Friedrich Nietzsche: The Artist and the Thinker (Translated) - An Essay #1012794

This edition includes:
• New English translation
• Critical introduction

One of the earliest book-length studies of Nietzsche ever published asks the question his admirers preferred to avoid: is this a philosopher at all? Alois Riehl, a leading Neo-Kantian, refuses to answer with a simple yes or no. He redefines the word instead — and builds his portrait of Nietzsche out of Nietzsche's own colours.

Riehl follows the whole man: the precocious professor of philology, the musician and painter in words, the poet of Zarathustra, the moralist of the revaluation of values. He gives the writings and the personality together and puts the personality first, because for Nietzsche, as Riehl shows, every philosophy is its author's confession. From Schopenhauer and Wagner through the free-spirit years to the doctrine of the Superman, he traces the three periods of a development that was broken off before it could end, reading them out of letters, verse and self-portraits rather than imposing a system from outside. Then he argues with the doctrines — the will to power, the eternal recurrence, the breeding of a higher human type — on Nietzsche's own ground and with Nietzsche's own weapons, and leaves the question of what Nietzsche might still have become standing open.

This edition offers a literary translation made to be read today: natural and alive in the language of the reader, faithful to Riehl's substance, voice, tone and images.

The volume opens with a critical introduction that sets the essay and its argument before the reader; Riehl's text follows.

If you want to watch a philosopher take the measure of Nietzsche in his own lifetime, add this volume to your library.