Friedrich Nietzsche

Early Life and Education

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, in Röcken, a village in Prussian Saxony. His father, a Lutheran pastor, died when Nietzsche was four, and he was raised by his mother, grandmother, and two aunts. He excelled as a student at the elite boarding school Schulpforta and at the universities of Bonn and Leipzig, where he studied classical philology.

At Leipzig, two encounters proved decisive: his discovery of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation, which struck him with the force of revelation, and his meeting with Richard Wagner, whose music and personality fascinated and inspired him.

The Professor

So extraordinary was Nietzsche's scholarly promise that he was appointed Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869, at the age of twenty-four — before he had even completed his doctorate (which was awarded without examination on the strength of his published work). His first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), combined philological scholarship with Schopenhauerian metaphysics and Wagnerian enthusiasm to argue that Greek tragedy was born from the creative tension between the Apollonian (order, form, individuation) and the Dionysian (chaos, ecstasy, dissolution) — and that modernity needed a similar rebirth of tragic culture.

The book was brilliant but unconventional, and it damaged Nietzsche's reputation among classicists. His health — always fragile, plagued by migraines, eye problems, and digestive ailments — deteriorated further during his service as a medical orderly in the Franco-Prussian War. He resigned his professorship in 1879 at the age of thirty-four.

The Wandering Years

For the next decade, Nietzsche led a peripatetic existence, moving between boarding houses in Switzerland, Italy, and the French Riviera, living on a modest university pension. These years of physical suffering and social isolation were also his most productive. He broke with Wagner (whose anti-Semitism and German nationalism he came to despise) and with Schopenhauer's pessimism.

Human, All Too Human (1878) marked his turn toward a more scientific, skeptical, and aphoristic style. The Gay Science (1882) proclaimed the death of God and introduced the idea of eternal recurrence. Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885), written in a prophetic, quasi-biblical style, presented his most affirmative vision: the Übermensch who creates new values, the eternal recurrence as the supreme test of life-affirmation, and the will to power as the fundamental drive of all living things.

Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) developed his critique of morality. The Genealogy, in particular, is a masterpiece of philosophical argumentation: it traces the origins of 'good and evil' to the ressentiment of the weak against the strong, reveals the ascetic ideal as a disguised form of the will to power, and exposes the 'slave revolt in morality' by which Christian values inverted the aristocratic equation of 'good = noble = powerful = happy.'

Collapse and Death

In January 1889, in Turin, Nietzsche collapsed after reportedly throwing his arms around the neck of a horse being flogged in the street. He had suffered a complete mental breakdown, from which he never recovered. The most probable diagnosis is tertiary syphilis, though other causes have been proposed. He spent the remaining eleven years of his life in the care of his mother and then his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who manipulated his unpublished manuscripts and promoted a distorted, proto-fascist interpretation of his work. Nietzsche died on August 25, 1900, in Weimar.

Legacy

Nietzsche's influence on twentieth-century thought is immense and pervasive. Existentialism (Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre, Camus), psychoanalysis (Freud acknowledged him as an anticipator), postmodernism (Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze), and literary modernism (Mann, Rilke, Yeats) all bear his mark. His misappropriation by Nazi ideology — facilitated by his sister's editorial manipulations — has been thoroughly debunked by modern scholarship, which recognizes him as a fierce critic of nationalism, anti-Semitism, and mass politics.