Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche stands among the most provocative, most misread, and most enduringly influential thinkers in the history of Western thought. A philologist by training and a philosopher by vocation, he produced in barely two decades of working life a body of writing that overturned the assumptions on which European morality, religion, and metaphysics had rested for two thousand years. He announced the death of God, diagnosed the creeping sickness of nihilism, called for a revaluation of all values, and imagined a humanity capable of affirming life in its entirety, suffering and all. He did this in a prose of astonishing power, by turns lyrical, savage, ironic, and tender, that has no real precedent in the philosophical tradition and few imitators worthy of the name. He wrote, as he himself put it, with blood, and he asked to be read slowly.

For most of his productive life Nietzsche was almost entirely unread. He published his books at his own expense or saw them ignored by reviewers, sold them in editions of a few hundred copies, and addressed, by his own admission, an audience that did not yet exist. Then, in January 1889, at the age of forty-four, his mind collapsed. He spent the final eleven years of his life in a condition of mental darkness, cared for first by his mother and then by his sister, while his reputation, untended by him, swelled into a continental and then a global phenomenon. By the time he died in 1900 he was famous. Within a generation he had become one of the defining presences of the modern intellectual landscape, claimed and disowned, quoted and distorted, by movements he would have detested and by thinkers who owed him more than they always admitted.

The history of Nietzsche's reception is itself a cautionary tale about what happens to a philosophy when its author can no longer defend it. His writings were edited, arranged, and selectively promoted by his sister Elisabeth, whose own politics drew her toward German nationalism and antisemitism, the very tendencies her brother had condemned with some of his fiercest scorn. For decades his name was entangled with a political catastrophe he did nothing to cause and would have abhorred. Only in the second half of the twentieth century did patient scholarship begin to disentangle the genuine Nietzsche from the legend, restoring to view a thinker far stranger, more careful, and more humane than either his admirers or his enemies had supposed. This account follows the life that produced the work: a life of frail health, deep solitude, broken friendships, and an almost unbearable intensity of inner experience, lived out in boarding houses and mountain villages across Switzerland and Italy by a man who described himself as dynamite.

Early Life and Family Origins

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on the fifteenth of October, 1844, in the small village of Röcken, in the Prussian Province of Saxony, a flat agricultural country of beet fields and church spires not far from the city of Leipzig. The date was significant to the family in a way that would later seem to Nietzsche faintly absurd. The fifteenth of October was the birthday of the reigning king of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm the Fourth, and the infant was named in the monarch's honor. His father liked to say that the boy had been born on a royal day. Nietzsche, in his maturity, took a wry pleasure in the coincidence and an equal pleasure in shedding the patriotic associations it carried.

The household into which he was born was a Lutheran parsonage, and the Lutheran ministry ran deep on both sides of his family. His father, Carl Ludwig Nietzsche, was the pastor of Röcken and of two neighboring villages, a cultivated and gentle man, devoted to music, who had been appointed to the living through the patronage of the Prussian crown. Carl Ludwig had himself been born in 1813, the son of a clergyman, and the line of pastors stretched back through several generations. Nietzsche's mother, Franziska Oehler, was likewise the daughter of a country parson, from the nearby village of Pobles. She had married Carl Ludwig in 1843, when she was barely seventeen years old, and she brought to the marriage a simple, sincere, and unquestioning Protestant piety that she would carry, unchanged, to the end of her long life.

It is one of the recurring ironies of Nietzsche's biography that the most formidable critic of Christianity that the modern world has produced grew up immersed in the gentlest and most devout form of Protestant family life. The young Friedrich was a pious child, so grave and so given to scripture that schoolfellows are said to have nicknamed him the little pastor. He could recite biblical passages and hymns with an emotion that brought listeners to tears. Religion was not, for the boy, an external imposition but the very air of the household, and his eventual repudiation of it was never the careless rebellion of someone to whom faith had meant little. It was, rather, the hard-won conclusion of someone who had known religion from the inside, who understood its consolations and its psychology with intimate precision, and who broke from it slowly, painfully, and at lasting personal cost.