The work opens by establishing Nietzsche's intellectual roots, noting his early admiration for and eventual estrangement from Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner. Brandes details Nietzsche's fierce polemic against David Strauss and the rising tide of German self-glorification, introducing the concept of the Culture-Philistine as a symptom of pervasive barbarism and spiritual mediocrity. Moving from historical education to the broader critique of European civilization, the author analyzes how excessive historical consciousness paralyzes vital action and breeds a fatalistic reverence for success.
Central to the analysis is Nietzsche's transvaluation of all values, wherein he dismantles traditional morality—particularly the ethics of pity, which he diagnoses as a disguised manifestation of slave morality, resentment, and spite. In contrast, the aristocratic valuation exalts the strong, life-affirming master morality of antiquity, anchored in the will to power rather than the pursuit of happiness. Brandes explores the origin of the bad conscience, explaining how suppressed aggressive instincts turn inward upon the individual under the iron constraint of communal life and the ascetic ideal championed by the Church.
The text delves into Nietzsche's psychological portrait, drawing connections between his physical suffering, his isolation in the Engadine and Nice, and the fierce independence of his thought. Brandes examines Thus Spake Zarathustra as a poetic exposition of Nietzsche's doctrine, highlighting the prophecy of the Superman, the critique of the State as the coldest of monsters, and the doctrine of eternal recurrence as a passionate affirmation of life in all its pain and joy.
Throughout the study, Brandes contextualizes Nietzsche alongside contemporary thinkers such as Eduard von Hartmann and Eugen Dühring, while comparing his aristocratic radicalism with the ideas of Ernest Renan and Henrik Ibsen. The narrative addresses the paradox of Nietzsche's lonely struggle for recognition juxtaposed against the vast scope of his ambition to reshape European philosophy.
The final sections chronicle the deepening correspondence between Brandes and Nietzsche during the closing years of the philosopher's conscious life, marked by intense productivity and rising megalomania. Brandes records the tragic collapse of Nietzsche's intellectual faculties into incurable madness at the end of 1888, offering a nuanced assessment of a thinker whose posthumous fame swept across the globe and fundamentally transformed modern intellectual history.
