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.

Two further children followed Friedrich into the Röcken parsonage. A sister, Therese Elisabeth Alexandra, was born in July 1846, and she would become the single most consequential and most troubling figure of his private life. A brother, Ludwig Joseph, was born in February 1848. For a few years the family lived in modest contentment, the pastor tending his parishes and his music, the children growing up in the garden and rooms of the old parsonage. That contentment did not last.

In the late summer of 1848 Carl Ludwig Nietzsche began to suffer from a disorder of the brain. The symptoms worsened through the following months, bringing headaches, deteriorating sight, and episodes of incapacity. He died in July 1849, not yet thirty-six years old. The diagnosis recorded at the time, in the medical language of the period, was a softening of the brain. The exact nature of the illness has never been established with certainty, and it would later cast a long shadow over interpretations of Nietzsche's own collapse, since some who have studied his case have wondered whether father and son were carried off by a related hereditary condition. Friedrich was four years old when his father died. The loss marked him permanently. He remembered, or believed he remembered, the sound of the funeral bells of Röcken, and he wrote of the event throughout his life in tones of grief that never entirely faded.

Worse was to follow with terrible swiftness. In January 1850, only months after the father's death, the youngest child, Ludwig Joseph, died as well, not yet two years old. The boy Friedrich, by his own later account, dreamed beforehand of his father rising from the grave and returning to the church, and on waking learned that his little brother had died in the night and would be buried in his father's arms. Whatever one makes of the dream, the sequence of deaths left an indelible impression: a household of women and one surviving son, bereaved twice over within a single year, and an early, unforgettable acquaintance with mortality.

A Childhood in Naumburg

With the pastor dead, the family had no claim on the Röcken parsonage, which passed to Carl Ludwig's successor. In the spring of 1850 the bereaved household moved a short distance to the cathedral town of Naumburg an der Saale. There the young Friedrich grew up in a home composed entirely of women: his mother Franziska, his sister Elisabeth, his paternal grandmother Erdmuthe Nietzsche, and two unmarried paternal aunts, Rosalie and Augusta. It was a respectable, frugal, intensely Protestant establishment, watchful of propriety and proud of its connection to the church. The only boy in this circle of devout and protective women, Nietzsche was indulged, observed, and held to a high standard of seriousness and good conduct.

Naumburg was a conservative town, loyal to throne and altar, and the household shared its values without reservation. The boy was sent first to a municipal boys' school, where he did not feel at ease among the rougher children of the town, and then to a private preparatory institute, where he formed his first lasting friendships. Two boys in particular, Wilhelm Pinder and Gustav Krug, became close companions. The three were drawn together by shared tastes in books and music, and in 1860 they founded a small artistic and literary society they grandly named Germania, into which each member contributed essays, poems, and musical compositions for the others to judge. It was an early sign of two traits that would define Nietzsche's life: an extraordinary seriousness about art and ideas, and a tendency to seek out a small circle of chosen friends rather than the company of the crowd.

Music was, from the beginning, central to him. He learned the piano, and he could improvise at the keyboard with a fluency that astonished those who heard him. He began to compose his own pieces, songs and piano works and choral settings, and although he would never become a composer of the first rank, music remained for him not a pastime but a necessity, something close to the deepest layer of his nature. Late in life he would write that without music life would be a mistake, and the remark was not a flourish but a confession. He also began, very early, to write: poems, autobiographical sketches, schoolboy essays of remarkable self-scrutiny. By the age of fourteen he was already composing accounts of his own short life, examining his development with a reflective intensity unusual in a child.

His health, too, declared itself early. From boyhood he suffered from violent headaches and from trouble with his eyes, ailments that would torment him without relief for the rest of his life and that some have linked, speculatively, to the same obscure constitutional weakness that killed his father. He was a delicate, inward, bookish boy, physically unsuited to the rough sociability of his contemporaries, and he turned that unsuitedness into a habit of solitude and reflection. Already the pattern of his existence was forming: a brilliant, lonely intelligence housed in a body that would not cooperate.

The Years at Schulpforta

In October 1858, shortly before his fourteenth birthday, Nietzsche was admitted to Schulpforta, and the event changed the course of his life. Schulpforta, often called simply Pforta, was a boarding school of the very first rank, established centuries earlier in the buildings of a former Cistercian monastery near Naumburg. It was famous throughout the German lands for the rigor of its classical education and for the distinction of its graduates, who included the poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and the historian Leopold von Ranke. To be offered a place at Pforta, and on a scholarship as Nietzsche was, was a mark of exceptional promise. For a boy from a clergyman's bereaved family it was an extraordinary opportunity, and a daunting one.

The regime at Pforta was austere and demanding. The school day began before dawn and was filled, hour upon hour, with Greek, Latin, theology, mathematics, history, and German literature. Discipline was strict, the timetable relentless, and the curriculum saturated above all in the languages and literature of classical antiquity. For six years Nietzsche lived within this monastic enclosure of learning, and although he often found its constraints oppressive and its piety stifling, and although his health frequently forced him to the school infirmary, he received there an education of formidable depth. He emerged from Pforta with a command of Greek and Latin so complete that the ancient world would remain, for the rest of his life, more vivid and more real to him than the modern one. The Greeks in particular became his lifelong measure of human possibility.

It was at Pforta that Nietzsche first showed the philological gifts that would launch his professional career. He produced, while still a schoolboy, a serious scholarly essay on the Greek poet Theognis of Megara, a piece of work mature enough that it pointed unmistakably toward a future in classical scholarship. He read voraciously and far beyond the syllabus, discovered the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin, then little regarded, and defended that unfashionable enthusiasm against the doubts of his teachers. He continued to compose music. And he began, within the disciplined Christian atmosphere of the school, to entertain the first serious religious doubts of his life.

Those doubts were sharpened by an exposure to modern biblical scholarship and historical criticism, which treated the scriptures not as revelation but as documents to be analyzed like any other ancient texts. The methods of philology that Pforta taught him to apply to Homer and Plato could be turned, he saw, upon the Bible as well, and once turned there they were corrosive. By the time he left the school his childhood faith had quietly drained away. The crisis was not announced with any drama, and he was careful, for his devout mother's sake, not to wound her with it. But the inner break was real and was, in essence, permanent. The boy once nicknamed the little pastor would never again be a believer.

When Nietzsche graduated from Schulpforta in September 1864, he submitted, as the school required, a final Latin essay. Its subject was Theognis again, and its quality confirmed what his teachers already suspected, that here was a young classicist of rare ability. He left Pforta equipped with one of the best classical educations available anywhere in Europe, with a circle of loyal friends, with a settled unbelief, and with a constitution already undermined by the headaches and eye trouble that would never let him go. He was nineteen years old and bound for university.

University Studies at Bonn

In October 1864 Nietzsche enrolled at the University of Bonn, on the Rhine, intending at first to study both theology and classical philology. The theology was, in some measure, a concession to his family, and to his mother's hope that her only son might follow his father and grandfathers into the Lutheran ministry. It did not survive his first year. Having lost his faith at Pforta, Nietzsche found the academic study of theology hollow, and after two semesters he abandoned it, devoting himself wholly to philology. The decision caused real pain at home. When he refused, during a visit to Naumburg, to take communion, his mother was distressed and his sister scandalized, and the episode opened a fissure between Nietzsche and the pious household that had raised him, a fissure that never fully closed.

Bonn itself was not, on the whole, a happy experience. Nietzsche joined a student fraternity, the Burschenschaft Frankonia, in the company of his friend Paul Deussen, and for a time he attempted to throw himself into the conventional sociability of German student life, with its drinking, its singing, and its ritual camaraderie. He was not suited to it. He found the coarseness and the conformity distasteful, the beer-hall heartiness an affront to his seriousness, and within a year he had withdrawn from the fraternity, disillusioned and somewhat isolated. The experiment in belonging had failed, as such experiments would generally fail for him. He was learning, not for the last time, that he did not fit the communities available to him.

What Bonn did give him was the example and instruction of a great teacher. The professor of classical philology at Bonn was Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl, one of the most eminent classicists of the age, a scholar of immense learning and a gifted judge of talent. Ritschl quickly recognized in Nietzsche a student of altogether exceptional gifts. When, in 1865, a bitter academic quarrel drove Ritschl from Bonn to a chair at the University of Leipzig, Nietzsche did not hesitate. He followed his teacher, transferring to Leipzig in the autumn of that year. The decision tied his early career firmly to Ritschl's patronage, and it placed him in the city where the two decisive intellectual encounters of his youth awaited him.

Leipzig and the Discovery of Schopenhauer

Leipzig suited Nietzsche far better than Bonn had done. Under Ritschl's guidance he flourished as a philologist, throwing himself into the technical, exacting work of textual scholarship with a discipline that won his teacher's unstinting admiration. He undertook detailed studies of the sources of Diogenes Laertius, the ancient compiler of the lives of the Greek philosophers, and returned again to Theognis, and the work was good enough to be published in the leading scholarly journal of the field, the Rheinisches Museum, which Ritschl himself edited. Among his fellow students he found, in the philologist Erwin Rohde, the closest male friendship of his life, an intellectual companionship of rare warmth and seriousness. With others he founded a philological society for the discussion of classical scholarship. By any conventional measure Nietzsche was now a young academic of brilliant promise, marked out for a distinguished career in the universities.

But the most important event of his Leipzig years had nothing to do with philology. One day in the autumn of 1865, browsing in a secondhand bookshop, Nietzsche came upon a copy of Arthur Schopenhauer's great work, The World as Will and Representation. He bought it, carried it back to his lodgings, and, as he later described the experience, surrendered himself to it completely, reading for days with a feverish absorption that left him sleepless and shaken. Schopenhauer's vision struck him with the force of revelation. Here was a philosopher who looked without flinching at the suffering and meaninglessness of existence, who described a world driven by a blind, insatiable, irrational Will, and who refused the comfortable optimism of the established philosophy of the day. Schopenhauer was, moreover, a magnificent writer, an atheist, and a thinker for whom art and especially music possessed a redemptive, metaphysical significance. For the young Nietzsche, who had lost his God and found nothing to replace him, Schopenhauer was a liberation.

The discovery gave Nietzsche, for the first time, a philosophical orientation of his own, distinct from the academic philology that occupied his days. He would later move decisively beyond Schopenhauer, indeed turn against the older man's pessimism and his ethic of resignation and denial of the will, and the eventual repudiation would be as thorough as the early enthusiasm had been total. But the imprint was permanent. Schopenhauer taught Nietzsche to take philosophy as a personal, existential matter, a question of how to live and how to face a godless and suffering world, rather than as a merely academic discipline. He gave Nietzsche the model of the philosopher as a solitary, honest, uncompromising figure, contemptuous of fashion and of comfortable consensus. And he supplied much of the vocabulary, above all the central notion of Will, that the young man would later transform into something distinctively his own.

The second decisive encounter of these years was personal. In November 1868, through a mutual acquaintance, Nietzsche was introduced in Leipzig to the composer Richard Wagner. Wagner was then in his middle fifties, already one of the most famous and most controversial artists in Europe, and he happened, like Nietzsche, to be a passionate admirer of Schopenhauer. The two men fell at once into intense conversation about music and philosophy, about Schopenhauer and the German spirit, and Nietzsche came away exhilarated. For a young man of twenty-four to be received as a kindred spirit by the towering Wagner was intoxicating, and the meeting laid the foundation of a friendship that would dominate the next decade of Nietzsche's life, shape his first book, and end, in time, in one of the most painful ruptures he ever suffered.

These, then, were the materials Nietzsche carried out of his student years: a superb training in classical philology and the patronage of its leading practitioner; a body of published scholarship that had already made his name in the field; the philosophical awakening brought by Schopenhauer; and the dazzling, dangerous new friendship with Wagner. He had also, in the spring and autumn of 1867 and 1868, interrupted his studies for a period of compulsory military service in a Prussian artillery regiment at Naumburg, an episode cut short when a serious accident, mounting a horse, badly injured his chest and left him unfit for duty. He returned to his books. He was a young man of immense and still unfocused power, formed by loss and solitude and music and the Greeks, and he was about to be lifted, at an age when most scholars are barely beginning, into a position that would make him, briefly, the youngest professor in the German-speaking world.

A Student's Character: Friendship, Music, and Ambition

The young man who emerged from these student years had a character already strongly marked, and it is worth pausing over, because the traits visible in the Leipzig undergraduate would persist, intensified, to the end. Nietzsche was, first of all, a creature of friendship. He did not move easily through crowds, took no pleasure in the herd warmth of the fraternity or the lecture hall, and felt at home only in the company of a few carefully chosen companions with whom he could share, without reserve, his deepest enthusiasms. Erwin Rohde was the dearest of these, a fellow philologist of comparable brilliance with whom Nietzsche walked, talked, read, and corresponded for years in a tone of almost amorous intellectual intimacy. There were others: Paul Deussen, who would become a noted scholar of Indian philosophy and a lifelong, if increasingly distant, friend; Carl von Gersdorff, an aristocratic companion of gentle temperament; and, a little later, the musician Heinrich Köselitz, whom Nietzsche rechristened Peter Gast and who would serve him devotedly as copyist, proofreader, and disciple. Friendship, for Nietzsche, was never casual. He invested it with enormous emotional and intellectual weight, demanded much of it, and suffered acutely, again and again across his life, when it failed or fell short of his exalted conception of what two minds might be to one another.

He was, secondly, a young man for whom music was not an accomplishment but an element of life as basic as breathing. He played the piano with a famous gift for improvisation, sitting at the keyboard in the dusk and conjuring whole worlds of sound, and those who heard him never forgot it. He composed steadily through his youth: songs, piano pieces, choral and orchestral fragments. His compositions reveal an ardent, romantic sensibility and a real if limited talent, and they mattered to him out of all proportion to their objective merit. The connection he felt between music and the deepest truths of existence, a connection Schopenhauer had given him a philosophy to articulate, was the seed from which his first book would grow. To the end of his life he would insist that his philosophy was, in some sense, music made into thought.

He was, thirdly and increasingly, ambitious, though his was an ambition of an unusual and inward kind. He cared nothing for honors, position, or wealth as such, and would in time throw away a secure and prestigious career without apparent regret. What he wanted was to matter, to make a difference to the spiritual condition of humanity, to do something that justified the labor and the suffering of a life. He held himself, and those around him, to a standard of seriousness that could be exhausting. The schoolboy who had written grave autobiographical sketches at fourteen had become a young man who scrutinized his own development with relentless honesty, measured himself against the greatest figures of the past, and was quietly certain, beneath a courteous and even diffident exterior, that he was destined for something extraordinary. The certainty was not vanity, or not only vanity. It was closer to a sense of vocation, of a task laid upon him that he had no choice but to discharge.

These three threads, the hunger for friendship, the primacy of music, and the inward, missionary ambition, were woven together with a fourth and darker one: the chronic ill health that had announced itself in childhood and would never release him. The headaches came in waves that could last for days, prostrating him in darkened rooms. His eyes, weak and painful, made reading and writing, the very activities his life depended on, into ordeals. His digestion was unreliable, his sleep poor. He was, in the most literal sense, a sufferer, and the experience of bodily pain became inseparable from his thought. He would later make of it a philosophical principle, insisting that great suffering, borne and overcome, was the school of all elevation of the soul, and that the question to ask of any pain was not how to escape it but what it could be made to mean. That doctrine was not an abstraction. It was the distillation of a life lived, from boyhood, in a body that hurt.

The Professor at Basel

In the early months of 1869 an offer reached Nietzsche that would have seemed, to anyone who measured careers by the ordinary timetable, simply impossible. The University of Basel, in Switzerland, was seeking a professor of classical philology, and the chair was offered to Nietzsche. He was twenty-four years old. He had not yet completed his doctorate, had never sat the examinations, had never written a dissertation. The offer was a measure of the extraordinary impression his published scholarship had made, and of the unreserved enthusiasm of his teacher. Ritschl, asked for a reference, wrote that in thirty-nine years of teaching he had never known a young man mature so early or so completely as Nietzsche, and that the young scholar could simply do anything he set his mind to. On the strength of his published articles alone, the University of Leipzig hastily conferred a doctorate upon him without examination, so that he might take up the post with the proper title. In the spring of 1869 Nietzsche moved to Basel and began to lecture. He was the youngest holder of a full professorship anywhere in the German-speaking academic world.

The appointment required one notable sacrifice. Basel lay in Switzerland, and to take up a Swiss professorship Nietzsche formally renounced his Prussian citizenship. He never afterward acquired Swiss citizenship in its place, and so, for the remaining thirty-one years of his life, Friedrich Nietzsche was a man without a country, officially stateless. There is something fitting in the fact, given the homeless, nationless, wandering existence he would lead and the contempt he would come to feel for nationalism of every kind. He delivered his inaugural lecture on the subject of Homer and classical philology, defending the dignity and the deeper purpose of his discipline, and he settled into the routine of a Basel professor, lecturing on Greek literature and philosophy at the university and also teaching Greek to schoolboys at the affiliated secondary school, the Pädagogium, a duty that consumed a great deal of his time and energy.

Basel gave Nietzsche two friendships of lasting importance. The first was with Franz Overbeck, a professor of church history, a man of scrupulous honesty and quiet skepticism who lodged for a time in the same house as Nietzsche and who would remain, through every storm and every estrangement, the most steadfast and reliable friend of his life. It was Overbeck who would come to fetch him from Turin when his mind finally gave way. The second was with the great cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt, the author of the celebrated study of the Renaissance in Italy, whose lectures on Greek civilization and on the history of European culture Nietzsche attended with reverence. Burckhardt's vision of history as the story of culture, of art and the human spirit rather than of politics and battles, and his pessimistic, aristocratic detachment from the optimism of the age, left a deep mark on the younger man. Nietzsche revered Burckhardt and sought his approval to the very end; it was to Burckhardt, along with Overbeck, that he addressed the most coherent of the strange letters he wrote in the days of his collapse.

Yet from the beginning Nietzsche was not entirely at home in the professorial role. He performed his duties conscientiously, and his lectures, when his health permitted them, were admired. But the routine, technical labor of academic philology, the editing of texts and the policing of manuscript variants, came to feel to him narrower and narrower, a cage rather than a calling. His real interests were migrating, irresistibly, toward philosophy, toward the largest questions of culture, value, and human destiny, questions that the discipline of philology, as then practiced, was not equipped to ask. He was a philosopher trapped in a philologist's chair, and the tension between the office he held and the work he was driven to do would, within a few years, become unbearable.

The Franco-Prussian War

In the summer of 1870 the long-gathering conflict between Prussia and France broke into open war. Nietzsche, now a Swiss resident and a man without citizenship, could not be conscripted and could not serve as a soldier. But the patriotic feeling of the moment, and a sense of duty toward the German cause that he had not yet learned to distrust, moved him to act. He obtained leave from the University of Basel and volunteered as a medical orderly, going to the front to tend the wounded. It was brief and harrowing service. He worked among shattered and dying men, accompanied a transport of grievously wounded soldiers on a long and terrible railway journey, and in the close, infected conditions of that work he contracted serious illnesses, dysentery and diphtheria among them. He fell gravely ill himself and had to be invalided home.

The episode lasted only weeks, but its consequences were lifelong. Nietzsche's constitution, never robust, was further and permanently undermined. Many who have studied the wreck of his health have pointed to the war service of 1870 as a turning point, after which the headaches, the stomach disorders, and the eye trouble grew markedly worse and more relentless. He returned to Basel and to his teaching in the autumn, but he returned a more damaged man. The experience also left an emotional residue. He had seen war close at hand, in its filth and its agony, and although he would later write with provocative admiration of struggle, hardness, and the warrior virtues, the easy, flag-waving patriotism of the new German Empire, founded in triumph in 1871, never again attracted him. He watched the German victory and the imperial pride that followed it with a growing, and soon openly expressed, distaste.

The Friendship with Richard Wagner

No relationship of Nietzsche's adult life, save the long entanglement with his sister, was as intense, as formative, or in the end as wounding as his friendship with Richard Wagner. The two had met in Leipzig in 1868, and once Nietzsche was installed at Basel the friendship flowered, for Wagner and his companion Cosima were then living at Tribschen, a villa on the shore of Lake Lucerne, within easy reach of Basel. Nietzsche became a frequent and welcome visitor. He made more than twenty journeys to Tribschen in the course of three years, and during those visits he was treated almost as a member of the household, a brilliant and devoted younger friend admitted to the family circle of the most famous and most controversial composer in Europe.

For the young Nietzsche the Tribschen years were a kind of enchantment. Wagner was thirty-one years his senior, a figure of overwhelming charisma and creative force, and he had been, like Nietzsche, captured early by the philosophy of Schopenhauer. Cosima, the daughter of the composer Franz Liszt and formerly the wife of the conductor Hans von Bülow, was a woman of formidable cultivation and presence, and Nietzsche admired her deeply and lastingly; in the disordered letters of his final breakdown it would be Cosima, addressed as Ariadne, who haunted his imagination. At Tribschen Nietzsche found warmth, genius, music, and the sense of being enlisted in a great cultural mission. He came to believe that Wagner's music drama was nothing less than the rebirth, in the modern world, of the tragic art of the Greeks, that Wagner was the living vessel of the Dionysian spirit, and that around Wagner's work a regeneration of German and European culture might be built. He poured this conviction, and his whole youthful capacity for hero worship, into the friendship and into the book that the friendship inspired.

The Birth of Tragedy

In January 1872 Nietzsche published his first book, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. It was unlike anything the philological profession had seen, and it was meant to be. There were no footnotes, no scholarly apparatus, no cautious weighing of manuscript evidence. It was, instead, a work of bold philosophical speculation and cultural prophecy, written in a charged, exalted prose, dedicated in spirit and in fact to Richard Wagner.

The book advanced a startling thesis about the origin and nature of Greek tragedy, and through it about art and life in general. Greek tragedy, Nietzsche argued, had been born from the union of two opposed artistic drives, two forces he named after two Greek gods. The first was the Apollonian, the principle named for Apollo: the impulse toward form, measure, clarity, individuation, the beautiful illusion, the dream image, the world seen as ordered and bounded and serene, the spirit of sculpture and of the plastic arts. The second was the Dionysian, named for Dionysus, the god of wine and ecstasy: the impulse toward intoxication, the dissolving of boundaries, the loss of the self in a deeper unity, the rapture and the terror of existence felt directly, the spirit of music and of dance. The Apollonian veils the abyss; the Dionysian gazes into it. Greek tragedy, in its great age, in the works of Aeschylus and Sophocles, achieved an almost miraculous fusion of the two, a form beautiful enough to make bearable a truth terrible enough to destroy. Tragedy let the Greeks look into the horror of existence and still say yes to life, redeeming the world, in Nietzsche's famous phrase, as an aesthetic phenomenon.

This sublime balance, the book argued, had not lasted. It was destroyed from within by a new force, the spirit of rationalism, of which Nietzsche took the philosopher Socrates and the dramatist Euripides as the representatives. The Socratic confidence that reason could understand and correct existence, that virtue was knowledge and the unexamined life not worth living, drove out the tragic, instinctive wisdom of the older art. What Nietzsche called aesthetic Socratism subordinated instinct to consciousness, music to argument, and so tragedy withered. The optimism of theoretical reason, the faith that the world is fundamentally intelligible and good, had governed European culture ever since, and it was, Nietzsche suggested, a shallow and ultimately exhausted thing. The book closed on a note of hope: the tragic spirit, the Dionysian depth, might be reborn, and it was being reborn, in the music of Richard Wagner and in the German spirit at its best.

The reception was, for Nietzsche's academic career, a disaster. The philological establishment received the book with hostility or with a more wounding silence. The most damaging blow came from a young classicist of his own generation, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, who published a scorching pamphlet that ridiculed the book as ignorant, unscholarly, and intoxicated, philology of the future in the worst sense, the work of a man who had abandoned the standards of his discipline. Erwin Rohde rushed to his friend's defense with a counter-pamphlet, and Wagner himself published a letter of support, but the damage was done. Nietzsche's standing among professional philologists never recovered. For a time students simply stopped enrolling in his courses, on the advice of their teachers, and a Basel professor of classics found himself lecturing, in effect, to an empty room. The book that announced Nietzsche to the world as an original mind had simultaneously ended his future as an academic scholar. In later years Nietzsche himself looked back on The Birth of Tragedy with mixed feelings, criticizing its immaturity, its Wagnerian and Schopenhauerian dependence, its overwrought style, and in a remarkable later preface he called it an impossible book, badly written and embarrassing, while still defending the importance of the questions it had dared to raise.

The Untimely Meditations

Between 1873 and 1876 Nietzsche published a series of long essays under the collective title Untimely Meditations, sometimes rendered as Thoughts Out of Season or Unfashionable Observations. The very title was a declaration of intent. Nietzsche meant to be untimely, to stand against the spirit of his age rather than to flatter it, to act, as he put it, against the time and so, he hoped, upon the time and for the benefit of a time to come. He projected a great many of these essays; he completed four.

The first, published in 1873, was an attack on the writer and theologian David Friedrich Strauss, and through him on a target much larger than any one man: the smug cultural complacency of the new German Empire. Flushed with military victory over France, German society had begun, Nietzsche thought, to mistake political and military success for cultural greatness, to believe that because German arms had triumphed German culture must be triumphant too. Against this he set the figure of the cultural philistine, the educated bourgeois who possessed the externals of culture without its substance, and he warned that victory might prove more dangerous to the German spirit than defeat.

The second meditation, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, published in 1874, is the most enduringly influential of the four. It addressed the dominant intellectual habit of the nineteenth century, the historical sense, the immense and ever-growing knowledge of the past. Such knowledge, Nietzsche argued, was not an unmixed good. An excess of history could overwhelm and paralyze the living present, burdening it with so great a weight of inherited tradition that action and creation became impossible. He distinguished three uses of history, the monumental, the antiquarian, and the critical, each valuable in its place and each destructive in excess, and he insisted that history must serve life rather than smother it, that a measure of forgetting was as necessary to health as memory.

The third, Schopenhauer as Educator, published in 1874, took the form of a tribute to the philosopher of Nietzsche's youth, but its real subject was the ideal of the philosophical life itself. Schopenhauer mattered, in this essay, less as the author of particular doctrines than as an example of integrity, of a man who lived for the truth, who stood alone, who refused the comforts of conformity and career. The essay contained one of Nietzsche's most resonant early ideas, the imperative to become who you are, to discover and to realize one's own true and highest self rather than to drift along as a copy of others.

The fourth and last, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, appeared in 1876, timed to coincide with the opening of Wagner's long-dreamed-of festival theater. On its surface it was a celebration of Wagner and of the cultural hopes invested in Bayreuth. But beneath the praise an attentive reader could already detect unease, hesitation, the first faint cracks in the structure of Nietzsche's devotion. The essay was, in a sense, a farewell disguised as a tribute, and within a year the friendship it honored would lie in ruins.

The Break with Wagner

The rupture between Nietzsche and Wagner was not a single event but a slow and painful estrangement, and it had many causes, personal, philosophical, and cultural, all working together.

The decisive occasion was the first Bayreuth Festival itself, in the summer of 1876. For years Nietzsche had idealized the Bayreuth project as the seedbed of a cultural rebirth. When at last he attended the festival, with its premiere performances of the complete Ring of the Nibelung, the reality dismayed him. He found not a community of the spiritually elect but a fashionable social occasion, crowded with princes, patrons, celebrities, and the merely curious, a spectacle of conspicuous cultivation rather than a sacred renewal. The festival air, the celebrity, the worldly success, all of it struck him as a betrayal of the high and lonely ideal he had projected. Unwell and disenchanted, he left Bayreuth before the festival had ended, retreating into the forest to be alone.

The deeper break was philosophical. Nietzsche had begun, even before Bayreuth, to move away from the romantic, metaphysical, Schopenhauerian outlook that he and Wagner had shared, and toward a cooler, more skeptical, more scientific cast of mind. And Wagner, for his part, was moving in the opposite direction. His last music drama, Parsifal, was steeped in the imagery of Christian redemption, of holy compassion, of guilt and grace and chastity. To Nietzsche this was an apostasy, the spectacle of the artist he had taken for the standard-bearer of a tragic, life-affirming, post-Christian culture sinking, as he later put it, broken, before the Christian cross. Wagner's loud German nationalism and his antisemitism, which Nietzsche found contemptible, deepened the alienation.

There was, finally, a personal humiliation. Wagner, with what he no doubt considered fatherly concern, had communicated to one of Nietzsche's physicians a theory about the origins of Nietzsche's wretched health, suggesting that his nervous and visual troubles were the consequence of solitary sexual habits. When Nietzsche came to learn of this intervention, he was wounded to the depths of his pride. The friendship cooled rapidly after 1876. In 1878 the breach was sealed almost ceremonially: Nietzsche sent Wagner his new book, Human, All Too Human, with its sober skepticism and its implicit repudiation of everything Wagnerian, and at nearly the same moment Wagner sent Nietzsche the text of Parsifal. The two parcels crossed in the post, and each man understood the message. They never met or corresponded again. Wagner died in Venice in February 1883, while Nietzsche, far away, was at work on the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and the news reached him as a strange, heavy blow. Nietzsche never finished settling his accounts with Wagner. The older man remained a permanent presence in his mind, an object of love turned to criticism but never to indifference, and in the very last year of his sane life Nietzsche would return to him obsessively in two short, brilliant, embittered books, The Case of Wagner and Nietzsche contra Wagner.

Human, All Too Human

The book that completed Nietzsche's break with his own past, as well as with Wagner, was Human, All Too Human, published in 1878 and subtitled A Book for Free Spirits. It announced, in form and in substance, a new Nietzsche. The exalted, continuous, prophetic prose of The Birth of Tragedy gave way to a procedure of short, sharp aphorisms and numbered reflections, hundreds of them, modeled in part on the great French moralists, the masters of the pointed maxim and the merciless psychological observation. The romantic metaphysics was gone. In its place came the spirit of the Enlightenment, of science, of cool and disabused analysis.

In Human, All Too Human Nietzsche turned the tools of historical and psychological criticism upon the highest and most cherished things, upon morality, religion, art, and metaphysics, and asked, of each, where it had really come from. The answer, again and again, was the answer the title implies: that what we revere as exalted and eternal has, in fact, humble, accidental, all too human origins, in fear, in vanity, in the needs of the weak, in error, in the slow sediment of custom. The free spirit of the subtitle was Nietzsche's name for the kind of person able to face these disenchanting truths without despair, able to live without the metaphysical comforts that the human race had always leaned upon. He dedicated the first edition of the book to the memory of Voltaire, on the centenary of Voltaire's death, a pointed signal that he now claimed the heritage of the Enlightenment, of skepticism, of intellectual courage and intellectual honesty.

Behind this transformation lay, in part, a new friendship. In these years Nietzsche had grown close to Paul Rée, a writer and psychologist of a positivist, Darwinian, unsentimental temper, whose analyses of the origins of moral feeling helped to push Nietzsche toward his new manner. Wagner, contemptuous, blamed Rée for the corruption of his former disciple. Nietzsche extended the work with two further installments of aphorisms, Assorted Opinions and Maxims in 1879 and The Wanderer and His Shadow in 1880, later gathered together as a second volume of the same book. With Human, All Too Human Nietzsche had found, at last, his characteristic voice and his characteristic method, the aphorism, the psychological unmasking, the suspicion turned upon the loftiest ideals. Everything he wrote afterward would build on the ground it cleared.

Resignation from Basel and the Wandering Life

While Nietzsche was remaking himself as a thinker, his body was breaking down. Through the late 1870s the attacks of illness grew steadily more frequent and more severe: blinding headaches that lasted for days, fits of violent vomiting, eyes so weak and so painful that reading and writing became forms of torture. He took longer and longer leaves of absence from his teaching, and at last it became clear that he could not continue. In June 1879, at the age of thirty-four, Nietzsche resigned his professorship at the University of Basel. The university, in recognition of his decade of service and the genuine misfortune of his condition, granted him a modest annual pension. With that small, secure income, and with the freedom that ill health had forced upon him, Nietzsche entered the strangest and most fruitful phase of his existence.

For the next ten years he had no profession, no home, and no country. He became a wanderer, an invalid drifting between rented rooms and cheap boarding houses in search of the climate and the altitude that might give his tormented nerves some relief. A pattern soon established itself. In the summers he went up into the Swiss Alps, and above all to the small village of Sils-Maria in the high Upper Engadine, where the thin, cold, brilliant mountain air seemed to suit him and where, walking for hours beside the lakes and among the pinewoods, he did much of the greatest work of his life. In the winters he came down to the Mediterranean, to Nice on the French coast, to Genoa and Rapallo on the Italian Riviera, and later to Venice and to Turin, seeking the milder air of the south. He traveled with a few books and a few clothes, ate plainly in modest pensions, depended on the kindness of a handful of friends, and lived, for the most part, in profound solitude.

It is one of the central paradoxes of his life that this decade of homelessness, poverty, physical agony, and almost total loneliness was also the decade of his supreme creativity. Nearly every book on which his greatness rests was composed in these years, in the intervals between attacks of illness, often by a man who could barely use his eyes, who dictated to a friend or scrawled in pencil notebooks carried on long walks. He suffered, and he wrote, and the suffering and the writing were not separate things. The thought that grew out of those years, the praise of hardness and overcoming, the refusal of pity and of comfortable optimism, the insistence that one must say yes to life including its pain, was the thought of a man who knew physical misery from the inside and had decided, as an act of will, not to be defeated by it.

Daybreak and the Gay Science

Two major books came out of the first stretch of the wandering years. The first was Daybreak, published in 1881, subtitled Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. Here Nietzsche opened in earnest what he would call his campaign against morality. The book did not preach immorality. It did something more radical and more disturbing: it questioned the value of morality itself, asked whether our moral values were truly as valuable as we assumed, and traced the role of custom, fear, habit, and self-deception in the long history of the moral feelings. Morality, Nietzsche suggested, had never been examined with real honesty, because morality had always forbidden the examination. He proposed to examine it anyway.

It was during the writing of Daybreak, in the high summer of 1881, that Nietzsche had the experience he regarded as the most important of his philosophical life. Walking one August day by the lake of Silvaplana, near Sils-Maria, he stopped beside a great pyramid-shaped rock, and there the thought of the eternal recurrence of the same came to him with overwhelming force. The idea was that all things return, that everything that has ever happened will happen again, and has happened before, in exactly the same way, endlessly, in an eternal circling of time. He noted that the thought had come to him, as he put it, six thousand feet beyond man and time. He called it the abysmal thought, the heaviest of all weights, and from that day it stood at the center of his philosophy, both as a cosmological speculation and, more importantly, as a test: could a person love life so completely as to will its exact repetition for all eternity?

The second book was The Gay Science, published in 1882, its title borrowed from a medieval Provençal phrase for the art of the troubadour-poets, the gay or joyful science of song. The book is among the most buoyant and exuberant Nietzsche ever wrote, in love with knowledge, with the south, with life. Yet at its heart it carries the gravest of announcements. In one celebrated passage Nietzsche tells the parable of the madman who runs into the marketplace in the bright morning, lantern in hand, crying out that he seeks God, and who, mocked by the unbelieving bystanders, turns on them with the terrible news that they themselves are God's murderers, that God is dead, that God remains dead, and that we have killed him. The death of God, in Nietzsche's hands, was not a boast of atheism but a diagnosis of a civilization-wide crisis. The belief in the Christian God had been the foundation of European morality, meaning, and value, and that belief was quietly collapsing. Most people, the madman says, do not yet grasp what they have done, do not feel the earth unchained from its sun, do not sense the cold and the empty space rushing in. The work of confronting that crisis, of finding new values to live by in a universe no longer underwritten by God, was the task Nietzsche set himself and his readers. The Gay Science also gave the eternal recurrence its first published statement, and on its final page introduced, for the first time, the figure of a prophet named Zarathustra, descending from his mountain. The next book was already calling.

Lou Salome and the Crisis of 1882

In the spring of 1882, in Rome, Nietzsche met the one woman who might, in another life, have changed the whole course of his. Her name was Lou von Salomé. She was twenty-one years old, Russian by birth, the daughter of a general of Huguenot descent, and she possessed an intellect of dazzling quickness, a fearless independence of mind, and a charm that drew brilliant men to her throughout a long life. Nietzsche was introduced to her by his friend Paul Rée and by the older woman of letters Malwida von Meysenbug, and he was, almost at once, overwhelmed.

In Lou Salomé Nietzsche believed he had found something he had despaired of ever finding: a mind worthy of his own, a true intellectual companion, perhaps a disciple to carry his thought into the future, perhaps even a wife. He spoke of her with an exhilaration that startled his friends. He proposed marriage, not once but twice, conveying the first proposal awkwardly through Rée and making the second himself. Lou refused him both times. She did not want a husband; she wanted intellectual freedom and intellectual friendship, and for a brief, intoxicated season the three of them, Nietzsche, Rée, and Lou, dreamed of forming an unconventional household, a community of study, a sort of intellectual trinity that would live and learn together in some great city. From this period dates the photograph that has become inseparable from the episode: Lou kneeling in a little cart with a length of cord and a sprig of lilac fashioned into a whip, and Nietzsche and Rée standing harnessed before the cart as if to draw it. The pose, by most accounts, was arranged at Nietzsche's own suggestion, and posterity has read it, perhaps too eagerly, as an emblem of the whole doomed entanglement.

The dream did not survive the year. Its destruction owed a great deal to Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth, who had conceived a violent jealousy and dislike of Lou Salomé, judged her an immoral and dangerous influence, and set herself, with all her considerable talent for intrigue, to break the relationship. She carried tales, inflamed their mother, and worked upon Nietzsche himself with insinuation and reproach until the atmosphere was poisoned beyond repair. Bitter family quarrels followed. Nietzsche was estranged for a time from both his sister and his mother, and the affair of Lou Salomé left lasting scars on all his closest relationships. By the end of 1882 the trinity had shattered. Lou and Rée departed together, to live for some years in a companionship that was intellectual rather than romantic, and Nietzsche was left entirely alone, feeling himself betrayed by the woman, by his old friend Rée, and by his family alike.

The winter that followed, spent largely in and around Rapallo on the Italian coast, was one of the blackest of his life. He was sick, sleepless, half-blind, racked by loneliness and by a sense of total abandonment, and at moments he came close to despair and even to thoughts of suicide. Yet out of that abyss, in a sudden convulsion of creative force, came the strangest and most ambitious of all his works. In the space of about ten days, in the early months of 1883, Nietzsche wrote the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. As for Lou Salomé, she would go on to a remarkable life entirely her own, becoming a respected writer, an intimate friend of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and later an associate of Sigmund Freud in the early circle of psychoanalysis. In 1894 she published one of the first serious studies of Nietzsche's philosophy, written by someone who had known the philosopher at the height of his powers and had refused to become his disciple.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

The book that Nietzsche regarded as his masterpiece, and as a gift to humanity unlike any other, was Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which carried the subtitle A Book for All and None. It was composed in four parts over roughly two years. The first part poured out of him in about ten days early in 1883, in the depths of the despair that had followed the loss of Lou Salomé, written at Rapallo on the Italian coast in a state he described as a kind of inspired possession. The second part followed that summer at Sils-Maria, the third early in 1884 at Nice, and the fourth, written in 1884 and 1885, Nietzsche could find no willing publisher for and finally had printed privately, in a tiny edition of perhaps forty copies, to be given only to a handful of friends.

Nietzsche chose as his mouthpiece the figure of Zarathustra, the prophet of ancient Persia, the historical founder of the Zoroastrian religion, and the choice was pointed. Zarathustra, Nietzsche reasoned, had been the first thinker to place the struggle of good and evil at the center of the moral and metaphysical order of the world. It was therefore fitting that Zarathustra should also be the first to recognize that this was an error, and to overcome it. The book is written in a deliberately scriptural, prophetic, parabolic style, a sustained and audacious counter-Bible, rich in imagery, song, riddle, and sermon, by turns soaring and savage and tender. Its Zarathustra descends from ten years of mountain solitude to bring his wisdom to humankind, and the narrative follows his teaching, his disappointments, his withdrawals, and his returns.

The teachings Zarathustra carries are the central doctrines of Nietzsche's mature thought. He proclaims the Übermensch, the overman, declaring that the human being is something that must be overcome, a rope stretched between the animal and the overman, a bridge and not an end. He sets against this aspiration the figure of the last man, the small, comfortable, cautious, incurious creature of a culture that has lost all longing, the one who has invented happiness and blinks, and he means the last man as a warning, a portrait of what humanity will become if it aims at nothing higher than contentment and security. He teaches the death of God and the will to power. He recounts the parable of the three metamorphoses of the spirit, which becomes first a camel, the beast that bears the heavy load of duty and tradition, then a lion, who fights the dragon of thou shalt and wins the freedom to say no, and finally a child, innocence and forgetting and a sacred yes, able to create new values. And at the book's deepest point Zarathustra confronts, with dread and at last with joy, his abysmal thought, the eternal recurrence of all things. Thus Spoke Zarathustra remains the most widely read and the most poetically powerful of Nietzsche's works, and also the most resistant to interpretation, a book that he believed stood entirely alone among the writings of humankind.

Beyond Good and Evil

After the prophetic intoxication of Zarathustra, Nietzsche returned in 1886 to a more direct and argumentative manner with Beyond Good and Evil, which he subtitled Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. He described the new book as saying the same things as Zarathustra, but plainly, in a manner terrifyingly direct, stripped of parable. It is a sustained assault on the philosophical tradition and on what Nietzsche called the prejudices of philosophers.

Philosophers, Beyond Good and Evil argues, have not been the disinterested seekers of truth they have claimed to be. Behind every great philosophy stands a personal confession, an involuntary memoir; the system is the advocate, finding reasons after the fact for conclusions arrived at by instinct and desire. Nietzsche questions the dogmatic assumptions buried in the tradition: the belief in the unified self or soul, the belief in free will, the faith in opposite values, the unexamined will to truth itself. In their place he offers the hypothesis of the will to power as the basic drive of all life. The book ranges widely and combatively, attacking democratic ideals, the cult of equality, English utilitarianism, the herd morality of modern Europe, and, with notable sharpness, German nationalism and the antisemitism that Nietzsche regarded with disgust. It also sketches the positive ideal of the free spirit and the philosopher of the future, and it contains an extended discussion of what is noble, of the difference between the morality of masters and the morality of slaves, a theme the next book would develop in full.

Beyond Good and Evil, like its predecessors, Nietzsche had to publish at his own expense, and it sold pitifully few copies. But in this barren season one genuine recognition arrived. The influential Danish critic Georg Brandes read Nietzsche, admired him, corresponded with him, and in 1888 delivered a course of public lectures on his philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, the first time Nietzsche's work had been taught anywhere. Brandes described Nietzsche's outlook as an aristocratic radicalism, a phrase Nietzsche seized upon with delight as the best short account of himself that anyone had yet produced.

On the Genealogy of Morality

In 1887 Nietzsche published On the Genealogy of Morality, subtitled A Polemic, and many readers consider it his most rigorous, sustained, and powerful book. He presented it as a clarification and amplification of Beyond Good and Evil, and it consists of three connected essays, each pursuing a single question to its roots.

The first essay, on good and evil and good and bad, examines the origin of our moral concepts. Nietzsche distinguishes two fundamentally different value systems. The first, the morality of the strong and noble, calls good whatever is powerful, healthy, life-affirming, and self-confident, and calls bad whatever is weak and contemptible; it is a morality that says yes to itself. The second arises as a revolt against the first. The weak and the oppressed, unable to revenge themselves in action, take their revenge in imagination, in a slow, patient hatred Nietzsche names with the French word ressentiment. Out of that resentment they forge a new table of values that condemns the strong as evil and consecrates the weak, the meek, the humble as good. This slave revolt in morality, Nietzsche argues, was begun within ancient Judaism and carried to victory by Christianity, and it is the morality under which Europe still lives.

The second essay studies the origin of guilt, conscience, and punishment, tracing the moral idea of guilt back to the material relation of debtor and creditor, and offering a startling account of the bad conscience. When early humanity was enclosed within the walls of society and the state, the aggressive instincts that could no longer be discharged outward turned inward against their owner; cruelty, denied an external object, became self-cruelty, and in that turning inward, Nietzsche suggests, the human soul, with all its depth and its capacity for self-torment, was born.

The third essay asks what ascetic ideals mean, why the ideals of self-denial, poverty, chastity, and humility have exercised such enormous power over humanity. The answer Nietzsche gives is that the ascetic ideal, for all its hostility to life, at least gave human suffering a meaning, and that human beings would rather will nothingness than not will at all, would rather have a terrible purpose than no purpose. He ends by turning the analysis upon the will to truth itself, the scientific and scholarly conscience of his own age, and identifying it as the last and most spiritualized form of the ascetic ideal, a recognition that opens directly onto the problem of nihilism. The Genealogy would prove one of the most influential of all his works, supplying later thinkers with the very model of how to write the history of an idea or an institution by exposing the hidden struggles of power and interest from which it grew.

The Productive Year of 1888

The year 1888 was the last full year of Nietzsche's conscious life, and it was the most prolific of all. He divided it between Nice, Sils-Maria, and the city of Turin, which he discovered that spring and came to love with an almost ecstatic intensity, praising its dignified streets, its clear light, its excellent food. Through the year he felt himself flooded with energy, lucidity, and a soaring sense of well-being, and that euphoria, in retrospect, carried a sinister meaning, for it was very likely an early symptom of the catastrophe approaching in his brain. In this single extraordinary year he completed an astonishing run of books.

He wrote The Case of Wagner, a brilliant, malicious settling of accounts with his old friend, presenting Wagner as the supreme artist of cultural decadence. He wrote, in little more than a week, Twilight of the Idols, subtitled How to Philosophize with a Hammer, a swift, compressed, dazzling summary of his whole philosophy, which contains the celebrated maxim that what does not kill him makes him stronger and the audacious little chapter tracing how the idea of a true world beyond this one finally dwindled into a fable. He wrote The Antichrist, a furious and unsparing indictment of Christianity and of what he held to be its hostility to life, health, and the body. He wrote Ecce Homo, an autobiography of his own mind, subtitled How One Becomes What One Is, with deliberately outrageous chapter headings asking why he was so wise, why he was so clever, why he wrote such good books, and why he was a destiny. He assembled Nietzsche contra Wagner from earlier passages, and he gathered his late poems as the Dithyrambs of Dionysus. The grandeur and the strange exaltation of these last writings, especially of Ecce Homo, have been read in two ways, by some as the first clear flickers of the coming madness, by others as a final, deliberate, half-ironic act of self-mythologizing by a man who knew that the world had not yet listened and was determined that it one day should. Recognition, indeed, was at last beginning to stir, with Brandes lecturing in Copenhagen and admiring letters arriving from figures such as the playwright August Strindberg. But it came too late. Even as the first readers turned toward him, Nietzsche was being carried over the edge.

The Collapse in Turin

In the first days of January 1889, in Turin, Friedrich Nietzsche's mind gave way. The most famous account of the moment, told and retold until it has become inseparable from his legend, places him in the Piazza Carlo Alberto on the third of January, where, the story goes, he saw a cab driver beating a worn-out horse, ran across the square, flung his arms around the animal's neck to shield it, and fell to the ground. Whether the scene with the horse occurred exactly as tradition relates it, or has been embroidered by later imagination, cannot now be established with certainty. What is certain is that in those January days Nietzsche broke down completely and irreversibly.

In the days following the collapse he sent out a series of short letters, since known as the madness notes, to friends and to strangers alike, to Cosima Wagner, to Jacob Burckhardt, to Franz Overbeck, to Georg Brandes, even to the King of Italy and to figures in the Vatican. The notes are brief, broken, sometimes frightening and sometimes piercingly beautiful, and he signed them now as Dionysus and now as the Crucified, the two figures, the affirming god and the suffering god, between whom his whole philosophy had moved. Burckhardt, deeply alarmed by the strange letter addressed to him, carried it at once to Overbeck. Overbeck understood immediately what had happened, set out for Turin without delay, and found his friend in his lodgings in a pitiable condition, by turns raving and singing and embracing him. With great difficulty Overbeck brought Nietzsche back across the Alps to Basel, where, on the tenth of January 1889, he was admitted to a psychiatric clinic. The working life of one of the modern world's most powerful minds was over. He was forty-four years old.

The Years of Darkness and Death

From the clinic in Basel Nietzsche was soon transferred to the psychiatric hospital attached to the University of Jena, so that he might be nearer his family. The physicians who examined him recorded a diagnosis of progressive paralysis, an advanced and incurable disease of the brain, understood in the medicine of the time as the final neurological stage of long-untreated syphilis. For most of the following century this remained the standard explanation of his ruin, the assumption being that Nietzsche had been infected at some point in his youth and that the slow infection had at last destroyed his mind.

Modern medical scholarship has treated that confident diagnosis with growing skepticism. The unusually long and gradual course of his decline, his survival for eleven years after the collapse, and the absence of certain symptoms that classic syphilitic paralysis would predict have led some researchers to propose other explanations: a slow-growing tumor pressing on the brain, or a hereditary disorder of the cerebral blood vessels, an inherited condition that would also account for the strikingly similar early death of Nietzsche's father from what the doctors of 1849 called a softening of the brain. Other diagnoses, including forms of dementia, have also been advanced. The honest conclusion is that the true cause of Nietzsche's collapse is not known and probably never will be; it remains one of the genuine unsolved questions of his biography.

Of the philosopher himself, after January 1889, there is little to relate, because little of him remained. His mother, Franziska, brought him home from the Jena clinic in 1890 and cared for him in the family house at Naumburg with a devotion that never wavered. He lived on in a deepening twilight, sometimes calm and sometimes agitated, gradually losing the power of speech and of movement, capable now and then of a few words or of a little wordless playing at the piano, but for the most part absent from the world and from himself. He almost certainly never understood, in those years, that the fame he had despaired of in his working life was at last arriving, that his books were being read across Europe, that the name of Nietzsche was becoming one to conjure with. His mother died in 1897. After her death his sister Elisabeth, who had returned from South America, took charge of the helpless invalid and moved him to the city of Weimar. There, weakened by a series of strokes, Friedrich Nietzsche died on the twenty-fifth of August, 1900, of pneumonia, at the age of fifty-five. He was buried, according to his wish, in the small churchyard of Röcken, the village of his birth, beside the grave of the pastor father he had lost as a child of four, in the shadow of the church where that father had once preached.

The Death of God and the Problem of Nihilism

At the center of Nietzsche's mature philosophy stands a diagnosis rather than a doctrine: the announcement that God is dead. The phrase is among the most quoted and most misunderstood in modern thought, and it is essential to grasp what Nietzsche did and did not mean by it. He did not mean it as a theological proposition, a claim that a deity had once existed and had now ceased to exist. He meant it as a cultural and historical fact about modern Europe. The belief in the Christian God, which for two thousand years had been the foundation of Western morality, meaning, purpose, and value, had quietly lost its hold. Science, history, the critical intellect, and Christianity's own insistence on truthfulness had together undermined the faith from within. God had not been refuted so much as outgrown. And the people who had done the killing, Nietzsche's madman insists, did not yet understand the magnitude of the deed.

For Nietzsche this was not a cause for celebration, or not simply that. The death of God was an event of catastrophic consequence, because the entire structure of European values had been built upon that foundation. With the foundation gone, the structure was bound, sooner or later, to fall. The name Nietzsche gave to that coming collapse was nihilism: the condition in which the highest values devalue themselves, in which the question why receives no answer, in which humanity, having lost its faith in any goal or meaning, is threatened by a paralyzing sense that nothing matters. Nietzsche believed that nihilism was the inevitable next chapter of European history, a long crisis that would unfold over centuries. He did not welcome it. But he insisted on facing it honestly, refusing both the false comfort of clinging to a dead faith and the shallow optimism of those who imagined that morality could carry on unchanged once its religious root had been cut. His whole positive philosophy was an attempt to find a way through nihilism and out the other side, to discover how human beings might create meaning and value for themselves once they could no longer receive it from above.

The Will to Power

If the death of God describes the crisis, the will to power is Nietzsche's name for the force he believed could be the basis of a new understanding of life. The idea is easily caricatured, and it has been. It does not mean, in the first place, a lust for political domination or for power over other people, though that is one of its possible expressions. Nietzsche conceived the will to power far more broadly, as the fundamental drive of all living things: not merely to survive, not merely to seek pleasure, but to grow, to extend themselves, to overcome resistance, to discharge and increase their strength, to master and shape and create.

So understood, the will to power appears everywhere. It is at work in the artist who struggles to give form to a vision, in the thinker who masters a difficult problem, in the saint who conquers and disciplines his own desires, in the athlete, the scientist, the lover, the child learning to walk. Self-overcoming, the disciplined mastery of oneself, was for Nietzsche the highest and most admirable form of the will to power, far higher than the crude domination of others, which he often regarded as a sign of weakness rather than strength. Nietzsche came to suspect that the will to power was not only the key to human psychology but perhaps the basic principle of all reality, and he toyed for years with the plan of a great systematic book to be built around it. He never wrote that book; he abandoned the plan in his final year. The notes he had drafted toward it would later be assembled by other hands into a volume that misrepresented both the idea and his intentions, a story to which this account will return.

The Eternal Recurrence

The thought that came to Nietzsche by the lake at Silvaplana in 1881, and that he regarded as the most fundamental conception of his philosophy, was the eternal recurrence of the same. Stated as a cosmological hypothesis, it holds that time is infinite, that the possible configurations of the world are finite, and that therefore every state of the world, every event, every life, must already have occurred an infinite number of times and must recur an infinite number of times more, always identical, in an eternal ring.

Scholars have long debated whether Nietzsche believed the recurrence to be literally true. What matters more, and what Nietzsche himself emphasized, is its function as a test and a discipline, the heaviest of all weights laid upon human action. He framed it as a question. Imagine, he wrote, that a demon were to tell you that you must live this very life, in every detail, every pain and every triviality, over and over again eternally, with nothing new in it ever. Would you collapse in despair and curse the demon? Or could you answer that you had never heard anything more divine? The eternal recurrence is thus a measuring instrument for the soul. To will the eternal return of one's life is to affirm existence so completely, so unconditionally, that one would gladly have all of it again, infinitely. It is the most demanding form imaginable of saying yes to life, and Nietzsche set it at the summit of his thought as the ultimate counter-ideal to the world-weariness, the longing for escape, and the secret hatred of existence that he believed lay at the heart of nihilism and of the old religious faith.

The Overman and Self-Overcoming

The Übermensch, variously translated as the overman, the superman, or the over-human, is the figure Nietzsche's Zarathustra proclaims as the meaning and the goal toward which humanity might strive. Few of Nietzsche's ideas have been more thoroughly abused. The Übermensch is not a blond, blue-eyed master of a conquered race; that grotesque misreading was the work of later propagandists and has nothing to do with Nietzsche's text. Nor is the Übermensch a superior biological species to be bred by force.

The Übermensch is, rather, an ideal of what a human being might become after the death of God: a person who has overcome the need for any other-worldly support, who creates values out of his own abundance instead of receiving them from religion or convention, who affirms life and the earth without resentment, who is the artist of his own existence. The overman is the human being who has fully accomplished the task of self-overcoming. That last phrase is the key to the whole conception. For Nietzsche the human being is not a fixed and finished thing but a process, a creature defined by its capacity to surpass itself, to make of itself something higher. Zarathustra calls humanity a bridge and not a goal, a rope stretched over an abyss between the animal and the overman. The imperative that runs through all of Nietzsche's mature writing, the imperative he had first stated as a young man, become who you are, expresses the same demand: not to rest in what one happens to be, but to discover and to forge one's own highest possibility.

Master Morality and Slave Morality

One of Nietzsche's most penetrating and most controversial contributions was his analysis of the two opposed types of morality, which he set out most fully in Beyond Good and Evil and the Genealogy of Morality. He argued that what we lump together under the single word morality is in fact a battlefield on which two radically different value systems have long contended.

The first he called master morality, the morality of the strong, the noble, the self-affirming. Those who possess power and vitality, Nietzsche suggested, originally called themselves and their qualities good, and meant by good whatever was strong, healthy, beautiful, generous, brave, and life-affirming; bad, in this scheme, was merely the secondary term, the description of the weak, the timid, the contemptible. Master morality begins with a yes to itself.

The second he called slave morality, and he traced its origin to the experience of the powerless, the oppressed, the suffering. Unable to revenge themselves in deed, the weak revenge themselves in valuation. They take the qualities of their oppressors, strength, pride, power, and brand them evil, and then they bless their own condition, their meekness, humility, patience, and obedience, as good. Slave morality begins not with a yes to itself but with a no to what is other, with the resentment Nietzsche named ressentiment. He argued that this slave revolt in morality, which originated within ancient Judaism and triumphed through Christianity, had become the dominant morality of Europe, and that its democratic and egalitarian descendants ruled the modern world. It is important to read this analysis carefully. Nietzsche was offering a genealogy, an account of where moral values came from, not a simple endorsement of cruelty or a call to oppress the weak. His concern was that a morality born of weakness and resentment, however understandable its origin, tended to suspect and to diminish everything strong, exceptional, and creative, and so threatened to level humanity downward toward the comfortable mediocrity of the last man.

The Revaluation of All Values

The phrase that Nietzsche chose, in his last working year, to describe the central task of his philosophy was the revaluation of all values. It gathers up everything else. If the death of God has knocked away the foundation of traditional morality, and if the morality that remains is in large part a structure built out of resentment and the fear of life, then what is required is not a tinkering reform but a fundamental reassessment, a placing of all inherited values upon the scales and a fearless asking, of each of them, whether it serves life or works against it.

This was the work Nietzsche believed he had been put on earth to begin. He did not imagine he could complete it; he spoke of himself as a beginning, as one who prepared the way. He did not propose a finished new table of values to replace the old, and readers who come to him expecting a tidy positive system are always disappointed. What he offered instead was a method and a demand: the courage to question what had never been questioned, to ask of pity, of humility, of selflessness, of the very opposition of good and evil, where they came from and what they cost, and to measure them all against a single standard, the enhancement and the affirmation of life. To philosophize, for the late Nietzsche, was to revalue, and to revalue was an act of immense daring, which is why he described himself, without entirely joking, as dynamite.

Perspectivism and the Question of Truth

Running through all of Nietzsche's work is a distinctive and influential account of knowledge and truth, usually called perspectivism. He rejected the idea, central to most of the philosophical tradition, that there exists a single, complete, objective truth about the world, a view from nowhere, a God's-eye perspective that disinterested reason might attain. There is no such view, Nietzsche argued. All knowing is done from somewhere, by a particular living creature with particular needs, drives, and interests, and every perspective both reveals and conceals. There are, he wrote, only interpretations.

This is easily mistaken for a careless relativism, the claim that any opinion is as good as any other, but that was not Nietzsche's position. His point was rather that objectivity, properly understood, is not the impossible elimination of all perspectives but the ability to command many of them, to see a thing through many eyes, and so to gain a fuller and more adequate picture. He also turned his suspicion upon the will to truth itself, asking why human beings should value truth so highly, why they should prefer a painful truth to a comforting illusion, and noting that life itself often depends upon error, simplification, and useful fiction. These ideas, the denial of a single absolute truth, the insistence that knowledge is bound up with power and interest, the attention to the perspectival and interpretive character of all understanding, would prove enormously fertile, and they place Nietzsche among the principal ancestors of much twentieth-century thought about knowledge, language, and interpretation.

Amor Fati: the Love of Fate

For all the violence of his polemics and the darkness of his diagnoses, the deepest impulse of Nietzsche's philosophy was affirmative, and he gave that affirmation a name borrowed from Latin: amor fati, the love of fate. He declared it his formula for human greatness, that a person should want nothing to be other than it is, not in the future, not in the past, not in all eternity; should not merely endure what is necessary, still less conceal it, but love it.

Amor fati is the practical and emotional core of Nietzsche's answer to nihilism, and it is inseparable from the eternal recurrence, which is simply amor fati raised to its highest power, the willingness to have one's whole life again and again forever. It is the disposition of a soul so strong, so overflowing, so reconciled with existence that it can embrace not only the joys of life but its sufferings, its losses, its errors, and even its boredom, seeing all of it as belonging necessarily together, as the single inseparable fabric of a fate one would not exchange. This was not, for Nietzsche, an easy serenity. It was an achievement wrung out of a life of almost continuous physical pain, loneliness, failure, and disappointment. The man who taught the love of fate was a man with a great deal of fate to love that most people would have found unlovable, and the doctrine carries the weight of that biography. It is the final reason why Nietzsche, so often described as a philosopher of despair or destruction, understood himself as exactly the opposite, as a teacher of the great yes to life.

The Critique of Christianity

No institution drew Nietzsche's fire more relentlessly than Christianity, and no part of his work has been more often quoted, and misquoted, than his attack upon it. His most concentrated assault came in the short, ferocious book of 1888 whose German title, Der Antichrist, carries a deliberate double meaning, naming both the Antichrist of legend and, more simply, the anti-Christian. To understand the attack it is necessary to remember where Nietzsche had begun, in the parsonage at Röcken, the devout child of a long line of Lutheran pastors. He never wrote about Christianity from the outside, as an ignorant scoffer. He wrote about it as someone who had known its inner life intimately and had broken from it slowly and at real cost, and that intimacy gave his criticism its peculiar penetration.

His charge against Christianity was, in essence, that it was hostile to life. It had been born, he argued, from the slave revolt in morality, from the resentment of the weak and the suffering against the strong and the flourishing, and it had raised that resentment into a sacred system. It made virtues of meekness, humility, poverty of spirit, and self-denial; it taught suspicion of the body, of sexuality, of pride, of this earthly world; it invented a perfect world beyond in order to make the only world there is seem worthless by comparison. Above all Nietzsche attacked the Christian elevation of pity into the supreme virtue, arguing that an uncritical pity preserves and multiplies what is sick and weak and so works, in the long run, against the health and ascent of humanity. Yet his position was more complex than simple contempt. Nietzsche drew a sharp line between the figure of Jesus himself, whom he treated with an unexpected and almost tender respect as a man who had embodied a particular practice of life, and the religion later constructed in his name, for which he held the apostle Paul chiefly responsible. And he readily granted that Christianity had been a school of enormous psychological depth, that it had refined the European conscience and cultivated exactly the rigorous honesty that had at last turned around and undermined the faith itself. His last word on the subject, the closing line of Ecce Homo, was not a dismissal but a confrontation, Dionysus against the Crucified, the setting of one way of redeeming suffering against another.

Nietzsche and the Greeks

Beneath every phase of Nietzsche's development, early and late, lay his lifelong intimacy with ancient Greece. He had been trained as a classical philologist, had read Greek since boyhood at Schulpforta, and had spent a decade as a professor of the subject, and the result was that the Greek world remained, throughout his life, more vivid and more real to him than the modern Europe around him. The Greeks were his constant measure, the people against whom he judged the achievements and the sicknesses of his own civilization.

What Nietzsche admired in the Greeks was, above all, their relationship to suffering. He believed that the Greeks of the tragic age had looked without illusion into the terror and the meaninglessness of existence, had felt the full weight of a profound pessimism, and had then, instead of being crushed by it, created out of it the supreme beauty of their art and their tragedy, and so had said yes to life. This, for Nietzsche, was the model of everything he hoped for. He was drawn especially to the philosophers who came before Socrates, and most of all to Heraclitus, with his vision of a world in ceaseless flux and becoming, of the unity and the strife of opposites; in Heraclitus Nietzsche felt he had found a kindred spirit across the centuries, and his early, unfinished study of the philosophy of the tragic age of the Greeks is a love letter to that lost world. He admired the Greek spirit of contest, the agon, the channeled and creative rivalry that he thought had driven Greek culture to greatness. And he located the beginning of decadence, the fateful wrong turning, in Socrates and Plato, in the triumph of reason over instinct and the invention of a true world behind the apparent one. Even here, though, his feeling was divided; Socrates fascinated and troubled him to the end, an opponent he could never quite finish with. The Greeks gave Nietzsche both halves of his thought: the diagnosis of how a healthy culture declines into rationalism and weakness, and the hope, founded on historical example, that humanity had once been stronger and might be made strong again.

Nietzsche's Style: the Aphorism and the Body

Nietzsche occupies a singular place among philosophers, because he is also, by common consent, one of the greatest prose writers the German language has produced. Most philosophers must be read for their arguments in spite of their prose; Nietzsche is read, by many, for the sheer pleasure and shock of the writing itself. From Human, All Too Human onward, his characteristic form was the aphorism, the short, polished, self-contained fragment, sometimes a single sentence, sometimes a compact paragraph, sharp as a blade and complete in itself.

This was partly a matter of temperament and partly a matter of grim necessity. Nietzsche distrusted philosophical systems; he wrote that the will to a system is a failure of integrity, and the aphorism was the natural enemy of the system, a way of striking at the truth from many angles without ever pretending to a false completeness. But the form was also forced upon him by his ruined health. His eyes could not bear long stretches of reading or writing, his headaches broke his concentration into fragments, and so he composed in bursts, often while walking for hours in the mountains or along the sea, jotting thoughts in pencil notebooks. The conditions of his body shaped the form of his work. And the body was not merely the condition of his writing but one of its central themes. Nietzsche insisted, against the long philosophical habit of treating the mind as separate from and superior to the flesh, that thinking is a bodily activity, that climate and diet and altitude and health shape what a thinker can think, that much past philosophy had been an unconscious misunderstanding of the body. He paid close, deliberate attention to the cold clear air of Sils-Maria and the bright air of the Mediterranean as conditions of his own best work. He asked to be read slowly, like a cow chewing its cud, demanded an active and ruminating reader, and warned that he was easy to misread. The warning was justified. The very brilliance and compression of his style, its irony, its hyperbole, its masks and personae, make him exhilarating to read and dangerously easy to quote out of context, a writer who must be met with both surrender and resistance.

Europe, Politics, and the Question of Women

Nietzsche was not a political philosopher in any systematic sense, and he left no political program, no blueprint for a society or a state. This silence has allowed thinkers of nearly every persuasion, of the left and of the right, to claim him, and the claiming has often involved a good deal of distortion. What can be said with confidence is what he opposed. He despised the modern state, which his Zarathustra called the coldest of all cold monsters. He distrusted mass democracy, socialism, and nationalism alike, regarding them as so many expressions of the herd instinct and of the leveling drive that he believed threatened to grind humanity down toward a comfortable, characterless mediocrity. He was, in this sense, an anti-egalitarian, convinced that culture and greatness are created by exceptional individuals and that a healthy society is one ordered so as to make the emergence of such individuals possible. But the rank he cared about was a rank of spirit, of achieved excellence, and had nothing to do with birth, wealth, or race.

On the questions of nation and race his position was unambiguous, and it is the exact opposite of what his later appropriators pretended. He was emphatically anti-nationalist, contemptuous of German chauvinism and of the new German Empire, and he had renounced his own German citizenship. He condemned antisemitism in the harshest terms and broke friendships over it. He called himself, instead, a good European, looking past the quarrelsome little nation-states toward a unified European culture, and he welcomed the mixing of peoples that nationalists feared. The most genuinely troubling aspect of his legacy lies elsewhere, in his writing about women. His published books contain a number of remarks about women that are dismissive, harsh, or deliberately provocative, including a notorious line in Thus Spoke Zarathustra about not forgetting the whip when one goes to women. Readers have responded to these passages in sharply different ways. Some take them as plain misogyny and find them indefensible. Others point out that Nietzsche frequently wrote in masks and personae, that he placed some of the sharpest of these lines in the mouths of his characters rather than stating them in his own voice, and that in his actual life he consistently sought out, admired, and learned from women of formidable intellect, among them Lou Salomé, the writer Malwida von Meysenbug, Cosima Wagner, the early Swiss feminist Meta von Salis, and the translator Helen Zimmern. The honest conclusion is that the texts do contain real and unsettling hostility, that Nietzsche shared and sometimes sharpened for effect the prejudices of his century, and that this remains one of the most debated and least comfortable parts of his work, a place where his readers are obliged to argue with him rather than simply for him.

The Nietzsche Archive and the Will to Power

The story of what happened to Nietzsche's work after his collapse is nearly as consequential as the story of how he wrote it, and at its center stands his sister Elisabeth. While Nietzsche lay helpless and uncomprehending, Elisabeth seized control of his manuscripts, his letters, his reputation, and his future. In 1894 she established the Nietzsche Archive, first at Naumburg and soon afterward at Weimar, and she made herself the sole gatekeeper of her brother's legacy. She wrote a long, adoring, and unreliable biography, controlled who might see the papers, quarreled with and excluded old friends such as Franz Overbeck who knew too much and would not flatter, and shaped the public image of Nietzsche to suit her own purposes.

Her most damaging act concerned the book known as The Will to Power. Nietzsche had, for several years, planned a great systematic work under that title, and had filled notebooks with fragments toward it. But in 1888, in his last working year, he had abandoned that plan and reorganized the material into other projects. After his death, Elisabeth and her collaborators went back to the discarded notebooks, selected from the thousands of unpublished fragments, arranged the chosen pieces according to an outline Nietzsche himself had thrown away, and published the result, first in 1901 and in a much enlarged version in 1906, as The Will to Power, presenting this assembled construction as Nietzsche's true philosophical masterpiece, the systematic summa that crowned his life. It was nothing of the kind. It was an editorial fabrication, a book Nietzsche never wrote and had explicitly decided not to write. For more than half a century, however, it was read as his central work, and a great deal of misinterpretation flowed from that error. Only with the great critical edition of Nietzsche's complete writings, prepared by the scholars Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari from the 1960s onward, were the notebook fragments finally restored to their true chronological order and the manufactured book exposed for what it was. Today serious scholarship treats The Will to Power not as a work by Nietzsche but as a selection from his literary remains, to be read with caution and always against the books he actually completed and published.

Elisabeth and the Nazi Distortion

Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche did more than mishandle her brother's manuscripts. She bent his name and his fame toward a politics that he had despised. Years before his collapse, Elisabeth had married Bernhard Förster, one of the most prominent antisemitic agitators in Germany. Nietzsche detested Förster and detested his politics, and the marriage had been a serious cause of friction between brother and sister. In 1886 Elisabeth and her husband emigrated to Paraguay to found a colony of racially pure German settlers, which they named Nueva Germania. The venture was a failure; mired in debt and disgrace, Förster killed himself in 1889. Elisabeth eventually returned to Germany, to her invalid brother and to the archive she would build around him.

In the decades after Nietzsche's death, Elisabeth's nationalist and antisemitic sympathies drew her toward the rising forces of the German far right. She admired Italian Fascism and then German National Socialism, cultivated their leaders, and welcomed them to the Nietzsche Archive in Weimar, which became a kind of shrine. Adolf Hitler visited the archive on several occasions; a widely circulated photograph shows him contemplating a bust of the philosopher. The regime gave the archive money and prestige, and Nazi ideologues helped themselves freely to Nietzsche's vocabulary, lifting the will to power, the overman, the blond beast, and the praise of hardness out of all context and welding them into a doctrine of racial supremacy, conquest, and the worship of the total state. When Elisabeth died in 1935, Hitler attended her funeral.

The irony of this appropriation could hardly be more bitter, because it inverted almost everything Nietzsche had actually written. He had broken with Richard Wagner in part over Wagner's antisemitism. He had attacked antisemites in print with open contempt, calling for them to be expelled from the country. He had praised the Jewish people and their contribution to European civilization. He had ridiculed German nationalism and the new German Empire, and had renounced his own German citizenship. He had despised the herd, the mob, and the worshippers of the state, which in Zarathustra he had called the coldest of all cold monsters. The philosopher of self-overcoming and of the sovereign individual was made, after his death and by the agency of his own sister, into a mascot for a movement of racial collectivism and mass obedience. Disentangling the real Nietzsche from this catastrophic distortion would become one of the central tasks of later scholarship.

The Recovery of Nietzsche

In the years immediately after the Second World War, Nietzsche's reputation lay under the heaviest of shadows. To much of the public he seemed simply the philosopher of Nazism, an intellectual accomplice of the regime that had used his words. The work of rescuing him from that verdict, and of restoring him to view as the serious and humane thinker he had been, was the achievement of a generation of scholars.

In the English-speaking world the decisive book was Walter Kaufmann's study of 1950, which patiently and systematically dismantled the Nazified caricature, showed how Elisabeth and the propagandists had falsified the record, and re-presented Nietzsche as a profound philosopher and psychologist whose true concerns were the individual, culture, and the affirmation of life. Kaufmann's translations made a reliable Nietzsche available to a wide readership for the first time. On the scholarly side, the monumental critical edition prepared by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari established, at last, a trustworthy text of everything Nietzsche had written, published and unpublished, and exposed the editorial crimes of the archive. Montinari's careful work in particular discredited The Will to Power as a book and gave scholars the genuine notebooks in their genuine order. By the closing decades of the twentieth century the recovery was complete. Nietzsche stood secure as one of the indispensable thinkers of the modern age, read, taught, argued over, and drawn upon across philosophy, literature, psychology, and the arts.

Legacy and Influence

It would be difficult to name a thinker of the past two centuries whose influence has been wider, deeper, or more various than Nietzsche's. He helped to shape, directly or indirectly, nearly every major current of twentieth-century intellectual life.

In philosophy he was the great forerunner of existentialism. Martin Heidegger devoted years of lectures to him; Karl Jaspers wrote a major study of him; and the French existentialists, Jean-Paul Sartre and especially Albert Camus, wrestled with his legacy as they confronted the question of how to live in a universe without God. Later in the century the French thinkers associated with what came to be called poststructuralism and postmodernism, among them Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida, took Nietzsche as a central inspiration; Foucault's genealogical method of historical analysis is unimaginable without the model of the Genealogy of Morality, and Deleuze's book on Nietzsche helped to launch a whole new wave of interpretation.

In psychology Nietzsche's influence was equally profound. Sigmund Freud regarded him with something close to awe, acknowledging that Nietzsche had anticipated many of the central insights of psychoanalysis and remarking that no one had ever known himself, or was ever likely to know himself, as deeply as Nietzsche had. The very notion of the unconscious, the analysis of guilt and conscience, the unmasking of noble motives, the idea that civilization is built upon the renunciation and redirection of instinct, all had powerful precedent in his pages. In literature his mark is everywhere, on Thomas Mann, who engaged with him throughout his career, on Hermann Hesse, Rainer Maria Rilke, André Gide, George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, and Jack London, among countless others. In music the composer Richard Strauss gave the world a celebrated tone poem inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra, whose sunrise opening has become one of the most recognizable passages in all of music, and Gustav Mahler set words from the same book in one of his symphonies. Nietzsche even left a mark on modern theology, where in the 1960s a movement of so-called death of God theology took its name and its starting point directly from him.

What unites this vast and contradictory progeny is not agreement with Nietzsche's conclusions, for his admirers have agreed with him on very little and with one another on less. It is, rather, that he changed the questions. After Nietzsche it became difficult to discuss morality without asking where moral values came from and whose interests they served, difficult to discuss truth without asking about perspective and power, difficult to discuss the self without suspecting the depths beneath its surface, difficult to take any cherished ideal at its own valuation. He taught a permanent suspicion and a permanent honesty, and in doing so he became, as he had predicted he would, a destiny.

The Circle of Friends

Nietzsche has come down to posterity as the philosopher of solitude, and the reputation is largely deserved, for the wandering years were years of an isolation so deep that it sometimes frightened him. Yet solitude was never what he wanted. He longed for friendship with an intensity that few people could satisfy, held it to an exalted standard, and suffered keenly each time it failed him, and the handful of friends who stayed loyal to him deserve a place in his story.

The most steadfast of all was Franz Overbeck, the Basel theologian, a man of quiet integrity and unshowy devotion who remained Nietzsche's friend through every change of doctrine and every estrangement, and who never flattered him. It was Overbeck who, alarmed by the strange letters of January 1889, traveled at once to Turin, found his friend in ruin, and brought him home. After the collapse it was Overbeck, again, who saw most clearly what Elisabeth was doing to her brother's legacy, and who paid for his honesty by being frozen out of the archive. Almost as devoted, in a different key, was the musician Heinrich Köselitz, whom Nietzsche affectionately renamed Peter Gast. Gast served him for years as copyist, proofreader, and disciple, deciphering the manuscripts that Nietzsche's failing eyes could barely produce, and his patient labor helped a number of the late books into existence.

The dearest friend of Nietzsche's youth was Erwin Rohde, the fellow philologist of the Leipzig years, with whom he had shared an intellectual companionship of rare warmth and who had publicly defended The Birth of Tragedy against its attackers. That friendship, like so many in Nietzsche's life, cooled with time and distance, and the two men drifted apart in later years, a loss Nietzsche felt deeply. Paul Deussen, his companion from Bonn who became a distinguished scholar of Indian philosophy, remained a friend, if an increasingly distant one, and was generous to Nietzsche with money in the lean years. Carl von Gersdorff, an aristocratic friend of gentle temper, belonged to the same early circle. Among the women who befriended and helped him, the most important was Malwida von Meysenbug, an older idealist and writer who offered him refuge, sympathy, and the introduction that led, for better and worse, to Lou Salomé. Paul Rée, the skeptical psychologist who had helped guide Nietzsche into his free-spirit period, was a close companion until the catastrophe of 1882 swept the friendship away. And at the very end, when recognition was at last beginning to stir, the Danish critic Georg Brandes became a valued correspondent and the first person anywhere to teach Nietzsche's philosophy to students. These friendships, with their warmth and their fragility, their devotion and their breakages, were the human setting of a body of work often imagined to have been produced in pure isolation. Nietzsche wrote alone, but he did not wish to be alone, and the loyalty of a few friends was one of the things that made the long ordeal of his productive years endurable.

The Man Behind the Work

It is one of the most striking facts about Nietzsche that the man and the writer seemed, to those who knew him, almost like two different people. The prose is volcanic, merciless, drunk on its own daring, full of thunder and contempt and exultation. The man, by the testimony of nearly everyone who met him, was the opposite: soft-spoken, courteous to the point of old-fashioned formality, considerate, gentle, modest in his manner, with beautiful manners and a quiet, almost shy charm. He was kind to servants and to the poor, incapable of cruelty in person, easily wounded, and unfailingly polite even to those he was demolishing in print. The mustache and the piercing, short-sighted eyes have become an icon; the living man behind them was mild.

He lived, in his wandering years, with a near-monastic simplicity, in rented rooms, on plain food, with a few books and few possessions, indifferent to comfort and to money beyond what his small pension supplied. He never married and had no children; his attempts at love, above all the painful episode with Lou Salomé, came to nothing, and he knew long stretches of an isolation so complete that the arrival of a letter could be the event of a week. He longed for friendship and for disciples, demanded a great deal of both, and was disappointed again and again. He carried, every day, the burden of a body that tormented him with headaches, nausea, insomnia, and failing sight, and he made out of that endurance not a complaint but a philosophy. He described himself, with a flash of grim humor, as dynamite, and he predicted that his name would one day be associated with a crisis such as the earth had never seen, that he would be understood only after his death, born, as he put it, posthumously. In the loneliness of his lifetime that prophecy must have looked like the consolation of a man whom almost no one read. It came true beyond anything even he could have imagined.

CONCLUSION

Friedrich Nietzsche lived fifty-five years, and for only about twenty of them was he able to work. He published his books into a silence that scarcely broke before his mind did, and the fame he had craved arrived only when he could no longer know it. He was betrayed, after his death, by the person closest to him, and his ideas were yoked, for a generation, to a movement that embodied everything he had fought. By almost any ordinary measure his was a life of failure, frustration, illness, and loss.

And yet there are few lives in the history of thought that have proved more consequential. Nietzsche saw, earlier and more clearly than anyone, that the religious and metaphysical foundations of Western civilization were crumbling, and he refused either to look away from that fact or to pretend that nothing followed from it. He spent his strength trying to imagine how human beings might live, create, and find meaning in a world they could no longer believe was watched over and underwritten from above. His answers, the will to power, the eternal recurrence, the overman, the revaluation of values, the love of fate, are not a finished system, and Nietzsche did not offer them as one. They are provocations, experiments, challenges flung down before a future he knew he would not see. He asked to be read slowly, and he asked, above all, not to be believed but to be thought with and against.

More than a century after his death, he is read more widely than ever, in every major language, by philosophers and poets and ordinary people drawn by the strange, exhilarating, dangerous voice that speaks from his pages. He remains genuinely difficult, genuinely disturbing, impossible to domesticate, and impossible to ignore. He wanted, he said, to be a teacher of the great yes to life, an affirmer in an age of denial, and to a remarkable degree he became exactly that. The frail, courteous, half-blind wanderer who wrote in mountain villages for an audience that did not yet exist had understood his own destiny precisely. He was born posthumously, and he is living still. SOURCES

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