Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)

German philosopher. Nietzsche was a professor of Greek by the age of twenty-five. He abandoned theology for philology and, influenced by the ideas of Schopenhauer (1788–1860), he attempted to develop a critique of traditional religious and philosophical thought. Deteriorating health and growing insanity after 1889 brought him under the control of his sister Elizabeth, who edited and distorted his writings.

Nietzsche’s complex and ambitious work stressed the importance of will, especially the ‘will to power’, and it anticipated modern existentialism in emphasizing that people create their own worlds and make their own values. In his first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche argued that Greek civilization had reached its peak before Socrates and was most clearly embodied in its art. Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883–5) developed the notion of the ‘superman’, an idea much distorted by twentieth-century fascists, but which Nietzsche used to refer to a person capable of generating their own values and living beyond the constrains of conventional morality. In works such as Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), he mounted a fierce attack on Christianity and ideologies derived from it, including liberalism and socialism, arguing that they had fostered a slave morality as opposed to the master morality of the Classical world. He summed up this view in the declaration that ‘God is dead.’