![\"WP_20141008_001\"](\"http:\/\/blogs.staffs.ac.uk\/ecw\/files\/2014\/10\/WP_20141008_001.jpg\")
<\/a>and he read out the final, concluding couple of pages ending with an ironic apotheosis of Greek culture, and an outlook into the future of European philosophy: the Nietzsche project has come full circle; the end links beautifully with the beginning… I was moved.<\/p>\nIt may be of interest to note that Nietzsche derived the much demonised notion of the ‘Overhuman’ from quite a benign source. Behind it is to a large extent an essay entitled ‘The Over-Soul’, by the American Ralph Waldo Emerson, published in 1836\u00a0. Emerson’s essays\u00a0were a lifelong source of inspiration for Nietzsche. He was in possession of the first volume of Emerson’s Collected Essays,\u00a0in the first\u00a0 mid-C19\u00a0German translation. The book, now in Nietzsche’s hand library in Weimar, accompanied him on his wanderings, as can be determined from the underlinings and marginal notes in Nietzsche’s mutating handwriting. Evidently, he consulted it over the three main periods of his entire writing career. Emerson,\u00a0together with his friend from across the Atlantic, Thomas Carlyle, had honed the new, genuinely modern\u00a0 literary form (Montaigne) of the essay into a fine art.\u00a0The flexibility of composition in an essay, its aesthetic dimension around topic investigation,\u00a0appealed to Nietzsche who was trying to find new ways of making philosophy relevant again in an age of rapid cultural and social modernisation. Traditional Idealist system-building philosophy was no longer up to the job:\u00a0too clunky and rigid. Future writing had to be like a fine spider’s web stretching over a stream of white water.<\/p>\n