Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (
October 15,
1844 â€"
August 25,
1900, ), a German
philologist and
philosopher, produced critiques of
religion,
morality, contemporary
culture, and
philosophy, centered around what he viewed as a fundamental question regarding the
life-affirming and life-denying qualities of different attitudes and beliefs.
Nietzsche's works feature unique, free-form stylization â€" combined with a wide philosophical breadth â€" through the use of (for example) logical rigor, etymology, punning, parables, paradoxes, and contradictions, employed to demonstrate the inadequacies of normative modes of thought. Although largely overlooked during his short yet productive working life, which ended with a mental collapse in 1889, Nietzsche received recognition during the first half of the
20th century in German, French, and English intellectual circles, and by the second half of the 20th century he became regarded as a highly significant and influencial figure in modern philosophy.
Youth (1844â€"1869)
Born on
October 15 1844, and christened as "Friedrich Wilhelm", Nietzsche lived in the small town of
Röcken, near
Leipzig, in the
Prussian province of
Saxony. His name comes from King
Frederick William IV of Prussia, who turned 49 on the day of Nietzsche's birth. (Nietzsche later dropped his given middle name, "Wilhelm".
[Kaufman, Walter, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, p. 22.]) Nietzsche's parents, Carl Ludwig (1813â€"1849), a
Lutheran pastor and former teacher, and Franziska Oehler (1826â€"1897), married in 1843. His sister,
Elisabeth, was born in 1846, followed by a brother, Ludwig Joseph, in 1848. After the death of their father in 1849 and the young brother in 1850, the family moved to
Naumburg, where they lived with Nietzsche's maternal grandmother and his father's two unmarried sisters. After the death of Nietzsche's grandmother in 1856 the family moved into their own house.
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Friedrich Nietzsche, 1861. |
During this time the young Nietzsche attended a boys' school and later a private school, where he became friends with Gustav Krug and Wilhelm Pinder, both of whom came from respected families. In 1854 he began to attend the
Domgymnasium in Naumburg, but after he showed particular talents in
music and language, the internationally-recognized
Schulpforta admitted him as a pupil, and there he continued his studies from 1858 to 1864. Here he became friends with
Paul Deussen and
Carl von Gersdorff. He also found time to work on
poems and musical compositions. At Schulpforta, Nietzsche received an important introduction to literature, particularly that of the ancient
Greeks and
Romans, and for the first time experienced a distance from his family life in a small-town
Christian environment.
After graduation in 1864, Nietzsche commenced studies in
theology and classical
philology at the
University of Bonn. For a short time he and Deussen became members of the
Burschenschaft Frankonia. After one semester (and to the anger of his mother) he stopped his theological studies and lost his faith.
[Schaberg, William,The Nietzsche Canon, University of Chicago Press, 1996, p32.] This may have happened in part due to his reading about this time of
David Strauss's
Life of Jesus, which had a profound effect on the young Nietzsche.
[Schaberg, William,The Nietzsche Canon, University of Chicago Press, 1996, p32.] Nietzsche then concentrated on studying
philology under Professor
Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl, whom he followed to the
University of Leipzig the next year. There, he became close friends with fellow-student
Erwin Rohde. Nietzsche's first philological publications appeared soon after.
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Friedrich Nietzsche, 1868. |
In 1865, Nietzsche became acquainted with the work of
Arthur Schopenhauer, and he read
Friedrich Albert Lange's Geschichte des Materialismus in 1866. He found both of these encounters stimulating: they encouraged him to expand his horizons beyond philology and to continue his schooling. In 1867, Nietzsche signed up for one year of voluntary service with the Prussian
artillery division in Naumburg. However, a bad riding-accident in March 1868 left him unfit for service. Consequently Nietzsche turned his attention to his studies again, completing them and first meeting with
Richard Wagner later that year.
Professor at Basel (1869â€"1879)
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Mid October, 1871. Left to right: Erwin Rohde, Carl von Gersdorff and Friedrich Nietzsche. |
Due in part to Ritschl's support, Nietzsche received an extraordinary offer to become professor of classical philology at the
University of Basel before having completed his doctorate degree or certificate for teaching. During his philological work in
Basel he discovered that the ancient poetic
meter related only to the length of syllables, different from the modern, accentuating meter. After moving to Basel, Nietzsche renounced his Prussian citizenship: for the rest of his life he remained officially
stateless. Nevertheless, he served on the Prussian side during the
Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to 1871 as a medical
orderly. In his short time in the military he experienced much, and witnessed the traumatic effects of battle. He also contracted
diphtheria and
dysentery. On returning to Basel in 1870, Nietzsche observed the establishment of the
German Empire and the following era of
Otto von Bismarck as an outsider and with a degree of skepticism regarding its genuineness. At the University, he delivered his inaugural lecture, "On Homer's Personality". Nietzsche also met
Franz Overbeck, a professor of theology, who remained his friend throughout his life. Two other colleagues:
Afrikan Spir,
[A biography on Spir.] a little-known Russian philosopher and author of
Thought and Reality (1873), and the historian
Jacob Burckhardt, whose lectures Nietzsche frequently attended, began to exercise significant influence on Nietzsche during this time.
Nietzsche had already met Richard Wagner in Leipzig in 1868, and (some time later) Wagner's wife
Cosima. Nietzsche admired both greatly, and during his time at Basel frequently visited Wagner's house in
Tribschen in the
Canton of Lucerne. The Wagners brought Nietzsche into their most intimate circle, and enjoyed the attention he gave to the beginning of the Festival House in
Bayreuth. In 1870, he gave Cosima Wagner the manuscript of 'The Genesis of the Tragic Idea' as a birthday gift. In 1872, Nietzsche published his first book,
The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. However, his classical philological colleagues, including Ritschl, expressed little enthusiasm for the work, in which Nietzsche forewent a precise philological method to employ a style of philosophical speculation. In a polemic,
Philology of the Future,
Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff dampened the book's reception and increased its notoriety. In response, Rohde (by now a professor in Kiel) and Wagner came to Nietzsche's defense. Nietzsche remarked freely about the isolation he felt within the philological community and attempted to attain a position in philosophy at Basel, though unsuccessfully.
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Friedrich Nietzsche in Basel, ca. 1875. |
Between 1873 and 1876, Nietzsche published separately four long essays:
David Strauss: the Confessor and the Writer,
On the Use and Abuse of History for Life,
Schopenhauer as Educator, and
Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. (These four later appeared in a collected edition under the title,
Untimely Meditations.) The four essays shared the orientation of a cultural critique, challenging the developing German culture along lines suggested by Schopenhauer and Wagner. Starting in
1873, Nietzsche also accumulated the notes later posthumously published as
Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. During this time, in the circle of the Wagners, Nietzsche met
Malwida von Meysenbug and
Hans von BĂĽlow, and also began a friendship with
Paul RĂ©e, who after 1876 influenced him in dismissing the pessimism in his early writings. However, his disappointment with the
Bayreuth Festival of 1876, where the banality of the shows and the baseness of the public repelled him, caused him in the end to distance himself from Wagner.
With the publication of
Human, All Too Human in 1878, a book of
aphorisms on subjects ranging from metaphysics to morality and from religion to the sexes, Nietzsche's departure from the philosophy of Wagner and Schopenhauer became evident. Nietzsche's friendship with Deussen and Rohde cooled as well. Nietzsche in this time attempted to find a wife â€" to no avail. In 1879, after a significant decline in health, Nietzsche had to resign his position at Basel. (Since his childhood, various disruptive illnesses had plagued him â€" moments of shortsightedness practically to the degree of blindness, migraine headaches, and violent stomach attacks. The 1868 riding accident and diseases in 1870 may have aggravated these persistent conditions, which continued to affect him through his years at Basel, forcing him to take longer and longer holidays until regular work became no longer practical.)
Free philosopher (1879â€"1888)
Driven by his illness to find more compatible climates, Nietzsche traveled frequently, and lived until 1889 as an independent author in different cities. He spent many summers in
Sils Maria, near
St. Moritz in
Switzerland, and many winters in the
Italian cities of
Genoa,
Rapallo, and
Turin, and in the French city of
Nice. He occasionally returned to Naumburg to visit his family, and especially during this time, he and his sister had repeated periods of conflict and reconciliation. He lived on his pension from Basel, but also received aid from friends. A past student of his,
Peter Gast (born Heinrich Köselitz), became a sort of private secretary to Nietzsche. To the end of his life, Gast and Overbeck remained consistently faithful friends. Malwida von Meysenbug remained like a motherly patron even outside the Wagner circle. Soon Nietzsche made contact with the music critic
Carl Fuchs. Nietzsche stood at the beginning of his most productive period. Beginning with
Human, All Too Human in 1878, Nietzsche would publish one book (or major section of a book) each year until 1888, his last year of writing, during which he completed five. In 1879, Nietzsche published
Mixed Opinions and Maxims, which followed the aphoristic form of
Human, All Too Human. The following year, he published
The Wanderer and His Shadow. Both appeared as the second part of the second edition of
Human, All-Too-Human.
In 1881 Nietzsche published
Daybreak: Reflections on Moral Prejudices, and in 1882 the first part of
The Gay Science. That year he also met
Lou Salomé through Malwida von Meysenbug and Paul Rée. Nietzsche and Salomé spent the summer together in
Tautenburg in
Thuringia, often with Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth as chaperone. However, Nietzsche regarded Salomé less as an equal partner than as a gifted student. He fell in love with her and pursued her despite their mutual friend Rée. When he asked to marry her, Salomé refused. Nietzsche's relationship with Rée and Salomé broke up in the winter of 1882/1883, partially due to intrigues conducted by his sister Elisabeth. (Lou Salomé eventually came to correspond with
Sigmund Freud, introducing him to Nietzsche's thought.) In the face of renewed fits of illness, in near isolation after a falling-out with his mother and sister regarding Salomé, and plagued by suicidal thoughts, Nietzsche fled to Rapallo, where in only ten days he wrote the first part of
Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
After severing philosophical ties to Schopenhauer and social ties to Wagner, Nietzsche had few remaining friends. Now, with the new style of
Zarathustra, his work became even more alienating and his readers received it only to the degree prescribed by politeness. Nietzsche recognized this and maintained his solitude, even though he often complained about it. He gave up his short-lived plan to become a poet in public, and was troubled by concerns about his publications. His books were as good as unsold. In 1885, he printed only 40 copies of the fourth part of
Zarathustra, and only a fraction of these were distributed among close friends.
In 1886 Nietzsche printed
Beyond Good and Evil at his own expense. With this book and with the appearance in 1886â€"1887 of second editions of his earlier works (
The Birth of Tragedy,
Human, All Too Human,
Daybreak, and
The Gay Science), he saw his work completed for the time and hoped that soon a readership would develop. In fact, interest in Nietzsche's thought did increase at this time, even if rather slowly and hardly perceived by him. During these years Nietzsche met
Meta von Salis,
Carl Spitteler, and also
Gottfried Keller. In 1886, his sister Elisabeth married the
anti-Semite Bernhard Förster and traveled to
Paraguay to found a "Germanic" colony, a plan to which Nietzsche responded with laughter. Through correspondence, Nietzsche's relationship with Elisabeth continued on the path of conflict and reconciliation, but she would not see him again in person until after his collapse. He continued to have frequent and painful attacks of illness, which made prolonged work impossible. In 1887, Nietzsche quickly wrote the polemic
On the Genealogy of Morals.
During this year Nietzsche encountered Dostoevsky's work, which he quickly appropriated.
[Kaufman, Walter, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, pp. 306â€"340.] He also exchanged letters with
Hippolyte Taine, and then also with
Georg Brandes, whom both
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche inspired. Brandes, who had started to teach the philosophy of
Søren Kierkegaard in the 1870s, wrote to Nietzsche asking him to read Kierkegaard, to which Nietzsche replied that he would. In the beginning of
1888, in Copenhagen, Brandes delivered one of the first lectures on Nietzsche's philosophy.
In the same year, Nietzsche wrote five books, based on his voluminous notes for the long-planned work,
The Will to Power. His health seemed to improve, and he spent the summer in high spirits. In the fall of 1888 his writings and letters began to reveal an overestimation of his status and 'fate'. He overestimated the increasing response to his writings, above all, for the recent polemic,
The Case of Wagner. On his 44th birthday, after completing
The Twilight of the Idols and
The Antichrist, he decided to write the autobiography
Ecce Homo, which presents itself to his readers in order that they "[h]ear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else." (Preface, sec. 1, tr.
Walter Kaufmann) In December, Nietzsche began a correspondence with
August Strindberg, and thought that, short of an international breakthrough, he would attempt to buy back his older writings from the publisher and have them translated into other European languages. Moreover, he planned the publication of the compilation
Nietzsche Contra Wagner and of the poems
Dionysian Dithyrambs.
Mental breakdown and death (1889â€"1900)
On
January 3 1889, Nietzsche had a mental collapse. That day two Turinese policemen approached him after he caused a public disturbance in the streets of Turin. What actually happened remains unknown. The often-repeated (and possibly apocryphal) tale states that Nietzsche witnessed the whipping of a horse at the other end of the Piazza Carlo Alberto, ran to the horse, threw his arms up around the horse's neck to protect it, and collapsed to the ground. In the following few days, he sent short writings to a number of friends (including Cosima Wagner and Jacob Burckhardt), which may indicate potential signs of a breakdown. To his former colleague Burckhardt he wrote: "I have had
Caiphas put in fetters. Also, last year I was crucified by the German doctors in a very drawn-out manner. Wilhelm, Bismarck, and all anti-Semites abolished."
[The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann.]On
January 6 1889, Burckhardt showed the letter he had received from Nietzsche to Overbeck. The following day Overbeck received a similarly revealing letter, and decided that Nietzsche's friends had to bring him back to Basel. Overbeck traveled to Turin and brought Nietzsche to a psychiatric clinic in Basel. By that time, Nietzsche appeared fully in the grip of insanity, and his mother Franziska decided to transfer him to a clinic in
Jena under the direction of
Otto Binswanger. From November 1889 to February 1890,
Julius Langbehn attempted to cure Nietzsche, claiming that the doctors' methods were ineffective to cure Nietzsche's condition. Langbehn assumed progressively greater control of Nietzsche until his secrecy discredited him. In March 1890 Franziska removed Nietzsche from the clinic, and in May 1890 brought him to her home in Naumburg. During this process, Overbeck and Gast contemplated what to do with Nietzsche's unpublished works. In January 1889 they proceeded with the planned release of
The Twilight of the Idols, by that time already printed and bound. In February, they ordered a 50-copy private edition of
Nietzsche contra Wagner, but the publisher
C. G. Naumann secretly printed 100. Overbeck and Gast decided to withhold publishing
Der Antichrist and
Ecce Homo due to their more radical content. Nietzsche's reception and recognition enjoyed their first surge.
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A photo by Hans Olde from the photographic series "The Ill Nietzsche", May of 1899 |
In 1893, Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth returned from Paraguay after the suicide of her husband. She read and studied Nietzsche's works, and piece by piece took control of them and of their publication. Overbeck eventually sufferred dismissal, and Gast finally co-operated. After the death of Franziska in 1897 Nietzsche lived in
Weimar, where Elisabeth cared for him and allowed people, including
Rudolf Steiner, to visit her uncommunicative brother.
Early commentators frequently diagnosed a
syphilitic infection as the cause of the breakdown; however, some of Nietzsche's symptoms seem inconsistent with typical cases of syphilis. Some have diagnosed a form of
brain cancer. Others suggest that Nietzsche experienced a mystical awakening, similar to the
mast-state studied by
Meher Baba.[
1] While most commentators regard Nietzsche's breakdown as unrelated to his philosophy, some, including
Georges Bataille and
René Girard, argue for considering his breakdown as a symptom of a psychological maladjustment brought on by his philosophy.
On
August 25 1900 Nietzsche died after contracting
pneumonia. At the wish of Elisabeth, he was buried beside his father at the church in Röcken. His friend, Gast, gave his funeral oration, proclaiming: "Holy be your name to all future generations!"[
2] (Note that Nietzsche had pointed out in
Ecce Homo how he did not wish to be called "holy".)
Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche compiled
The Will to Power from notes he had written; and published it posthumously. (She had married an anti-Semitic agitator, and her brother had opposed her marriage from the beginning because he did not share Elisabeth's husband's anti-Semitic views.) Since his sister arranged the book, the general consensus holds that it does not reflect Nietzsche's intent. Indeed,
Mazzino Montinari, the editor of Nietzsche's
Nachlass, called it a forgery. The content of
The Will to Power has given rise to accusations that Nietzsche shared views similar to those of the
Nazis.
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Friedrich Nietzsche, 1882 |
In his preface to
The Portable Nietzsche, the prominent translator of Nietzsche,
Walter Kaufmann, expressed the view that, although Nietzsche's ideas may often seem contradictory, a thorough understanding of Nietzsche's free-thinking nature may also yield an explanation of his paradoxes. In addition to this,
perspectivism intimates a thesis regarding the seeming contradictions in Nietzsche's writings, suggesting that Nietzsche used multiple viewpoints in his work as a means of challenging his reader to consider various approaches toward an issue. The thesis, however, does not claim that Nietzsche himself regarded all ideas as equally valid. Nietzsche's disagreements with many other philosophers, such as
Kant,
Plato,
Schopenhauer, and
Spinoza, populate his texts. Whether one views the conflicting elements in his writings as intentional or not, his various ideas continue to have influence.
Nietzsche's reception has proved a rather confused and complex affair. Many Germans eventually discovered his appeals for greater individualism and personality development in
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but responded to those appeals in diverging ways. He had some following among left-wing Germans in the 1890s; in 1894â€"95, German conservatives wanted to ban his work as subversive. By the
First World War, however, he had acquired a reputation as a source of right-wing German
militarism. The
Dreyfus Affair (ca 1894 - 1906) provides another example of his reception: the French anti-semitic Right labelled the Jewish and Leftist intellectuals who defended
Alfred Dreyfus as "Nietzscheans".
During the
interbellum, certain
Nazis employed a highly selective reading of Nietzsche's work to advance their ideology, notably
Alfred Baeumler in his reading of
The Will to Power. The era of Nazi rule (1933 â€" 1945) saw Nietzsche's writings widely studied in German (and, after 1938, Austrian) schools and universities. The Nazis viewed Nietzsche as one of their "founding fathers". Although there exist few â€" if any â€" similarities between Nietzsche's views and Nazism (
see political views), phrases like "the will to power" became common in Nazi circles. The wide popularity of Nietzsche among Nazis stemmed in part from the endeavors of his sister,
Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, the editor of Nietzsche's work after his 1889 breakdown, and an eventual Nazi sympathizer. Nietzsche himself thoroughly disapproved of his sister's anti-Semitic views; in a letter to her he wrote:
Moreover,
Mazzino Montinari, while editing Nietzsche's posthumous works in the 1960s, found that Förster-Nietzsche, while editing the posthumous fragments making up
The Will to Power, had cut extracts, changed their order, and added titles of her own invention .
The psychologist
Carl Jung recognized Nietzsche's importance early on: he held a seminar on Nietzsche's
Zarathustra in 1934[
3]. According to
Ernest Jones, biographer and personal acquaintance of
Sigmund Freud, Freud frequently referred to Nietzsche as having "more penetrating knowledge of himself than any man who ever lived or was likely to live" (Jones,
The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud). Yet Jones also reports that Freud emphatically denied that Nietzsche's writings influenced his own psychological discoveries. Moreover, Freud took no interest in philosophy while a medical student, forming his opinion about Nietzsche later in life.
Early twentieth-century thinkers influenced by Nietzsche include: philosophers
Theodor Adorno,
Georg Brandes,
Henri Bergson,
Martin Buber,
Jean-Paul Sartre,
Albert Camus,
Emil Cioran,
Aleister Crowley,
Ayn Rand, and
Muhammad Iqbal; sociologist
Max Weber; theologian
Paul Tillich; novelists
Hermann Hesse,
André Malraux,
André Gide and
D. H. Lawrence; psychologists
Alfred Adler,
Abraham Maslow,
Carl Rogers, and
Rollo May; poets
Rainer Maria Rilke, and
William Butler Yeats; playwrights
George Bernard Shaw, and
Eugene O'Neill; and authors
Menno ter Braak, and
Jack London. American writer
H.L. Mencken avidly read and translated Nietzsche's works and has gained the soubriquet "the American Nietzsche".
In 1936
Martin Heidegger lectured on the "Will to Power as a Work of Art"; he later published four large volumes of lectures on Nietzsche.
Thomas Mann's essays mention Nietzsche with respect. One of the characters in Mann's 1947 novel
Doktor Faustus represents Nietzsche fictionally. In 1938 the German existentialist
Karl Jaspers wrote the following about the influence of Nietzsche and the Danish philosopher
Søren Kierkegaard:
The appropriation of Nietzsche's work by the Nazis, combined with the rise of
analytic philosophy, ensured that British and American academic philosophers would almost completely ignore him until at least 1950. Even
George Santayana, an American philosopher whose life and work betray some similarity to Nietzsche's, dismissed Nietzsche in his 1916
Egotism in German Philosophy as a "prophet of Romanticism". Analytic philosophers, if they mentioned Nietzsche at all, characterized him as a literary figure rather than as a philosopher. Nietzsche's present stature in the English-speaking world owes much to the exegetical writings and improved Nietzsche translations by the German-American philosopher
Walter Kaufmann, beginning with the 1950 publication of the first edition of his
Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist.
Nietzsche's influence on continental philosophy increased dramatically after the
second World War, especially among the French intellectual Left and
post-structuralists.
Jacques Derrida,
Jean-Luc Nancy, and
Michel Foucault all owe a heavy debt to Nietzsche.
Gilles Deleuze and
Pierre Klossowski wrote monographs drawing new attention to his work, and a
1972 conference at CĂ©risy-la-Salle ranks as the most important event in France for a generation's reception of Nietzsche.
Harold Bloom has described Nietzsche as "
Emerson's belated rival". Bloom's theory of the "anxiety of influence" betrays a Nietzschean influence. Others influenced by Nietzsche include "Death of God" theologian
Thomas Altizer; novelists
Nikos Kazantzakis,
Mikhail Artsybashev,
Jack Kerouac,
Donna Tartt,
Philippe Sollers and
Lu Xun; musicians
Jim Morrison,
Marilyn Manson,
Anton LaVey, the
Church of Satan; and
Stanley Kubrick's film
2001: A Space Odyssey.
*
The Birth of Tragedy, 1872
*
Human, All Too Human, 1878
*
Daybreak, 1881
*
The Gay Science, 1882 and 1887
*
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883-5
*
Beyond Good and Evil, 1886
*
On the Genealogy of Morals, 1887
*
The Twilight of the Idols, 1888
*
The Antichrist, 1888
*
Ecce Homo, 1888
Full texts
*
Free ebook of Friedrich Nietzsche at
Project Gutenberg*
The Antichrist; trans by
H. L. Mencken*
Der Antichrist *
Wiki Nietzsche * Free audiobook of
Beyond Good and Evil at
LibriVoxOther sources
*
Open Directory Project:
Friedrich Nietzsche*
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Friedrich Nietzsche* Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Nietzsche's Moral and Political Philosophy*
Nietzsche Chronicle (Detailed Chronology and Biography)
*
The Nietzsche Circle*
Friedrich Nietzsche Society*
Nietzsche Research Group: Radboud University Nijmegen *
The Nietzsche Channel*
Nietzsche and Ortlepp*
Nietzsche's initial crisis: New light on the Stirner/Nietzsche question by Bernd A. Laska
