Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844–1900)

A German philosopher and poet, Friedrich Nietzsche has been called, among other things, the wellspring of the 20th century. Many artists claimed him as an influence, including James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, and Herman Hesse, along with various surrealists, cubists, and modernists. He was also claimed as an influence by a variety of thinkers, including psychologists such as Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, and Wilhelm Reich, Marxists such as Theodor Adorno, Nazis such as Alfred Baumler and the philosopher Martin Heidegger, existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre, postmodernists, feminists, the phenomenologist Max Scheler, the neoconservative Leo Strauss, and some analytic philosophers. Interpretations of his thought vary as wildly as the cross-purposes behind them. However, almost all interpreters agree that his biography is important to understanding the growth and gist of his thought, making him one of the few eminent philosophers in the West whose life matters to his influential readers.

Nietzsche was trained as a philologist. Although he is remembered primarily as a philosopher and writer, a few of his philological innovations have become standard fare among classicists, including his speculations about the pronunciation of ancient Greek vowels. While still a professor of classics, however, his interests turned to philosophy. He sought but failed to attain a professorship in philosophy. He published essays on such topics as “The Use and Abuse of History for Life,” and “Schopenhauer as Educator.” He also brought out his first two collections of philosophical aphorisms. After eventually leaving the university, he was able to focus all of his energy on philosophy. Three more collections of aphorisms appeared [Page 448]over the next three years. Then, perhaps unexpectedly, Nietzsche spent two years on four long poems, these being the four books, originally published separately, that make up Thus Spoke Zara-thustra. After that, more philosophical works appeared. Among these, Beyond Good and Evil and Toward a Genealogy of Morals have the greatest notoriety. The final year of his career was his most productive, yielding five separate though short works, including an autobiography.

Early in his 10-year professorship, Nietzsche became a close friend of the most celebrated artist of his era, Richard Wagner, and his eventual wife, Cosima. At that time Cosima, illegitimate daughter of composer Franz Liszt, was married to another man while living adulterously and having children with Wagner in Switzerland. Nietzsche admired their open contempt for the repressive morality of the times. He was also deeply impressed by Wagner. He spent half of his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, discussing Wagner. Later he contracted with a group of Wagner's followers to publish an essay, Wagner at Bayreuth, in association with the festival that occasioned the first ever performance of Wagner's epic Ring cycle. At or around the time of the festival, Nietzsche discovered that his heart was no longer with Wagner, and eventually that it was squarely set against him. They ceased to communicate. However, Wagner is discussed in all but a few of Nietzsche's books, and he is the primary topic of two pamphlet-length works from his final year, The Case of Wagner and Nietzsche Contra Wagner.

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