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Friedrich Nietzsche
1844 - 1900
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche foresaw a European
collapse into nihilism. In works of powerful and beautiful prose
and poetry he struggled to head off the catastrophe.
Friedrich Nietzsche was born on Oct. 15, 1844, in Röcken, a
village in Saxony where his father served as a Lutheran pastor.
The father's death, when the child was 4 years old, was a
shattering blow to which Nietzsche often referred in his later
writings. This death left Nietzsche in a household of women: his
mother, grandmother, several aunts, and a sister, Elizabeth.
After attending local schools in Naumburg, in 1858 Nietzsche won
a scholarship to Pforta, one of the best boarding schools in
Germany. Here he received a thorough training in the classics
and acquired several lifetime friends. At the end of this period
of schooling, Nietzsche, who had earlier fully shared the
genuine piety of his family, found that he had ceased to accept
Christianity - a view that soon hardened into outright atheism.
With the highest recommendations of his Pforta teachers,
Nietzsche enrolled in the University of Bonn in 1864.
There he pursued classical studies with Friedrich Ritschl, and
when the latter, within the year, moved to Leipzig, Nietzsche
followed him. Nietzsche attempted to enter into the social life
of the students, even joining a dueling fraternity, but he soon
discovered that his sense of his own mission in life had
isolated him from the pursuits and interests most students
shared. At this time, too, Nietzsche apparently contracted
syphilis in a Leipzig brothel. The incurable disease gradually
undermined his strong constitution. In middle life he suffered
almost constantly from migraine and gastric upsets. Loneliness
and physical pain were thus the constant background of his life
- though Nietzsche later came to interpret them as the necessary
conditions for his work.
Nietzsche's early publications in classical philology so
impressed his teacher that when a chair of philology opened up
at Basel, Ritschl was able to secure it for Nietzsche, then only
24 years old and still without his degree. This the University
of Leipzig gave him on the strength of his writings without
requiring an examination, and Nietzsche entered upon a teaching
career. Important for Nietzsche's intellectual development was
his discovery in these Leipzig years of the philosophy of Arthur
Schopenhauer and Friedrich Lange and the music dramas of Richard
Wagner.
When Nietzsche took up residence in Basel, Wagner was nearby at
Tribschen, and Nietzsche was soon drawn into his circle. Wagner
was then at work on the Ringcycle and on the great festival at
Bayreuth that would be inaugurated for its premiere. The project
needed publicity and financial support, and many German
intellectuals were backing it. Nietzsche entered into the cause
with enthusiasm and for several years was a frequent house-guest
at Tribschen. Friendship with the charismatic but egocentric
Wagner was, however, incompatible with independence of thought,
the quality Nietzsche most valued. Before long he began to
reassert his own ideas and plans. This led finally to a break,
followed by some bitter polemics.
Prior to the break, Wagner had greatly influenced Nietzsche's
first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), which gave an
imaginative account of the forces that led to the rise of
Athenian tragedy and to its subsequent decline. Nietzsche's book
ends with a rousing advocacy of Wagner's music drama as a
revival of Hellenic tragedy. But no sooner had it been published
than Nietzsche began to perceive the difference between Wagner's
musical genius and the shabby pseudophilosophy of the Wagnerian
cult. From then on, though he still felt affection for Wagner's
person, Nietzsche attacked ever more vigorously the "decadence"
of Wagner's political and philosophical ideas. Two works of his
last year of writing deal with the subject: The Wagner Case
(1888) and Nietzsche contra Wagner (1888).
Nietzsche's teaching at Basel was interrupted frequently by
prolonged bouts of sickness and by several months of service as
a medical orderly during the Franco-Prussian War, which further
aggravated his illness. In April 1879 his health had
deteriorated so much that he was driven to resign. He was given
a small pension, and he now began a 10-year period of wandering
in search of a tolerable climate. Though racked by increasing
pain from the relentless progress of his disease, Nietzsche
managed to produce 10 substantial books before his final
collapse. They belong to the first rank of German literature and
contain a provocative set of philosophical ideas.
His Philosophy
Nietzsche believed that European man was standing at a critical
turning point. The advance of scientific enlightenment, in
particular the Darwinian theory, had destroyed the old religious
and metaphysical underpinnings for the idea of human dignity.
"God is dead," declares Nietzsche's spokesman Zarathustra, and
man, no longer "the image of God," is a chance product of a
nature indifferent to purpose or value. The great danger is that
man will find his existence meaningless. Unless a new grounding
for values is provided, Nietzsche predicted a rapid decline into
nihilism and barbarity.
Nietzsche aimed in all his work to provide a new meaning for
human existence in a meaningless world. In the absence of any
transcendent sanction, men must create their own values.
Nietzsche's writings are either analyses and criticisms of the
old system of values or attempts to formulate a new system. For
European man, the Judeo-Christian tradition was the source of
the old values. Nietzsche attacked it head on in such works as A
Genealogy of Morals (1887) and The Antichrist (1888).
In his constructive works Nietzsche sought to find in life
itself a force that would serve to set human existence apart. He
found it in the hypothesis of the will to power - the urge to
dominate and master. All creatures desire this, but only man has
achieved sufficient power to turn the force back upon himself.
Self-mastery, self-overcoming: these are the qualities that give
a unique value to human life. The ideal man, the "superman,"
will achieve a fierce joy in mastering his own existence,
ordering his passions, and giving style to his character. The
sublimation of passion and of life's circumstances that the
ideal man achieves in his self-overcoming will release in him a
flood of creative energy. The lives of such men will be the
justification of reality; their preferences will constitute the
standard of value.
All morality is thus the result of self-overcoming, but
Nietzsche discerned a criterion by which to distinguish the
morality of the superman from the "decadent" morality of
Christianity. The latter undercuts earthly life in favor of an
illusory afterlife, condemns self-assertion as pride, and
perverts bodily functions with guilt and fear. Its tendency is
toward nihilism and the denial of life. The new morality, on the
other hand, will affirm life, encourage self-assertion, and
eliminate guilt consciousness. In Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883)
Nietzsche formulated the ultimate test of the superman's
affirmations. Confronted with the hypothesis of eternal
recurrence, the notion that the world process is cyclical and
eternal, the superman still affirms life. Let it be - again and
again - with all its joys and sorrows.
On Jan. 3, 1889, Nietzsche collapsed on a street in Turin,
Italy. When he regained consciousness, his sanity was gone. He
began to send off wild letters to friends and strangers signed
"Dionysus - the Crucified." He was taken to his mother's home
and lived on in a twilight condition, sinking ever further from
the real world until his death on Aug. 25, 1900.
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1. Life: 1844-1900
In the small German village of Röcken bei Lützen, located in a
rural farmland area southwest of Leipzig, Friedrich Wilhelm
Nietzsche was born at approximately 10:00 a.m. on October 15,
1844. The date coincided with the 49th birthday of the Prussian
King, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, after whom Nietzsche was named, and
who had been responsible for Nietzsche's father's appointment as
Röcken's town minister. Nietzsche's uncle and grandfathers were
also Lutheran ministers, and his paternal grandfather, Friedrich
August Ludwig Nietzsche, was further distinguished as a
Protestant scholar, one of whose books (1796) affirmed the
“everlasting survival of Christianity.” When Nietzsche was 4
years old, his father, Karl Ludwig Nietzsche (1813-1849) died
from a brain ailment, and the death of Nietzsche's two-year-old
brother, Joseph, followed six months later. Having been living
only yards away from Röcken's church in the house reserved for
the pastor and his family, the remaining Nietzsche family left
their home soon after Karl Ludwig's death. They moved to nearby
Naumburg an der Saale, where Nietzsche (called “Fritz” by his
family) lived with his mother, Franziska (1826-1897), his
father's mother, Erdmuthe (d. 1856), his father's two sisters,
Auguste (d. 1855) and Rosalie (d. 1867), and his younger sister,
Therese Elisabeth Alexandra (1846-1935).
From the ages of 14 to 19, Nietzsche attended a first-rate
boarding school, Schulpforta, located not far from Naumburg,
where he prepared for university studies. The school's
educational atmosphere was reflected in its long history as a
former Cistercian monastery (1137-1540) and its buildings
included a 12th century Romanesque chapel and a 13th century
Gothic church. At Schulpforta, Nietzsche met his lifelong
acquaintance, Paul Deussen (1845-1919), who was confirmed at
Nietzsche's side in 1861, and who was to become an Orientalist,
historian of philosophy, and in 1911, the founder of the
Schopenhauer Society. During his summers in Naumburg, Nietzsche
led a small music and literature club named “Germania,” and
became acquainted with Richard Wagner's music through the club's
subscription to the Zeitschrift für Musik. The teenage Nietzsche
also read the German romantic writings of Friedrich Hölderlin
and Jean-Paul Richter, along with David Strauss's controversial
and demythologizing Life of Jesus Critically Examined (Das Leben
Jesu kritisch bearbeitet, 1848).
After graduating from Schulpforta, Nietzsche entered the
University of Bonn in 1864 as a theology and philology student,
and his interests soon gravitated more exclusively towards
philology — a discipline which then centered upon the
interpretation of classical and biblical texts. As a student of
philology, Nietzsche attended lectures by Otto Jahn (1813-1869)
and Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl (1806-1876). Jahn was a biographer
of Mozart who had studied at the University of Berlin under Karl
Lachmann (1793-1851) — a philologist known both for his studies
of the Roman philosopher Lucretius and for having developed the
genealogical method in textual recension; Ritschl was a classics
scholar whose work centered on the Roman comic poet Plautus
(254-184 BCE). Inspired by 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 Leipzig, he developed a
close friendship with Erwin Rohde (1845-1898), a fellow
philology student and future philologist, with whom he would
correspond extensively in later years. Momentous for Nietzsche
in 1865 was his accidental discovery of Arthur Schopenhauer's
The World as Will and Representation (1818) in a local
bookstore. He was then 21. Schopenhauer's atheistic and
turbulent vision of the world, in conjunction with his highest
praise of music as an art form, captured Nietzsche's
imagination, and the extent to which the “cadaverous perfume” of
Schopenhauer's world-view continued to permeate Nietzsche's
mature thought remains a matter of scholarly debate. After
discovering Schopenhauer, Nietzsche read F.A. Lange's
newly-published History of Materialism and Critique of its
Present Significance (1866) — a work that criticized materialist
theories from the standpoint of Kant's critique of metaphysics,
and attracted Nietzsche's interest in its view that metaphysical
speculation is an expression of poetic illusion.
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, he suffered a serious chest injury and was put
on sick leave after his chest wound refused to heal. He returned
shortly thereafter to the University of Leipzig, and in November
of 1868, met the composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883) at the home
of Hermann Brockhaus (1806-1877), an Orientalist who was married
to Wagner's sister, Ottilie. Brockhaus was himself a specialist
in Sanskrit and Persian whose publications included (1850) an
edition of the Vendidad Sade — a text of the Zoroastrian
religion, whose prophet was Zarathustra (Zoroaster). Wagner and
Nietzsche shared an enthusiasm for Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche —
who had been composing piano, choral and orchestral music since
he was a teenager — admired Wagner for his musical genius and
magnetic personality. Wagner was the same age Nietzsche's father
would have been, and he had also attended the University of
Leipzig many years before. The Nietzsche-Wagner relationship was
quasi-familial and sometimes-stormy, and it affected Nietzsche
deeply: twenty years later, he would still be assessing Wagner's
cultural significance. During the months surrounding Nietzsche's
initial meeting with Wagner, Ritschl recommended Nietzsche for a
position on the classical philology faculty at the University of
Basel. The Swiss university offered Nietzsche the professorial
position, and he began teaching there in May, 1869, at the
extraordinary age of 24.
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 (1837-1905)
and Jacob Burkhardt (1818-1897), whose lectures he attended.
Overbeck — who roomed for five years in the same house as
Nietzsche — became Nietzsche's close and enduring friend,
exchanging many letters with him over the years, and rushing to
Nietzsche's assistance in Turin immediately after his
devastating collapse in 1889. Nietzsche also cultivated his
friendship with Richard Wagner and visited him often at his
Swiss home in Tribschen, a small town near Lucerne. Never in
outstanding health, further complications arose from Nietzsche's
August-October 1870 service as a 25-year-old hospital attendant
during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71). He witnessed the
traumatic effects of battle, took close care of wounded
soldiers, and contracted diphtheria and dysentery.
Nietzsche's enthusiasm for Schopenhauer, his studies in
classical philology, his inspiration from Wagner, his reading of
Lange, and his frustration with the contemporary German culture,
coalesced in his first book — The Birth of Tragedy (1872) —
which was published in January 1872 when Nietzsche was 27.
Wagner showered the book with praise, but a biting critical
reaction by Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff (1848-1931) — who
was Nietzsche's junior by four years — dampened the book's
reception among scholars. In later life, von
Wilamowitz-Möllendorff became one of Germany's leading
philologists.
As he continued his residence in Switzerland between 1872 and
1879, Nietzsche often visited Wagner at his new (1872) home in
Bayreuth, Germany. In 1873, Nietzsche met Paul Rée, who, while
later living in close company with Nietzsche in Sorrento, would
write On the Origin of Moral Feelings (1877). During this time,
he completed a series of four studies on contemporary German
culture — the Unfashionable Observations (1873-76) — which
focussed, respectively, upon the historian of religion and
culture critic, David Strauss, issues concerning the social
value of historiography, and Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard
Wagner as inspirations for new cultural standards. Near the end
of his university career, he completed Human, All-Too-Human
(1878) — a book that marked a turning point in Nietzsche's
philosophical style, confirming his friendship with Rée as it
ended his friendship with Wagner, who came under attack in a
thinly-disguised characterization of “the artist.” Despite the
unflattering review of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche remained
respected in his professorial position in Basel, but his
deteriorating health, which led to migraine headaches, eyesight
problems and vomiting, necessitated his resignation from the
university in June, 1879, at age 34.
From 1880 until his collapse in January 1889, Nietzsche led a
wandering, gypsy-like existence as a stateless person (having
given up his German citizenship, and not having acquired Swiss
citizenship), circling almost annually between his mother's
house in Naumburg and various French, Swiss, German and Italian
cities. His travels took him through the Mediterranean seaside
city of Nice (during the winters), the Swiss alpine village of
Sils-Maria (during the summers), Leipzig (where he had attended
university), Turin, Genoa, Recoaro, Messina, Rapallo, Florence,
Venice, and Rome, never residing in any place longer than
several months at a time. On a visit to Rome in 1882, Nietzsche,
now at age thirty-seven, met Lou von Salomé (1861-1937), 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 took a turn for the
worse, as Salomé and Rée left Nietzsche and moved to Berlin. In
the years to follow, Salomé would become an associate of Sigmund
Freud, and would write with psychological insight of her
association with Nietzsche. These nomadic years were the
occasion of Nietzsche's main works, among which are Daybreak
(1881), The Gay Science (1882/1887), Thus Spoke Zarathustra
(1883-85), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), and On the Genealogy of
Morals (1887). Nietzsche's final active year, 1888, saw the
completion of The Case of Wagner (May-August 1888), Twilight of
the Idols (August-September 1888), The Antichrist (September
1888), Ecce Homo (October-November 1888) and Nietzsche Contra
Wagner (December 1888).
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 — although this episode
with the horse could be anecdotal — he threw his arms around the
horse's neck and collapsed in the plaza, never to return to full
sanity. Some argue that Nietzsche was afflicted with a
syphilitic infection (this was the original diagnosis of the
doctors in Basel and Jena) contracted either while he was a
student or while he was serving as a hospital attendant during
the Franco-Prussian War; some claim that his use of chloral
hydrate, a drug which he had been using as a sedative,
undermined his already-weakened nervous system; some speculate
that Nietzsche's collapse was due to a brain disease he
inherited from his father; some maintain that a mental illness
gradually drove him insane. The exact cause of Nietzsche's
incapacitation remains unclear. That he had an extraordinarily
sensitive nervous constitution and took an assortment of
medications is well-documented as a more general fact. To
complicate matters of interpretation, Nietzsche states in a
letter from April 1888 that he never had any symptoms of a
mental disorder.
During his creative years, Nietzsche struggled to bring his
writings into print and never doubted that his books would have
a lasting cultural effect. He did not live long enough to
experience his world-historical influence, but he had a brief
glimpse of his growing intellectual importance in discovering
that he was the subject of 1888 lectures given by Georg Brandes
(Georg Morris Cohen) at the University of Copenhagen, to whom he
directed the above April 1888 correspondence, and from whom he
received a recommendation to read Kierkegaard's works.
Nietzsche's collapse, however, followed soon thereafter. After a
brief hospitalization in Basel, he spent 1889 in a sanatorium in
Jena at the Binswanger Clinic, and in March 1890 his mother took
him back home to Naumburg, where he lived under her care for the
next seven years. After his mother's death in 1897, his sister
Elisabeth — having previously returned home from Paraguay, where
she had been working with her husband Bernhard Förster to
establish an Aryan, anti-Semitic German colony called “New
Germany” (“Nueva Germania”) — assumed responsibility for
Nietzsche's welfare. In an effort to promote her brother's
philosophy, she rented a large house on a hill in Weimar, called
the “Villa Silberblick,” and moved both Nietzsche and his
collected manuscripts to the residence. This became the new home
of the Nietzsche Archives (which had been located at the family
home for the three years preceding), where Elisabeth received
visitors who wanted to observe the now-incapacitated
philosopher. On August 25, 1900, Nietzsche died in the villa as
he approached his 56th year, apparently of pneumonia in
combination with a stroke. His body was then transported to the
family gravesite directly beside the church in Röcken bei Lützen,
where his mother and sister now also rest.
2. Early Writings: 1872-1876
Nietzsche's first book was published in 1872 and was entitled
The Birth of Tragedy, Out of the Spirit of Music (Die Geburt der
Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik). It was reissued in 1886 with
the revised title, The Birth of Tragedy, Or: Hellenism and
Pessimism (Die Geburt der Tragödie, Oder: Griechentum und
Pessimismus), and contained a lucid prefatory essay — “An
Attempt at Self-Criticism” — which expressed Nietzsche's own
critical reflections on the book, looking back fourteen years.
The Birth of Tragedy set forth an alternative conception to the
late 18th/early 19th century understanding of Greek culture — an
understanding largely inspired by Johann Winckelmann's History
of Ancient Art (1764) — which hailed ancient Greece as the
epitome of noble simplicity, calm grandeur, clear blue skies,
and rational serenity. Nietzsche, having by this time absorbed
the German romanticist, and specifically Schopenhauerian, view
that non-rational forces reside at the foundation of all
creativity and of reality itself, identified a strongly
instinctual, wild, amoral, “Dionysian” energy within
pre-Socratic Greek culture as an essentially creative and
healthy force. Surveying the history of Western culture since
the time of the Greeks, Nietzsche lamented over how this
Dionysian, creative energy had been submerged and weakened as it
became overshadowed by the “Apollonian” forces of logical order
and stiff sobriety. He concluded that European culture since the
time of Socrates had remained one-sidedly Apollonian,
bottled-up, and relatively unhealthy. As a means towards
cultural rebirth, he advocated the resurrection and fuller
release of Dionysian artistic energies — those which he
associated with primordial creativity, joy in existence and
ultimate truth. The seeds of this liberating rebirth Nietzsche
perceived in the contemporary German music of his time (viz.,
Bach, Beethoven and Wagner), and the concluding part of The
Birth of Tragedy, in effect, adulates the emerging German
artistic, tragic spirit as the potential savior of European
culture.
Some scholars regard Nietzsche's 1873 unpublished essay, “On
Truth and Lies in an Nonmoral Sense” (“Über Wahrheit und Lüge im
außermoralischen Sinn”) as a keystone in his thought. In this
essay, Nietzsche rejects the idea of universal constants, and
claims that what we call “truth” is only “a mobile army of
metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms.” His view at this
time is that arbitrariness prevails within human experience:
concepts originate via the transformation of nerve stimuli into
images, and “truth” is nothing more than the invention of fixed
conventions for practical purposes, especially those of repose,
security and consistency. Viewing human existence from a great
distance, Nietzsche further notes that there was an eternity
before human beings came into existence, and believes that after
humanity dies out, nothing significant will have changed in the
great scheme of things.
Between 1873 and 1876, Nietzsche wrote the Unfashionable
Observations (Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen). These are four (of a
projected, but never completed, thirteen) studies concerned with
the quality of European, and especially German, culture during
Nietzsche's time. They are unfashionable and nonconformist (or
“untimely,” or “unmodern”) insofar as Nietzsche regarded his
standpoint as culture-critic to be in tension with the
self-congratulatory spirit of the times. The four studies were:
David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer (David Strauss, der
Bekenner und der Schriftsteller, 1873); On the Uses and
Disadvantages of History for Life (Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der
Historie für das Leben, 1874); Schopenhauer as Educator
(Schopenhauer als Erzieher, 1874); Richard Wagner in Bayreuth
(1876). The first of these attacked David Strauss, whose popular
six-edition book, The Old and the New Faith: A Confession (1871)
encapsulated for Nietzsche the general cultural atmosphere in
Germany. Responding to Strauss's advocacy of a “new faith”
grounded upon a scientifically-determined universal mechanism —
one, however, lubricated by the optimistic, “soothing oil” of
historical progress — Nietzsche attacked Strauss's view as a
vulgar and dismal sign of cultural degeneracy. Overbeck, in his
contemporaneous writings, also adopted a critical attitude
towards Strauss. The second “untimely meditation” surveyed
alternative ways to write history, and discussed how these ways
could contribute to a society's health. Here Nietzsche claimed
that the principle of “life” is a more pressing and higher
concern than that of “knowledge,” and that the quest for
knowledge should serve the interests of life. The third and
fourth studies — on Schopenhauer and Wagner, respectively —
addressed how these two thinkers, as paradigms of philosophic
and artistic genius, held the potential to inspire a stronger,
healthier and livelier German culture.
3. Middle-Period Writings: 1878-1882
Nietzsche completed Human, All-Too-Human in 1878, supplementing
this with a second part in 1879, Mixed Opinions and Maxims (Vermischte
Meinungen und Sprüche), and a third part in 1880, The Wanderer
and his Shadow (Der Wanderer und sein Schatten). The three parts
were published together in 1886 as Human All-Too-Human, A Book
for Free Spirits (Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, Ein Buch für
freie Geister). Reluctant to construct a philosophical “system,”
and sensitive to the importance of style in philosophic writing,
Nietzsche composed these works as a series of several hundred
aphorisms whose typical length ranges from a line or two to a
page or two. Here, he often reflects upon cultural and
psychological phenomena in reference to individuals' organic and
physiological constitutions. The idea of power (for which he
would later become known) sporadically appears as an explanatory
principle, but Nietzsche tends at this time to invoke hedonistic
considerations of pleasure and pain in his explanations of
cultural and psychological phenomena.
In Daybreak: Reflections on Moral Prejudices (Morgenröte.
Gedanken über die moralischen Vorurteile, 1881), Nietzsche
continued writing in his aphoristic style, but he marks a new
beginning by accentuating as opposed to pleasure, the importance
of the “feeling of power” in his understanding of human, and
especially of so-called “moral” behavior. Always interested in
the nature of health, his emerging references to power stemmed
from his earlier speculations about the nature of the ancient
Greeks' outstanding health, which he had regarded as the effects
of how “agon” (i.e., competition, one-upmanship, or contest, as
conceived in his 1872 essay, “Homer's Contest”) permeated their
cultural attitudes. In this respect, Daybreak contains the seeds
of Nietzsche's doctrine of the “will to power” — a doctrine that
appears explicitly for the first time two years later in Thus
Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85). Daybreak is also one of Nietzsche's
clearest, intellectually calmest, and most intimate, volumes,
providing many social-psychological insights in conjunction with
some of his first sustained critical reflections on the cultural
relativity at the basis of Christian moral evaluations.
In a more well-known aphoristic work, The Gay Science (Die
fröhliche Wissenschaft, 1882) — whose title was inspired by the
troubadour songs of southern-French Provence (1100-1300) —
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 — a doctrine that attends to
how people of different levels of health are likely to react to
the prospect of an “eternal return” in which one is reborn, over
and over again, to relive one's life exactly as before in every
pleasurable and painful detail. Nietzsche's atheism — his
account of “God's murder” (section 125) — was voiced in reaction
to the conception of a single, ultimate, judgmental authority
who is privy to everyone's hidden and personally embarrassing
secrets; his atheism also aimed to redirect people's attention
to their inherent freedom, the presently-existing world, and
away from escapist, pain-relieving, heavenly otherworlds. To a
similar end, Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal recurrence
(sections 285 and 341) serves to draw attention away from all
worlds other than the one in which we presently live, since
eternal recurrence precludes the possibility of any final escape
from the present world. The doctrine also functions as a measure
for judging someone's overall psychological strength and mental
health, since Nietzsche believed that the doctrine of eternal
recurrence was the hardest world-view to affirm. In 1887, The
Gay Science was reissued with an important preface, an
additional fifth Book, and an appendix of songs, reminiscent of
the troubadours.
4. Later-Period Writings: 1883-1887
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, A Book for All and None (Also Sprach
Zarathustra, Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen, 1883-85), is one of
Nietzsche's most famous works, and Nietzsche regarded it as
among his most significant. It is a manifesto of personal
self-overcoming, and a guidebook for others towards the same
revitalizing end. Thirty years after its initial publication,
150,000 copies of the work were printed by the German government
and issued as inspirational reading, along with the Bible, to
the young soldiers during WWI. 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. Nietzsche also filled the work with nature
metaphors, almost in the spirit of pre-Socratic naturalist
philosophy, which invoke animals, earth, air, fire, water,
celestial bodies, plants, all in the service of describing the
spiritual development of Zarathustra, a solitary, reflective,
exceedingly strong-willed, sage-like, laughing and dancing voice
of self-mastery who, accompanied by a proud, sharp-eyed eagle
and a wise snake, envisioned a mode of psychologically healthier
being beyond the common human condition. Nietzsche refers to
this higher mode of being as “superhuman” (übermenschlich), and
associates the doctrine of eternal recurrence — a doctrine for
only the healthiest who can love life in its entirety — with
this spiritual standpoint, in relation to which all-too-often
downhearted, all-too-commonly-human attitudes stand as a mere
bridge to be crossed and overcome.
Beyond Good and Evil, Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (Jenseits
von Gut und Böse. Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft, 1886)
is arguably a rethinking of Human, All-too-Human, since their
respective tables of contents and sequence of themes loosely
correspond to one another. In Beyond Good and Evil, 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, 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 located beyond good
and evil, and challenges the entrenched moral idea that
exploitation, domination, injury to the weak, destruction and
appropriation are universally objectionable behaviors. Above
all, he believes that living things aim to discharge their
strength and express their “will to power” — a pouring-out of
expansive energy that, quite naturally, can entail danger, pain,
lies, deception and masks. As he views things from the
perspective of life, he further denies that there is a universal
morality applicable indiscriminately to all human beings, and
instead designates a series of moralities in an order of rank
that ascends from the plebeian to the noble: some moralities are
more suitable for subordinate roles; some are more appropriate
for dominating and leading social roles. What counts as a
preferable and legitimate action depends upon the kind of person
one is. The deciding factor is whether one is weaker, sicker and
on the decline, or whether one is healthier, more powerful and
overflowing with life.
On the Genealogy of Morals, A Polemic (Zur Genealogie der Moral,
Eine Streitschrift, 1887) is composed of three sustained essays
that 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 this essay, as well as the next,
Nietzsche's controversial references to the “blond beast” in
connection with master morality also appear. 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 that turns an evil eye towards
our natural inclinations. He also discusses how punishment,
conceived as the infliction of pain upon someone in proportion
to their offense, is likely to have been grounded in the
contractual economic relationship between creditor and debtor.
In the third essay, Nietzsche focusses upon the truth-oriented
ascetic ideals that underlie and inform prevailing styles 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. The third essay also contains
one of Nietzsche's clearest expressions of “perspectivism”
(section 12) — the idea that there is no absolute, “God's eye”
standpoint from which one can survey everything that is.
5. Final Writings of 1888
The Case of Wagner, A Musician's Problem (Der Fall Wagner, Ein
Musikanten-Problem, May-August 1888), compares well with
Nietzsche's 1873 meditation on David Strauss in its unbridled
attack on a popular cultural figure. In The Case of Wagner,
Nietzsche “declares war” upon Richard Wagner, whose music is
characterized as the epitome of modern cultural achievement and
also as sick and decadent. The work is a brilliant display of
Nietzsche's talents as a music critic, and includes memorable
mockings of Wagner's theatrical style, reflections on redemption
via art, a “physiology of art,” and the virtues associated,
respectively, with ascending and descending life energies.
The title, Twilight of the Idols, or How One Philosophizes with
a Hammer (Götzen-Dämmerung, oder Wie man mit dem Hammer
philosophiert, August-September 1888), word-plays upon Wagner's
opera, The Twilight of the Gods (Die Götterdämmerung). Nietzsche
reiterates and elaborates some of the criticisms of Socrates,
Plato, Kant and Christianity found in earlier works, criticizes
the then-contemporary German culture as being unsophisticated
and too-full of beer, and shoots some disapproving arrows at key
French, British, and Italian cultural figures such as Rousseau,
Hugo, Sand, Michelet, Zola, Renan, Carlyle, Mill, Eliot, Darwin,
and Dante. In contrast to all these alleged representatives of
cultural decadence, Nietzsche applauds Caesar, Napoleon, Goethe,
Dostoevski, Thucydides and the Sophists as healthier and
stronger types. The phrase “to philosophize with a hammer”
primarily signifies a way to test idols by tapping on them
lightly; one “sounds them out” to determine whether they are
hollow, or intact, etc., as physician would use a percussion
hammer upon the abdomen as a diagnostic instrument.
In The Antichrist, Curse on Christianity (Der Antichrist. Fluch
auf das Christentum, September 1888), Nietzsche expresses his
disgust over the way noble values in Roman Society were
corrupted by the rise of Christianity, and he discusses specific
aspects and personages in Christian culture — the Gospels, Paul,
the martyrs, priests, the crusades — with a view towards showing
that Christianity is a religion for weak and unhealthy people,
whose general historical effect has been to undermine the
healthy qualities of the more noble cultures.
Nietzsche describes himself as “a follower of the philosopher
Dionysus” in Ecce Homo, How One Becomes What One Is (Ecce Homo,
Wie man wird, was man ist, October-November 1888) — a book in
which he examines retrospectively his entire corpus, work by
work, offering critical remarks, details of how the works were
inspired, and explanatory observations regarding their
philosophical contents. He begins this fateful intellectual
autobiography — he was to lose his mind little more than a month
later — with three eyebrow-raising sections entitled, “Why I Am
So Wise,” “Why I Am So Clever,” and “Why I Write Such Good
Books.” Nietzsche claims to be wise as a consequence of his
acute aesthetic sensitivity to nuances of health and sickness in
people's attitudes and characters; he claims to be clever
because he knows how to choose the right nutrition, climate,
residence and recreation for himself; he claims to write such
good books because they allegedly adventurously open up, at
least for a very select group of readers, a new series of noble
and delicate experiences. After examining each of his published
works, Nietzsche concludes Ecce Homo with the section, “Why I Am
a Destiny.” He claims that he is a destiny because he regards
his anti-moral truths as having the annihilating power of
intellectual dynamite; he expects them to topple the morality
born of sickness which he perceives to have been reigning within
Western culture for the last two thousand years. In this way,
Nietzsche expresses his hope that Dionysus, the god of life's
exuberance, would replace Jesus, the god of the heavenly
otherworld, as the premier cultural standard for future
millennia.
Nietzsche Contra Wagner, Out of the Files of a Psychologist
(Nietzsche contra Wagner, Aktenstücke eines Psychologen,
December 1888) is a short, but classic, selection of passages
Nietzsche extracted from his 1878-1887 published works. Many
concern Wagner, but the excerpts serve mostly as a foil for
Nietzsche to express his own views against Wagner's. In this
self-portrait, completed only a month before his collapse,
Nietzsche characterizes his own anti-Christian sentiments, and
contemplates how even the greatest people usually undergo
significant corruption. In Wagner's case, Nietzsche claims that
the corrupting force was Christianity. At the same time, he
describes how he truly admired some of Wagner's music for its
profound expressions of loneliness and suffering — expressions
which Nietzsche admitted were psychologically impossible for he
himself to articulate.
6. Nietzsche's Unpublished Notebooks
Nietzsche's unpublished writings often reveal his more tentative
and speculative ideas. This material is surrounded by
controversy, however, since some of it conflicts with views he
expresses in his published works. Disagreement regarding
Nietzsche's notebooks, also known as his Nachlass, centers
around the degree of interpretive priority which ought to be
given to the unpublished versus the published manuscripts. One
popular approach in the tradition of classical scholarly
interpretation is to maintain that Nietzsche's published works
express his more considered and polished views, and that these
should take precedence over the unpublished manuscripts when
conflicts arise; a second attitude, given voice by Martin
Heidegger, and broadly consistent with a psychoanalytic approach
as well, is to regard what Nietzsche published as representative
of what he decided was publicly presentable, and what he kept
privately to himself in unpublished form as containing his more
authentic views; a third, more comprehensive, interpretive style
tries to grasp all of Nietzsche's texts together in an effort to
form the most coherent interpretation of Nietzsche's thought,
judging the priority of published versus unpublished works on a
thematic, or case-by-case basis; a fourth position influenced by
the French deconstructionist perspective maintains that any
rigid prioritizing between published and private works is
impossible, since all of the texts embody a comparable
multidimensionality of meaning.
In his unpublished manuscripts, Nietzsche sometimes elaborates
the topics found in the published works, such as his early
1870's notebooks, where there is important material concerning
his theory of knowledge. In the 1880's notebooks — those his
sister collected together after his death under the title, The
Will to Power: Attempt at a Revaluation of all Values —
Nietzsche adopts a more metaphysical orientation towards the
doctrines of Eternal Recurrence and the Will to Power,
speculating upon their intellectual strength as interpretations
of reality itself. Side-by-side with these speculations, and
complicating efforts towards developing an interpretation which
is both comprehensive and coherent, Nietzsche's 1880's notebooks
also repeatedly state that “there are no facts, only
interpretations.”
7. Nietzsche's Influence Upon 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. Here, Nietzsche's
advocacy of new, healthy beginnings, and of creative artistry in
general stood forth. 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
Förster-Nietzsche through her associations 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. Until the 1960's in France, Nietzsche
appealed mainly to writers and artists, since the academic
philosophical climate was dominated by G.W.F. Hegel's, Edmund
Husserl's and Martin Heidegger's thought, along with the
structuralist movement of the 1950's. 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.
Specific 20th century figures who were influenced, either quite
substantially, or in a significant part, by Nietzsche include
painters, dancers, musicians, playwrights, poets, novelists,
psychologists, sociologists, literary theorists, historians, and
philosophers: Alfred Adler, Georges Bataille, Martin Buber,
Albert Camus, E.M. Cioran, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze,
Isadora Duncan, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Stefan George,
André Gide, Hermann Hesse, Carl Jung, Martin Heidegger, Gustav
Mahler, André Malraux, Thomas Mann, H.L. Mencken, Rainer Maria
Rilke, Jean-Paul Sartre, Max Scheler, Giovanni Segantini, George
Bernard Shaw, Lev Shestov, Georg Simmel, Oswald Spengler,
Richard Strauss, Paul Tillich, Ferdinand Tönnies, Mary Wigman,
William Butler Yeats and Stefan Zweig.
That Nietzsche was able to write so prolifically and profoundly
for years, while remaining in a condition of ill-health and
often intense physical pain, is a testament to his spectacular
mental capacities and willpower. Lesser people under the same
physical pressures might not have had the inclination to pick up
a pen, let alone think and record thoughts which — created in
the midst of striving for healthy self-overcoming — would have
the power to influence an entire century.
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