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Nietzsche And His Century (external) – NIHILUS

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Looking back at the nineteenth century and letting its great men pass before the mind’s eye, we can observe an amazing thing about the figure of Friedrich Nietzsche, something that was hardly noticeable in his own time. All the other outstanding personages, including Wagner, Strindberg, and Tolstoy, reflect to a certain degree the color and shape of those years. Each of them was somehow bound up with the shallow optimism of the progress-mongers, with their social ethics and utilitarianism, their philosophy of matter and energy, pragmatism and “adaptation”; each of them made sacrifice after sacrifice to the spirit of the time. Only one person represents a radical departure from this pattern. If the word “untimely,” which he himself coined, is applicable to anyone at all, then it is Nietzsche. One searches in vain throughout his whole life and all of his thought for any indication that he might have yielded inwardly to any vogue or fad. In this respect he is the antithesis of, and yet in

An address delivered on October 15, 1924, Nietzsche’s eightieth birthday, at the Nietzsche Archive, Weimar | First published in Spengler, Reden und Aufsätze (Munich, 1937). note : this article is only being hosted at this website Looking back at the nineteenth century and letting its great men pass before the mind’s eye, we can observe an amazing thing about the figure of Friedrich Nietzsche , something that was hardly noticeable in his own time. All the other outstanding personages, including Wagner, Strindberg, and Tolstoy, reflect to a certain degree the color and shape of those years. Each

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