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They do not have a finger for nuances-poor me!
I am a nuance-
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo1
Ecce Homo has aged in the shadows, and its sorry life consists of neglect, misunderstanding and disparagement. As far as I can tell, the last person to comprehend and gain merriment from its farraginous form was its author, Friedrich Nietzsche. Instead of laughing at this cheerfully cynical book, a legion of grave scholars has found it oddly distressing at best and pathetic madness at worst. (Unless you count the worst as the view in all camps that the work has no good reason to be.) Roberto Calasso has written that the "great changes of madness unfold in the hidden chamber of this work, something mysterious haunts these pages, and the mystery is destined to remain such."2 With due deference to mystery, I beg to differ.
Sometimes called his autobiography, Nietzsche completed Ecce Homo ("Behold the Man") just weeks before his mental collapse on January 3, 1889. Yet his last original composition is no memoir or confession; rather, it shows us Nietzsche attempting to unify and understand his philosophical work overall. As such, Ecce Homo provides a way to read Nietzsche on his own terms. But it does much more than this by way of its form. My central contention is that Ecce Homo is a satire. As a trained classicist, Nietzsche was familiar with this ancient genre, and my essay contends that he wrote a parody of autobiography in order to skewer not only the inherent pretensions of self-reflection and unvarnished truth, but the larger historical pretensions of philosophy to procure timeless wisdom. Seen this way, Nietzsche wrote Ecce Homo to recast his entire corpus as a species of what I call philosophical satire: the comic attack by hyperbole of philosophy itself, the better to contrast his own program of truth-telling.
Assume for a moment that you know nothing of Nietzsche and find yourself in an ocean liner deck chair with Ecce Homo. What would this book communicate to you? The author describes grand intellectual travails, and German pastry; reviews his own books that "overcome morality," and celebrates the climate of Turin; purports to give reasons for the existence of his outstanding character traits and abilities, and recounts...