Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, in Rocken, Germany, where his father served as a Lutheran pastor. Friedrich’s father’s death, when he was four years old, was distressing, which he often referred to in his later writings. Soon after, his youngest brother died, resulting in his mother moving her family in with her mother and two sisters. The death of both his father and his brother left Nietzsche in a household of woman including his sister, Elizabeth.

After attending local schools in Naumburg, in 1858 Nietzsche won a scholarship to Pforta, one of the best boarding schools in Germany. Here he received a thorough training in the classics and acquired several life-time friends. At the end of this period of schooling, Nietzsche, who had earlier shared the Lutheran religion of his family, found that he had ceased to accept Christianity-a view that soon hardened into outright disbelief in any God. With the highest recommendations of his Pforta teachers, Nietzsche enrolled in the University of Bonn in 1864.

On January 3, 1889, Nietzsche collapsed on a street in Turin, Italy. When he regained consciousness, his sanity was gone. He began to send off wild letters to friends and strangers signed “Dionysus-the Crucified.” He was taken to his mother’s home and lived on in a semiconscious state, sinking ever further from the real world until his death on August 25, 1900.

Nietzsche believed that European man was standing at a critical turning point. The advance of scientific enlightenment, in particular the Darwinian Theory (Darwin’s theory that man evolved from primitive life forms), had destroyed the old religious ideas. In thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche wrote: “God is dead. “Further, he declared that man no longer “the image of god,” is a chance product of a nature uninterested in purpose or value. The great danger is that man will find his existence meaningless. Unless a new grounding for values is provided, Nietzsche predicted a rapid weakening into destruction for society.

Nietzsche aimed in all his work to provide a new meaning for human existence in a meaningless world. In the absence of any religious guidance, men must create their own values. Nietzsche’s writing is either criticisms of the old system of values or attempts to form a new system. For European man, the traditions common to both Jewish and Christian religions were the source of the old values. Nietzsche attacked it head-on in such works as A Genealogy of Morals (1887) and The Antichrist (1888).

In Nietzsche’s constructive works he sought to find in life itself a force that would serve to set human existence apart. He found it in the theory of the urge to dominate and master. All creatures desire this, but only man has achieved sufficient power to turn the force back on himself. Self-mastery and self-overcoming are the qualities that give a unique value to human life. The ideal man, the “superman,” will delight in being the master of his life, measuring out his passion, and giving style to his character. His power over himself and his life will give him a flood of a creative energy. This will be the new reality and the standard by which all of life is judged.

All morality (right conduct) is therefore the result of overcoming one’s self, but Nietzsche had a standard by which to tell between the morality of the superman from the morality of Christianity. Christianity is based on the concept of afterlife. It attacks the idea of being master of your life, calling that idea “pride,” and sees natural passions as evil, putting guilt and fear into its followers. The new morality, on the other hand, will support life, encourage self-assertion, and do away with guilt. In Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883) Nietzsche formed the ultimate test of the superman’s statements. Confronted with the notion that the world process is cyclical (circular or in sequence) and eternal, the superman still supports life.