Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a German classical philologist who became a professor at Basel at just twenty-four, resigned because of ill health in 1879, and spent the next decade writing restlessly while moving between lodgings in Switzerland and Italy. In January 1889 he suffered a mental collapse in Turin and never recovered. He lived his last eleven years in the care of his mother and then his sister.
The death of God
In The Gay Science (1882) a madman runs into a marketplace with a lantern in broad daylight and cries: “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” The people laughing at him are not believers but unbelievers who have not grasped what they have done. Nietzsche's point was not a proof that God does not exist. It was a cultural diagnosis: belief in God had lost its power to ground European values, but people had not yet faced the consequences. If Christian faith goes, so does the foundation of much of the morality built on it.
Nihilism
The danger Nietzsche foresaw was nihilism, the condition in which the highest values devalue themselves and nothing seems worth striving for. He predicted it would dominate the coming centuries. He did not celebrate nihilism; he treated it as a crisis to be passed through and overcome by creating new values.
Master and slave morality
In Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), Nietzsche traced moral ideas to their origins. He contrasted an aristocratic “master morality,” which called the strong, proud and healthy good, with a “slave morality” born of the resentment of the weak, which praised humility, pity and meekness and called the powerful evil. He argued that Christian morality grew from the second. Readers still disagree about how far he endorsed master morality and how far he was diagnosing both.
Will to power
Nietzsche suggested that living things are driven less by survival or pleasure than by a will to power: a drive to grow, overcome resistance and express strength. In his best-known uses this includes artistic creation and self-mastery, not only domination of others.
Eternal recurrence
In section 341 of The Gay Science Nietzsche imagines a demon who tells you that you will live your life again, every pain and joy in the same order, innumerable times. Would you curse the demon, or call this news divine? The eternal recurrence works as a test of whether one can affirm one's life completely. His ideal was amor fati, love of fate: wanting nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity.
The Übermensch
Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885) introduces the Übermensch (overman or superman), a figure who creates his own values and affirms life after the death of God, rather than seeking escape into an afterlife. Zarathustra contrasts him with the “last man,” who wants only comfort and safety and blinks at anything higher.
The misuse of Nietzsche
Nietzsche's reputation was badly damaged by his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. She had married the antisemitic agitator Bernhard Förster, took control of her brother's papers after his collapse and founded the Nietzsche Archive, which she moved to Weimar in the 1890s. She assembled a book called The Will to Power from his unpublished notes, edited to suit her views. She later welcomed the Nazis, and Hitler visited the Archive in the 1930s. Yet Nietzsche himself despised antisemitism and German nationalism; he broke with Richard Wagner partly over them and wrote scornfully to his sister about her husband's views. After the Second World War, scholars such as Walter Kaufmann worked to recover the texts from her editing and to show how far the Nazi reading distorted them.
Worked example: answering the demon
Leah is forty and has had a hard decade: a divorce, a long illness, a business that failed. One night she reads Nietzsche's passage about the demon and tries the test honestly. Would she want to live these exact years again, endlessly?
Her first answer is no. She would curse the demon. But she notices something. The illness taught her who her real friends were. The failed business taught her a trade she now loves. Her divorce, painful as it was, is part of the person she has become. If she wishes those years away, she wishes herself away.
This is the point of the eternal recurrence. Nietzsche is not mainly offering a theory of time. He is asking whether one can say yes to one's whole life, including the suffering, because it is woven into everything one values. That attitude is amor fati.
Notice what amor fati does not mean. It does not mean passivity or pretending that pain is pleasant. Leah decides that if she cannot yet say yes to her life, she can begin living in a way she could affirm: taking risks she has avoided, dropping habits she is ashamed of. The test becomes a guide for the future.
Notice also the contrast with the last man, who would answer the demon with a shrug, asking only whether the repeated life would be comfortable. Nietzsche's challenge is harder. Critics reply that some suffering, such as the torture of a child, should never be affirmed, and that amor fati risks making peace with what ought to be resisted.