Friedrich Nietzsche

Introduction

Friedrich Nietzsche is the German philosopher and philologist whose work in the 1870s and 1880s produced one of the most influential, most contested, and most rhetorically distinctive bodies of work in modern philosophy. The combination of relentless critique (of Christianity, of conventional morality, of the philosophical tradition from Socrates onward, of the political and cultural conditions of his time), positive doctrine (the will to power, eternal recurrence, the übermensch), and stylistic experiment (aphorism, fragment, dramatic prose, the philosophical poem) is what makes Nietzsche Nietzsche.

He is also one of the most misappropriated figures in modern thought. The Nazi appropriation of selected Nietzschean themes in the 1930s and 1940s (substantially facilitated by his sister Elisabeth's editorial manipulation of his unpublished notes) shaped his reception for decades; the post-war scholarly recovery, especially through Walter Kaufmann in the United States and the later French reception through Deleuze, Foucault, and others, restored Nietzsche to serious philosophical engagement.

Life

Nietzsche was born in 1844 in Röcken, Saxony, the son of a Lutheran pastor who died when Friedrich was four. He was educated at the prestigious Schulpforta gymnasium and at the universities of Bonn and Leipzig, where he studied classical philology under Friedrich Ritschl. At twenty-four, on Ritschl's recommendation, he was appointed Professor Extraordinarius of Classical Philology at the University of Basel — an extraordinary appointment for someone who had not yet completed his doctorate (which Leipzig promptly awarded without examination).

The Basel years (1869–1879) included Nietzsche's intense friendship with Richard Wagner (whom he initially celebrated as the savior of German culture, then attacked in The Case of Wagner, 1888), his brief military service in the Franco-Prussian War (which left him with chronic health problems), and the composition of The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Untimely Meditations (1873–1876), and Human, All Too Human (1878).

In 1879, ill health forced Nietzsche to resign his Basel professorship. He spent the next decade as a wandering scholar, moving among Italian, Swiss, and southern German towns according to his health, supported by a modest pension from Basel. The decade 1879–1888 was Nietzsche's most productive: Daybreak (1881), The Gay Science (1882; second edition 1887), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), and the rapid sequence of late works (The Case of Wagner, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Ecce Homo) in 1888.

In early January 1889 Nietzsche collapsed mentally in Turin (the famous story of his throwing his arms around a horse being beaten in the street, though the historical accuracy of the specific detail is contested). He never recovered. The remaining eleven years of his life were spent in the care of his mother, then (after her death) of his sister Elisabeth, in a state of mental incapacity. He died in 1900 in Weimar.

Elisabeth's posthumous editorial management of Nietzsche's papers, especially the construction of The Will to Power (1901; expanded 1906) from selected notes, shaped the early-twentieth-century reception substantially and produced the Nietzsche the Nazi movement appropriated. The post-war scholarly recovery began with Karl Schlechta's revised edition (1956) and Walter Kaufmann's English translations and Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950); the Colli-Montinari critical edition (begun 1967) eventually replaced the older texts with reliable scholarly versions.

The problem he worked on

Nietzsche's project, across multiple works, is the diagnosis and critique of the cultural-philosophical-religious framework of European modernity. The framework, as Nietzsche analyzes it, is the long inheritance of Platonism and Christianity: a metaphysics of stable transcendent reality, a morality of self-denial and pity for the weak, a religious commitment to a God whose death has already occurred in European consciousness without being acknowledged. The combination has produced what Nietzsche calls nihilism — the loss of any genuine grounding for values, masked by the continued performance of forms that have lost their substance.

The critical project is to expose this condition and trace it to its roots. The constructive project is to imagine what comes after — a revaluation of all values, a recovery of life-affirming modes of existence, the figure of the übermensch who can affirm life including its eternal recurrence without consolation. Whether the constructive project succeeds, and what exactly it consists in, has been the central interpretive question of Nietzsche scholarship for a century.

Contributions

The critique of morality

Nietzsche's most extensive single project. The Genealogy of Morality (1887) is the canonical text. Conventional European morality, Nietzsche argues, is not a discovery of moral truth but a product of specific historical and psychological forces, especially the slave revolt in morals by which the powerless inverted the older aristocratic values (good = noble, strong, life-affirming) into their opposites (good = humble, meek, self-denying). The Christian moral framework is the historical victor of this inversion.

The critique is not the claim that morality is bad in any straightforward sense; it is the claim that morality has a history, that this history is not the history of moral discovery, and that recognizing the actual sources of moral judgments transforms how those judgments should be evaluated. The genealogical method (the careful tracing of the historical and psychological sources of an apparently natural or universal phenomenon) has been one of Nietzsche's most influential single contributions; Michel Foucault's later work is recognizably indebted to it.

The death of God

The famous proclamation, given in The Gay Science §125 (the parable of the madman) and elsewhere, that God is dead, and we have killed him. The doctrine is not the assertion of atheism in the conventional sense; it is the diagnosis of a cultural-historical condition. European culture had increasingly proceeded as if the religious framework that had organized it for centuries no longer applied; the implications of this fact had not yet been recognized or worked through. The death of God names this condition and its consequences.

Nietzsche presents the consequences as both opportunity and danger. The opportunity: the recovery of life from the framework that had denigrated it. The danger: nihilism, the collapse into the recognition that without the old framework, no values seem grounded. The figure of the übermensch in Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the image of what would come after — the human being capable of creating values in the absence of inherited grounding.

The will to power

Nietzsche's most contested positive doctrine. The will to power (der Wille zur Macht) is presented (especially in the late works) as the fundamental drive of all living things and perhaps of all reality. Power here is not primarily political domination; it is the expansion, intensification, self-overcoming of life. Every living thing strives toward growth, mastery, the expression of its specific form of vitality; the analysis of any organism, any culture, any value system requires understanding it in terms of the wills to power it expresses.

The doctrine's status is contested. Some readers (especially in the early-twentieth-century tradition) treated it as Nietzsche's central metaphysical commitment. Others (Walter Kaufmann, the post-war Nietzsche scholarship) have argued that it is more diagnostic than metaphysical — a tool for analyzing the psychological and cultural phenomena Nietzsche cares about, not a comprehensive theory of being. The unfinished status of The Will to Power (the book Nietzsche projected but never completed; the published volume of that name is editorial construction) complicates the question.

Eternal recurrence

Introduced in The Gay Science §341 and developed in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Imagine that every moment of your life will recur infinitely many times, identically, with all its joys and miseries. Would you affirm this? Would you want to live this same life again, and again, infinitely? The test of amor fati (the love of fate) is the capacity to answer yes.

The doctrine functions partly as a thought experiment (a test of the agent's relation to their own life) and partly, in some passages, as a metaphysical claim about the structure of time. The interpretive question of which Nietzsche intended is contested. As an ethical-existential test, eternal recurrence has been one of the most influential single ideas in modern philosophy.

Stylistic experimentation

Nietzsche's prose is one of the most distinctive in the philosophical tradition. The aphoristic method (especially in Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil) presents thought in short, often paradoxical units that resist systematic reduction. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a philosophical poem-novel in a style modeled on biblical and prophetic literature. The combination of polemic, irony, lyric, and argument that characterizes Nietzsche's mature writing is integral to the philosophy, not decorative.

Key works

• The Birth of Tragedy (1872). The early work on Greek tragedy and the contest of Apollonian and Dionysian principles.
• Untimely Meditations (1873–1876). Four essays on the use and abuse of history, Schopenhauer, Wagner, and David Strauss.
• Human, All Too Human (1878). The aphoristic turn; the break with Wagner.
• Daybreak (1881). Continuing aphoristic work; the critical analysis of morality begins to crystallize.
• The Gay Science (1882; expanded 1887). The proclamation of the death of God; the introduction of eternal recurrence.
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885). The philosophical poem-novel; the figure of the übermensch; eternal recurrence as central doctrine.
• Beyond Good and Evil (1886). The major systematic statement of the mature philosophy.
• On the Genealogy of Morality (1887). Three essays on the historical psychology of moral judgment.
• The Case of Wagner, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Ecce Homo (all 1888). The rapid late sequence before the collapse.

Influences and influenced

Influenced by: the Greek pre-Socratics, especially Heraclitus (whom Nietzsche admired throughout his career); Spinoza (whom Nietzsche described in a famous postcard to Overbeck as his only precursor); Schopenhauer (whose pessimism shaped the early Nietzsche before the eventual break); Lange's History of Materialism (the major nineteenth-century introduction to scientific naturalism); the Greek tragedians; the French moralistes (especially La Rochefoucauld and Chamfort, whose aphoristic style influenced Nietzsche's own); the experience of friendship and eventual disillusionment with Wagner.

Influenced: incalculably broad. The existentialist tradition (Heidegger's Nietzsche lectures, 1936–1940, are a major engagement; Sartre, Camus, Jaspers all develop Nietzschean themes); the phenomenological tradition; the French post-structuralist tradition (Foucault's Discipline and Punish is recognizably Nietzschean; Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy, 1962, was a major intervention; Derrida engaged Nietzsche extensively); the broader continental tradition through Adorno, Habermas, Lyotard, and many others; the contemporary analytic philosophy of Nietzsche (Bernard Williams, Brian Leiter, Maudemarie Clark) since the 1980s; the broader cultural reception in literature, psychology, and political theory.

The Nazi appropriation of selected Nietzschean themes in the 1930s and 1940s was substantially facilitated by Elisabeth's editorial manipulation and by selective reading of late notes and rhetoric. The post-war scholarly recovery has largely separated Nietzsche from this appropriation, though the question of whether Nietzsche's actual thought has affinities with proto-fascist politics remains contested.

Reception

Nietzsche's reception in his lifetime was modest; the breakthrough works of the 1880s found their audience slowly. The first wave of broad European reception came in the 1890s, the decade of his mental collapse and during which his sister Elisabeth was actively cultivating his reputation. Early influential receivers included Georg Brandes (whose Copenhagen lectures of 1888 introduced Nietzsche to a Scandinavian and broader European audience), Thomas Mann, and the early modernist literary movements across Europe.

The early-twentieth-century reception was substantially shaped by Elisabeth's editorial work and by the assemblage of selected late notes into The Will to Power. The Nazi appropriation of selected themes in the 1930s and 1940s was facilitated by this editorial preparation and by selective ideological reading.

The post-war recovery began in the late 1940s and 1950s. Walter Kaufmann's Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950) was the foundational English-language scholarly reframing. Karl Jaspers's Nietzsche (1936; English 1965) provided a major philosophical engagement. Heidegger's lectures on Nietzsche (delivered 1936–1940; published in two volumes 1961) were a major engagement of an opposite political and philosophical orientation. The Colli-Montinari critical edition (begun 1967) eventually made reliable scholarly texts available; the new translations by Carol Diethe, Adrian Del Caro, and others have continued the work.

The French reception through Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, and Klossowski was perhaps the most extensive single national reception of the post-war period. The contemporary analytic reception, beginning with Bernard Williams's late work and Maudemarie Clark's Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (1990), has produced a substantial body of careful scholarly work on Nietzsche's epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics.

Continuing engagement

Major recent scholarly work includes Brian Leiter's Nietzsche on Morality (2002; revised 2015), Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick's The Soul of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil (2012), Julian Young's Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography (2010), Bernard Reginster's The Affirmation of Life (2006), and the substantial work of Lawrence Hatab, Robert Pippin, and Christopher Janaway. The major journals (Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Nietzsche-Studien) document continuing scholarship. Active scholarly debates concern the status of the will to power as a metaphysical doctrine, the interpretation of eternal recurrence, the relation between Nietzsche's diagnostic critique and any positive ethics, and Nietzsche's relation to contemporary political theory.

Further reading

• Existentialism — the tradition his work substantially shaped
• Heraclitus — the Pre-Socratic Nietzsche most admired
• Spinoza — the philosophical predecessor he named as his precursor
• Amor Fati — the doctrine he revived from Stoicism under the Latin name
• Virtue — the ethical category his critique of morality engages
• Belief Systems — the structure his genealogical method exposes

The German philosopher whose critique of morality, doctrine of the will to power, and aphoristic style produced one of the most influential bodies of work in modern thought.