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A Prussian-born philologist and philosopher, produced critiques of religion, morality, contemporary culture, and philosophy. These works centered on what he viewed as fundamental questions regarding the life-affirming and life-denying qualities of different attitudes and beliefs. Nietzsche's works feature unique, free-form stylization – combined with a wide philosophical breadth – through the use of analyses, etymologies, punning, parables, paradoxes, aphorisms, and contradictions, employed to demonstrate the inadequacies of normative modes of thought.
In 1864 Nietzsche received an important introduction to literature, particularly that of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and for the first time experienced a distance from his family life in a small-town Christian environment.
In 1872, Nietzsche published his first book, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music.
Between 1873 and 1876, Nietzsche published separately four long essays: David Strauss: the Confessor and the Writer, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, Schopenhauer as Educator, and Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. The four essays shared the orientation of a cultural critique, challenging the developing German culture along lines suggested by Schopenhauer and Wagner. Starting in 1873, Nietzsche also accumulated the notes later posthumously published as Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks.
With the publication of Human, All Too Human in 1878, a book of aphorisms on subjects ranging from metaphysics to morality and from religion to the sexes, Nietzsche's departure from the philosophy of Wagner and Schopenhauer became evident.
Free philosopher (1879–1888)
In 1879, Nietzsche published Mixed Opinions and Maxims. The following year, he published The Wanderer and His Shadow.
In 1881 Nietzsche published Daybreak: Reflections on Moral Prejudices, and in 1882 the first part of The Gay Science.
1883, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
In 1886 Nietzsche printed Beyond Good and Evil at his own expense.
In 1887, Nietzsche quickly wrote the polemic On the Genealogy of Morals. The Will to Power.
In 1888 his writings and letters began to reveal a higher estimation of his own status and 'fate'. He overestimated the increasing response to his writings, above all, for the recent polemic, The Case of Wagner. On his 44th birthday, after completing The Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist, he decided to write the autobiography Ecce Homo.
Key concepts
Nietzsche's disagreements with many other philosophers, such as Kant, Plato, Schopenhauer, and Spinoza, populate his texts. Whether one views the conflicting elements in his writings as intentional or not, his various ideas continue to have influence.
In Daybreak: Reflections on Moral Prejudices, Nietzsche de-emphasizes the role of hedonism as a motivator and accentuates the role of a "feeling of power". His relativism, both moral and cultural, and his critique of Christianity also reaches greater maturity.
Main article: Beyond Good and Evil
Of the four "late-period" writings of Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future most closely resembles the aphoristic style of his middle period. Therein he identifies the qualities of genuine philosophers: imagination, self-assertion, danger, originality and the "creation of values" - all else he considers incidental. Continuing from this he contests some key pre-suppositions such as "self-consciousness" and "free-will" as used by some of the great members of the philosophic tradition. Instead of these traditional analyses, which Nietzsche paints as insufficient, he offers the will to power as an explanatory device, being part of his "perspective of life" which he regards as "beyond good and evil", denying a universal morality for all human beings. A tone of moral relativism and perspectivism dominates throughout.
On the Genealogy of Morals
The three essays that make up On the Genealogy of Morals, A Polemic represent the last of Nietzsche's works before his flurry of activity in 1888.
* 'Good and Evil', 'Good and Bad'" continues Nietzsche's discussion of the Master-Slave Morality, maintaining that the slave morality (which labels "good" and "evil" compared to the less judgmental and more masterful "good" and "bad") arises from a denial of life — as opposed to the vitalism of the master morality. Nietzsche identifies ressentiment as the driving force of the slave morality.
* 'Guilt', 'Bad Conscience', and Related Matters investigates the sources of conscience, especially "bad conscience", and names cruelty as the base of punishment and self-punishment. Cruelty as punishment of others provides gratification because thereby one imposes one's will over another; cruelty to oneself happens through "bad conscience", whereby one punishes oneself because of not holding to a self-imposed standard of dependability. In this way Nietzsche characterizes altruistic, "selfless", behavior as immense cruelty to oneself by imposing another's will over oneself, an explanation he offers for Christianity and monotheism in general.
* What Do Ascetic Ideals Mean? continues the theme. Nietzsche describes how such a paradoxical action as asceticism might serve the interests of life: through asceticism one can attain mastery over oneself. In this way one can express both ressentiment and the will to power. Nietzsche describes the morality of the ascetic priest as characterized by Christianity as one where, finding oneself in pain, one places the blame for the pain on oneself and thereby attempts and attains mastery over the world, a tactic that Nietzsche places behind secular science as well as behind religion.
In The Antichrist, Curse on Christianity, Nietzsche proposes an "Anti-Christian" morality for the future: the transvaluation of all values.
"It is evident at once that Nietzsche is far superior to Kant and Hegel as a stylist; but it also seems that as a philosopher he represents a sharp decline—and men have not been lacking who have not considered him a philosopher at all—because he had no “system.” Yet this argument is hardly cogent. Schelling and Hegel, Spinoza and Aquinas had their systems; in Kant's and Plato's case the word is far less applicable; and of the many important philosophers who very definitely did not have systems one need only mention Socrates and many of the pre-Socratics. Not only can one defend Nietzsche on this score—how many philosophers today have systems?—but one must add that he had strong philosophic reasons for not having a system."
—Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist
Nietzsche's influence on continental philosophy increased dramatically after the second World War, especially among the French intellectual Left and post-structuralists. Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Michel Foucault all owe a heavy debt to Nietzsche. Gilles Deleuze and Pierre Klossowski wrote monographs drawing new attention to Nietzsche's work, and a 1972 conference at Cérisy-la-Salle ranks as the most important event in France for a generation's reception of Nietzsche.
Harold Bloom has described Nietzsche as "Emerson's belated rival". Bloom's theory of the "anxiety of influence" betrays a Nietzschean influence.
