Ecce Homo - Friedrich Nietzsche

Ecce Homo is Nietzsche's philosophical biography. It was his last full scale work before he surrendered to the syphillis induced madness which lead to his institutionalisation for the last decade of his life. As with all Nietzsche, this work is fairly ambiguous but there are many rewards the careful reader. Nietzsche is a notoriously unreliable commentator on his own work. In Ecce Homo Nietzsche is dismissive of metaphysics and of Schopenhauer and Wagner in particular. This tends to distort the influence that these figures had on his early work and how much his later work was an attempt to ... more

I use the translation by R.J. Hollingdale, Penguin Classics. A wonderfully written book, written shortly before Nietzsche went completely mad, it has a beautiful style as well as being an illuminating reflection on his philosophy. With chapters entitled 'Why I Am So Wise,' 'Why I Am So Clever,' and 'Why I Write Such Excellent Books,' no-one could accuse Nietzsche of modesty. The style is almost breathtaking in places, a million miles from the tedium, of, say, Locke. Because of its style and its nature of a review, it is suitable for general readers as well as philosophers, although the Penguin ... more