13 - Nietzsche’s Critique of the Reason of His Life: On the Interpretation of The Anti-Christ and Ecce Homo

Summary

Colli and Montinari’s new edition of Nietzsche’s works has confirmed how arbitrarily his sister Elisabeth and friend Peter Gast assembled Nietzsche’s ostensible “major work,” The Will to Power. Montinari, furthermore, has demonstrated convincingly that Nietzsche finally abandoned the plan of writing such a major work.¹ With that, our view of Nietzsche’s actual final works was restored, above all The Anti-Christ and Ecce Homo, which he had written in place of the planned major work. As long as The Will to Power was seen as a summary of the philosophical content of his entire oeuvre, The Anti-Christ and Ecce Homo were considered merely as very personal expressions of boundless hatred for Christianity and a self-assessment exaggerated to the point of insanity. After Montinari’s clarifications we now have to ask whether these two works in particular might contain the systematic philosophical content that was previously attributed to The Will to Power and whether, given the latter, this content only summarizes the content of his previous works or goes beyond it. That the two works have a systematic philosophical significance is suggested by the fact that they are not aphoristic but are systematically constructed as are few other works of Nietzsche’s; that they do not summarize his previous writings is obvious. Thus, it remains to be shown that The Anti-Christ and Ecce Homo have yet another far-reaching, systematic importance in Nietzsche’s philosophical oeuvre. We will advance the thesis that in them Nietzsche attempts to perform a critique of the reason of his life. The phrase comes from Nietzsche himself: he had initially considered for the title of Ecce Homo “The Mirror: Attempt at a Self-Assessment,” and for the subtitle, “On the Reason of My Life” (KGW VIII, 24 [5], [8]).