Friedrich Nietzsche , the German philosopher, was born #onthisday in 1844.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born 15 October 1844 and was a German philosopher, cultural critic, composer, poet, writer, and philologist whose work has exerted a profound influence on modern intellectual history. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy.
Nietzsche resigned his chair at the University of Basel in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In his 1883 book Thus Spoke Zarathustra (German: Also Sprach Zarathustra), Nietzsche has his character Zarathustra posit the Übermensch as a goal for humanity to set for itself. The Übermensch represents a shift from otherworldly Christian values and manifests the grounded human ideal.
In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897 and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Nietzsche died in 1900.