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How long does it take to read Nietzsche?

Karl Jaspers

Nietzsche by Karl Jaspers takes about 9 hours 6 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 9 hours 6 minutes

A week or two of reading

First published 1936. 496 pages, about 136,400 words.

19 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 15 hours 9 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 9 hours 6 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 5 hours 41 minutes

The page count is the median across 20 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

Nietzsche claimed to be a philosopher of the future, but he was appropriated as a philosopher of Nazism. His work inspired a long study by Martin Heidegger and essays by a host of lesser disciples attached to the Third Reich. In 1935, however, Karl Jaspers set out to "marshall against the National Socialists the world of thought of the man they had proclaimed as their own philosopher." The year after publishing Nietzsche, Jaspers was discharged from his professorship at Heidelberg University by order of the Nazi leadership. Jaspers does not fall into the same trap as idealogues do, citing bits and pieces from Nietzsche's work to reinforce already held opinions. Instead, he openly shows the wide range of Nietzsche's views, including his endorsement of wars and warriors, his prophecies of world struggle and "new masters," and the cruel arrogance of the supermen. Yet Jaspers finds Nietzsche's philosophy to be extraordinary not only because he foresaw all the monstrosities of the twentieth century, but also because he saw through them. --

Subjects: Biography, Philosophers, Philosophy, Philosophy [MESH]

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