Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher and classical scholar whose attacks on Christianity, conventional morality and the idea of objective truth made him one of the most provocative and influential thinkers of the modern age. Writing in a brilliant, aphoristic style, he announced the "death of God" and asked how human beings could find meaning and create values once traditional beliefs had collapsed. He wrote his major works in about sixteen years before a mental breakdown in 1889 ended his working life, and his reputation was then shaped, and badly distorted, by his sister and by the Nazis.

Nietzsche was born on 15 October 1844 in Röcken, a village near Leipzig in the Prussian province of Saxony, in the Kingdom of Prussia. His father, a Lutheran pastor, died in 1849, and he grew up in Naumburg in a household of women, including his mother and his younger sister Elisabeth. He received a rigorous classical education at the boarding school of Schulpforta, then studied theology and classical philology at Bonn before following his teacher Friedrich Ritschl to Leipzig. There, in 1865, he discovered the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, and in 1868 he met the composer Richard Wagner, who became a mentor and friend.

In 1869, aged only twenty-four and before completing his doctorate, he was appointed professor of classical philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland, giving up his Prussian citizenship. He briefly served as a volunteer medical orderly in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, where he fell seriously ill. His first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), argued that Greek tragedy arose from the union of two forces, the Apollonian, representing order, form and clarity, and the Dionysian, representing intoxication, passion and the dissolution of the self. It praised Wagner's music as a rebirth of the tragic spirit and was condemned by most philologists.

Nietzsche broke with Wagner in the late 1870s, repelled by the nationalism, antisemitism and Christian piety he saw in the composer's circle at Bayreuth. Human, All Too Human (1878) marked a turn to a cooler, sceptical style. Constant ill health, including migraines, vomiting and failing eyesight, forced him to resign his professorship in 1879. On a small pension he spent the next decade moving between boarding houses in the Swiss Alps at Sils Maria, and in Italian and French cities such as Genoa, Nice and Turin, writing prolifically. In 1882 he fell in love with the young Russian writer Lou Salomé, who rejected him.

His most important books came in these years: Daybreak (1881), The Gay Science (1882), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883 to 1885), a poetic work whose prophet borrows the name of Zoroaster, Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and On the Genealogy of Morality (1887). In 1888 alone he wrote Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, The Case of Wagner and the autobiographical Ecce Homo. His books sold poorly, and some he had to publish at his own expense.

The famous claim that "God is dead", made in The Gay Science, was not a simple boast of atheism. Nietzsche meant that belief in the Christian God was no longer credible for educated Europeans, and that most had not yet grasped the consequences. If God goes, so does the foundation of the morality built on him, and the result threatens to be nihilism, the sense that nothing has value.

In On the Genealogy of Morality he traced the history of moral ideas. He contrasted a master morality of the ancient nobility, which called its own strength, pride and vitality good, with a slave morality born of the resentment of the weak, which turned those values upside down, praising humility, pity and meekness and condemning the powerful as evil. He saw Christianity as the great triumph of slave morality and argued that its values had come to drain life of health and vigour.

Against this he set the will to power. In his writings it is chiefly a psychological principle: living things seek not merely to survive but to grow, to overcome resistance and to express their strength, and this striving can take many forms, including art, knowledge and self-discipline, not only domination of others. In some notebooks he speculated that it might be the basic character of all reality.

The Übermensch, often translated as the overman or superman, appears in Thus Spoke Zarathustra as an ideal for humanity after the death of God: a person who overcomes inherited values and creates his or her own, affirming life as it is. It is a goal of self-overcoming, not a biological race or a political ruler. Closely linked is the eternal recurrence, the thought that one's life might repeat itself, identically, infinitely many times. Nietzsche presented it chiefly as a test: whoever could welcome that thought would have achieved complete affirmation of life, an attitude he called amor fati, love of one's fate.

Nietzsche's perspectivism held that there is no view from nowhere: all knowledge is interpretation from a particular standpoint, shaped by needs and drives. He did not conclude that every view is equally good; he suggested that seeing a thing through more perspectives gives a fuller and more objective understanding of it. He was also a severe critic of German nationalism and of antisemitism, which he repeatedly denounced.

In early January 1889, in Turin, Nietzsche suffered a sudden mental collapse. He wrote strange letters signed "Dionysus" and "The Crucified", and never recovered. He was cared for first by his mother in Naumburg and then by his sister in Weimar, where he died on 25 August 1900. The cause of his illness has long been debated: the traditional diagnosis was syphilis, but modern researchers have proposed alternatives such as a brain tumour, a hereditary vascular disease or frontotemporal dementia.

Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche had married Bernhard Förster, a leading antisemitic agitator, and helped him found Nueva Germania, a colony for Germans in Paraguay. Nietzsche despised Förster and his politics. After the colony failed and her husband killed himself in 1889, Elisabeth returned to Germany and took control of her brother's papers, founding the Nietzsche Archive, which she moved to Weimar in the late 1890s. She restricted access to manuscripts, altered and even forged letters, and assembled selected notes into The Will to Power, published in 1901 and in an expanded edition in 1906, presenting it as his masterpiece, although he had abandoned plans for such a book.

Elisabeth promoted her brother as a prophet of German nationalism. She admired Benito Mussolini and became an enthusiastic supporter of Adolf Hitler, who visited the archive several times and attended her funeral in 1935. In Nazi Germany, ideologues such as Alfred Baeumler used selected phrases about the will to power, master morality and the superman to present Nietzsche as a forerunner of the regime, ignoring his hostility to antisemitism, nationalism and the state. After the Second World War scholars such as Walter Kaufmann worked to separate Nietzsche from this misuse, and the critical edition of Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, begun in the 1960s, restored his texts.

Few philosophers have been read so widely outside philosophy. Nietzsche influenced writers such as Thomas Mann and Rilke, the psychology of Sigmund Freud, existentialists including Albert Camus, and Martin Heidegger, who wrote a long study of him. Later French thinkers such as Michel Foucault drew on his genealogical method and his ideas about power and truth, making him a central figure in continental philosophy. His place in his own century is traced on the nineteenth-century philosophy page, and his homeland in the history of Germany.