ABSTRACT

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) remains for most modern philosophers what he was for his contemporaries: a scandal wrapped in layers of enigma. One reaction in recent times has been to brand him as a dire precursor of the Nazi phenomenon, a thinker whose supposedly ‘irrationalist’ outlook and megalomaniac pretensions paved the way for Hitler and his ideologues. These charges cannot be altogether rejected. They rest on a partial reading of Nietzsche which was actively encouraged by certain of his followers and no doubt exercised some baleful influence, if not on the scale imagined by his latter-day detractors. Suffice it to say that Nietzsche’s doctrinaire mythology, his ideas of the ‘superman’ and ‘eternal recurrence’, have suffered considerable guilt by association.