Nietzsche Friedrich Wilhelm - Ecce homo: how one becomes what one is

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ECCE HOMO

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (18441900) was born in Rcken, Saxony, and educated at the universities of Bonn and Leipzig. At the age of only 24 he was appointed Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basle, but prolonged bouts of ill health forced him to resign from his post in 1879. Over the next decade he shuttled between the Swiss Alps and the Mediterranean coast, devoting himself entirely to thinking and writing. His early books and pamphlets (The Birth of Tragedy, Untimely Meditations) were heavily influenced by Wagner and Schopenhauer, but from Human, All Too Human (1878) on, his thought began to develop more independently, and he published a series of ground-breaking philosophical works (The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals) which culminated in a frenzy of production in the closing months of 1888. In January 1889 Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown from which he was never to recover, and he died in Weimar eleven years later. Ecce Homo (1888) is a mischievously provocative autobiography, a blasphemous exercise in self-styling in which he reviews his life and work from a divine perspective of absolute affirmation.

DUNCAN LARGE, former Chairman of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society, is Reader in German at Swansea University. He has translated Nietzsches Twilight of the Idols for Oxford Worlds Classics (1998) and co-edited (with Keith Ansell Pearson) The Nietzsche Reader (Blackwell, 2005). He is the author of Nietzsche and Proust: A Comparative Study (Oxford University Press, 2001) and is currently completing a monograph on Nietzsches Renaissance Figures.

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FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

How To Become What You Are

Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
DUNCAN LARGE

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP

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First published as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 2007

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British Library Cataloging in Publication Data

Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 18441900.
[Ecce homo. English]
Ecce homo : how to become what you are / Friedrich Nietzsche ; translated
with an introduction and notes by Duncan Large.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 9780192832283 (alk. paper)
1. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 18441900. 2. PhilosophersGermany
Biography. I. Large, Duncan. II. Title.
B3316.N54A3413 2007
193dc22
2006039681

Typeset by Cepha Imaging Private Ltd., Bangalore, India
Printed in Great Britain
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ISBN 9780192832283

13579 10 8642

TO THE MEMORY OF
SARAH KOFMAN
19341994

Cross-references within Ecce Homo are by chapter and paragraph number, with the chapters referred to in abbreviated form as follows:

F: Foreword

I: Why I Am So Wise

II: Why I Am So Clever

III: Why I Write Such Good Books

IV: Why I Am a Destiny

References to Nietzsches other works are also by paragraph number, except for the correspondence and the unpublished notes not collected in The Will to Power, where volume and page references to the German editions are given. The following are the abbreviations used and the editions from which illustrative quotations have been taken: