(1844 - 1900)

I fear animals regard man as a creature of their own kind which has in a highly dangerous fashion lost its healthy animal reason - as the mad animal, as the laughing animal, as the weeping animal, as the unhappy animal. -- Nietzsche

Second only to Rousseau in the impact he had on Psychology is Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. He was born in Röcken, in Prussia Saxony, on October 15, 1844, named after Friedrich Wilhelm IV, King of Prussia, who had the same birthday. Nietzsche's father was a minister -- one of many in the family -- who had tutored several members of the royal family. His mother was a puritanical housewife.

When Friedrich was 18, he lost his faith -- which would remain a central issue for the rest of his life. And he said his life was changed as well by his reading of Schopenhauer a few years later while a student at the University of Leipzig.

When he was 23, he was drafted into the Prussian army -- but he fell off a horse, hurt his chest, and was released.

He received an appointment as professor of philology (classical languages and literature) at the University of Basel at the tender age of 24, a year before he received his Ph.D.  Near Basel lived the famous Richard Wagner, and Nietzsche was invited to Christmas dinner in 1869.  Wagner’s grandiose and romantic operas were to influence Nietzsche’s view of life for some time to come.

He served a brief stint as a volunteer medical orderly during the Franco-Prussian War, during which he contracted diphtheria and dysentery, which damaged his health permanently.

After returning to Basel, he published his first book in 1872 -- inspired by Wagner -- called The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music.  It was in this book that he introduced the contrast of the Dionysian and Apollonian.  Dionysus was the god of wine and revelry, living for the moment.  Apollo was the god of peace, order, and art.  The one lacks discipline, but the other lacks, as we would say today, soul.

In 1879, because of his seriously deteriorating health, he was forced to retire from teaching. He published Human, All Too Human -- an analysis of emotion -- in parts from 1878 through 1880.  During this time also, he fell in love, although briefly, with the famous Lou Salomé (later a confident of Sigmund Freud’s!).

Heartbroken, and perhaps recognizing that he was destined for bachelorhood, he retired high into the Alps to write his master work, Thus Spake Zarathustra, published in 1883 through 1885.  Here, he made a heroic effort at addressing the pessimism of Schopenhauer.  Nietzsche felt that religion had failed miserably to provide man with meaning. So now that God was “dead,” we needed to stop looking to the skies and  start providing that missing meaning ourselves.  The people he saw as having accomplished this transition he called “Über-menschen,” usually translated as supermen.  But, he notes, supermen have not arrived as yet, and we must be satisfied to serve as a bridge to that future.

The book is a masterpiece by any standard, yet Nietzsche remained an unknown.  His health continuing to deteriorate, he was cared for by his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.  She, however, married an anti-semite who Nietzsche abhorred and moved to a commune in Paraguay!

Nietzsche then lived in various rooming houses all over Italy and Switzerland.  His eyesight went from bad to worse, and his headaches overwhelmed him.  He stopped writing books and instead wrote aphorisms (short comments), which he then collected into books.

Beyond Good and Evil (the best introduction to his ideas) came out in 1886, and The Genealogy of Morals in 1887. In these books, he makes clear his great distinction between Herren-Moral and Herden-Moral, that is, the morality of lords and the morality of the herd.

The morality of the herd is what he calls traditional Judeo-Christian morality:  It is, he says, an ethic of helplessness and fear.  With this morality, we keep the powerful and talented under control by appealing to virtues such as altruism and egalitarianism.  Secretly, it is, like all motives, a “will to power” -- but a sly, manipulative one.  We cry “I am weaker than you, but I am still better than you!”

The morality of lords, on the other hand, is based on the manly virtues of courage, honor, power, and the love of danger.  It is pagan, western, teutonic.  The only rule, he said, is do not betray a friend.

Although he was not anti-semitic, his choice of words would lead the Nazis to use some of them in ways he never intended many years after his death.  Ask yourself if the masses of people shouting “Heil Hitler!” and the acts of rounding up minority civilians for work camps and slaughter in any way make you think of courage and honor!

The contrast between these two moralities is in fact a very productive one:

Nietzsche become increasingly ill and bitter, blind and paranoid.  In Turin in January of 1889 he had attempted to protect a horse that was being whipped when he suffered an apoplectic stroke (just like Rousseau) which sent him to an asylum.  Some believe his collapse was the result of syphilis, but it could just as well have been due to years of medication. His mother claimed him and took care of him until she died in 1897, when his sister, now back in Germany, took him in.

He was seldom lucid after that.  He died August 25, 1900 at the age of 55, of stroke and pneumonia.

A number of his works were published after his collapse, including The Will to Power in 1889, which is a collection of aphorisms found in his notebooks, and his autobiography Ecce Homo in 1908.  Ecce Homo illustrates both his brilliance and his insanity very dramatically.  Freud called him the most brilliant psychologist who ever lived.