Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)

Friedrich Nietzsche was a famous German philosopher of the late nineteenth century. Raised as a Lutheran, Nietzsche studied at the University of Leipzig where, in 1865, he was attracted to the atheistic beliefs of another German philosopher—Arthur Schopenhauer. From this point onward, Nietzsche became an opponent of Christianity. In addition to Schopenhauer, early influences on Nietzsche included Darwin’s theory of evolution and the German composer, Robert Wagner. (Nietzsche rejected Wagner, though, when Wagner became a Christian.)

Nietzsche questioned the traditional intellectual and moral foundation of western civilization and launched an aggressive attack on Christianity. He believed that the values and ideas of traditional Christianity had lost their power. Christianity may have had some benefit for an ancient society, but it no longer served our modern world well. Nietzsche was first to coin the phrase “God is dead” which means that traditional views of God have no meaning or value for today. He also argued that Christianity created a “slave morality” in which people were convinced to be weak under the guise of kindness. He called on people to reject the “morality of the herd” and stop being stupid followers of old beliefs. For Nietzsche, new values needed to replace old ones. The person who could rise above the old and outmoded beliefs could rise to the level of a “superman.” The superman (ubermensch) is the one who puts aside the herd mentality and has a “will to power”—the will to live in a more powerful state. The superman also focuses on the current life and not on some alleged afterlife.

Nietzsche argued that everything was the result of random chance and that humans, like animals, were just a part of nature. Also, the world has no purpose. For Nietzsche, there is no objective or universal truth. For him, philosophy, religion, metaphysics, and science failed to prove that there were absolute truths or absolute knowledge. These particular ideas have caused many in recent years to identify Nietzsche as “the father of postmodernism” although postmodernism did not begin for another sixty years. Nietzsche believed that Western civilization needed to find a better philosophy or it would be headed toward a period of nihilism.

The Nazis viewed Nietzsche as a precursor of their ideas, but it is probably not fair to label Nietzsche as a Nazi. During his life, Nietzsche was plagued by poor eyesight and migraine headaches. By 1889, he started to show signs of insanity and he lived in senile retirement until his death in 1900.