This was my first book-length reading of Nietzsche. As one of the most thrown-around names in literature and philosophy, Nietzsche is the "college" highbrow read. But for everything that his name evokes, his actual work was startlingly fresh, fascinating and generative. The book begins many of his most well-known ideas, including his ever-important revaluation of morality, his notorious skepticism, and his concept of "life as art." We see the wheels begin to turn of an idiosyncratic, brilliant, and over-the-top mind.
I didn't think I'd be drawn into a philosophical work about Greek Tragedy and Socrates, but his prose is infectious, like only very few writers can achieve. (For me, it was Whitman, Woolf, Hunter S. Thompson, Bukowski and Delany.) This only becomes more pronounced in his later works, such as Beyond Good and Evil.
An interesting addition that Nietzsche included in later publications of this book was a sort of apology attached to the beginning. In it he undertakes a mission that is admirable (and too rare) for any writer: self-critique. Not only that, but brutal self-critique. Freud said (hyperbolic statement activate) that Nietzsche was the most self-knowledgeable person that had ever lived; I'm not sure about that, but reading Nietzsche's prologue to this book, I do get the impression that Nietzsche's mind could not rest when he knew that it could do better.
If you're looking to get in to Nietzsche, this might be a good place to start (it was his first published book). If you're off-put by the accruements of ancient Greek tragedy, you could skip right to Beyond Good and Evil (it dives right in to the major components of his philosophy), or Thus Spoke Zarathustra (it's a story! - sort of. Definitely my favorite.)
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