Friedrich Nietzsche  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Revision as of 15:07, 15 December 2013; view current revision
←Older revision | Newer revision→
Jump to: navigation, search
"One ought to learn anew about cruelty," said Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil, 229), "and open one's eyes. Almost everything that we call 'higher culture' is based upon the spiritualizing and intensifying of cruelty...." more ...

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop

Featured:

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher. He wrote several critical texts on religion, morality, culture, philosophy and science, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and aphorism.

Nietzsche's key ideas include the Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy, perspectivism, the Will to Power, the "death of God", the Übermensch and eternal recurrence. Central to his philosophy is the idea of "life-affirmation", which involves questioning of any doctrine that drains one's expansive energies, however socially prevalent those ideas might be. His radical questioning of the value and objectivity of truth has been the focus of extensive commentary and his influence remains substantial, particularly in the continental philosophical tradition comprising existentialism, postmodernism, and post-structuralism.

Nietzsche began his career as a classical philologist - a scholar of Greek and Roman textual criticism - before turning to philosophy. In 1869, at age twenty-four, he was appointed to the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel, the youngest individual to have held this position. He resigned in the summer of 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life. In 1889, at age forty-four, he suffered a collapse and a complete loss of his mental faculties. The breakdown was later ascribed to atypical general paresis due to tertiary syphilis, but this diagnosis has come into question. Re-examination of Nietzsche's medical evaluation papers show that he almost certainly died of brain cancer, and researchers attribute his posthumous smear to an anti-Nazism campaign. Nietzsche lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897, after which he fell under the care of his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche until his death in 1900.

As his caretaker, his sister assumed the roles of curator and editor of Nietzsche's manuscripts. Förster-Nietzsche was married to a prominent German nationalist and antisemite, Bernhard Förster, and reworked Nietzsche's unpublished writings to fit her husband's ideology, often in ways contrary to Nietzsche's stated opinions, which were strongly and explicitly opposed to antisemitism and nationalism (see Nietzsche's criticism of antisemitism and nationalism). Through Förster-Nietzsche's editions, Nietzsche's name became associated with German militarism and Nazism, although later twentieth-century scholars have attempted to counteract this misconception of his ideas.

Nietzsche's aphorism 377 in The Gay Science "We who are homeless" is often held as a proof that Nietzsche was against pan-Germanism and patriotism.

Philosophy

Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche

Of major philosophers, Nietzsche has generated possibly the least consensus. One can readily identify his key concepts, but the meaning of each, let alone the relative significance of each, remains hotly contested. Nietzsche famously claimed that "God is dead", and this death either results in radical perspectivism or compels one to confront the fact that truth had always been perspectival. Nietzsche also distinguished between master and slave moralities, the former arising from a celebration of life, the latter the result of ressentiment at those capable of the former. This distinction becomes in summary the difference between "good and bad" on the one hand, and "good and evil" on the other; importantly, the "good" man of the master morality equates to the "evil" man of the slave morality.

The rise of morality and of moral disputes thus becomes a matter of psychology; Nietzsche's perspectivism likewise reduces epistemology to psychology. One of the most recurrent themes in Nietzsche's work, therefore, emerges as the "Will to Power". At a minimum, Nietzsche claims for the will to power that it describes human behavior more compellingly than Platonic eros, Schopenhauer's "will to live," or Paul Rée's utilitarian account of morality, among others; to go beyond this would involve interpretation.

Much of Nietzsche's philosophy has a critical flavour to it, and much criticism of his work has arisen from the fact that "he does not have a system". However, Nietzsche himself expressed a general disdain for philosophy as the construction of systems — indeed, he says (for example) in the preface of Beyond Good and Evil that many systems built by dogmatist philosophers have relied more on popular prejudices (such as the idea of a soul) than anything else. Concepts still associated with a more constructive project include the Übermensch (variously translated as superman, superhuman, or in the way most philosophers refer to it today, overman) and the eternal return (or eternal recurrence). Nietzsche posits the overman as a goal that humanity can achieve for itself, or that an individual can set for himself.

Nietzsche contrasts the Übermensch with the "last man", who appears as an exaggerated version of the degraded "goal" that liberal democratic or bourgeois society sets for itself. Both the Übermensch and the eternal return feature heavily in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. (Scholars also disagree about the interpretation of the eternal return.)

Works

List of works by Friedrich Nietzsche, List of works about Friedrich Nietzsche

See also


Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Friedrich Nietzsche" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Retrieved from "http://artandpopularculture.com/Friedrich_Nietzsche"
Personal tools
Metas