Friedrich Nietzsche

Key ideas

1. The Apollonian and the Dionysian. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872) Nietzsche read Greek tragedy as the joining of two drives: the Apollonian, the art of the shaper that gives form and beautiful appearance, and the Dionysian, the art of music and of strenuous, ecstatic becoming.
2. The death of God. In The Gay Science Nietzsche’s madman announces that God is dead. This is a diagnosis, not a celebration: belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable, and with it everything built on that belief, including European morality, is threatened.
3. Genealogy and master and slave morality. On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) traces the history of moral values. Nietzsche contrasts a noble good/bad way of valuing with a good/evil morality that he says arose in a slave revolt driven by ressentiment, and he asks what these values do for the life of those who hold them.
4. Perspectivism. All knowing is from a perspective. There is only a seeing and a knowing from a perspective, Nietzsche wrote, and the more different eyes we train on one thing, the more complete our idea of it and our “objectivity” will be.
5. Will to power. Nietzsche made the drive to power, understood in part as overcoming resistance, central to his account of life, of psychology and of morality. Interpreters disagree on whether it is a claim about the human mind or about all of reality.
6. Eternal recurrence and amor fati. In The Gay Science a demon asks whether you would welcome living your life again, every detail, innumerable times. The thought tests how far one can say yes to life, and amor fati, love of one’s fate, is the attitude he hopes for.
7. The Übermensch. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra the Übermensch, often translated overman or superman, is the goal beyond the human, set against the contented last man. Scholars debate whether it is a transitional movement or a new state of being.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher who began as a classical philologist and became one of the sharpest critics of the moral and intellectual inheritance of Europe. He announced that the belief in God on which that inheritance rested had collapsed, and he asked how people might live, and say yes to life, without it. His work on morality, truth and power shaped existentialism, postmodernism and post-structuralism.

Who was Friedrich Nietzsche?

Nietzsche was born in Röcken, in Prussian Saxony, the son of a Lutheran minister who died when he was four. In 1869, aged 24, he became professor of classical philology at Basel, the youngest ever appointed to such a chair. He was close to Richard Wagner for some years, but the friendship ended around 1878. Poor health forced him to resign in 1879, and he lived as an independent writer in Switzerland, Italy and France, producing a book almost every year.

In January 1889 he collapsed in the street in Turin and never recovered his mind. He was cared for by his mother and then his sister until he died at Weimar on 25 August 1900.

What did he mean by “God is dead”?

In The Gay Science (1882) a madman runs into the market-place with a lantern and says: “God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!” (Thomas Common’s translation). Belief in the Christian God had become unbelievable, in part because the modern commitment to honest inquiry undermines it, and the morality built on that belief would not stand alone.

The danger is nihilism, the sense that the highest values have lost their authority. His response was to ask for new values created by free spirits, not to return to the old ones.

How does Nietzsche criticise morality?

On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) asks where moral values came from. Nietzsche contrasts two patterns of evaluation: a good/bad pattern that began among the high-born, and a good/evil pattern that he says arose in a “slave revolt in morality”, driven by ressentiment, a corrosive resentment of the powerful. In Beyond Good and Evil (§260) he distinguishes “master-morality” and “slave-morality” and notes that in higher and mixed civilisations they often sit side by side, even in one soul. The third essay examines the ascetic ideal, which reads suffering as punishment for guilt.

This is a genealogy: a history of how a value arose, used to ask what it does for those who hold it. Nietzsche is not saying that anything goes. He asks whether a morality enhances or diminishes life, and the question is still contested. The UGC NET syllabus names his critique of the Enlightenment, will to power and genealogy of morals; see the UGC NET guide.

Can there be knowledge without a view from nowhere?

For Nietzsche knowing is always from a point of view. In Beyond Good and Evil he says that “there could have been no life at all except upon the basis of perspective estimates and semblances” (Helen Zimmern’s translation). In the Genealogy (III, §12) he adds that “the more eyes, different eyes, we train on the same thing, the more complete will be our ‘idea’ of that thing, our ‘objectivity’” (Horace Samuel’s translation). This is perspectivism, a position in epistemology: objectivity is the weighing of many perspectives, not escape from perspective. Whether it amounts to relativism is disputed.

What are the will to power, eternal recurrence and the Übermensch?

In Beyond Good and Evil §9 Nietzsche calls philosophy itself “the most spiritual Will to Power”. Interpreters divide over whether the will to power is a theory of human psychology or a theory of all reality. The book The Will to Power was assembled after his death from his notebooks by his sister and Peter Gast; Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, who prepared the first complete critical edition, called it a “historic forgery”.

The Gay Science §341 poses eternal recurrence: a demon tells you that you must live this life once more and “innumerable times”. Would you curse the demon, or answer that you never heard anything more divine? The thought can be read as a test of life-affirmation or as a cosmological claim, and critics disagree about which Nietzsche meant. His own motto is “Amor fati: let that henceforth be my love!” (The Gay Science, §276).

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra the prophet teaches: “Man is something that is to be surpassed.” Thomas Common renders Übermensch as “Superman”. The Übermensch stands against the “last man”, who says he has discovered happiness and blinks.

After his death

Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth took over his manuscripts and edited them to suit her nationalism, though his own stated views were opposed to antisemitism and nationalism. That is how his name came to be linked with Nazism, a link scholars from Walter Kaufmann onwards have rejected. His work enjoyed renewed popularity in the 1960s and has shaped existentialism, postmodernism and post-structuralism, and so continental philosophy more widely.

How should you start reading Nietzsche?

Zarathustra is poetic and hard to read cold, so many readers begin elsewhere: with The Gay Science, sections 125 and 341, or the first part of the Beyond Good and Evil, then the Genealogy. Then try Thus Spoke Zarathustra. His books are collections of short numbered sections, so read them a section at a time. The Gutenberg translations are over a century old; see the guide to reading philosophy.