Oeuvres

Friedrich Nietzsche

Publié par Flammarion, le 19 avril 2000

Résumé

Friedrich Nietzsche was a classical scholar and philologist whose interest in ancient Greek religion led him to ask the question 'What happens to morality when religion dies?' His answer is that what dies is slave morality, and that humans have to find the basis for a new morality within themselves !51; in the will to power. This leads him to the idea of the Superman, the creator of a 'master morality' free from all values except those he himself chooses. Such morality finds expression in independence, creativity, and originality. Nietzsche has been blamed — unfairly — for the rise of Nazism. By rights he should be seen as the champion of the human spirit — against politicized and repressive religion on the one hand, and nihilism on the other.Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, in Rocken, Prussia. His father, a Lutheran minister, died when Nietzsche was five, and Nietzsche was raised by his mother in a home that included his grandmother, two aunts, and a sister. He studied classical philology at the universities of Bonn and Leipzig and was appointed professor of classical philology at the University of Basel at the age of twenty-four. Ill health (he was plagued throughout his life by poor eyesight and migraine headaches) forced his retirement in 1879. Ten years later he suffered a mental breakdown from which he never recovered. He died in Weimar on August 25, 1900.