Philosophy And Life Of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

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Philosophy and Life of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Nietzsche was born in Rocken (Saxony), Germany, on October 15, 1844. At age four, he lost his father, a Lutheran minister. Nietzsche spent his childhood in Naumburg surrounded by five females: a sister, mother, paternal grandmother, and two maiden aunts. After attending the prestigious boarding school at Pforta ,Nietzsche studied classical philology at Bonn and Liepzig. In May 1869, at the age of 24, the brilliant scholar was awarded his doctorate without thesis or examination so that he could accept a professorship at the University of Basel, Switzerland. This was in part due to a recommendation from Friedrich Ritschl, a professor at Liepzig.

“However many young talents I have seen develop under my eyes for thirty-nine years now, never yet have I known a young man, or tried to help one along in my fields as best I could, who is mature as early and as young as this Nietzsche. His museum articles he wrote in the second and third year of his triennium. He is the first from whom I have ever accepted any contribution at all the while he was still a student. If-God -Grant he lives long enough, I prophesy that he will one day stand in the front rank of German Philology. He is now twenty-four years old: strong, vigorous, healthy, courageous physically and morally, so constituted as to impress those of a similar nature. On top of that, he possesses the enviable gift of presenting ideas, talking freely, as calmly as he speaks skillfully and clearly. He is the idol and, without wishing it, the leader of the whole younger generation of philologists here in Liepzig who-and they are rather numerous-cannot wait to hear him lecture. You will say, I describe phenomenon. Well, that is just what he is-and at the same time pleasant and modest. Also a gifted musician, which is irrelevant here.”(The Portable Nietzsche,7)

As a student, Nietzsche had been especially influenced by Friedrich A. Lange’s The History of materialism and Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation and Richard Wagner’s music.Although Later Nietzsche came to reject pessimism, dualism, idealism, and materialism as well as racism, anarchism, spiritualism, and mysticism: moeover Nietzsche also came to reject the ideas, ideologies and beliefs of some of the most influential thinkers in the history of western thought: Plato, Aristotle, St. Paul, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibiniz, Kanlt, Hegel and even Marx, (A Critical Life, 14).

After ten years a t Basel, Nietzsche resigned from the university due to shattered health and then spent the following decade wandering alone through Italy and Switzerland. Despite his inadequate pension and chronic illness along with poor eyesight and chronic depression, the always suffering and utterly detached thinker was able to write ten ingenious books filled with new insights.

Essentially a loner , Nietzsche spent his mature years reflecting upon our species within a universe utterly indifferent to the origin, existence, and destiny of human kind. For him the cosmos have no divine purpose or goal.

Nietzsche’s intellectual development passed through three major stages: Original insights into Greek culture and a love for music ( operas of Richard Wagner) through a brutal criticism of western values (particularly democracy, socialism, communism, nationalism, utilitarianism, and Christianity) to the presentation of his distinctive philosophy of overcoming.

Nietzsche’s own counter-culture interpretation of classical Greek culture made a crucial distinction between the contrasting but mixed rational and irrational components involved in birth and death of ancient tragedy. In fact, Nietzsche saw Wagner’s early music as a revival of the old Greek tragedies, reenacted in modern music dramas.

Disenchanted by Wagner’s strict nationalism, stifling egoism and his religiously oppressive theatric Ring Des Nibulungen, Nietzsche turned away from the composer. Nietzsche ended their complex friendship in May of 1878. Freing the solitary Nietzsche to expand his creative theories.

Nietzsche rejected the theory of absolute truth and fixed values, preferring to look at the world within his own framework, which acknowledges that a multiplicity of perspectivism, suggesting that a multiplicity of ways of viewing reality are necessary. For example, Nietzsche saw the evolution of morality advancing from the premoral ape, through the moral human being with its mask of culture, to the ultra-moral overman yet to come.

Nietzsche held that Christianity is responsible for the entrenched bad conscience in the decadent European society and culture. Since our species is the only evaluating animal, Nietzsche called for a rigorous reevaluation of all values. He investigated fear, guilt, pity, friendship, resentment, suffering, and compassion. Nietzsche said that our species must grow by overcoming the struggles and sufferings within human exisitence. His own catigorial imperative beyond good and evil is a duty to eternal reoccurrence: So act that you will be able to act in just that manner an infinite number of times. In short his theory maintains that once is forever! One faces the supreme to make a decision for all eternity; a decision that has already been made an infinite number of times, but is still unknown to most of human kind.

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