Nietzsche, Friedrich - Terry Eagleton (essay date 1990)
Terry Eagleton (essay date 1990)
[An English critic and educator, Eagleton is the author of numerous Marxist literary studies, including Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontes (1975) and Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (1976). In the following excerpt from his The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), Eagleton examines Nietzsche's critique of idealism.]
It is not difficult to trace certain general parallels between historical materialism and the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche. For Nietzsche is in his own way a full-blooded materialist, whatever scant regard he may pay to the labour process and its social relations. One might say that the root of all culture for Nietzsche is the human body, were it not that the body itself is for him a mere ephemeral expression of the will to power. He asks himself in The Gay Science whether philosophy has 'not been merely an interpretation of the body and a...
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