Frederick Nietzsche

(Röcken, October 15, 1844-Weimar, August 25, 1900)

Fiedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher, poet, musician and philologist, whose work has had a profound influence on contemporary world thought and Western culture. He wrote on topics as diverse as art, philology, music, history, religion, science and tragedy. Nietzsche's philosophy as a whole is, on the one hand, a radical criticism of the foundations of Western culture based on a metaphysics, a religion and a morality that have supplanted and inverted vital values; On the other hand, it is an attempt to overcome this culture which he describes as a product of resentment against life.

Three periods are usually distinguished that characterize the development of his thought:
A first period until 1883, in which two stages can be noted: the first (until 1876) is characterized by a work of critical interpretation of culture greatly influenced by Schopenhauer and Wagner; From Schopenhauer he took the notion of phenomenon as a representation whose root would be in the will and from Wagner he took the creative enthusiasm and the project of total art. The most representative work of this first stage is The Birth of Tragedy in the Spirit of Music (1872). In this work he examines not only the origin of tragedy but the general aspects that have given rise to the birth of Western culture, which he analyzes from two complementary categories of aesthetic analysis: the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The second stage within this period is more marked by the scientific interests of Nietzsche, who was interested in the positive sciences (physics, biology, anthropology, astronomy and paleontology), and in which he developed fine psychological analyzes and defended those whom he called free spirits, in the tradition of enlightened thinkers who rebel against a world gripped by prejudice.
The second period is marked by the appearance of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the most important work, in which he resumes the criticism of metaphysics, morality and Western culture, and formulates his great theses: nihilism, the transmutation of the values, the doctrine of the will to power, the eternal return and that of the superman, and in which he elaborates a vision that can lead to overcoming the spirit of revenge or resentment against life that Western metaphysics and its great ally: religion.
And a third period that corresponds to the stage after Zarathustra, in which the same lines continue, but with a more bitter character, more focused on the criticism of morality and the need for the transvaluation of all values. The most representative works of this period are: Beyond Good and Evil (1886), The Genealogy of Morals (1887) and The Twilight of the Idols (1889).