Nietzsche, Friederich (Wilhelm) (1844-1900)
Nietzsche, Friederich (Wilhelm) (1844-1900)
Philosopher and critic, born in Röcken, Germany. He was a strongly religious child and a brilliant undergraduate, accepting the chair of classical philology at Basel (1869-79) before graduating. Influenced by Schopenhauer, he dedicated his first book, Die Geburt der Tragödie (1872, The Birth of Tragedy) to his friend Wagner, whose operas he regarded as the true successors to Greek tragedy. He determined to give his age new values, Schopenhauer's "will to power" serving as the basic principle. His major work, Also sprach Zarathustra (1883-5, Thus Spoke Zarathustra) develops the idea of the Übermensch "overperson". Much of his esoteric doctrine appealed to the Nazis, and he was a major influence on existentialism. In 1889 he had a mental breakdown, from which he never recovered.
Let me expand on that "strongly relgious" point with a quote from R.J. Hollingsdale's Nietzsche: "He was the heir of a line of Lutheran pastors going back to the beginning of the seventeenth century, his father and both grandfathers were Lutheran ministers, and he lived the first five years of his life in a parsongage and later in an equally pious home; . . . ". The American translator Walter Kaufmann seems to favor an angrier, more reactionary Nietzsche, while I see Hollingsdale as focusing on him as having faithfully pursued some traditional Lutheran values and metaphysics towards their ultimate logical conclusions. In the introduction to his translation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Penguin, 1961), Hollingsdale did a quick little analogy which I've always found helpful:
Amor fati: Lutheran acceptance of the events of life as divinely willed, with the consequent affirmation of life as such as divine, as a product of the divine will, and the implication that to hate life is blasphemous.
Eternal recurrence: as a consequence of amor fati the extremest formula of life-affirmation, strongly influenced by the Christian concepts of eternal life and the unalterable nature of God: what is, "is now and ever shall be, world without end."
Will to power: divine grace. The clue to the connexion is the concept of "self-overcoming", which is one of Nietzsche's terms for sublimation and the hinge upon which the theory of the will to power turns from being a nihilist to a positive and jouful conception. The corresponding Christian conception is that of unregenerate nature redeemed by the force of God's grace. In bothe conceptions the central idea is that a certain inner quality (grace/sublimated will to power) elevates man (or some men) above the rest of nature. The pathos with which "will to power" is invested derives to some extent from "Thy will be done" and the juxtaposition of "power" and "glory", together with the Christian doctrine that to God's will all things are possible.
Live dangerously!: "Take up thy Cross, and follow me"- Christian deprecation of the easy life.
Great noontide: the Second Coming, the Last Judgement, the division of the sheep from the goats, the wheat from the chaff.
Superman: God as creator and "highest being", the "Son of Man" as God, man as the receptacle of divine grace who rejoices at the idea of eternity: the embodiment and actualization of everything regarded as desirable. What the Christian says of God, Nietzsche says in very nearly the same words of the Superman, namely: "Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever."
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