Editing Felix Hausdorff (section)

=== Hausdorff as philosopher and writer (Paul Mongré) ===
Hausdorff's volume of aphorisms, published in 1897, was his first work published under the pseudonym Paul Mongré. It is entitled ''Sant' Ilario: Thoughts from the landscape of Zarathustra''. The subtitle  plays first on the fact that Hausdorff had completed his book during a recovery stay on the Ligurian coast by Genoa and that in this same area, Friedrich Nietzsche  wrote the first two parts of ''Thus Spoke Zarathustra''; he also alludes to his spiritual closeness to Nietzsche. In an article on Sant' Ilario in the weekly paper [[Die Zukunft]], Hausdorff acknowledged in [[Wiktionary:expressis verbis|expressis verbis]] his debt to Nietzsche.

Hausdorff was not trying to copy or even exceed Nietzsche. "Of Nietzsche imitation no trace", says a contemporary review. He follows Nietzsche in an attempt to liberate individual thinking, to take the liberty of questioning outdated standards. Hausdorff maintained critical distance to the late works of Nietzsche. In his essay on the book [[The Will to Power (manuscript)|''The Will to Power'']] compiled from notes left in the Nietzsche Archive he says:

{{blockquote|In Nietzsche glows a fanatic. His morality of breeding, erected on our present biological and physiological foundations of knowledge: that could be a world historical scandal against which the [[Inquisition]] and [[witch trials]] fade into harmless aberrations.}}

His critical standard he took from Nietzsche himself,

{{blockquote|From the kind, modest, understanding Nietzsche and from the free spirit of the cool, dogma-free, unsystematic skeptic Nietzsche ...}}

In 1898—also under the pseudonym Paul Mongré—Hausdorff published an epistemological experiment titled ''Chaos in cosmic selection''. The critique of metaphysics put forward in this book had its starting point in Hausdorff's confrontation with Nietzsche's idea of eternal recurrence. Ultimately, it is about destroying ''any'' kind of metaphysics. Of the world itself, of the ''transcendent core of the world''—as Hausdorff puts it—we know nothing and we can know nothing. We must assume "the world itself" as undetermined and undeterminable, as mere chaos. The world of our experience, our cosmos, is the result of the selections that we have made and will always instinctively make according to our capacity for understanding. Seen from that chaos, all other frameworks, other cosmos, are conceivable. That is to say, from the world of our cosmos, one cannot draw any conclusions about the transcendent world.

In 1904, in the magazine The New Rundschau, Hausdorff's play appeared, the one-act play ''The doctor of his honor''. It is a crude satire on the duel and on the traditional concepts of honor and nobility of the Prussian officer corps, which in the developing bourgeois society were increasingly anachronistic. ''The doctor of his honor'' was Hausdorff's most popular literary work. In 1914–1918 there were numerous performances in more than thirty cities. Hausdorff later wrote an epilogue to the play, but it was not performed at that time. Only in 2006 did this epilogue have its premier at the annual meeting of the German Mathematical Society in Bonn.  In 2021 the first English translation of ''The doctor of his honor'' was published by The Hausdorff Center for Mathematics in Bonn.

Besides the works mentioned above, Hausdorff also wrote numerous essays that appeared in some of the leading literary magazines of the time. He also wrote a book of poems, ''Ecstasy'' (1900). Some of his poems were set to music by Austrian composer [[Joseph Marx]].