Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (October 15, 1844 – August 25, 1900) is a German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist.

He writes critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy, and science, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony, and aphorism.

Nietzsche's key ideas include the "death of God", the Übermensch, the eternal recurrence, the Apollonian and Dionysian dichotomy, perspectivism, and the will to power.

Central to his philosophy is the idea of "life-affirmation", which involves questioning of all doctrines that drain life's expansive energies, however socially prevalent and radical those views might be.

His influence remains substantial within philosophy, notably in existentialism, post-modernism, and post-structuralism, as well as outside it.

His radical questioning of the value and objectivity of truth has been the focus of extensive commentary, especially in the continental tradition.

Nietzsche begins his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy.

In 1869, at the age of twenty-four, he is appointed to the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel (the youngest individual to have held this position), but resigns in the summer of 1879 due to health problems that plague him most of his life.

At the age of forty-five in 1889, he suffers a collapse and a complete loss of his mental faculties.

The breakdown had been ascribed to atypical general paralysis attributed to tertiary syphilis, but this diagnosis has since come into question.

He lives his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897, then under the care of his sister until his death in 1900.

His sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who acts as curator and editor of Nietzsche's manuscripts during his illness, is married to a prominent German nationalist and Judeophobe Bernhard Förster, and she reworks some of Nietzsche's unpublished writings to fit her husband's ideology, often in ways contrary to Nietzsche's opinions, which are strongly and explicitly opposed to anti-Jewish sentiments and nationalism.

Through Förster-Nietzsche's editions, Nietzsche's name becomes associated with German militarism and Nazism, but twentieth century scholars have worked hard to counteract the abuse of Nietzsche's philosophy by this ideology and rediscover the original writings of Nietzsche, unedited by his sister.

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