From Röcken to Turin in 1889, and death in 1900

Nietzsche was born in Röcken, in Saxony, the son of a pastor. He lost his father at five and grew up among women in his maternal grandparents’ house. The essay says he left theology at Bonn, read Schopenhauer over two weeks — the book’s title is not recovered here — and later, at twenty-four, became a professor of classical languages at Basel, on Ritschl’s recommendation.

In 1870, when war broke out, he volunteered as a medical orderly, contracted severe dysentery, and was discharged; his health kept worsening. In 1889 he collapsed in a street in Turin and was diagnosed at Jena with progressive paralysis. After twelve years of suffering in a coma, as the essay places that period, he died in 1900, as the century turned, leaving works that include Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which the note calls his greatest masterpiece.

Life as the measure of value, and a philosophy of affirmation

For Nietzsche, life is the measure of value. What strengthens it is good; what weakens it should be expelled. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, eternal recurrence means the same life repeats, and freedom lies in living the present moment faithfully — a thought that also leads to the overman, a lonely subject who affirms life now. He opposed Schopenhauer’s reading of will as the source of suffering, and regarded Christian morality as a “slave morality” that pulls life down.

A turn to relationism, the essay says, is decisive for his philosophical identity: the “I” is already communal, not a self-standing substance. The revaluation of all values is not negation for its own sake, but a thought of affirmation. This page stays with 1889 and 1900 as the essay places them, and does not add a birth year absent from the source, or later critical editions. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. This page reads a note on a first encounter with German modern philosophy, centered on Nietzsche’s life and values. The life Nietzsche looks at is the measure of value and acts as the root of his philosophy. He therefore began philosophy from the will to life. The good that strengthens life is the measure of all things, and evil as what weakens life should naturally be expelled. All values that weaken the root of life should be discarded, and, on the contrary, setting up new values for the strengthening and growth of life, which he regards as most important in life, is Nietzsche’s task. According to Nietzsche, whether a claim or a belief is true [good] or false [bad], or whether it is grounded in a correct recognition, is not a very important problem. What he regards as important instead is whether that claim or belief strengthens and promotes life, or not. Therefore, for him, the dichotomous value system of Christian morality — good and evil, this shore and the other shore — and an excessive blind faith in reason, which is no more than a product of finite human beings, are a problem, because such a value system gives no help in strengthening our life. He therefore sought to collapse the metaphysical value system that had been misused until then, and to form a view of values that would present a vision of a new future. In order to find an answer to what it means to live today faithfully, and to find it in Nietzsche among others, one must first know Nietzsche well. Nietzsche was born in Röcken, in Saxony, Germany, as the son of a pastor. But in the year he turned five he lost his father, and, growing up in his maternal grandparents’ house where there were only women, he came, given that background of growth, to have a feminine and delicate character. From his high-school years, the essay says, he left the theology department of the University of Bonn, bought a work by Schopenhauer in a used bookstore, and after reading it over a full two weeks fell into philosophy. The title of that book is not recovered here and is not filled in. Thereafter, at the University of Leipzig, he devoted himself to the classical culture of Greece; he served in the army, was injured while riding a horse, and was soon discharged; and, receiving the recommendation of his teacher Ritschl, at the age of twenty-four he stood as a professor of classical languages at the University of Basel in Switzerland. In 1870 a war broke out and he volunteered as a medical orderly, then contracted severe dysentery and was soon discharged. After that his health continued to worsen. In 1889, at that time in Turin, he suddenly showed symptoms of paralysis and collapsed in the street, and in response the university hospital in Jena issued a diagnosis of progressive paralysis. After a long period of twelve years of suffering in a coma, as the essay places that period, in 1900, as the century was turning, he at last left the world. Before he died he left many well-known works, including Thus Spoke Zarathustra, counted as his greatest masterpiece, as well as Nietzsche’s Last Confession, The Birth of Tragedy, Untimely Meditations, Human, All Too Human, and also Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morality, Ecce Homo, and The Will to Power. In Nietzsche’s work Thus Spoke Zarathustra the thought of eternal recurrence appears. In Nietzsche’s imaginative idea, life takes the model of a circle and is repeated eternally, and both reaching a life on the other shore and being reborn and seeping into a new life in the next world are denied; it is the thought that the same is always repeated. Therefore he argues that freedom and salvation of life exist in accepting the suffering and the joy of present life as they are, and in living only that moment faithfully. This is something that again awakens the meaning and the attitude of a life lived today. This also leads on to Nietzsche’s thought of the overman. The overman Nietzsche mentions is a lonely being, and a being who suffers eternally. He is a being who has thrown off original ideas and idols. He is also a being who, as a subject, fights lonely with himself. He is a subject who struggles with the self of now, not of the past or of the future, and a being who affirms life. He is a being who, more as a subject, breaks through and overcomes the life of eternal recurrence that repeats without cease at every moment. That is Nietzsche’s answer to the meaning of living today. For Nietzsche, “life” acts as the measure of value and as the root of philosophy. He therefore began philosophy from the will to life. The good that strengthens life is the measure of all things, and evil as what makes life weak should naturally be expelled. All values that weaken the root of life should be discarded, and setting up new values for the strengthening or growth of life is precisely Nietzsche’s task. Nietzsche goes beyond good and evil and again defines the character of his philosophy as a whole. The post-metaphysical turn Nietzsche spoke of, the break with essentialism, the abandonment of a centrist model and of an absolutist model, and a program for overcoming monism through a pluralist model, or the turn from a theory of substance to relationism, all became starting points and foundations of a modern upheaval that arose in the various fields of philosophy. This turn to relationism plays a decisive role in showing the identity of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Of course the philosophy Nietzsche presented is a many-faced philosophy that combines countless faces. But the mature Nietzschean philosophy, having deleted the romantic and pessimistic melancholy of his youth, has a “philosophy of affirmation” as its more representative face. A Dionysian philosophy of affirmation, which takes as its task securing the possibility of affirmation concerning human beings and the world, chooses a methodological principle such as the will to power in order to carry out that task. Meanwhile Nietzsche opposes the interpretation A. Schopenhauer gave of the will to power; Schopenhauer saw will itself as the source that induces the suffering of life. Nietzsche criticizes such a will as bringing a pessimistic attitude that denies life. From this point of view Nietzsche saw the Christian world as a world of innocent fiction, and saw its morality and its religion as keeping a distance from reality, and so he saw Christianity not only as a nihilism that refuses a healthy life, but also as the rebellion of the weak shown to the strong, a resentment. In addition, Nietzsche regarded Christian morality as a “slave morality,” on the ground that the theory that all human beings are equal before God pulls all life and human beings down to the lowest level, and so denies the enhancement of life and the will to power that is the essence of life. Just as the world as will is a world jointly made, so is the “I.” I too am one of the will to power. Therefore I am neither a self-standing substance that could exist alone, nor an atomic individual. My “what” and my “how” are the result of interaction that the whole and I perform. My acts, too, are not acts of mine alone. This relational way of being is also confirmed through Nietzsche’s concept of the “body,” and is also confirmed through the “measuring and exchange of power-economic value” that Nietzsche presented as a ground of human sociality. The power-economic relating of bodily beings is not a matter of likes and dislikes. A Platonic naturalness, in which human beings form ties because they are beings of lack, also does not apply here. Nor can a modern contract theory, which guarantees safety with freedom as collateral, be applied. Human beings are, “in their nature,” already relational beings who measure and exchange power-economic value, and the I is, “in its nature,” already a communal I. Nietzsche’s “revaluation of all values” is a negation of original values. But it never ends only as “negation for the sake of negation”; rather, it can be called a system of thought of “affirmation,” precisely for creating still newer values. Western rationalism regards the essence of being as reason. According to F. W. V. Hegel, reason is the infinite absolute that is the substance of every natural and spiritual world and of life. It also exists as the ground of the being and standing of human reality. But W. J. Schelling, raising a flag against this, rebutted that the ultimate ground existing in the world exists in the irrational human will, which does not follow rationalism. Nietzsche, running parallel with Schelling’s stance, is placed with a philosophy that starts from the will to life. The philosophy of affirmation, the note also says, reaches even the conclusion that the psychoanalytic aim should be to show, in themselves, the uncountable or inexplicable primal impulses of human beings, rather than application or ego-strengthening. Of course Freud did not mention the matter that far, and closed the last door of his own research with the two, Thanatos and Eros, and that later became a large point of dispute in modern psychoanalytic theory. This point, the essay says, rose as a dispute among many psychoanalysts after Freud, such as Melanie Klein, Anna Freud, and Lacan. The conclusion of this writing on that path is that the unconscious is the essence of the human being, and that from it we can find the hidden true look of our being. Of course this path is made through a hard questioning and inquiry that passes resistance and the defenses of consciousness. In this sense, psychoanalysis can be called an intellectual journey toward finding a true self. This page stays with the life as the essay places it, including the collapse in Turin in 1889, the diagnosis of progressive paralysis at Jena, and the death in 1900 after twelve years of suffering in a coma, and does not add a birth year that is not in the source, or later critical editions.

Last updated: 14 November 2026