Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher, cultural critic, poet, philologist, and Latin and Greek scholar whose work has exerted a profound influence on Western philosophy and modern intellectual history.
Background
Born on 15 October 1844, Nietzsche grew up in the small town of Röcken, near Leipzig, in the Prussian Province of Saxony.
He was named after King Frederick William IV of Prussia, who turned forty-nine on the day of Nietzsche's birth. (Nietzsche later dropped his middle name "Wilhelm". )
Nietzsche's parents, Carl Ludwig Nietzsche (1813–1849), a Lutheran pastor and former teacher, and Franziska Oehler (1826–1897), married in 1843, the year before their son's birth. They had two other children: a daughter, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, born in 1846, and a second son, Ludwig Joseph, born in 1848. Nietzsche's father died from a brain ailment in 1849; Ludwig Joseph died six months later, at age two. The family then moved to Naumburg, where they lived with Nietzsche's maternal grandmother and his father's two unmarried sisters.
After the death of Nietzsche's grandmother in 1856, the family moved into their own house, now Nietzsche-Haus, a museum and Nietzsche study centre.
Education
Later he attended the famous old boarding school of Pforta and then the universities of Bonn and Leipzig, where he studied the Greek and Latin classics.
In a secondhand bookstore at Leipzig he accidentally discovered the main work of Arthur Schopenhauer, the German philosopher, and was profoundly impressed.
He entered Bonn University in 1864 as a theology and philology student.
His university career lasted ten years.
In 1869, when Nietzsche had already published some scholarly articles but had not yet received his doctorate, he was called to the chair of classical philology at the University of Basel, Switzerland.
Leipzig hurriedly conferred the degree.
Career
He read David Strauss’s skeptical Life of Jesus (1835–1836), discovered Arthur Schopenhaur’s atheistic philosophy, and became friends with Richard Wagner, leading to a stormy relationship.
Nietzsche became a professor in classical philology in Basel, Switzerland, in 1869.
In 1879 Nietzsche resigned from the university, pleading ill health, and received a small pension.
Henceforth he lived very modestly, spending his summers in Switzerland and his winters in Italy.
In 1879 and 1880 he published two sequels to Human, All-too-human, and in the following two years MorgenröteMorgenrote (The Dawn), which deals with moral questions, and Die fröhlichefrohliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science or The Joyful Wisdom.
All these books consist of short sections, about a page each, which are equally notable for their excellent style and for the incisiveness and frequent originality of the ideas. Then Nietzsche tried to bring together his most important conclusions in Also sprach Zarathustra (published in four parts, 1883-1892; Thus Spoke Zarathustra).
The first two parts appeared separately in 1883, the third in 1884.
They went almost entirely unnoticed.
His final decade of sanity produced his major works, including his attacks on Christianity, Wagner, traditional morality, and most aspects of the European philosophical tradition and its greatest icons, such as Socrates, Plato, and Immanuel Kant (strangely, he said little about Aristotle).
While he despised Christianity, Nietzsche admired Jesus himself, or at least the historical Jesus who, Nietzsche thought, the church had distorted.
He shares with Max Weber the credit (or blame perhaps) for switching ethical discourse from virtues to values.
His ethics involve a preference for aristocratic values over slave morality, the Übermensch, and the claim that we create our values.
From this one might conclude that therefore “anything goes. ”
He did not accept the apparent corollary of nihilism that Fyodor Dostoyevsky (among others) claimed followed from its premises.
Instead, it is our task to create or invent our own values and also to create the meaning of life for ourselves, a view repeated in the twentieth century by philosophers as diverse as Karl Popper and Jean-Paul Sartre. Nietzsche’s first book proposed an instinctual, amoral, Dionysian creative energy that has been submerged and repressed by an Apollonian force of logic and sobriety (an anticipation perhaps of subsequent work on the left brain versus the right brain).
This is in striking contrast to Karl Marx’s opposite argument (made by many leftist thinkers) that the real problem is that the church has taken the side of the powers that be, sanctifying their exploitation of the weak and vulnerable members of society.
Many Nietzsche scholars respond to criticism about the unsystematic and even contradictory nature of his ideas by claiming he was not propounding a system but proposing ideas and hypotheses.
Thus, one can ask of preferences for affirming life versus denying life, why is the former preferable?”
What is the basis for this other than Nietzsche’s own opinions?
Why cannot revenge, resentment, and hatred be noble under some circumstances if people create their own values?
This is a problem not unique to Nietzsche because it rests on the fact-value distinction Weber and Nietzsche helped formulate. There is also a question of the coherence of his critique of Christianity.
In his ultimate critique of Christianity, On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), he argues that Christian morals have emerged from revenge, resentment, hatred, impotence, and cowardice.
He may well be correct about this and claims that Paul or the church or someone else distorted the original message of Jesus, but perspectivism and subjectivism regarding truth rule out any argument that this is correct.
Of the fourth part Nietzsche printed a mere forty copies, then distributed only seven of these among his friends and gave up his earlier plan to continue the work.
To that end he published Jenseits von Gut und BöseBose (1886; Beyond Good and Evil) and Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887; Toward a Genealogy of Morals).
In 1888, Nietzsche completed five books: Der Fall Wagner (1888; The Wagner Case), a short polemic; GötzendämmerungGotzendammerung (1889; The Twilight of the Idols), a hundred-page summary of his philosophy; Der Antichrist (1895), a vehement polemic against Christianity; then Ecce Homo (1908), a very witty attempt at a self-estimate, with such chapter titles as "Why I Am So Wise, " "Why I Am So Clever, " and, heading illuminating discussions of Nietzsche's works, one by one--"Why I Write Such Excellent Books"; and finally, Nietzsche Contra Wagner (1895), a selection of passages from his earlier works, slightly edited. In January 1889, Nietzsche collapsed in a street in Turin in northern Italy.
If his insanity was an atypical form of general paralysis, as seems probable, Nietzsche must have had a syphilitic infection earlier in his life.
During all of his adult life he lived as an ascetic.
And while his last works show an increasing lack of inhibition, they are certainly not the works of a madman: he merely declares openly, and sometimes with considerable force, what he had earlier said in his letters and notes.
None of his books can be written off as products of insanity. The Meaning of Nietzsche.
By the time he died, Nietzsche was world-famous.
And in his published work, Freud remarked that Nietzsche's "premonitions and insights often agree in the most amazing manner with the laborious results of psychoanalysis.
"Most of the major German and French philosophers, poets, and novelists of the first half of the 20th century show Nietzsche's influence, and many have paid generous tribute to him.
Nietzsche himself remarked that "scholarly oxen" had misconstrued the notion of the overman as if it referred to a species that might come into being as the next step of evolution.
In fact, Nietzsche urges humankind to "remain faithful to the earth, " not to entertain otherworldly hopes which constitute a slander of this world.
Toward the end of The Twilight of the Idols, Goethe is pictured as a classical example.
All the men Nietzsche most admired were men of surpassing intelligence and creative power, passionate men who were able to employ their passions creatively.
Leonardo da Vinci is another example.
Cesare Borgia, the Renaissance tyrant, on the other hand, was, a popular misconception notwithstanding, not one of Nietzsche's idols.
He does not exhort us to strive for power but to be honest with ourselves.
And he would have us seek the "superhuman" power represented by men like Goethe and Leonardo instead of the "human, all-too-human" power of military despots.
Nietzsche derides the power of the young German empire.
It was also Nietzsche who first used the word "sublimation" in its contemporary sense. There are many moral codes, and the adherents of each consider their own the moral code.
A distinction that seems to Nietzsche especially illuminating is that between codes that have originated in a ruling class and codes that have originated among the oppressed.
He calls them master moralities and slave moralities.
He does not claim that some individuals are masters and others slaves, and he insists that modern morality represents a mixture of both types, full of inconsistencies.
But in ancient Greece and Rome he finds, on the whole, master moralities; in Christianity, a slave morality.
Without identifying himself with master morality, he prefers it to slave morality.
What he most abhors is the deep resentment which seems to him the key to slave morality: the resentment against the rich, the powerful, the masters; the resentment against reason, against the body, against sex; the resentment against this world, which is slandered by way of extolling another, fictitious world.
Lack of candor and courage parades as meekness and humility, and the hope to behold the punishment of one's enemies in hell hides behind talk of charity.
What Nietzsche celebrates is not, as uninformed detractors and admirers have supposed, brawn and brutality but rather the free spirit whose magnanimity is genuinely above resentment; the superior intellect in a well-developed body; the boundless affirmation of this world which considers even the eternal recurrence of the same events at gigantic intervals not a horrible but a joyous thought. Scholarship.
The most complete German edition of Nietzsche's works (Musarionausgabe) comprises 23 volumes; the authorized, but inadequate, English translation edited by Oscar Levy, 18 volumes.
Religion
While Nietzsche clearly endorsed all three of the above, he is best classified as an aesthetic, amoral atheist.
He challenged the moral idea that exploitation, domination, injury to the weak, destruction, and appropriation are universally evil behaviors.
Nietzsche argued in The Anti-Christ (1895) that noble values in Roman society were corrupted by the rise of Christianity, and he discussed many of its main figures, concluding that Christianity is a religion for the weak and unhealthy whose effect has been to undermine the healthy qualities of more noble peoples.
Politics
It is used basically as a this-worldly alternative to traditional piety.
Übermensch is related to both the weakest points in Nietzsche’s philosophy, lack of systematic, logical argument, and the strongest point, his brilliant critique of egalitarianism, especially anarchism, socialism, and democracy.
While it is unfair to see him as a precursor of National Socialism, he can be seen as a precursor of postmodernism and theories of social construction with their subjectivist theories of truth.
In addition nothing in his theories seems to rule out racist, fascist, or even Communist ideologies (unlike Kant, utility, that is, all the theories he despises).
Views
His ontology includes his best known saying, “God is dead”; truth is subjective; the will to power; and eternal recurrence.
Nietzsche’s philosophy is mostly based on three components: his ontology, his theory of ethics, and his views on intellectual history.
Many would say the same about Plato, who is also contentiously associated with twentieth-century totalitarian ideologies.
However, it can then still be asked, “If it is true that we invent our values then we invented the perverse one such as slave morality, human equality, Platonism.
The last point leads to the problem of nihilism.
Nihilism (from nihil, Latin for nothing) can be defined as consisting of three main components, atheism, moral skepticism, and the claim that life has no meaning.
Nietzsche’s Übermensch idea can be misunderstood if it is taken in a collectivist rather than a radical individualist sense.
It has been translated as both “superman” and “overman. ”
The former is highly misleading and the latter unclear.
The best term might seem to be “superior man. ”
But this also is misleading.
It is arguable that everyone, or at least anyone, could be an Übermensch, a person who mastered her or his passions and became a creator rather than a creature.
But again this must not be confused with later Nazi or other racial, anti-Semitic, nationalist, genetic based theories of group superiority.
Quotations:
Nietzsche called the Primordial Unity, which revives Dionysian nature. He describes this primordial unity as the increase of strength, experience of fullness and plenitude bestowed by frenzy.
Frenzy acts as an intoxication, and is crucial for the physiological condition that enables making of any art.
Stimulated by this state, person's artistic will is enhanced:
"In this state one enriches everything out of one's own fullness: whatever one sees, whatever wills is seen swelled, taut, strong, overloaded with strength. A man in this state transforms things until they mirror his power—until they are reflections of his perfection. This having to transform into perfection is—art. "
He condemned institutionalized Christianity for emphasizing a morality of pity (Mitleid), which assumes an inherent illness in society: "Christianity is called the religion of pity. Pity stands opposed to the tonic emotions which heighten our vitality: it has a depressing effect. We are deprived of strength when we feel pity. That loss of strength which suffering as such inflicts on life is still further increased and multiplied by pity. Pity makes suffering contagious. "
"A nihilist is a man who judges that the real world ought not to be, and that the world as it ought to be does not exist. According to this view, our existence (action, suffering, willing, feeling) has no meaning: this 'in vain' is the nihilists' pathos—an inconsistency on the part of the nihilists. "
— Friedrich Nietzsche, taken from The Will to Power, section 585, translated by Walter Kaufmann.
While interpretations of Nietzsche's overman vary wildly, here is one of his quotations from Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Prologue, §§3–4):
"I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?. .. All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood, and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is ape to man? A laughing stock or painful embarrassment. And man shall be that to overman: a laughingstock or painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape. .. The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth. .. Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss . .. what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end. "
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre puts Nietzsche in a high place in the history of philosophy. While criticizing nihilism and Nietzsche together as a sign of general decay, he still commends him for recognizing psychological motives behind Kant and Hume's moral philosophy:
For it was Nietzsche's historic achievement to understand more clearly than any other philosopher. .. not only that what purported to be appeals of objectivity were in fact expressions of subjective will, but also the nature of the problems that this posed for philosophy.