2 - The Formative Influence of Weimar Classicism in the Genesis of Zarathustra

Summary

Und wer weiß, ob nicht auch der ganze Mensch wieder nur ein Wurf nach einem höhern Ziele ist?

[And who knows whether even the whole individual is not just another gamble for a yet higher goal?]

— Goethe, conversation with J. D. Falk, 14 June 1809; WA Gespräche 2:263

Himmel! Was bin ich einsam!

IN APRIL 1869 NIETZSCHE, just twenty-four years old, began his appointment as extraordinary professor of classical philology at Basel University. On 28 May he gave his inaugural lecture, a discussion of the identity of Homer, which made a favorable impression on his audience, or at least so he told his university friend, Erwin Rohde (1845–98), and his mother, Franziska Nietzsche (1826–97), in his letters to them of 29 May and mid-June: “Gestern hielt ich vor ganz gefüllter Aula meine Antrittsrede, und zwar ‘über die Persönlichkeit Homers,’ mit einer Menge von philosophischaesthetischen Gesichtspunkten, die einen lebhaften Eindruck hervorgebracht zu haben scheinen” (KSB 3:13; “Yesterday I gave in front of a full auditorium my Inaugural Lecture, ‘On the Personality of Homer,’ with lots of philosophical-aesthetic points of view, which seem to have provoked a lively reaction”); “Durch diese Antrittsrede sind die Leute hier von Verschiedenem überzeugt worden, und mit ihr war meine Stellung, wie ich deutlich erkenne, gesichert” (KSB 3:15; “Because of this inaugural lecture the people here have been convinced about a number of things, and with it my position, as I can clearly see, has been secured”).