Nietzsche

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900)

German philosopher and cultural critic, trained as a classical philologist, who published intensely through the 1870s and 1880s. He is known for his radical critiques of traditional European morality, religion and philosophy, and for concepts such as the will to power, the eternal recurrence and the Übermensch. His productive career ended abruptly with the mental collapse of 1889; much of what later circulated under his name was shaped posthumously by his sister Elisabeth's stewardship of the estate.[3] [4] [5] [7] [8] [10] [9] [11] [12] [13] [14] [6]

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Life and works

YearEvent
15 October 1844Born in Röcken, near Lützen in Prussian Saxony, first child of the Lutheran pastor Carl Ludwig Nietzsche. His father died in 1849, and in 1850 the family moved to Naumburg.[3] [4] [5]
1858–1864Educated on a scholarship at Schulpforta, the boarding school near Naumburg, receiving a rigorous classical training.[3] [4]
1864–1868A year of theology and philology at Bonn, then follows the philologist Friedrich Ritschl to Leipzig, where he discovers Schopenhauer and, in 1868, meets Richard Wagner; military service with a cavalry regiment is cut short by a serious chest injury.[3] [4]
1869Called to the chair of classical philology at Basel at 24, before completing the doctorate, on Ritschl's recommendation — the youngest ever appointed to such a post, a superlative recorded here as the SEP's. The sources differ on the appointment's month: the SEP has May, the IEP January, Britannica gives none.[3] [5] [4]
August–October 1870Serves in the Franco-Prussian War as a volunteer medical orderly; contracts dysentery and diphtheria and returns to Basel in permanently weakened health.[4] [3]
1872Publishes The Birth of Tragedy. The young philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff answers with the pamphlet Zukunftsphilologie!, deriding its method; Erwin Rohde replies in kind and Wagner defends the book in an open letter — a polemic that cost it its standing in the discipline.[3] [14]
1873–1876The four Untimely Meditations. The winter of 1876–77 is spent in Sorrento with Paul Rée and Malwida von Meysenbug, his first long absence from Basel and the season his distance from Wagner becomes visible. The break with Wagner has no single date: the SEP places it in the mid-1870s, the IEP says 1877, Britannica calls it final by 1878 — a range, recorded as such.[3] [5] [4] [13]
1878Human, All Too Human, the landmark of the aphoristic 'positivist' middle period.[3] [4]
1879Resigns the Basel chair on health grounds, with a pension. Britannica dates the resignation 14 June 1879; the IEP writes that he retired in 1878 — the disagreement is recorded rather than resolved. A decade of itinerant writing follows: summers at Sils-Maria in the Engadine, winters in Italian cities and at Nice.[4] [5] [3]
1882The Gay Science, carrying the first announcement of the 'death of God'; the year also of the intense friendship and breach with Lou Salomé — an episode Britannica's account omits entirely.[3]
1883–1885Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in four parts; the fourth is printed privately and at first circulates only among a handful of friends.[3] [4]
1886–1887Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), the central works of the maturity; an expanded second edition of The Gay Science follows in 1887.[3]
1888The last productive year, largely in Turin: The Case of Wagner is the only one of its books he saw published. Twilight of the Idols appeared in 1889, The Antichrist and Nietzsche contra Wagner in 1895, Ecce Homo only in 1908 — everything after the collapse reached the public through the estate.[3] [4]
3 January 1889Collapses in Turin — the breakdown itself is in every source. The famous horse is not: the SEP and Britannica omit the anecdote entirely, the IEP hedges with 'reportedly', and its sole original source is a 1900 interview with Nietzsche's Turin landlord conducted by an unnamed journalist relaying an unnamed policeman — third-hand, eleven years after the event, with no coachman and no flogging in it. It is recorded here as an attributed tradition, not an established event.[7] [8] [5] [3]
1889–1897 ≈The clinic years and after: Basel, then the Jena asylum under Otto Binswanger, where the contemporaneous diagnosis was dementia paralytica — tertiary syphilis; from 1890 in his mother's care in Naumburg, and from 1897, after her death, in his sister's at the Villa Silberblick in Weimar.[3] [12]
1889 onward ≈The diagnosis has remained open. Against the syphilis verdict stand named alternatives: a 2008 neurological study proposing CADASIL, Huenemann's 2013 case for a slow-growing retro-orbital meningioma, and frontotemporal dementia; a 2015 survey of the question concludes it is unresolved. The SEP itself endorses the meningioma reading — recorded here as the SEP's position, not as a settled fact.[10] [9] [11]
1894–1896His sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche founds the Nietzsche-Archiv in Naumburg in 1894 and moves it to Weimar in 1896.[6]
25 August 1900Dies in Weimar — the SEP records a stroke complicated by pneumonia — and is buried beside his father at Röcken. Elisabeth outlived him by thirty-five years, controlling the estate until her death in 1935.[3] [4] [6]
1901–1906The Will to Power is published — an arrangement of notebook material by Elisabeth and Peter Gast, expanded in 1906. The SEP judges the compilation not well founded in Nietzsche's surviving plans and marred by Elisabeth's editorial hand; the critical Colli–Montinari edition, begun in 1967, dissolved the book back into the notebooks, Montinari concluding that a book called The Will to Power does not exist. Elisabeth's tampering with letters is documented separately; the broader claim that she forged The Will to Power outruns the record and is not made here.[3]

Reception in the COF

Present in 156 of the 589 transcription files of the Curso Online de Filosofia; 39 lectures engage him substantially (5 or more mentions). The most engaged lectures:

This section documents what Olavo said and when — never what the philosopher "really" meant. Characterizations are Olavo’s, tied to a lecture by number and date.

Lecture (aula)DateMentions
216—31
455—21
752010-09-1819
722010-08-2918
334—12
396—12
1852012-12-2211
409—11
549—11
357—10
1142011-07-169
2292013-11-309
266—9
310—9
354—9

A dash in the date column means the transcription file carries no verified date — an undated file, not an undated lecture. Counts are accent-insensitive, word-boundary matches over the public community transcription corpus.[1] [2]

References

  1. COF — community transcriptions of the Curso Online de Filosofia (585 lectures) — Community transcription repository (upstream declares CC0 for the transcription work; the lectures remain the estate's)
  2. COF em Áudio — lecture audio collection — Internet Archive (community upload)
  3. Friedrich Nietzsche — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  4. Friedrich Nietzsche — Encyclopaedia Britannica
  5. Friedrich Nietzsche — Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  6. Nietzsche-Archiv — Klassik Stiftung Weimar
  7. Chris Townsend, 'Nietzsche's Horse' — Los Angeles Review of Books, 25 April 2017
  8. Anacleto Verrecchia, La catastrofe di Nietzsche a Torino (Einaudi, 1978) — Einaudi / PhilPapers record
  9. Charlie Huenemann, 'Nietzsche's Illness', in The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche (OUP, 2013) — Oxford University Press
  10. Hemelsoet, Hemelsoet & Devreese, 'The neurological illness of Friedrich Nietzsche' (2008) — Acta Neurologica Belgica / PubMed
  11. 'Furious Frederich: Nietzsche's neurosyphilis diagnosis and new hypotheses' (2015) — Arquivos de Neuro-Psiquiatria
  12. Sander L. Gilman (ed.), Conversations with Nietzsche: A Life in the Words of His Contemporaries — Oxford University Press
  13. Julian Young, Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, ch. 13 'Sorrento' — Cambridge University Press
  14. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Zukunftsphilologie! (1872), trans. Babette Babich — Fordham University research repository