Friedrich Nietzsche
1844–1900, Prussia, Basel and Turin
Post-Kantian, genealogical critique
Our morality has a history, and it was not written by the strong.
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”
The life
Nietzsche was the son of a Lutheran pastor who died when he was four. He was a brilliant classicist, appointed professor of philology at Basel at twenty-four, before finishing his doctorate.
His early friendship with Wagner was intense and ended badly; he came to see Wagner's later work as exactly the decadent nationalism he was diagnosing. Chronic illness, migraines, vomiting and failing eyesight, forced him to resign in 1879. He spent the next decade moving between boarding houses in Sils-Maria, Nice, Genoa and Turin, writing almost everything he is known for.
In January 1889, in Turin, he collapsed in the street. He spent his last eleven years incapacitated, cared for first by his mother and then by his sister Elisabeth, an antisemite who took control of his manuscripts and edited them into shapes he would have detested.
What shaped the ideas
The nineteenth century had quietly stopped believing while keeping the moral furniture that belief had supported. Nietzsche's question is what happens when the foundation goes and the building is still standing: which values were only ever propped up, and what replaces them?
As a philologist he had a distinctive tool. He read moral concepts the way he read texts, tracing the history of words like "good" and "bad" and finding that their meanings had been inverted at some point, by someone, for reasons.
Core arguments
- 01
The death of God
The collapse of belief removes the foundation of European values, and we have not noticed.
Christian morality was underwritten by a divine guarantor. Remove that and the values do not automatically survive, but people continue asserting them out of habit. The madman who announces it is mocked, then says he has come too early: the deed is done but the news has not arrived.
- 02
Master and slave morality
Our moral vocabulary is the product of an inversion carried out by the powerless.
An older aristocratic scheme called its own traits good and everything else bad, without much interest in the latter. A later scheme, born of resentment toward the powerful, called them evil first and derived its own goodness from that opposition. Humility, meekness and patience become virtues, which is what you would expect if the values were designed by those who had no choice about possessing them.
- 03
Genealogy as method
Tracing where a value came from tests its authority.
Values present themselves as timeless. Showing that a concept had a different meaning, arose in specific conditions and served specific interests does not by itself refute it, but it removes the appearance of necessity and forces the question of whether it still serves life.
- 04
Eternal recurrence
Would you accept your life repeated identically, forever?
It functions as a test rather than a cosmology. If the thought crushes you, you are living a life you do not affirm. If you could greet it with joy, you are. It sets the highest possible bar for the question of whether you are actually saying yes to your existence.
Commonly got wrong
- The Nazi association is largely his sister's construction. She assembled The Will to Power from discarded notes and courted the regime. Nietzsche attacked antisemitism and German nationalism repeatedly and broke with Wagner partly over it.
- "God is dead" is not a triumphant slogan. It is spoken by a madman, greeted with laughter, and described as a catastrophe whose consequences have not yet been understood.
- The Übermensch is not a master race or a superior type of person to be bred. It is a figure for someone capable of creating values after the old ones have failed, and Nietzsche is deliberately vague about it.
- Will to power is not primarily political ambition. It is proposed as a basic drive toward growth and mastery, including self-mastery, and the ascetic priest is one of its most extreme expressions.
Works
The Birth of Tragedy 1872
Apollonian and Dionysian. Ruined his reputation among classicists.
The Gay Science 1882
Contains the death of God and the first statement of eternal recurrence.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra 1883–85
His most famous and least argumentative book. Written as scripture, and easy to misread.
Beyond Good and Evil 1886
The clearest statement of the critique of morality and of philosophers' hidden motives.
On the Genealogy of Morality 1887
Three essays, sustained and systematic. The best single book to argue with.
On the Genealogy of Morality, first essay. It is an argument with a structure you can follow and object to, unlike Zarathustra.
Why they still get taught
He supplied the method of suspicion that runs through Freud, Foucault and most modern critical theory: ask what a value is doing and whom it serves. Whether you find him liberating or dangerous, the questions have not gone away.
Chapters
- 'God Is Dead', and What Follows · Freedom & Meaning
- Why We Watch Suffering · The Sense of Beauty