This essay is concerned with Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900), and his philosophical approach. Basically, Nietzsche interpreted existence in terms of evolution, focusing on the biological urge toward survival and taking the shape of a 'will to power'. This is the substance of life and the standard of value. Life is a continual attempt to provide a configuration to the unshaped inner impulse. But all of these concepts arise from flashes of intuition instead of carefully analyzed inferences. Consequently, Nietzsche was a poetic thinker rather than a systematic philosopher.
At the age of twenty, in October 1864, Nietzsche matriculated in theology and philosophy at the University of Bonn. Nietzsche did his best to be one of the boys. He joined a student corps, the Franconia. It is possible Nietzsche may have had an experience with a prostitute from whom he caught the syphilis which brought his life to an-end twenty-five years later.
Nietzsche began to dislike the worldly ways of the Franconia, and he submitted his resignation. He later left Bonn and attended the University of Leipzig, where he became familiar with the philosophy of Schopenhauer and his work The World as Will and Idea. Crane Brinton states: "Schopenhauer's slightly Biedermeier stoicism, though it could not for long satisfy the emotional needs of a man as God-ridden as Nietzsche, solved in this crisis and for a moment the problem of the universe . . . The world makes no sense intellectually; Kant and the 18th-century philosophes were no more than whistlers in the dark. Will, the blind striving of millions of organisms, is what really makes the world go. And it goes crazily, stupidly, cruelly. All that is left for a philosopher is renunciation, the extinction of the will to live which is the will to evil. Schopenhauer came in the end to a kind of Nordic Nirvana most attractive to the lonely young philologist. Nietzsche decided, not without prid...