Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900) resigned a promising philology chair at Basel at 35, spent ten nomadic years writing some of the most influential prose in Western philosophy, then collapsed into a decade of mental illness before his death. His major works — Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, The Genealogy of Morals, Twilight of the Idols — attacked the comfortable metaphysics of his era and demanded that readers take responsibility for creating their own values.

Nietzsche is hard. He wrote in aphorisms, contradicted himself deliberately, and is routinely misread as a nihilist when he is in fact one of the clearest anti-nihilists in the canon. The videos below start with accessible lectures — Rick Roderick’s ’80s series remains the best intro in English — then move into specific themes: eternal recurrence, the will to power, master vs. slave morality, and the übermensch.