Friedrich Nietzsche

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 3rd of January 1889, in the streets of Turin, Friedrich Nietzsche caused a public disturbance and two policemen approached him. An often-repeated tale holds that he had watched a horse being flogged across the Piazza Carlo Alberto, ran to it, threw his arms around its neck, and collapsed. What actually happened remains unknown. The man at the center of that scene was a German philosopher, born on the 15th of October 1844 and dead by the 25th of August 1900. He had been a brilliant young classical scholar, then an isolated writer who moved between Switzerland, Italy, and southern France in search of climates that might ease his failing body. In the days after that collapse, he sent short notes to friends, signing them "Dionysus" or "the crucified one." Why did a stateless scholar who renounced his Prussian citizenship come to declare that God is dead? How did a thinker who explicitly condemned antisemitism end up associated with fascism and Nazism after his death? And who was the sister who edited his manuscripts to fit her own ultranationalist ideology? Those questions run beneath everything that follows.

• 2. A Pastor's Son

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  Carl Ludwig Nietzsche, a Lutheran pastor, died of a brain disease in 1849 after a year of excruciating agony, when his son was only four years old. Six months later the second son, Ludwig Joseph, died at age two. The family then moved to Naumburg to live with the boy's maternal grandmother and his father's two unmarried sisters. Friedrich had been named after King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, who turned 49 on the day of the birth in the town of Röcken near Leipzig. He later dropped his middle name, Wilhelm. Academic records noted that he excelled in Christian theology, and a scholarship offered because his father had served the state sent him to the school at Schulpforta, where he studied from 1858 to 1864. At Schulpforta he received a grounding in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and French, so he could read primary sources directly. His end-of-semester exams in March 1864 showed a top mark of 1 in Religion and German and a lackluster 3 in Hebrew and Mathematics. He pursued subjects considered unbecoming, embracing the then-almost-unknown poet Friedrich Hölderlin, whom he called "my favourite poet." The teacher who marked the essay urged him toward healthier, more lucid, more German writers instead. A drunken return to school with a student named Richter cost Nietzsche his place as first in his class and ended his status as prefect. The lost faith would come next.

• 3. Losing The Faith

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  After graduating in September 1864, Nietzsche began studying theology and classical philology at the University of Bonn, hoping to become a minister. After a single semester, to his mother's anger, he stopped his theological studies and lost his faith. As early as his 1862 essay "Fate and History," he had argued that historical research discredited the central teachings of Christianity. David Strauss's Life of Jesus appears to have struck him deeply, and Ludwig Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity pressed the argument that people created God, not the reverse. In June 1865, at the age of 20, Nietzsche wrote to his devoutly religious sister Elisabeth about this rupture. "Hence the ways of men part," he told her. "If you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire." That same year he followed Professor Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl to the University of Leipzig and threw himself into philology. In 1865 he also discovered Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation, which awakened his philosophical interest. He later dedicated the essay "Schopenhauer as Educator" to that thinker. A horse would intervene before the academic path could close. In March 1868, while mounting, he struck his chest against the pommel and tore two muscles in his left side, leaving him unable to walk for months.

• 4. The Youngest Professor

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  In 1869, at age 24, Nietzsche received an offer to become professor of classical philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland. He had neither completed his doctorate nor received his teaching certificate, and Leipzig University awarded him an honorary doctorate in March 1869 to bridge the gap, both moves backed by Ritschl. To this day he remains among the youngest tenured Classics professors on record. Before moving to Basel, he renounced his Prussian citizenship, and for the rest of his life he remained officially stateless. Nietzsche nonetheless served in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to 1871 as a medical orderly, where he contracted diphtheria and dysentery and witnessed the traumatic effects of battle. In 1872 he published his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, abandoning the strict philologic method for a more speculative approach. His colleagues, including Ritschl, showed little enthusiasm. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff attacked it in a polemic, while Erwin Rohde and Richard Wagner came to its defense. Between 1873 and 1876 Nietzsche published four long essays, later collected as Untimely Meditations, each carrying a cultural critique. Various illnesses had plagued him since childhood, including near-blinding shortsightedness, migraines, and violent indigestion. By 1879 the decline forced him to resign his position and accept a pension. He was 34, and his most productive years lay ahead.

• 5. Wandering And Writing

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  From 1879 to 1888 Nietzsche lived as an independent author, drifting between cities in search of relief. He spent summers in Sils Maria near St. Moritz and winters in the Italian cities of Genoa, Rapallo, and Turin, and the French city of Nice. In Genoa his failing eyesight pushed him to try a typewriter, the Hansen Writing Ball, before a former pupil named Peter Gast became his secretary and transcribed nearly all of his work. Beginning with Human, All Too Human in 1878, he published one book or major section each year until 1888, when he completed five. In 1882 Nietzsche met Lou Andreas-Salomé through Malwida von Meysenbug and Paul Rée. He is believed to have fallen in love with her almost at once. He asked Rée to propose marriage on his behalf, and she rejected it; on the 13th of May, alone with her in Lucerne, he proposed himself, and she refused again. Salomé had wanted him as a friend, not a husband, and the three planned an academic commune they never built. Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth wrote letters to the families of Salomé and Rée to wreck the plan, determined to pull her brother from the "immoral woman." By 1883 Nietzsche wrote that he felt "genuine hatred for my sister." Fleeing to Rapallo in near-isolation, he wrote the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in only ten days. His books barely sold; in 1885 he printed only 40 copies of the fourth part of Zarathustra and gave a fraction to close friends. He was already taking huge doses of opium and writing his own prescriptions for chloral hydrate, signing them "Dr. Nietzsche."

• 6. Tragedy And The Dead God

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  In classical Athenian tragedy, Nietzsche found an art form that let Greek spectators look into the abyss of human suffering and still affirm life as worth living. The Birth of Tragedy argues that drama is born from the fusion of two impulses drawn from the gods Apollo and Dionysus. Apollo stands for harmony, clarity, logic, and the principle of individuation, a dreaming state full of illusions. Dionysus stands for disorder, intoxication, ecstasy, and unity, a state that liberates the instincts and dissolves boundaries. Nietzsche held that the works of Aeschylus and Sophocles reached the apex of tragedy, and that with Euripides this art began its Untergang, its going under. He blamed Euripides for infusing tragedy with Socratic rationalism and morality, robbing it of the fragile balance between the two forces. Socrates and Plato carried reason forward at the expense of artistic impulse, and the modern world inherited that bargain. From this same suspicion of inherited frameworks came his best-known remark, "God is dead," stated in several works and notably in The Gay Science. Nietzsche meant that scientific progress and the secularization of Europe had metaphorically killed the Abrahamic God who had grounded meaning in the West for more than a thousand years. He saw a danger in what followed, passive nihilism, the despair of meaninglessness, which he recognized in Schopenhauer's pessimism and called a "will to nothingness." Yet he praised the crisis rather than reproaching it, calling its arrival one of the greatest crises and a moment of the deepest self-reflection of humanity.

• 7. Masters, Slaves, And The Overman

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  In Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche traced a fundamental shift in human history from thinking in terms of "good and bad" toward "good and evil." The original master morality, perhaps best seen in Homeric Greece, was set by a warrior aristocracy. To be good meant to be happy, strong, healthy, and powerful; to be bad meant to resemble the slaves, poor and weak and pathetic. Slave morality then developed as a reaction, born of the ressentiment of slaves, prizing other-worldliness, charity, meekness, and submission while branding the worldly and strong as evil. Nietzsche tied this slave morality to the Jewish and Christian traditions and argued that the idea of equality let slaves escape self-contempt by inventing new values. He condemned institutionalized Christianity for a morality of pity, which he said deprives us of strength and makes suffering contagious. Walter Kaufmann rejected the assumption that Nietzsche simply preferred masters, insisting these analyses were descriptive and historic, not glorification. Against this background Nietzsche introduced the Übermensch in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the creator of new values who answers the problem of the death of God. "I teach you the Übermensch," Zarathustra proclaims. "Man is something that shall be overcome." The Übermensch rises above the herd and above good and evil itself. Even while attacking the principles of Judaism, Nietzsche explicitly condemned antisemitism, calling modern antisemitism despicable and contrary to European ideals. He broke with his publisher Ernst Schmeitzner in 1886, disgusted by his antisemitic opinions, and printed Beyond Good and Evil at his own expense.

• 8. The Sister And The Forgery

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  On his 44th birthday, after finishing Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist, Nietzsche wrote the autobiography Ecce Homo. In its preface he declared, "Hear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else." Within months the collapse came in Turin. Franz Overbeck travelled there and brought him to a psychiatric clinic in Basel, after which his mother Franziska moved him to a clinic in Jena. His insanity was first diagnosed as tertiary syphilis, though later researchers proposed manic-depressive illness with vascular dementia, a meningioma, frontotemporal dementia, the stroke disorder CADASIL, and even mercury poisoning. In 1898 and 1899 he suffered at least two strokes that left him unable to speak or walk. After contracting pneumonia in mid-August 1900, he died about noon on the 25th of August, and was buried beside his father at the church in Röcken. Gast gave the funeral oration, proclaiming, "Holy be your name to all future generations." His sister Elisabeth had returned from Paraguay in 1893 after the suicide of her husband, the antisemite Bernhard Förster, with whom she had founded the colony Nueva Germania. Piece by piece she seized control of his publications, dismissing Overbeck. She edited his unpublished writings to fit her German ultranationalist ideology, often contradicting his stated opinions, and through her editions his work became linked to fascism and Nazism. In 1901 she compiled The Will to Power from his notebooks; Mazzino Montinari, editor of the Nachlass, called it a forgery. Walter Kaufmann, R. J. Hollingdale, and Georges Bataille later defended Nietzsche against this distortion, corrected editions appeared, and his work found renewed popularity in the 1960s among thinkers in existentialism, postmodernism, and post-structuralism.