Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche
Born	Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-10-15)15 October 1844 Röcken, Saxony, Prussia, German Confederation
Died	25 August 1900(1900-08-25) (aged 55) Weimar, Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, German Empire
Alma mater	University of Bonn Leipzig University
Era	19th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Continental philosophy Existentialism (anti-nihilism) Perspectivism Realism
Main interests	Aesthetics, classical studies, ethics, history, moral psychology, ontology, tragedy, values
Notable ideas	Amor fati Apollonian and Dionysian Eternal recurrence God is dead Herd instinct Master–slave morality Übermensch Perspectivism Will to power Ressentiment
Influences Dostoevsky Emerson Goethe Heraclitus Kant Plato La Rochefoucauld Schopenhauer Pascal Wagner Darwin Burckhardt Stendhal Spinoza
Influenced Theodor Adorno Georges Bataille Jean Baudrillard Martin Buber Judith Butler Albert Camus Gilles Deleuze Jacques Derrida Michel Foucault Martin Heidegger Iqbal Karl Jaspers Ayn Rand George Santayana Jean-Paul Sartre Leo Strauss Oswald Spengler Bernard Williams Ludwig Wittgenstein

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher, writer, and scholar of ancient languages. He was born on 15 October 1844 and died on 25 August 1900. He is one of the most influential modern thinkers.

Nietzsche trained as a scholar of ancient Greek and Latin texts. He became a professor at the University of Basel in Switzerland when he was only 24 years old. After ten years he had to give up his job because he was often ill. For the rest of his working life he had no fixed home. He moved between cheap rooms in Switzerland, Italy, and France, and wrote almost all of his famous books in those years.

His books are not like ordinary philosophy books. Many of them are made of short, sharp pieces of writing called aphorisms. He used jokes, stories, and strong images instead of long chains of proof. He attacked Christianity and the common ideas about right and wrong. He said that the old religious view of the world was dying, and he wrote the famous line "God is dead" to describe this. He thought that people would have to find new values for themselves, or fall into the belief that life means nothing. Some of his best known ideas are the will to power, the eternal return of all things, and the Übermensch, which means the "overman" or "overhuman".

In January 1889 Nietzsche had a sudden mental breakdown. He never got better. He spent the last eleven years of his life unable to work, cared for first by his mother and then by his sister. He died in 1900, just as his fame was beginning to grow.

During his illness and after his death, his sister took more and more control of his writings. She changed how people read him. Later, the German Nazi Party used parts of his work for their own ends, often by taking his words out of their setting. Scholars after the Second World War showed that this picture of Nietzsche was false. He is studied as a thinker who shaped existentialism, modern psychology, and much of later European thought.

Life

Early life and education

Nietzsche was born in the village of Röcken, near Lützen, in the eastern part of Germany. His father, Carl Ludwig Nietzsche, was a Lutheran pastor, which is a kind of Christian minister. His father died in 1849, when Friedrich was only four. His baby brother died the next year. After that, the young boy grew up in a house full of women: his mother, his younger sister Elisabeth, his grandmother, and two aunts. In 1850 the family moved to the town of Naumburg.

As a boy Nietzsche was serious, careful, and very good at his lessons. From 1858 to 1864 he went to Schulpforta, one of the best and strictest schools in Germany. There he fell in love with the ancient Greek and Latin writers. His family hoped he would become a Christian minister like his father. So he first went to the University of Bonn to study religion. But he quickly gave up religion and moved to the University of Leipzig to study philology, the careful study of old languages and texts.

Two discoveries marked these student years. The first was a book by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer called The World as Will and Representation. Nietzsche found it by chance in a second-hand bookshop, and it shook him deeply. Schopenhauer taught that the world is driven by a blind, hungry force he called the "will", and that life is mostly suffering. Nietzsche later disagreed with much of this, but the questions stayed with him. The second discovery was the music and friendship of the composer Richard Wagner, whom he met in 1868 and admired for years.

Professor at Basel

In April 1869 something rare happened. The University of Basel in Switzerland offered Nietzsche a chair as a professor of classical philology. He was only 24, and he had not even chosen the subject of his doctoral thesis. Leipzig gave him the degree without an exam, because his work was already so respected. He gave his first lecture there in May 1869. To take the job he gave up his Prussian citizenship. He never became a Swiss citizen either, so for the rest of his life he officially belonged to no country.

In 1870 a war broke out between Prussia and France. Nietzsche served for a short time as a medical helper, caring for wounded and sick soldiers. He caught serious illnesses himself. From then on his health was never strong. He suffered from terrible headaches, stomach trouble, and very poor eyesight for the rest of his life.

His first book came out in 1872. It was called The Birth of Tragedy. In it he wrote about ancient Greek plays and about two forces in art and life, which are explained below. Other scholars of ancient languages attacked the book hard, because it broke the rules of their careful, narrow field. It hurt Nietzsche's name as a scholar, but it pointed the way to the bold thinker he would become.

In these years Nietzsche slowly grew away from Wagner. He came to feel that Wagner's later music turned toward Christian feeling and German national pride. Nietzsche disliked both. The friendship cooled and finally broke. In 1878 Nietzsche published Human, All Too Human, a book of sharp short pieces that questioned many things he had once loved. By 1879 his health was so bad that he had to leave his post at Basel. The university gave him a small pension to live on.

The wandering years

The next ten years were hard but full of work. Nietzsche had no home of his own. In summer he often stayed in the cool mountain village of Sils-Maria in Switzerland. In winter he moved to warmer towns such as Nice in France or Genoa and Turin in Italy. He was lonely and often in pain, yet he wrote his greatest books in these years.

In 1881 he published Daybreak, and in 1882 The Gay Science. The phrase "gay science" here means joyful or playful knowledge, not anything to do with sexuality. The year 1882 also brought a painful episode in his private life. He fell in love with a young writer and thinker named Lou Salomé and hoped to marry her. She refused. This unhappy episode belongs to the years in which he began his next and most famous book.

That book was Thus Spoke Zarathustra, written between 1883 and 1885. It is part poem, part story, and part prophecy. Its hero, named after an ancient Persian teacher, comes down from a mountain to share his wisdom with people. Through this character Nietzsche set out his ideas about the Übermensch and the eternal return.

The year 1888 was the most productive of all. In a single burst Nietzsche wrote The Case of Wagner, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, and Ecce Homo, a strange book about his own life and work. He had never written so much, or so fast. He was also more alone than ever, and almost unknown to the wider public.

Illness and death

In early January 1889, in the city of Turin, Nietzsche broke down. According to a famous story, he saw a horse being beaten in the street, threw his arms around its neck, and collapsed. Many writers repeat this story, but it may not be exactly true. What is certain is that his mind gave way. He sent wild letters to friends, signing them with strange names. He was taken to a clinic and never recovered his reason.

What caused the breakdown is still debated. For a long time most doctors blamed syphilis, a disease that can attack the brain. Some scholars now doubt this and suggest other causes, such as a slow brain illness. Whatever the reason, the last eleven years of his life were silent ones. His mother cared for him until she died in 1897. After that his sister took him into her house in the German city of Weimar. Friedrich Nietzsche died there on 25 August 1900, aged 55.

Main ideas

Nietzsche is hard to sum up, and on purpose. He did not build one neat system in which every idea fits together. He wrote in pieces, he changed his mind, and he often wore "masks", saying one thing to make people think harder about another. He warned readers not to follow him blindly. Because of this, people still argue about what he really meant. The ideas below are the most important and the most discussed.

The Apollonian and the Dionysian

In his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche described two forces that he saw at work in art and in life. He named them after two Greek gods.

The first he called the "Apollonian", after Apollo, the god of light, form, and dreams. This is the drive toward order, clear shapes, and calm beauty. Think of a perfect marble statue, or a quiet, well-made painting.

The second he called the "Dionysian", after Dionysus, the god of wine and wild feasts. This is the drive toward energy, loss of self, and being swept away. Think of music that makes a crowd move as one, or a dance in which a person forgets who they are.

Nietzsche thought that great Greek tragedy joined these two forces together. The wild Dionysian truth, that life is full of pain and chaos, was made bearable by Apollonian beauty and form. Later in his life he leaned more and more toward the Dionysian side. He used the name Dionysus as a sign for saying a full "yes" to life, even to its suffering.

Master morality and slave morality

One of Nietzsche's deepest projects was to ask where ideas of "good" and "evil" come from. He set this out most clearly in On the Genealogy of Morality (1887). A "genealogy" is a kind of family tree. Nietzsche traced the family tree of moral ideas, to show that they have a history and were not simply handed down from heaven.

He described two very different ways of judging the world. He called the first "master morality". Here the strong, proud, and successful look at themselves and call their own qualities "good": strength, courage, health, beauty. Then they call the opposite "bad", meaning weak or low. The starting point is a "yes" to themselves.

He called the second "slave morality". This grows among the weak, the ruled, and the suffering. They cannot beat the strong by force, so they fight back in their minds. They call the qualities of the strong "evil", and they make a virtue out of their own state, praising humility, patience, pity, and obedience. Nietzsche thought that this turn was driven by a hidden, helpless anger. He named it with the French word ressentiment. This means a deep and lasting bitterness.

Nietzsche gave a famous picture of this in the Genealogy. Imagine birds of prey carrying off little lambs. The lambs may decide that the birds are "evil", and that they, the lambs, who eat no one, are therefore "good". From the lambs' point of view this feels like justice. But, Nietzsche pointed out, it is a little strange to blame a bird of prey for acting like a bird of prey.

It is important to read this carefully. Nietzsche was not simply praising cruelty or telling people to be bullies. He studied culture almost like a doctor studies an illness, trying to show where common values came from and what they cost. At the same time, he should not be made too gentle. He really did admire rank, discipline, and the making of higher kinds of human beings, and he attacked the idea that all people are equal. His view of morality cannot be reduced only to "being true to yourself".

Criticism of Christianity

Nietzsche grew up in a Christian home, and he knew the religion well. As an adult he became one of its sharpest critics. He set out his attack most strongly in The Antichrist (written in 1888). The word "antichrist" here means "against Christ" or "against Christianity".

Nietzsche linked Christianity to slave morality. In his view, certain forms of the religion grew out of the hidden resentment of the weak, above all in the way it later hardened into a moral code and a church. He argued that it taught people to feel guilty, to fear the body, and to look away from this life toward a better world after death. In his eyes this turned people against life itself. He called such values "life-denying", meaning that they say "no" to the natural world.

Nietzsche also drew a sharp picture of the difference between Jesus and the apostle Paul. This picture was his own reading of the two men as human types. It was not a neutral piece of history. He treated Jesus as a gentle figure who lived a certain inner state. He treated Paul as the man who built a church, and a whole system of guilt and reward, around that figure. It is not a portrait that most scholars of religion would accept.

"God is dead" and nihilism

Nietzsche's most famous saying is "God is dead". He did not mean that a living god had died. He meant something about culture and belief. He thought that in the modern world, science and reason had quietly destroyed the old faith in God, even among people who still went to church. In his view, the shared belief that once held everything together was dying out.

He gave this idea a striking scene in The Gay Science (section 125). A madman runs into a market square in the morning with a lantern, crying out that he is looking for God. The people there, who no longer believe, only laugh at him. The madman tells them a terrible thing: it is they who have killed God, and they have not yet understood what they have done.

For Nietzsche this was not good news to celebrate. He saw a great danger ahead, which he called nihilism. Nihilism is the belief that nothing has any meaning, value, or purpose. If the old source of values is gone, people may feel that life is empty and that nothing matters. Nietzsche thought this was the deepest crisis facing the modern world. His whole work can be read as a search for a way through nihilism, by creating new values out of love for life rather than fear of it.

The will to power

Schopenhauer had said that all living things are driven by a "will to live", a simple wish to survive and to keep going. Nietzsche thought this did not go far enough. He proposed instead a "will to power".

Nietzsche often describes life as a drive to grow, to overcome resistance, and to become stronger. A plant pushes through stone toward the light. An artist works for years to master a craft. A thinker tries to understand more and more of the world. In each case the deep urge is not only to stay alive, but to overcome and to expand.

This idea is one of the most debated in all of Nietzsche. Some readers take it as a claim about all of nature, almost like a law of physics. Others take it more narrowly, as an idea about human drives and feelings. It is also easy to twist. "Power" here does not only mean armies or rule over others, and it does not only mean quiet self-control either. It covers the full range of striving, growth, and overcoming. Nietzsche never finished turning it into a clear theory, and much of what he wrote about it was found only in his notebooks after his death.

Eternal recurrence

Another strange and powerful idea is the "eternal recurrence", sometimes called the eternal return. Recurrence means happening over and over. Nietzsche introduces the idea in The Gay Science (section 341) as a kind of test.

Nietzsche asks the reader to imagine a strange visit. One night a demon comes and speaks. He says that this same life will have to be lived again. Every joy and every pain will return. Every moment, large and small, will come back in the same order, again and again, forever, with nothing new added. How would a person take such news? For some, it would be a heavy burden, almost too much to bear. But a person who truly loved life might welcome it, and even wish for it.

Nietzsche uses this thought as a way to measure a life. A person who truly loved their life would be able to face the demon with joy. Some scholars also ask whether Nietzsche believed the eternal return was literally true about the universe. But its main force in his work is as a test of the heart: can a person say "yes" so fully to life that they would happily live it over forever?

The Übermensch

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche presents the Übermensch. The word is often translated as "superman", but "overman" or "overhuman" fits better, because it points to the idea of going beyond and overcoming. Zarathustra gives a famous image for it. The human being, he says, is like a rope stretched over a deep gorge, tied between the animal and the overman. To cross such a rope is dangerous, but it is also the great task.

The overman is the person who can live without the old God and the old values, and who creates new values out of strength and love of life. Such a person overcomes themselves again and again, instead of standing still. They do not look away from this world toward another, and they do not deny life. For this reason, Nietzsche says, the overman might even look frightening to other people.

It is very important to say what the Übermensch is not. It is not a fixed new kind of human, a final stage of evolution, or a master race. It is an ideal of constant self-overcoming, always reaching beyond what a person already is. Reading it as a kind of super-race is a serious mistake, and that mistake later did real harm, as the next section explains.

Amor fati and saying yes to life

Behind many of these ideas lies one feeling that Nietzsche prized above all. He called it by the Latin phrase amor fati, which means "love of fate". To have amor fati is to love everything that happens in one's life, the bad as well as the good, and to wish for nothing to be different.

This connects the will to power, the eternal return, and the overman into a single attitude. The eternal return tests whether a person can love their fate that much. The overman can be understood as a figure of this kind of strength that says yes to life. For Nietzsche, the highest goal was not to escape suffering or to reach a calm heaven, but to say a deep and joyful "yes" to life exactly as it is. His famous line "What does not kill me makes me stronger", from Twilight of the Idols, belongs to this same spirit.

Truth and perspective

Nietzsche also had bold ideas about truth and knowledge. He doubted that anyone could see the world without having a point of view. He argued that all seeing and all knowing come from some particular position, with its own interests and limits. This idea is often called "perspectivism", from the word "perspective", meaning a point of view.

This does not quite mean that "anything goes" or that every opinion is as good as every other. Nietzsche's point was that taking in more points of view gives a fuller and fairer understanding. There is no view from outside the world, but some points of view see more than others. This part of his work later became very important for thinkers who study how knowledge and power are linked.

Main writings

Nietzsche wrote many books. Some of the most important are:

• The Birth of Tragedy (1872)
• Untimely Meditations (1873 to 1876)
• Human, All Too Human (1878)
• Daybreak (1881)
• The Gay Science (1882)
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883 to 1885)
• Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
• On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)
• Twilight of the Idols (1888)
• The Antichrist (written 1888)
• Ecce Homo (written 1888, published 1908)

A book called The Will to Power is sometimes listed among his works, but Nietzsche never wrote it as a finished book. It was put together after his death from his private notebooks. The next section explains why this matters.

Misuse by the Nazis

The story of how Nietzsche was read after his death is almost as strange as his ideas. During his years of illness, and after his death, his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, took more and more control of his writings. She outlived him by many years and ran an archive devoted to his work. She also edited his unpublished notes, and from them she helped to shape the book called The Will to Power.

Elisabeth had been married to a man named Bernhard Förster, who hated Jews and dreamed of a "pure" German colony. Nietzsche himself had disliked his brother-in-law's views and had spoken against the hatred of Jews. Yet over time his sister steered his name closer to German nationalism. Years later, the Nazi Party and its leader Adolf Hitler treated Nietzsche as one of their heroes. They lifted single lines and words out of his books and used them to support ideas about race, war, and the rule of the strong.

Scholars now agree that this picture was false. Nietzsche was not a Nazi, and he was not even an early model for the Nazis. That description fits his brother-in-law far better, and Nietzsche had opposed those very views. The Nazis took his claims out of their setting and bent them to serve their own needs. After the Second World War, writers such as Walter Kaufmann worked to clear his name and to show the real shape of his thought.

The truth, however, is not simple, and it is fair to readers to say so plainly. Nietzsche was not a Nazi, but he was also not a comfortable, modern liberal. He wrote harsh things about equality, about democracy, and about whole groups of people, and he defended rank and hardness. It is also too simple to put all the blame on his sister, as if she alone had spoiled a gentle thinker. The honest position lies in between. His own views were often hard and troubling, but the Nazi version of Nietzsche was still a distortion of what he himself wrote.

Influence

Few modern thinkers have had a wider effect than Nietzsche, even though he was almost unknown while he could still work. His influence reaches across the whole of the twentieth century and beyond.

He is often seen as a father of existentialism, a movement that asks how people can make meaning in a world without a fixed plan. Several major philosophers wrote long studies of his work. They include Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida. The French thinkers among them read him above all as a doubter of fixed truth. Nietzsche is also often linked to the new study of the mind. Many readers have compared him with Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, because both wrote about hidden drives in the mind. Freud knew of Nietzsche's importance, but he did not simply present himself as Nietzsche's follower.

His influence also runs through literature and the arts. Writers, poets, composers, and painters have all drawn on his images and his daring. Because his work can be read in so many ways, many different groups have tried to claim him as their own. That very richness is part of why people still read and argue about Friedrich Nietzsche.

Related pages

• Arthur Schopenhauer
• Richard Wagner
• Existentialism
• Nihilism
• Christianity

Books used as sources

• Ansell-Pearson, Keith (ed.). A Companion to Nietzsche. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.
• Bishop, Paul (ed.). A Companion to Friedrich Nietzsche: Life and Works. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012.
• Brobjer, Thomas H. Nietzsche's Philosophical Context: An Intellectual Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008.
• Burnham, Douglas. The Nietzsche Dictionary. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.
• Leiter, Brian, and Neil Sinhababu (eds.). Nietzsche and Morality. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007.
• Stern, Tom (ed.). The New Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

Other websites

• Nietzsche Source: Digital version of the German critical edition of the complete works and Digital facsimile edition of the entire Nietzsche estate