Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on 15 October 1844 in Röcken, a small town near Leipzig in the Prussian Province of Saxony. His father, Carl Ludwig Nietzsche, was a Lutheran pastor who died of a brain disease in 1849, when Friedrich was only four years old. The family relocated to Naumburg, where Nietzsche grew up among his mother, sister Elisabeth, and two of his father's unmarried sisters. The loss of his father and this predominantly female, deeply religious household shaped the emotional landscape of his early years.

At the boarding school Schulpforta, which he attended from 1858 to 1864, Nietzsche received rigorous training in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and French, giving him direct access to primary sources that would anchor his later scholarship. He befriended Paul Deussen and Carl von Gersdorff there, and found time to compose music and lead a small literature and music club during summers in Naumburg. After graduation he enrolled at the University of Bonn to study theology and classical philology, but abandoned theology after a single semester. He followed his philology professor Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl to the University of Leipzig, where his published research so impressed Ritschl that, in 1869, Nietzsche was appointed Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basel at just twenty-four years old, without having completed his doctorate.

During his Basel years Nietzsche became intimately connected with the composer Richard Wagner and his wife Cosima, visiting them frequently at their home in Tribschen near Lucerne. In 1872 he published his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, which argued that ancient Greek drama achieved greatness through a tension between two opposing forces: the Apollonian, representing order, clarity, and reason, and the Dionysian, representing passion, intoxication, and the dissolution of individual boundaries. The book was poorly received by professional philologists, including Nietzsche's own mentor Ritschl, who felt it abandoned rigorous classical scholarship in favour of speculation.

Nietzsche's admiration for Wagner gradually soured. He was repelled by the commercial atmosphere surrounding the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876, by Wagner's championing of German nationalism, and by what he saw as Wagner's pandering to popular taste. By the time he published Human, All Too Human in 1878, a collection of aphorisms that explicitly turned away from the pessimistic Romanticism of both Wagner and the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, the friendship had effectively ended. Nietzsche's health had also been deteriorating for years, plagued by severe migraines, violent indigestion, and near-blindness, and in 1879 these problems forced him to resign his professorship and accept a pension from the university.

After leaving Basel, Nietzsche spent roughly a decade moving between Switzerland, northern Italy, and southern France, searching for climates that might ease his chronic illnesses. Living frugally on his pension and occasional help from friends, he wrote prolifically. Between 1878 and 1888 he produced one major work nearly every year, including The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, and On the Genealogy of Morality. His former pupil Peter Gast served as a personal secretary, transcribing and proofreading manuscripts because Nietzsche's eyesight made sustained writing difficult.

The central ideas of this period were sweeping in ambition. In The Gay Science Nietzsche introduced the declaration that God is dead, meaning that the scientific and secular developments of modern Europe had fatally undermined the religious framework that had given Western life its sense of meaning and moral direction. He argued that this collapse risked plunging Europe into nihilism, and that humanity needed new values to replace the old ones. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra he introduced the concept of the Übermensch, a figure who creates new values rather than inheriting them, and the doctrine of eternal return, the thought that one should be willing to live one's life over and over in exactly the same way. In On the Genealogy of Morality he traced Christian ethics back to what he called slave morality, the argument that values like meekness and pity originated as a psychological strategy by which the weak could reframe their weakness as virtue.

In the autumn of 1888, living in Turin, Nietzsche's letters and writings began to show signs of grandiosity and instability. On 3 January 1889 he suffered a complete mental breakdown in the streets of Turin, after which he sent a series of incoherent notes to friends, signing many of them as Dionysus. His friend Franz Overbeck travelled to Turin to bring him to a psychiatric clinic in Basel, after which Nietzsche's mother had him transferred to a clinic in Jena. He never recovered his mental faculties. He spent his remaining years first in his mother's care in Naumburg and then under his sister Elisabeth's supervision in Weimar, paralysed and largely uncommunicative. He died on 25 August 1900.

After his death, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who had previously married an antisemite and co-founded a German nationalist colony in Paraguay, took control of Nietzsche's unpublished manuscripts and his public reputation. She compiled and edited a posthumous volume called The Will to Power from his notebooks, and scholars have long noted that this book does not reliably reflect his intentions. Earlier accounts held that Elisabeth deliberately falsified his work to align it with Nazi ideology; more recent scholarship argues her primary motive was to protect her brother's reputation and to present herself as his closest interpreter. Regardless of her precise motives, when Hitler came to power in 1933 the Nietzsche Archive received government support, and Elisabeth allowed the regime to borrow her brother's prestige. Subsequent generations of scholars, aided particularly by translations and analyses by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale after the Second World War, worked to separate Nietzsche's actual writings from the distortions layered over them, restoring his standing as one of the most consequential philosophers of the nineteenth century.