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THIS PAPER ATTEMPTS TO SUMMARIZE a series of twelve lectures on Nietzsche, given twice at Loyola University of Chicago in the fall and winter semesters 1980-1981. Following Nietzsche's provocative style, I have utilized a form which I think Nietzsche would have approved of and which, like his famous German rhetoric, I hope also best illustrates his basic philosophy.
Every achievement of knowledge is a consequence of courage, of severity toward oneself, of cleanliness toward oneself … to wash one's soul ever cleaner from the marketplace dust and noise of this age.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power (1968, pp. 536 and 541)
I, FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, WAS BORN in a small town in Prussia in 1844 to a 31 year old Lutheran minister father and the daughter of another Lutheran minister; she was only 18. I was their first child. Two years later, in 1846, my "demonic" (Kaufmann 1968) sister Elizabeth was born; in two more years, 1848, my brother Joseph was born. When I was five years old, in 1849, my father died of madness—probably general paresis, and in January, 1850, Joseph died (Fuss and Shapiro 1971).
As I wrote, I became after that time a homeless wanderer obsessively seeking what I called the shadow of God (Nietzsche 1968a), (Copleston 1975).
My household from the age of five until I went off to school consisted of my mother, my sister, my father's mother, and two