Friedrich Nietzsche

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Born on 15 October 1844, Nietzsche{{Cite web |title=The Life Of Friedrich Nietzsche – YTread |url=https://youtuberead.com/the-life-of-friedrich-nietzsche |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230924033446/https://youtuberead.com/the-life-of-friedrich-nietzsche |archive-date=24 September 2023 |access-date=27 March 2023 |website=youtuberead.com |language=en}} grew up in the town of Röcken (now part of Lützen), near Leipzig, in the Prussian Province of Saxony. He was named after King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, who turned 49 on the day of Nietzsche's birth (Nietzsche later dropped his middle name Wilhelm). Nietzsche's great-grandfather, {{ill|Gotthelf Engelbert Nietzsche|ja|ゴットヘルフ・エンゲルベルト・ニーチェ}} (1714–1804), was an inspector and a philosopher. Nietzsche's grandfather, {{ill|Friedrich August Ludwig Nietzsche|de}} (1756–1826), was a theologian.{{Sfn |Kaufmann |1974 |p=22}} Nietzsche's parents, Carl Ludwig Nietzsche (1813–1849), a Lutheran pastor and former teacher; and {{ill|Franziska Nietzsche|de}} (née Oehler) (1826–1897), married in 1843, the year before their son's birth. They had two other children: a daughter, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, born in 1846; and a second son, Ludwig Joseph, born in 1848. Nietzsche's father died from a brain disease in 1849, after a year of excruciating agony, when the boy was only four years old; Ludwig Joseph died six months later at age two.{{Cite encyclopedia |year=2014 |title=Friedrich Nietzsche |encyclopedia=Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Archive |url=http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2014/entries/nietzsche/ |last=Wicks |first=Robert |editor-last=Zalta |editor-first=Edward N. |edition=Winter 2014}} The family then moved to Naumburg, where they lived with Nietzsche's maternal grandmother and his father's two unmarried sisters. After the death of Nietzsche's grandmother in 1856, the family moved into their own house, now Nietzsche-Haus, a museum and Nietzsche study centre.

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Nietzsche attended a boys' school and then a private school, where he became friends with Gustav Krug and Wilhelm Pinder, both of whom came from highly respected families. Academic records from one of the schools attended by Nietzsche noted that he excelled in Christian theology.{{Cite web |year=1999 |title=Friedrich Nietzsche |url=https://www.college.columbia.edu/core/content/human-all-too-human-bbc-documentary-1999 |access-date=16 October 2019 |website=Human, All Too Human |publisher=BBC Documentary |via=Columbia College}}

In 1854, he began to attend the Domgymnasium in Naumburg. Because his father had worked for the state (as a pastor) the now-fatherless Nietzsche was offered a scholarship to study at the internationally recognised Schulpforta. The claim that Nietzsche was admitted on the strength of his academic competence has been debunked: his grades were not near the top of the class.{{Cite journal |last=Brobjer |first=Thomas H. |date=2001 |title=Why Did Nietzsche Receive a Scholarship to Study at Schulpforta? |url=https://philpapers.org/rec/BROWDN |journal=Nietzsche Studien |volume=30 |issue=1 |pages=322–328 |doi=10.1515/9783110172409.322 |s2cid=151393894}} He studied there from 1858 to 1864, becoming friends with Paul Deussen and Carl von Gersdorff (1844–1904), who later became a jurist. He also found time to work on poems and musical compositions. Nietzsche led "Germania", a music and literature club, during his summers in Naumburg. At Schulpforta, Nietzsche received an important grounding in languages—Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and French—so as to be able to read important primary sources;{{Cite book |last1=Krell |first1=David Farrell |title=The Good European: Nietzsche's work sites in word and image |last2=Bates |first2=Donald L. |date=1997 |publisher=University of Chicago Press}} he also experienced for the first time being away from his family life in a small-town conservative environment. His end-of-semester exams in March 1864 showed a 1 in Religion and German; a 2a in Greek and Latin; a 2b in French, History, and Physics; and a "lackluster" 3{{nbsp}}in Hebrew and Mathematics.{{sfn|Cate|2005|p=37}}

Nietzsche was an amateur composer.{{Cite encyclopedia |year=2001 |title=Nietzsche, Friedrich |encyclopedia=Grove Music Online |publisher=Oxford University Press |location=Oxford |url=https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000019943 |last=Hollingdale |first=R. J. |author-link=R. J. Hollingdale |doi=10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.19943 |isbn=978-1-56159-263-0 |url-access=subscription}} {{Grove Music subscription}} He composed several works for voice, piano, and violin beginning in 1858 at the Schulpforta in Naumburg when he started to work on musical compositions. Richard Wagner was dismissive of Nietzsche's music, allegedly mocking a birthday gift of a piano composition sent by Nietzsche in 1871 to Wagner's wife Cosima. German conductor and pianist Hans von Bülow also described another of Nietzsche's pieces as "the most undelightful and the most anti-musical draft on musical paper that I have faced in a long time".{{Cite web |title=Who knew? Friedrich Nietzsche was also a pretty decent classical composer |url=https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/friedrich-nietzsche-composer/ |website=Classic FM}}

While at Schulpforta, Nietzsche pursued subjects that were considered unbecoming. He became acquainted with the work of the then-almost-unknown poet Friedrich Hölderlin, calling him "my favourite poet" and writing an essay in which he said that the poet raised consciousness to "the most sublime ideality".{{sfn|Hayman|1980|p=42}} The teacher who corrected the essay gave it a good mark but commented that Nietzsche should concern himself in the future with healthier, more lucid, and more "German" writers. Additionally, he became acquainted with Ernst Ortlepp, an eccentric, blasphemous, and often drunken poet who was found dead in a ditch weeks after meeting the young Nietzsche but who may have introduced Nietzsche to the music and writing of Richard Wagner.{{Cite book |last=Kohler |first=Joachim |title=Nietzsche & Wagner: A Lesson in Subjugation |date=1998 |publisher=Yale University Press |page=17}} Perhaps under Ortlepp's influence, he and a student named Richter returned to school drunk and encountered a teacher, resulting in Nietzsche's demotion from first in his class and the end of his status as a prefect.{{sfn|Hollingdale|1999|p=21}}

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After graduation in September 1864,His "valedictorian paper" ({{lang|de|Valediktionsarbeit}}, graduation thesis for Pforta students) was titled "On Theognis of Megara" ("De Theognide Megarensi"); see {{harvnb|Jensen|Heit|2014|p=4}} Nietzsche began studying theology and classical philology at the University of Bonn in the hope of becoming a minister. For a short time, he and Deussen became members of the Burschenschaft Frankonia. After one semester (and to the anger of his mother), he stopped his theological studies and lost his faith.{{Cite book |last=Schaberg |first=William |title=The Nietzsche Canon |publisher=University of Chicago Press |year=1996 |page=32}} As early as his 1862 essay "Fate and History", Nietzsche had argued that historical research had discredited the central teachings of Christianity,{{Cite book |last=Salaquarda |first=Jörg |title=The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=1996 |page=99 |chapter=Nietzsche and the Judaeo-Christian tradition}} but David Strauss's Life of Jesus also seems to have had a profound effect on the young man. In addition, Ludwig Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity influenced young Nietzsche with its argument that people created God, and not the other way around.{{sfn|Solomon|Higgins|2000|p=86}} In June 1865, at the age of 20, Nietzsche wrote to his sister Elisabeth, who was deeply religious, a letter regarding his loss of faith. This letter contains the following statement:

Hence the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire....{{Cite book |url=http://babbledom.com/2011/02/17/intermission/ |title=Nietzsche, Letter to His Sister (1865) |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121124011911/http://babbledom.com/2011/02/17/intermission/ |archive-date=24 November 2012 |url-status=dead |df=dmy-all}}

File:Arthur Schopenhauer by J Schäfer, 1859b.jpg strongly influenced Nietzsche's philosophical thought.]]

Nietzsche subsequently concentrated on studying philology under Professor Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl, whom he followed to the University of Leipzig in 1865.{{sfn|Magnus|1999}} There he became close friends with his fellow student Erwin Rohde. Nietzsche's first philological publications appeared soon after.

In 1865, Nietzsche thoroughly studied the works of Arthur Schopenhauer. He owed the awakening of his philosophical interest to reading Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation and later admitted that Schopenhauer was one of the few thinkers whom he respected, dedicating the essay "Schopenhauer as Educator" in the Untimely Meditations to him.

In 1866, he read Friedrich Albert Lange's History of Materialism. Lange's descriptions of Kant's anti-materialistic philosophy, the rise of European Materialism, Europe's increased concern with science, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, and the general rebellion against tradition and authority intrigued Nietzsche greatly. Nietzsche would ultimately argue the impossibility of an evolutionary explanation of the human aesthetic sense.{{Cite journal |last=Pence |first=Charles H. |year=2011 |title=Nietzsche's aesthetic critique of Darwin |url=https://www.academia.edu/759427 |journal=History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences |volume=33 |issue=2 |pages=165–190 |pmid=22288334}}{{Dead link|date=June 2022 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes}}{{dead link|date=November 2022}}

In 1867, Nietzsche signed up for one year of voluntary service with the Prussian artillery division in Naumburg. He was regarded as one of the finest riders among his fellow recruits, and his officers predicted that he would soon reach the rank of captain. However, in March 1868, while jumping into the saddle of his horse, Nietzsche struck his chest against the pommel and tore two muscles in his left side, leaving him exhausted and unable to walk for months.{{sfn|Hayman|1980|p=93}}Nietzsche, Friedrich. [June 1868] 1921. "Letter to Karl Von Gersdorff." Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by A. M. Ludovici. Consequently, he turned his attention to his studies again, completing them in 1868. Nietzsche also met Richard Wagner for the first time later that year.Nietzsche, Friedrich. [November 1868] 1921. "[http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Selected_Letters_of_Friedrich_Nietzsche#To_Rohde_-_October.2C_1868 Letter to Rohde]." Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by A. M. Ludovici.{{Cite book |last1=Nietzsche |first1=Friedrich |author-link=Friedrich Nietzsche |url=https://archive.org/details/nietzschewagnerc00nietiala/page/n7/mode/2up |title=The Nietzsche-Wagner Correspondence |last2=Wagner |first2=Richard |author-link2=Richard Wagner |publisher=Boni & Liveright |others=Introduction by Mencken, H.L. |editor-last=Foerster-Nietzsche |editor-first=Elizabeth |editor-link=Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche |publication-place=New York |publication-date=1921 |translator-last=Kerr |translator-first=Caroline V. |asin=B000HFOAGI |translator-link=Caroline V. Kerr}}

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File:Rohde Gersdorff Nietzsche.JPG, Karl von Gersdorff and Nietzsche, October 1871]]

In 1869, with Ritschl's support, Nietzsche received an offer to become a professor of classical philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland. He was only 24 years old and had neither completed his doctorate nor received a teaching certificate ("habilitation"). He was awarded an honorary doctorate by Leipzig University in March 1869, again with Ritschl's support.{{sfn|Jensen|Heit|2014|p=129}}

Despite his offer coming at a time when he was considering giving up philology for science, he accepted.{{Sfn |Kaufmann |1974 |p=25}} To this day, Nietzsche is still among the youngest of the tenured Classics professors on record.{{Cite book |last=Bishop |first=Paul |title=Nietzsche and Antiquity |publisher=Boydell & Brewer |year=2004 |isbn=978-1571136480 |page=117}}

Nietzsche's 1870 projected doctoral thesis, "Contribution toward the Study and the Critique of the Sources of Diogenes Laertius" ("Beiträge zur Quellenkunde und Kritik des Laertius Diogenes"), examined the origins of the ideas of Diogenes Laërtius.{{sfn|Jensen|Heit|2014|p=115}} Though never submitted, it was later published as a {{Langx|de|text=Gratulationsschrift|label=none}} ('congratulatory publication') in Basel.{{Cite web |last=McCarthy |first=George E. |title=Dialectics and Decadence |url=http://personal.kenyon.edu/mccarthy/Book1.htm}}{{efn-lr|Between 1868 and 1870, he published two other studies on Diogenes Laertius: On the Sources of Diogenes Laertius (De Fontibus Diogenis Laertii) Part I (1868) & Part II (1869); and Analecta Laertiana (1870). See {{harvnb|Jensen|Heit|2014|p=115}}}}

Before moving to Basel, Nietzsche renounced his Prussian citizenship: for the rest of his life he remained officially stateless.{{Cite journal |last=Hecker |first=Hellmuth |year=1987 |title=Nietzsches Staatsangehörigkeit als Rechtsfrage. |trans-title=Nietzsche's nationality as a legal question |journal=Neue Juristische Wochenschrift |language=de |volume=40 |pages=1388–1391 |number=23}}His, Eduard. 1941. "Friedrich Nietzsches Heimatlosigkeit." Basler Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Altertumskunde 40:159–186.

Note that some authors (incl. Deussen and Montinari) mistakenly claim that Nietzsche became a Swiss citizen to become a university professor.

Nevertheless, Nietzsche served in the Prussian forces during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) as a medical orderly. In his short time in the military, he experienced much and witnessed the traumatic effects of battle. He also contracted diphtheria and dysentery.{{Cite book |last=Deussen |first=Paul |author-link=Paul Deussen |title=Erinnerungen a Friedrich Nietzsche |date=1901 |publisher=F.A. Brockhaus |location=Leipzig |language=de |trans-title=Memoirs of Friedrich Nietzsche}} Walter Kaufmann speculates that he also contracted syphilis at a brothel along with his other infections at this time.{{Cite journal |last=Sax |first=Leonard |year=2003 |title=What was the cause of Nietzsche's dementia? |journal=Journal of Medical Biography |volume=11 |issue=1 |pages=47–54 |doi=10.1177/096777200301100113 |pmid=12522502 |s2cid=6929185}}{{Cite book |last=Schain |first=Richard |title=The Legend of Nietzsche's Syphilis |publisher=Greenwood Press |year=2001 |location=Westwood}}{{full citation needed|date=November 2012}} On returning to Basel in 1870, Nietzsche observed the establishment of the German Empire and Otto von Bismarck's subsequent policies as an outsider and with a degree of scepticism regarding their genuineness. His inaugural lecture at the university was "Homer and Classical Philology". Nietzsche also met Franz Overbeck, a professor of theology who remained his friend throughout his life. Afrikan Spir, a little-known Russian philosopher responsible for the 1873 Thought and Reality and Nietzsche's colleague, the historian Jacob Burckhardt, whose lectures Nietzsche frequently attended, began to exercise significant influence on him.{{Cite book |last=Green |first=M. S. |title=Nietzsche and the Transcendental Tradition |date=2002 |publisher=University of Illinois Press}}{{full citation needed|date=November 2012}}

Nietzsche had already met Richard Wagner in Leipzig in 1868 and later Wagner's wife, Cosima. Nietzsche admired both greatly and during his time at Basel frequently visited Wagner's house in Tribschen in Lucerne. The Wagners brought Nietzsche into their most intimate circle—which included Franz Liszt, of whom Nietzsche colloquially described: "Liszt or the art of running after women!"Hughes, Rupert. [1903] 2004. "[http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11419/11419-h/11419-h.htm#img2 Franz Liszt]." Ch. 1 in [http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11419/11419-h/11419-h.htm#img2 The Love Affairs of Great Musicians 2]. Project Gutenberg. Also available via [http://www.bookrags.com/ebooks/11419/1.html#gsc.tab=0 Book Rags]. Nietzsche enjoyed the attention he gave to the beginning of the Bayreuth Festival. In 1870, he gave Cosima Wagner the manuscript of "The Genesis of the Tragic Idea" as a birthday gift. In 1872, Nietzsche published his first book, The Birth of Tragedy. However, his colleagues within his field, including Ritschl, expressed little enthusiasm for the work in which Nietzsche eschewed the classical philologic method in favour of a more speculative approach. In his polemic Philology of the Future, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff damped the book's reception and increased its notoriety. In response, Rohde (then a professor in Kiel) and Wagner came to Nietzsche's defence. Nietzsche remarked freely about the isolation he felt within the philological community and attempted unsuccessfully to transfer to a position in philosophy at Basel.

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In 1873, Nietzsche began to accumulate notes that would be posthumously published as Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. Between 1873 and 1876, he published four separate long essays: "David Strauss: the Confessor and the Writer", "On the Use and Abuse of History for Life", "Schopenhauer as Educator", and "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth". These four later appeared in a collected edition under the title Untimely Meditations. The essays shared the orientation of a cultural critique, challenging the developing German culture suggested by Schopenhauer and Wagner. During this time in the circle of the Wagners, he met Malwida von Meysenbug and Hans von Bülow. He also began a friendship with Paul Rée who, in 1876, influenced him into dismissing the pessimism in his early writings. However, he was deeply disappointed by the Bayreuth Festival of 1876, where the banality of the shows and baseness of the public repelled him. He was also alienated by Wagner's championing of "German culture", which Nietzsche felt a contradiction in terms, as well as by Wagner's celebration of his fame among the German public. All this contributed to his subsequent decision to distance himself from Wagner.

With the publication in 1878 of Human, All Too Human (a book of aphorisms ranging from metaphysics to morality to religion), a new style of Nietzsche's work became clear, highly influenced by Afrikan Spir's Thought and Reality{{Cite book |last=Safranski |first=Rüdiger |author-link=Rüdiger Safranski |title=Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography |date=2003 |publisher=W. W. Norton & Company |page=161 |translator-last=Frisch |translator-first=Shelley |quote=This work had long been consigned to oblivion, but it had a lasting impact on Nietzsche. Section 18 of Human, All Too Human cited Spir, not by name, but by presenting a 'proposition by an outstanding logician' (2,38; HH I § 18). |translator-link=Shelley Frisch}} and reacting against the pessimistic philosophy of Wagner and Schopenhauer. Nietzsche's friendship with Deussen and Rohde cooled as well. In 1879, after a significant decline in health, Nietzsche had to resign his position at Basel and was pensioned. Since his childhood, various disruptive illnesses had plagued him, including moments of shortsightedness that left him nearly blind, migraine headaches, and violent indigestion. The 1868 riding accident and diseases in 1870 may have aggravated these persistent conditions, which continued to affect him through his years at Basel, forcing him to take longer and longer holidays until regular work became impractical.

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File:Nietzsche paul-ree lou-von-salome188.jpg, Paul Rée and Nietzsche posing for a studio photo during their trip through Italy in 1882, planning to establish an educational commune together, but the friendship disintegrated in late 1882 due to complications from Rée's and Nietzsche's mutual romantic interest in Salomé.]]

Living on his pension from Basel along with aid from friends, Nietzsche travelled frequently to find climates more conducive to his health. He lived until 1889 as an independent author in different cities. He spent many summers in Sils Maria near St. Moritz in Switzerland, and many of his winters in the Italian cities of Genoa, Rapallo, and Turin, and the French city of Nice. In 1881, when France occupied Tunisia, he planned to travel to Tunis to view Europe from the outside but later abandoned that idea, probably for health reasons.{{Cite journal |last=Güntzel |first=Stephan |date=2003 |title=Nietzsche's Geophilosophy |url=https://muse.jhu.edu/article/45353/pdf |format=PDF |journal=Journal of Nietzsche Studies |volume=25 |pages=78–91 (85) |doi=10.1353/nie.2003.0010 |s2cid=201784626 |via=Project MUSE}} Nietzsche occasionally returned to Naumburg to visit his family, and, especially during this time, he and his sister, Elisabeth, had repeated periods of conflict and reconciliation.

While in Genoa, Nietzsche's failing eyesight prompted him to explore the use of typewriters as a means of continuing to write. He is known to have tried using the Hansen Writing Ball, a contemporary typewriter device. In the end, a past pupil of his, Peter Gast, became a private secretary to Nietzsche. In 1876, Gast transcribed the crabbed, nearly illegible handwriting of Nietzsche's first time with Richard Wagner in Bayreuth.{{Sfn |Cate |2005 |p=221}} He subsequently transcribed and proofread the galleys for almost all of Nietzsche's work. On at least one occasion, on 23 February 1880, the usually poor Gast received 200 marks from their mutual friend, Paul Rée.{{Sfn |Cate |2005 |p=297}} Gast was one of the very few friends Nietzsche allowed to criticise him. In responding most enthusiastically to Also Sprach Zarathustra ("Thus Spoke Zarathustra"), Gast did feel it necessary to point out that what were described as "superfluous" people were in fact quite necessary. He went on to list the number of people Epicurus, for example, had to rely on to supply his simple diet of goat cheese.{{Sfn |Cate |2005 |p=415}}

To the end of his life, Gast and Overbeck remained consistently faithful friends. Malwida von Meysenbug remained like a motherly patron even outside the Wagner circle. Soon Nietzsche made contact with the music-critic Carl Fuchs. Nietzsche stood at the beginning of his most productive period. Beginning with Human, All Too Human in 1878, Nietzsche published one book or major section of a book each year until 1888, his last year of writing; that year, he completed five.

In 1882, Nietzsche published the first part of The Gay Science. That year he also met Lou Andreas-Salomé,{{Cite web |title=Lou von Salomé |url=http://www.f-nietzsche.de/lou_e.htm |website=f-nietzsche.de}} through Malwida von Meysenbug and Paul Rée.

Salomé's mother took her to Rome when Salomé was 21. At a literary salon in the city, Salomé became acquainted with Paul Rée. Rée proposed marriage to her, but she, instead, proposed that they should live and study together as "brother and sister", along with another man for company, where they would establish an academic commune.{{sfn|Hollingdale|1999|p=149}} Rée accepted the idea and suggested that they be joined by his friend Nietzsche. The two met Nietzsche in Rome in April 1882, and Nietzsche is believed to have instantly fallen in love with Salomé, as Rée had done. Nietzsche asked Rée to propose marriage to Salomé, which she rejected. She had been interested in Nietzsche as a friend, but not as a husband.{{sfn|Hollingdale|1999|p=149}} Nietzsche nonetheless was content to join with Rée and Salomé touring through Switzerland and Italy together, planning their commune. The three travelled with Salomé's mother through Italy and considered where they would set up their "Winterplan" commune. They intended to set up their commune in an abandoned monastery, but no suitable location was found. On 13 May, in Lucerne, when Nietzsche was alone with Salomé, he earnestly proposed marriage to her again, which she rejected. He nonetheless was happy to continue with the plans for an academic commune.{{sfn|Hollingdale|1999|p=149}} After discovering the relationship, Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth became determined to get Nietzsche away from the "immoral woman".{{sfn|Hollingdale|1999|p=151}} Nietzsche and Salomé spent the summer together in Tautenburg in Thuringia, often with Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth as a chaperone. Salomé reports that he asked her to marry him on three separate occasions and that she refused, though the reliability of her reports of events is questionable.{{Sfn |Kaufmann |1974 |p=49}} Arriving in Leipzig (Germany) in October, Salomé and Rée separated from Nietzsche after a falling-out between Nietzsche and Salomé, in which Salomé believed that Nietzsche was desperately in love with her.

While the three spent a number of weeks together in Leipzig in October 1882, the following month Rée and Salomé left Nietzsche, leaving for Stibbe (modern-day Zdbowo in Poland){{Cite book |last1=Killy |first1=Walther |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=JkoK_108xJkC&q=Stibbe+Zdbowo+Nietzsche&pg=PT223 |title=Plett – Schmidseder |last2=Vierhaus |first2=Rudolf |publisher=Walter de Gruyter |year=2011 |isbn=978-3-11-096630-5 |language=en |via=Google Books}} without any plans to meet again. Nietzsche soon fell into a period of mental anguish, although he continued to write to Rée, stating "We shall see one another from time to time, won't we?"{{sfn|Hollingdale|1999|p=152}} In later recriminations, Nietzsche would blame on separate occasions the failure in his attempts to woo Salomé on Salomé, Rée, and on the intrigues of his sister (who had written letters to the families of Salomé and Rée to disrupt the plans for the commune). Nietzsche wrote of the affair in 1883, that he now felt "genuine hatred for my sister".{{sfn|Hollingdale|1999|p=152}}

Amidst renewed bouts of illness, living in near-isolation after a falling out with his mother and sister regarding Salomé, Nietzsche fled to Rapallo, where he wrote the first part of Also Sprach Zarathustra in only ten days.

File:Nietzsche1882.jpg, 1882]]

By 1882, Nietzsche was taking huge doses of opium and continued to have trouble sleeping.{{Sfn |Cate |2005 |p=389}} In 1883, while staying in Nice, he was writing out his own prescriptions for the sedative chloral hydrate, signing them "Dr. Nietzsche".{{Sfn |Cate |2005 |p=453}}

He turned away from the influence of Arthur Schopenhauer, and after he severed his social ties with Wagner, Nietzsche had few remaining friends. Now, with the new style of Zarathustra, his work became even more alienating, and the market received it only to the degree required by politeness. Nietzsche recognised this and maintained his solitude, though he often complained. His books remained largely unsold. In 1885, he printed only 40 copies of the fourth part of Zarathustra and distributed a fraction of them among close friends, including Helene von Druskowitz.

In 1883, he tried and failed to obtain a lecturing post at the University of Leipzig. According to a letter he wrote to Peter Gast, this was due to his "attitude towards Christianity and the concept of God".Nietzsche, Friedrich. [26 August 1883] 1921. "Letter to Peter Gast." Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by A. M. Ludovici.

In 1886, Nietzsche broke with his publisher Ernst Schmeitzner, disgusted by his antisemitic opinions. Nietzsche saw his own writings as "completely buried and in this anti-Semitic dump" of Schmeitzner—associating the publisher with a movement that should be "utterly rejected with cold contempt by every sensible mind".{{Cite web |date=1 February 2000 |title=Ernst Schmeitzner (1851–1895). 115 letters 1874–1886 {{!}} Correspondences |url=http://www.thenietzschechannel.com/correspondence/corresp.htm#schmei |access-date=27 November 2013 |website=The Nietzsche Channel}} He then printed Beyond Good and Evil at his own expense. He also acquired the publication rights for his earlier works and over the next year issued second editions of The Birth of Tragedy, Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, and of The Gay Science with new prefaces placing the body of his work in a more coherent perspective. Thereafter, he saw his work as completed for a time and hoped that soon a readership would develop. In fact, interest in Nietzsche's thought did increase at this time, if rather slowly and imperceptibly to him. During these years Nietzsche met Meta von Salis, Carl Spitteler, and Gottfried Keller.

In 1886, his sister, Elisabeth, married the antisemite Bernhard Förster and travelled to Paraguay to found Nueva Germania, a "Germanic" colony."[https://www.britannica.com/biography/Elisabeth-Forster-Nietzsche Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche]." Britannica.com. [1998] 2019. Retrieved 25 May 2020.{{Cite web |last=van Eerten |first=Jurriaan |date=27 February 2016 |title=The lost 'Aryan utopia' of Nueva Germania |url=https://ticotimes.net/2016/02/27/the-lost-aryan-utopia-of-nueva-germania |access-date=29 September 2019 |website=The Tico Times |location=Costa Rica}} Through correspondence, Nietzsche's relationship with Elisabeth continued through cycles of conflict and reconciliation, but they met again only after his collapse. He continued to have frequent and painful attacks of illness, which made prolonged work impossible.

In 1887, Nietzsche wrote the polemic On the Genealogy of Morality. During the same year, he encountered the work of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, to whom he felt an immediate kinship.Nietzsche, Friedrich. [March 1887] 1921. "Letter to Peter Gast." Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by A. M. Ludovici. He also exchanged letters with Hippolyte Taine and Georg Brandes. Brandes, who had started to teach the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard in the 1870s, wrote to Nietzsche asking him to read Kierkegaard, to which Nietzsche replied that he would come to Copenhagen and read Kierkegaard with him. However, before fulfilling this promise, Nietzsche slipped too far into illness. At the beginning of 1888, Brandes delivered in Copenhagen one of the first lectures on Nietzsche's philosophy.

Although Nietzsche had previously announced at the end of On the Genealogy of Morality a new work with the title The Will to Power: Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values, he seems to have abandoned this idea and, instead, used some of the draft passages to compose Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist in 1888.{{Cite book |last=Montinari |first=Mazzino |title=Friedrich Nietzsche. Eine Einführung |publisher=De Gruyter |year=1974 |language=de}} translated as {{cite book |title=Friedrich Nietzsche |language=fr |year=1991 |location=Paris |publisher=PUF}}

His health improved and he spent the summer in high spirits. In the autumn of 1888, his writings and letters began to reveal a higher estimation of his own status and "fate". He overestimated the increasing response to his writings, however, especially to the recent polemic, The Case of Wagner. On his 44th birthday, after completing Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist, he decided to write the autobiography Ecce Homo. In its preface—which suggests Nietzsche was well aware of the interpretive difficulties his work would generate—he declares, "Hear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else."{{Sfn |Nietzsche |1888d |loc=Preface, section 1}} In December, Nietzsche began a correspondence with August Strindberg and thought that, short of an international breakthrough, he would attempt to buy back his older writings from the publisher and have them translated into other European languages. Moreover, he planned the publication of the compilation Nietzsche contra Wagner and of the poems that made up his collection Dionysian-Dithyrambs.

{{anchor|mental breakdown and death|breakdown|death}}File:Friedrich Nietzsche drawn by Hans Olde.jpg from the photographic series The Ill Nietzsche, late 1899|251x251px]]On 3 January 1889, Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown.{{Cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Xeb80itrlRIC |title=The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche |date=1996 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |isbn=978-0-521-36767-7 |editor-last=Magnus |editor-first=Bernd |pages=79–81 |language=en |editor-last2=Higgins |editor-first2=Kathleen Marie}} Two policemen approached him after he caused a public disturbance in the streets of Turin. What happened remains unknown, but an often-repeated tale from shortly after his death states that Nietzsche witnessed the flogging of a horse at the other end of the Piazza Carlo Alberto, ran to the horse, threw his arms around its neck to protect it, then collapsed to the ground.{{Sfn |Kaufmann |1974 |p=67}}{{Cite book |last=Verrecchia |first=Anacleto |title=Nietzsche in Italy |date=1988 |publisher=ANMA Libri, Stanford University |editor-last=Harrison |editor-first=T. |location=Stanford |pages=105–112 |chapter=Nietzsche's Breakdown in Turin}} In the following few days, Nietzsche sent short writings—known as the Wahnzettel or Wahnbriefe (literally "Delusion notes" or "letters")—to a number of friends including Cosima Wagner and Jacob Burckhardt. Most of them were signed "Dionysus", though some were also signed "der Gekreuzigte" meaning "the crucified one". To his former colleague Burckhardt, Nietzsche wrote:{{Cite web |last=Simon |first=Gerald |date=January 1889 |title=Nietzsches Briefe. Ausgewählte Korrespondenz. Wahnbriefe. |trans-title=Nietzsche's letters. Selected Correspondence. delusional letters. |url=http://www.thenietzschechannel.com/correspondence/ger/nilettersg.htm |access-date=24 August 2013 |publisher=The Nietzsche Channel |language=de |quote=Ich habe Kaiphas in Ketten legen lassen; auch bin ich voriges Jahr von den deutschen Ärzten auf eine sehr langwierige Weise gekreuzigt worden. Wilhelm, Bismarck und alle Antisemiten abgeschafft. |trans-quote=I put Caiaphas in chains; I was also crucified last year by the German doctors in a very lengthy manner. Wilhelm, Bismarck and all anti-Semites abolished.}}

I have had Caiaphas put in fetters. Also, last year I was crucified by the German doctors in a very drawn-out manner. Wilhelm, Bismarck, and all anti-Semites abolished.

File:Nietzsche Olde 05.JPG

On 6 January 1889, Burckhardt showed the letter he had received from Nietzsche to Overbeck. The following day, Overbeck received a similar letter and decided that Nietzsche's friends had to bring him back to Basel. Overbeck travelled to Turin and brought Nietzsche to a psychiatric clinic in Basel. By that time Nietzsche appeared fully in the grip of a serious mental illness,{{Cite web |last=Brown |first=Malcolm |year=2011 |title=1889 |url=https://www.dartmouth.edu/~fnchron/1889.html |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120208181453/http://www.dartmouth.edu/~fnchron/1889.html |archive-date=8 February 2012 |access-date=28 September 2019 |website=Nietzsche Chronicle |publisher=Dartmouth College}} and his mother Franziska decided to transfer him to a clinic in Jena under the direction of Otto Binswanger.{{Cite book |last=Safranski |first=Rüdiger |url=https://archive.org/details/nietzschephiloso00safr_0/page/371 |title=Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography |publisher=W. W. Norton & Company |year=2003 |isbn=0-393-05008-4 |location=New York |page=[https://archive.org/details/nietzschephiloso00safr_0/page/371 371]}} In January 1889, they proceeded with the planned release of Twilight of the Idols, by that time already printed and bound. From November 1889 to February 1890, the art historian Julius Langbehn attempted to cure Nietzsche, claiming that the methods of the medical doctors were ineffective in treating Nietzsche's condition.{{Cite web |editor-last=Sorensen |editor-first=Lee |title=Langbehn, Julius |url=http://arthistorians.info/langbehnj |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190608170651/http://arthistorians.info/langbehnj |archive-date=8 June 2019 |access-date=29 September 2019 |website=Dictionary of Art Historians}} Langbehn assumed progressively greater control of Nietzsche until his secretiveness discredited him. In March 1890, Franziska removed Nietzsche from the clinic and, in May 1890, brought him to her home in Naumburg. During this process Overbeck and Gast contemplated what to do with Nietzsche's unpublished works. In February, they ordered a fifty-copy private edition of Nietzsche contra Wagner, but the publisher C. G. Naumann secretly printed one hundred. Overbeck and Gast decided to withhold publishing The Antichrist and Ecce Homo because of their more radical content. Nietzsche's reception and recognition enjoyed their first surge.{{Cite book |last=Safranski |first=Rüdiger |url=https://archive.org/details/nietzschephiloso00safr_0/page/317 |title=Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography |publisher=W. W. Norton & Company |year=2003 |isbn=0-393-05008-4 |pages=[https://archive.org/details/nietzschephiloso00safr_0/page/317 317–350]}}

In 1893, Nietzsche's sister, Elisabeth, returned from Nueva Germania in Paraguay following the suicide of her husband. She studied Nietzsche's works and, piece by piece, took control of their publication. Overbeck was dismissed and Gast finally co-operated. After the death of Franziska in 1897, Nietzsche lived in Weimar, where Elisabeth cared for him and allowed visitors, including Rudolf Steiner (who in 1895 had written Friedrich Nietzsche: A Fighter Against His Time, one of the first books praising Nietzsche),{{Cite book |last=Steiner |first=Rudolf |title=Friedrich Nietzsche, in Kämpfer seine Zeit |year=1895 |location=Weimar |language=de |trans-title=Friedrich Nietzsche, in Fighters of His Time}} to meet her uncommunicative brother. Elisabeth employed Steiner as a tutor to help her to understand her brother's philosophy. Steiner abandoned the attempt after only a few months, declaring that it was impossible to teach her anything about philosophy.{{Cite book |last=Bailey |first=Andrew |title=First Philosophy: Fundamental Problems and Readings in Philosophy |publisher=Broadview Press |year=2002 |page=704}}

File:Eh-dm-27.JPG "corrected" Nietzsche's writings without his approval.|alt=|left|350x350px]]

Nietzsche's insanity was originally diagnosed as tertiary syphilis, in accordance with a prevailing medical paradigm of the time. Although most commentators{{who|date=May 2021}} regard his breakdown as unrelated to his philosophy, Georges Bataille wrote poetically of his condition ("'Man incarnate' must also go mad"){{Cite journal |last1=Bataille |first1=Georges |last2=Michelson |first2=Annette |date=Spring 1986 |title=Nietzsche's Madness |journal=October |volume=36 |pages=42–45 |doi=10.2307/778548 |jstor=778548}} and René Girard's postmortem psychoanalysis posits a worshipful rivalry with Richard Wagner.{{Cite journal |last=Girard |first=René |author-link=René Girard |year=1976 |title=Superman in the Underground: Strategies of Madness – Nietzsche, Wagner, and Dostoevsky. |journal=Modern Language Notes |volume=91 |pages=1161–1185 |doi=10.2307/2907130 |jstor=2907130 |s2cid=163754306 |number=6}} Girard suggests that Nietzsche signed his final letters as both Dionysus and the Crucified One because he was demonstrating that by being a god (Dionysus), one is also a victim (Crucified One) since a god still suffers by overcoming the law. Nietzsche had previously written, "All superior men who were irresistibly drawn to throw off the yoke of any kind of morality and to frame new laws had, if they were not actually mad, no alternative but to make themselves or pretend to be mad." (Daybreak, 14) The diagnosis of syphilis has since been challenged and a diagnosis of "manic-depressive illness with periodic psychosis followed by vascular dementia" was put forward by Cybulska prior to Schain's study.{{Cite journal |last=Cybulska |first=E. M. |year=2000 |title=The madness of Nietzsche: a misdiagnosis of the millennium? |journal=Hospital Medicine |volume=61 |issue=8 |pages=571–575 |doi=10.12968/hosp.2000.61.8.1403 |pmid=11045229}}{{Cite book |last=Schain |first=Richard |title=The Legend of Nietzsche's Syphilis |publisher=Greenwood Press |year=2001 |isbn=978-0-313-31940-2 |location=Westport}}{{Page needed|date=September 2010}} Leonard Sax suggested the slow growth of a right-sided retro-orbital meningioma as an explanation of Nietzsche's dementia;{{Cite journal |last=Sax |first=Leonard |year=2003 |title=What was the cause of Nietzsche's dementia? |journal=Journal of Medical Biography |volume=11 |issue=1 |pages=47–54 |doi=10.1177/096777200301100113 |pmid=12522502 |s2cid=6929185}} Orth and Trimble postulated frontotemporal dementia{{Cite journal |last1=Orth |first1=M. |last2=Trimble |first2=M. R. |year=2006 |title=Friedrich Nietzsche's mental illness – general paralysis of the insane vs. frontotemporal dementia |journal=Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica |volume=114 |issue=6 |pages=439–444; discussion 445 |doi=10.1111/j.1600-0447.2006.00827.x |pmid=17087793 |s2cid=25453044}} while other researchers have proposed a hereditary stroke disorder called CADASIL.{{Cite journal |last1=Hemelsoet |first1=D. |last2=Hemelsoet |first2=K. |last3=Devreese |first3=D. |date=March 2008 |title=The neurological illness of Friedrich Nietzsche |journal=Acta Neurologica Belgica |volume=108 |issue=1 |pages=9–16 |pmid=18575181}} Poisoning by mercury, a treatment for syphilis at the time of Nietzsche's death,{{Cite journal |last1=Dayan |first1=L. |last2=Ooi |first2=C. |date=October 2005 |title=Syphilis treatment: old and new |journal=Expert Opinion on Pharmacotherapy |volume=6 |issue=13 |pages=2271–2280 |doi=10.1517/14656566.6.13.2271 |pmid=16218887 |s2cid=6868863}} has also been suggested.{{Cite book |last=Hammond |first=David |title=Mercury Poisoning: The Undiagnosed Epidemic |date=2013 |page=11}}

In 1898 and 1899, Nietzsche suffered at least two strokes. They partially paralysed him, leaving him unable to speak or walk. He likely suffered from clinical hemiparesis/hemiplegia on the left side of his body by 1899. After contracting pneumonia in mid-August 1900, he suffered another stroke during the night of 24–25 August and died at about noon on 25 August.Concurring reports in Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche's biography (1904) and a letter by Mathilde Schenk-Nietzsche to Meta von Salis, 30 August 1900, quoted in Janz (1981) p. 221. Cf. Volz (1990), p. 251. Elisabeth had him buried beside his father at the church in Röcken near Lützen. His friend and secretary Gast gave his funeral oration, proclaiming: "Holy be your name to all future generations!"{{Cite web |last=Schain |first=Richard |title=Nietzsche's Visionary Values – Genius or Dementia? |url=http://www.philosophos.com/philosophy_article_31.html |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060513011228/http://www.philosophos.com/philosophy_article_31.html |archive-date=13 May 2006 |publisher=Philosophos}}

File:Röcken (Lützen), the grave of Friedrich Nietzsche.jpg in Germany.]]

Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche compiled The Will to Power from Nietzsche's unpublished notebooks and published it posthumously in 1901. Because his sister arranged the book based on her own conflation of several of Nietzsche's early outlines and took liberties with the material, the scholarly consensus has been that it does not reflect Nietzsche's intent. (For example, Elisabeth removed aphorism 35 of The Antichrist, where Nietzsche rewrote a passage of the Bible.) Indeed, Mazzino Montinari, the editor of Nietzsche's Nachlass, called it a forgery.{{Cite book |last=Montinari |first=Mazzino |author-link=Mazzino Montinari |title=The 'Will to Power' Does Not Exist}}{{Incomplete short citation|date=September 2024}} Yet, the endeavour to rescue Nietzsche's reputation by discrediting The Will to Power often leads to scepticism about the value of his late notes, even of his whole Nachlass. However, his Nachlass and The Will to Power are distinct.

General commentators and Nietzsche scholars, whether emphasising his cultural background or his language, overwhelmingly label Nietzsche as a "German philosopher."{{Cite web |last=Anderson |first=R. Lanier |date=17 March 2017 |title=Friedrich Nietzsche |url=https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/ |website=Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy |publisher=Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University}}{{sfn|Tanner|2000}}{{sfn|Magnus|1999}}{{Cite book |last1=Magnus |first1=Bernd |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Xeb80itrlRIC&q=%22German+philosopher%22+Nietzsche&pg=PA1 |title=The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche |last2=Higgins |first2=Kathleen Marie |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=1996 |isbn=978-0-521-36767-7 |page=1 |via=Google Books}} Others do not assign him a national category.{{Cite book |title=The Shorter Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy |date=2005 |publisher=Routledge |editor-last=Craid |editor-first=Edward |location=Abingdon |pages=726–741}}{{Cite book |last=Blackburn |first=Simon |title=The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy |date=2005 |publisher=Oxford University Press |location=Oxford |pages=252–253}}{{Cite book |url=https://archive.org/details/conciseencyclope00rejo_674 |title=The Concise encyclopedia of western philosophy |publisher=Routledge |year=2005 |isbn=978-0-415-32924-8 |editor-last=Rée |editor-first=Jonathan |edition=3rd |location=London |pages=[https://archive.org/details/conciseencyclope00rejo_674/page/n275 267]–270 |orig-date=1960 |editor-last2=Urmson |editor-first2=J.O. |url-access=limited}} While Germany had not yet been unified into a single sovereign state, Nietzsche was born a citizen of Prussia, which was mostly part of the German Confederation.{{Cite book |last=Mencken |first=Henry Louis |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=dyOwIOqoopkC&pg=PA11 |title=The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche |publisher=Wilder Publications |year=2008 |isbn=978-1-60459-331-0 |pages=11– |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121112014543/http://books.google.com/books?id=dyOwIOqoopkC&pg=PA11 |archive-date=12 November 2012 |url-status=dead |via=Google Books}} His birthplace, Röcken, is in the modern German state of Saxony-Anhalt. When he accepted his post at Basel, Nietzsche applied for annulment of his Prussian citizenship.{{Cite book |last=Janz |first=Curt Paul |title=Friedrich Nietzsche: Biographie |date=1978 |publisher=Carl Hanser Verlag |volume=1 |location=Munich |page=263 |language=de |trans-title=Friedrich Nietzsche: Biography |quote=Er beantragte also bei der preussischen Behörde seine Expatriierung. |trans-quote=He accordingly applied to the Prussian authorities for expatrification.}} The official revocation of his citizenship came in a document dated 17 April 1869,{{Cite book |last1=Colli |first1=Giorgio |author-link=Giorgio Colli |title=Nietzsche Briefwechsel |last2=Montinari |first2=Mazzino |author-link2=Mazzino Montinari |date=1993 |publisher=Walter de Gruyter |isbn=978-3-11-012277-0 |series=Kritische Gesamtausgabe |volume=4 |location=Berlin |page=566 |language=de |trans-title=Nietzsche Correspondence |chapter=Entlassungsurkunde für den Professor Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche aus Naumburg |trans-chapter=Dismissal certificate for Professor Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche from Naumburg}} and for the rest of his life he remained officially stateless.

File:Portrait Bust of Friedrich Nietzsche (SM sgp1).png, 1903–1904, at the Städel, Frankfurt]]

At least towards the end of his life, Nietzsche believed his ancestors were Polish.{{Cite book |last=Mencken |first=Henry Louis |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=_r71AzHvf64C&q=poland+polish&pg=PA6 |title=Friedrich Nietzsche |publisher=Transaction Publishers |year=1913 |isbn=978-1-56000-649-7 |page=6 |via=Google Books}} He wore a signet ring bearing the Radwan coat of arms, traceable back to Polish nobility of medieval times{{Cite web |last=Warberg |first=Ulla-Karin |title=Nietzsche's ring |url=http://auktionsverket.com/news/nietzsches-ring/ |archive-url=https://archive.today/20170624204834/http://auktionsverket.com/news/nietzsches-ring/ |archive-date=24 June 2017 |access-date=16 August 2018 |website=auktionsverket.com |publisher=Stockholms Auktionsverk |quote=Nietzsche's ring{{nbsp}}... it was worn by Friedrich Nietzsche and it represents the ancient Radwan coat of arms, which can be traced back to the Polish nobility of medieval times. |location=Östermalm, Stockholm}} and the surname "Nicki" of the Polish noble (szlachta) family bearing that coat of arms.{{Cite book |last1=Niesiecki |first1=Kasper |author-link=Kasper Niesiecki |title=Herbarz Polski Kaspra Niesieckiego S.J., powiększony dodatkami z poźniejszych autorów, rękopismów, dowodów urzędowych i wydany przez Jana Nep. Bobrowicza. |last2=Bobrowicz |first2=Jan Nepomucen |author-link2=Jan Nepomucen Bobrowicz |publisher=Breitkopf & Härtel |year=1841 |volume=VIII |location=Leipzig, Germany |page=28 |language=pl |trans-title=Polish armorial of Kasper Niesiecki S.J., enlarged by additions from other authors, manuscripts, official proofs and published by Jan Nep. Bobrowicz. |chapter=Radwan Herb |trans-chapter=Radwan Coat of Arms |type=Noble/szlachta genealogical and heraldic reference |quote=Herbowni ... Nicki, ... (Heraldic Family ... Nicki, ...) |orig-date=1728 |chapter-url=http://ebuw.uw.edu.pl/dlibra/docmetadata?id=165 |chapter-format=Online book}}{{Cite web |last1=Niesiecki |first1=Kasper |author-link=Kasper Niesiecki |last2=Bobrowicz |first2=Jan Nepomucen |author-link2=Jan Nepomucen Bobrowicz |year=1845 |orig-date=1728 |title=Kasper Niesiecki, Herbarz Polski, wyd. J.N. Bobrowicz, Lipsk 1839–1845: herb Radwan (t. 8 s. 27–29) |url=http://wielcy.pl/niesiecki/herb/radwan/5066.php |url-status=live |archive-url=https://archive.today/20180817062826/http://wielcy.pl/niesiecki/herb/radwan/5066.php |archive-date=17 August 2018 |access-date=17 August 2018 |website=wielcy.pl |publisher=Dr Minakowski Publikacje Elektroniczne |language=pl |type=Noble/szlachta genealogical and heraldic reference |format=website |quote=Herbowni ... Nicki, ... (Heraldic Family ... Nicki, ...) |location=Kraków, Poland}} Gotard Nietzsche, a member of the Nicki family, left Poland for Prussia. His descendants later settled in the Electorate of Saxony circa the year 1700.{{Cite web |last=Warberg |first=Ulla-Karin |title=Nietzsche's ring |url=http://auktionsverket.com/news/nietzsches-ring/ |archive-url=https://archive.today/20170624204834/http://auktionsverket.com/news/nietzsches-ring/ |archive-date=24 June 2017 |access-date=16 August 2018 |website=auktionsverket.com |publisher=Stockholms Auktionsverk |quote=In 1905, the Polish writer Bernhard Scharlitt in the spirit of Polish patriotism wrote an article about the Nietzsche family. In Herbarz Polski, a genealogy of Polish nobility, he had come across a note about a family named 'Nicki,' who could be traced back to Radwan. A member of this family named Gotard Nietzsche had left Poland for Prussia, and his descendants had eventually settled in Saxony around the year 1700. |location=Östermalm, Stockholm}} Nietzsche wrote in 1888, "My ancestors were Polish noblemen (Nietzky); the type seems to have been well preserved despite three generations of German mothers."{{sfn|Hollingdale|1999|p=6}} At one point, Nietzsche became even more adamant about his Polish identity. "I am a pure-blooded Polish nobleman, without a single drop of bad blood, certainly not German blood."{{Cite book |last=Appel |first=Fredrick |title=Nietzsche Contra Democracy |date=1998 |publisher=Cornell University Press |page=114}} On yet another occasion, Nietzsche stated, "Germany is a great nation only because its people have so much Polish blood in their veins.... I am proud of my Polish descent."{{Cite book |last=Mencken |first=Henry Louis |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=nnEOAAAAIAAJ&q=Nietzsche+Polish&pg=PA6 |title=The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche |publisher=University of Michigan |year=2006 |isbn=978-0722220511 |page=6 |orig-date=1908 |via=Google Books}} [https://archive.org/details/philosophyoffrie00menc/page/6/mode/2up Alt URL] Nietzsche believed his name might have been Germanised, in one letter claiming, "I was taught to ascribe the origin of my blood and name to Polish noblemen who were called Niëtzky and left their home and nobleness about a hundred years ago, finally yielding to unbearable suppression: they were Protestants.""Letter to Heinrich von Stein, December 1882." KGB III 1, Nr. 342, p. 287; KGW V 2, p. 579; KSA 9 p. 681

Most scholars dispute Nietzsche's account of his family's origins. Hans von Müller debunked the genealogy put forward by Nietzsche's sister in favour of Polish noble heritage.von Müller, Hans. 2002. "Nietzsche's Vorfahren" (reprint). Nietzsche-Studien 31:253–275. {{doi|10.1515/9783110170740.253}} Max Oehler, Nietzsche's cousin and curator of the Nietzsche Archive at Weimar, argued that all of Nietzsche's ancestors bore German names, including the wives' families.{{sfn|Hollingdale|1999|p=6}} Oehler claims that Nietzsche came from a long line of German Lutheran clergymen on both sides of his family, and modern scholars regard the claim of Nietzsche's Polish ancestry as "pure invention."{{Cite book |last=Mencken |first=Henry Louis |title=The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche |publisher=See Sharp Press |others=introd. & comm. Charles Q. Bufe |year=2003 |page=2}} Colli and Montinari, the editors of Nietzsche's assembled letters, gloss Nietzsche's claims as a "mistaken belief" and "without foundation.""Letter to Heinrich von Stein, December 1882," KGB III 7.1, p. 313."Letter to Georg Brandes, 10 April 1888," KGB III 7.3/1, p. 293. The name Nietzsche itself is not a Polish name, but an exceptionally common one throughout central Germany, in this and cognate forms (such as Nitsche and Nitzke). The name derives from the forename Nikolaus, abbreviated to Nick; assimilated with the Slavic Nitz; it first became Nitsche and then Nietzsche.{{sfn|Hollingdale|1999|p=6}}

It is not known why Nietzsche wanted to be thought of as Polish nobility. According to the biographer R. J. Hollingdale, Nietzsche's propagation of the Polish ancestry myth may have been part of his "campaign against Germany."{{sfn|Hollingdale|1999|p=6}} Nicholas D. More states that Nietzsche's claims of having an illustrious lineage were a parody on autobiographical conventions, and suspects Ecce Homo, with its self-laudatory titles, such as "Why I Am So Wise", as being a work of satire.{{Cite book |last=More |first=Nicholas D. |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=JVAHAwAAQBAJ&q=nietzsche+polish+aristocracy+satire&pg=PA69 |title=Nietzsche's Last Laugh: Ecce Homo as Satire |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=2014 |isbn=978-1107050815 |page=69 |language=en |access-date=31 August 2021 |via=Google Books}} He concludes that Nietzsche's supposed Polish genealogy was a joke—not a delusion.

Nietzsche was never married. He proposed to Lou Salomé three times and each time was rejected.{{Cite web |last=Leventhal |first=Robert S. |year=2001 |title=Nietzsche and Lou Andreas-Salomé: Chronicle of a Relationship 1882 |url=https://rsleve.people.wm.edu/FNLAS_1882.html |website=rsleve.people.wm.edu}} One theory blames Salomé's view on sexuality as one of the reasons for her alienation from Nietzsche. As articulated in her 1898 novella Fenitschka, Salomé viewed the idea of sexual intercourse as prohibitive and marriage as a violation, with some suggesting that they indicated sexual repression and neurosis.{{Cite book |last=Diethe |first=Carol |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=2RAhAAAAQBAJ |title=Nietzsche's Women: Beyond the Whip |publisher=Walter de Gruyter |year=1996 |isbn=978-3-11-014819-0 |location=Berlin |page=56 |via=Google Books}} Reflecting on unrequited love, Nietzsche considered that "indispensable ... to the lover is his unrequited love, which he would at no price relinquish for a state of indifference".{{efn-lr|This is how R. B. Pippin describes Nietzsche's views in The Persistence of Subjectivity (2005), p. 326.}}

Deussen cited the episode of Cologne's brothel in February 1865 as instrumental to understanding the philosopher's way of thinking, mostly about women. Nietzsche was surreptitiously accompanied to a "call house" from which he clumsily escaped upon seeing "a half dozen apparitions dressed in sequins and veils." According to Deussen, Nietzsche "never decided to remain unmarried all his life. For him, women had to sacrifice themselves to the care and benefit of men." Nietzsche scholar {{interlanguage link|Joachim Köhler|de|Joachim Köhler (Philosoph)}} has attempted to explain Nietzsche's life history and philosophy by claiming that he was homosexual. Köhler argues that Nietzsche's supposed syphilis, which is "...{{nbsp}}usually considered to be the product of his encounter with a prostitute in a brothel in Cologne or Leipzig, is equally likely. Some maintain that Nietzsche contracted it in a male brothel in Genoa."{{Cite book |last=Köhler |first=Joachim |title=Zarathustra's secret: the interior life of Friedrich Nietzsche |publisher=Yale University Press |year=2002 |isbn=978-0-300-09278-3 |location=New Haven, Conn. |page=xv}} The acquisition of the infection from a homosexual brothel was the theory believed by Sigmund Freud, who cited Otto Binswanger as his source.{{Cite book |last=Golomb |first=Jacob |url=https://archive.org/details/nietzschejewishc00golo_034 |title=Nietzsche and Jewish Culture |publisher=Routledge |year=2001 |isbn=978-0-415-09512-9 |location=London |page=[https://archive.org/details/nietzschejewishc00golo_034/page/n214 202] |url-access=limited}} Köhler also suggests that Nietzsche had a romantic relationship, as well as a friendship, with Paul Rée. There is the claim that Nietzsche's homosexuality was widely known in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, with Nietzsche's friend Paul Deussen claiming that "he was a man who had never touched a woman."{{Cite book |last=Pletsch |first=Carl |url=https://archive.org/details/youngnietzschebe00plet |title=Young Nietzsche: Becoming a Genius |publisher=The Free Press |year=1992 |isbn=978-0-02-925042-6 |location=New York |page=[https://archive.org/details/youngnietzschebe00plet/page/n74 67] |url-access=limited}}{{Cite book |last=Small |first=Robin |title=Nietzsche and Rée: A Star Friendship |publisher=Clarendon Press |year=2007 |isbn=978-0-19-927807-7 |location=Oxford |page=207}}

Köhler's views have not found wide acceptance among Nietzsche scholars and commentators. Allan Megill argues that, while Köhler's claim that Nietzsche was conflicted about his homosexual desire cannot simply be dismissed, "the evidence is very weak," and Köhler may be projecting twentieth-century understandings of sexuality on nineteenth-century notions of friendship.{{Cite journal |last=Megill |first=Allan |date=1 March 1996 |title=Historicizing Nietzsche? Paradoxes and Lessons of a Hard Case |url=https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/245288 |journal=The Journal of Modern History |volume=68 |issue=1 |pages=114–152 |doi=10.1086/245288 |issn=0022-2801 |s2cid=147507428}} It is also rumoured that Nietzsche frequented heterosexual brothels. Nigel Rodgers and Mel Thompson have argued that continuous sickness and headaches hindered Nietzsche from engaging much with women. Yet they offer other examples in which Nietzsche expressed his affections to women, including Wagner's wife Cosima Wagner.{{Cite book |last1=Rogers |first1=N. |title=Philosophers Behaving Badly |last2=Thompson |first2=M. |date=2004 |publisher=Peter Owen |location=London}}

Other scholars have argued that Köhler's sexuality-based interpretation is not helpful in understanding Nietzsche's philosophy.{{Cite journal |last=Grenke |first=Michael W. |year=2003 |title=How Boring... |journal=The Review of Politics |volume=65 |issue=1 |pages=152–154 |doi=10.1017/s0034670500036640 |jstor=1408799 |s2cid=145631903}}{{Cite journal |last=Risse |first=Mathias |date=13 January 2003 |title=Zarathustra's Secret. The Interior Life of Friedrich Nietzsche |url=http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/23249-zarathustra-s-secret-the-interior-life-of-friedrich-nietzsche/ |journal=Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews}} However, there are also those who stress that, if Nietzsche preferred men—with this preference constituting his psycho-sexual make-up—but could not admit his desires to himself, it meant he acted in conflict with his philosophy.{{sfn|Clark|2015|p=154}}

{{Main|Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche}}

Because of Nietzsche's evocative style and provocative ideas, his philosophy generates passionate reactions. His works remain controversial, due to varying interpretations and misinterpretations. In Western philosophy, Nietzsche's writings have been described as a case of free revolutionary thought, that is, revolutionary in its structure and problems, although not tied to any revolutionary project.{{Cite book |last=Benjamin Bennett |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=AVYbszVKUO4C&pg=PA184 |title=Goethe As Woman: The Undoing of Literature |publisher=Wayne State University Press |year=2001 |isbn=978-0-8143-2948-1 |page=184 |access-date=3 January 2013}} His writings have also been described as a revolutionary project in which his philosophy serves as the foundation of a European cultural rebirth.{{sfn|Young|2010}}{{Cite book |last=Bowman |first=William |title=Friedrich Nietzsche: Herald of a New Era |publisher=Hazar Press |year=2016 |isbn=978-0-9975703-0-4}}

{{Main|Apollonian and Dionysian}}

The Apollonian and Dionysian is a two-fold philosophical concept based on two figures in ancient Greek mythology, Apollo and Dionysus. This relationship takes the form of a dialectic.{{Cite journal |last=Schrift |first=Alan D. |title=Deleuze Becoming Nietzsche Becoming Spinoza Becoming Deleuze |url=http://dx.doi.org/10.5840/philtoday200650supplement23 |journal=Philosophy Today |volume=50 |year=2006 |pages=187–194 |doi=10.5840/philtoday200650supplement23 |issn=0031-8256}} Even though the concept is related to The Birth of Tragedy, the poet Hölderlin had already spoken of it, and Winckelmann had talked of Bacchus.

Nietzsche found in classical Athenian tragedy an art form that transcended the pessimism found in the so-called wisdom of Silenus. The Greek spectators, by looking into the abyss of human suffering depicted by characters on stage, passionately and joyously affirmed life, finding it worth living. The main theme in The Birth of Tragedy is that the fusion of Dionysian and Apollonian Kunsttriebe ("artistic impulses") forms dramatic arts or tragedies. He argued that this fusion has not been achieved since the ancient Greek tragedians. Apollo represents harmony, progress, clarity, logic and the principle of individuation, whereas Dionysus represents disorder, intoxication, emotion, ecstasy and unity (hence the omission of the principle of individuation).

However, Nietzsche strongly distinguishes his Dionysus from the Dionysus of the Orphic tradition, which he considers a later corruption of the original Dionysian force. To him in the pre-Homeric world, Dionysian civilisations were marked by barbarism, cruelty, and ecstatic sexual excess, unrestrained by rational or moral principles. Nietzsche associates this period with unmediated life-affirmation, where violence and eroticism intertwined as expressions of raw vitality.Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Kritische Studienausgabe [KSA], vol. 1, p. 785. However, the Orphics, overwhelmed by anxiety toward this unmitigated savagery, reacted by turning away from the physical world and abstracting their gods into metaphysical ideas. In doing so, they transformed Dionysus from a figure of visceral power into a god of suffering and redemption and, in parallel, converted man from a being of flesh and instincts into a soul burdened with guilt and the need for purification.Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Kritische Studienausgabe [KSA], vol. 1, p. 874.

Nietzsche criticises this Orphic reinterpretation as an early decline in Greek spiritual health, arguing that it marked the beginning of an anti-life tendency that would later manifest in Platonism and Christianity.Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Kritische Studienausgabe [KSA], vol. 1, p. 785. He further argues that Socrates and Euripides continued the Orphic trajectory, replacing instinct, myth, and artistic frenzy with rationalism, dialectic, and moral didacticism. By doing so, they undermined the ecstatic and violent balance of Apollonian and Dionysian forces, ultimately leading to the decline of Greek tragedy.Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Kritische Gesamtausgabe Werke [KGW], II, 4, p. 252.

Nietzsche used these two forces because, for him, the world of mind and order on one side, and passion and chaos on the other, formed principles that were fundamental to the Greek culture:{{Cite web |title=Nietzsche, Dionysus and Apollo |url=http://www.historyguide.org/europe/dio_apollo.html |website=www.historyguide.org}}{{Cite book |last=Desmond |first=Kathleen K. |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=iP4sA3kwcFsC&q=Jim+Morrison+Apollonian+and+Dionysian&pg=PA69 |title=Ideas About Art |publisher=John Wiley & Sons |year=2011 |isbn=978-1-4443-9600-3 |via=Google Books}} the Apollonian a dreaming state, full of illusions; and Dionysian a state of intoxication, representing the liberation of instincts and dissolution of boundaries. In this mould, a man appears as the satyr. He is the horror of the annihilation of the principle of individuality and at the same time someone who delights in its destruction.{{Cite web |title=Nietzsche's Apollonianism and Dionysiansism: Meaning and Interpretation |url=https://www.bachelorandmaster.com/creationofknowledge/apollonianism-dyonysianisism.html |website=bachelorandmaster.com}}

Apollonian and Dionysian juxtapositions appear in the interplay of tragedy: the tragic hero of the drama, the main protagonist, struggles to make (Apollonian) order of his unjust and chaotic (Dionysian) fate, though he dies unfulfilled. Elaborating on the conception of Hamlet as an intellectual who cannot make up his mind, and is a living antithesis to the man of action, Nietzsche argues that a Dionysian figure possesses the knowledge that his actions cannot change the eternal balance of things, and it disgusts him enough not to act at all. Hamlet falls under this category—he glimpsed the supernatural reality through the Ghost; he has gained true knowledge and knows that no action of his has the power to change this. For the audience of such drama, this tragedy allows them to sense what Nietzsche called the Primordial Unity, which revives Dionysian nature. He describes primordial unity as the increase of strength, the experience of fullness and plenitude bestowed by frenzy. Frenzy acts as intoxication and is crucial for the physiological condition that enables the creation of any art.{{Citation needed|date=January 2023}} Stimulated by this state, a person's artistic will is enhanced:

In this state one enriches everything out of one's own fullness: whatever one sees, whatever wills is seen swelled, taut, strong, overloaded with strength. A man in this state transforms things until they mirror his power—until they are reflections of his perfection. This having to transform into perfection is—art.

Nietzsche is adamant that the works of Aeschylus and Sophocles represent the apex of artistic creation, the true realisation of tragedy; it is with Euripides, that tragedy begins its Untergang (literally 'going under' or 'downward-way;' meaning decline, deterioration, downfall, death, etc.). Nietzsche objects to Euripides' use of Socratic rationalism and morality in his tragedies, claiming that the infusion of ethics and reason robs tragedy of its foundation, namely the fragile balance of the Dionysian and Apollonian. Socrates emphasised reason to such a degree that he diffused the value of myth and suffering to human knowledge. Plato continued along this path in his dialogues, and the modern world eventually inherited reason at the expense of artistic impulses found in the Apollonian and Dionysian dichotomy. He notes that without the Apollonian, the Dionysian lacks the form and structure to make a coherent piece of art, and without the Dionysian, the Apollonian lacks the necessary vitality and passion. Only the fertile interplay of these two forces brought together as an art represented the best of Greek tragedy.{{Cite web |title=SparkNotes: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900): The Birth of Tragedy |url=https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/nietzsche/section1/ |website=sparknotes.com}}

An example of the impact of this idea can be seen in the book Patterns of Culture, where the anthropologist Ruth Benedict acknowledges Nietzschean opposites of "Apollonian" and "Dionysian" as the stimulus for her thoughts about Native American cultures.{{Cite book |last=Benedict |first=Ruth |author-link=Ruth Benedict |url=http://classes.yale.edu/03-04/anth500b/projects/project_sites/02_alexy/ruthpatterns.html |title=Patterns of Culture |access-date=17 October 2012 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120414224516/http://classes.yale.edu/03-04/anth500b/projects/project_sites/02_Alexy/ruthpatterns.html |archive-date=14 April 2012 |url-status=dead}} Carl Jung has written extensively on the dichotomy in Psychological Types.{{Cite book |last=Jung |first=Carl |title=Psychological Types |chapter=The Apollonian and the Dionysian}} Michel Foucault commented that his own book Madness and Civilization should be read "under the sun of the great Nietzschean inquiry". Here Foucault referenced Nietzsche's description of the birth and death of tragedy and his explanation that the subsequent tragedy of the Western world was the refusal of the tragic and, with that, refusal of the sacred.{{Cite book |last=Mahon |first=Michael |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=4aNoFpNfYeMC&q=foucault+genealogy&pg=PA1 |title=Foucault's Nietzschean Genealogy |publisher=SUNY Press |year=1992 |isbn=978-0-7914-1149-0}} The painter Mark Rothko was influenced by Nietzsche's view of tragedy presented in The Birth of Tragedy.

{{Main|Perspectivism}}

Nietzsche claimed the death of God would eventually lead to the realisation that there can never be a universal perspective on things and that the traditional idea of objective truth is incoherent.{{Cite book |last=Yockey |first=Francis |title=Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics |publisher=The Palingenesis Project (Wermod and Wermod Publishing Group) |year=2013 |isbn=978-0-9561835-7-6}}{{sfn|Lampert|1986|pp=17–18}}{{Sfn |Heidegger}}{{Incomplete short citation|date=September 2024}} Nietzsche rejected the idea of objective reality, arguing that knowledge is contingent and conditional, relative to various fluid perspectives or interests.{{Cite book |last=Cox |first=Christoph |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=TxlMccAak4wC&q=Objective |title=Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation |publisher=University of California Press |year=1999 |isbn=978-0-520-92160-3 |via=Google Books}} This leads to constant reassessment of rules (i.e., those of philosophy, the scientific method, etc.) according to the circumstances of individual perspectives.{{sfn|Schacht|1983|p=61}} This view has acquired the name perspectivism.

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche proclaimed that a table of values hangs above every great person. He pointed out that what is common among different peoples is the act of esteeming, of creating values, even if the values are different from one person to the next. Nietzsche asserted that what made people great was not the content of their beliefs, but the act of valuing. Thus the values a community strives to articulate are not as important as the collective will to see those values come to pass. The willingness is more essential than the merit of the goal itself, according to Nietzsche. "A thousand goals have there been so far", says Zarathustra, "for there are a thousand peoples. Only the yoke for the thousand necks is still lacking: the one goal is lacking. Humanity still has no goal." Hence, the title of the aphorism, "On The Thousand And One Goal". The idea that one value-system is no more worthy than the next, although it may not be directly ascribed to Nietzsche, has become a common premise in modern social science. Max Weber and Martin Heidegger absorbed it and made it their own. It shaped their philosophical and cultural endeavours, as well as their political understanding. Weber, for example, relied on Nietzsche's perspectivism by maintaining that objectivity is still possible—but only after a particular perspective, value, or end has been established.{{Cite book |last=Steve |first=Hoenisch |url=http://www.criticism.com/md/weber1.html |title=Max Weber's View of Objectivity in Social Science}}{{Cite journal |last=Nobre |first=Renarde Freire |year=2006 |title=Culture and perspectivism in Nietzsche's and Weber's view |journal=Teoria & Sociedade |volume=2 |issue=SE |page=0 |doi=10.1590/S1518-44712006000200006 |doi-broken-date=13 November 2024 |doi-access=free}}

Among his critique of traditional philosophy of Immanuel Kant, René Descartes, and Plato in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche attacked the thing in itself and cogito ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am") as unfalsifiable beliefs based on naive acceptance of previous notions and fallacies.{{Cite book |url=http://www.monomorphic.org/wordpress/objective-and-subjective-reality-perspectivism/ |title=Objective and subjective reality; perspectivism |year=2011 |access-date=23 April 2012 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130524061713/http://www.monomorphic.org/wordpress/objective-and-subjective-reality-perspectivism/ |archive-date=24 May 2013 |url-status=dead}} The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre put Nietzsche in a high place in the history of philosophy. While criticising nihilism and Nietzsche together as a sign of general decay,{{Cite book |last=Solomon |first=Robert C. |author-link=Robert C. Solomon |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=3JA3vyj4slsC&q=Alasdair+MacIntyre+Nietzsche+Kant&pg=PA108 |title=From Hegel to Existentialism |publisher=Oup USA |year=1989 |isbn=978-0-19-506182-6 |via=Google Books}} he still commended him for recognising psychological motives behind Kant and David Hume's moral philosophy:{{Cite book |last=Murphy |first=Mark C. |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=TN7sop-yILMC&q=Alasdair+MacIntyre+Nietzsche+Kant&pg=PA136 |title=Alasdair MacIntyre |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=2003 |isbn=978-0-521-79381-0 |via=Google Books}}

For it was Nietzsche's historic achievement to understand more clearly than any other philosopher ... not only that what purported to be appeals of objectivity were in fact expressions of subjective will, but also the nature of the problems that this posed for philosophy.{{Cite book |last=Lutz |first=Christopher Stephen |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Z9RaG9ccs44C&q=Alasdair+MacIntyre+Nietzsche+Kant&pg=PA37 |title=Tradition in the ethics of Alasdair MacIntyre |publisher=Rowman & Littlefield |year=2009 |isbn=978-0-7391-4148-9 |via=Google Books}}

{{Main|Master–slave morality}}

In Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche's genealogical account of the development of modern moral systems occupies a central place. For Nietzsche, a fundamental shift took place during the human history from thinking in terms of "good and bad" toward "good and evil".

The initial form of morality was set by a warrior aristocracy and other ruling castes of ancient civilisations. Aristocratic values of good and bad coincided with and reflected their relationship to lower castes such as slaves. Nietzsche presented this "master morality" as the original system of morality—perhaps best associated with Homeric Greece.{{Cite web |last1=Nietzsche |first1=Friedrich |last2=Lacewing |first2=Michael |title=Nietzsche on master and slave morality |url=http://documents.routledge-interactive.s3.amazonaws.com/9781138793934/A2/Nietzsche/NietzscheMasterSlave.pdf |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160510060210/http://documents.routledge-interactive.s3.amazonaws.com/9781138793934/A2/Nietzsche/NietzscheMasterSlave.pdf |archive-date=10 May 2016 |access-date=29 September 2019 |website=Amazon Online Web Services |publisher=Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group}} To be "good" was to be happy and to have the things related to happiness: wealth, strength, health, power, etc. To be "bad" was to be like the slaves over whom the aristocracy ruled: poor, weak, sick, pathetic—objects of pity or disgust rather than hatred.{{Cite web |title=Nietzsche, "Master and Slave Morality" |url=https://philosophy.lander.edu/ethics/notes-nietzsche.html#1. |access-date=28 September 2019 |website=philosophy.lander.edu}}

"Slave morality" developed as a reaction to master morality. Value emerges from the contrast between good and evil: good being associated with other-worldliness, charity, piety, restraint, meekness, and submission; while evil is worldly, cruel, selfish, wealthy, and aggressive. Nietzsche saw slave morality as pessimistic and fearful, its values emerging to improve the self-perception of slaves. He associated slave morality with the Jewish and Christian traditions, as it is born out of the ressentiment of slaves. Nietzsche argued that the idea of equality allowed slaves to overcome their own conditions without despising themselves. By denying the inherent inequality of people—in success, strength, beauty, and intelligence—slaves acquired a method of escape, namely by generating new values on the basis of rejecting master morality, which frustrated them. It was used to overcome the slave's sense of inferiority before their (better-off) masters. It does so by depicting slave weakness, for example, as a matter of choice, by relabelling it as "meekness". The "good man" of master morality is precisely the "evil man" of slave morality, while the "bad man" is recast as the "good man".

Nietzsche saw slave morality as a source of the nihilism that has overtaken Europe. Modern Europe and Christianity exist in a hypocritical state due to a tension between master and slave morality, both contradictory values determining, to varying degrees, the values of most Europeans (who are "motley"). Nietzsche called for exceptional people not to be ashamed in the face of a supposed morality-for-all, which he deems to be harmful to the flourishing of exceptional people. He cautioned, however, that morality, per se, is not bad; it is good for the masses and should be left to them. Exceptional people, in contrast, should follow their own "inner law". A favourite motto of Nietzsche, taken from Pindar, reads: "Become what you are."{{Cite web |last=Look |first=Brandon |title='Becoming Who One Is' in Spinoza and Nietzsche |url=http://www.uky.edu/~look/essays/Spinoza&Nietzsche.pdf |access-date=28 September 2019 |website=uky.edu |publisher=University of Kentucky}}

A long-standing assumption about Nietzsche is that he preferred master over slave morality. However, eminent Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann rejected this interpretation, writing that Nietzsche's analyses of these two types of morality were used only in a descriptive and historic sense; they were not meant for any kind of acceptance or glorification.{{Cite book |last=Kaufmann |first=Walter Arnold |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=wvKRUSdUsnkC&q=Master+slave+morality&pg=PA213 |title=From Shakespeare to existentialism |publisher=Princeton University Press |year=1980 |isbn=978-0-691-01367-1 |via=Google Books}} On the other hand, Nietzsche called master morality "a higher order of values, the noble ones, those that say Yes to life, those that guarantee the future".{{Cite book |last=Nietzsche |first=Friedrich |title=Ecce Homo |year=1908 |page=Chapter on The Case of Wagner, section 2}} Just as "there is an order of rank between man and man", there is also an order of rank "between morality and morality".{{Cite book |last=Nietzsche |first=Friedrich |title=Beyond Good and Evil |year=1886 |page=Section 228}} Nietzsche waged a philosophic war against the slave morality of Christianity in his "revaluation of all values" to bring about the victory of a new master morality that he called the "philosophy of the future" (Beyond Good and Evil is subtitled Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future).{{Cite book |last=Bowman |first=William |title=Friedrich Nietzsche: Herald of a New Era |publisher=Hazar Press |year=2016 |isbn=978-0-9975703-0-4 |pages=31–38, 60–106}}

In Daybreak, Nietzsche began his "Campaign against Morality".{{sfn|Kaufmann|1974|p=187}}{{sfn|Nietzsche|1888d|loc=M I}} He called himself an "immoralist" and harshly criticised the prominent moral philosophies of his day: Christianity, Kantianism, and utilitarianism. Nietzsche's concept "God is dead" applies to the doctrines of Christendom, though not to all other faiths: he claimed that Buddhism is a successful religion that he complimented for fostering critical thought.{{sfn|Sedgwick|2009|p=26}} Still, Nietzsche saw his philosophy as a counter-movement to nihilism through appreciation of art:

{{blockquote|text=Art as the single superior counterforce against all will to negation of life, art as the anti-Christian, anti-Buddhist, anti-Nihilist par excellence.{{Cite web |title=Art in Nietzsche's philosophy |url=http://jorbon.tripod.com/niet01.html |website=jorbon.tripod.com}}|sign=|source=}}

Nietzsche claimed that the Christian faith as practised was not a proper representation of Jesus' teachings, as it forced people merely to believe in the way of Jesus but not to act as Jesus did; in particular, his example of refusing to judge people, something that Christians constantly did.{{Sfn |Sedgwick |2009 |p=26}} He condemned institutionalised Christianity for emphasising a morality of pity (Mitleid), which assumes an inherent illness in society:{{sfn|Sedgwick|2009|p=27}}

{{blockquote|text=Christianity is called the religion of pity. Pity stands opposed to the tonic emotions which heighten our vitality: it has a depressing effect. We are deprived of strength when we feel pity. That loss of strength in which suffering as such inflicts on life is still further increased and multiplied by pity. Pity makes suffering contagious.The Antichrist, section 7. transl. Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche, 1977, pp. 572–573.}}

In Ecce Homo Nietzsche called the establishment of moral systems based on a dichotomy of good and evil a "calamitous error",{{Sfn |Nietzsche |1888d |loc=Why I Am a Destiny, § 3}} and wished to initiate a re-evaluation of the values of the Christian world.{{sfn|Nietzsche|1888c|pp=4, 8, 18, 29, 37, 40, 51, 57, 59}} He indicated his desire to bring about a new, more naturalistic source of value in the vital impulses of life itself.

While Nietzsche attacked the principles of Judaism, he was not antisemitic: in his work On the Genealogy of Morality, he explicitly condemned antisemitism and pointed out that his attack on Judaism was not an attack on contemporary Jewish people but specifically an attack upon the ancient Jewish priesthood who he claimed antisemitic Christians paradoxically based their views upon.{{sfn|Sedgwick|2009|p=69}} An Israeli historian who performed a statistical analysis of everything Nietzsche wrote about Jews claims that cross-references and context make clear that 85% of the negative comments are attacks on Christian doctrine or, sarcastically, on Richard Wagner.{{citation needed|date=January 2023}}

Nietzsche felt that modern antisemitism was "despicable" and contrary to European ideals.{{sfn|Sedgwick|2009|p=68}} Its cause, in his opinion, was the growth in European nationalism and the endemic "jealousy and hatred" of Jewish success.{{sfn|Sedgwick|2009|p=68}} He wrote that Jews should be thanked for helping uphold a respect for the philosophies of ancient Greece,{{sfn|Sedgwick|2009|p=68}} and for giving rise to "the noblest human being (Christ), the purest philosopher (Baruch Spinoza), the mightiest book, and the most effective moral code in the world".{{Cite book |last=Nietzsche |first=Friedrich |title=Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits |date=1986 |publisher=University of Nebraska Press |page=231 |orig-date=1878}}

{{Main|God is dead|Nihilism}}

The statement "God is dead," occurring in several of Nietzsche's works (notably in The Gay Science), has become one of his best-known remarks. On the basis of it, many commentators{{Cite book |last=Morgan |first=George Allen |title=What Nietzsche Means |publisher=Harvard University Press |year=1941 |isbn=978-0-8371-7404-4 |location=Cambridge, MA |page=36}} regard Nietzsche as an atheist; others (such as Kaufmann) suggest that this statement might reflect a more subtle understanding of divinity. Scientific developments and the increasing secularisation of Europe had effectively 'killed' the Abrahamic God, who had served as the basis for meaning and value in the West for more than a thousand years. The death of God may lead beyond bare perspectivism to outright nihilism, the belief that nothing has any inherent importance and that life lacks purpose. While Nietzsche rejected the traditional Christian morality and theology, he also rejected the nihilism which many thought was the only alternative to it.

Nietzsche believed that Christian moral doctrine was originally constructed to counteract nihilism. It provides people with traditional beliefs about the moral values of good and evil, belief in God (whose existence one might appeal to in justifying the evil in the world), and a framework with which one might claim to have objective knowledge. In constructing a world where objective knowledge is supposed to be possible, Christianity is an antidote to a primal form of nihilism—the despair of meaninglessness. As Martin Heidegger put the problem, "If God as the supra sensory ground and goal of all reality is dead if the supra sensory world of the ideas has suffered the loss of its obligatory and above it its vitalising and upbuilding power, then nothing more remains to which man can cling and by which he can orient himself."{{sfn|Heidegger|p=61}}{{Incomplete short citation|date=September 2024}}

One such reaction to the loss of meaning is what Nietzsche called passive nihilism, which he recognised in the pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer's doctrine—which Nietzsche also referred to as Western Buddhism—advocates separating oneself from will and desires to reduce suffering. Nietzsche characterised this ascetic attitude as a "will to nothingness". Life turns away from itself as there is nothing of value to be found in the world. This moving away of all value in the world is characteristic of the nihilist, although, in this, the nihilist appears to be inconsistent; this "will to nothingness" is still a (disavowed) form of willing.F. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, III:7.

{{blockquote|A nihilist is a man who judges that the real world ought not to be and that the world as it ought to do not exist. According to this view, our existence (action, suffering, willing, feeling) has no meaning: this 'in vain' is the nihilists' pathos—an inconsistency on the part of the nihilists.|Friedrich Nietzsche, KSA 12:9 [60]|taken from The Will to Power, section 585, translated by Walter Kaufmann}}

Nietzsche approached the problem of nihilism as a deeply personal one, stating that this problem of the modern world had "become conscious" in him.Nietzsche, KSA 12:7 [8] Furthermore, he emphasised the danger of nihilism and the possibilities it offers, as seen in his statement that "I praise, I do not reproach, [nihilism's] arrival. I believe it is one of the greatest crises, a moment of the deepest self-reflection of humanity. Whether man recovers from it, whether he becomes a master of this crisis, is a question of his strength!"Friedrich Nietzsche, Complete Works Vol. 13. According to Nietzsche, it is only when nihilism is overcome that a culture can have a true foundation on which to thrive. He wished to hasten its coming only so that he could also hasten its ultimate departure. Heidegger interpreted the death of God with what he explained as the death of metaphysics. He concluded that metaphysics has reached its potential and that the ultimate fate and downfall of metaphysics was proclaimed with the statement "God is dead."{{Cite journal |last=Hankey |first=Wayne J. |author-link=Wayne Hankey |year=2004 |title=Why Heidegger's 'History' of Metaphysics is Dead |url=https://www.academia.edu/11651293 |journal=American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly |volume=78 |issue=3 |pages=425–443 |doi=10.5840/acpq200478325 |issn=1051-3558}}

Scholars such as Keiji Nishitani and Graham Parkes have aligned Nietzsche's religious thought with Buddhist thinkers, particularly those of the Mahayana tradition.{{Cite book |last=Nishitani |first=Keiji |author-link=Keiji Nishitani |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/43475134 |title=The self-overcoming of nihilism |date=1990 |publisher=State University of New York Press |isbn=0-585-05739-7 |location=Albany |oclc=43475134}} Occasionally, Nietzsche has also been considered in relation to Catholic mystics such as Meister Eckhart.{{Cite book |last=Stambaugh |first=Joan |author-link=Joan Stambaugh |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/27684700 |title=The other Nietzsche |date=1994 |publisher=State University of New York Press |isbn=0-7914-1699-2 |location=Albany |oclc=27684700}} Milne has argued against such interpretations on the grounds that such thinkers from Western and Eastern religious traditions strongly emphasise the divestment of will and the loss of ego, while Nietzsche offers a robust defence of egoism.{{Cite book |last=Milne |first=Andrew |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1264715169 |title=Nietzsche as egoist and mystic |date=2021 |isbn=978-3-030-75007-7 |location=Cham |oclc=1264715169}} Milne argues that Nietzsche's religious thought is better understood in relation to his self-professed ancestors: "Heraclitus, Empedocles, Spinoza, Goethe".{{Cite web |last=Nietzsche |first=Friedrich |title=Nachlass Fragments, 1884 |url=http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/NF-1884,25[454}} Milne plays particularly close attention to Nietzsche's relationship to Goethe, who has typically been neglected in research by academic philosophers. Milne shows that Goethe's views on the one and the many allow a reciprocal determinism between part and whole, meaning that a claimed identity between part and whole does not give the part value solely in terms of belonging to the whole. In essence, this allows for a unitive sense of the individual's relationship to the universe, while also fostering a sense of "self-esteem" which Nietzsche found lacking in mystics such as Eckhart.{{Cite web |last=Nietzsche |first=Friedrich |title=Nachlass Fragments, 1884 |url=http://www.nietzschesource.org/eKGWB/NF-1884,26%5B442}}{{Dead link|date=October 2022 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes}}

With regard to Nietzsche's development of thought, it has been noted in research that although he dealt with "nihilistic" themes ("pessimism, with nirvana and with nothingness and non-being"{{Cite book |last=Elisabeth Kuhn |title=Nietzsches Philosophie des europäischen Nihilismus |year=1992 |location=Berlin & New York |pages=10–11, 14–15}}) from 1869 onwards, a conceptual use of nihilism first took place in handwritten notes in mid-1880. This period saw the publication of a then popular work that reconstructed so-called "Russian nihilism" on the basis of Russian newspaper reports (N. Karlowitsch: The Development of Nihilism. Berlin 1880), which is significant for Nietzsche's terminology .{{Cite book |last=Martin Walter, Jörg Hüttner |title=Nachweis aus Nicolai Karlowitsch, Die Entwickelung des Nihilismus (1880) und aus Das Ausland (1880). In: Nietzsche-Studien, Vol. 51, 2022, p. 330–333.}}

{{Main|Will to power}}

A basic element in Nietzsche's philosophical outlook is the "will to power" ({{lang|de|der Wille zur Macht}}), which he maintained provides a basis for understanding human behaviour—more so than competing explanations, such as the ones based on pressure for adaptation or survival.{{sfn|Nietzsche|1886|p=13}}{{sfn|Nietzsche|1887|p=II:12}} As such, according to Nietzsche, the drive for conservation appears as the major motivator of human or animal behaviour only in exceptions, as the general condition of life is not one of a 'struggle for existence.'{{sfn|Nietzsche|1888b|loc=Skirmishes of an untimely man, § 14}} More often than not, self-conservation is a consequence of a creature's will to exert its strength on the outside world.

In presenting his theory of human behaviour, Nietzsche also addressed and attacked concepts from philosophies then popularly embraced, such as Schopenhauer's notion of an aimless will or that of utilitarianism. Utilitarians claim that what moves people is the desire to be happy and accumulate pleasure in their lives. But such a conception of happiness Nietzsche rejected as something limited to, and characteristic of, the bourgeois lifestyle of the English society,Brian Leiter, Routledge guide to Nietzsche on morality, p. 121 and instead put forth the idea that happiness is not an aim per se. It is a consequence of overcoming hurdles to one's actions and the fulfilment of the will.{{sfn|Nietzsche|1888c|loc=§ 2}}

Related to his theory of the will to power is his speculation, which he did not deem final,{{sfn|Nietzsche|1886|loc=I, § 36}} regarding the reality of the physical world, including inorganic matter—that, like man's affections and impulses, the material world is also set by the dynamics of a form of the will to power. At the core of his theory is a rejection of atomism—the idea that matter is composed of stable, indivisible units (atoms). Instead, he seemed to have accepted the conclusions of Ruđer Bošković, who explained the qualities of matter as a result of an interplay of forces.{{efn-lr|Nietzsche comments in many notes about the matter being a hypothesis drawn from the metaphysics of substance. {{Cite journal |last=Whitlock |first=G. |date=1996 |title=Roger Boscovich, Benedict de Spinoza and Friedrich Nietzsche: The Untold Story |journal=Nietzsche-Studien |volume=25 |page=207 |doi=10.1515/9783110244441.200 |s2cid=171148597}}}}{{sfn|Nietzsche|1886|loc=I, § 12}} One study of Nietzsche defines his fully developed concept of the will to power as "the element from which derive both the quantitative difference of related forces and the quality that devolves into each force in this relation" revealing the will to power as "the principle of the synthesis of forces".{{sfn|Deleuze|2006|p=46}} Of such forces Nietzsche said they could perhaps be viewed as a primitive form of the will. Likewise, he rejected the view that the movement of bodies is ruled by inexorable laws of nature, positing instead that movement was governed by the power relations between bodies and forces.{{sfn|Nietzsche|1886|loc=I, § 22}}

Other scholars disagree that Nietzsche considered the material world to be a form of the will to power: Nietzsche thoroughly criticised metaphysics, and by including the will to power in the material world, he would simply be setting up a new metaphysics. Other than Aphorism 36 in Beyond Good and Evil, where he raised a question regarding will to power as being in the material world, they argue, it was only in his notes (unpublished by himself), where he wrote about a metaphysical will to power. And they also claim that Nietzsche directed his landlord to burn those notes in 1888 when he left Sils Maria.{{Cite journal |last=Leddy |first=Thomas |date=14 June 2006 |title=Nietzsche's Mirror: The World as Will to Power (review) |journal=Journal of Nietzsche Studies |volume=31 |issue=1 |pages=66–68 |doi=10.1353/nie.2006.0006 |s2cid=170737246}} According to these scholars, the "burning" story supports their thesis that Nietzsche rejected his project on the will to power at the end of his lucid life. However, a recent study (Huang 2019) shows that although it is true that in 1888 Nietzsche wanted some of his notes burned, this indicates little about his project on the will to power, not only because only 11 "aphorisms" saved from the flames were ultimately incorporated into The Will to Power (this book contains 1067 "aphorisms"), but also because these abandoned notes mainly focus on topics such as the critique of morality while touching upon the "feeling of power" only once.{{Cite journal |last=Huang |first=Jing |date=19 March 2019 |title=Did Nietzsche want his notes burned? Some reflections on the Nachlass problem |journal=British Journal for the History of Philosophy |volume=27 |issue=6 |pages=1194–1214 |doi=10.1080/09608788.2019.1570078 |s2cid=171864314}}

{{Main|Eternal return}}

"Eternal return" (also known as "eternal recurrence") is a hypothetical concept that posits that the universe has been recurring, and will continue to recur, for an infinite number of times across infinite time or space. It is a purely physical concept, involving no supernatural reincarnation, but the return of beings in the same bodies. Nietzsche first proposed the idea of eternal return in a parable in Section 341 of The Gay Science, and also in the chapter "Of the Vision and the Riddle" in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, among other places.{{Sfn |Nietzsche |1961 |pp=176–180}} Nietzsche considered it as potentially "horrifying and paralyzing", and said that its burden is the "heaviest weight" imaginable (" das schwerste Gewicht").{{Cite book |last=Kundera |first=Milan |title=The Unbearable Lightness of Being |year=1999 |page=5}} The wish for the eternal return of all events would mark the ultimate affirmation of life, a reaction to Schopenhauer's praise of denying the will-to-live. To comprehend eternal recurrence, and to not only come to peace with it but to embrace it, requires amor fati, "love of fate".{{Cite book |last=Dudley |first=Will |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=4dLeWFK6qp0C&pg=PA201 |title=Hegel, Nietzsche, and Philosophy: Thinking Freedom |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=2002 |isbn=978-0-521-81250-4 |page=201 |via=Google Books}} As Martin Heidegger noted in his lectures on Nietzsche, Nietzsche's first mention of eternal recurrence presents this concept as a hypothetical question rather than stating it as fact. According to Heidegger, it is the burden imposed by the question of eternal recurrence – the mere possibility of it, and the reality of speculating on that possibility – which is so significant in modern thought: "The way Nietzsche here patterns the first communication of the thought of the 'greatest burden' [of eternal recurrence] makes it clear that this 'thought of thoughts' is at the same time 'the most burdensome thought.'"See Heidegger, Nietzsche. Volume II: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same trans. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper and Row, 1984. 25.

Alexander Nehamas writes in Nietzsche: Life as Literature of three ways of seeing the eternal recurrence:

1. "My life will recur in exactly identical fashion:" this expresses a totally fatalistic approach to the idea;
2. "My life may recur in exactly identical fashion:" This second view conditionally asserts cosmology, but fails to capture what Nietzsche refers to in The Gay Science, p. 341; and finally,
3. "If my life were to recur, then it could recur only in identical fashion." Nehamas shows that this interpretation exists totally independently of physics and does not presuppose the truth of cosmology.

Nehamas concluded that, if individuals constitute themselves through their actions, they can only maintain themselves in their current state by living in a recurrence of past actions.{{sfn|Nehamas|1985|p=153}} Nietzsche's thought is the negation of the idea of a history of salvation.{{Cite book |last=Van Tongeren |first=Paul |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=TqxrlA9Qxg0C&pg=PA295 |title=Reinterpreting Modern Culture: An Introduction to Friedrich Nietzsche's Philosophy |publisher=Purdue University Press |year=2000 |isbn=978-1-55753-157-5 |page=295 |access-date=18 April 2013}}

{{Main|Übermensch}}

Another concept important to understanding Nietzsche is the Übermensch (Superman).{{Cite book |last=Nietzsche |first=Friedrich |title=The Portable Nietzsche |publisher=Penguin |year=1954 |location=New York |translator-last=Walter Kaufmann}}{{Cite book |last=Nietzsche |first=Friedrich |title=Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=2006 |isbn=978-0-521-60261-7 |editor-last=Adrian Del Caro |location=Cambridge |editor-last2=Robert Pippin}}{{Sfn |Lampert |1986}}{{Cite book |last=Rosen |first=Stanley |author-link=Stanley Rosen |title=The Mask of Enlightenment |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=1995 |location=Cambridge}} Writing about nihilism in Also Sprach Zarathustra, Nietzsche introduced an Übermensch. According to Laurence Lampert, "the death of God must be followed by a long twilight of piety and nihilism (II. 19; III. 8). Zarathustra's gift of the overman is given to mankind not aware of the problem to which the overman is the solution."{{Sfn |Lampert |1986 |p=18}} Zarathustra presents the Übermensch as the creator of new values, and he appears as a solution to the problem of the death of God and nihilism. The Übermensch does not follow the morality of common people since that favours mediocrity but rises above the notion of good and evil and above the "herd".{{Cite web |title=Nietzsche, "Master and Slave Morality" |url=https://philosophy.lander.edu/ethics/notes-nietzsche.html |website=philosophy.lander.edu}} In this way Zarathustra proclaims his ultimate goal as the journey towards the state of the Übermensch. He wants a kind of spiritual evolution of self-awareness and overcoming of traditional views on morality and justice that stem from the superstitious beliefs still deeply rooted or related to the notion of God and Christianity.{{Cite journal |last=van der Braak |first=Andre |date=31 March 2015 |title=Zen and Zarathustra: Self-Overcoming without a Self |url=https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274738809 |journal=Journal of Nietzsche Studies |volume=46 |pages=2–11 |doi=10.5325/jnietstud.46.1.0002 |hdl-access=free |hdl=1871.1/201e9876-d07c-4d6a-89f7-951ae8adf1e9}}

From Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Zarathustra's Prologue; pp. 9–11):{{Cite book |last1=Martin |first1=Clancy |title=Thus Spoke Zarathustra |last2=Higgins |first2=Kathleen M. |last3=Solomon |first3=Robert C. |last4=Stade |first4=George |date=2005 |publisher=Barnes & Noble Books |isbn=978-1-59308-384-7 |location=New York |pages=9–11}}

{{blockquote|text=I teach you the Übermensch. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? All beings so far have created something beyond themselves: and you want to be the ebb of that great tide, and would rather go back to the beast than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. And just the same shall man be to the Übermensch: a laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much within you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even yet man is more of an ape than any ape. Even the wisest among you is only a conflict and hybrid of plant and ghost. But do I bid you become ghosts or plants? Behold, I teach you the Übermensch! The Übermensch is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The Übermensch shall be the meaning of the earth... Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Übermensch—a rope over an abyss... What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an over-going and a going under.}}

Zarathustra contrasts the Übermensch with the last man of egalitarian modernity (the most obvious example being democracy), an alternative goal humanity might set for itself. The last man is possible only by mankind's having bred an apathetic creature who has no great passion or commitment, who is unable to dream, who merely earns his living and keeps warm. This concept appears only in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and is presented as a condition that would render the creation of the Übermensch impossible.{{Cite book |url=http://www.nietzschespirit.com/files/The_Most_Despicable_Man_is_Coming...the_Last_Man.html |title=Nietzsche and Heidegger |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120607060856/http://www.nietzschespirit.com/files/The_Most_Despicable_Man_is_Coming...the_Last_Man.html |archive-date=7 June 2012 |url-status=dead}}{{Better source needed|date=September 2024}}

Some{{Cite book |last=Deleuze, Gilles |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/8763853 |title=Nietzsche and philosophy |date=1983 |publisher=Columbia University Press |isbn=0-231-05668-0 |location=New York |oclc=8763853}} have suggested that the eternal return is related to the {{lang|de|Übermensch}}, since willing the eternal return of the same is a necessary step if the {{lang|de|Übermensch}} is to create new values untainted by the spirit of gravity or asceticism. Values involve a rank-ordering of things, and so are inseparable from approval and disapproval, yet it was dissatisfaction that prompted men to seek refuge in other-worldliness and embrace other-worldly values. It could seem that the {{lang|de|Übermensch}}, in being devoted to any values at all, would necessarily fail to create values that did not share some bit of asceticism. Willing the eternal recurrence is presented as accepting the existence of the low while still recognising it as the low, and thus as overcoming the spirit of gravity or asceticism. One must have the strength of the {{lang|de|Übermensch}} to will the eternal recurrence. Only the {{lang|de|Übermensch}} will have the strength to fully accept all of his past life, including his failures and misdeeds, and to truly will their eternal return. This action nearly kills Zarathustra, for example, and most human beings cannot avoid other-worldliness because they really are sick, not because of any choice they made.

The Nazis attempted to incorporate the concept into their ideology by means of taking Nietzsche's figurative form of speech and creating a literal superiority over other ethnicities. After Nietzsche's death his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, became the curator and editor of her his manuscripts. She reworked Nietzsche's unpublished writings to fit her own German nationalist ideology while often contradicting or obfuscating Nietzsche's stated opinions, which were explicitly opposed to antisemitism and nationalism. Through her published editions, Nietzsche's work became associated with fascism and Nazism;{{Cite book |title=Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism?: On the Uses and Abuses of a Philosophy |date=2002 |publisher=Princeton University Press |editor-last=Golomb |editor-first=Jacob |editor-link=Jacob Golomb |location=Princeton, NJ |editor-last2=Wistrich |editor-first2=Robert S. |editor-link2=Robert S. Wistrich}} 20th-century scholars contested this interpretation of his work and corrected editions of his writings were soon made available.

Although Nietzsche has been misrepresented as a predecessor to Nazism, he criticised antisemitism, pan-Germanism and, to a lesser extent, nationalism.{{Cite book |last=Ansell-Pearson |first=Keith |title=An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker: The Perfect Nihilist |date=1994 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |pages=33–34}} Thus, he broke with his editor in 1886 because of his opposition to his editor's antisemitic stances, and his rupture with Richard Wagner, expressed in The Case of Wagner and Nietzsche contra Wagner, both of which he wrote in 1888, had much to do with Wagner's endorsement of pan-Germanism and antisemitism—and also of his rallying to Christianity. In a 29 March 1887 letter to Theodor Fritsch, Nietzsche mocked antisemites, Fritsch, Eugen Dühring, Wagner, Ebrard, Adolf Wahrmund, and the leading advocate of pan-Germanism, Paul de Lagarde, who would become, along with Wagner and Houston Chamberlain, the main official influences of Nazism. This 1887 letter to Fritsch ended by: "And finally, how do you think I feel when the name Zarathustra is mouthed by anti-Semites?"{{citation needed|date=January 2023}} In contrast to these examples, Nietzsche's close friend Franz Overbeck recalled in his memoirs, "When he speaks frankly, the opinions he expresses about Jews go, in their severity, beyond any anti-Semitism. The foundation of his anti-Christianity is essentially anti-Semitic."Franz Overbeck (1906) "Erinnerungen an Friedrich Nietzsche". Die neue Rundschau. 1:209–231, 320–330; quoted in Domenico Losurdo (2020) Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel. Leiden: Brill, p. 572.

Friedrich Nietzsche held a pessimistic view of modern society and culture. He believed that the press and mass culture led to conformity and brought about mediocrity, and that the lack of intellectual progress was leading to the decline of the human species. In his opinion, some people would be able to become superior individuals through the use of willpower. By rising above mass culture, those persons would produce higher, brighter, and healthier human beings.{{Cite journal |last=Kellner |first=Douglas |year=1999 |title=Nietzsche's Critique of Mass Culture |url=http://www.pdcnet.org/PDC/bvdb.nsf/purchase?openform&fp=intstudphil&id=intstudphil_1999_0031_0003_0077_0089&onlyautologin=true |journal=International Studies in Philosophy |volume=31 |issue=3 |pages=77–89 |doi=10.5840/intstudphil199931353}}

{{see also|Library of Friedrich Nietzsche}}

File:Villa Silberblick.jpg, Germany, which holds many of Nietzsche's papers]]

A trained philologist, Nietzsche had a thorough knowledge of Greek philosophy. He read Immanuel Kant, Plato, John Stuart Mill, Arthur Schopenhauer and Afrikan Spir,Brobjer, Thomas. "Nietzsche's Reading and Private Library, 1885–1889". Journal of History of Ideas. who became the main opponents in his philosophy, and later engaged, via the work of Kuno Fischer in particular, with the thought of Baruch Spinoza, whom he saw as his "precursor" in many respects"Letter to Franz Overbeck, 30 July 1881"Jason Maurice Yonover: "Nietzsche, Spinoza, and Philosophical Etiology (On the Example of Free Will)", in: European Journal of Philosophy (forthcoming). but as a personification of the "ascetic ideal" in others. However, Nietzsche referred to Kant as a "moral fanatic", Plato as "boring", Mill as a "blockhead", and of Spinoza, he asked: "How much of personal timidity and vulnerability does this masquerade of a sickly recluse betray?"{{Sfn|Russell|2004|pp=693–697}} He likewise expressed contempt for the British author George Eliot.{{Cite journal |last=Joudrey |first=Thomas J. |year=2017 |title=The Defects of Perfectionism: Nietzsche, Eliot, and the Irrevocability of Wrong |journal=Philological Quarterly |volume=96 |issue=1 |pages=77–104}}

Nietzsche's philosophy, while innovative and revolutionary, was indebted to many predecessors. While at Basel, Nietzsche lectured on pre-Platonic philosophers for several years, and the text of this lecture series has been characterised as a "lost link" in the development of his thought. "In it, concepts such as the will to power, the eternal return of the same, the overman, gay science, self-overcoming and so on receive rough, unnamed formulations and are linked to specific pre-Platonic, especially Heraclitus, who emerges as a pre-Platonic Nietzsche."{{Sfn|Nietzsche|2001|p=xxxvii}} The pre-Socratic thinker Heraclitus was known for rejecting the concept of being as a constant and eternal principle of the universe and embracing "flux" and incessant change. His symbolism of the world as "child play" marked by amoral spontaneity and lack of definite rules was appreciated by Nietzsche.{{Sfn|Roochnik|2004|pp=37–39}} Due to his Heraclitean sympathies, Nietzsche was also a vociferous critic of Parmenides, who, in contrast to Heraclitus, viewed the world as a single, unchanging Being.{{Sfn|Roochnik|2004|p=48}}

In his Egotism in German Philosophy, the philosopher George Santayana claimed that Nietzsche's whole philosophy was a reaction to Schopenhauer. Santayana wrote that Nietzsche's work was "an emendation of that of Schopenhauer. The will to live would become the will to dominate; pessimism founded on reflection would become optimism founded on courage; the suspense of the will in contemplation would yield to a more biological account of intelligence and taste; finally in the place of pity and asceticism (Schopenhauer's two principles of morals) Nietzsche would set up the duty of asserting the will at all costs and being cruelly but beautifully strong. These points of difference from Schopenhauer cover the whole philosophy of Nietzsche."{{Sfn|Santayana|1916|p=114}}{{Cite journal |last=Wagner |first=Albert Malte |year=1939 |title=Goethe, Carlyle, Nietzsche and the German Middle Class (Concluded) |journal=Monatshefte für Deutschen Unterricht |publisher=University of Wisconsin Press |volume=31 |issue=5 |pages=235–242 |jstor=30169571 }}

The superficial similarity of Nietzsche's Übermensch to Thomas Carlyle's Hero as well as both authors' rhetorical prose style has led to speculation concerning the degree to which Nietzsche might have been influenced by his reading of Carlyle.{{Cite journal |last=Wagner |first=Albert Malte |year=1939 |title=Goethe, Carlyle, Nietzsche and the German Middle Class |journal=Monatshefte für Deutschen Unterricht |publisher=University of Wisconsin Press |volume=31 |issue=4 |pages=161–174 |jstor=30169550 }}{{Cite book |last=Bentley |first=Eric |url=https://archive.org/details/centuryofherowor0000bent/mode/2up |title=A Century of Hero-Worship: A study of the idea of heroism in Carlyle and Nietzsche, with notes on Wagner, Spengler, Stefan George, and D. H. Lawrence |publisher=Beacon Press |year=1957 |edition=2nd, revised and reset |location=Boston |url-access=registration}}{{Cite book |last=LaValley |first=Albert J. |url=https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780300006766/mode/2up |title=Carlyle and the Idea of the Modern: Studies in Carlyle's Prophetic Literature and Its Relation to Blake, Nietzsche, Marx, and Others |publisher=Yale University Press |year=1968 |isbn=978-0300006766 |location=New Haven |url-access=registration}}{{Cite journal |last=Meakins |first=William |year=2014 |title=Nietzsche, Carlyle, and Perfectionism |journal=Journal of Nietzsche Studies |publisher=Penn State University Press |volume=45 |issue=3 |pages=258–278 |doi=10.5325/jnietstud.45.3.0258 |jstor=10.5325/jnietstud.45.3.0258 |s2cid=170182808 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jnietstud.45.3.0258 |url-access=registration}} G. K. Chesterton believed that "Out of [Carlyle] flows most of the philosophy of Nietzsche", qualifying his statement by adding that they were "profoundly different" in character.Chesterton, G. K. (1902). "Thomas Carlyle". [https://www.gutenberg.org/files/12491/12491-h/12491-h.htm Twelve Types]. London: Arthur L. Humphries. Ruth apRoberts has shown that Carlyle anticipated Nietzsche in asserting the importance of metaphor (with Nietzsche's metaphor-fiction theory "appear[ing] to owe something to Carlyle"), announcing the death of God, and recognising both Goethe's Entsagen (renunciation) and Novalis's Selbsttödtung (self-annihilation) as prerequisites for engaging in philosophy. apRoberts writes that "Nietzsche and Carlyle had the same German sources, but Nietzsche may owe more to Carlyle than he cares to admit", noting that "[Nietzsche] takes the trouble to repudiate Carlyle with malicious emphasis."{{Cite book |last=apRoberts |first=Ruth |url=https://archive.org/details/ancientdialectth00apro/mode/2up |title=The Ancient Dialect: Thomas Carlyle and Comparative Religion |publisher=University of California Press |year=1988 |isbn=978-0520061163 |location=Berkeley and Los Angeles |page=68 |url-access=registration}} Ralph Jessop, senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow, has recently argued that a reassessment of Carlyle's influence on Nietzsche is "long-overdue".{{Cite book |last=Jessop |first=Ralph |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=SHCoMxt2hCAC |title=Thomas Carlyle Resartus: Reappraising Carlyle's Contribution to the Philosophy of History, Political Theory, and Cultural Criticism |publisher=Fairleigh Dickinson University Press |year=2010 |isbn=978-0838642238 |editor-last=Kerry |editor-first=Paul E. |location=Madison and Teaneck, NJ |page=67 |chapter=Shooting the Enlightenment: A Brave New Era for Carlyle? |editor-last2=Hill |editor-first2=Marylu |url-access=limited}}

Nietzsche expressed admiration for 17th-century French moralists such as François de La Rochefoucauld, Jean de La Bruyère and Luc de Clapiers, marquis de Vauvenargues,Brendan Donnellan, [https://www.jstor.org/stable/404869 "Nietzsche and La Rochefoucauld"] in The German Quarterly, Vol. 52, No. 3 (May 1979), pp. 303–318 as well as for Stendhal.{{Sfn|Nietzsche|1888d|loc="Why I am So Clever", § 3}} The organicism of Paul Bourget influenced Nietzsche,Le Rider, Jacques. 1999. Nietzsche en France. De la fin du XIXe siècle au temps présent. Paris: PUF. pp. 8–9, as cited in Grzelczyk, Johan. 2005. "[http://www.hypernietzsche.org/navigate.php?sigle=jgrzelczyk-4 Féré et Nietzsche: au sujet de la décadence]" {{in lang|fr}}. {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061116213847/http://www.hypernietzsche.org/navigate.php?sigle=jgrzelczyk-4|date=16 November 2006}}. via HyperNietzsche. as did that of Rudolf Virchow and Alfred Espinas.{{cite journal |last=Wahrig-Schmidt |first=B. |date=1988 |title=Irgendwie, jedenfalls physiologisch. Friedrich Nietzsche, Alexandre Herzen (fils) und Charles Féré 1888. |language=de |trans-title=Somehow, at least physiologically. Friedrich Nietzsche, Alexandre Herzen (fils) and Charles Féré 1888. |journal=Nietzsche Studien |volume=17 |location=Berlin |publisher=Walter de Gruyter |page=439}}, as cited in {{Cite web |last=Grzelczyk |first=Johan |date=2005 |title=Féré et Nietzsche: au sujet de la décadence |trans-title=Féré and Nietzsche: about decadence |url=http://www.hypernietzsche.org/navigate.php?sigle=jgrzelczyk-4 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061116213847/http://www.hypernietzsche.org/navigate.php?sigle=jgrzelczyk-4 |archive-date=16 November 2006 |language=fr |via=HyperNietzsche}} In 1867 Nietzsche wrote in a letter that he was trying to improve his German style of writing with the help of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg and Schopenhauer. It was probably Lichtenberg (along with Paul Rée) whose aphoristic style of writing contributed to Nietzsche's own use of aphorism.{{Cite book |last=Thomas |first=Brobjer |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=V4DDxmM0T9EC&q=Nietzsche+neo-Kantians&pg=PA58 |title=Nietzsche's Philosophical Context: An Intellectual Biography |publisher=University of Illinois Press |year=2010 |isbn=978-0-252-09062-2 |via=Google Books}} Nietzsche early learned of Darwinism through Friedrich Albert Lange.[http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Note_sur_Nietzsche_et_Lange_:_%C2%AB_le_retour_%C3%A9ternel_%C2%BB Note sur Nietzsche et Lange: "Le retour éternel"], Albert Fouillée, Revue philosophique de la France et de l'étranger. An. 34. Paris 1909. T. 67, S. 519–525 (on French Wikisource) The essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson had a profound influence on Nietzsche, who "loved Emerson from first to last",Walter Kaufmann, intr. p. 11 of his transl. of 'The Gay Science' wrote "Never have I felt so much at home in a book", and called him "[the] author who has been richest in ideas in this century so far".Notebooks, cf. The Gay Science, Walter Kaufmann transl, p. 12 Hippolyte Taine influenced Nietzsche's view on Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Napoleon.{{Cite book |last=Weaver |first=Santaniello |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=BSQJgIKTJ7QC&q=Nietzsche+Hippolyte+Taine&pg=PA194 |title=Nietzsche, God, and the Jews: His Critique of Judeo-Christianity in Relation to the Nazi Myth |publisher=State University of New York Press |year=1994 |isbn=978-0-7914-2136-9 |via=Google Books}} Notably, he also read some of the posthumous works of Charles Baudelaire,{{Cite book |last=Montinari |first=Mazzino |author-link=Mazzino Montinari |title=La Volonté de puissance' n'existe pas |date=1996 |publisher=Éditions de l'Éclat |page=13 |language=fr |trans-title=The Will to Power does not exist}} Leo Tolstoy's My Religion, Ernest Renan's Life of Jesus, and Fyodor Dostoevsky's Demons.{{Sfn|Kaufmann|1974|pp=306–340}} Nietzsche called Dostoevsky "the only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn".{{Sfn|Nietzsche|1888b|loc=§ 45}} While Nietzsche never mentions Max Stirner, the similarities in their ideas have prompted a minority of interpreters to suggest a relationship between the two.{{sfn|Löwith|1964|p=187}}{{Cite book |last=Taylor |first=S. |title=Left Wing Nietzscheans: The Politics of German Expressionism 1910–1920 |date=1990 |publisher=Walter de Gruyter |location=Berlin/New York |page=144}}{{sfn|Deleuze|2006|pp=153–154}}{{Cite book |last1=Solomon |first1=R. C. |title=The Age of German Idealism |last2=Higgins |first2=K. M. |date=1993 |publisher=Routledge |page=300}}{{Cite book |last=Samek |first=R. A. |title=The Meta Phenomenon |date=1981 |location=New York |page=70}}Goyens, T. 2007. Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City. Illinois. p. 197.{{Cite journal |last=Laska |first=Bernd A. |title=Nietzsche's initial crisis |url=http://www.lsr-projekt.de/poly/ennietzsche.html |journal=Germanic Notes and Reviews |volume=33 |issue=2 |pages=109–133}}

In 1861 Nietzsche wrote an enthusiastic essay on his "favourite poet," Friedrich Hölderlin, mostly forgotten at that time.{{Cite web |last=Liukkonen |first=Petri |title=Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) |url=http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/holderli.htm |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20141226203214/http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/holderli.htm |archive-date=26 December 2014 |website=Books and Writers (kirjasto.sci.fi) |publisher=Kuusankoski Public Library |location=Finland}} He also expressed deep appreciation for Adalbert Stifter's Indian Summer,Meyer-Sickendiek, Burkhard. 2004. "Nietzsche's Aesthetic Solution to the Problem of Epigonism in the Nineteenth Century." In Nietzsche and Antiquity: His Reaction and Response to the Classical Tradition, edited by P. Bishop. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell & Brewer. p. 323. Lord Byron's Manfred and Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer.{{Cite book |last=Rebekah |first=Peery |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Eh4YJfNeO7QC&q=Nietzsche+Adventures+of+Tom+Sawyer&pg=PA19 |title=Nietzsche, Philosopher of the Perilous Perhaps |publisher=Algora |year=2008 |isbn=978-0-87586-644-4 |via=Google Books}}

A translation by Louis Jacolliot of the Calcutta version of the ancient Hindu text the Manusmriti was reviewed by Nietzsche. He commented on it both favourably and unfavourably:

• He deemed it "an incomparably spiritual and superior work" to the Christian Bible, observed that "the sun shines on the whole book" and attributed its ethical perspective to "the noble classes, the philosophers and warriors, [who] stand above the mass".Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist (1888), 56–57. Nietzsche does not advocate a caste system, states David Conway, but endorses the political exclusion conveyed in the Manu text.Daniel Conway (1997), Nietzsche and the Political, Routledge, {{ISBN|978-0415100694}}, p. 36 Nietzsche considered Manu's social order as far from perfect, but considers the general idea of a caste system to be natural and right, and stated that "caste-order, order of rank is just a formula for the supreme law of life itself", a "natural order, lawfulness par excellence".{{sfn|Young|2010|p=515}}Aaron Ridley, Nietzsche: The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols: And Other Writings, Cambridge University Press, p. 58 According to Nietzsche, states Julian Young, "Nature, not Manu, separates from each other: predominantly spiritual people, people characterized by muscular and temperamental strength, and a third group of people who are not distinguished in either way, the average".{{sfn|Young|2010|p=515}} He wrote that "To prepare a book of law in the style of Manu means to give a people the right to become master one day, to become perfect, – to aspire to the highest art of life."
• The Law of Manu was also criticised by Nietzsche. Nietzsche writes, "these regulations teach us enough, in them we find for once Aryan humanity, quite pure, quite primordial, we learn that the concept of pure blood is the opposite of a harmless concept."Walter Kaufmann (1980), From Shakespeare to Existentialism, Princeton University Press, {{ISBN|978-0691013671}}, p. 215

{{Main|Influence and reception of Friedrich Nietzsche}}

File:Edvard Munch Friedrich Nietzsche Thielska 292.tif, 1906, at the Thiel Gallery, Stockholm]]

File:Munch - Friedrich Nietzsche, MM.G.00263-02.jpg

Nietzsche's works did not reach a wide readership during his active writing career. However, in 1888 the influential Danish critic Georg Brandes aroused considerable excitement about Nietzsche through a series of lectures he gave at the University of Copenhagen. In the years after Nietzsche's death in 1900, his works became better known, and readers have responded to them in complex and sometimes controversial ways.{{Cite EB1911 |wstitle=Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm |volume=19 |last=Schiller |first=Ferdinand Canning Scott |author-link=Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller |page=672}} Many Germans eventually discovered his appeals for greater individualism and personality development in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but responded to them divergently. He had some following among left-wing Germans in the 1890s; in 1894–1895 German conservatives wanted to ban his work as subversive. During the late 19th century Nietzsche's ideas were commonly associated with anarchist movements and appear to have had influence within them, particularly in France, Germany,{{Cite book |last=Miething |first=Dominique F. |url=http://www.nomos-elibrary.de/index.php?doi=10.5771/9783845280127 |title=Anarchistische Deutungen der Philosophie Friedrich Nietzsches: Deutschland, Großbritannien, USA (1890–1947) |date=2016 |publisher=Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG |isbn=978-3-8452-8012-7 |doi=10.5771/9783845280127}} Britain and the United States.Ewald, O. 1908. "German Philosophy in 1907." The Philosophical Review 17(4):400–426.Riley, T. A. 1947. "Anti-Statism in German Literature, as Exemplified by the Work of John Henry Mackay." PMLA 62(3):828–843.Forth, C. E. 1993. "Nietzsche, Decadence, and Regeneration in France, 1891–1895." Journal of the History of Ideas 54(1):97–117. Gustav Landauer is credited with the most in-depth appreciation and critique of Nietzsche's ideas from an anarchist perspective.{{Cite journal |last=Miething |first=Dominique |date=2016-04-02 |title=Overcoming the preachers of death: Gustav Landauer's reading of Friedrich Nietzsche |url=http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17496977.2016.1140404 |journal=Intellectual History Review |language=en |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=285–304 |doi=10.1080/17496977.2016.1140404 |issn=1749-6977 |s2cid=170389740}} H.L. Mencken produced the first book on Nietzsche in English in 1907, The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, and in 1910 a book of translated paragraphs from Nietzsche, increasing knowledge of his philosophy in the United States.{{Cite book |last=Mencken |first=H. L. |url=https://archive.org/details/gistnietzsche00mencgoog |title=The Gist of Nietzsche |publisher=J.W. Luce |year=1910 |location=Boston}} Nietzsche is known today as a precursor to existentialism, post-structuralism and postmodernism.{{Cite encyclopedia |title=Postmodernism |encyclopedia=Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy |url=http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/#1 |last=Aylesworth |first=Gary |date=2015 |orig-date=2005}}. §Precursors.

W. B. Yeats and Arthur Symons described Nietzsche as the intellectual heir to William Blake.{{Cite journal |last=Coste |first=Bénédicte |date=15 December 2016 |title=The Romantics of 1909: Arthur Symons, Pierre Lasserre and T.E. Hulme |journal=E-rea |volume=14 |issue=1 |doi=10.4000/erea.5609 |issn=1638-1718 |doi-access=free}} Symons went on to compare the ideas of the two thinkers in The Symbolist Movement in Literature, while Yeats tried to raise awareness of Nietzsche in Ireland.{{Cite book |last=Everdell |first=William |url=https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780226224817/page/508 |title=The First Moderns |publisher=University of Chicago Press |year=1998 |isbn=978-0-226-22481-7 |location=Chicago |page=[https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780226224817/page/508 508]}}{{Cite book |url=http://www.fathom.com/feature/61007/ |title=Joyce and Nietzsche |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110612202020/http://www.fathom.com/feature/61007/ |archive-date=12 June 2011 |url-status=dead}}{{Cite book |last=Pasley |first=Malcolm |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=N9H1vjyOMswC&q=Arthur+Symons+Nietzsche&pg=PA231 |title=Nietzsche:Imagery and thoughts |publisher=University of California Press |year=1978 |isbn=978-0-520-03577-5 |via=Google Books}} A similar notion was espoused by W. H. Auden who wrote of Nietzsche in his New Year Letter (released in 1941 in The Double Man): "O masterly debunker of our liberal fallacies ... all your life you stormed, like your English forerunner Blake."{{Cite book |last=Forrester |first=John |url=https://archive.org/details/dispatchesfromfr00forr |title=Dispatches from the Freud Wars |publisher=Harvard University Press |year=1997 |isbn=978-0-674-53960-0 |page=[https://archive.org/details/dispatchesfromfr00forr/page/39 39] |quote=masterly debunker of our liberal fallacies. |url-access=registration}}{{Cite book |last=Argyle |first=Gisela |url=https://archive.org/details/germanyasmodelmo0000argy |title=Germany as model and monster: Allusions in English fiction |publisher=McGill-Queen's University Press – MQUP |year=2002 |isbn=978-0-7735-2351-7 |page=[https://archive.org/details/germanyasmodelmo0000argy/page/130 130] |quote=W.H. Auden Nietzsche. |url-access=registration}}{{Cite book |last=Auden |first=Wystan Hugh |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=WokrAAAAYAAJ |title=The Double Man |date=1 June 1979 |publisher=Greenwood Press |isbn=978-0-313-21073-0 |via=Google Books}} Nietzsche made an impact on composers during the 1890s. The writer Donald Mitchell noted that Gustav Mahler was "attracted to the poetic fire of Zarathustra, but repelled by the intellectual core of its writings". He also quoted Mahler himself, and adds that he was influenced by Nietzsche's conception and affirmative approach to nature, which Mahler presented in his Third Symphony using Zarathustra's roundelay. Frederick Delius produced a piece of choral music, A Mass of Life, based on a text of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, while Richard Strauss (who also based his Also sprach Zarathustra on the same book), was only interested in finishing "another chapter of symphonic autobiography".{{Cite book |last=Donald |first=Mitchell |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=yKCq909vSpwC&q=Mahler+Nietzsche+influence&pg=PA99 |title=Gustav Mahler: The Early Years |publisher=University of California Press |year=1980 |isbn=978-0-520-04141-7 |via=Google Books}} Writers and poets influenced by Nietzsche include André Gide,{{Cite journal |last=Holdheim |first=William W. |year=1957 |title=The Young Gide's Reaction to Nietzsche |url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/pmla/article/abs/young-gides-reaction-to-nietzsche/FFE35D5DC1DF62BF689A575434934BC1 |journal=PMLA |language=en |volume=72 |issue=3 |pages=534–544 |doi=10.2307/460474 |issn=0030-8129 |jstor=460474 |s2cid=163634107}} August Strindberg,{{Citation |last=Dahlkvist |first=Tobias |title=By the Open Sea – A Decadent Novel? |work=The International Strindberg |pages=195–214 |url=http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv47w3xd.13 |access-date=28 May 2021 |publisher=Northwestern University Press |doi=10.2307/j.ctv47w3xd.13 |isbn=978-0-8101-6629-5}} Robinson Jeffers,{{Cite journal |last=Carpenter |first=Frederic I. |year=1977 |title=Robinson Jeffers Today: Beyond Good and Beneath Evil |journal=American Literature |volume=49 |issue=1 |pages=86–96 |doi=10.2307/2925556 |issn=0002-9831 |jstor=2925556}} Pío Baroja,{{Cite journal |last=Murphy |first=Katharine |date=27 May 2020 |title=Spanish Modernism in Context: Failed Heroism and Cross-Cultural Encounters in Pío Baroja and Joseph Conrad |url=https://doi.org/10.1080/14753820.2020.1726630 |journal=Bulletin of Spanish Studies |volume=97 |issue=5 |pages=807–829 |doi=10.1080/14753820.2020.1726630 |issn=1475-3820 |s2cid=214389935 |hdl-access=free |hdl=10871/39620}} D. H. Lawrence,{{Cite book |last=Colin |first=Milton |url=http://worldcat.org/oclc/797149190 |title=Lawrence and Nietzsche : a study in influence |date=1987 |publisher=Aberdeen University Press |isbn=0-08-035067-4 |oclc=797149190}} Edith Södergran{{Cite journal |last=Mier-Cruz |first=Benjamin |date=5 February 2021 |title=Edith Södergran's Genderqueer Modernism |journal=Humanities |volume=10 |issue=1 |page=28 |doi=10.3390/h10010028 |issn=2076-0787 |doi-access=free}} and Yukio Mishima.{{Cite journal |last1=Wagenaar |first1=Dick |last2=Iwamoto |first2=Yoshio |year=1975 |title=Yukio Mishima: Dialectics of Mind and Body |journal=Contemporary Literature |volume=16 |issue=1 |pages=41–60 |doi=10.2307/1207783 |issn=0010-7484 |jstor=1207783}}

Nietzsche was an early influence on the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke.{{Cite journal |last=Paine |first=Jeffery M. |year=1986 |title=Rainer Maria Rilke: The Evolution of a Poet |journal=The Wilson Quarterly |volume=10 |issue=2 |pages=148–162 |issn=0363-3276 |jstor=40257012}} Knut Hamsun counted Nietzsche, along with Strindberg and Dostoyevsky, as his primary influences.{{Cite news |last=James |first=Wood |date=26 November 1998 |title=Addicted to Unpredictability |url=http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n23/james-wood/addicted-to-unpredictability |work=London Review of Books |pages=16–19}} The author Jack London wrote that he was more stimulated by Nietzsche than by any other writer.{{Cite book |last=Reesman |first=Jeanne Campbell |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=fbrV_fwgcq4C&q=Nietzsche+Jack+London&pg=PA44 |title=Jack London's Racial Lives |publisher=University of Georgia Press |year=2011 |isbn=978-0-8203-3970-2 |via=Google Books}} Critics have suggested that the character of David Grief in A Son of the Sun was based on Nietzsche.{{Cite book |last=London |first=Jack |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=7q2AHsyTuo4C&q=Nietzsche+Jack+London&pg=PR19 |title=A Sun of the Son |publisher=University of Oklahoma Press |year=2001 |isbn=978-0-8061-3362-1 |via=Google Books}} Nietzsche's influence on Muhammad Iqbal is most evidenced in Asrar-i-Khudi (The Secrets of the Self).{{Cite book |last=Ray |first=Jackson |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ftpGJy0DPbYC&q=Iqbal+Nietzsche&pg=PA57 |title=Nietzsche and Islam |publisher=Routledge |year=2007 |isbn=978-1-134-20500-4 |via=Google Books}} Wallace Stevens{{Cite book |url=http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/poets/stevens.php |title=Poets of Cambridge |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120429020746/http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/poets/stevens.php |archive-date=29 April 2012 |url-status=dead}} was another reader of Nietzsche, and elements of Nietzsche's philosophy were found throughout Stevens's poetry collection Harmonium.{{Cite web |title=Wallace Stevens' Harmonium – Collaborative Essays and Articles – Geneseo Wiki |url=https://wiki.geneseo.edu/display/essaysarticles/Wallace+Stevens%27+Harmonium#WallaceStevens%27Harmonium-TheInfluenceofNietzsche |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121211011940/https://wiki.geneseo.edu/display/essaysarticles/Wallace+Stevens%27+Harmonium#WallaceStevens%27Harmonium-TheInfluenceofNietzsche |archive-date=11 December 2012 |access-date=17 May 2012 |website=wiki.geneseo.edu}}{{Cite book |last=Serio |first=John N. |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=3m7_U1UdeRgC&q=Wallace+Stevens+Nietzsche&pg=PA112 |title=The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=2007 |isbn=978-1-139-82754-6 |via=Google Books}} Olaf Stapledon was influenced by the idea of the {{lang|de|Übermensch}} and it is a central theme in his books Odd John and Sirius.{{Cite book |url=http://olafstapledonarchive.webs.com/biography.html |title=Olaf Stapleton |access-date=22 December 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090717120543/http://olafstapledonarchive.webs.com/biography.html |archive-date=17 July 2009 |url-status=dead}} In Russia, Nietzsche influenced Russian symbolism{{Cite book |last=Brad |first=Damare |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Fo2QqyyFCR4C&q=Merezhovsky+Nietzsche&pg=PA12 |title=Music and Literature in Silver Age Russia: Mikhail Kuzmin and Alexander Scriabin |isbn=978-0-549-81910-3 |via=Google Books}}{{Dead link|date=February 2023 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes}} and figures such as Dmitry Merezhkovsky,{{Cite book |last=Bernice |first=Rosenthal |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Ppvr3LZ8o2wC&q=Merezhkovsky+Nietzsche&pg=PA35 |title=New Myth, New World: From Nietzsche to Stalinism |publisher=Penn State Press |year=2010 |isbn=978-0-271-04658-7 |via=Google Books}} Andrei Bely,{{Cite book |last=Bernice |first=Rosenthal |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=f5cUEHHchNAC&q=Andrei+Bely+Nietzsche&pg=PA117 |title=Nietzsche and Soviet Culture: Ally and Adversary |date=1994 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |isbn=978-0-521-45281-6 |via=Google Books}} Vyacheslav Ivanov and Alexander Scriabin incorporated or discussed parts of Nietzsche philosophy in their works. Thomas Mann's novel Death in Venice{{Cite book |last=Shookman |first=Ellis |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=hJZm5QWgxC4C&q=Thomas+Mann+Nietzsche |title=Thomas Mann's Death in Venice |publisher=Greenwood Publishing |year=2004 |isbn=978-0-313-31159-8 |via=Google Books}} shows a use of Apollonian and Dionysian, and in Doctor Faustus Nietzsche was a central source for the character of Adrian Leverkühn.{{Cite book |url=http://www.nietzschecircle.com/essayArchive5.html |title=Nietzsche Circle |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130123020205/http://nietzschecircle.com/essayArchive5.html |archive-date=23 January 2013 |url-status=dead}}{{Cite web |title=Doctor Faustus |url=http://medhum.med.nyu.edu/view/12474 |website=medhum.med.nyu.edu}} Hermann Hesse, similarly, in his Narcissus and Goldmund presents two main characters as opposite yet intertwined Apollonian and Dionysian spirits. The painter Giovanni Segantini was fascinated by Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and he drew an illustration for the first Italian translation of the book. The Russian painter Lena Hades created the oil painting cycle Also Sprach Zarathustra dedicated to the book Thus Spoke Zarathustra.{{Cite web |script-title=ru:Book: Ницше Фридрих Вильгельм. Так говорил Заратустра (с репродукциями картин Л. Хейдиз из цикла "Так говорил Заратустра") |url=https://books.academic.ru/book.nsf/58297551/ |website=Academic Dictionaries and Encyclopedias |language=ru}}

By World War I, Nietzsche had acquired a reputation as an inspiration for right-wing German militarism and leftist politics. German soldiers received copies of Thus Spoke Zarathustra as gifts during World War I.{{Cite book |last=Aschheim |first=Steven E. |title=The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990 |year=1992 |location=Berkeley and Los Angeles |page=135 |quote="[a]bout 150,000 copies of a specially durable wartime Zarathustra were distributed to the troops"}}{{sfn|Kaufmann|1974|p=8}} The Dreyfus affair provided a contrasting example of his reception: the French antisemitic Right labelled the Jewish and leftist intellectuals who defended Alfred Dreyfus as "Nietzscheans".{{Cite book |last=Schrift |first=A.D. |title=Nietzsche's French Legacy: A Genealogy of Poststructuralism |date=1995 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=0-415-91147-8}} Nietzsche had a distinct appeal for many Zionist thinkers around the start of the 20th century, most notable being Ahad Ha'am,{{Cite book |last=Jacob |first=Golomb |url=http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100486340 |title=Nietzsche and Zion |date=2004 |publisher=Cornell University Press |isbn=978-0-8014-3762-5}} Hillel Zeitlin,{{Cite book |last=Jacob |first=Golomb |url=http://www.azure.org.il/article.php?id=188 |title=Nietzsche and Zion}} Micha Josef Berdyczewski, A.D. Gordon{{Cite book |last=Ohana |first=David |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=TOMrUcFiU0UC&q=A.+D.+Gordon+Nietzsche&pg=PA48 |title=The Origins of Israeli Mythology: Neither Canaanites nor Crusaders |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=2012 |isbn=978-1-139-50520-8 |via=Google Books}} and Martin Buber, who went so far as to extoll Nietzsche as a "creator" and "emissary of life".{{sfn|Golomb|1997|pp=234–235}} Chaim Weizmann was a great admirer of Nietzsche; the first president of Israel sent Nietzsche's books to his wife, adding a comment in a letter that "This was the best and finest thing I can send to you."{{Cite book |last=Walter |first=Kaufmann |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=9RHqWPIC0QQC&q=Andre+Malraux+Nietzsche&pg=PA419 |title=Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist |publisher=Princeton University Press |year=2008 |isbn=978-1-4008-2016-0 |via=Google Books}} Israel Eldad, the ideological chief of the Stern Gang that fought the British in Palestine in the 1940s, wrote about Nietzsche in his underground newspaper and later translated most of Nietzsche's books into Hebrew.Zev Golan, God, Man and Nietzsche, iUniverse, 2007, p. 169: "It would be most useful if our youth climbed, even if only briefly, to Zarathustra's heights{{nbsp}}..." Eugene O'Neill remarked that Zarathustra influenced him more than any other book he ever read. He also shared Nietzsche's view of tragedy.{{Cite book |last=Törnqvist |first=Egil |author-link=Egil Törnqvist |chapter=O'Neill's philosophical and literary paragons |title=The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O'Neill |editor-last=Manheim |editor-first=Michael |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=1998 |isbn=978-0-521-55645-3 |url=https://archive.org/details/cambridgecompani00mich |page=19}} The plays The Great God Brown and Lazarus Laughed are examples of Nietzsche's influence on him.{{Cite web |title=Eugene O'Neill - eOneill.com: An Electronic Archive |url=http://eoneill.com/ |website=eoneill.com}}{{Cite book |last=Diggins |first=John Patrick |author-link=John Patrick Diggins |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=LnnSlZMp0oAC&q=Lazarus+Laughed+Nietzsche&pg=PA201 |title=Eugene O'Neill's America: Desire Under Democracy |publisher=University of Chicago Press |year=2008 |isbn=978-0-226-14882-3 |via=Google Books}}{{Cite book |last=Törnqvist |first=Egil |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=g1whggReJx4C&q=Nietzsche+Eugene+O%27Neill&pg=PA40 |title=Eugene O'Neill: A Playwright's theatre |publisher=McFarland |year=2004 |isbn=978-0-7864-1713-1 |via=Google Books}} The First International claimed Nietzsche as ideologically one of their own.{{Cite book |last=Prideaux |first=Sue |title=I am dynamite |publisher=Faber & Faber |pages=Chapter 6-page 9 |language=En}} From 1888 through the 1890s there were more publications of Nietzsche works in Russia than in any other country.{{Cite book |last=Prideaux |first=Sue |title=I am dynamite |publisher=Faber & Faber |pages=Chapter 20 pages 6–8 |language=en}} Nietzsche was influential among the Bolsheviks. Among the Nietzschean Bolsheviks were Vladimir Bazarov,{{sfn|Čeika|2021|pp=181–182}} Anatoly Lunacharsky{{sfn|Čeika|2021|p=181}} and Aleksandr Bogdanov.{{sfn|Čeika|2021|pp=178–179}} Nietzsche's influence on the works of the Frankfurt School philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno{{Cite web |title=Adorno, Theodor | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy |url=https://iep.utm.edu/adorno/}} can be seen in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Adorno encapsulated Nietzsche's philosophy as expressing the "humane in a world in which humanity has become a sham".{{Cite book |last=Herman |first=Arthur |author-link=Arthur L. Herman |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=A2NxFq1C7uIC&q=I+have+come+to+the+conclusion+that+Nietzsche+is+probably+a+greater+thinker+than+Marx&pg=PT351 |title=The Idea of Decline in Western History |publisher=Simon and Schuster |year=2010 |isbn=978-1-4516-0313-2 |via=Google Books}}{{Dead link|date=February 2024 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }}

Nietzsche's growing prominence suffered a severe setback when his works became closely associated with Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. Many political leaders of the twentieth century were at least superficially familiar with Nietzsche's ideas, although it is not always possible to determine whether they actually read his work. It is debated among scholars whether Hitler read Nietzsche, although if he did, it may not have been extensively.{{efn-lr|Trevor-Roper, Hugh. [1972] 2008. "Introductory essay for 'Hitler's Table Talk 1941–1944 Secret Conversations'." In The Mind of Adolf Hitler. Enigma Books. p. xxxvii:

"We know, from his [Hitler's] secretary, that he could quote Schopenhauer by the page, and the other German philosopher of willpower, Nietzsche, whose works he afterward presented to Mussolini, was often on his lips."}}{{efn-lr|{{Cite book |last=Kershaw |first=Ian |author-link=Ian Kershaw |title=Hitler: Hubris 1889–1936 |publisher=W. W. Norton |page=240 |quote='Landsberg,' Hitler told Hans Frank, was his 'university paid for by the state.' He read, he said, everything he could get hold of: Nietzsche, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Ranke, Treitschke, Marx, Bismarck's Thoughts and Memories, and the war memoirs of German and allied generals and statesmen.... But Hitler's reading and reflection collection were anything but academic, doubtless, he did read much. However, as was noted in an earlier chapter, he made clear in My Struggle that reading for him had purely an instrumental purpose. He read not for knowledge or enlightenment, but for confirmation of his own preconceptions.}}}}{{Cite book |last=Santaniello |first=Weaver |title=Nietzsche, God, and the Jews |date=1994 |publisher=SUNY Press |page=41 |quote=Hitler probably never read a word of Nietzsche.}}{{Cite book |last=Lang |first=Berel |author-link=Berel Lang |title=Post-Holocaust: Interpretation, Misinterpretation, and the Claims of History |date=2005 |publisher=Indiana University Press |page=162 |quote=Arguably, Hitler himself never read a word of Nietzsche; certainly, if he did read him, it was not extensively.}} He was a frequent visitor to the Nietzsche museum in Weimar and used expressions of Nietzsche's, such as "lords of the earth" in {{lang|de|Mein Kampf}}.{{Cite book |last=Shirer |first=William L. |author-link=William L. Shirer |title=The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany |date=1959 |publisher=Touchstone |pages=100–101}} The Nazis made selective use of Nietzsche's philosophy. Alfred Baeumler was perhaps the most notable exponent of Nietzschean thought in Nazi Germany. Baeumler had published his book "Nietzsche, Philosopher and Politician" in 1931, before the Nazis' rise to power, and subsequently published several editions of Nietzsche's work during the Third Reich.{{Cite book |last=Baeumler |first=Alfred |author-link=Alfred Baeumler |title=Nietzsche, der Philosoph und Politiker |date=1931 |publisher=Reclam |location=Leipzig |language=de |trans-title=Nietzsche, the philosophy and politics}}{{Cite journal |last=Whyte |first=Max |date=2008 |title=The Uses and Abuses of Nietzsche in the Third Reich: Alfred Baeumler's 'Heroic Realism' |journal=Journal of Contemporary History |volume=43 |pages=171–194 |doi=10.1177/0022009408089028 |s2cid=144479240 |number=2}} Benito Mussolini,{{Cite book |last=Falasca-Zamponi |first=Simonetta |title=Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini's Italy |date=2000 |publisher=University of California Press |page=44 |quote=In 1908 he presented his conception of the superman's role in modern society in a writing on Nietzsche titled "The Philosophy of Force"}}{{Cite book |last=Morgan |first=Philip |title=Fascism in Europe, 1919–1945 |date=2003 |publisher=Routledge |page=21 |quote=We know that Mussolini had read Nietzsche}} Charles de Gaulle{{Cite book |last1=Gaddis |first1=J. L. |title=Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb |last2=Gordon |first2=P. H. |last3=May |first3=E. R. |last4=Rosenberg |first4=J. |date=1999 |publisher=Oxford University Press |page=217 |quote=The son of a history teacher, de Gaulle read voraciously as a boy and young man—Jacques Bainville, Henri Bergson, Friederich {{sic}} Nietzsche, Maurice Barres—and was steeped in conservative French historical and philosophical traditions.}} and Huey P. Newton{{Cite book |first=Mumia |last=Abu-Jamal |author-link=Mumia Abu-Jamal |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=caWPDd6PuaMC&q=Nietzsche |title=We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party |publisher=South End Press |year=2004 |isbn=978-0-89608-718-7 |via=Google Books}} read Nietzsche. Richard Nixon, the 37th president of the United States, read Nietzsche with "curious interest", and his book Beyond Peace might have taken its title from Nietzsche's book Beyond Good and Evil, which Nixon read beforehand.{{Cite book |last=Crowley |first=Monica |title=Nixon in Winter |publisher=I.B. Tauris |year=1998 |page=351 |quote=He read with curious interest the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche [...] Nixon asked to borrow my copy of Beyond Good and Evil, a title that inspired the title of his final book, Beyond Peace.}} Bertrand Russell wrote that Nietzsche had exerted great influence on philosophers and on people of literary and artistic culture, but warned that the attempt to put Nietzsche's philosophy of aristocracy into practice could only be done by an organisation similar to the Fascist or the Nazi party.{{Cite book |last=Russell |first=Bertrand |url=https://archive.org/details/historyofwestern00russ/ |title=A History of Western Philosophy |publisher=Simon & Schuster |year=1945 |isbn=978-0-671-20158-6 |location=New York |pages=[https://archive.org/details/historyofwestern00russ/page/766 766, 770]}}

A decade after World War II, there was a revival of Nietzsche's philosophical writings thanks to translations and analyses by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. Georges Bataille was also influential in this revival, defending Nietzsche against appropriation by the Nazis with his notable 1937 essay "Nietzsche and Fascists".{{Cite journal |last=Bataille |first=Georges |author-link=Georges Bataille |date=January 1937 |title=Nietzsche and Fascists |url=http://i.a.m.free.fr/acephale/nietzsheetlesfascistes.html |journal=Acéphale}} Others, well known philosophers in their own right, wrote commentaries on Nietzsche's philosophy, including Martin Heidegger, who produced a four-volume study, and Lev Shestov, who wrote a book called Dostoyevski, Tolstoy and Nietzsche, in which he portrays Nietzsche and Dostoevsky as the "thinkers of tragedy".{{Cite book |last=Lev |first=Shestov |author-link=Lev Shestov |url=https://archive.org/details/dostoevskytolsto0000shes |title=Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche |publisher=Ohio University Press |year=1969 |isbn=978-0-8214-0053-1 |url-access=registration}} Georg Simmel compares Nietzsche's importance to ethics to that of Nicolaus Copernicus for cosmology.{{Citation |last=Sorgner |first=Stefan |title=Nietzsche & Germany |journal=Philosophy Now |volume=29 |year=2000 |url=http://www.philosophynow.org/issues/29/Nietzsche_and_Germany}} The sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies read Nietzsche avidly from his early life, and later frequently discussed many of his concepts in his own works. Nietzsche has influenced philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre,{{Cite book |last=Rickman |first=Hans Peter |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=D6fM0jqDVFgC&q=Nietzsche+Sartre+influence&pg=PA142 |title=Philosophy in Literature |publisher=Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press |year=1996 |isbn=978-0-8386-3652-7 |via=Google Books}} Oswald Spengler,{{Cite book |url=http://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index.php/Oswald_Spengler |title=Oswald Spengler |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130520200025/http://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index.php/Oswald_Spengler |archive-date=20 May 2013 |url-status=dead}} George Grant,{{Cite web |title=George Grant |url=https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/george-grant |access-date=31 August 2019 |website=The Canadian Encyclopedia}} Emil Cioran,{{Cite book |last1=Tat |first1=Alin |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=sJp6tGCgO-8C&q=Emil+Cioran+Nietzsche&pg=PA17 |title=Romanian Philosophical Culture, Globalization, and Education |last2=Popenici |first2=Stefan |year=2008 |isbn=978-1-56518-242-4}} Albert Camus,{{Cite encyclopedia |year=2019 |title=Albert Camus (1913–1960) |encyclopedia=The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy |url=https://www.iep.utm.edu/camus/ |last=Simpson |first=David |issn=2161-0002}} Ayn Rand,{{Cite magazine |last=Murray |first=Charles |author-link=Charles Murray (political scientist) |date=Spring 2010 |title=Who Is Ayn Rand? |url=https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/who-is-ayn-rand/ |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210513121901/https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/who-is-ayn-rand/ |archive-date=May 13, 2021 |access-date=May 16, 2021 |magazine=Claremont Review of Books |volume=10 |issue=2}} Jacques Derrida,{{Cite book |last1=Derrida |first1=J. |author-link=Jacques Derrida |title=Acts of Literature |last2=Attridge |first2=D. |date=25 September 2017 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=978-0-203-87354-0 |pages=33–75 |chapter="This Strange Institution Called Literature": An Interview with Jacques Derrida |doi=10.4324/9780203873540-2 |access-date=28 May 2021 |orig-date=1992 |chapter-url=http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203873540-2}} Sarah Kofman,{{Cite book |last=Kofman |first=Sarah |author-link=Sarah Kofman |title=Nietzsche and metaphor |publisher=A&C Black |year=1993}} Leo Strauss,{{Cite book |last=Lampert |first=Laurence |title=Leo Strauss and Nietzsche |publisher=University of Chicago Press |year=1996 |location=Chicago}} Max Scheler, Michel Foucault,{{Cite book |last=Foucault |first=Michel |author-link=Michel Foucault |url=https://philarchive.org/rec/FOUNGH |title=Language, Counter-Memory, Practice |date=1980 |publisher=Cornell University Press |isbn=978-1-5017-4191-3 |pages=139–164 |language=en |chapter=Nietzsche, Genealogy, History |doi=10.1515/9781501741913-008 |chapter-url=https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781501741913-008/html |s2cid=158684860}} Bernard Williams,{{Cite book |last=Williams |first=Bernard |title=Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality |date=31 December 1994 |publisher=University of California Press |isbn=978-0-520-91404-9 |pages=237–248 |language=en |chapter=13. Nietzsche's Minimalist Moral Psychology |doi=10.1525/9780520914049-017 |chapter-url=https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1525/9780520914049-017/html}} and Nick Land.{{Cite book |last=Land |first=Nick |author-link=Nick Land |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1176303181 |title=Fanged noumena collected writings 1987–2007 |date=2019 |publisher=Urbanomic/Sequence Press |others=Ray Brassier, Robin Mackay |isbn=978-0-9832169-4-0 |location=[S.l.] |oclc=1176303181}}

Camus described Nietzsche as "the only artist to have derived the extreme consequences of an aesthetics of the absurd".{{Cite book |last=Cornwell |first=Neil |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=bmq7AAAAIAAJ&q=Kafka+Nietzsche&pg=PA186 |title=The Absurd in Literature |publisher=Manchester University Press |year=2006 |isbn=978-0-7190-7410-3 |via=Google Books}} Paul Ricœur called Nietzsche one of the masters of the "school of suspicion", alongside Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud.{{Cite book |last=Ricœur |first=Paul |url=https://archive.org/details/freudphilosophye00rico_826 |title=Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation |publisher=Yale University Press |year=1970 |isbn=978-0-300-02189-9 |location=New Haven and London |page=[https://archive.org/details/freudphilosophye00rico_826/page/n42 32] |url-access=limited}} Carl Jung was also influenced by Nietzsche.{{Cite book |url=http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6163.html |title=Jung's Seminar on Nietzsche's Zarathustra |date=1997 |publisher=Princeton University Press |isbn=978-0-691-01738-9 |editor-last=Jarrett |editor-first=J. L. |edition=abridged |access-date=22 August 2014}} In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, a biography transcribed by his secretary, he cites Nietzsche as a large influence.{{Cite web |title=Jung's Reception of Friedrich Nietzsche: A Roadmap for the Uninitiated by Dr. Ritske Rensma |url=http://www.depthinsights.com/Depth-Insights-scholarly-ezine/e-zine-issue-3-fall-2012/jungs-reception-of-friedrich-nietzsche-a-roadmap-for-the-uninitiated-by-dr-ritske-rensma/ |access-date=22 August 2014 |publisher=Depth Insights}} Aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy, especially his ideas of the self and his relation to society, run through much of late-twentieth and early twenty-first century thought.{{Cite book |last=Belliotti |first=Raymond A. |title=Jesus or Nietzsche: How Should We Live Our Lives? |date=2013 |location=Amsterdam |publisher=Rodopi}}{{Cite journal |last=Kuipers |first=Ronald A. |author-link=Ronald A. Kuipers |date=2011 |title=Turning Memory into Prophecy: Roberto Unger and Paul Ricoeur on the Human Condition Between Past and Future |journal=The Heythrop Journal |pages=1–10}} Nietzsche's writings have also been influential to some advancers of Accelerationist thought through his influence on Deleuze and Guattari.{{Cite book |last=Deleuze |first=Gilles |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/370411932 |title=Anti-Oedipus : capitalism and schizophrenia |date=2009 |publisher=Penguin Books |others=Guattari, Félix; Foucault, Michel |isbn=978-0-14-310582-4 |location=New York |oclc=370411932}} His deepening of the romantic-heroic tradition of the nineteenth century, for example, as expressed in the ideal of the "grand striver" appears in the work of thinkers from Cornelius Castoriadis to Roberto Mangabeira Unger.{{Cite journal |last=Rorty |first=Richard |author-link=Richard Rorty |date=1988 |orig-date=1987 |title=Unger, Castoriadis, and the Romance of a National Future |journal=Northwestern University Law Review |volume=82 |page=39}} For Nietzsche, this grand striver overcomes obstacles, engages in epic struggles, pursues new goals, embraces recurrent novelty, and transcends existing structures and contexts.{{rp|195}}

{{Main|Friedrich Nietzsche bibliography}}

{{See also|List of works about Friedrich Nietzsche}}

File:Nietzsche-Stein 01.jpg, the inspiration for Thus Spoke Zarathustra]]

• The Birth of Tragedy (1872)
• On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (1873)
• Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (1873; first published in 1923)
• Untimely Meditations (1876)
• Human, All Too Human (1878)
• The Dawn (1881)
• The Gay Science (1882)
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883)
• Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
• On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)
• The Case of Wagner (1888)
• Twilight of the Idols (1888)
• The Antichrist (1888)
• Ecce Homo (1888; first published in 1908)
• Nietzsche contra Wagner (1888)
• The Will to Power (various unpublished manuscripts edited by his sister Elisabeth; not recognised as a unified work after {{Circa|1960}})
• Magnum in parvo: A philosophy in compendium (1888, a reconstruction of a project of work conceived by Nietzsche in Sils Maria at the end of August 1888, the last summer of his lucid life).

{{Portal|Philosophy|Religion|Germany|Biography}}

{{cols|colwidth=21em}}

• Difference (poststructuralism)
• Dionysos
• Existential nihilism
• Faith in the Earth
• Friedrich Nietzsche and free will
• Manusmriti
• Relationship between Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Stirner
• Rigveda
• When Nietzsche Wept – a film about his life
• World riddle

{{colend}}

{{notelist-lr|35em}}

{{Reflist}}

{{refbegin|30em}}

• {{Citation |last=Nietzsche |first=Friedrich Wilhelm |title=Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and For None |year=1961 |others=trans. RJ Hollingdale |place=New York |publisher=Penguin Classics |isbn=0-14-044118-2 |orig-date=1883–85}}.
• {{Citation |last=Nietzsche |first=Friedrich Wilhelm |title=On the Genealogy of Morality |year=1887}}.
• {{Citation |last=Nietzsche |first=Friedrich Wilhelm |title=Twilight of the Idols |year=1888b}}.
• {{Citation |last=Nietzsche |first=Friedrich Wilhelm |title=The Antichrist |year=2004 |place=Grand Rapids |publisher=Kessinger |ref={{harvid|Nietzsche|1888c}} |orig-year=1888c}}.
• {{Citation |last=Nietzsche |first=Friedrich Wilhelm |title=Ecce Homo |volume=Basic Writings of Nietzsche |year=2000 |others=trans. Walter Kaufmann |publisher=Modern Library |isbn=0-679-78339-3 |ref={{harvid|Nietzsche|1888d}} |orig-year=1888d}}.
• {{Citation |last=Nietzsche |first=Friedrich Wilhelm |title=Kritische Studienausgabe |volume=1 |year=1980 |publisher=de Gruyter |editor-last=Colli |editor-first=Giorgio |editor-last2=Montinari |editor-first2=Mazzino |ref={{harvid|Nietzsche|1980}}}}.
• {{Citation |last=Nietzsche |first=Friedrich Wilhelm |title=Kritische Gesamtausgabe Werke |volume=II |year=1967 |publisher=de Gruyter |editor-last=Colli |editor-first=Giorgio |editor-last2=Montinari |editor-first2=Mazzino |ref={{harvid|Nietzsche|1967}}}}.
• {{Citation |last=Nietzsche |first=Friedrich Wilhelm |title=The Pre-Platonic Philosophers |year=2001 |others=trans. Greg Whitlock |publisher=University of Illinois Press |isbn=0-252-02559-8}}.

{{refend}}

{{refbegin}}

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• {{cite book |last=Young |first=Julian |author-link=Julian Young |title=Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=2010 |isbn=9780521871174}}

{{refend}}

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• {{cite book |last=Waite |first=Geoff |title=Nietzsche's Corps/e: Aesthetics, Prophecy, Politics, or, The Spectacular Technoculture of Everyday Life |location=Durham, NC |publisher=Duke University Press |year=1996 |url=https://monoskop.org/images/1/1d/Waite_Geoff_Nietzsches_Corps-e_Aesthetics_Politics_Prophecy.pdf|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201111202045/https://monoskop.org/images/1/1d/Waite_Geoff_Nietzsches_Corps-e_Aesthetics_Politics_Prophecy.pdf |archive-date=11 November 2020 }}
• Wallis, Glenn. (2024), [https://warblerpress.com/nietzsche-now/ Nietzsche NOW!: The Great Immoralist on the Vital Issues of Our Time], New York City: Warbler Press.
• Weir, Simon & Hill Glen. (2021), "Making space for degenerate thinking: revaluing architecture with Friedrich Nietzsche." arq: architecture research quarterly 25:2. [https://doi.org/10.1017/S1359135521000221 Making space for degenerate thinking: revaluing architecture with Friedrich Nietzsche]
• {{cite book |last=Welshon |first=Rex |title=Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality: A Guide |location=New York |publisher=Oxford University Press |year=2023 |isbn=9780197611821 |doi=10.1093/oso/9780197611814.001.0001}}
• {{Cite encyclopedia |title=Friedrich Nietzsche |encyclopedia=The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy |url=http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2004/entries/nietzsche/ |last=Wicks |first=Robert |editor-last=Edward N. Zalta |edition=Fall 2004}}
• {{cite book |last=Zupančič |first=Alenka |author-link=Alenka Zupančič |title=The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two |location=Cambridge, MA |publisher=MIT Press |year=2003 |isbn=0-262-74026-5}}

{{Refend}}

{{Sister project links|wikt=no|s=Author:Friedrich Nietzsche|b=no|n=no|voy=no|v=Friedrich Nietzsche annotated bibliography|Friedrich Nietzsche}}

• [https://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9108765/Friedrich-Nietzsche#387226.hook Entry on Nietzsche] at Britannica.com
• [http://www.philosopher.eu/others-writings/nietzsches-autobiography/ Nietzsche's brief autobiography]
• {{StandardEbooks|Standard Ebooks URL=https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/friedrich-nietzsche}}
• {{Gutenberg author |id=779}}
• {{Internet Archive author |sname=Nietzsche}}
• {{Librivox author |id=411}}
• {{Helveticat}}
• {{cite IEP |url-id=nietzsch |title=Friedrich Nietzsche |last=Wilkerson |first=Dale|year=2009}}
• {{cite IEP |url-id=nietzsches-ethics |title=Nietzsche's Ethics |last=Kirwin |first=Claire}}
• {{cite IEP |url-id=niet-his |title=Nietzsche's Philosophy of History |last=Jensen |first=Anthony K.}}
• {{cite SEP |url-id=nietzsche |title=Friedrich Nietzsche |last=Wicks |first=Robert|date=14 November 2007}}
• {{cite SEP |url-id=nietzsche-moral-political |title=Nietzsche's Moral and Political Philosophy |last=Leiter |first=Brian |author-link=Brian Leiter |date=27 July 2007}}
• [http://www.nietzschesource.org/ Nietzsche Source: Digital version of the German critical edition of the complete works and Digital facsimile edition of the entire Nietzsche estate]
• [http://www.lexido.com/ Lexido: Searchable Database index of Public Domain editions of all Nietzsche's major works] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210514094631/http://lexido.com/ |date=14 May 2021}}
• {{IMSLP|id=Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm}}
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20110421040017/http://www.weple.org/timeline.html#ids=14631,12007,12598,700,10671,9518,37304,95184,&title=8%20German%20Philosophers Timeline of German Philosophers]
• Walter Kaufmann 1960 [https://archive.org/details/NietzscheAndTheCrisisInPhilosophy Prof. Nietzsche and the Crisis in Philosophy] (audio)
• {{Cite journal |last=Kierans |first=Kenneth |year=2010 |title=On the Unity of Nietzsche's Philosophy |url=http://www2.swgc.mun.ca/animus/Articles/Volume%2014/9_Kierans.pdf |url-status=dead |journal=Animus |volume=14 |issn=1209-0689 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20111003192327/http://www2.swgc.mun.ca/animus/Articles/Volume%2014/9_Kierans.pdf |archive-date=3 October 2011 |access-date=17 August 2011}}
• Burkhart Brückner, Robin Pape: [http://biapsy.de/index.php/en/9-biographien-a-z/71-nietzsche-friedrich-wilhelm-e Biography of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche] in: [http://biapsy.de/index.php/en/ Biographical Archive of Psychiatry (BIAPSY)].
• {{PM20|FID=pe/012893}}
• Rick Roderick (1991) [http://rickroderick.org/200-guide-nietzsche-and-the-postmodern-condition-1991/ Nietzsche and the Postmodern Condition (1991)] Video Lectures

{{Nietzsche|expanded}}

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