Friedrich Nietzsche is now recognized as one of the most important and controversial figures in the history of modern philosophy, whose work had a profound influence on European philosophy and many other disciplines during the 20th century; yet for maybe a hundred years after his major works were written, his ideas were widely misunderstood, having been appropriated and linked to Nazi and Fascist sympathizers....
Born into a Lutheran family in Saxony, Nietzsche attended Germany’s leading Protestant boarding school and studied theology and philology at the Universities of Bonn and Leipzig. An extraordinarily gifted scholar, he was just 24 years old when he became Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869 and two years later moved to philosophy. He had no formal education in philosophy but was introduced to the discipline at Leipzig, through Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation.
During the 1870s, his ‘early period’, Nietzsche wrote two important works: The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, a study in aesthetics inspired by his friendship with Richard Wagner, and Human, All-too-Human, which was his first book written in aphoristic style. By the end of the decade, ill health had forced him to resign his University post.
Between leaving Basel in 1879 and 1889, when he suffered a total physical and mental collapse, Nietzsche was to produce an astonishing body of work putting forward his ideas about the impending failure of western philosophy, religion and morality and the subsequent ‘death of God’ and nihilism. His masterworks – Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals and Twilight of the Idols – described, from many perspectives and across many subjects, the task of reinterpretation and revaluation needed to attain a higher humanity, and the concept of the ‘will to power’. Also during that decade, he wrote The Case of Wagner, a condemnation of his erstwhile friend whose chauvinism and anti-Semitism appalled him and, finally, the autobiographical Ecce Homo.
Incapacitated, Nietzsche was cared for by his sister in the final years before his death in 1900, and she had access to his notebooks, which were dubiously edited and published posthumously as The Will to Power (1901).
