The Importance of Nietzsche: Ten Essays
University of Chicago Press (1988)
| Abstract | In this book, one of the most distinguished scholars of German culture collects his essays on a figure who has long been one of his chief preoccupations. Erich Heller's lifelong study of modern European literature necessarily returns again and again to Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche prided himself on having broken with all traditional ways of thinking and feeling, and once even claimed that he would someday be recognized for having ushered in a new millennium. While acknowledging Nietzsche's radicalism, Heller also insists on the continuity of the story in which he does indeed occupy a central place. By considering Nietzsche in relation to Goethe, Rilke, Wittgenstein, Yeats, and others, Heller shows the philosopher's ambivalence toward the tradition he inherited as well as his profound effect on the thought and sensibility of those who followed him. It is hardly an exaggeration to say, as Heller does in his first essay, that Nietzsche is to many modern writers and thinkers--including Mann, Musil, Kafka, Freud, Heidegger, Jaspers, Gide, and Sartre--what St. Thomas Aquinas was to Dante: the categorical interpreter of a world, which they contemplate imaginatively and theoretically without ever much upsetting its Nietzschean structure. Thus it is Nietzsche's thought, so pervasively present in the themes of modernity, that gives coherence and unity to Heller's essays. What emerges from them is that, despite his iconoclastic declarations and unorthodox philosophical practices, Nietzsche deals with the human spirit's persistent concerns. His questions remain urgent, and even the answers, in all their contradictoriness, possess the commanding force of his inquiry. An example is the incompatibility of the famous extremes, the teaching of the U;bermensch and the Eternal Recurrence of All Things. These cancel each other out and yet grow from the same intellectual and spiritual roots, as is shown lucidly and cogently by one of Heller's most forceful essays, "Nietzsche's Terrors: Time and the Inarticulate." In fathoming the depth of this contradiction, Heller at the same time reveals the importance of Nietzsche for those who seek to understand the wellsprings of the epoch's disquiet, turmoil, and creativity. | |||||||||
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| Buy the book | $62.77 new (7% off) $67.00 direct from Amazon Amazon page | |||||||||
| Call number | B3317.H43 1988 | |||||||||
| ISBN(s) | 0226326373 9780226326375 | |||||||||
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Similar books and articlesAnthony W. Riley (1969). Dialectics and Nihilism. Essays on Lessing, Nietzsche, Mann, and Kafka. By Peter Heller. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press; Toronto: Copp Clark. 1966. Pp. Viii, 344. $7.70. [REVIEW] Dialogue 8 (01):142-145.
Malcolm Pasley (ed.) (1978). Nietzsche: Imagery and Thought: A Collection of Essays. University of California Press.
Richard Schacht (ed.) (2001). Nietzsche's Postmoralism: Essays on Nietzsche's Prelude to Philosophy's Future. Cambridge University Press.
Agnes Heller (1999). A Theory of Modernity. Blackwell Publishers.
Wolter Hartog (forthcoming). Nietzsche on Time and History. Journal of Nietzsche Studies 39 (1):89-92.
Joe Ward (forthcoming). Nietzsche's Value Conflict: Culture, Individual, Synthesis. Journal of Nietzsche Studies.
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