Friedrich Nietzsche: The Life and Times of a Philosopher Who Declared War on Certainty
Part Two: Illness, Exile, Human, All Too Human, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the Übermensch, Eternal Recurrence, and the Death of God
By the mid-1870s, Friedrich Nietzsche had achieved what many scholars spend a lifetime pursuing. At just thirty years old he held a prestigious professorship at the University of Basel, had published a provocative first book, and had formed a close friendship with the celebrated composer Richard Wagner. From the outside, his future appeared secure. Yet beneath the surface, everything was beginning to unravel.
The next decade would transform Nietzsche from a respected classical scholar into one of history's most original philosophers. It would also become a period marked by relentless physical suffering, loneliness, financial uncertainty and intellectual isolation. Ironically, it was precisely during these years of apparent failure that Nietzsche produced the works that would secure his immortality.
His philosophy was no longer merely about ancient Greece. It had become an attempt to answer a far more urgent question: how should humanity live after the collapse of its deepest certainties?
A Body at War with Itself
For much of his adult life, Nietzsche's greatest adversary was not another philosopher but his own body. He suffered from crippling migraines that could last for days, severe digestive disorders, persistent nausea, insomnia and worsening eyesight. At times he was almost blind, forced to dictate or write only for short periods before unbearable pain overwhelmed him.
Victorian medicine offered little relief. Doctors prescribed rest cures, strict diets, mineral baths and various experimental treatments, yet none brought lasting improvement. Friends often found him bedridden, unable to read or write for weeks at a time. These illnesses gradually made university life impossible.
Lecturing became an ordeal. Research became exhausting. Even conversation could become painful. In 1879, at only thirty-four years old, Nietzsche resigned from the University of Basel on medical grounds. Although granted a modest pension, he effectively abandoned the academic career that had once promised such distinction. To many observers, it appeared a tragic end. For Nietzsche, it became an unexpected beginning. Free from academic expectations, he would now dedicate his life entirely to philosophy.
The Wanderer
What followed were years of extraordinary solitude. Without a permanent home, Nietzsche wandered across Europe in search of climates that might ease his suffering. Summers were often spent in the cool mountain air of Sils Maria, while winters took him to the gentler climates of Genoa, Nice, Venice and Turin.
His possessions were few. A trunk of books. Manuscripts. Writing materials. Little else. He lived in rented rooms, walked for hours each day and wrote almost entirely in notebooks while roaming mountains, forests and coastal paths.
Walking became central to his philosophy. Ideas arrived not in lecture halls but on lonely roads. Many of his most profound insights emerged during these long solitary journeys. Nietzsche once remarked that only thoughts conceived while walking possessed genuine value.
Movement, for him, stimulated thought itself. His philosophy became as restless as his life.
Breaking with Wagner
The intellectual break that had quietly begun during the writing of The Birth of Tragedy eventually became impossible to ignore. Nietzsche had once believed Richard Wagner represented the artistic renewal of European civilisation. Instead he watched Wagner embrace German nationalism, Christian symbolism and cultural conservatism.
The final rupture came after the opening of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in 1876. Rather than witnessing the rebirth of tragic art, Nietzsche believed he had attended a theatrical celebration of celebrity, nationalism and hero worship. He left deeply disappointed. Their friendship never recovered.
Years later Nietzsche published The Case of Wagner and Nietzsche Contra Wagner, offering devastating critiques of the composer he had once idolised. For Nietzsche, Wagner had abandoned artistic honesty in favour of spectacle and moral certainty.
The separation was painful. But it also symbolised Nietzsche's growing independence. He was no longer willing to follow intellectual heroes. Every idol, he believed, must eventually be questioned.
Human, All Too Human
In 1878 Nietzsche published Human, All Too Human, a work that marked one of the great turning points in modern philosophy. The lyrical style of The Birth of Tragedy disappeared. In its place came hundreds of short aphorisms. Each was concise, provocative and unsettling.
Rather than constructing a grand philosophical system, Nietzsche invited readers into an ongoing conversation. Truth emerged through questioning rather than certainty. The book examined religion, morality, psychology, politics, art and love with remarkable scepticism.
Nietzsche argued that many supposedly noble ideals were rooted not in divine revelation but in human needs, fears and historical circumstances. Morality, he suggested, was not eternal. It was created. Religious beliefs were not timeless truths. They were cultural inventions. Even reason itself was shaped by history.
This represented a profound shift. Philosophy became less concerned with discovering absolute truths than with uncovering how beliefs are formed. Many of these ideas would later influence psychology, sociology and twentieth-century continental philosophy.
Although the book sold poorly, it announced the arrival of a radically new voice.
"God Is Dead"
Perhaps no phrase associated with Nietzsche has been more frequently misunderstood than his declaration that "God is dead." The famous proclamation appears most powerfully in The Gay Science. It was never intended as a triumphant celebration of atheism. Nor was it simply an argument against religion.
Instead it described a historical transformation already taking place across Europe. Scientific discovery, historical criticism, industrialisation and the Enlightenment had steadily weakened traditional Christianity's authority.
Europe still lived according to Christian morality. But increasingly, fewer people genuinely believed its foundations. The old framework remained standing. Its foundations had quietly disappeared.
"We have killed him," Nietzsche writes through the figure of the Madman. The statement is metaphorical. Humanity itself had dismantled the religious worldview that had sustained Western civilisation for centuries.
Yet Nietzsche's concern was not that belief had vanished. His concern was what would replace it. Without shared religious meaning, societies risked falling into nihilism, the belief that life possesses no intrinsic purpose or value.
The death of God, therefore, created not only liberation but also immense responsibility. If values were no longer given by heaven, humanity would have to create them.
The Birth of Zarathustra
Between 1883 and 1885 Nietzsche composed what many regard as his masterpiece: Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Neither conventional philosophy nor straightforward literature, the book combines poetry, parable, prophecy and philosophical reflection.
Its central character is Zarathustra, inspired by the ancient Persian prophet Zoroaster. After spending years alone in the mountains, Zarathustra descends to humanity carrying a new message.
The book deliberately echoes religious scripture. Yet instead of revealing divine commandments, Zarathustra urges humanity to overcome itself. Again and again Nietzsche returns to one central challenge.
Human beings should not remain satisfied with what they already are. They must become something greater.
The Übermensch
Perhaps Nietzsche's most controversial concept is the Übermensch, often translated as the "Overman" or "Superman." Popular culture has frequently misunderstood the idea. It has nothing to do with biological superiority, racial hierarchy or political domination.
Nietzsche was not describing a superior race. He was describing a superior relationship to existence. The Übermensch is an individual who creates meaning rather than merely inheriting it.
Instead of accepting conventional morality, inherited traditions or social expectations, this individual courageously creates new values grounded in creativity, honesty and self-overcoming.
The greatest battle is never against others. It is against oneself. Every limitation becomes an invitation to grow. Every certainty becomes something to question. Every failure becomes raw material for transformation.
The Übermensch represents humanity's creative potential rather than its political destiny. This distinction would later be tragically ignored by those seeking ideological justification for authoritarian beliefs.
Eternal Recurrence
Among Nietzsche's most demanding ideas is the concept of eternal recurrence. Imagine, he asks, that every moment of your life must be lived again. Not once. But infinitely.
Every joy. Every heartbreak. Every mistake. Every success. Every ordinary afternoon. Every painful memory. Repeated forever.
Would such knowledge fill you with despair? Or would you embrace your life exactly as it has unfolded?
Nietzsche presents this not as a scientific theory but as an ethical challenge. The thought experiment forces us to ask whether we are living in a way worthy of endless repetition.
Can we affirm life so completely that we would willingly choose to experience it again?
This radical affirmation lies at the heart of Nietzsche's philosophy. Rather than longing for another world or regretting the past, he urges us to say yes to existence in its entirety.
Amor Fati
Closely connected to eternal recurrence is one of Nietzsche's most beautiful ideas: amor fati. The phrase means "love of fate." It does not mean passive acceptance. Nor does it encourage resignation.
Instead, it calls for a profound embrace of everything life brings. Joy and suffering. Success and failure. Health and illness. Love and loss.
For Nietzsche, greatness emerges not despite suffering but through it. His own life embodied this conviction. His physical pain never disappeared. His books sold very few copies. He remained largely ignored by the academic establishment.
Yet he continued writing with astonishing intensity. He refused bitterness. Instead, he transformed adversity into philosophy.
Alone Before the Future
Despite producing works of extraordinary originality, Nietzsche lived in almost complete obscurity during these years. His books sold only a few hundred copies. Many remained unsold. Reviews were scarce. Friends drifted away.
He never married. His brief hope of romance with Lou Andreas-Salomé ended painfully after she rejected his proposal of marriage, leaving him emotionally devastated.
Increasingly he stood alone. Yet Nietzsche believed he was writing not for his contemporaries but for future generations.
"My time has not yet come," he once remarked. "Some are born posthumously."
History would prove him right.
The wandering philosopher, dismissed by many during his lifetime as eccentric and obscure, was quietly laying the foundations for existentialism, psychoanalysis, postmodern philosophy and much of twentieth-century intellectual life.
His greatest works still lay ahead. So too did the catastrophe that would end his writing forever.
In January 1889, in the streets of Turin, Friedrich Nietzsche would suffer the mental collapse that has become one of the most haunting episodes in the history of philosophy. The brilliant mind that had challenged every certainty would suddenly fall silent, leaving behind a body of work that the twentieth century would spend decades struggling to understand and, too often, misinterpret.
