Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche is important as a precursor of twentieth-century existentialism, an inspiration for post-structuralism and an influence on postmodernism.

Nietzsche's works helped to reinforce not only agnostic trends that followed Enlightenment thinkers, and the biological worldview gaining currency from the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin (which also later found expression in the "medical" and "instinctive" interpretations of human behavior by Sigmund Freud), but also the "romantic nationalist" political movements in the late nineteenth century when various peoples of Europe began to celebrate archaeological finds and literature related to pagan ancestors, such as the uncovered Viking burial mounds in Scandinavia, Wagnerian interpretations of Norse mythology stemming from the Eddas of Iceland, Italian nationalist celebrations of the glories of a unified, pre-Christian Roman peninsula, French examination of Celtic Gaul of the pre-Roman era, and Irish nationalist interest in revitalizing the Irish language. Anthropological discoveries about India, particularly by Germany, also contributed to Nietzsche's broad religious and cultural sense.

Some people have suggested that Fyodor Dostoevsky may have specifically created the plot of his Crime and Punishment as a Christian rebuttal to Nietzsche, though this cannot be correct as Dostoevsky finished Crime and Punishment well before Nietzsche published any of his works. Nietzsche admired Dostoevsky and read several of his works in French translation. In an 1887 letter Nietzsche says that he read Notes from Underground (translated 1886) first, and two years later makes reference to a stage production of Crime and Punishment, which he calls Dostoevsky's "main novel" insofar as it followed the internal torment of its protagonist. In Twilight of the Idols, he calls Dostoevsky the only psychologist from whom he had something to learn: encountering him was "the most beautiful accident of my life, more so than even my discovery of Stendhal."

Nietzsche and Women

Nietzsche's comments on women are perceptibly impudent (although it is also the case that he attacked men for their behaviors as well). However, the women he came into contact with typically reported that he was amiable and treated their ideas with much more respect and consideration than they were generally acquainted with from educated men in that period of time, amidst various sociological circumstances that continue to this day (e.g., Feminism). Moreover, in this connection, Nietzsche was acquainted with the work On Women by Schopenhauer and was probably influenced by it to some degree. As such, some statements scattered throughout his works seem forthright to attack women in a similar vein. And, indeed, Nietzsche believed there were radical differences between the mind of men as such and the mind of women as such. "Thus," said Nietzsche through the mouth of his Zarathustra, "would I have man and woman: the one fit for warfare, the other fit for giving birth; and both fit for dancing with head and legs" (Zarathustra III. [56, "Old and New Tables," sect. 23]) - that is to say: both are capable of doing their share of humanity's work, with their respective physiological conditions granted and therewith elucidating, each individually, their potentialities. Of course, it is contentious whether Nietzsche here adequately or accurately identifies the "potentialities" of women and men.