Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philologist, philosopher, prose poet and cultural critic. He has been a major influence on modern philosophy. He was born in Rocken, Lutzen in Germany on 15th October 1844 and died in Weimar on 25th August 1900 aged 55.
Major Works
“Human, All Too Human” (1878)
“Daybreak” (1881)
“The Joyful Science” (1882)
“Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (1884)
“Beyond Good and Evil” (1886)
“On the Genealogy of Morals” (1887)
“Twilight of the Idols” (1888)
Biography Timeline
1844: Friedrich Nietzsche was born at Rocken in the German province of Saxony on 15th October to Carl Ludwig Nietzsche a religious pastor and his wife Franziska.
1846: His sister Elisabeth is born on 10th July.
1849: His father dies aged 36 of a brain tumour.
1850: His mother moves the family to Naumburg to be near relatives. Nietzsche attends the local elementary school.
1854: His mother refuses to send him to the Franckeschen Stiftungen in Halle, a school for fatherless children. Nietzsche begins to write music and poetry for the first time.
1855: He enrols at the Naumburg Domgymnasium.
1858: He writes more music and writes his autobiography “Aus Meinen Leben“. In September he receives a scholarship to the Landesschule Pforta despite poor grades.
1859: He begins to do well at school and writes a play called “Prometheus”.
1860: He starts a literary society called “Germania” for monthly musical and literary works.
1861: He composes “Ermanarich: Symphonische Dichtung“, a work for four hands on the piano.
1862: He writes “Fatum und Geschichte” (Fate and History), “Willensfreiheit und Fatum” (Freedom of the Will and Fate) and “Uber das Dämonische in der Musik” (On the Demonic in Music) for “Germania”.
1864: He writes “Uber Stimmungen” (On Moods). He finishes at Pforta and becomes a student of theology and philology at the University of Bonn in October where he joins the fraternity “Franconia”.
1865: He resigns from “Franconia” saying he can’t cope with the constant drinking culture. In the autumn Friedrich Ritschl, who taught latin grammar, resigns due to a dispute and moves to the University of Leipzig and Nietzsche follows him there. Nietzsche discovers the works of Arthur Schopenhauer in a second hand bookshop.
1866: He begins a friendship with Erwin Rohde.
1867: He embarks on a compulsory year of military service.
1868: A private in an Artillery regiment he has an accident on a horse and is confined to bed with chest pains. He writes notes for a planned dissertation.“Die Teleologie Seit Kant” (The Concept of the Organic Since Kant). He publishes several works including “Beiträge zur Kritik der Griechischen Lyriker” (Contribution toward the Critique of the Greek Lyric Poet, Simonides”) in the Rheinisches Museum für Philologie. On 8th November he meets Richard Wagner in Leipzig.
1869: He is appointed the professor of classical philology at the University of Basel in February. In May he gives his inaugural lecture entitled “Über die Persönlichkeit Homers” (On the Personality of Homer). He begins writing “The Birth of Tragedy“.
1870: He gives a number of public lectures at Basel and becomes a full time teaching professor. In August he serves as a volunteer medical orderly in the Franco-Prussian war.
1872: “Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik” (The Birth Of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music) is published. Nietzsche meets Wagner in May.
1873: He meets Paul Ree during May. In August he publishes the first of his “Untimely Meditations” called “David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer“. In October Richard Wagner asks him to write “Mahnruf an die Deutschen” (Exhortation to the Germans) as a fundraising appeal for his new theatre in Bayreuth, Bavaria.
1876: He takes leave of absence from the University of Basel. He attends the first Bayreuth Wagner festival in Bayreuth and publishes the fourth “Untimely Meditation” “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth“. Nietzsche goes to Naples during October and has his last meeting with Wagner there. He spends the winter in Sorrento, Italy.
1877: He requests an extension in his leave of abscence.
1878: Richard Wagner sends him the finished version of “Parsifal”. “Human, All Too Human” is completed and Nietzsche sends it to his publisher and a copy rot Wagner. This is the last time the two will correspond. He requests another extension in his leave of abscence.
1879: He finally resigns from the university by sending letter from Geneva. They grant him a six year pension. “The Wanderer and His Shadow” is published in December.
1880: He visits Venice. In November he completes writing“Dawn” in Genoa, Italy.
1881: He visits Sils Maria in Switzerland. He writes “The Joyful Science” later in the year.
1882: He meets Lou Salome for the first time in Rome. In October Paul Rée and Lou Salomé arrive in Leipzig for a one-month visit to see him but their friendship declines rapidly and they go off to Paris. Nietzsche never sees them again.
1883: He begins to write “Thus Spake Zarathustra” and begins the second part in Sils Maria. In September his sister Elisabeth becomes engaged to Bernhard Förster, a leader anti-jewish movement in Germany.
1884: “Thus Spake Zarathustra” part three is published and he begins work on part four later in the year.
1885: Elisabeth marries Bernhard Forster on 22nd May.
1886: Elisabeth leaves for Paraguay in South America. “Beyond Good and Evil” is published in August.
1887: He writes “On the Genealogy of Morals” which is published in November.
1888: He writes Writes “The Case of Wagner” and “Dionysus Dithyrambs“. He begins to write “Twilight of the Idols“, which is published the following year and “The Antichrist” which ispublished in November 1894. He also writes “Ecce Homo” and “Nietzsche contra Wagner“.
1889: He suffers a complete nervous breakdown whilst in Turin, Italy and he is looked after by his mother in in Jena and Naumburg in Germany.
1897: His mother dies and Elisabeth, now back in Germany, takes over his care in Weimar.
Friedrich Nietzsche finally dies on 25th August 1900 in Weimar and he is buried in Röcken Churchyard in Thüringen, Germany.
Influences
Nietzsche was a philosopher who became one of the most influential of all modern thinkers affecting many other philosophers, psychologists, theologians, poets, novelists, and playwrights. We should state firstly he wasn’t a “Nazi” and indeed he was against nationalism in all its forms in Germany and elsewhere. Confusion happened when his sister Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche took it upon herself to popularise his works after his death and edited his ideas considerably. She created the Nietzsche Archive in 1894 and although her husband Berhardt had been a fervent anti-semite she never joined the Nazi party. In fact her brother Friedrich cut ties with her as he disliked anti-semitism. She did however donate Nietzsche’s walking stick to Hitler and he attended her funeral in 1935.
As a student and then professor of philology Nietzsche had a thorough knowledge of the Greek philosophers particularly Socrates and Aristotle and he lectured on pre-Platonic philosophers such as Empedocles and Heraclitus’s theories of eternal change in the universe for many years. He also criticised Plato for attempting to apply a logos to the world but ignoring chaos and emotion in the real world.
He admired Michel de Montaigne, as well as the French moralists of the seventeenth century such as Francois de La Rochefoucauld and the Portuguese Baruch Spinoza but later began to criticise him. He also admired Blaise Pascal, Voltaire and his favourite, Stendhal. He read widely the works of Homer, William Shakespeare, Niccolo Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Heinrich Heine and his personal favourite poet Friedrich Holderlin. He also read works by Fyodr Dostoevsky (whom he described as “the only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn”), Edgar Allan Poe, Adam Mickiewicz, William Butler Yeats, Stefan Zweig, and was conversant with the theories of Charles Darwin.
Music was a major part of his life and he admired Richard Strauss but his great love was Richard Wagner whom he at first idolised and then distanced himself from. Some contend that Wagner was a significant influence on the concept of the Übermensch or Superman.
Amongst the philosophers he was influenced by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Ludwig Feuerbach, Baltasar Gracian, George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the art historian Johann Joachim Wincklemann. It was Arthur Schopenhauer however who most influenced his philosophical thought and in 1872 his “The Birth of Tragedy” was strongly indebted to Schopenhauer. Indeed, some critics have suggested his whole career was a reaction to Schopenhauer although in later life his ideas began to turn away from him. He was also influenced by the organicism of Paul Bourget and the work of Rudolf Ludwig Carl Virchow and Alfred Victor Espinas. There is also a nod to the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson whose essays had made a deep impression on him and whose belief in personal transcendence can be seen as a precursor of the Übermensch. He said of Emerson “Never have I felt so much at home in a book”. Meanwhile G.K Chesteron believed that the concept could have come from Thomas Carlyle. Ruth apRoberts wrote that “Nietzsche and Carlyle had the same German sources, but Nietzsche may owe more to Carlyle than he cares to admit”. Not all philosophers were heroes however and he was particularly scathing about Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill as well as Plato and the novelist George Eliot came in for heavy criticism. In 1867 he wrote he was trying to improve his German style and it is thought that Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s aphoristic style influenced this aspect of his work the most.
Nietzsche’s works did not reach a wide readership during his career but Georg Brandes lectures at the University of Copenhagen in 1888 aroused much curiosity and after his death they became gradually better known. Because of the wide range of his writings and subjects there have been many interpretations placed upon them by widely diverging groups of people. In the 1890’s he was studied by left wing politicians in Germany so much so that conservatives tried to ban his works as subversive. He was also popular with anarchists in France, Germany, Britain and the United States. In 1906, during the Dreyfus Affair, the French antisemitic right labelled the Jewish and leftist intellectuals who defended Alfred Dreyfus as “Nietzscheans”. In 1907 H.L. Mencken published “The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche” in English broadening his appeal outside Germany and France. During the First World War he had a reputation as an inspiration for right-wing German militarism as well as politics of the left and German soldiers were given copies of “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” to read throughout the conflict. He has also been eagerly read by Social-democratic revisionists, anarchists, feminists and the left-wing youth movement in Germany. Alfred Bäumler quoted fragments of his “The Will to Power” which also appealed to National Socialists during the 1930’s. Benito Mussolini, Charles de Gaulle and the founder of the American Black Panther revolution Huey Percy Newton also read his works.
Nowadays Nietzsche is known as a precursor of existentialism, post-structuralism and post-modernism. The list of twentieth century philosophers influenced by him is long and includes Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Jaspers, Jean-Paul Sartre, Leo Strauss, Theodor Adorno, Jacques Derrida and Martin Buber to name but a few. Ayn Rand called him her “favorite philosopher”.
The founder of analytical psychology Carl Jung was heavily influenced by him by his own admission and there is evidence that Freud was as well. The novelist Albert Camus described Nietzsche as “the only artist to have derived the extreme consequences of an aesthetics of the absurd” and Thomas Mann described him as his favourite philosopher and in his 1947 novel “Doktor Faustus” one of the characters, Adrian Leverkühn, represents Nietzsche. Other writers include Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke, Joseph Conrad, Hermann Hesse, Andre Malraux, Andre Gide, James Joyce, August Strindberg, George Bernard Shaw, Eugene O’Neill and D.H. Lawrence. Composers Gustav Mahler and Frederick Delius were attracted to his works. In 1898 Delius wrote “A Mass of Life” based on “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, whilst Richard Strauss used the same work for a symphonic poem.
Many painters too have been influenced such as Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, Mark Rothko and the Russians Wassily Kandinsky and Lena Hades. He also has had an influence on the French historian of ideas Michel Foucault, theologians such as Paul Tillich and Thomas J.J. Altizer and amongst the occultists such as Aleister Crowley.
His influence has not been exclusively confined to the west. The Pakistani poet and philosopher Allama Iqbal’s Idea Of Mard e Momin as a perfect man is highly influenced by Nietzsche.
The names throughout this whole section are only a snapshot of some of the people who owe him a debt.