Who was Nietzsche and what did his nihilistic philosophy consist of?

The German philosopher, philologist and poet Friedrich Nietzsche, was one of the most popular and controversial thinkers, whose ideas on religion, morality, history and science, among others, exerted a strong influence on the West. What does your nihilistic philosophy consist of?

Lived in the second half of the nineteenth century, he exercised a strong criticism of culture, religion and culture Western philosophy.

He argued that religion was born from man’s fear of himself and one of his fundamental arguments indicated this traditional values, essentially represented by Christianity.

Nietzsche renounced his German citizenship, remaining without a nationality for the rest of his life.

Who was Friedrich Nietzsche

He was born on 15 October 1844 in Prussia and died on 25 August 1900 at the age of 56. In addition to his studies, the young Nietzsche liked him writing poems and musical compositions.

After graduating from high school Schulpforta from Naumburg in 1864, Nietzsche began studying theology and classical philology at the University of Bonn. Before then he had already written a sort of philosophical treatise entitled “On the origin of evil”.

In 1865 he became acquainted with the work of Arthur Schopenhauer and of Friedrich Albert Langewhich motivated him from a philosophical point of view and became his discipline of interest, even more than philology.

Likewise, he became the youngest professor of classical philology at the University of Basel. In 1869 the University of Leipzig granted him a doctorate without examination or thesis about quality of their investigations.

In that period Nietzsche renounced his German citizenship, remaining without it no nationality for the rest of his life.

Almost everything about Nietzsche was written in small fragments; short texts which can be one line or one page but always capable of having a strong impact on the reader and are known as “aphorisms”.

Among his great works there are essays such as Gay science, Thus spoke Zarathustra AND Human, too humanamong many others.

What is Nietzsche’s nihilistic philosophy?

Nietzche took the Greek way of seeing the world as a symptom of decadence, raised a criticism of the rational world, the moral world and the religious world.

Although it was not something new for that time, it was what resonated the loudest with his phrase “God is dead“.

He was a promoter of nihilism, which can be considered a political, social and cultural criticism of society’s customs, values ​​and beliefs. The term nihilism It is one of the most popular concepts in the recent history of philosophy.

The specialized portal Philosophy & Codelves into the concept: “The word nihilism has its origins in nothing word, which in Latin means ‘nothing’. By adding the suffix ‘-ism’, the word nihilism etymologically means the position or doctrine of nothingness.”

So the nihilist, as already said, is that person who believes in nothingness or who does not believe in any principle.

The concept arose before Nietzschean philosophy, when, for example, in the 4th century BC C. Saint Augustine He accused non-believers of being nihilists.

But nihilism in Nietzsche took on another dimension and robustness, and he is a central author of this current.

In his vision of ideas in moral decline and Christian values, nihilism is the advent of that “devaluation of supreme values”.