ABSTRACT
After this first work, which struck a balance between diagnosis and cure, specifically through the reconciliation of opposites, Nietzsche became the critical diagnostician par excellence, which is why almost exclusively diagnostic theorists like Freud and Derrida could be so deeply influenced by his work. There are certainly many brilliant positive insights in Nietzsche’s subsequent books, but the overarching tone of his work is primarily critical. While he brilliantly prophesied and influenced the trajectory of culture and thought over the century-and-a-half following his writing, it is this first book which perhaps provides us with the clearest envisagement of how the deep historical problems he diagnoses can be overcome in a constructive moment after deconstruction, still far in the future in 1872. Certainly, the concepts of the eternal return, the will to power, and the Overman are also positive gestures in this direction, and they are more profound in some ways than this early work, but they are also more obscure and ambiguous. Nevertheless, those later concepts can be understood as developments, forged during Nietzsche’s darker days, of the mode of thought he expressed during his happiest and most conventionally successful years.
