ABSTRACT
How are we to read Nietzsche? How are we to understand the characteristic style of his philosophizing and the mode of language in which it is cast? Two important circumstances of his biography offer a possible start. The first is the fact that his creative life is confined to the astonishingly short period of about sixteen years, from 1872 (when, at the age of twenty-eight, he published The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music) to January 1889, when he wrote the last pathetic letters and postcards to his friends, and was taken from his Turin lodgings by the ever-faithful Franz Overbeck, to spend the remaining twelve years of his life, mindless, confined, in the hideous care of his sister. He tended to see his writings, now as a single venture in the apparently absolute freedom of uncommitted philosophical speculation, now again as purposeful critical thinking about the state of Western mankind in an age of decadence, as reflection consistently committed to a number of concrete moral and existential concerns (though these are not the terms he himself would have used). And this is the two-fold way we must approach his work. We can see that his philosophizing begins by taking issue with, and remains grounded in, the contemporary cultural situation of the Second German Reich founded in 1871, and that his care for the contemporary world and his critique of it are not so very different from the concern and critique of writers like Karl Marx, Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold1 (and again these are comparisons he would have scorned); but we can also see that he tried to rid himself of the burden of criticism and strove for a greater freedom.
