Companion to Nietzsche Introduction英文电子书.pdf

BERND MAGNUS AND KATHLEEN M . HIGGIN S Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche The importance to the humanities and to our culture of the nineteenth-century German philosopher and writer Friedrich Nietz- sche may require little motivation or discussion. He was quite simply one of the most influential modern European thinkers. His attempts to unmask the root motives which underlie traditional Western philosophy, morality, and religion have deeply affected sub- sequent generations of philosophers, theologians, psychologists, po- ets, novelists and playwrights. Indeed, one contemporary English- speaking philosopher, Richard Rorty, has characterized the entire present age as post-Nietzschean. That is because Nietzsche was able to think through the consequences of the triumph of the En- lightenments secularism - captured in his observation that God is dead - in a way that determined the agenda for many of Eu- ropes most celebrated intellectuals after his death in 1900. An ardent foe of nationalism, anti-Semitism, and power politics, his name was later invoked by Fascists and Nazis to advance the very things he loathed. It might also be useful to recall that, according to Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche is the consummation of the Western philo- sophical tradition, the thinker who brings metaphysics to its end; that Michel Foucault frequently regarded Nietzsche as the progenitor of his own genealogical method and its stress on discursive practices,- that Jacques Derrida considers Nietzsche the deconstructive thinker par excellence. All this serves as eloquent testimony to Nietzsches claim, voiced in The Antichrist and elsewhere, that some persons are born posthumously,- for that