On Nietzsche -- and His Dionysian (Anti-Christian) Philosophy

From Wikipedia...

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (October 15, 1844 – August 25, 1900) was a nineteenth-century German philosopher and classical philologist. He wrote critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy, and science, using a distinctive German language style and displaying a fondness for aphorism. Nietzsche's influence remains substantial within and beyond philosophy, notably in existentialism and postmodernism. His style and radical questioning of the value and objectivity of truth raise considerable problems of interpretation, generating an extensive secondary literature in both continental and analytic philosophy. Some of his major ideas include interpreting tragedy as an affirmation of life, an eternal recurrence (which numerous commentators have re-interpreted), a rejection of Platonism, and a repudiation of (especially 19th-century) Christianity.


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I do not pretend to be a Nietzschean scholar -- far from it. One day I would like to say that I have read all of his books -- if time, energy, and health afford me such a luxury -- but right now I can only say that I have read snippets of parts of his different books, and various interpretations of his philosophy as a whole, as well as its evolutionary develoment (from The Birth of Tragedy, 1872, to let us say, Ecce Homo, his second last work, written between October 15th and November 4th, 1888; his last work, Nietzsche contra Wagner, must have been written in either November and/or December, 1888, because Nietzsche physically and mentally collapsed on January 3rd, 1889, and did not write anything lucid afterwards until he died in 1900. Source: Walter Kaufman, introduction to 'On The Geneology of Morals' and 'Ecce Homo', 1967).

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So this is a 'hit and run' evaluation of Nietzsche and his Dionysian Philosophy but at the same time it is both a comparison and a contrast of DGB Philosophy to Nietzschean Philosophy.

Philosophically, I prefer the thesis that Nietzsche presented at the beginning of his professional career to the one he presented later in his philosophical career. Case in point: I prefer Nietzsche's thesis and philosophy within 'The Birth of Tragedy' (BT) to anything he wrote latter such as what I am reading now in 'Ecce Homo' (EH).

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Why? It is precisely what Nietzsche most hated about his earliest work (BT) that I most like about it -- specifically, that it was Hegelian, or at least post-Hegelian, in its thesis/anti-thesis/synthesis style of presentation.

The difference between the early Nietzsche vs. the later Nietzsche is this: homeostatic balance vs. existential extremism.