Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher whose attacks on conventional morality, religion, and the comfortable assumptions of European civilization made him one of the most provocative and widely misread thinkers of the modern era. Born in 1844 in Röcken, Prussia, the son of a Lutheran pastor who died when Nietzsche was four, he became a professor of classical philology at Basel at twenty-four before his first major work, The Birth of Tragedy, appeared in 1872. His subsequent writings — Human, All Too Human, The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals — challenged readers to examine the values they had inherited and to ask whether those values served life or diminished it. His concept of the will to power, the eternal recurrence, and the Übermensch were all attempts to articulate a philosophy adequate to a world without God. He suffered a mental collapse in 1889 from which he never recovered, dying in 1900.

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