Friedrich Nietzsche (Photograph, c. 1875)

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844 - 1900) was a 19th Century German philosopher and philologist. He is considered an important forerunner of Existentialism movement (although he does not fall neatly into any particular school), and his work has generated an extensive secondary literature within both the Continental Philosophy and Analytic Philosophy traditions of the 20th Century.

He challenged the foundations of Christianity and traditional morality, famously asserting that "God is dead", leading to (generally justified) charges of Atheism, Moral Skepticism, Relativism and Nihilism. His original notions of the "will to power" as the mankind's main motivating principle, of the "Übermensch" as the goal of humanity, and of "eternal return" as a means of evaluating ones life, have all generated much debate and argument among scholars.

He wrote prolifically and profoundly for many years under conditions of ill-health and often intense physical pain, ultimately succumbing to severe mental illness. Many of his works remain controversial and open to conflicting interpretations, and his uniquely provocative and aphoristic writing style, and his non-traditional and often speculative thought processes have earned him many enemies as well as great praise. His life-affirming ideas, however, have inspired leading figures in all walks of cultural life, not just philosophy, especially in Continental Europe.

Nietzsche (pronounced NEE-cha) was born on 15 October 1844 in the small town of Röcken bei Lützen, near Leipzig in the Prussian province of Saxony (modern-day Germany). His father was Carl Ludwig Nietzsche (a Lutheran pastor and former teacher) and his mother was Franziska Oehler, and the couple had two other children, Elisabeth (born in 1846) and Ludwig Joseph (born in 1848).

Nietzsche's father died from a brain ailment in 1849 (when Nietzsche was only five), and his younger brother died soon after, in 1850. The family then moved to Naumburg, where they lived with Nietzsche's paternal grandmother and his two unmarried aunts. After the death of Nietzsche's grandmother in 1856, the family moved into their own house.

Nietzsche attended a boys' school and later a private school, before beginning to attend the Domgymnasium in Naumburg in 1854. He showed particular talents in music and language, and the internationally-recognized Schulpfortaschool admitted him as a pupil in 1858, and he continued his studies there until 1864, receiving an important introduction to literature (particularly that of the ancient Greeks and Romans) and an taste of life outside his early small-town Christian environment.

After graduating in 1864, Nietzsche commenced studies in theology and classical philology (the study of literary texts and linguistics) at the University of Bonn. After just one semester (much to the dismay of his mother), he stopped his theological studies and announced that he had lost his faith (although, two years earlier, he had already argued that historical research had discredited the central teachings of Christianity). Nietzsche then concentrated on philology under Professor Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl (1806 - 1876), whom he followed to the University of Leipzig the next year, producing his first philological publications soon thereafter.

In 1865, Nietzsche thoroughly studied the works of Arthur Schopenhauer and, in 1866, he read Friedrich Albert Lange's "Geschichte des Materialismus" ("History of Materialism". These works, as well as Europe's increasing concern with science, Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, and the general rebellion against tradition and authority greatly intrigued Nietzsche, and he looked to expand his horizons beyond philology and to study more philosophy.

After his one year voluntary service with the Prussian army was curtailed by a bad riding accident in March 1868, he returnd to his studies and graduated later in 1868. Although he was considering giving up philology for science at that time, he nevertheless accepted an offer to become professor of classical philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland. He renounced his Prussian citizenship, and remained officially stateless> thereafter. Although he did serve in the Prussian forces during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to 1871 as a medical orderly (witnessing there something of the horrors of war, as well as contracting diphtheria, dysentery and possibly syphilis), he observed the establishment of the German Empire and the militaristic era of Otto von Bismarck as a skeptical outsider.

During his time at Basel, Nietzsche frequently visited Richard Wagner and his wife Cosima and was accepted into their inner circle. In 1872, he published his first book, "The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music", although his one-time teacher and mentor Professor Ritschl berated its lack of philological rigour. His increasing a friendship with Paul Rée, from 1876 onwards, however, influenced him in dismissing the pessimism in his early writings, which had been encouraged by the pessimistic philosophy of Schopenhauer and Wagner.

In 1879, after a significant decline in health, forcing him to take longer and longer holidays until regular work became impractical, Nietzsche had to resign his position at Basel (his health had always been precarious, with moments of acute shortsightedness, migraine headaches and violent stomach upsets). In search of a palliative for his delicate health, he travelled frequently over the next ten years, living (on his pension from Basel, but also on aid from friends) as an independent author near St. Moritz in Switzerland, 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 his past students, Peter Gast (AKA Heinrich Köselitz: 1854 - 1918) and Franz Overbeck (1837 - 1905) remained consistently faithful friends.

This also marked the beginning of Nietzsche's most productive period and, starting with "Menschliches, Allzumenschliches" ("Human, All Too Human") in 1878, he 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 1882, as well as publishing the first part of "Die fröhliche Wissenschaft" ("The Gay Science"), he met Lou Andreas Salomé (1861 - 1937), a gifted student and friend of Wagner, Freud and Rilke among others, and she may have refused his offer of marriage. 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 he wrote the first part of "Also sprach Zarathustra" ("Thus Spoke Zarathustra") in just ten days. The book was published in in four parts between 1883 and 1885, but the market received it only to the degree required by politeness and the book remained largely unsold.

The poor reception of the new alienating style and atheistic content of "Zarathustra" increased his isolation and made him effectively unemployable at any German University. He nursed feelings of revenge and resentment, and broke with his anti-Semitic German editor, Ernst Schmeitzner, printing "Jenseits von Gut und Böse" ("Beyond Good and Evil") at his own expense in 1886.

Very slowly, his work attracted more interest, but he continued to have frequent and painful attacks of illness, which made prolonged work impossible. Georg Brandes, who had started to teach the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard in the 1870s, delivered one of the first lectures on Nietzsche's philosophy in the late 1880s. In 1887, he published "Zur Genealogie der Moral" ("On the Genealogy of Morality") , considered by many academics to be his most important work. "Götzen-Dämmerung" ("Twilight of the Idols") and "Der Antichrist" ("The Antichrist") were both written in 1888, and his health and his spirits seemed to improve somewhat. Late in 1888, he penned his autobiographical and eccentrically self-laudatory "Ecce Homo".

However, in Turin, early in 1889, Nietzsche first exhibited apparent signs of mental illness. He sent bizarre short writings, known as the "Wahnbriefe" (or "Madness Letters") to various friends, and his old friend Overbeck travelled to Turin and brought Nietzsche to a psychiatric clinic in Basel. Now, fully in the grip of insanity (variously attributed to syphilis, brain cancer and frontotemporal dementia), he was transferred to a a clinic in Jena where various unsuccessful attempts at a cure were made, until his mother finally took him back to her home in Naumburg./P>

Ironically, Nietzsche's reception and recognition enjoyed their first surge during this period, as Overbeck and Gast published some of his still unpublished work (although they witheld "The Antichrist" and "Ecce Homo" due to their more radical content). During the late 19th Century, Nietzsche's ideas were commonly associated with anarchist movements and appear to have had influence within them, particularly in France and the United States. He had some following among left-wing Germans in the 1890s; German conservatives, however, wanted to ban his work as subversive.

After the death of his mother in 1897, Nietzsche lived in Weimar, where his sister Elisabeth cared for him. Many people, including Rudolf Steiner (1861 - 1925), came to visit him, but he remained uncommunicative. In 1898 and 1899, he suffered from at least two strokes which partially paralyzed him and left him unable to speak or walk and, after another stroke the next year, combined with pneumonia, he died on August 25 1900. He was buried beside his father at the church in Röcken.

Nietzsche wrote in a uniquely provocative style (he called himself a "philosopher of the hammer"), and he frequently delivered trenchant critiques of Christianity and of great philosophers like Plato and Kant in the most offensive and blasphemous terms possible (given the context of 19th Century Europe). His arguments often employed ad-hominem (or personal) attacks and emotional appeals, and he tended to jump from one grand assertion to another with little sustained logical support or elucidation of the connection between his ideas. All these aspects of Nietzsche's style ran counter to traditional values in philosophical writing, and they alienated Nietzsche from the academic establishment both in his time and, to a lesser extent, today, when he is still often dismissed as inconsistent and speculative.

His works remain controversial, and the meanings and relative significance of some of his key concepts remain contested. His distinctive German language style, his fondness for aphorism and the distance he maintained from the major existing schools of philosophy, have led to his subsequent adoption by many and varied political movements on both the right and the left. The political dictators of the 20th Century, including Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini, all read Nietzsche, and the Nazis made (admittedly selective) use of Nietzsche's philosophy, an association which caused Nietzsche's reputation to suffer after World War II.

Unusually for a major philosopher, his influences were as much non-philosophical as philosophical, including the philologist Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl (1806 - 1876), the Swiss art historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818 -1897), the Russian novelists Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821 - 1881) and Leo Toslstoy (1828 - 1910), the poet Charles Baudelaire (1821 - 1867), the composer Richard Wagner (1813 - 1883) and the naturalist Charles Darwin (1809 - 1882). The influences of philosophers such as Plato, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill and Arthur Schopenhauer, while perhaps important, were almost totally negative. Nevertheless, Nietzsche's ideas themselves exercised a major influence on several prominent European philosophers, including Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze (1925 - 1995), Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, Albert Camus (1913 - 1960), and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as on leading figures in other walks of cultural life.

His most important books include "Menschliches, Allzumenschliches" ("Human, All Too Human") of 1878, "Die fröhliche Wissenschaft" ("The Gay Science") of 1882, "Also sprach Zarathustra" ("Thus Spoke Zarathustra") of 1883 - 1885, "Jenseits von Gut und Böse" ("Beyond Good and Evil") of 1886, "Zur Genealogie der Moral" ("On the Genealogy of Morality") of 1887, and "Götzen-Dämmerung" ("Twilight of the Idols") and "Der Antichrist" ("The Antichrist"), both of 1888.

A few of Nietzsche's major themes in these books (which are discussed below) include his "immoralism", his view that "God is dead", his notions of the "will to power" and of the "Übermensch", and his suggestion of "eternal return".

In Ethics, Nietzsche called himself an "immoralist" and harshly criticized the prominent moral schemes of his day, namely Christianity, Kantianism and Utilitarianism. However, rather than destroying morality, Nietzsche wanted a re-evaluation of the values of the Judeo-Christian, preferring the more naturalistic source of value which he found in the vital impulses of life itself. In his "Beyond Good and Evil" in particular he argued that we must go beyond the simplistic Christian idea of Good and Evil in our consideration of morality.

He posited that the original system of morality was the "master-morality", dating back to ancient Greece, where value arises as a contrast between good (the sort of traits found in a Homeric hero: wealth, strength, health and power) and bad (the sort of traits conventionally associated with slaves in ancient times: poor, weak, sick, and pathetic). "Slave-morality", in contrast, came about as a reaction to master-morality, and is associated with the Jewish and Christian traditions, where value emerges from the contrast between good (associated with charity, piety, restraint, meekness and subservience) and evil (associated with cruelty, selfishness, wealth, indulgence and aggressiveness). Initially a ploy among the Jews and Christians dominated by Rome to overturn the values of their masters, to justify their situation and to gain power for themselves, Nietzsche saw the slave-morality as a hypocritical social illness that has overtaken Europe, which can only work by condemning others as evil, and he called on the strong of the world to break their self-imposed chains and assert their own power, health and vitality on the world.

The statement "God is dead" famously occurs in several of Nietzsche's works (notably in "The Gay Science" of 1882), and has led most commentators to regard Nietzsche as an Atheist. He argued that modern science and the increasing secularization of European society had effectively "killed" the Christian God, who had served as the basis for meaning and value in the West for more than thousand years. He claimed that this would eventually lead to the loss of any universal perspective on things and any coherent sense of objective truth, leaving only our own multiple, diverse and fluid perspectives, a view known as Perspectivism, a type of Epistemological Relativism. (Among his other well-known quotes of a relativistic nature are: "There are no facts, only interpretations" and "There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths"). However, some commentators have noted that the death of God may lead beyond bare Perspectivism to outright Nihilism, the belief that nothing has any importance and that life lacks purpose.

An important element of Nietzsche's philosophical outlook is the concept of the "will to power", which provides a basis for understanding motivation in human behaviour. He extended his argument to suggest that the struggle to survive is a secondary drive in the evolution of animals, less important than the desire to expand one’s power, even going so far as to posit matter itself as a centre of the will to power. His notion of the will to power can be viewed as a response and challenge to Schopenhauer's "will to live" (which regarded the entire universe and everything in it as driven by a primordial will to live, thus resulting in all creatures' desire to avoid death and to procreate), appealing to many instances in which people and animals willingly risk their lives in order to promote their power, most notably in instances like competitive fighting and warfare.

He contrasted his theory with several of the other popular psychological views of his day, such as Utilitarianism (which claims that all people want fundamentally to be happy, an idea Nietzsche merely laughed at) and Platonism (which claims that people ultimately want to achieve unity with the good or, in Christian Neo-Platonism, with God). In each case, Nietzsche argued that the "will to power" provides a more useful and general explanation of human behaviour.

Another concept important to an understanding of Nietzsche's thought is that of the "Übermensch", introduced in his 1883 book "Also sprach Zarathustra" ("Thus Spoke Zarathustra"). Variously translated as "superman", "superhuman" or "overman" (although the word is gender-neutral in German), this refers to the person who lives above and beyond pleasure and suffering, treating both circumstances equally (because joy and suffering are, in his view, inseparable). Nietzsche saw this as a goal for humanity to set for itself, although its relation to Nazi interpretations and eugenics is highly debatable.

Likewise, his notion of "eternal return" (or "eternal recurrence") has generated much argument among scholars. Nietzsche suggested that if a person could imagine their life repeating over and over again for all eternity, each moment recurring in exactly the same way, then those who could embrace the idea cheerfully are, ipso facto, leading the right sort of life, and those who recoil with horror from this idea have not yet learned to love and value life sufficiently. Some scholars (particularly the later Existentialists) have interpreted the idea as as a perpetually recurring condition of human existence, as one faces, in every moment, infinite possibilities or modes of interpretation.