He was born in Roecken, Prussia, southwest of Leipzig, on October 15, 1844. His father was a minister and from a long line of Lutheran ministers, but he died when Friedrich was only four. This left him to be brought up as the only boy in a household of women; a paternal grandmother, a mother, two aunts (his father's sisters) and his sister.
These women were very religious, one might say pious. It was, afterall, the Victorian ere in England. But this was Germany where most Christians were not only stiff and stuffy, they were also strong anti-semites. Friedrich, a small boy, pale and not very strong, was pampered and petted by these women. He was told not to play rough and get dirty like those other boys. He was told not to be dirty like those dirty Jews, and not to get hurt.
Of course Friedrich rebelled against this. It would show up later in his philosophy. He criticised the Christian values of meekness and servileness. He saw something evil in it, a sort of slave mentality that hates its masters. He advocated strength, will to power, overcoming one's self. Pain and tragedy were life affirming, not bad like those delicate females tried to tell him. It was Nietzsche who said, "That which doesn't kill me only makes me stronger."
Unfortunately, he never did become physically strong and atheletic. At the age of 23, he injured his chest from falling off a horse and was excused from his manditory military service. Three years later, in 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War, he served as a hospital attendant and saw some of the horrors of war.
He did acheive some success as a scholar. At 24 he was appointed Associate Professor at Basel. Leibpzig University granted him a Ph.D without requiring a dissertation, and he was appointed to professorship just before his service at the hospital for the Prussian army.
He had also read Schopenhauer's "The World as Will and Idea," which had an impact on him. Although he liked the dark flavor in this work, he would later criticize Schopenhauer for giving into the pessimism, for prasing the Christian and Buddhist values of meekness and sympathy.
He met Richard Wagner, with whom he initially had a great friendship. They shared interests in music and composing. Nietzsche, at first, admired Wagner's flamboyant personality. He thought this could be one of his models for the Ubermensch, the Superman, someone who could take the place of Jesus once Christianity is rejected. However, Wagner's rabid anti-semitism bothered Nietzsche, and the last straw was when Wagner composed a work called Pasifal, which praised Christian values of selflessness and servitude which so dusgusted Nietzsche. He turned his back on his former friend and walked away, never to speak with him again.
Nietzzsche began his most recognized masterpiece, "Thus Spake Zarathustra," in 1883. In it he developed the three themes of will to power, revaluation of values, and the doctrine of eternal recurence. All of life can be viewed as a will to power. It's a constant conflict in which only the strongest survive, as Darwin and Spencer indicated. To really flourish, however, one must overcome the conventions of the herd, the common men, one must become an Overman, a Superman. The Christian values of pity and meekness seek to destroy this will to power. But, this God who is supposedly behind such values is dead, no longer viable in the hearts and minds of intellegent people, so it's time now for a revaluation, a transvaluation, of values. The Overman is virtuous when he frees himself from belief in God, when he surpases those who live by false hopes and dreams.
The prologue of Zarathustra begins as follows:
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When Zarathustra was thirty years old, he left his home and the lake of his home, and went into the mountains. There he enjoyed his spirit and his solitude, and for ten years did not weary of it. But at last his heart changed, and rising one morning with the rosy dawn, he went before the sun, and spake thus unto it;
Thou great star! What would be thy happiness if thou hadst not those for who thou shinest!
For ten years hast thou climbed hither unto my cave: thou wouldst have wearied of thy light and of the journey, had it not been for me, mine eagle, and my serpent.
But we await thee every morning, took from thee thine overflow, and blessed thee for it.
Lo! I am weary of my wisdom, like the bee that hath gathered too much honey; I need hands outstretched to take it.
So, "Thus began Zarathustra's downgoing."
On his way, Zarathustra meets and old sage, a holy man, wandering in the forrest who remembers Zarathustra from before. They exchange words, and the holy man tells Zarathustra that the best way to help men is to stay away from them and pray. They part, and Zarathustra wonders if this old man has not yet heard that God is dead.
When he reaches the town, he announces, "I teach you the Superman. Man is something that has to be surpassed. What have ye done to surpass man?"
But the crowd at the busy market place doesn't seem to pay attention to him. Those who do mistaken him for an announcer for a tightrope walker who is trying to perform his act. Still, he continued:
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All beings hitherto have created something beyond themselves: and ye want to be the ebb of that great tide, and would rather go back to the beast than surpass man?
What is ape to man? A laughingstock, a thing of shame. And just the same shall man be to the superman: a laughingstock, a thing of shame.
Ye have made your way from the worm to man, and much within you is still worm. Once were ye apes, and even yet man is more of an ape than any of the apes.
Even the wisest among you is only a disharmony and hybrid of plant and phantom. But do I bid you become phantoms or plants?
Lo! I teach you the Superman!
The Superman is the meaning of the earth. let your will say: The Superman shall be the meaning of the earth!
I conjure you, my bretheren, remain true to the earth, and believe not those who speak unto you of superearthly hopes! Poisners are they, whether they know it or not.
Despisers of life are they, decaying ones and poisened ones themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so away with them!
Once blasphemy against God was the greatest blasphemy, but God died, and therewith also those blasphemers. To blaspheme the earth is now the dreadfulest sin, and to rate the heart of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth!
Once the soul looked contemptuously on the body, and then that contempt was the surpreme thing: the soul wished the body meager, ghastly, and famished. Thus it thought to escape from the body and the earth.
Oh, that soul was itself meager, ghastly and famished; and cruelty was the delight of that soul!
But ye, also, my brethren, tell me: What doth your body say aboput your soul? Is your soul not poverty and pollution and wretched self-complacency?
Verily, a poluuted stream is man. One must be a sea to receive a poluted stream without becoming impure.
Lo, I teach you the Superman: he is that sea; in him can your contempt be submerged.
Zarathustra continued talking but was interrupted by someone in the crowd who said, "Enough about the ropedancer. It's time now for us to see him."
The tightropewalker then begins his act.
Zarathustra compared man to a rope tied between animal and the Superman, and he kept on talking about how dangerous was the journey from one pole to the other. However, noticed that people were not really understanding him. He finally concluded that he was not the mouth for their ears. He would have to find some other audience. His message was not one that could be appreciated by a crowd.
Then, the tightrope walker, taking risks to please the crowd, fell. People in the market place ran around in disorder, but Zarathustra remained calm:
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Zarathustra, however, remained standing, and just beside him fell the body, badly injured and disfigured, but not yet dead. After a while consciousness returned to the shattered man, and he saw Zarathustra kneeling beside him. What art thou doing there?" said he at last. "I knew long ago that the devil would trip me up, Now he draggeth me to hell: wilt thou prevent him?"
"On mine honor, my friend," answered Zarathustra, "there is nothing of all that whereof thou speakest: there is no devil and no hell. Thy soul will be dead even sooner than thy body: fear, therefore, nothing any more!"
The man looked up distrustfully. "If thou speakest the truth," said he, "I lose nothing when I lose my life. I am not much more than an animal which hath been taught to dance by blows and scanty fare."
"Not at all," said Zarathustra, "thou hast made danger thy calling; therein there is nothing contemptible. Now thou perishest by thy calling: therefore will I bury thee with mine own hands."
When Zarathustra had said this the dying one did not reply further, but he moved his hand as if he sought the hand of Zarathustra in gratitude.
Also developed in this work is the theory of eternal return. If matter is finite, and time is infinite; then it seems only a matter of time before present configuations of matter must repeat themselves. This would mean that once we die, we return and live every experience again, infinitely. Is this plausible? Well, it has been, since Nietsche's time, mathematically disproven. If three wheels on a common axis are marked with three dots in a line, and then set to revolve at relative speeds of 1, 2, an 1/pi, the dots will never again line up.
In January of 1889, in Turin, Nietzsche observed a horse being beaten by its master. He intervened and hugged the abused horse compassionately. Then, he suffered a complete mental breakdown. This was the end of his productive life.
His old mother, the pious lady, took him back in, after all his tirades against religion and Christianity, and nursed him until her death a few years later. Then his sister, who married the leading anti-semite in Germany at that time, took care of him until his death in 1900.
Hitler and the Nazis tried to use some of Nietzsche's philosophy to justify their view of the superiority of a master race, but Nietzsche would not have been a Nazi. He criticized Jews only for what they had in common with Christians, who he thought were worse. He did not like anti-semites. That's part of what broke up his friendship with Wagner, and he hated his sister's husband. He even made disparging remarks about Germans, ranking them under the French and Italians. He did not like German nationalism, prefering European unification. His core beliefs were very much against what the Nazis believed.
Yes, Nietzsche was not a careful philosopher. Some of what he said was designed more to be provocative then accurate. He was a male chauvinist. He was opposed to socialism and democracy because of his prejudice against the common man, although some of us think he wasn't really an elitist. Perhaps, had he lived longer, he would have cleaned up some of his more careless, youthful statements. Still, he was a very deep person who influenced many people after him.
Personally, I can't believe Nietzsche's life hasn't been a major motion picture yet. It was more interesting than Zarathustra, his own epic.
This essay is not enough to completely capture everything that was Friedrich Nietzsche. One can devote a lifetime to studying this interesting man. I hope I've given some indication of how fascinating he was. One can find more information from the following link:
plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/
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