Friedrich Nietzsche (15 October 1844-25 August 1900) was a German philosopher who was a major proponent of existentialism and German idealism. His views had a profound influence on philosophy, especially Western philosophy and modern intellectual history.
Biography[]
Friedrich Nietzsche was born in Rocken, Saxony, Prussia in 1844, and he began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy, and he became the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at the age of 24, becoming the youngest person to do so. He resigned in 1879 due to his chronic health problems, and he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. He critiqued truth in favor of perspectivism, critiqued religion and Christian morality, aesthetically affirmed existence in response to the "Death of God" and the profound crisis of nihilism, and characterized the human subject as the expression of competing wills, collectively understood as the will to power. In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and the complete loss of his mental faculties, and he lived his remaining years under the care of his mother until her death in 1897. He died in Weimar, Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, German Empire in 1900 while he was in the care of his sister, Elisabeth. After his death, she forged and altered his unpublished writings to fit with her German ultranationalist ideology, often contradicting her brother's views which were explicitly opposed to nationalism. This led to Nietzsche being wrongly considered an early philosopher of fascism but 20th-century scholars have strongly disputed this conception of his ideas.