The brief contents of the lecture
Friedrich Nietzsche
born Oct. 15, 1844, Röcken, Saxony, Prussia [now in Germany]
died Aug. 25, 1900, Weimar, Thuringian States
German classical scholar, philosopher, and critic of culture, who became one of the most influential of all modern thinkers. His attempts to unmask the motives that underlie traditional Western religion, morality, and philosophy deeply affected generations of theologians, philosophers, psychologists, poets, novelists, and playwrights. Although he was an ardent foe of nationalism, anti-Semitism, and power politics, his name was later invoked by Fascists to advance the very things he loathed.
Nietzsche's mature philosophy
Nietzsche's writings fall into three well-defined periods. The early works, The Birth of Tragedy and the four Untimely Meditations, are dominated by a Romantic perspective influenced by Schopenhauer and Wagner. The middle period, from Human, All-Too-Human up to The Gay Science, reflects the tradition of French aphorists. It extols reason and science, experiments with literary genres, and expresses Nietzsche's emancipation from his earlier Romanticism and from Schopenhauer and Wagner. Nietzsche's mature philosophy emerged after The Gay Science.
In his mature writings Nietzsche was preoccupied by the origin and function of values in human life. If, as he believed, life neither possesses nor lacks intrinsic value and yet is always being evaluated, then such evaluations can usefully be read as symptoms of the condition of the evaluator. He was especially interested, therefore, in a probing analysis and evaluation of the fundamental cultural values of Western philosophy, religion, and morality, which he characterized as expressions of the ascetic ideal.
The ascetic ideal is born when suffering becomes endowed with ultimate significance. According to Nietzsche the Christian tradition, for example, made suffering tolerable by interpreting it as God's intention and as an occasion for atonement. Christianity, accordingly, owed its triumph to the flattering doctrine of personal immortality, that is, to the conceit that each individual's life and death have cosmic significance. Similarly, traditional philosophy expressed the ascetic ideal when it privileged soul over body, mind over senses, duty over desire, reality over appearance, the timeless over the temporal. While Christianity promised salvation for the sinner who repents, philosophy held out hope for salvation for its sages. Common to traditional religion and philosophy was the instated but powerful motivating assumption that existence requires explanation, justification, or expiation. Both denigrated experience in favour of some other, “true” world. Both may be read as symptoms of a declining life, or life in distress.