Nietzsche: Life as Literature

~v

k{

~~~

{WI.

l)yv~,

t. ~t

~t.,{Lf)',~M,

~vt.l ;~C,t1'114 1 )t(y

LIFE AS LITERATURE

Alexander Nehamas

flietzsche: Life as Literature

Nietzsche LIFE AS LITERATURE

Alexander Nehamas

Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

Copyright © 1985 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Eleventh printing, 1999

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Nehamas, Alexander, 1946Nietzsche, life as literature. Includes index. 1. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900. I. Title. B3317.N425 1985 193 85-5589 ISBN 0-674-62435-1 (cloth) ISBN 0-674-62426-2 (paper)

For Christine and Albert Nehama

PREFACE

Reading Nietzsche was a matter of course for intellectu:ally inclined high school students when I was growing up in Greece. I a.11 convinced today that almost none of us understood much of what we read, and I suspect that almost none of us enjoyed it very mllch either. At least in that respect, therefore, it was a relief to arrive in America as a college student in the mid-sixties, for I soon realized not only that no one expected me to bring Nietzsche's name up at judicious points in my conversation but also that I could not have even if I had wanted to, since I could find no connections between his concerns and the topics that were a matter of course in my new situation. It was, then, with serious misgivings that, as a graduate student at Princeton University, I found that I had been assigned, quite by chance, to assist the late Walter Kaufmann in a course he offered on Nietzsche and existentialism. But my misgivings soon gave way to a new interest, mixed at the same time with a deep sense of bewilderment. On the one hand, I found that there were parts of Nietzsche which I liked, admired, and wanted to think about. On the other, thtre were parts which seemed to me at best incomprehensible and at worst embarrassing and better forgotten, or at least tactfully overlo