Since the dawn of the 20th century, the philosophy of Nietzsche has had great intellectual and political influence around the world. Nietzsche applied himself to such topics as morality, religion, epistemology, poetry, ontology, and social criticism.
Although Nietzsche has famously been misrepresented as a predecessor to Nazism, he criticized anti-Semitism, pan-Germanism and, to a lesser extent, nationalism.
At the beginning of 1888, Brandes delivered in Copenhagen one of the first lectures on Nietzsche's philosophy.
Nietzsche’s great influence is due not only to his originality but also to the fact that he was one of the German language ’s most-brilliant prose writers.
Nietzsche’s relativism has had a powerful influence on two of the most important modern French Deconstructionist philosophers, Jacques Derrida (b. 1930) and Michel Foucault (1926-1984). ( Summary of a 1971 Foucault essay relating to Nietzsche ). Oddly enough, he has also been a powerful influence on certain theologians, ...
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) expressed his version of Nietzsche’s struggle for power in his play Man and Superman, and more than one character in the plays of Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953) is under Nietzsche’s spell.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was notoriously unread and uninfluential during his own lifetime, and his works suffered considerable distortion in the hands of his sister Elisabeth, who managed his literary estate and twisted his philosophy into a set of ideas supporting Hitler and Nazism ...
Like many other poets, William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) combined an admiration for Blake with interest in Nietzsche.
His celebration of mortal life as a sort of religion is extremely Nietzschean. He was also became lover of Lou Andreas-Salomé, a woman who ten years earlier Nietzsche loved unrequitedly.
The two grandfathers of modern psychology, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and Carl Jung (1875-1961), both had a deep admiration for Nietzsche and credited him with many insights into the human character.
Besides Kanzantzakis, many novelists have drawn on Nietzsche. Thomas Mann (1875-1955) wrote repeatedly about him and his characters are often engaged in struggles to define their ideas in a world in which old philosophies are decaying, like Nietzsche, torn between romanticism and rationalism (notably in The Magic Mountain ). Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) similarly explored the necessity for the individuals to overcome their social training and traditional ideas to seek their own way ( Steppenwolf and The Glass Bead Game ).
Nietzsche conceptualizes this with the famous statement "God is dead", which first appeared in his work in section 108 of The Gay Science, again in section 125 with the parable of "The Madman", and even more famously in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Nietzsche applied himself to such topics as morality, religion, epistemology, psychology, ontology, and social criticism. Because of Nietzsche's evocative style and his often outrageous claims, his philosophy generates passionate reactions running from love to disgust.
The work of Philipp Mainländer had an important impact on Nietzsche's intellectual development and made him distance himself from the philosophy of Schopenhauer. In Mainländer's 200 pages long criticism of Schopenhauer's philosophy, Mainländer argues against a metaphysical will behind the world, and argues instead for a real multiplicity of wills that struggle with each other.
The statement, typically placed in quotation marks, accentuated the crisis that Nietzsche argued that Western culture must face and transcend in the wake of the irreparable dissolution of its traditional foundations, moored largely in classical Greek philosophy and Christianity.
Main article: God is dead. Nietzsche saw nihilism as the outcome of repeated frustrations in the search for the meaning of religion. He diagnosed nihilism as a latent presence within the very foundations of European culture and saw it as a necessary and approaching destiny.
Nietzsche also criticized Christianity for demonizing flourishing in life, and glorifying living an apathetic life. By the 19th century, Nietzsche concludes, Christianity had become so worldly as to parody itself—a total inversion of a world view which was, in the beginning, nihilistic, thus implying the "death of God".
In aphorisms 55 and 56 of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche talks about the ladder of religious cruelty that suggests how Nihilism emerged from the intellectual conscience of Christianity. Nihilism is sacrificing the meaning "God" brings into our lives, for "matter and motion", physics, "objective truth.".
Because his father had worked for the state (as a pastor) the now-fatherless Nietzsche was offered a scholarship to study at the internationally recognized Schulpforta (the claim that Nietzsche was admitted on the strength of his academic competence has been debunked: his grades were not near the top of the class).
Nietzsche's 1870 projected doctoral thesis, "Contribution toward the Study and the Critique of the Sources of Diogenes Laertius" ("Beiträge zur Quellenkunde und Kritik des Laertius Diogenes"), examined the origins of the ideas of Diogenes Laërtius.
Lou Salomé, Paul Rée and Nietzsche traveled through Italy in 1882, planning to establish an educational commune together, but the friendship disintegrated in late 1882 due to complications from Rée's and Nietzsche's mutual romantic interest in Lou Andreas-Salomé.
He was only 24 years old and had neither completed his doctorate nor received a teaching certificate (" habilitation ").
However, in March 1868, while jumping into the saddle of his horse, Nietzsche struck his chest against the pommel and tore two muscles in his left side, leaving him exhausted and unable to walk for months. Consequently, he turned his attention to his studies again, completing them in 1868.
His end-of-semester exams in March 1864 showed a 1 in Religion and German; a 2a in Greek and Latin; a 2b in French, History, and Physics; and a "lackluster" 3 in Hebrew and Mathematics. While at Schulpforta, Nietzsche pursued subjects that were considered unbecoming.
Nietzsche stood at the beginning of his most productive period. Beginning with Human, All Too Human in 1878, Nietzsche published one book or major section of a book each year until 1888, his last year of writing; that year, he completed five. In 1882, Nietzsche published the first part of The Gay Science.
It escalated with his death with the misrepresentation of his work by his opportunistic sister Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche who edited his works to support her German nationalist views. To be clear, Nietzsche was critical of nationalism. In fact, he was critical of the very idea of governments in general.
Friedrich Nietzsche was a 19th century philosopher who exerted a massive influence on the path of academic thought that arguably shaped the late-modern and postmodern eras. Nietzsche is unique in that he doesn't align to any philosophical tradition. His ideas are so foundational that it is common for his philosophy to be used as a basis ...
Nietzsche argues that their are two types of morality: master and slave. Master morality values pride and power. This evaluates actions based on whether they are good or evil. Nietzsche views this as the morality of the strong-willed. In other words, he views this in a positive light.
the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism ... ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, 1887. Nihilism is the philosophy that life is meaningless. Nietzsche views this as a threat to humankind which he equates to a "will to nothingness" and compares with an animal-like state of being.
In the absence of religion, Nietzsche searches for a meaning to life and comes up with the idea of a will to power. In modern parlance, this could be described as the drive to achieve self-fulfillment. Nietzsche leaves this somewhat open-ended but also tends to portray this as a warrior-hero pursuit of what is good.
Liberalism: in other words, herd-animalization. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 1888. Nietzsche views freedom as the ability to pursue will to power. He views liberalism and the liberal state as a threat to freedom that forces people into a mediocre herd.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche , On the Genealogy of Morality, 1887.