Friedrich Nietzsche

1844-1900 · German · Philosophical Psychology, Moral Philosophy, Philosophy of Culture, Existentialism

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

By his early thirties, Friedrich Nietzsche had abandoned a brilliant career as a classical philologist, broken with his idol Wagner, and begun to suspect that European civilization was coasting on moral assumptions it could no longer justify. That suspicion drove everything that followed. His first book, The Birth of Tragedy, argued that Greek culture at its greatest was a collision between the Apollonian drive toward order and the Dionysian toward ecstatic dissolution — and that Socratic rationalism killed that tragic vitality by demanding existence justify itself before reason.

Topics Friedrich Nietzsche addresses

• the will to power
• eternal recurrence
• the Übermensch (overman)
• master and slave morality
• the death of God
• ressentiment
• the revaluation of all values
• genealogy of morals
• the ascetic ideal
• bad conscience
• the Dionysian and the Apollonian
• perspectivism
• amor fati
• the last man
• the free spirit
• the herd
• nihilism
• the slave revolt in values
• the good will to appearance
• the great reason of the body
• the chemistry of concepts and sensations
• philosophical naturalism
• the dangerous Perhaps
• self-overcoming

Converse with Friedrich Nietzsche on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Friedrich Nietzsche's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.