Friedrich Nietzsche

About this figure

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher and philologist whose radical critique of morality, religion, and truth made him one of the most influential and most frequently misread thinkers of the modern era. A prodigiously talented classical scholar, he was appointed professor of classical philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at the age of twenty-four, before he had even completed his doctorate, on the strength of his published work alone. Chronic ill health, including migraines and eye trouble that plagued him for most of his life, forced him to resign the post a decade later, after which he lived an itinerant life in guesthouses across Switzerland, France, and Italy, largely supported by a university pension, writing at a furious pace.

Nietzsche's first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), argued that Greek tragedy arose from a tension between two impulses he called the Apollonian, associated with order and form, and the Dionysian, associated with ecstatic excess, and that this tension had been lost with the rise of rationalism in Greek philosophy; the book also reflected his enthusiasm, later abandoned, for the composer Richard Wagner, whom he attacked years afterward in The Case of Wagner. His middle period produced a series of aphoristic works, including Human, All Too Human and The Dawn of Day, that turned a skeptical, almost scientific eye on the psychological origins of morality, religion, and philosophical belief. His most famous and stylistically unusual book, Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883–1885), used the voice of a fictional prophet to introduce ideas including the "will to power," the "übermensch," and eternal recurrence, in prose deliberately closer to poetry than argument.

Nietzsche's later works sharpened his critique into more direct philosophical argument: Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) traced the historical origins of concepts like good, evil, guilt, and conscience, arguing that Christian morality in particular represented an inversion of aristocratic values driven by resentment; The Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist, both written in 1888, extended this attack on Christianity and on what he saw as the era's false idols with increasing ferocity. In late 1888 he wrote a strange, self-assessing autobiography, Ecce Homo, with chapter titles including "Why I Am So Wise," shortly before suffering a complete mental breakdown in Turin in January 1889. He never recovered his sanity, was cared for by his mother and then his sister until his death in 1900, and lived to see almost none of the enormous influence his work would come to have on twentieth-century philosophy and literature.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.