From Plato and Aristotle to Locke and Kant, moral and political theorists build their theories on the founding principle that human beings are especially valuable, somehow preeminent in the natural order, usually by virtue of reason or intellect, possessing thereby a nobility and grandeur that singles them out. Other thinkers, however, begin with a different estimate of the human and its place in nature; to them the proper way to understand humankind is to appreciate the impulses, desires, and instincts that ground all animal behavior and hence human action as well. Morality and political conduct, on such a view, are manifestations of these desires and drives, for example, the desire for self-preservation. On this view, human beings are to be considered like any other natural beings. Among such thinkers are Hobbes, Spinoza, Freud, and, perhaps the most bold and dramatic of all, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900).
In an unpublished fragment of 1873, Nietzsche expresses this view about human intelligence with a powerful image:
In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge.… After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.… how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened.
(from On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense)
According to Nietzsche, then, reason or intellect is no special capacity. It comes and goes like other natural abilities, as do knowledge, truth, and morality, too. All are tools of nature and must be studied historically, almost anthropologically or biologically, as devices that manifest the deepest drives of human nature. Western morality and religion incorporate many traditions, some that repress such central drives and others that enable them to flourish. Philosophy works to unearth these various traditions, to clarify them, and to enhance the lives of the philosophers and artists who do so. The proper way to study morality is not to seek to ground a special set of principles in some universal or transcendent source; rather, it is to examine and expose the features of various moralities as they have functioned in societies throughout history, that is, to study moralities historically and to see how some do and some do not repress the natural drives that characterize the human animal.
Such a conception—of morality as a historical, natural phenomenon and not as a set of universal principles—is one teaching of a powerful, influential set of works written by Nietzsche in the second half of the nineteenth century. These works are the products of a brilliant student of classical philology who broke out of the bonds of technical scholarship and welded a deep affinity with ancient culture to rare literary ability. Nietzsche was once attacked as a source of Nazi ideology; more recently, he is frequently cited as an inspiration for deconstructionists. But in his own day he was famous and controversial on a variety of fronts, not least of all for his bold style and his withering critique of Christianity and religion.
Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, in Rocken, Germany, where his father was a Lutheran pastor. In 1849, when he was nearly five, his father died, and Nietzsche spent his youth surrounded by his mother, his sister Elisabeth, who was two years younger than Nietzsche, his grandmother, and two maiden aunts. In 1864 he entered the University of Bonn to study theology. By the next year, however, Nietzsche had transferred to Leipzig to study classical philology and was hard at work on a dissertation on the classical Greek poet Theognis. The results were a lecture, an essay, and, as Nietzsche put it, his “birth as a philologist.” During the next few years he was deeply involved with a variety of projects, from essays on Diogenes Laertius and on Democritus to studies of history and teleology.
In 1869 the brilliant young scholar was appointed to a professorship at Basel University in Switzerland. At about this time, he first met the composer Richard Wagner, who became a powerful influence on his work. With the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Nietzsche volunteered and served for a short time as a medical orderly. When he contracted dysentary and diphtheria, however, he was forced to return home. His deteriorating health and insomnia accompanied him for the rest of his life. By 1872, his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, was published; in it he explored the emergence of Greek tragedy out of music and its ruin at the hands of the rational philosophy of Socrates.
Nietzsche’s health was constantly bad. By 1876 his painful physical condition mirrored his relationship with Wagner, which finally fell apart. Wagner had become a commercial success and the center of a cult at the opera center at Bayreuth. Wagner’s self-importance, insensitivity, anti-Semitism, and total neglect of Nietzsche’s work repelled Nietzsche, whose physical pain and psychological torment was expressed in his writings. During this period, his work, no longer scholarly, appeared at a steady rate—essays on David Strauss, the New Testament scholar and young radical Hegelian, on philosophy and Greek tragedy, on the uses and disadvantages of history, on Schopenhauer, and much else. Several of these essays were published, from 1873 to 1876, as Untimely Meditations, of which On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life is the second. In 1878, Human, All Too Human appeared, then the Gay Science in 1882, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Parts One and Two) in 1883, Beyond Good and Evil in 1886, On the Geneology of Morality in 1887, and the Twilight of the Idols in 1889.
During these extraordinarily productive but pain-racked years, Nietzsche was rarely at rest. His bad health forced him to clinics and convalescence, and illness interrupted his teaching. By 1876 he had stopped teaching altogether at the university, and in 1879 he formally resigned. The decade of the 1880s was filled with suffering, sickness, writing, and the interminable moving, mostly in Switzerland and Italy, in a vain effort to find a comfortable climate and peaceful surroundings. For much of these years Nietzsche and his entourage traveled from Genoa to Sils-Maria, back and forth, with occasional trips to Venice, Nice, Naumburg, and elsewhere. Then, in January of 1889, Nietzsche collapsed in the street in Turin, Italy, hopelessly insane. After brief periods in clinics, Nietzsche was released into the care of his mother, in whose home in Jena he lived until his death on August 25, 1900. His autobiographical work, Ecce Homo, written in 1888, was published in 1908.
Recommended Readings
Aschheim, Steven E. The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993.
Danto, Arthur. Nietzsche as Philosopher. New York: Macmillan, 1965.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981.
Magnus, Bernd and Kathleen M. Higgins. The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Nehamas, Alexander. Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985.
Schacht, Richard. Nietzsche. London: Routledge, 1983.
Solomon, Robert (ed.). Nietzsche. Garden City: Doubleday, 1973.
Strong, Tracy. Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.
Thiele, Paul. Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.
Warren, Mark. Nietzsche and Political Thought. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1988.