Abstract

The treatise provides an extensive commentary and exegesis of Friedrich Nietzsche's last original composition. Reading Ecce Homo as philosophical autobiography, the book is understood as the effort to recast the genre of philosophy through the conscious attention it gives to the circumstance and perspective whence a particular author's philosophy arises. Only a work which grounds itself by explicating its unique and personal source is honest and rational philosophy, it is argued, because it thereby establishes the perspective from which its own interpretations of phenomena are made, and made coherent. Nietzsche wrote Ecce Homo to provide the whole of his corpus this grounding. The present work includes chapters on autobiography theory and Nietzsche's view of philosophy as an autobiographical activity, on interpretation and surmounting the hermeneutical dilemma, a commentary for every section of Ecce Homo, and a final chapter which identifies Nietzsche's own interpretation of his corpus as the effort to recover and increase physical/psychological health. With this conception in hand, and considering Nietzsche's own analysis of decadent as against affirmative philosophies in Ecce Homo, the work concludes by reinterpreting the major themes and teachings of Nietzsche's philosophy as having been specifically created in response to and invoked against Krankhaftigkeit, his lifelong morbidity and pessimism. Nietzsche reads his life as having demonstrated that this morbid condition was conquered, first, by the rejection of all moral, universal, impersonal, and unwise ways of thinking as endemic to his illness, and second, by employing consciously therapeutic, personal, autobiographical and philosophical self-treatments. Ecce Homo is considered the culmination of such treatments