The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche owned an extensive private library, which has been preserved after his death. Today this library consists of some 1,100 volumes, of which about 170 contain annotations by him, many of them substantial. However, fewer than half of the books he read are found in his library. [1]
Nietzsche, who had been a student and a professor of philology, had a thorough knowledge of the Greek philosophers. Among modern philosophers, his reading included Kant, Mill and Schopenhauer, [1] who became major targets of criticism in his philosophy. He also mentions reading Hegel at the age of twenty. [2] Late in life he read Spinoza, whom he called his "precursor", in particular for his criticisms of free will, teleology and his thoughts on the role of affects, joy and sadness. [3] Nietzsche, however, opposed Spinoza's theory of conatus , for which he substituted the "will to power" (Wille zur Macht); and he replaced Spinoza's formula "Deus sive Natura" (God or Nature) by "Chaos sive Natura".
Philipp Mainländer's The Philosophy of Redemption, can still be found in the library. [4] Nietzsche read the work, of which a large part is a criticism of Schopenhauer's metaphysics, while he was parting ways with Schopenhauer. [5] Nietzsche kept an interest for the philosopher: among his books was Mainländer, a new Messiah, written by Max Seiling, published a decade later. [6]
Nietzsche also admired the French moralists of the 17th century such as La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère and Vauvenargues, whose books he received from his sister in 1869. [7] He also admired Pascal and, most of all, Stendhal. [8] He also read Eduard von Hartmann's "Philosophy of the Unconscious", and alludes to it in some of his works. Nietzsche read in 1883 Paul Bourget's Essais de psychologie contemporaine, from which he borrowed the French term décadence . [9] Bourget had an organicist conception of society. Nietzsche had already encountered organicist theories in Rudolf Virchow's Die Cellularpathologie (1858) and in Alfred Espinas's Des sociétés animales (1887; Die thierischen Gesellschaften, Braunschweig, 1879). [10] Nietzsche's 1888 notebooks also contain references to Victor Brochard's Les Sceptiques grecs (1887); [8] to Charles Féré, who had concerns about "degeneration" issues; and to Louis Jacolliot's Les Lois de Manou, which became for Nietzsche the "classical [case] of pia fraus, the pious lie of religion" [11] In his notebooks, Nietzsche copied several passages of Féré, later included, without quotation marks, in The Will to Power published by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and Peter Gast. [12] [13] Finally, Wolfgang Müller-Lauter showed that Nietzsche also read the embryologist Wilhelm Roux. [14] In a letter of 26 February 1888 to Peter Gast, Nietzsche mentions his reading of the posthumous works of Charles Baudelaire (published in 1887). [11]
Nietzsche also became familiar with Darwinism through his early reading of Friedrich Albert Lange's Geschichte des Materialismus (1865), which criticized Darwin's gradualism. [15] Lange alluded to Stirner in this book, whom he (incorrectly) identified with Schopenhauerian positions. [16] He also mentioned Blanqui's L'Eternité par les astres , which discussed the thesis of an eternal return. [15] Besides Lange, he read the anti-Darwinist botanist Carl Nägeli's Mechanisch-physiologische Theorie der Abstammungslehre (1884) in the period of Beyond Good and Evil, which became his main source concerning physiology. Nietzsche targeted Social Darwinism, in particular Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill and David Strauss (he read all of them, and titled the first Untimely Meditation "David Strauss: the Confessor and the Writer"). [17]
He also read Tolstoy's My Religion (Paris, 1885), the Jewish historian Julius Wellhausen on Arab antiquities and his Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (Berlin, 1882), the first volume of the Journal of the Goncourt brothers, thoughts of Benjamin Constant on German theater, Ernest Renan's Life of Jesus — whom he opposed —, and Dostoevsky's The Possessed (Paris, 1886 – read in 1887). [11] [18] Julius Wellhausen became famous for his critical investigations into Old Testament history and into the composition of the Hexateuch , the uncompromising scientific attitude he adopted in testing its problems bringing him into antagonism with the older school of biblical interpreters. He became arguably best known for the Documentary hypothesis on the origin of the Pentateuch. Wellhausen influenced Nietzsche in his writing of The Antichrist and in his musings on the internal discrepancies of the Bible.
Nietzsche was also an admirer and frequent reader of Ralph Waldo Emerson. [19]
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher, prose poet, cultural critic, philologist, and composer whose work has exerted a profound influence on contemporary philosophy.
Johann Kaspar Schmidt, known professionally as Max Stirner, was a German post-Hegelian philosopher, dealing mainly with the Hegelian notion of social alienation and self-consciousness. Stirner is often seen as one of the forerunners of nihilism, existentialism, psychoanalytic theory, postmodernism and individualist anarchism.
German philosophy, meaning philosophy in the German language or philosophy by German people, in its diversity, is fundamental for both the analytic and continental traditions. It covers figures such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle, and the Frankfurt School, who now count among the most famous and studied philosophers of all time. They are central to major philosophical movements such as rationalism, German idealism, Romanticism, dialectical materialism, existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, logical positivism, and critical theory. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard is often also included in surveys of German philosophy due to his extensive engagement with German thinkers.
Philipp Mainländer was a German philosopher and poet. Born Philipp Batz, he later changed his name to "Mainländer" in homage to his hometown, Offenbach am Main.
History of Materialism and Critique of Its Present Importance is a philosophical work by Friedrich Albert Lange, originally written in German and published in October 1865. Lange vastly extended the second edition published in two volumes in 1873–75. A three-volume English translation of the opus was published 1877–81.
"God is dead" is a statement made by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. The first instance of this statement in Nietzsche's writings is in his 1882 The Gay Science, where it appears three times. The phrase also appears in Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits is a book by 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, originally published in 1878. A second part, Assorted Opinions and Maxims, was published in 1879, and a third part, The Wanderer and his Shadow, followed in 1880.
The will to power is a concept in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. The will to power describes what Nietzsche may have believed to be the main driving force in humans. However, the concept was never systematically defined in Nietzsche's work, leaving its interpretation open to debate. Usage of the term by Nietzsche can be summarized as self-determination, the concept of actualizing one's will onto one's self or one's surroundings, and coincides heavily with egoism.
Afrikan Aleksandrovich Spir (1837–1890) was a Russian neo-Kantian philosopher of German-Greek descent who wrote primarily in German, but also French.
Paul Ludwig Carl Heinrich Rée was a German author, physician, philosopher, and friend of Friedrich Nietzsche.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) developed his philosophy during the late 19th century. He owed the awakening of his philosophical interest to reading Arthur Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung and said that Schopenhauer was one of the few thinkers that he respected, dedicating to him his essay Schopenhauer als Erzieher, published in 1874 as one of his Untimely Meditations.
Spinoza: Practical Philosophy is a book by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, in which the author examines Baruch Spinoza's philosophy, discussing Ethics (1677) and other works such as the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670), providing a lengthy chapter defining Spinoza's main concepts in dictionary form. Deleuze relates Spinoza's ethical philosophy to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Willem van Blijenbergh, a grain broker who corresponded with Spinoza in the first half of 1665 and questioned the ethics of his concept of evil. The work has received praise from commentators.
Untimely Meditations, also translated as Unfashionable Observations and Thoughts Out of Season, consists of four works by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, started in 1873 and completed in 1876.
Friedrich Nietzsche's influence and reception varied widely and may be roughly divided into various chronological periods. Reactions were anything but uniform, and proponents of various ideologies attempted to appropriate his work quite early.
The ideas of 19th-century German philosophers Max Stirner and Friedrich Nietzsche have often been compared and many authors have discussed apparent similarities in their writings, sometimes raising the question of influences. In Germany, during the early years of Nietzsche's emergence as a well-known figure the only thinker discussed in connection with his ideas more often than Stirner was Arthur Schopenhauer. It is certain that Nietzsche read about Stirner's book The Ego and Its Own, which was mentioned in Friedrich Albert Lange's History of Materialism and Critique of its Present Importance (1866) and Eduard von Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869), both of which young Nietzsche knew very well. However, there is no irrefutable indication that he actually read it as no mention of Stirner is known to exist anywhere in Nietzsche's publications, papers or correspondence.
Egoist anarchism or anarcho-egoism, often shortened as simply egoism, is a school of anarchist thought that originated in the philosophy of Max Stirner, a 19th-century philosopher whose "name appears with familiar regularity in historically orientated surveys of anarchist thought as one of the earliest and best known exponents of individualist anarchism".
The relation between anarchism and Friedrich Nietzsche has been ambiguous. Even though Nietzsche criticized anarchists, his thought proved influential for many of them. As such "[t]here were many things that drew anarchists to Nietzsche: his hatred of the state; his disgust for the mindless social behavior of 'herds'; his anti-Christianity; his distrust of the effect of both the market and the State on cultural production; his desire for an 'übermensch'—that is, for a new human who was to be neither master nor slave".
This is a list of articles in modern philosophy.
Robert Misrahi is a French philosopher who specialises in the work of 17th Century Dutch thinker Baruch Spinoza.
The philosophical ideas and thoughts of Edmund Burke, Thomas Carlyle, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Søren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner have been frequently described as Romantic.
It was in a letter to Cosima Wagner, 19 december 1876, that is, while reading Mainländer, that Nietzsche for the first time explicitly claimed to have parted ways with Schopenhauer. It may be worth mentioning that Mainländer's book ends with a long section (more than two hundred pages) consisting mainly of a critique of Schopenhauer's metaphysics