Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)I. Life
Nietzsche’s father was a Lutheran minister and was also the son of a Lutheran minister. His mother was the daughter of a Lutheran minister. His father died of mental illness due to what was termed “a softening of the brain” when Nietzsche was 4 years old. Nietzsche was raised in a household consisting of his mother, his younger sister, his father’s mother, and two maiden aunts. He was educated at Bonn and Leipzig. At some point he was supportive of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Due to the influence of his favorite teacher, Frederick Ritschl, he was appointed as professor at the University of Basel when he was 24 years of age, being awarded a doctoral degree without having to write or defend a dissertation. He taught at Basel from 1869-1879 and in 1870 he served as a medical orderly during the Franco-Prussian War, contracting both diphtheria and dysentery. During his teaching years and throughout most of his life he suffered from migraine headaches and gastric pains which were severe enough to induce vomiting. His illnesses were a primary factor in his giving up teaching. He published his first book, The Birth of Tragedy in 1872. During the 1870’s he was a friend of Richard Wagner and was also in love with Wagner’s wife Cosima. Nietzsche and Wagner both were extremely egoistic and they found themselves at odd as time passed. Nietzsche especially disliked anti-Semitism, Berman nationalism, and Wagner’s favorable use of Christianity in Parsifal. In 1882, Nietzsche met and formed a brief friendship with Lou Salome, who established herself as a friend of celebrities. His major works after The Birth of Tragedy, include, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, The Genealogy of Morals, Human All Too Human, The Joyful Wisdom, Twilight of Idols, Ecce Homo, The Antichrist, and The Will to Power. The Will to Power is a posthumous collection of notes written between 1864 and 1888. His last works, The Antichrist and Ecce Homo, may show some early signs of mental illness, but they cannot be discounted as philosophy. IN January 1889, he collapsed on a street and was insane for the remainder of his life. It is generally held that the insanity resulted from tertiary syphilis, which was contracted when Nietzsche may have visited a brother as a student. He is regarded to have been sexually celibate nearly all of his life. His sister who apparently changed some of his writings after his death was married to the leading anti-Semite in Germany and she took control of his literary estate after his death.
