Obras completas: Volumen I. Escritos de juventud

by Friedrich Nietzsche

En este primer volumen de las Obras completas de Nietzsche, se recogen los apuntes, proyectos inacabados y obras publicadas redactadas entre 1858 y 1876. En parte, se trata de materiales inéditos o poco conocidos en castellano, en especial los pertenecientes al período anterior a 1872, y entre los que destacan los importantes estudios sobre Demócrito, Schopenhauer y Kant. Junto a esbozos autobiográficos y diarios de los años de formación en Pforta y en las universidades de Bonn y Leipzig, se encuentran gran cantidad de penetrantes observaciones sobre filología, música, historia, poesía y religión, con un estilo de pensamiento que modifica sustancialmente la imagen convencionalmente difundida del joven Nietzsche. En la obra estelar de este período, El nacimiento de la tragedia, y en los escritos que la preparan, brilla una nueva y original intuición de la cultura griega y de su sabiduría trágica, cuya profundidad y misterio Nietzsche trata genialmente de conquistar con sus potentes categorías de lo dionisíaco y lo apolíneo. Escrita en una prosa inaudita, construida sobre el paradigma de la deslumbrante orquestación musical wagneriana, era inevitable que provocase escándalo y polémica en el mundo académico. En fin, en los proyectos inacabados y en las Consideraciones intempestivas, Nietzsche lanza un desafío a la cultura moderna, envilecida por su servidumbre al dinero y al Estado, esforzándose por reconstruir la fisonomía de figuras e ideas incompatibles con el prosaico gusto pequeño-burgués. Porque la grandeza y la serenidad no pueden prescindir, en su opinión, de la familiaridad con el fondo trágico de la existencia.

984 pages, Paperback

Published September 22, 2016

About the author

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German classical scholar, philosopher, and critic of culture, who became one of the most influential of all modern thinkers. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest person to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at the age of 24, but resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties, with paralysis and probably vascular dementia. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897 and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Nietzsche died in 1900, after experiencing pneumonia and multiple strokes.
Nietzsche's work spans philosophical polemics, poetry, cultural criticism, and fiction while displaying a fondness for aphorism and irony. Prominent elements of his philosophy include his radical critique of truth in favour of perspectivism; a genealogical critique of religion and Christian morality and a related theory of master–slave morality; the aesthetic affirmation of life in response to both the "death of God" and the profound crisis of nihilism; the notion of Apollonian and Dionysian forces; and a characterisation of the human subject as the expression of competing wills, collectively understood as the will to power. He also developed influential concepts such as the Übermensch and his doctrine of eternal return. In his later work, he became increasingly preoccupied with the creative powers of the individual to overcome cultural and moral mores in pursuit of new values and aesthetic health. His body of work touched a wide range of topics, including art, philology, history, music, religion, tragedy, culture, and science, and drew inspiration from Greek tragedy as well as figures such as Zoroaster, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Wagner, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
After his death, Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth became the curator and editor of his manuscripts. She edited his unpublished writings to fit her German ultranationalist ideology, often contradicting or obfuscating Nietzsche's stated opinions, which were explicitly opposed to antisemitism and nationalism. Through her published editions, Nietzsche's work became associated with fascism and Nazism. 20th-century scholars such as Walter Kaufmann, R.J. Hollingdale, and Georges Bataille defended Nietzsche against this interpretation, and corrected editions of his writings were soon made available. Nietzsche's thought enjoyed renewed popularity in the 1960s and his ideas have since had a profound impact on 20th- and early 21st-century thinkers across philosophy—especially in schools of continental philosophy such as existentialism, postmodernism, and post-structuralism—as well as art, literature, music, poetry, politics, and popular culture.

Reviews

[La Pasión Inútil · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un volumen clave para acercarse, en primer lugar, a los textos con los que el propio Nietzsche expuso los años iniciales de su vida y, en segundo término, a los textos en los que el autor se fue abriendo de la disciplina filológica a la filosofía. Por demás, la sola recopilación aquí de las “Consideraciones intempestivas” y el estudio de la polémica desatada tras la publicación de “El nacimiento de la tragedia” justifican la lectura de las casi 1000 páginas que conforman el texto.