Friedrich Nietzsche
1844–1900 12 entries
Biography
Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher and classical philologist whose ideas have deeply shaped modern thought. The son of a Lutheran pastor, he was born in Röcken in Saxony and became a professor at the University of Basel at only twenty-four. Ill health forced him to give up teaching in 1879, and for the next ten years he lived modestly in Switzerland, Italy and the south of France, writing one book after another. Among them are The Birth of Tragedy, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality.
He wrote of the death of God, the will to power, eternal recurrence and the overman, and in short, sharp aphorisms he questioned the values of his age. In January 1889 he collapsed in Turin and never recovered his mind, and he spent his last eleven years in the care of his mother and his sister. His sister later edited and distorted his unpublished notes, but his work went on to influence the philosophy, literature and psychology of the twentieth century.