Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, born on 15 October 1844 and dying on 25 August 1900, began his professional life as a classical philologist before shifting his focus to philosophy early in his academic career. At just 24, in 1869, he became a professor of classical philology at the University of Basel. Chronic health issues plagued him throughout much of his life, forcing him to resign his post in 1879. He then supported himself as a freelance writer, living in relative isolation and financial uncertainty, moving between Switzerland, Italy, and southern France in an effort to find a climate that might ease his ailments. During the following decade, he produced the bulk of his major writings. In 1889, at age 44, he experienced a neurological breakdown that led to a complete loss of his mental faculties, accompanied by paralysis and vascular dementia. He spent his final 11 years under the care of his mother and later his sister, until his death. His writings and philosophy have generated both extensive academic study and widespread public fascination.

Nietzsche’s output includes poetry, cultural criticism, and philosophical essays, often marked by a fondness for aphorisms and irony. Central to his thought are a rejection of objective truth in favor of perspectivism; a genealogical critique of Christian morality and the related idea of master–slave morality; an affirmation of life in the face of religion’s decline (“God is dead”) and the passive nihilism that followed; the concept of Apollonian and Dionysian duality; and a view of the human subject as a field of competing drives, collectively called the will-to-power. His later work introduced influential ideas such as the Übermensch, the transvaluation of values, and his distinctive version of eternal return. His writings cover a broad range of topics—aesthetics, philology, history, music, religion, tragedy, culture, and science—and drew inspiration from sources as varied as Greek tragedy, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Richard Wagner.

After Nietzsche’s death, his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche took control of his manuscripts and edited them to align with her German ultranationalist beliefs, often distorting or contradicting Nietzsche’s own stated views, which were explicitly opposed to antisemitism and nationalism. Through her editions, his work became linked with fascism and Nazism. In the 20th century, scholars such as Walter Kaufmann, R. J. Hollingdale, and Georges Bataille pushed back against this interpretation, and corrected editions of his writings were eventually published. His works saw a resurgence of popularity in the 1960s, and his ideas have since influenced a wide range of 20th- and 21st-century thinkers—especially within continental philosophy, including existentialism, postmodernism, and post-structuralism—as well as art, literature, music, poetry, politics, and popular culture.

**Biography**

**Youth (1844–1868)**

Nietzsche was born on 15 October 1844 in the town of Röcken (now part of Lützen), near Leipzig, in the Prussian Province of Saxony. He was named after King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, who turned 49 on the day of his birth (Nietzsche later dropped his middle name, Wilhelm). His great-grandfather, an inspector and philosopher, and his grandfather, a theologian, preceded him. His parents were Carl Ludwig Nietzsche (1813–1849), a Lutheran pastor and former teacher, and Franziska Oehler (1826–1897), who married in 1843. They had two other children: a daughter, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, born in 1846, and a second son, Ludwig Joseph, born in 1848. When Nietzsche was only four, his father died of a brain disease after a year of intense suffering; six months later, his younger brother Ludwig Joseph died at age two. The family then moved to Naumburg, living with Nietzsche’s maternal grandmother and his father’s two unmarried sisters. After his grandmother’s death in 1856, they moved into their own house, now the Nietzsche-Haus museum and study center.

Nietzsche attended a boys’ school and then a private school, where he befriended Gustav Krug and Wilhelm Pinder, both from highly respected families. School records from one institution noted that he excelled in Christian theology. In 1854 he began attending the Gymnasium in Naumburg. Because his father had been a state-employed pastor, the now-fatherless Nietzsche received a scholarship to study at Schulpforta—though the idea that he was admitted purely on academic merit has been disproven, as his grades were not near the top of his class. He studied there from 1858 to 1864, forming friendships with Paul Deussen and Carl von Gersdorff (1844–1904), who later became a jurist. During this time he also wrote poems and musical compositions. In his summers in Naumburg, he led a music and literature club called “Germania.” At Schulpforta, he gained a strong grounding in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and French, enabling him to read primary sources, and experienced life away from his family’s conservative small-town environment. His end-of-semester exams in March 1864 earned him a 1 in Religion and German; a 2a in Greek and Latin; a 2b in French, History, and Physics; and a lackluster 3 in Hebrew and Mathematics.

Nietzsche was an amateur composer, producing several works for voice, piano, and violin beginning in 1858 at Schulpforta. Richard Wagner dismissed Nietzsche’s music, reportedly mocking a piano composition Nietzsche sent as a birthday gift in 1871 to Wagner’s wife.