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Originally Posted by musicfallinglikesnow
That's right, he was a beautiful soul. Reading "Thus spoke Zarathustra" almost killed me. He was a giant.
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His best book is his prose poem, Thus Spake Zarathustra, yes.
Neitzche himself said that "among my writings my Zarathustra stands to my mind by itself," in the preface to Ecce Homo
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He has a few little aphorisms borne of madness here and there, but in the realm of true philosophy, he's more contradictory than any religion he holds up to ridicule as hypocritical.
Bottom line: Neitzsche was a mad, poetic genius. Here's a generalization that may not be correct, but (to ramble a bit) I just came up with it: Kierkegaard (super ego), Dostoyevsky (ego), and Nietsche (id).
{Freud=who the little analogy is based on of course from roughly the same period as well}.
They were all contemporary and part of the same zeitgeist. Dostoevsky approaches Neitzsche's thought in some of his nihilistic characters. ((loosely) Raskolnikov is quintessential, yes, but has the arc of sorts...Stavrogin from The Possessed, in particular....D's place "in the middle" is exemplified in the "split" in The Brothers Karamazov with the three brothers.)
Kierkegaard explores a dark side in many of his pseudonymous writings (as opposed to his Edicts).
Neitzsche was the sufferer though to be sure. His father died when he was pre-school age or so and he was raised by women relatives. He had a horse accident when he was young that made him ill all the time with migraines and rheumatoid arthritis. He had to go into mandatory service and contracted syphillis soon after being away from home. He also had a second horse accident and was pretty much an "outsider" mentally from then onwards. The only long-term relationship he ever had with a woman is rumored to be one he incestually had with his anti-semetic sister, Elisabeth.
Now, I know you didn't ask for my opinion, !@#$%!, yet there it is. Weird how life never fits your expectations, isn't it? He's still a fairly brilliant writer, just some times a whole lot less than others.