The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers

Many philosophers before Nietzsche had rejected the specific teachings of Christianity but maintained its basic ethical system. Nietzsche would complete the work of Darwin by cleaving Christianity from ethics, and the case study for this emerging morality would be the newly unified German empire.

Born in 1844 to a Prussian minister father who then died young, Nietzsche renounced God at the age of 18 and was profoundly influenced by the work of Schopenhauer. He avoided military service due to an injury, and so he came to worship the military ideal from a distance. After becoming a professor of philosophy at Basle, he befriended the great composer Richard Wagner, and under his mentorship wrote his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, in 1872.

Nietzsche viewed Greek culture as the “union of two ideals—the restless masculine power of Dionysius and the quiet feminine beauty of Apollo” (442). He saw tragedy as a particularly noble art form for its willingness to confront the difficult facts of life without succumbing to despair. A society that moves from tragedy and poetry to logic and rationalism is a society in decay, the final triumph of the Apollonian over the Dionysian spirit. He hopes that the German people, newly unified after its triumph over France in 1870-1871, may be the ones to bring about the return of Dionysian vigor.