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Essay on Friedrich Nietzsche

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Friedrich Nietzsche was born near Rocken a small town in the Prussian province of Saxony, on October 15, 1844. Ironically the philosopher who rejected religion and coined the phrase "god is dead" was descended from a line of respected clergymen. Nietzsche completed his secondary education at the exacting boarding school of Pforta. A brilliant student, he received rigorous training in Latin, Greek, and German. In 1864 the young man entered the University of Bonn to study theology and classical philology. A year later, however, he abandoned theology and transferred to the University of Leipzig to pursue a doctorate in philology. At Leipzig Nietzsche became an ardent admirer of philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, whose work he accidentally …show more content…

Subtitled "A Book for Free Spirits," Human All-too-Human also signaled the beginning of Nietzsche's break with Wagner. Nietzsche resigned from his professorship in 1879 owing to chronic ill health; he had long suffered from paralyzing migraine headaches, and brief military service in the Franco-Prussian War left him shattered. Afterward he existed on a university pension as an unassuming gentleman lodger at resorts in Italy, France, and Switzerland. Yet his intellectual revolt continued unabated over the next decade. Though almost constantly in pain he produced, to quote Thomas Mann, "stylistically dazzling books -- works sparkling with audacious insults to his age, venturing into more and more radical psychology, radiating a more and more glaring white light." The Gay Science (1882), which Nietzsche regarded as his most personal book, includes sustained discussions of truth, art, and knowledge. Then, in 1883 and 1884, Nietzsche published the first three sections of Thus Spoke Zarathustra; the fourth part, completed in 1885, did not appear until 1892. Cast as a series of parables about a prophet who proclaims the death of God and challenges mankind to face its destiny, Zarathustra is a mine of ideas and perhaps Nietzsche's most popular work. "Zarathustra is in a way a document of our time, and it surely has much to do with our own psychological condition," noted Jung.

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