Friedrich Nietzsche
1844–1900 · Germany
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”
Peak-work percentile in the canon.
The lineage through Friedrich Nietzsche
Drew From(3)
who shaped Friedrich Nietzsche
via The Gospels
- A parody you can only fully hear if you know the original — Zarathustra is a deliberate inversion of the Gospels
- The prophet leaving at thirty, returning to the crowds, gathering disciples, being misunderstood: Nietzsche lifted the Gospel structure and prophetic cadence whole, then loaded it with the opposite gospel
- Read the Gospels first and every borrowed beat lands as the calculated blasphemy he meant it to be
via The Republic
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a conscious inversion of The Republic — Nietzsche the philologist knew exactly whose cave he was rewriting
- Plato's prisoners climb out of the cave toward the sun; Zarathustra climbs up to his cave on the mountain, the allegory deliberately reversed
- He even starts at thirty, the age Plato sets for the dialectic — read the Republic first and you'll see Nietzsche answering it line by line
via Faust, Part Two
- Zarathustra sets itself against Faust directly — Goethe was the one German Nietzsche held as a near-realization of the Übermensch
- Goethe's closing "the Eternal Feminine draws us upward" is the line Nietzsche borrows and inverts, pulling the gaze down toward the earth and the eternal return
- Read Faust's ending first and you'll hear exactly what Nietzsche is answering
Portraits
The defining photograph of Nietzsche: head resting on hand, fit and lucid the year before Zarathustra. Reproduced everywhere; the source image for the Bauer lithograph and Munch's portraits.
Gustav-Adolf Schultze, 1882
Three-quarter-length portrait of Nietzsche in a black overcoat at a railing, set against a turbulent yellow-orange Symbolist sky over a stylised mountain landscape.
Edvard Munch, 1906
Nietzsche, recently released from the Jena clinic, seated on a white bench in the pergola of his mother's house in Naumburg, hands awkwardly overlapping.
Curt Stoeving, 1894
Hartmann's Basel-period portrait, c. 1875 — a widely reprinted seated photograph of Nietzsche in his early thirties during his philology professorship.
Friedrich Hermann Hartmann, 1875
Famous Quotes
“I teach you the Superman. Man is something that is to be surpassed.”
“Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—a rope over an abyss.”
“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”
“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
About Friedrich Nietzsche
German philosopher whose work on morality, religion, and the self has had a profound and contested influence on modern thought. Nietzsche was appointed professor at Basel at twenty-four but resigned a decade later for health reasons; his most important books were written during a peripatetic decade of solitary travel. He suffered a mental collapse in Turin in 1889 and never recovered, dying eleven years later.