Nietzsche's Influences In Modern Day Philosophy

“Who was Nietzsche? A poet- philosopher; a lover of mankind; a prophet of a ‘Christ that is to be’.” The above quote is the opening line of Friedrich Nietzsche: his life and work, a book written by Mugge Maximilian A. It is a great definition of who Nietzsche was. Nietzsche was a great German philosopher that was born in 1844. He was also a poet and a composer (but not an exemplary one). This paper will focus mainly on his philosophical ideas and thoughts. Nietzsche’s philosophy, although written down over 100 years ago, still has influences in modern day philosophy especially in metaphysics and ethics. This paper will cover Nietzsche’s work in the fields of metaphysics, ethics and politics and it will also compare his life to his philosophy.

The year after his father’s death Nietzsche’s little brother died at the age of two. One would think that the death of his brother and father would be the beginning of his hate for religion but it wasn’t. After all this sorrow in his life, Nietzsche stayed close to God and even wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps and enter into priesthood. He thought that by doing so he would “one day be reunited with his father”. Through most of Nietzsche’s childhood he stayed good and religious. His sister Elizabeth wrote in her memoirs that she could not remember any time when her brother was bad or naughty. She also mentioned one day there was a heavy rain and while all the other children ran home, her brother walked home. When his mother told him to run he responded by saying that the school rules forbid all the students from running home after school and that they were supposed to walk home “quietly and decorously”. Nietzsche was very bright as a child and at the age of 14 he received a full scholarship to Pforta, a boarding school in Germany which he had wanted to go to since the age of 10. It was at this school that Nietzsche’s rebellious side began to

Pessimism was first introduced into philosophy in 1750 in Rousseau’s Discourse on the Arts and Sciences. Rousseau’s ideas were backed upped by Leopardi’s Moral Essays and his poetry. It wasn’t until 1851 that pessimism got its first real taste of popularity by Schopenhauer’s Parerga and Paralipomena. Schopenhauer’s work and that of his predecessors set the framework for which Nietzsche’s work was based on. Although our understanding of what pessimism is had changed over the years one thing that still remains true is “…a view of human existence as fundamentally time-bound and hence, subject to the vicissitudes of time, lacking in any permanent features.” By this they could mean that time/human existence will come to an end and that the future has the ability to change into something bad. When Nietzsche started writing about pessimism the popular ideas of pessimism that people had were of Schopenhauer and Hartmann’s works. Nietzsche believed that their works on pessimism were too depressing. Nietzsche didn’t like the things they had to say about pessimism or he didn’t agree with the so instead of calling his work pessimism he named it Dionysian Pessimism and Apolline Pessimism to make sure his work wasn’t accidentally mistaken to be related to Schopenhauer or Hartmann’s