Nietzsches Last Laugh

This book demonstrates that Nietzsche's autobiographical and much-maligned Ecce Homo is a sophisticated satire by which the thinker unifies his disparate corpus.

Nietzsche's Ecce Homo was published posthumously in 1908, eight years after his death, and has been variously described ever since as useless, mad, or merely inscrutable. Against this backdrop, Nicholas D. More provides the first complete and compelling analysis of the work, and argues that this so-called autobiography is instead a satire. This form enables Nietzsche to belittle bad philosophy by comic means, attempt reconciliation with his painful past, review and unify his disparate works, insulate himself with humor from the danger of 'looking into abysses', and establish wisdom as a special kind of 'good taste'. After showing how to read this much-maligned book, More argues that Ecce Homo presents the best example of Nietzsche making sense of his own intellectual life, and that its unique and complex parody of traditional philosophy makes a powerful case for reading Nietzsche as a philosophical satirist across his corpus.

Demonstrates that Nietzsche's autobiographical and much-maligned Ecce Homo is a sophisticated satire by which the thinker unifies his disparate corpus.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s intellectual autobiography Ecce Homo has always been a controversial book. Nietzsche prepared it for publication just before he became incurably insane in early 1889, but it was held back until after his death, and finally appeared only in 1908. For much of the first century of its reception, Ecce Homo met with a sceptical response and was viewed as merely a testament to its author’s incipient madness. This was hardly surprising, since he is deliberately outrageous with the ‘megalomaniacal’ self-advertisement of his chapter titles, and brazenly claims ‘I am not a man, I am dynamite’ as he attempts to explode one preconception after another in the Western philosophical tradition. In recent decades there has been increased interest in the work, especially in the English-speaking world, but the present volume is the first collection of essays in any language devoted to the work. Most of the essays are selected from the proceedings of an international conference held in London to mark the centenary of the first publication of Ecce Homo in 2008. They are supplemented by a number of specially commissioned essays. Contributors include established and emerging Nietzsche scholars from the UK and USA, Germany and France, Portugal, Sweden and the Netherlands.

Examines Nietzsche's thinking on the virtues using a combination of close reading and digital analysis.

The 'Illuminating Modernity' series examines the great but lesser known thinkers in the 'Romantic Thomist' tradition such as Erich Przywara and Fernand Ulrich and shows how outstanding 20th century theologians like Ratzinger and von Balthasar have depended on classical Thomist thought, and how they radically reinterpreted this thought. The chapters in this volume are dedicated to the encounter between the presuppositions and claims of modern intellectual culture and the Christian confession that the crucified and resurrected Jesus is the power and wisdom of God and is the lord of history and of his church. The scholars contributing to this discussion do not assume that Christianity and modernity are two discrete entities which can be readily defined, nor do they presume that Christian wisdom and modernity meet each other only in conflict or by coincidence. They engage with a variety of great figures – Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Rahner, Przywara, Guardini, Karl Barth, and Karol Wojtyla – to illustrate the connection between modernism and Christian wisdom. The volume concludes with a programmatic statement for the renewal of Christian philosophy that has been able to retain the cosmo-theological vision as outlined by Mezei in the final chapter.

Analyzing the importance of joy, laughter, and cheerfulness in Nietzsche's thought, this volume addresses an under-examined topic in the secondary literature. By exploring disparate aspects of these interrelated emotions it provides new insights into his key ideas. The contributors-among them philosophers and political scientists-illustrate the significance of these feelings to reveal political ramifications of their affirmative potential and their broader role in Nietzsche's philosophical aims. These include how the joyful disposition Nietzsche commends informs his free spirit's self-overcoming, attempts to revalue all values, and prospects of ultimately transfiguring humanity. Among other topics, scholars assess the Übermensch and shared joy, learning to laugh at oneself, Schopenhauer's jokes, Pascal's cheerfulness, and the Dada movement's subversively playful aesthetic. By contemplating Nietzsche's emphasis on joy and laughter, the volume reveals a thinker who, far from being a caricature of hopeless nihilism, is in fact the hitherto unrecognised champion of an alternative liberatory politics.

When careful consideration is given to Nietzsche's critique of Platonism and to what he wrote about Bismarck, Kaiser Wilhelm, and to Germany's place in "international relations" (die Gro e Politik), the philosopher's carefully cultivated "pose of untimeliness" is revealed to be an imposture. As William H. F. Altman demonstrates, Nietzsche should be recognized as the paradigmatic philosopher of the Second Reich, the short-lived and equally complex German Empire that vanished in World War One. Since Nietzsche is a brilliant stylist whose seemingly disconnected aphorisms have made him notoriously difficult for scholars to analyze, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche is presented in Nietzsche's own style in a series of 155 brief sections arranged in five discrete "Books," a structure modeled on Daybreak. All of Nietzsche's books are considered in the context of the close and revealing relationship between "Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche" (named by his patriotic father after the King of Prussia) and the Second Reich. In "Preface to 'A German Trilogy, '" Altman joins this book to two others already published by Lexington Books: Martin Heidegger and the First World War: Being and Time as Funeral Oration and The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National Socialism.

Shows how Nietzsche's pivotal work The Gay Science formulates his three key concepts: the death of God, eternal recurrence and self-fashioning.

Challenging the standard interpretation of Nietzsche's last published work, Ecce Homo, as frivolous autobiography, Thomas H. Brobjer provides an original and detailed analysis of Ecce Homo as fundamental to Nietzsche's unfinished masterwork on the revaluation of all values. Arguing that Ecce Homo laid the foundations for his planned four-volume work on values, Brobjer draws together the intentions and motivations behind Nietzsche's late work to create a new narrative on it. He situates this period in the desire to undermine the system of Christian values that Nietzsche believed were unchecked as the standard moral gauge for his time. To engage in this project, Brobjer shows that it was essential for Nietzsche to explore the self and life-denying qualities of a Christian system of values within a broader framework of ideas about morality, altruism, egotism, pessimism, humility and pride. By fully outlining the context of Ecce Homo, Brobjer provides a complete corrective to its reception as a self-referential and eccentric text of little philosophical significance, enabling a new understanding within the history of philosophy and Nietzsche's oeuvre.