To single out at least a few of them: Hans Vaihinger and Georg Simmel, Nicolai Hartmann and Karl Jaspers. Indeed, the only outstanding exception was Edmund Husserl; and his most renowned followers—Max Scheler and Martin Heidegger—changed their orientation drastically after coming under Nietzsche’s influence. This is also true of Jean-Paul Sartre. Indeed, one of Sartre’s best-known literary works can be shown to embody Nietzsche’s ideas: the ethic of The Flies differs sharply from Sartre’s own Being and Nothingness, finished at the same time, and from his famous lecture, Existentialism Is a Humanism, but contains dozens of echoes of Nietzsche’s writings, and the central motifs of the play are Nietzschean.1

Perhaps Nietzsche’s influence on literature is even more striking than his impact on twentieth-century philosophy. Besides Sartre, one may think of Camus, Gide, and Malraux; of Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse; and among German poets, of Rilke and Stefan George, Christian Morgenstern and Gottfried Benn.2 His influence on Shaw, Yeats, and Joyce, and on Eugene O’Neill and other major American writers deserves more study than it has yet received.

Nietzsche’s anticipations of and influence on various psychological theories are no less remarkable. In section 142 of The Dawn he anticipated the so-called James-Lange theory of the emotions; again and again he pioneered what Jaspers later called, in the title of his first major philosophical work, Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (psychology of world views); and Sigmund Freud remarked in an autobiographical sketch that Nietzsche’s “premonitions and insights often agree in the most amazing manner with the laborious results of psychoanalysis.”3 Alfred Adler’s modification of Freud’s theories, which in turn profoundly influenced Sartre,4 is even closer to Nietzsche’s psychology of the will to power than Freudianism.

Freud also “several times said of Nietzsche that he had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any other man who ever lived or was ever likely to live.”5 This is surely an extraordinary compliment from the founder of psychoanalysis whose life’s work it had been to develop techniques to advance man’s knowledge of himself. It may well have been too generous. But it contrasts pleasantly with the occasional condescension of would-be psychologists who claim to have figured out the inner workings of “poor” Nietzsche’s mind. And Freud was certainly right in suggesting that Nietzsche is of extraordinary interest not only as a philosopher and writer but also as a psychologist and a human being.

His influence extends much further than suggested so far. In the preface to The Decline of the West, Spengler said that he owed “everything” to Goethe and Nietzsche. Paul Tillich has frequently paid tribute to Nietzsche’s influence on his own thought, actually hailing Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as the greatest modern “Protestants.” Martin Buber was eighty-five when he revealed in print that at age seventeen—that is, in 1895—he was “so taken by” Thus Spoke Zarathustra “that I decided to translate it into Polish and had even translated the first part. I had just gone to the second part when I received the letter of a known Polish author who likewise had translated several sections of the book and proposed to me that we do the work in common. I preferred renouncing in his favor.”6

The full story of Nietzsche’s influence has never been told and cannot be told yet. Buber’s remark was not published until 1963; a letter in which Freud said of Nietzsche, “In my youth he signified a nobility which I could not attain,” was published posthumously.7 No doubt, many relevant documents will appear in years to come. What is called for in this introduction is merely an attempt to forestall snap judgments about Nietzsche.

Shallow judgments frequently take one of three forms. Either one knows all about Nietzsche: he was the man who said, or claimed, or believed this or that. Or one knows how to label Nietzsche as, say, an irrationalist metaphysician, or an evolutionist in ethics, or an existentialist. Worst of all, people who have never read a single one of his books from beginning to end “knew” at one time that he was the mind that had caused World War I, and a generation later that he was a Nazi philosopher. Regarding this last notion, suffice it here to say that all serious interpreters of Nietzsche, no matter how much they may disagree on other points, agree that this absurdity can be supported only by either rank ignorance of his works (common at one time in the English-speaking world) or an incredible lack of intellectual integrity (common to a few Nazi hacks). In fact, no other philosopher since Plato and Aristotle, with the exception of Kant and Hegel, has influenced so many widely different thinkers and writers so profoundly.

There are no signs that interest in Nietzsche is flagging. He is more widely read and studied than ever; only the perspectives keep changing. Once it was the fashion to link him with Darwin and evolutionary thought, but his reputation did not pass with this fashion, and it actually gained when more and more writers came to realize the inadequacy of such an interpretation. The same goes for later vogues. What gradually becomes more and more obvious is the unexampled richness of Nietzsche’s thought.

Nietzsche was not a one-book man. Nor are there two or three books that are obviously his best and most important. Born in 1844, Nietzsche published his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, in 1872.8 He followed it with four shorter essays which he called “Untimely Meditations;” in the English translation they were called Thoughts Out of Season—as if they were collections of aphorisms, which they are not, not even in appearance. Nietzsche here became a critic of his time—the period after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, the rise of the new German Empire, the age of Bismarck. Instead of joining in the growing self-satisfaction of his people, Nietzsche developed into their severest critic.

Then came the break with Richard Wagner, the resignation from the University of Basel, where he had been a professor of classical philology from 1869 to 1879, and the publication of the three volumes of Human, All-Too-Human, followed by The Dawn and The Gay Science.9 In these books Nietzsche turned against the romanticism of his first period, consciously imitated the French aphorists of the Enlightenment, and became, in his own phrase, a Good European.

Had Nietzsche died then, at thirty-seven, he would be remembered as one of the greatest masters of German prose and a thinker comparable to Montaigne and Pascal. He would still be cited as proof that the German language can be used to write lucidly, penetratingly, wittily, and beautifully about topics on which German professors, from Kant down to Heidegger, have written without a trace of wit or beauty. But he would not be a world-historical figure; his influence would be nothing like what it has been—it would be as if Shakespeare had died at thirty-seven, in 1601.