Who is Friedrich Nietzsche?

Defeating nihilism by tearing down and rebuilding the values of western civilization, and then going insane. A Simple explanation of his biggest ideas

The Life and Death of Friedrich Nietzsche

“I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous — a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

Nietzsche (pronounced knee-chuh) was born on October 15, 1844, in Prussia before it became unified Germany. His father, a Lutheran pastor, died of brain disease in 1849. Nietzsche’s brother died six months later. He hated his sister, who went on to cherry-pick his work in favor of the Nazi party. Nietzsche himself lived a life of chronic illness, with a probable brain tumor and syphilis he picked up in his travels.

At the age of only 24, Nietzsche became a professor of classical philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland, studying and lecturing on the languages and texts of ancient Greece and Rome. He wrote his first essays and books there, surrounded by an academia…