1844 – 1900

The work of Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher, cultural critic, composer, poet, philologist, and Latin and Greek scholar has exerted a profound influence on Western philosophy and modern intellectual history.

One of the most profound, enigmatic and ultimately controversial philosophers in the whole of the Western canon, Nietzsche’s work has been variously appropriated, vilified, venerated or simply misunderstood. Through the relationship of his sister, Elisabeth, with the national socialists in Germany, Nietzsche’s philosophy has wrongly gained the reputation of supporting Nazism, though his concept of the  Übermensch or ‘superman’, is in fact closer to Aristotle’s man of virtue than the glorified Aryan hero. Elisabeth’s edited and altered collection of Nietzsche’s writings, published shortly after his death as The Will to Power, has done much to mar the reception of Nietzsche’s thought in the twentieth century. As a result, it may be another hundred years before his philosophy is widely appreciated for the genius that it is. Freud said of Nietzsche that ‘he had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any other man who ever lived or was ever likely to live’.

Son of a Protestant clergyman, Nietzsche gained a professorship at the University of Basel at the remarkable age of only twenty-four. After ten years, ill health forced him to retire into a solitudinous but vagrant lifestyle across Europe, whence he devoted himself to writing and recuperation. He eventually received worldwide fame during the last decade or so of his life. Of this he was probably unaware, since, in 1889, Nietzsche suffered a final and irreversible breakdown and remained insane until his death.

Nietzsche’s writings are varied and cover diverse topics, from ethics and religion to metaphysics and epistemology (study of the source, nature, and limitations of knowledge). He is most renowned, however, for his concept of ‘the will to power’. Influenced by Schopenhauer to a certain extent, albeit without so much metaphysical baggage, Nietzsche saw the fundamental driving force of the individual as expressed in the need to dominate and control the external forces operating upon him. As such, Nietzsche’s individual requires what the existentialists would later give him, the power to be master of his own destiny.

The frustration of this urge is responsible for the existence of various moral systems and religious institutions, all of which attempt to bind and subdue the will. Perhaps because of his father’s influence, Nietzsche was particularly hostile to Christianity, which he famously once described as being a ‘slave morality’. In it he saw the resentment of the weak towards the strong. Those who failed to have the courage to master their own passions, who lacked, ultimately, inner strength of character, sought revenge on those stronger than themselves, not in this life, but in a fictional ‘other’ world, where some other power, namely God, would wreak vengeance on their behalf.

Unlike Schopenhauer, Nietzsche did not see the will to power as something to be resisted, but pursued and affirmed. It is, Nietzsche insists, the exuberance of spring, the affirmation of life, the saying of ‘Yes!’ However, as already outlined, Nietzsche did not advocate the dominance of the strong over the weak, nor suggest that mastery of the will to power belonged to some special elite by virtue of birth. Rather he described, historically, how the domination of the strong results in, and is necessary to, what we would now call, the ‘evolutionary progress’ of the human being. But strength, as Nietzsche understands it, is not constituted in physical, but rather psychical, force. The strong are those who are more complete, as human beings, who have learnt to sublimate and control their passions, to channel the will to power into a creative force.

Neither, contrary to popular misunderstanding, did Nietzsche endorse the ‘master morality’ – moral systems peculiar to the aristocracy – although it is true he thought it more life affirming than ‘slave morality’, which he insists is typified within Christianity. Rather, Nietzsche held that the strong had a duty towards the less fortunate: ‘The man of virtue, too, helps the unfortunate, but not, or almost not, out of pity, but prompted by an urge which is begotten by the excess of power’.

. Previously (Philosophy) Essential Thinkers: Plato