Nietzsche philosophy of life
Human, All Too Human , [ edit ]. The Dawn , [ edit ]. The Gay Science , , [ edit ]. Thus Spoke Zarathustra , —5 [ edit ]. Beyond Good and Evil , [ edit ]. On the Genealogy of Morals , [ edit ]. The Case of Wagner , [ edit ]. Twilight of the Idols , [ edit ]. The Antichrist , [ edit ]. But the first section itself is not simply one long aphorism.
Instead, the aphorism that requires so much interpretation is the compressed, high-impact arrival point of GM III, 1; the section begins by noting a series of different things that the ascetic ideal has meant, listed one after another and serving as a kind of outline for the Treatise, before culminating in the taut aphorism:. That the ascetic ideal has meant so much to man, however, is an expression of the basic fact of the human will, its horror vacui : it needs a goal ,—and it would rather will nothingness than not will.
GM III, 1. It is to this compressed formulation, not the entirety of the section, that Nietzsche returns when he wraps up his interpretation in GM III, But the aphoristic form is only one challenge among many. What is more, Nietzsche makes heavy use of allusions to both contemporary and historical writing, and without that context one is very likely to miss his meaning— BGE 11—15 offers a particularly dense set of examples; see Clark and Dudrick 87— for one reading to which Hussain , Anderson , and Riccardi propose alternatives.
Almost as often, Nietzsche invents a persona so as to work out some view that he will go on to qualify or reject BGE 2 is a clear example , so it can be a steep challenge just to keep track of the various voices in action within the text. Nevertheless, such comprehensive readings are there to be had. Clark and Dudrick offer a a sustained, albeit controversial, close reading exploring the unity of Part I of Beyond Good and Evil ; their efforts reveal the scope of the difficulty—they needed an entire book to explain the allusions and connections involved in just twenty-three sections of Nietzsche, covering some couple-dozen pages!
Following such connections, he proposes, allows us to understand the books as monologues presented by a narrator. It is impossible to conclude that the work is not deliberately designed to be as offensive as possible to any earnest Christian believer.
Nietzsche biography wiki english
He achieves both at once by ensuring that exactly those readers will be so offended by his tone that their anger will impair understanding and they will fail to follow his argument. If this is right, the very vitriol of the Genealogy arises from an aim to be heard only by the right audience—the one it can potentially aid rather than harm—thereby overcoming the problem that.
There are books that have opposite values for soul and health, depending on whether the lower soul… or the higher and more vigorous ones turn to them. Commentators have therefore expended considerable effort working out rational reconstructions of these doctrines. This section offers brief explanations of three of the most important: the will to power, the eternal recurrence, and perspectivism.
Others receive it as an anti-essentialist rejection of traditional metaphysical theorizing in which abstract and shifting power-centers replace stable entities Nehamas 74—, Poellner —98 , or else as a psychological hypothesis Kaufmann [] , Soll ; Clark and Dudrick , or a quasi- scientific conjecture Schacht ; Abel ; Anderson , b.
As we saw 3. Some commentators take this to suggest a monistic psychology in which all drives whatsoever aim at power, and so count as manifestations of a single underlying drive or drive-type. He thought that past philosophers had largely ignored the influence of their own perspectives on their work, and had therefore failed to control those perspectival effects BGE 6; see BGE I more generally.
Speaking of what he takes to be the perversely counterintuitive doctrines of some past philosophers, he writes,. This famous passage bluntly rejects the idea, dominant in philosophy at least since Plato, that knowledge essentially involves a form of objectivity that penetrates behind all subjective appearances to reveal the way things really are, independently of any point of view whatsoever.
There is of course an implicit criticism of the traditional picture of a-perspectival objectivity here, but there is equally a positive set of recommendations about how to pursue knowledge as a finite, limited cognitive agent. In working out his perspective optics of cognition, Nietzsche built on contemporary developments in the theory of cognition—particularly the work of non-orthodox neo-Kantians like Friedrich Lange and positivists like Ernst Mach, who proposed naturalized, psychologically-based versions of the broad type of theory of cognition initially developed by Kant and Schopenhauer see Clark ; Kaulbach , ; Anderson , , ; Green ; Hill ; Hussain The Kantian thought was that certain very basic structural features of the world we know space, time, causal relations, etc.
In particular, the Genealogy passage emphasizes that for him, perspectives are always rooted in affects and their associated patterns of valuation. Thus, theoretical claims not only need to be analyzed from the point of view of truth, but can also be diagnosed as symptoms and thereby traced back to the complex configurations of drive and affect from the point of view of which they make sense.
Nietzsche makes perspectivist claims not only concerning the side of the cognitive subject, but also about the side of the truth, or reality, we aim to know. See recent exchanges on this topic between Clark and Nehamas , , These efforts argue for strong connections between perspectivism and the will to power doctrine section 6.
Nietzsche himself suggests that the eternal recurrence was his most important thought, but that has not made it any easier for commentators to understand. But the texts are difficult to interpret. Skeptics like Loeb are correct to insist that, if recurrence is to be understood as a practical thought experiment, commentators owe us an account of how the particular features of the relevant thoughts are supposed to make any difference Soll already posed a stark form of this challenge.
Three features seem especially salient: we are supposed to imagine 1 that the past recurs , so that what has happened in the past will be re-experienced in the future; 2 that what recurs is the same in every detail; and 3 that the recurrence happens not just once more, or even many times more, but eternally. The supposed recurrence 1 plausibly matters as a device for overcoming the natural bias toward the future in practical reasoning.
Since we cannot change the past but think of ourselves as still able to do something about the future, our practical attention is understandably future directed. By imaginatively locating our entire life once again in the future, the thought experiment can mobilize the resources of our practical self-concern to direct an evaluative judgment onto our life as a whole.
Similar considerations motivate the constraint of sameness 2. If my assessment of myself simply elided any events or features of my self, life, or world with which I was discontent, it would hardly count as an honest, thorough self-examination. The constraint that the life I imagine to recur must be the same in every detail is designed to block any such elisions.
As Reginster —7 observes, it is more difficult to explain the role of the third constraint, eternity. Reginster proposes that the eternity constraint is meant to reinforce the idea that the thought experiment calls for an especially wholehearted form of affirmation— joy —whose strength is measured by the involvement of a wish that our essentially finite lives could be eternal.
More modestly, one might think that Nietzsche considered it important to rule out as insufficient a particular kind of conditional affirmation, suggested by the Christian eschatological context, which would leave in place the judgment that earthly human life carries intrinsically negative value. After all, the devout Christian might affirm her earthly life as a test of faith , which is to be redeemed by an eternal heavenly reward should one pass that test—all the while retaining her commitment that, considered by itself, earthly life is a sinful condition to be rejected.
It is held in many university libraries and is typically cited by volume and page number using the abbreviation KGA. This entry cites published works in the English translations listed below, and for the unpublished writing, it cites the useful abridged version of the critical edition, prepared for students and scholars the Kritische Studienausgabe , KSA.
Those references follow standard scholarly practice, providing volume and page numbers of the KSA , preceded by the notebook and fragment numbers established for the overall critical edition. English translations have now appeared containing selections from the unpublished writing included in KSA , and those volumes WEN , WLN are listed among the translations in the next section.
The full bibliographical information for the German editions is.
Nietzsche biography wiki
Citations follow the North American Nietzsche Society system of abbreviations for reference to English translations. For each work, the primary translation quoted in the entry is listed first, followed by other translations that were consulted. Original date of German publication is given in parentheses at the end of each entry.
I am grateful to Rachel Cristy for exchanges that helped me work out basic ideas for the structure and contents of this entry. Joshua Landy, Andrew Huddleston, Christopher Janaway, and Elijah Millgram provided helpful feedback on a late draft, and each saved me from several errors. Life and Works 2. Critique of Religion and Morality 3. Value Creation 3.
Nietzsche philosophy: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche [ii] (15 October – 25 August ) was a German classical scholar, philosopher, and critic of culture, who became one of the most influential of all modern thinkers. [14] He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy.
The Self and Self-fashioning 5. Key Doctrines 6. Critique of Religion and Morality Nietzsche is arguably most famous for his criticisms of traditional European moral commitments, together with their foundations in Christianity. GM III, 15 Thus, Nietzsche suggests, The principal bow stroke the ascetic priest allowed himself to cause the human soul to resound with wrenching and ecstatic music of every kind was executed—everyone knows this—by exploiting the feeling of guilt.
A well-known passage appears near the opening of the late work, The Antichrist : What is good? What is bad? Everything that is born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing , that resistance is overcome. For example, in GS 2 Nietzsche expresses bewilderment in the face of people who do not value honesty: I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lacks an intellectual conscience.
Nietzsche often recommends the pursuit of knowledge as a way of life: No, life has not disappointed me… ever since the day when the great liberator came to me: the idea that life could be an experiment for the seeker for knowledge…. GS Indeed, he assigns the highest cultural importance to the experiment testing whether such a life can be well lived: A thinker is now that being in whom the impulse for truth and those life-preserving errors now clash for their first fight, after the impulse for truth has proved to be also a life-preserving power.
GS A second strand of texts emphasizes connections between truthfulness and courage , thereby valorizing honesty as the manifestation of an overall virtuous character marked by resoluteness, determination, and spiritual strength. GS But even in the face of such worries, Nietzsche does not simply give up on truthfulness.
Nietzsche biography wiki fandom
Nietzsche raises a more specific worry about the deleterious effects of the virtue of honesty—about the will to truth, rather than what is true—and artistry is wheeled in to alleviate them, as well: If we had not welcomed the arts and invented this kind of cult of the untrue, then the realization of general untruth and mendaciousness that now comes to us through science—the realization that delusion and error are conditions of human knowledge and sensation—would be utterly unbearable.
GM III, 12 As the passage makes clear, however, Nietzschean perspectives are themselves rooted in affects and the valuations to which affects give rise , and in his mind, the ability to deploy a variety of perspectives is just as important for our practical and evaluative lives as it is for cognitive life. The Self and Self-fashioning A probing investigation into the psyche was a leading preoccupation for Nietzsche throughout his career, and this aspect of his thought has rightly been accorded central importance across a long stretch of the reception, all the way from Kaufmann to recent work by Pippin , Katsafanas , Leiter , Riccardi , and others.
To the natural complaint that such telegraphic treatment courts misunderstanding, he replies that One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood.
Friedrich nietzsche biography
Instead, the aphorism that requires so much interpretation is the compressed, high-impact arrival point of GM III, 1; the section begins by noting a series of different things that the ascetic ideal has meant, listed one after another and serving as a kind of outline for the Treatise, before culminating in the taut aphorism: That the ascetic ideal has meant so much to man, however, is an expression of the basic fact of the human will, its horror vacui : it needs a goal ,—and it would rather will nothingness than not will.
If this is right, the very vitriol of the Genealogy arises from an aim to be heard only by the right audience—the one it can potentially aid rather than harm—thereby overcoming the problem that There are books that have opposite values for soul and health, depending on whether the lower soul… or the higher and more vigorous ones turn to them.
GM III, 12 This famous passage bluntly rejects the idea, dominant in philosophy at least since Plato, that knowledge essentially involves a form of objectivity that penetrates behind all subjective appearances to reveal the way things really are, independently of any point of view whatsoever. Colli and M. Berlin: W.
According to him, weak people rely on other people's love as a way of protecting themselves. Nietzsche believed that people should be stronger than that. He thought that people should be very aware of their bodies and of the real world in which they live. He told his readers not to live in a daydream or make decisions based on unrealistic thoughts.
He believed that ideas of heaven came from an inability to cope with life in the world. Nietzsche considered the world to be one connected thing, including mankind and nature. He invented the idea of the "will to power". This idea is that everyone and everything is trying to overcome itself, or defeat or take control of itself.
Therefore, if the world is just one thing, this is the force that makes the world. Nietzsche thought that human beings would be successful at overcoming themselves, and he thought that when they did, they would be different and better. He thought that the supermen would be stronger than normal humans, and not restricted by other people's ideas of right and wrong.
Some people say that Hitler did not understand Nietzsche's ideas, but he used them to try to show that his actions were right. However he was not popular among all fascists.
He also began to distance himself from classical scholarship, as well as the teachings of Schopenhauer, and to take more interest in the values underlying modern-day civilization. By this time, his friendship with Wagner had deteriorated. Suffering from a nervous disorder, he resigned from his post at Basel in For much of the following decade, Nietzsche lived in seclusion, moving from Switzerland to France to Italy when he was not staying at his mother's house in Naumburg.
However, this was also a highly productive period for him as a thinker and writer. One of his most significant works, Thus Spoke Zarathustra , was published in four volumes between and In these works of the s, Nietzsche developed the central points of his philosophy. One of these was his famous statement that "God is dead," a rejection of Christianity as a meaningful force in contemporary life.
Nietzsche suffered a collapse in while living in Turin, Italy. The last decade of his life was spent in a state of mental incapacitation. The reason for his insanity is still unknown, although historians have attributed it to causes as varied as syphilis, an inherited brain disease, a tumor and overuse of sedative drugs.