Friedrich Nietzche
October 3rd, 2007 by diemorgan(1844 – 1869)
Nietzsche Born on October 15, 1844, Nietzsche lived in the small town of Röcken, near Leipzig, in the Prussian province of Saxony. His name comes from King Frederick William IV of Prussia, who turned 49 on the day of Nietzsche’s birth. (Nietzsche later dropped his given middle name, "Wilhelm".[1]) Nietzsche’s parents, Carl Ludwig (1813–1849), a Lutheran pastor and former teacher, and Franziska Oehler (1826–1897), married in 1843. His sister, Elisabeth, was born in 1846, followed by a brother, Ludwig Joseph, in 1848. Nietzsche’s father died from a brain ailment in 1849; his younger brother died in 1850. The family then moved to Naumburg, where they lived with Nietzsche’s paternal grandmother and his father’s two unmarried sisters. After the death of Nietzsche’s grandmother in 1856, the family moved into their own house.
Friedrich Nietzsche, 1861.Nietzsche attended a boys’ school and later a private school, where he became friends with Gustav Krug and Wilhelm Pinder, both of whom came from respected families. In 1854 he began to attend the Domgymnasium in Naumburg, but after he showed particular talents in music and language, the internationally-recognized Schulpforta admitted him as a pupil, and there he continued his studies from 1858 to 1864. Here he became friends with Paul Deussen and Carl von Gersdorff. He also found time to work on poems and musical compositions. At Schulpforta, Nietzsche received an important introduction to literature, particularly that of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and for the first time experienced a distance from his family life in a small-town Christian environment.
After graduation in 1864, Nietzsche commenced studies in theology and classical philology at the University of Bonn. For a short time, he and Deussen became members of the Burschenschaft Frankonia. After one semester (and to the anger of his mother) he stopped his theological studies and lost his faith.[2] This may have happened in part due to his reading about this time of David Strauss’ Life of Jesus, which had a profound effect on the young Nietzsche.[2] Nietzsche then concentrated on studying philology under Professor Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl, whom he followed to the University of Leipzig the next year. There, he became close friends with fellow-student Erwin Rohde. Nietzsche’s first philological publications appeared soon after.
Friedrich Nietzsche, 1868.In 1865, Nietzsche became acquainted with the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, and he read Friedrich Albert Lange’s Geschichte des Materialismus in 1866. He found both of these encounters stimulating: they encouraged him to expand his horizons beyond philology and to continue his schooling. In 1867, Nietzsche signed up for one year of voluntary service with the Prussian artillery division in Naumburg. However, a bad riding accident in March 1868 left him unfit for service. Consequently Nietzsche turned his attention to his studies again, completing them and first meeting with Richard Wagner later that year.
Professor at Basel (1869–1879)
Mid October, 1871. Left to right: Erwin Rohde, Carl von Gersdorff and Friedrich Nietzsche.Due in part to Ritschl’s support, Nietzsche received a generous offer to become professor of classical philology at the University of Basel before having completed his doctorate degree or certificate for teaching. After moving to Basel, Nietzsche renounced his Prussian citizenship: for the rest of his life he remained officially stateless.[3] Nevertheless, he served on the Prussian side during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to 1871 as a medical orderly. In his short time in the military he experienced much, and witnessed the traumatic effects of battle. He also contracted diphtheria and dysentery. Walter Kaufmann speculates that he might also have contracted syphilis along with his other infections at this time — if (as many though not all believe) syphilis caused his eventual madness. On returning to Basel in 1870, Nietzsche observed the establishment of the German Empire and the following era of Otto von Bismarck as an outsider and with a degree of skepticism regarding its genuineness. At the University, he delivered his inaugural lecture, "Homer and Classical Philology". Nietzsche also met Franz Overbeck, a professor of theology, who remained his friend throughout his life. Afrikan Spir,[4] a little-known Russian philosopher and author of Thought and Reality (1873), and his colleague the historian Jacob Burckhardt, whose lectures Nietzsche frequently attended, began to exercise significant influence on Nietzsche during this time. Nietzsche had already met Richard Wagner in Leipzig in 1868, and (some time later) Wagner’s wife Cosima. Nietzsche admired both greatly, and during his time at Basel frequently visited Wagner’s house in Tribschen in the Canton of Lucerne. The Wagners brought Nietzsche into their most intimate circle, and enjoyed the attention he gave to the beginning of the Bayreuth Festival Theatre. In 1870, he gave Cosima Wagner the manuscript of ‘The Genesis of the Tragic Idea’ as a birthday gift. In 1872, Nietzsche published his first book, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. However, his classical philological colleagues, including Ritschl, expressed little enthusiasm for the work, in which Nietzsche forewent a precise philological method to employ a style of philosophical speculation. In a polemic, Philology of the Future, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff dampened the book’s reception and increased its notoriety. In response, Rohde (by now a professor in Kiel) and Wagner came to Nietzsche’s defense. Nietzsche remarked freely about the isolation he felt within the philological community and attempted to attain a position in philosophy at Basel, though unsuccessfully.
Friedrich Nietzsche in Basel, ca. 1875.Between 1873 and 1876, Nietzsche published separately four long essays: David Strauss: the Confessor and the Writer, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, Schopenhauer as Educator, and Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. (These four later appeared in a collected edition under the title, Untimely Meditations.) The four essays shared the orientation of a cultural critique, challenging the developing German culture along lines suggested by Schopenhauer and Wagner. Starting in 1873, Nietzsche also accumulated the notes later posthumously published as Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. During this time, in the circle of the Wagners, Nietzsche met Malwida von Meysenbug and Hans von Bülow, and also began a friendship with Paul Rée, who in 1876 influenced him in dismissing the pessimism in his early writings. However, his disappointment with the Bayreuth Festival of 1876, where the banality of the shows and the baseness of the public repelled him, caused him in the end to distance himself from Wagner.
With the publication of Human, All Too Human in 1878, a book of aphorisms on subjects ranging from metaphysics to morality and from religion to the sexes, Nietzsche’s departure from the philosophy of Wagner and Schopenhauer became evident. Nietzsche’s friendship with Deussen and Rohde cooled as well. Nietzsche in this time attempted to find a wife — to no avail. In 1879, after a significant decline in health, Nietzsche had to resign his position at Basel. (Since his childhood, various disruptive illnesses had plagued him — moments of shortsightedness practically to the degree of blindness, migraine headaches, and violent stomach attacks. The 1868 riding accident and diseases in 1870 may have aggravated these persistent conditions, which continued to affect him through his years at Basel, forcing him to take longer and longer holidays until regular work became no longer practical.)
Independent philosopher (1879–1888)
Because his illness drove him to find more compatible climates, Nietzsche traveled frequently, and lived until 1889 as an independent author in different cities. He spent many summers in Sils Maria, near St. Moritz in Switzerland, and many winters in the Italian cities of Genoa, Rapallo, and Turin, and in the French city of Nice. In 1881, when France occupied Tunisia, he planned to travel to Tunis in order to gain a view of Europe from the outside, but later abandoned that idea (probably for health reasons).[5] Nietzsche occasionally returned to Naumburg to visit his family, and especially during this time, he and his sister had repeated periods of conflict and reconciliation. He lived on his pension from Basel, but also received aid from friends. A past student of his, Peter Gast (born Heinrich Köselitz), became a sort of private secretary to Nietzsche. To the end of his life, Gast and Overbeck remained consistently faithful friends. Malwida von Meysenbug remained like a motherly patron even outside the Wagner circle. Soon Nietzsche made contact with the music critic Carl Fuchs. Nietzsche stood at the beginning of his most productive period. Beginning with Human, All Too Human in 1878, Nietzsche would publish one book (or major section of a book) each year until 1888, his last year of writing, during which he completed five.
Lou Salomé, Paul Rée and Nietzsche, 1882.In 1882 Nietzsche published the first part of The Gay Science. That year he also met Lou Salomé through Malwida von Meysenbug and Paul Rée. Nietzsche and Salomé spent the summer together in Tautenburg in Thuringia, often with Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth as chaperon. However, Nietzsche regarded Salomé less as an equal partner than as a gifted student. He fell in love with her and pursued her with the help of their mutual friend Rée. Salomé reports that he asked her to marry him and that she refused, though the reliability of her reports of events has come into question[citation needed]. Nietzsche’s relationship with Rée and Salomé broke up in the winter of 1882/1883, partially due to intrigues conducted by his sister Elisabeth. In the face of renewed fits of illness, in near isolation after a falling-out with his mother and sister regarding Salomé, and plagued by suicidal thoughts, Nietzsche fled to Rapallo, where he wrote the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in only ten days.
After severing his philosophical ties with Schopenhauer and his social ties with Wagner, Nietzsche had few remaining friends. Now, with the new style of Zarathustra, his work became even more alienating and the market received it only to the degree required by politeness. Nietzsche recognized this and maintained his solitude, even though he often complained about it. His books remained largely unsold. In 1885, he printed only 40 copies of the fourth part of Zarathustra, and distributed only a fraction of these among close friends, including Helene von Druskowitz.
In 1886 Nietzsche broke with his editor, Ernst Schmeitzner, disgusted over his anti-Semitic opinions. Nietzsche saw his writings as "completely buried and unexhumeable in this anti-Semitic dump" of Schmeitzner — associating the editor with a movement that should be "utterly rejected with cold contempt by every sensible mind".[6] He then printed Beyond Good and Evil at his own expense, and issued in 1886-87 second editions of his earlier works (The Birth of Tragedy, Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, and The Gay Science), accompanied by new prefaces in which he re-read his earlier works. Hereafter, he saw his work as completed for the time and hoped that soon a readership would develop. In fact, interest in Nietzsche’s thought did increase at this time, even if rather slowly and hardly perceived by him. During these years Nietzsche met Meta von Salis, Carl Spitteler, and also Gottfried Keller. In 1886, his sister Elisabeth married the anti-Semite Bernhard Förster and traveled to Paraguay to found Nueva Germania, a "Germanic" colony, a plan to which Nietzsche responded with laughter. Through correspondence, Nietzsche’s relationship with Elisabeth continued on the path of conflict and reconciliation, but they would meet again only after his collapse. He continued to have frequent and painful attacks of illness, which made prolonged work impossible. In 1887, Nietzsche quickly wrote the polemic On the Genealogy of Morality.
During this year Nietzsche encountered Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s work, which he quickly appropriated.[7] He also exchanged letters with Hippolyte Taine, and then also with Georg Brandes. Brandes, who had started to teach the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard in the 1870s, wrote to Nietzsche asking him to read Kierkegaard, to which Nietzsche replied that he would come to Copenhagen and read Kierkegaard with him. However, before fulfilling this undertaking, he slipped too far into sickness and madness. In the beginning of 1888, in Copenhagen, Brandes delivered one of the first lectures on Nietzsche’s philosophy.
Although Nietzsche had in 1886 announced (at the end of Beyond Good and Evil) a new work with the title The Will to Power. Essay of a transvaluation of all values, he eventually abandoned this project and used its draft materials to compose Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist (both written in 1888).[8]
His health seemed to improve, and he spent the summer in high spirits. In the fall of 1888 his writings and letters began to reveal a higher estimation of his own status and "fate." He overestimated the increasing response to his writings, especially to the recent polemic, The Case of Wagner. On his 44th birthday, after completing Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist, he decided to write the autobiography Ecce Homo, which presents itself to his readers in order that they "[h]ear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else." (Preface, sec. 1, tr. Walter Kaufmann) In December, Nietzsche began a correspondence with August Strindberg, and thought that, short of an international breakthrough, he would attempt to buy back his older writings from the publisher and have them translated into other European languages. Moreover, he planned the publication of the compilation Nietzsche Contra Wagner and of the poems Dionysian Dithyrambs.
Mental breakdown and death (1889–1900)
A photo by Hans Olde from the photographic series "The Ill Nietzsche", summer of 1899.On January 3, 1889, Nietzsche exhibited signs of a serious mental illness. Two policemen approached him after he caused a public disturbance in the streets of Turin. What actually happened remains unknown. The often-repeated tale states that Nietzsche witnessed the whipping of a horse at the other end of the Piazza Carlo Alberto, ran to the horse, threw his arms up around the horse’s neck to protect it, and collapsed to the ground. (The first dream-sequence from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (Part 1, Chapter 5) has just such a scene in which Raskolnikov witnesses the whipping of a horse around the eyes.[9] Incidentally, Nietzsche called Dostoyevsky "[t]he only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn.") [10]
In the following few days, Nietzsche sent short writings — known as the "Wahnbriefe" ("Madness Letters") — to a number of friends (including Cosima Wagner and Jacob Burckhardt).
To his former colleague Burckhardt Nietzsche wrote: "I have had Caiaphas put in fetters. Also, last year I was crucified by the German doctors in a very drawn-out manner. Wilhelm, Bismarck, and all anti-Semites abolished."[11] (He also commanded the German emperor to go to Rome in order to be shot and summoned the European powers to take military action against Germany.)[12]
On January 6, 1889, Burckhardt showed the letter he had received from Nietzsche to Overbeck. The following day, Overbeck received a similarly revealing letter, and decided that Nietzsche’s friends had to bring him back to Basel. Overbeck travelled to Turin and brought Nietzsche to a psychiatric clinic in Basel. By that time, Nietzsche appeared fully in the grip of insanity, and his mother Franziska decided to transfer him to a clinic in Jena under the direction of Otto Binswanger. From November 1889 to February 1890, Julius Langbehn attempted to cure Nietzsche, claiming that the doctors’ methods were ineffective to cure Nietzsche’s condition. Langbehn assumed progressively greater control of Nietzsche until his secrecy discredited him. In March 1890 Franziska removed Nietzsche from the clinic, and in May 1890 brought him to her home in Naumburg. During this process, Overbeck and Gast contemplated what to do with Nietzsche’s unpublished works. In January 1889 they proceeded with the planned release of Twilight of the Idols, by that time already printed and bound. In February, they ordered a 50-copy private edition of Nietzsche contra Wagner, but the publisher C. G. Naumann secretly printed 100. Overbeck and Gast decided to withhold publishing The Antichrist and Ecce Homo due to their more radical content. Nietzsche’s reception and recognition enjoyed their first surge.
Peter Gast would "correct" Nietzsche’s writings even after the philosopher’s breakdown and so without his approval - something heavily criticized by today’s Nietzsche scholarship.In 1893 Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth returned from Nueva Germania (Paraguay) following the suicide of her husband. She read and studied Nietzsche’s works, and piece by piece took control of them and of their publication. Overbeck eventually suffered dismissal, and Gast finally co-operated. After the death of Franziska in 1897, Nietzsche lived in Weimar, where Elisabeth cared for him and allowed people, including Rudolf Steiner, to visit her uncommunicative brother.
Commentators have frequently diagnosed a syphilitic infection as the cause of the illness; however, some of Nietzsche’s symptoms — and the long period before it presumably began affecting his mind — seem inconsistent with typical cases of syphilis. While most commentators regard Nietzsche’s breakdown as unrelated to his philosophy, some, including Georges Bataille and René Girard, argue for considering his breakdown as a symptom of a psychological maladjustment brought on by his philosophy.
On August 25, 1900, Nietzsche died after contracting pneumonia. Elisabeth had him buried beside his father at the church in Röcken. His friend, Gast, gave his funeral oration, proclaiming: "Holy be your name to all future generations!"[13] (Note that Nietzsche had pointed out in his book Ecce Homo, not yet published at the time, how he did not wish people to call him "holy".)
Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche compiled The Will to Power, from notes he had written, and published it posthumously. Since his sister arranged the book, the general consensus holds that it does not reflect Nietzsche’s intent. Indeed, Mazzino Montinari, the editor of Nietzsche’s Nachlass, called it a forgery in The ‘Will to Power’ does not exist. Among other forgeries and suppressions of passages, Elisabeth removed aphorism 35 of The Antichrist, where Nietzsche rewrote a passage of the Bible (see The Will to Power and Nietzsche’s criticisms of anti-Semitism and nationalism).
Philosophy
Friedrich Nietzsche, 1882 Of major philosophers, Nietzsche has generated possibly the least consensus. One can readily identify some key concepts, but the meaning of each, let alone the relative significance of each, remains hotly contested. Nietzsche famously put forward the idea that "God is dead", and this death may result in radical perspectivism or may lead one to confront the fact that humans have always regarded truth perspectivally. Nietzsche also distinguished between master and slave moralities, the former arising from a celebration of life, the latter the result of ressentiment at those capable of the former. This distinction becomes in summary the difference between "good and bad" on the one hand, and "good and evil" on the other; importantly, the "good" man of the master morality equates to the "evil" man of the slave morality.
Morality and moral disputes thus become matters of psychology; Nietzsche’s perspectivism likewise reduces epistemology to psychology. One of the most recurrent themes in Nietzsche’s work, therefore, emerges as the "Will to Power". At a minimum, Nietzsche claims for the will to power that it describes human behavior more compellingly than Platonic eros, Schopenhauer’s "will to live," or Paul Rée’s utilitarian account of morality, among others; to go beyond this would involve interpretation.
Much of Nietzsche’s philosophy has a critical flavour to it, and much criticism of his work has arisen from the fact that "he does not have a system". However, Nietzsche himself expressed a general disdain for philosophy as the construction of systems — indeed, he says (for example) in the preface of Beyond Good and Evil that many systems built by dogmatist philosophers have relied more on popular prejudices (such as the idea of a soul) than anything else.[citation needed]
Other Nietzschean concepts include the Übermensch (variously translated as superman, superhuman, or in the way most philosophers refer to it today, overman) and the eternal return (or eternal recurrence). Nietzsche posits the overman as a goal that humanity can achieve for itself, or that an individual can set for himself.
Nietzsche contrasts the Übermensch with the Last Man, who appears as an exaggerated version of the degraded "goal" that liberal democratic or bourgeois society sets for itself. Both the Übermensch and the eternal return feature heavily in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. (Scholars also disagree about the interpretation of the eternal return.)
