Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher, cultural critic, and classicist. He was one of the most influential and most misunderstood thinkers of the 19th century. He was born on 15 October 1844 in Röcken, a small village in Prussia. His father was a Lutheran pastor who died when Friedrich was four. His grandfather and great-grandfather were also pastors. He grew up in a household of women: his mother, sister, and two aunts. He was a brilliant student. At 24, before he had even finished his doctorate, he was offered the chair of classical philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland. He held this post for ten years. His first major book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), was a study of Greek culture that was considered wildly unorthodox by other classical scholars. His academic career stalled. Health problems forced him to retire at 35. He spent the next decade as a wandering philosopher, moving between Switzerland, Italy, and France. He wrote his major works in this period: Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), and On the Genealogy of Morality (1887). He was almost unknown during his lifetime. His books sold poorly. In January 1889, in Turin, Italy, Nietzsche collapsed in the street. He had a complete mental breakdown. He spent the last eleven years of his life in the care of his mother and then his sister, unable to work or speak coherently. He died on 25 August 1900, aged 55. After his death, his sister Elisabeth edited his unpublished notes to push them in a nationalist and antisemitic direction. She aligned his legacy with the rising German right and later with the Nazis, despite the fact that Nietzsche himself had opposed antisemitism sharply.
Nietzsche matters for three reasons. First, he asked uncomfortable questions about morality. For most of Western history, morality had been connected to religion, especially Christianity. Right and wrong were what God commanded. Nietzsche argued that in a world where belief in God was fading (he famously said 'God is dead'), morality had to be rethought from the ground up. What are our values actually based on? Where do they come from? Who benefits from them? His answers were sometimes shocking. But his questions are now unavoidable in moral philosophy.
Second, he was a master of a particular kind of writing. His books are not like other philosophy books. They use aphorisms, poetry, parables, and satire. They contradict themselves on purpose. They demand that the reader think rather than agree. This style has influenced an enormous range of later writers, from the existentialists to postmodern theorists like Foucault and Derrida. Reading Nietzsche is a different experience from reading most other philosophers.
Third, he matters because his work was twisted after his death. His sister, who controlled his unpublished writings, edited them to make him sound like a German nationalist and antisemite. The Nazis later adopted him as a forerunner. This was a distortion. Nietzsche himself had explicitly rejected antisemitism and German nationalism. The rescue of his actual views from this distortion, by scholars like Walter Kaufmann from the 1950s onwards, is a major case study in how thinkers can be misused. Reading Nietzsche honestly today means both taking his real provocations seriously and refusing the false versions of him.
For a first introduction, Michael Tanner's Nietzsche: A Very Short Introduction is clear and reliable. For a lively narrative biography, Sue Prideaux's I Am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche (2018) is excellent and won several prizes. To read Nietzsche himself, start with Twilight of the Idols, a short late book, or the aphorisms of Beyond Good and Evil. Walter Kaufmann's translations (Penguin) are generally considered the best in English. The BBC's In Our Time has episodes on Nietzsche's major works.
For deeper reading, The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil, and On the Genealogy of Morality are the key mature works. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is more ambitious and more difficult.
Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950) was the book that rescued Nietzsche from the Nazi version and remains an important study.
Life as Literature engages his style seriously. Maudemarie Clark's Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy is strong on perspectivism.
Nietzsche was an antisemite and a proto-Nazi.
He was not. He explicitly rejected antisemitism, mocked German nationalism, and broke with Richard Wagner partly because of Wagner's antisemitism. The Nazi version of Nietzsche was created after his death by his sister Elisabeth, who edited his unpublished notes and pushed them in a nationalist direction. The Nazis adopted this distorted version. Walter Kaufmann and later scholars have thoroughly documented the distortion. Students reading Nietzsche today should know that the Nazi version was not Nietzsche's own view. It was a posthumous appropriation.
The 'will to power' means trying to dominate other people.
Nietzsche meant something deeper. Will to power is the drive in all living things to express and extend their capacities. An artist creates. A scholar understands. A friend strengthens a friendship. A plant grows toward light. All of these are will to power. Domination of others is one possible form of will to power but not its essence. Reading will to power as 'be cruel to people' turns Nietzsche into a cartoon villain. His actual concept is more interesting and more ambiguous.
Nietzsche said all moral values are equal and there is no truth.
He did not. He was a perspectivist, not a relativist. He believed every viewpoint comes from a specific standpoint, but he did not believe all standpoints were equally good. He judged some perspectives as more life-affirming, more honest, more rich than others. Slave morality, for example, he thought was a worse perspective than master morality. This is the opposite of 'anything goes'. It is a strong evaluative judgement. Students who read Nietzsche as a relativist miss his actual ethical seriousness.
The Übermensch is a specific race or type of person.
It is not. Nietzsche explicitly rejected racial theories. The Übermensch is an ideal of human self-overcoming, available in principle to any human willing to move beyond inherited values and create new ones. Nazi propaganda linked the Übermensch to the Aryan race, but this link is not in Nietzsche's own writing. The concept is more of a philosophical challenge than a description of real groups. Reading it otherwise distorts Nietzsche and replicates the Nazi misuse.
For research-level engagement, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries on Nietzsche are outstanding. Brian Leiter's Nietzsche on Morality is a major contemporary analytic study. Raymond Geuss's essays on Nietzsche connect him to later continental thought. For the Nazi appropriation problem, Steven Aschheim's The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany is definitive. The journal Nietzsche-Studien (mostly in German) publishes current scholarship. For the posthumous notebooks, the critical editions by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (still being translated into English) replace the tendentious Will to Power edition Elisabeth created.
Your feedback helps other teachers and helps us improve TeachAnyClass.