Autobiography as Gestalt: Nietzsche's Ecce Homo

Abstract

Nietzsche's autobiography, his self-presentation in Ecce Homo,1 has until now been subjected to no other treatment than that inflicted by philosophy. In other words, this text has been considered either as literature or as an essentially philosophical writing disguised under the appearances of a literary genre. According to the second of these two genuinely philosophical alternatives, Ecce Homo has to be stripped of all of its esthetic magic, of what belongs to Nietzsche's great style and his art of poetry, in order to reveal the authentic experience of being hidden beneath its delusive exteriority. Martin Heidegger, undoubtedly the first to promote a philosophical reading of Ecce Homo, escapes as little as anybody else this kind of logic. Indeed, the few remarks on Ecce Homo