Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844–1900)

Friedrich Nietzsche has emerged as perhaps the most influential thinker of the recent past. To a significant degree, this is due to the fact that he took time seriously in terms of both cosmology and ethics. Nietzsche offered a dynamic world-view that rejected the entrenched Aristotelian philosophy and Thomistic theology of Western civilization. His provocative writings contained scathing criticisms of modern European culture, [Page 917]particularly its religious beliefs and social morals (all decadent values, as he saw them).

Nietzsche spent his formative years in Rocken and Naumburg, Germany, where he developed a lasting interest in music and literature. At universities, his academic concerns shifted from classical philology to ancient philosophy. He became fascinated with the early culture of Greece, especially the fundamental idea of Heraclitus, which maintained the cyclical flux of all reality. Furthermore, Nietzsche stressed the necessary value of feelings and emotions (over the use of reason) for human creativity and fulfillment. His own emerging ideas were greatly influenced by the seminal writings of the philosophers Ludwig Feuerbach and Arthur Schopenhauer.

After his studies at Bonn and Leipzig, Nietzsche became a professor at the University of Basel, Switzerland. Due to chronic illnesses, he left the university after 10 years and became a solitary wanderer in the mountains of southern Europe. The following years gave the philosopher free time to rigorously reflect on the place of our species within both Earth history and sociocultural development. He wrote a series of ingenious books, his masterpiece being the four-part poetic work Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883–1885).

Over time, Nietzsche wrote blistering criticisms of Christianity that dismissed all the basic beliefs of traditional theism. He boldly proclaimed that “God is dead!”—guaranteeing himself a permanent place in Western thought. He remained an unabashed atheist his entire life.

It was Charles Darwin the scientist who awoke Friedrich Nietzsche the philosopher from his dogmatic slumber. Although he benefited from reading Darwin's writings on evolution, Nietzsche's own interpretation of organic evolution offered startling philosophical speculations that were far beyond the views of his scientific naturalist contemporaries. The Darwinian struggle for survival (existence) became the Nietzschean struggle for power (creativity). The iconoclastic Nietzsche also called for a rigorous réévaluation of all values, because he saw religion, democracy, communism, and utilitarianism promoting values that were reducing human beings to a collective mediocrity. Consequently, he stressed the value of those superior individuals who are unencumbered by the vacuous ideas and false beliefs of the inferior masses.

One of Nietzsche's most important ideas, that of eternal return, is the theory that there is infinite time and a finite number of events, and eventually all events will recur again and again

For Nietzsche, dynamic reality is essentially the will to power. As such, all the objects of this evolving universe are composed of vital energy as units of force. This is a strictly naturalistic stance that gives no credence to philosophical idealism or theological spiritualism. Throughout time, this will to power continuously creates all those objects that fill this evolving universe. If a steadfast observer with a high-powered telescope had witnessed, over billions of years, organic evolution on Earth from the surface of our moon (the process rapidly accelerated like a time-lapse film), then he or she would have experienced life forms exploding into an astonishing diversity of plant and animal species: One-celled organisms are followed by multicellular life forms, invertebrates precede vertebrates, and fossil apes give rise to human beings. Briefly, the creating universe includes creative evolution.

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