Friedrich Nietzche: He who killed God
“After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands” (Brobjer). This quote said by the famous philosopher Friedrich Nietzche defines perfectly his view on God and in certain ideologies in general. To sum up Friedrich Nietzche, he was a German philosopher of the lat 19th century who challenged the foundations of Christianity and traditional morality. He was interested in the enhancement of individual and cultural health, and believed in life, creativity, power, and the realities of the world we live in, rather than those situated in a world beyond. He believed in the idea of “life-affirmation” which is an honest questioning of all doctrines that drain life’s expansive energies which is extremely unpopular at this time. Friedrich Nietzche was a man who has two death dates. One of few who thought like no other and went against social norms which was completely unheard of during the 19th century. Thats is who Friedrich Nietzche is, a mad man who was brilliant for what he did.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born in a small German village of Rocken bei Lutzen on October 15, 1844. Fun fact: his birthday is the same as Prussian King, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, which is whom Nietzsche is named after. He grew up in a family of ministers and church goers. He was raised on Christian beliefs and was being molded into a future pastor. Nietzsche’s childhood was one of death and instability. When he was almost five years of age, his father, Karl Ludwig Nietzsche died from a brain ailment. Shortly after was the death of Nietzsche’s two-year-old brother, Ludwig Joseph. Having only lived a few yards from the church that his father pastored, young Nietzche and the rest of his family moved to nearby Naumburg an der saale.
Having started off his life in a very difficult situation, Nietzsche attended a first-rate boarding school to prepare him for a university education and a better life. The boarding school was a very strict religious school that did not allow for outside the box thinking. After graduating from the boarding school, named Schulpforta, Nietzche entered the University of Bonn in 1864 as a theology and philology student. After touching base on the subject, his interests soon gravitated more exclusively towards philology. The involves a discipline which then centered upon the interpretation of classical and biblical texts. He began to gain knowledge beyond belief after attending lectures from very prominent philosophers and writing essays on poets of the 6th century including Aristotle. This was the beginning of his philosophic work.
In 1867, when Nietzsche was about to turn 23, he entered a required military service and was assigned to an equestrian field artillery regiment close to Naumburg, where he lived with his mother. His military career did not last long, as he was trying to make a leap-mount into the saddle, he suffered a serious chest injury and was put on sick leave after his chest refused to heal. This only led him back to the University of Leipzing.
After taking course there and listening to lectures, the University of Basel in Switzerland offered Nietzsche a position in their classical philology department. At Basel, Nietzsche’s satisfaction with his life among his philology colleagues was limited, and he established closer intellectual ties to the historians Franz Overbeck and Jacob Burkhardt whose lectures he attended. All three became very good friends as they shared experiences and ideas. Nietzsche remained in Switzerland between 1872 and 1879 where he would go on to write “On the Origin of Moral Feelings”. He also completed a series of four studies on contemporary German Culture, “Unfashionable Observations”, which focuses on (1) the historian of religion and culture critic, David Strauss, (2) issues concerning the social value of historiography, (3) Arthur Schopenhauer and (4) Richard Wagner, both as heroic inspirations for new cultural standards.
Rounding out the end of his university career, Nietzsche completed “Human, ALl-Too-Human” in 1878. The book was the turning point in his philosophical style and that, while reinforcing his friendship with Ree, it also ended his friendship with the anti-Semitic Wagner. Wagner is actually attacked in the book under a thinly designed characteristics of “the artist”. Even though after much criticism for this piece, Nietzsche was still respected amongst his peers. Yet, his deteriorating health, which led to his migraines, eyesight problems, and vomiting, necessitated his resignation from the university in June, 1879, at the age of 34.
After leaving the university, Nietzsche led a wandering, gypsy-like existence as a stateless person. He traveled as much as he could meeting you new people and having new experiences. On his travels, Nietzsche met Lou von Salome who was twenty one at the time while he was thirty seven. He fell in love but she ran away with a friend of Niezsche. Just a continuing downfall for Nieszche. All these experiences led to his works such as “Daybreak”, “The Gay Science”, and “The Antichrist”.
Everything finally hit Nieszche on January 3, 1889. While in Turing, Nietszche experienced a mental breakdown which left him an invalid for the rest of his life. This was the first time that Friedrich Niezsche died. He was now considered mentally mad. He would never be the same after this and everyone knew it. Some argue that Nietzsche was afflicted with a syphilitic infection contracted either while he was a student or while he was serving as a hospital attendant during the Franco-Prussian War. Some say he used drugs others say it was a detachment from his family but there are too many theories to narrow it down to one. All we know is that now Friedrich Nietzsche would never be looked at the same again. Some say he was always this mad but we will never know. After a short hospital stay, Nietzsche spent 1889 in a sanatorium in Jena at the Binswanger Clinic, and in March 1890 his mother took him back home to Naumberg, where he lived under her care for the nest several years. Tragically, his mother died in 1897 and his sister Elisabeth took over the responsibilities.
On August 25, 1900, Mietzche died in the villas as he approached his 56th birthday. He apparently died of pneumonia in combination with a stroke. His body was transported to the family gravesite directly beside the church that his further used to pastor.
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a lot of critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy and science, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony, and aphorism. His key ideas include the Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy, perspectivism, the will to power, the “death of God”, and the eternal recurrence. One of his key concepts in philosophy is “life-affirmation.” This embraces the realities of the world in which we live over the idea of a world beyond. This further challenges the individual to do the things he wants rather than just what society tells them. Coming from a very religious background, Nietzsche always had religion as a big part of his life. After devastating things that occurred in his life like several family deaths, he began to really dislike the idea of God. He is quite famous for the saying “God is Dead” which is from his work “The Gay Science”.
This is when people started questioning his ideologies and wondered if he was actually sane. Thats ridiculous in todays world but back then if you came up with an idea or a theory that went against what everyone knew you were seen as completely insane. Which, arguably, he did go insane around his forty’s. Yet, when you came out and said “God is Dead” you could only assume the culture fact backed then and to the people around him. In his book “The Gay Science” is where this is all documented and it takes about what the book is about as well as Niezsche personal ideologies.
In his book, “The Will to Power”, Nietzsche says “A nihilist is a man who judges that the real world ought not to be, and that the world as it ought to be does not exist. According to this view, our existence (action, suffering, willing, feeling) has no meaning: this ‘in vain’ is the nihilists’ pathos — an inconsistency on the part of the nihilists’’ (Hoover). He was never one to hide what he was saying, If you ever feel like Niezsche was one to shy away from his beliefs just as how many schools he was kicked out of and how underground room. Some did not believe that a brother forgot harrison.
The reason that Nietzsche went mad was not just because people completely disagreed with his work but because he was mentally not right. He was a soldier and has seen alot in the Franco-Prussian war so I could only assume that those scenes do not help a man who is trying to come back to normal. He also did not have the greatest childhood. He lost his father and baby brother that he barely knew and moved around quite alot. As well as having an extremely religious family while he was a theologist and did not believe in all the God talk.
Friedrich Nietzsche was seen as mad by some and a revolutionary by others. He was one of the first people if not the very first person to go against the idea of God. Some say that he claimed this because he is an atheist but others say that there is a deeper meaning behind this. During this time period, developments in modern science and the increasing secularization of European society had effectively ‘killed’ the idea of God. God has served as the basis for meaning and value in the West for more than a thousand years. The ‘death of God’ led to the idea that is nihilism, the belief that nothing has any inherent importance and that life lacks purpose. This is where he states that the Christian moral doctrine provides people with intrinsic value and a basis for objective knowledge. “If God as the supra sensory ground and goal of all reality is dead, if the supra sensory world of the ideas has suffered the loss of its obligatory and above it its vitalizing and upbuilding power, then nothing more remains to which man can cling and by which he can orient himself” (Elborough).
He was a revolutionary thinker that was very controversial and is a very two sided person. You can see him as a mad man who goes crazy and says that God is dead or you could see him as a man who thought differently and actually ended up showing the world a whole new side to it to the people who live in it.
The way I see it is that without Friedrich Nietzsche it would have been someone else who would have been seen as crazy and said something about the idea of God. Before this time period and even further back everything revolved around religion. Every aspect of the every day life was based of what the religious books said. The people did not have many resources and scientific discoveries so people had to use something to explain what was going on. Now with scientific discoveries and new inventions, people in the 19th century could explain why things happened without using religion. That is what Friedrich Nietzche did. He was the first to step up and publicly say that God is not the answer is everything. He thinks that if you think God is the creator of everything and we are one of his creations than what else is there to know. What else is there to live for? Friedrich Nietzsche was a visionary who stood up for what he believed and he just so happen to go mad then die because of it. Not only is God dead but sadly so is Friedrich Nietzsche.
Work Cited
Brobjer, Thomas H. Nietzsche’s Philosophical Context: An Intellectual Biography. Urbana: U of Illinois, 2008. Print.
Elborough, Travis. The Pocket Essential Nietzsche. Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2001. Print.
Hoover, Arlie J., and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. Friedrich Nietzsche: His Life and Thought. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994. Print.
Wicks, Robert. “Friedrich Nietzsche.” Stanford University. Stanford University, 30 May 1997. Web. 21 Apr. 2014. <http:// plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/>.
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