Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche was born on 15 October 1844 at Röcken, a village near Leipzig in the Prussian Province of Saxony, and named after King Frederick William IV of Prussia, who turned 49 that day. His father Carl Ludwig Nietzsche and his grandfather were Lutheran clergymen, so he was the eldest son of a devout parsonage. His father died in 1849 after a long brain illness, and his two-year-old brother six months later. His mother Franziska moved with Friedrich and his sister Elisabeth, two years younger, to Naumburg, where they lived with his grandmother and two aunts. This childhood among the women of the family led into his lifelong, tangled bond with his sister.

As a pastor's son he won a place at the renowned boarding school of Schulpforta, where he studied from 1858 to 1864. There he learned Greek, Latin, Hebrew and French well enough to read the classics in the original, and he wrote poems and composed music. An essay calling the then almost forgotten Friedrich Hölderlin his “favourite poet” earned him the advice to concern himself in future with healthier, more “German” writers.

In 1864 he began theology and classical philology at Bonn, meaning to become a minister. After one semester he dropped theology and lost his faith. Two books from the last phase of classical German philosophy played a part: David Friedrich Strauss's Life of Jesus, which took the Gospels apart by historical criticism, and Ludwig Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity, which argued that people created God and not the other way round. In June 1865 he wrote to his devout sister that if she wished for peace of soul and pleasure she should believe, and if she wished to be a devotee of truth she should inquire. The Young Hegelian critique of religion that led to Marx became for Nietzsche the starting point of a very different road.

In 1865 he followed his teacher Friedrich Ritschl to Leipzig. That year he picked up Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation in a second-hand bookshop, and this was what turned him to philosophy: Schopenhauer's pessimism, with blind will at the bottom of the world and life as suffering, gripped the young man. Friedrich Albert Lange's History of Materialism, read the next year, introduced him to Kant, Darwin's theory of evolution and modern natural science. In 1867 he joined the Prussian artillery at Naumburg as a one-year volunteer, but in March 1868 he badly injured his chest mounting a horse and was laid up for months. Back at his studies in 1868, he met the composer Richard Wagner, himself an admirer of Schopenhauer, in Leipzig. Schopenhauer and Wagner were to be the two pillars of his thought for the next ten years.

In 1869, on Ritschl's recommendation, Nietzsche was called to Basel in Switzerland as professor of classical philology at the age of 24, with neither a doctorate nor a teaching qualification; Leipzig hurriedly gave him an honorary doctorate. Before leaving for Basel he applied to give up his Prussian citizenship, which was formally revoked by a document of 17 April 1869, and he remained officially stateless for the rest of his life. Even so, when the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870 he served on the German side as a medical orderly and came back with dysentery and diphtheria. Back in Basel he watched the founding of the German Empire and Otto von Bismarck's policies from outside and with scepticism. In Basel he grew close to the theologian Franz Overbeck, a friend for life, and the historian Jacob Burckhardt, whose lectures he often attended.

In these years he was a frequent guest at Wagner's house at Tribschen near Lucerne and belonged to the couple's most intimate circle. His first book, The Birth of Tragedy, appeared in 1872. Greek tragedy, it argued, was born from the clash and union of the Apollonian, the order of dream and form, and the Dionysian, the drive of intoxication and oneness; Socratic rationalism had killed the Dionysian power, and Wagner's music drama would now bring tragedy back to life. One sentence of the book became the first motto of his thought:

“For it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.”

denn nur als aesthetisches Phänomen ist das Dasein und die Welt ewig gerechtfertigt

The philologists were cold. Even Ritschl was unenthusiastic, and the young Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff attacked the book in his pamphlet Philology of the Future! as speculation that had abandoned scholarly method. His friend Erwin Rohde and Wagner defended him, but Nietzsche grew isolated in his field, and in 1871 he tried in vain to move to a chair of philosophy at Basel.

In the four Untimely Meditations of 1873–1876 he criticised contemporary German culture from the side of Schopenhauer and Wagner. The first mocked The Old Faith and the New, the late book of the same Strauss whose Life of Jesus had cost him his faith, as the work of a cultural philistine. The first Bayreuth Festival in 1876 was the turning point. Repelled by the banality of the performances and the baseness of the audience, he was also alienated by Wagner's championing of “German culture” and his enjoyment of fame among the German public. He also clearly distanced himself from Wagner's antisemitic writings and remarks. He broke with Schopenhauer at the same time, and in Human, All Too Human (1878) he brought out a new style of short aphorisms dissecting metaphysics, morality and religion. Severe short sight, migraines and stomach trouble, which had plagued him since childhood, had worsened after his illnesses of 1870; after longer and longer leaves he gave up his chair in 1879, aged 34, and was pensioned.

Living on his Basel pension and help from friends, Nietzsche moved constantly in search of a climate he could bear: summers mostly at Sils Maria in the Swiss Engadine, winters in Italian cities such as Genoa, Rapallo and Turin and in Nice in France. With his eyesight failing he even tried a typewriter, and his former pupil Peter Gast (Heinrich Köselitz) became a kind of secretary, copying out and proofreading his nearly illegible manuscripts. Gast and Overbeck were among the very few friends who stayed with him to the end. From 1878 to 1888 he published a book almost every year.

Daybreak (1881) was followed in 1882 by The Gay Science. In its section 125 a “madman” runs into the marketplace with a lantern in broad daylight, crying that he seeks God; the unbelievers standing about laugh at him. The madman says:

“God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!”

Gott ist todt! Gott bleibt todt! Und wir haben ihn getödtet!

This is no atheist's cry of triumph. Modern people themselves, through science and historical criticism, have killed God, but they do not yet grasp what it means. If the whole order of morality and meaning that the Christian God upheld collapses, they will stray through an “infinite nothing” with no up or down. This is the nihilism Nietzsche saw as the problem of the coming two centuries. In section 341 of the same book he asks whether one could bear, and affirm, having to live this very life again innumerable times, exactly the same: the thought of eternal recurrence.

In the spring of 1882 in Rome, through Malwida von Meysenbug and the philosopher Paul Rée, Nietzsche met Lou Salomé, a Russian-born woman of twenty-one. The three dreamed of a commune for living and studying together; Nietzsche proposed to her through Rée and then in person at Lucerne, and was refused. They spent that summer together at Tautenburg in Thuringia, but his sister Elisabeth, calling Salomé an “immoral woman”, wrote to both families to wreck the plan, and in November Rée and Salomé left him. Estranged from his mother and sister as well and almost wholly isolated, tormented by thoughts of suicide, he fled to Rapallo and early in 1883 wrote the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in only ten days.

Zarathustra, a prophet come down from the mountains, speaks to the crowd in the marketplace:

“I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome.”

Ich lehre euch den Übermenschen. Der Mensch ist Etwas, das überwunden werden soll.

After the death of God, people must make new values themselves and go beyond themselves. Yet the book's new style met with no more than politeness even among his close friends. It hardly sold, and in 1885 he had only forty copies of the fourth part printed at his own expense, giving away seven. In 1886 he broke with his publisher Ernst Schmeitzner, disgusted by his antisemitism, and complained that his writings lay buried in an “anti-Semitic dump”. That year he printed Beyond Good and Evil at his own expense and bought back the rights to his earlier books, reissuing them with new prefaces. The same year his sister married the antisemitic agitator Bernhard Förster and left for Paraguay to found the “Germanic” colony of Nueva Germania, a project Nietzsche found ridiculous.

In 1887 Nietzsche wrote the polemic On the Genealogy of Morality in a short time. Its starting point is that our moral values of good and evil did not fall from heaven but arose in history. He set master morality, in which the noble affirm themselves as “good”, against slave morality, which begins from resentment of the strong, ressentiment, brands the strong “evil” and calls its own powerlessness “good”.

“The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values.”

Der Sklavenaufstand in der Moral beginnt damit, dass das Ressentiment selbst schöpferisch wird und Werthe gebiert

Christianity, for Nietzsche, is the victory of this slave revolt, and bad conscience and the ascetic ideal are its products. This method of tracing historically where and how values arose passed in the twentieth century into Michel Foucault's “genealogy”. The same year he read Fyodor Dostoevsky and felt an immediate kinship, and he corresponded with Hippolyte Taine and the Danish critic Georg Brandes. Early in 1888 Brandes gave the first lecture series on Nietzsche's philosophy at the University of Copenhagen and began to make his name known.

At the end of the Genealogy Nietzsche announced a new work, The Will to Power: Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values, but he seems to have dropped the plan and used some of the drafts for Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist in 1888. He was in such high spirits that he wrote five books that year. The Case of Wagner attacked his old master, and The Antichrist denounced Christianity as a religion hostile to life. That book also holds a passage no Marxist reader can pass over. Nietzsche saw the very demand for equality as the resentment of the weak, and he wrote of the socialists:

“Whom do I hate most among the rabble of today? The socialist rabble, the Chandala apostles, who undermine the worker's instinct, his pleasure, his feeling of contentment with his small existence.”

Wen hasse ich unter dem Gesindel von Heute am besten? Das Socialisten-Gesindel, die Tschandala-Apostel, die den Instinkt, die Lust, das Genügsamkeits-Gefühl des Arbeiters mit seinem kleinen Sein untergraben

The next sentence adds that “injustice never lies in unequal rights; it lies in the claim to ‘equal’ rights.” Scholars such as Domenico Losurdo stress that extreme statements of this kind, such as praise of slavery or the fight against pity, stand not in the notebooks his sister tampered with but in the books Nietzsche published himself.

On his 44th birthday he decided to write the autobiography Ecce Homo. Its preface asks the reader: “Hear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else!” In its last chapter he writes that his name will one day be linked to a crisis such as the earth has never known:

“I am no man, I am dynamite.”

Ich bin kein Mensch, ich bin Dynamit.

From the autumn of 1888 his letters and writings show a growing overestimation of his own fate. In December he corresponded with August Strindberg, and believing an international breakthrough to be at hand he planned to buy back his earlier books and have them translated into the main European languages.

On 3 January 1889 Nietzsche collapsed in a street in Turin. The famous story that he threw his arms around a horse being flogged spread only after his death and cannot be confirmed. Over the next few days he sent short notes signed “Dionysus” or “the Crucified” to Cosima Wagner, Burckhardt and others. Alarmed, Overbeck went to Turin and took him to an asylum in Basel; his mother moved him to the university psychiatric clinic at Jena and in 1890 brought him home to Naumburg. The diagnosis at the time was tertiary syphilis, which is now doubted; other explanations such as vascular or hereditary disease have been proposed. He never recovered.

Just as he collapsed, his books began to be read. Overbeck and Gast discussed what to do with the remaining manuscripts, and Gast started a first collected edition. In 1893 his sister Elisabeth, back from Paraguay after her husband's suicide, had the already printed volumes of Gast's edition pulped, founded the Nietzsche Archive and step by step took control of her brother, his papers and the publication of his works. She fell out with Overbeck, while Gast in the end co-operated. After their mother's death in 1897 she moved him to the Villa Silberblick in Weimar, nursing him and admitting chosen visitors to see the silent philosopher. Having lost speech and the use of his legs after at least two strokes in 1898 and 1899, he died of pneumonia and a further stroke on 25 August 1900 and was buried beside his father at Röcken.

His sister picked fragments from his notebooks and published them as a book, The Will to Power, in 1901, with a much enlarged edition in 1906. Bearing a title Nietzsche had once planned and then dropped, it is not a book Nietzsche wrote but a compilation of his notebooks selected and arranged by Elisabeth and Gast. She conflated several of his outlines and took liberties with the material (she removed section 35 of The Antichrist, for example), and scholars today agree that it does not reflect his intent. She also rewrote his letters to make herself appear close to him; these forgeries became widely known through Karl Schlechta's edition in the 1950s.

It was two Italians who recovered the Nietzsche of the manuscripts. In the early 1960s Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, a member of the Italian Communist Party, were preparing a translation when they realised the existing editions could not be trusted; Montinari went to Weimar in East Germany in 1961 to examine the manuscripts, and they decided to make an entirely new critical edition. The German Kritische Gesamtausgabe began to appear in 1967, and Montinari called The Will to Power a forgery. Yet discrediting The Will to Power can easily slide into belittling Nietzsche's whole Nachlass; the notebooks and the compilation are distinct.

Nietzsche was hardly read in his lifetime. Brandes's Copenhagen lectures of 1888 first aroused wide interest, and only after his death in 1900 did his books become widely known. The first welcome actually came from the left. He had some following among left-wing Germans in the 1890s, and in 1894–1895 German conservatives wanted to ban his work as subversive. In the late nineteenth century his ideas were commonly associated with anarchist movements, and the German anarchist Gustav Landauer gave the most searching appreciation and critique of Nietzsche from an anarchist standpoint. From 1888 through the 1890s more of his works were published in Russia than in any other country. The Russian Symbolist poets read him, and among the Bolsheviks Vladimir Bazarov, Anatoly Lunacharsky and Alexander Bogdanov were influenced by him. The shadow of the Übermensch fell across the God-building of Lunacharsky and Maxim Gorky, who would have humanity worship itself in place of the old God, and Vladimir Lenin, furious, attacked the idea for hiding religion's role as a tool of exploitation and compromising with reactionary forces.

The same Nietzsche was read on the right. German soldiers received copies of Thus Spoke Zarathustra as gifts in the First World War, and by then he had a reputation as an inspiration both for German militarism and for leftist politics. What finally pulled his name to the right was his sister's Nietzsche Archive. A German nationalist and antisemite, Elisabeth admired Benito Mussolini and received Adolf Hitler at the Archive several times in 1932–1934. How much Hitler read of Nietzsche is unclear, but he often visited the Nietzsche museum in Weimar and used Nietzsche's expressions in Mein Kampf. The Nazis used Nietzsche selectively; their foremost exponent was Alfred Baeumler, who published Nietzsche, Philosopher and Politician in 1931 and several editions of Nietzsche during the Third Reich. Against this use of a man who had despised antisemitism and German nationalism, the French writer Georges Bataille tried to rescue him from Nazi appropriation in his 1937 essay “Nietzsche and the Fascists”.

The weightiest Marxist verdict was György Lukács's The Destruction of Reason (1954). Lukács read the whole of German bourgeois philosophy after Hegel as a reactionary, irrationalist response to the class struggle, a line running from the late Schelling through Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and life-philosophy to the political force of fascism. The book was praised within the Marxist tradition, yet also called the low point of Lukács's long career. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, by contrast, took Nietzsche up in Dialectic of Enlightenment as a critic who saw through the reversal of enlightenment into domination.

After the Second World War Nietzsche revived. Walter Kaufmann in America and R. J. Hollingdale in Britain stripped away the Nazi image with their translations and commentaries, and Martin Heidegger produced a four-volume study. The existential philosophy of Heidegger and Karl Jaspers and the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus took up Nietzsche's question of how people are to make meaning themselves in a world without God, and in 1960s France Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida read him anew and opened the way of post-structuralism. The philosopher Paul Ricœur called Nietzsche a master of the “school of suspicion” along with Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. And the critical edition of Colli and Montinari made all these readings argue over Nietzsche's manuscripts rather than his sister's compilation.