Friedrich Nietzsche

Born: 1844

Died: 1900, at the age of 55

Country of origin: Prussia (Germany)

• Areas of focus:      
  
  
• Major Books written by Friedrich Nietzsche:
  
  
  • "The Birth of Tragedy" (1872)
    
  • "Human, All Too Human" (1878)
    
  • "The Gay Science" (1882)
    
  • "Thus Spake Zarathustra" (1885)
    
  • "Beyond Good and Evil" (1886)
    
  • "On the Genealogy of Morals" (1887)
    
  • "Twilight of the Gods" (1888)
    
  • "The Antichrist" (1888)
    
  • "Ecce Homo" (1888) (Auto-biography. The title refers to Pontius Pilate's greeting to Jesus)
    
  • "The Will to Power" (1901) (Published posthumously by his sister, selectively edited from his notes & anecdotes)
  
  
• Cocktail summary of Friedrich Nietzsche's main ideas:
  
  
  Nietzsche's ideas all revolved around one basic theme: Power, and why morality is bad. He said that all of life and all of history is motivated by one single purpose - a striving for power. From the law of the jungle to the rules of courtship to how nations behave, all actions are focused on one thing - gaining power. He viewed this power-lust as the creative energy behind all of life, and he considered all moralities and ideologies and religions and "culture" as nothing more than ways to prevent these natural power-instincts to express themselves.
  
  He called this underlying motivation of all life "the Will to Power", which was a direct reference to Arthur Schopenhauer's earlier idea of "The Will", and the argument that all of history is motivated by non-rational instincts rather than by abstract, rational ideas (such as Hegel had argued earlier). Nietzsche argued that all of life and all of history could be explained by this one simple motivation, and any ideology that made a virtue out of altruism or martyrdom was nothing but poor sportsmanship.
  
  Nietzsche was the alpha-male of philosophers, arguing that the lust for power was not to be judged against any morality, and lay beyond concepts of good and evil. Power should be taken by anyone who had it within their reach, and those who lack power are just sore losers in the game of life. He is famous for his idea of the "Superman" ("Übermenschlich" in German, which literally means "Overman") which refers to the superior members of any social group rising above the mediocrity around them and pursuing their potential for power, without concern for any suffering they may cause.
  
  It has been suggested that the comic-book character "Superman" is actually a pretty faithful representation of Nietzsche's superman: he is a person who is superior to his peers in terms of ability and potential, he exercises his power without feeling the need to justify himself, and he uses his power according to his own set of ethics. That he chooses to use his power for good is a secondary issue. Nietzsche would argue that Clark Kent's alter-ego is like a lion in the jungle: no one judges the lion evil because it dismembers a zebra and eats it, and no one judges Superman as evil because he smashes a few buildings while battling Lex Luthor. The only relevant issue is that the superior being actualizes their full potential.
  
  Nietzsche viewed history as being controlled by 2 opposing mindsets, using 2 ancient Greek figures of mythology as analogies: Dionysus and Apollo. Dionysus symbolized the natural, non-rational instincts of life, the subconscious drives and intuition and urges that define our animal instincts, which Sigmund Freud would later call the "Id". These forces, argued Nietzsche, are the essential nature of humanity and should be allowed to freely express themselves. He considered the ancient Greeks, prior to Socrates, as being the purest example of a society in which these forces were celebrated and encouraged, and therefore formed a healthy society, as Nietzsche defined it.
  
  He argued that there was no such thing as a universal morality, which define good and bad actions for all of society. Instead, he argued for a hierarchy of moralities, with each morality applied to different strata of society. Those at the top of society, the possessors of power, the Supermen, required their own morality, which encouraged the "creative forces of life" (which Nietzsche called the subconscious lust for power) and allowed for collateral damage like the suffering of those in the lower strata. He didn't encourage suffering of others, as the Nazis would later use his writings to justify their own agenda, but he argued for the rules of war to be applied to the Supermen, in which sometimes "crap happens" in the effort to form a healthy society, and should be accepted as normal.
  
  Those at the lower strata of society, those who lack power, should possess their own different morality, which he called a "slave morality". The morality of the losers should not be applied to the winners in the struggle for power. Nietzsche's primary target in this regard was Christianity, which he considered a morality of losers, since it was created by a group of people who experienced suffering and a loss of power. Therefore the Christian virtues of suffering and martyrdom and "turning the other cheek" were simply a morality of envy directed against the winners in society, Nietzsche argued.
  
  The other Greek figure, Apollo, symbolized dry, abstract Reason and intellect, which suppresses the natural Dionysian human instincts, by the enforcement of unbending logical rationalism, soberness, and a morality of weakness. He considered the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity as the beginning of this rule by Apollo over Western Civilization, and therefore the fall of a healthy culture, which he argued remained in control of society up to his day. He saw it as his duty as a Philosopher to topple the rule of Apollo and resurrect the rule of Dionysus. It is due to this battle with Apollo, as it were, that gives Nietzsche his image of someone pulling the rug out from under the feet of Western history.
  
  Nietzsche's most famous phrase was "God is dead". By this he meant that modern man had already left its Judeo-Christian heritage behind and it was pointless to continue to adopt the associated morality and ethic of this discarded ideology. God was dead in terms of serving any relevant role in the modern cultural psyche, and people needed to face up this reality. He didn't use the phrase in a positive sense, and feared what the future might bring, since he argued that when a culture rips out its own foundation it is "weightless", and filling that void with a healthy replacement is not easy nor safe. For this reason he is often considered the father of Nihilism, as well as a founding father of Existentialism.
  
  Like Schopenhauer before him, Nietzsche considered Art, particularly music, as the one path towards redemption of the human spirit. His name has long been associated with the German composer Richard Wagner, since Nietzsche considered Wagner's music as the best contemporary example of the effort to free the human psyche from the oppression of Apollo, and give free expression to the natural spirit of Dionysus. Wagner's celebration of all things German, and his use of pre-Christian mythology as symbols in his operas, filled Nietzsche will waves of admiration, at least for a while. In later years Nietzsche decided that Wagner's music had become decadent and he wrote long diatribes against his former role-model.
  
  Nietzsche didn't suffer from low self-esteem. He titled some of his essays "Why I Write Such Good Books", "Why I Am So Clever", and "Why I Am So Wise". He once famously wrote, "I am not a man. I am dynamite!" His effect on modern Philosophy turned out to be exactly that. His ideas had the effect of smashing the cracked surface of modern Philosophy, which had by his time become increasingly paralyzed by it's loss of absolutes. He buried the last remaining nostalgia for the reasurring absolutes of the past and argued for a culture of power, and violent creativity, and the heck with moralizing.
  
  These "might makes right" ideas appealed to many famous abusers of power in the 20th century, and his writings have been long associated with such cheery names like Hitler and Mussolini. Yet, his ideas have also appealed to anarchists and Beatnicks and Bohemian artist types, so his ideas seem to be maleable to any agenda at your disposal, as long as that agenda involves justifying the law of the jungle. His influence still hangs over modern 21st Century ideas like a dark, brooding shadow.
  
  The term "Nietzschean" has come to refer to any ideology of the survival of the fittest, in which the grabbing of power by those able to should, and not worry about petty issues like morality. Power should simply be grabbed and utilized without guilt.
  
  
• Friedrich Nietzsche praised & criticized:
  
  
  • Friedrich Nietzsche has long been praised as a champion of the anti-rational ideals of the Romantic Era. The late 19th century was a time of deep antipathy to abstraction and metaphysical pondering. Nietzsche represented much of the spirit of the age, in which instinct was praised over intellect, emotion over dry theory, and vitality over soberness. He perceptively realized the path that Western thought had long been taking away from its Judeo-Chritian roots, and deliberately smashed any remaining relics of this ideological past and its associated morality. But he also realized that this has the effect of creating a spiritual vacuum, which is easy to fill with desctruction but hard to fill with vitality. The uncertainty over what would replace Christianity as the soul of the West drove him to insanity, some argue. This idea is meant as something of a credit to his perception, altough it is pure conjecture.
    
    On the other hand, Nietzsche has long been criticized due to the later, eager use of his ideas by the Nazis and Fascsists in the 1930's, long after his death. His praise of power and survival of the fittest, and particularly his cryptic references to "the blonde beast" as a metaphor for the vitality of the Superman, has caused him to occupy a role in history as a founding father of 20th Century Totalitarianism. This was largely due to the scheming efforts of his younger sister, but Nietzsche can't claim total innocence from the assocation, given his arguments for different moralities for those who hold power compared to those who don't. He was something of a Machiavelli of the modern age, and despite his recommendation to the contrary, many still cling to a Christian morality of human rights and civility, even if he was correct regarding the loss of religious faith as a motivator of the modern psyche. He was an idealist, but it was an idealism of "greed is good", and this is an ideology that will never be universally accepted.
    
    
  
  
• Notable Facts about Friedrich Nietzsche:
  
  
  • Religious affiliation:
    To say that Nietzsche hated religion is like saying that Hitler was not friendly. Nietzsche breathed unholy fire of anger against all religion, particularly Christianity. He not only argued that Christianity was wrong, but he even suggested that the entire religion was originally a conspiracy by the Apostle Paul who made up the whole idea of the redemptive nature of Christ's death and the corresponding Christian morality, as a way to take revenge on the Roman Empire for destroying Jerusalem in the year 70 AD. (Fritz apparently liked conspiracy theories...)
    
    Up until is mid-teens, he had actually been devoutly religious and had considered a career as a man of the cloth. At the age of 14 he wrote this:
    
    
    "In everything God has led me safely as a father leads his weak little child. I have firmly resolved to dedicate myself forever to his service". (He obviously had a change of heart later).
    
    
    He famously said "There was only one true Christian, and he died on the cross". Nietzsche respected Jesus the man, but totally rejected the idea of Christ and the idea that the death of one man had any relevance to all of humanity.
    
    He argued that Christianity promoted a "slave morality" in which weakness became a virtue and natural instincts became a vice. He argued that Christianity was an ideology of losers, in which weakness is glorified. The idea of God dying on a Roman cross struck Nietzsche as ludicrous and as a deliberate attempt to suppress the natural "will to power" that should glorify strength, not weakness.
    
    In other words, he probably never went to Church on Sunday.
    
    
  • Nietzsche probably had the biggest mustache ever to grace the face of a philosopher. He could have swept the floor with it.
    
    
  • Nietzsche's family nicknamed him "Fritz".
    
    
  • After Fritz's father died when he was when he was only 5, Fritz was raised in a family as the only boy in a household of religiously devout women: his mother, his paternal grandmother, his 2 aunts (one who morally disapproved of Shakespeare), his younger sister, and a maid. It has been suggested that this may have contributed to his later misogynistic attitudes, and his association with Christianity's "passive morality" with femininity. Perhaps there wasn't enough testosterone in Fritz's household as a child.
    
    
  • Nietzsche spent his adult life in 3 distinct phases:
    
    
    • Starting when he was 24 years old, he spent the next 11 years of his life (1869 - 1880) as a professor of Philology at University of Basel, interrupted by a 3-month period of military service in 1870 in the Franco-Prussian War, as a medic, where he contracted a number of diseases, including dysentery and diphtheria, which he suffered from throughout the rest of his life. In 1880 he resigned his post at the University due to medical problems (consisting of 9-day-long migraine headaches, vomiting, and vision problems), as well as due to a general inability to integrate socially with his fellow academics.
      
      
    • For the next 9 years of his life (1880 - 1889) Nietzsche wandered around Europe aimlessly as a "stateless person", having renounced his German citizenship and having never taken a Swiss citizenship. Throughout this time he wandered aimlessly around Europe between Germany, France, Switzerland, and Italy, never spending more than a few months at any one location. He spent this time writing some of his most famous books and totally failing at his attempts at romance. (Despite Nietzsche's alpha-male approach to Philosophy, he was a stammering bundle of Woody Allen-like insecurity in most social situations, especially around women).
      
      
    • For the last remaining 11 years of his life (1889 - 1900) Nietzsche existed in a near-catatonic state of insanity. In the year 1889 Nietzsche was in Turin, Italy and, while walking down the street one morning in the Piazza Carlo Alberto, he passed by a coachman who was whipping his uncooperative horse. Nietzsche suddenly threw his arms around the horse's neck in a tearful embrace and started to cry. He had suffered a total mental breakdown, from which he never recovered. He was committed to a sanitarium in Jena, Germany for 1 year, then was cared for by his mother for 7 years, then by his sister for 3 years, before dying of a stroke in 1900 at the ripe old age of 55.
      
      
  • Nietzsche never married and appears to have had little success with women, preferring solitude over socializing. He proposed to 2 different women, and was rejected both times. The first time was in 1876 when he was 32, when he proposed to a 23 year-old poet named Mathilde Trampedach, in Geneva. But she turned down his offer. The second proposal he made, 6 years later, was far more notorious and became the stuff of tabloid scandal.
    
    In 1882, when he was 38 years old he met a 21 year-old woman in Rome named Lou Salome, a Russian poet. He fell for her fast and hard and within days he proposed to her, twice. She also turned down his offer, but with a unique twist. She suggested that, instead of marriage, he and she enter into a "3-way relationship" with his friend Paul Ree. (Unknown to Nietzsche, Ree had also proposed marriage earlier to Salome, but had also been turned down). She suggested that they all 3 live together and spend their time traveling around Europe discussing Philosophy, Poetry, and visiting museums. This wasn't exactly what Nietzsche had in mind, but she was serious about her idea. After her rejection he wrote, "I am a headache-plagued half-lunatic, crazed by too much solitude."
    
    There is a famous picture of the three of them, with Salome sitting in a hand-cart with a whip, with the cart being pulled by Nietzsche and Ree.
    
    The suggested relationship was apparently meant to be Platonic, and Nietzsche appears to have rejected her idea, although the details are unclear and is therefore, naturally, a topic of endless speculation. Salome later went on to seduce many members of royalty and academia, including another German thinker named Sigmund Freud.
    
    
  • For many years following his death, a book called "Sister and I" was circulated which was claimed to have been written by Nietzsche during his 14 months in the Jena insane asylum. It decribes an incestuous relationship with his sister, with explicit details regarding intimate contact between the two. The book was almost certainly a forgery, given the fact that he was certifiably insane during the time the book was supposed to have been written, and the fact that he didn't like his sister.
    
    
  • Nietzsche is probably the only philosopher to have a candy-bar named after him. Naturally, it is a Power Bar, the Will to Power Bar.
    
    
  • Nietzsche and Wagner:
    
    Nietzsche was, for many years, one of the horde of acolytes who surrounded the German composer Richard Wagner and his pseudo-cult of German opera. Nietzsche saw in Wagner the archetype of the Superman as artist, giving expression to the creative vitality of Nietzsche's ideas. His favorite Wagner operas were "Tristan" and "Die Meistersinger". Wagner saw in Nietzsche a worthy addition to his collection of sycophants who eagerly basked in the glow of his enormous ego. Nietzsche visited Wagner's sprawling home in Tribschen, Switzerland, on Lake Lucern, some 23 times over a period of many years, and was present at the laying of the corner-stone at Wagner's opera-house/pseudo-Aryan temple at Bayreuth, in Bavaria. Nietzsche later turned on Wagner and made him the target of some of his most critical writing, particulary in "The Case of Wagner", written in 1888 (after Wagner had been safely dead for 5 years). He felt that his former hero had become too pompous (as if he wasn't previously) and he objected to Wagner's operas moving away from "vigorous" pre-Christian mythologolical themes to "weaker" Christian imagery. But his earlier fawning worship at the cult of Wagner was forever stuck to Nietzsche's reputation like a fly on a windshield.
    
    
  • Nietzsche on Darwin: Suprisingly, Nietzsche rejected Darwin's survivial-of-the-fittest theory, despite its similarities to his own ideas. Nietzsche felt that Darwin was describing how nature should operate, but not how it actually did. Nietzsche argued that human history has been dominated by an ideology of weakness (Christian morality) at the expense of our natural, primal instincts of strength.
    
    Imagine lions in the jungle being told to be nice to weaker animals, and not be the king of the jungle and not hurt anything. They should not roar, but should pretend to be weak. This is how Fritz viewed the effect of religion on human instincts.
    
    He had this to say about how nature is usually defined by a survival-of-the-weakest:
    
    
    • "I see all philosophers and the whole of science on their knees before a reality which is the reverse of the struggle for life as Darwin and his school understood it. That is to say, wherever I look, I see those prevailing and surviving, who throw doubt and suspicion upon life and the value of life. The error of the Darwinian school became a problem to me: how can one be so blind as to make this mistake?"
      
      
    • "What surprises me most on making a general survey of the great destinies of man, is that I invariably see the reverse of what today Darwin and his school sees or will persist in seeing: selection in favour of the stronger, the better constituted, and the progress of the species. Precisely the reverse of this stares one in the face: the suppression of the lucky cases, the uselessness of the more highly constituted types, the inevitable mastery of the mediocre, and even of those who are below mediocrity. Unless we are shown some reason why man is an exception among living creatures, I incline to the view that Darwin's school is everywhere at fault."
      
      
    • "The strong have always to be upheld against the weak; and the well-constituted against the ill-constituted, the healthy against the sick and physiologically botched. If we drew our morals from reality, they would read thus: the mediocre are more valuable than the exceptional creatures, and the decadent than the mediocre, the will to nonentity prevails over the will to life, and the general aim now is, in Christian, Buddhistic, Schopenhauerian phraseology 'It is better not to be than to be'."
      
      
  • As an example of Nietzsche's enduring association with the Nazis, he was quoted at the Nuremberg Trials, with a French prosecutor saying, "This was the morality of immorality, the result of Nietzsche's purest teaching, which regards the destruction of any conventional moral as the highest duty of man."
    
    
  • Nietzsche's evil sister:
    
    Nietzsche has long been intimately associated with the legacy of the Nazis, with his ideas being used by them as an intellectual justification for their racial ideology. Since Nietzsche died over 30 years prior to the rise of the Nazis, and since his writings actually contained numerous criticisms of anti-Semitism, this use by the Nazis was a result of a lot of posthumous creative editing.
    
    This editing was largely due to the efforts of his younger sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who was probably the most evil sister in the entire history of Philosophy. She represents the second half of the evolution of her brother's ideas, with the first half being his productive years of writing and traveling, and the second half being the careful transformation of his ideas by his younger sister into a bastion of anti-Semitic rantings and Nazi propaganda, creating a cult of anti-Semitic rants to rival the cult of Wagner as the worship of all things German.
    
    The role of Nietzsche's profoundly evil younger sister in recreating her brother's ideas according to her own image is a tale of intrigue and opportunism and extreme racism, and lies behind much of the popular image of Nietzsche as a champion of Totalitarianism. Some pertinent details of the world's most sinister sister:
    
    Elisabeth Nietzsche was the polar opposite of her brother. Where he was intellectually vibrant she was academically slow. Where he eagerly sought out new ideas, she made a virtue out of tradition and narrow-minded thinking. She idolized her brother, however the affection was met with alternating love and hate from Fritz, with him relying on her to care for him during his periods of ill health, but also finding her frustrating in the extreme. He once wrote, "When I look for my profoundest opposite, the incalculable pettiness of my instincts, I always find my mother and my sister. To be related to such rabble would be blasphemy against my divinity". The transformation of his ideas into Nazi propaganda occurred as a result of him eventually loosing his mind and, while under the care of his sister, her successful efforts at bilking her own mother out of the legal rights to Nietzsche's literary estate, and then carefully publishing select segments of his writings, focusing on his "Will to Power" ideas, creatively packaging them in pro-Nazi and pro-Fascist language.
    
    Elisabeth had remained unmarried until her mid-30's. She shared none of her brother's intellectual leanings, and made a virtue out of holding extremely Puritanical attitudes. She eventually married a man named Bernhard Förster, an extreme racist and a prototype of the later Nazis. Her brother despised her new husband and his simplistic racial ideology, and he refused to attend their wedding (choosing to go on a picnic that day instead), which they held on Wagner's birthday. In 1885, Elisabeth and Bernhard read an essay that their hero Wagner had written in 1880 called "Religion and Art", which was one long rant on the effects of Jews on all things wholesome.
    
    This essay formed the basis of an idea this cheery couple had of saving humanity by re-creating the perfect community in the form of an anti-Semitic colony in the jungle, made up of starry-eyed German idealists who would create a "racially pure community" that would exist in a state of blonde, blue-eyed bliss. They chose a remote area in Paraguay, South America, which had recently been decimated by years of war, and took 14 fellow-German families with them and moved deep in to the jungles of Paraguay and formed their very own Aryan commune, calling it "Nueva Germania". The goal was to make this community the nucleus of the eventual expansion of the German master-race across the entire continent, with Elisabeth and Bernhard as their spiritual leaders.
    
    Their Utopian effort only lasted about 7 years, with the effort a total disaster. The families were not prepared for the harsh jungle conditions and diseases like malaria and tuberculosis. Their German style of farming was totally ill-suited to the local environment and most of their crops failed. Her husband, who had borrowed money from everyone and who was up to his ears in debt, eventually committed suicide by going on a 6-week long drinking binge and then poisoning himself by drinking a mixture of strychnine and morphine. Elisabeth portrayed her husband's death as a heroic martyr's sacrifice brought on by his enemies, and portrayed the colony's problems as merely a temporary setback. But she later changed her mind and returned to Germany in 1893 to take up a new career transforming her now-insane brother's ideas into Nazi fodder.
    
    Incidentally, this colony in Paraguay still exists, with around 100 families descended from these original settlers still eeking out a meager existence in the jungle.
    
    Once back in Germany, Elisabeth took over the care of her brother and purchased a house in Weimar called "Villa Silberblick", renaming it "The Nietzsche Archives". It opened in 1894. Some of the people who helped her in this effort early on were the writers H.G. Wells and Rudolph Steiner, the later head of the Anthroposophic Society. Steiner later quit, saying "Frau Förster-Nietzsche is a complete laywoman in all that concerns her brother's doctrine. She lacks any sense for fine, and even for crude, logical distinctions. Her thinking is void of even the least logical consistency, and she lacks any sense of objectivity." (Ouch...)
    
    Ignoring Steiner's criticisms, Elisabeth began a lengthy project of re-publishing her brothers' ideas in a form that justified the growing racist and fascist ideology gradually gaining strength throughout Europe. She even invited various dignitaries to come upstairs and view her catatonic brother as he stared blankly at the wall. He became like a hamster in his sister's cage.
    
    She wrote a vast, 2-volume biography of her brother - "The Young Nietzsche" and "The Lonely Nietzsche" - in which she portrayed herself as Fritz' only true confidant. Nietzsche was never able to respond to this portrayal of his life, and since it largely contradicts his own written descriptions of his relationship with his sister, it is most likely a work of fiction.
    
    She wrote fawning letters to her 2 heroes, Benito Mussolini in Italy and Adolf Hitler, congratulating them on bringing life to her brother's prophecies. When Hitler met Mussolini in Venice on June 14, 1934, Elisabeth sent them a telegram saying, "The spirit of Nietzsche hovers over this meeting of the two greatest statesmen of Europe". They sent her a reply saying that they both had, indeed, sensed the spirit of Nietzsche in their midst. (But, of course, neither of these 2 men had ever actually read any of Nietzsche's books. They were too busy conquering Europe.)
    
    She became something of a celebrity amongst the Nazi party in the early 1930's, modeling her public image as a tireless matriarch of pure German ideals, in the mold of her fellow anti-Semite widow, Cosima Wagner. Edvard Munch painted a portrait of Elisabeth on her 60th birthday. Amazingly, she was even nominated for the Nobel prize for Literature 3 times, with backing by a group of German professors in 1908, 1915, and 1923, but failing each time. Adolf Hitler himself visited The Archives 7 times, with Elisabeth eagerly welcoming Hitler to her shrine.
    
    Not only did Hitler never actually read any of Nietzsche's books, he never even mentioned Nietzsche's name in any of his speeches, beyond quoting some Nietzsche buzz-words like "Superman" and "Will to Power" at his rallies. Perhaps he just admired Nietzsche's mustache?
    
    During one visit in 1933, she gave Hitler her brother's walking-stick as a token of her admiration. Hitler attended Elisabeth's funeral in 1935, and he was seen to weep a tear or two during the ceremony. She milked her brother's legacy to the last possible drop, at the fangs of the Nazi vampires.
    
    Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche was probably single-handedly responsible for her brother's enduring legacy as a Nazi prophet. She took carefully-selected pieces of his writings and sifted them through the evil web of her twisted mind and produced books that fit perfectly into the Nazi world view. The past 60+ years have been a period of slow, partial rehabilitation of her brother's legacy, as the extent of her influence has been discovered. Friedrich Nietzsche's name is still on the list of dangerous philosophers under the 21st century's Politically Correct climate, since Nazi memories die hard. Nietzsche was no boyscout and he perhaps deserves much of the criticism of the consequences of his own ideas, but the task of disentangling his legacy from his sister's influence is a project that is still in progress.
    
    
  • Nietzsche died on August 25, 1900 at the age of 55. The official cause of death was a stroke during a bout of pneumonia, brought on by the presumed effects of syphilis. Despite his intensely anti-religious sentiments, he was buried in a traditional Lutheran ceremony, arranged by his sister, against his wishes to be buried without a priest present. He had written that "I want to descend into my tomb an honest pagan." But his sister apparently didn't see this memo.
    
    The fact that Nietzsche went insane in his later life has struck many as a poetic consequence of his ideas. Since he ripped the rational foundation out from under Western Philosophy, it has been suggested that he realized the violence he had committed against Truth and saw the Despair that lay in the future, so that perhaps he had the good sense to go insane. Others take a position which separates a person's ideas from their personal life. For instance, Einstein's discoveries would not have been affected if he had gone insane at the end of his life, since the discoveries stand on their own. Whatever position you take, a man of violent ideas going insane at the end of his life is a made-for-TV climax to his life's story.
    
    The cause of his dementia was determined by his doctors in Basel to have been due to syphilis, which was assumed he perhaps contracted in a brothel while a student in Leipzig many years earlier, or perhaps while he was serving as a medic in the Franco-Prussian war. However this has always been a point of dispute, since later research has never revealed the usual symptoms of syphilis, such as slurred speach or deteriorating handwriting. His last writings bore the same clear handwriting as at his peak, and his speech was clear until he finally stopped speaking. The following alternatives have been suggested as his real ailment:
    
    
    • Perhaps he suffered from a brain tumor, which would explain his increasing episodes of severe migraine headaches, which would last for up to 9 days at a time, and problems with his vision. A tumor near the visual cortex of his brain could have caused his symptoms.
      
      
    • Perhaps he inherited the disease that his father had died from, which was determined to have been a "softening of brain tissue".
      
      
    • Perhaps he was suffering from mental illness. His last writings expressed many pseudo-religious "ecstasies", of the type sometimes expressed by people with mental breakdowns.
      
      
    • Perhaps he was suffering from side-effects of the drug Chloral Hydrate, which he had been taking as a sedative, since he long suffered from a "sensitive nervous constitution".
      
      
    The theory of syphilis was widely circulated much later by people trying to tarnish his legacy, given the role of his ideas by the Nazis in Germany and Fascists in Italy. His sister Elisabeth's hijacking of his writings to fit the racial rhetoric of these 2 groups created plenty of enemies of Nietzsche's name.
    
    Nietzsche apparently knew something bad was going to happen to him. Shortly before his collapse he wrote, "With me a catastrophe is being prepared. I know its name, but I will not pronounce it." He also started to act a little nuts prior to his collapse, writing letters to his friend August Strindberg where he said, "I have ordered a convocation of princes in Rome. I want to have the young Kaiser shot. Yours truly, Nietzsche Caesar". He signed other letters as "Dionysus" and "The Crucified One".
    
    When Nietzsche collapsed in Turin he arrived at the asylum in Jena and said that his "wife, Cosima Wagner" had brought him there. He referred to himself as "the Kaiser" and "the Duke of Cumberland" and accused one of the doctors of being Otto von Bismarck. He once wrote, "I have just seized possession of my kingdom, and am throwing the Pope into prison and having Wilhelm, Bismarck, and Stöcker shot." He was diagnosed as having a "Paralytic Psychic Disturbance". He remained in the asylum in Jena for 14 months, before being moved to his mother's house in Naumburg, in 1890. He remained here for 7 years, before his sister took over his care until his death.
    
    As a final ironic twist to the saga of Nietzsche's writings and their transformation by his sister, Elisabeth had made arrangements that when she died, her body was to be buried in the family-plot (located in a churchyard in Röcken bei Lützen, near Leipzig) in a location that required that her brother's body be relocated by several feet. (She wished to be buried in the very center of the family plot). However, according to several accounts, his body was never moved, only his headstone, with Elisabeth's headstone being placed over his plot. So, in the end, not only were Friedrich Nietzsche's ideas usurped by his sister, but his grave as well.
    
    
• Quotes:
  
  
  • "God is dead". This most famous quote by Nietzsche was first written in his book "The Gay Science" (and later repeated in his book "Thus Spake Zarathustra"), and was originally meant as a metaphor for the loss of the religious in the face of modern Rationalism and the hubris of science, but the expression has become a popular summary of Nietzsche's entire anti-religion philosophy. The phrase occurs in this context:
    
    
    Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market-place, and cried incessantly: "I am looking for God! I am looking for God!" As many of those who did not believe in God were standing together there, he excited considerable laughter. "Have you lost him, then"? said one. "Did he lose his way like a child"? said another. "Or is he hiding"? "Is he afraid of us"? "Has he gone on a voyage? or emigrated"? Thus they shouted and laughed. The madman sprang into their midst and pierced them with his glances.
    
    "Where has God gone?" he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I. We are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not more and more night coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God's decomposition? Gods too decompose.
    
    God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
    
    
  • "I know my fate. One day there will be associated with my name the recollection of something frightful, of a crisis like no other before on earth, of the profoundest collision of conscience, of a decision evoked against everything that until then had been believed in, demanded, sanctified. I am not a man. I am dynamite!" (Fritz did not suffer from undue humility).
    
    
  • "Through life's school of war, that which does not kill you only serves to make you stronger."
    
    
  • "I love the magnificent exuberance of a young beast of prey that plays gracefully and, as it plays, dismembers."
    
    
  • "In heaven all the interesting people are missing".
    
    
  • "Only sick music makes money today". (Commenting on Wagner's later music)
    
    
  • Like his role-model Schopenhauer, Nietzsche was notoriously non-progressive in his views on women, which was probably partially due to his total lack of success in romance. Some of his more non-charming comments:
    
    
    • "Concerning woman, one should only talk unto men."
      
    • "Everything in woman is a riddle, and everything in woman hath one solution: it is called pregnancy".
      
    • "Man is for woman a means: the purpose is always the child. But what is woman for man?"
      
    • "Man shall be trained for war, and woman for the recreation of the warrior. All else is folly."
      
    • "When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is generally something wrong with her sexual nature."
      
    • "Bitter is even the sweetest woman".
      
    • "Thou goest to women? Do not forget thy whip!"
      
      
    (And Nietzsche still wondered why he was unlucky in love...)
    
    
  • "Evil men have no songs. How is it that the Russians have songs?"
    
    
  • "Morality is herd instinct in the individual".
    
    
  • "Art raises its head where creeds relax".
    
    
  • "Christianity gave Eros poison to drink. He did not die of it, but degenerated into a vice".
    
    
  • "For youthful, vigorous barbarians Christianity is poison; to implant the teaching of sinfulness and damnation into the heroic, childish and animal soul of the ancient German, for example, is nothing than to poison it."
    
    
  • "If what you want is peace of soul and happiness, then believe. If you want to be a disciple of Truth, then seek".
    
    
  • "Faith is not wanting to know what is true".
    
    
  • "A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything".
    
    
  • "How much beer there is in the German intellect!"
    
    
  • "The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously".
    
    
  • "After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands".
    
    
  • "An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris".
    
    
  • "Egoism is the very essence of a noble soul".
    
    
  • "I would not know what the spirit of a philosopher might wish more to be than a good dancer".
    
    
  • "Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones, but by contrary extreme positions".
    
    
  • "My way of thinking calls for a warlike soul, a desire to hurt, a joy in denial, a hard hide".
    
    
  • Nietzsche's association with anti-Semitism is ironic given the fact that he often criticized his fellow-Germans who liked to blame Jews for all the world's problems. Some of his more direct statements against anti-Semites:
    
    
    • "To enthusiasm for the 'German National Character' I have indeed attained very little, but even less to the wish to keep this 'glorious' race pure".
      
      
    • "There is no more stupid and outrageous gang in Germany than the anti-Semites".
      
      
    • "This accursed anti-Semitism is the cause of a radical breach between me and my sister."
      
      
    • Nietzsche's last written sentence, prior to going silent for the last 10 years of his life, was "With these, my last writings, I am defying all anti-Semites".
      
      
    Nietzsche did criticize Judaism, but mostly by association with Christianity, since he felt that the Jews were ultimately responsible for the creation of his favorite scapegoat, Christian morality. But anti-Semitism as an ideology was something he never adopted. But the Nazis, and Nietzsche's sister, conveniently skipped these comments when using his ideas to justify their ideologies.