Nietzsche - The Philosopher Who Warned the West Documentary

The man known to history as Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on the 15th of October 1844 in the village of Röcken near the town Lützen, in what was then the Kingdom of Prussia. He was named after King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, on whose birthday he was born. Friedrich’s father was Ludwig Nietzsche, a 31-year-old Lutheran priest at the local church. After receiving his religious training at the University of Halle, Ludwig had spent seven years working as a private tutor to the three daughters of Duke Joseph of Saxe-Altenberg, a minor prince and a veteran of the

Napoleonic Wars. In 1842, soon after taking up his post at Röcken, Ludwig met 17-year-old Franziska Oehler. The pair were married the following October, on Ludwig’s 30th birthday. The daughter of the priest of the nearby parish of Pobles, Franziska was 19 years old when she gave birth to Friedrich. The couple had two further children, a daughter in 1846 named Elisabeth and a son two years later that they named Ludwig Joseph. Nietzsche’s recollections of his earliest years were dominated by his father, who was a well-respected member of their community. Living in a scholarly house, little Friedrich enjoyed

playing with the books that were proudly displayed in his father’s study. This idyllic existence would soon be disrupted by the Revolutions of 1848, which swept across the European continent that spring and summer. The conservative Nietzsches were horrified when the King of Prussia was forced to acquiesce to many of the demands of the Prussian revolutionaries. Yet there were more personal problems soon facing the family. A few months later Friedrich’s father began suffering from a series of seizures which doctors could not explain and he died in July 1849. A few months later, in January 1850, Friedrich’s younger

brother Ludwig Joseph also died, a few weeks short of his second birthday. After the death of his father and youngest brother, Friedrich moved with his family to the town of Naumburg, where his paternal grandmother Erdmuthe and two aunts lived. The young five-year old Friedrich, nicknamed Fritz, initially struggled to adjust to the more urban life in Naumburg. In 1851 he began to receive lessons from a priest-in-training named Weber, and soon became close friends with two classmates: Wilhelm Pinder, who lived with his family in one of the town’s most prestigious houses, and the latter’s cousin Gustav Krug,

the son of a prominent local official and accomplished musician. In October 1854, 10-year-old Fritz and his friends were admitted to the cathedral high school. Two years later, the Nietzsches moved into a larger house. With a new piano at his disposal, Fritz received lessons from a local choirmaster and proved a talented musician. In October 1857, not long after his thirteenth birthday, Fredrich began to suffer from serious headaches. His mother took him out of school until he recovered his health. By the time he returned to school in early 1858, he had written two short plays. His literary

output continued later in the year on a visit to his maternal relations at Pobles, where he wrote a brief autobiographical account of his young life, including idyllic reminiscences of his father’s house at Röcken. Commenting on the music he heard in his father’s church, the 13-year-old Nietzsche defended the Classical tradition of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven which “leads our thoughts to higher things,” while describing the music of contemporary Romantic composers such as Liszt and Berlioz as decadent and of limited value from a cultural perspective, as it was being used, quote, “solely for enjoyment or to make a

public exhibition of itself.” Although he would spend his adult life challenging such moral prejudices, the teenage Nietzsche was already displaying the literary talent that would make him a profound writer, critic and thinker. In September 1858, not long after Nietzsche returned to Naumburg, he received a scholarship to study at the prestigious Pforta boarding school west of Naumburg. The curriculum here was typical of the nineteenth century and focused on the study of classical languages including Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. While the school timetable provided for ten hours of studying each day, Nietzsche adapted quickly and was consoled by

the proximity to Naumburg, which enabled him to meet his family regularly. However, he regretted being separated from his friends Wilhelm and Gustav, both of whom continued their studies in the town. After a memorable visit to the university town of Jena during his summer break in July 1859, Nietzsche returned to Pforta in August, and finished top of the class in his exams. However, the year was marred by the death of his 72-year-old grandfather David Oehler, which forced his maternal relatives to move away from Pobles. In the summer of 1860, Nietzsche, Wilhelm Pinder and Gustav Krug formed

a three-man literary society named ‘Germania,’ agreeing to meet regularly to discuss their respective musical and literary outputs. As part of this pursuit, Nietzsche began writing a Christmas oratorio. In November, he received a lengthy letter from Krug in which he praised Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde, a tempestuous five-hour spectacle based on Arthurian legend which had not yet been performed but whose musical scores were already available and being analysed by critics. For the time being Nietzsche did not share his friend’s enthusiasm for Wagner’s work, though that would change in time. He continued to work on his

oratorio but was once again affected by his migraines. Over the course of 1861 he also began to drift towards the music of Liszt, which he had earlier denounced as sinful, and began to take an interest in Slavic and Hungarian folklore. The year also had a transformative impact on Nietzsche’s thinking about history and literature. For school, he wrote a provocative essay defending Friedrich Hölderlin, a poet and philosopher who contrasted German ‘barbarism’ with the achievements of classical antiquity and who had supported the French Revolution. Elsewhere Nietzsche was inspired by the English poet Lord Byron, in particular his

superhuman Romantic hero Manfred. Far more controversial was an essay which he composed around this time which was supportive of Napoleon III, Emperor of the French and a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte whose armies had inflicted so much devastation on Germany a half a century earlier. Nietzsche’s text was criticised by both his friends, an early sign of Friedrich’s willingness to court controversy in his writing. In the period that followed, Nietzsche’s creativity increased as his thinking continued to develop. In an essay entitled ‘Fate and History,’ Nietzsche came to the realisation that an individual who is theoretically free is

in fact obeying a wide range of customs and traditions ingrained into them from childhood, which he called ‘fate.’ For Nietzsche, an individual who was truly free had to constantly battle against the constraints of fate. This realisation led him to reject his Christian upbringing, marking the beginning of Nietzsche’s lifelong quest to break free from the chains of Christian morality. Despite frequent bouts of poor health and headaches, Nietzsche continued to meet with academic success at Pforta. By the autumn of 1862, he was finally ready to embrace Wagner after the Germania Society acquired a copy of the score

of Tristan und Isolde. Sitting at his piano, Nietzsche valiantly joined Krug in making their way through the opera. Nietzsche was so impressed that he took the score with him to Pforta, deaf to Krug’s complaints that it was his idea to purchase it. In his efforts to tear down the rules around him, Nietzsche had begun joining his classmates in smoking and drinking, but in the spring of 1863 a teacher ran into him as he and a friend were returning to school from a drunken binge, resulting in him being moved back a semester. His pursuit of his

literary interests caused his grades to fall, and he only just managed to pass his final exams in the late summer of 1864. While his friends Wilhelm Pinder and Gustav Krug went to university at Heidelberg, Nietzsche opted to study theology at Bonn, despite his growing religious pessimism. Nietzsche arrived at Bonn in October, accompanied by his Pforta classmate Paul Deussen, who would later become a renowned Sanskrit scholar. Here he attended lectures by the preeminent philologists, Otto Jahn and Friedrich Ritschl. Philology is considered a relatively arcane field of endeavour today, yet in the nineteenth century it was at

the cutting edge of European scholarship. As a discipline it combines literary criticism with analysis of texts and languages, all within a historical framework. It’s important to bear this in mind, as most contemporaries considered Nietzsche to primarily be a philologist rather than a philosopher, as he is more often deemed to have been today, as well as this, much of his earlier work falls very clearly into the realm of philology. When he returned to Naumburg for the Easter holidays in 1865, Nietzsche shocked his mother by informing her that he was no longer planning to become a priest.

His growing interest in philology had informed him of how myths come into being and he increasingly recognised that the early Christians had transformed the historical Jesus of Nazareth into a divine figure in a similar fashion. Supporting his arguments with a copy of David Strauss’s Life of Jesus, published back in 1835 and which attributed the gospels in the Bible to early Christians several decades after Jesus’s death, Nietzsche stubbornly resisted his family’s efforts to convince him to return to theology. When he returned to Bonn, he formally transferred to the Faculty of Philology. Nietzsche soon decided that Bonn

was not for him and opted to transfer to the University of Leipzig in his native Saxony. Aside from financial considerations, Nietzsche had decided to follow Friedrich Ritschl, who had recently been recruited by Leipzig. Soon after his arrival at Leipzig in October 1865, the 21-year-old Nietzsche discovered the work of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who would become the greatest influence on his thinking. In his book The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer built on the work of his great predecessor Immanuel Kant by arguing that the empirical world is only a representation constructed from sensual perceptions, while the

true world is defined by an unknowable “Will” that exists among all living beings. In his efforts to understand this enigmatic force, Schopenhauer anticipated Darwin by recognising that nature is a struggle for survival. Although humans had achieved a dominant position in nature through superior intellect, Schopenhauer pessimistically saw the human Will as one which relentlessly pursues its desires only to encounter boredom after attaining them. The only way to escape the suffering of the human condition was to appreciate the wonders of nature and art. In early 1866, Nietzsche furthered his intellectual pursuits by founding a Philological Club, and

presenting a paper which caught the attention of Professor Ritschl, who offered to support him in getting his work published. At this time, Saxony found itself caught up in a war between Prussia, the dominant power in northern Germany, and the Austrian Habsburg Empire, the largest German region in the south of Central Europe. After the Prussians won a decisive victory at Königgrätz in July, Prussia extended its influence and Saxony effectively became a Prussian protectorate. Notwithstanding his academic success, in September 1867 Nietzsche was swept up in the German patriotic fervour and enlisted in an artillery regiment. In March

1868, he was badly injured after falling from his horse. He took advantage of his recovery to work on his academic contributions. Shortly before entering military service, he had written a prize-winning essay on the third-century AD Greek historian and biographer of the ancient philosophers, Diogenes Laertius. Laertius is our foremost source for the details of the lives of many of the ancient world’s most important philosophers, men such as Zeno of Citium, the founder of the school of philosophy known as Stoicism. Nietzsche’s essay on Laertius was subsequently published in a prestigious journal edited by Ritschl, who would accept

two more of Nietzsche’s contributions in 1868. At just 24 years of age, Nietzsche was firmly on the path to academic stardom when he returned to Leipzig in October 1868 after his military service. Following an introduction from a friend, on the 8th of November Nietzsche was invited to a private gathering to meet one of his idols, Richard Wagner. After Wagner entertained his small audience by playing extracts from his operas, he and Nietzsche talked about philosophy, and the latter was delighted to hear that his favourite composer was also an enthusiastic admirer of Schopenhauer. At the end of

the meeting, Wagner invited Nietzsche to visit him at his home in Lucerne in Switzerland to continue their discussions. As chance would have it, not long afterwards, Nietzsche received an astonishing offer to take up a professorship in classical philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland. Motivated by the salary of 3,000 Swiss francs a year, Nietzsche left for the Alpine country in March 1869 to take on a professorship without even having completed his university degree. Clearly his early published work had convinced his new departmental colleagues in Basel that the young man was worth hiring, degree or

no degree. While he struggled with being away from friends and family in Germany, Nietzsche did make frequent trips to Wagner’s villa at Tribschen on the shores of Lake Lucerne after arriving at Switzerland. There he cultivated good relations with Wagner’s mistress and future wife, Cosima von Bülow, the daughter of Franz Liszt, whom he would later praise as the model for womanhood. Nietzsche was glad to become part of his idol’s intimate circle at a time when Wagner was working on Siegfried, the third part of his epic Ring cycle based on Germanic mythology, while the composer appreciated the

young philologist’s interest in his work. After spending Christmas with the Wagners, Nietzsche delivered two controversial lectures in early 1870, in which he argued that the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates, a revered figure in the canon of western philosophy, was partly responsible for the degeneration of Greek culture from the heights of epic poetry and tragedy. He would soon expand out these ideas, arguing that Classical Greek culture was actually at its height in the sixth and early fifth centuries BC and that figures like Socrates in the late fifth century BC, with what Nietzsche viewed as a rather simplistic

philosophical approach, represented a decline. In April 1870, Nietzsche had his post at Basel confirmed as a permanent one, but his joy was short-lived after learning that he would be teaching 20 hours a week, a schedule which would leave little time for his own research and writing. He received a further shock a few weeks later when Wagner informed his close friends that he was intending to move away from Tribschen to manage his own opera theatre at Bayreuth in Bavaria under the patronage of his admirer, King Ludwig II, where he hoped to stage his Ring cycle with

musicians trained under his direction. A disconsolate Nietzsche wrote to Cosima suggesting that he might leave his academic post after a year or two and follow Wagner to Bayreuth. Meanwhile, Nietzsche’s life was further disrupted when Napoleon III of France declared war on Prussia in July 1870. After spending his summer holiday with the Wagners, he obtained leave from the university to serve as a medical orderly in eastern France, and arrived at the headquarters of the Prussian Southern Army at Nancy in Lorraine just before the Prussians defeated the French decisively at Sedan on the 2nd of September 1870.

Although the Franco-Prussian War was a short one and soon ended in January 1871 with the unification of the German Empire under Prussian domination, a move orchestrated by the Prussian chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, Nietzsche’s views on it evolved in the few short months of the conflict. This was in part owing to his contracting both diphtheria and dysentery during his time as a medical orderly, conditions which further damaged his always precarious health. As a result, he took a dimmer view of the Prussian aggression by the time the war came to an end. During the winter of 1870,

while recovering from his ailments, he began to make plans to move away from his focus on philology in favour of studying philosophy more directly. After a joyful Christmas holiday during which he had the privilege of witnessing Wagner perform his Siegfried Idyll as a surprise birthday gift for Cosima, Nietzsche sank into a depression when several friends refused to join him in Basel. Further disappointment followed when Nietzsche’s request to take over the chair of philosophy in the university was denied. While recovering his health in Lugano in Italian Switzerland, Nietzsche worked on a study of Greek tragedy, which

eventually became a book under the title The Birth of Tragedy, published in December 1871. Nietzsche identified within Greek tragedy a struggle between ‘Apollonian’ and ‘Dionysian’ forces, the former representing order and reason and the latter chaos and emotion. These forces were manifested in the cults of Apollo, the Greek god of music and dance, and Dionysius, the Greek god of wine, excess, ecstasy and madness. Nietzsche saw music as the highest representation of the Dionysian concept, and speculated that the epic poetry of ancient Greece had been inspired by music. The book was dedicated to Wagner, whom Nietzsche argued

had emulated the Greek tragedians in achieving a perfect balance of Apollonian and Dionysian elements. The composer was delighted with Nietzsche’s work, and asked the author to send copies to his patron King Ludwig of Bavaria and his father-in-law Franz Liszt. Although the book proved popular among artists and musicians, the academic community was less enamoured by Nietzsche’s conjectural approach to philology, and Nietzsche was disappointed to find his mentor Friedrich Ritschl among the critics. That said, any reader of The Birth of Tragedy today will find a refreshingly novel insight into Classical Greek culture. Nietzsche was already very much

carving out his own path by the early 1870s when it came to his interpretations. Nietzsche saw himself along with Wagner as the vanguard of a movement striving to return German culture to the heights it had attained at the turn of the nineteenth century, the era of Kant, Mozart, Goethe and Beethoven. In early 1872, he delivered a series of public lectures attacking the German education system and warning against the trend towards the democratisation of education. While he recognised a need for the practical training of state officials, farmers, and factory workers, he argued that cultural education and

intellectualism was being denigrated by making it overly functional with the goal that individuals should solely be training for a profession at all times, rather than engaging in scholarship as an end in and of itself. In May he went to Bayreuth to attend a ceremony marking the laying down of the foundation stone of Wagner’s New Theatre at Bayreuth, an edifice built to the composer’s specifications. Back in Basel, Nietzsche soon found himself in the middle of a vicious debate in the pages of the national newspapers about the merits of his book The Birth of Tragedy. While he

appreciated the publicity, he realised that most of his fellow philologists were against him, and after spending his summer holidays in Italy, Nietzsche returned to Basel to find that only two students had signed up to his course on Greek and Roman rhetoric. He was forced to abandon a second lecture course on Homer altogether. Unperturbed, Nietzsche now decided to work on a study of pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, which he hoped to publish under the title Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks in time for Wagner’s 60th birthday in May 1873. When he visited the Wagners in early

April in Bayreuth to inspect construction work on the Theatre, Nietzsche’s reading from his latest work received a somewhat cool reception and his efforts to lighten the mood by playing one of his compositions on the piano were likewise received awkwardly. By early May, Nietzsche had almost finished his new book when he became distracted by the publication of The Old and New Faith by David Strauss, the writer whose Life of Jesus had inspired Nietzsche to give up religion. Now, four decades after the Life of Jesus first appeared, Strauss’ latest work set out a vision of progressive Christianity

that labelled Schopenhauer’s pessimistic diagnosis of the human condition as the product of a, quote, “putrefying brain.” Nietzsche was infuriated by this and wrote a polemical essay targeting Strauss as the representative of a contemporary cultural Philistinism in Germany that had stopped seeking truth and beauty and instead looked for easy and comfortable answers. This polemic of Nietzsche’s against Strauss was the first of a series of four essays which would eventually be published together in 1876 under the title Untimely Meditations. In the next instalment, under the heading On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, Nietzsche argued

that it was worth studying the past as a reminder that it was possible for humanity to achieve greatness, but warned against hero-worship and mythmaking, suggesting that periodically the past should be re-examined with an eye to the future. Nietzsche then proceeded to attack the scientific approach to history in Germany, which served to undermine the power of the past. In another essay from this time, entitled Schopenhauer as Educator, he praised the manner in which Schopenhauer sought to liberate his readers from convention. It certainly influenced Nietzsche. he was nothing if not original in his views. For the fourth

of his Untimely Meditations, Nietzsche turned his attention to art with a piece entitled Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. Although he had written most of it by early 1875, he was once again struck down by ill health that would leave him almost blind. Scholars have debated what afflicted Nietzsche for well over a century. Many have concluded that he was suffering from tertiary syphilis, but it may have been a number of different ailments that gradually became worse over time, notably gastric spasms, hemmorhoids, debilitating headaches, failing eyesight and eventually fits and fainting spells. Some have speculated that these myriad

neurological issues indicate the development of a brain tumour. It was not until July 1876 that Nietzsche recovered enough from this latest bout of ill health that he managed to complete the manuscript of Richard Wagner in Bayreuth with the assistance of a young musician and admirer named Heinrich Köselitz. Copies were immediately sent out to Wagner, who urged Nietzsche to hurry to Bayreuth to attend the final rehearsals in advance of the premiere of the Ring cycle in mid-August. Nietzsche arrived there by the 22nd of July, but found the town full of aristocrats who were there for the

social occasion rather than any particular appreciation of Wagner’s work. Keen to get away from the crowds, Nietzsche refused an invitation to meet the king of Bavaria. The University of Basel now granted Nietzsche a year-long sabbatical. He spent the first part of it in Italy with Malwida von Meysenbug, a German aristocrat who had turned her back on her family and befriended several prominent European revolutionaries, and was an enthusiastic admirer of both Wagner and Nietzsche’s work. Although Meysenbug was 28 years Nietzsche’s senior, she became one of his closest confidants after their first meeting in Munich several years

earlier. Nietzsche travelled to Sorrento in the Bay of Naples with two companions, Albert Brenner and Dr Paul Rée, both of whom had previously been his students. Under Rée’s influence, Nietzsche found himself questioning Schopenhauer’s more pessimistic writings. He also became embroiled in a disagreement with Wagner at this time, whose German nationalism Nietzsche was increasingly critical of. Aside from any philosophical disagreements, Wagner knew that his ambitions for Nietzsche to edit a journal to promote his ideas about music and art were unlikely to be realised given Nietzsche’s poor health. Following his return to Basel in the autumn of

1877, Nietzsche went to Dr Otto Eiser in Frankfurt for a medical examination. The doctor diagnosed a damaged optic nerve as the source of his failing eyesight and prescribed his patient, quote, “an absolute avoidance of reading and writing for years to come.” This was an instruction Nietzsche was never going to even remotely consider following. During his sabbatical Nietzsche had been working on a fifth Untimely Meditation about the human condition, but by the time the manuscript was completed it had become a separate book of more than 300 pages under the title Human, All too Human. This was

published in the spring of 1878. Composed of a series of 638 aphorisms intended to communicate his thoughts concisely if not systematically, Nietzsche argued that there were no eternal truths, and that the efforts of Kant and Schopenhauer to discover such truths were fundamentally misguided. In a dramatic reversal of his earlier views, Nietzsche now placed science on a higher level than art, arguing that small scientific discoveries had done much to advance human progress. While Nietzsche continued to acknowledge the importance of art, he described it as a bridge to facilitate the transition from religion and superstition to his

free-spirited way of thinking. Indeed, the subtitle of the book was A Book for Free Spirits. Elsewhere in the book, he continued his relentless attack on Christianity by asserting that its core precepts had no rational and scientific basis, that its notions of good and evil were social constructs which had no place in the modern world. Nietzsche knew that his new book would infuriate Wagner and chose not to send him a copy. Later he heard from his and Wagner’s publisher Ernst Schmeitzner that the composer had acquired a copy of the book but did not read much of

it before setting it aside in order to not disturb the positive impression he had of Nietzsche’s early work. Many of Nietzsche’s friends were equally critical after reading the book, and were especially troubled by his rejection of morality. In response to his critics, Nietzsche doubled down by writing a second part subtitled Mixed Opinions and Maxims, offering another 400-odd aphorisms in which he argued that Christian humility and self-denial was in fact a manifestation of a self-centred desire to avoid eternal damnation, and that Christianity was a “cult of suffering.” Nietzsche’s deteriorating health prompted him to request to be

relieved of his duties at the University of Basel in May 1879. By now in his mid-thirties, his thinking had evolved considerably during his years at Basel, though over the course of the next decade he would have to eke out an existence as an independent philosopher with a pension of 3,000 Swiss francs a year from the university and occasional financial support from friends and family. However, despite his poor health and the manner in which his work in the 1870s had strongly divided opinion, Nietzsche was about to embark on the most productive period of his life, as

the liberation from his academic duties freed him to research and write to an unprecedented extent. By the autumn of 1879 he had already put together another collection of free-thinking aphorisms entitled The Wanderer and His Shadow. In this Nietzsche denounced the promotion of abstract concepts such as the salvation of the soul, arguing that human beings should not be troubled by metaphysical considerations. Addressing an age old question about the state of nature, he attacks Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s notion that “man is born free, but everywhere is in chains,” arguing that rather than voluntarily giving up part of their freedoms

for the social good, human communities evolved in response to external threats, and the earliest forms of justice were no more than legalised systems of revenge. By giving his book the title The Wanderer and His Shadow, Nietzsche used his aphorisms to explore positive and negative aspects of the same issue. For instance, addressing the impacts of war, Nietzsche asserted that while war was clearly was a destructive force, it can also provide the necessary catalyst to rejuvenate stagnant communities and resolve long-standing tensions within them. These views were often controversial, but many of the ideas outlined in The Wanderer

and his Shadows are now widely incorporated into the field of anthropology and the study of early human societies. The winter of 1879 proved disastrous for Nietzsche’s health and he spent 1880 on the move seeking more amenable climates. In February 1880 he went to the northern Italian lakes, where he met up with Heinrich Köselitz and accompanied him to Venice. Nietzsche enjoyed Venice in the company of his young friend, whose support in transcribing Nietzsche’s barely-legible drafts into a fine copy proved indispensable, but the summer heat compelled him to move to the fashionable spa town of Marienbad, now

in The Czech Republic. After returning to Naumburg in September, he returned to Italy in October to pre-empt the onset of winter and settled down in Genoa. Here Nietzsche was prodigiously busy and by February 1881 he had completed his draft of Morgenröte, or Morning Glow, which was published in June. While Nietzsche had high hopes for the book, it would prove to be one of his lesser-known works, though it allowed him to further develop his ideas about Christianity’s harmful impact on human development while expressing his appreciation for eastern religions, in particular Buddhism, which had largely cast aside

the need for gods in favour of a quest for the spiritual fulfilment of the individual. January 1882 saw Nietzsche in unusually good health, and he was glad to have the company of Paul Rée, who had brought a typewriter with him to help Nietzsche with his work. Typewriters had only really become commercially available from the late 1860s onwards and Nietzsche, who was trying to use one in a sustained manner for the first time, initially struggled to operate the machine, straining his eyes to make sure that he was pressing the right key. Now in his late thirties,

Nietzsche made the light-hearted suggestion that he might need a wife, a subject that he had occasionally discussed before with Paul Rée and Malwida von Meysenbug during their time in Sorrento. After spending five weeks in Genoa with Nietzsche, Rée had continued his journey to Rome to stay with Meysenbug, in whose salon he encountered Lou Salomé, a 21-year-old Russian-born poet whose iconoclastic opinions reflected her disillusionment at the religious and moral instruction she received as a student of theology. Rée insisted that Nietzsche ought to meet this extraordinary prodigy, and after a brief stay in Messina in Sicily, Nietzsche

arrived at Rome in mid-April. In spite of their rather awkward initial encounters in Rome, Nietzsche was soon impressed by Salomé’s intellect. In Salomé, Nietzsche believed that he had found a young female disciple who could support his work. Although Salomé later claimed that Nietzsche had proposed to her during a third meeting in Lucerne in early May, Nietzsche insisted that he was only after intellectual companionship, in contrast to Rée, who addressed incessant letters to her in distinctly romantic terms. In a plan devised by Salomé, the three intended to live together in a philosophical commune in Vienna. To

his sceptical friends, Nietzsche declared his intention to train Salomé as his intellectual successor, and pre-emptively denied that he had any romantic interest in her. Nietzsche had arranged for his sister Elisabeth and Salomé to meet in Bayreuth in July for a performance of Wagner’s opera Parsifal, based on the Arthurian knight Percival’s quest for the Holy Grail, one which Nietzsche hated due to its Christian inspiration. Despite their outward display of friendship, Elisabeth Nietzsche was irritated by the young Russian. In the meantime, Nietzsche had added to his body of work with Joyous Science, in which he endorsed Charles

Darwin’s views on biological evolution, which were still enormously controversial over twenty years after The Origin of Species had first been published. At the same time, Nietzsche challenged the Darwinian concept of the “survival of the fittest.” Following this logic, the purpose of humans and all other animals was solely to survive, but Nietzsche observed that many individuals who had made the greatest contributions to human culture, such as the Renaissance artist Raphael or the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, had died young without leaving any heirs. Nietzsche argued that human existence was both comic and tragic: the comic aspect was

due to the vanity of short-lived humans who believed that they could master nature, while the tragic element came from the recognition that humans are an infinitesimally small part of the cosmos. Near the end of the book, Nietzsche issued a call to his readers to wage an intellectual war on behalf of science against religion. Joyous Science is a peculiar in many ways, one which tried to apply the evolutionary biology of Darwin to a new theory of cultural evolution. Although Nietzsche had called his book Joyous Science, he concluded that the tragic aspects of human existence would always

prevail. Nevertheless, his encounters with Lou Salomé had inspired within him a sense of optimism about life. In August 1882, the two spent three weeks in philosophical discussions in the Tautenburg forest in Saxony, which Nietzsche hailed as one of the happiest times of his life. Arguments did occur though with his sister and mother about the propriety of his relationship with Salomé, which led Nietzsche to leave Naumburg for Leipzig. There the already precarious foundations of his triangular relationship began to crumble, as a jealous Rée resented Nietzsche’s insistence on spending time alone with Salomé, while the young and

strong-minded Russian had no intention of submitting herself to Nietzsche’s intellectual control. Nietzsche also admitted privately in his notebooks around this time that his desire for Salomé had assumed a physical dimension. He was consequently immensely upset when the relationship between them all began to collapse in the weeks that followed. Plunged into a deep depression and resorting to taking growing quantities of opium to treat both his physical ailments and his emotional pain, Nietzsche continued an acrimonious correspondence in the months that followed with his erstwhile companions from his retreat at Rapallo in Italy, all to no avail as

they drifted apart. As emotionally turbulent a period as this was for Nietzsche, it proved an intellectually productive one as he began working on what is often deemed to be his most important work, Thus Spake Zarathustra. In this he sought to establish a new philosophical framework of his own, independent of the influence of Schopenhauer, Kant or any other philosopher. This singularly Nietzschean philosophy was expressed via the mouthpiece of the ancient Persian prophet Zoroaster, who gave his name to Zoroastrianism, the world’s first monotheistic faith, one which had flourished in Mesopotamia and Persia in the first millennium BC

and in which the Creator God Ahura Mazda was involved in an eternal struggle with the demon Ahriman. Although Nietzsche rejected the dichotomy of good and evil introduced by Zoroastrianism, one which had clearly influenced the development of Christianity, he saw Zoroaster as a prophet who had challenged the status quo, hence his motives for expressing some of his own philosophical ideas through the mouthpiece of the Persian prophet. Nietzsche wrote the first part of Zarathustra within the space of ten days in late January 1883. A couple of weeks later, he learned that Richard Wagner had died unexpectedly in

Venice. They had not seen each other in over six years after an acrimonious divergence of views in the mid-1870s, though Nietzsche continued to revere elements of the great composer’s work. During a visit to Rome in April 1883, Nietzsche reconciled with his sister Elisabeth, whom he had earlier blamed for the wrecking of his plans with Salomé. By June, he was back at his favourite Swiss mountain retreat of Sils-Maria, where he expressed his anger at his Leipzig publisher Ernst Schmeitzner for delaying the publication of the first part of Zarathustra. Nietzsche speculated that Zoroaster’s declaration in the book

that, quote, “God is dead!”, surely one of the most famous lines of modern philosophy, had led Schmeitzner’s printer to sit on the manuscript and delay its publication. The text was paradoxical. On the one hand, Nietzsche argued that the advent of science and modernity was leading to a growing secularism, one which would eventually lead to the death of Christianity. Yet on the other hand, Zarathustra is evidently framed in the text as a parallel to Jesus Christ and Nietzsche even referred to his book as a ‘fifth gospel.’ These contradictions can be explained when we see that Nietzsche

was arguing that man was now moving to a new stage of evolution after the religiosity of the past, one in which a new Übermensch, ‘overman’ or ‘superman’, one based on rationality and a higher culture, would emerge. By July, Nietzsche had completed the second part of Zarathustra, consisting of 22 further discourses in which he went further than ever in denouncing the hypocrisy of Christians seeking self-negating virtuousness for the sake of a heavenly kingdom. Nietzsche began to develop the idea of the “will to power,” substituting Schopenhauer’s image of nature as a struggle for survival with a struggle

for mastery, arguing that no relationship between two humans is without a desire to gain control over the other. As he elaborated on the concept, Nietzsche argued that Christianity had only been able to succeed because the emperors at the heart of the Roman Empire had realised in the fourth century that adopting the new religion served their material purposes well and that the Church soon became estranged from the moral message of Christ as the Bishops of Rome sought ever greater power in medieval times. What was needed was a new morality entirely. In the third part of Zarathustra,

completed in early 1884 during a stay in Nice, Nietzsche portrays Zoroaster returning to the mountains, where he draws the depressing conclusion that since time is infinite, everything in life is an eternal recurrence of what has already happened before, and will happen again, and that humanity as a collective would never fully evolve, though in the end Nietzsche’s Zoroaster or Zarathustra still finds comfort in the notion of eternity. Although Nietzsche intended this to be the final part of a Zarathustra trilogy, in January 1885 he wrote another 20 Zarathustra scenes of such an explicitly sacrilegious nature that he

decided to limit the print run of this fourth part to 40 copies that he distributed among a select circle of friends. These exclusive copies were printed by the Leipzig printer Constantin Naumann, who had also printed the first three volumes at Schmeitzner’s request. By this point Nietzsche had broken off with Schmeitzner. Meanwhile, Nietzsche received news that his sister Elisabeth was planning to marry Dr Bernhard Förster, a Wagnerphile teacher who was planning to found a German nationalist community in South America after his radical opinions cost him his teaching jobs. While both Nietzsche and his mother were opposed

to the match, the couple married in May, and would leave for Paraguay in early 1886. After completing Zarathustra, Nietzsche decided to return to writing more conventional philosophical treatises without using ancient religious philosophers as his mouthpiece. By March 1886, he had completed Beyond Good and Evil, a work he would struggle to find a publisher for and which he eventually had published at his own expense on the first print run. There were reasons for this. Zarathustra had not sold well and hundreds of copies of it, and Nietzsche’s other works were languishing in storage. Publishers were reluctant to

take on his books, fearing losses. The stock of his earlier books was eventually bought by the music publisher Ernst Wilhelm Fritzsch. Despite his poor sales figures, Nietzsche ordered 1,250 copies of Beyond Good and Evil, regarding it as a concise statement of his thinking. This latest book was another attack on the forces of democratisation and egalitarianism, which Nietzsche saw as evolving harmfully out of Christianity. Nietzsche took a stand against these developments, claiming that a great many elements of human progress and cultural creativity had taken place in aristocratic societies. Building on his belief that morality was an

artificial construct designed to control people within society, Nietzsche distinguished between what he termed a ‘slave morality’ and a ‘master morality.’ Given his optimism about the book’s potential commercial appeal, Nietzsche was deeply disappointed to learn in February 1887 that only 65 copies of Beyond Good and Evil had been sold. Among the few readers who appreciated the book was Meta von Salis, a Swiss writer and historian who had just become the first woman in Switzerland to receive a doctorate. Nietzsche and Salis had known each other since 1884 and became close friends. In the summer of 1887, Salis

visited Nietzsche in Sils-Maria, where in an effort to encourage sales of Beyond Good and Evil, he began work on a follow-up volume entitled On the Genealogy of Morality. Drawing on his training in philology, Nietzsche observed that the word for ‘good’ in many ancient languages derived from words denoting nobility and bravery, while ‘bad’ related to words such as ‘common’ or ‘lowly.’ According to Nietzsche, the process of linguistic transformation began first with the ancient priestly classes of the Levant and wider parts of the Middle East where civilization had first flourished. For these people purity and faith were

more important than nobility or courage. Out of this tradition there later emerged the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, who encouraged humanity to sympathise with the poor and lowly in exchange for spiritual comfort. For Nietzsche, it was the warrior class of Germanic and Scandinavian conquerors who prevented Europe from becoming a Christian theocracy after the fall of the Roman Empire. Although they adopted Christianity, the new kings established an aristocratic hierarchy that was inspired by Roman rule. However, the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution saw a return of the slave morality in places like Calvinist Geneva in the

sixteenth century. While many individuals will disagree with Nietzsche’s arguments about mortality in it, in terms of the rigour of his analysis in tracing how Judaeo-Christian morality developed over a period of three millennia, On the Genealogy of Morality is one of Nietzsche’s most significant works. Throughout the creative process for these philosophical texts, Nietzsche continued to suffer from frequent bouts of ill health. Nevertheless, during a stay in Nice in the early months of 1888 he experienced his best health for several years, and conceived of a four-volume work entitled The Will to Power as the crowning statement of

his philosophy, yet as early as March he recognised that the plan was too ambitious and abandoned it. By that time he was searching for a new refuge and decided to head to Turin. The city’s climate and its music culture delighted Nietzsche, who remained for three months until leaving for Sils-Maria. In a burst of creativity, Nietzsche wrote The Case of Wagner, a polemical critique in which he cast his erstwhile musical idol as a symbol of decadence and decay in European music and society. He continued with The Twilight of the Idols, a series of light-hearted attacks on

all the philosophical and religious doctrines Nietzsche opposed, with a title parodying the final opera in Wagner’s Ring cycle, the Twilight of the Gods. This was followed by The Antichrist, an investigation into the origins of Christianity, one in which Nietzsche argued that while Jesus, whose kingdom of God was both in the future and in the present, had encouraged his followers to live free from hatred and resentment, the early Christians imposed a doctrine of Judgement that used the concepts of Heaven and Hell as a system of rewards and punishments. Nietzsche compared Jesus’s original teachings to those of

Buddhism, remarking that “Buddhism makes no promises but keeps them, Christianity promises everything but keeps nothing.” Nietzsche had returned to Turin in September. To mark the occasion of his 44th birthday on the 15th of October 1888, he decided to write an autobiographical work under the title Ecce Homo, or ‘Behold the Man,’ the words attributed to Jesus’ executioner Pontius Pilate as he presented him to the Jewish crowd. In this short volume, Nietzsche hoped to clear up misunderstandings about his work to date. Under provocative chapter titles such as “Why am I so wise,” and “Why I write such

good books,” Nietzsche explored his upbringing, his poor health and the thinkers and artists of the past who had inspired him, both positively and negatively. In his defence of his own work, Nietzsche suffused the text with exaggeration, claiming that his Zarathustra was superior to anything that Goethe, Shakespeare, or Dante had ever produced. Ecce Homo should not be read literally in all places and clearly whether in his boastful passages about his literary prowess or in the sarcastic titles of the chapters, Nietzsche was being humorous. Having written Ecce Homo in the space of three weeks, he returned to

the split between himself and Wagner many years earlier, something which still clearly troubled him deeply. Compiling extracts from his previous work, he argued that it was not he who had changed his mind about German culture back in the mid-1770s, but Wagner in becoming increasingly nationalist and pandering to the popular mood of the day. Nietzsche’s burst of immense activity in the 1880s was soon to come to an end. At the end of the year his mental state suddenly deteriorated. He became prone to fits of anger, and in his delusions of grandeur he wrote letters addressed to

Kaiser Wilhelm II and Bismarck denouncing their doctrines, while in correspondence to friends he wrote about forming an anti-German league and bringing down the German Empire. In a letter to Meta von Salis dated 3 January 1889, Nietzsche declared that “God is on earth” and claimed to have imprisoned the Pope and ordered Kaiser Wilhelm and Bismarck to be shot. According to an account published after his death, Nietzsche’s condition became public when he saw a horse being flogged by its driver in the streets of Turin and ran to protect it, before collapsing at its feet. Clearly he was

deeply unwell and both those who argue that he was syphilitic or suffering from a brain tumour agree that whatever his condition was it became much worse in the course of 1888 and 1889. As news of his erratic behaviour spread, Nietzsche’s family hurried to have him brought back to Switzerland. After a series of medical examinations, which determined that Nietzsche may have been suffering from syphilis contracted as a young man, the philosopher was transferred to the care of his mother Franziska in Naumburg. For a year or two Nietzsche could still string together a few coherent sentences in

conversation, but over time his condition worsened irreversibly. The fate of Nietzsche’s final unpublished works was still up in the air until 1892, when Elisabeth gave Naumann the right to publish a second edition of her brother’s complete works, edited by Heinrich Köselitz, who used the pseudonym ‘Peter Gast’ that Nietzsche bestowed upon him for his musical compositions. Elisabeth’s ill-fated Paraguayan adventure had come to an end and its failure had caused her husband to take his own life in despair. In 1893 she decided to take control of the whole process, side-lining Köselitz and writing her own biography of

her brother, in which she resumed her vengeful attacks against Lou Salomé, blaming her in part for her brother’s psychological collapse. By 1895, after an argument with her mother about the publication of The Antichrist, Elisabeth bought out her mother’s rights to future royalties. When Franziska died in April 1897, Elisabeth moved her brother to the Villa Silberblick near Weimar, where she received admirers of Nietzsche’s works and took them to see him, despite his condition. On the 25th of August 1900, a couple of months shy of his 56th birthday, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche died at Villa Silberblick following a

heart attack. Three days later, he was buried beside his father at the parish church in Röcken despite the protests of the vicar. Following a tumultuous life in which he struggled against persistent illness to become firstly a distinguished academic, and secondly an original thinker who sought to dismantle conventional morality, the iconoclastic anti-Christian philosopher found his final resting place in a Christian graveyard. In a further irony, just as Nietzsche argued that Jesus’ followers distorted his teaching after his death, Nietzsche’s own thinking was misrepresented by imperialists, communists, and fascists, who adapted his concepts of ‘will to power’, ‘master

morality’ and the ‘superman’ for their own ends. The worst culprit of all was Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who promoted her brother as a German nationalist and antisemite and was received by Adolf Hitler on several occasions before her death at the age of 88 in 1935. Both Wagner and Nietzsche had their work exploited by the Nazis towards their own political ends in the 1930s and early 1940s. There are very few philosophers in human history who have left behind as contentious a legacy as Friedrich Nietzsche did. On the one hand, he has been rightly praised as one of the

most startlingly original thinkers of modern times. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the conclusions he drew, there is no doubt that the arguments which he put forward in books like The Birth of Tragedy, Beyond Good and Evil, Thus Spake Zarathustra and the essays in Untimely Meditations were extremely novel in their approach. However, many people have found his rejection of the ideas of social egalitarianism and his fundamental rejection of conventional western morality unpalatable. That being said, the attribution of fascist views to him is not accurate. Moreover, even if one finds his arguments unpalatable, there is no

denying their influence. His commentaries on the so-called ‘death of god’ in an increasingly secular age foreshadowed the decline of the Christian churches in twentieth-century Europe and laid the groundwork for much of the existential philosophy of the post-war era. Many of Nietzsche’s arguments about the evolution of society have also been absorbed to varying degrees into the fields of history, anthropology and sociology. And that is perhaps the most striking thing about Nietzsche; the sheer breadth of his work. It went far beyond philosophical inquiry to embrace history, anthropology, philology, religion, literary and artistic criticism, musical theory and much

more besides. Thus, whether one loves or loathes him, there is no ignoring Nietzsche in modern scholarship. What do you think of Friedrich Nietzsche? Was he a profound and original thinker who encouraged humanity to seek improvement and scale new heights of cultural and intellectual achievement, or was his complex philosophy the product of a tortured mind that was degenerating in many ways in the 1880s? Please let us know in the comment section and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.