Ecce Homo
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~47,400 words · 225 passages
Cite this work
- APANietzsche. (n.d.). Ecce Homo. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/ecce-homo
- MLANietzsche. "Ecce Homo." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/ecce-homo.
- ChicagoNietzsche. Ecce Homo. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/ecce-homo.
What it is about
Ecce Homo (1888): the autobiography, with chapters titled 'Why I Am So Wise' and 'Why I Write Such Good Books'.
Context and history
The titles look like megalomania and partly are — he wrote it just before his collapse — but the book is also the best guide to his own work that exists: he goes through each book and says what he meant to do. That it is lucid and unhinged at once is what makes it unforgettable. English translation from the complete edition edited by Oscar Levy (1909-1913), the one in the public domain. It is over a century old and it shows. The original is GERMAN, and citation should follow the original: the catalogue holds two of them, Also sprach Zarathustra and Der Wille zur Macht; for the rest, only the translation is here.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
As it is my intention within a very short time to confront my fellow-men with the very greatest demand that has ever yet been made upon them, it seems to me _above_ all necessary to declare here who and what I am. As a matter of fact, this ought to be pretty well known already, for I have not "held my tongue" about myself. But the disparity which obtains between the greatness of my task and the smallness of my contemporaries, is revealed by the fact that people have neither heard me nor yet seen me. I live on my own self-made credit, and it is probably only a prejudice to suppose that I am alive at all. I do but require to speak to any one of the scholars who come to the Ober-Engadine in the summer in order to convince myself that I am _not_ alive.... Under these circumstances, it is a duty--and one against which my customary reserve, and to a still greater degree the pride of my instincts, rebel--to say: _Listen! for I am such and such a person. For Heaven's sake do not confound me with any one else!_ I am, for instance, in no wise a bogey man, or moral monster. On the contrary, I am the very opposite in nature to the kind of man that has been honoured hitherto as virtuous. Between ourselves, it seems to me that this is precisely a matter on which I may feel proud. I am a disciple of the philosopher Dionysus, and I would prefer to be even a satyr than a saint. But just read this book! Maybe I have here succeeded in expressing this contrast in a cheerful and at the same time sympathetic manner--maybe this is the only purpose of the present work. The very last thing I should promise to accomplish would be to "improve" mankind. I do not set up any new idols; may old idols only learn what it costs to have legs of clay. To overthrow idols (idols is the name I give to all ideals) is much more like my business. In proportion as an ideal world has been falsely assumed, reality has been robbed of its value, its meaning, and its tr← Back to Nietzsche