Friedrich Nietzsche
The philosopher who declared God dead and asked what we would do next
No philosopher is quoted more often, or more wrongly, than Friedrich Nietzsche. “God is dead.” “What does not kill me makes me stronger.” “There are no facts, only interpretations.” The phrases have escaped their books and live on T-shirts, in song lyrics and in the mouths of film villains. Behind them stands a shy, half-blind, chronically ill classics professor who wrote most of his books alone in cheap boarding houses, sold almost no copies in his lifetime, and spent his last eleven years in a mental darkness from which he never emerged. He wanted, he said, to be “dynamite.” He got his wish, though not in the way he imagined.
Who was Nietzsche?
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on 15 October 1844 in Röcken, a village in Prussian Saxony, the son of a Lutheran pastor. His father died of a brain disease when Friedrich was four; his little brother died a few months later. He grew up in Naumburg in a household of women – mother, sister, grandmother, two aunts – and was so pious and well-behaved as a boy that his schoolmates called him “the little pastor.”
He won a place at Schulpforta, one of Germany’s most demanding boarding schools, and went on to study theology and classical philology at Bonn. Within a year he had dropped theology, to his mother’s distress, and followed his teacher Friedrich Ritschl to Leipzig. There, in 1865, he picked up Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation in a second-hand bookshop and read it, he said, as if it had been written for him. Three years later he met Richard Wagner, who became for a decade the most important figure in his life: father-substitute, artistic hero and, eventually, the friend whose loss he never quite got over.
Nietzsche was so brilliant a student that Basel offered him a professorship of classical philology in 1869, when he was twenty-four and had not yet completed a doctorate (Leipzig hastily awarded him one). He served briefly as a medical orderly in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, caught dysentery and diphtheria, and was never fully well again. For the rest of his life he suffered crippling migraines, vomiting attacks that could last for days, and eyesight so poor that he could read and write only for short periods.
His first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), scandalised his fellow philologists, who thought it wild and unscholarly. His friendship with Wagner cooled after the first Bayreuth festival in 1876, where Nietzsche was repelled by the nationalism and self-congratulation surrounding the composer. In 1879, his health in ruins, he resigned his chair with a small pension and began the ten “wandering years” in which almost all his important work was written: summers in the Swiss alpine village of Sils-Maria, winters in Genoa, Nice or Turin, always in rented rooms, always alone.
Friedrich Nietzsche, around 1875. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
One episode in those years deserves mention. In 1882 Nietzsche met Lou Salomé, a brilliant twenty-one-year-old Russian, and proposed to her (twice, once through his friend Paul Rée, who was also in love with her). She refused, the three-way friendship collapsed amid the meddling of Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth, and Nietzsche fell into a despair out of which, within a few months, he wrote the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
The books now came almost one a year, each more intense than the last, and almost nobody read them. In 1888, in Turin, he wrote five in twelve months. Then, in early January 1889, he collapsed in the street. The famous story that he was embracing a horse that was being beaten is probably a later embellishment; what is certain is that he began sending deranged letters signed “Dionysus” and “The Crucified” to friends and heads of state. He was taken to a clinic in Basel, then Jena, then home to his mother. He never recovered his mind. The cause is still disputed – tertiary syphilis was the standard diagnosis for a century, but a slow-growing brain tumour and a hereditary vascular disease have both been proposed.
After his mother’s death in 1897, Elisabeth moved him to Weimar, where she established a Nietzsche Archive and exhibited her silent, white-robed brother to visitors like a saint’s relic. He died on 25 August 1900. Elisabeth, an ardent German nationalist married to a notorious anti-Semite, spent the next thirty-five years editing, suppressing and in some cases forging his papers, and ended by welcoming Hitler to the Archive in 1934. The result was the “Nazi Nietzsche” that it took scholars a generation to dismantle – an irony, since Nietzsche himself loathed both nationalism and anti-Semitism and broke with his publisher partly over the latter.
The main works
Nietzsche’s writing falls into three fairly clear periods.
The early period (1872–1876) is under the spell of Schopenhauer and Wagner. The Birth of Tragedy argues that Greek tragedy was born from the union of two artistic impulses, the Apollonian (order, form, individuality) and the Dionysian (intoxication, dissolution, the collective), and that Socratic rationalism killed it. The four Untimely Meditations are cultural criticism; the second, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, is still widely read.
The middle period (1878–1882) is cooler, more sceptical and scientific in temper. In Human, All Too Human, Daybreak and The Gay Science, Nietzsche adopts the aphorism as his characteristic form – short, numbered paragraphs, sometimes a single line, sometimes two pages – and turns a psychologist’s eye on morality, religion, art and his own former enthusiasms. The Gay Science contains the first announcement of the death of God and the first statement of eternal recurrence.
The late period (1883–1888) opens with Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a philosophical prose poem in which a prophet descends from his mountain to teach the Übermensch and eternal recurrence to a humanity that is not ready for him. Nietzsche considered it his masterpiece; many readers find it his most difficult book. Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) restate the ideas in argumentative prose and are the best places to begin. The final year, 1888, produced The Case of Wagner, Twilight of the Idols (a brilliant short summary of his whole position), The Antichrist, Ecce Homo (an autobiography with chapter titles like “Why I Am So Wise”) and Nietzsche contra Wagner.
A word of caution about The Will to Power. This is not a book Nietzsche wrote. It is a selection from his notebooks assembled by Elisabeth and her collaborators after his collapse, arranged according to a plan he had abandoned. It contains genuine Nietzsche, but his published books are the authoritative statement of his thought, and he had the habit of writing things in his notebooks in order to reject them.
The big ideas
The death of God
In the most famous passage Nietzsche ever wrote (The Gay Science §125), a madman runs into a marketplace crying “I seek God!” and is laughed at by the atheists standing around. He turns on them: “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” The point is not that Nietzsche has disproved God’s existence; he takes it for granted that educated Europeans no longer believe. The point is that they have not understood what they have done. Christian belief was not one opinion among others; it was the foundation on which European morality, politics, science and the sense of life’s meaning had been built. Remove it, and sooner or later the whole structure must shift. The madman’s listeners do not yet feel the tremor. “This tremendous event is still on its way.”
What is existentialism? A beginner’s guide to the movement from Kierkegaard to Heidegger, Sartre, Beauvoir and Camus – its core ideas, its religious and atheist wings, and the argument that Sartre was never really an existentialist at all.
Nihilism
The shift Nietzsche foresaw he called nihilism: the condition in which “the highest values devalue themselves,” in which nothing seems worth striving for because the old guarantees of worth have collapsed. He thought the nineteenth century was already half-nihilistic without knowing it, keeping Christian morality while dropping the God who had underwritten it – rather like, he said, continuing to see the light of a star that has already gone out. Nietzsche is often called a nihilist. He was the opposite: a physician who diagnosed nihilism and spent his life looking for a cure.
The genealogy of morality
Where does our morality come from? Not from God, not from reason, Nietzsche argued, but from history – and a history of struggle. In On the Genealogy of Morality he distinguishes two moral vocabularies. Master morality is the morality of the strong and self-confident: “good” means noble, powerful, happy, like us; “bad” means common, weak, contemptible. Slave morality was invented by those on the receiving end of this. Unable to retaliate, they took revenge in imagination, redefining their masters' qualities as “evil” and their own helplessness as “goodness”: meekness, humility, pity, patience. Nietzsche calls the engine of this inversion ressentiment, a festering, creative resentment, and sees in Christianity its most spectacular triumph.
The Genealogy goes on to trace the origin of guilt and the bad conscience (instincts turned inward when they can no longer be discharged outward) and the ascetic ideal (the strange human preference for self-denial), which Nietzsche sees as both a sickness and the thing that made human beings interesting. The method – asking not “Is this value true?” but “Who benefits from it, and what need does it serve?” – is Nietzsche’s single most influential contribution, taken up by Freud, Foucault and much of twentieth-century social thought.
Will to power
Schopenhauer had said that the inner nature of everything is a blind will to live. Nietzsche thought this did not go far enough. Living things do not merely want to survive; they want to grow, expand, overcome resistance, impose form on their surroundings. He called this the will to power (Wille zur Macht). It is important to understand what the phrase does not mean. It is not primarily about domination of other people – the artist shaping a block of marble, the thinker mastering a problem, the ascetic mastering his own desires are all exercising will to power. In his notebooks Nietzsche sometimes toyed with making it a cosmic principle governing all matter; in his published books it is mostly a psychological hypothesis about what drives human behaviour, including behaviour that looks selfless.
The Übermensch
In the prologue to Zarathustra, the prophet announces: “I teach you the Übermensch. Man is something that shall be overcome.” The word has been translated as “superman” and “overman”; neither is quite right, and the Nazi appropriation of it has made it almost impossible to hear clearly. Nietzsche’s Übermensch is not a biological type or a master race. It is a possibility for human beings after the death of God: the person who, instead of collapsing into nihilism or clinging to borrowed values, creates values, who can say yes to life without the need for a heaven to justify it. “Man is a rope,” Zarathustra says, “tied between beast and Übermensch – a rope over an abyss.” The opposite of the Übermensch is the last man, the comfortable, risk-averse, entertainment-seeking creature who asks “What is love? What is creation? What is a star?” and blinks.
Eternal recurrence
In The Gay Science §341, under the heading “The greatest weight,” Nietzsche poses a thought experiment. Suppose a demon told you that you would have to live your life again, and again, innumerable times, with every pain and every joy, every petty detail, in exactly the same sequence. Would you throw yourself down and curse the demon? Or would you say: “You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine”? Scholars still debate whether Nietzsche believed recurrence was literally true. What matters philosophically is its use as a test. A life you could will to repeat eternally is a life you have truly affirmed. Nietzsche gives this attitude a name: amor fati, love of fate – “that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity.”
Perspectivism
Nietzsche denied that there is a “view from nowhere,” a God’s-eye standpoint from which the world can be seen as it really is. “There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective knowing,” he writes in the Genealogy, and the more perspectives we can bring to bear, the more complete our understanding. This is not the claim that everything is equally true. It is the claim that every knower stands somewhere, and that honesty requires admitting it. The slogan “there are no facts, only interpretations” comes from his notebooks and is cruder than anything in his books.
Nietzsche in 1882, photographed by Gustav Schultze in Naumburg. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Why Nietzsche matters
Nietzsche’s posthumous career has been one of the strangest in intellectual history. Ignored while sane, he became within a decade of his collapse the most fashionable thinker in Europe. Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Rilke, Yeats, Shaw, Gide and Kazantzakis all wrote under his influence; Richard Strauss set Zarathustra to music. Freud remarked that Nietzsche had “a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any other man who ever lived or was ever likely to live” – and claimed to have stopped reading him for fear of finding his own discoveries anticipated.
Then came the catastrophe of the Nazi appropriation, engineered by Elisabeth and completed by party ideologues who quoted the “blond beast” and the will to power while ignoring everything he had said against Germans, nationalists, anti-Semites and the state. For a generation after 1945 Nietzsche was, in the English-speaking world, nearly unreadable. His rehabilitation was largely the work of Walter Kaufmann, whose 1950 study and subsequent translations presented a humane, existentialist Nietzsche, and of Heidegger, Jaspers, Camus and Sartre, who made him one of the founding figures of existentialism.
A second wave came from France in the 1960s. Foucault took over genealogy as a method for studying how prisons, clinics and sexuality came to be what they are. Deleuze and Derrida found in Nietzsche’s perspectivism and his play with style the ancestor of poststructuralism. Meanwhile, more recently, analytic philosophers such as Bernard Williams and Brian Leiter have read him as a hard-headed naturalist and moral psychologist, whose claims about the hidden origins of our values can be tested against empirical research. Few thinkers have been claimed by so many incompatible camps – which is itself a kind of tribute.
What survives all these readings is a set of questions that Nietzsche posed more sharply than anyone before him. Can morality survive the loss of religion? Is compassion always what it seems? What would it mean to live without consolation, and to live well?
Relevance to life
Nietzsche is a dangerous philosopher to apply too quickly. He wrote for “the very few,” in deliberately provocative language, and he said many things that are repellent – about women, about democracy, about the weak. But read with care, he is one of the most practically useful philosophers in the canon.
Ask where your values come from. Most of what we call “conscience” we did not choose; we inherited it from parents, religion, nation and class. Nietzsche’s genealogical question – whose interests does this value serve, and what need in me does it satisfy? – is uncomfortable, and that is its point. It is the beginning of having values rather than merely being had by them.
Watch for ressentiment. Nietzsche’s most penetrating psychological insight is that moral indignation is often disguised envy, and that “goodness” can be a way of getting even. Before condemning something, it is worth asking: do I hate this because it is wrong, or because I cannot have it?
Take the recurrence test. Imagine living your present life over and over forever. Which parts could you affirm? Which would you dread repeating? The exercise does not tell you what to change, but it tells you very quickly what matters.
Suffering needs a why, not a cure. “If we have our own why of life,” Nietzsche writes in Twilight of the Idols, “we shall get along with almost any how.” He thought modern culture had made the elimination of discomfort its highest goal, and that this was a recipe for the “last man.” Difficulty, in his view, is not an obstacle to a good life but part of its material – though he would have scorned the way “what does not kill me makes me stronger” has become a bumper sticker.
Become who you are. Nietzsche borrowed this phrase from the Greek poet Pindar and made it his own. It does not mean “find your true self,” as if it were lying there waiting. It means give style to your character: take your drives, your history, your limitations, and shape them into something you can call your own, the way an artist works with resistant material.
Beware comfort. The last man, “who makes everything small,” with his little pleasure for the day and his little pleasure for the night, is a portrait of a life organised around safety and distraction. Nietzsche’s challenge is not to live dangerously for its own sake but to ask whether a life without any risk, striving or overcoming is really a life one would want to repeat.
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Where to start reading
- Twilight of the Idols – Nietzsche’s own compact summary of his mature thought, written in 1888. Short, savage, funny. The best single entry point.
- On the Genealogy of Morality – his most sustained argument, in three essays. Read the first for master and slave morality.
- Beyond Good and Evil – the full range of his later views in aphoristic form. Part One (“On the Prejudices of Philosophers”) and the final part (“What is Noble?") are the most rewarding.
- The Gay Science – the most cheerful and personal of his books, containing the death of God (§§108, 125, 343) and eternal recurrence (§341).
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra – read it last, not first. The Prologue is essential; the rest rewards patience.
Walter Kaufmann’s translations (in The Portable Nietzsche and Basic Writings of Nietzsche) and R. J. Hollingdale’s Penguin versions remain the standard English texts. The Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series offers newer scholarly translations with helpful introductions.
Read more
- Friedrich Nietzsche – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. A thorough, scholarly overview of his life and thought.
- Nietzsche’s Moral and Political Philosophy – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. A detailed guide to the critique of morality.
- Friedrich Nietzsche – Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Somewhat more approachable than the Stanford entry, with a good section on the main concepts.
- Nietzsche’s Ethics – Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. On the critical and the positive sides of his ethical thought.
- Nietzsche Source – The digital critical edition of Nietzsche’s complete works and letters in German, plus a facsimile archive of his manuscripts. For readers who want to see the real thing.
- Nietzsche on Project Gutenberg – Free full texts in older English translations.
