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Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (IPA:[nit], [niti]) (October 15, 1844 August 25, 1900) was a German philosopher, whose critiques of contemporary culture, religion, and philosophy centered around a basic question regarding the foundation of values and morality. Beyond the unique themes dealt with in his works, Nietzsche's powerful style and subtle approach are distinguishing features of his writings. Although largely overlooked during his short working life, which ended with a mental collapse at the age of 44, and frequently misunderstood and misrepresented thereafter, Nietzsche received recognition during the second half of the 20th century as a highly significant figure in modern philosophy. His influence was particularly noted throughout the 20th century by many existentialist, phenomenological and postmodern philosophers.

Friedrich Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, in the small town of Rcken, near Leipzig, within what was then the Prussian province of Saxony. His name comes from King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, on whose 49th birthday Nietzsche was born. Nietzsche's parents were Carl Ludwig (1813-1849), a Lutheran pastor and former teacher, and Franziska (1826-1897). His sister, Elisabeth, was born in 1846, followed by his brother Ludwig Joseph in 1848. After the death of their father in 1849 and the young brother in 1850, the family moved to Naumburg, where they lived with Franziska's mother and Carl Ludwig's two unmarried sisters, and under the guardianship of a local magistrate, Bernhard Dchsel.

After the death of Franziska's mother in 1856, the family was able to afford their own house. During this time, the young Nietzsche attended a boys' school, where he felt isolated, and later a private school, where he became friends with Gustav Krug and Wilhelm Pinder, both of whom came from respected families. In 1854, he began to attend a Catholic preparatory school, but after demonstrating particular talents in music and language, he was admitted to the internationally recognized Schulpforta, where he continued his studies from 1858 to 1864. Here he became friends with Paul Deussen and Carl von Gersdorff. He also found time to work on poems and musical compositions. At Schulpforta, Nietzsche received an important introduction to literature, particularly in regard to the Ancient Greeks and Romans, and also first experienced a distance from his family life in a small-town Christian environment.

Friedrich Nietzsche, 1864.

After graduation, in 1864, Nietzsche commenced his studies in theology and classical philology at the University of Bonn. For a short time, with Deussen, he was a member of the brotherhood Frankonia, which he found uncomfortable. After one semester and to the anger of his mother, he stopped his studies in theology, and concentrated on philology, with Professor Friedrich Ritschl, whom he followed to the University of Leipzig the next year. There, he became close friends with fellow student Erwin Rohde. Nietzsche's first philological publications appeared soon after.

In 1865, Nietzsche became acquainted with the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Albert Lange's History of Materialism in 1866. Both of these encounters were stimulating, encouraging him to no longer limit himself to philology and continue his schooling. In 1867, Nietzsche committed to one year of voluntary service with the Prussian artillery division in Naumburg. After a bad riding accident in March 1868, however, he revisited his philological studies while unfit for service. Later that year, Nietzsche completed the last year of studies, and had his first meeting with Richard Wagner.

Friedrich Nietzsche in Basel, ca. 1875.

Based on Ritschl's support, Nietzsche received the extraordinary offer to become professor of classical philology at the University of Basel before having completed his doctorate degree or certificate for teaching. Among his philological work there, he discovered that the ancient poetic meter related only to the length of syllables, different from the modern, accentuating meter.

In accordance with his own wish, after moving to Basel, Nietzsche renounced his Prussian citizenship, and was for the rest of his life, officially stateless. Nevertheless, he served on the Prussian side during the Franco-Prussian War as a medical orderly. His time in the military was short, but he experienced much, and witnessed the traumatic effects of battle. He also contracted diphtheria and dysentery.

On returning to Basel in 1870, Nietzsche observed the establishment of the German Empire and the following era of Otto von Bismarck as an outsider and with a degree of skepticism regarding its genuineness. At the University, he delivered his inaugural lecture, 'On Homer's Personality'. Also, Nietzsche met Franz Overbeck, a professor of theology, who remained his friend throughout his life. The other most influential colleague was historian Jacob Burckhardt, whose lectures Nietzsche frequently attended.

Already in 1868, Nietzsche had met Richard Wagner in Leipzig, and sometime later, his wife, Cosima. Nietzsche admired both greatly, and during his time at Basel was a frequent guest in Wagner's 'House of the Masters' in Tribschen. The Wagners brought Nietzsche into their closest circle, and enjoyed the attention he gave to the beginning of the Festival House in Bayreuth. In 1870, he gave Cosima Wagner the manuscript of 'The Genesis of the Tragic Idea' as a birthday gift.

In 1872, Nietzsche published his first book, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. However, the work, in which he forewent a precise philological method to employ a style of philosophical speculation, was not well received among his classical philological colleagues, including Ritschl. In a polemic, 'Future Philology', Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff dampened the book's reception and increased its notoriety. In response, Rohde, by now a professor in Kiel, and Wagner came to Nietzsche's defense. Nietzsche remarked freely about the isolation he felt within the philological community and attempted unsuccessfully to attain a position in philosophy at Basel.

Between 1873 and 1876, Nietzsche published separately four long essays: David Strauss: the Confessor and the Writer, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, Schopenhauer as Educator, and Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. (These four were later collected and published under the title, Untimely Meditations.) The four shared the orientation of a cultural critique, challenging the developing German culture along lines suggested by Schopenhauer and Wagner. Starting in 1873, he also accumulated notes that were posthumously published as Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks.

During this time, in the circle of the Wagners, Nietzsche met Malwida von Meysenbug and Hans von Blow, and also began a friendship with Paul Re, an influence for the pessimism in his early writings. However, his disappointment with the Bayreuth Festival of 1876, where he was repelled by the banality of the shows and the baseness of the public, caused him to finally distance himself from Wagner.

Most commentators agree that Nietzsche read Max Stirner, however they differ in respect to whether he was influenced by him. [1] At least one, philosopher Eduard von Hartmann, has accused him of plagiarizing Stirner.

With the publication of Human, All-Too-Human in 1878, a book of aphorisms on subjects ranging from metaphysics to morality and from religion to the sexes, Nietzsche's departure from the philosophy of Wagner and Schopenhauer became evident. Also, Nietzsche's friendship with Deussen and Rohde cooled. Nietzsche undertook more experiments, attempted to find a wife, and pursued Malwida von Meysenbug to no avail.

In 1879, after a significant decline in health, he was forced to resign his position. Since his childhood, Nietzsche had been plagued by various disruptive illnesses -- moments of shortsightedness practically to the degree of blindness, migraine headaches, and violent stomach attacks. These persistent conditions were perhaps aggravated by his riding accident in 1868 and diseases in 1870, and continued to affect him through his years at Basel, forcing him to take longer and longer holidays until regular work was no longer practicable.

Lou Salom, Paul Re and Nietzsche, 1882.

Driven by his illness to find more compatible climates, Nietzsche travelled frequently and lived until 1889 as a free author in different cities. He spent many summers in Sils Maria, near St. Moritz in Switzerland, and many winters in the Italian cities of Genoa, Rapallo, and Turin, and the French city of Nice. He occasionally returned to Naumburg to visit his family, and especially during this time, he and his sister had repeated periods of conflict and reconciliation. He lived on his pension from Basel, but also received aid from friends.

A past student of his, Peter Gast (born Heinrich Kselitz), became a private secretary. To the end of his life, Gast and Overbeck were consistently faithful friends. Malwida von Meysenbug remained like a motherly patron even outside the Wagner circle. Soon Nietzsche made contact with the music critic Carl Fuchs.

Nietzsche was at the beginning of his most productive period. Beginning with Human, All-Too-Human in 1878, Nietzsche would publish one book (or major section of a book) each year until 1888, his last year of writing, during which he completed five. In 1879, Nietzsche published Mixed Opinions and Maxims, which followed the aphoristic form of Human, All-Too-Human. The following year, he published The Wanderer and His Shadow. Both were published as the second part of Human, All-Too-Human with the second edition of the latter.

In 1881, Nietzsche published Daybreak: Reflections on Moral Prejudices, and in 1882, the first part of The Gay Science. That year he also met Lou Salom through Malwida von Meysenbug and Paul Re. Nietzsche and Salom spent the summer together in Tautenburg, often with Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth as chaperone. However, Nietzsche's regard for Salom was less as an equal partner than as a gifted student. He fell in love with her and pursued her despite their mutual friend Re. When he asked to marry her, Salom refused. Through various avenues of intrigue, Elisabeth broke up Nietzsche's relationship with Re and Salom in the winter of 1882-83. (Lou Salom eventually came to correspond with Sigmund Freud, introducing him to Nietzsche's thought.) In the face of renewed fits of illness, in near isolation after a falling out with his mother and sister regarding Salom, and plagued by suicidal thoughts, he fled to Rapallo, where in only ten days he wrote the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

After severing philosophical ties to Schopenhauer and social ties to Wagner, Nietzsche had few remaining friends. Now with the new style of Zarathustra, his work became even more alienating and was received only to the degree prescribed by politeness. Nietzsche recognized this and maintained his solitude, even though he often complained about it. He gave up his short-lived plan to become a poet in public, and was troubled by concerns about his publications. His books were as good as unsold. In 1885, he printed only 40 copies of the fourth part of Zarathustra, and only a fraction of these were distributed among close friends.

In 1886, he printed Beyond Good and Evil at his own expense. With this book and the appearance in 1886-87 of second editions of his earlier works (The Birth of Tragedy, Human, All-Too-Human, Daybreak, and The Gay Science), he saw his work completed for the time and hoped that soon a readership would develop. In fact, the interest in Nietzsche did arise at this time, if also rather slowly and hardly perceived by him.

During these years, Nietzsche's met Meta von Salis, Carl Spitteler, and also Gottfried Keller. In 1886, his sister Elisabeth married the anti-Semite Bernhard Frster and travelled to Paraguay to found a "Germanic" colony, a plan to which Nietzsche responded with laughter. Through correspondence, Nietzsche's relationship with Elisabeth continued on the path of conflict and reconciliation, but she would not see him again in person until after his collapse.

Nietzsche continued to have frequent and painful attacks of illness, which made prolonged work impossible. In 1887, Nietzsche quickly wrote the polemic On the Genealogy of Morals. He also exchanged letters with Hippolyte Taine, and then also with Georg Brandes, who at the beginning of 1888 delivered in Copenhagen the first lectures on Nietzsche's philosophy.

In the same year, Nietzsche wrote five books, based on his voluminous notes for the long-planned work, The Will to Power. His health seemed to be improving, and in the summer he was in high spirits. In the fall of 1888, his writings and letters began to reveal an overestimation of his status and 'fate'. He overestimated the increasing response to his writings, above all, for the recent polemic, The Case of Wagner.

On his 44th birthday, after completing The Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist, he decided to write the autobiography Ecce Homo, which presents itself to his readers in order that they, 'Hear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else.' (Preface, sec. 1, tr. Walter Kaufmann)

In December, Nietzsche began correspondence with August Strindberg, and thought that, short of an international breakthrough, he would attempt to buy back his older writings from the publisher and have them translated into other European languages. Moreover, he planned the publication of the compilation Nietzsche Contra Wagner and the poems Dionysian Dithyrambs.

On 3 January 1889, Nietzsche had a mental collapse. That day he had been approached by two Turinese policemen after making some sort of public disturbance in the streets of Turin. What actually happened is not known. The often-repeated (and apocryphal) tale is that Nietzsche saw a horse being whipped at the other end of the Piazza Carlo Alberto, ran to the horse, threw his arms up around the horses neck to protect it, and collapsed to the ground. In the following few days, he sent short writings to a number of friends, including Cosima Wagner and Jacob Burckhardt, which showed signs of a breakdown.

To his former colleague Burckhardt he wrote: 'I have had Caiphas put in fetters. Also, last year I was crucified by the German doctors in a very drawn-out manner. Wilhelm, Bismarck, and all anti-Semites abolished.' (The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann)

On January 6, 1889, Burckhardt showed the letter he received from Nietzsche to Overbeck. The following day Overbeck received a similarly revealing letter, and decided Nietzsche must be brought back to Basel. Overbeck traveled to Turin and brought Nietzsche to a psychiatric clinic in Basel.

By that time, Nietzsche was fully in the grip of insanity, and his mother Franziska decided to bring him to a clinic in Jena under the direction of Otto Binswanger. From November 1889 to February 1890, Julius Langbehn attempted to cure Nietzsche, claiming that the doctors' methods were ineffective to cure Nietzsche's condition. Langbehn assumed greater and greater control of Nietzsche until his secrecy discredited him. In March 1890, Franziska removed Nietzsche from the clinic, and in May 1890 to her home in Naumburg.

During this process, Overbeck and Gast contemplated what to do with Nietzsche's unpublished works. In January 1890 they proceeded with the planned release of The Twilight of the Idols, by that time already printed and bound. In February, they ordered a 50-copy private edition of Nietzsche Contra Wagner, but the publisher C. G. Naumann secretly printed 100. Overbeck and Gast decided to withhold publishing Antichrist and Ecce Homo due to their more radical content. Nietzsche's reception and recognition enjoyed their first surge.

In 1893, Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth returned from Paraguay after the suicide of her husband. She read and studied Nietzsche's works, and piece by piece took control of them and their publication. Overbeck was eventually dismissed, and Gast finally cooperated. After the death of Franziska in 1897, Nietzsche lived in Weimar, where he was cared for by Elisabeth, who allowed people to visit the uncommunicative Nietzsche.

On August 25, 1900, Nietzsche died after contracting pneumonia. At the wish of Elisabeth, he was buried beside his father at the church in Rcken.

The cause of Nietzsche's breakdown has been the subject of speculation and remains uncertain. An early and frequent diagnosis was a syphilitic infection; however, some of Nietzsche's symptoms were inconsistent with typical cases of syphilis. Another diagnosis was a form of brain cancer. Others suggest that Nietzsche experienced a mystical awakening, similar to ones studied by Meher Baba. While most commentators regard Nietzsche's breakdown as irrelevant to his philosophy, some, including Georges Bataille, argue that the breakdown must be considered.

Much controversy surrounds whether Nietzsche advocated a single or comprehensive philosophical viewpoint. Many charge Nietzsche with propounding contradictory thoughts and ideas. Here are Nietzsche's main ideas.

After the skepticism in his early works towards the old foundations of philosophy, religion, and morality, Nietzsche experienced the absence of any meaning or purpose to the world and human existence. Nietzsche did not attribute this nihilism to an autonomous and reactive movement against culture; rather, he diagnosed nihilism as a latent presence within the very foundations of European culture, and thus, as a necessary and approaching destiny.

For Nietzsche, nihilism is the outcome of repeated frustrations in the search for meaning. The religious worldview had already suffered a number of challenges from contrary perspectives grounded in philosophical skepticism, modern science (heliocentrism superseding geocentrism, evolution superseding creationism), and internal disputes (Reformation). However, these attempts to replace God with human reason were also inadequate and unjustified.

In writings from notebooks dated from November 1887 to March 1888, Nietzsche described three steps by which 'nihilism as a psychological state' would be reached:

Nietzsche sees this intellectual condition as a new challenge to European culture, which has extended itself beyond a sort of point-of-no-return. Nietzsche conceptualizes this with the famous statement, 'God is dead', which appears prominently in The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, suggesting the impending, yet obscure, crisis that European thought faces in the wake of the irreparable disturbances to its traditional foundations. Nietzsche treats this phrase as more than a provocative declaration, but almost reverently, as it represents the potential of a nihilism that arrests growth and progress in the midst of an overwhelming absurdity and meaninglessness:

The first instance of the phrase occurs at the beginning of Book III of The Gay Science (section 108), and again prominently in section 125.

In response to the constraining and defeating aspects of nihilism, Nietzsche began to seek a sense of bold, cheerful experimentation. Nietzsche seems to identify his own self as the remaining constraint after the death of the Gods, writing that 'the seal of liberation' is 'no longer being ashamed in front of oneself.' (Gay Science, Book III, sec. 275, trans. Walter Kaufmann)

Nietzsche acknowledged that after having liberated himself from the Gods and their morality, he has yet to answer for what he is liberated: he suffers as a protagonist without an antagonist. At the beginning of Book IV of The Gay Science, Nietzsche celebrates the new year and the strength he attributes to the month of January. He writes that his 'wish' is:

This attitude of creativity and challenge carries Nietzsche further to the idea of 'the eternal recurrence', an intellectual and existential test. Eternal recurrence means that time runs its course and then repeats exactly and infinitely. Thus, the absurdities and pains of life must be endured not only once, but repeatedly and forever. Nietzsche imagines that the nihilist would find this thought torturous, but for one who has learned to be a 'Yes-sayer', it should be bliss. At the end of Book IV of The Gay Science, juxtaposed with what becomes the beginning of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes:

The eternal recurrence is also discussed prominently in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which Nietzsche wrote after The Gay Science. And he gives strangely lucid consideration of the eternal recurrence in various sections in the collection of notes under the title of The Will to Power. Particularly interesting here is the idea that, towards the end of his life, Nietzsche seems to use the eternal recurrence as something to simply consign himself to the pointlessness of existence. He says 'Everything seems far too valuable to be so fleeting...My only consolation is...the sea will cast it up again' (Will to Power, section 1026. trans Walter Kaufmann). This can be thought of as one of the things that has fitted Nietzsche in to the category of existentialism. But furthermore, the ruminations on eternal recurrence in The Will to Power include some of Nietzsche's attempts to actually prove it as a cosmological thesis (see Arthur Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher for a detailed analysis of these efforts). Interestingly, in his letters and notebooks, Nietzsche says that he thinks eternal recurrence may even disprove the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, but this is often glossed over as his insanity had at this point begun to set in.

There is some controversy over who or what Nietzsche considered an overman (or "superman"; in German, bermensch). Not only is there some basis to think that Nietzsche was skeptical about individual identity and the notion of subject, but there was never a concrete example of the overman.

Nietzsche coined the terms herd instinct or slave morality, which represents the kind of morality or ideology produced by a group of people, such as a culture or a society. The herd instinct is the inevitable consequence of society, and it is considered extremely difficult for an individual to take on a value or moral system apart from the society within which one is embedded.

The overman cannot be defined with respect to how much power one wields over others (although the overman, having overcome himself, will consequently dominate those who have not), but rather to the extent to which one is, in Nietzsche's words, "judge and avenger and victim of one's own law." This is in contrast to the Christian notion that humans are created beings whose purpose is to obey the dictates of their Creator.

Nietzsche never set out who was, or was not, an overman. Perhaps the overman is a state of human-being having bypassed himself (which could be said "post-human"). The overman was possibly an ideal or a theoretical construct designed to point out that it is difficult, if not impossible, to break free from society's ideological and moral grasp. As an intellectual exercise, contemporary thinkers have asked who or what could have been an overman. Could rulers such as Stalin or Hitler be overman? According to Nietzsche, this is most unlikely, given that rulers represent the moralities and ideologies of their time, as opposed to breaking free from them.

In his text on the "tyrants of democracy", Nietzsche opposed the covert artists overmen to the political leaders, which Nietzsche despised. A discussion of how Nietzsche relates to Hitler and the Nazis is below. Is the concept of the overman more limited to intellectual and artistic figures such as Goethe and Wagner? This seems more likely, especially given that Nietzsche held Wagner in very high esteem early in his life. However, he totally broke with him writing Nietzsche against Wagner (Wagner's antisemitism and germanism being one of the reasons of the rupture), and thus could certainly not considered him as the artist that he waited for.

Nietzsche's critique of the subject makes it impossible to reduce the "overman" or any other individual person to an individual subject, thus assimilating him as a kind of hero: "there is no doer behind the doing", wrote Nietzsche. We attribute a subject as a cause of the event, because we need this "grammatical fiction"; but in fact, there is no more subject than there is any substance, because both presuppose an eternally identical world, whereas world is always in a state of flux and change. There is no substance, there is no subject and there is no causality are Nietzsche's most radical thesis.

In his Nietzsche, Heidegger himself, although later rightly criticized for his membership in the NSDAP, criticized this more or less deliberate misunderstanding of Nietzsche's philosophy, based in a scientist conception and on a biological interpretation of Nietzsche's thought. Mazzino Montinari's edition of the posthumous fragments and philological criticisms of the fake Will to Power, as Gilles Deleuze's particular reading of Nietzsche, would be essential moments of the revealing of this caricature.

Nietzsche argued that there were two types of morality, a master morality that springs actively from the 'noble man' and a slave morality that develops reactively within the weak man. These two moralities are not simple inversions of one another, they are two different value systems; master morality fits actions into a scale of 'good' or 'bad' whereas slave morality fits actions into a scale of 'good' or 'evil'.

Nietzsche defined master morality as the morality of the strong-willed. For these men the 'good' is the noble, strong and powerful, while the 'bad' is the weak, cowardly, timid and petty. Master morality begins in the 'noble man' with a spontaneous idea of the 'good', then the idea of 'bad' develops in opposition to it. (On the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, Section 11) He said: "The noble type of man experiences itself as determining values; it does not need approval; it judges, "what is harmful to me is harmful in itself"; it knows itself to be that which first accords honor to things; it is value-creating." (Beyond Good and Evil)

Slave morality begins in those people who are weak, uncertain of themselves, oppressed and abused. The essence of slave morality is utility: the good is what is most useful for the community as a whole. Since the powerful are few in number compared to the masses of the weak, the weak gain power vis-a-vis the strong by treating those qualities that are valued by the powerful as "evil," and those qualities that enable sufferers to endure their lot as "good." Thus patience, humility, pity, submissiveness to authority, and the like, are considered good.

Slave morality begins in a ressentiment that turns creative and gives birth to values. (Ressentiment was a term coined by Nietzsche to describe the feeling of the weak, unhealthy and ugly towards those who have fared better in life.) The slave regards the virtues of beauty, power, strength and wealth as 'evil' in an act of revenge against those who have them in abundance. (On the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, Section 10) Slave morality is therefore a reactionary morality because 'good' does not spring creatively from the individual but develops as a negation of the values of the powerful. The noble person conceives of goodness first and later determines what is 'bad' while the slave conceives of 'evil' first and fashions his own conception of 'good' in opposition to this.

One of the main themes in Nietzsche's work is that ancient Roman society was grounded in master morality, and that this morality disappeared as the slave morality of Christianity spread through ancient Rome. Nietzsche was concerned with the state of European culture during his lifetime and therefore focused much of his analysis on the history of master and slave morality within Europe. Occasional references, however, also suggest that he meant these terms to be applied to other societies.

However, as with so many ideas in Nietzsche's work, there is no material manifestation of this idea, no hard and fast difference between that which is created by the master morality and that created by the slave. While Nietzsche stated repeatedly that the master morality was necessary for the advancement of humanity (through overhuman - bermenschiese - deeds), he gave examples of where these advances were made through the use of the tenets of the slave morality. The second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals is an indication of this insight, as well as his longstanding fascination for Jesus. Mastery for Nietzsche was the creation of values, and a recurring theme (especially in Thus Spoke Zarathustra) is how even what might seem bad can be, must be, taken up into a masterful life. As Zarathustra says (in Part II, Manly Prudence): "he who lives amongst men must know how to wash himself with dirty water." Nietzsche gives a concise investigation of how any idea might be used masterfully in the ninth aphorism of Beyond Good on Evil, concerning Stoicism.

According to Nietzsche, the Cartesian proofs for the existence of God are all examples of logic only a master from the nobility would invent. Thomas Aquinas' notions of what constitutes the "good life" is a particular example of what "good" might mean to a master. Nietzsche claimed that such notions of the good life would have their root in the discipline and punishment Aquinas received as a child from the hands of his father.

In Nietzsche's book the Anti-Christ, Nietzsche fights against how Christianity has become an ideology set forth by institutions like churches, and how churches have failed to represent the life of Jesus. It is important, for Nietzsche, to distinguish between the religion of Christianity and the person of Jesus. Nietzsche attacked Christian religion as it was represented by churches and institutions for what he called its "transvaluation" of healthy instinctive values. Transvaluation is the process by which the meaning of a concept or ideology can be reversed to its opposite. He went beyond agnostic and atheistic thinkers of the Enlightenment, who felt that Christianity was simply untrue. He claimed that it may have been deliberately propagated as a subversive religion (a "psychological warfare weapon" or what some would call a "memetic virus") within the Roman Empire by the Apostle Paul as a form of covert revenge for the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple during the Jewish War.

Nietzsche contrasts the Christians with Jesus, whom he greatly admires. Nietzsche argues that Jesus transcended the moral influences of his time by creating his own set of values. As such Jesus represents a step towards the overman. Ultimately, however, Nietzsche claims that, unlike the overman, who embraces life, Jesus denied reality in favor of his "kingdom of God," and that Jesus' refusal to defend himself, and subsequent death, were logical consequences of this total disengagement. Nietzsche then analyzes the history of Christianity, finding it to be a progressively grosser distortion of the teachings of Jesus. He criticizes the early Christians for turning Jesus into a martyr and Jesus' life into a story of the redemption of mankind in order to gain power over the masses, finding them to be cowardly, vulgar, and resentful. He argues that Christianity had become more and more corrupted, as successive generations further misunderstood the life of Jesus. By the 19th century, Nietzsche concludes, Christianity had become so worldly as to be a parody of itself--a total inversion of a worldview which was, in the beginning, nihilistic.

In 1894 (after Nietzsche's death), his sister Elisabeth Frster-Nietzsche, founded the Nietzsche-Archiv in Naumburg, which she would later transfer to Weimar. The culmination of this organization was the publishing, in Leipzig between 1894 and 1926, of the Grooktavausgabe edition. It was first edited by C. G. Naumann, then by Krner. In these 20 volumes, Elisabeth Frster-Nietzsche included part of Nietzsche's posthumous fragments, which she gathered together and entitled The Will To Power. With Peter Gast, she claimed that Nietzsche had died before completing his magnum opus, which he allegedly would have wanted to name "The Will to Power, in Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values". This compilation of Nietzsche's posthumous fragments, selected and ordered under his sister's authority, led to the book commonly known as The Will to Power. Until Colli & Montinari's edition, this would form the basis for all successive editions, including the 1922 Musarion edition, often commonly used to this day.

While researching materials for the Italian translation of Nietzsche's complete works in the 1960s, philologists Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari decided to go to the Archives in Leipzig to work with the original documents. From their work emerged the first complete and chronological edition of Nietzsche's posthumous fragments, which Frster-Nietzsche had cut up, mixed and paste together, according to her own antisemitic views (which were one of the reasons of the lack of understanding with her brother). The complete works make up 5 000 pages, compared to the 3 500 pages of the Grooktavausgabe. In 1964, during the International Colloque on Nietzsche in Paris, Colli & Montinari met Karl Lwith, who would put them in contact with Heinz Wenzel, editor for Walter de Gruyter's publishing house. Heinz Wenzel would buy the rights of the complete works of Colli & Montinari (33 volumes in German) after the French Gallimard edition and the Italian Adelphi editions.

Before Colli & Montinari's philological work, the previous editions led readers to believe that Nietzsche had organized all his work toward a final structured opus called The Will to Power. In fact, if Nietzsche did consider the eventuality of writing such a book, he changed plans before his collapse. The title of The Will to Power, which appears for the first time at the end of the summer of 1885, would be replaced by another plan at the end of August 1888. This new plan was title Project for an inversion of all values, and ordered the multiple fragments in a completely different way than the one chosen by Elisabeth Frster-Nietzsche.

In fact, according to Montinari, the previous editions, which all depended of the Grooktavausgabe, were technically nonsense, as Nietzsche's fragments were cut up in various places and ordered according to his sister's will; and a case of revisionism, as it was left to his sister to artificially combine Nietzsche's fragments into an unified opus magnum (whose very concept is alien to Nietzsche's philosophy and style of writing), whose meaning was distorted according to Elisabeth Frster-Nietzsche's anti-semitic and Germanist biases. Gilles Deleuze himself saluted Montinari's work declaring:

Furthermore, this critical philological work, a milestone in the Nietzsche studies, which proved case-by-case all the distortions accomplished by Nietzsche's sister on his posthume fragments, also put into question, which had already been done before, the possible cenceforonception of a Nietzschean magnum opus, given his style of writing and thinking. So The 'Will to Power' (as a book) may not have been written by Nietzsche. But the concept of Will to power in itself certainly is central in Nietzsche's philosophy, so much that Heidegger considered it to form, with the thought of the eternal recurrence, the basis of his thought. [3]

The concept of Will to power is a concept of Nietzsche's thought, which led to many interpretations, some of whom, such as the Nazi interpretation of it as a "will of power", were deliberate attempts of political instrumentation.

The Will to power must first of all thought taking into account Nietzsche's roots and violent critic of Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer posited a will to live, in which living things were motivated by sustaining and developing their own lives. Nietzsche instead posited a will to power, in which living things are not just driven by the mere need to stay alive, but in fact by a greater need to wield and use power, to dominate others, and to make them weaker. Thus, Nietzsche regarded such a will to live as secondary to the primary will to power. Henceforth, he opposed himself to social darwinism and plain darwinism, as he contested the validity of the concept of "adaptation", which he considered a simple and weak will to live [4].

One possible interpretation of "will to power" is that it is a process of expansion and venting of creative energy that he believed was the basic driving force of nature. This interpretation would suggest that he believed it to be the fundamental causal power in the world, the driving force of all natural phenomena and the dynamic to which all other causal powers could be reduced. Indeed, the will to power must not be understood in a psychological or subjective way, but rather in a "cosmic way". That is, according to this theory, Nietzsche in part hoped the will to power could be a "theory of everything," providing the ultimate foundations for explanations of everything from whole societies, to individual organisms, down to mere lumps of matter.

Nietzsche perhaps developed the will to power concept furthest with regard to living organisms, and it is there that the concept is perhaps easiest to understand. There, the will to power is taken as an animal's most fundamental instinct or drive, even more fundamental than the act of self-preservation; the latter is but an epiphenomenon of the former. According to Nietzsche, the will to power is the basic means through which living things "interpret" or interact with the world, and, in this sense, the world is "will to power, and nothing else besides,".

The will to power is something like the desire to exert one's will in self-overcoming, although this "willing" may be unconscious. Indeed, it is unconscious in all non-human beings; it was the frustration of this will that first caused man to become conscious at all. The philosopher and art critic Arthur C. Danto says that "aggression" is at least sometimes an approximate synonym. However, Nietzsche's ideas of aggression are almost always meant as aggression toward oneself, as the energy a person motivates toward self-mastery. In any case, since the will to power is fundamental, any other drives are to be reduced to it; the "will to survive" (i.e. the survival instinct) that biologists (at least in Nietzsche's day) thought to be fundamental, for example, was in this light a manifestation of the will to power.

Not just instincts but also higher level behaviors (even in humans) were to be reduced to the will to power. In fact, Nietzsche considered consciousness itself to be the a form of instinct. This includes both such apparently harmful acts as physical violence, lying, and domination, on one hand, and such apparently non-harmful acts as gift-giving, love, and praise on the other. In Beyond Good and Evil, he claims that philosophers' "will to truth" (i.e., their apparent desire to dispassionately seek objective truth) is actually nothing more than a manifestation of their will to power; this will can be life-affirming or a manifestation of nihilism, but it is will to power all the same.

As indicated above, the will to power is meant to explain more than just the behavior of an individual person or animal. It is not psychological, nor intentional or subjective.

It should be noted, however, that a biological interpretation of Will to Power such as this is but one of many possible - indeed, Nietzsche scholarship is replete with interpretations, largely due to Nietzsche's elusive style. Others might suggest that the will to power is not really as central a concept in Nietzsche's thought. Indeed, it appears that Nietzsche himself might have agreed, when he suggests, in Ecce Homo, that his notion of eternal recurrence of the same is his most central thought, and the central theme of his most famous work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. However, Heidegger, and also Deleuze, would argue that both concepts, the will to power and the thought of the eternal recurrence, were to be thought together.

Nietzsche is unique among philosophers for what is widely regarded as the remarkable power and effectiveness of his prose style - particularly as manifested in Zarathustra. The indigestible 'heaviness' long associated with German-language philosophy is eschewed, with puns and paradoxes abounding, and aphoristic brevity rubbing shoulders with parable and even poem in his rhetoric. The end result is a manner of philosophical writing which, being "pitched half-way between metaphor and literal statement" is "something quite extraordinary" (J.P. Stern).

His work has been described as 'half philosophic, half poetic'; the fact that it can thus manage to convince the reader emotionally as well as intellectually is no doubt one reason for its appeal (especially among creative artists) - but it also means that the theory behind the metaphors is never fully or clearly written out.

One problem inevitably caused by this is that the boundaries of his thinking are not easily discerned: for example, many people not only feel that Nietzsche's term bermensch conjures up the 'pure Aryan' of Hitlerian mythology, but further assume that it must have been accompanied by the complementary lesser human or sub-human 'Untermensch' - whereas this latter term is in fact a creation of Nazi racial ideology.

Another vulnerability entailed by Nietzsche's style is that nuances and shades of meaning are very easily lost - and all too easily gained - in translation. Here the bermensch is a case in point: the equivalent 'Superman' found in dictionaries and in the translations by Thomas Common and R.J. Hollingdale may create an unfortunate association with the heroic comic-character 'Superman' - while other logical alternatives which one might propose ('Over-human?' 'Above-human?' 'Super-human?' 'Beyond-human?') are either uselessly clumsy or smack of a 'political correctness' foreign to Nietzsche's outlook. Walter Kaufmann's 'Overman' would perhaps be more serviceable - were it not for the overtone of hierarchical authoritarianism which it introduces. A little used alternative is 'Hyper-man.' It is as precisely Greek (which Nietzsche knew quite well) as 'Superman,' without the pop-political connotations.

Regardless of the translation, it is illuminating to think of 'ber' in relationship to the development of the individual subject. The bermensch is the being that overcomes the "great nausea" associated with nihilism; that overcomes that most "abysmal" realization of the eternal return. He is the being that "sails over morality," and that dances over gravity (the "spirit of gravity" is Zarathustra's devil and archenemy). He is a "harvester" and a "celebrant" who endlessly affirms his existence, thereby becoming the transfigurer of his consciousness. He is initially a destructive force, excising and annihilating the insidious 'truths' of the herd, and consequently reclaiming the chaos from which pure creativity is born. It is this creative existence that justifies suffering without displacing it in some "afterworld." He is the lightning that brings the frenzy of religious ecstasy to earth -- complete with suffering and birth pangs.

Nietzsche's work addresses ethics from several perspectives; in today's terms, we might say his remarks pertain to meta-ethics, normative ethics, and descriptive ethics.

As far as meta-ethics is concerned, Nietzsche can perhaps most usefully be classified as a moral skeptic; that is, he claims that all ethical statements are false, because any kind of correspondence between ethical statements and "moral facts" is illusory. (This is part of a more general claim that there is no universally true fact, roughly because none of them more than "appear" to correspond to reality). Instead, ethical statements (like all statements) are mere "interpretations."

Sometimes, Nietzsche may seem to have very definite opinions on what is moral or immoral. Note, however, that Nietzsche's moral opinions may be explained without attributing to him the claim that they are "true." For Nietzsche, after all, we needn't disregard a statement merely because it is false. On the contrary, he often claims that falsehood is essential for "life." Interestingly enough, he mentions a 'dishonest lie,' discussing Wagner in The Case of Wagner, as opposed to an 'honest' one, saying further, to consult Plato with regards to the latter, which should give some idea of the layers of paradox in his work.

In the juncture between normative ethics and descriptive ethics, Nietzsche distinguishes between "master morality" and "slave morality." Although he recognises that not everyone holds either scheme in a clearly delineated fashion without some syncretism, he presents them in contrast to one another. Some of the contrasts in master vs. slave morality:

These ideas were elaborated in his book On the Genealogy of Morals in which he also introduced the key concept of ressentiment as the basis for the slave morality.

Nietzsche's assessment of both the antiquity and resultant impediments presented by the ethical and moralistic teachings of the world's monotheistic religions eventually led him to his own epiphany about the nature of God and morality, resulting in his work Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Nietzsche is also well-known for the statement "God is dead". While in popular belief it is Nietzsche himself who blatantly made this declaration, it was actually placed into the mouth of a character, a "madman," in The Gay Science. It was also later proclaimed by Nietzsche's Zarathustra. This largely misunderstood statement does not proclaim a physical death, but a natural end to the belief in God being the foundation of the western mind. It is also widely misunderstood as a kind of gloating declaration, when it is actually described as a tragic lament by the character Zarathustra.

"God is Dead" is more of an observation than a declaration, and it is noteworthy that Nietzsche never felt the need to advance any arguments for atheism, but merely observed that, for all practical purposes, his contemporaries lived "as if" God were dead. Nietzsche believed this "death" would eventually undermine the foundations of morality and lead to moral relativism and moral nihilism. To avoid this, he believed in re-evaluating the foundations of morality and placing them not on a pre-determined, but a natural foundation through comparative analysis.

During the First World War and after 1945, many regarded Nietzsche as having helped to cause the German militarism. In fact, the German right-wing did not appreciate Nietzsche's thought until the rise of the Nazis. Nietzsche was popular among left-wing Germans in the 1890s. Many Germans read Thus Spoke Zarathustra and were influenced by Nietzsche's appeal of unlimited individualism and the development of a personality. The enormous popularity of Nietzsche led to the subversion debate in German politics in 1894/1895. Conservatives wanted to ban the work of Nietzsche. Nietzsche influenced the Social-democratic revisionists, anarchists, feminists and the left-wing German youth movement.

During the interbellum, various fragments of Nietzsche's work were appropriated by National Socialists, notably Alfred Bumler in his reading of The Will to Power. During the period of Nazi rule, Nietzsche's work was widely studied in German (and, after 1938, Austrian) schools and universities. The Nazis viewed Nietzsche as one of their "founding fathers." They incorporated much of his ideology and thoughts about power into their own political philosophy (without consideration to its contextual meaning). Although there exist some significant differences between Nietzsche and Nazism, his ideas of power, weakness, women, and religion became axioms of Nazi society. The wide popularity of Nietzsche among Nazis was due partly to Nietzsche's sister, Elisabeth Frster-Nietzsche, a Nazi sympathizer who edited much of Nietzsche's works. However, Nietzsche disapproved of his sister's antisemitic views. Furthermore, Mazzino Montinari, one of editors of Nietzsche's posthumous works in the 1960s, argued that Frster-Nietzsche had deliberately cut extracts, changed their order, and added false titles to the posthumous fragments, thus constituting the fake Will to power [1].

It is worth noting that Nietzsche's thought largely stands opposed to Nazism, its apology of Germanism, its nationalism and its antisemitism. However, Nietzsche did spoke of a "big politic", considered as a "European politics", which understanding has remained quite obscure. He also made several references to eugenics, which were at that time - as racism - common ideologies [5].

In particular, Nietzsche despised anti-Semitism and held a very high opinion of European Jewry. While some of his writings on "the Jewish question" were critical of the Jewish population in Europe, this criticism was equally, if not more strongly, applied to the English, the Germans, and the rest of Europe. However, he also praised the strength of the Jewish people. For instance, in Beyond Good and Evil, he wrote: "The Jews, however, are beyond any doubt the strongest, toughest, and purest race now living in Europe; they know how to prevail even under the worst conditions..." However, his venomous attack upon many of the religious principles of the Jews throughout his work brings confusion to many readers. This ambiguity is perhaps best expressed in part 250 of Beyond Good and Evil:

He also despised nationalism. He took a dim view of German culture as it was in his time, and derided both the state and populism (however, he valorised strong leadership, and it was this last tendency that the Nazis took up) (see Nietzsche against Wagner). As the joke goes: "Nietzsche detested Nationalism, Socialism, Germans and mass movements, so naturally he was adopted as the intellectual mascot of the National Socialist German Workers' Party." He was also far from being a racist, believing that the "vigour" of any population could only be increased by mixing with others. In The Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche says, "...the concept of 'pure blood' is the opposite of a harmless concept." Furthermore, in Ecce Homo Nietzsche claims Polish descent - even aristocratic Polish ancestry - a claim for which there is no evidence. This is most probably another satyrical attack on the rising German nationalism - like the Poles who had no nation-state (see The Partition of Poland)and through his claim he suggests that he would rather associate with a stateless people (Nietzsche was himself stateless since moving to Basel) than join the 'herdish' nationalism of the German unification. Through his claim he also takes attention away from his given names (after Frederick William II of Prussia) to his surname, which carries no such grandeur - he does not want to be judged as a German. Ultimately the claim is a dissassociation of nationalism.

As for the idea of the "blond beast," Walter Kaufmann has this to say in The Will to Power: "The 'blond beast' is not a racial concept and does not refer to the 'Nordic race' of which the Nazis later made so much. Nietzsche specifically refers to Arabs and Japanese, Romans and Greeks, no less than ancient Teutonic tribes when he first introduces the term... and the 'blondness' obviously refers to the beast, the lion, rather than the kind of man."

While his thought shares little with Nazism, it should not be supposed that he was strongly liberal either. One of the things that he seems to have detested the most about Christianity was its emphasis on pity and how this leads to the elevation of the weak-minded. Nietzsche believed that it was wrong to deprive people of their pain, because it was this very pain that stirred them to improve themselves, to grow and become stronger. It would overstate the matter to say that he disbelieved in helping people; but he was persuaded that much Christian pity robbed people of necessary painful life experiences, and robbing a person of his necessary pain, for Nietzsche, was wrong. He once noted in his Ecce Homo: "pain is not an objection to life."

Nietzsche often referred to the common people who participated in mass movements and shared a common mass psychology as "the rabble", and "the herd." He valued individualism above all else, although his understanding of it was quite different from the classical liberal conception of the individual subject (See above). While he had a dislike of the state in general, he also spoke negatively of anarchists and made it clear that only certain individuals should attempt to break away from the herd mentality. This theme is common throughout Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

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