Introduction

Abstract This canvases a number of possible reasons for taking an interest in Nietzsche’s aesthetics: that his aesthetics informs his thought about every other area of philosophy, that any overview of his thought must be incomplete without his aesthetics, that his aesthetics may tell us what he hoped to achieve in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, that some of his views in aesthetics deserve more attention than they have received, and that, because his aesthetics feeds into and occasionally collides with his views elsewhere in philosophy, sometimes to perplexing effect, the resolution of these perplexities may require us to interrogate and/or take issue with his specifically aesthetic conclusions. The present collection is motivated by each of these reasons. Essay-by-essay summaries follow.