Abstract

The 1886/87 prefaces for the new editions of The Birth of Tragedy, the first volume of Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, and The Gay Science, as well the preface for the first edition of the second volume of Human, All Too Human, are Nietzsche’s starting point for elaborating and developing his late conception of illness and health. To arrive at a more detailed interpretation of the health process that Nietzsche describes, it is necessary to establish an intertextual reading of the prefaces and the aphorism GS 370 from the perspective of a psychophysiological analysis. Nietzsche classifies his interpretation of illness under the term “romanticism,” which he sees embodied by the figures of Schopenhauer and Wagner and which he considers to be the most extreme case of illness – while his conception of health is classified under the term “tragic pessimism.” Nietzsche applies the meaning of romanticism and tragic pessimism until the end of his work, transforming both concepts into categories from which he defines the nature of the human being.