A prodigy, a wanderer, a collapse — a life inseparable from his philosophy.
Nietzsche Unplugged is a six-part series: the man, the death of God, master and slave morality, the Overman, eternal recurrence, and will to power and amor fati. This is Part 1.
A life of brilliance and loss
Nietzsche was born in 1844 in Röcken, Saxony, into a family of Lutheran pastors. His father died when he was four.
He was a dazzling student — at just 24 he became professor of classical philology at Basel. But his health failed early: migraines, near-blindness and chronic pain began in his twenties, and war service in 1870 damaged him further. He resigned his chair at 34, a wandering invalid.
In roughly eleven years of illness he produced almost all of his greatest work. The suffering forced his philosophy to grow.
The writing years and the collapse
“A philosophy that must be read as the document of a man’s struggle with suffering, meaning, and joy.”
Between 1879 and 1888 he drifted between boarding houses, writing in fury, almost completely ignored. Thus Spoke Zarathustra — his masterpiece — sold barely forty copies at first.
In January 1889, in Turin, he collapsed beside a whipped horse — by legend, though the story reaches us second-hand — and never wrote again. For eleven years his mind was gone while his fame exploded around him. He died in 1900.
His life made his philosophy. Illness became amor fati; rejection became the Übermensch; the loss of faith became God is dead. He became an image of the human animal: brilliant, suffering, and defiant.
Related Reading
- Nietzsche Unplugged, Part 2: God Is Dead
- Nietzsche Unplugged, Part 3: Master & Slave Morality
- Nietzsche Unplugged, Part 4: The Übermensch
- Nietzsche Unplugged, Part 5: Eternal Recurrence
- Nietzsche Unplugged, Part 6: Will to Power & Amor Fati
Ignore the Stigmas 
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