Author
Friedrich Nietzsche
Genre
Philosophy
Last Read
December 26, 2024
Cover
Stars
★★★☆☆
Was a quick read. This is Nietszche’s first published work. Nietzsche revisits this book in 1886 and criticizes it. His criticism revolves around an; (i) overreliance on Schopenhauer and Wagner, (ii) a romantic and metaphysical tone (as opposed to grounded in reality), (iii) an unbalanced view of the Greeks, (iv) excessive idealism.
“For if we imagine that the whole incalculable store of energy used in that global tendency had been used not in the service of knowledge but in ways applied to the practical – selfish – goals of individuals and nations, universal wars of destruction and constant migrations of peoples would have enfeebled man’s instinctive zest for life to the point where, suicide having become universal, the individual would perhaps feel a vestigial duty as a son to strangle his parents, or as a friend his friend, as the Fiji islanders do: a practical pessimism that could even produce a terrible ethic of genocide through pity, and which is, and always has been, present everywhere in the world where art has not in some form, particularly as religion and science, appeared as a remedy and means of prevention for this breath of pestilence.”
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