Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche attacked the foundations of Western morality and spent his last eleven years insane. Born in Röcken in Saxony in 1844, the son of a Lutheran pastor who died of a brain disease when he was four, he was raised in a household of women and was a brilliant classicist, appointed professor at Basel at twenty-four before completing his doctorate. He served as a medical orderly in the Franco-Prussian war and contracted illnesses that left him with migraines, vomiting and near-blindness for the rest of his life. He resigned his chair in 1879 and spent a decade moving between boarding houses in Switzerland and Italy, writing in short bursts between attacks. He was devoted to Wagner and broke with him bitterly over Parsifal's Christianity and Wagner's antisemitism. His work is aphoristic and deliberately unsystematic. He argued that Christian morality was an inversion invented by the weak to constrain the strong; that values are created rather than discovered; that the death of God, announced by a madman in The Gay Science, removes the ground for the morality that outlived belief; and that the response is to affirm life without consolation, which is what the Übermensch and eternal recurrence are for. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morals followed in the 1880s, largely unread. He collapsed in Turin in January 1889, reportedly embracing a horse being beaten, and never recovered. His sister Elisabeth, an antisemite and later a Nazi sympathiser, took control of his papers and edited them into something the party could use.

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