Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche was born on the 15th of October 1844 in the small town of Röcken, Prussia, and named after King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, who turned 49 on the very day of his birth. His early life was defined by a series of devastating losses that would shape his worldview before he ever wrote a single philosophical treatise. His father, a Lutheran pastor, died of a brain disease in 1849 after a year of excruciating agony, leaving Nietzsche an orphan at the age of four. Just six months later, his younger brother Ludwig Joseph died at the age of two, leaving Nietzsche and his sister Elisabeth as the sole survivors of their immediate family. The family moved to Naumburg, where they lived with Nietzsche's maternal grandmother and his father's two unmarried sisters, creating a household dominated by women and steeped in religious tradition. Despite this pious environment, Nietzsche's academic records from the Gymnasium in Naumburg showed a boy who excelled in Christian theology but was already beginning to question the foundations of his faith. By the time he was twenty, he had written to his deeply religious sister that the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire. This letter marked the beginning of a lifelong struggle with the loss of faith that would drive his entire philosophical project.

The Youngest Professor In History

In 1869, at the age of 24, Nietzsche was appointed Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basel, making him one of the youngest tenured Classics professors on record. He had neither completed his doctorate nor received a teaching certificate, yet the support of Professor Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl secured the position for him. To this day, Nietzsche remains among the youngest of the tenured Classics professors on record, a testament to his extraordinary talent in classical languages and literature. Before moving to Basel, Nietzsche renounced his Prussian citizenship, and for the rest of his life, he remained officially stateless. His health, however, began to fail him almost immediately. He suffered from moments of shortsightedness that left him nearly blind, migraine headaches, and violent indigestion. These conditions were likely aggravated by a riding accident in 1868, where he struck his chest against the pommel and tore two muscles in his left side, leaving him exhausted and unable to walk for months. Despite these physical ailments, Nietzsche produced his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, in 1872, a work that eschewed the classical philologic method in favor of a more speculative approach. His colleagues within his field, including Ritschl, expressed little enthusiasm for the work, and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff damped the book's reception, increasing its notoriety. Nietzsche remarked freely about the isolation he felt within the philological community and attempted unsuccessfully to transfer to a position in philosophy at Basel.

Common questions

When was Friedrich Nietzsche born and where was he born?

Friedrich Nietzsche was born on the 15th of October 1844 in the small town of Röcken, Prussia. He was named after King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, who turned 49 on the very day of his birth.

What happened to Friedrich Nietzsche on the 3rd of January 1889?

On the 3rd of January 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown in the streets of Turin, Italy. He was subsequently taken to a psychiatric clinic in Basel and later transferred to a clinic in Jena under the direction of Otto Binswanger.

How did Friedrich Nietzsche die and when did he die?

Friedrich Nietzsche died at about noon on the 25th of August 1900 after contracting pneumonia in mid-August 1900 and suffering another stroke during the night of the 24th of August. He was buried beside his father at the church in Röcken near Lützen.

Who edited Friedrich Nietzsche's manuscripts after his death?

Friedrich Nietzsche's sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, became the curator and editor of his manuscripts after his death. She edited his unpublished writings to fit her German ultranationalist ideology and compiled The Will to Power from his unpublished notebooks.

What is the meaning of the phrase God is dead in Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy?

Friedrich Nietzsche used the phrase God is dead to predict that scientific developments and the increasing secularization of Europe had metaphorically killed the Abrahamic God who had served as the basis for meaning and value in the West for more than a thousand years. He believed this statement reflected the loss of the supra sensory world of ideas and the death of metaphysics.

What is the concept of the Übermensch in Friedrich Nietzsche's work?

Friedrich Nietzsche introduced the concept of the Übermensch or Superman in Thus Spoke Zarathustra as the creator of new values to solve the problem of nihilism following the death of God. He presented the Übermensch as a solution to the crisis of meaninglessness and the need for a new foundation for culture.

The Tragedy Of Lou Salomé

In 1882, Nietzsche met Lou Andreas-Salomé, a young woman who would become the center of a dramatic and painful love triangle. Salomé's mother took her to Rome when she was 21, and at a literary salon in the city, she became acquainted with Paul Rée. Rée proposed marriage to her, but she instead proposed that they should live and study together as brother and sister, along with another man for company, where they would establish an academic commune. Rée accepted the idea and suggested that they be joined by his friend Nietzsche. The two met Nietzsche in Rome in April 1882, and Nietzsche is believed to have instantly fallen in love with Salomé, as Rée had done. Nietzsche asked Rée to propose marriage to Salomé, which she rejected. She had been interested in Nietzsche as a friend, but not as a husband. Nietzsche nonetheless was content to join with Rée and Salomé touring through Switzerland and Italy together, planning their commune. The three traveled with Salomé's mother through Italy and considered where they would set up their Winterplan commune. They intended to set up their commune in an abandoned monastery, but no suitable location was found. On the 13th of May, in Lucerne, when Nietzsche was alone with Salomé, he earnestly proposed marriage to her again, which she rejected. He nonetheless was happy to continue with the plans for an academic commune. After discovering the relationship, Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth became determined to get Nietzsche away from the immoral woman. Nietzsche and Salomé spent the summer together in Tautenburg in Thuringia, often with Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth as a chaperone. Salomé reports that he asked her to marry him on three separate occasions and that she refused, though the reliability of her reports of events is questionable. Arriving in Leipzig in October, Salomé and Rée separated from Nietzsche after a falling-out between Nietzsche and Salomé, in which Salomé believed that Nietzsche was desperately in love with her. While the three spent a number of weeks together in Leipzig in October 1882, the following month Rée and Salomé left Nietzsche, leaving for Stibbe without any plans to meet again. Nietzsche soon fell into a period of mental anguish, although he continued to write to Rée, stating We shall see one another from time to time, won't we? In later recriminations, Nietzsche would blame on separate occasions the failure in his attempts to woo Salomé on Salomé, Rée, and on the intrigues of his sister, who had written letters to the families of Salomé and Rée to disrupt the plans for the commune. Nietzsche wrote of the affair in 1883, that he now felt genuine hatred for my sister. Amidst renewed bouts of illness, living in near-isolation after a falling out with his mother and sister regarding Salomé, Nietzsche fled to Rapallo, where he wrote the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in only ten days.

The Madness In Turin

On the 3rd of January 1889, Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown in the streets of Turin, Italy. Two policemen approached him after he caused a public disturbance, and what happened remains unknown, but an often-repeated tale from shortly after his death states that Nietzsche witnessed the flogging of a horse at the other end of the Piazza Carlo Alberto, ran to the horse, threw his arms around its neck to protect it, and then collapsed to the ground. In the following few days, Nietzsche sent short writings known as the Wahnzettel or Wahnbriefe, literally Delusion notes or letters, to a number of friends including Cosima Wagner and Jacob Burckhardt. Most of them were signed Dionysus, though some were also signed der Gekreuzigte, meaning the crucified one. To his former colleague Burckhardt, Nietzsche wrote: I have had Caiaphas put in fetters. Also, last year I was crucified by the German doctors in a very drawn-out manner. Wilhelm, Bismark, and all anti-Semites abolished. Additionally, he commanded the German emperor to go to Rome to be shot and summoned the European powers to take military action against Germany, writing also that the pope should be put in jail and that he, Nietzsche, created the world and was in the process of having all antisemites shot dead. On the 6th of January 1889, Burckhardt showed the letter he had received from Nietzsche to Overbeck. The following day, Overbeck received a similar 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 a serious mental illness, and his mother Franziska decided to transfer him to a clinic in Jena under the direction of Otto Binswanger. In January 1889, they proceeded with the planned release of Twilight of the Idols, by that time already printed and bound. From November 1889 to February 1890, the art historian Julius Langbehn attempted to cure Nietzsche, claiming that the methods of the medical doctors were ineffective in treating Nietzsche's condition. Langbehn assumed progressively greater control of Nietzsche until his secretiveness 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 February they ordered a fifty-copy private edition of Nietzsche contra Wagner, but the publisher C. G. Naumann secretly printed one hundred. Overbeck and Gast decided to withhold publishing The Antichrist and Ecce Homo because of their more radical content. Nietzsche's reception and recognition enjoyed their first surge. In 1893, Nietzsche's sister, Elisabeth, returned from Nueva Germania in Paraguay following the suicide of her husband. She studied Nietzsche's works and, piece by piece, took control of their publication. Overbeck was dismissed and Gast finally co-operated. After the death of Franziska in 1897, Nietzsche lived in Weimar, where Elisabeth cared for him and allowed visitors, including Rudolf Steiner, to meet her uncommunicative brother. Elisabeth employed Steiner as a tutor to help her to understand her brother's philosophy. Steiner abandoned the attempt after only a few months, declaring that it was impossible to teach her anything about philosophy. Nietzsche's insanity was originally diagnosed as tertiary syphilis, in accordance with a prevailing medical paradigm of the time. Although most commentators regard his breakdown as unrelated to his philosophy, Georges Bataille wrote poetically of his condition, Man incarnate must also go mad, and René Girard's postmortem psychoanalysis posits a worshipful rivalry with Richard Wagner. Girard suggests that Nietzsche signed his final letters as both Dionysus and the Crucified One because he was demonstrating that by being a god, one is also a victim since a god still suffers by overcoming the law. Nietzsche had previously written, All superior men who were irresistibly drawn to throw off the yoke of any kind of morality and to frame new laws had, if they were not actually mad, no alternative but to make themselves or pretend to be mad. The diagnosis of syphilis has since been challenged, and a diagnosis of manic-depressive illness with periodic psychosis followed by vascular dementia was put forward by Cybulska prior to Schain's study. Leonard Sax suggested the slow growth of a right-sided retro-orbital meningioma as an explanation of Nietzsche's dementia, while Orth and Trimble postulated frontotemporal dementia, and other researchers have proposed a hereditary stroke disorder called CADASIL. Poisoning by mercury, a treatment for syphilis at the time of Nietzsche's death, has also been suggested. In 1898 and 1899, Nietzsche suffered at least two strokes. They partially paralyzed him, leaving him unable to speak or walk. He likely suffered from clinical hemiparesis/hemiplegia on the left side of his body by 1899. After contracting pneumonia in mid-August 1900, he suffered another stroke during the night of 24, the 25th of August and died at about noon on the 25th of August. Concurring reports in Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche's biography and a letter by Mathilde Schenk-Nietzsche to Meta von Salis, the 30th of August 1900, quoted in Janz, 1981, p. 221, confirm the date of his death. Elisabeth had him buried beside his father at the church in Röcken near Lützen. His friend and secretary Gast gave his funeral oration, proclaiming: Holy be your name to all future generations!

The Sister's Betrayal

After Nietzsche's death, his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, became the curator and editor of his manuscripts, and she edited his unpublished writings to fit her German ultranationalist ideology, often contradicting or obfuscating Nietzsche's stated opinions, which were explicitly opposed to antisemitism and nationalism. Through her published editions, Nietzsche's work became associated with fascism and Nazism. Elisabeth compiled The Will to Power from Nietzsche's unpublished notebooks and published it posthumously in 1901. Because his sister arranged the book based on her own conflation of several of Nietzsche's early outlines and took liberties with the material, the scholarly consensus has been that it does not reflect Nietzsche's intent. For example, Elisabeth removed aphorism 35 of The Antichrist, where Nietzsche rewrote a passage of the Bible. Mazzino Montinari, the editor of Nietzsche's Nachlass, called it a forgery. Yet, the endeavor to rescue Nietzsche's reputation by discrediting The Will to Power often leads to skepticism about the value of his late notes, even of his whole Nachlass. His Nachlass and The Will to Power are distinct. Elisabeth had him buried beside his father at the church in Röcken near Lützen. His friend and secretary Gast gave his funeral oration, proclaiming: Holy be your name to all future generations! Twentieth-century scholars such as Walter Kaufmann, R. J. Hollingdale, and Georges Bataille defended Nietzsche against this interpretation, and corrected editions of his writings were soon made available. The works of Nietzsche then renewed popularity in the 1960s, and his ideas have since had a widespread impact on 20th- and 21st-century thinkers across philosophy, especially in schools of continental philosophy such as existentialism, postmodernism, and post-structuralism, as well as art, literature, music, poetry, politics, and popular culture. Nietzsche's sister, Elisabeth, married the antisemite Bernhard Förster and traveled to Paraguay to found Nueva Germania, a Germanic colony. Through correspondence, Nietzsche's relationship with Elisabeth continued through cycles of conflict and reconciliation, but they met again only after his collapse. She studied Nietzsche's works and, piece by piece, took control of their publication. Overbeck was dismissed and Gast finally co-operated. After the death of Franziska in 1897, Nietzsche lived in Weimar, where Elisabeth cared for him and allowed visitors, including Rudolf Steiner, to meet her uncommunicative brother. Elisabeth employed Steiner as a tutor to help her to understand her brother's philosophy. Steiner abandoned the attempt after only a few months, declaring that it was impossible to teach her anything about philosophy.

The Death Of God And The Will To Power

Nietzsche's philosophy centers on the statement God is dead, occurring in several of his works, notably in The Gay Science, which has become one of his best-known remarks. On the basis of it, many commentators regard Nietzsche as an atheist, while others suggest that this statement might reflect a more subtle understanding of divinity. Nietzsche predicted that the scientific developments and the increasing secularization of Europe had killed the Abrahamic God in a metaphorical sense, who had served as the basis for meaning and value in the West for more than a thousand years. Nietzsche believed that Christian moral doctrine was originally constructed to counteract nihilism. It provides people with traditional beliefs about the moral values of good and evil, belief in God, and a framework with which one might claim to have objective knowledge. In constructing a world where objective knowledge is supposed to be possible, Christianity is an antidote to a primal form of nihilism, the despair of meaninglessness. As Martin Heidegger put the problem, If God as the supra sensory ground and goal of all reality is dead if the supra sensory world of the ideas has suffered the loss of its obligatory and above it its vitalizing and upbuilding power, then nothing more remains to which man can cling and by which he can orient himself. One such reaction to the loss of meaning is what Nietzsche called passive nihilism, which he recognized in the pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer's doctrine, which Nietzsche also referred to as Western Buddhism, advocates separating oneself from will and desires to reduce suffering. Nietzsche characterized this ascetic attitude as a will to nothingness. Life turns away from itself as there is nothing of value to be found in the world. This moving away of all value in the world is characteristic of the nihilist, although, in this, the nihilist appears to be inconsistent; this will to nothingness is still a disavowed form of willing. Nietzsche approached the problem of nihilism as a deeply personal one, stating that this problem of the modern world had become conscious in him. Furthermore, he emphasized the danger of nihilism and the possibilities it offers, as seen in his statement that I praise, I do not reproach, [nihilism's] arrival. I believe it is one of the greatest crises, a moment of the deepest self-reflection of humanity. Whether man recovers from it, whether he becomes a master of this crisis, is a question of his strength! According to Nietzsche, it is only when nihilism is overcome that a culture can have a true foundation on which to thrive. He wished to hasten its coming only so that he could also hasten its ultimate departure. Heidegger interpreted the death of God with what he explained as the death of metaphysics. He concluded that metaphysics has reached its potential and that the ultimate fate and downfall of metaphysics was proclaimed with the statement God is dead. Scholars such as Keiji Nishitani and Graham Parkes have aligned Nietzsche's religious thought with Buddhist thinkers, particularly those of the Mahayana tradition. Occasionally, Nietzsche has also been considered in relation to Catholic mystics such as Meister Eckhart. Milne has argued against such interpretations on the grounds that such thinkers from Western and Eastern religious traditions strongly emphasize the divestment of will and the loss of ego, while Nietzsche offers a robust defense of egoism. Milne argues that Nietzsche's religious thought is better understood in relation to his self-professed ancestors: Heraclitus, Empedocles, Spinoza, Goethe. Milne plays particularly close attention to Nietzsche's relationship to Goethe, who has typically been neglected in research by academic philosophers. Milne shows that Goethe's views on the one and the many allow a reciprocal determinism between part and whole, meaning that a claimed identity between part and whole does not give the part value solely in terms of belonging to the whole. In essence, this allows for a unitive sense of the individual's relationship to the universe, while also fostering a sense of self-esteem which Nietzsche found lacking in mystics such as Eckhart. With regard to Nietzsche's development of thought, it has been noted in research that although he dealt with nihilistic themes from 1869 onwards, a conceptual use of nihilism first took place in handwritten notes in mid-1880. This period saw the publication of a then popular work that reconstructed so-called Russian nihilism on the basis of Russian newspaper reports, which is significant for Nietzsche's terminology. Nietzsche's concept God is dead applies to the doctrines of Christendom, though not to all other faiths: he claimed that Buddhism is a successful religion that he complimented for fostering critical thought. Still, Nietzsche saw his philosophy as a counter-movement to nihilism through appreciation of art: Nietzsche claimed that the Christian faith as practiced was not a proper representation of Jesus' teachings, as it forced people merely to believe in the way of Jesus but not to act as Jesus did; in particular, his example of refusing to judge people, something that Christians constantly did. He condemned institutionalized Christianity for emphasizing a morality of pity, which assumes an inherent illness in society: In Ecce Homo Nietzsche called the establishment of moral systems based on a dichotomy of good and evil a calamitous error, and wished to initiate a re-evaluation of the values of the Christian world. He indicated his desire to bring about a new, more naturalistic source of value in the vital impulses of life itself. While Nietzsche attacked the principles of Judaism, he was not antisemitic: in his work On the Genealogy of Morality, he explicitly condemned antisemitism and pointed out that his attack on Judaism was not an attack on contemporary Jewish people but specifically an attack upon the ancient Jewish priesthood who he claimed antisemitic Christians paradoxically based their views upon. Nietzsche felt that modern antisemitism was despicable and contrary to European ideals. Its cause, in his opinion, was the growth in European nationalism and the endemic jealousy and hatred of Jewish success. He wrote that Jews should be thanked for helping uphold a respect for the philosophies of ancient Greece, and for giving rise to the noblest human being Christ, the purest philosopher Baruch Spinoza, the mightiest book, and the most effective moral code in the world.

The Overman And The Eternal Return

Another concept important to understanding Nietzsche is the Übermensch, or Superman. Writing about nihilism in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche introduced an Übermensch. According to Laurence Lampert, the death of God must be followed by a long twilight of piety and nihilism. Zarathustra's gift of the overman is given to mankind not aware of the problem to which the overman is the solution. Zarathustra presents the Übermensch as the creator of new values, and he appears as a solution to the problem. Nietzsche also proposed the idea of eternal return, also known as eternal recurrence, which is a hypothetical concept that posits that the universe has been recurring, and will continue to recur, for an infinite number of times across infinite time or space. It is a purely physical concept, involving no supernatural reincarnation, but the return of beings in the same bodies. Nietzsche first proposed the idea of eternal return in a parable in Section 341 of The Gay Science, and also in the chapter Of the Vision and the Riddle in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, among other places. Nietzsche considered it as potentially horrifying and paralyzing, and said that its burden is the heaviest weight imaginable. The wish for the eternal return of all events would mark the ultimate affirmation of life, a reaction to Schopenhauer's praise of denying the will-to-live. To comprehend eternal recurrence, and to not only come to peace with it but to embrace it, requires amor fati, love of fate. As Martin Heidegger noted in his lectures on Nietzsche, Nietzsche's first mention of eternal recurrence presents this concept as a hypothetical question rather than stating it as fact. According to Heidegger, it is the burden imposed by the question of eternal recurrence, the mere possibility of it, and the reality of speculating on that possibility, which is so significant in modern thought: The way Nietzsche here patterns the first communication of the thought of the greatest burden makes it clear that the thought of thoughts is at the same time the most burdensome thought. Alexander Nehamas writes in Nietzsche: Life as Literature of three ways of seeing the eternal recurrence: My life will recur in exactly identical fashion: this expresses a totally fatalistic approach to the idea; My life may recur in exactly identical fashion: This second view conditionally asserts cosmology, but fails to capture what Nietzsche refers to in The Gay Science, p. 341; and finally, If my life were to recur, then it could recur only in identical fashion. Nehamas shows that this interpretation exists totally independently of physics and does not presuppose the truth of cosmology. Nehamas concluded that, if individuals constitute themselves through their actions, they can only maintain themselves in their current state by living in a recurrence of past actions. Nietzsche's thought is the negation of the idea of a history of salvation. Nietzsche also developed the concept of perspectivism, which claimed the death of God would eventually lead to the realization that there can never be a universal perspective on things and that the traditional idea of objective truth is incoherent. Nietzsche rejected the idea of objective reality, arguing that knowledge is contingent and conditional, relative to various fluid perspectives or interests. This leads to constant reassessment of rules, such as those of philosophy, the scientific method, etc., according to the circumstances of individual perspectives. This view has acquired the name perspectivism. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche proclaimed that a table of values hangs above every great person. He pointed out that what is common among different peoples is the act of esteeming, of creating values, even if the values are different from one person to the next. Nietzsche asserted that what made people great was not the content of their beliefs, but the act of valuing. Thus the values a community strives to articulate are not as important as the collective will to see those values come to pass. The willingness is more essential than the merit of the goal itself, according to Nietzsche. A thousand goals have there been so far, says Zarathustra, for there are a thousand peoples. Only the yoke for the thousand necks is still lacking: the one goal is lacking. Humanity still has no goal. Hence, the title of the aphorism, On The Thousand And One Goal. The idea that one value-system is no more worthy than the next, although it may not be directly ascribed to Nietzsche, has become a common premise in modern social science. Max Weber and Martin Heidegger absorbed it and made it their own. It shaped their philosophical and cultural endeavors, as well as their political understanding. Weber, for example, relied on Nietzsche's perspectivism by maintaining that objectivity is still possible, but only after a particular perspective, value, or end has been established. Among his critique of traditional philosophy of Immanuel Kant, René Descartes, and Plato in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche attacked the thing in itself and cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am, as unfalsifiable beliefs based on naive acceptance of previous notions and fallacies. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre put Nietzsche in a high place in the history of philosophy. While criticizing nihilism and Nietzsche together as a sign of general decay, he still commended him for recognizing psychological motives behind Kant and David Hume's moral philosophy: For it was Nietzsche's historic achievement to understand more clearly than any other philosopher... not only that what purported to be appeals of objectivity were in fact expressions of subjective will, but also the nature of the problems that this posed for philosophy. Nietzsche also developed the concept of master-slave morality, which argued that a fundamental shift took place during human history from thinking in terms of good and bad toward good and evil. The initial form of morality was set by a warrior aristocracy and other ruling castes of ancient civilizations. Aristocratic values of good and bad coincided with and reflected their relationship to lower castes such as slaves. Nietzsche presented this master morality as the original system of morality, perhaps best associated with Homeric Greece. To be good was to be happy and to have the things related to happiness: wealth, strength, health, power, etc. To be bad was to be like the slaves over whom the aristocracy ruled: poor, weak, sick, pathetic, objects of pity or disgust rather than hatred. Slave morality developed as a reaction to master morality. Value emerges from the contrast between good and evil: good being associated with other-worldliness, charity, piety, restraint, meekness, and submission; while evil is worldly, cruel, selfish, wealthy, and aggressive. Nietzsche saw slave morality as pessimistic and fearful, its values emerging to improve the self-perception of slaves. He associated slave morality with the Jewish and Christian traditions, as it is born out of the ressentiment of slaves. Nietzsche argued that the idea of equality allowed slaves to overcome their own conditions without despising themselves. By denying the inherent inequality of people, in success, strength, beauty, and intelligence, slaves acquired a method of escape, namely by generating new values on the basis of rejecting master morality. It was used as an attempt to overcome the slave's sense of inferiority before their better-off masters. It does so by depicting slave weakness, for example, as a matter of choice, by relabeling it as meekness. The good man of master morality is precisely the evil man of slave morality, while the bad man is recast as the good man. Slave morality, however, leads to seeing the present state of the world as unjust, and creates the need for a belief in an afterlife, where the evil man the master will be punished, while the good man the slave will be rewarded. Nietzsche saw slave morality as a source of the nihilism that has overtaken Europe: it had led to view earthly life as inherently unfair, only justified as a prelude to the world to come; as such, the ever-increasing loss of belief in religion and Heaven had led to utter despair and pessimism. Furthermore, modern Europe and Christianity exist in a hypocritical state due to a tension between master and slave morality, both contradictory values determining, to varying degrees, the values of most Europeans who are motley. Nietzsche called for exceptional people not to be ashamed in the face of a supposed morality-for-all, which he deems to be harmful to the flourishing of exceptional people. He cautioned that morality, per se, is not bad; it is good for the masses and should be left to them. Exceptional people, in contrast, should follow their own inner law. A favorite motto of Nietzsche, taken from Pindar, reads: Become what you are. A long-standing assumption about Nietzsche is that he preferred master over slave morality. The eminent Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann rejected this interpretation, writing that Nietzsche's analyses of these two types of morality were used only in a descriptive and historic sense; they were not meant for any kind of acceptance or glorification. On the other hand, Nietzsche called master morality a higher order of values, the noble ones, those that say Yes to life, those that guarantee the future. Just as there is an order of rank between man and man, there is also an order of rank between morality and morality. Nietzsche waged a philosophic war against the slave morality of Christianity in his revaluation of all values to bring about the victory of a new master morality that he called the philosophy of the future. Beyond Good and Evil is subtitled Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. In Daybreak Nietzsche began his Campaign against Morality. He called himself an immoralist and harshly criticized the prominent moral philosophies of his day: Christianity, Kantianism, and utilitarianism. Nietzsche's concept God is dead applies to the doctrines of Christendom, though not to all other faiths: he claimed that Buddhism is a successful religion that he complimented for fostering critical thought. Still, Nietzsche saw his philosophy as a counter-movement to nihilism through appreciation of art: Nietzsche claimed that the Christian faith as practiced was not a proper representation of Jesus' teachings, as it forced people merely to believe in the way of Jesus but not to act as Jesus did; in particular, his example of refusing to judge people, something that Christians constantly did. He condemned institutionalized Christianity for emphasizing a morality of pity, which assumes an inherent illness in society: In Ecce Homo Nietzsche called the establishment of moral systems based on a dichotomy of good and evil a calamitous error, and wished to initiate a re-evaluation of the values of the Christian world. He indicated his desire to bring about a new, more naturalistic source of value in the vital impulses of life itself. While Nietzsche attacked the principles of Judaism, he was not antisemitic: in his work On the Genealogy of Morality, he explicitly condemned antisemitism and pointed out that his attack on Judaism was not an attack on contemporary Jewish people but specifically an attack upon the ancient Jewish priesthood who he claimed antisemitic Christians paradoxically based their views upon. Nietzsche felt that modern antisemitism was despicable and contrary to European ideals. Its cause, in his opinion, was the growth in European nationalism and the endemic jealousy and hatred of Jewish success. He wrote that Jews should be thanked for helping uphold a respect for the philosophies of ancient Greece, and for giving rise to the noblest human being Christ, the purest philosopher Baruch Spinoza, the mightiest book, and the most effective moral code in the world.