Friedrich Nietzsche

## Who was Friedrich Nietzsche?

Most
philosophers take a step back and observe their own, and the life of others.
Based on this they compose their own consensus of this and allow others to see
with their perspective. One of these people is Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche
has stated some of the most controversial quotes such as: ‘What doesn’t kill me
makes me stronger,’ ‘God is dead! And we have killed him.’ But if we were to
see his reasoning behind these statements, we can see that he was a thinker who
is intermittently enchanting, wise and very helpful.

Friedrich
Nietzsche was born in 1844 in a quiet village in the eastern part of Germany
where his father was the priest. He did exceptionally well at school and
university and excelled at ancient Greek. This to such an extent that he was made a professor at the
university of Basel when still in his mid-twenties. Even so his official career
did not work out. He got fed up with his fellow academics and gave up
his job. He moved to Sils Maria in the Swiss Alps, there he lived quietly,
working on his masterpieces. Some of these are:

* The Birth of Tragedy

* Human, All Too Human

* The Gay Science

* Thus Spoke Zarathustra

* Beyond Good and Evil

* On the Genealogy of Morals

He
was a troubled man as he did not get along with his family. ‘I don’t like my
mother and it’s painful even for me to hear my sister’s voice.’ He wasn’t lucky
with women, his books didn’t sell. When he was only forty-four, he had a mental
breakdown, precipitated when he saw a horse in a Turin street being beaten by
its driver. Nietzsche ran over to embrace him while shouting ‘I understand
you!’ He never recovered of this and died eleven years after that.

## What does Nietzsche have to do with "Life is a game: live it well"?

Even though Nietzsche did not lead an inviable life, his philosophy was full of heroism and grandeur. He claimed to
be a prophet of what he called ‘Selbstüberwindung’ or self-conquest. A process
by which an ambitious person, what he called an übermensch, rises above their
difficulties and circumstances to embrace whatever life throws at them. He
wanted his work to teach, as he put it, ‘how to become who we truly are.’ His beliefs center around four main recommendations:

**1. Own up to envy**

Envy is, according to Nietzsche, a big
part of life. But the lingering effect of Christianity generally teaches to
feel ashamed of our envious feelings. They seem an indication of evil. So we
hide them from ourselves and others. Yet there isn’t anything wrong with envy
so long as we use it as a guide to what we really want. Every person who makes
us envious should be seen as an indication of what we could one day become. The
envy-inducing writer, artist or chef is hinting at who you are capable of becoming one
day. Nietzsche didn’t believe we can always get what we want, this he
realised from his own life experience. He just insisted we must face up to our
true desires. That we fight to defend, honour and get them and only then mourn
failure with dignity. That is, what Nietzsche believes, what it means to be an übermensch.

**2. Don’t be a**
Christian

Nietzsche had extreme opinions on Christianity. ‘In the entire New Testament,’ he wrote, ‘there is only
one person worth respecting: Pilate, the Roman governor.’ He resented the way
Christianity protected people from their envy. Christianity had, in Nietzsche’s
account, emerged in the late Roman Empire in the minds of slaves who didn’t
have the stones to get a hold of what they really wanted. That’s why they clung
to a philosophy that made it a virtue of their cowardice. Nietzsche called this
‘sklavenmoral’ or slave morality. Christians, who he rudely termed ‘die heerde’
meaning the herd, wanted to enjoy the real ingredients of fulfilment. But are
to inept to get them, therefore they fashioned a hypocritical creed denouncing
what they wanted but were too weak to fight for, while praising what they
didn’t want but happened to have. So, in the Christian value system, being celebate
turned into purity, weakness became goodness, submission to people and hate
became obedience. In Nietzsche’s phrase, “not being able to take revenge”
turned into “forgiveness.” Christianity was, to him, a giant machine for bitter
denial.

**3. Never drink**
alcohol

Nietzsche himself only drunk water or,
on occasion, milk. He thought we should do this as well. He didn’t want this
for the sake of dieting but it is part of his philosophy. As contained in his
declaration: ‘There have been two great narcotics in European civilization:
Christianity and alcohol.’ He hated alcohol for the same reasons he hated
Christianity. Because both numb pain, both reassure us that things are just
fine as they are, taking the will to change our life for the better from us.
Drinks give us a feeling of satisfaction that can get in the way of taking the
needed steps to improve our lives. Nietzsche was obsessed with thinking that
getting really valuable things done, hurts. ”How little you know of human
happiness, you comfortable people” he wrote “the secret of a fulfilled life is:
live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius!”

**4. God is dead**

Nietzsche’s
dramatic claim that god is dead is not, as is often presumed, a celebratory
statement. Despite his reservations about Christianity, Nietzsche did not think
that the end of belief was anything to cheer about. Religious beliefs were
false, he knew, but he observed that they were very beneficial in the sense of
helping us cope with the problems of life. Nietzsche felt that the gap left by
religion should ideally be filled with culture. He thought that philosophy,
art, music and literature should replace the scripture. But he was skeptical
about the way the era he lived in handled culture. He believed that
universities were killing originality, turning it into dry academic exercises.
He thought they weren’t what they were supposed to be, that being guides to
life. He admired the way the Greeks had used tragic drama in a practical,
therapeutic way, as an occasion for catharsis and moral education. He wished
his own age to be more ambitious. He called for a reformation, in which people,
made conscious of the crisis brought on by the end of faith, would fill the gap
with philosophy and art.

Every
era faces particular psychological challenges, thought Nietzsche, and it is the
task of the philosopher to identify and help solve these. He thought the
nineteenth century was reeling under the impact of two developments: Mass
democracy and atheism. The first threatened to unleash torrents of envy, the
second would leave humans without guidance or morality.

Nietzsche
believed it is crucial to break free of the loop we find ourselves in, to see
what we are doing and to improve and reach for the things we want. That is the
perspective his philosophy gives us.

## Sources

Friedrich Nietzsche quotes(http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/f/friedrich\_nietzsche.html)
Filosophy (http://www.filosofie.nl/friedrich-nietzsche/index.html)
Friedrich Nietzche (http://www.humanistischecanon.nl/atheisme/nietzsche)