Friedrich Nietzsche Biography

He was interested in the enhancement of individual and cultural health, and believed in life, creativity, power, and the realities of the world we live in, rather than those situated in a world beyond. Central to his philosophy is the idea of “life-affirmation,” which involves an honest questioning of all doctrines that drain life's expansive energies, however socially prevalent those views might be. Often referred to as one of the first existentialist philosophers along with Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), Nietzsche's revitalizing philosophy has inspired leading figures in all walks of cultural life, including dancers, poets, novelists, painters, psychologists, philosophers, sociologists and social revolutionaries.

Nietzsche is regarded as a major influence on 20th century philosophy, theology and art. His ideas on individuality, morality and the meaning of existence contributed to the thinking of philosophers Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault; Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, two of the founding figures of psychiatry; and writers such as Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse.

Less beneficially, certain aspects of Nietzsche's work were used by the Nazi Party of the 1930s–'40s as justification for its activities; this selective and misleading use of his work has somewhat darkened his reputation for later audiences.

Works:

• The Greek Music Drama (1870)
• The Greek State (1871)
• The Birth of Tragedy (1872)
• On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (1873)
• Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (1873)
• We Philologists (1874, posthumous)
• Untimely Meditations (1876)
• Human, All Too Human (1878)
• The Dawn (1881)
• The Gay Science (1882)
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883)
• Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
• On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)
• The Case of Wagner (1888)
• Twilight of the Idols (1888)
• The Antichrist (1888)
• Ecce Homo (1888)
• Nietzsche contra Wagner (1888)
The Will to Power (unpublished manuscripts edited by his sister Elisabeth)