Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, in Röcken, Prussia, the son of Lutheran pastor Carl Ludwig Nietzsche and Franziska Oehler. His father died in 1849, after which the family moved to Naumburg. Nietzsche attended Schulpforta, a rigorous Protestant boarding school, studying Greek, Latin, poetry, and music. In 1864, he entered the University of Bonn to study theology and classical philology, but abandoned theology within a year. He followed philologist Friedrich Ritschl to Leipzig, where he read Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation and first met Richard Wagner. Ritschl secured him a Basel professorship at age twenty-four. He accepted Basel’s chair of classical philology in 1869, renounced Prussian citizenship, and never took another nationality. During the Franco-Prussian War, he served as a medical orderly and suffered illnesses that aggravated his poor health. His first book, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872), interpreted Greek tragedy through Apollonian form and Dionysian ecstasy. Many classical scholars rejected it. Nietzsche later broke with Wagner, disturbed by Bayreuth, Wagner’s nationalism, and his embrace of Christianity. In Human, All Too Human (1878), Daybreak (1881), and The Gay Science (1882), Nietzsche used aphorisms to challenge metaphysics, conventional morality, and religion. The Gay Science includes the madman’s announcement that “God is dead,” a diagnosis of European cultural crisis rather than a celebratory catchphrase. After resigning from Basel in 1879, Nietzsche lived on a pension while moving through Switzerland and Italy. Thus Spoke Zarathustra was published in four parts from 1883 to 1885. Its prophet presents the Übermensch and eternal recurrence. Beyond Good and Evil (1886) attacked philosophical dogmatism. On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) traced moral concepts historically, contrasting master and slave moralities and criticizing ascetic ideals. He also wrote The Antichrist, Twilight of the Idols, and Ecce Homo in 1888. In January 1889, Nietzsche collapsed in Turin and never resumed independent intellectual work. He was cared for first by his mother and then by his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. He died in Weimar on August 25, 1900. Elisabeth controlled his literary estate and promoted editions that encouraged nationalist readings. Nietzsche, however, repeatedly criticized German nationalism and antisemitism in letters and published writings. The Will to Power appeared after his death as a compilation assembled from notebooks, not as a book he completed. His influence subsequently reached writers, psychologists, and philosophers, including existentialists and poststructuralists, while debates persist over his perspectivism, morality, and politics.