1）Nietzsche was profoundly influenced by two events shortly before he took up his chair. One was reading of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea; the other was meeting Richard Wagner, whose Tristan und Isolde had fascinated him since he had heard it at the age of sixteen. His first published work, The Birth of Tragedy of 1872, showed the influence of both men. In it he drew a contrast between two aspects of the Greek psyche: the wild irrational passions personified in Dionysus, which found expression in music and tragedy, and the disciplined and harmonious beauty represented by Apollo, which found expression in epic and the plastic arts. The triumph of Greek culture was to achieve a synthesis between the two—a synthesis that was disrupted by the rationalistic incursion of Socrates.The decadence which then overtookGreecehad infected contemporaryGermany, which could achieve salvation only through following the lead of Wagner, to whom the book was dedicated.2）These ideas were given an exposition that was less prophetical and morediscursive in the philosophically most important of Nietzsche’s works, Beyond Good and Evil of 1886 and The Genealogy of Morals in 1887. These texts set out a contrast between an aristocratic master-morality which places a high value on nobility, bravery, and truthfulness, and a slave-morality or herd-morality which values submissive traits such as humility, sympathy, and benevolence. Nietzsche saw these works as prolegomena to a systematic exposition of his philosophy, on which he worked energetically but was never able to complete. Several versions extracted from his notes were posthumously published, but only the first part of the work appeared in his lifetime, under the title The Antichrist (published in 1895).3）The year 1888 was one of feverish production. In addition to The Antichrist Nietzsche published a ferocious attack on Wagner (The Case of Wagner) and wrote The Twilight of the Idols (published in 1889). He also wrote a semi-autobiographical work, Ecce Homo, in which can be detected signs of the mental instability (probably of syphilitic origin) that led to him being institutionalized in Jena in 1889. He ended his days insane, being nursed first by his mother and later at Weimar by his sister Elizabeth, who built up an archive of his papers. Nietzsche died in 1900; his sister took control of his Nachlass and exercised a degree of protective control over its publication.4) During the twentieth century Nietzsche had a great influence in continental Europe, especially upon Russian literature and German philosophy. His opposition to submissive morality and to democratic socialism made him popular among Nazis, who saw themselves as developing a race of superior humans. Partly for this reason, he was long neglected by English-speaking philosophers; but in the latter part of the century, ethicists in the analytic tradition came to realize that his onslaught on traditional morality needed to be answered rather than ignored
1）Nietzsche was profoundly influenced by two events shortly before he took up his chair. One was reading of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea; the other was meeting Richard Wagner, whose Tristan und Isolde had fascinated him since he had heard it at the age of sixteen. His first published work, The Birth of Tragedy of 1872, showed the influence of both men. In it he drew a contrast between two aspects of the Greek psyche: the wild irrational passions personified in Dionysus, which found expression in music and tragedy, and the disciplined and harmonious beauty represented by Apollo, which found expression in epic and the plastic arts. The triumph of Greek culture was to achieve a synthesis between the two—a synthesis that was disrupted by the rationalistic incursion of Socrates.The decadence which then overtookGreecehad infected contemporaryGermany, which could achieve salvation only through following the lead of Wagner, to whom the book was dedicated.2）These ideas were given an exposition that was less prophetical and morediscursive in the philosophically most important of Nietzsche’s works, Beyond Good and Evil of 1886 and The Genealogy of Morals in 1887. These texts set out a contrast between an aristocratic master-morality which places a high value on nobility, bravery, and truthfulness, and a slave-morality or herd-morality which values submissive traits such as humility, sympathy, and benevolence. Nietzsche saw these works as prolegomena to a systematic exposition of his philosophy, on which he worked energetically but was never able to complete. Several versions extracted from his notes were posthumously published, but only the first part of the work appeared in his lifetime, under the title The Antichrist (published in 1895).3）The year 1888 was one of feverish production. In addition to The Antichrist Nietzsche published a ferocious attack on Wagner (The Case of Wagner) and wrote The Twilight of the Idols (published in 1889). He also wrote a semi-autobiographical work, Ecce Homo, in which can be detected signs of the mental instability (probably of syphilitic origin) that led to him being institutionalized in Jena in 1889. He ended his days insane, being nursed first by his mother and later at Weimar by his sister Elizabeth, who built up an archive of his papers. Nietzsche died in 1900; his sister took control of his Nachlass and exercised a degree of protective control over its publication.4) During the twentieth century Nietzsche had a great influence in continental Europe, especially upon Russian literature and German philosophy. His opposition to submissive morality and to democratic socialism made him popular among Nazis, who saw themselves as developing a race of superior humans. Partly for this reason, he was long neglected by English-speaking philosophers; but in the latter part of the century, ethicists in the analytic tradition came to realize that his onslaught on traditional morality needed to be answered rather than ignored
