Nietzsche

Nietzsche was born in the small German town of Rocken bei Lutzen in October 1844. His father was a town minister, and his grandfathers were Lutheran ministers. After graduating from Schulpforta, Nietzsche entered the University of Bonn in 1864 as a theology and philology student, but his interests gravitated more exclusively towards philology -- a discipline which then centered upon the interpretation of classical and biblical texts. Inspired by Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl, and following him to the University of Leipzig in 1865 -- an institution located closer to Nietzsche's hometown of Naumburg -- Nietzsche quickly established his own academic reputation through his published essays on Aristotle, Theognis and Simonides.

In 1867, as he approached the age of 23, Nietzsche entered his required military service and was assigned to an equestrian field artillery regiment close to Naumburg, during which time he lived at home with his mother. While attempting to leap-mount into the saddle upon a particularly unruly horse, he suffered a serious chest injury and was put on sick leave after his chest wound refused to heal.

In 1869, Nietzsche began teaching philology at the University of Basel. At Basel, Nietzsche's satisfaction with his life among his philology colleagues was limited, and he established closer intellectual ties to the historians Franz Overbeck and Jacob Burkhardt, whose lectures he attended. Never in outstanding health, further complications arose from Nietzsche's August-October 1870 service as a hospital attendant during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71). He witnessed the traumatic effects of battle, took close care of wounded soldiers, contracted diphtheria and dysentery, and subsequently experienced a painful variety of health difficulties for the rest of his life.

On a visit to Rome in 1882, Nietzsche, now at age thirty-seven, met Lou Salome, a twenty-one-year-old Russian woman who was studying philosophy and theology in Zurich. He soon fell in love with her, and offered his hand in marriage. She declined, and the future of Nietzsche's friendship with her and Paul Rée appears to have suffered as a consequence.

On the morning of January 3, 1889, while in Turin, Nietzsche experienced a mental breakdown which left him an invalid for the rest of his life. Upon witnessing a horse being whipped by a coachman at the Piazza Carlo Alberto, Nietzsche threw his arms around the horse's neck and collapsed, never to return to full sanity. The exact cause of Nietzsche's incapacitation still remains unclear. That Nietzsche had an extraordinarily sensitive nervous constitution and took an assortment of medications is well-documented as a more general fact.

Writings:

The Birth of Tragedy - set forth an alternative conception to the late 18th/early 19th century understanding of Greek culture, which hailed ancient Greece as the epitome of noble simplicity, calm grandeur, clear blue skies, and rational serenity.

The Gay Science - Nietzsche set forth some of the existential ideas for which he became famous, namely, the proclamation that "God is dead" and the doctrine of "eternal recurrence"-- the idea that one is, or might be, fated to relive forever every moment of one's life, with no omission whatsoever of any pleasurable or painful detail.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, A Book for All and None - One of Nietzsche's most famous works, and Nietzsche himself regarded it as among his most significant. Though Thus Spoke Zarathustra is antagonistic to the Judeo-Christian world-view, its poetic and prophetic style relies upon many, often inverted, Old and New Testament allusions.

Beyond Good and Evil, Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future - Nietzsche identified imagination, self-assertion, danger, originality and the "creation of values" as qualities of genuine philosophers, as opposed to incidental characters who engage in dusty scholarship. Nietzsche also took aim at some of the world's great philosophers' key presuppositions, who grounded their outlooks wholeheartedly upon concepts such as "self-consciousness," "free will," and "either/or" bipolar thinking. Alternatively, Nietzsche philosophizes from "the perspective of life" which he regards as "beyond good and evil," and challenges the deeply-entrenched moral idea that exploitation, domination, injury to the weak, destruction and appropriation are universally objectionable behaviors. Above all, Nietzsche believes that living things aim to discharge their strength and express their "will to power" -- a pouring-out of expansive energy which, quite naturally, can entail danger, pain, lies, deception and masks.

On the Genealogy of Morals, A Polemic - composed of three sustained essays which advance the critique of Christianity expressed in Beyond Good and Evil. The first essay continues the discussion of master morality versus servant morality, and maintains that the traditional ideals set forth as holy and morally good within Christian morality are products of self-deception, since they were forged in the bad air of revenge, resentment, hatred, impotence, and cowardice. In the second essay, Nietzsche continues with an account of how feelings of guilt, or the "bad conscience," arise merely as a consequence of an unhealthy Christian morality which turns an "evil eye" towards our natural inclinations. In the third essay, Nietzsche focuses upon the ascetic ideals typical of the social representatives of art, religion and philosophy, and he offers a particularly scathing critique of the priesthood: the priests are allegedly a group of weak people who shepherd even weaker people as a way to experience power for themselves.

Influence on 20th Century Thought:

Nietzsche's thought extended a deep influence during the 20th century, especially in Continental Europe. In English-speaking countries, his positive reception has been less resonant. During the last decade of Nietzsche's life and the first decade of the 20th century, his thought was particularly attractive to avant-garde artists who saw themselves on the periphery of established social fashion and practice. His tendency to seek explanations for commonly-accepted values and outlooks in the less-elevated realms of sheer animal instinct was also crucial to Sigmund Freud's development of psychoanalysis. Later, during the 1930's, aspects of Nietzsche's thought were espoused by the Nazis and Italian Fascists, partly due to the encouragement of Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche through her solicitations with Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. It was possible for the Nazi interpreters to assemble, quite selectively, various passages from Nietzsche's writings whose juxtaposition appeared to justify war, aggression and domination for the sake of nationalistic and racial self-glorification. Nietzsche became especially influential in French philosophical circles during the 1960's-1980's, when his "God is dead" declaration, his perspectivism, and his emphasis upon power as the real motivator and explanation for people's actions revealed new ways to challenge established authority and launch effective social critique.

This information was taken from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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