Background

Friedrich Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, in Röcken, a village in Saxony where his father Carl Ludwig Nietzsche (1813-1849) served as a Lutheran pastor. The father's death, when the child was 4 years old, was a shattering blow to which Nietzsche often referred in his later writings. This death left Nietzsche in a household of women: his mother Franziska Nietzsche (née Oehler) (1826-1897), grandmother, several aunts, and a sister, Elizabeth.

Education

After attending local schools in Naumburg, in 1858 Nietzsche won a scholarship to Pforta, one of the best boarding schools in Germany. Here he received thorough training in the classics and acquired several lifetime friends. With the highest recommendations of his Pforta teachers, Nietzsche enrolled in the University of Bonn in 1864.

There he pursued classical studies with Friedrich Ritschl, and when the latter, within the year, moved to Leipzig, Nietzsche followed him. Nietzsche attempted to enter into the social life of the students, even joining a dueling fraternity, but he soon discovered that his sense of his own mission in life had isolated him from the pursuits and interests most students shared.

Nietzsche's early publications in classical philology so impressed his teacher that when a chair of philology opened up at Basel, Ritschl was able to secure it for Nietzsche, then only 24 years old and still without his degree. This the University of Leipzig gave him on the strength of his writings without requiring an examination, and Nietzsche entered upon a teaching career. Important for Nietzsche's intellectual development was his discovery in these Leipzig years of the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Lange and the music dramas of Richard Wagner.

He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Leipzig in 1869.

Career

Nietzsche had a brilliant school and university career, culminating in May 1869 when he was called to a chair in classical philology at Basel. At age 24, he was the youngest ever appointed to that post. His teacher Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl wrote in his letter of reference that Nietzsche was so promising that "He will simply be able to do anything he wants to do." Most of Nietzsche’s university work and his early publications were in philology, but he was already interested in philosophy, particularly the work of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Albert Lange. Before the opportunity at Basel arose, Nietzsche had planned to pursue a second doctorate in philosophy, with a project about theories of teleology in the time since Kant.

When he was a student in Leipzig, Nietzsche met Richard Wagner, and after his move to Basel, he became a frequent guest in the Wagner household at Villa Tribschen in Lucerne. Nietzsche’s friendship with Wagner (and Cosima Liszt Wagner) lasted into the mid-1870s, and that friendship - together with their ultimate break - were key touchstones in his personal and professional life. His first book, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872), was not the careful work of classical scholarship the field might have expected, but a controversial polemic combining speculations about the collapse of the tragic culture of fifth-century Athens with a proposal that Wagnerian music-drama might become the source of a renewed tragic culture for contemporary Germany. The work was generally ill-received within classical studies - and savagely reviewed by Ulrich Wilamovitz-Möllendorff, who went on to become one of the leading classicists of the generation - even though it contained some striking interpretive insights. Following the first book, Nietzsche continued his efforts to influence the broader direction of German intellectual culture, publishing essays intended for a wide public on David Friedrich Strauss, on the "use of history for life," on Schopenhauer, and on Wagner. These essays are known collectively as the Untimely Meditations.

Although he assisted in early planning for Wagner’s Bayreuth project and attended the first festival, Nietzsche was not favorably impressed by the cultural atmosphere there, and his relationship with the Wagners soured after 1876. Nietzsche’s health, always fragile, forced him to take leave from Basel in 1876-1877. He used the time to explore a broadly naturalistic critique of traditional morality and culture - an interest encouraged by his friendship with Paul Rée, who was with Nietzsche in Sorrento working on his Origin of Moral Sensations. Nietzsche’s research resulted in Human, All-too-human (1878), which introduced his readers to the corrosive attacks on conventional pieties for which he became famous, as well as to a style of writing in short, numbered paragraphs and pithy aphorisms to which he often returned in later work. When he sent the book to the Wagners early in 1878, it effectively ended their friendship: Nietzsche later wrote that his book and Wagner’s Parsifal libretto crossed in the mail "as if two swords had crossed."

Nietzsche’s health did not measurably improve during the leave, and by 1879, he was forced to resign his professorship altogether. As a result, he was freed to write and to develop the style that suited him. He published a book almost every year thereafter. These works began with Daybreak (1881), which collected critical observations on morality and its underlying psychology, and there followed the mature works for which Nietzsche is best known: The Gay Science (1882, second expanded edition 1887), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), and in the last year of his productive life Twilight of the Idols (1888) and The Wagner Case (1888), along with The Antichrist and his intellectual biography, Ecce Homo, which was published only later. At the beginning of this period, Nietzsche enjoyed an intense but ultimately painful friendship with Rée and Lou Salomé, a brilliant young Russian student. The three initially planned to live together in a kind of intellectual commune, but Nietzsche and Rée both developed a romantic interest in Salomé, and after Nietzsche unsuccessfully proposed marriage, Salomé and Rée departed for Berlin. Salomé later wrote an illuminating book about Nietzsche, which first proposed an influential periodization of his philosophical development.

In later years, Nietzsche moved frequently in the effort to find a climate that would improve his health, settling into a pattern of spending winters near the Mediterranean (usually in Italy) and summers in Sils Maria, Switzerland. His symptoms included intense headaches, nausea, and trouble with his eyesight. Recent work (Huenemann 2013) has convincingly argued that he probably suffered from a retro-orbital meningioma, a slow-growing tumor on the brain surface behind his right eye. In January 1889, Nietzsche collapsed in the street in Turin, and when he regained consciousness he wrote a series of increasingly deranged letters. His close Basel friend Franz Overbeck was gravely concerned and traveled to Turin, where he found Nietzsche suffering from dementia. After unsuccessful treatment in Basel and Jena, he was released into the care of his mother, and later his sister, eventually lapsing entirely into silence. He lived on until 1900 when he died of a stroke complicated by pneumonia.

During his illness, his sister Elisabeth assumed control of his literary legacy, and she eventually published The Antichrist and Ecce Homo, as well as a selection of writing from his notebooks for which she used the title The Will to Power, following Nietzsche’s remark in the Genealogy that he planned a major work under that title. The editorial work was not well-founded in Nietzsche’s surviving plans for the book and was also marred by Elisabeth’s strong anti-Semitic commitments, which had been extremely distressing to Nietzsche himself. As a result, The Will to Power leaves a somewhat misleading impression of the general character and content of the writings left in Nietzsche’s notebooks. That writing is now available in an outstanding critical edition.

Achievements

• Nietzsche is regarded as a major influence on 20th-century philosophy, theology, and art. His ideas on individuality, morality and the meaning of existence contributed to the thinking of philosophers Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault; Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, two of the founding figures of psychiatry; and writers such as Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Thomas Mann, and Hermann Hesse.
  
  Less beneficially, certain aspects of Nietzsche's work were used by the Nazi Party of the 1930s-'40s as justification for its activities; this selective and misleading use of his work has somewhat darkened his reputation for later audiences.
  
  His thought enjoyed renewed popularity in the 1960s, and his ideas have since had a profound impact on 20th and early-21st century thinkers across philosophy - especially in schools of continental philosophy such as existentialism, postmodernism, and post-structuralism - as well as art, literature, psychology, politics, and popular culture.
  
  Friedrich-Nietzsche-Preis, a German literary award established in 1996, continues to carry his legacy. Nietzsche-Haus, where he spent his childhood in Naumburg, has now been turned into a museum.

Works

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• book

  • The Antichrist

    (The Antichrist comprises a total of sixty-two short chapt...)

    1888
  • The Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ

    (Twilight of the Idols is a grand declaration of war on re...)

    1888
  • Untimely Meditations

    (The four early essays in Untimely Meditations are key doc...)

    1876
  • On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense

    (On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense is an (initially...)

    1873
  • Thus Spoke Zarathustra

    (First published between 1883 and 1891, this philosophical...)

    1883
  • The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms

    ("Nietzsche contra Wagner" is a critical essay by Friedric...)

    1888
  • On the Genealogy of Morality

    (On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic is an 1887 book b...)

    1887
  • The Dawn of Day

    (The Dawn of Day or Dawn or Daybreak is an 1881 book by th...)

    1881
  • Greek Music Drama

    ("The Greek Music Drama" marks an intriguing moment in the...)

    1870
  • We Philologists

    (A search for a definition of what classical culture reall...)

    1874
  • Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

    (This volume presents Nietzsche's remarkable collection of...)

    1878
  • The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music

    (The first book by the author of the classic philosophical...)

    1872
  • The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs

    (Nietzsche called The Gay Science "the most personal of al...)

    1882
  • Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

    (For Nietzsche, the Age of Greek Tragedy was indeed a trag...)

    1873
  • Beyond Good & Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future

    (It represents Nietzsche's attempt to sum up his philosoph...)

    1886

Religion

Nietzsche was raised in a religious family, his father was a Lutheran pastor. Nietzsche is arguably most famous for his criticisms of traditional European moral commitments, together with their foundations in Christianity. This critique is very wide-ranging; it aims to undermine not just religious faith or philosophical moral theory, but also many central aspects of ordinary moral consciousness, some of which are difficult to imagine doing without (e.g., altruistic concern, guilt for wrongdoing, moral responsibility, the value of compassion, the demand for equal consideration of persons, and so on).

Views

Nietzsche believed that the European man was standing at a critical turning point. The advance of scientific enlightenment, in particular the Darwinian theory, had destroyed the old religious and metaphysical underpinnings for the idea of human dignity. "God is dead, " declares Nietzsche's spokesman Zarathustra, and man, no longer "the image of God," is a chance product of a nature indifferent to purpose or value. The great danger is that man will find his existence meaningless. Unless a new grounding for values is provided, Nietzsche predicted a rapid decline into nihilism and barbarity.

Nietzsche aimed in all his work to provide a new meaning for human existence in a meaningless world. In the absence of any transcendent sanction, men must create their own values. Nietzsche's writings are either analyses and criticisms of the old system of values or attempts to formulate a new system. For European men, the Judeo-Christian tradition was the source of the old values. Nietzsche attacked it head-on in such works as A Genealogy of Morals (1887) and The Antichrist (1888).

In his constructive works, Nietzsche sought to find in life itself a force that would serve to set human existence apart. He found it in the hypothesis of the will to power - the urge to dominate and master. All creatures desire this, but the only man has achieved sufficient power to turn the force back upon himself. Self-mastery, self-overcoming: these are the qualities that give a unique value to human life. The ideal man, the "superman," will achieve a fierce joy in mastering his own existence, ordering his passions, and giving style to his character. The sublimation of passion and of life's circumstances that the ideal man achieves in his self-overcoming will release in him a flood of creative energy. The lives of such men will be the justification of reality; their preferences will constitute the standard of value.

All morality is thus the result of self-overcoming, but Nietzsche discerned a criterion by which to distinguish the morality of the superman from the "decadent" morality of Christianity. The latter undercuts earthly life in favor of an illusory afterlife, condemns self-assertion as pride, and perverts bodily functions with guilt and fear. Its tendency is toward nihilism and the denial of life. The new morality, on the other hand, will affirm life, encourage self-assertion, and eliminate guilt consciousness. In Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883) Nietzsche formulated the ultimate test of the superman's affirmations. Confronted with the hypothesis of eternal recurrence, the notion that the world process is cyclical and eternal, the superman still affirms life. Let it be - again and again - with all its joys and sorrows.

Quotations: "Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed."

"There are two different types of people in the world, those who want to know, and those who want to believe."

"Enjoy life. This is not a dress rehearsal."

"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."

"I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you."

Personality

Loneliness and physical pain were thus the constant backgrounds of his life - though Nietzsche later came to interpret them as the necessary conditions for his work.

Some modern scholars believe that he was homosexual, but others dismiss this view.

Physical Characteristics: Nietzsche suffered a collapse in 1889 while living in Turin, Italy. The last decade of his life was spent in a state of mental incapacitation. The reason for his insanity is still unknown, although historians have attributed it to causes as varied as syphilis, an inherited brain disease, a tumor, and overuse of sedative drugs. After a stay in an asylum, Nietzsche was cared for by his mother in Naumburg and his sister in Weimar, Germany. He died in Weimar on August 25, 1900.

Quotes from others about the person

• "Only Nietzsche and Blake know a wholly fallen Godhead, a Godhead which is an absolutely alien Nihil, but the full reversal of that Nihil is apocalypse itself, an apocalypse which is an absolute joy, and Blake and Nietzsche are those very writers who have most evoked that joy." - Thomas J. J. Altizer, in Godhead and the Nothing (2003), Preface
  
  "The philosopher John Searle once told me that reading Nietzsche was like drinking cognac - a sip was good, but you didn't want to drink the whole bottle." - Gary Kamiya, "Falling Out With Superman", The New York Times, January 23, 2000

Interests

• Ontology, epistemology, Greek and Christian thought, theory of values, nihilism, aesthetics, cultural theory

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  David Strauss, Arthur Schopenhauer

• Writers

  Friedrich Hölderlin, Ernst Ortlepp

Connections

Friedrich Nietzsche did not marry. He is said to have proposed to Lou Salomé, a Russian student, in around 1892-1893 thrice; but each time he was rejected by her.

Father:

Carl Ludwig Nietzsche

(1813-1849)

Mother:

Franziska Nietzsche

(née Oehler) (1826-1897)

Sister:

Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche

She was the creator of the Nietzsche Archive in 1894.

Friend:

Paul Rée

Friend:

Richard Wagner

Friend:

Paul Deussen

teacher:

Friedrich Ritschl

References

• Nietzsche: The Man and his Philosophy
  1965
• Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist
  1950
• What Nietzsche Really Said
  2000
• The Nietzsche Reader
  1954