Friedrich Nietzsche

15 OCTOBER 1844 – 25 AUGUST 1900

The challenge begins with how to pronounce his name. The first bit should sound like ‘Knee’, the second like ‘cher’: Knee – cher. Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844 in a quiet village in the eastern part of Germany, where – for generations – his forefathers had been pastors. He did exceptionally well at school and university; and so excelled at ancient Greek (a very prestigious subject, at the time) that he was made a professor at the University of Basel when still only in his mid-twenties. But his official career didn’t work out. He got fed up with his fellow academics, gave up his job and moved to Switzerland and Italy where he lived modestly and often alone. He was rejected by a succession of women, causing him much grief (‘My lack of confidence is immense’). He didn’t get on with his family (‘I don’t like my mother and it’s painful even for me to hear my sister’s voice’) and in response to his isolation, grew a huge moustache and took long country walks every day. For many years, his books hardly sold at all. When he was forty-four, his mental health broke down entirely. He never recovered and died eleven years later. Nietzsche believed that the central task of philosophy was to teach us how to ‘become who we are’, in other words, how to discover and be loyal to our highest potential.

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

Notable Works

The Birth of Tragedy, 1872

The first work Nietzsche published describes the tragic feeling of life, as a typical philosophical aspect of modernity. According to the German existentialist, this feeling is mainly expressed through music, therefore tragedy played a dominant role within the framework of the aesthetic conceptions through the consecutive eras. Read more.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883–5

One of the most famous philosophical book of the last 150 years was published in 1892. Even the most unfamiliar with philosophy have it in their library, or have at least heard about Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Nietzsche described it as his deepest philosophical work, the most representative reflection of his thinking and vision, referring to the issue of the death of God and Übermensch‘s appearance. Read more.

Beyond Good and Evil, 1886

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche accuses past philosophers of lacking critical sense and blindly accepting dogmatic premises in their consideration of morality. Specifically, he accuses them of founding grand metaphysical systems upon the faith that the good man is the opposite of the evil man, rather than just a different expression of the same basic impulses that find more direct expression in the evil man. The work moves into the realm "beyond good and evil" in the sense of leaving behind the traditional morality which Nietzsche subjects to a destructive critique in favour of what he regards as an affirmative approach that fearlessly confronts the perspectival nature of knowledge and the perilous condition of the modern individual. Read more.

On the Genealogy of Morality, 1887

Arguably the most systematic and coherent of Nietzsche’s works, On the Genealogy of Morality deals with – and, actually, confronts – the value system of the West, as a system that captures man’s freedom, weakens his existence and undermines knowledge through religion, ethics and philosophy. The German philosopher suggests the rejection of this ‘slave morality’ and supports the Übermensch, who will overcome all these obstacles to reach freedom and knowledge. Read more.

Chronology