Friedrich Nietzsche
Philosophers to Study | Ethics | Ludwig Wittgenstein
Who he was
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philologist turned philosopher. Born in Röcken, son of a Lutheran pastor, he became a professor of classical philology at Basel at just 24. Ill health forced him to retire at 34, and for the next ten years he wandered between Swiss mountain villages and Italian towns, writing book after book that almost nobody read. In January 1889 he collapsed in Turin and never recovered his mind. He spent his last eleven years in the care of his mother and then his sister Elisabeth, who later edited his notes — badly and with a political agenda — into The Will to Power.
The main works, in order:
- The Birth of Tragedy (1872) — Greek art as a tension between the Apollonian (order, form, dream) and the Dionysian (frenzy, music, dissolution).
- Human, All Too Human (1878) and Daybreak (1881) — short, sharp aphorisms.
- The Gay Science (1882) — where the madman announces “God is dead”.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85) — the prophet-poem of the Übermensch and eternal recurrence.
- Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) — his most systematic attack on morality.
- Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Ecce Homo (1888) — written in a final, furious year.
The core idea in plain words
Nietzsche asks a question most people never ask: where did our values come from, and are they good for us?
We tend to assume that “good” and “evil” were handed down, fixed and obvious. Nietzsche plays detective instead. In the Genealogy he argues that the ancient nobles called themselves “good” — strong, healthy, proud — and called the weak “bad”, meaning simply low or unlucky. Then the oppressed, unable to win in the world, performed a revolt of values: they called the strong “evil” and made meekness, humility and suffering into virtues. He calls this slave morality, driven by ressentiment — resentment that cannot act and so takes revenge by re-describing the world.
He is not saying “be cruel”. He is saying: look honestly at the motives hidden inside your morality, and ask whether it makes life larger or smaller.
The death of God
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” This is not a cheerful atheist slogan. The madman in The Gay Science (§125) is horrified. Nietzsche’s point is cultural: modern Europe no longer really believes, but it still lives on the moral credit of a belief it has abandoned. When that credit runs out, the danger is nihilism — the feeling that nothing matters. His whole later work is an attempt to find a way through nihilism rather than collapse into it.
An analogy: the house with a vanished foundation
Imagine you live in a grand old house. One day you discover the foundation was rotted away years ago. The house is still standing, held up by habit and by the walls leaning on each other — but it will not stand forever.
You have three options. Pretend you never noticed (most people). Panic and burn the house down (the nihilist). Or do the hard thing: build a new foundation yourself, while still living in the house. That last option is what Nietzsche means by the revaluation of all values, and the person strong enough to do it is the Übermensch — not a master race, but a human who creates meaning instead of borrowing it.
A worked example: eternal recurrence as a test
In The Gay Science §341 Nietzsche offers a thought experiment. A demon comes to you in your loneliest hour and says: this life, exactly as you have lived it, you will live again, and again, innumerable times — every pain, every joy, every small moment, in the same order.
Would you curse the demon, or say “I have never heard anything more divine”?
Try it on one concrete day. Take yesterday. If you had to live it a million more times, which parts would you keep? The hour scrolling your phone? The argument you didn’t need? The walk at sunset? The test turns a vague question (“is my life good?”) into a sharp one (“would I will this again?”). The ideal Nietzsche calls amor fati — love of fate: wanting nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity.
Common misconceptions
- “Nietzsche was a Nazi.” He despised German nationalism and anti-Semitism, broke with Wagner partly over it, and quarrelled bitterly with his sister and her anti-Semite husband. The Nazis used Elisabeth’s edited version of him.
- “He was a nihilist.” He diagnosed nihilism in order to overcome it.
- “The will to power means wanting to dominate others.” Mostly it means the drive of living things to grow, express and master themselves. The artist and the ascetic show it as much as the conqueror.
- “He wanted everyone to be an Übermensch.” He was frankly elitist and doubted most people wanted the burden.
- “He’s easy to quote, so he’s easy to understand.” The aphorisms are bait. He wrote in masks, irony and experiments; read whole books, not fridge magnets.
Connections
- Ethics — the morality Nietzsche is attacking, and the alternatives he left standing.
- Philosophers to Study — where he sits in the line from the Greeks to the moderns.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein and Richard Rorty — later thinkers who, like Nietzsche, doubted that philosophy could find a God’s-eye view.
- Jordan B Peterson — leans heavily on Nietzsche’s warning about nihilism.
- Thales of Miletos — Nietzsche loved the pre-Socratics and wrote Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks about them.