Friedrich Nietzsche
Also known as Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
German philosopher (1844 to 1900) of the death of God, the will to power and the Übermensch.
At a glance
Main ideas
God is dead, Master and slave morality, Perspectivism …
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The Birth of Tragedy, The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra …
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Beyond Good and Evil and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History
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Also on this page: Key facts · Links · Sources · Related pages
- Nietzsche was a German philosopher and writer who began as a classical philologist.
- He was made a professor at Basel at 24 and resigned in 1879 because of ill health.
- He then lived as an independent writer and completed much of his core work in the following decade.
- In 1889 he suffered a collapse and lost his mental faculties for his last 11 years.
- His sister edited his manuscripts to fit her ultranationalism, which tied his work to Nazism until later scholars corrected it.
Why it matters
- His ideas shaped 20th- and 21st-century thought, especially existentialism, postmodernism and post-structuralism, as well as art, literature and politics.
Key facts
- Born
- 15 Oct 1844, Röcken, near Leipzig, Prussian Province of Saxony1
- Died
- 25 Aug 1900; buried beside his father at the church in Röcken1
- Professor at Basel
- Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basel from 1869 to 18791
- Breakdown
- Mental breakdown in Turin on 3 Jan 18891
- Editor after his death
- His sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who compiled The Will to Power (1901) from his notebooks1
- Opposed
- Antisemitism and nationalism, explicitly1
Main ideas
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God is dead1
The weakening of religion, and the nihilism that followed it, call for an affirmation of life.
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Master and slave morality1
Morality shifted from "good and bad", set by aristocracies, to "good and evil", born of the ressentiment of slaves.
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Perspectivism1
He critiqued objective truth in favour of perspectivism.
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Will to power1
The human subject is the expression of competing wills, together understood as the will to power.
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Übermensch and eternal return1
His later work developed the Übermensch, the transvaluation of values and eternal return.
Books to start with
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Connections
Links
Sources
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