Photo by Hans Olde from the photographic series, The Ill Nietzsche, summer 1899
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Nietzsche began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. At the age of 24 he became the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel (the youngest-ever holder of this position)[1], but resigned in 1879 due to health problems, which would plague him for most of his life. In 1889 he exhibited symptoms of serious mental illness, living out his remaining years in the care of his mother and sister until his death in 1900.

Biography

Friedrich Nietzsche, 1861.
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Youth (1844–1869)

Nietzsche attended a boys' school and later a private school, where he became friends with Gustav Krug and Wilhelm Pinder, both of whom came from respected families. In 1854 he began to attend the Domgymnasium in Naumburg, but after he showed particular talents in music and language, the internationally-recognized Schulpforta admitted him as a pupil, and there he continued his studies from 1858 to 1864. Here he became friends with Paul Deussen and Carl von Gersdorff. He also found time to work on poems and musical compositions. At Schulpforta, 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.

After graduation in 1864 Nietzsche commenced studies in theology and classical philology at the University of Bonn. For a short time he and Deussen became members of the Burschenschaft Frankonia. After one semester (and to the anger of his mother) he stopped his theological studies and lost his faith[3]. This may have happened in part due to his reading about this time of David Strauss' Life of Jesus, which had a profound effect on the young Nietzsche[3], though in an essay entitled Fate and History written in 1862, Nietzsche had already argued that historical research had discredited the central teachings of Christianity[4]. Nietzsche then concentrated on studying philology under Professor Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl, whom he followed to the University of Leipzig the next year. There he became close friends with fellow-student Erwin Rohde. Nietzsche's first philological publications appeared soon after.

In 1865 Nietzsche thoroughly studied the works of Arthur Schopenhauer and he read Friedrich Albert Lange's History of Materialism in 1866. His encounter with Schopenhauer's ideas had an influence on him until the end of his sentient life. Lange's descriptions of Immanuel Kant's anti-materialistic philosophy, the rise of European Materialism, Europe's increased concern with science, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, and the general rebellion against tradition and authority greatly intrigued Nietzsche. The cultural environment encouraged him to expand his horizons beyond philology and to continue his study of philosophy. In 1867 Nietzsche signed up for one year of voluntary service with the Prussian artillery division in Naumburg. However, a bad riding accident in March 1868 left him unfit for service[5]. Consequently Nietzsche turned his attention to his studies again, completing them and first meeting with Richard Wagner later that year.[6]

Professor at Basel (1869–1879)

Nevertheless, Nietzsche served in the Prussian forces during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to 1871 as a medical orderly. In his short time in the military he experienced much, and witnessed the traumatic effects of battle. He also contracted diphtheria and dysentery. Walter Kaufmann speculates that he might also have contracted syphilis along with his other infections at this time, and some biographers speculate that syphilis caused his eventual madness[10], though there is some dispute on this matter. On returning to Basel in 1870 Nietzsche observed the establishment of the German Empire and the following era of Otto von Bismarck as an outsider and with a degree of skepticism regarding its genuineness. At the University, he delivered his inaugural lecture, "Homer and Classical Philology". Nietzsche also met Franz Overbeck, a professor of theology, who remained his friend throughout his life. Afrikan Spir[12], a little-known Russian philosopher and author of Thought and Reality (1873), and his colleague the historian Jacob Burckhardt, whose lectures Nietzsche frequently attended, began to exercise significant influence on Nietzsche during this time.

Nietzsche had already met Richard Wagner in Leipzig in 1868, and (some time later) Wagner's wife Cosima. Nietzsche admired both greatly, and during his time at Basel frequently visited Wagner's house in Tribschen in the Canton of Lucerne. The Wagners brought Nietzsche into their most intimate circle, and enjoyed the attention he gave to the beginning of the Bayreuth Festival Theatre. In 1870 he gave Cosima Wagner the manuscript of 'The Genesis of the Tragic Idea' as a birthday gift. In 1872 Nietzsche published his first book, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. However, his colleagues in the field of classical philology, including Ritschl, expressed little enthusiasm for the work, in which Nietzsche forewent a precise philological method to employ a style of philosophical speculation. In a polemic, Philology of the Future, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff dampened the book's reception and increased its notoriety. In response, Rohde (by now a professor in Kiel) and Wagner came to Nietzsche's defense. Nietzsche remarked freely about the isolation he felt within the philological community and attempted to attain a position in philosophy at Basel, though unsuccessfully.

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. (These four later appeared in a collected edition under the title, Untimely Meditations.) 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. During this time, in the circle of the Wagners, Nietzsche met Malwida von Meysenbug and Hans von Bülow, and also began a friendship with Paul Rée, who in 1876 influenced him in dismissing the pessimism in his early writings. However, his disappointment with the Bayreuth Festival of 1876, where the banality of the shows and the baseness of the public repelled him, caused him in the end to distance himself from Wagner.

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 reaction against the pessimistic philosophy of Wagner and Schopenhauer became evident, as well as the infuence of African Spir's Denken und Wirklichkeit.[12] Nietzsche's friendship with Deussen and Rohde cooled as well. Nietzsche in this time attempted to find a wife — to no avail. In 1879, after a significant decline in health, Nietzsche had to resign his position at Basel. (Since his childhood, various disruptive illnesses had plagued him — moments of shortsightedness practically to the degree of blindness, migraine headaches and violent stomach attacks. The 1868 riding accident and diseases in 1870 may have aggravated these persistent conditions, which continued to affect him through his years at Basel, forcing him to take longer and longer holidays until regular work became impractical.)

Independent philosopher (1879–1888)

Nietzsche occasionally returned to Naumburg to visit his family, and, especially during this time, he and his sister had repeated periods of conflict and reconciliation. He lived on his pension from Basel, but also received aid from friends. A past student of his, Peter Gast (born Heinrich Köselitz), became a sort of private secretary to Nietzsche. To the end of his life, Gast and Overbeck remained consistently faithful friends. Malwida von Meysenbug remained like a motherly patron even outside the Wagner circle. Soon Nietzsche made contact with the music-critic Carl Fuchs. Nietzsche stood at the beginning of his most productive period. Beginning with Human, All Too Human in 1878, Nietzsche would publish one book (or major section of a book) each year until 1888, his last year of writing, during which he completed five.

Lou Salomé, Paul Rée and Nietzsche, 1882
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After severing his philosophical ties with Schopenhauer and his social ties with Wagner, Nietzsche had few remaining friends. Now, with the new style of Zarathustra, his work became even more alienating and the market received it only to the degree required by politeness. Nietzsche recognized this and maintained his solitude, even though he often complained about it. His books remained largely unsold. In 1885 he printed only 40 copies of the fourth part of Zarathustra, and distributed only a fraction of these among close friends, including Helene von Druskowitz.

In 1883 he tried and failed to obtain a lecturing post at the University of Leipzig. It was made clear to him that, in view of the attitude towards Christianity and the concept of God expressed in Zarathustra, he had become in effect unemployable at any German University. The subsequent "feelings of revenge and resentment" embittered him. "And hence my rage since I have grasped in the broadest possible sense what wretched means (the depreciation of my good name, my character and my aims) suffice to take from me the trust of, and therewith the possibility of obtaining, pupils."[15]

In 1886 Nietzsche broke with his editor, Ernst Schmeitzner, disgusted over his anti-Semitic opinions. Nietzsche saw his writings as "completely buried and unexhumeable in this anti-Semitic dump" of Schmeitzner — associating the editor with a movement that should be "utterly rejected with cold contempt by every sensible mind".[16] He then printed Beyond Good and Evil at his own expense, and issued in 1886-87 second editions of his earlier works (The Birth of Tragedy, Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, and The Gay Science), accompanied by new prefaces in which he re-read his earlier works. Hereafter, he saw his work as completed for the time and hoped that soon a readership would develop. In fact, interest in Nietzsche's thought did increase at this time, even if rather slowly and hardly perceived by him. During these years Nietzsche met Meta von Salis, Carl Spitteler, and also Gottfried Keller. In 1886 his sister Elisabeth married the anti-Semite Bernhard Förster and traveled to Paraguay to found Nueva Germania, a "Germanic" colony — an undertaking that Nietzsche ridiculed with laughter.[17] Through correspondence, Nietzsche's relationship with Elisabeth continued on the path of conflict and reconciliation, but they would meet again only after his collapse. He continued to have frequent and painful attacks of illness, which made prolonged work impossible. In 1887 Nietzsche wrote the polemic On the On the Genealogy of Morals (German: Zur Genealogie der Moral).

During this year Nietzsche encountered Fyodor Dostoyevsky's work, which according to some, he felt an immediate affinity.[18] He also exchanged letters with Hippolyte Taine, and then also with Georg Brandes. Brandes, who had started to teach the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard in the 1870s, wrote to Nietzsche asking him to read Kierkegaard, to which Nietzsche replied that he would come to Copenhagen and read Kierkegaard with him. However, before fulfilling this undertaking, he slipped too far into sickness and madness. In the beginning of 1888, in Copenhagen, Brandes delivered one of the first lectures on Nietzsche's philosophy.

Although Nietzsche had in 1886 announced (at the end of Beyond Good and Evil) a new work with the title The Will to Power. Essay of a transvaluation of all values, he eventually abandoned this project and used its draft materials to compose Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist (both written in 1888).[19]

His health seemed to improve, and he spent the summer in high spirits. In the fall of 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, especially to the recent polemic, The Case of Wagner. On his 44th birthday, after completing Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist, he decided to write the autobiography Ecce Homo, which presents itself to his readers in order that they "[h]ear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else."[20] (Preface, section 1, translated by Walter Kaufmann) In December, Nietzsche began a correspondence with August Strindberg, and thought that, short of an international breakthrough, he would attempt to buy back his older writings from the publisher and have them translated into other European languages. Moreover, he planned the publication of the compilation Nietzsche Contra Wagner and of the poems Dionysian Dithyrambs.

Mental breakdown and death (1889–1900)

Manuscript of Ecce Homo, extract p. 27, i.e. first paragraph of the section about Also sprach Zarathustra.
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In the following few days, Nietzsche sent short writings — known as the Wahnbriefe ("Madness Letters") — to a number of friends (including Cosima Wagner and Jacob Burckhardt). To his former colleague Burckhardt, Nietzsche wrote: "I have had Caiaphas put in fetters. Also, last year I was crucified by the German doctors in a very drawn-out manner. Wilhelm, Bismarck, and all anti-Semites abolished."[21] Additionally, he commanded the German emperor to go to Rome in order to be shot and summoned the European powers to take military action against Germany.[23]

On January 6, 1889 Burckhardt showed the letter he had received from Nietzsche to Overbeck. The following day Overbeck received a similarly revealing letter, and decided that Nietzsche's friends had to bring him back to Basel. Overbeck traveled to Turin and brought Nietzsche to a psychiatric clinic in Basel. By that time Nietzsche appeared fully in the grip of insanity, and his mother Franziska decided to transfer him to a clinic in Jena under the direction of Otto Binswanger. From November 1889 to February 1890 Julius Langbehn attempted to cure Nietzsche, claiming that the doctors' methods were ineffective to cure Nietzsche's condition. Langbehn assumed progressively greater control of Nietzsche until his secrecy discredited him. In March 1890 Franziska removed Nietzsche from the clinic, and in May 1890 brought him to her home in Naumburg. During this process Overbeck and Gast contemplated what to do with Nietzsche's unpublished works. In January 1889 they proceeded with the planned release of Twilight of the Idols, by that time already printed and bound. In February they ordered a 50-copy private edition of Nietzsche contra Wagner, but the publisher C. G. Naumann secretly printed 100. Overbeck and Gast decided to withhold publishing The Antichrist and Ecce Homo due to their more radical content. Nietzsche's reception and recognition enjoyed their first surge.

In 1893 Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth returned from Nueva Germania (Paraguay) following the suicide of her husband. She read and studied Nietzsche's works, and piece by piece took control of them and of their publication. Overbeck eventually suffered dismissal, and Gast finally co-operated. After the death of Franziska in 1897 Nietzsche lived in Weimar, where Elisabeth cared for him and allowed people, including Rudolf Steiner, to visit her uncommunicative brother.

Commentators have frequently diagnosed a syphilitic infection as the cause of the illness. While most commentators regard Nietzsche's breakdown as unrelated to his philosophy, some, including Georges Bataille and René Girard, argue that his breakdown may have been caused by a psychological maladjustment brought on by his philosophy. At least one study has suggested that brain cancer (rather than syphilis) led to his breakdown and killed him; others have classified Nietzsche's "madness" as frontotemporal dementia.

In 1898 and 1899 Nietzsche suffered from at least two strokes which partially paralyzed him and left him unable to speak or walk. After contracting pneumonia in mid-August 1900 he had another stroke during the night of August 24 / August 25[32], and died about noon on August 25. Elisabeth had him buried beside his father at the church in Röcken bei Lützen. His friend, Gast, gave his funeral oration, proclaiming: "Holy be your name to all future generations!"[33] Nietzsche had written in Ecce Homo (then unpublished) of his fear that one day his name would be regarded as "holy".

Nietzsche's sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, compiled The Will to Power from notes he had written and published it posthumously. Since his sister arranged the book, the general consensus holds that it does not reflect Nietzsche's intent. Indeed, Mazzino Montinari, the editor of Nietzsche's Nachlass, called it a forgery in The 'Will to Power' does not exist. Among other forgeries and suppressions of passages, Elisabeth removed aphorism 35 of The Antichrist, where Nietzsche rewrote a passage of the Bible.

At The Antichrist aphorism 35 Nietzsche suggests the following of Jesus’ manner of dying:

This “bringer of glad tidings” died as he lived, as he taught – not to “redeem mankind” but to demonstrate how one ought to live. What he bequeathed to mankind is his practice: his bearing before the judges, before the guards, before the accusers and every kind of calumny and mockery – his bearing on the Cross. He does not defend his rights, he takes no steps to avert the worst that can happen to him – more, he provokes it… And he entreats, he suffers, he loves with those, in those who are doing evil to him. His words to the thief on the cross next to him contain the whole Evangel. ‘That was verily a divine man, a child of God’ – says the thief. ‘If thou feelest this’ — answers the redeemer — ‘thou art in Paradise, thou art a child of God.’ Not to defend oneself, not to grow angry, not to make responsible… But not to resist even the evil man to love him (aphorism 35).[24]

Nietzsche's mental illness was originally diagnosed as tertiary syphilis, in accordance with a prevailing medical paradigm of the time. While most commentators regard his breakdown as unrelated to his philosophy, some, including Georges Bataille and René Girard, argue that his breakdown may have been caused by a psychological maladjustment brought on by his philosophy.[26][27] Manic-depressive illness with periodic psychosis, followed by vascular dementia was put forward[28]prior Schain's and Sax's studies [29]; Orth and Trimble confirm that frontotemporal dementia[30] is indicated rather than syphilis, but refrain from speculating as to the cause. A paper of 2008 by Hemelsoet, Hemelsoet and Devreese [31] agree that syphilis is contra-indicated, but argue against Sax's revival of Hildebrandt’s hypothesis of a benign brain tumor, positing instead a syndrome called CADASIL, which causes internal hernia of the cerebral blood-vessels increasing cranial pressure and causing dementia.

Notes on citizenship, nationality and ethnicity

Nietzsche's feelings about his national identity were clearly complex. In Ecce Homo, he writes:

Even by virtue of my descent, I am granted an eye beyond all merely local, merely nationally conditioned perspectives; it is not difficult for me to be a "good European." On the other hand, I am perhaps more German than present-day Germans, mere citizens of the German Reich, could possibly be—I, the last anti-political German. And yet my ancestors were Polish noblemen: I have many racial instincts in my body from that source—who knows? [...] When I consider how often I am addressed as a Pole when I travel, even by Poles themselves, and how rarely I am taken for a German, it might seem that I have been merely externally sprinkled with what is German.[37]

Many commentators, whether emphasizing his cultural background or his language, label Nietzsche as a "German philosopher". Others omit to assign him a nationalist category. But although he emerged from the Central European cultural tradition and wrote in the German language and moves somewhere between Schopenhauer and Heidegger, much of Nietzsche's work does not fit readily into mainstream German philosophical currents.

Philosophy

In the years after his death in 1900, Nietzsche's works at last became better known. For example, the poet W.B. Yeats helped to raise awareness of Nietzsche in Ireland. [41] H.L. Mencken produced translations of Nietzsche's works that helped to increase knowledge of his philosophy in the United States. Nietzsche's growing prominence suffered a severe setback when he became closely associated with Adolf Hitler and the German Reich. A decade after World War II, there was a revival of Nietzsche's philosophical writings thanks to exhaustive translations and analyses by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. Others, well known philosophers in their own right, wrote commentaries on Nietzsche’s philosophy, including Martin Heidegger, who produced a four-volume study. Many 20th century thinkers (particularly in the tradition of continental philosophy) cite him as a profound influence, including notables Sartre, Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze, whose philosophy of immanence has significant resonances with Nietzsche's will to power.

Nietzsche’s works remain controversial, and no real consensus exists on their meaning. The interpretation of his works seems shakier than the interpretative literature on most other major philosophers. One can readily identify some key concepts, but the meaning of each, let alone the relative significance of each, remains contested.

Part of the difficulty in interpreting Nietzsche arises from the uniquely provocative style of his philosophical writing. Nietzsche called himself a philosopher of the hammer, and he frequently delivered trenchant critiques of Christianity and of great philosophers like Plato and Kant in the most offensive and blasphemous terms possible given the context of 19th-century Europe. His arguments often employed ad-hominem attacks and emotional appeals, and, particularly in his aphoristic works, he often jumps from one grand assertion to another (leaping from mountain-top to mountain-top, as he describes it), with little sustained logical support or elucidation of the connection between his ideas. All these aspects of Nietzsche's style run counter to traditional values in philosophical writing, and they alienated Nietzsche from the academic establishment both in his time and, to a lesser extent, today (when some analytic philosophers still tend to dismiss Nietzsche as inconsistent and speculative, producing something other than "real" philosophy).

A few of the themes that Nietzsche scholars have devoted the most attention to include Nietzsche's views on morality, his view that "God is dead" (and along with it any sort of God's-eye view on the world thus leading to perspectivism), his notions of the will to power and Übermensch, and his suggestion of eternal return.

Morality

In both these projects, Nietzsche's genealogical account of the development of master-slave morality occupies a central place. Nietzsche presents master-morality as the original system of morality—perhaps best associated with Homeric Greece. Here, value arises as a contrast between good and bad: wealth, strength, health, and power (the sort of traits found in an Homeric hero) count as good; whereas badness becomes associated with the poor, weak, sick, and pathetic (the sort of traits conventionally found among ancient Greek slaves).

Slave-morality, in contrast, can only come about as a reaction to master-morality. Nietzsche associates slave-morality with the Jewish and Christian traditions. Here, value emerges from the contrast between good and evil: good associated with charity, piety, restraint, meekness, and subservience; evil seen in the cruel, selfish, wealthy, indulgent, and aggressive. Nietzsche sees slave-morality as an ingenious ploy among the slaves and the weak (such as the Jews and Christians dominated by Rome) to overturn the values of their masters and to gain value for themselves: explaining their situation, and at the same time fixing themselves in a slave-like life.

Whatever its cynical cleverness, Nietzsche sees the slave-morality as a sociological illness which has overtaken Europe — a derivative and resentful value which can only work by condemning others as evil. In Nietzsche's eyes, Christianity exists in a hypocritical state wherein people preach love and kindness but find their joy in condemning and punishing others for pursuing the impulses they themselves are not publicly allowed to act upon. Nietzsche calls for the strong in the world to break their self-imposed chains and assert their own power, health, and vitality upon the world.

The death of God, nihilism, and perspectivism

Nietzsche claimed the "death of God" would eventually lead to the loss of any universal perspective on things, and along with it any coherent sense of objective truth[45]. Instead we would retain only our own multiple, diverse, and fluid perspectives. This view has acquired the name "perspectivism".

Alternatively, the death of God may lead beyond bare perspectivism (to which some appeal in support of tolerant relativism) to outright nihilism, the belief that nothing has any importance and that life lacks purpose. As Heidegger put the problem, "If God as the suprasensory ground and goal of all reality is dead, if the suprasensory 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."[46] The secular-minded people of Nietzsche's day did not recognize this crisis, and both to clarify and to overcome it Nietzsche wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra and introduced the concept of a value-creating Übermensch. According to Lampert, "the death of God must be followed by a long twilight of piety and nihilism (II. 19; III. 8). […] Zarathustra's gift of the superman is given to a mankind not aware of the problem to which the superman is the solution."[47]

The Will to Power

Some commentators understand Nietzsche's notion of the "will to power" as a response to Schopenhauer's "will to live". Writing a generation before Nietzsche, Schopenhauer had regarded the entire universe and everything in it as driven by a primordial will to live, thus resulting in all creatures' desire to avoid death and to procreate. Nietzsche, however, challenges Schopenhauer's account and suggests that people and animals really want power; living in itself appears only as a subsidiary aim — something necessary to promote one's power. In defense of his view, Nietzsche appeals to many instances in which people and animals willingly risk their lives in order to promote their power, most notably in instances like competitive fighting and warfare. Once again, Nietzsche seems to take part of his inspiration from the ancient Homeric Greek texts he knew well: Greek heroes and aristocrats or "masters" did not desire mere living (they often died quite young and risked their lives in battle) but wanted power, glory, and greatness.

In addition to Schopenhauer's psychological views, Nietzsche contrasts his notion of the will to power with many of the other most popular psychological views of his day: utilitarianism, which claims all people want fundamentally to be happy (Nietzsche responds that only the Englishman wants that), and Platonism, which claims that people ultimately want to achieve unity with the good or, in Christian neo-Platonism, with God. In each case, Nietzsche argues that the "will to power" provides a more useful and general explanation of human behavior.

Übermensch

The principle of Eternal Return

However, based on some of the unpublished notes, many scholars think Nietzsche meant the suggestion as something more than a thought-experiment, and that he might have taken it quite seriously as a factual premise. This would, of course, only redouble the importance of living life in such a way that one could wish its eternal repetition.

Another interpretation, favored by many later Existential and Post-modern thinkers, argues that Nietzsche did not intend his readers to take eternal recurrence as a factual premise of physical reality but rather as a perpetually recurring condition of human existence. One faces, in every moment, infinite possibilities or modes of interpretation. A person may will a certain mode of being, but in each moment that will is exhausted and must be re-willed in the next. This would imply an eternal recurrence of the same state without necessitating a physical repetition of material beings in identical configurations.

The idea occurs in a parable in Sec. 341 of The Gay Science, and also in the chapter "Of the Vision and the Riddle" in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, among other places.

Works

The Birth of Tragedy

In contrast to the typical Enlightenment view of ancient Greek culture as noble, simple, elegant and grandiose, Nietzsche characterizes it as a conflict between two distinct tendencies: the Apollonian and Dionysian. The Apollonian in culture he sees as Arthur Schopenhauer's concept of the principium individuationis (principle of individuation) with its refinement, sobriety and emphasis on superficial appearance, whereby man separates himself from the undifferentiated immediacy of nature. Nietzsche claims sculpture as the art-form that captures this impulse most fully: sculpture has clear and definite boundaries and seeks to represent reality, in its perfectly stable form. The Dionysian impulse, by contrast, features immersion in the wholeness of nature, intoxication, non-rationality, and inhumanity; rather than the detached, rational representation of the Apollonian that invites similarly detached observation, the Dionysian impulse involves a frenzied participation in life itself. Nietzsche sees the Dionysian impulse as best realized in music, which tends not to have clear boundaries, is unstable and non-representational, and, in Nietzsche's view, invites participation among its listeners through dance. Nietzsche argues that the Apollonian has dominated Western thought since Socrates, but he sees German Romanticism (especially Richard Wagner) as a possible re-introduction of the Dionysian, which might offer the salvation of European culture. The book shows the influence of Schopenhauer.

Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff criticised The Birth of Tragedy heavily. By 1886 Nietzsche himself had reservations about the work, referring to it as "an impossible book . . . badly written, ponderous, embarrassing, image-mad and image-confused, sentimental, saccharine to the point of effeminacy, uneven in tempo, [and] without the will to logical cleanliness."

"On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense"

As this work represents one of his first engagements with epistemology and the philosophy of language, Nietzsche often rewrites Kant’s description of perception and experience to emphasize the aesthetic over the conceptual: nodding at the categories of understanding, in particular time and space, Nietzsche notes that "the artistic process of metaphor formation with which every sensation begins in us already presupposes these forms and thus occurs within them".

Nietzsche expresses a nuanced but immature argument, and does not seem so much interested in refuting Kant — or even seriously arguing with Kant — on Kant’s own terms. As he later admitted, his early writings struggled to use Kantian, or even Hegelian, modes of expression in a spirit quite against Kant and Hegel: "I tried laboriously to express by means of Schopenhauerian and Kantian formulas strange and new variations which were basically at odds with Kant's and Schopenhauer's spirit and taste!"

Untimely Meditations

1. David Strauss: the Confessor and the Writer, 1873 (David Strauss: der Bekenner und der Schriftsteller) attacks David Strauss's The Old and the New Faith: A Confession (1871), which Nietzsche holds up as an example of the German thought of the time. He paints Strauss's "New Faith" — scientifically-determined universal mechanism based on the progression of history — as a vulgar reading of history in the service of a degenerate culture, polemically attacking not only the book but also Strauss as a Philistine of pseudo-culture.
2. On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, 1874 (Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben) offers—instead of the prevailing view of "knowledge as an end in itself"—an alternative way of reading history, one where living life becomes the primary concern; along with a description of how this might improve the health of a society. It also introduced an attack against the basic precepts of classic humanism. In this essay, Nietzsche attacks both the historicism of man (the idea that man is created through history) and the idea that one can possibly have an objective concept of man, since a major aspect of man resides in his subjectivity. Nietzsche expands the idea that the essence of man dwells not inside of him, but rather above him, in the following essay, "Schopenhauer als Erzieher" ("Schopenhauer as Educator"). Glenn Most argues for the possible translation of the essay as "The Use and Abuse of History Departments for Life", as Nietzsche used the term Historie and not Geschichte. Furthermore, he alleges that this title may have its origins via Jacob Burckhardt, who would have referred to Leon Battista Alberti's treatise, De commodis litterarum atque incommodis (1428 — "On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Literary Studies"). Glenn Most argues that the untimelessness of Nietzsche here resides in calling to a return, beyond historicism, to Humboldt's humanism, and, maybe even beyond, to the first humanism of the Renaissance.
3. Schopenhauer as Educator, 1874 (Schopenhauer als Erzieher) describes how the philosophic genius of Schopenhauer might bring on a resurgence of German culture. Nietzsche gives special attention to Schopenhauer's individualism, honesty and steadfastness as well as his cheerfulness, despite Schopenhauer's noted pessimism.
4. Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, 1876 investigates Richard Wagner's psychology — less flatteringly than Nietzsche's friendship with his subject might suggest. Nietzsche considered not publishing it because of this, and eventually settled on drafts that criticized the musician less than they might have done. Nonetheless this essay foreshadows the imminent split between the two.

Human, All Too Human

Daybreak

The Gay Science

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Beyond Good and Evil

On the Genealogy of Morality

In the First Treatise Nietzsche traces Christian morality back to what he calls the "slave revolt in morality", which he attributes to the ressentiment experienced by the weak members of society vis-à-vis their strong, aristocratic masters. The morality of the nobles operates with the value-distinction "good/bad"; they view themselves as evidently good and their inferiors as beneath contempt. The slaves find their subjection to the strong intolerable and thus set up an "imaginary revenge" by labelling the strong as evil and themselves as good, thereby instituting the morality of Christianity, which says that the meek shall inherit the earth.

In the Second Treatise Nietzsche sketches a pre-moral society (what he calls a "morality of custom") in which the right to inflict harm on others emerges from man's capacity, as an animal capable of memory, to make promises. The infliction of harm on the transgressor can compensate for the breaking of promises. In this way, according to Nietzsche, the institution of punishment comes about, free from any moral purpose or justification. "Bad conscience", too, originates in a pre-moral situation. Here man turns his violent animal nature on himself once he loses the freedom to roam and to pillage.

In the Third Treatise Nietzsche considers the many ways in which the "ascetic ideal" (the paradigm of Christian morality) has manifested itself, ever taking on new forms and perpetuating itself by "underground" means. Nietzsche suggests that the "will to power" drives the need to hold on to the ascetic ideal in one form or another, as a surrogate for taking revenge on a hostile world.

The Case of Wagner

Twilight of the Idols

The Anti-christ

Ecce Homo

Nietzsche contra Wagner

The unpublished notebooks

Later investigation would reveal that Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche had included material extremely selectively and that she gave these excerpts an order different to that of the author, leading to the current opinion of her manuscript as a revisionist corruption bringing her brother's text in line with her own beliefs, which he vehemently opposed. On the strength of this manuscript, Elisabeth later fostered sympathy for her brother's works among the Nazis, and her revisionism forms the cornerstone of the defense of Nietzsche against the charges of fascism and antisemitism.

In the 1960s Mazzino Montinari and Giorgio Colli published the first, integral notebooks, with the fragments arranged in a chronological order (whereas Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and Peter Gast had arranged them thematically, added titles, cut parts, and included copied fragments of other authors such as Charles Féré) without quotation marks, as if Nietzsche himself had written them. This reference edition has subsequently appeared in translation in various languages. Martin Heidegger expressed in his courses on Nietzsche the opinion that this unpublished work of Nietzsche is fundamental to the understanding of Nietzsche's thought.

Nietzsche's reading

The organicism of Paul Bourget influenced Nietzsche,[58] as did that of Rudolf Virchow and Alfred Espinas.[59] Nietzsche early learned of Charles Darwin through Friedrich Lange.[60] Notably, he also read some of the posthumous works of Charles Baudelaire,[61] Tolstoy's My Religion, Ernest Renan's Life of Jesus and Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Possessed.[61][62] Nietzsche called Dostoevsky "the only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn."[63] Comments in several passages suggest that he responded strongly and favorably to the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson. While Nietzsche never mentions Max Stirner, the similarities in their ideas have prompted a minority of interpreters to suggest he both read and was influenced by him.[64]

Nietzsche's influence and reception

By World War I, however, he had acquired a reputation as an inspiration for right-wing German militarism. German soldiers even received copies of Thus Spoke Zarathustra as gifts during World War I.[66][67] The Dreyfus Affair provides another example of his reception: the French anti-semitic Right labelled the Jewish and Leftist intellectuals who defended Alfred Dreyfus as "Nietzscheans".[68] Nietzsche even had a distinct appeal for many Zionist thinkers at the turn of the century. It has been argued that his work influenced Theodore Herzl,[69] and Martin Buber went so far as to extoll Nietzsche as a "creator" and "emissary of life".[70]

Many political leaders of the twentieth century were at least superficially familiar with Nietzsche's ideas. However, it is not always possible to determine whether or not they actually read his work. Adolf Hitler, for example, probably never read Nietzsche, and if he did, his reading was not extensive[71] although he was a frequent visitor to the Nietzsche museum in Weimar and did use expressions of Nietzsche's, such as "lords of the earth" in Mein Kampf.[72] The Nazis made very selective use of Nietzsche's philosophy; this association with National Socialism caused Nietzsche's reputation to suffer following World War II. Mussolini certainly read Nietzsche,[73] as did the founder of the "French Fifth Republic" in 1958, Charles de Gaulle.[74] It has been suggested that Theodore Roosevelt read Nietzsche and was profoundly influenced by him,[75] and in more recent years, Richard Nixon read Nietzsche avidly.[76]

Nietzschean ideas exercised a major influence on several prominent European philosophers, including Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre. In the Anglo-American tradition he has had a profound influence on Bernard Williams due to the scholarship of Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, which rehabilitated Nietzsche as a philosopher, and American philosophers such as Allan Bloom, Alexander Nehamas, William E. Connolly and Brian Leiter continue to study him today. A vocal minority of recent Nietzschean interpreters (Bruce Detwiler, Fredrick Appel, Domenico Losurdo, Abir Taha) have contested what they consider the popular but erroneous egalitarian misrepresentation of Nietzsche's "aristocratic radicalism". Bertrand Russell in his History of Western Philosophy was caustic in his chapter on Nietzsche, calling his work the "mere power-phantasies of an invalid" and referring to Nietzsche as a "megalomaniac".[77]

Notes

1. «  Baird, Forrest E.; Walter Kaufmann (2008). From Plato to Derrida. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall. pp. 1011–1014. ISBN 0-13-158591-6.
2. «  Kaufmann, Walter, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, p. 22.
3. «  Schaberg, William, The Nietzsche Canon, University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 32
4. «  Jörg Salaquarda, "Nietzsche and the Judaeo-Christian tradition," in The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 99.
5. «  For Nietzsche's account of the accident and injury see his letter to Karl Von Gersdorff: Letter of Friedrich Nietzsche to Karl Von Gersdorff - June, 1868
6. «  A letter containing Nietzsche's description of the first meeting with Wagner.
7. «  Kaufmann, p. 25.
8. «  Paul Bishop, Nietzsche and Antiquity, 2004, p117
9. «  Hecker, Hellmuth: "Nietzsches Staatsangehörigkeit als Rechtsfrage", Neue Juristische Wochenschrift, Jg. 40, 1987, nr. 23, p. 1388-1391; and His, Eduard: "Friedrich Nietzsches Heimatlosigkeit", Basler Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Altertumskunde, vol. 40, 1941, p. 159-186. Note that some authors (among them Deussen and Montinari) mistakenly claim that Nietzsche became a Swiss citizen.
10. «  Richard Schain, The Legend of Nietzsche's Syphilis (Westwood: Greenwood Press, 2001
11. «  "A biography of Spir.". http://radicalacademy.com/adiphilunclassified3.htm#Spir.
12. «  Rüdiger Safranski, Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography (trans. Shelley Frisch), W. W. Norton &Company, 2003, p. 161: "This work [Denken und Wirklichkeit] had long been consigned to oblivion, but it had a lasting impact on Nietzsche. Section 18 of Human, All Too Human cited Spir, not by name, but by presenting a "proposition by an outstanding logician" (2,38; HH I §18)
13. «  Stephan Güntzel, "Nietzsche's Geophilosophy", p.85 in: Journal of Nietzsche Studies 25 (Spring 2003), The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park (Penn State), 2003-10-15; re-published on HyperNietzsche's website (English)/(German)
14. «   Kaufmann, p.49
15. «  Letter to Peter Gast - August 1883
16. «   The Nietzsche Channel, Correspondences
17. «  Encyclopædia Britannica Online. "Förster-Nietzsche, Elisabeth." http://www.search.eb.com.librarypx.lclark.edu/eb/article-9034925 (Accessed October 10, 2008).
18. «  Letter to Peter Gast, March 1887.
19. «  Mazzino Montinari, Friedrich Nietzsche (1974; translated into German in 1991, Friedrich Nietzsche. Eine Einführung., Berlin-New York, De Gruyter; and in French, Friedrich Nietzsche, PUF, 2001)
20. «  From the Preface, section 1 (English translation by Walter Kaufmann)
21. «  Kaufmann, p. 67.
22. «  The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann.
23. «  Zweig, Stefan (1939) Master Builders [trilogy], The Struggle with the Daimon, Viking Press, p. 524.
24. «  ISSN 1393-614X Minerva - An Internet Journal of Philosophy 10 (2006): 245-266. Morgan Rempel Nietzsche on the Deaths of Socrates and Jesus Retrieved 11/20/2009.
25. «  Andrew Bailey, First Philosophy: Fundamental Problems and Readings in Philosophy, Broadview Press, 2002, p704
26. «  Georges Bataille &Annette Michelson, Nietzsche's Madness, October, Vol. 36, Georges Bataille: Writings on Laughter, Sacrifice, Nietzsche, Un-Knowing. (Spring, 1986), pp. 42-45.
27. «   René Girard, Superman in the Underground: Strategies of Madness—Nietzsche, Wagner, and Dostoevsky, MLN, Vol. 91, No. 6, Comparative Literature. (December, 1976), pp. 1161-1185
28. «  E.M. Cybulska (August 2000). The madness of Nietzsche: a misdiagnosis of the millennium? Hospital Medicine, 61 (8):571-575
29. «  ""Nietzsche 'died of brain cancer'"". http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/05/05/1051987657451.html.
30. «  "Friedrich Nietzsche's mental illness--general paralysis of the insane vs. frontotemporal dementia" in Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica 2006 December;114(6):439-44; summarised in PubMed
31. «  Hemelsoet, Hemelsoet and Devreese, “The Neurological Illness of Friedrich Nietzsche” Acta Neurologica Belgium 108(2008) pp. 9-16. [1]
32. «  Concurring reports in Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche's biography (1904) and a letter by Mathilde Schenk-Nietzsche to Meta von Salis, August 30, 1900, quoted in Janz (1981) p. 221. Cf. Volz (1990), p. 251.
33. «  Schain, Richard. "Nietzsche's Visionary Values — Genius or Dementia?
34. «  General commentators and Nietzsche scholars, whether emphasizing his cultural background or his language, overwhelmingly label Nietzsche as a "German philosopher". For example: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; Source: Nietzsche: A Very Short Introduction (See Preview on Amazon); Britannica; The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, page 1. Others do not assign him a nationalist category. For example: Edward Craid (editor): The Shorter Routledge Encyclopedia of philosophy. Abingdon: Routledge, 2005, pages 726-741; Simon Blackburn: The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pages 252-253; Jonathan Rée and J. O. Urmson, ed (2005) [1960]. The Concise encyclopedia of western philosophy (3rd edition ed.). London: Routledge. pp. 267–270. ISBN 0-415-32924-8.
35. «  Er beantragte also bei der preussischen Behörde seine Expatrierung [Translation:] "He accordingly applied to the Prussian authorities for expatrification". Curt Paul Janz: Friedrich Nietzsche: Biographie volume 1. Munich: Carl Hanser, 1978, page 263.
36. «  German text available as Entlassungsurkunde für den Professor Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche aus Naumburg in Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari: Nietzsche Briefwechsel: Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Part I, Volume 4. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1993. ISBN 3 11 012277 4, page 566.
37. «  Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecco Homo, Why I Am So Wise, 3 (trans. by W. Kaufmann)
38. «  Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Ecce Homo: How One Becomes what One is. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale, Micheal Tanner. (New York: Penguin Classics, 1992), 106.
39. «  Some recently translations use this latter text. See: Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings: And Other Writings. Translated by Judith Norman, Aaron Ridley. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 77.
40. «  Henry Louis Mencken, "The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche", T. Fisher Unwin, 1908, reprinted by University of Michigan 2006, pg. 6, [2]
41. «  Everdell, William (1998). The First Moderns. Chicago: U Chicago Press. pp. 508. ISBN 0226224813.
42. «  Kaufmann, p.187. (Ecce Homo-M I)
43. «  Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Antichrist. Grand Rapids: Kessinger, 2004: 4,8,18,29,37,40,51,57,59. Print.
44. «  Morgan, George Allen (1941). What Nietzsche Means. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. pp. 36.
45. «  Lampert, Nietzsche's Teaching, 17–8; Heidegger, "The Word of Nietzsche."
46. «  Heidegger, "The Word of Nietzsche," 61.
47. «  Lampert, Nietzsche's Teaching, 18.
48. «  Beyond Good &Evil 13, Gay Science 349 &Genealogy of Morality II:12
49. «  Nietzsche comments in many notes about matter being a hypothesis drawn from the metaphysics of substance, see G. Whitlock, "Roger Boscovich, Benedict de Spinoza and Friedrich Nietzsche: The Untold Story," Nietzsche-Studien 25, 1996 p207
50. «  Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche ad Philosophy, translated by Hugh Tomlinson, 2006, p46
51. «  Dennett, D. C. (1995), Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, Simon &Schuster
52. «  For a clear reconstruction of Nietzsche's uncharacteristically careful deduction of what he once described as "the most scientific of hypotheses," see Danto 1965, pp. 201-9- For a discussion and survey of this and other interpretations of Nietzsche's no-torious idea of eternal recurrence, see Nehamas 1980, which argues that by "scientific" Nietzsche meant specifically "not-teleological." A recurring—but, so far, not eternally recurring—problem with the appreciation of Nietzsche's version of the eternal recur-rence is that, unlike Wheeler, Nietzsche seems to think that this life will happen again not because it and all possible variations on it will happen over and over, but because there is only one possible variation—this one—and it will happen over and over." Dennett, D. C. (1995), Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, Simon &Schuster
53. «  Brobjer, Thomas. Nietzsche's Reading and Private Library, 1885-1889. Published in Journal of History of Ideas. Accessed via JSTOR on May 18, 2007.
54. «  Letter to Franz Overbeck, July 30, 1881
55. «  Russell, Bertrand, History of Western Philosophy, Routledge, 2004, pp 693-697
56. «  Brendan Donnellan, "Nietzsche and La Rochefoucauld" in The German Quarterly, Vol. 52, No. 3 (May, 1979), pp. 303-318 (English)
57. «  See for example Ecce Homo, "Why I am So Clever", §3
58. «  Johan Grzelczyk, "Féré et Nietzsche : au sujet de la décadence", HyperNietzsche, 2005-11-01 (French). Grzelczyk quotes Jacques Le Rider, Nietzsche en France. De la fin du XIXe siècle au temps présent, Paris, PUF, 1999, pp.8-9
59. «  Johan Grzelczyk, "Féré et Nietzsche : au sujet de la décadence", HyperNietzsche, 2005-11-01 (French). Grzelczyk quotes B. Wahrig-Schmidt, "Irgendwie, jedenfalls physiologisch. Friedrich Nietzsche, Alexandre Herzen (fils) und Charles Féré 1888" in Nietzsche Studien, Band 17, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1988, p.439
60. «  Note sur Nietzsche et Lange : « le retour éternel », Albert Fouillée, Revue philosophique de la France et de l'étranger. An. 34. Paris 1909. T. 67, S. 519-525 (on French Wikisource)
61. «  Mazzino Montinari, "La Volonté de puissance" n'existe pas, Éditions de l'Éclat, 1996, §13
62. «  Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, pp. 306-340.
63. «  Twilight of the Idols, Friedrich Nietzsche, 1889, §45).
64. «  K. Löwith, From Hegel To Nietzsche, New York, 1964, p187; S. Taylor, Left Wing Nietzscheans, The Politics of German Expressionism 1910-1920, p144, 1990, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin/New York; G. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, (translated by Hugh Tomlinson), 2006, pp153-154; R. C. Solomon &K. M. Higgins, The Age of German Idealism, p300, Routledge, 1993; R. A. Samek, The Meta Phenomenon, p70, New York, 1981; T. Goyens, Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement In New York City, p197, Illinois, 2007; a special treatise on that question is: Bernd A. Laska: Nietzsche's initial crisis In: Germanic Notes and Reviews, 33 (2): 109-133.
65. «  O. Ewald, "German Philosophy in 1907", in The Philosophical Review, Vol. 17, No. 4, July, 1908, pp. 400-426; T. A. Riley, "Anti-Statism in German Literature, as Exemplified by the Work of John Henry Mackay", in PMLA, Vol. 62, No. 3, September, 1947, pp. 828-843; C. E. Forth, "Nietzsche, Decadence, and Regeneration in France, 1891-95", in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 54, No. 1, January, 1993, pp. 97-117
66. «  Steven E. Aschheim notes that "[a]bout 150,000 copies of a specially durable wartime Zarathustra were distributed to the troops" in The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890-1990, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1992, p135
67. «  Kaufmann, p.8
68. «  Schrift, A.D. (1995). Nietzsche's French Legacy: A Genealogy of Poststructuralism. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-91147-8.
69. «  Francis R. Nicosia, Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, Cambridge University Press, 2008, p36; Jacob Golomb, Nietzsche and Zion, Cornell University Press, 2004, pp 25-27; against the view of particular influence on Herzl, see: Gabriel Sheffer, U.S.-Israeli Relations at the Crossroads, Routledge, 1997, p170
70. «  Jacob Golomb (Ed.), Nietzsche and Jewish Culture, Routledge, 1997, pp 234-235
71. «  Weaver Santaniello, Nietzsche, God, and the Jews, SUNY Press, 1994, p41: "Hitler probably never read a word of Nietzsche"; Berel Lang, Post-Holocaust: Interpretation, Misinterpretation, and the Claims of History, Indiana University Press, 2005, p162: "Arguably, Hitler himself never read a word of Nietzsche; certainly, if he did read him, it was not extensively"; Jacob Golomb, Nietzsche and Jewish Culture, Routledge, 1997, p9: "To be sure, it is almost certain that Hitler either never read Nietzsche directly or read very little."; Andrew C. Janos, East Central Europe in the Modern World, Stanford University Press, 2002, p184: "By all indications, Hitler never read Nietzsche. Neither Mein Kampf nor Hitler's Table Talk (Tischgesprache) mentions his name. Nietzschean ideas reached him through the filter of Alfred Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century, and, more simply, through what was coffeehouse Quatsch in Vienna and Munich. This at least is the impression he gives in his published conversations with Dietrich Eckart."
72. «  William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a History of Nazi Germany, Touchstone, 1959, p100-101
73. «  Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini's Italy, University of California Press, 2000, p44: "In 1908 he presented his conception of the superman's role in modern society in a writing on Nietzsche entitled, "The Philosophy of Force."; Philip Morgan, Fascism in Europe, 1919-1945, Routledge, 2003, p21: "We know that Mussolini had read Nietzsche"
74. «  J. L. Gaddis, P. H. Gordon, E. R. May, J. Rosenberg, Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb, Oxford University Press, 1999, p217: "The son of a history teacher, de Gaulle read voraciously as a boy and young man — Jacques Bainville, Henri Bergson, Friederich [sic] Nietzsche, Maurice Barres — and was steeped in conservative French historical and philosophical traditions."
75. «  H. L. Mencken (Ed.), The Selected Writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Wilder Publications, 2008, p153 (referring to Roosevelt's published speech The Strenuous Life): "It is inconceivable that Mr. Roosevelt should have formulated his present confession of faith independently of Nietzsche".; Georges Sorel (trans. J. Stanley), Essays in Socialism and Philosophy, Transaction Publishers, 1987, p214 "J. Bourdeau has pointed out the strange similarity which exists between the ideas of Andrew Carnegie and Roosevelt, and those of Nietzsche: Carnegie deploring the wasting of money on the support of incompetents, Roosevelt appealing to Americans to become conquerors, a race of predators."
76. «  Monica Crowley, Nixon in Winter, I.B.Tauris, 1998, p351: "He read with curious interest the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche [...] Nixon asked to borrow my copy of Beyond Good and Evil, a title that inspired the title of his final book, Beyond Peace."
77. «  Russell, Bertrand, History of Western Philosophy, Routledge, 2004, pp 693-697

References

• Kaufmann, Walter (1974). Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. Princeton University Press.
• Lampert, Laurence (1986). Nietzsche's Teaching: An Interpretation of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra. New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Magnus and Higgins, "Nietzsche's works and their themes", in The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, Magnus and Higgins (ed.), University of Cambridge Press, 1996, pp.21-58.
• Seung, T.K. Nietzsche's Epic of the Soul: Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005.
• Tanner, Michael, "Nietzsche" Oxford: Oxford University Press 1994.
• Wicks, Robert, "Friedrich Nietzsche", in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2004 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.),
• O'Flaherty, James C., Sellner, Timothy F., Helm, Robert M., "Studies in Nietzsche and the Classical Tradition" (University of North Carolina Press)1979 ISBN:0--08078-8085-X
• O'Flaherty, James C., Sellner, Timothy F., Helm, Robert M., ""Studies in Nietzsche and the Judaeo-Christian Tradition" (University of North Carolina Press)1985 ISBN:0-8078-8104-X