Friedrich Wilhelm (1844–1900), German philosopher and cultural critic. Born in a small town in the Prussian province of Saxony, Nietzsche’s early education emphasized religion and classical languages and literature. After a year at the university at Bonn he transferred to Leipzig, where he pursued classical studies. There he happened upon Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, which profoundly influenced his subsequent concerns and early philosophical thinking. It was as a classical philologist, however, that he was appointed professor at the Swiss university at Basel, before he had even received his doctorate, at the astonishingly early age of twenty-four.
A mere twenty years of productive life remained to him, ending with a mental and physical collapse in January 1889, from which he never recovered. He held his position at Basel for a decade, resigning in 1879 owing to the deterioration of his health from illnesses he had contracted in 1870 as a volunteer medical orderly in the Franco-Prussian war. At Basel he lectured on a variety of subjects chiefly relating to classical studies, including Greek and Roman philosophy as well as literature. During his early years there he also became intensely involved with the composer Richard Wagner; and his fascination with Wagner was reflected in several of his early works – most notably his first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), and his subsequent essay Richard Wagner in Bayreuth (1876). His later break with Wagner, culminating in his polemic The Case of Wagner (1888), was both profound and painful to him. While at first regarding Wagner as a creative genius showing the way to a cultural and spiritual renewal, Nietzsche came to see him and his art as epitomizing and exacerbating the fundamental problem with which he became increasingly concerned.
This problem was the pervasive intellectual and cultural crisis Nietzsche later characterized in terms of the ‘death of God’ and the advent of ‘nihilism.’ Traditional religious and metaphysical ways of thinking were on the wane, leaving a void that modern science could not fill, and endangering the health of civilization. The discovery of some life-affirming alternative to Schopenhauer’s radically pessimistic response to this disillusionment became Nietzsche’s primary concern. In The Birth of Tragedy he looked to the Greeks for clues and to Wagner for inspiration, believing that their art held the key to renewed human flourishing for a humanity bereft both of the consolations of religious faith and of confidence in reason and science as substitutes for it. In his subsequent series of Untimely Meditations (1873–76) he expanded upon his theme of the need to reorient human thought and endeavor to this end, and criticized a variety of tendencies detrimental to it that he discerned among his contemporaries. Both the deterioration of Nietzsche’s health and the shift of his interest away from his original discipline prevented retention of his position at Basel. In the first years after his retirement, he completed his transition from philologist to philosopher and published the several parts of Human, All-Too-Human (1878–90), Daybreak (1881), and the first four parts of The Gay Science (1882). These aphoristic writings sharpened and extended his analytical and critical assessment of various human tendencies and social, cultural, and intellectual phenomena. During this period his thinking became much more sophisticated; and he developed the philosophical styles and concerns that found mature expression in the writings of the final years of his brief active life, following the publication of the four parts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85). These last remarkably productive years saw the appearance of Beyond Good and Evil (1886), a fifth part of The Gay Science, On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), The Case of Wagner (1888), and a series of prefaces to his earlier works (1886–87), as well as the completion of several books published after his collapse – Twilight of the Idols (1889), The Antichrist (1895), and Ecce Homo (1908). He was also amassing a great deal of material in notebooks, of which a selection was later published under the title The Will to Power. (The status and significance of this mass of Nachlass material are matters of continuing controversy.) In the early 1880s, when he wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche arrived at a conception of human life and possibility – and with it, of value and meaning – that he believed could overcome the Schopenhauerian pessimism and nihilism that he saw as outcomes of the collapse of traditional modes of religious and philosophical interpretation. He prophesied a period of nihilism in the aftermath of their decline and fall; but this prospect deeply distressed him. He was convinced of the untenability of the ‘God hypothesis,’ and indeed of all religious and metaphysical interpretations of the world and ourselves; and yet he was well aware that the very possibility of the affirmation of life was at stake, and required more than the mere abandonment of all such ‘lies’ and ‘fictions.’ He took the basic challenge of philosophy now to be to reinterpret life and the world along more tenable lines that would also overcome nihilism.
What Nietzsche called ‘the death of God’ was both a cultural event – the waning and impending demise of the ‘Christian-moral’ interpretation of life and the world – and also a philosophical development: the abandonment of anything like the God-hypothesis (all demidivine absolutes included). As a cultural event it was a phenomenon to be reckoned with, and a source of profound concern; for he feared a ‘nihilistic rebound’ in its wake, and worried about the consequences for human life and culture if no countermovement to it were forthcoming. As a philosophical development, on the other hand, it was his point of departure, which he took to call for a radical reconsideration of everything from life and the world and human existence and knowledge to value and morality. The ‘de-deification of nature,’ the ‘translation of man back into nature,’ the ‘revaluation of values,’ the tracing of the ‘genealogy of morals’ and their critique, and the elaboration of ‘naturalistic’ accounts of knowledge, value, morality, and our entire ‘spiritual’ nature thus came to be his main tasks. His published and unpublished writings contain a wealth of remarks, observations, and suggestions contributing importantly to them.
It is a matter of controversy, even among those with a high regard for Nietzsche, whether he tried to work out positions on issues bearing any resemblance to those occupying other philosophers before and after him in the mainstream of the history of philosophy. He was harshly critical of most of his predecessors and contemporaries; and he broke fundamentally with them and their basic ideas and procedures. His own writings, moreover, bear little resemblance to those of most other philosophers. Those he himself published (as well as his reflections in his notebooks) do not systematically set out and develop views. Rather, they consist for the most part in collections of short paragraphs and sets of aphorisms, often only loosely if at all connected. Many deal with philosophical topics, but in very unconventional ways; and because his remarks about these topics are scattered through many different works, they are all too easily taken in isolation and misunderstood. On some topics, moreover, much of what he wrote is found only in his very rough notebooks, which he filled with thoughts without indicating the extent of his reflected commitment to them. His language, furthermore, is by turns coolly analytical, heatedly polemical, sharply critical, and highly metaphorical; and he seldom indicates clearly the scope of his claims and what he means by his terms. It is not surprising, therefore, that many philosophers have found it difficult to know what to make of him and to take him seriously – and that some have taken him to repudiate altogether the traditional philosophical enterprise of seeking reasoned conclusions with respect to questions of the kind with which philosophers have long been concerned, heralding the ‘death’ not only of religious and metaphysical thinking, but also of philosophy itself. Others read him very differently, as having sought to effect a fundamental reorientation of philosophical thinking, and to indicate by both precept and example how philosophical inquiry might better be pursued. Those who regard Nietzsche in the former way take his criticisms of his philosophical predecessors and contemporaries to apply to any attempt to address such matters. They seize upon and construe some of his more sweeping negative pronouncements on truth and knowledge as indicating that he believed we can only produce fictions and merely expedient (or possibly creative) perspectival expressions of our needs and desires, as groups or as individuals. They thus take him as a radical nihilist, concerned to subvert the entire philosophical enterprise and replace it with a kind of thinking more akin to the literary exploration of human possibilities in the service of life – a kind of artistic play liberated from concern with truth and knowledge. Those who view him in the latter way, on the other hand, take seriously his concern to find a way of overcoming the nihilism he believed to result from traditional ways of thinking; his retention of recast notions of truth and knowledge; and his evident concern – especially in his later writings – to contribute to the comprehension of a broad range of phenomena. This way of understanding him, like the former, remains controversial; but it permits an interpretation of his writings that is philosophically more fruitful. Nietzsche indisputably insisted upon the interpretive character of all human thought; and he called for ‘new philosophers’ who would follow him in engaging in more self-conscious and intellectually responsible attempts to assess and improve upon prevailing interpretations of human life. He also was deeply concerned