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Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

 

German philosopher and critic of culture, who influenced a number of the major writers and philosophers of the 20th century Germany and France. Friedrich Nietzsche's most popular book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885), in which the ancient Persian prophet tells the world that God is dead, went ignored at the time of its appearance. Full of provocative ideas, Nietzsche was a master of aphoristic form and use of contradictions. Before and after the rise and fall of the Nazis, he was widely misrepresented as an anti-Semite and a woman hater, and many philosophers found it difficult to take his writings seriously. Like the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard (1813-1855), Nietzsche often contradicted himself.

But when Zarathustra was alone, he spoke thus to his heart: 'Could it be possible! This old saint has not yet heard in his forest that God is dead!'
. . .
I teach you the Superman. Man is something that should be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?
All creatures hitherto have created something beyond themselves: and do you want to be the ebb of this great tide, and return to the animals rather than overcome man?
What is the ape to men? A laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. And just so shall man be to the Superman: a laughing-stock or a painfull embarrassment
.

(in Thus Spoke Zarathustra): A Book for Everyone and No One, translated with an introduction by R. J. Hollingdale, Penguin Books, 2003, pp. 40-41)

Friedrich Nietzsche born  in Röcken, near Leipzig, the son of Karl Ludwig Nietzsche, a Lutheran pastor and  Franziska (neé Oehler), a devout mother with profound Christian faith. His father died –  mad; the diagnosis was softening of the brain –  in 1849. Franziska lost her youngest son in 1850 and moved her family to Naumberg, where Nietzsche spent the rest of his childhood with his mother, sister, father's mother, and two aunts – they all pampered him.

Nietzsche began to write of his intellectual maturation from an early age. In one of his 1884 journal entries he wrote: "When I was twelve years old I conjured up for myself a marvelous trinity: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Devil. My deduction was that God, thinking himself, created the second person of the godhead, but that to be able to think himself he had to think his opposite, and thus had to create it.—That is how I began to philosophize." (Comic Relief: Nietzsche's Gay Science by Kathleen Marie Higgins, Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 158) During his high school and college years, he penned nine autobiographical sketches. At the Pforta school, an elite boarding school, Nietzsche discovered the philosopher-poet Friedrich Höldering, virtually forgotten at that time. He wrote an essay on him and was given a low grade for it and adviced by his teacher "to stick to poets who are healthier, more lucid, and more German." (I Am Dynamite! A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche by Sue Prideaux, Tim Duggan Books, 2018, p. 32)

After years of self-scrutiny Nietzsche refused to take communion, to the shock of his mother. "My dear old Fritz is a noble person, despite our differences of opinion," she wrote to her brother Edmund. "He truly interprets life or, more accurately, time and appreciates only the lofty and good and despises everything crude. Yet I am often worried about this dear child of mine." (Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography by Rüdiger Safranski, translated by Shelley Frisch, Granta Books, 2002, p. 44)

Rejecting his father's faith, Nietzsche became a lifelong rebel against Christianity. "The very word "Christianity is a misunderstanding—at bottom there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross. The "Gospels" died on the cross." (The Antichrist by F. W. Nietzsche, translated from the German with an introduction by H. L. Mencken, Alfred A. Knopf, 1931, p. 11)

Nietzsche was brought up by pious female relatives. He studied classical philology at the universities of Bonn (1864-65) and Leipzig (1864-68), and became at the age of 25 a professor at the University of Basel, Switzerland, but he had not finished his dissertation or postgradual thesis. Among his acquaintances there was Jakob Burckhardt, the writer of The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). Although Burckhardt was a neurotically private person, they enjoyed each other's company and often walked out of the town to take meal and some wine.

In October 1867, Nietzsche entered the military service. He learned to ride, but in March 1868 he had a serious riding accident, injuring his sternum. Nietzsche took morphine to manage his pain. During the Franco-Prussian he served briefly as a medical orderly with the Prussian army. Nietzsche's military career was short: he contracted dysentery and diphtheria and was hospitalized.

In 1872 Nietzsche published his first book, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik  (The Birth of Tragedy). He diagnosed in it human beings as subject to unconscious, involuntary, overwhelmingly self-destructive Dionysian instincts. According to Nietzsche, against this tendency the Greeks erected the sober, rational, and active Apollonian principle.

Nietzsche considered reality as an endless Becoming (Werden). Apollinian power is associated with the creation of illusion – the plastic arts deny the actuality of becoming with the illusion of timeless beauty. Dionysian frenzy threatens to destroy all forms and codes. Only the Apollinian power of the Greeks was able to control the Dionysian flood. But all illusions are temporary, and in his "experimentalist phase" (1878-1882) Nietzsche saw that the loss of Apollinian spell will make the return to Dionysian actuality even more painful.

It must be noted, that the Dionysus whom Nietzsche celebrated in his later writings, was the synthesis of the two forces and represented passion controlled. In the earlier work he favored perhaps more Apollo. His thesis, however, was, that it took both to make possible the birth of tragedy. Later in life Nietzsche addressed Cosima Wagner as "Princess Ariadne" in his letters to her, and declared that the author of them is the god Dionysus. In Cosima's view, there was an affinity between the young Nietzsche and King Ludwig II of Bavaria; she found striking parallels of temperament, and even their eyes were similar.

At Basel Nietzsche had become a close friend of Richard Wagner (1813-1883), and the second part of The Birth of Tragedy deals with Wagner's music. Nietzsche called the composer "Old Minotaur." In History of Western Philosophy Bertrand Russell remarked: "Nietzsche's superman is very like Siegfried, except that he knows Greek. This may seem odd, but that is not my fault." (Ibid., Routledge, 1972, p. 687) 

By the end of the decade, Nietzsche became interested in the French enlightenment, which ended in 1878 his friendship with Wagner and his wife Cosima. The composer despised the French and searched acceptance in Germany. Nietzsche did not accept the rising Wagnerian cult at Bayreuth, especially with its anti-Semitism and Cosima's authoritarian attitude in interpreting the composer's intentions. "Madame Wagner," said Bernard Shaw, "is a clever stage manager; but one of the faults of her qualities is to conceive a dramatic representation as a series of tableaux vivants, and to invent attitudes for people instead of continuous and natural action" (Wagner and the Art of the Theatre by Patrick Carnegy, 2005, p. 145)

Nietzsche gave up Prussian citizenship in 1869 and remained stateless for the rest of his life. In 1879 Nietzsche resigned his professorship – or was forced to give up his chair – due to his headaches, extreme eyeache, and poor health. He often had to lie in a darkened room with the curtains drawn, unable to read or write. Much of his life before the fatal years of 1889, Nietzsche wandered about Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, living in boardinghouses, and producing most of his famous books. When he was in an euphoric mood, Nietzsche could sing and dance naked in his room Zarathustra dances; his landlady, peeping through a keyhole, caught him once in the act.

Nietzsche respected that sincere and "genuine Christianity" which he considered "possible in all ages" – but Wagner's Parsifal with its sickly Christianity clearly did not seem to him belonging in that category. In Bayreuth Nietzsche had became increasingly aware of the impossibility of serving both Wagner and his own call. "What did I never forgive Wagner? . . . that he became reichdeutsch," Nietzsche wrote disillusioned. (Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist by Walter Kaufmann, fourth edition, Princeton University Press, 1974, p. 38) The final break came after much anguish when Wagner told him about the ecstasies that he had experienced when thinking of the Holy Grail and the Eucharist. Nietzsche was appalled. (Nietzsche's Journey to Sorrento: Genesis of the Philosophy of the Free Spirit by Paolo D'Iorio, 2016, p. 32) In the essay 'Der Fall Wagner' (1888, The Case of Wagner) he even asked, "Was Wagner a German at all?" and answered his own question by claiming that he was the natural son of his stepfather, Ludwig Geyer, a Jew. "Now we can understand his antipathy towards the Jews." (Nietzsche and Wagner: A Lesson in Subjugation by Joachim Köhler, 1998, p. 162) 

Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937), the talented and spirited daughter of a Russian army officer, became Nietzsche's most painful love. "Give that Russian girl my regards if that makes any sense," Nietzsche wrote to her companion Paul Rée in March 1882, "I lust after this kind of soul. . . . Marriage is an altogther different story—I could agree only to a maximum of two years of marriage". (Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, p. 250) Their first meeting took place at the end of April in Rome. "From which stars did we fall to meet each other here?" were Nietzche's first words when he saw her at Saint Peter's Basilica. (Ibid., pp. 250-251) Possibly Nietzsche proposed marriage to her in matter of days. However, Nietzsche told Andreas-Salomé that Zarathustra had been conceived as an artistic substitute for the son he would never have.

Nietzsche praised her poem, 'Hymnus an das Leben' (1882, Hymn to Life), which he set to music. "The text, let it be well understood, as there is some misunderstanding abroad on this point, is not by me; it was the astounding inspiration of a young Russian lady, Miss Lou von Salome, with whom I was then on friendly terms. He who is in anyway able to make some sense of the last words of the poem, will divine why I preferred and admired it: there is greatness in them. Pain is not regarded as an objection to existence: "And if thou hast no bliss now left to crown me—Lead on! Thou hast thy Sorrow still." Perhaps my music, too, attains greatness at this point." Maybe that my music is also great in this passage. (The last note of the oboe, by the bye, is C sharp, not C. The latter is a misprint.)" (Ecce Homo (Nietzsche's Autobiography), translated by Anthony M. Ludovici, The Macmillan Company, 1911, p. 98)

In May 1882 in Lucerne, Andreas-Salomé, Nietzsche and Rée had a photograph taken of themselves, Lou kneeling in a small cart and holding a whip over the two man-team pulling the cart. Nietzsche proposed to Lou again.

'Are you visiting women? Do not forget your whip!'
Thus spoke Zarathustra. 
(
Thus Spoke Zarathustra): A Book for Everyone and No One, p. 93)

Rejected by Andreas-Salomé, Nietzsche withdrew into the existence of a tourist-scholar. He spent summers in Switzerland and winters in Italy, and published his major works in a period of ten years. Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) appeared first in three parts in 1883-1884 and was formally published in 1892. Among his other works were Jenseits von Gut und Böse (1886), Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887),  Götzen-Dämmerung (1889), and Ecce Homo (pub. in 1908, written in 1888).

Thus Spoke Zarathustra centered around the notions of the will to power, radical nihilism, and the eternal recurrence, which substituted the ordinary conception of progress. Pain, suffering, and contradictions are no longer seen as objections to existence but as an expression of its actual tensions; there is virtue in one's own downfall. In a note entitled 'Anti-Darwin' Nietzsche stated:  "The domestication (culture) of man does not sink very deep. When it does sink far below the skin it immediately becomes degeneration (type: the Christian). The "wild" man (or, in moral terminology, the evil man) is a reversion to Nature—and, in a certain sense, he represents a recovery, a cure from the effects of "culture." . . ." (The Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values, translated by Anthony M. Ludovici, Vol. II, Books III and IV, T. N. Foulis, 1910, p. 158)

"I call Christianity the one great curse, the one enormous and innermost perversion, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are too venomous, too underhand, too underground and too petty,—I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind. . . . " (The Twilight of the Idols Or, How to Philosophise with the Hammer, translated by Anthony M. Ludovivi, George Allen & Unwin, 1927, p. 251)

In January 1889 Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown in Turin, Italy. According to the standard story he was found on the Piazza Carlo Alberto, weeping and embracing a coach horse after seeing it whipped by its driver – noteworthy, the horse did not appear until 1900 as a part of the accounts of Nietzsche's breakdown. Nietzsche lived first in an asylum and then in his family's care, first in Naumberg with his mother, and then he was brought by his sister to Villa Silberblick.

It has been claimed that his insanity was probably due to an early syphilitic infection. Many scholars, including the novelist and biographer Sue Prideaux in I Am Dynamite! A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche (2018), have suggested that Nietzsche died of a brain tumor. The Nietzsche family was affected by a tendency to mental or neurological instability.

During his final years in mental darkness Nietzsche was almost invariably gentle and pleasant, and in lucid hours he engaged in conversation. The musicologist August Horneffer visited Nietzsche and described him as follows: "Although his eyes were vacant and his features slack, and although the poor man lay there with crooked limbs, more helpless than a child, a sense of magic radiated from his personality, and his appearance revealed a majesty that I would never experience again with any human being." (The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche: Ethics, Ontology and the Self by Nik Farrell Fox, Bloomsbury, 2022, p. 203) Nietzsche died in Weimar on August 25, 1900. No post-mortem was performed on his body. He was buried in Röcken next to his father.

After Nietzsche's death, his sister Elisabeth secured the rights to his literary remains and edited them for publication – sometimes in arbitrary and distorted form. Elisabeth had married in 1885 Bernhard Förster, a prominent leader of the German anti-Semitic movement which Nietzsche loathed. She founded with Förster a German colony in Paraguay, which was meant for the "Aryans only." Förster committed suicide in 1889 in a hotel room in San Bernardino. Elizabeth returned to Germany.

How much Nietzsche's illness – dementia paralytica or syphilis or brain tumor – affected his thinking and writing is open to speculations. In the second period of brain syphilis the patient often acts manic-depressively and has megalomaniac visions. During his own manic period in the 1880s Nietzsche produced Thus Spoke Zarathustra, The Gay Science, and Beyond Good and Evil.

Nietzsche believed that all life evidences a will to power. Hopes for a higher state of being after death are explained as compensations for failures in this life. The famous view about the "death of God" resulted from his observations of the movement from traditional beliefs to a trust of science and commerce. Nietzsche dissected Christianity and Socialism as faiths of the "little men," where excuses for weakness paraded as moral principles. John Stuart Mill's liberal democratic humanism was for him a target for scorn and he called Mill "that blockhead." (History of Western Philosophy, p. 689)

The famous announcement of the death of God in The Gay Science can be taken as a religious paradox, atheist provocation, or Mad Hatter's Tea Party type of stuff: "The madman jumped into their midst and pieced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now. Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? . . . Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition. Gods, too, decompose. God is dead, God remains dead. And we have killed him." (The Gay Science; with a prelude in rhymes and an appendix of songs, translated, with commentary, by Walter Kaufmann, Vintage Books, 1974, p. 125)

According to Nietzsche, the other world is an illusion, and instead of worshipping gods man should concentrate on his own elevation, which Nietzsche symbolizes in the Übermench. By creating the figure of Zarathustra he introduced the teacher of the coming Superman. A slave (Nietzsche associated slave morality with Judeo-Christian values) cannot be a friend of the Superman. "In woman, a slave and a tyrant have all too long been concealed. For that reason, woman is not yet capable of friendship: she knows only love." (Ibid., p. 83) Nietzsche argued that no single morality can be appropriate to all men. The meaning of history was the appearance, at rare moments, of the exceptional individual. 

"My first dose of Nietzsche shocked me profoundly. In black and white he had had the audacity to affirm: 'God is dead!' What? I had just learned that God did not exist, and now someone was informing me that He had died. . . . The day after I first started reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra I had already made up my mind about Nietzsche. He was a weakling who had been freckless enough to go mad, when it was essential, in this world, not to go mad!" (Salvador Dali, in Diary of a Genius, foreword and notes by Michel Déon, translated from the French by Richard Howard, Picador, 1975, pp. 20-21)

First Nietzsche's works began to gain significant public notice by Danish critic and scholar Georg Brandes, who lectured on Nietzsche at the University of Copenhagen in 1888. Nietzsche's thoughts have influenced, among others, Thomas Mann, Herman Hesse, André Malraux, André Gide, Albert Camus, Rainer Maria Rilke, Stefan George, Sigmund Freud, and Jean Paul Sartre. The Nazi propaganda took advantage of some of the philosopher's ideas, but Nietzsche himself was on the side of the few, in direct opposition to the mass psychology, which gave National Socialism the necessary base. Moreover, the Nazis were not inclined to reading as their leisure activity – they favored group meetings more highly and burned books.

Nietzsche rejected German nationalism, writing: "Every great cultural crime of four centuries is what they have on their conscience!" (Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, translated with notes by R. J. Hollingdale, introduction by Michael Tanner, Penguin Books, 1992, p. 11) Radical rightists, on the other hand, welcomed Nietzsche's view of "Herrenmensch," a new type of man who is a law unto himself. (This was the idea tested by Dostoevsky's protagonist Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment.) Adolf Hitler was photographed beside a bust of Nietzsche and in 1943 he gave the complete works of Nietzsche as a birthday gift to Mussolini, whose selectively copied terminology and ideas from the philosopher. When Elisabeth Nietzsche died in 1935, Hitler participated in the funeral ceremony. The Nazis built three years later a monument for Nietzsche.

For further reading: The Madness of Nietzsche by Erich F. Podach (1931); Nietzsche by Crane Brinton (1941); Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist by W. Kaufmann (1950); International Nietzsche Bibliography by H.W. Reichert & K. Schlecta (1968); The New Nietzsche, ed. by David B. Allison (1977); Friederich Nietzsche by Otto Janz (1978, 3 vols.); Nietzsche by M. Heidegger (1979-82, 4 vols.); Spurs: Nitzsche's Styles by Jacques Derrida (1979); Nietzsche: A Collection of Critical Essays ed. by Robert C. Solomon (1980); Nietzsche by R. Schacht (1983); Nietzsche and Philosophy by G. Deleuze (1983); Nietzsche: Life as Literature by Alexander Nehamas (1985); The Importance of Nietzsche by Erich Heller (1988); Nietzsche contra Nietzsche by Adrian Del Caro (1989); Forgotten Fatherland: The Search for Elisabeth Nietzsche by Ben Macintyre (1992); Nietzsche's Voice by Henry Staten (1990); Friedrich Nietzsche by Robert Holub (1995); Nietzsche and Wagner: A Lesson in Subjugation by Joachim Köhler (1998); Thomas Mann and Friedrich Nietzsche. Eroticism, Death, Music, and Laughter by Caroline Joan S. Picart (1999); Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography by Rudiger Safranski (2001); Friedrich Nietzsche by Curtis Cate (2005); Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography by Julian Young (2010); Nietzsche's Journey to Sorrento: Genesis of the Philosophy of the Free Spirit by Paolo D'Iorio (2016); Music for the Superman: Nietzsche and the Great Composers by David Huckvale (2017); The Moral Meaning of Nature: Nietzsche's Darwinian Religion and Its Critics by Peter J. Woodford (2018); I Am Dynamite! A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche by Sue Prideaux (2018); Nietzsche in Hollywood: Images of the Übermensch in Early American Cinema by Matthew Rukgaber (2022); Nietzsche's Philosophy of Nature and Cosmology by Alistair Moles (2023); Nietzsche and Race by Marc de Launay; translated by Sylvia Gorelick (2023) - Note 1: Lou Andreas Salomé became the lover of the poet Rilke and a friend of Freud.  Note 2: Nietzsche in his final years of sanity  (portrait by Stefan Zweig): "Carefully the myopic man sits down to a table; carefully, the man with the sensitive stomach considers every item on the menu: whether the tea is not too strong, the food not spiced too much, for every mistake his diet upsets his sensitive digestion, and every transgression in his nourishment wreaks havoc with his quivering nerves for days. No glass of wine, no glass of beer, no alcohol, no coffee at his place and no cigarette after his meal, nothing that stimulates, refreshes, or rests him, only the short meager meal and a little urbane, unprofound conversation in a soft voice with an occasional neighbor..."  See also: Isaiah Berlin, Volter Kilpi, Edith Södergran, Francois La Rochefoucauld

Selected bibliography:

  • Homer und die klassische Philologie, 1869
    - Homer and Classical Philology (inaugural address; translated by J. M. Kennedy, in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Vol. 3, 1910)
    - Homeros ja klassinen filologia (suom. Pekka Seppänen, teoksessa Kirjoituksia kreikkalaisista, 2006) 
  • Die Dionysische Weltanschauung, 1870
    - The Dionysian Worldview (lecture; translated by Claudia Crawford,  in Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 1997)
  • Socrates und die Tragödie, 1870 (lecture; Socrates and Tragedy)
  • Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, 1872
    -  The Birth of Tragedy; or, Hellenism and Pessimism (translated by William August Haussmann, 1909) / Ecce Homo: and The Birth of Tragedy (translated by Clifton P. Fadiman, 1927) / The Birth of Tragedy (translated by Francis Golffing, 1965; Walter Kaufmann, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 1966; Douglas Smith, 2000) / The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (translated by Shaun Whiteside, 1994) / The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings (translated by Ronald Speirs, 1999)
    - Tragedian synty (suomentanut Jarkko S. Tuusvuori, 2007)
  • Fünf Vorreden zu fünf ungeschriebenen Büchern, 1872 (Über das Pathos der Wahrheit; Gedanken über die Zukunft unserer Bildungsanstalten; Der griechische Staat; Das Verhältnis der Schopenhauerischen Philosophie zu einer deutschen Cultur; Homers Wettkampf;in Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studieaufgabe in 15 Bänden, Band 1, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 1980)
    - The Greek State; Homer's Contest; The Relation of Schopenhauer's Philosophy to a German Culture (translated by Maximilian A. Mugge, in Friedrich Nietzsche: The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche: Vol. 2: Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays, 1911)
    - Homeroksen kilpailu; Kreikkalainen valtio (suom. Pekka Seppänen, teoksessa Kirjoituksia kreikkalaisista, 2006)
  • Die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen, 1873 (unfinished, in Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studieaufgabe in 15 Bänden, Band 1, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 1980)
    - Philosophy During the Tragic Age of the Greeks (translated by M.A. Mügge, in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Vol. 2: Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays, 1911) / Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (translated by  Marianne Cowan, 1962)
    -  Filosofia Kreikan traagisella aikakaudella (suom. Pekka Seppänen, teoksessa Kirjoituksia kreikkalaisista, 2006)
  • Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen I-IV, 1873-76
    - Untimely Meditations (translated by R.J. Hollingdale, 1983) / Unfashionble Observations (translated by Richard T. Gray, 1995) 
    - Historian hyödystä ja haitasta elämälle (suom. Antti Halmesvirta, 1999)
  • Menschliches, Allzumenschliches: Ein Buch für freie Geister, 1878
    - Human, All Too Human (translated by Alexander Harvey, 1908; Helen Zimmern, 1909; Marion Faber, with Stephen Lehmann, 1984; 1986; Gary Handwerk, 1997; R.J. Hollingdale, 1997)
  • Morgenröte: Gedanken über die moralischen Vorurteile, 1881
    - The Dawn of Day (translated by J.M. Kennedy, in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Vol. 9, 1911) / Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality (translated by R.J. Hollingdale, 1997) / Dawn: Thoughts on the Presumptions of Morality (translated by Brittain Smith; afterword by Keith Ansell-Pearson, 2011)
    - Aamurusko (suom. 2011)
  • Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 1882
    - Joyful Wisdom (translated by Thomas Common,  in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Vol. 10, 1910) / The Gay Science (translated by Walter Kaufmann, 1966; Josefine Nauckhoff and Adrian Del Caro, 2001)
    - Iloinen tiede (suom. J.A. Hollo, 1962)
  • Also sprach Zarathustra:Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen, 1883-85
    - Thus Spake Zarathustra (translated by Thomas Common, 1917; Thomas Wayne, 2003) / Thus Spoke Zarathustra (translated by Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche, 1954; R.J. Hollingdale, 1961; Graham Parkes, 2005; Adrian Del Caro, 2006) 
    - Näin puhui Zarathustra (suom. Aarni Kouta 1907, tark. Otto Manninen, uusittu suom. edellisestä laitoksesta v. 1961 J.A. Hollo)
  • Jenseits von Gut und Böse, 1886
    - Beyond Good and Evil (translated by Helen Zimmern, 1906; Marianne Cowan, 1955; Walter Kaufmann,  in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 1966;  R.J. Hollingdale, 1973; Marion Faber, 1999; Judith Norman, 2001)
    - Hyvän ja pahan tuolla puolen (suom. J.A. Hollo, 1966)
  • Zur Genealogie der Moral, 1887
    - The Genealogy of Morals (translated by Horace B. Samuel, 1923) / On The Genealogy of Morals (tranlasted by Walter Kaufmann,  in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 1966; Douglas Smith, 1996) / On the Genealogy of Morality (translated by Carol Diethe, 1994; Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen, 1998)
    - Moraalin alkuperästä (suom. J.A. Hollo, 1969)
  • Der Antichrist, 1888
    - Antichrist (translated by Thomas Common, 1896; H. L. Mencken, 1920; Anthony M. Ludovici, 2000) / The Anti-Christ (translated by Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche, 1954; Anthony M. Ludovici, 2000) / The Antichrist + Fragments from a Shattering Mind (translated by Domino Falls, et al., 2002) / The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings (translated by Judith Norman, 2005)
    - Antikristus (suom. Aarni Kouta, 1908)
  • Der Fall Wagner, 1888
    - The Case of Wagner (translated by Thomas Common, 1896; Walter Kaufmann, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 1966)
  • Götzen-Dämmerung; oder, Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophiert, 1889
    - The Twilight of the Idols (translated by Thomas Common, 1896; Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche, 1954; Duncan Large, 1998) /  The Twilight of the Idols: Or, How to Philosophize with the Hammer (translated by Richard Polt, 1997)  / The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings (translated by Judith Norman, 2005)
    - Epäjumalten hämärä (suom. Markku Saarinen, 1995)
  • Nietzsche contra Wagner, 1889
    - Nietzsche contra Wagner (translated by Thomas Common, 1896; Anthony M. Ludovici, in the Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Vol. 8, 1911; Walter Kaufmann, 1968)
  • Gedichte und Sprüche, 1898
  • Gesamtausgabe, 1892 (edited by Peter Gast)
  • Grossoktavausgabe, 1894-1904 (15 vols., edited by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche et al.; second ed.: 19 vols., 1901-13)
  •  Der Wille zur Macht, 1901
    - The Will to Power (translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, 1968)
  • Gesammelte Briefe, 1902-09
  • Werke, 1894-1904
  • Ecce homo – Wie man wird, was man ist, 1908
    - Ecce Homo (translated by Anthony M. Ludovici, 1911; Clifton P. Fadiman, 1927; Walter Kaufmann,  in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 1966) / The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings (translated by Judith Norman, 2005) / Ecce Homo: How to Become What You Are (translated by Duncan Large, 2007)
    - Ecce homo (suom. Tuikku Ljungberg, 2002) / Ecce homo: kuinka tulee siksi mitä on (suom. Antti Kuparinen, 2002)
  • Briefe an Peter Gasr, 1908
  • Friedrich Nietzsches Briefe an Mutter und Schwester, 1909
  • Friedrich Nitzsches gesammelte Briefe, 1900-09 (5 vols.)
  • The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, 1909-13 (18 vols., edited by Oscar Levy)
  • Friedrich Nietzsches briefwechsel: mit Franz Overbeck, 1916 (edited by C.A. Bernoulli and Richard Oehler)
  • Selected Leters of Friedrich Nietzsche, 1921 (edited by Oscar Levy, translated by A.M. Ludovici)
  • Gesammelte Werke, 1920-29 (23 vols.)
  • Nietzsches Briefe, 1922 (edited by Richard Oehler)
  • Friedrich Nietzsches briefwechsel mit Erwin Rohde, 1923 (edited by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche und Fritz Schöll)
  • Sieben ausgewählte Lieder für eine Singstimme mit Klavierbegleitung, 1924 (Vol. I of Musikalische Werke von Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Georg Göhler)
  • Nietzsche in seinen Briefen und Berichten der Zeitgenossen; die Lebensgeschichte in Dokumenten, 1932  (edited by Alfred Baeumler)
  • Werke und Briefe, 1933-42 (9 vols.)
  • Sokrates und die griechische Tragoedie, 1933 (edited by H.J. Mette)
  • The Philosophy of Nietzsche, 1937 (edited by Geoffrey Clive)
  • Schwert des geistes: worte für den deutschen kämpfer und soldaten, 1940 (edited by Joachim Schondorff)
  • Von neuen Freiheiten des Geistes, 1943 (edited by Friedrich Würzbach)
  • Werke in drei Bänden, 1954-56 (3 vols., edited by Karl Schlechta)
  • The Portable Nietzsche, 1954 (translated by Walter Kaufmann)
  • Nietzsche: Unpublished Letters, 1959 (translated and edited by Kurt F. Leidecker)
  • Friedrich Nietzsches Werke des Zusammenbruchs, 1961 (edited by Erich F. Podach)  
  • Complete Works, 1964 (18 vols., ed. Oscar Levy)
  • Werke in zwei Bänden, 1967 (2 vols., edited by Ivo Frenzel)
  • Nietzsche Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 1967 ff (30 vols., edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari)
  • Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 1966 (translated and edited by Walter Kaufmann)
  • A Nietzsche Reader, 1977 (translated by R. J. Hollingdale)
  • Sämtliche Werke, 1967-86 (15 vols.)
  • Nietzsche: A Self-portrait from His Letters, 1971 (translated and edited by Peter Fuss and Henry Shapiro)
  • Gedichte: Deutsch-Englisch = Poems: German-English, 1973 (translated by Olga Marx)
  • A Nietzsche Reader, 1977 (ed. R.J. Hollingdale)
  • Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870s, 1979 (translated and edited by Daniel Breazeale)
  • Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studieaufgabe in 15 Bänden, 1980 (edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari)
  • Nietzsche Selections, 1993 (edited by Richard Schacht)
  • Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, 1996 (translated and edited by Christopher Middleton)
  • Unpublished Writings from the Period of Unfashionable Observations, 1999 (translated by Richard T. Gray)
  • Political Writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, 2008 (compiled by Frank Cameron and Don Dombowsky)
  • Writings from the Early Notebooks, 2009  (edited by Raymond Geuss, Alexander Nehamas; translated by Ladislaus Loöb)
  • The Peacock and the Buffalo: The Poetry of Nietzsche, 2010 (translated by James Luchte)
  • The Will to Power: Selections from the Notebooks of the 1880s, 2017 (translated by R. Kevin Hill and Michael A. Scarpitti; edited, with an introduction and notes, by R. Kevin Hill)
  • Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Thus Spoke Zarathustra: (Spring 1884-Winter 1884/85), 2022 (translated, with an afterword, by Paul S. Loeb and David F. Tinsley)
  • Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Dawn (Winter 1879/80-Spring 1881), 2023 (translated, with an afterword, by J.M. Baker, Jr. and Christiane Hertel)
  • Joyful Science; Idylls from Messina; Unpublished Fragments from the Period of The Joyful Science (Spring 1881-Summer 1882), 2023 (translated, with an afterword, by Adrian Del Caro)


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