Friedrich Nietzsche was born in the small
town of Röcken, Germany, in 1844. His father, a Lutheran pastor,
died when Nietzsche was only four years old, and Nietzsche grew
up in a family consisting of his mother, grandmother, two aunts, and
a younger sister. He attended a top boarding school and studied philology
at the universities of Bonn and Leipzig. He was such an exceptional
student that he was offered an academic position at the University
of Basel at the age of twenty-four, before he had even completed
his doctorate. Around this time, he also met the great composer
Richard Wagner, whom he idolized and with whom he became close friends.
Nietzsche volunteered to serve as a medical orderly in
the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 and returned to Basel after having contracted
dysentery, diphtheria, and perhaps syphilis. Health problems would
plague him for the rest of his life. In 1872, he published his first
book, The Birth of Tragedy, which met with controversy
due to its unconventional style. He continued teaching at Basel until
1879, but his interest in philology waned in favor of philosophical
interests. In the late 1870s, Nietzsche broke with Wagner, disgusted
by the cult of personality surrounding Wagner as well as with Wagner’s
German nationalism and anti-Semitism.
Between 1879 and 1889, Nietzsche lived mostly in Switzerland and
Italy, subsisting on a small university pension and writing furiously
despite his declining health. He suffered constant migraines, insomnia,
and indigestion, such that he could only read and write for a few
hours each day, and his eyesight became so poor that he was partially
blind. Despite these setbacks, Nietzsche wrote eleven books and
thousands of pages of notebook jottings in the next ten years. Throughout
this time, Nietzsche’s books sold very poorly, and he had only a
handful of admirers.
In January 1889, Nietzsche saw a man beating his horse
on the street in Turin and rushed to intervene. He collapsed in
the street and never regained his sanity. He spent the last eleven
years of his life as a vegetable, oblivious to his surroundings,
and died in August 1900.
During his insanity, Nietzsche was cared for by his half
sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. She was married to Bernhard
Förster, a prominent German nationalist and anti-Semite, whose political views
she shared. Elisabeth published Nietzsche’s writings selectively
and used her close relationship with her brother to promote him
as a kind of proto-Nazi saint. Though Nietzsche was unaware of it,
he became suddenly famous during the 1890s,
and by the time of his death he was a national celebrity. Due to
his sister’s influence, however, he was frequently and wrongly associated
with the politics of the Nazi party, and it was only after the Second
World War that his reputation was cleared.
Nietzsche lived during a time of rising German nationalism. After
the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1,
Germany was united for the first time as a single empire. The brutish
nationalism and anti-Semitism that Nietzsche derides in his writings
are precisely the sentiments that led Germany into two world wars.
Nietzsche also lived at a time when the scientific spirit
was triumphant in the West. Physicists of the late nineteenth century
were confident that they had essentially settled all the major questions
their discipline had to offer, the social sciences were coming into
their own, and Darwin’s theory of evolution was making great waves
in all variety of fields.
Despite the optimism felt by his countrymen at Germany’s
rise as a world power and the triumph of the sciences, Nietzsche
characterized his age as nihilistic. The scientific worldview does
not require God, and while most Europeans were still practicing
Christians, Nietzsche recognized that “God is dead”: Christianity
had given way to science as the primary means of making sense of
the world. However, science is avowedly value-neutral: it had replaced
Christianity without introducing any new values. As a result, Nietzsche saw
a great void opening up in the realm of human values, which was
in danger of being filled by the kind of narrow-minded nationalism
that indeed led to two world wars. Much of his writing is concerned
with this crisis in values that most of his contemporaries did not
even recognize.
As a trained philologist, Nietzsche knew the Greek and
Roman classics backward and forward. However, his philosophical
tastes were atypical. He rarely mentions Aristotle, and he is mostly
contemptuous of Plato. His attitude toward Socrates is more complex but
mostly negative. Instead, he prefers Heraclitus, a pre-Socratic philosopher
famous for the doctrine that one cannot step into the same river
twice. Heraclitus contends that everything is in flux, such that
we cannot make any fixed claims about any aspect of reality.
Nietzsche first became fascinated by philosophy when he
read Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World As Will and Representation. Schopenhauer
argues that reality has two different aspects. The first is the
“world as representation,” which is the world as it appears to the
senses. The second is the “world as will,” which lies behind the senses.
According to Schopenhauer, the world as will is the real world,
and we must look behind appearances to see the wills at work in
nature. Schopenhauer was also the first major Western philosopher
to take seriously the philosophies of India, and it is thanks to
Schopenhauer that we find Nietzsche conversant in the main ideas
of Hinduism and Buddhism.
While Nietzsche drew some influence from thinkers, such
as Heraclitus and Schopenhauer, and drew much negative influence
from many other thinkers, most notably Plato, Kant, and the Christian tradition,
he does not belong to any tradition. Nietzsche is as much of an
oddball as can be found among the great philosophers.
His peculiarities have not kept him from being tremendously influential
in the twentieth century, however. Those philosophers who stand
in his debt read as a “who’s who” of twentieth-century continental
philosophy: Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre, Derrida, and Foucault, just
to name a few. More than perhaps any other philosopher, Nietzsche
has had a profound impact on literature and other fields. Joyce,
Yeats, Freud, Shaw, and Thomas Mann are only some of the major thinkers
deeply indebted to Nietzsche. In his preface to The Antichrist,
Nietzsche writes, “Only the day after tomorrow belongs to me. Some
are born posthumously.” Given that Nietzsche was largely ignored
while he wrote, and given his tremendous influence on twentieth-century
thought, we can only conclude that Nietzsche was right on that count,
and that he was, in a sense, born posthumously.
