New Titles from Atropos Press …
Andrzej Jachimczyk
How I Became What I Am
Young Nietzsche Embarks On Life’s Odyssey
Publication Series | Paperback – 09 October 2022 | 297 pages| ISBN 978-1-7375591-9-1
Friedrich Nietzsche’s thought journey began long before its first seminal culmination in The Birth of Tragedy, going back to age fourteen when young Fritz wrote his first autobiography on the eve of his entry into Schulpforta boarding school. In his early writings, the budding philosopher symbiotically leveraged his experiences, studies, relationships, and nascent ideas towards fashioning, one brushstroke at a time, the eternal work of art, himself.
This book locates the self-reflexive form of Fritz’s youthful writings as the inception of the introspective perspective that would be fully realized in his later works, especially in his last book Ecce Homo.
“It is a pleasure to read Jachimczyk’s account of ‘Young Fritz’ because it gives an insight into Nietzsche’s Lebenslauf until 1869 and simultaneously prepares us for his mature thought that revolutionized Western philosophy. It is enlightening to read, or read again, such names as Goethe, Hölderlin, Byron, Emerson, Strauss, Stirner, Hegel, Lange, Kant, Wagner and last, but not least, Schopenhauer, all of whom, as Jachimczyk scrupulously points out, played a role in ‘Young Fritz’s’ intellectual and creative development. In a word: Bravo!”
“This is a well-researched and highly engaging account of Nietzsche’s formative years. Jachimczyk draws on a wide range of primary and secondary sources to paint a vivid portrait of a genius in the making. The quotations from notebooks and letters allow us to hear Nietzsche’s own voice, while the author contextualizes them from a critical distance where appropriate. He makes judicious use of the voluminous secondary literature, so that even readers who are well acquainted with Nietzsche’s early years will learn new things about his development. The influences on his views and ways of thinking—whether from the actual persons in his life, the authors he read with enthusiasm, or the characters portrayed in novels or poetry—are sympathetically presented. Jachimczyk’s choice of ‘becoming what one is’ as a leitmotiv pays off handsomely. Following the development of the mediocre student into a brilliant learner, and of the accomplished student of philology into a future teacher of philosophy, we are made aware of the fascinating process whereby young Fritz became Nietzsche—and one of the profoundest thinkers of the Western tradition.”
About the Author
Andrzej Jachimczyk is a New York based writer and filmmaker, a Fellow at the European Graduate School, Switzerland, and teaches sociology at the University of North Carolina, Pembroke. He is the author of a book, Reading Hegel After Nietzsche (2013), and the writer-director of a short film, Artworkers (2015).
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