| Friedrich Nietzsche | |
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Real Name |
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche |
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Born |
15 October, 1844 |
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Died |
25 August, 1900 |
Origin[]
Friedrich Nietzsche was a German classical scholar, philosopher, and critic of culture, who became one of the most influential of all modern thinkers. His attempts to unmask the motives that underlie traditional Western religion, morality, and philosophy deeply affected generations of theologians, philosophers, psychologists, poets, novelists, and playwrights. He thought through the consequences of the triumph of the Enlightenment’s secularism, expressed in his observation that “God is dead,” in a way that determined the agenda for many of Europe’s most-celebrated intellectuals after his death. Although he was an ardent foe of nationalism, anti-Semitism, and power politics, his name was later invoked by fascists to advance the very things he loathed. He also developed influential concepts such as the Übermensch and his doctrine of eternal return.
He became the youngest person to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland in 1869, at the age of 24, but resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties, with paralysis and probably vascular dementia. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897, and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Nietzsche died in 1900, after experiencing pneumonia and multiple strokes.
His influence was particularly noted throughout the 20th century by many existentialist, phenomenological and postmodern philosophers. His ideas on individuality, morality and the meaning of existence contributed to the thinking of the philosophy. Less beneficially, certain aspects of Nietzsche's work were used by the Nazi Party of the 1930s – '40s as justification for its activities; this selective and misleading use of his work has somewhat darkened his reputation for later audiences.
Nietzsche also used his psychological analyses to support original theories about the nature of the self and provocative proposals suggesting new values that he thought would promote cultural renewal and improve social and psychological life by comparison to life under the traditional values he criticized.
Public Domain Literary Works[]
All works written by or featuring Friedrich Nietzsche published before January 1, 1929 are in the public domain in the US.
Some notable works are listed below:
- The Birth of Tragedy (1872)
- On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (1873)
- Untimely Meditations (1876)
- Human, All Too Human (1878)
- The Dawn (1881)
- The Gay Science (1882)
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883)
- Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
- On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)
- The Case of Wagner (1888)
- Twilight of the Idols (1888)
- The Antichrist (1888)
- Nietzsche contra Wagner (1888)
Notes[]
- Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster named their character Superman after the Nietzschean term Übermensch (Superman) coined in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.