Friedrich Nietzsche
Modern European · Europe · 1844 to 1900
German thinker who questioned the morals and truths we inherit. He urged people to create values that say yes to life.
What it is
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 to 1900) was a German philosopher and classical scholar who wrote that God is dead, questioned where our moral values came from, and asked people to create their own values and to say yes to life. His ideas about morality, truth and religion have had an enormous influence on Western philosophy and on culture well beyond it. He also wrote in a style of sharp, short passages that makes him easy to quote and hard to pin down.
He was born in Röcken, near Leipzig, the son of a Lutheran minister who died when Nietzsche was a small child. He trained in classical philology and was called to a chair at the University of Basel in 1869, at the age of 24. Illness cut short his academic career. In January 1889 he collapsed in the street in Turin and never recovered his health. He lived on until 1900.
The main ideas
- The death of God. Nietzsche said that belief in the Christian God had faded, and that the values built on that belief would fade with it. This is not mainly the claim that atheism is true. It is a warning about a crisis that was coming for the culture.
- Where our morals came from. In On the Genealogy of Morality he traced how our ideas of good and evil developed in history and asked whom they serve. He described a 'slave revolt in morality', in which the values of the weak came to dominate the values of the strong.
- Perspectivism. He distrusted the idea that anyone sees the world from nowhere. There are only views from particular perspectives, and understanding grows by taking several of them.
- Will to power. He described living things as driven to increase their power. How far this is a theory of the whole world, and how far only of human psychology, is disputed.
- Eternal recurrence. A thought experiment: imagine your life returning exactly as it is, again and again, and ask whether you could welcome that.
- The overman. His figure of a person who creates new values after the old ones have lost their force. Readers disagree about exactly what he meant.
What it looks like in practice
Picture someone who has always taken it for granted that they should be modest and always put others first. A Nietzschean question is not 'is this right?' but 'where did this value come from, and whom does it serve?' If they find that they hold it only because everyone around them did, the next question is whether they would choose it for themselves. The test of the recurrence thought is similar: if this life came round forever, could they say yes?
Books and moments
- The Birth of Tragedy (1872) was his first book, a controversial work on Greek tragedy and music.
- The Gay Science (1882) contains the famous passage on the death of God.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883 to 1885) is a philosophical work in the form of a story.
- Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) set out his criticism of morality.
- Wagner. He met the composer Richard Wagner while a student in Leipzig and became a frequent guest in his household.
Questions and criticism
- Did he embrace nihilism or fight it? Some interpreters say he embraced nihilism. Others say he diagnosed it and wanted to overcome it.
- Does perspectivism undo itself? If there are only perspectives, it is fair to ask how Nietzsche can be so sure of his own judgments.
- Whose Nietzsche? After his breakdown his sister Elisabeth took control of his writings and edited them. Her work shaped, and distorted, how he was read in the early twentieth century.
Close neighbours
Nietzsche is often placed beside the existentialists, though he lived before them, and beside nihilism, which he wrote about. The pages on Nietzschean perspectivism and on nihilism describe the ideas he is linked with.
Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 9 October 2026. The sources are listed below.
Where to start reading
Books by Friedrich Nietzsche or about them, from the easiest way in to the harder ones.
Covers belong to their publishers and are shown so you can recognise the book.
Philosophies they belong to or are close to
Who they connect to
Influenced
- Albert Camus · Camus' The Rebel and other works engage Nietzsche's affirmation of life without ready-made meaning.
- Bernard Williams · Williams read Nietzsche as a guide to truthfulness and to the limits of moral thought.
- Georges Bataille · He read Nietzsche as a guide to living without fixed aims and wrote on him.
- Gilles Deleuze · His first major book on a thinker is on Nietzsche, whose view of force and difference he took up.
- Jacques Derrida · He drew on Nietzsche's view that truth is bound to interpretation and style.
- Jose Ortega y Gasset · He took up Nietzsche's stress on life as the basic fact and on the task of becoming oneself.
- Karl Jaspers · He wrote a book on Nietzsche and took up his stress on the single person making a life.
- Martin Heidegger · Heidegger gave long lecture courses on Nietzsche and read him as the end of the old way of asking what is real.
- Max Weber · He took up Nietzsche's view that values cannot be proved, and so must be chosen. (scholars disagree about this link)
- Michel Foucault · Foucault's genealogy is named after and modelled on Nietzsche's history of morals.
- Muhammad Iqbal · He engaged with Nietzsche's idea of the strong self, though he rejected his rejection of faith. (scholars disagree about this link)
- Richard Rorty · Rorty took from Nietzsche the idea of remaking oneself and one's vocabulary.
- Sigmund Freud · Freud said he avoided reading Nietzsche, yet they share the view that hidden drives lie beneath reason. (scholars disagree about this link)
- Theodor Adorno · Adorno and Horkheimer drew on Nietzsche's critique of morality and reason.
Influenced by
- Arthur Schopenhauer · Nietzsche first admired Schopenhauer, then broke with his pessimism.
- Heraclitus · Nietzsche admired Heraclitus' picture of a world of becoming without a fixed backdrop.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson · Nietzsche read him closely and kept a copy of his essays with notes.
Reacted against
- Socrates · Nietzsche blamed Socrates for putting reason above instinct and life.
Reacted against by
- Alasdair MacIntyre · MacIntyre poses the choice as Nietzsche or Aristotle and sides with Aristotle.
Other Modern European thinkers
- Arthur Schopenhauer · 1788 to 1860
- Alexis de Tocqueville · 1805 to 1859
- Thomas Henry Huxley · 1825 to 1895
- Wilhelm Dilthey · 1833 to 1911
- Sigmund Freud · 1856 to 1939
- Georg Simmel · 1858 to 1918
- Henri Bergson · 1859 to 1941
- Max Weber · 1864 to 1920
- Ernst Cassirer · 1874 to 1945
- Jose Ortega y Gasset · 1883 to 1955
Sources we used
- Friedrich Nietzsche · Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, read on 9 October 2026
- Friedrich Nietzsche · Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, read on 9 October 2026