Nietzsche

German philosopher and classical philologist (1844–1900), born in Röcken, professor of Greek philology at Basel at the extraordinarily young age of twenty-four, until chronic illness forced him to abandon teaching in 1879 to devote himself, in a constant itinerancy through European boarding houses, to a philosophical body of work written in an aphoristic, literary style without precedent in the discipline. An early intellectual disciple of Schopenhauer and admirer of Wagner, from whom he painfully distanced himself, his first work, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), proposes the tension between the Apollonian principle (order, form, individuation) and the Dionysian (intoxication, dissolution, cosmic unity) as the key to Greek culture and, by extension, to all artistic creation. His central work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85), a prophetic philosophical poem written in biblically inspired prose, announces the death of God — the collapse of all the transcendent foundations of Western morality — and proposes two responses: eternal recurrence, the idea that we should live each moment as though it would repeat infinitely and identically, and the Übermensch, the ideal of a human being capable of creating their own values after the collapse of the old ones. In Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality he developed his genealogical critique of morality: values that seem eternal and universal — especially the Christian opposition between good and evil — actually have a concrete historical origin, often rooted in the resentment of the weak toward the strong, and conceal relations of power that must be unmasked. His notion of 'will to power' as the fundamental vital drive of all existence was deplorably distorted and appropriated by Nazism — partly through his sister's editorial manipulations — a distortion that subsequent academic philology has spent decades dismantling, and today Nietzsche is recognised as one of the most profound and influential thinkers on modernity, morality, language and the subject in all of Western philosophy.

22 works

• Beyond Good and Evil
• Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays
• Ecce Homo
• Homer and Classical Philology
• Human, All-Too-Human A Book for Free Spirits, Part 1
• Human, All-Too-Human A Book for Free Spirits, Part 2
• On the Use and Abuse of History for Life
• Richard Wagner in Bayreuth
• Schopenhauer as Educator
• Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche
• The Antichrist
• The Birth of Tragedy; or, Hellenism and Pessimism
• The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms.
• The Dawn of Day
• The Genealogy of Morals
• The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza)
• The Twilight of the Idols; or, How to Philosophize with the Hammer. The Antichri
• The Will to Power
• The Will to Power (de)
• Thoughts Out of Season, Part I (David Strauss; Richard Wagner in Bayreuth)
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra (de)