## 1. Life: 1844-1900



In the small German village of Rocken bei Lutzen, located in
a rural farmland area about 20 miles southwest of Leipzig, Friedrich
Wilhelm Nietzsche was born at approximately 10:00 a.m. on October 15,
1844. The date coincided with the 49th birthday of the Prussian King,
Friedrich Wilhelm IV, after whom Nietzsche was named, and who had been
responsible for Nietzsche's father's appointment as
Rocken's town pastor.



Nietzsche's uncle and grandfathers were also Lutheran ministers,
and his paternal grandfather, Friedrich August Ludwig Nietzsche
(1756-1826), was further distinguished as a Protestant scholar,
one of whose books (1796) affirmed the "everlasting survival of
Christianity." Nietzsche's grandparents on both sides were
from the Province of Saxony, with his paternal grandfather, paternal
grandmother (Erdmuthe Dorothea Krause, 1778-1856), maternal
grandfather (David Ernst Ohler, 1787-1859) and maternal
grandmother (Johanna Elisabeth Wilhelmine Hahn, 1794-1876)
having been born respectively in the small towns of Bibra (just south
of Jena), Reichenbach (southeast of Jena), Zeitz (between Jena and
Leipzig), and Wehlitz (just northwest of Leipzig).



When Nietzsche was nearly 5 years old, his father, Karl Ludwig
Nietzsche (1813-1849) died from a brain ailment (July 30, 1849)
and the death of Nietzsche's two-year-old brother, Ludwig
Joseph, followed traumatically six months later (January 4, 1850).
Having been living only yards away from Rocken's church in
the house reserved for the pastor and his family, the Nietzsche family
left their home soon after Karl Ludwig's death. They moved to
nearby Naumburg an der Saale, where Nietzsche (called
"Fritz" by his family) lived with his mother, Franziska
(1826-1897), his grandmother, Erdmuthe, his father's two
sisters, Auguste and Rosalie (d. 1855 and 1867, respectively), and his
younger sister, Therese Elisabeth Alexandra (1846-1935).



From the ages of 14 to 19 (1858-1864), Nietzsche attended a
first-rate boarding school, Schulpforta, located about 4km from his
home in Naumburg, where he prepared for university studies. The
school's rigid educational atmosphere was reflected in its long
history as a former Cistercian monastery (1137-1540), with
buildings that included a 12th century Romanesque chapel and a 13th
century Gothic church. At Schulpforta--a school whose alumni
included the German Idealist philosopher, Johann Gottlieb Fichte
(1762-1814) and the philologist, Ulrich von
Wilamowitz-Mollendorff (1848-1931)--Nietzsche met his
lifelong friend, Paul Deussen (1845-1919), who was confirmed at
Nietzsche's side in 1861, and who was to become an Orientalist,
historian of philosophy, and in 1911, the founder of the Schopenhauer
Society. During his summers in Naumburg, Nietzsche led a small music
and literature club named "Germania," and became
acquainted with Richard Wagner's music through the club's
subscription to the *Zeitschrift fur Musik.* The teenage
Nietzsche also read the German romantic writings of Friedrich
Holderlin and Jean-Paul Richter, along with David Strauss's
controversial and demythologizing *Life of Jesus Critically
Examined* (*Das Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet*, 1848).



After graduating from Schulpforta, Nietzsche entered the University of
Bonn in 1864 as a theology and philology student, and his interests
soon gravitated more exclusively towards philology--a discipline
which then centered upon the interpretation of classical and biblical
texts. As a student of philology, Nietzsche attended lectures by Otto
Jahn (1813-1869) and Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl
(1806-1876). Jahn was a biographer of Mozart who had studied at
the University of Berlin under Karl Lachmann (1793-1851)--a
philologist known both for his studies of the Roman philosopher,
Lucretius (ca. 99-55 BCE), and for having developed the
genealogical, or stemmatic, method in textual recension; Ritschl was a
classics scholar whose work centered on the Roman comic poet, Plautus
(254-184 BCE).



Inspired by Ritschl, and following him to the University of Leipzig in
1865--an institution located closer to Nietzsche's hometown
of Naumburg--Nietzsche quickly established his own academic
reputation through his published essays on two 6th century BCE poets,
Theognis and Simonides, as well as on Aristotle. In Leipzig, he
developed a close friendship with Erwin Rohde (1845-1898), a
fellow philology student and future philologist, with whom he would
correspond extensively in later years. Momentous for Nietzsche in 1865
was his accidental discovery of Arthur Schopenhauer's *The
World as Will and Representation* (1818) in a local bookstore. He
was then 21. Schopenhauer's atheistic and turbulent vision of
the world, in conjunction with his high praise of music as an art form
captured Nietzsche's imagination, and to this day, the extent to
which the "cadaverous perfume" of Schopenhauer's
world-view continued to permeate Nietzsche's mature thought
remains a matter of scholarly debate. After discovering Schopenhauer,
Nietzsche read F.A. Lange's newly-published *History of
Materialism and Critique of its Present Significance*
(1866)--a work that criticizes materialist theories from the
standpoint of Kant's critique of metaphysics, and that attracted
Nietzsche's interest for its view that metaphysical speculation
is an expression of poetic illusion.



In 1867, as he approached the age of 23, Nietzsche entered his
required military service and was assigned to an equestrian field
artillery regiment close to Naumburg, during which time he lived at
home with his mother. While attempting to leap-mount into the saddle,
he suffered a serious chest injury and was put on sick leave after his
chest wound refused to heal. He returned shortly thereafter to the
University of Leipzig, and in November of 1868, met the composer
Richard Wagner (1813-1883) at the home of Hermann Brockhaus
(1806-1877), an Orientalist who was married to Wagner's
sister, Ottilie. Brockhaus was himself a specialist in Sanskrit and
Persian whose publications included (1850) an edition of the
*Vendidad Sade*--a text of the Zoroastrian religion, whose
prophet was Zarathustra (Zoroaster).



Wagner and Nietzsche shared an enthusiasm for Schopenhauer, and
Nietzsche--who had been composing piano, choral and orchestral
music since he was a teenager--admired Wagner for his musical
genius, magnetic personality and cultural influence. Wagner was the
same age Nietzsche's father would have been, and he had also
attended the University of Leipzig many years before. The
Nietzsche-Wagner relationship was quasi-familial and sometimes-stormy,
and it affected Nietzsche deeply. Early on, he could write (in 1869)
that his friendship with Wagner was the "greatest
achievement" [*die grosste Errungenschaft*] of
his life, and he was still energetically engaged in appraising and
pondering Wagner's cultural significance twenty years later at
the end of his writing life. But Nietzsche broke with Wagner
personally and intellectually in the late 1870s, and his assessments
became increasingly negative (and more and more explicit) as time went
on. Nevertheless, even after their break, Nietzsche was still
reminiscing wistfully in 1882 about how his days with Wagner had been
the best of his life. During the months surrounding Nietzsche's
initial meeting with Wagner, Ritschl recommended Nietzsche for a
position on the classical philology faculty at the University of
Basel. The Swiss university offered Nietzsche the professorial
position, and he began teaching there in May, 1869, at the age of 24.




At Basel, Nietzsche's satisfaction with his life among his
philology colleagues was limited, and he established closer
intellectual ties to the historians Franz Overbeck (1837-1905)
and Jacob Burkhardt (1818-1897), whose lectures he attended.
Overbeck--who roomed for five years in the same house as
Nietzsche--became Nietzsche's close and enduring friend,
exchanging many letters with him over the years, and rushing to
Nietzsche's assistance in Turin immediately after his
devastating collapse in 1889. Nietzsche also cultivated his friendship
with Richard Wagner and visited him often at his Swiss home in
Tribschen, a small town near Lucerne. Never in outstanding health,
further complications arose from Nietzsche's August-October 1870
service as a 25-year-old hospital attendant during the Franco-Prussian
War (1870-71), where he participated in the siege of Metz. He
witnessed the traumatic effects of battle, took close care of wounded
soldiers, and contracted diphtheria and dysentery.



Nietzsche's enthusiasm for Schopenhauer, his studies in
classical philology, his inspiration from Wagner, his reading of
Lange, his interests in health, his professional need to prove himself
as a young academic, and his frustration with the contemporary German
culture, all coalesced in his first book--*The Birth of
Tragedy* (1872)--which was published in January 1872 when
Nietzsche was 27. Wagner showered the book with praise, but a
vitriolic, painfully-memorable and yet authoritative critical reaction
by Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Mollendorff--who later became one
of Germany's leading philologists--immediately dampened the
book's reception, not to mention Nietzsche's class
enrollments in Basel.



Wilamowitz-Mollendorff came from an aristocratic family of
distant Polish descent and knew Nietzsche as a student at Schulpforta.
In his critique, he referred to Nietzsche as a disgrace to
Schulpforta, and said that in light of the latter's prophetic,
soothsaying, exaggerated and historically uninformed style of writing,
Nietzsche should instead "gather tigers and panthers about his
knees, but not the youth of Germany." It is intriguing that in
*Thus Spoke Zarathustra*, written thirteen years later,
Nietzsche invokes the comparable imagery of a lion nuzzling warmly at
the knees of Zarathustra in the book's concluding and
inspirational scene, as if to acknowledge that his proper audience is,
indeed, not a set of university professors.



As Nietzsche continued his residence in Switzerland between 1872 and
1879, he often visited Wagner at his new (1872) home in Bayreuth,
Germany. In 1873, he met Paul Ree (1849-1901), who, while
living in close company with Nietzsche in Sorrento during the autumn
of 1876, would write *On the Origin of Moral Feelings* (1877).
During this time, Nietzsche completed a series of four studies on
contemporary German culture--the *Unfashionable
Observations* (1873-76)--which focus respectively upon
(1) the historian of religion and culture critic, David Strauss, (2)
issues concerning the social value of historiography, (3) Arthur
Schopenhauer and (4) Richard Wagner, both as heroic inspirations for
new cultural standards.



Near the end of his university career, Nietzsche completed *Human,
All-Too-Human* (1878)--a book that marks a turning point in
his philosophical style and that, while reinforcing his friendship
with Ree, also ends his friendship with the anti-Semitic
Wagner, who comes under attack in a thinly-disguised characterization
of "the artist." Despite the damage done by the
unflattering review of *The Birth of Tragedy*, Nietzsche
remained respected in his professorial position in Basel, but his
deteriorating health, which led to migraine headaches, eyesight
problems and vomiting, necessitated his resignation from the
university in June, 1879, at age 34. At this point, he had been a
university professor for ten years, and had just less than another ten
years of productive intellectual life remaining.



From 1880 until his collapse in January 1889, Nietzsche led a
wandering, Roma-like existence as a stateless person (having given up
his German citizenship, and not having acquired Swiss citizenship),
circling almost annually between his mother's house in Naumburg
and various French, Swiss, German and Italian cities. His travels took
him through the Mediterranean seaside city of Nice (during the
winters), the Swiss alpine village of Sils-Maria (during the summers,
located near the present-day ski resort of St. Moritz), Leipzig (where
he had attended university, and had been hoping to resume his teaching
career in 1883), Turin, Genoa, Recoaro, Messina, Rapallo, Florence,
Venice, and Rome, never residing in any place longer than several
months at a time.



On a visit to Rome in 1882, Nietzsche, now at age thirty-seven, met
Lou von Salome (1861-1937), a 21 year old Russian woman
who was studying philosophy and theology in Zurich. They had an active
intellectual relationship and Nietzsche appears to have fallen in love
with her. Their relationship did not develop on a romantic level, and
their friendship took a turn for the worse when Salome and Paul
Ree left Nietzsche and moved to Berlin. In the years to follow,
Salome would write a book about Nietzsche (*Friedrich
Nietzsche in seinen Werken* [Friedrich Nietzsche in his Works]) in
1894, and would later become an associate of Sigmund Freud, who she
met in 1911. Salome's insightful book on Nietzsche is one
of the first to propose the division of Nietzsche's writings
into early, middle, and late periods.



These nomadic years were the occasion of Nietzsche's main works,
among which are *Daybreak* (1881), *The Gay Science*
(1882/1887), *Thus Spoke Zarathustra* (1883-85),
*Beyond Good and Evil* (1886), and *On the Genealogy of
Morals* (1887). Nietzsche's final active year, 1888, saw the
completion of *The Case of Wagner* (May-August 1888),
*Twilight of the Idols* (August-September 1888), *The
Antichrist* (September 1888), *Ecce Homo* (October-November
1888) and *Nietzsche Contra Wagner* (December 1888).



On the morning of January 3, 1889, while in Turin, Nietzsche
experienced a mental breakdown which left him an invalid for the rest
of his life. Coincidentally, on virtually the same date, viz., January
4, his little brother, Joseph, had died many years before. Nietzsche,
upon witnessing a horse being whipped by a coachman at the Piazza
Carlo Alberto--although this episode with the horse could be
anecdotal--threw his arms around the horse's neck and
collapsed in the plaza, never to return to full sanity.



Some argue that Nietzsche was afflicted with a syphilitic infection
(this was the original diagnosis of the doctors in Basel and Jena)
contracted either while he was a student or while he was serving as a
hospital attendant during the Franco-Prussian War; some claim that his
use of chloral hydrate, a drug which he had been using as a sedative,
undermined his already-weakened nervous system; some speculate that
Nietzsche's collapse was due to a brain disease he inherited
from his father; some maintain that a mental illness gradually drove
him insane; some maintain that he suffered from a slow-growing,
frontal cranial base tumor; some maintain that he suffered from
CADASIL syndrome, a hereditary stroke disorder; some maintain that
Nietzsche suffered from a tumor on the surface of the brain growing
behind his right eye. The exact cause of Nietzsche's
incapacitation remains unclear. That he had an extraordinarily
sensitive nervous constitution and took an assortment of medications
is well-documented as a more general fact. To complicate matters of
interpretation, Nietzsche states in a letter from April 1888 that he
never had any symptoms of a mental disorder.



During his creative years, Nietzsche struggled to bring his writings
into print and never doubted that his books would have a lasting
cultural effect. He did not live long enough to experience his
world-historical influence, but he had a brief glimpse of his growing
intellectual importance in discovering that he was the subject of 1888
lectures given by Georg Brandes (Georg Morris Cohen) at the University
of Copenhagen, to whom he directed the above April 1888
correspondence, and from whom he received a recommendation to read
Kierkegaard's works. Nietzsche's collapse, however,
followed soon thereafter.



After a brief hospitalization in Basel, he spent 1889 in a sanatorium
in Jena at the Binswanger Clinic, and in March 1890 his mother took
him back home to Naumburg, where he lived under her care for the next
seven years in the house he knew as a youngster. After his
mother's death in 1897, his sister Elisabeth--having
returned home from Paraguay in 1893, where she had been working since
1886 with her husband Bernhard Forster to establish an Aryan,
anti-Semitic German colony called "New Germany"
("Nueva Germania")--assumed responsibility for
Nietzsche's welfare. In an effort to promote her brother's
philosophy, she rented the "Villa Silberblick," a large
house in Weimar, and moved both Nietzsche and his collected
manuscripts to the residence. This became the new home of the
Nietzsche Archives (which had been located at the family home for the
three years preceding), where Elisabeth received visitors who wanted
to observe the now-incapacitated philosopher.



On August 25, 1900, Nietzsche died in the villa as he approached his
56th year, apparently of pneumonia in combination with a stroke. His
body was then transported to the family gravesite directly beside the
church in Rocken bei Lutzen, where his mother and sister now
also rest. The Villa Silberblick was eventually turned into a museum,
and since 1950, Nietzsche's manuscripts have been located in
Weimar at the *Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv*


## 2. Early Writings: 1872-1876



Nietzsche's first book was published in 1872 and was entitled
*The Birth of Tragedy, Out of the Spirit of Music* (*Die
Geburt der Tragodie aus dem Geiste der Musik*). Overall, it
sets forth a more visceral and existential alternative to the late
18th/early 19th century understanding of Greek culture--an
understanding largely inspired by Johann Winckelmann's
*History of Ancient Art* (1764)--which, grounded on the
aesthetics of classical sculpture, hailed ancient Greece as the
epitome of noble simplicity, calm grandeur, clear blue skies, and
rational serenity. In 1886, Nietzsche's book was reissued with a
revised title, *The Birth of Tragedy, Or: Hellenism and
Pessimism* (*Die Geburt der Tragodie, Oder: Griechentum
und Pessimismus*), along with a lucid and revealing prefatory
essay--"An Attempt at Self-Criticism"--which
expresses Nietzsche's own critical reflections on the book,
looking back fourteen years. Although he remained proud of the work,
Nietzsche also describes it as questionable, strange and almost
inaccessible, filled with Kantian and Schopenhauerian formulas that
were inherently at odds with the new valuations he was trying to
express.



Having by this time absorbed the Schopenhauerian view that
non-rational forces reside at the foundation of all creativity and of
reality itself, and that these forces are artistically best conveyed
in music, Nietzsche identifies a strongly instinctual, wild, amoral,
"Dionysian" energy within pre-Socratic Greek culture as an
essentially creative and healthy force, locating its prime expression
in the tragic chorus, and constituting the very life of the tragedy.
Surveying the history of Western culture since the time of the Greeks,
Nietzsche laments over how this Dionysian, creative energy had been
submerged and weakened as it became overshadowed by the
"Apollonian" forces of logical order and stiff sobriety.
He concludes that European culture since the time of Socrates has
remained one-sidedly Apollonian, repressed, scientific, and relatively
unhealthy. Wagner expressed similar sentiments in his 1849 essay
"Art and Revolution," as he described Western society as
having been on the decline since the times of the ancient Greeks. 



As a means towards a cultural rebirth, Nietzsche advocates in
contemporary life, the resurrection and fuller release of Dionysian
artistic energies--those which he associates with primordial
creativity, joy in existence and ultimate truth. The seeds of this
liberating rebirth Nietzsche perceives in the German music of his time
(viz., Bach, Beethoven and especially Wagner), and the concluding part
of *The Birth of Tragedy*, in effect, adulates the emerging
German artistic, tragic spirit as the potential savior of European
culture. As one of his early books, *The Birth of Tragedy* has
a strong Wagnerian and Schopenhauerian flavor, and scholars disagree
about the extent to which Nietzsche departs from Schopenhauer in this
work and in later works.



Some regard Nietzsche's 1873 unpublished essay, "On Truth
and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" ("*Uber Wahrheit und
Luge im aussermoralischen Sinn*") as a keystone in
his thought; some believe that it is a peripheral, conflicted and
non-representative fragment in his writings. In this essay, Nietzsche
rejects the idea of universal constants, and claims, presumably as a
truth, that what we call "truth" is only "a mobile
army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms." His view at
this time is that arbitrariness prevails within human experience:
concepts originate via the transformation of nerve stimuli into
images, and "truth" is nothing more than the invention of
fixed conventions for practical purposes, especially those of repose,
security and consistency. Nietzsche regards our
"knowledge" as human, all-too-human, mostly a matter of
self-deception that issues from a deep-seated exercise of metaphorical
thought. Viewing our existence from a vast and sobering distance,
Nietzsche further notes that there was an eternity before human beings
came into existence, and believes that after humanity dies out,
nothing significant will have changed in the great scheme of
things.



Between 1873 and 1876, Nietzsche wrote the *Unfashionable
Observations* (*Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen*, also
translated as *Untimely Meditations* or *Thoughts Out of
Season*). These are four (of a projected, but never completed,
thirteen) studies concerned with the quality of European, and
especially German, culture during Nietzsche's time. They are
unfashionable and nonconformist (or "untimely," or
"unmodern," or "out of place") insofar as
Nietzsche regarded his standpoint as culture-critic to be in tension
with the self-congratulatory spirit of the times. The four studies
were: *David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer* (*David
Strauss, der Bekenner und der Schriftsteller*, 1873); *On the
Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life* (*Vom Nutzen und
Nachteil der Historie fur das Leben*, 1874); *Schopenhauer
as Educator* (*Schopenhauer als Erzieher*, 1874);
*Richard Wagner in Bayreuth* (1876).



The first of these attacks David Strauss, whose popular six-edition
book, *The Old and the New Faith: A Confession* (1871)
encapsulated for Nietzsche the general cultural atmosphere in Germany.
Responding to Strauss's advocacy of a "new faith"
grounded upon a scientifically-determined universal
mechanism--one, however, lubricated by the optimistic,
"soothing oil" of historical progress--Nietzsche
criticizes Strauss's view as a vulgar and dismal sign of
cultural degeneracy. Nietzsche's friend, Overbeck, in his
contemporaneous writings, also adopted a critical attitude towards
Strauss. The second "untimely meditation" surveys
alternative ways to write history, and discusses how these ways could
contribute to a society's health. Here Nietzsche claims that the
principle of "life" is a more pressing and higher concern
than that of "knowledge," and that the quest for knowledge
should serve the interests of life. This parallels how, in *The
Birth of Tragedy*, Nietzsche had looked at art through the
perspective of life and foreshadows Nietzsche's hallmark theme
of "life-affirmation" in his later works.



The third and fourth studies--on Schopenhauer and Wagner,
respectively--address how these two thinkers, as paradigms of
philosophic and artistic genius, hold the potential to inspire a
stronger, healthier and livelier German culture. Nietzsche states here
that we all have a duty to help nature complete its goal of producing
the highest examples of the human being--these will be the
"new redeemers"--which he recognizes in superb
instances of the philosopher, the artist and the saint
("Schopenhauer as Educator," Section 5). These celebratory
studies on Schopenhauer and Wagner reveal how, as a recurring feature
of Nietzsche's thought, he presents us with some higher type of
character--he offers different models of heroic characters as the
years go by--as an ideal towards which he would have his best
readers aspire.


## 3. Middle-Period Writings: 1878-1882



Nietzsche completed *Human, All-Too-Human* in 1878,
supplementing this with a second part in 1879, *Mixed Opinions and
Maxims* (*Vermischte Meinungen und Spruche*), and a
third part in 1880, *The Wanderer and his Shadow* (*Der
Wanderer und sein Schatten*). The three parts were published
together in 1886 as *Human All-Too-Human, A Book for Free
Spirits* (*Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, Ein Buch fur
freie Geister*). Reluctant to construct a philosophical
"system," and sensitive to the importance of style in
philosophic writing, Nietzsche composed these works as a series of
several hundred short passages and aphorisms--concise
condensations of his assorted insights--whose typical length
ranges from a line or two to a page or two. Here, he often reflects
upon cultural and psychological phenomena by connecting them to
individuals' organic and physiological constitutions. The idea
of power (for which he would later become known) sporadically appears
as an explanatory principle, but he tends at this time to invoke
hedonistic considerations of pleasure and pain in his explanations of
cultural and psychological phenomena. Given his harsh criticisms of
hedonism and utilitarianism in later works (e.g., *Thus Spoke
Zarathustra*, re: "the Last Man"), *Human
All-Too-Human* appears to many readers as an uncharacteristic
work, more science- than art-inspired in its approach to health, where
Nietzsche was struggling to break free of Wagner's spell, and
which, presupposing a fundamentally hedonistic moral psychology, does
not fully embody the pain-and-power-centered approach that he later
developed.



In *Daybreak: Reflections on Moral Prejudices*
(*Morgenrote. Gedanken uber die moralischen
Vorurteile*, 1881), Nietzsche continues writing in his aphoristic
style, but he marks a new beginning by accentuating as opposed to
pleasure, the importance of the "feeling of power" in his
understanding of human, and especially of so-called
"moral" behavior. Always having been interested in the
nature of health, his emerging references to power stem from his
earlier efforts to discover the secret of the ancient Greeks'
outstanding health, which he had regarded as the effects of how
"*agon*" (i.e., competition, one-upmanship, or
contest, as conceived in his 1872 essay, "Homer's
Contest") permeated their cultural attitudes. In this respect,
*Daybreak* contains the seeds of Nietzsche's doctrine of
the "will to power"--a doctrine that appears
explicitly for the first time two years later in *Thus Spoke
Zarathustra* (1883-85). *Daybreak* is also one of
Nietzsche's clearest, intellectually calmest, and most intimate,
volumes, providing many social-psychological insights in conjunction
with some of his first sustained critical reflections on the cultural
relativity at the basis of Christian moral evaluations. In this
book--as he remarks retrospectively in *Ecce Homo*
(1888)--Nietzsche begins his "crusade [*Feldzug*]
against morality."



In a more well-known aphoristic work, *The Gay Science*
(*Die frohliche Wissenschaft*, 1882)--whose title was
inspired by the troubadour songs of southern-French Provence
(1100-1300)--Nietzsche sets forth some of the existential
ideas for which he became famous, namely, the proclamation that
"God is dead" and the doctrine of eternal
recurrence--a doctrine that attends to how people of different
levels of health are likely to react to the prospect of being reborn,
over and over again, to replay life's experience exactly as
before in every pleasurable and painful sequence of detail.
Nietzsche's atheism--his account of "God's
murder" (section 125)--expresses in a literary manner, his
philosophical condemnation of all absolute perspectives and values.
His atheism also aims to redirect people's attention to their
inherent freedom, the presently-existing world, and away from
escapist, pain-relieving, heavenly otherworlds.



To a similar end, Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal recurrence
(sections 285 and 341) serves to draw attention away from all worlds
other than the one in which we presently live, since eternal
recurrence precludes the possibility of any final escape from the
present world. The doctrine also functions as a measure for judging
someone's overall psychological strength and mental health,
since Nietzsche believed that the doctrine of eternal recurrence was
the hardest world-view to affirm. There are some differences of
scholarly opinion concerning whether Nietzsche primarily intends this
doctrine to describe a serious metaphysical theory, or whether he is
offering merely one way to interpret the world among many others,
which if adopted therapeutically as a psychologically healthy myth,
can help us become stronger.



In 1887, *The Gay Science* was reissued with an important
preface, an additional fifth Book, and an appendix of songs,
reminiscent of the troubadours.


## 4. Later-Period Writings: 1883-1887



*Thus Spoke Zarathustra, A Book for All and None* (*Also
Sprach Zarathustra, Ein Buch fur Alle und Keinen*,
1883-85), is one of Nietzsche's most famous works, and
Nietzsche regarded it as among his most significant. It is a manifesto
of personal self-overcoming, and a guidebook for others towards the
same revitalizing end. Thirty years after its initial publication,
150,000 copies of the work were printed by the German government and
issued during WWI as inspirational reading to the young soldiers,
along with the Bible. Though *Thus Spoke Zarathustra* is
antagonistic to the Judeo-Christian world-view, its poetic and
prophetic style relies upon many, often inverted, Old and New
Testament allusions. Nietzsche also filled the work with nature
metaphors, almost in the spirit of pre-Socratic naturalist philosophy,
which invoke animals, earth, air, fire, water, celestial bodies,
plants, all in the service of describing the spiritual development of
Zarathustra, a solitary, reflective, exceedingly strong-willed,
sage-like, laughing and dancing voice of heroic self-mastery who,
accompanied by a proud, sharp-eyed eagle and a wise snake, envisions a
mode of psychologically healthier being beyond the common human
condition. Nietzsche refers to this higher mode of being as
"superhuman" (*ubermenschlich*), and
associates the doctrine of eternal recurrence--a doctrine for
only the healthiest who can love life in its entirety--with this
spiritual standpoint, in relation to which all-too-often downhearted,
all-too-commonly-human attitudes stand as a mere bridge to be crossed
and overcome.



Within Nietzsche's corpus, *Thus Spoke Zarathustra* has a
controversial place, owing mainly to its peculiar literary style.
Nietzsche speaks in parables and short narratives populated by
fictional characters--"the hunchback," "the
ugliest man," "the soothsayer," "the
saint," "the tightrope walker," "the
jester," and "the Last Man," to name a
few--leaving their philosophical import open to a variety of
interpretations. One of Nietzsche's most well-known and morally
troubling figures--the superhuman--also appears
substantially only in this work, rendering it questionable to some
interpreters whether this ideal of supreme human health is central to
Nietzsche's thought as a whole. There is also some interpretive
uncertainty about whether the work, which was written across the span
of three years, properly ends triumphantly at the conclusion of the
Third Part, thus situating the psychologically complex Fourth Part as
a question-raising supplement, or whether the book's narrative
moves smoothly and progressively across the entire four parts.



*Beyond Good and Evil, Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future*
(*Jenseits von Gut und Bose. Vorspiel einer Philosophie der
Zukunft*, 1886) is arguably a rethinking of *Human,
All-too-Human*, since their respective tables of contents and
sequence of themes loosely correspond to one another. In *Beyond
Good and Evil*, Nietzsche identifies imagination, self-assertion,
danger, originality and the "creation of values" as
qualities of genuine philosophers, as opposed to mere scholars engaged
in positive research in the sciences and humanities, or the dusty
classification of philosophical outlooks. Nietzsche takes aim at some
of the world's great philosophers, who ground their outlooks
wholeheartedly upon concepts such as "self-consciousness,"
"free will," and "either/or" bipolar
thinking.



Nietzsche alternatively philosophizes from the perspective of life
located beyond good and evil, and challenges the entrenched moral idea
that exploitation, domination, injury to the weak, destruction and
appropriation are universally objectionable behaviors. Above all, he
believes that living things aim to discharge their strength and
express their "will to power"--a pouring-out of
expansive energy as if one were like a perpetually-shining sun that,
quite naturally, can entail danger, pain, lies, deception and masks.
Here, "will" is not an inner emptiness, lack, feeling of
deficiency, or constant drive for satisfaction, but is a fountain of
constantly-swelling energy, life, and power.



As he views things from the perspective of life, Nietzsche further
denies that there is a universal morality applicable indiscriminately
to all human beings, and instead designates a series of moralities in
an order of rank that ascends from the plebeian to the noble: some
moralities are more suitable for subordinate roles; some are more
appropriate for dominating and leading social roles. What counts as a
preferable and legitimate action depends upon the kind of person one
is. The deciding factor is whether one is weaker, sicker and on the
decline, or whether one is healthier, more powerful and overflowing
with life.



*On the Genealogy of Morals, A Polemic* (*Zur Genealogie der
Moral, Eine Streitschrift*, 1887) is composed of three sustained
essays that advance the critique of Christianity expressed in
*Beyond Good and Evil*. The first essay continues the
discussion of master morality versus servant morality, and maintains
that the traditional ideals set forth as holy and morally good within
Christian morality are products of self-deception, since they were
forged in the bad air of revenge, resentment, hatred, impotence, and
cowardice. In this essay, as well as the next, Nietzsche's
controversial references to the "blond beast" in
connection with master morality also appear. In the second essay,
Nietzsche continues with an account of how feelings of guilt, or the
"bad conscience," arise merely as a consequence of an
unhealthy Christian morality that turns an evil eye towards our
natural inclinations. He also discusses how punishment, conceived as
the infliction of pain upon someone in proportion to their offense, is
likely to have been grounded in the contractual economic relationship
between creditor and debtor, i.e., in business relationships. In the
third essay, Nietzsche focusses upon the truth-oriented ascetic ideals
that underlie and inform prevailing styles of art, religion and
philosophy, and he offers a particularly scathing critique of the
priesthood: the priests are allegedly a group of weak people who
shepherd even weaker people as a way to experience power for
themselves. The third essay also contains one of Nietzsche's
clearest expressions of "perspectivism" (section
12)--the idea that there is no absolute, "God's
eye" standpoint from which one can survey everything that
is.



*On the Genealogy of Morals* is Nietzsche's
"polemic," i.e., attack, against the assumptions and
methods (which, incidentally, are still popular) characteristic of
works such as Paul Ree's *The Origin of the Moral
Sensations* (1877). Inspired by utilitarianism and Darwinism,
Ree offers a naturalistic account of our moral values,
especially altruism, but by Nietzsche's lights, does not
question the value of the moral values themselves. In the
*Genealogy*, Nietzsche offers a competing account of the origin
of moral values, aiming to reveal their life-negating foundations and
functions.



Nietzsche ultimately advocates valuations that issue from a
self-confident, self-reinforcing, self-governing, creative and
commanding attitude, as opposed to those that issue from reactive
attitudes that determine values more mechanically and subordinatingly
to those who are inherently more powerful. For Nietzsche, those who
prefer to think in terms of "good vs. bad" exemplify the
former, leading and superior mentality, and those who think in terms
of "good vs. evil," exemplify the latter, inferior and
subservient mentality. From the standpoint of a leader, in the
appropriate circumstances it is good to be able to inflict pain and
instil fear among those who are led, and bad not to be able to do so.
From the standpoint of those who are led, the infliction of pain and
instillation of fear upon subordinates does not appear typically to be
good at all, but rather evil.


## 5. Final Writings of 1888



*The Case of Wagner, A Musician's Problem* (*Der Fall
Wagner, Ein Musikanten-Problem*, May-August 1888), contrasts
sharply with Nietzsche's laudatory portrayal of Wagner in
*The Birth of Tragedy* (1872), and compares well with his 1873
meditation on David Strauss in its unbridled attack on a popular
cultural figure. In *The Case of Wagner*, Nietzsche
"declares war" upon Richard Wagner, whose music is
characterized as the epitome of modern cultural achievement, but also
crucially as sick and decadent. The work is a brilliant display of
Nietzsche's talents as a music critic, and includes memorable
ridicule of Wagner's theatrical style, reflections on redemption
via art, a "physiology of art," and discussion of the
virtues associated, respectively, with ascending and descending life
energies. As the therapeutic inversion and antithesis of
Wagner's debilitatingly serious music, Nietzsche refers us to
Georges Bizet (1838-1875) whose music he finds cheerful,
revitalizing, redeeming and light-hearted. Wagner himself had some
years earlier (1850) condemned Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) for
having confounded the public's taste in music. Nietzsche,
writing almost thirty years later, here accuses Wagner of having done
the same.



The title, *Twilight of the Idols, or How One Philosophizes with a
Hammer* (*Gotzen-Dammerung, oder Wie man mit dem
Hammer philosophiert*, August-September 1888), word-plays upon
Wagner's opera, *The Twilight of the Gods* (*Die
Gotterdammerung*). Nietzsche reiterates and elaborates
some of the criticisms of Socrates, Plato, Kant and Christianity found
in earlier works, criticizes the then-contemporary German culture as
being unsophisticated and too-full of beer, and shoots some
disapproving arrows at key French, British, and Italian cultural
figures such as Rousseau, Hugo, Sand, Michelet, Zola, Renan, Carlyle,
Mill, Eliot, Darwin, and Dante. In contrast to these alleged
representatives of cultural decadence, Nietzsche applauds Caesar,
Napoleon, Goethe, Dostoevsky, Thucydides and the Sophists as healthier
and stronger types. The phrase "to philosophize with a
hammer" primarily signifies a way to test idols by tapping on
them lightly; one "sounds them out" to determine whether
they are hollow, or intact, etc., as physician would use a percussion
hammer upon the abdomen as a diagnostic instrument.



In *The Antichrist, Curse on Christianity* (*Der Antichrist.
Fluch auf das Christentum*, September 1888 [published 1895]),
Nietzsche expresses his disgust over the way noble values in Roman
Society were corrupted by the rise of Christianity, and he discusses
specific aspects and personages in Christian culture--the
Gospels, Paul, the martyrs, priests, the crusades--with a view
towards showing that Christianity is a religion for weak and unhealthy
people, whose general historical effect has been to undermine the
healthy qualities of the more noble cultures. *The Antichrist*
was initially conceived of as the first part of a projected four-part
work for which Nietzsche had in mind the title, *Revaluation of All
Values* (the second part was to be entitled, "The Free
Spirit"). As in most of his 1888 works, Nietzsche criticizes,
either implicitly or explicitly, the anti-Semitic writers of his day.
In this particular study, one of his main targets is the French,
anti-Semitic, Christian historian, Ernest Renan (1823-1892), who
was known for works such as *The Life of Jesus* (1863) and
*History of the Origins of Christianity* (1866-1881), the
fourth book of which was entitled *The Antichrist* (1873). Some
interpret Nietzsche's title for his book as meaning, "the
Antichristian." It should be noted that in an 1883 letter to his
friend, Peter Gast [Johann Heinrich Koselitz], Nietzsche does
describe himself self-entertainingly as "the Antichrist,"
and also more seriously as "the most terrible opponent of
Christianity."



Nietzsche describes himself as "a follower of the philosopher
Dionysus" in *Ecce Homo, How One Becomes What One Is*
(*Ecce Homo, Wie man wird, was man ist*, October-November
1888)--a book in which he examines retrospectively his entire
corpus, work by work, offering critical remarks, details of how the
works were inspired, and explanatory observations regarding their
philosophical contents. He begins this fateful intellectual
autobiography--he was to lose his mind little more than a month
later--with three eyebrow-raising sections entitled, "Why I
Am So Wise," "Why I Am So Clever," and "Why I
Write Such Good Books." Nietzsche claims to be wise as a
consequence of his acute aesthetic sensitivity to nuances of health
and sickness in people's attitudes and characters; he claims to
be clever because he knows how to choose the right nutrition, climate,
residence and recreation for himself; he claims to write such good
books because they allegedly adventurously open up, at least for a
very select group of readers, a new series of noble and delicate
experiences. After examining each of his published works, Nietzsche
concludes *Ecce Homo* with the section, "Why I Am a
Destiny." He claims that he is a destiny because he regards his
anti-moral truths as having the annihilating power of intellectual
dynamite; he expects them to topple the morality born of sickness
which he perceives to have been reigning within Western culture for
the last two thousand years. In this way, he expresses his hope that
Dionysus, the god of life's exuberance, would replace Jesus, the
god of the heavenly otherworld, as the premier cultural standard for
future millennia.



Although *Ecce Homo* stands historically as Nietzsche's
final autobiographical statement, if we consider that--although
the plans were in flux--Nietzsche was embarking on a new work, at
one point to be entitled, *Revaluation of All Values*, his 1888
autobiographical excursion can be appreciated as a kind of
house-cleaning and summing-up of where he had intellectually arrived
at that point. Rather than being a final self-definition, it can be
seen as yet another among Nietzsche's several efforts over the
years to clear the way for a freer intellectual development or
metamorphosis. In this respect, it compares to *Thus Spoke
Zarathustra*, Book IV, which appears to be Nietzsche's
squarely facing, almost as a kind of exorcism, the variety of inner
characters that constituted his personality. Along the same lines,
*Ecce Homo* recalls the interval between
*Human-All-too-Human* and *Daybreak*, when Nietzsche
plunged to a very low point in his health, coming close to death, and
then dramatically recuperated.



*Nietzsche Contra Wagner, Out of the Files of a Psychologist*
(*Nietzsche contra Wagner, Aktenstucke eines Psychologen*,
December 1888) is a short, but classic, selection of passages
Nietzsche extracted from his 1878-1887 published works. Many
concern Wagner, but the excerpts serve mostly as a foil for Nietzsche
to express his own views against Wagner's. In this
self-portrait, completed only a month before his collapse, Nietzsche
characterizes his own anti-Christian sentiments, and contemplates how
even the greatest people usually undergo significant corruption. In
Wagner's case, Nietzsche claims that the corrupting force was
Christianity. One cannot help remembering here how, using the same
kind of rationale, Wagner claimed that Felix Mendelssohn's
corrupting force was Judaism. At the same time, Nietzsche describes
how he truly admired some of Wagner's music for its profound
expressions of loneliness and suffering--expressions which
Nietzsche admitted were psychologically impossible for he himself to
articulate.



The writings of Nietzsche's final active year are peppered with
some wild phrasings, but they remain lucid and philosophically
penetrating on the whole. Given the utter loss of Nietzsche's
intellectual capacities upon his collapse, this prior lucidity is
puzzling. The abruptness of his breakdown in combination with the
lucidity of his final writings has fed speculation that rather than
suffering from a slowly progressive mental disease, Nietzsche had a
physical condition (e.g., a brain tumor) whose silent growth
eventually reached a critical mass that caused his mental composure to
snap.


## 6. Nietzsche's Unpublished Notebooks



Nietzsche's unpublished writings often reveal his more tentative
and speculative ideas. This material is surrounded by controversy,
since some of it conflicts with views he expresses in his published
works. Disagreement regarding Nietzsche's notebooks, also known
as his *Nachlass*, centers around the degree of interpretive
priority which ought to be given to the unpublished versus the
published writings. One popular approach in the tradition of classical
scholarly interpretation is to maintain that Nietzsche's
published works express his more considered and polished views, and
that these should take precedence over the unpublished manuscripts
when conflicts arise; a second attitude, given voice by Martin
Heidegger (who lectured on Nietzsche in Nazi Germany,
1936-1940), and broadly consistent with a psychoanalytic
approach as well, is to regard what Nietzsche published as
representative of what he decided was publicly presentable, and what
he kept privately to himself in unpublished form as containing his
more authentic views; a third, more comprehensive, interpretive style
tries to grasp all of Nietzsche's texts together in an effort to
form the most coherent interpretation of Nietzsche's thought,
judging the priority of published versus unpublished works on a
thematic, or case-by-case basis; a fourth position influenced by the
French deconstructionist perspective maintains that any rigid
prioritizing between published and private works is impossible, since
all of the texts embody a comparable multidimensionality of
meaning.



In his unpublished manuscripts, Nietzsche sometimes elaborates the
topics found in the published works, such as his early 1870s
notebooks, where there is important material concerning his theory of
knowledge. In the 1880s notebooks--those from which his sister
collected together a large selection after his death under the title,
*The Will to Power: Attempt at a Revaluation of all
Values*--Nietzsche sometimes adopts a more metaphysical
orientation towards the doctrines of Eternal Recurrence and the Will
to Power, speculating upon their structure, implications, and
intellectual strength as interpretations of reality itself.
Side-by-side with these speculations, and complicating efforts towards
developing an interpretation which is both comprehensive and coherent,
Nietzsche's 1880s notebooks also repeatedly state that
"there are no facts, only interpretations."


## 7. Nietzsche's Influence Upon 20th Century Thought



Nietzsche's thought extended a deep influence during the 20th
century, especially in Continental Europe. In English-speaking
countries, his positive reception has been less resonant. During the
last decade of Nietzsche's life and the first decade of the 20th
century, his thought was particularly attractive to avant-garde
artists who saw themselves on the periphery of established social
fashion and practice. Here, Nietzsche's advocacy of new, healthy
beginnings, and of creative artistry in general stood forth. His
tendency to seek explanations for commonly-accepted values and
outlooks in the less-elevated realms of sheer animal instinct was also
crucial to Sigmund Freud's development of psychoanalysis. Later,
during the 1930s, aspects of Nietzsche's thought were espoused
by the Nazis and Italian Fascists, partly due to the encouragement of
Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche through her associations with Adolf
Hitler and Benito Mussolini. It was possible for the Nazi interpreters
to assemble, quite selectively, various passages from
Nietzsche's writings whose juxtaposition appeared to justify
war, aggression and domination for the sake of nationalistic and
racial self-glorification.



Until the 1960s in France, Nietzsche appealed mainly to writers and
artists, since the academic philosophical climate was dominated by
G.W.F. Hegel's, Edmund Husserl's and Martin
Heidegger's thought, along with the structuralist movement of
the 1950s. Nietzsche became especially influential in French
philosophical circles during the 1960s-1980s, when his
"God is dead" declaration, his perspectivism, and his
emphasis upon power as the real motivator and explanation for
people's actions revealed new ways to challenge established
authority and launch effective social critique. In the
English-speaking world, Nietzsche's unfortunate association with
the Nazis kept him from serious philosophical consideration until the
1950s and 60s, when landmark works such as Walter Kaufmann's,
*Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist* (1950) and
Arthur C. Danto's, *Nietzsche as Philosopher* (1965),
paved the way for a more open-minded discussion.



Specific 20th century figures who were influenced, either quite
substantially, or in a significant part, by Nietzsche include
painters, dancers, musicians, playwrights, poets, novelists,
psychologists, sociologists, literary theorists, historians, and
philosophers: Alfred Adler, Georges Bataille, Martin Buber, Albert
Camus, E.M. Cioran, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Isadora Duncan,
Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Stefan George, Andre Gide,
Hermann Hesse, Carl Jung, Martin Heidegger, Gustav Mahler,
Andre Malraux, Thomas Mann, H.L. Mencken, Rainer Maria Rilke,
Jean-Paul Sartre, Max Scheler, Giovanni Segantini, George Bernard
Shaw, Lev Shestov, Georg Simmel, Oswald Spengler, Richard Strauss,
Paul Tillich, Ferdinand Tonnies, Mary Wigman, William Butler
Yeats and Stefan Zweig.



That Nietzsche was able to write so prolifically and profoundly for
years, while remaining in a condition of ill-health and often intense
physical pain, is a testament to his spectacular mental capacities and
will power. Lesser people under the same physical pressures might not
have had the inclination to pick up a pen, let alone think and record
thoughts which--created in the midst of striving for healthy
self-overcoming--would have the power to influence an entire
century.