Abstract

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was born in the village of Röcken, in Prussian Saxony, the son and grandson of Lutheran ministers. He studied theology and classical philosophy at the University of Bonn, but in 1865 he gave up theology and went to Leipzig. Then he discovered the composer Richard Wagner and the philosophers Schopenhauer and F. A. Lange (author of History of Materialism and Critique of its Present Significance, 1866). He won a prize for an essay on Diogenes Laertius, the biographer of ancient Greek philosophers, and was appointed associate professor of classical philology at Basel, when he was only twenty-four. He became a full professor the following year. His principle writings between then and 1879, when illness made him resign from the university, were The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and Human, All Too Human (1878). After his resignation his principal writings were Daybreak (1881), The Gay Science (1882), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Parts 1 and 2 published 1883, Part 3 published 1884, Part 4 issued privately 1885, published 1892), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), The Wagner Case (1888) and Twilight of the Idols (1888). Nietzsche became insane in January 1889, and vegetated until his death in 1900. His madness was probably tertiary syphilis, which he may have contracted while ministering to sick soldiers in 1870 as a medical orderly in the Franco-Prussian war.