The Dawn of Day

INTRODUCTION.


When Nietzsche called his book _The Dawn of Day_, he was far from giving
it a merely fanciful title to attract the attention of that large section
of the public which judges books by their titles rather than by their
contents. _The Dawn of Day_ represents, figuratively, the dawn of
Nietzsche’s own philosophy. Hitherto he had been considerably influenced
in his outlook, if not in his actual thoughts, by Schopenhauer, Wagner,
and perhaps also Comte. _Human, all-too-Human_, belongs to a period of
transition. After his rupture with Bayreuth, Nietzsche is, in both parts
of that work, trying to stand on his own legs, and to regain his spiritual
freedom; he is feeling his way to his own philosophy. _The Dawn of Day_,
written in 1881 under the invigorating influence of a Genoese spring, is
the dawn of this new Nietzsche. “With this book I open my campaign against
morality,” he himself said later in his autobiography, the _Ecce Homo_.