value than The Twilight of the Idols. Here ...

Diese kleine Schrift ist eine grosse Kriegserklärung; und was das Aushorchen von Götzen anbetrifft, so sind es dies Mal keine Zeitgötzen, sondern ewige Götzen, an die hier mit dem Hammer wie mit einer Stimmgabel gerührt wird, – es giebt überhaupt keine älteren, keine überzeugteren, keine aufgeblaseneren Götzen… Auch keine hohleren… Das hindert nicht, dass sie die geglaubtesten sind; auch sagt man, zumal im vornehmsten Falle, durchaus nicht Götze…
(aus Friedrich Nietzsches Vorwort zur Götzendämmerung)

The Joyful Wisdom (later translated as The Gay Science), written in 1882, just before Zarathustra, is rightly judged to be one of Nietzsche’s best books. Here the essentially grave and masculine face of the poet-philosopher is seen to light up and suddenly break into a delightful smile. The warmth and kindness that beam from his features will astonish those hasty psychologists who have never divined that behind the destroyer is the creator, and behind the blasphemer the lover of life. In the retrospective valuation of his work which appears in Ecce Homo the author himself observes with truth that the fourth book, “Sanctus Januarius,” deserves especia...

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a nineteenth-century German philosopher. He wrote critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy and science, using a distinctive German language style and displaying a fondness for aphorism. Nietzsche’s influence remains substantial within and beyond philosophy, notably in existentialism and postmodernism.

Thus Spake Zarathustra is a work composed in four parts between 1883 and 1885. Much of the work deals with ideas such as the “eternal recurrence of the same”, the parable on the “death of God”, and the “prophecy” of the Overman, which were first introduced in The Gay Science. Described by Nietzsche ...

“Der tolle Mensch” ist der Aphorismus 125 aus dem dritten Buch der “Fröhlichen Wissenschaft” und befaßt sich mit dem Thema “Gott ist tot”. Der stilistisch dichte Aphorismus enthält Anspielungen an klassische Werke der Philosophie und Tragödie. Dieser Text lässt den Tod Gottes als bedrohliches Ereignis erscheinen. Dem Sprecher in diesem Text graut vor der Aussicht, dass die zivilisierte Welt ihr bisheriges geistiges Fundament weitgehend zerstört hat. Der unfassbare Vorgang des Todes Gottes würde gerade wegen der großen Dimension lange brauchen, um in seiner Tragweite erkannt zu werden. (Zusammenfassung von Wikipedia.de und Rainer)

A collection of three of Nietzsche's writings concerning the music of Wagner. In particular, he relates Wagner's music as degenerate, unrefined and unintelligent and relates it to a gradually degenerating German culture and society. The translator provides a detailed introduction.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s autobiography, Ecce Homo, was the last prose work that he wrote before his illness in 1889. Coming at the end of an extraordinarily productive year in which he had produced The Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist, Nietzsche shuns any pretense at modesty with chapter titles include “Why I am so Wise”, “Why I am so Clever” and “Why I Write Such Excellent Books”. His translator Anthony M. Ludovici states, Ecce Homo “is not only a coping-stone worthy of the wonderful creations of that year, but also a fitting conclusion to his whole life, in the form of a grand summing up of his character as a man, his purpose as a reformer, and his achievement as...