German philosopher,

poet, composer and classical philologist Influence: existentialism, nihilism and postmodernism Key ideas: death of God, perspectivism, the bermensch, amor fati, the eternal recurrence, and the will to power.

 October 15, 1844 -August

25, 1900 Rcken bei Ltzen, Leipzig, Germany Named after King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia Parents: Karl Ludwig Nietzsche (Lutheran pastor and former teacher) and Franziska Oehler (married in 1843 and had had two other children before him)

 From ages 14-19 (18581864) Attended a school at Schulpforta led a small music and literature club named Germania read the German romantic writings of Friedrich Hlderlin and Jean-Paul Richter, along with David Strauss's controversial and demythologizing Life of Jesus Critically Examined (Das Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet, 1848). Poems and musical compositions Final grades:

"straight I- Religion and German 2a - Greek and Latin 2b French, History and Physics "lackluster" 3 - Hebrew and Mathematics

 University of Bonn(1864) Philology - a discipline which then centered

upon the interpretation of classical and biblical texts

The World as Will and Representation - Arthur

Schopenhauer
History of Materialism and Critique of its Present

Significance (1866) - F.A. Lange 1867 - entered his required military service and was assigned to an equestrian field artillery regiment Franco-Prussian War - He witnessed the traumatic effects of battle, took close care of wounded soldiers, and contracted diphtheria and dysentery.

 As philologist: thorough knowledge of Greek philosophy, read Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Arthur Schopenhauer and African Spir Philosophy Pre-platonic philosophy Pre-socratic philosophy - Heraclitus Admirations: 17th century French moralists La Rochefoucauld, Jean de La Bruyre and Vauvenargues Organicism Paul Bourget, Rudolf Virchow and Alfred Espinas Darwinism posthumous works of Charles Baudelaire,Tolstoy's My Religion,

Ernest Renan's Life of Jesus and Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Possessed. Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson

 Morality
Death of God, nihilism, perspectivism Will to power

bermensch
Eternal return

 recent developments in modern science and the increasing secularization of European society

lead to perspectivism

Lead to nihilism

 the drive for conservation appears as the

major motivator of human or animal behavior only in exceptions, as the general condition of life is not one of emergency, of 'struggle for existence'

 "I teach you the overman. Man is something that

shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood, and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is ape to man? A laughing stock or painful embarrassment. And man shall be that to overman: a laughingstock or painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape.... The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth.... Man is a rope, tied between beast and overmana rope over an abyss what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end."

 "horrifying and paralyzing

its burden is the "heaviest weight" imaginable mark the ultimate affirmation of life

requires amor fati, "love of fate

 the universe has been recurring, and will

continue to recur, in a self-similar form an infinite number of times across infinite time or space.

 Remorse - never yield to remorse, but at

once tell yourself: remorse would simply mean adding to the first act of stupidity a second.

 What, if some day or night demon were to steal

after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: This life as you now live it and have live it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unatterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!