Ecce Homo

“Have I been understood? - Dionysus versus the Crucified!"

Ecce Homo was Nietzsche's last published work, one of the most remarkable and influential books of the nineteenth century.

Written just a few weeks before his final collapse into madness, Nietzsche set out to compose his autobiography, and Ecce Homo remains one of the most intriguing yet bizarre examples of the genre ever written.

Nietzsche traces his life, work and development as a philosopher, examines the heroes he has identified with, struggled against and then overcome - Schopenhauer, Wagner, Socrates, Christ - and predicts the cataclysmic impact of his 'forthcoming revelation of all values'.

For Nietzsche, any type of spiritual ideal – say "lovingkindness" or self-sacrifice – or any type of morality, any "thou shalt" or "thou shalt not," is a lie: the enemy of humanity.

Both self-celebrating and self-mocking, penetrating and strange, Ecce Homo gives the final, definitive expression to Nietzsche's beliefs and is in every way his last testament.

Impassioned and exhilarating in its conviction, Ecce Homo has become a key text in European culture and in literary criticism.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (1844–1900) was a German philosopher, cultural critic, poet, philologist, and Latin and Greek scholar whose work has exerted a profound influence on Western philosophy and modern intellectual history. Nietzsche's body of work touched widely on art, philology, history, religion, tragedy, culture, and science, and drew early inspiration from figures such as Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Goethe. A powerfully original thinker, Nietzsche's influence on successive writers, such as George Bernard Shaw, D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann and Jean-Paul Sartre, was significant.