In this blog post, I will briefly summarize Nietzsche’s life and ideas, as well as the impact and significance he has had on Europe today.
Nietzsche and the Intellectuals of the 20th Century
It is fair to say that Nietzsche is the most magnificent mountain range of thought towering over the century in which we live, and that the sweet spring that has nourished today’s Europe originated from this watershed. In fact, 20th-century intellectuals such as Spengler, Ziegler, Toynbee, Wingger, Ben, Thomas Mann, Schweitzer, Heidegger, Jaspers, Hermann Hesse, and André Gide were all influenced by Nietzsche.
Nietzsche once remarked, “Goethe is still hardly understood. Goethe will continue to exert his influence for nearly a thousand years to come.” These words apply just as much to Nietzsche himself. In fact, Nietzsche is only now beginning to be understood.
In May 1884, Nietzsche said, “After a world-historical crisis of 40 or 50 years, people will finally understand me.” He was casting his gaze toward a future a thousand years away, beyond the endless horizon. Although he was a figure of the 19th century, he did not reflect solely for the sake of the 19th century. As he himself put it, he thought “for the future.”
Zarathustra and Early Reactions
It is not at all surprising that the people of his time failed to understand him—a man who prophesied nihilism and the atomic bomb. He had no choice but to self-publish his book ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ because no bookstore or publisher would take it on. Even then, he sold only 40 copies. Of course, shortly after his death, 100,000 copies sold out.
It was inevitable that he had to write on the title page of ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’: “This book is a book for everyone, and yet it is a book for no one.” Nietzsche felt an inescapable, fateful distance between himself and the era in which he lived. It was this awareness that led him to believe his reflections were “out of step with the times.”
There was probably no one as lonely as Nietzsche. With the exception of his one faithful younger sister, Elisabeth, no one came to his aid. He did not even have a God to turn to, for to him, “God was already dead.”
Nietzsche’s Struggle and the Revaluation of Values
Nevertheless, he did not hesitate to throw himself into danger with fortitude. He fought a hopeless battle with fiery passion. It is very fitting that Ernst Bertram likened Nietzsche to Dürer’s painting, ‘The Knight Marching into Battle with Death and the Devil’.
As stated in the famous preface to ‘The Will to Power’, he fought against European “power,” nihilism, and decadence. He also confronted all negative values—including morality, religion, philosophy, art, and politics. In their place, he proposed a new philosophy and morality that affirmed life, seeking to determine all values with life at their center.
In other words, he fundamentally transformed all of Europe’s existing values. That is, he presented humanity with an unprecedented demand to shift from “negation” to “affirmation.” Because of this, he had no choice but to position himself as an “anti-moralist” standing outside the mainstream of Europe. However, he was by no means a random or baseless revolutionary.
He was a classical heir to Heraclitus and Plato, an heir to Goethe’s will, and the bearer of the most authentic legacy of Europe’s two-thousand-year history. He applied Goethe’s methodology of life to the problems of culture and humanity, and furthermore sought to elevate humanity beyond itself—that is, to the “Overman” or the “Great Spirit.”
The Limits and Influence of Nietzsche the Human Being
It was truly an unprecedented endeavor, and he reached the limits of humanity. Beyond those limits, he caught a glimpse of the landscape of the “Overman”—a landscape both sublime and harrowing. Just as Rilke had beheld the world of “angels” beyond humanity.
But Nietzsche, too, was human. His great destiny could not help but lead to his downfall. This is because the human world is built on trivial sentimentality and compromise. The grand retreat of this solitary man fills us with sorrow.
Yet today’s Europe, having experienced world wars and revolutions, likely feels that what Nietzsche denounced long ago is valid. It is not merely external destruction. Internally and spiritually, Europe has experienced the crisis and disintegration Nietzsche spoke of. And only now are people beginning to listen to Nietzsche’s words.
We must build a new future for Europe—and for ourselves. But where does the vitality for this new future come from? Where should we seek the blueprint for the future? At the very least, we must learn it from the “more beautiful Europe” Nietzsche envisioned, from the affirmation of rebirth.
Biographical Summary and Major Works
Nietzsche was born in 1844 in the German state of Saxony as the son of a pastor; after losing his father at the age of five, he was raised by his mother. At the University of Bonn, he initially studied theology and philosophy, later turning to philology. After transferring to the University of Leipzig, he published several papers and became deeply engrossed in Schopenhauer’s writings while also becoming captivated by Wagner’s music.
After returning from the Franco-Prussian War, he suffered continuously from migraines and eye ailments. In his debut work, ‘The Birth of Tragedy’, he built an artistic metaphysics upon the joy of life and pessimism, affirmation and negation, before expressing skepticism toward European culture and holding the great creative genius up as the ideal of culture. This philosophy became even clearer in ‘Human, All Too Human’, in which he denounced all past ideals as idols and sought a shift in values toward a new ideal.
In 1881, suffering from headaches and stomach ailments, he stayed in northern Italy and southern France, devoting himself to writing; as his reflections deepened, he continued to produce his most original works. In works such as ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’, ‘Beyond Good and Evil’, and ‘On the Genealogy of Morals’, he established a kind of metaphysics centered on the concepts of the “Übermensch” (Overman) and “eternal recurrence,” which later exerted a profound influence on the philosophy of life and existential philosophy.
However, his mental illness worsened, and he eventually died in Weimar in 1900. This is the simplest sketch of “Nietzsche the man.”
On His Works and the Compilation of Selected Works
The works he left behind amount to 19 volumes in his collected works. Of these, three volumes deal with specialized philology; half of the remaining sixteen volumes were published by Nietzsche himself, while the other half were published during his mental illness or after his death.
It would be impractical to compile a selection of Nietzsche’s works within the limited space available here. Fortunately, there is an anthology compiled by Professor Karl Löwith, a leading authority on Nietzsche, which I have adapted to fit a paperback format. The primary texts consulted for this compilation were the complete works of Nietzsche (Werke) and Karl Löwith’s anthology.
