The challenge begins with how to pronounce his name. The first bit should sound like knee, the second cha, Nietzsche. Then we need to get past some of his extraordinary and provocative statements. "What doesn't kill me makes me stronger. God is dead and we have killed him," and his large mustache, but when we do, we'll discover a thinker who's intermittently, enchanting, wise and very helpful.
Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844 in a quiet village in the eastern part of Germany where his father was the priest. He did exceptionally well at school and university and so excelled at ancient Greek that he was made a professor at the University of Basel when still only in his mid-20s, but his official career didn't work out. He got fed up with his fellow academics, gave up his job, and moved to Sils Maria in the Swiss Alps where he lived quietly working on his masterpieces. Among them, the Birth of Tragedy, Human All Too Human, The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals.
He had lots of problems. He didn't get on with his family. "I don't like my mother and it's painful even for me to hear my sister's voice." Women kept rejecting him. His books didn't sell and when he was only 44, he had a mental breakdown precipitated when he saw a horse in a Turin street being beaten by its driver and ran over to embrace him shouting, "I understand you." He never recovered and died 11 sad years later, but his philosophy was full of heroism and grandeur. He was a prophet of what he called Selbstuberwindung, or self-overcoming, the process by which a great souled person, what he called an ubermensch, rises above their circumstances and difficulties to embrace whatever life throws at them.
He wanted his work to teach us, as he put it, how to become who we really are. His thought centers around four main recommendations. One, own up to envy. Envy is, Nietzsche recognized, a big part of life, yet the lingering effects of Christianity generally teach us to feel ashamed of our envious feelings. They seem an indication of evil, so we hide them from ourselves and others. Yet, there's nothing wrong with envy, maintained Nietzsche, so long as we use it as a guide to what we really want. Every person who makes us envious should be seen as an indication of what we could one day become. The envy-inducing, writer, tycoon, or chef is hinting at who you are capable of one day being. It's not that Nietzsche belief we always end up getting what we want. His own life had taught him this well enough. He simply insisted that we must face up to our true desires, put up a heroic fight to honor them, and only then mourn failure with solemn dignity. That is what it means to be an ubermensch.
Two, don't be a Christian. Nietzsche had some extreme things to say about Christianity. "In the entire New Testament," he wrote, "there is only one person worth respecting: Pilate, the Roman governor." It was knockabout stuff, but his true target was more subtle and more interesting. He resented Christianity for protecting people from their envy. Christianity had, in Nietzsche's account, emerged in the late Roman empire in the minds of timid slaves who'd lacked the stomach to get hold of what they really wanted, and so had clung to a philosophy that made a virtue of their cowardice. He called this sklavenmoral.
Christians whom he rather rudely termed [foreign language], the herd, had wished to enjoy the real ingredients of fulfillment, a position in the world, sex, intellectual mastery, creativity, but they'd been too inept to get them. They'd therefore fashioned a hypocritical creed, denouncing what they wanted, but were too weak to fight for while praising what they didn't want but happened to have. So in the Christian value system, sexlessness turned into purity. Weakness became goodness. Submission to people one hates became obedience and in Nietzsche's phrase, not being able to take revenge turned into forgiveness. Christianity amounted to a giant machine for bitter denial.
Three, never drink alcohol. Nietzsche himself drank only water and as a special treat milk, and he thought we should do likewise. He wasn't making a small eccentric dietary point. The idea went to the heart of his philosophy. As contained in his declaration, there have been two great narcotics in European civilization, Christianity and alcohol. He hated alcohol for the very same reasons that he scorned Christianity, because both numb pain. Both reassure us that things are just fine as they are, sapping us of the will to change our lives for the better. A few drinks usher in a transient feeling of satisfaction that can get fatally in the way of taking the steps necessary to improve our lives. Nietzsche was obsessed with the awkward truth that getting really valuable things done hurts. "How little you know of human happiness, you comfortable people," he wrote. "The secret of a fulfilled life is live dangerously, build your cities on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius."
Four, God is dead. Nietzsche's dramatic assertion that God is dead is not as it's often taken to be, some kind of a celebratory statement. Despite his reservations about Christianity, Nietzsche didn't think that the end of belief was anything to cheer about. Religious beliefs were false, he knew, but he observed that they were very, very beneficial in the sense of helping us cope with the problems of life. Nietzsche felt that the gap left by religion should ideally be filled by culture. He meant philosophy, art, music, literature. Culture should replace scripture. However, Nietzsche was deeply suspicious of the way his own era was handling culture. He believed the universities were killing the humanities, turning them into dry academic exercises rather than using them for what they were always meant to be, guides to life. He admired the way the Greeks had used tragic drama in a practical therapeutic way as an occasion for catharsis and moral education, and wished his own age to be comparably ambitious.
He called for a reformation in which people newly conscious of the crisis brought on by the end of faith would fill the gaps created by the disappearance of religion with philosophy and art. Every era faces particular psychological challenges, thought Nietzsche, and it's the task of the philosopher to identify and help solve these. For Nietzsche, the 19th century was reeling under the impact of two developments, mass democracy and atheism. The first threatened to unleash torrents of undigested envy, the second to leave humans without guidance or morality. In relation to both challenges, Nietzsche remains are endearing, fascinating, often lovable and mustachioed guide.