Nietzsche Friedrich Wilhelm - Friedrich Nietzsche (Routledge Critical Thinkers)

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

It is difficult to imagine a world without common sense, the distinction between truth and falsehood, the belief in some form of morality or an agreement that we are all human. But Friedrich Nietzsche did imagine such a world, and his work has become a crucial point of departure for contemporary critical theory and debate. This volume offers a lucid and accessible account of Nietzsche's philosophy, encompassing such ideas as anti-humanism, good and evil, nihilism and the will to power, and introduces the reader to the radical questions posed by Nietzsche that challenged the received history of thought. The author not only prepares readers for their first encounter with Nietzsche's most influential texts, but enables them to begin to apply his philosophy in studies of literature, art and contemporary culture.

Lee Spinks is a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He has published articles on literary theory, modern and postmodern culture and contemporary American literature.

essential guides for literary studies

Series Editor: Robert Eaglestone, Royal Holloway, University of London

Routledge Critical Thinkers is a series of accessible introductions to key figures in contemporary critical thought.

With a unique focus on historical and intellectual contexts, each volume examines a key theorist's:

significance

motivation

key ideas and their sources

impact on other thinkers

Concluding with extensively annotated guides to further reading, Routledge Critical Thinkers are the literature student's passport to today's most exciting critical thought.

Already available:

Jean Baudrillard by Richard J. Lane

Maurice Blanchot by Ullrich Haase and William Large

Judith Butler by Sara Salih

Gilles Deleuze by Claire Colebrook

Sigmund Freud by Pamela Thurschwell

Martin Heidegger by Timothy Clark

Fredric Jameson by Adam Roberts

Jean-Franois Lyotard by Simon Malpas

Paul de Man by Martin McQuillan

Paul Ricoeur by Karl Simms

Edward Said by Bill Ashcroft and Pal Ahluwalia

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak by Stephen Morton

For further details on this series, see www.literature.routledge.com/rct

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

Lee Spinks

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2003
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.

2003 Lee Spinks

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Spinks, Lee, 1963
Friedrich Nietzsche / Lee Spinks.
p. cm. (Routledge critical thinkers)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 18441900. I. Title. II. Series.
B3317.S64 2003
193dc21 2002151163

ISBN 0-203-45175-9 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-45537-1 (MP PDA Format)

ISBN 0-415-26360-3 (pbk)

ISBN 0-415-26359-X (hbk)

Copyright 2002/2003 . All rights reserved.

Reader's Guide

This ebook has been optimized for PDA.

Tables may have been presented to accommodate this Device's Limitations.

Table content may have been removed due to this Device's Limitations.

Image presentation is limited by this Device's Screen resolution.

All possible language characters have been included within the Font handling ability of this Device.

The books in this series offer introductions to major critical thinkers who have influenced literary studies and the humanities. The Routledge Critical Thinkers series provides the books you can turn to first when a new name or concept appears in your studies.

Each book will equip you to approach a key thinker's original texts by explaining her or his key ideas, putting them into context and, perhaps most importantly, showing you why this thinker is considered to be significant. The emphasis is on concise, clearly written guides which do not presuppose a specialist knowledge. Although the focus is on particular figures, the series stresses that no critical thinker ever existed in a vacuum but, instead, emerged from a broader intellectual, cultural and social history. Finally, these books will act as a bridge between you and the thinker's original texts: not replacing them but rather complementing what she or he wrote.

These books are necessary for a number of reasons. In his 1997 autobiography, Not Entitled, the literary critic Frank Kermode wrote of a time in the 1960s:

On beautiful summer lawns, young people lay together all night, recovering from their daytime exertions and listening to a troupe of Balinese musicians. Under their blankets or their sleeping bags, they would chat drowsily about the gurus of the time What they repeated was largely hearsay; hence my lunchtime suggestion, quite impromptu, for a series of short, very cheap books offering authoritative but intelligible introductions to such figures.

There is still a need for 'authoritative and intelligible introductions'. But this series reflects a different world from the 1960s. New thinkers have emerged and the reputations of others have risen and fallen, as new research has developed. New methodologies and challenging ideas have spread through arts and humanities. The study of literature is no longer if it ever was simply the study and evaluation of poems, novels and plays. It is also the study of ideas, issues, and difficulties which arise in any literary text and in its interpretation. Other arts and humanities subjects have changed in analogous ways.

With these changes, new problems have emerged. The ideas and issues behind these radical changes in the humanities are often presented without reference to wider contexts or as theories which you can simply 'add on' to the texts you read. Certainly, there's nothing wrong with picking out selected ideas or using what comes to hand indeed, some thinkers have argued that this is, in fact, all we can do. However, it is sometimes forgotten that each new idea comes from the pattern and development of somebody's thought and it is important to study the range and context of their ideas. Against theories 'floating in space', the Routledge Critical Thinkers series places key thinkers and their ideas firmly back in their contexts.

More than this, these books reflect the need to go back to the thinker's own texts and ideas. Every interpretation of an idea, even the most seemingly innocent one, offers its own 'spin', implicitly or explicitly. To read only books on a thinker, rather than texts by that thinker, is to deny yourself a chance of making up your own mind. Sometimes what makes a significant figure's work hard to approach is not so much its style or content as the feeling of not knowing where to start. The purpose of these books is to give you a 'way in' by offering an accessible overview of these thinkers' ideas and works and by guiding your further reading, starting with each thinker's own texts. To use a metaphor from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (18891951), these books are ladders, to be thrown away after you have climbed to the next level. Not only, then, do they equip you to approach new ideas, but also they empower you, by leading you back to the theorist's own texts and encouraging you to develop your own informed opinions.