Nietzsche, Friedrich

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NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH

NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH (1844–1900), German philosopher and social, cultural, and religious critic. Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most remarkable, controversial, original, and important figures in modern philosophical and intellectual history. In his short productive life (which ended with his collapse in 1889, although he lived on until 1900), he published an astonishing number and variety of works, and wrote a great deal more. His writings attracted relatively little attention prior to his collapse; but the subsequent impact of his thought was and continues to be both great and diverse.

Life and Work

Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, in Röcken, Saxony (in Prussia). The son of a Lutheran pastor (who died when he was six), he entered a boarding school in Pforta in 1858, excelling in his studies of religion and classical and German literature. In 1864 he entered the University of Bonn, intending to study theology and classical philosophy; but after only one year he transferred to the University of Leipzig, where he concentrated on philosophy. While there he discovered Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation, which profoundly influenced him. It was as a classical philologist, however, that he received a call from the University of Basel at the astonishingly early age of twenty-four.

Nietzsche taught at Basel from 1869 until 1879, when he retired owing to the deterioration of his health (which resulted from illnesses he contracted in 1870 as a volunteer medical orderly in the Franco-Prussian War). During this period he formed a close association with Richard Wagner, his early fascination with whom is reflected in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872). His later break with Wagner, culminating in his polemic The Case of Wagner (1888), was both profound and painful to him. At first regarding Wagner as showing the way to a cultural and spiritual renewal, Nietzsche came to see him as epitomizing and fostering decadent and dangerous tendencies.

These concerns with the direction and health of contemporary cultural and intellectual life were the real focus of most of Nietzsche's early writings. As he developed his own quite distinctive philosophical idiom and method, he drew strongly upon the idea and practice of interpretation associated with his discipline of classical philology. He departed increasingly from the conventional limits and norms of that discipline, however, and the unorthodox character of his published work during his tenure at Basel—beginning with The Birth of Tragedy and becoming more pronounced in his Untimely Meditations (1873–1876) and Human, All-Too-Human (1878)—effectively divorced him from it. This rendered his retirement in 1879 merely the ratification of an accomplished fact.

The following decade, most of which Nietzsche spent alternating between residences in Switzerland and northern Italy, was phenomenally productive. The Dawn (1881) and the first four books of The Gay Science (1882) were followed by the four-part Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885). The next four years saw the appearance of Beyond Good and Evil (1886), the fifth book of The Gay Science and The Genealogy of Morals (1887), The Case of Wagner (1888), and Twilight of the Idols (1889) as well as the completion of several other works that were published some years later: The Antichrist (1895) and Ecce Homo (1908). During this period he also amassed a great deal of material in notebooks. (A substantial selection of this material, the significance of which is a matter of considerable controversy, was arranged and published posthumously under the title The Will to Power.)

Having written the last four of these works in the single year of 1888, Nietzsche suffered a complete mental and physical breakdown in early January of 1889, in Turin. His illness probably was the consequence of his having contracted syphilis many years earlier. He remained a partially paralyzed invalid, never regaining his health and sanity. During the remaining years of his life he was cared for by his sister, Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche. She obtained control of his writings, sought to enhance and exploit his reputation, and was partly responsible for the misrepresentation of his thought that culminated in the travesty of his work being presented as the philosophical inspiration of National Socialism. This seriously damaged his reputation and long obstructed a just assessment of his work.

Nietzsche's style and manner of writing have affected his reception as well. Unlike most philosophers, he generally did not set out his views systematically, in clearly discernible lines of argument cast in dry and measured prose. His works, for the most part, consist of series of short paragraphs and sets of aphorisms, often only loosely (if at all) connected. Many deal with philosophical topics, but in very unconventional ways. His language, moreover, is by turns coolly analytical, heatedly polemical, and highly metaphorical. It is not surprising, therefore, that many philosophers have found it difficult to know what to make of him or whether to take him seriously, and that they have interpreted his work in many different ways.

Thought

The early Nietzsche was greatly concerned with basic problems he discerned in contemporary Western culture and society, for which he considered it imperative to seek new solutions. He was further convinced that Schopenhauer's bleak picture of the world and the human condition was fundamentally sound, and yet he was determined to discover some way of avoiding Schopenhauer's pessimistic conclusions. In The Birth of Tragedy he looked to the ancient Greeks for clues and to Wagner for inspiration, believing that their art held the key to human flourishing in a Schopenhauerian world. In his subsequent series of four essays collectively titled Untimely Meditations, he expanded upon the need to reorient human thought and endeavor in a manner more conducive to the creativity and vitality of human life.

These essays were followed by a number of aphoristic books in which Nietzsche refined and extended his assessment of various human tendencies and social and cultural phenomena. During this period his thinking became much more sophisticated, and he developed the philosophical style and outlook that found mature expression in his writings of the 1880s. He prophesied the advent of a period of nihilism as traditional modes of interpretation and valuation collapsed in conjunction with the "death of God," the demise of metaphysics, and the discovery of science's inability to yield anything like absolute knowledge. However, the prospect of this forthcoming crisis deeply disturbed him. He took the basic challenge of philosophy to be that of overcoming not only traditional metaphysics and scientific rationalism but also the nihilism resulting from their abandonment. In the early 1880s, when he conceived and wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he arrived at a conception of human life and possibility—and with it, of value and meaning—that he believed could serve to fill the void left by the bankruptcy of traditional philosophy and religion and the poverty of science.

What Nietzsche called the "death of God" was both a cultural event—the waning of the "Christian-moral" interpretation of life and the world—and a philosophical development: the dismissal of the idea of God as a concept deserving serious philosophical attention. As a cultural event it was a phenomenon to be reckoned with, and a source of profound concern. As a philosophical development, on the other hand, it was his point of departure, demanding a radical reconsideration of the nature of life and the world, human existence, knowledge, value, and morality. Thus the "de-deification of nature," the "translation of man back into nature," the development of a "naturalistic" value-theory and its application to a "revaluation of values," and the tracing of the "genealogy of morals" and their critique were among the main tasks he set for himself.

Nietzsche emphatically rejected not only the "God-hypothesis" but also any metaphysical postulation of a "true world of 'being'" transcending the world of life and experience, and likewise deemed the "soul" and "things-in-themselves" to be ontological fictions. He conceived of all existence in terms of an interplay of forces without any inherent structure or final end; these forces ceaselessly refigure themselves as the fundamental disposition he called "will to power" gives rise to successive arrays of power relationships among them. His idea of the "eternal recurrence" underscores this conception of the world, in which things ever happen in this same manner. He thus construed human nature and existence naturalistically: "The soul is only a word for something about the body," he wrote; and the body is fundamentally an arrangement of natural forces and processes manifesting the "will to power." At the same time, however, he stressed the importance of social institutions and interactions in human development. He also insisted upon the possibility of the emergence of exceptional human beings ("higher men") capable of an independence and creativity elevating them above the general human level ("the herd"), and he proclaimed the "overman" (Übermensch ) to be "the meaning of the earth," representing the overcoming of the "all-too-human" and the attainment of the fullest possible "enhancement of life."

Thus, far from seeking to diminish one's humanity by stressing animality, Nietzsche sought to direct one's attention and efforts to the emergence of a "higher humanity" capable of endowing existence with a redemptive human justification. He espoused a "Dionysian value-standard" based upon an affirmation of the "will to power" as the creative transformation of existence; and he accordingly made the "enhancement of life" and creativity the central themes of his "revaluation of values" and value-theory.

Insisting that moralities ought to be understood and assessed "in the perspective of life," Nietzsche argued that most of them were obstructive rather than conducive to the enhancement of life, reflecting all-too-human needs, weaknesses, and fears. Distinguishing between "master" and "slave" moralities, he found the latter to have eclipsed the former, issuing in a dominant "herd-animal morality" well-suited to the mediocre who are the human rule but stultifying and detrimental to potential exceptions. Therefore he advocated a "higher morality" for the latter, one that would be "beyond good and evil" and better attuned to their attainment of an enhanced, creative form of life. This reflects the linkage of his notions of such a "higher humanity" and the associated "higher morality" to his conception of art. Art, involving the creative transformation, in restricted contexts, of the world as humans find it, anticipates the kind of life that might be lived more fully in this manner and constitutes a step toward its emergence.

Influence

In the decades following Nietzsche's collapse, a veritable Nietzsche cult developed in central Europe, as self-styled followers produced a variety of influential but simplistic and distorted interpretations of his thought. Thus he was depicted by turns as a latter-day Romantic, an iconoclastic nihilist, a social Darwinist, and a racist and protofascist. He also attracted a substantial following in artistic and literary circles beyond as well as within central Europe. It was only slowly, however, that he began to be taken seriously by philosophers, and even then he was, and continues to be, interpreted in ways lending themselves to diverse philosophical purposes that often stand in a rather problematical relation to his own.

The common association of Nietzsche with existential philosophy, for example, is owing to his appropriation (in different ways) first by such German existential philosophers as Heidegger and Jaspers and then by French existentialists, notably Sartre and Camus. For others, he was a leading representative of Lebensphilosophie; as such he influenced the philosophical-anthropological movement that developed out of this school in central Europe. He was also one of the sources upon which members of the Frankfurt School drew in their attempts to develop a critical theory of society and culture. More recently still, he has been warmly embraced by post-structuralist French philosophers, who derive much of their inspiration from their reading of him. Certain recent Anglo-American analytical philosophers have discovered in him a kindred spirit as well.

Nietzsche and Religion

Unlike most philosophers of importance before him, Nietzsche was openly and profoundly hostile to most forms of religious thought (with the notable exception of that of the early Greeks). He declared "war" upon the major world religions and their theologies, contending not only that they perpetuate superstitions and errors for which there is no longer any excuse but also that they are deeply objectionable owing to their detrimental impact upon human life. It was above all their purported "crimes against life" for which he attacked them, arguing that they have fed upon and fostered weakness, sickliness, life-weariness, and ressentiment, and that they have poisoned the wellsprings of human health, strength, and vitality by "devaluing" all "naturalistic values."

Thus Nietzsche undertook to "revalue" religious values, to expose the "all-too-human" origins and motivations of religious ways of thinking, and to undermine all otherworldly theologies, seeking to deprive them of any appearance of legitimacy they might still retain. He intended both to make their emergence and continuing acceptance understandable as human phenomena and at the same time to render them unacceptable to those capable of doing without them and of thinking clearly and honestly. He had some respect for a religion like Christianity as a form of life answering to a certain (interesting but flawed) configuration of human traits, and associated Jesus with this human possibility, but he contended that historical Christianity represented a perversion of it, fostering life-endangering attitudes and seducing potentially healthier human types into stunted or self-destructive forms of existence.

Although Nietzsche may have done religion in general and Christianity in particular a considerable injustice, he compelled their advocates to consider whether and how various forms of religion could be exonerated of his charges against them. He also gave strong impetus to attempts to develop new theologies that dispensed with traditional conceptions of God and the soul in favor of alternative ways of conceiving of the divine and the spiritual nature of mankind. In other quarters, his attack upon traditional religious ways of thinking prompted their defiant defense, thereby contributing indirectly to the resurgence of neo-orthodoxy in opposition to the liberal-theological and naturalistic secular currents of modern thought. Finally, Nietzsche helped to stimulate a reconsideration of the relation between religion and theology. The idea that the most important thing about a religion is the difference it makes in the lives of those who embrace it, rather than the belief system it elaborates, owes much to him, even though most religious thinkers who have followed him in this have tended to assess the effects of religion on the lives of believers very differently than he did.

Nietzsche may not have subverted religion as decisively as he desired and claimed to have done, for his criticisms do not leave all its forms without any means of defense. His critique cannot be lightly dismissed, however, and if it is accorded the serious consideration by religious thinkers it deserves, then the religious issue of this confrontation will be arguably more deserving of respect than most of religion as he knew and conceived it. In any case, anyone well disposed toward religion would do well to make the experiment of attempting to view it through Nietzsche's eyes. This may not lead one to abandon religion, but it is almost certain to alter one's view of it to good effect.

Bibliography

Works by Nietzsche

The definitive new German edition of Nietzsche's writings is the thirty-volume Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin, 1967–1978). The best English translations of most of his writings have been made by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (sometimes in collaboration). These include The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner (New York, 1967); The Gay Science (New York, 1974); Beyond Good and Evil (New York, 1966; Harmondsworth, 1973); On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo (New York, 1968); The Will to Power (New York, 1967); Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Harmondsworth, 1961); and Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist (Harmondsworth, 1968). The last three, with Nietzsche Contra Wagner, are also contained in The Portable Nietzsche (New York, 1954). See also A Nietzsche Reader (Harmondsworth, 1977).