The first book by the author of the classic philosophical text Beyond Good and Evil.
The youthful faults of this work were exposed by the author himself in the brilliant Attempt at a Self-Criticism, which he added to the new edition of 1886. But the book, whatever its excesses, remains one of the most relevant statements on tragedy ever penned. It exploded the conception of Greek culture that was prevalent down through the Victorian era, and it analyzed themes developed in the twentieth century by classicists, existentialists, psychoanalysts, and others.

Friedrich Nietzsche's most accessible and influential philosophical work, misquoted, misrepresented, brilliantly original and enormously influential

Nietzsche was one of the most revolutionary and subversive thinkers in Western philosophy, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra remains his most famous and influential work. It describes how the ancient Persian prophet Zarathustra descends from his solitude in the mountains to tell the world that God is dead and that the Superman, the human embodiment of divinity, is his successor. Nietzsche's utterance 'God is dead', his insistence that the...

The literary career of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) spanned less than twenty years, but no area of intellectual inquiry was left untouched by his iconoclastic genius. The philosopher who announced the death of God in The Gay Science (1882) and went on to challenge the Christian code of morality in Beyond Good and Evil (1886), grappled with the fundamental issues of the human condition in his own intense autobiography, Ecce Homo (1888). Most notorious of all, perhaps, his idea of the triumphantly transgressive ubermann ('superman') is developed in the extreme, yet poetic words of Thus Spake...

'One must be superior to mankind in force, in loftiness of soul--in contempt'

In these two devastating works, Nietzsche offers a sustained and often vitriolic attack on the morality and the beliefs of his time, in particular those of Hegel, Kant and Schopenhaur. Twilight of the Idols is a 'grand declaration of war' on reason, psychology and theology that combines highly charged personal attacks on his contemporaries with a lightning tour of his own philosophy. It also paves the way for The Anti-Christ, Nietzche's final assault on institutional Christianity, in which he...

In late 1888, only weeks before his final collapse into madness, Nietzsche (1844-1900) set out to compose his autobiography, and 'Ecce Homo' remains one of the most intriguing yet bizarre examples of the genre ever written.

A series of 638 aphorisms and discourses on subjects ranging from art, arrogance and boredom to passion, science, vanity, women and youth. Nietzsche himself described this work as the monument of a crisis, since it was written at a time of major upheaval in his life.

This work dramatically rejects the tradition of Western thought with its notions of truth and God, good and evil. Nietzsche demonstrates that the Christian world is steeped in a false piety and infected with a slave morality. With wit and energy, he turns from this critique to a philosophy that celebrates the present and demands that the individual imposes their own will to power upon the world.

For the first time in Penguin Classics: Nietzsche's accessible exploration of key ideas in his landmark Beyond Good and Evil--in a lucid new translation

Friedrich Nietzsche claimed that the purpose of On the Genealogy of Morals was to call attention to his previous writings. But in fact the book does much more than that, elucidating and expanding on the cryptic aphorisms of Beyond Good and Evil, and presenting a coherent discussion of morality in a work that is more accessible than much of his previous writings.

For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has...

In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche expounds on the origins of Greek tragedy and its relevance to the German culture of its time. He declares it to be the expression of a culture which has achieved a delicate but powerful balance between Dionysian insight into the chaos and suffering which underlies all existence and the discipline and clarity of rational Apollonian form. In order to promote a return to these values, Nietzsche critiques complacent rationalism of late nineteenth-century German culture and makes an impassioned plea for the regenerative potential of the music of Wagner. A wide...

Ecce Homo is an autobiography like no other. Deliberately provocative, Nietzsche subverts the conventions of the genre and pushes his philosophical positions to combative extremes, constructing a genius-hero whose life is a chronicle of incessant self-overcoming. Written in 1888, a few weeks before his descent into madness, the book passes under review all of Nietzsche's previous works so that we, his "posthumous"readers, can finally understand him, on his own terms. He reaches final reckonings with his many enemies, including Richard Wagner, German nationalism, "modern men" in general, and...