Friedrich Nietzsche was a nineteenth century philosopher who is most remembered for his
killer quotes and incredibly large mustache.
The main goal of his work was aimed to uncover the fact that there is no universal truth,
and that the human condition is in a constant state of overcoming our animalistic urges.
He came up with many amazing quotes that we still use to this very day, including “What
doesn’t kill me makes me stronger”, and “God is dead”.
While he is often misunderstood, and his work has been used for the justification of evil
over the past hundred years, the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche truly has changed the
way people live in the 21st Century.
Today, we’re going to talk about his life, philosophy, and legacy.
Early Life and Influences to His Philosophy Friedrich Nietzsche was born on October 15th,
1844 in Saxony, Prussia, which is now apart of modern-day Germany.
He just so happened to be born on the same birthday as King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, which
is why his parents decided to name him after their ruler.
He grew up in a very strict Protestant family.
His father was a priest, and his grandfather published books defending Lutheranism.
His father contracted an excruciatingly painful brain disease that lasted for a year before
he died.
And in 1849, Friedreich's younger brother, Ludwig, died when he was only 2 years old.
By the time he started going to Kindergarten, Nietzsche had seen so much death and suffering
in his young life, he was already a very serious person.
He was nearsighted and got constant headaches from a condition called myopia, so he already
wore glasses as a young child.
He looked and acted like a tiny professor who was too grown-up for childish games.
Obviously, he wasn’t very popular with his classmates, and he didn’t make very many
friends.
Most of his childhood was spent surrounded by women.
His mother, grandmother, and two aunts all shared in the responsibilities of raising
him.
In 1956, Friedrich Nietzsche, his sister Elisabeth, and his mother moved to their own house in
Naumburg, Germany.
That house would become the place where he wrote his most important work, and the property
has been preserved today as a museum.
Nietzsche attended a Christian prep school, and later transferred to a boarding school.
He never got particularly good grades, but his father had a state job before he passed
away, which meant that he got a full scholarship to any college of his choice.
He chose to study theology and philosophy at Bonn University.
He originally wanted to become a priest, like his father.
After just two semesters, he realized that his personal beliefs were in direct conflict
with the theological curriculum, and he often got into arguments with his professors.
He had to transfer to The University of Leipzig, and he studied the ancient languages of Latin
and Greek, instead.
As a student, Nietzsche contracted syphilis from a prostitute at a brothel, which made
him physically weak and in constant pain for the rest of his life.
Syphilis is also known for causing people to fall into madness, which did happen to
him, eventually.
At that time, there wasn’t a cure for syphilis.
Today, it’s treated with penicillin, but that would not be invented until 1923, after
his death.
Nietzsche spent much of his free time listening to live performances of orchestras and operas.
The music was so beautiful, it helped him to forget about his pain.
He was particularly fascinated by the work of composer Richard Wagner, and he would pay
to see each new performance 3 or 4 times in a row.
He was completely inspired by the tragedy of the characters in Wagner’s operas, and
he eventually got to meet the composer.
They became very good friends, and Richard Wagner was like a father figure to Nietzsche.
When he was 24 years old, he worked as a full-time professor of languages at the University of
Basel.
He taught for several years, even though he claimed that he was not all that happy in
the classroom.
He decided to volunteer his time as an orderly at the hospital after school.
But he ended up contracting dysentery and diphtheria from the patients.
His health continued to decline so dramatically, he would sometimes end up bedridden for several
days straight.
He chose to retire from being a professor in his 30’s, and lived on a very modest
pension.
For Nietzsche, simply staying alive was a constant battle.
He spent so much time in bed with nothing to do, so he was always thinking about the
meaning of life and humanity.
This is when he began to write books on his philosophy.
The Crux of Nietzsche’s Philosophy Friedrich Nietzsche believed that there is
no absolute truth, and that people should not have blind faith in their church or political
leaders.
Today, this sounds like common sense, but, back in the 1800’s, people were raised that
there were absolute right and wrong answers, and nothing in-between.
By telling people to inquire rather than to just blindly accept something, he inspired
future generations to completely change the way we think.
One of his most famous quotes, “God is Dead” is used by Atheists everywhere, but it is
actually misunderstood, and taken out of context.
What he really said, was, “God is dead.
God remains dead.
And we have killed him.
How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?”
He wasn’t celebrating the death of God, though.
He was making a statement that more and more people were losing faith all the time, and
he believed that without Christianity, mankind didn’t know how to figure out right and
wrong.
Without the existence of religion, people often look up to their political leaders and
royal families with god-like reverence, instead.
He knew that people needed something else to take its place.
He wanted people to embrace the arts like music, literature, and theater, instead, and
that Shakespeare had just as much value to human morality as the Bible, without giving
away their ability to think for themselves.
He believed that rules of society were developed to keep people down, and maintain the status
quo.
For example, in Christianity, it is taught that people should be like Jesus Christ, and
not have a desire for material things.
Nietzsche believes that this is only taught to the poor to manipulate them to accept their
station in life.
If people are taught to feel shame for feeling envious of others and desiring more, they
may not try to achieve a higher status.
And, therefore, if they’re happy with less, they won’t cause a revolution against their
government to demand more.
Nietzsche tells us to own our selfish desires, and that the rules of society are something
that need to be overcome in order to get to the real truth of our lives.
Nietzsche believed that every individual person should be in the process of “selbst uberwindung”
or “self-overcoming”.
If we are envious of someone else, this is just a sign of what we really need in order
to become our true selves.
For example, if you feel envious of guys who look muscular, it’s a sign you should go
to the gym.
If you’re jealous of someone who is rich, you could find a job that makes more money...etcetera,
etcetera.
Everyone has their own dream, and if we refuse to acknowledge these desires, we’re only
going to make ourselves miserable.
And even if we fail to achieve our goals, at least we have the satisfaction of knowing
we tried.
Nietzsche said that if someone has succeeded in overcoming obstacles while also accepting
their failures with grace, they have become an “ubermensch” or “superman”.
He claimed that every man should aspire to become like this.
He said that most people are stuck in-between their animal instincts, and the “ubermensch”,
and there is a constant struggle between the two impulses.
He was one of the first people to come up with the concept that “ignorance is bliss”,
and that it’s easy to be happy as a human if you just accept the status quo.
He admits that the quest for knowledge and to become the ubermensch might make him miserable
along the way, but it was a life he chose to pursue, nonetheless.
Many people have read his concept of “ubermensch” and misinterpreted it as the ability to become
someone who is superior to the rest of humanity.
Others, like the Nazis, would see this as proof that certain races were more civilized,
and therefore, more human than others.
Personal Life
Even though Friedrich Nietzsche is a household name today, his work would not be translated
into other languages until the 1890’s, and by that point, he was already too sick to
enjoy his new popularity.
So, while his philosophy was well-known in Germany, he wasn’t exactly becoming rich
and famous.
In fact, his philosophy made him very unpopular, and it ruined his friendship with Richard
Wagner, who thought he was going mad.
Nietzsche decided to isolate himself in the Swiss Alps, where he could spend a lot of
time in nature.
He often went on long walks thinking of nothing but philosophy, only to go home and write
his new ideas for his next book.
He wrote several volumes of his ideas, and sometimes got letters in the mail from fellow
philosophers and people who wanted to be his friend.
He met a psychoanalyst named Lou Andreas-Salomé.
When she read Nietzsche’s work, she felt that his philosophy perfectly aligned with
everything she had already been thinking.
She was only 20 years old at that time, but Nietzsche considered her to be his protege.
Lou was trying to challenge the norms of society by experimenting to see if men and women can
truly be friends without sex getting in the way.
In 1882, Nietzsche decided to go on a year-long vacation with Italy with Lou Andreas-Salomé,
and their mutual friend, Paul Rée, who was also a philosopher.
The three friends wanted to buy an old monastery and start an academic commune together so
that they could live in a society that was only filled with other like-minded intellectuals.
Friedrich Nietzsche was excited, and hoped that he could finally have a group of friends
who understood him, but his family was totally against it.
His sister, Elisabeth, was always writing him letters telling him to stop trying to
make a cult.
There was a bit of a love triangle, because Friedrich and Paul were both in love with
Lou, and they were competing to win her heart.
Paul proposed to her first, but she rejected him, saying that she liked him enough for
them to live together, but more like “brother and sister”.
She claimed that sex got in the way of thinking clearly, and she used Nietzsche’s own philosophy,
saying said that society demands that women get married, but she personally wished to
remain celibate and focus on her academic work.
Even though he agreed to be friends, Friedrich Nietzsche was still only human, and the more
he got to know her, the more he was falling in love.
After all, Lou seemed to be the only woman on the planet who completely understood his
life’s work.
He proposed to her, but she put him in the friend zone, just like Paul Ree.
In her defense, Nietzsche did have syphilis, and marrying him would have meant that she
would have contracted the disease, as well.
But she continued to live with him- flirting, teasing, and leading him on.
He remained hopeful that she would eventually come around, and he proposed to her two more
times.
No amount of intellectual reasoning could overcome his human desire, and this situation
became way too uncomfortable for the three of them.
His dream of starting a commune never happened, and Lou and Paul rode away on their horse-drawn
carriage, leaving Friedrich behind.
It’s probably best that he got out of that situation, though, because she later broke
up with Paul Ree and married a man named Friedrich Carl Andreas.
They apparently remained celibate throughout the entire course of their marriage.
She actually did have sexual affairs, though, which is just a bit hypocritical.
She also had an emotional affair with none other than Sigmund Freud.
It turns out that all of this was one big experiment to her, and in 1910, she published
a book called The Erotic, where we learn that she spent most of her life trying to analyze
and document the differences between men and women when it came to sex.
Nietzsche’s Final Days The relationship with Lou Andreas-Salomé
completely traumatized Friedrich Nietzsche, and he never got married.
He often wrote about love, and how it can make the most logical person feel like they’re
going crazy.
Instead of writing about his own life, Nietzsche expressed his feelings in a book called Thus
Spoke Zarathustra, about a man who isolated himself in the mountains to find all of the
wisdom in the world, but he could not find any disciples to listen to him or follow him.
So, he becomes one of the most lonely men in the world.
Since he was rejecting Christianity, Nietzsche knew that mankind needed some kind of moral
compass to live by.
So he wrote Beyond Good and Evil, and addressed all of the issues of what makes something
good or bad.
In 1888, he could feel his mind and body betraying him.
His last book was called The AntiChrist, where he expressed his “transvaluation of all
values”, where he was trying to come up with a set of rules for morality that could
replace Christianity.
He saw himself as a martyr who was making a sacrifice for the human race.
In 1889, he was only 44 years old, and he had a nervous breakdown.
He was triggered into hysteria when he was walking in the street of Turin, Italy, and
he saw a man beating his horse with a whip.
He ran to the horse, hugging its neck to protect it.
He was sobbing, and saying, “I understand you.”
His landlord, David Fino, had to usher him out of the street, and get him back to his
room.
He spent the next two days laying on the couch in a catatonic state, so Fino arranged for
him to get home to Basel, Germany.
Even though they had a falling out, Richard Wagner and his wife were still his true friends.
They were the ones to help him get into a mental hospital.
During one of the last moments where he was responsive, he started to sketch a picture
of a man and a woman hugging one another in a long embrace, before he slipped into a permanent
catatonic state.
It was almost as if he was trying to say that all of his philosophical work was nothing
without someone to share it with, and that at the end of his life, love was the one thing
he truly wanted more than anything else.
At the hospital, he was diagnosed with paralytic dementia, which was a direct result of his
battle with syphilis for over 20 years.
But many people believe that the pressure he put on himself to find the answer to morality
without God, and to unravel the inner workings of the human condition is what ultimately
made him go crazy.
He slipped into madness, and was unresponsive when people tried to speak to him.
He eventually died in the year 1900.
The Dangers of Studying Nietzsche Soon after his death, Friedrich Nietzsche’s
work was being translated into multiple languages, and it began to inspire people around the
world.
However, many people would read his work and completely misunderstand what he was trying
to say.
Even his sister, Elisabeth, was a pseudo-Nazi, and later re-published a second edition of
his books.
She rewrote certain sections of his work to glorify the German race as being superior
to the rest of the world.
Because of this, Nietzsche has been blamed for starting not just one, but two world wars.
Before World War I, even priests were preaching Nietzsche’s philosophy at their pulpits,
relating it to their own countries.
This caused a lot of national pride, especially in Germany.
Adolf Hitler became a fan of Nietzsche, and he took this as a sign that Germans were far
more evolved than the rest of the human race.
During the rise of the Third Reich in the 1930’s, fascists often quoted Nietzsche,
especially with his idea of the “ubermensch”.
They wanted to make an entire race of the supermen.
Nietzsche’s sister welcomed Adolf Hitler to the museum, where they posed together for
a photograph next to the bust of Friedrich Nietzsche.
Even today, many critics of Nietzsche’s work consider his books to be too dangerous
for young people to read.
Since his main philosophy is to question everything, this can often manifest in acts of rebellion
in teenagers.
After all, if they question their teachers, parents, and government, they are more likely
to lash out.
In the 1924, this happened in the case of Leopold and Loeb.
They were two college students from Chicago who thought that they were so much smarter
than everyone else, and that they were the example of the “ubermensch” Nietzsche
was writing about.
They believed that they could commit the “perfect crime”.
So, they murdered a 14-year old boy.
Their defense lawyer cited Nietzsche as the reason why they committed murder.
Yes, this is a ridiculous excuse, because plenty of people read Nietzsche, and they
don’t become serial killers.
But the jury actually bought it, and the young men got away with murder, because they considered
his philosophy be just that dangerous.
Despite his criticisms, civilization of the 20th and 21st century were completely changed
by Nietzsche's teachings, and they continue on to this day.
Now, it is very normal to think critically and question the world around us, and it is
often the basis of liberal arts education.
And for those of us who do not go to church, we tend to learn about right and wrong from
what we see on TV and in the movies.
Whether we realize it or not, we are living in a very Nietzsche world.
It’s just a shame he didn’t live to see it.