Nietzsche

Lore & Background

Nietzsche grew up in Röcken, near Leipzig, in the Prussian Province of Saxony. His father, a Lutheran pastor, died of a brain disease when Nietzsche was four, and his younger brother died six months later. The family moved to Naumburg, where Nietzsche attended school and excelled in Christian theology. He followed philologist Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl to the University of Leipzig, where he became friends with Erwin Rohde and was deeply influenced by reading Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation.

Reader's Guide

Nietzsche's significance lies in his radical critiques of traditional philosophy, religion, and morality. He argued for perspectivism, the idea that objective truth is an illusion, and genealogically traced Christian morality to a 'master–slave' dynamic. His declaration 'God is dead' addressed the crisis of meaning following the decline of religion, and he proposed the affirmation of life through concepts like the will-to-power and eternal return. Twentieth-century scholars such as Walter Kaufmann, R. J. Hollingdale, and Georges Bataille corrected this misinterpretation. His ideas gained renewed popularity in the 1960s and have since influenced continental philosophy (existentialism, postmodernism, post-structuralism), as well as art, literature, music, politics, and popular culture.

Did You Know?

• Nietzsche was appointed Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at age 24.
• He suffered a neurological collapse in 1889 at age 44, losing his mental faculties, and lived his remaining 11 years under the care of his mother and later his sister.
• His sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche edited his unpublished writings to fit her German ultranationalist ideology, often contradicting his stated opposition to antisemitism and nationalism.
• Nietzsche was an amateur composer; Richard Wagner dismissed his music, and Hans von Bülow called one piece 'the most undelightful and the most anti-musical draft on musical paper'.