Book Review: Friedrich Nietzsche Why I am so Wise translated by R.J. Hollingdale

 

Nietzsche lived from 1844 to 1900. This book has been compiled by including excerpts from Ecce Homo and Twilight of the Idols. The author says that the overthrowing idols is his business. According to him, philosophy is a voluntary living in ice and high mountains- a seeking after everything strange and questionable in existence, all that has hitherto been excommunicated by morality.

Nietzsche says: ‘It also seems to me that the rudest word, the rudest letter is more good-natured, more honest than silence.’ He believes that he has a right to wage a war on Christianity because he has never experienced anything disagreeable from them. Furthermore, he states that he does not speak to the masses because he fears that he would be pronounced holy. He does not want to be a saint. He thinks there is nothing more mendacious than saints.

Moreover, in the book the author considers himself as an immoralist. This immoralist involves two denials. First, denial of the man who has been counted as the highest and second, denial of Christian morality. In Maxims and Arrows, the author clearly states his mistrust of all systematizers and says that ‘the will to a system is a lack of integrity.’

Nietzsche states that he knows his fate. He writes: ‘One day there will be associated with my name the recollection of something frightful- of crisis like no other before on earth, of the profoundest collision of conscience, of a decision evoked against everything that until the had been believed in, demanded, sanctified. I am not a man, I am dynamite.’