Human, All Too Human & Beyond Good and Evil

Human, All Too Human (1878) marks the point where Nietzsche abandons German romanticism for the French Enlightenment. At a moment of crisis in his life (no longer a friend of Richard Wagner, forced to leave academic life through ill health), he sets out his views in a scintillating and bewildering series of aphorisms which contain the seeds of his later philosophy (e.g. the will to power, the need to transcend conventional Christian morality). The result is one of the cornerstones of his life’s work. It well deserves its subtitle ‘A Book for Free Spirits’, and its original dedication to Voltaire, whose project of radical enlightenment here finds a new champion. Beyond Good and Evil (1886) is a scathing and powerful critique of philosophy, religion and science. Here Nietzsche presents us with problems and challenges that are as troubling as they are inspiring, while at the same time outlining the virtues, ideas, and practices which will characterise the philosophy of the future. Relentless, energetic, tirelessly probing, he both determines that philosophy’s agenda and is himself the embodiment of the type of thought he wants to foster. With an Introduction by Ray Furness. AUTHOR: When the German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844 - 1900) lapsed into insanity in 1889, he had little conception of the fame and controversy his works would come to attract. Initially influential on writers such as George Bernard Shaw and Thomas Mann, his ideas would be misappropriated by the Nazis in the 1930s to support their policies on anti-Semitism, nationalism and warfare. It would be some years, and with the benefit of better translations, before his works would become more properly evaluated.