The Life and Passion of
About Nietzsche: "Specifically, Nietzsche accuses the platonic/christian schema of being inadequate to the needs of superior human beings, in that it promotes an anemic and unaesthetic worldview. This worldview is based on the illusion of another, more real world than the one we inhabit on earth, a supersensible world for which our actions here become merely derivative rituals. Plato's Ideas and the Christian God become the guarantors of all meaning for our lives. But Nietzsche maintained that this was a fiction that detoured us from being human, and that made men and women into slaves fettered to a herd mentality that strangled our profound creative urges."-- From the American Nihilist Association web page.
At Basel, Nietzsche was the younger colleague of Jacob Burckhardt and Franz Overbeck. His relationship with Overbeck solidified with the two becoming lifelong friends and associates. During the Franco-Prussian war, Nietzsche left Basel and volunteered as a medical orderly on active duty. His time in the military was short and he returned to Basel in a state of shattered health. Instead of waiting to heal, he pushed headlong into a more fervent schedule of study than ever before. In 1872, he published his first book: The Birth of Tragedy. Over the following years, he published several more books as well authoring many opinion pieces. In 1879, he resigned from the university because of ill health. His most productive years were after he left Basel, with the culmination of his work (not to mention notoriety) coming with the writing of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In 1889, less than two weeks after the completion of Nietzsche contra Wagner, he broke down, insane. His madness is suspected to have been a condition brought on by an advancing case of syphilis. Most of his final years were spent in his sister Elisabeth's care. During this time, Elisabeth grew more and more involved in the burgeoning anti-semitic movements in Germany. While he wasted away, she collected and edited many of his scattered notes and tailored them to suit her own political agenda. The fruition of this was Nietzsche's altered works and philosophy being a cornerstone in the Nazi party and Adolf Hitler's personal mantra. In 1900, he died... in 1901, Elisabeth published The Will to Power. |
Biographies
Nietzsche was born in 1844. His father, a Lutheran minister, died in 1849. He spent his childhood days surrounded by his mother, his sister, and two aunts. After attending a first rate boarding school (Schulpforta), he went on to study
classical philology at the universities of Bonn and Leipzig. At 24 years of age, he earned a professorship at Basel, which is where he truly came to be noticed.