David Strauss the Confessor and the Writer

Abstract

This chapter argues that Nietzsche’s critical essay on David Strauss’s last book, The Old and New Faith, is his first sustained attempt at a critique of contemporary culture and modern science. It also argues that the essay presents an early version of the human type called “the last man” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but who is called the “cultivated philistine” in the essay on Strauss. Looking back on the essay in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche said that it should not be read as a direct attack on Strauss because Strauss was used merely as a “magnifying glass […] to make visible a general but creeping and elusive [cultural] crisis.” The chapter concludes that Nietzsche took aim at Strauss because Strauss was a pseudo-genius who the Germans mistakenly hailed as a true cultural genius, and because Strauss’s scientific manner of thinking enervated the German spirit.