ABSTRACT
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) is one of those thinkers whose personalities cannot easily be separated from their achievements in philosophy. This is not because his life was an unusually eventful one in outer respects. Rather, it is due to the intensely personal engagement in thinking that is evident throughout his writings. Franz Rosenzweig’s description of Nietzsche as ‘the first real human being among the philosophers’ is a striking testimony to this characteristic; though Rosenzweig was less justified in dismissing the content of Nietzsche’s thinking as irrelevant to his real importance.
