Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (/'ni?t??/;[3] German: ['f?i?d?? 'v?lh?lm 'ni?t?s??];

15 October 1844
25 August 1900) was a German philosopher, cultural critic, poet
, and Latin and Greek scholar whose work has exerted a profound influence on Wes
tern philosophy and modern intellectual history.[4][5][6][7] Beginning his caree
r as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy, he became the younges
t-ever occupant of the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel i
n 1869, at age 24. He resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him m
ost of his life, and he completed much of his core writing in the following deca
de.[8] In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and a complete loss of his men
tal faculties.[9] He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother (until
her death in 1897) and then his sister Elisabeth Frster-Nietzsche, and died in 19
00.[10]
Nietzsche's body of writing spanned philosophical polemics, poetry, cultural cri
ticism, and fiction, and drew widely on art, philology, history, religion, and s
cience. His writing displayed a fondness for aphorism and irony[11] while engagi
ng with a wide range of subjects including morality, aesthetics, tragedy, episte
mology, atheism, and consciousness. Some prominent elements of his philosophy in
clude his radical critique of reason and truth in favor of perspectivism; his no
tion of the Apollonian and Dionysian; his genealogical critique of religion and
Christian morality, and his related theory of master-slave morality;[4][12] his
aesthetic affirmation of existence in response to the "death of God" and the pro
found crisis of nihilism;[4] and his characterization of the human subject as th
e expression of competing wills, collectively understood as the will to power.[1
3] In his later work, he developed influential concepts such as the bermensch and
the doctrine of eternal recurrence, and became increasingly preoccupied with th
e creative powers of the individual to overcome social, cultural, and moral cont
exts in pursuit of aesthetic health.[7]
After his death, Elisabeth Frster-Nietzsche became the curator and editor of her
brother's manuscripts, reworking Nietzsche's unpublished writings to fit her own
German nationalist ideology while often contradicting or obfuscating his stated
opinions, which were explicitly opposed to antisemitism and nationalism. Throug
h her published editions, Nietzsche's work became associated with fascism and Na
zism;[14] 20th-century scholars contested this interpretation of his work and co
rrected editions of his writings were soon made available. His thought enjoyed r
enewed popularity in the 1960s, and his ideas have since had a profound impact o
n twentieth and early-twenty-first century thinkers across philosophy especially i
n schools of continental philosophy such as existentialism, postmodernism, and p
ost-structuralism as well as art, literature, psychology, politics, and popular cu
lture.[5][6][7][15][16]