Friedrich Nietzsche Research Paper

In the fall of 1864, Nietzsche began a course of study in theology and philology in Bonn; in 1865 he continued his study of philology in Leipzig and finally decided against the theological career which had been designated for him. Although an investigation concerning Diogenes Laertius submitted for a university competition was awarded a prize, Nietzsche had plans for writing a philosophical dissertation concerning Kant and even considered changing his field of study to chemistry. Neither plan came to fruition. Instead, following completion of his military service (1867–8) with the mounted canoneers in Naumburg, the 24 year-old student was unexpectedly named Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in February 1869 with a recommendation from the influential teacher Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl.

After a brief tour in the Franco–German War, broken off after some weeks due to severe illness, Nietzsche applied in January 1871 for a vacant chair of philosophy at the University of Basel, but without success. Nietzsche had close contacts to his colleague Jacob Burckhardt, whose course of lectures—later to be published under the title Observations of World History—he attended in the summer of 1872. He also maintained a friendship with Richard and Cosima Wagner from the very beginning of his tenure in Basel.

In The Birth of Tragedy, his first publication, Nietzsche interpreted Greek culture in the spirit of Schopenhauer as the result of a reconciliation between two drives which mutually cultivate and challenge one another: the Apollinian, standing for those concepts created and formed by art, and the Dionysian, being the deeper lying, formless foundation of the existence of its counterpart. Nietzsche believed that the theoretical approach to science beginning with Socrates and continuing into the present was in crass opposition to life, and hoped this approach might be overcome through Wagner’s cultural-political plans. His ambition to act as a political author and educator of the German people was formative for the composition of five lectures On the Future of Our Educational Institutions, as well as for a series of shorter essays which were written between 1871 and 1873 and first published in the posthumous works: Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, which influenced our view of pre-Socratic philosophy decisively. On the Pathos of Truth (1872) and Truth and Lie in an Extra-moral Sense (1873) contain Nietzsche’s radical critique of metaphysics and knowledge, which seeks to prove both truth and knowledge to be measures set by humans. The Warning to all Germans (1873) was conceived as a programmatic essay to accompany Wagner’s opera festival in Bayreuth and raised the demand for a kind of Machtpolitik under the aegis of culture.

Between 1873 and 1876, Nietzsche published four critical essays on culture and contemporary topics, the Untimely Meditations: the first work contains a sharp polemic against David Friedrich Strauss, who is represented as the very model of cultural philistinism in the academic establishment of the time. Nietzsche came out against the historicism of the nineteenth century in the second work and demanded a revision of the value of history for human life, such that historical inquiry might be placed at the service of the living moment. In the third and fourth works, Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagnerare portrayed as paradigmatic examples of the unique individual with a heroic life, to which Nietzsche attached hopes for a rebirth of culture as an aesthetic unity of all life experience.

The first symptoms of physical illness had become apparent during Nietzsche’s time at Pforta. Beginning in 1873, Nietzsche was plagued by ever more frequent migraine-like attacks which forced him to interrupt his teaching. In addition, Nietzsche suffered from a chronically upset stomach and severe pain in the eyes. He took a leave of absence from the university for two semesters in the fall of 1876, after various therapies and several spa-visits showed no effect on his health. The intensity and frequency of his attacks increased so dramatically that in 1879, at only 34 years of age, Nietzsche submitted a request for his dismissal from the university. He obtained a pension settlement which was unusually generous for the time, but nevertheless extremely modest. Living on his pension from the University of Basel, Nietzsche led an unstable, lonely existence in constant search of favorable climates. He spent his winters mostly on the French and Italian Rivieras (Venice, Turin, Nice), his summers in SilsMaria in Engadin. With the exception of occasional visits to Germany, his social contact was limited almost entirely to correspondence with Lou von Salome, Paul Ree, Franz Overbeck, Carl von Gersdorff, and Heinrich Koselitz. Preoccupation with the history of his own illness was to influence Nietzsche’s concepts of ‘health’ and ‘illness’ as philosophical and existential categories, and played a significant role in his diagnosis of culture.

With the publication of Human, All-too-human in 1878, and following the final break with Wagner, Nietzsche completed a transition to an independent manner of thinking in the style of an exposing critique. This committed him to a new literary style—a kind of essay writing in nuce. In the aphoristic works Mixed Opinions and Sayings (1879), The Wanderer and his Shadow (1880) (both published in a 2nd edition as Volume 2 of Human, All-too-human) and Dawn. With Thoughts Concerning Moral Prejudices (1881), Nietzsche achieved fundamental insights into the origin, capacity, and importance of moral acts through his genealogical and psychological method. He thus arrived at a devastating result by showing the immorality of morals. With the loss of all transcendent and historical certainties there could only be for Nietzsche an ‘experimental philosophy’ founded on the basis of the perspectivism of human existence, a condition of the finite worldliness of human knowledge and action. It is this ‘experimental philosophy’ which Nietzsche draws from physical experience in The Gay Science (Books 1–4, 1882).

Nietzsche created his ‘ideal’ of a creative combination of all human contradictions through the literary rebirth of a Persian sage in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Parts 1 and 2, 1883, Part 3, 1884, Part 4 as a private publication). Here we find the conception of the Ubermensch or superman, as well as the doctrine of the eternal return of the same. We also find a theory of the will to power as the original unity of all mental and physical strength and potential—a theory intended to lend Nietzsche’s practical expectations of a revaluation of all values a metaphysical foundation. In the years 1886 and 1887 Nietzsche began a retrospective of his previous works, some of which he edited anew, added to, and prefaced. He thereby consciously sought a connection to his previous critical and disillusioning phase, begun with the first book of aphorisms in 1878. Simultaneously, the most important critiques of morality appeared: Beyond Good and E il (1886) and On the Genealogy of Morals (1887). In this last work Nietzsche advances the thesis that Judeo-Christian religion has not only provoked a revaluation of all values with its life-hostile morality, but that—in an erstwhile established allegiance with modern science—it threatened the future of humanity. Nietzsche saw salvation from this threat in the merciless destruction of the old values, which would thereby both overcome nihilism and make a renewed revaluation of values possible.

In 1887 came yet another serious deterioration in Nietzsche’s health. He nevertheless wrote his Hymn for Life at the end of the year, the only musical composition he ever submitted to press, and was extraordinarily productive in the months that followed. In the spring of 1888 Nietzsche wrote The Case of Wagner while continuing his main work, Will to Power. In the course of the year 1888 he slipped into a kind of ecstatic state which was hardly burdened by sickness. This enabled him to be immensely productive. Having broken off preparations for his main work, Nietzsche concentrated with increasing haste on other projects: a summary of the main themes of the planned work, Twilight of the Idols (1889) and The Antichrist (1894), a final reckoning with Richard Wagner in Nietzsche contra Wagner (1894), the auto- biography Ecce Homo (1908), and a late collection of poems, Dionysian Dithyrambs (1894). Signs of a growing public interest in Nietzsche’s work increased, and Georg Brandes held lectures on Nietzsche in Copenhagen.

An expression of Nietzsche’s emotional state in this period are effusive letters in which he predicts immanent decisions concerning his fate. He portrays himself as playing the key role in these decisions. There is evidence of a progressive loss of a realistic view of himself by the end of 1888; Nietzsche seemed to be in a delirium of exaltation. Texts and fragments from the turn of the year document a gradual crossing over into insanity. In January 1889 Nietzsche experienced a mental breakdown, and he lived thereafter in a kind of mental derangement. His physicians’ diagnosis—until this day uncertain—was progressive paralysis, that is, a continual decline of the activity of the brain, presumably as the result of a latent, long-term syphilis infection.

Following Nietzsche’s brief stay in the psychiatric clinic in Basel and a year-long residence at the psychiatric clinic in Jena, his mother selflessly took over his care. Nietzsche himself was in a state of progressive dementia and lost nearly all physical and mental capacities in the course of the final 10 years of his life. Nietzsche’s sister took over his care at her Villa Silberblick in 1897, following the death of their mother. Nietzsche’s sister’s relationship to the sick man and her connection to his work were rather ambivalent, however.

At the time of his death, on August 25, 1900, in Weimar, Nietzsche had long since become a symbolic figure in European literature. Today he is, as a philosopher, the modern classic par excellence.

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