NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH WILHELM. – Philologist and philosopher, born at Röcken in Saxony on 15 Sept. 1844, died at Weimar on 25 Aug. 1900. Doctor and professor of philology (1869) at the University of Basel, he left teaching in 1879 for reasons of health. Indeed, the nervous illness (cerebral paralysis) from which he suffered grew steadily worse despite various health resorts, culminating in a state of insanity (Turin 1889), from which he never recovered.
His literary output falls into three phases, corresponding to the periods of his spiritual formation, rebellion, and decline, as well as to his cultural relationships.
1. 1866–72: philological studies. In addition to work on the history of Greek poets (Theocritus, the lyric poets, the *Certamen Homeri et Hesiodi*), posthumous material on the history of rhetoric and rhythm, Nietzsche achieved great success with his critical edition of Diogenes Laertius’ *Lives of the Philosophers*, published in the *Rheinisches Museum* for 1868–70, in which he demonstrated that its sources could be identified and reconstructed, thereby revealing the work of earlier historians. He gave shape to his classical historiography in two fundamental works: *Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik* (1871, ed. Leipzig 1872, 1878) and *Über die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen* (posthumous).
Nietzsche’s thesis is that in the formation of Greek civilization two spiritual forces contend for dominance: the Apollinian, contemplative and dreamy, and the Dionysian, titanic and barbaric; the former prevails in dialogue, the latter in the chorus of tragedy. Since tragedy has its origin in choral song and music, its primary source lies in the Dionysian cults. The same pattern appears in philosophy, where the Heraclitean and Sophistic currents are Dionysian, but with Socrates an Apollinian attitude emerges, which Nietzsche regards as inferior.
2. 1873–79: critique of culture. Just as classical philology seemed to Nietzsche to require renewal through Dionysian insights, so too did German culture—which had produced it—appear outdated and inadequate after the war of 1870–71. He devoted himself to developing a critique and extolling those who might save it from decadence. Thus arose, from university lectures, the *Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen*, four essays: *David Friedrich Strauss* (1873), a reconstruction of the moralist and philistine of historical-religious criticism; *Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Geschichte für das Leben* (1874), a critique of traditional, erudite, hypercritical historicism; *Schopenhauer als Erzieher* (1874), in which he first recognized in the philosopher of pessimism a master of human redemption; and *Richard Wagner in Bayreuth* (1876), devoted to illustrating the antibourgeois and ultraromantic genius of the great musician, with whom, however, he later broke.
*Human, All Too Human* contains a revision of decadent Enlightenment values: futurism, moral sense, religiosity, artistic-literary consciousness, high and popular culture, commercial life, the education of women and children, statism, and solipsism. Nietzsche’s philosophy in this period is no longer merely Dionysian-Sophistic but an aestheticizing irrationalism; artistic creation, through its *pathos*, saves man from the pessimistic reality of existence and substitutes an inner image as vision and dream of beauty. The Apollinian element thus gained ascendancy even in Nietzsche, though he sought from it a practical affirmation, demanding a solution for life.
3. 1880–88: doctrine of the “Übermensch” and the will to power. Despite the progression of his illness, he meditated and composed a series of systematically conceived works, though almost all in aphoristic form: *Morgenröthe. Gedanken über moralische Vorurteile* (Chemnitz, 1880–81; the title recalls a theosophical work by Jakob Böhme); *Die Wiederkunft des Gleichen* (1881), a sketch of ideas later developed in *Die fröhliche Wissenschaft* (1881–82; 2nd enlarged ed. 1887; the title alludes to troubadour culture and includes a prologue and epilogue in verse); *Also sprach Zarathustra*, “a book for everyone and for no one”: Nietzsche’s masterpiece, a prose-and-verse poem in four parts (the first three published in Chemnitz in 1883–84, the fourth in a few copies in 1885 and added to the others in 1892), the only one of his works to be fully organic after *Die Geburt der Tragödie* (the title derives from the prologue to the Arabic text of the *Gospel of the Infancy*, according to Cod. orient. Laur. 32 in Florence); *Jenseits von Gut und Böse*, “prelude to a philosophy of the future” (Leipzig 1885–86), a philosophical commentary on *Zarathustra*; *Zur Genealogie der Moral* (1887), in which the author approached positivism. From September 1886 to March 1888 he worked on the major treatise *Der Wille zur Macht*, “an attempt at a transvaluation of all values” (in four books: European nihilism; Critique of previous supreme values; Principle of a new determination of values; Race and education of the race), left fragmentary and published posthumously in 1902.
In 1888 alone, sensing the impending crisis, he composed and published *frenetically* between Turin and Sils-Maria: *Der Fall Wagner*, a violent diatribe against his former champion, to which he added *Nietzsche contra Wagner* (1888), a selection of aphorisms from his other works adapted to the same end; *Die Götzendämmerung* (1889), “how one philosophizes with a hammer,” in which he resumed in sententious fashion his early critique of Greek philosophy and its modern imitations; *Der Antichrist*, “an attempt at a critique of Christianity” and a new recension of *The Will to Power*; *Ecce Homo*, a synthetic account of his spiritual drama and literary output (up to the Wagner affair). On these final pages, published posthumously (Leipzig 1908), his pen came to rest.
The system of ideas Nietzsche had thus formulated remains a classic alongside Neohumanism and might be defined as an Eastern (Apollinian-Zoroastrian) classicism combined with pragmatist skepticism. It comprises the following paradoxes:
1) True redemption of humanity consists in liberation from ideas of collectivist or societal origin, in which Socratism, Christianity, modern bourgeois society, and Western *Kultur* have foundered, and in dissolving the doctrine of civilizational progress to which they had adhered. In this dissolution it is discovered that a non-progressive natural law governs human life, symbolized by the ancient myth of the eternal recurrence of all things and events, even personal ones, through cosmic cycles. The continuous and perpetually repeated identity of forms and acts deprives their apparent evolution and presumptive appropriation by any epoch or class of all meaning.
2) Only the *Übermensch*—a prophet acting upon other men, like Zarathustra, the magus of the Persian *Zend-Avesta*—can surpass, scorn, and dissolve the bonds of these human fictions. The Nietzschean Übermensch is devoid of transcendence; he is the *sense of the earth*, the very terrestrial consciousness of humanity that becomes liberating. The liberation he produces is not anticorporeal; it is the will itself imposing itself with its naïveté and strength. This is a form of Neopaganism, though not bound to the Manichaean dualism of good and evil as in ancient Zoroastrianism, but rather *beyond good and evil*.
3) Nihilism, or the nullity of supreme values—a doctrine of Eastern origins but presented at the time of Nietzsche as the latest novelty among anarchist philosophers—is the consequence of the historical synthesis between Christianity and European thought. Modern Christianity, in fact, attributes absolute value to man, perfection to the world, and the knowledge of values the meaning of adequate knowledge, while religion is seen as the healing of what man unfolds of himself. Rationalist philosophy, in turn, transforms this science of absolute values into a system of categories commensurate with that conception of man and the world. But in both cases, the problems of teleology and relativity are encountered: "What is all this for?" and "How long will it last?" The world of categories is relative to a world finite by humanity in becoming; the absolute of eternal return is the annulment of this fiction. The relativistic pragmatism of Hans Vaihinger’s *Philosophie des Als-Ob* (q.v.), his contemporary, coincides with the fundamental views outlined in *The Will to Power*.
4) To rediscover their purity and authenticity, human values must be transvalued according to this new principle. By *will to power*—a concept in itself contradictory, since power, even in the scientific conception of potential force (*Macht*), is always an abstraction of act—Nietzsche intends the return of life toward its primal, negative source (in the Schopenhauerian sense of will), a return in which, as with historical-mystical reality in eternal return, or rather identically with it, lies all its genuine nature. The will to power generates knowing as phenomenism (q.v.) of both the external and internal world; its theoretical forms are merely interpretations, for themselves unreflective and irrational, even when they assume intellectualist guises and posit in reason the unnecessary hypothesis of a subject (q.v.) or of multiple subjects. The power thus acquired over one’s own sensibility in turn generates the conviction of truth as the persistence of hypotheses and the admission of an equivalent reality; but Nietzsche rejects the positivist theory that equates facts with causal and functional determinations. Instead, in the formulation of being, the will to power is exalted, and with the idea of eternal return, the closest possible approximation to the idea of real being is achieved (though this remains appearance in comparison to actual becoming). The will to power reveals itself in nature as the desire for force in act, *Kraft*; it is its inner animator, the inner becoming of which physical phenomena and laws are the manifestation, the symptoms. This will intrinsic to nature produces organic life; but not in the sense indicated by Darwinism, which ties biological phenomena to extrinsic utility and apparent power (struggle for existence, survival of the fittest; conformism replacing intellectual transformism): rather, it does so in the sense of a finality consisting in the increase of power and the triumph of what is stronger (individuation [q.v.]), indeed of the strongest individual (q.v.), even at the expense of the species. This is not progress, particularly in the human species, nor of this species in comparison to others, but a search for the highest type of existence, up to genius. The more this is a "sublime machine," the more destructive it is of other forms of individuation. The same principle explains the genesis of the volitive, unconscious values of power among individuals and must establish the values of society and the State in favor of the strongest individual, the Übermensch, artistic genius, and the superiority of race and culture.
These latter themes, later put to the service of Pan-Germanism, were instead by Nietzsche directed toward illustrating the contrast between the Dionysian-sophistic spirit, which he objectively imitated, and Christianity as the promoter of human weakness and subjection to traditional and intellectualist powers. Yet it remains doubtful whether, even if systematically composing the doctrine he outlined, he could ever have reconciled its contradictions and paradoxes, which are more suggestive than coherent, their poetic efficacy outweighing a better assessment of history and reality.
On Nietzsche’s thought, see F. Fiorentino, *Pietro Pomponazzi*, Florence 1868, pp. 35–41, 50–57, 214–41, 263–70; id., *Del "Principe" di Machiavelli e di un libro di A. N.*, in *Giornale napoletano di filosofia e letteratura*, 1879, pp. 94–114; B. Nardi, *Sigieri di Brabante nel pensiero del Rinascimento italiano*, Rome 1945 (see onomastic index).