Nietzsche's World

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Nietzsche taught at the university of Basel, Switzerland,  a  serious  Protestant city which every spring explodes in a carnival of incredible noise, music, beauty, and nonsense.

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So Nietzsche called the  industrious city of Basel “The Colourful Cow”. This was in the second half of the 19th century.

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Van Gogh and Monet, Marx, Freud, and Mark Twain were his famous contemporaries.

Van Gogh

Boats by Van Gogh

Cliffs by Monet

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Nietzsche would  maybe not have heard of that new subjective and irreverent art, but he must have read Marx, and he would have seen the same  world as Marx where children had to work, people were getting hopelessly poor, and industry was messy:

Photo from http://img223.imageshack.us/i/chicago19098bely9.jpg/

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Photo from http://gdl.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/springburn/springwor/springworleg03.jpg

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Miners with their pit pony and  horses delivering beer: the photos is from http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/

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The Indians had trouble surviving

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And there were still slave markets in many places:

The painting is by Jean-Leon Gerome at hoocher.com/Jean_Leon_Gerome

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But this was his home town :

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Nietzsche was the son of a pastor at Röcken in Germany, and he started out as a philologist** studying and teaching about the Greeks.

**  the study of language, its origin, development, and functions.

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The house to the right is where Nietzsche was born, and I think (but could not confirm it) that the church in the background is where Nietzsche’s father preached.

Look at this architecture and consider what an orderly, intelligible little world that was.

And yet Nietzsche pronounced it a hoax.

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He taught that reason is some sort of biochemical accident that can’t last, because it is at odds with the forces of nature.

Reason tries to overcome and stifle nature and thereby brings about its own destruction.–

However, he is most famous for his attacks on religion.

He wrote that  God was dead and therefore the “superior human” had to take over to save the West from the spread of nihilism.

That “superior human” is not defined by race, but by willpower.

Quote :  Is man  God’s blunder? Or is God a blunder of man’s?

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This picture, according to an e-mail received from Gabrio Bevilacqua, is not of Nietzsche, but of King Umberto I of Savoy who was assassinated in 1899.

This is the young Nietzsche:

Nietzsche lived from 1844 to 1900.

Nobody read his last works until some time after his death, when the Nazis set him up as their thinker.

After WWII his reputation had to be repaired.

And then, in the sixties, he and Sartre were all the talk.

He remains more readable than any of the great philosophers :

” In irgend einem abgelegenen Winkel des in zahllosen Sonnensystemen flimmernd ausgegossenen Weltalls gab es einmal ein Gestirn, auf dem kluge Thiere das Erkennen erfanden. Es war die hochmüthigste und verlogenste Minute der “Weltgeschichte”: aber doch nur eine Minute.”

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“In some remote corner of one of the innumerable solar systems of the universe there was once a star where some clever animals invented Knowledge. It was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of history, but even so only a minute….”

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So Nietzsche saw most of man’s history as  an ongoing party where everyone wears a masque and a costume.

“You’d have to write a fable to illustrate how [....] aimless our reason appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it disappears nothing will have happened.”

His most famous friend was Lou Salomé.

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Aged 45 Nietzsche collapsed mentally and did not recover. However,  he has always been loved best precisely for his later, pigheaded writings. There is a complete collection of his works at

http://www.davemckay.co.uk/philosophy/nietzsche/

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As a philosopher he has been read and studied by many more people than will admit it, but his premises are not compatible with our laws, our ethics and their Biblical origins, and so all the academic talk about him has always been uneasy.

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The Nietzsche Family Circus is a program that lampoons famous Nietzsche quotes by haphazardly pairing them with  parenting  cartoons:

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