Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche (Röcken, 1844 – Weimar, 1900) was a German philosopher who began his career as a classical philologist. His writing ranges over the critique of culture, religion and morality, as well as aesthetics, music, history and Greek tragedy. Together with Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, he is often counted among the 'masters of suspicion', and his thought reshaped much of later philosophy.

He was born on 15 October 1844 in Röcken, near Leipzig, in the Prussian Province of Saxony. He was named after King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, whose forty-ninth birthday fell on the same day. His father, a Lutheran pastor, died in 1849, and the family moved to Naumburg. From 1858 to 1864 he attended the school at Schulpforta, where he received a rigorous grounding in Greek and Latin and began writing poems and short musical pieces. He started theology at Bonn but gave it up after one semester, turning to philology under Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl, whom he followed to Leipzig. In 1865 he came across Schopenhauer, whose work awakened his philosophical interests. A riding accident in 1868 kept him out of military service, and that same year he met Richard Wagner, whose friendship would shape the following years.

In 1869, at the age of twenty-four, he was appointed professor of classical philology at the University of Basel, before completing his formal studies. He gave up his German citizenship and, during the Franco-Prussian War, briefly served as a medical orderly. He caught diphtheria and dysentery, illnesses that damaged his health for the rest of his life. In Basel he befriended Franz Overbeck and the historian Jacob Burckhardt, and he was a frequent guest at the Wagners' home at Tribschen. In 1872 he published The Birth of Tragedy, which opposed the Apollonian, linked to form and appearance, to the Dionysian, linked to impulse and intoxication. His fellow philologists savaged it. Between 1873 and 1876 he published the four Untimely Meditations, which challenged the German culture of his day. His break with Wagner deepened after the Bayreuth Festival of 1876.

In 1879, worn down by illness, he resigned his chair. He then lived as an independent writer, moving between Switzerland, Italy and southern France in search of a climate that might ease his suffering. In these years he wrote Human, All Too Human, The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, developing his critique of Christian morality, the distinction between master and slave morality, the affirmation of life against nihilism, the will to power and eternal return. In 1889 he suffered a neurological collapse and spent his last years in the care of his mother and then his sister Elisabeth. After his death she edited his manuscripts to suit a nationalist and antisemitic agenda that he had opposed, distorting his reputation for decades. His influence is vast: Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and Bataille all drew on his work, which helped shape existentialism and post-structuralism.