ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche’s account of death by considering the basic contours of his tragic outlook. It considers Nietzsche’s very strident critiques of modern morality, as well as of Western epistemology. The chapter provides a mature Nietzsche’s views on death and human mortality. Nietzsche’s first published work, The Birth of Tragedy, is a whirlwind tour of the early Greek perspective on tragedy, in twenty-three parts. The Birth of Tragedy offers a good glimpse of Nietzsche’s unusual and ambitious philosophic style, full as it is of poetry and invention, of novel historical theorizing layered through with political myth-making. Nietzsche returns to the theme of tragic pessimism and the meaning of mortality in what would become his most well-known work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The Genealogy of Morality is his most sustained consideration of modern moralism, in which he offers an account of how the relatively healthy pre-Platonic value-system was transformed to resemble the modern Christian one.
