The Life and Passion of
"There are no facts, only interpretations." "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies." "Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him." "Even great spirits have only their five fingers breadth of experience - just beyond it their thinking ceases and their endless empty space and stupidity begins." "It is not things, but opinions about things
that have absolutely no existence, which have so deranged mankind!" All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment..." -- from Nietzsche's Thus spoke Zarathustra, p.3,4,5, Walter Kaufmann transl. "For the game of creation, my brothers, a
sacred "Yes" is needed: the spirit now wills his own will, and
he who had been lost to the world now conquers his own world." "Even in your folly and contempt, you despisers of
the body, you serve your self. I say unto you: your self itself
wants to die and turns away from life. It is no longer capable of
what it would do above all else: to create beyond itself. That is
what it would do above all else, that is its fervent wish." "What happened, my brothers? I overcame myself, the
sufferer; I carried my own ashes to the mountains; I invented a brighter
flame for myself." "Companions, the creator seeks, not corpses, not herds
and believers. Fellow creators, the creator seeks -- those who write
new values on new tablets. Companions, the creator seeks, and fellow
harvesters; for everything about him is ripe for the harvest. ... Fellow
creators, Zarathustra seeks, fellow harvesters and fellow celebrants: what
are herds and shepherds and corpses to him?" "How I understand the philosopher -- as a terrible
explosive, endangering everthing... my concept of the philosopher is
worlds removed from any concept that would include even a Kant, not to
speak of academic "ruminants" and other professors of
philosophy..." "Even today many educated people think that the victory
of Christianity over Greek philosophy is a proof of the superior truth of
the former - although in this case it was only the coarser and more
violent that conquered the more spiritual and delicate. So far as superior
truth is concerned, it is enough to observe that the awakening sciences
have allied themselves point by point with the philosophy of Epicurus, but
point by point rejected Christianity." "If all goes well, the time will come when one will take
up the memorabilia of Socrates rather than the Bible as a guide to morals
and reason... The pathways of the most various philosophical modes of life
lead back to him... Socrates excels the founder of Christianity in being
able to be serious cheerfully and in possessing that wisdom full of
roguishness that constitutes the finest state of the human soul. And
he also possessed the finer intellect." "What then is truth? A
mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms -- in short, a
sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and
embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem
firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about
which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn
out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and
now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. "Because we have for
millenia made moral, aesthetic, religious demands on the world, looked
upon it with blind desire, passion or fear, and abandoned ourselves to the
bad habits of illogical thinking, this world has gradually become
so marvelously variegated, frightful, meaningful, soulful, it has acquired
color - but we have been the colorists: it is the human intellect that has
made appearances appear and transported its erroneous basic conceptions
into things." "But when will we ever
be done with our caution and care? When will all these shadows of God
cease to darken our minds? When will we complete our de-deification of
nature? When may we begin to "naturalize" humanity in
terms of a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature?"
"What, if some day or
night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and
say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you
will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will
be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and
sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to
return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this
spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I
myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again
and again, and you with it, speck of dust!"
"All philosophers have the common failing of starting out from man as he is now and thinking they can reach their goal through an analysis of him. They involuntarily think of 'man' as an aeterna veritas, as something that remains constant in the midst of all flux, as a sure measure of things. Everything the philosopher has declared about man is, however, at bottom no more than a testimony as to the man of a very limited period of time. Lack of historical sense is the family failing of all philosophers."
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.