BIOGRAPHY

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born in Rocken, Prussia, in 1844. He was named in honor of the Prussian king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, whose birthday, October 15, he shared. Nietzsche's father, Ludwig Nietzsche, was a Lutheran minister and his mother, Franziska Oehler Nietzsche, was the daughter of a Lutheran minister. When Nietzsche was only five years old, his father died from what was then called "softening of the brain" after a year of mental instability. The rest of Nietzsche's childhood was spent in a household of women, including his widowed mother, his sister, his anxious paternal grandmother, and two maiden aunts.

Following grade school, Nietzsche attended a famous boarding school at Pforta where he did outstanding work. However, while there, Nietzsche suffered migraine headaches, which afflicted him until he experienced a mental breakdown in 1889. The medicine he took to relieve the headaches would upset his stomach and leave him nauseous. For much of his adult life, he would alternate between the extremes of headaches and nausea with only short periods of health in between.

Nietzsche before his collapse.

In 1864 he enrolled at the University of Bonn to study theology and classical philology (linguistics), but he left within a year. By this time he had given up whatever religious faith he had and was no longer interested in theology. He moved to the University of Leipzig to continue his studies in philology. His professor at Leipzig, Friedrich Ritschl, was so impressed with Nietzsche's work that he published some of his papers and later recommended him for a chair of classical philology at the University of Basel. In 1869, at the unusual age of only twenty-four, Nietzsche was given the chair as an associate professor. He had produced neither a doctoral dissertation nor the additional book normally required of an associate professor. Leipzig immediately awarded him a doctorate without examination or thesis and within a year he was promoted to full professor at Basel.

In 1872 Nietzsche published his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, which included a laudatory section on Richard Wagner's music. Over the next four years Nietzsche wrote four meditations (published collectively in English as Thoughts out of Season), the last of which was another tribute to Wagner. During this period Nietzsche and Wagner were close friends and Nietzsche often visited Wagner's villa on Lake Lucerne. But by 1878 they had broken relations over Wagner's nationalism and anti-Semitism.

Nietzsche's health began to deteriorate, and he was forced to resign from the university in 1879. Over the next ten years, Nietzsche travelled and devoted all his remaining energy to writing, publishing such books as The Gay Science (1882), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), and his final denunciation of his former friend, The Case of Wagner (1888).

By the end of 1888, Nietzsche was showing signs of oncoming madness and in January of 1889 he collapsed in the street of Turin, Italy, while hugging the neck of a horse. For the next eleven years until his death in 1900, he lived in the care of his mother and sister. Works that he had written in 1888, including The Will to Power, The Twilight of the Idols, The Anti-Christ, and his outrageous autobiography Ecco Homo (which includes chapter headings such as "Why I Am So Clever"), were published after distorted editing by his sister. Only in the twentieth century have unedited versions of these works become available.

The cause of Nietzsche's insanity has been vigorously debated. Critics have held that his ideas caused it and claim to have found evidence of insanity in many of his writings. His sister romanticized that he went mad because Germany spurned him. More likely explanations are that he contracted syphilis during a rare sexual escapade while a young man or that he simply inherited a brain disease from his father.

BASIC THOUGHT

Nietzsche's style of writing in epigrams, aphorisms, stories, poetry, and essays virtually defies an editor to systematically summarize his thought. But while Nietzsche never sought to build a system, there are recurring, interwoven themes.

One important theme in Nietzsche's writing is the distinction between Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies in art. The Apollonian tendency (named for the Greek god of the sun, Apollo) represents the harmony and restraint exemplified by Greek sculpture and architecture. The Dionysian tendency (named for the Greek god of wine and revelry, Dionysos) represents wild abandonment as exemplified by the drunken sexual frenzies of the Dionysian cult festivals or the music of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Greek tragedy arises as a synthesis of Apollonian form and Dionysian urges. But Greek tragedy is in turn superseded by Greek rationalism as exemplified by Socrates: the theoretical man who optimistically sees knowledge as the panacea to the problems of life. What is needed now, Nietzsche argues, is a new synthesis of these Dionysian and Apollonian tendencies by an "artistic" Socrates. Such a Socratic figure would be a creative genius who would honestly face the harshness of life without losing a clear rational analytic perspective.

In order to produce new values, such a creative genius must be free from all constraints, including moral constraints that would limit creativity by imposing "universal" standards. In his important On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche shows how such a limiting morality developed as he distinguishes between "master morality" and "slave morality." Master morality is basically affirmative and defines itself on its own terms. In this morality "good" means that which is noble, powerful, and beautiful and belongs to the highest rank; and "bad" signifies that which is base, low-minded, and unworthy of greatness. On the other hand, slave morality is basically negative and claims to find values "out there," ordained by God or some other transcedent law-giver. It is born out of resentment and identifies the "good" with such base sentiments as humility and pity. Instead of "bad," this morality uses the vindictive term "evil" to castigate all who would stand against it. Nietzsche claims that beginning with the Jews, and completed by the Christians, this slave morality had infected all of Europe with its life-denying poison. What is now needed is a "transvaluation of all values," which would move us "beyond good and evil."

In affirming the master morality, the creative genius must begin by proclaiming the death of God. With the death of God, slave morality--and all values dependent on some external law-giver--collapses and the individual is free to create self-defined values. By the "death of God," Nietzsche does not mean that there once was a diety who got old and passed away, nor that people no longer live holy lives. Rather, Nietzsche claims that all absolutes have collapsed and there is no transcendent basis in any area--whether religion, philosophy, science, or politics--for making meaning out of life.

Nietzsche also examines how philosophers have tried to find something transcendent, something permanent. Beginning with the Pre-Socratic thinker Parmenides, philosophers have been unwilling to accept the actual transitory world of "becoming." Instead they have denigrated this world, labeling it "apparent," and have in its place invented an immutable world of "being." But, as Nietzsche explains, "Any distinction between a `true' and an `apparent' world--whether in the Christian manner or in the manner of Kant . . . is only a suggestion of decadence, a symptom of the decline of life."

The genius who can embrace "becoming," who acknowledges the death of all external values, could become an Ubermensch ("overman" or "superman"). Such an overman would be a this-world antithesis to God and would affirm life without any resentment. The overman would be to humans as humans are to apes. But, most importantly, the overman would be one who acknowledges and celebrates the will to power.

According to Nietzsche, all human behavior can be understood in terms of the will to power and every relationship between persons is a power relationship. In master morality the hero asserts the will to power by taking direct action. In slave morality, as explained in Nietzsche's final work, The Anti-Christ, the will to power is perverted into resentment in order to gain the imaginary powers of revenge and pity.

But the will to power can also be expressed within the person. That is, more than gaining power over others, the will to power can lead to power over the self. The overman will be the one who uses power in this way to "overcome his animal nature, organize the chaos of his passions, sublimate his impulses, and give style to his character,"⁽¹⁾ becoming completely free and self-created.

Ironically, despite his distaste for anti-Semitism and his emphasis on the self-overcoming aspects of the will to power, Nietzsche was hailed as a hero by the Nazis. They used his emphases on the master morality and the will to power as a justification for their atrocities. Nietzsche's sister, Elisabeth, married a German anti-Semite and in her old age eagerly received Adolph Hitler at the Nietzsche Archives. Yet despite its unfortunate association with the Nazis, Nietzsche's thought has continued to be influential as his insights have been developed by existentialists, phenomenologists, psychoanalysts, poststructuralists, and deconstructionists, as well as poets and novelists.

1. Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950), p. 316.

  By Forrest Baird © 2000 by Prentice Hall from Philosophic Classics, Volume IV