It is not the degree that makes a great person;

it is the person that makes the degree great.

A person's reputation depends much on his or her professional career and achievements. It also depends on a good education the individual has acquired, firmly established with a university diploma. Most companies employment criteria is driven by the candidate's know-how, ability to solve problems, and other practical skills, and not just the university degree. Bircham International University students and graduates have gotten jobs or promotions in leading companies worldwide. Many felt a considerable increase in their self-esteem and social status. Most of them had moved on to a better job, had been promoted, or had received a salary raise.

There are many success stories among Bircham International University graduates, but we do not know all of them. With all the respect for the privacy of your life, we would like to read your testimony here. Your story may be helpful for other people. It may motivate current students to continue working in their programs of study, it may encourage BIU graduates to aim high in their personal lifes and professional affairs, it may help the decision of those candidates who are now considering Bircham International Universitya suitable option for their future education.

Probably you would have loved to read some of these stories.

Well, why don't you start telling yours?

You may send your testimony toThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Thanks in advance for sharing.

Abdikadir Mohamed Haamud (Somalia):

Bachelor Degree in Community and Social Development - Social Work

TESTIMONY: "I joined Bircham University from Puntland State of Somalia, during my learning I really gained knowledge, skills and progress. I feed my children, stay with them at home and learn from Bircham University at the same time. It is a great golden, learning staying with your family/space. I say once again thanks to Bircham University that facilitated my learning while studying at my own pace."

Abdo Miled Abou Jaoude (Lebanon):

Doctor Ph.D. Degree in Applied Mathematics

Doctor Ph.D. Degree in Applied Statistics & Probability

Cum Laude in Applied Statistics & Probability

TESTIMONY: "I thank Bircham Universitybecause it gave me the chance to continue my education on a distance learning program. I completed at Bircham University three Ph.D's,the firstin Applied Mathematics, the second in Computer Science with Magna Cum Laude, and the third in Applied Statistics with Magna Cum Laude also. If I have the time I would complete also my knowledge in other fields of knowledge, and all this thanks to Bircham University, and with the support and valuable guidance of Dr. Antoine Abou Assaf, Bircham University's delegate in Middle East and North Africa, and Dr. William Martin, Bircham University's CEO. They both provided me with all the help I needed to complete all the work that I have done during those years. Moreover, the distance learning program is a fantasticadventure rich of pleasure and knowledge that I invite everyone seeking knowledge and self discipline to experience. My sincere thanks to Bircham University."

Abdul Hannan Kakar (Afghanistan):

Master Degree in Community and Social Development

TESTIMONY: "This is to confirm the receipt of my master degree and the supporting documents. I take this opportunity to thank you for your professional and timely correspondence and excellent support throughout my degree program. During the last one year, I really enjoyed the innovative method of studying and therefore hope to continue my Doctorate at Bircham University in the nearest future. Please also extend my special thanks to the entire team of Bircham University and Mr. William Martin, the CEO and Vice-president for providing such a great opportunity to the working professionals to pursue their higher education with a flexible schedule and no interference withprofessional life."

Abdul Qayeum Karim (Afghanistan):

Doctor Ph.D. Degree in Environmental Engineering - Hydrology

Cum Laude in Hydrology

TESTIMONY: "I would like to thank all BIU colleagues and friends who were involved in the organization of the graduation ceremony such as the professors and staff. I would like tothank you all from the bottom of my heart for all your support and cooperation in obtaining the visa to travel to Spain, in all the arrangements for the graduation ceremony, for the on time approval of my Ph. D. Thesis and awarding us with the degree and making our travel and efforts a success. I strongly hope that the Afghanistan will be peaceful, and I will be able to benefit from my experience and knowledge of the topic/subject I studied during my Ph.D. studies for the rehabilitation, education and prosperity of Afghans as a member of the global community. I wish all of you further success in spreading education globally and helping the human communities in development activities."

Ado Henrique Saldanha Ribeiro Pizarro (Portugal):

Specialist Diploma in Natural Heath

TESTIMONY: "Tive a felicidade de conhecer a Bircham University. Depois de muitas perguntas que fiz, e sempre prontamente elucidado de forma categrica pelo Ex Sr. Cesar Martinez, no exitei mais e me inscrevi na formao de Especialista em Saude Natural. J tinha efectuado em Portugal vrias formaes nesta rea, em E-larning, mas com a Bircham University, tudo foi diferente. Diferente na exigncia e no rigor, na forma e no mtodo que tm de nos enviar os livros e respectivo material de estudo, na calma que nos transmitem durante o processo e o tempo de estudo, tirando-nos qualquer dvida e aconselhando-nos para a devida calma, mas sempre pedindo o nosso esforo e dedicao com os principios definidos que no me canso de repetir. Assim, o seu mtodo, de fazer com que sejam lidos os respectivos livros, a forma como temos que reler para ir anotando as nossas descobertas para a elaborao do nosso trabalho to intensa, que sem darmos conta disso, j lemos os diversos captulos de cada livro 3 ou 4 vezes. Dessa forma, bem claro que aprendemos mesmo as matrias por eles estipuladas e fazemos o nosso trabalho e com o orgulho de dever cumprido, fixando essa aprendizagem para o resto da vida."

Ahmad Timor Qayoomi (Afghanistan):

Master Degree in Construction Management

TESTIMONY: "I am happy as a member of Bircham University students."

Ahmed Mohamoud Warsame (Somalia):

Master Degree in Public Administration - Human Resources Management

TESTIMONY: "You kept me pushing my career forward since I joined this honorable university and at last here I am reaping my rewards. For me it was an incredible dream to have a post graduate degree in Somalia where I live now, where there was no functional government for the last 20 years. I still remember when i was collecting some of my colleagues to join this university with me and how hard it was to convince them to do their masters through distance learning. I confess that many of them have already had their master degrees before me from Bircham University. Thanks to the staff of Bircham University MEA, specially Graziella who was the bridge between me and the university, and who was coordinating the program tirelessly. In fact text books were being sent on time, evaluation reports on time, and any other needed information was timely circulated. After that, as you stated I am satisfied that I made great development and career building, and benefited from the courses I have been given through your distance learning programs with your continuous whisper in my ear day and night. I have to say that unless I would not join this university, my dreams would still remain dreams and would not see the light."

Alex Vicente Gonzalez (Switzerland):

Bachelor Degree in Computer Engineering

TESTIMONY: "Quiero dar mi testimonio en agradecimiento a todo el staff de Bircham International University por los excelentes servicios prestados a m como estudiante. Bircham International University me inspir en mi carrera profesional y en mis deseos de continuar educndome, cuando en su brochoure deca: Lo importante no es de donde el estudiante se grade, sino, lo que el estudiante puede hacer con su trabajo para darle prestigio a la institucin de donde se gradu. Ahora me encuentro realizando un postgrado en SEAS centro de formacion abierta en Redes y comunicacion. Gracias una vez mas."

Alfredo Eduardo Manuel Mingas (St. Tome Principe):

Bachelor Degree in International Relations

TESTIMONY: "As autoridades angolanas invalidaram todos os documentos acadmicos que atestam a concluso de formao graduada e ps-graduada na American World University. A deciso veem expressa no despacho n. 2477/13, assinado pelo Ministro do Ensino Superior. Um dos seus mais notveis estudantes em Angola e o actual embaxador de Angola em So Tom, Alfredo Mingas Eduardo Panda, que esteve a fazer um curso ligado a gesto de empresas na American World University, mudou-se depois para a Bircham International University, onde estudou Relaes internacionais."

Amon NGuessan Broutch Charles (Ivory Coast):

Certificate Degree in Petroleum Industry Management - course only

Certificate Degree in Diplomatic Relations

Certificate Degree in Cert. Total Quality Mgmt.

Master Degree in Executive Leadership

Certificate Degree in Business Administration

TESTIMONY: "Une bonne nouvelle: grace au "petroleum industry management" certificate, je commencea travallier BOLLORE AFRICALOGISTICS/OIL& GAS."

Andrew Austin (Ghana):

Master Degree in Management Information Systems

TESTIMONY: "Iam very happyto be part of Bircham University because of how organized things are and hope to personally meet you one day. I have benefited from my program and I have started introducingBircham University to my colleagues who are interested in upgrading themselves. It was my headache to leave my job to school because I needed its proceed to support myself my upgrade and Bircham University provided me with the solution. Thank you so much William for your personal motivation to work harder till the completion of my degree program."

Anton D. Buttigieg (Malta):

Doctor Ph.D. Degree in Information Technology

Cum Laude in Information Technology

TESTIMONY: "Talking from my personal experience, I had spent 4 months searching throughout the web for distance learning universities throughout the world. I was looking for flexibility, value for money, organization and professionalism. I found all these attributes in the Bircham University degree I pursued, through which I could read, study and write at my own pace, and balance my time between full-time work, study and my personal life, thereby practising time management and self discipline. I am doing my best to encourage my friends and colleagues to consider taking a Bircham University degree so that they may share the same rewarding experience as myself. Since graduating with Bircham University, I've never looked back and my career keeps on flourishing."

Balinda Manzi William (Rwanda):

Master Degree in Business Adminstration

TESTIMONY: "I'm very happy with your service. The diploma also looks very good. I will be your ambassador everywhere I will go."

Belmiro Figueiredo Cipriano (Angola):

Master Degree in Electrical Engineering

TESTIMONY: "Bircham University is having a great impact in my daily life. As a student at Bircham University I learned how to communicate efficiently and trust people that you do not see."

Birendra Nath Sikder (Bangladesh):

Doctor Ph.D. Degree in International Law

TESTIMONY: "Thank you BIU! Ministry of Youth & Sports from Bangladesh."

Blanca Elvia Narvez Rodriguez (U.S.A.):

Bachelor Degree in Psychology

Master Degree in Counseling Psychology

TESTIMONY: "Escribo esta nota para darle mis sinceros agradecimientos, pues he recibido la noticia de que fuiadmitida en la Universidad Leon, para estudiar la Maestria en Salud Mental y Bioetica. Pasare a contarle mis logros desde que empece a estudiar en Bircham International University.

Read the original:
Graduate's Testimony - BIU HUMAN NETWORK

Resources. Contents: Zen Buddhism; General Resources; Schools of Zen Buddhism; Hakuin Ekaku School of Zen Buddhism; Harada-Yasutani School of Zen Buddhism; Zen Koans Study Pages 20th c.; Zen People and Their Teachings; Daily Zen Sutras; Zen Documents and Writings; Zen Electronic Newsletters and Journals; Zen Buddhism Electronic Forum; Zen Organizations and Institutions; Directories of Practice Centers; Diamond Sangha Home Page; Zen Names; Zen Calendar; Zen Buddhism Online Bookstore.

The Zen Buddhist Order of Hsu Yun (ZBOHY) was created to spread the teachings of Ven. Master Hsu (Xu) Yun, China's greatest Zen (Chan) master of the 20th Century. Our priests follow in the Southern School (Mahayana) lineage of Hui Neng, the Sixth and last Patriarch of Zen. For a comprehensive overview of Zen history, psychology, and practice, visit The Seventh World of Chan Buddhism, prepared for this site by Rev. Ming Zhen Shakya (a priest of Nan Hua temple in the People's Republic of China. As always, our Temple doors are open, the virtual incense is burning .

The International Zen Association (IZA; in French, l'Association Zen Internationale, or AZI) is composed of Master Deshimaru's disciples, as well as all the dojos and zazen groups whose coordinators practice together regularly at the Zen Temple of La Gendronniere during the major annual sessions. A cultural association founded in 1970 by Master Taisen Deshimaru to support his mission, the International Zen Association has as its goal the dissemination of Zen practice and teaching as transmitted by Master Deshimaru, in an effort to help today's civilization resolve the serious crisis it is facing. The IZA is part of the Soto Zen school and is recognized by the Japanese Zen authorities.

Founded in 1966 by Soto Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki-roshi, comprises three practice places: City Center in San Francisco, Green Gulch Farm in Marin and Tassajara Zen Mountain Center near Monterey - all in California. This website includes descriptions of the centers, provides schedules of events and programs, and offers excerpts of books by Zen Center teachers as well as sutras chanted here. Soon to be added: a photo gallery, a notice board and a page of links.

The Zen Studies Society was established in 1956 to assist the Buddhist scholar D.T. Suzuki in his efforts to introduce Zen to the West. In 1965 it came under the leadership of a Japanese Zen monk, Eido Tai Shimano, who shifted the emphasis towards zazen (Zen meditation) practice. With his dedicated energy, and the help of many Dharma friends and supporters, two centers for Zen practice came into being: New York Zendo Shobo-ji, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan; and Dai Bosatsu Zendo Kongo-ji, deep in the Catskill Mountains of Upstate New York. In 1972, Eido Shimano Roshi received Dharma transmission from Soen Nakagawa Roshi, and today serves as the abbot and spiritual teacher of these two zendos in the Japanese Rinzai Zen tradition.

CiWZC is a Zen community located in the warehouse district of St. Paul, Minnesota, organized around authentic practice realization and Zen training. Amidst a warm and open environment, CiWZC welcomes students at all levels to develop and deepen their spiritual practice through a broad range of programs and offerings. Our website includes schedules for zazen, programs, and retreats; information about our center and teachers; dharma talks and sutras; meditation instructions; and much more!

Located in San Francisco, the Zen Hospice Project is dedicated to the care of people who are approaching death and to increasing our understanding of our own impermanence.

Nestled in the San Jacinto Mountains of Southern California, Zen Mountain Center is dedicated to the teaching and practice of Zen Buddhism. The center welcomes participants at any stage of life or experience. In addition to Zen meditation instruction and practice, the center hosts a variety of retreats and workshops in related disciplines, such as T'ai Chi and Yoga. Founded in 1979 by Taizan Maezumi Roshi as a summer retreat for the Zen Center of Los Angeles, it now serves as a year-round Zen Training Center. Run by co-Abbots Tenshin and Seisen Fletcher, it attracts an international community of practitioners.

The Prairie Zen Center is a group of individuals studying Zen in the lineage established by Charlotte Joko Beck of the Zen Center of San Diego. We offer weekly sittings, periodic workshops, and, six times a year, sesshin led by one of Joko's dharma successors, Elihu Genmyo Smith. Elihu now lives in Champaign, Illinois and serves as our resident teacher.

This site features a translation of The Gateless Gate, which is a famous collection of koans.

This site features the sale of audio and videotapes of lectures by Alan Watts as compiled by his son, Mark.

Minnesota Zen Meditation Center was formed nearly 30 years ago. The founding abbott, Dainin Katagiri Roshi was invited to come from California to teach a small but growing group of students interested in the dharma, among them current head priest Sekijun Karen Sunna. Rev. Sunna studied with Katagiri Roshi until his death in 1990, and was installed as head priest in September, 1997. Today MZMC works to maintain a vibrant, welcoming community committed to the teaching and practice of Zen Buddhism. It offers daily sitting meditation, weekly classes and lectures, and intensive meditation practices such as retreats. MZMC is a member-supported non-profit organization operated by a board of directors and small staff. Its main offices are at its Twin Cities temple, also known as Ganshoji. MZMC also owns and operates country facility called Hokyoji in southern Minnesota near the Iowa border.

Located in Omaha, NZC is a Soto Zen Buddhist temple in the tradition of Zen Master Dogen. Our Head Priest and teacher is Rev. Nonin Chowaney, an American Zen Master ordained and authorized to teach by Rev. Dainin Katagiri. We offer daily meditation, intensive retreats, classes, and workshops. Detailed information, including dharma talks by Rev. Chowaney and current and back issues of our newsmagazine, Prairie Wind.

Pine Mountain Buddhist Temple is a small monastic community on 45 acres in the mountains north of Ventura, California in the Ozena Valley, with retreat facilities for guests. The resident monks are members of the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives, founded by the late Rev. Master Jiyu-Kennett. The daily practice is Serene Reflection Meditation (Soto Zen).

Mt. Baldy Zen Center was founded in 1972 by Joshu Sasaki Roshi and is the main training facility of Rinzai-ji. Joshu Roshi is now in his 93rd year and has been teaching in the United States for 37 years. The website offers information about the center, the activities, formal practice etc. Weekly updates for practitioners connected to the center inform about current events. The news section also contains on-line newsletters, texts of sutras, and a glossary of Japanese terms used at Mt. Baldy.

SWZC is a residential, urban Zen practice community in San Diego couty's South Bay area ... a member of the White Plum sangha. Our head teacher is Anne Seisen Saunders. SWZC is a Zen Buddhist community in San Diego county. SWZC offers opportunities for Zen meditation, koan practice, and explores practices from other traditional and contemporary spiritual paths.

A unique and elegant environment. Profound contemplation of the day, inspiring artwork, seasoned with a dash of humor to en-lighten the day. Come visit this spacious haven steeped in Zen spirit.

Zen-Master Kopp is an enlightened one whose luminous transforming wisdom opens new paths of spiritual realisation to those who truly seek spiritually. He leads the TAO CHAN Centre, Wiesbaden, Germany as the dharma-succesor of the late (1977) Zen-Master Soji Enku Roshi This Homepage is in German and English and the books of Zen-Master Kopp are translated into English.

Dharma Field offers daily meditation, retreats, a three-year curriculum as well as advanced seminars in Buddhist studies which provide a complete background in Zen, the teachings of the Buddha, the Wisdom teachings of Mahayana Buddhism, and the essentials of Buddhist psychology. The head teacher at Dharma Field is Steve Hagen, author of Buddhism Plain and Simple.

Zen Community of Oregon is a zen practice center based in Portland, Oregon. We are affiliated with the Soto Zen lineage of Taizan Maezumi Roshi and the Rinzai Zen lineage of Shodo Harada Roshi. This site provides information about our activities, schedule, and zen training. The Communityemphasizes zen practice in the midst of daily life.

This is ths Web site of a Zen monk-artist in Korea, Ven. SongYoon: "As a contemporary seeker on the Path, I have chosen painting as my own special way of living amongst the people. My training as a monk sutra study, chanting, meditation prepared me well for this experience. Particularly the meditation. Zen meditation is much brighter than the gold and silver of the world, and its scent is more elegant than that of all the flowers in the marketplace. Diamonds are both beautiful and indestructible; yet following the laws of karma, they will inevitably return to dust. The crystallization of Zen, however, is as endless and infinite, as is the scent of a painting."

Hartford Street Zen Center, San Francisco is a small Buddhist center of the Soto Zen tradition. We offer a schedule of traditional Zen Buddhist practice for the lay community in a comfortable and friendly environment.We have three scheduled meditation periods each weekday and one meditation period and a Dharma talk on Saturday. Classes on Buddhism or specifically Zen is offered frequently. One day sittings are available each month. Meditation instruction is available by confirmed appointment.

Zen in daily life the Soto approach to Zen, introduce Zen teacher Dogen teaching and many issues such as Zen and Judo and the Martial Arts, Zen and art, Zen in Japan and Zen in Israel, Dogen on time and death and many other subjects concerning combining Zen meditation, finding true self, activating humanism compassion, and creativity in full function in modern society of the 21 century.

Throssel Hole Buddhist Abbey is a Buddhist monastery and retreat centre in the Serene Reflection Meditation Tradition (J. Soto Zen, C. Tsao Tung) and is within the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives. It is located in Northumberland, England. All are warmly invited to join the Abbeys programme of lay training which include introductory retreats, weekend retreats, week retreats and residential lay training.

Zen Mountain Monastery is an American Zen Buddhist monastery and training center for monastics and lay practitioners of the Mountains & Rivers Order of Zen Buddhism. At all times the training program is devoted to one thing only: the clear and direct realization of enlightenment in practice.

ZENVC is an organization dedicated to fostering the growth of everyday, " real world" compassionate action, by integrating the wisdom of Zen Buddhism with the techniques of Nonviolent Communication (aka NVC, developed by Marshall B. Rosenberg). This site offers resources for anyone wanting to practice in the midst of worldly life.

Dharma Zen Center was founded in 1974 by Zen Master Seung Sahn, and is located in the mid-Wilshire area of Los Angeles. Our Guiding Teachers are Zen Master Ji Bong (Robert Moore) and Paul Park, JDPSN. The Center is an affiliate of the Kwan Um School of Zen.

This site is dedicated to a better understanding of Zen, its history, its teachings and its philosophy. Includes a comprehensive Zen book review section, critiques of Zen, translation of Sutras and writings by and about Dogen and Nagarjuna. A wide-ranging collection of authoritative writings about Zen Buddhism.

We utilize Chan and Zen Buddhist practice methods that resonate with Westerners, including the central practice of sitting meditation (zazen). The Pragmatic Buddhist approach uses modern-day language to explain Buddhism's relevance to the contemporary Western lifestyle.

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BuddhaNet's Buddhist Web Links: Zen Buddhism Websites

Buddhism began in India 2,500 years ago and, although virtually extinct in India, it remains the dominant world religion in the East. There are over 360 million followers of Buddhism worldwide and over one million American Buddhists. There even a significant number of "Jewish Buddhists." Buddhist concepts have also been influential on western society in general, primarily in the areas of meditation and nonviolence.

Buddhist beliefs and practices are based on the teachings of the Buddha ("Enlightened One"), an Indian prince named Siddharta Gautama who lived around 500 BCE. According to Buddhist tradition, the young prince lived an affluent and sheltered life until a journey during which he saw an old man, a sick man, a poor man, and a corpse. Shocked and distressed at the suffering in the world, Gautama left his family to seek enlightenment through asceticism. But even the most extreme asceticism failed to bring enlightenment. Finally, Gautama sat beneath a tree and vowed not to move until he had attained enlightenment. Days later, he arose as the Buddha - the "enlightened one." He spent the remaining 45 years of his life teaching the path to liberation from suffering (the dharma) and establishing a community of monks (the sangha).

Over its long history, Buddhism has grown into a variety of forms ranging from an emphasis on religious rituals and the worship of deities, to a complete rejection of both rituals and deities in favor of pure meditation. Yet all forms of Buddhism share respect for the teachings of the Buddha and the goal of ending suffering and the cycle of rebirth. Theravada Buddhism, prominent in Southeast Asia, is atheistic and philosophical in nature and focuses on the monastic life and meditation as means to liberation.

Mahayana Buddhism, prominent in China and Japan, incorporates several deities, celestial beings, and other traditional religious elements. In Mahayana, the path to liberation may include religious ritual, devotion, meditation, or a combination of these elements. Zen, Nichiren, Tendai, and Pure Land are the major forms of Mahayana Buddhism.

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Buddhism ReligionFacts

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Religion Facts Buddhism

Introduction Zen is a subchool of Mahayana or the Greater Vehicle of Buddhism. Zen is a Japanese term, a short for Zen-na. It is a transliteration of the Chinese term, Chan or Chan-na which in turn is a transliteration of Sanskrit, dhyana. The primary focus of Zen Buddhism is on spiritual practice through daily activities. Philosophical explanations are given lesser importance. Today, Zen Buddhism is practised in a number of countries.

The Mythology of Zen Buddhism It is believed that the origin of Zen Buddhism lies in the Flower Sermon delivered by the Buddha. The Flower Sermon did not involve any verbal communication between the Buddha and His disciples. Rather, what Buddha did was very simple, He upheld a flower before His disciples and quietly waited for a response from them. None responded, except one. This was Mahakashyapa and his response was simple, just a smile. The seemingly simple action and reaction from the Buddha and Mahakashyapa is considered to have a deeper meaning. It is believed that through this, the Buddha passed on a special insight to Mahakashyapa.

History of Zen Buddhism The roots of Zen lie in India, the land of origin of Buddhism. From India, Buddhism spread to other parts of the world. Missionaries from India also visited China to spread the religion. Bodhidharma, a monk from south India visited China in the 6th century CE and is regarded as the founder of the Chan or the Zen Buddhism in the country. He, it is believed, came to China to preach "special transmission outside scriptures" which "did not rely upon words". Huike, a disciple of Bodhidharma, became his successor and the first Chinese patriarch of Zen in China. Huike was followed by Sengcan, Dao Xin, Hongren and Huineng. (The last of these patriarchs is regarded as the ancestor by the surviving schools of Zen Buddhism today).

The ensuing period saw Zen emerging as the largest sect in Chinese Buddhism. A number of school sprung up, each with their own set of beliefs, however, the basic focus still remained the same meditational practice, personal instruction and personal experience. Zen Buddhism developed further during the Tang and the Song period. A number of renowned teachers like Mazu, Shitou, Baizhang, Huangbo, Linzi and Yunmen contributed immensely to develop specialised teaching methods which later became the feature of Five houses of mature Chinese Zen Buddhism. The Five Houses of advanced Zen Buddhism included Cadong, Linji,Guiyaing, Fayan and Yunmen. The last three schools, slowly, merged into the Linzi School. This happened during the rule of Song dynasty (960-1279) and the same period also saw development of Zen teaching methods shape up into a technique that was singular to Zen Buddhism, Koan practice.

Zen developed in China in post Song period as well and a number of texts came up. Later, it got merged with Pure Land Buddhism. Still later, Zen saw periods of decline and revival. The first revival took place during the rule of Ming dynasty while another revival was staged during the 20th century by Hsu Yun, a prominent figure in Chinese Buddhism. Yet another revival took place more recently after the severe repression of Peoples republic of China.

Zen in Other Countries Zen did not remain confined to China, infact very early in its history it crossed borders and reached Vietnam. Later, it also made its presence felt in Korea, Japan and western countries. Below is given a listing of different schools of Zen in these countries and regions other than China.

Japan : Soto, Rinzai and Obaku. Rinzai School is further categorised into Myoshin-ji, Nanzen-ji, Tenry?-ji, Daitoku-ji, and Tofuku-ji. These schools are based on their association with temples.

Vietnam : Vinitaruci School is considered the oldest Zen Buddhist School. Other early Zen Buddhist Schools in Vietnam include Vo Ngon Thong and Thao Duong. More recent Schools in Vietnamese Buddhism are Truc Lam and Lam Te, Lieu Quan.

Korea : Seon is the earliest sect in Korean Zen. Jogye order is its subsect and one of the most dominant form of Zen in Korea.

West : Big Mind, Mountains and Rivers Order, the Zen Peacemaker Order, the Ordinary Mind school, Katagiri lineage.

Zen Beliefs & Practices Zen Buddhism is an offshoot of Mahayana Buddhism and like all the Buddhist schools, it lays stress on the very basic teachings of the Buddha the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, the Five Precepts, the Three Dharma Seals and the Five Skandhas. Zen Buddhism also draws from specific teachings of Mahayana Buddhism, most prominently the Mahayana concept of paramitas and bodhisattva ideal of universe salvation. Buddhist deities important in Mahayana tradition are also held in high reverence in the Zen traditions. These deities include Shakyamuni Buddha, Kuan Yin, Maju?ri, Samantabhadra, and Amitabha Buddha

The literary basis of Zen Buddhism are the Mahayana Sutras composed in India and China. These Mahayana Sutras include the Heart Sutra; the Diamond Sutra; the Lankavatara Sutra, the Samantamukha Parivarta, a chapter of the Lotus Sutra; and the Platform Sutra of Huineng.

The focus of Zen lays on daily life practice together with concentrated period of meditation. Also, practicing with others is of paramount importance in Zen. The emphasis on Zen Buddhism is on direct experience rather than on study of books.

Zazen : The most important Zen practice is Zazen (in Japanese) or sitting meditation. In it, practitioners sit in a posture that are called, the lotus, half lotus, seiza and Burmese. Focus is given on ones posture and breathing. The amount of time spent in the practice of Zazen varies, it is more for the monks and less for the householders. It offers an occasion for both discipline and insight.

Koan Practice: Literally, this term means public case and is used as an aid in the advancement of realisation in Zen training. It is usually a story or a phrase from the teaching that comprise a riddle. This riddle is what master seeks a solution to from the student. The solution of these riddle depends not on logic but on insight. In a private meeting known as doksun, the students reveals his level of progress in the resolution of the problem to the teacher. The teacher, on his part, encourages the student to make intuitive leap into a genuine understanding of reality.

Other Techniques : A number of other techniques are characteristics of Zen Buddhism. Some of these are meant to shock the student to eventually assist him to abandon the habitual activities of mind. Not all of these are in practise today, quiet a few exist only in stories. One of these which still exist today is katsu. It is a loud belly shout that helps disciples break through rational thought pattern and thereby achieve enlightenment.

Some Books to Increase Your Understanding of Zen Buddhism

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Zen Buddhism,Outline of Zen Buddhism,Introduction to Zen ...

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Think it's impossible to find free books online? Think again. There are tons of online libraries that provide fiction, nonfiction and reference books at no charge. Here is a list of the 25 best places to read free books online.

The University of Pennsylvania's Online Books Page is a great place to read free online books. There are more than 30,000 English language works available. All of them are nicely formatted and can be read right on your computer.

Project Gutenberg is the original free electronic book producer. There are currently over 25,000 books in its online catalog, with 100,000 more titles available from many partners and affiliates.

Questia is best known as a resource for writers and students, but the site also hosts a library featuring more than 5,000 free books that may be read online. Offerings include rare books as well as classics.

This free online library holds many of the world's most treasured classics. Books include the writings of authors such as L. Frank Baum, H.G. Wells and Jane Austen.

FullBooks.com offers thousands of books that can be read online for free. All of these books are sorted by title. FullBooks.com also has links to sites with free reference books, biographies and science books.

The Internet Public Library is a goodplace to access newspapers, magazines and reference works. Nearly 100 links that will take site visitors to websites offering free online books. Links are updated regularly and include descriptions to help you find what you're looking for.

Classic Reader has nearly 4,000 free classic books, poems, plays and short stories. You may read the books for free online and even add your own annotations.

Authorama features free books from a wide range of authors. All of the books on this site are public domain and are formatted in XHTML, which means that text style and illustrations have been preserved. Currently more than 100 free books are available, with new books added on a regular basis.

Bored.com is just what the name implies--a website for people who are bored. The site offers thousands of free books that can be stored on your computer and/or read online. Book offerings include British literature, American literature, cookbooks, children's books, textbooks and reference books.

Read Print is a free online library that was designed for teachers, students and readers of classic books. This well-organized site has its thousands of free books sorted by author. Other features include literature articles and a section on Shakespeare.

The Literature Network features thousands of free short stories, books and poems that you maybegin reading immediately. The site also includes quizzes, author biographies and user comments.

LibriVox is a unique online library catering to both listeners and readers. The site has free audio books and links to text versions to read online. Other site features include book summaries, author bios and links to further book-related content.

Bartleby is one of those sites you'll want to bookmark as soon as you discover it. This Internet publisher features a huge collection of free books to read on your computer. Offerings include fiction, nonfiction, poetry and reference works.

The Classic Bookshelf is a nice place to read classic books online because of its easy readability program. Users can open the free book of their choice and then decide how they'd like the screen to look. Things readers can customize include page color, text color, print size, margin size and font.

Although this website isn't that pretty, it's a good place to read books online for free. The site has over 1,000 books by different authors. Offerings include the best of British, Irish and American literature.

If fiction isn't your favorite thing, Chest of Books is a good place for you. This free online library features nonfiction books on a wide range of topics, including business, art, computers, finance, health, history, gardening, home improvement, science, real estate, sports and travel.

PublicLiterature.org has a good selection of free classic books that may be read online in a free user-friendly interface. The site also features works by accomplished authors from around the world. Reading categories include classics, comedy, children's, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, plays and sci fi.

Biblomania has over 2,000 poems, short stories, novels and plays to read for free online. New books are added each month. Biblomania provides study guides, literature articles and a whole range of resources for students to go along with these works.

The International Children's Digital Library Foundation provides access to online free books for children around the world. Books are available in many different languages and most of them feature user-submitted activities and other content that can be used in conjunction with the books.

Public Bookshelf will likely have something to suit you no matter your interests. This online library has classic books as well as new authors. Free book categories fantasy, history, mystery, romance, teen fiction and horror. Public Bookshelf also features a substantial collection of nonfiction.

Perseus Digital Library of Tufts University is an evolving digital library featuring a wide range of materials and constantly updated with new content. Current works include modern English Literature, classics and science papers.

DailyLit offers a unique service for reading free books online. This site lets readers choose classic and contemporary books, then the books will be sent out in installments via RSS feed or email.

Fiction.us is a great place to find free online novels. Books are split into chapters, so it's easy to remember where you left off. The site also offers poetry, plays and picture books.

Page By Page Books has hundreds of classic books that may be read online for free . Books can be searched for by author and title.

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Online Libraries - 25 Places to Read Free Books Online

In the small German village of Rcken bei Ltzen, located in a rural farmland area southwest of Leipzig, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born at approximately 10:00 a.m. on October 15, 1844. The date coincided with the 49th birthday of the Prussian King, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, after whom Nietzsche was named, and who had been responsible for Nietzsche's father's appointment as Rcken's town minister.

Nietzsche's uncle and grandfathers were also Lutheran ministers, and his paternal grandfather, Friedrich August Ludwig Nietzsche (17561826), was further distinguished as a Protestant scholar, one of whose books (1796) affirmed the everlasting survival of Christianity. Nietzsche's grandparents on both sides were from the Province of Saxony, with his paternal grandfather, paternal grandmother (Erdmuthe Dorothea Krause, 17781856), maternal grandfather (David Ernst Ohler, 17871859) and maternal grandmother (Johanna Elisabeth Wilhelmine Hahn, 17941876) having been born respectively in the small towns of Bibra (just south of Jena), Reichenbach (southeast of Jena), Zeitz (between Jena and Leipzig), and Wehlitz (just northwest of Leipzig).

When Nietzsche was nearly 5 years old, his father, Karl Ludwig Nietzsche (18131849) died from a brain ailment (July 30, 1849) and the death of Nietzsche's two-year-old brother, Ludwig Joseph, traumatically followed six months later (January 4, 1850). Having been living only yards away from Rcken's church in the house reserved for the pastor and his family, the Nietzsche family left their home soon after Karl Ludwig's death. They moved to nearby Naumburg an der Saale, where Nietzsche (called Fritz by his family) lived with his mother, Franziska (18261897), his grandmother, Erdmuthe, his father's two sisters, Auguste and Rosalie (d. 1855 and 1867, respectively), and his younger sister, Therese Elisabeth Alexandra (18461935).

From the ages of 14 to 19 (18581864), Nietzsche attended a first-rate boarding school, Schulpforta, located about 4km from his home in Naumburg, where he prepared for university studies. The school's rigid educational atmosphere was reflected in its long history as a former Cistercian monastery (11371540), with buildings that included a 12th century Romanesque chapel and a 13th century Gothic church. At Schulpforta a school whose alumnae included the German Idealist philosopher, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (17621814) Nietzsche met his lifelong acquaintance, Paul Deussen (18451919), who was confirmed at Nietzsche's side in 1861, and who was to become an Orientalist, historian of philosophy, and in 1911, the founder of the Schopenhauer Society. During his summers in Naumburg, Nietzsche led a small music and literature club named Germania, and became acquainted with Richard Wagner's music through the club's subscription to the Zeitschrift fr Musik. The teenage Nietzsche also read the German romantic writings of Friedrich Hlderlin and Jean-Paul Richter, along with David Strauss's controversial and demythologizing Life of Jesus Critically Examined (Das Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet, 1848).

After graduating from Schulpforta, Nietzsche entered the University of Bonn in 1864 as a theology and philology student, and his interests soon gravitated more exclusively towards philology a discipline which then centered upon the interpretation of classical and biblical texts. As a student of philology, Nietzsche attended lectures by Otto Jahn (18131869) and Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl (18061876). Jahn was a biographer of Mozart who had studied at the University of Berlin under Karl Lachmann (17931851) a philologist known both for his studies of the Roman philosopher, Lucretius (ca. 9955 BCE), and for having developed the genealogical, or stemmatic, method in textual recension; Ritschl was a classics scholar whose work centered on the Roman comic poet, Plautus (254184 BCE).

Inspired by Ritschl, and following him to the University of Leipzig in 1865 an institution located closer to Nietzsche's hometown of Naumburg Nietzsche quickly established his own academic reputation through his published essays on two 6th century BCE poets, Theognis and Simonides, as well as on Aristotle. In Leipzig, he developed a close friendship with Erwin Rohde (18451898), a fellow philology student and future philologist, with whom he would correspond extensively in later years. Momentous for Nietzsche in 1865 was his accidental discovery of Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation (1818) in a local bookstore. He was then 21. Schopenhauer's atheistic and turbulent vision of the world, in conjunction with his highest praise of music as an art form, captured Nietzsche's imagination, and the extent to which the cadaverous perfume of Schopenhauer's world-view continued to permeate Nietzsche's mature thought remains a matter of scholarly debate. After discovering Schopenhauer, Nietzsche read F.A. Lange's newly-published History of Materialism and Critique of its Present Significance (1866) a work that criticizes materialist theories from the standpoint of Kant's critique of metaphysics, and that attracted Nietzsche's interest in its view that metaphysical speculation is an expression of poetic illusion.

In 1867, as he approached the age of 23, Nietzsche entered his required military service and was assigned to an equestrian field artillery regiment close to Naumburg, during which time he lived at home with his mother. While attempting to leap-mount into the saddle, he suffered a serious chest injury and was put on sick leave after his chest wound refused to heal. He returned shortly thereafter to the University of Leipzig, and in November of 1868, met the composer Richard Wagner (18131883) at the home of Hermann Brockhaus (18061877), an Orientalist who was married to Wagner's sister, Ottilie. Brockhaus was himself a specialist in Sanskrit and Persian whose publications included (1850) an edition of the Vendidad Sade a text of the Zoroastrian religion, whose prophet was Zarathustra (Zoroaster).

At Basel, Nietzsche's satisfaction with his life among his philology colleagues was limited, and he established closer intellectual ties to the historians Franz Overbeck (18371905) and Jacob Burkhardt (18181897), whose lectures he attended. Overbeck who roomed for five years in the same house as Nietzsche became Nietzsche's close and enduring friend, exchanging many letters with him over the years, and rushing to Nietzsche's assistance in Turin immediately after his devastating collapse in 1889. Nietzsche also cultivated his friendship with Richard Wagner and visited him often at his Swiss home in Tribschen, a small town near Lucerne. Never in outstanding health, further complications arose from Nietzsche's August-October 1870 service as a 25-year-old hospital attendant during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), where he participated in the siege of Metz. He witnessed the traumatic effects of battle, took close care of wounded soldiers, and contracted diphtheria and dysentery.

Nietzsche's enthusiasm for Schopenhauer, his studies in classical philology, his inspiration from Wagner, his reading of Lange, his interests in health, his professional need to prove himself as a young academic, and his frustration with the contemporary German culture, all coalesced in his first book The Birth of Tragedy (1872) which was published in January 1872 when Nietzsche was 27. Wagner showered the book with praise, but a vitriolic, painfully-memorable and yet authoritative critical reaction by Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Mllendorff (1848-1931) a scholar who was to become one of Germany's leading philologists immediately dampened the book's reception, not to mention Nietzsche's class enrolments in Basel.

Wilamowitz-Mllendorff himself came from an aristocratic family of distant Polish descent and was also a graduate of Schulpforta (1867). In his critique, he referred to Nietzsche as a disgrace to Schulpforta, and said that in light of the latter's prophetic, soothsaying, exaggerated and historically uninformed style of writing, Nietzsche should instead gather tigers and panthers about his knees, but not the youth of Germany. It is intriguing that in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, written thirteen years later, Nietzsche invokes the comparable imagery of a lion nuzzling warmly at the knees of Zarathustra in the book's concluding and inspirational scene, as if to acknowledge that his proper audience is, indeed, not a set of university professors.

As Nietzsche continued his residence in Switzerland between 1872 and 1879, he often visited Wagner at his new (1872) home in Bayreuth, Germany. In 1873, he met Paul Re (18491901), who, while living in close company with Nietzsche in Sorrento during the autumn of 1876, would write On the Origin of Moral Feelings (1877). During this time, Nietzsche completed a series of four studies on contemporary German culture the Unfashionable Observations (187376) which focus respectively upon (1) the historian of religion and culture critic, David Strauss, (2) issues concerning the social value of historiography, (3) Arthur Schopenhauer and (4) Richard Wagner, both as heroic inspirations for new cultural standards.

Near the end of his university career, Nietzsche completed Human, All-Too-Human (1878) a book that marks a turning point in his philosophical style and that, while reinforcing his friendship with Re, also ends his friendship with the anti-Semitic Wagner, who comes under attack in a thinly-disguised characterization of the artist. Despite the damage done by the unflattering review of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche remained respected in his professorial position in Basel, but his deteriorating health, which led to migraine headaches, eyesight problems and vomiting, necessitated his resignation from the university in June, 1879, at age 34. At this point, he had been a university professor for ten years, and had just less than another ten years of productive intellectual life remaining.

From 1880 until his collapse in January 1889, Nietzsche led a wandering, gypsy-like existence as a stateless person (having given up his German citizenship, and not having acquired Swiss citizenship), circling almost annually between his mother's house in Naumburg and various French, Swiss, German and Italian cities. His travels took him through the Mediterranean seaside city of Nice (during the winters), the Swiss alpine village of Sils-Maria (during the summers, located near the present-day ski resort of St. Moritz), Leipzig (where he had attended university, and had been hoping to resume his teaching career in 1883), Turin, Genoa, Recoaro, Messina, Rapallo, Florence, Venice, and Rome, never residing in any place longer than several months at a time.

On a visit to Rome in 1882, Nietzsche, now at age thirty-seven, met Lou von Salom (18611937), a 21 year old Russian woman who was studying philosophy and theology in Zurich. He quickly fell in love with her. Eventually declining to develop her relationship with Nietzsche on a romantic level, the future of Nietzsche's friendship with her and Paul Re took a turn for the worse, as Salom and Re left Nietzsche and moved to Berlin. In the years to follow, Salom would become an associate of Sigmund Freud, and would write with psychological insight of her association with Nietzsche.

These nomadic years were the occasion of Nietzsche's main works, among which are Daybreak (1881), The Gay Science (1882/1887), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (188385), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), and On the Genealogy of Morals (1887). Nietzsche's final active year, 1888, saw the completion of The Case of Wagner (May-August 1888), Twilight of the Idols (August-September 1888), The Antichrist (September 1888), Ecce Homo (October-November 1888) and Nietzsche Contra Wagner (December 1888).

On the morning of January 3, 1889, while in Turin, Nietzsche experienced a mental breakdown which left him an invalid for the rest of his life. Coincidentally, on virtually the same date, viz., January 4, his little brother, Joseph, had died many years before. Nietzsche, upon witnessing a horse being whipped by a coachman at the Piazza Carlo Alberto although this episode with the horse could be anecdotal threw his arms around the horse's neck and collapsed in the plaza, never to return to full sanity.

Some argue that Nietzsche was afflicted with a syphilitic infection (this was the original diagnosis of the doctors in Basel and Jena) contracted either while he was a student or while he was serving as a hospital attendant during the Franco-Prussian War; some claim that his use of chloral hydrate, a drug which he had been using as a sedative, undermined his already-weakened nervous system; some speculate that Nietzsche's collapse was due to a brain disease he inherited from his father; some maintain that a mental illness gradually drove him insane; some maintain that he suffered from a slow-growing, frontal cranial base tumor; some maintain that he suffered from CADASIL syndrome, a heriditary stroke disorder. The exact cause of Nietzsche's incapacitation remains unclear. That he had an extraordinarily sensitive nervous constitution and took an assortment of medications is well-documented as a more general fact. To complicate matters of interpretation, Nietzsche states in a letter from April 1888 that he never had any symptoms of a mental disorder. In contrast, we have Paul Re writing in an 1897 letter that Nietzsche had always been unbalanced.

During his creative years, Nietzsche struggled to bring his writings into print and never doubted that his books would have a lasting cultural effect. He did not live long enough to experience his world-historical influence, but he had a brief glimpse of his growing intellectual importance in discovering that he was the subject of 1888 lectures given by Georg Brandes (Georg Morris Cohen) at the University of Copenhagen, to whom he directed the above April 1888 correspondence, and from whom he received a recommendation to read Kierkegaard's works. Nietzsche's collapse, however, followed soon thereafter.

After a brief hospitalization in Basel, he spent 1889 in a sanatorium in Jena at the Binswanger Clinic, and in March 1890 his mother took him back home to Naumburg, where he lived under her care for the next seven years in the house he knew as a youngster. After his mother's death in 1897, his sister Elisabeth having returned home from Paraguay in 1893, where she had been working since 1886 with her husband Bernhard Frster to establish an Aryan, anti-Semitic German colony called New Germany (Nueva Germania) assumed responsibility for Nietzsche's welfare. In an effort to promote her brother's philosophy, she rented the Villa Silberblick, a large house in Weimar, and moved both Nietzsche and his collected manuscripts to the residence. This became the new home of the Nietzsche Archives (which had been located at the family home for the three years preceding), where Elisabeth received visitors who wanted to observe the now-incapacitated philosopher.

On August 25, 1900, Nietzsche died in the villa as he approached his 56th year, apparently of pneumonia in combination with a stroke. His body was then transported to the family gravesite directly beside the church in Rcken bei Ltzen, where his mother and sister now also rest. The Villa Silberblick was eventually turned into a museum, and since 1950, Nietzsche's manuscripts have been located in Weimar at the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv

Nietzsche's first book was published in 1872 and was entitled The Birth of Tragedy, Out of the Spirit of Music (Die Geburt der Tragdie aus dem Geiste der Musik). In terms of its intellectual atmosphere, it sets forth an alternative to the late 18th/early 19th century understanding of Greek culture an understanding largely inspired by Johann Winckelmann's History of Ancient Art (1764) which, grounded on the aesthetics of classical sculpture, hailed ancient Greece as the epitome of noble simplicity, calm grandeur, clear blue skies, and rational serenity. In 1886, Nietzsche's book was reissued with a revised title, The Birth of Tragedy, Or: Hellenism and Pessimism (Die Geburt der Tragdie, Oder: Griechentum und Pessimismus), along with a lucid and revealing prefatory essay An Attempt at Self-Criticism which expresses Nietzsche's own critical reflections on the book, looking back fourteen years. Although he obviously remained proud of the work, Nietzsche also describes it as a questionable, strange and almost inaccessible book, filled with Kantian and Schopenhauerian formulas that were inherently at odds with the new valuations he was trying to express.

Nietzsche, having by this time absorbed the German romanticist, and specifically Schopenhauerian, view that non-rational forces reside at the foundation of all creativity and of reality itself, identifies a strongly instinctual, wild, amoral, Dionysian energy within pre-Socratic Greek culture as an essentially creative and healthy force. Surveying the history of Western culture since the time of the Greeks, Nietzsche laments over how this Dionysian, creative energy had been submerged and weakened as it became overshadowed by the Apollonian forces of logical order and stiff sobriety. He concludes that European culture since the time of Socrates has remained one-sidedly Apollonian, bottled-up, and relatively unhealthy.

As a means towards cultural rebirth, he advocates the resurrection and fuller release of Dionysian artistic energies those which he associates with primordial creativity, joy in existence and ultimate truth. The seeds of this liberating rebirth Nietzsche perceives in the contemporary German music of his time (viz., Bach, Beethoven and especially Wagner), and the concluding part of The Birth of Tragedy, in effect, adulates the emerging German artistic, tragic spirit as the potential savior of European culture. As one of his early books, The Birth of Tragedy has a strong Schopenhauerian, eternalistic flavor, and scholars disagree about the extent to which Nietzsche departs from that eternalistic dimension in this work and in later works.

Some regard Nietzsche's 1873 unpublished essay, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (ber Wahrheit und Lge im auermoralischen Sinn) as a keystone in his thought; some believe that it is a peripheral, conflicted and non-representative fragment in his writings. In this essay, Nietzsche rejects the idea of universal constants, and claims, presumably as a truth, that what we call truth is only a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms. His view at this time is that arbitrariness prevails within human experience: concepts originate via the transformation of nerve stimuli into images, and truth is nothing more than the invention of fixed conventions for practical purposes, especially those of repose, security and consistency. Viewing human existence from a vast and sobering distance, Nietzsche further notes that there was an eternity before human beings came into existence, and believes that after humanity dies out, nothing significant will have changed in the great scheme of things.

Between 1873 and 1876, Nietzsche wrote the Unfashionable Observations (Unzeitgemsse Betrachtungen). These are four (of a projected, but never completed, thirteen) studies concerned with the quality of European, and especially German, culture during Nietzsche's time. They are unfashionable and nonconformist (or untimely, or unmodern) insofar as Nietzsche regarded his standpoint as culture-critic to be in tension with the self-congratulatory spirit of the times. The four studies were: David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer (David Strauss, der Bekenner und der Schriftsteller, 1873); On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life (Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie fr das Leben, 1874); Schopenhauer as Educator (Schopenhauer als Erzieher, 1874); Richard Wagner in Bayreuth (1876).

The first of these attacks David Strauss, whose popular six-edition book, The Old and the New Faith: A Confession (1871) encapsulated for Nietzsche the general cultural atmosphere in Germany. Responding to Strauss's advocacy of a new faith grounded upon a scientifically-determined universal mechanism one, however, lubricated by the optimistic, soothing oil of historical progress Nietzsche criticizes Strauss's view as a vulgar and dismal sign of cultural degeneracy. Nietzsche's friend, Overbeck, in his contemporaneous writings, also adopted a critical attitude towards Strauss. The second untimely meditation surveys alternative ways to write history, and discusses how these ways could contribute to a society's health. Here Nietzsche claims that the principle of life is a more pressing and higher concern than that of knowledge, and that the quest for knowledge should serve the interests of life. This parallels how, in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche looked at art through the perspective of life. The third and fourth studies on Schopenhauer and Wagner, respectively address how these two thinkers, as paradigms of philosophic and artistic genius, hold the potential to inspire a stronger, healthier and livelier German culture. These celebratory studies on Schopenhauer and Wagner reveal how, as a recurring feature of Nietzsche's thought, he presents us with some higher type of character he offers different models of heroic characters as the years go by as an ideal towards which he would have his best readers aspire.

Nietzsche completed Human, All-Too-Human in 1878, supplementing this with a second part in 1879, Mixed Opinions and Maxims (Vermischte Meinungen und Sprche), and a third part in 1880, The Wanderer and his Shadow (Der Wanderer und sein Schatten). The three parts were published together in 1886 as Human All-Too-Human, A Book for Free Spirits (Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, Ein Buch fr freie Geister). Reluctant to construct a philosophical system, and sensitive to the importance of style in philosophic writing, Nietzsche composed these works as a series of several hundred aphorisms whose typical length ranges from a line or two to a page or two. Here, he often reflects upon cultural and psychological phenomena in reference to individuals' organic and physiological constitutions. The idea of power (for which he would later become known) sporadically appears as an explanatory principle, but Nietzsche tends at this time to invoke hedonistic considerations of pleasure and pain in his explanations of cultural and psychological phenomena. Given Nietzsche's harsh criticisms of hedonism and utilitarianism in later works (e.g., Thus Spoke Zarathustra, re: the Last Man), Human All-Too-Human appears to many readers as an uncharacteristic work, more science- than art-inspired in its approach to health, where Nietzsche was struggling to break free of Wagner's spell, and which does not fully embody the pain-and-power-centered approach that he later developed.

In Daybreak: Reflections on Moral Prejudices (Morgenrte. Gedanken ber die moralischen Vorurteile, 1881), Nietzsche continues writing in his aphoristic style, but he marks a new beginning by accentuating as opposed to pleasure, the importance of the feeling of power in his understanding of human, and especially of so-called moral behavior. Always having been interested in the nature of health, his emerging references to power stem from his earlier efforts to discover the secret of the ancient Greeks' outstanding health, which he had regarded as the effects of how agon (i.e., competition, one-upmanship, or contest, as conceived in his 1872 essay, Homer's Contest) permeated their cultural attitudes. In this respect, Daybreak contains the seeds of Nietzsche's doctrine of the will to power a doctrine that appears explicitly for the first time two years later in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (188385). Daybreak is also one of Nietzsche's clearest, intellectually calmest, and most intimate, volumes, providing many social-psychological insights in conjunction with some of his first sustained critical reflections on the cultural relativity at the basis of Christian moral evaluations. In this book as he remarks retrospectively in Ecce Homo (1888) Nietzsche begins his crusade against morality.

In a more well-known aphoristic work, The Gay Science (Die frhliche Wissenschaft, 1882) whose title was inspired by the troubadour songs of southern-French Provence (11001300) Nietzsche sets forth some of the existential ideas for which he became famous, namely, the proclamation that God is dead and the doctrine of eternal recurrence a doctrine that attends to how people of different levels of health are likely to react to the prospect of being reborn, over and over again, to replay life's experience exactly as before in every pleasurable and painful sequence of detail. Nietzsche's atheism his account of God's murder (section 125) is a reaction to the conception of a single, ultimate, judgmental authority who is privy to everyone's hidden and personally embarrassing secrets. His atheism also aims to redirect people's attention to their inherent freedom, the presently-existing world, and away from escapist, pain-relieving, heavenly otherworlds.

To a similar end, Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal recurrence (sections 285 and 341) serves to draw attention away from all worlds other than the one in which we presently live, since eternal recurrence precludes the possibility of any final escape from the present world. The doctrine also functions as a measure for judging someone's overall psychological strength and mental health, since Nietzsche believed that the doctrine of eternal recurrence was the hardest world-view to affirm. There are some differences of scholarly opinion concerning whether Nietzsche primarily intends this doctrine to describe a serious metaphysical theory, or whether he is offering merely one way to interpret the world among many others, which if adopted therapeutically as a psychologically healthy myth, can help us become stronger.

In 1887, The Gay Science was reissued with an important preface, an additional fifth Book, and an appendix of songs, reminiscent of the troubadours.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, A Book for All and None (Also Sprach Zarathustra, Ein Buch fr Alle und Keinen, 188385), is one of Nietzsche's most famous works, and Nietzsche regarded it as among his most significant. It is a manifesto of personal self-overcoming, and a guidebook for others towards the same revitalizing end. Thirty years after its initial publication, 150,000 copies of the work were printed by the German government and issued as inspirational reading, along with the Bible, to the young soldiers during WWI. Though Thus Spoke Zarathustra is antagonistic to the Judeo-Christian world-view, its poetic and prophetic style relies upon many, often inverted, Old and New Testament allusions. Nietzsche also filled the work with nature metaphors, almost in the spirit of pre-Socratic naturalist philosophy, which invoke animals, earth, air, fire, water, celestial bodies, plants, all in the service of describing the spiritual development of Zarathustra, a solitary, reflective, exceedingly strong-willed, sage-like, laughing and dancing voice of heroic self-mastery who, accompanied by a proud, sharp-eyed eagle and a wise snake, envisions a mode of psychologically healthier being beyond the common human condition. Nietzsche refers to this higher mode of being as superhuman (bermenschlich), and associates the doctrine of eternal recurrence a doctrine for only the healthiest who can love life in its entirety with this spiritual standpoint, in relation to which all-too-often downhearted, all-too-commonly-human attitudes stand as a mere bridge to be crossed and overcome.

Within Nietzsche's corpus, Thus Spoke Zarathustra has a controversial place, owing mainly to its thoroughly literary style. Nietzsche speaks in parables and short narratives populated by fictional characters the hunchback, the ugliest man, the soothsayer, the saint, the tightrope walker, the jester, and the Last Man, to name a few leaving his inherent messages open to a variety of interpretations. One of Nietzsche's most well-known and morally troubling figures the superhuman also appears substantially only in this work, rendering it questionable to some interpreters whether this ideal for the earth's future meaning is indeed central to Nietzsche's thought as a whole. There is also some interpretive uncertainty about whether the work, which was written across the span of three years, properly ends triumphantly at the conclusion of the Third Part, thus situating the psychologically complex Fourth Part as a question-raising supplement, or whether the book's narrative moves smoothly and progressively across the entire four parts.

Beyond Good and Evil, Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (Jenseits von Gut und Bse. Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft, 1886) is arguably a rethinking of Human, All-too-Human, since their respective tables of contents and sequence of themes loosely correspond to one another. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche identifies imagination, self-assertion, danger, originality and the creation of values as qualities of genuine philosophers, as opposed to incidental characters who engage in dusty scholarship. Nietzsche takes aim at some of the world's great philosophers, who ground their outlooks wholeheartedly upon concepts such as self-consciousness, free will, and either/or bipolar thinking.

Nietzsche alternatively philosophizes from the perspective of life located beyond good and evil, and challenges the entrenched moral idea that exploitation, domination, injury to the weak, destruction and appropriation are universally objectionable behaviors. Above all, he believes that living things aim to discharge their strength and express their will to power a pouring-out of expansive energy as if one were like a perpetually-shining sun that, quite naturally, can entail danger, pain, lies, deception and masks. Here, will is not an inner emptiness, lack, feeling of deficiency, or constant drive for satisfaction, but is a fountain of constantly-swelling energy, or power.

As he views things from the perspective of life, Nietzsche further denies that there is a universal morality applicable indiscriminately to all human beings, and instead designates a series of moralities in an order of rank that ascends from the plebeian to the noble: some moralities are more suitable for subordinate roles; some are more appropriate for dominating and leading social roles. What counts as a preferable and legitimate action depends upon the kind of person one is. The deciding factor is whether one is weaker, sicker and on the decline, or whether one is healthier, more powerful and overflowing with life.

On the Genealogy of Morals, A Polemic (Zur Genealogie der Moral, Eine Streitschrift, 1887) is composed of three sustained essays that advance the critique of Christianity expressed in Beyond Good and Evil. The first essay continues the discussion of master morality versus servant morality, and maintains that the traditional ideals set forth as holy and morally good within Christian morality are products of self-deception, since they were forged in the bad air of revenge, resentment, hatred, impotence, and cowardice. In this essay, as well as the next, Nietzsche's controversial references to the blond beast in connection with master morality also appear. In the second essay, Nietzsche continues with an account of how feelings of guilt, or the bad conscience, arise merely as a consequence of an unhealthy Christian morality that turns an evil eye towards our natural inclinations. He also discusses how punishment, conceived as the infliction of pain upon someone in proportion to their offense, is likely to have been grounded in the contractual economic relationship between creditor and debtor, i.e., in business relationships. In the third essay, Nietzsche focusses upon the truth-oriented ascetic ideals that underlie and inform prevailing styles of art, religion and philosophy, and he offers a particularly scathing critique of the priesthood: the priests are allegedly a group of weak people who shepherd even weaker people as a way to experience power for themselves. The third essay also contains one of Nietzsche's clearest expressions of perspectivism (section 12) the idea that there is no absolute, God's eye standpoint from which one can survey everything that is.

On the Genealogy of Morals is Nietzsche's polemic, i.e., attack, against the assumptions and methods (which, incidentally, are still popular) characteristic of works such as Paul Re's The Origin of the Moral Sensations (1877). Inspired by utilitarianism and Darwinism, Re offers a naturalistic account of our moral values, especially altruism, but by Nietzsche's lights, does not question the value of the moral values themselves. In the Genealogy, Nietzsche offers a competing account of the origin of moral values, aiming to reveal their life-negating foundations and functions.

Nietzsche ultimately advocates valuations that issue from a self-confident, self-reinforcing, self-governing, creative and commanding attitude, as opposed to those that issue from reactive attitudes that determine values more mechanically, subordinatingly, and opposingly to those who are inherently more powerful. For Nietzsche, those who prefer to think in terms of good vs. bad exemplify the former, leading and superior mentality, and those who think in terms of good vs. evil, exemplify the latter, inferior and subservient mentality.

The Case of Wagner, A Musician's Problem (Der Fall Wagner, Ein Musikanten-Problem, May-August 1888), contrasts sharply with Nietzsche's 1872 laudatory portrayal of Wagner in The Birth of Tragedy, and compares well with his 1873 meditation on David Strauss in its unbridled attack on a popular cultural figure. In The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche declares war upon Richard Wagner, whose music is characterized as the epitome of modern cultural achievement, but also crucially as sick and decadent. The work is a brilliant display of Nietzsche's talents as a music critic, and includes memorable mockings of Wagner's theatrical style, reflections on redemption via art, a physiology of art, and the virtues associated, respectively, with ascending and descending life energies. As the therapeutic inversion and antithesis of Wagner's debilitatingly serious music, Nietzsche refers us to Georges Bizet (18381875) whose music he finds cheerful, revitalizing, redeeming and light-hearted. Wagner himself had some years earlier (1850) condemned Felix Mendelssohn (18091847) for having confounded the public's taste in music. Nietzsche, writing almost thirty years later, here accuses Wagner of having done the same.

The title, Twilight of the Idols, or How One Philosophizes with a Hammer (Gtzen-Dmmerung, oder Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophiert, August-September 1888), word-plays upon Wagner's opera, The Twilight of the Gods (Die Gtterdmmerung). Nietzsche reiterates and elaborates some of the criticisms of Socrates, Plato, Kant and Christianity found in earlier works, criticizes the then-contemporary German culture as being unsophisticated and too-full of beer, and shoots some disapproving arrows at key French, British, and Italian cultural figures such as Rousseau, Hugo, Sand, Michelet, Zola, Renan, Carlyle, Mill, Eliot, Darwin, and Dante. In contrast to all these alleged representatives of cultural decadence, Nietzsche applauds Caesar, Napoleon, Goethe, Dostoevski, Thucydides and the Sophists as healthier and stronger types. The phrase to philosophize with a hammer primarily signifies a way to test idols by tapping on them lightly; one sounds them out to determine whether they are hollow, or intact, etc., as physician would use a percussion hammer upon the abdomen as a diagnostic instrument.

In The Antichrist, Curse on Christianity (Der Antichrist. Fluch auf das Christentum, September 1888 [published 1895]), Nietzsche expresses his disgust over the way noble values in Roman Society were corrupted by the rise of Christianity, and he discusses specific aspects and personages in Christian culture the Gospels, Paul, the martyrs, priests, the crusades with a view towards showing that Christianity is a religion for weak and unhealthy people, whose general historical effect has been to undermine the healthy qualities of the more noble cultures. The Antichrist was initially conceived of as the first part of a projected four-part work for which Nietzsche had in mind the title, Revaluation of All Values (the second part was to be entitled, The Free Spirit). As in most of his 1888 works, Nietzsche criticizes, either implicity or explicitly, the anti-Semitic writers of his day. In this particular study, one of his main targets is the French, anti-Semitic, Christian historian, Ernest Renan (1823-1892), who was known for works such as The Life of Jesus (1863) and History of the Origins of Christianity (18661881), the fourth book of which was entitled The Antichrist (1873). Some interpret Nietzsche's title for his book as meaning, the Antichristian. It should be noted that in an 1883 letter to his friend, Peter Gast [Johann Heinrich Kselitz], Nietzsche does describe himself self-entertainingly as the Antichrist, and also more seriously as the most terrible opponent of Christianity.

Nietzsche describes himself as a follower of the philosopher Dionysus in Ecce Homo, How One Becomes What One Is (Ecce Homo, Wie man wird, was man ist, October-November 1888) a book in which he examines retrospectively his entire corpus, work by work, offering critical remarks, details of how the works were inspired, and explanatory observations regarding their philosophical contents. He begins this fateful intellectual autobiography he was to lose his mind little more than a month later with three eyebrow-raising sections entitled, Why I Am So Wise, Why I Am So Clever, and Why I Write Such Good Books. Nietzsche claims to be wise as a consequence of his acute aesthetic sensitivity to nuances of health and sickness in people's attitudes and characters; he claims to be clever because he knows how to choose the right nutrition, climate, residence and recreation for himself; he claims to write such good books because they allegedly adventurously open up, at least for a very select group of readers, a new series of noble and delicate experiences. After examining each of his published works, Nietzsche concludes Ecce Homo with the section, Why I Am a Destiny. He claims that he is a destiny because he regards his anti-moral truths as having the annihilating power of intellectual dynamite; he expects them to topple the morality born of sickness which he perceives to have been reigning within Western culture for the last two thousand years. In this way, he expresses his hope that Dionysus, the god of life's exuberance, would replace Jesus, the god of the heavenly otherworld, as the premier cultural standard for future millennia.

Although Ecce Homo stands historically as Nietzsche's final autobiographical statement, if we consider that although the plans were in flux Nietzsche was embarking on a new work, at one point to be entitled, Revaluation of All Values, his 1888 autobiographical excursion can be appreciated as a kind of house-cleaning and summing-up of where he had intellectually arrived at that point. Rather than being a final self-definition, it can be seen as yet another among Nietzsche's several efforts over the years to clear the way for a freer intellectual development or metamorphosis. In this respect, it compares to Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Book IV, which appears to be Nietzsche's squarely facing, almost as a kind of exorcism, the variety of inner characters that constituted his personality. Along the same lines, Ecce Homo recalls the interval between Human-All-too-Human and Daybreak, when Nietzsche plunged to a very low point in his health, coming close to death, and then dramatically recuperated.

Nietzsche Contra Wagner, Out of the Files of a Psychologist (Nietzsche contra Wagner, Aktenstcke eines Psychologen, December 1888) is a short, but classic, selection of passages Nietzsche extracted from his 18781887 published works. Many concern Wagner, but the excerpts serve mostly as a foil for Nietzsche to express his own views against Wagner's. In this self-portrait, completed only a month before his collapse, Nietzsche characterizes his own anti-Christian sentiments, and contemplates how even the greatest people usually undergo significant corruption. In Wagner's case, Nietzsche claims that the corrupting force was Christianity. One cannot help remembering here how, using the same kind of rationale, Wagner claimed that Felix Mendelssohn's corrupting force was Judaism. At the same time, Nietzsche describes how he truly admired some of Wagner's music for its profound expressions of loneliness and suffering expressions which Nietzsche admitted were psychologically impossible for he himself to articulate.

The writings of Nietzsche's final active year are peppered with some wild phrasings, but they remain lucid and philosophically penetrating on the whole. Given the utter loss of Nietzsche's intellectual capacities upon his collapse, this prior lucidity is puzzling. The abruptness of his breakdown in combination with the lucidity of his final writings has fed speculation that rather than suffering from a slowly progressive mental disease, Nietzsche had a physical condition (e.g., a brain tumor) whose silent growth eventually reached a critical mass that caused his mental composure to snap.

Nietzsche's unpublished writings often reveal his more tentative and speculative ideas. This material is surrounded by controversy, since some of it conflicts with views he expresses in his published works. Disagreement regarding Nietzsche's notebooks, also known as his Nachlass, centers around the degree of interpretive priority which ought to be given to the unpublished versus the published manuscripts. One popular approach in the tradition of classical scholarly interpretation is to maintain that Nietzsche's published works express his more considered and polished views, and that these should take precedence over the unpublished manuscripts when conflicts arise; a second attitude, given voice by Martin Heidegger (who lectured on Nietzsche in Nazi Germany, 19361940), and broadly consistent with a psychoanalytic approach as well, is to regard what Nietzsche published as representative of what he decided was publicly presentable, and what he kept privately to himself in unpublished form as containing his more authentic views; a third, more comprehensive, interpretive style tries to grasp all of Nietzsche's texts together in an effort to form the most coherent interpretation of Nietzsche's thought, judging the priority of published versus unpublished works on a thematic, or case-by-case basis; a fourth position influenced by the French deconstructionist perspective maintains that any rigid prioritizing between published and private works is impossible, since all of the texts embody a comparable multidimensionality of meaning.

In his unpublished manuscripts, Nietzsche sometimes elaborates the topics found in the published works, such as his early 1870's notebooks, where there is important material concerning his theory of knowledge. In the 1880's notebooks those his sister collected together after his death under the title, The Will to Power: Attempt at a Revaluation of all Values Nietzsche adopts a more metaphysical orientation towards the doctrines of Eternal Recurrence and the Will to Power, speculating upon their intellectual strength as interpretations of reality itself. Side-by-side with these speculations, and complicating efforts towards developing an interpretation which is both comprehensive and coherent, Nietzsche's 1880's notebooks also repeatedly state that there are no facts, only interpretations.

Nietzsche's thought extended a deep influence during the 20th century, especially in Continental Europe. In English-speaking countries, his positive reception has been less resonant. During the last decade of Nietzsche's life and the first decade of the 20th century, his thought was particularly attractive to avant-garde artists who saw themselves on the periphery of established social fashion and practice. Here, Nietzsche's advocacy of new, healthy beginnings, and of creative artistry in general stood forth. His tendency to seek explanations for commonly-accepted values and outlooks in the less-elevated realms of sheer animal instinct was also crucial to Sigmund Freud's development of psychoanalysis. Later, during the 1930's, aspects of Nietzsche's thought were espoused by the Nazis and Italian Fascists, partly due to the encouragement of Elisabeth Frster-Nietzsche through her associations with Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. It was possible for the Nazi interpreters to assemble, quite selectively, various passages from Nietzsche's writings whose juxtaposition appeared to justify war, aggression and domination for the sake of nationalistic and racial self-glorification.

Until the 1960s in France, Nietzsche appealed mainly to writers and artists, since the academic philosophical climate was dominated by G.W.F. Hegel's, Edmund Husserl's and Martin Heidegger's thought, along with the structuralist movement of the 1950's. Nietzsche became especially influential in French philosophical circles during the 1960's-1980's, when his God is dead declaration, his perspectivism, and his emphasis upon power as the real motivator and explanation for people's actions revealed new ways to challenge established authority and launch effective social critique. In the English-speaking world, Nietzsche's unfortunate association with the Nazis kept him from serious philosophical consideration until the 1950's and 60's, when landmark works such as Walter Kaufmann's, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950) and Arthur C. Danto's, Nietzsche as Philosopher (1965), paved the way for a more open-minded discussion.

Specific 20th century figures who were influenced, either quite substantially, or in a significant part, by Nietzsche include painters, dancers, musicians, playwrights, poets, novelists, psychologists, sociologists, literary theorists, historians, and philosophers: Alfred Adler, Georges Bataille, Martin Buber, Albert Camus, E.M. Cioran, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Isadora Duncan, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Stefan George, Andr Gide, Hermann Hesse, Carl Jung, Martin Heidegger, Gustav Mahler, Andr Malraux, Thomas Mann, H.L. Mencken, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jean-Paul Sartre, Max Scheler, Giovanni Segantini, George Bernard Shaw, Lev Shestov, Georg Simmel, Oswald Spengler, Richard Strauss, Paul Tillich, Ferdinand Tnnies, Mary Wigman, William Butler Yeats and Stefan Zweig.

That Nietzsche was able to write so prolifically and profoundly for years, while remaining in a condition of ill-health and often intense physical pain, is a testament to his spectacular mental capacities and willpower. Lesser people under the same physical pressures might not have had the inclination to pick up a pen, let alone think and record thoughts which created in the midst of striving for healthy self-overcoming would have the power to influence an entire century.

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Friedrich Nietzsche (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Read books online at our other site: The Literature Page - We have 1 book review related to Friedrich Nietzsche. - Read the works of Friedrich Nietzsche online at The Literature Page A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything. Friedrich Nietzsche At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid. Friedrich Nietzsche Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. Friedrich Nietzsche Be careful when you fight the monsters, lest you become one. Friedrich Nietzsche Great men's errors are to be venerated as more fruitful than little men's truths. Friedrich Nietzsche In heaven all the interesting people are missing. Friedrich Nietzsche In truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross. Friedrich Nietzsche Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. Friedrich Nietzsche It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them! Friedrich Nietzsche Man is the cruelest animal. Friedrich Nietzsche Many people wait throughout their whole lives for the chance to be good in their own fashion. Friedrich Nietzsche No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. Friedrich Nietzsche One must have a good memory to be able to keep the promises one makes. Friedrich Nietzsche Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself. Friedrich Nietzsche The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time. Friedrich Nietzsche The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. Friedrich Nietzsche The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it. Friedrich Nietzsche The overman...Who has organized the chaos of his passions, given style to his character, and become creative. Aware of life's terrors, he affirms life without resentment. Friedrich Nietzsche The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others. Friedrich Nietzsche To forget one's purpose is the commonest form of stupidity. Friedrich Nietzsche

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Friedrich Nietzsche,(born October 15, 1844,Rcken, Saxony, Prussia [Germany]died August 25, 1900,Weimar, Thuringian States),German classical scholar, philosopher, and critic of culture, who became one of the most-influential of all modern thinkers. His attempts to unmask the motives that underlie traditional Western religion, morality, and philosophy deeply affected generations of theologians, philosophers, psychologists, poets, novelists, and playwrights. He thought through the consequences of the triumph of the Enlightenments secularism, expressed in his observation that God is dead, in a way that determined the agenda for many of Europes most-celebrated intellectuals after his death. Although he was an ardent foe of nationalism, anti-Semitism, and power politics, his name was later invoked by fascists to advance the very things he loathed.

Nietzsches home was a stronghold of Lutheran piety. His paternal grandfather had published books defending Protestantism and had achieved the ecclesiastical position of superintendent; his maternal grandfather was a country parson; his father, Carl Ludwig Nietzsche, was appointed pastor at Rcken by order of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, after whom Friedrich Nietzsche was named. His father died in 1849, before Nietzsches fifth birthday, and he spent most of his early life in a household consisting of five women: his mother, Franziska, his younger sister, Elisabeth, his maternal grandmother, and two aunts.

In 1850 the family moved to Naumburg on the Saale River, where Nietzsche attended a private preparatory school, the Domgymnasium. In 1858 he was admitted to Schulpforta, Germanys leading Protestant boarding school. He excelled academically and received an outstanding classical education there. Having graduated in 1864, he went to the University of Bonn to study theology and classical philology. Despite efforts to take part in the universitys social life, the two semesters at Bonn were a failure, owing chiefly to acrimonious quarrels between his two leading classics professors, Otto Jahn and Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl. Nietzsche sought refuge in music, writing a number of compositions strongly influenced by Robert Schumann, the German Romantic composer. In 1865 he transferred to the University of Leipzig, joining Ritschl, who had accepted an appointment there.

Nietzsche prospered under Ritschls tutelage in Leipzig. He became the only student ever to publish in Ritschls journal, Rheinisches Museum (Rhenish Museum). He began military service in October 1867 in the cavalry company of an artillery regiment, sustained a serious chest injury while mounting a horse in March 1868, and resumed his studies in Leipzig in October 1868 while on extended sick leave from the military. During the years in Leipzig, Nietzsche discovered Arthur Schopenhauers philosophy, met the great operatic composer Richard Wagner, and began his lifelong friendship with fellow classicist Erwin Rohde (author of Psyche).

When a professorship in classical philology fell vacant in 1869 in Basel, Switzerland, Ritschl recommended Nietzsche with unparalleled praise. He had completed neither his doctoral thesis nor the additional dissertation required for a German degree; yet Ritschl assured the University of Basel that he had never seen anyone like Nietzsche in 40 years of teaching and that his talents were limitless. In 1869 the University of Leipzig conferred the doctorate without examination or dissertation on the strength of his published writings, and the University of Basel appointed him extraordinary professor of classical philology. The following year Nietzsche was promoted to ordinary professor.

Nietzsche obtained a leave to serve as a volunteer medical orderly in August 1870, after the outbreak of the Franco-German War. Within a month, while accompanying a transport of wounded, he contracted dysentery and diphtheria, which ruined his health permanently. He returned to Basel in October to resume a heavy teaching load, but as early as 1871 ill health prompted him to seek relief from the stultifying chores of a professor of classical philology; he applied for the vacant chair of philosophy and proposed Rohde as his successor, all to no avail.

During those early Basel years Nietzsches ambivalent friendship with Wagner ripened, and he seized every opportunity to visit Richard and his wife, Cosima. Wagner appreciated Nietzsche as a brilliant professorial apostle, but Wagners increasing exploitation of Christian motifs, as in Parsifal (1882), coupled with his chauvinism and anti-Semitism proved to be more than Nietzsche could bear. By 1878 the breach between the two men had become final.

Nietzsches first book, Die Geburt der Tragdie aus dem Geiste der Musik (1872; The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music), marked his emancipation from the trappings of classical scholarship. A speculative rather than exegetical work, it argued that Greek tragedy arose out of the fusion of what he termed Apollonian and Dionysian elementsthe former representing measure, restraint, and harmony and the latter representing unbridled passionand that Socratic rationalism and optimism spelled the death of Greek tragedy. The final 10 sections of the book are a rhapsody about the rebirth of tragedy from the spirit of Wagners music. Greeted by stony silence at first, it became the object of heated controversy on the part of those who mistook it for a conventional work of classical scholarship. It was undoubtedly a work of profound imaginative insight, which left the scholarship of a generation toiling in the rear, as the British classicist F.M. Cornford wrote in 1912. It remains a classic in the history of aesthetics to this day.

Having requested and received a sick leave, Nietzsche in 1877 set up house with his sister and his friend Peter Gast (Johann Heinrich Kselitz), and in 1878 his aphoristic Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (Human, All-Too-Human) appeared. Because his health deteriorated steadily, he resigned his professorial chair on June 14, 1879, and was granted a pension of 3,000 Swiss francs per year for six years.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Photos.com/JupiterimagesApart from the books Nietzsche wrote between 1879 and 1889, it is doubtful that his life held any intrinsic interest. Seriously ill, half-blind, in virtually unrelenting pain, he lived in boarding houses in Switzerland, the French Riviera, and Italy, with only limited human contact.

Nietzsches acknowledged literary and philosophical masterpiece in biblical-narrative form, Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra), was published between 1883 and 1885 in four parts, the last of which was a private printing at his own expense. As with most of his works, it received little attention. His attempts to set forth his philosophy in more-direct prose, in the publications in 1886 of Jenseits von Gut und Bse (Beyond Good and Evil) and in 1887 of Zur Genealogie der Moral (On the Genealogy of Morals), also failed to win a proper audience.

Nietzsches final lucid year, 1888, was a period of supreme productivity. He wrote and published Der Fall Wagner (The Case of Wagner) and wrote a synopsis of his philosophy, Die Gtzen-Dmmerung (Twilight of the Idols), Der Antichrist (The Antichrist), Nietzsche contra Wagner, and Ecce Homo, a reflection on his own works and significance. Twilight of the Idols appeared in 1889; The Antichrist and Nietzsche contra Wagner were not published until 1895, the former mistakenly as book one of The Will to Power; and Ecce Homo was withheld from publication until 1908, 20 years after its composition.

Nietzsche collapsed in the streets of Turin, Italy, in January 1889, having lost control of his mental faculties completely. Bizarre but meaningful notes he sent immediately after his collapse brought his friend Franz Overbeck, a Christian theologian, to Italy to return Nietzsche to Basel. Nietzsche spent the last 11 years of his life in total mental darkness, first in a Basel asylum, then in Naumburg under his mothers care and, after her death in 1897, in Weimar in his sisters care. He died in 1900. Although the cause of his breakdown remains uncertain, informed opinion favours a diagnosis of atypical general paralysis caused by dormant tertiary syphilis.

The association of Nietzsches name with Adolf Hitler and fascism owes much to the use made of his works by his sister, Elisabeth. She had married a leading chauvinist and anti-Semite, Bernhard Frster, and after his suicide in 1889 she worked diligently to refashion Nietzsche in Frsters image. Elisabeth maintained ruthless control over Nietzsches literary estate and, dominated by greed, produced collections of his works consisting of discarded notes, such as Der Wille zur Macht (1901; The Will to Power). She also committed petty forgeries. Generations of commentators were misled. Equally important, her enthusiasm for Hitler linked Nietzsches name with that of the dictator in the public mind.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Photos.com/JupiterimagesNietzsches writings fall into three well-defined periods. The early works, The Birth of Tragedy and the four Unzeitgemsse Betrachtungen (1873; Untimely Meditations), are dominated by a Romantic perspective influenced by Schopenhauer and Wagner. The middle period, from Human, All-Too-Human up to The Gay Science, reflects the tradition of French aphorists. It extols reason and science, experiments with literary genres, and expresses Nietzsches emancipation from his earlier Romanticism and from Schopenhauer and Wagner. Nietzsches mature philosophy emerged after The Gay Science.

In his mature writings Nietzsche was preoccupied by the origin and function of values in human life. If, as he believed, life neither possesses nor lacks intrinsic value and yet is always being evaluated, then such evaluations can usefully be read as symptoms of the condition of the evaluator. He was especially interested, therefore, in a probing analysis and evaluation of the fundamental cultural values of Western philosophy, religion, and morality, which he characterized as expressions of the ascetic ideal.

The ascetic ideal is born when suffering becomes endowed with ultimate significance. According to Nietzsche, the Judeo-Christian tradition, for example, made suffering tolerable by interpreting it as Gods intention and as an occasion for atonement. Christianity, accordingly, owed its triumph to the flattering doctrine of personal immortality, that is, to the conceit that each individuals life and death have cosmic significance. Similarly, traditional philosophy expressed the ascetic ideal when it privileged soul over body, mind over senses, duty over desire, reality over appearance, the timeless over the temporal. While Christianity promised salvation for the sinner who repents, philosophy held out hope for salvation, albeit secular, for its sages. Common to traditional religion and philosophy was the unstated but powerful motivating assumption that existence requires explanation, justification, or expiation. Both denigrated experience in favour of some other, true world. Both may be read as symptoms of a declining life, or life in distress.

Nietzsches critique of traditional morality centred on the typology of master and slave morality. By examining the etymology of the German words gut (good), schlecht (bad), and bse (evil), Nietzsche maintained that the distinction between good and bad was originally descriptive, that is, a nonmoral reference to those who were privileged, the masters, as opposed to those who were base, the slaves. The good/evil contrast arose when slaves avenged themselves by converting attributes of mastery into vices. If the favoured, the good, were powerful, it was said that the meek would inherit the earth. Pride became sin. Charity, humility, and obedience replaced competition, pride, and autonomy. Crucial to the triumph of slave morality was its claim to being the only true morality. That insistence on absoluteness is as essential to philosophical as to religious ethics. Although Nietzsche gave a historical genealogy of master and slave morality, he maintained that it was an ahistorical typology of traits present in everyone.

Nihilism was the term Nietzsche used to describe the devaluation of the highest values posited by the ascetic ideal. He thought of the age in which he lived as one of passive nihilism, that is, as an age that was not yet aware that religious and philosophical absolutes had dissolved in the emergence of 19th-century positivism. With the collapse of metaphysical and theological foundations and sanctions for traditional morality only a pervasive sense of purposelessness and meaninglessness would remain. And the triumph of meaninglessness is the triumph of nihilism: God is dead. Nietzsche thought, however, that most people could not accept the eclipse of the ascetic ideal and the intrinsic meaninglessness of existence but would seek supplanting absolutes to invest life with meaning. He thought the emerging nationalism of his day represented one such ominous surrogate god, in which the nation-state would be invested with transcendent value and purpose. And just as absoluteness of doctrine had found expression in philosophy and religion, absoluteness would become attached to the nation-state with missionary fervour. The slaughter of rivals and the conquest of the earth would proceed under banners of universal brotherhood, democracy, and socialism. Nietzsches prescience here was particularly poignant, and the use later made of him especially repellent. For example, two books were standard issue for the rucksacks of German soldiers during World War I, Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the Gospel According to John. It is difficult to say which author was more compromised by that gesture.

Nietzsche often thought of his writings as struggles with nihilism, and apart from his critiques of religion, philosophy, and morality he developed original theses that have commanded attention, especially perspectivism, the will to power, eternal recurrence, and the superman.

Perspectivism is a concept which holds that knowledge is always perspectival, that there are no immaculate perceptions, and that knowledge from no point of view is as incoherent a notion as seeing from no particular vantage point. Perspectivism also denies the possibility of an all-inclusive perspective, which could contain all others and, hence, make reality available as it is in itself. The concept of such an all-inclusive perspective is as incoherent as the concept of seeing an object from every possible vantage point simultaneously.

Nietzsches perspectivism has sometimes been mistakenly identified with relativism and skepticism. Nonetheless, it raises the question of how one is to understand Nietzsches own theses, for example, that the dominant values of the common heritage have been underwritten by an ascetic ideal. Is this thesis true absolutely or only from a certain perspective? It may also be asked whether perspectivism can be asserted consistently without self-contradiction, since perspectivism must presumably be true in an absolute, that is a nonperspectival sense. Concerns such as those have generated much fruitful Nietzsche commentary as well as useful work in the theory of knowledge.

Nietzsche often identified life itself with the will to power, that is, with an instinct for growth and durability. That concept provides yet another way of interpreting the ascetic ideal, since it is Nietzsches contention that all the supreme values of mankind lack this willthat values which are symptomatic of decline, nihilistic values, are lording it under the holiest names. Thus, traditional philosophy, religion, and morality have been so many masks a deficient will to power wears. The sustaining values of Western civilization have been sublimated products of decadence in that the ascetic ideal endorses existence as pain and suffering. Some commentators have attempted to extend Nietzsches concept of the will to power from human life to the organic and inorganic realms, ascribing a metaphysics of will to power to him. Such interpretations, however, cannot be sustained by reference to his published works.

The doctrine of eternal recurrence, the basic conception of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, asks the question How well disposed would a person have to become to himself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than the infinite repetition, without alteration, of each and every moment? Presumably most people would, or should, find such a thought shattering because they should always find it possible to prefer the eternal repetition of their lives in an edited version rather than to crave nothing more fervently than the eternal recurrence of each of its horrors. The person who could accept recurrence without self-deception or evasion would be a superhuman being (bermensch), a superman whose distance from the ordinary man is greater than the distance between man and ape, Nietzsche says. Commentators still disagree whether there are specific character traits that define the person who embraces eternal recurrence.

Nietzsche once wrote that some men are born posthumously, and that is certainly true in his case. The history of philosophy, theology, and psychology since the early 20th century is unintelligible without him. The German philosophers Max Scheler, Karl Jaspers, and Martin Heidegger laboured in his debt, for example, as did the French philosophers Albert Camus, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. Existentialism and deconstruction, a movement in philosophy and literary criticism, owe much to him. The theologians Paul Tillich and Lev Shestov acknowledged their debt, as did the God is dead theologian Thomas J.J. Altizer; Martin Buber, Judaisms greatest 20th-century thinker, counted Nietzsche among the three most-important influences in his life and translated the first part of Zarathustra into Polish. The psychologists Alfred Adler and Carl Jung were deeply influenced, as was Sigmund Freud, who said of Nietzsche that he had a more-penetrating understanding of himself than any man who ever lived or was ever likely to live. Novelists like Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Andr Malraux, Andr Gide, and John Gardner were inspired by him and wrote about him, as did the poets and playwrights George Bernard Shaw, Rainer Maria Rilke, Stefan George, and William Butler Yeats, among others. Nietzsches great influence is due not only to his originality but also to the fact that he was one of the German languages most-brilliant prose writers.

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Friedrich Nietzsche | German philosopher | Britannica.com

Friedrich Nietzsche 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 (The World as Will and Representation, 1819, revised 1844) and admitted that Schopenhauer was one of the few thinkers that he respected, dedicating to him his essay Schopenhauer als Erzieher (Schopenhauer as Educator), published in 1874 as one of his Untimely Meditations.

Since the dawn of the 20th century, the philosophy of Nietzsche has had great intellectual and political influence around the world. Nietzsche applied himself to such topics as morality, religion, epistemology, psychology, ontology, and social criticism. Because of Nietzsche's evocative style and his often outrageous claims, his philosophy generates passionate reactions running from love to disgust. Nietzsche noted in his autobiographical Ecce Homo that his philosophy developed over time, so interpreters have found it difficult to relate concepts central to one work to those central to another, for example, the thought of the eternal recurrence features heavily in Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra), but is almost entirely absent from his next book, Beyond Good and Evil. Added to this challenge is the fact that Nietzsche did not seem concerned to develop his thought into a system, even going so far as to disparage the attempt in Beyond Good and Evil.

Common themes in his thought can, however, be identified and discussed. His earliest work emphasized the opposition of Apollonian and Dionysian impulses in art, and the figure of Dionysus continued to play a role in his subsequent thought. Other major currents include the will to power, the claim that God is dead, the distinction between master and slave moralities, and radical perspectivism. Other concepts appear rarely, or are confined to one or two major works, yet are considered centerpieces of Nietzschean philosophy, such as the bermensch and the thought of eternal recurrence. His later works involved a sustained attack on Christianity and Christian morality, and he seemed to be working toward what he called the transvaluation of all values (Umwertung aller Werte). While Nietzsche is often associated in the public mind with fatalism and nihilism, Nietzsche himself viewed his project as the attempt to overcome the pessimism of Arthur Schopenhauer.

Nietzsche saw nihilism as the outcome of repeated frustrations in the search for meaning. He diagnosed nihilism as a latent presence within the very foundations of European culture, and saw it as a necessary and approaching destiny. The religious worldview had already suffered a number of challenges from contrary perspectives grounded in philosophical skepticism, and in modern science's evolutionary and heliocentric theory.[citation needed] Nietzsche saw this intellectual condition as a new challenge to European culture, which had extended itself beyond a sort of point-of-no-return. Nietzsche conceptualizes this with the famous statement "God is dead", which first appeared in his work in section 108 of The Gay Science, again in section 125 with the parable of "The Madman", and even more famously in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The statement, typically placed in quotation marks,[1] accentuated the crisis that Nietzsche argued that Western culture must face and transcend in the wake of the irreparable dissolution of its traditional foundations, moored largely in classical Greek philosophy and Christianity.[2] In aphorisms 55 and 56 of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche talks about the ladder of religious cruelty that suggests how Nihilism emerged from the intellectual conscience of Christianity. Nihilism is sacrificing the meaning "God" brings into our lives, for "matter and motion", physics, "objective truth." In aphorism 56, he explains how to emerge from the utter meaninglessness of life by reaffirming it through the Nietzsche's ideal of Eternal Return.

In The Antichrist, Nietzsche fights against the way in which Christianity has become an ideology set forth by institutions like churches, and how churches have failed to represent the life of Jesus. Nietzsche finds it important to distinguish between the religion of Christianity and the person of Jesus. Nietzsche attacked the Christian religion, as represented by churches and institutions, for what he called its "transvaluation" of healthy instinctive values. Transvaluation consists of the process by which one can view the meaning of a concept or ideology from a "higher" context. Nietzsche went beyond agnostic and atheistic thinkers of the Enlightenment, who simply regarded Christianity as untrue. He claimed that the Apostle Paul may have deliberately propagated Christianity as a subversive religion (a "psychological warfare weapon") within the Roman Empire as a form of covert revenge for the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and of the Second Temple in 70 AD during the Jewish War of 66-73 AD. Nietzsche contrasts the Christians with Jesus, whom he regarded as a unique individual, and argues he established his own moral evaluations. As such, Jesus represents a kind of step towards his ideation of the bermensch. Ultimately, however, Nietzsche claims that, unlike the bermensch, who embraces life, Jesus denied reality in favor of his "kingdom of God". Jesus's refusal to defend himself, and subsequent death, logically followed from this total disengagement. Nietzsche goes further to analyze the history of Christianity, finding it has progressively distorted the teachings of Jesus more and more. He criticizes the early Christians for turning Jesus into a martyr and Jesus's life into the story of the redemption of mankind in order to dominate the masses, and finds the Apostles cowardly, vulgar, and resentful. He argues that successive generations further misunderstood the life of Jesus as the influence of Christianity grew. By the 19th century, Nietzsche concludes, Christianity had become so worldly as to parody itselfa total inversion of a world view which was, in the beginning, nihilistic, thus implying the "death of God".

Nietzsche argued that two types of morality existed: a master morality that springs actively from the "noble man", and a slave morality that develops reactively within the weak man. These two moralities do not present simple inversions of one another. They form two different value systems: master morality fits actions into a scale of 'good' or 'bad' consequences, whereas slave morality fits actions into a scale of "good" or "evil" intentions. Notably he disdained both, though the first clearly less than the second.

Since Martin Heidegger at least, the concepts of the will to power (Wille zur Macht), of bermensch and of the thought of Eternal Recurrence have been inextricably linked. According to Heidegger's interpretation, one can not be thought without the others. During Nazi Germany, Alfred Baeumler attempted to separate the concepts, claiming that the Eternal Recurrence was only an "existential experience" that, if taken seriously, would endanger the possibility of a "will to power"deliberately misinterpreted, by the Nazis, as a "will for domination".[3] Baeumler attempted to interpret the "will to power" along Social Darwinist lines, an interpretation refuted by Heidegger in his 1930s courses on Nietzsche.

The term Wille zur Macht first appeared in the posthumous fragment 23 [63] of 1876-1877.[citation needed] Heidegger's reading has become predominant among commentators, although some have criticized it: Mazzino Montinari by declaring that it was forging the figure of a "macroscopical Nietzsche", alien to all of his nuances.[4]

Nietzsche's "will to power" (Wille zur Macht) is the name of a concept created by Nietzsche; the title of a projected book which he finally decided not to write; and the title of a book compiled from his notebooks and published posthumously and under suspicious circumstances by his sister and Peter Gast.

The work consists of four separate books, entitled "European Nihilism", "Critique of the Highest Values Hitherto", "Principles of a New Evaluation", and "Discipline and Breeding". Within these books there are some 1067 small sections, usually less than a page, and sometimes just a key phrasesuch as his opening comments in the 1st section of the preface: "Of what is great one must either be silent or speak with greatness. With greatnessthat means cynically and with innocence."[5]

Despite Elisabeth Frster-Nietzsche's falsifications (highlighted in 1937 by Georges Bataille[3] and proved in the 1960s by the complete edition of Nietzsche's posthumous fragments by Mazzino Montinari and Giorgio Colli), his notes, even in the form given by his sister, remain a key insight into the philosophy of Nietzsche, and his unfinished transvaluation of all values. An English edition of Montinari & Colli's work is forthcoming (it has existed for decades in Italian, German and French).

Throughout his works, Nietzsche writes about possible great human beings or "higher types" who serve as an example of people who would follow his philosophical ideals. These ideal human beings Nietzsche calls by terms such as "the philosopher of the future", "the free spirit", "the tragic artist" and "the Ubermensch". They are often described by Nietzsche as being highly creative, courageous, powerful and extremely rare individuals. He compares such individuals with certain historical figures which have been very rare and often have been considered geniuses, such as Napoleon, Goethe and Beethoven. His main example of a genius exemplary culture is Archaic Greece.

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche posits the bermensch(helpinfo) (often translated as "overman" or "superman") as a goal that humanity can set for itself. While interpretations of Nietzsche's overman vary wildly, here are a few of his quotes from Thus Spoke Zarathustra:[citation needed]

I teach you the bermensch. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? [...] All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood, and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is ape to man? A laughingstock or painful embarrassment. And man shall be that to bermensch: a laughingstock or painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape...The bermensch is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the bermensch shall be the meaning of the earth... Man is a rope, tied between beast and bermenscha rope over an abyss...what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end...

Nietzsche may have encountered the idea of the Eternal Recurrence in the works of Heinrich Heine, who speculated that one day a person would be born with the same thought-processes as himself, and that the same applied to every other individual. Nietzsche expanded on this thought to form his theory, which he put forth in The Gay Science and developed in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Schopenhauer directly influenced this theory.[6] Schopenhauer postulated that a person who unconditionally affirms life would do so even if everything that has happened were to happen again repeatedly.[citation needed]

Nietzsche's view on eternal return is similar to that of Hume: "the idea that an eternal recurrence of blind, meaningless variationchaotic, pointless shuffling of matter and lawwould inevitably spew up worlds whose evolution through time would yield the apparently meaningful stories of our lives. This idea of eternal recurrence became a cornerstone of his nihilism, and thus part of the foundation of what became existentialism."[7] Nietzsche was so impressed by this idea, that he at first thought he had discovered a new scientific proof of the greatest importance, referring to it as the "most scientific of hypotheses". He gradually backed-off of this view, and in later works referred to it as a thought-experiment. "Nietzsche viewed his argument for eternal recurrence as a proof of the absurdity or meaninglessness of life, a proof that no meaning was given to the universe from on high."[8]

What if a demon were to creep after you one day or night, in your loneliest loneness, and say: "This life which you live and have lived, must be lived again by you, and innumerable times more. And mere will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigheverything unspeakably small and great in your lifemust come again to you, and in the same sequence and series. . . . The eternal hourglass will again and again be turnedand you with it, dust of dust!" Would you not throw yourself down and curse the demon who spoke to you thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment, in which you would answer him: "Thou art a god, and never have I heard anything more divine!" [The Gay Science (1882), p. 341 (passage translated in Danto 1965, p. 210).]

Nietzsche's work addresses ethics from several perspectives: meta-ethics, normative ethics, and descriptive ethics.

In the field of meta-ethics, one can perhaps most accurately classify Nietzsche as a moral skeptic; meaning that he claims that all ethical statements are false, because any kind of correspondence between ethical statements and "moral facts" remains illusory. (This forms part of a more general claim that no universally true fact exists, roughly because none of them more than "appear" to correspond to reality). Instead, ethical statements (like all statements) remain mere "interpretations." However, Nietzsche does not claim that all interpretations are equivalent, since some testify for "noble" character while others are the symptom of a "decadent" life-form.

Sometimes Nietzsche may seem to have very definite opinions on what he regards as moral or as immoral. Note, however, that one can explain Nietzsche's moral opinions without attributing to him the claim of their truth. For Nietzsche, after all, we needn't disregard a statement merely because it expresses something false. On the contrary, he depicts falsehood as essential for "life". Interestingly enough, he mentions a "dishonest lie", (discussing Wagner in The Case of Wagner) as opposed to an "honest" one, recommending further to consult Plato with regard to the latter, which should give some idea of the layers of paradox in his work.

In the juncture between normative ethics and descriptive ethics, Nietzsche distinguishes between "master morality" and "slave morality". Although he recognizes that not everyone holds either scheme in a clearly delineated fashion without some syncretism, he presents them in contrast to one another. Some of the contrasts in master vs. slave morality include:

Nietzsche elaborated these ideas in his book On the Genealogy of Morality, in which he also introduced the key concept of ressentiment as the basis for the slave morality. Nietzsche's primarily negative assessment of the ethical and moralistic teachings of Christianity followed from his earlier considerations of the questions of God and morality in the works The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. These considerations led Nietzsche to the idea of eternal recurrence. Nietzsche primarily meant that, for all practical purposes, his contemporaries lived as if God were dead, though they had not yet recognized it. Nietzsche believed this "death" had already started to undermine the foundations of morality and would lead to moral relativism and moral nihilism. As a response to the dangers of these trends he believed in re-evaluating the foundations of morality to better understand the origins and motives underlying them, so that individuals might decide for themselves whether to regard a moral value as born of an outdated or misguided cultural imposition or as something they wish to hold true.

While a political tone may be discerned in Nietzsche's writings, his work does not in any sense propose or outline a "political project." The man who stated that "The will to a system is a lack of integrity" was consistent in never devising or advocating a specific system of governance, enquiry, or ethics just as, being an advocate of individual struggle and self-realization, he never concerned himself with mass movements or with the organization of groups and political parties although there are parts of his works where he considers an enigmatic "greater politics", and others where he thinks the problem of community.[9]

In this sense, some have read Nietzsche as an anti-political thinker. Walter Kaufmann put forward the view that the powerful individualism expressed in his writings would be disastrous if introduced to the public realm of politics. Georges Bataille argued in 1937, in the Acphale review, that Nietzsche's thoughts were too free to be instrumentalized by any political movement. In "Nietzsche and Fascists," he argued against such instrumentalization, by the left or the right, declaring that Nietzsche's aim was to by-pass the short timespan of modern politics, and its inherent lies and simplifications, for a greater historical timespan.[3]

Later writers, led by the French intellectual Left, have proposed ways of using Nietzschean theory in what has become known as the "politics of difference" particularly in formulating theories of political resistance and sexual and moral difference. Owing largely to the writings of Kaufmann and others, the spectre of Nazism has now been almost entirely exorcised from his writings.

Nietzsche often referred to the common people who participated in mass movements and shared a common mass psychology as "the rabble", or "the herd". He allegedly valued individualism above all else, although this has been considered by many philosophers to be an oversimplification, as Nietzsche criticized the concept of the subject and of atomism (that is, the existence of an atomic subject at the foundation of everything, found for example in social contract theories). He considered the individual subject as a complex of instincts and wills-to-power, just as any other organization. Beginning in the 1890s some scholars have attempted to link his philosophy with Max Stirner's radical individualism of The Ego and Its Own (1844). The question remained pendant. Recently there was unearthed further, still circumstantial, evidence clarifying the relationship between Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Stirner.[10] In any case, few philosophers really consider Nietzsche an "individualist" thinker. He is best characterized as a thinker of "hierarchy", although the precise nature of this hierarchy does not cover the current social order (the "establishment") and is related to his thought of the Will to Power. Against the strictly "egoist" perspective adopted by Stirner, Nietzsche concerned himself with the "problem of the civilization" and the necessity to give humanity a goal and a direction to its history, making him, in this sense, a very political thinker.[11][12]

Furthermore, in the context of his criticism of morality and Christianity, expressed, among others works, in On the Genealogy of Morals and in The Antichrist, Nietzsche often criticized humanitarian feelings, detesting how pity and altruism were ways for the "weak" to take power over the "strong". However, he qualified his critique of Christianism as a "particular case" of his criticisms of free will.[13] Along with the rejection of teleology, this critique of free will is one of the common points he shared with Spinoza, whom he qualified as a "precursor".[14] To the "ethics of compassion" (Mitleid, "shared suffering") exposed by Schopenhauer,[15] Nietzsche opposed an "ethics of friendship" or of "shared joy" (Mitfreude).[16]

While he had a dislike of the state in general, which he called a "cold monster" in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche also spoke negatively of anarchists and socialism, and made it clear that only certain individuals could attempt to break away from the herd mentality. This theme is common throughout Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Although Nietzsche has famously been represented (or rather, as most strongly argue, misrepresented)[18] as a predecessor to Nazism, he criticized anti-Semitism, pan-Germanism and, to a lesser extent, nationalism. Thus, he broke with his editor in 1886 because of his opposition to his editor's anti-Semitic stances, and his rupture with Richard Wagner, expressed in The Case of Wagner and Nietzsche Contra Wagner, both of which he wrote in 1888, had much to do with Wagner's endorsement of pan-Germanism and anti-Semitism and also of his rallying to Christianity. In a March 29, 1887 letter to Theodor Fritsch, Nietzsche mocked anti-Semitics, Fritsch, Eugen Dhring, Wagner, Ebrard, Wahrmund, and the leading advocate of pan-Germanism, Paul de Lagarde, who would become, along with Wagner and Houston Chamberlain, the main official influences of Nazism.[3] This 1887 letter to Fritsch ended by: "-- And finally, how do you think I feel when the name Zarathustra is mouthed by anti-Semites? ..."[19]

Section VIII of Beyond Good and Evil, titled "Peoples and Fatherlands", criticized pan-Germanism and patriotism, advocating instead the unification of Europe (256, etc.). In Ecce Homo (1888), Nietzsche criticized the "German nation" and its "will to power (to Empire, to Reich)," thus underscoring an easy misinterpretation of the Wille zur Macht, the conception of Germans as a "race," the "anti-Semitic way of writing history," or of making "history conform to the German Empire," and stigmatized "nationalism, this national neurosis from which Europe is sick," this "small politics."[20]

Nietzsche heavily criticized his sister and her husband, Bernhard Frster, speaking harshly against the "anti-Semitic canaille:"

"I've seen proof, black on white, that Herr Dr. Frster has not yet severed his connection with the anti-Semitic movement...Since then I've had difficulty coming up with any of the tenderness and protectiveness I've so long felt toward you. The separation between us is thereby decided in really the most absurd way. Have you grasped nothing of the reason why I am in the world?...Now it has gone so far that I have to defend myself hand and foot against people who confuse me with these anti-Semitic canaille; after my own sister, my former sister, and after Widemann more recently have given the impetus to this most dire of all confusions. After I read the name Zarathustra in the anti-Semitic Correspondence my forbearance came to an end. I am now in a position of emergency defense against your spouse's Party. These accursed anti-Semite deformities shall not sully my ideal!!"

Draft for a letter to his sister Elisabeth Frster-Nietzsche (December 1887)

Georges Bataille was one of the first to denounce the deliberate misinterpretation of Nietzsche carried out by Nazis, among them Alfred Baeumler. In January 1937 he dedicated an issue of Acphale, titled "Reparations to Nietzsche," to the theme "Nietzsche and the Fascists.[3]" There, he called Elisabeth Frster-Nietzsche "Elisabeth Judas-Frster," recalling Nietzsche's declaration: "To never frequent anyone who is involved in this bare-faced fraud concerning races."[3]

Nietzsche titled aphorism 377 in the fifth book of The Gay Science (published in 1887) "We who are homeless" (Wir Heimatlosen),[21] in which he criticized pan-Germanism and patriotism and called himself a "good European". In the second part of this aphorism, which according to Bataille contained the most important parts of Nietzsche's political thought, the thinker of the Eternal Return stated:

No, we do not love humanity; but on the other hand we are not nearly "German" enough, in the sense in which the word "German" is constantly being used nowadays, to advocate nationalism and race hatred and to be able to take pleasure in the national scabies of the heart and blood poisoning that now leads the nations of Europe to delimit and barricade themselves against each other as if it were a matter of quarantine. For that we are too open-minded, too malicious, too spoiled, also too well-informed, too "traveled": we far prefer to live on mountains, apart, "untimely," in past or future centuries, merely in order to keep ourselves from experiencing the silent rage to which we know we should be condemned as eyewitnesses of politics that are desolating the German spirit by making it vain and that is, moreover, petty politics:to keep its own creation from immediately falling apart again, is it not finding it necessary to plant it between two deadly hatreds? must it not desire the eternalization of the European system of a lot of petty states? ... We who are homeless are too manifold and mixed racially and in our descent, being "modern men," and consequently do not feel tempted to participate in the mendacious racial self-admiration and racial indecency that parades in Germany today as a sign of a German way of thinking and that is doubly false and obscene among the people of the "historical sense." We are, in one wordand let this be our word of honor! good Europeans, the heirs of Europe, the rich, oversupplied, but also overly obligated heirs of thousands of years of European spirit: as such, we have also outgrown Christianity and are averse to it, and precisely because we have grown out of it, because our ancestors were Christians who in their Christianity were uncompromisingly upright; for their faith they willingly sacrificed possessions and position, blood and fatherland. Wedo the same. For what? For our unbelief? For every kind of unbelief? No, you know better than that, my friends! The hidden Yes in you is stronger than all Nos and Maybes that afflict you and your age like a disease; and when you have to embark on the sea, you emigrants, you, too, are compelled to this by a faith! ...[22]

Nietzsche's views on women have served as a magnet for controversy, beginning during his life and continuing to the present. He frequently made remarks in his writing that some view as misogynistic. He claimed in Twilight of the Idols (1888) "Women are considered profound. Why? Because we never fathom their depths. But women aren't even shallow."[23]

Nietzsche knew little of the 19th-century philosopher Sren Kierkegaard.[24][25]Georg Brandes, a Danish philosopher, wrote to Nietzsche in 1888 asking him to study the works of Kierkegaard, to which Nietzsche replied that he would.[26][nb 1]

Recent research, however, suggests that Nietzsche was exposed to the works of Kierkegaard through secondary literature. Aside from Brandes, Nietzsche owned and read a copy of Hans Lassen Martensens Christliche Ethik (1873) in which Martensen extensively quoted and wrote about Kierkegaards individualism in ethics and religion. Nietzsche also read Harald Hffdings Psychologie in Umrissen auf Grundlage der Erfahrung (ed. 1887) which expounded and critiqued Kierkegaards psychology. Thomas Brobjer believes one of the works Nietzsche wrote about Kierkegaard is in Morgenrthe, which was partly written in response to Martensen's work. In one of the passages, Nietzsche wrote: Those moralists, on the other hand, who, following in the footsteps of Socrates, offer the individual a morality of self-control and temperance as a means to his own advantage, as his personal key to happiness, are the exceptions. Brobjer believes Kierkegaard is one of "those moralists".[27]

The first philosophical study comparing Kierkegaard and Nietzsche was published even before Nietzsche's death.[28] More than 60 articles and 15 full-length studies have been published devoted entirely in comparing these two thinkers.[28]

According to Santayana, Nietzsche considered his philosophy to be a correction of Schopenhauers philosophy. In his Egotism in German Philosophy,[29] Santayana listed Nietzsches antithetical reactions to Schopenhauer.

The will to live would become the will to dominate; pessimism founded on reflection would become optimism founded on courage; the suspense of the will in contemplation would yield to a more biological account of intelligence and taste;

finally in the place of pity and asceticism (Schopenhauer s two principles of morals) Nietzsche would set up the duty of asserting the will at all costs and being cruelly but beautifully strong.

These emendations show how Schopenhauers philosophy was not a mere initial stimulus for Nietzsche, but formed the basis for much of Nietzsches thinking.

Perhaps Nietzsche's greatest philosophical legacy lies in his 20th century interpreters, among them Pierre Klossowski, Georges Bataille, Leo Strauss, Alexandre Kojve, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze (and Flix Guattari), Jacques Derrida and Albert Camus. Foucault's later writings, for example, adopt Nietzsche's genealogical method to develop anti-foundationalist theories of power that divide and fragment rather than unite politics (as evinced in the liberal tradition of political theory). The systematic institutionalisation of criminal delinquency, sexual identity and practice, and the mentally ill (to name but a few) are examples used to demonstrate how knowledge or truth is inseparable from the institutions that formulate notions of legitimacy from 'immoralities' such as homosexuality and the like (captured in the famous power-knowledge equation). Deleuze, arguably the foremost of Nietzsche's interpreters, used the much-maligned 'will to power' thesis in tandem with Marxian notions of commodity surplus and Freudian ideas of desire to articulate concepts such the rhizome and other 'outsides' to state power as traditionally conceived.

Certain recent Nietzschean interpretations have emphasized the more untimely and politically controversial aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy. Nietzschean commentator Keith Ansell Pearson has pointed out the absurd hypocrisy of modern egalitarian liberals, socialists, feminists and anarchists claiming Nietzsche as a herald of their own left-wing politics: "The values Nietzsche wishes to subject to a revaluation are largely altruistic and egalitarian values such as pity, self-sacrifice, and equal rights. For Nietzsche, modern politics rests largely on a secular inheritance of Christian values (he interprets the socialist doctrine of equality in terms of a secularization of the Christian belief in the equality of all souls before God" (On the Genealogy of Morality, Ansell-Pearson and Diethe, eds., Cambridge University Press, 1994, p.9). Works such as Bruce Detwiler's Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism (University of Chicago Press, 1990), Fredrick Appel's Nietzsche Contra Democracy (Cornell University Press, 1998), and Domenico Losurdo's Nietzsche, il ribelle aristocratico (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2002) challenge the prevalent liberal interpretive consensus on Nietzsche and assert that Nietzsche's elitism was not merely an aesthetic pose but an ideological attack on the widely held belief in equal rights of the modern West, locating Nietzsche in the conservative-revolutionary tradition.

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