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Nietzsche bibliography. Brief biography of Friedrich Nietzsche

Life and works of Nietzsche

With Nietzsche, philosophy again became a dangerous game, but in a different way. In previous centuries, philosophy brought danger to the philosophers themselves; Nietzsche made it dangerous to everyone. Nietzsche went mad towards the end of his life, and there is a certain madness in the tone of his later works. But his dangerous ideas appeared long before his madness and had nothing to do with clinical symptoms. They anticipated the collective madness that had terrible consequences in Europe in the first half of the 20th century. These days there are ominous signs of a relapse.

Nietzsche's main philosophical ideas might not need to be said much - whether we are talking about the superman, the eternal recurrence (the idea that we live our lives over and over again for eternity) or the sole purpose of civilization (to produce "great men" like Goethe, Napoleon and Nietzsche himself). His use of the will to power as a universal explanation borders on simplification or nonsense - even Freudian monism seems more subtle, and Schopenhauer's not so specific concept more convincing. Like any well-developed conspiracy theory, Nietzsche's doctrine of the all-pervasive will to power contains the usual element of paranoia in such cases. But Nietzsche's way of philosophizing is no less brilliant, persuasive and incisive than that of other philosophers before and after him. As you read it, you get the exhilarating feeling that philosophy actually makes sense (one of the reasons that makes it so dangerous). And when Nietzsche used the will to power solely as a tool of analysis, he discovered such constituent elements of human motivation that few people had guessed. As a result, the philosopher debunked the values that grew out of these motives and traced the development of these values across a broad historical canvas, illuminating the very foundations of our civilization and culture.

Although Nietzsche is responsible for the dangerous nonsense that has tarnished his name, it must be admitted that most of the accusations are caricatures of what he actually wrote. He simply despised the proto-fascists of his time, anti-Semitism was disgusting to him, and the idea of a racially pure German nation of masters would certainly have caused him a Homeric laugh. Had he lived (and retained his sanity) until the 1930s, when he would have entered his ninth decade, he would hardly have remained silent at the sight of the monstrous events that were happening in his homeland, like some German philosophers who considered themselves his followers.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844 in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, which at that time was a province of Prussia, which was rapidly gaining strength. Nietzsche came from a family of shopkeepers, including hatters and butchers, but his grandfather and father were Lutheran pastors. Nietzsche's father was a Prussian patriot who held his king, Frederick William IV, in high esteem. The first son of Karl Ludwig Nietzsche was born on the king’s birthday, which determined the choice of name. By some senseless coincidence, the king, his admirer and the latter's son will die in a cloud of reason.

The first was Carl Ludwig, who died in 1849. He was diagnosed with brain softening, and an autopsy showed that a quarter of his brain had indeed suffered from softening. Today's doctors do not make such diagnoses. Authoritative biographers of Nietzsche are convinced that his illness was not hereditary.

Nietzsche was brought up in Naumburg, among “holy women”: his mother, his maternal grandmother, his younger sister and two eccentric spinsters, his aunts. This seems to have influenced Nietzsche's attitude towards women in the future. At the age of thirteen, he began to study at the famous Pforta Gymnasium, one of the best private schools in Germany. Such a pious upbringing and spoiling greatly influenced Nietzsche (it was not for nothing that he was called the “little pastor”) with all the ensuing consequences. But he was such a brilliant mind that eventually he inevitably began to think for himself. At eighteen, Nietzsche began to doubt his faith. The insightful thinker saw the square pegs in the round holes of the surrounding world. It is characteristic that these thoughts appeared to him when he was in complete isolation. Throughout his life, very few living people (and dead ones too) influenced the philosopher’s ideas.

At nineteen, Nietzsche entered the University of Bonn to study theology and classical philology, hoping to become a pastor. Frederick’s future for years to come was planned by “holy women,” but he already had an unconscious desire for rebellion, and his character changed. Once in Bonn, the lonely schoolboy suddenly turned into a sociable student. He found cheerful company, drank with friends and once even fought a duel (a routine skirmish that ended as soon as he received an honorable wound - a small mark on his nose, which was later hidden by the temple of his glasses). It was just an inevitable stage of life. It was then that Nietzsche decided that “God is dead.” (By the way, this phrase, which is always associated with Nietzsche and his philosophy, was first uttered by Hegel two decades before Nietzsche was born.) Arriving home for the holidays, he refused communion and announced that he would no longer set foot in church. The following year he decided to move to the University of Leipzig, where he abandoned theology and concentrated on classical philology.

Nietzsche arrived in Leipzig in October 1865. In the same month he turned 21 years old. Around the same time, two events occurred that were destined to change his life. During an excursion to Cologne, he visited a brothel. According to Nietzsche, the visit was accidental. Once in the city, he asked a street porter to take him to a restaurant, and the same one took him to a brothel. This is what Nietzsche later told his friend: “I immediately found myself surrounded by half a dozen visions in tinsel and transparent fabric, staring at me expectantly. For a brief moment I was speechless. Then I instinctively turned to the only spiritual object that was there: the piano. I played a few chords, which freed me from paralysis, and ran away.”

Of course, we only have Nietzsche's testimony about this dubious episode. It is impossible to say whether this visit to the brothel was accidental and whether Nietzsche caressed only the piano keys. Almost certainly he was still a virgin at that time - an extremely ardent, but worldly inexperienced and awkward young man. (Which did not stop him from speaking out on such topics. Despite his sexual status, he confidently told one friend that he needed three women at once to satisfy him.)

On reflection, Nietzsche must have decided that it was not just the piano that attracted him. He went back to the brothel, and when he returned to Leipzig, he almost certainly visited similar establishments several times. Soon after this, Nietzsche discovered that he had contracted the disease. The doctor who treated him did not say that he had syphilis (in those days it was incurable, and such a diagnosis was not reported). Be that as it may, as a result of this incident, Nietzsche apparently began to abstain from sexual relations with women. However, throughout his life, in his writings, he made shocking remarks about them that exposed the author himself: “Are you going to women? Don't forget the whip! (Although perhaps the Leipzig brothel was of such a nature that Nietzsche thought it wise to go there to prepare for a fight.)

The second fateful incident occurred when he walked into a second-hand bookstore and discovered Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation. “I picked up an unfamiliar book and began turning over page by page. I don’t know what kind of demon was whispering in my ears: “Take this book home.” And so, violating my principle of never buying books right away, I did just that. Once at home, I huddled in the corner of the sofa with my new treasure and let this dynamic, dark genius work on my mind... I found myself looking into a mirror that reflected the world, life and my own nature in terrifying grandeur... And then I saw the disease and health, exile and refuge, Hell and Heaven."

As a result of these amazingly prophetic sentiments, Nietzsche became a follower of Schopenhauer. At that moment, when Nietzsche had nothing to believe in, he simply needed Schopenhauer's pessimism and detachment. According to Schopenhauer, the world is just an idea supported by an all-pervading evil will. This will is blind and does not pay attention to the concerns of humanity and, when its representatives rebel against its manifestations around them (the world), it imposes on them a life full of suffering. Our only option is to reduce the power of will within ourselves by choosing the path of rejection and asceticism.

Schopenhauer's pessimism did not correspond to Nietzsche's nature, but Nietzsche immediately recognized his honesty and strength. From now on, Nietzsche's positive ideas had to gain enough strength to go beyond this pessimism. The path forward ran through Schopenhauer. But Schopenhauer's idea of will as a leading force was decisive. Ultimately it transformed into the Nietzschean will to power.

In 1867, Nietzsche was drafted into the Prussian army for a year. The authorities were clearly fooled by the bushy, fierce mustache that Nietzsche grew under an unconvincing dueling scar, and assigned him to the cavalry. This was a mistake. Nietzsche was decisive, but physically pathetic. He was seriously injured in a fall from a horse, but continued to ride in the best Prussian traditions. Returning to the barracks, Private Nietzsche was hospitalized for a month. For his diligence, he received the rank of lance corporal and was sent home.

Nietzsche again found himself at the University of Leipzig, where he was recognized as the best student in his professor's forty years of teaching. But Nietzsche himself became disillusioned with philology and its “indifference to truth and the pressing problems of life.” He didn't know what to do. In desperation, he considered switching to chemistry or going to Paris for a year to taste “the divine cancan or the yellow poison of absinthe.” One fine day he decided to introduce himself to the composer Richard Wagner, who secretly came to the city. (Twenty years earlier, Wagner had been banned from entering Saxony because of his revolutionary activities, and the ban remained in force, although the composer's political views had since shifted from left to right.)

Wagner was born the same year as Carl Ludwig Nietzsche and was remarkably similar to him. Nietzsche felt a desperate – albeit unconscious – need for a father. Previously, he had not met either famous artists or those whose ideas were so consistent with his own. During their short meeting, Nietzsche learned that Wagner deeply revered Schopenhauer. Wagner, flattered by the attention of the brilliant young philosopher, revealed himself to him in all his brilliance. He immediately made a deep impression on Nietzsche. The great composer, as passionate in life as his operas, shocked Nietzsche.

A couple of months later, Nietzsche was offered a position as professor of philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland. He was only twenty-four years old and had not even received his doctorate. For all his distrust of philology, Nietzsche could not refuse such an offer. In April 1869 he took up his post in Basel and immediately began giving additional lectures on philosophy. He wanted to combine philosophy and philology, the study of aesthetics and classical authors, welding them into a single tool that would reveal the mistakes of our civilization - just that! He quickly became a young rising star at the university and became friends with Jacob Burckhardt, the great cultural historian who first developed the historical concept of the Renaissance. On the faculty he was the only thinker of the same caliber as Nietzsche, and perhaps the only person whom the philosopher revered throughout his life. Perhaps Burckhardt could have exerted a balancing influence on Nietzsche, but his patrician restraint did not allow this. In addition, Nietzsche already had a paternal influence in his life, and it cannot be called a balancing influence.

Basel is located a hundred kilometers from Triebschen, where Wagner lived with Liszt's daughter Cosima (at that time she was still married to a mutual friend of Liszt and Wagner, conductor von Bülow). Nietzsche immediately became a regular Sunday guest at Wagner's luxurious villa on the shores of Lake Lucerne. But the composer’s life resembled opera not only in the musical, emotional and social sense. This man believed that you could live entirely according to your fantasies. Tribschen itself was reminiscent of an opera, and there was never any doubt about who had the main role here. Dressed “in Flemish style” (a cross between the Dutchman and Rubens in fancy dress), in black silk breeches, a Scottish beret and an overly fluffy silk neckerchief, Wagner strode and recited among walls covered in pink silk, rococo cherubs, his own busts, large paintings dedicated to him, and silver cups in memory of the productions of his operas. The air was filled with incense, and only the maestro's music was allowed to mix with it. And Cosima fulfilled all the whims of her companion and made sure that no one took with them the domestic lambs, wolfhounds in ribbons and decorative chickens wandering around the garden.

It is difficult to understand how Nietzsche could fall for all this. Moreover, it is difficult to understand how anyone could fall for this. (Because of his extravagance, Wagner was constantly going bankrupt, so he needed the support of wealthy patrons, including King Ludwig of Bavaria, who generously helped him at the expense of the state treasury.) But when you listen to Wagner’s music, you understand the power of conviction and the fatal charm of his character. The composer himself was no less stunning than his enchanting melodies. The immature Nietzsche quickly succumbed to the spell of this heady atmosphere - the leitmotifs of unconscious fantasy permeated the luxurious salons. If Wagner replaced his father, Nietzsche soon discovered that he had an Oedipus complex. Not daring to admit it (even to himself), he fell in love with Cosima.

In July 1870, the Franco-Prussian War broke out. Prussia had the opportunity to take revenge for its defeat in the Napoleonic Wars, conquer France and turn Germany into the leading power in Europe. Filled with patriotic fervor, Nietzsche voluntarily entered the service as an orderly. While passing through a small town on business, he saw rows of cavalrymen thundering through the streets in full regalia. It was as if a scale had fallen from his eyes. “I clearly felt... that the strongest and highest will to live finds its expression not in the miserable struggle for existence, but in the will to battle, power and superiority.” Thus was born the "Will to Power", and although it underwent major changes so that it should not be considered in military, but rather in individual and social terms, it never broke away from its militaristic source. Meanwhile, while Bismarck was crushing France, Nietzsche discovered that there was more to war than glory. On the battlefield of Wörth, he had to work in the midst of human remains scattered everywhere, fetid, decaying bodies. Then he had to transport the wounded and sick in a freight car. On a two-day trip amid crushed bones, gangrenous flesh and dying, Nietzsche behaved with dignity and courage. But, having arrived in Karlsruhe, he himself fell ill with dysentery and diphtheria and ended up in the hospital.

Despite this difficult experience, within two months Nietzsche was teaching again in Basel. Overloading himself with lectures on philosophy and philology, he begins to write “The Birth of Tragedy.” This brilliant and highly original analysis of Greek culture contrasts the orderly and clear Apollonian principle of classical restraint with the dark instinctive Dionysian forces. According to Nietzsche, the great art of Greek tragedy arose from the fusion of these two principles, which was later destroyed by the empty rationalism of Socrates. The philosopher was the first to draw attention to the dark side of Greek culture as something fundamental, which met with a lot of objections. Throughout the 19th century. the classical world was something sacred. His ideals of justice, culture and democracy corresponded to the self-image of the rising middle classes. Nobody wanted to hear that it was a mistake. Even more resistance was caused by the fact that, in illustrating his arguments, Nietzsche often resorted to Wagner and his “music of the future.” He even wrote to his publisher: “The real purpose [of this book] is to illuminate Richard Wagner, that singular enigma of our time, in his relation to Greek tragedy.” Only Wagner managed to combine both the Apollonian and Dionysian principles in the spirit of Greek tragedy.

The emphasis on the powerful Dionysian principle revealed an important aspect of Nietzsche's subsequent philosophy. He was no longer going to put up with Schopenhauer’s “Buddhist denial of will.” Nietzsche contrasted Dionysianism with Christian influence, which, in his opinion, weakened civilization. He concluded that most of our impulses are double-edged. Even our so-called best intentions have a dark side: “Every ideal involves love and hate, adoration and contempt. Premium mobile is a positive or negative feeling." According to Nietzsche, Christianity began with a negative feeling. It took over the Roman Empire as the religion of the oppressed and slaves. This was fully manifested in the Christian attitude towards life. Christianity constantly strives to overcome the strongest of our positive instincts. This denial is both conscious (in the acceptance of asceticism and self-restraint) and unconscious (in meekness, which Nietzsche considered an unconscious expression of resentment - aggression, turned inside out in the weak).

Likewise, Nietzsche attacks the compassion, suppression of genuine feeling, and sublimation of desire rooted in Christianity, calling for an ethic of power corresponding to the origins of our feelings. God is dead, the era of Christianity is over. XX century tried to prove Nietzsche right, but it turned out that many of the best elements of “Christianity” are not related to belief in God. But whether we have become closer to our main feelings is a moot point.

Wagner was a great artist, but as a philosopher he was lesser. Gradually Nietzsche saw what was hiding under Wagner's intellectual mask. Wagner was a walking ego of enormous size and had intuitive power, but even his love for Schopenhauer was transitory, mere grist for the mill of his art. Previously, Nietzsche tried not to notice some of Wagner’s disgusting everyday traits: anti-Semitism, overflowing arrogance and reluctance to recognize the abilities and needs of anyone other than himself. But there is a limit to everything. Wagner moved to Bavaria, where King Ludwig built a theater for him that would stage only Wagnerian operas (a project that drained the Bavarian treasury and led to Ludwig's abdication). In 1876, Nietzsche came to Bayreuth for the performance of “The Ring of the Nibelung”, which opened the First Bayreuth Festival, but fell ill - the illness was probably psychosomatic in nature. He could not bear the megalomania and decadence and was forced to leave.

Two years later, Nietzsche published a book of aphorisms, Human, All Too Human, which marked the final break with Wagner. The praise of French art, psychological insight and rejection of romantic pretensions, as well as Nietzsche's subtle sensibility in general, were completely unacceptable to Wagner. Worse, the book lacked the obligatory advertisement for “the music of the future.”

But perhaps more importantly, the book alienated Nietzsche's most sincere admirers of his philosophy. Ironically, it was the very reason why Nietzsche is admired today (even by those who reject his philosophy). Nietzsche began to develop his own style, which allowed him to become a great master of the German language. (An extraordinary task, given the peculiarities of the German language, which the greatest writers in Germany could not cope with.) Nietzsche's style was always clear and militant, and his ideas were condensed, but very intelligible. Now he began to write in aphorisms. Refusing long-winded argumentation, he preferred to express his ideas in the form of a series of piercing insights with rapid transitions from topic to topic.

Nietzsche loved to walk and philosophize while on the move. The best ideas came to him during long walks through the Swiss mountains and forests. He often reported that he walked for more than three hours, despite his poor health (was this just a projection of the will to power?). They even claim that Nietzsche’s aphorism is due to the fact that he wrote down his thoughts in a notebook right on the go. Be that as it may, Nietzsche's aphoristic writing has no parallel in 19th-century Europe. It sounds loud, although Nietzsche would no doubt agree with it. The 19th century was the era of great masters of style. However, with the exception of the French enfant terrible Rimbaud, no other writer sensed the coming revolution in language - more in tone and general meaning than in accuracy. In Nietzsche's prose one can hear the voice of the approaching 20th century. – this is the language of the future.

But all this did not happen overnight. When Nietzsche wrote “Human, All Too Human,” the search for his own voice was just beginning. His very ideas in many cases needed to find expression. This work is filled with amazing psychological discoveries. “The dreamer denies reality to himself, the liar only to others.” “The mother of excess is not joy, but joylessness.” “All poets and writers in love with superlatives want to do more than they can.” “A poignancy is an epigram on the death of some feeling.” However, there was a clear overkill here. Nietzsche's admirers reproached him for not being a philosophy, and they were right. This is psychology (and of such quality that after several decades Freud suddenly decided not to reread Nietzsche, fearing to discover that after his books there was nothing more to say on these topics). But the mixture of aphorisms and psychology is not enough for a coherent, lengthy book. Psychological revelations lacked a systematic argumentation capable of linking aphorisms together. Nietzsche's work was called unsystematic. But his ideas are no less coherent and well-argued than those contained in any great philosophical system.

Yes, of course, Nietzsche is unsystematic in the sense that his philosophy heralded the end of all systems. Or I tried - there will always be someone willing to try (it was at that time that Karl Marx was working hard in the library of the British Museum).

Despite its flaws, Human, All Too Human established Nietzsche as one of the most prominent psychologists of his time. This is something of a feat, given his unsociability. Essentially he was a loner. In the conventional sense, he knew few people. He had no real friends. He had several close admirers in his life, but Nietzsche's own obsession prevented him from bestowing friendship on anyone or accepting the friendship of others. So where could he have acquired such deep knowledge of psychology? Many commentators believe that Nietzsche's source in this area was one man: Richard Wagner. Quite possible. Here you can really reveal a whole layer of psychological oddities. But such commentators usually overlook the fact that Nietzsche knew himself quite well (albeit with gaps and rather selectively).

Nietzsche's psychological insights have a universal character, although both of their sources are so different - the misanthropic philosopher and the madcap composer. Well, Nietzsche’s access to his main psychological source will soon be closed. After the publication of Human, All Too Human, a break with Wagner became inevitable. Nietzsche's work prepared the coming of the future "brave new world", while Wagner began his last creation, Parsifal, which marked the end of his passion for Schopenhauer and his return to the fold of Christianity. Their paths diverged forever. It is said that Nietzsche only really knew one person in his entire life, and that person provided him with enough material to become the greatest psychologist of his time. This was Wagner.

In 1879, Nietzsche had to leave his post in Basel due to a long illness. He had always had fragile health, and now he had become a completely sick person. He received a small pension and, on the advice of doctors, moved to a more favorable climate.

For the next ten years, Nietzsche wandered around Italy, the south of France and Switzerland in search of a place where he would feel better. What was he sick with? It seems like everyone at once. His vision was so weakened that the philosopher was half blind (the doctor warned him that he should stop reading; Nietzsche might as well have been advised to stop breathing). He was tormented by severe headaches, due to which he sometimes did not get out of bed for several days; it was not a person, but a collection of physical ailments and complaints. His desktop collection of elixirs, pills, tonics, powders and tinctures turned Nietzsche into a special creature, one of the darkest hypochondriac philosophers in the world. And it was he who came up with the concept of the superman! The obvious element of psychological compensation contained in this idea cannot dislodge it from the central place it occupies among Nietzsche's most popular ideas. We can say that she became the grain of sand around which the pearl of stupidity grew.

The superman appeared in the book “Thus Spake Zarathustra” - a philosophical novel filled with almost unbearable pomposity and seriousness, where the lack of a sense of humor is not softened by the author’s attempts at “irony” and leaden “lightness”. It is impossible to read it, like the works of Dostoevsky and Hesse, unless you are a teenager - but at that age, reading it is often “life changing.” And not always for the worse. Silly ideas are easily distilled, and the rest become an antidote to the multitude of conventional ideas, stimulating deep self-reflection. Philosophy as such is almost invisible here. But the call to philosophizing - to knowing oneself - sounds very powerful, as do the characteristics of our existence. “Is there an up and down here from now on? Isn’t it carrying us through endless nothingness?.. Is it true that an even deeper night is gathering around us? Don't we need lanterns in the morning? Are we all still deaf to the sounds of gravediggers digging a grave for God? We still do not hear the stench of divine decay?.. The most sacred and powerful thing in the world is bleeding at our feet... There was no greater deed, and thanks to this deed whoever comes after us will live in a history higher than all what happened before." Almost a century later, the French existentialists would begin to express similar thoughts—though not in such a frantic form—and they would be praised as the vanguard of modern philosophy.

During Nietzsche's endless tour of resorts and places with mild winters, the philosopher's friend Paul Reu introduced him to a Russian noblewoman of German origin, Lou Salomé (Louise Gustavovna von Salomé), who was twenty-one years old. Reu and Nietzsche (separately and together) walked with her for a long time, trying to fill her head with their philosophical ideas. (Zarathustra was introduced to Lou as “the son I will never have”—which could be considered lucky for little Zarathustra, whose name would have attracted too much attention at school.) The relationship between Lou, Nietzsche and Reu formed a triangle, which was unthinkable in an era when the possibility of a sexual revolution was still unknown. At first, all three declared that they would study philosophy together and live in a platonic m?nage? trois. Then Reyo and Nietzsche (separately) declared their love for Lou and decided to propose to her. Unfortunately, Nietzsche made a stupid mistake: he asked Reyo to convey his proposal to Lou. (This does not discount Nietzsche's importance as the greatest psychologist of his era, as anyone familiar with the love life of psychologists will attest.) A staged photograph of the three of them, taken in the same Lucerne studio, perfectly demonstrates who was in control of this situation. Two impressionable innocent youths (thirty-eight and thirty-three years old) are harnessed to a cart driven by a real twenty-one-year-old virgin with a whip in her hand. In the end, they were no longer able to continue this farce and separated. In despair, Nietzsche wrote: “Tonight I will take enough opium to lose my mind,” but nevertheless, on reflection, he decided that Lou was not worthy to become either the mother or the sister of baby Zarathustra. (Lou, who took the double surname Andreas-Salome in honor of her tame husband, a German professor, would become one of the most brilliant women of her time. Later, she would make a deep impression on two more leading figures of the era: she would enter into a relationship with the great German lyric poet Rilke and will strike up a close friendship with the middle-aged Freud.)

Wintering in Nice, Turin, Rome or Menton, Nietzsche spent the summer at an altitude of “1500 meters above the world and even higher above the people” - in Sils Maria, a lakeside village in the Swiss Engadine. Today Sils Maria is a cozy little resort, but the simple room where Nietzsche usually lived and kept his first aid kit has been preserved here. The mountains rise sheerly above the lake, ending with the snow-capped Bernina Peak (height - 4048.6 meters), which marks the border with Italy. Behind the house there are paths along which you can go far into the mountains, where Nietzsche loved to wander, reflecting on his philosophy and stopping at a lonely rock or roaring stream to write down his thoughts in a notebook. The atmosphere of these places - distant peaks, grandiose panoramas, a sense of lonely grandeur - is reflected in the tone of his works. When you see exactly where many of Nietzsche's works were thought out, some of their strengths and errors become clearer.

Nietzsche lived mostly alone, renting inexpensive rooms, constantly working and eating in cheap restaurants - all the while battling debilitating headaches and debilitating illnesses. He often vomited all night long, and sometimes he could not work three or four days a week. But every year his next book of astonishing level was published. "Dawn", "The Gay Science", "Beyond Good and Evil" - all of these works contain powerful criticism of Western civilization, its values and psychology, as well as its contradictions. Nietzsche's style is clear and aphoristic, there are almost no extravagant ideas. This is not systematic philosophy, but philosophizing of the highest order. Many (if not most) of the core values of Western man and Western civilization have been examined and found to be empty. As Nietzsche wrote in his unpublished notebook: “The destruction of Christianity is due to its morality(it is inseparable); this morality turns against the Christian God (the sense of truthfulness, highly developed by Christianity, begins to experience disgust to the falsehood and falsehood of all Christian interpretations of the world and history. A sharp turn back from “God is truth” to the fanatical belief “Everything is false.” No one had ever carried out such destruction, although more than a hundred years earlier Hume had already accomplished much subversive philosophical work. (But the revival of the German metaphysical system required once again resorting to the destruction of the foundations.)

All 1880s Nietzsche still worked alone, unknown and unread by anyone, working the more intensely as the isolation and lack of recognition became unbearable. It was not until 1888 that the Danish Jewish critic Georg Brandes began lecturing on Nietzsche's philosophy at the University of Copenhagen. But, unfortunately, it was already too late. In 1888, Nietzsche completed no less than four books, and cracks began to appear in his mind. He was a great thinker and he knew it; it was necessary for the world to know this too. In Ecce homo he writes of Zarathustra as the highest and most profound book that ever existed, a statement that always sets critical altimeters into motion and raises the question of trust. As if this were not enough, he chooses for some of the chapters of the book the titles “Why I am so wise”, “Why I write such good books”, “Why I am rock”, warning against drinking alcohol, advising butter-free cocoa and approving the work your intestines. The pomposity and self-absorption characteristic of Zarathustra reappear here with a vengeance in the form of mania.

In January 1889 everything comes to an end. While walking in Turin, Nietzsche fell in tears, clutching the neck of a horse that was being beaten by its owner. He was carried home, where he began writing postcards to Cosima Wagner (“I love you, Ariadne”), the King of Italy (“Dear Umberto... All the anti-Semites are shooting at me”) and Jacob Burckhardt (signing himself “Dionysus”). Burckhardt realized what had happened and contacted another friend of Nietzsche, who immediately came for him.

Nietzsche was mentally ill and never recovered. It would almost certainly not be possible to cure it today. Overwork, loneliness and suffering led to the disease, but the root cause was syphilis. He reached the third stage, which is characterized by “cerebral paralysis.” After a short treatment at the clinic, Nietzsche was placed in the care of his mother. Now he was harmless. An almost constant painful trance reduced him to a vegetative state. In moments of enlightenment, he vaguely remembered his past life. Taking a book in his hand, he said: “After all, I also wrote good books?”

In 1897, his mother died, and his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche began to look after Nietzsche. This was the last person who, in theory, could care for him. Nietzsche's younger sister Elisabeth married Bernard Foster, a failed schoolteacher who became a notorious anti-Semite. Nietzsche despised him and his ideas. Förster founded a colony of purebred Aryans in Paraguay called New Germany, bringing there poor peasants from Saxony. It all ended in ruin and suicide for Förster. (Remnants of New Germany still exist in Paraguay, although the “master race” lives much the same as the local Indians, differing from them only in their blond hair.) Returning to Germany and taking upon herself the care of her sick brother, Elizabeth decided to make him a great man. She moved it to Weimar, famous for its cultural associations with Goethe and Schiller, hoping to create an archive of Nietzsche there. Then she began editing her brother's unpublished notebooks, introducing anti-Semitic ideas and flattering notes about herself. These notebooks were published under the title “The Will to Power.” They were later cleared of added debris by the great Nietzschean specialist Walter Kaufmann and became perhaps Nietzsche's greatest creation.

At the beginning of his work, Nietzsche characterizes the coming era. “Skepticism about morality is crucial. A fall moral interpretation of the world, which can no longer be found sanctions, after he had made an attempt to find refuge in some otherworldliness: in the final analysis - nihilism. “Everything is meaningless (the inability to fully interpret the world, on which enormous energy was spent, raises doubts whether everything in general interpretation of the world). This may seem to deny the meaning of any philosophy, but Nietzsche playfully continues: “The entire cognitive apparatus is an abstracting and simplifying apparatus, aimed not at cognition, but at mastery things: “goal” and “means” are as far from the true essence as “concepts”. And further he shows what our knowledge is: “All our cognitive organs and senses developed only in relation to conditions of conservation and growth. Confidence to reason and its categories, to dialectics - therefore, high grade logic - proves only what has been tested by experience utility her for life, but Not its "truth". His psychological observations are as insightful as ever, but now they lead from preliminary insights to fundamental (and dangerous) revelations. “Joy comes where there is a feeling of power.

Happiness lies in the consciousness of power and victory that pervades you.

Progress: strengthening of type, ability to great aspiration; everything else is a mistake, a misunderstanding, a danger.”

Nietzsche lived to see the twentieth century, the nature of which he predicted so well. Finally, this expressive pale figure with a huge military mustache, a man who had little understanding of who he was and where he was, died on August 25, 1900.

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Friedrich Nietzsche is a German philosopher, thinker, poet and even composer. His non-academic teachings became widespread not only in the scientific and philosophical community, but also far beyond its borders. Nietzsche questioned the key principles of the norms of culture and morality, social and political relations generally accepted in the 19th-20th centuries. The philosopher’s concept still causes a lot of controversy and disagreement.

Childhood and youth

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844 in the village of Röcken, located near Leipzig. His father, Carl Ludwig Nietzsche, as well as both of his grandfathers, were Lutheran ministers. A few years later, the boy had a sister, Elisabeth, and a couple of years later, a brother, Ludwig Joseph. Friedrich's younger brother died in 1849, and his sister lived a long life and passed away in 1935.

Soon after the birth of his youngest son, Carl Ludwig Nietzsche died. His mother took full responsibility for raising Friedrich. This continued until 1858, when the matured young man went to get an education at the prestigious Pforta gymnasium. The time he studied at the gymnasium became fateful for Nietzsche: there he first began to write, became interested in reading ancient texts, and even experienced an irresistible desire to devote himself to music. There, Friedrich became acquainted with the works of Byron, Schiller, Hölderlin, and the works of Wagner.

In 1862, Nietzsche began his studies at the University of Bonn, choosing philology and theology. The young student soon became bored with student life; In addition to this, he did not have good relationships with his classmates, to whom he tried to instill a progressive worldview. Therefore, Friedrich soon transferred to the University of Leipzig. One day, while walking around the city, he accidentally wandered into an old bookshop and purchased the work “The World as Will and Representation.” The book greatly impressed Nietzsche and influenced his development as a philosopher.

Friedrich's studies at the Faculty of Philology at the University of Leipzig went brilliantly: already at the age of 24, the guy was invited to teach classical philology as a professor at the University of Basel. This was the first time in the European higher education system that such a young scientist was allowed to receive the status of professor. However, Nietzsche himself did not take much pleasure in his studies, although he did not refuse to build a professorial career.

However, the philosopher did not work long as a teacher. Upon taking up this post, he decided to renounce his Prussian citizenship (the University of Basel is located in Switzerland). Therefore, Nietzsche could not participate in the Franco-Prussian War, which took place in 1870. Switzerland took a neutral position in this confrontation and therefore allowed the professor only to work as an orderly.

Friedrich Nietzsche was not in good health since childhood. So, at the age of eighteen he suffered from insomnia and migraines, at the age of thirty, in addition to this, he became practically blind and began to experience stomach problems. He completed his work in Basel in 1879, after which he began to receive a pension and began to work closely on writing books, without ceasing to fight the disease.

Philosophy

Friedrich Nietzsche's first book was published in 1872 and was entitled The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. Before this, the philosopher had submitted a number of scientific articles for publication, but had not yet published full-fledged books. His first serious work consists of 25 chapters.

In the first 15, Nietzsche tries to establish what Greek tragedy is, and in the last 10, he talks and discusses Wagner, with whom he met and was friends for some time (until the composer converted to Christianity).

"Thus spoke Zarathustra"

No other work by a philosopher can claim the level of popularity of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Friedrich Nietzsche received the main ideas for his famous work thanks to a trip to Rome at the end of the 19th century. There he met the writer, therapist and philosopher Lou Salome. Nietzsche found her a pleasant listener and was fascinated by the flexibility of her mind. He even tried to propose to her, but Lou Salome chose friendship over marriage.

Soon Nietzsche and Salome quarreled and never communicated again. After this, Frederick wrote the first part of the work “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” in which modern researchers unmistakably guess the influence of the philosopher’s soulmate and ideas about their “ideal friendship.” The second and third parts of the work were published in 1884, and the fourth appeared in print in 1885. Nietzsche published 40 of them at his own expense.

The style of this work changes as the narrative progresses: it turns out to be poetic, comic, and again close to poetry. In the book, Frederick first introduced the term superman, and also began to develop the theory of the will to power. At that time, these ideas were poorly developed, and he subsequently developed his concept in the works “Beyond Good and Evil” and “Towards the Genealogy of Morality.” The fourth book of the work is dedicated to the story of how Zarathustra ridiculed the hated admirers of his own teaching.

Will to power

Almost all of the philosopher’s works run through the morality of the will to power as the basic concept of his theory. According to Nietzsche, dominion represents the primary nature, the fundamental principle of existence, as well as a way of existence. In this regard, Frederick contrasted the will to power with goal setting. He said that choosing a goal and moving towards it can already be called a full-fledged act of power.

Death of God

Friedrich Nietzsche was actively interested in issues of religion and death. “God is dead” is one of his famous postulates. The philosopher explained this statement as an increase in nihilism, which was a consequence of the devaluation of the supersensible foundations of life directions.

The scientist also criticized Christianity for the fact that this religion prefers being in the afterlife to life in the real world. The author dedicated the book “Antichrist” to this topic. A curse on Christianity." Friedrich Nietzsche first expressed his nihilistic position in the book “Human is All Too Human,” which was published in 1876.

Personal life

Friedrich Nietzsche repeatedly changed his views on the female sex, so the popularity of his quote “Women are the source of all stupidity and unreason in the world” does not fully reflect his views. Thus, the philosopher managed to be a misogynist, a feminist, and an antifeminist. At the same time, his only love was probably Lou Salome. There is no information about the philosopher’s relationships with other women.

For many years, the biography of the philosopher was closely connected with the life path of his sister Elizabeth, who took care of her brother and helped him. However, gradually discord began in these relations. Elisabeth Nietzsche's husband was Bernard Foerster, one of the ideologists of the anti-Semitic movement. She even went with her husband to Paraguay, where supporters of this movement intended to create a German colony. Due to financial difficulties, Förster soon committed suicide, and the widow returned to her native country.

Nietzsche did not share his sister's anti-Semitic views and criticized her for such a position. Relations between brother and sister improved only towards the end of the latter’s life, when he, weakened by illness, needed help and care. As a result, Elizabeth gained the opportunity to dispose of her brother's literary works. She sent Nietzsche's works for publication only after making her own edits, as a result of which some provisions of the philosopher's teaching were distorted.

In 1930, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche supported the Nazi regime and invited her to become an honored guest of the Nietzsche Museum-Archive, which she created. The leader of the fascist movement was pleased with the visits and awarded the philosopher’s sister a lifelong pension. This was partly the reason that Nietzsche is often associated in the minds of ordinary people with fascist ideology.

Death

The philosopher often found himself misunderstood both by his close people and by the general public. His ideology began to gain popularity only in the late 1880s, and at the beginning of the 20th century his works were translated into many languages of the world. In 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche's creative work ceased due to clouding of his mind.

There is an opinion that the philosopher was shocked by the scene of the horse being beaten. This seizure became the cause of a progressive mental illness. The writer spent the last months of his life in a Basel mental hospital. After some time, his elderly mother took him to his parental home, but she soon died, which is why the philosopher received an apoplexy.

Bibliography

"The Birth of Tragedy, or Hellenism and Pessimism"
"Untimely Thoughts"
“Human, all too human. A book for free minds"
"Morning dawn, or thoughts about moral prejudices"
"Fun Science"
“Thus spoke Zarathustra. A book for everyone and no one"
“Beyond good and evil. Prelude to the philosophy of the future"
“Toward the genealogy of morality. Polemical essay"
"Case Wagner"
"Twilight of the Idols, or how one philosophizes with a hammer"
"Antichrist. A curse on Christianity"
“Ecce Homo. How to become yourself"
"The Will to Power"

The work of Friedrich Nietzsche, the world famous German philosopher, still causes a lot of controversy. Some consider him the “father” and theorist of racial theory, while others admire his outstanding research in the field of ethical philosophy. To form your own idea of the achievements and conclusions of this extraordinary person, you should carefully study his biography and the formation of a worldview that allows you to draw your own conclusions.

Childhood

In 1844, in a small provincial town in East Prussia, the future scientist Friedrich Nietzsche was born. To this day, the philosopher’s ancestors are not exactly known: one point of view is that his ancestors had Polish roots and the surname Nitzke, another – German and Bavarian roots, names and origins. Some researchers believe that Nietzsche simply fantasized his Polish origin in order to cover his origin with a veil of mystery and arouse interest around his origin.

But it is very well known that both of his grandfathers (both on his mother’s and father’s sides) were Lutheran clergymen, just like his father. But already at the age of five, the boy remained in the care of his mother due to the premature death of his father. In addition, his sister, with whom Frederick was very close, had a huge influence on the child’s upbringing. Mutual understanding and ardent affection for each other reigned in the family, but already at that time the child showed an extraordinary mind and a desire to be different from everyone else and to be special in all respects. Perhaps it was precisely this dream that forced him to act differently from what others expected.

Classical education

At the age of 14, the young man went to study at the classical gymnasium of the city of Pforta, which was famous for teaching ancient languages and history, and also classical literature.

Studying languages and literature, the future philosopher achieved enormous success, but always had problems with mathematics. He read a lot, was interested in music and tried to write himself, while his works were still immature, but he, being carried away by German poets, tried to imitate them.

In 1862, a gymnasium graduate went to the central university of Bonn and entered the department of theology and philosophy. Since childhood, he felt a strong desire to study the history of religion and dreamed of following in the footsteps of his father and becoming a pastor-preacher.

It is unknown whether unfortunately or fortunately, but during his student days Nietzsche’s views changed dramatically, and he became a militant atheist. In addition, he did not develop trusting relationships with either his classmates or the teaching staff of the University of Bonn, and Friedrich transferred to study in Leipzig, where he was immediately appreciated and was invited to teach Greek. Under the influence of his teacher Richli, he agreed to this service while still a student. After a very short time, Friedrich passed the exam and received the title of professor of philology and a teaching position in Basel. But he was not satisfied with this work, since he never saw himself only as a teacher and professor.

Formation of Beliefs

It is in his youth that a person greedily absorbs everything that piques his interest and easily learns everything new. Thus, the future great philosopher in his youth experienced several serious shocks that influenced the formation of his beliefs and the development of philosophical views. In 1868, the young man met the famous German composer Wagner. Undoubtedly, even before meeting him, Nietzsche knew and loved, he was even simply fascinated by the music of Wagner, but the acquaintance shook him to the core. Over the course of three years, their acquaintance grew into a warm friendship, since there were a lot of interests connecting these extraordinary people. But gradually this friendship began to fade, and after Friedrich published the book “Human, All Too Human” it was severed. In this book, the composer saw signs of the philosopher’s mental illness.

Nietzsche experienced another strong shock after reading A. Schopenhaur’s book “The World as Will and Representation.” In general, a scrupulous study of Schopenhauer’s works can change still immature views on the world; it is not without reason that he is called the “father of universal pessimism.” This is exactly the impression this book made on Nietzsche.

The young man was amazed by Schopenhauer’s ability to tell people the truth to their faces, without looking back at social laws and conventions. Since childhood, Nietzsche dreamed of standing out from the crowd and destroying the foundations, so the philosopher’s book had the effect of a bomb exploding. It was this work that forced Nietzsche to become a philosopher and publish his views, boldly throwing in people’s faces the real truth from which they cowardly hide.

During the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), Nietzsche worked as an orderly and saw a lot of dirt and blood, but this, oddly enough, did not turn him away from violence, but on the contrary, made him think that any wars are necessary as processes that heal society, and since people are greedy and cruel by nature, during war they quench their thirst for blood and society itself becomes healthier and calmer.

Nietzsche's health

Since childhood, the future philosopher could not boast of good health (in addition, the inheritance of a mentally ill father had an impact); his poor eyesight and physical weakness often let the young man down and did not allow him to sit for a long time at work. Intensive study at the university led to the young man experiencing severe migraines, insomnia, dizziness and nausea. All this, in turn, led to a decrease in vitality and the appearance of a prolonged depressive state.

At a more mature age, he contracted neurosyphilis from a woman of easy virtue, which at that time could not yet be completely cured. At the age of thirty, my health deteriorated even more: my vision began to deteriorate sharply, debilitating headaches and chronic fatigue led to extreme mental exhaustion.

In 1879, due to health problems, Nietzsche had to resign from the university and seriously take up treatment. At the same time, his teaching took full shape, and his creative work became more productive.

Love on life's path

The personal and intimate life of the philosopher cannot be called happy. In his early youth, he had a sexual relationship with his sister, with whom he even wanted to start a family. Again, in his youth, he experienced violence from a woman much older than himself, which turned the young man away from sex and love for a long time.

He had quite a long relationship with women of easy virtue. But since the philosopher valued in a woman not sexuality, but intelligence and education, it was very difficult for him to establish long-term relationships that develop into strong bonds.

The philosopher himself admitted that only twice in his life did he propose to women, but in both cases he was refused. For quite a long time he was in love with Wagner’s wife, then he became very interested in the doctor and psychotherapist Lou Salome.

For some time they lived in a civil marriage, and it was under the influence of their relationship that Nietzsche wrote the first part of the sensational book “Thus Spoke Zarathustra.”

The apogee of creativity

After his early retirement, Nietzsche took up philosophy seriously. It was in the next ten years that he wrote 11 of his most significant books, which completely changed Western philosophy. Over the next four years, he created the most famous book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

This work cannot be called philosophical, in the usual and familiar sense of the word, the book contains sayings, poetry, abstract bright ideas, non-trivial thoughts about life in society. Within two years after its publication, Nietzsche became the most famous person not only in his country, but also abroad.

The philosopher’s last book, “The Will to Power,” which took more than five years to complete, was published after the philosopher’s death with the help of his sister Elizabeth.

Philosophical teachings of Nietzsche

The views of Friedrich Nietzsche can be called everything-denying and extremely radical. Having become a militant atheist, he criticized the Christian basis of society and Christian morality. He considered the culture of Ancient Greece, which he studied well, to be the ideal of human existence, and characterized the further development of society as regression.

His philosophical vision of the world, outlined in the book “Philosophy of Life,” explains that every human life is unique and inimitable. Moreover, any human individual is valuable precisely from the point of view of his own life experience, obtained empirically. He considered will to be the main human quality, since only will can force a person to carry out any orders of the brain (mind).

From the very beginning of human civilization, people have been fighting for survival and in this struggle only the most worthy survive, i.e. the strongest. This is how the idea of a Superman arose, standing “Beyond good and evil,” above the law, above morality. This idea is fundamental in Nietzsche’s work, and it was from it that the fascists drew their racial theory.

The meaning of life according to Nietzsche

The main philosophical question is: what is the meaning of human life? Why did humanity come to this world? What is the purpose of the historical process?

In his writings, Nietzsche completely denies the existence of the meaning of life, he denies Christian morality and proves that the church deceives people by imposing on them false concepts of happiness and fictitious goals in life.

There is only one life and it is real on earth here and now; you cannot promise a reward for good behavior in a different measure, which does not exist. HE believed that the church forces people to do things that are not at all characteristic of them, and are even contrary to destructive human nature. If you understand that there is simply no God, then a person will have to bear responsibility for any of his actions, without shifting them to the notorious “God’s will.”

It is in this case that man will manifest himself: as the greatest creation of nature or man - an animal, aggressive and cruel. In addition, every man must strive for power and victory at any cost, only because of the desire to dominate given to him by nature.

Explanation of the concept of Superman

In his main book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche formulates the idea of a Superman who should emerge as a result of the evolutionary process in the struggle for leadership. This man destroys all foundations and laws, he knows no illusions and mercy, his main goal is power over the whole world.

In contrast to the Superman, the last man appears. How can one not recall Rodion Raskolnikov and his: “Am I a trembling creature or do I have the right?” This last man does not fight and does not strive for leadership, he chose for himself a comfortable, animal existence: he eats, sleeps and reproduces, multiplying the last people like himself, capable only of obeying the orders of the superman.

Precisely because the world is filled with people so unnecessary to history and progress, war is a blessing, clearing space for new people, a new race.

Therefore, Nietzsche’s concept was positively accepted by Hitler and others like him and formed the basis of racial theory. For these reasons, the philosopher’s works were banned in the USSR.

The influence of Nietzsche's philosophy on world culture

Today, Nietzsche's works no longer evoke such fierce rejection as at the beginning of the twentieth century. Sometimes they discuss with him, sometimes they think about it, but it is simply impossible to be indifferent to his ideas. Under the influence of these philosophical views, Thomas Mann wrote the novel “Doctor Faustus”, and the philosophical thought of O. Spegler developed, and his work “The Decline of Civilization” was clearly dictated by the interpretation of Nietzsche’s ideological views.

last years of life

Hard mental work shook the philosopher’s already weak health. In addition, a hereditary tendency to mental illness could manifest itself at any time.

In 1898, the philosopher saw a public scene of cruel abuse of a horse, which provoked an unexpected attack of mental illness. Doctors could not offer any other way out and sent him to a psychiatric hospital for treatment. For several months the philosopher was in a room with soft walls so as not to damage his limbs due to outbursts of aggression.

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The essay is dedicated to one of the titans of modern thought, whose fame has not waned for more than a hundred years, although few amateurs understand his teaching. The author tried, to the best of his student abilities, to show not Nietzsche’s tragedy itself (Stefan Zweig, Karl Jaspers and others did this brilliantly), but the internal, immanent philosophical meaning of this tragedy.

Nietzsche Friedrich (1844 - 1900) : German voluntarist philosopher, irrationalist and modernist, founder of the European “philosophy of life”, poet. Developing the ideas of a “new morality”, a superman, Nietzsche at the end of his life came to a complete denial of Christianity and even wrote a treatise called “The Antichrist” (Der Antichrist; usually translated as “The Anti-Christian”). In 1889 he fell into madness and remained insane until his death. He had a significant influence on various philosophical and social movements of the twentieth century: from fascism and racism to pluralism and liberalism. Nietzsche's ideas are abundantly used by the enemies of Christianity to fight it.

Over the past decades, “Nietzscheanism” has become a kind of intellectual fashion for young people, and Nietzsche is the idol of many educated people. To a large extent, this phenomenon is associated with moral laxity and selfishness, which have become the principles of modern society. “Nietzsche,” writes one of the new authors, “is the only one who, at every stage of each new reading, more and more deeply confirmed just my own experiences"1. Without a careful study of the philosopher’s life, it is impossible to understand either the specifics of his work or the reasons for his colossal influence. After all, these reasons lie in the coincidence of many subjective factors of his and our time. And according to I. Garin, an ardent supporter of his ideas, “Nietzsche’s philosophy is the revelation of Nietzsche’s inner world”2.

Friedrich Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844 in the family of a pastor. Despite the early death of his father (1848), which deeply affected the boy, he received a good upbringing with a very strong religious component. As a child, admiring music or the singing of a choir, he dreamily contemplated his favorite scenes and imagined the singing of angels. But not only the gospel stories, but also the teaching had a great influence on him: concepts such as chastity, purity, compassion greatly touched his heart.

The development of the philosopher's soul is largely reflected in his poems. There is a wonderful poem about young years:

You wounded me with new slander.
Well! The path to the grave is clearer to me...
A monument poured out of malice by you,
Soon my trembling chest will press down.
You will sigh... How long will it last?! Sweet revenge eyes
They will turn on fire again to a new enemy;
You will languish all night long,
“I can’t live without revenge,” you say, “I can’t!”
And now I know: from a damp grave
I will again regret not my sad age,
Not your own, broken by deceit,
And about this: why are you, my enemy is a man!

Here we see a deep understanding of the Christian ideal. In another poem, also quite early, Nietzsche seriously warns against replacing love with sensual passion:

Sensuality will ruin
All the sprouts of love...
Passion will forget love
Dust in the blood will flare up.
You are a greedy dream
Don't touch youth
Or the merciless fire,
Sensual fire
Courage will melt
In fiery blood,
Will not leave ashes
From your love.

This is how Nietzsche thought in his youth; but already in those years he wrote other poems that reveal to us the demonic force that lived in his soul. The later period of his life we consider, the more influential this force turns out to be.

It's pouring into me again like a wave
Living blood through the open window...
Here, there it matches my head
And whispers: I am freedom and love!
I can taste and smell blood...
Its wave follows me...
I'm out of breath, throwing myself onto the roof...
But you won’t leave: she is more formidable than fire!
I run outside... I marvel at the miracle:
Living blood reigns and is everywhere...
All the people, streets, houses - everything is in it!..
It doesn’t blind their eyes like it does mine,
And fertilizes the good of life for people,
But I feel stuffy: I see blood everywhere!

Perhaps such a poem was only an attempt to create a poetic image? - No, we find echoes of the same “nightmare” in his diaries and letters, in his philosophical works themselves. But poetry provides the most obvious example. Poetry, like music, early became Nietzsche’s favorite pastime, which already in childhood, according to his best biographer D. Halévy, “was taken over by the tyrannical instinct of creativity”3.

Love and don't be ashamed of crazy pleasures,
Say openly that you are praying for evil,
And the wonderful aroma of ferocious crimes
Breathe in before the bliss is gone.

For many, the familiar image of Nietzsche is just such an “amoralist,” cheerfully choosing evil instead of good and convinced that no one has the right to demand an account from him for this. In fact, as we see, this image is much deeper and more complex. But Nietzsche, at least at some points in his life, would have liked to see himself as the idol he became. The main motive is the heroism of a person who is not afraid to remain completely alone as everything human is rejected by him and given over to ridicule. Overcoming the fear of loneliness is one of the most convincing indicators of greatness: it is no coincidence that hermits became guiding stars for many generations, for centuries. Nietzsche, who had no family and did not recognize the values of society, wanted to be a kind of “hermit” of philosophy. Moreover, he wanted to emerge from the “desert” like a prophet in order to usher in a new era - the era of the superman. Therefore, in his most successful work, he puts his ideas into the mouth of the prophet, but not the Christian one, but the Persian Zarathustra.

My sail is my thought, and the helmsman is a free spirit,
And proudly my ship sails across the waters,
And the voice of conscience, the noble element,
Will save, save me: I am with the power of nature
I go to battle alone, and the ocean roars...

Admirers of Nietzsche imagine him exactly like this: like Doctor Faustus, who by force (albeit with the help of the devil) snatches nature’s secrets from her. “They are saints for us! - said at the beginning of the twentieth century. writer Hermann Hesse. “We want to rejoice in them, we want to admire in reverent shyness the powerful, high columns supporting the arch of these temples... We call Faust and Zarathustra temples and holy places”3. The central ideal here is freedom that does not recognize God. It presupposes a new religious faith - man's faith in his own powers, and a new religious worship - of the “superman”. But Nietzsche’s profound words about himself turned out to be truly prophetic:

From the diary

If all enemies are killed,
I want to resurrect again
Those whose names are forgotten,
To kill them again.
Scary: I'm afraid he'll laugh
Fate is evil over the heart:
I'll have to fight with myself
Cut yourself like a slave.

The main underlying motive of Friedrich Nietzsche's work, and especially his philosophy, the main engine and, at the same time, the threat to his life is the mysterious force which acted through him, as through a genius, but at the same time on its own, and Nietzsche was aware of this. Sometimes he was afraid of her, more often he was proud of her, as his highest difference from “mere mortals.” It follows from this that the ideal of complete freedom and self-sufficiency is an incorrect interpretation of the philosopher’s aspirations. Indeed, since Nietzsche lost faith in God, he no longer found an ideal for himself that he could worship: every new ideal turned out to be false, and he devoted all his work, in fact, to exposing ideals - the public good, morality4, humanism5, independence (for example, women’s, because the issue of emancipation was then on a wave of popularity)6, reason7, scientific objectivity8 and many others. etc. It was a radical “revaluation of values,” but not with the goal of abandoning all values in general, but with the goal of creating new values.

Who was supposed to create these new values? Nietzsche himself wrote about himself: “I am one of those who dictate values for thousands of years. To immerse your hands in the centuries, as in soft wax, to write, as on copper, the will of a thousand people... this, Zarathustra will say, is the bliss of the creator.”9 But Zarathustra is only a “prophet” of the superman. Can he dictate his values in advance? Reflecting on his Zarathustra four years after it was written (and a year before his madness), Nietzsche will write words that are difficult for the reader to immediately understand, but which are very important for the author himself: “Zarathustra once defined with all severity his task ... he There is approver up to justification, up to redemption for everything that has happened.”10 This means that his mission concerns not only the future, but also the past - philosophy, embodied in the image of Zarathustra, was supposed to justify all of humanity, its aimless and meaningless existence, before the searching gaze of the thinker. But how, if this existence is truly aimless and meaningless, could it be justified, that is, philosophically comprehended? The answer to this question is perhaps Nietzsche's main goal as a philosopher who denied God and sought a replacement for Him. He found it, as it seemed to him, in the idea progress. Humanity, in accordance with Darwin's theory, turns out to be only an intermediate species: it, in the course of natural selection (the struggle of strong individuals with weak ones), has yet to become super-humanity. This shows how unfair it is to call Nietzsche a humanist (from the word humanum - human). According to him, man is only that which must be overcome. And young Hermann Hesse in 1909 happily put Nietzsche on the same pedestal with his idols - Darwin and Haeckel, the founder of social Darwinism, for extolling the idea of progress: “we rejoice at the new beautiful present and the tea of an even better, most beautiful future”11.

It turns out that Nietzsche himself finds himself in the middle between the past and the future, which has not yet arrived. But he himself did not yet consider himself a superman. What values, in his opinion, could he create himself, being just a man? Perhaps these are the values of overcoming, moving forward without stopping, about which he wrote so much? But how can you overcome something for the sake of something that does not yet fit into your consciousness? Here we find a clear parallel with Christianity. The Church teaches that a person must fight base manifestations in himself for the sake of that highest thing that only God Himself can give him. How can a person know what to strive for if he is still enslaved to sin? This knowledge little by little gives him Grace, which calls, guides, and supports a person in this struggle. Grace is a manifestation of the power of God. So Nietzsche, only “inside out,” believed in some great force, who imparted to him knowledge of the superman. He did not write his works himself; some kind of irresistible passion drove his hand, which was facilitated by the “terrifying, demonic hypersensitivity of his nerves”12. Not only Nietzsche's biographers, but also he himself in many places noted the affectiveness, even the mediumistic nature of his character. I. Garin’s fair statement also relates to this aspect: “Nietzsche’s attractiveness, which, by the way, increases over time, is due to his charismatic gift of “infection,” the transmission of a powerful energy impulse”13. For a person this is only possible if energy, which feeds the impulse, is something objective. So, whose medium was Nietzsche?

The key concept, the word in which this energy or force was encrypted, is “Will”. Nietzsche is called a voluntarist, that is, a representative of a philosophical movement that considers personal will, and not the laws of existence, to be the main cause of the entire order of things. As a rule, voluntarism differed from Christianity in that it rejected God - “Will” turned out to be fragmented, and therefore chaotic. Although some Christian thinkers in Europe were also voluntarists: for example, the English philosopher and historian Thomas Carlyle. In the atheistic voluntarism of the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, a person is endowed with absolute freedom, but may not know it; a person is alone with himself, and no one else will ask him. In Nietzsche, the concept of “Will” had a special background associated with the names of the idols of his youth - Schopenhauer and Wagner.

By the time he first became acquainted with the books of the German philosopher Schopenhauer (lived 1788 - 1860), Nietzsche had already lost faith in God. From the age of fourteen, studying at the Pfort High School, he early became acquainted with the lack of faith that reigned in the minds of the then recognized writers (although the school itself was religious). His idols were the great poets Schiller, Byron, Hölderlin and others - many of them were deeply corrupt people who made pride and self-love the principle of life. Having entered the university and making good progress in science, he, on the advice of his teacher, the famous philologist Professor Ritschl, completely abandoned theology studies in order to devote himself entirely to philology, Greek language and literature. From now on, he will reflect on Christianity, which never gave him peace, only from the outside, from the outside, from the position of an unbeliever and even an unkind mind.

In 1865, reading Schopenhauer produced a real revolution in his soul and for the first time confronted him with the need to reassess all the values of life. In his book “The World as Will and Representation,” Schopenhauer wrote about the Will that rules the world, and about the Representation that watches its grandiose and terrible performance. The will is insane, passionate, there is no contemplative principle in it, but only one active one. Constantly fighting with herself in the guise of her creations, she represents eternal suffering. No one can escape death, because the Will must destroy in order to create. The idea itself is in slavery to the Will, but it can, through self-knowledge, reach the heights of contemplation. It makes the suffering of the individual meaningful, bringing it into dissonance with the empty content of the surrounding world. Nietzsche subtly felt the suffering and untruths that fill the world. It seemed to him that Schopenhauer was a prophet of liberation who mercilessly pointed out society’s vices so that people could be saved. Although Schopenhauer often used Christian concepts, especially ascetic ones, in his philosophy “salvation” was reminiscent of what is called “enlightenment” in Hinduism and Buddhism: one must acquire apathy, equanimity, extinguish the will to live, that is go out from her. Then she will no longer have power over the person. You need to fade away, die forever. Nietzsche understood it this way:

Wisdom

The truth is in the motionless one freezing, in the rotting alone!
Mystery is nirvana; a hopelessly powerless mind will find bliss in it...
Life is a holy calm, covered with sleep...
Life is a grave peacefully and quietly rotting from the light
Scull.

The next person who greatly influenced Nietzsche was the composer Richard Wagner (1813 - 1883). He met him back at the time of his ardent passion for Schopenhauer, whom Wagner also appreciated. Having knowledge of music, talent and a critical mind, Nietzsche became a good interlocutor for the new idol of Germany, tired of fans. In Wagner's operas, noble and strong heroes always become victims, not knowing how to use the weapons of vile creatures - deception, etc. Wagner allegorized the departure of the mighty culture of old Europe in “Twilight of the Gods,” where the omnipotent gods, as a result of struggle, treachery and the inevitable course of things, leave this world. Germany admired Wagner for the idea of the German character, which he tried to convey through his music, breaking with the Italian operatic canons. He built himself a real temple in Bayreth - a theater specially designed for his productions, half-performances, half-mysteries (the building later burned down). Wagner, like Nietzsche, left Christianity in his youth. He experienced a cooling of faith after confirmation*, when, by his own admission, together with a friend, “he spent part of the money intended to pay the pastor for confession on sweets”14. In adulthood, he was friends with the founder of Russian anarchism, Mikhail Bakunin, and valued his advice; Bakunin once asked a composer who intended to write the tragedy “Jesus of Nazareth” to portray Jesus as a weak-willed man15. Wagner himself thought, like Nietzsche: “Christianity justifies the dishonest, useless and miserable existence of man on earth by the miraculous love of God.”16 The extinction of life, like Schopenhauer's, was not Wagner's ideal. He was more interested in heroism and its aesthetic features. He tried to ennoble the “will to live” by placing it in tragic circumstances. But, according to contemporaries, he loved success and personal glory most of all.

Gradually, Nietzsche's dissatisfaction with both Schopenhauer and Wagner grew. In both he saw symbols of decline, an attempt to hide from reality, which in Wagner, moreover, puts on the guise of feigned heroism and hypocritical morality. Nietzsche, who himself wanted to be a herald of new truths, did not find either true leadership or sincere friendship in the person of his two idols. As soon as he began to criticize Wagner, the master's patronizing attitude towards him began to become hostile and cold, and the composer's entourage laughed at him.

Nietzsche's passionate nature could not come to terms with hopelessness and extinction. After reflection, he began to see in this philosophy “lustful love of death,” a malicious aestheticization of decay. To create a qualitatively different philosophy, the rehabilitation of the Will was required, and therefore that cult of autocratic, subordinate to no one strength in the man for whom Nietzsche's philosophy is best known. He knew that this Will (which he called “The Will to Power”) acts through him with special energy when he creates: he composes music, poetry, philosophical aphorisms. He lived by this, and without a religious life he had the effect of becoming accustomed to frantic “creativity”, the sole purpose of which was self-expression. True, in this self-expression he sometimes found it difficult to recognize himself, and was frightened by the scale of his own activity. But more and more often force captured him completely, leaving no time for quiet reflection. He came to the conviction, very significant for a European person: “Culture is just a thin apple peel over the hot chaos”17.

The main concepts of Nietzsche's own philosophy were ressentiment, superman, and eternal recurrence. Let's look at them separately.

Ressentiment 18 is the hidden hatred that the weak have for the strong. Nietzsche himself considered himself a “strong” person, although in moments of despondency he often doubted this. The “weak” are unable to truly create, since their main goal is survival. Seeing that they could not survive alone, they united and created a society, a state. The morality of these “monstrous” institutions weighs heavily on everyone, including the “strong” ones who do not need it. But in order to keep them in line, the “weak” came up with shame, pity, compassion, etc. In fact, they are not capable of anything like that: their compassion, being external, is filled with lust. But they convince the “strong” people that they are wrong in everything. Thus, they protect their earthly life, although they preach about heavenly things all the time. According to Nietzsche, ressentiment is the essence of Christianity. "This is hatred for mind blowing, pride, courage, freedom... to the joys of feelings, to joy in general"19. The well-known belief that the last Christian was Christ Himself, and He died on the cross, after which the apostles (especially Paul) radically distorted His teaching about non-resistance to evil, leads him to “anti-Christianity.” Nietzsche considers the ideal of Christ weak and weak-willed, the ideal of His disciples as base and barbaric.

Was this attitude due to a misunderstanding of Christianity? Partly so. But it cannot be said that Nietzsche did not understand him completely and welcomed the primitive criticism of religion as complete self-deception. In his youth, when one of his friends expressed an ironic opinion about the essence of prayer, Nietzsche gloomily interrupted him with the words: “Donkey wit worthy of Feuerbach!”20. And in the famous work “Beyond Good and Evil” he admits: “Loving a person for the sake of God - this has been until now the most noble and distant feeling that people have achieved."21 But all such statements are drowned in his hatred of Christianity, which grew over time. Ressentiment has no content of its own. Being an envious feeling, he feeds only on the goods of others. The question of whether it is permissible to connect ressentiment and Christianity is a question about the internal content of Christianity. Nietzsche knew his emotions about Christianity: they were different, and depending on his mood, he gave the floor to one or the other. But the positive content of Christianity was closed to him. He paid special attention to the criticism of the “world” in the Holy Scriptures, without understanding its meaning. Christianity teaches about two parts in a person, the best and the worst. Love for the world and its vanity allows the worst part to develop to demonic proportions; on the contrary, renunciation of the world makes room for the better, heavenly side of the human soul. The philosopher did not recognize or notice this side, at least with his mind. But in doing so, he allowed the passions that he mistook for the “Will to Power” to take over and destroy himself. He strictly divided humanity into “the best” and “the worst,” but he himself could not achieve complete confidence that he belonged to the first. Having rejected the complexity, ambiguity and mobility of every living person, Nietzsche found himself defenseless in the face of the complexity of his own character.

Superman- the ultimate development of Nietzsche’s idea of the “strong” man. This is his dream, which could not come true. The opposite of superman is the “last man,” the embodiment of which the philosopher considered contemporary society to be. The main problem of the “last man” is his inability to despise himself22. Therefore, he cannot surpass himself. This is the limit of development of the “weak”. Unable to create, he rejects all creativity as unnecessary, and lives only for pleasure. Not being able to truly hate anyone, he is ready to destroy anyone who tries to disturb the peace and security of his life. In the “last man” one can easily recognize the everyday ideal that is being imposed on people of the 21st century. For Nietzsche, who believed in evolution, such humanity turns out to be its dead-end branch. According to him, the superman will have to separate himself from the “last people”, like a person from an impersonal mass. Maybe he will fight with them, or maybe he will command them. But what are the qualities of a superman? - This remains not entirely clear. What exactly will he create, what will he live for? And if only for his own sake, then what is his real difference from the “last man”? Most likely, the difference lies in the demonic nature of his nature. “The Last Man” is simply pitiful and insignificant; the superman has the imprint of a super-strong mind. He denies the qualities of Christ, but has the qualities of Dionysus - the pagan "suffering god" of wine, orgies and mysteries, the violent double of Apollo. Torn to pieces by the rampant chaos, Dionysus confronts the Savior who voluntarily endures death and remains whole. Nietzsche saw Dionysus in himself. All the senses of the “superman” are heightened, he literally “rushes” around the universe, not stopping at anything. The demonic nature of Nietzsche’s own personality was noted (not without admiration) by Stefan Zweig23.

In the idea of dividing the human race into the initially capable and incapable, we see one of the reasons for the popularity of Nietzsche's philosophy in our era. On the one hand, all the media preach precisely the cult of the “last man”, who has nothing to create and only has to happily use everything. On the other hand, in parallel, a cult of the “elite” is also being created, a special class of individuals who, for the benefit of the whole world, can wisely or “professionally” manage billions of ordinary mortals. And modern culture does not hesitate to emphasize the “demonism” of these people, and is even proud of it. Many today consider the philosophy of Satanism to be the lot of intellectuals, and the very worship of Lucifer (“light-bringer”) to be a religion of knowledge. But Nietzsche's example will always remain a warning against this. Being a thinker, he could not blindly believe in the tenets of the religion he created. He doubted, feeling his weakness and susceptibility to painful conditions24. The support he found became the cause of his spiritual death. This is the “myth of eternal return.”

Eternal Return- a world order, according to which everything that happened in the world is repeated in it without end and without beginning. This idea, similar to the view of Indian Brahmanism and other pagan philosophies, came to Nietzsche's mind before he formalized the doctrine of the superman. But its influence was deeper and longer lasting. The author himself considered its meaning cruel and merciless: let everyone be ready to live the same life an infinite number of times. He was faced with a difficult question: can a person change this life? And if it cannot, then the “return” is truly terrible. The fact of the matter is that can not. Nietzsche witnessed his own weakness; he felt how, with illness and powerlessness, a feeling of ressentiment grew irresistibly within himself25. And if a person cannot change anything, he can only “forbid” himself those states into which his personality is ready to plunge. This means that victory over oneself lies in the willingness to accept life as it is. This was a response to Schopenhauer. Nietzsche proclaimed not the negation, but the affirmation of the Will. You need to completely surrender to it, and, standing in defiance of everything that exists, take possession of everything (of course, in the subjective sense). This is how the concept of “Will to Power” arose, which the fascists later used in an objective sense. And he gave himself to her strength, that acted in him, for theft.

The idea of "eternal recurrence" has been called a "myth" or even a "symbol" for the reason that it is not to be taken literally. We cannot say how much the author believed in the actual repetition of everything. True, this idea had a truly mystical effect on him: striking him during a forest walk in the mountains, it plunged the thinker into shock. He wept with sacred delight, thinking that he had found the “highest point of thinking”26. The essence of “eternal return” was another concept - amor fati, love for fate. “Without a doubt, there is a distant, invisible, wonderful star that controls all our actions; let us rise to such a thought.”27 The readiness with which “the most freedom-loving philosopher” was ready to surrender to the power of some star is surprising. But what was important to him was what he would receive in return: superhuman powers, genius.

From the diary

The heart doesn't like freedom
Slavery by nature
The heart is given as a reward.
Let your heart go free
The spirit will curse its lot,
The link will break with life!

It was precisely at this time that he became infatuated with Lou Salome, who played a fatal role in his fate. Having truly fallen in love for the first time (this was in 1882, at the age of 38), Nietzsche gave the following description to the object of his feelings: “Lou is the daughter of a Russian general, and she is 20 years old; she is as insightful as an eagle and brave as a lion, and for all that, however, she is too much of a girl and a child who probably is not destined to live long.”28 He was wrong. Lou lived for a long time (until she was 76 years old), and wrote about him in her memoirs. She also became, to a certain extent, the “muse” of the psychoanalytic movement; S. Freud was friends with her, whose base and full of perversions philosophy would hardly have pleased Nietzsche himself. Being a woman of easy principles, Lou had an affair with both Nietzsche and his friend, Paul Re. Without noticing this at first, the philosopher chose her as an interlocutor to present his innermost ideas. But after some time the situation became clear; Nietzsche was offended to the core, especially since he was already thinking of starting a family. His sister Lisbeth, a not very insightful person, but who loves him, bluntly pointed out to her brother that Lou was the living embodiment of his own philosophy. (She was right: Nietzsche himself admits this in ESSE NOMO29). As a result, he broke up with Lou Salome and Paul Re, and also quarreled with his mother and sister. All this produced a revolution in his impressionable soul. The idea of “eternal return,” of love for one’s own destiny, was under threat: “ Despite everything“,” he wrote these days to his best friend Peter Gast, “I would not like to relive these last few months”30.

In an effort to overcome his humiliated state, he finishes his most famous book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. There is a truly demonic charge of genius in her. At the same time, being as it were prophecy about a superman, the book was waiting for its continuation. Nietzsche wanted public resonance, controversy. Without waiting for them, he predicted that his works would influence the minds of people after his death. But Nietzsche could not stop there. Until the end of the 1880s. he writes a number of more works, more and more provocative. His goal is “to rebel against everything that is sick in me, including Wagner, including Schopenhauer, including all modern “humanity””31. However, linking everything that was sick in oneself only with strangers, only with former idols, was a big mistake. Some serious illness progressed within him, requiring expression in evil pamphlets and poetry. Even Nietzsche’s admirer I. Garin recognizes his sadistic tendencies, although he attributes their cause entirely to brain disease32.

Pay

Execute with your beauty, throwing yourself onto a dirty bed...
In the arms of crazy nights of execution with its beauty,
And let the body of my goddess look like carrion!..

From the diary

Don't judge me, my outbursts of anger:
I am a slave of passions and a formidable scourge of the mind...
My soul has rotted, and instead of a body there are bones...
Don't judge! Freedom is a prison.

These and other poems show what was happening in his soul. The disease actually developed on the physical level. Karl Jaspers, a psychiatrist, writes about this: “Nietzsche’s disease (progressive paralysis due to infection with syphilis) was one of those that weakens all inhibition processes. Sharp changes of mood, intoxication with unprecedented possibilities, leaps from one extreme to another... all these are purely painful states”33. But at the same time, the melancholy of spiritual loneliness steadily grew. In the very years when he wrote the famous book “The Will to Power,” Nietzsche admitted in a letter to his sister: “Where are they, those friends with whom I once thought I was so closely connected? We live in different worlds, speak different languages! I walk among them as an exile, as a stranger; not a single word, not a single look reaches me... A “deep man” needs to have a friend if he does not have God; but I have neither God nor friend.”34 It is impossible to associate only the manifestations of the disease itself, which are different in different people, with the disease. In addition, infection with syphilis must have been caused by an incorrect lifestyle. At the age of forty he felt in his prime and wrote a famous poem

Noon of life.

Oh, noon of life, sultry summer garden,
Laden,
Intoxicated with alarming, sensitive happiness!
I'm waiting for friends. I waited both day and night...
Where are you, friends? Come! The hour has come!

In 1889, Nietzsche's sanity left him and he suddenly plunged into an inadequate state, in which, with minor rays, he remained until his death in 1900. This was preceded by several months of struggle with mental illness. Friends and relatives were only gradually able to notice what was going on in the philosopher’s mind. Nietzsche was then living on holiday in Turin, Italy, which always inspired his philosophical works. As in previous years, he actively corresponded - his letters came to Mrs. Meisenbuch, Cosima Wagner (the composer's wife), Peter Gast, Franz Overbeck and many of those who had previously surrounded Nietzsche and now remained indifferent to his fate. “The most independent mind in all of Europe”, “the only German writer”, “the genius of truth”... all these epithets with which he called himself in his letters were now perceived as a manifestation of a creative crisis, incontinence of character. But they were followed by other, increasingly strange words. The letters were reduced to one line, which contained some incomprehensible confessions. He either called himself by the names of the murderers about whom modern newspapers wrote, or suddenly signed himself - “Dionysus” or “Crucified”... Nietzsche’s last feelings towards Christ remained a mystery. When Overbeck arrived in Turin, he found his friend in an insane state, under the supervision of strangers. Nietzsche played the piano with his elbow, sang hymns in honor of Dionysus, and jumped on one leg. The later years of madness were calm, and there was evidence of sudden glimpses of consciousness, although doctors claimed that the brain was hopelessly damaged. On August 25, 1900, Friedrich Nietzsche died in the city of Weimar.

"Zarathustra" by Friedrich Nietzsche in the light of the Beatitudes

Nietzsche's influence on his contemporaries was not as great as on his descendants, including the current generations. According to K. Jaspers, “Nietzsche, and with him modern man, no longer lives in connection with the One, who is God, but exists, as it were, in a state of free fall”35. We examined the life of this German philosopher, the sad end of which is not in dissonance with the laws of its development. But Nietzsche’s most successful work, through which a powerful stream of his talent breaks through, not yet subject to the obvious painful decay of the mind, is, of course, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra.” Here, in poetic form, the philosopher contrasted himself with all the values of the Christian world, mixing them with objects that cause contempt. He, as we may have already noticed, tried in the person of Christianity to remove the obstacle to the prophecy of the coming “superman”. Therefore, our study will be incomplete if we do not consider this particular work of his in the light of the Beatitudes from the Savior’s Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:3-12).

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for to them is the Kingdom of Heaven.	Zarathustra almost nowhere directly contradicts the Gospel, and this is deeply no coincidence - Nietzsche seemed to be afraid to start the Bible; he only indirectly refers to it. The ideal of evangelical poverty in the understanding of Nietzsche (as well as many unbelieving philosophers) is most closely associated with ignorance, to which he contrasts active knowledge. “Since we know little, we sincerely like the poor in spirit... As if there were a special, secret access to knowledge, hidden for those who learn something: this is how we believe in the people and their “wisdom”36. Nietzsche saw in poverty of spirit the desire to know the truth without working or suffering. From this it is clear how he was deeply mistaken about Christianity, not wanting to see heroism in it. What he calls “voluntary poverty”37 is essentially just an escape from reality. But the Lord called for something completely different. “For you say: “I am rich, I have become rich, and I have need of nothing”; but you do not know that you are miserable and pitiful and poor and blind and naked” (Rev. 3:17). To be poor in spirit means first of all to realize this. “When a person looks inside his heart and judges his inner state, he will see spiritual poverty, worse than physical poverty. He has nothing in himself except poverty, wretchedness, sin and darkness. He does not have true and living faith, true and heartfelt prayer, true and heartfelt thanksgiving, truth, love, purity, goodness, mercy, meekness, patience, peace, silence, peace and other spiritual goodness. ... But whoever has that treasure receives it from God, and not from himself” (St. Tikhon of Zadonsk)37.
Blessed are those who cry, for they will be comforted.	Nietzsche highly valued crying, and we can often find evidence in his works, as well as letters and diaries, that his nervous nature was characterized by shedding streams of tears. “The world,” says Zarathustra, “is sorrow to all depths”38. However, no less important for him is overcoming crying, that is, the already mentioned amor fati. Could a philosopher understand the words: “in the abyss of crying there is consolation” (Ladder 7.55)? His cry was of a different nature, and Nietzsche did not know the gospel cry “for God.” That is, I did not know crying as a request for healing, which at the same time serves as a means of healing. Many ascetics could fall into madness in solitude, like Nietzsche, if crying about sins did not preserve clarity of consciousness in them.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.	“Joyful” crying in Christian teaching is accompanied by meekness. Nietzsche did not advocate the cult of power, as it might seem. He was gentle in his dealings with people and even spoke of himself as a meek person. But how can this be combined with the “will to power”? The fact is that Nietzsche’s entire philosophy relates to the inner world of man, and his attention is directed only to self-awareness. He considered meekness as a moral effort to be hypocrisy, under which internal human vices are hidden. “I have often laughed at the weak who think they are good because their paws are weak.”39 It must be admitted that the philosopher could actually encounter such examples in life. Kindness, in his opinion, should entirely be a natural impulse, again an action strength nature in man. Therefore, Nietzsche defends the idea of revenge: it is better to take revenge in a natural impulse than to humiliate the offender with the guise of forgiveness. So, we see that the philosopher did not understand moral meekness as a person’s work on himself. This only means that at some stage of his life he himself abandoned this work, surrendering to the will of the raging elements. But the Lord speaks of the meek as workers, tirelessly working not on their outer image, but on the state of their heart. Therefore, as workers on the earth, they will inherit it. “In the hearts of the meek the Lord rests, but a troubled soul is the seat of the devil” (Ladder 24.7).
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied.	The desire for knowledge is always noted as an essential character trait of Nietzsche. But his knowledge had no final goal, ultimately no object. In works devoted to Nietzsche, one can find the concept of “Don Juan of knowledge.” What does it mean? Just as Don Juan, according to legend, immediately lost interest in the victims of his seduction, so the philosopher allegedly abandoned the truth immediately after he found it. In fact, this is not true: Nietzsche was very attached to his ideas and abandoned them only when a powerful stream of consciousness carried him along. He was seduced, not seduced. But his desire was to become like his Zarathustra, for whom, in the end, “good and evil are only running shadows, wet sorrow and creeping clouds”40. Christians thirst for truth, generally speaking, because they do not sympathize with falsehood. Bliss is promised because truth will prevail. The world, therefore, is a struggle between truth and falsehood, and the latter does not exist in itself: it is distortion, lie, deception. For Nietzsche, it turns out that good does not exist either. He seeks the truth “beyond good and evil.” But by the same token, looking for, it shows the inherent attraction to truth in every person.
Blesseds of mercy, for there will be mercy.	Most of all, Nietzsche as a thinker receives reproaches for his lack of mercy. In fact, here too the ambiguity of his character was revealed. He could, seeing a dog with a wounded paw on the street, carefully bandage it; at the same time, when the newspapers wrote about an earthquake on the island of Java, which claimed the lives of several hundred thousand people at once, Nietzsche was in aesthetic delight at such “beauty.” What does Zarathustra say about mercy? First of all, he resorts to his favorite method of exposing false, hypocritical virtue. “Your eyes are too cruel, and you look lustfully at those who suffer. Hasn’t it just been your voluptuousness that has changed its disguise and is now called compassion!”41. This exposure of lust hidden in pity occupies Nietzsche a lot. Perhaps someone hypocritically expressed sympathy for him, as a sick person, but he keenly felt such moments. The fear of humiliation always lived in him: he was afraid of internal ressentiment. At the same time, of course, he did not have the leisure to form an idea of living, active mercy, which is not at all on display, but on the contrary, even hidden and hiding, shows kindness to those who need it. Thus, under the cover of darkness, St. performed his alms. Nicholas the Wonderworker. This means putting yourself and your property at the disposal of God, who gives every good thing to those who ask Him. Charity does not imagine itself to be a virtue: it is rather obedience, with the help of which one can acquire some virtues of the soul. It helps to acquire purity of heart.
Blessed are those who are pure in heart, for they will see God.	Nietzsche talks about the body quite often; in essence, being a monist*, he tries to shift the attention of German philosophy from the mind to the emotional sphere of the flesh. But at the same time - a strange thing - Nietzsche says very little about the heart. Moreover, “purity of heart” is generally ignored by him. “I teach you about a friend and his overflowing heart”42 - such statements can still be found in Zarathustra. The heart must be full. With what? Here the author describes himself, the high sensory tension of his character. The heart is understood, most likely, as a fleshly muscle, but not as the center of spiritual-physical life. Meanwhile, it was no coincidence that the Lord paid a lot of attention to the heart. When speaking about the fact that a person is defiled not by what enters him, but by what comes from him, He meant precisely the heart: “For from the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery... these are the things that defile a person” ( Matthew 15:19). And one more thing: out of the abundance of the heart a man’s mouth speaks (Luke 6:45). In a word, as St. teaches. Tikhon Zadonsky43, “what is not in the heart is not in the thing itself. Faith is not faith, love is not love, when there is nothing in the heart, but there is hypocrisy.” The Gospel, therefore, contains the answer to Nietzsche, who was so afraid of all hypocrisy. Purity of heart excludes pretense, and only in it does a person regain his pristine ability to see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for these shall be called sons of God.	Nietzsche often spoke of “love of what is distant” instead of love of one’s neighbor. And the word of God says: “I will fulfill the word: peace, peace to him that is far and to him that is near, says the Lord, and I will heal him” (Is. 57:19). What does Nietzsche’s “ethics of love for the distant” mean? This is a rather deep thought: you need to love in a person what he can become, and be demanding of what he is. Otherwise, by loving him just like that, we will be doing him a disservice. Man in his development (in the future, superman) is, according to Nietzsche, “distant”. As you can see, there is some truth to this. Gospel love does not indulge and always requires changes from a person. But it is no less true that a person must maintain peace with other people as a condition for inner peace with God. Often humanity, and especially the Church, is compared to a single body, in which if different members are at enmity, not one of them can be healthy. It is natural that peacemakers are given such a high dignity: after all, by reconciling warring parties, they restore the harmony created by God Himself. But for Nietzsche, war (primarily in the allegorical sense, but also in the literal sense) is a necessary condition for development. Why? Because he does not believe in God and the rational structure of the universe. Zarathustra says this on behalf of Life: “no matter what I create and no matter how much I love what I created, I must soon become an opponent to him and my love: this is what my will wants”44. Here we recognize that blind Will that Schopenhauer taught about: it generates and kills its creatures. Suffice it to say that this bleak idea destroyed Friedrich Nietzsche himself.
Blessed is the expulsion of truth for the sake of them, for those are the Kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are you when they revile you, and ridicule you, and say all sorts of evil things about you lying, for my sake.	Christianity also knows about the presence of evil Will in the world, but sees its cause not in the objective order of being, but in its subjective distortions, the diminishment of good. Therefore, if for the sake of the truth of God it is necessary to be expelled from somewhere, or even deprived of life, a Christian accepts this as bliss, because the world itself, afflicted with evil, thereby helps him avoid his temptations. Nietzsche intuitively understood this. The majority, in his opinion, “hates the lonely”45 who goes a different way. This is how the philosopher sees Christ, crucified by the majority because He denied his ostentatious virtue. But Nietzsche further claims that if the Lord had still lived on earth, He would have refused to go to the Cross. It was a voluntary sacrifice, it was carried out by giving up power. And a new, non-trivial virtue is itself Power46. “Don’t you know who everyone needs most? Who commands great things”47. The Christian meaning of exile for the sake of truth was incomprehensible to the philosopher. He wanted to order, dictate values to people, to be heard. But the Kingdom of Heaven is alien to vanity, and therefore does not come “in a noticeable way” (Luke 17:20). He must first come in the hearts of believers, and only then triumph in the world. The prophet said about the Savior: “He will not cry out or lift up His voice, and will not let it be heard in the streets. A bruised reed he will not break, and smoking flax he will not quench; will execute judgment according to the truth” (Isa. 42: 2-3). If the Judgment of God is coming anyway, then blessed are those who are exiled for the sake of righteousness.
Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is abundant in heaven.	It is only fair to end our reading of Nietzsche here. What could be more natural and at the same time more gratifying for a person than the belief that life is eternal, and our earthly life is just a test? Even the pagans retained the idea of this; but European philosophy has lost it, succumbing to materialism. Nietzsche deliberately contrasts Eternity with his mechanical “eternal return.” His hero risks getting lost in timelessness: “I look forward and back - and I don’t see the end”47. But even despite this, he speaks a very true truth: "All joy wants the eternity of all things" 48. Only Nietzsche himself tried to find joy in doom, in “love of fate,” in man’s enjoyment of himself. But the result was like a building without a foundation and without a roof, unsuitable for living. “Joy in created things does not last long, like a dream, and like a dream, with the taking away of beloved worldly things, it disappears: spiritual joy begins in time, but is completed in eternity, and abides forever, like God Himself, in whom those who love Him rejoice forever abides" (St. Tikhon of Zadonsk)49.

“Man loves to be God,” wrote the Serbian theologian Rev. Justin Popovich. - But none of the gods compromised themselves as terribly as the man-god. He could not comprehend death, suffering, or life.”50 This is the fate of the tragic European thinker F. Nietzsche. He lost his understanding of Christianity and the most important thing that it contains: that which makes it neither resentment, nor simply a moral teaching, nor a philosophy. This is unity with Christ and in Christ, in God. The promise of eternal life, containing inexhaustible benefits, because the Lord lives and is good. This is Christian love, which humbles every mind into obedience, which “is long-suffering, merciful, does not envy, does not boast, is not proud, does not act outrageously, does not seek its own, is not irritated, does not think evil, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices in the truth; loves everything, has faith in everything, trusts everything, endures everything. Love will no longer disappear: if prophecies are abolished, if the pagans are silent, if reason is destroyed...” (1 Cor. 13: 4 - 8).

1 Smolyaninov A.E. My Nietzsche. Chronicles of an Interpretive Pilgrim. 2003 (htm).

2 Garin I. Nietzsche. M.: TERRA, 2000.

3 Daniel Halevi. Life of Friedrich Nietzsche. Riga, 1991. P. 14.

3 Faust and Zarathustra. St. Petersburg: Azbuka, 2001. P. 6.

4 See Towards a genealogy of morality.

5 See Thus spoke Zarathustra.

6 See Beyond good and evil.

7 See On the genealogy of morality.

8 See About the benefits and harms of history for life.

9 See Daniel Halevi. Life of Friedrich Nietzsche. P. 203.

10 Nietzsche F. Essays. T. 2. M.: MYSL, 1990. P. 752.

11 Faust and Zarathustra. P. 17.

12 Stefan Zweig. Friedrich Nietzsche. St. Petersburg: “Azbuka-classics”, 2001. P. 20.

13 Garin I. Nietzsche. P. 23.

* Confirmation is the rite of anointing among Catholics and Lutherans, which they undergo in adolescence.

14 Richard Wagner. Ring of the Nibelung. M. - St. Petersburg, 2001. P. 713.

15 Ibid. P. 731.

16 Ibid. P. 675.

17 Nietzsche F. Essays. T. 1. P. 767.

18 Ressentiment (French) - rancor, hostility.

19 Nietzsche F. Essays. T. 2. P. 647.

20 Daniel Halevi. Life of Friedrich Nietzsche. P. 30.

21 Nietzsche F. Essays. T. 2. P. 287.

22 Nietzsche F. Essays. T. 2. P. 11.

23 Stefan Zweig. Friedrich Nietzsche. P. 95.

24 For many years of his life, Nietzsche could not work or sleep without narcotic drugs: he was so overcome by headaches and general nervous disorder. Cm. Daniel Halevi. Life of Friedrich Nietzsche. P. 192.

25 Nietzsche F. Essays. T. 2. P. 704 - 705.

26 Daniel Halevi. Life of Friedrich Nietzsche. P. 172.

27 Ibid. P. 178.

28 Biography of Friedrich Nietzsche // World of Words (htm).

29 Nietzsche F. Essays. T. 2. P. 744.

30 Daniel Halevi. Life of Friedrich Nietzsche. P. 191.

31 Nietzsche F. Essays. T. 2. P. 526.

32 Garin I. Nietzsche. P. 569.

33 Karl Jaspers. Nietzsche and Christianity. M.: "MEDIUM", 1994. P. 97.

34 Daniel Halevi. Life of Friedrich Nietzsche. P. 235.

35 Karl Jaspers. Nietzsche and Christianity. P. 55.

36 Nietzsche F. Essays. T. 2. P. 92.

37 Nietzsche F. Essays. T. 2. pp. 193-196.

37 Schiaarchm. John (Maslov). Symphony. M.: 2003. P. 614.

38 Nietzsche F. Essays. T. 2. P. 233.

39 Nietzsche F. Essays. T. 2. P. 85.

40 Nietzsche F. Essays. T. 2. P. 118.

41 Nietzsche F. Essays. T. 2. P. 39.

* Monism is a broad philosophical movement, one of the postulates of which is that the soul and body are one and the same.

42 Nietzsche F. Essays. T. 2. P. 44.

43 Symphony. P. 836.

44 Nietzsche F. Essays. T. 2. P. 83.

45 Nietzsche F. Essays. T. 2. P. 46.

46 Nietzsche F. Essays. T. 2. P. 55.

47 Nietzsche F. Essays. T. 2. P. 106.

47 Nietzsche F. Essays. T. 2. P. 116.

48 Nietzsche F. Essays. T. 2. P. 234.

49 Symphony. P. 785.

50 Reverend Justin (Popovich). Philosophical abysses. M.: 2004. P. 31.

Often the reason for outstanding achievements in philosophy and art is a difficult biography. Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the most significant philosophers of the second half of the 19th century, went through a difficult short but very fruitful life path. We will tell you about the milestones of his biography, about the most significant works and views of the thinker.

Childhood and origins

On October 15, 1844, in East Germany, in the small town of Recken, the future great thinker was born. Every biography, Nietzsche and Friedrich is no exception, begins with ancestors. And with this in the history of the philosopher, not everything is clear. There are versions that he comes from a Polish noble family named Nitsky, this was confirmed by Friedrich himself. But there are researchers who claim that the philosopher’s family had German roots and names. They suggest that Nietzsche simply invented the “Polish version” in order to give himself an aura of exclusivity and unusualness. It is known for sure that two generations of his ancestors were associated with the priesthood; on the part of both parents, Frederick’s grandfathers were Lutheran priests, just like his father. When Nietzsche was 5 years old, his father died of a serious mental illness, and his mother raised the boy. He had a tender affection for his mother, and he had a close and very complex relationship with his sister, which played a big role in his life. Already in early childhood, Friedrich demonstrated a desire to be different from everyone else, and was ready for various extravagant actions.

Education

At the age of 14, Frederick, who had not yet even begun to emerge, was sent to the famous Pfort gymnasium, where classical languages, ancient history and literature, as well as general education subjects were taught. Nietzsche was diligent in languages, but he was very bad at mathematics. It was at school that Friedrich developed a strong interest in music, philosophy, and ancient literature. He tries himself as a writer and reads a lot of German writers. After school, in 1862, Nietzsche went to study at the University of Bonn at the Faculty of Theology and Philosophy. Since school, he felt a strong pull towards religious activities and even dreamed of becoming a pastor like his father. But during his student years his views changed greatly, and he became a militant atheist. In Bonn, Nietzsche’s relationships with his classmates did not work out, and he transferred to Leipzig. Here great success awaited him; while still studying, he was invited to work as a professor of Greek literature. Under the influence of his favorite teacher, the German philologist F. Richli, he agreed to this job. Nietzsche easily passed the exam for the title of Doctor of Philosophy and went to teach in Basel. But Friedrich did not feel satisfaction from his studies; the philological environment began to weigh on him.

Youth hobbies

In his youth, Friedrich Nietzsche, whose philosophy was just beginning to take shape, experienced two strong influences, even shocks. In 1868 he met R. Wagner. Friedrich had been fascinated by the composer’s music before, and the acquaintance made a strong impression on him. Two extraordinary personalities found a lot in common: both loved ancient Greek literature, both hated the social shackles that constrained the spirit. For three years, friendly relations were established between Nietzsche and Wagner, but later they began to cool and ceased completely after the philosopher published the book “Human, All Too Human.” The composer found in it obvious signs of the author's mental illness.

The second shock was associated with A. Schopenhauer’s book “The World as Will and Representation.” She changed Nietzsche's views on the world. The thinker highly valued Schopenhauer for his ability to tell the truth to his contemporaries, for his willingness to go against generally accepted ideas. It was his works that pushed Nietzsche to write philosophical works and to change his occupation - now he decided to become a philosopher.

During the Franco-Prussian War he worked as an orderly, and all the horrors from the battlefields, oddly enough, only strengthened him in his thoughts about the benefits and healing influence of such events on society.

Health

Since childhood, he was not in good health, he was very short-sighted and physically weak, perhaps this was the reason for the way his biography developed. Friedrich Nietzsche had poor heredity and a weak nervous system. At the age of 18, he began to experience attacks of severe headaches, nausea, insomnia, and experienced long periods of decreased tone and depressed mood. Later, neurosyphilis was added to this, contracted from a relationship with a prostitute. At the age of 30, his health began to decline sharply, he was almost blind, and experienced debilitating attacks of headaches. He was treated with opiates, which led to gastrointestinal problems. In 1879, Nietzsche retired due to health reasons; his benefits were paid by the university. And he began a permanent fight against disease. But it was precisely at this time that the teachings of Friedrich Nietzsche took shape and his philosophical productivity grew significantly.

Personal life

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose ideas changed 20th-century culture, was unhappy in his relationship. According to him, there were 4 women in his life, but only 2 of them (prostitutes) made him at least a little happy. From his early youth he had a sexual relationship with his sister Elizabeth, he even wanted to marry her. At age 15, Friedrich was sexually assaulted by an adult woman. All this radically influenced the thinker’s attitude towards women and his life. He always wanted to see a woman first and foremost as an interlocutor. Intelligence was more important to him than sexuality. At one time he was in love with Wagner's wife. He later became fascinated by psychotherapist Lou Salome, with whom his friend, writer Paul Ree, was also in love. For some time they even lived together in the same apartment. It was under the influence of his friendship with Lou that he would write the first part of his famous work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Twice in his life, Friedrich proposed marriage and was refused both times.

The most productive period of life

With his retirement, despite a painful illness, the philosopher enters the most productive era of his life. Friedrich Nietzsche, whose best books have become classics of world philosophy, writes 11 of his main works in 10 years. Over the course of 4 years, he wrote and published his most famous work, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra.” The book not only contained bright, unusual ideas, but also formally it was not typical for philosophical works. It intertwines reflections, myology, and poetry. Within two years after the publication of the first parts, Nietzsche became a popular thinker in Europe. Work on the latest book, “The Will to Power,” lasted several years, and included reflections from an earlier period. The work was published after the philosopher’s death thanks to the efforts of his sister.

last years of life

At the beginning of 1898, a sharply worsening illness led to the end of his philosophical biography. Friedrich Nietzsche saw a scene of a horse being beaten on the street, and this provoked a fit of madness in him. Doctors never found the exact cause of his illness. Most likely, a complex of prerequisites played a role here. The doctors could not offer treatment and sent Nietzsche to a psychiatric hospital in Basel. There he was kept in a room upholstered with soft cloth so that he could not harm himself. The doctors were able to bring the patient into a stable condition, that is, without violent attacks, and allowed him to be taken home. The mother looked after her son, trying to ease his suffering as much as possible. But she died a few months later, and Friedrich had an accident that completely immobilized him and made him unable to speak. Lately, the philosopher has been cared for by his sister. On August 25, 1900, after another stroke, Nietzsche died. He was only 55 years old; the philosopher was buried in a cemetery in his hometown next to his relatives.

Philosophical views of Nietzsche

The philosopher Nietzsche is known throughout the world for his nihilistic and radical views. He very sharply criticized modern European society, especially its Christian foundations. The thinker believed that since the times of Ancient Greece, which he considers as a certain ideal of civilization, there has been a collapse and degradation of the culture of the Old World. He formulates his own concept, later called the “Philosophy of Life”. This direction believes that human life is unique and unique. Each individual is valuable in his or her experience. And he considers the main property of life not reason or feelings, but will. Humanity is in constant struggle and only the strongest deserve to live. From here arises the idea of the Superman - one of the central ones in Nietzsche's doctrine. Friedrich Nietzsche reflects on love, the meaning of life, truth, the role of religion and science.

Major works

The philosopher's legacy is small. His last works were published by his sister, who did not hesitate to edit the texts in accordance with her worldview. But these works were enough for Friedrich Nietzsche, whose works are included in the compulsory program on the history of philosophy at any university in the world, to become a true classic of world thought. The list of his best books includes, in addition to those already mentioned, the works “Beyond Good and Evil”, “Antichrist”, “The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music”, “On the Genealogy of Morality”.

Search for the meaning of life

Reflections on the meaning of life and the purpose of history are the basic themes of European philosophy; Friedrich Nietzsche could not stand aside from them. He speaks about the meaning of life in several of his works, completely denying it. He argues that Christianity imposes imaginary meanings and goals on people, essentially deceiving people. Life exists only in this world and it is dishonest to promise some kind of reward in the other world for moral behavior. Thus, Nietzsche says, religion manipulates a person, forces him to live for goals that are inorganic to human nature. In a world where “God is dead,” man himself is responsible for his own moral character and humanity. And this is the greatness of man, that he can “become a man” or remain an animal. The thinker also saw the meaning of life in the will to power; a person (man) must strive for victory, otherwise his existence is meaningless. Nietzsche saw the meaning of history in the education of the Superman; he does not yet exist and social evolution must lead to his appearance.

Superman concept

In his central work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche formulates the idea of the Superman. This ideal person destroys all norms and foundations, he boldly seeks power over the world and other people, false sentiments and illusions are alien to him. The antipode of this supreme being is the “last man,” who, instead of boldly fighting stereotypes, chose the path of a comfortable, animal existence. According to Nietzsche, the modern world was planted with such “lasts”, so he saw in wars a blessing, purification and an opportunity for rebirth. was positively assessed by A. Hitler and accepted as an ideological justification for fascism. Although the philosopher himself did not even think about anything like that. Because of this, Nietzsche’s works and name were strictly prohibited in the USSR.

Quotes

The philosopher Nietzsche, whose quotes were spread throughout the world, knew how to speak succinctly and aphoristically. That is why many of his statements are so fond of being quoted by various speakers on any occasion. The philosopher’s most famous quotes about love were the words: “People who are incapable of either true love or strong friendship always rely on marriage,” “There is always a little madness in love..., but in madness there is always a little reason.” . He spoke very scathingly about the opposite sex: “If you go to a woman, take a whip.” His personal motto was: “Everything that doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”

The importance of Nietzsche's philosophy for culture

Today, from the works of which can be found in many works of modern philosophers, it no longer causes such fierce debate and criticism as at the beginning of the 20th century. Then his theory became revolutionary and gave rise to many directions that existed in dialogue with Nietzsche. One could agree with him or argue with him, but he could no longer be ignored. The philosopher's ideas had a strong influence on culture and art. Impressed by the works of Nietzsche, for example, T. Mann wrote his “Doctor Faustus.” His direction “philosophy of life” gave the world such outstanding philosophers as V. Dilthey, A. Bergson, O. Spengler.

Bright people always arouse people's curiosity, and Friedrich Nietzsche did not escape this. Researchers are looking for interesting facts from his biography, and people read about them with pleasure. What was unusual about the life of a philosopher? For example, he was interested in music all his life and was a good pianist. And even when he lost his mind, he created musical opuses and improvised in the hospital lobby. In 1869, he renounced Prussian citizenship and lived the rest of his life without belonging to any state.

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