Nietzsche as a young man viewed the purpose of the philosopher in much the same light as did Plato--he saw the philosopher as the physician of a culture, identifying and curing its ills. Nietzsche's mode of discourse was lofty and ennobling but also difficult for many to understand, and some see his works as evidence of the moribund nature of late romanticism in the nineteenth century. Most readers tend to place Nietzsche within the terms of traditional thought, finding that he is fully bound by the tradition he attacks, meaning "by what has now come to be called the language and thought of onto-theology, what Nietzsche himself simply called God."
Critics have addressed different aspects of Nietzsche's thinking. In pursuing his view, Nietzsche made a very critical analysis of the German culture of his time in several of his works, beginning with his assessment of history and culture in The Birth of Tragedy and modified in later works as he rethought his position and changed some of his views. Nietzsche makes a comparison between historical knowledge about past cultures and culture itself. He sees true culture as a unity of the forces of life with the love of form and beauty. Nietzsche considers life as terrible and tragic, but he also views it as transmuted through art, the work of creative genius. Nietzsche discovers the proper role of art in his study of the Greeks, who also knew that life was tragic and terrible but who never gave in to the pessimism that this might entail. Instead, they transmuted life through art. They did this through two different aesthetics, one Dionysian and the other Apollonian. Modern culture did not affirm life and had given in to the pessimism that Nietzsche wished to avoid. Part of the sterility of modern culture was its dedication to historical learning as a substitute for a living culture. Allan Megill rejects much of what Nietzsche has to say about myth and meaning in human life, not...