As of the five years age, the child, who lost his father, is placed under the authority of the women: his/her paternal grandmother, her mother and two aunts raise it in an atmosphere of austerity, if not asceticism, but also of cultural refinement. It begins its studies at the school Lutheran and humanistic of Pforta, where it bathes in civilization of Greece and Rome and in the discipline of a well ordered school: “This quasi military constraint which, intended to act on the mass, treats the individual in a cold and surface way, brought back to me to myself”, he will write.  

In 1864, it is registered in theology at the university of Bonn, but it is especially attracted by the studies of philology, that its Ritschl Master did not limit to the history of the literary forms but which it taught like the general study of the systems of thought and institutions.  

Of Wagner to the “merry knowledge”
In 1865, the discovery of the pessimistic philosophy of Schopenhauer then its meeting with Wagner, in 1868, upset its references first, of which it will undertake the analysis: the interrogation on the origins always carried it at his place on the critical inventory of the heritage. The interest of Nietzsche for the genealogy poses the crucial problem for him relationship between tradition and innovation, ambivalence not ceasing accentuating the violence of its destroying will of the last values and its fascination for the ancestral bonds.  

The rupture with Christianity consumed, it obtains, in 1869, a pulpit of philology in Basle. In 1872, in the Birth of the tragedy, it reverses the traditional prospect on the Greek culture, supporting that the tragedy, like the music, is produced by the Dionysiac, mysterious and irrational spirit, and not by the Apollinian spirit, symbol of the light and the harmony, that the Occident admires however like the most eminent quality of old Greece. The book, emanating from a young hellenist, is very criticized by the academic world, whereas Wagner speaks in praise of it. The Birth of the tragedy is presented in the form of a first contribution to the criticism of Socrate, that Nietzsche proposed as of this time to conclude, but this criticism is still largely dependant on esthetic and nationalist aspirations, grateful Nietzsche in Wagner the prolongation of the Helene genius.  

In 1873, Nietzsche composes a praise of Wagner in one of his out-of-date Considerations, but, since 1876, it breaks with the musician, whom it looks at from now on like a surface being and the principal representative of this German art that it loathes. In 1878, Nietzsche publishes, “in memory of Voltaire for the hundredth birthday of his death”, Humain, too human. Composed of more than fifteen hundred aphorisms, this “book for free spirits” seals the rupture of Nietzsche with the “will of morals of Schopenhauer” and the “incurable romanticism of Richard Wagner”. In Gay Ecce, Nietzsche will write that it is Birth of the tragedy “which the great dependant experiments” in the name of Wagner date, considering its first work then as a “suspect book” (Test of self-criticism, 1886): suspect - with the eyes of Nietzsche - of “wagnerism”, but also - and this time in a positive direction - because it considered the knowledge “like problems and suspect”. Wagner will not answer criticisms of Nietzsche, and this one will go until posting its preference for the music of Bizet, while writing to his/her friends that it should not “be taken with serious”.

With the beginning of the year 1870, Nietzsche ties bonds of friendship with Franz Overbeck, professor of theology in Basle, then, as from 1876, with Peter Gast, a musician who will remain ignored but that Nietzsche, itself composer of some musical works, will support without defection; he will maintain with them a bulky correspondence until his crisis 1888-1889. On May 2nd, 1879, Nietzsche resigns of his post of professor for health reasons, and as from this time, it will divide the year into one season of summer, which it will generally spend in Engadine, and a season of winter, which it will share between Nice, Venice, Rome, Genoa then Turin. Recluse and sinks, it however thinks, in 1882, to find his happiness at Lou Andreas-Salomé, future friend of Rilke and Freud, who refuses the marriage to him. He had been got excited before of Cosima Wagner, the girl of Liszt, and, in the official reports of the psychiatric asylum of Iéna, at dated March 27th, 1889, these words will be reported: “It is my wife, Cosima Wagner, who led me here.”  

Nietzsche composes, between 1879 and 1881, the five hundred and seventy-five aphorisms of Dawn, “thought on the moral prejudices”: “The free man is immoral because he wants in all to depend on itself and not of a tradition.” The Merry Knowledge (1882) was initially thought like a prolongation of Aurore, and indeed the two collections mark a turning in the work of the author, who said Merry Knowledge: “. my last book, I suppose”, and considered “unpublishable” these works in margin of the production intellectual of the time. What one called the “nihilism nietzschéen” expresses thus in this judgment which it carries on the Merry Knowledge in a letter in Gast (June 1882): “. the opinion of my current readers on this book or me does not import absolutely - but what imports enough, it is what I had thought of me, as one will be able to read it in this book: this was to only warn against myself.”  

Advertisement of the superman
The Merry Knowledge marks a top in the work of Nietzsche, and the following work, Ainsi spoke Zarathoustra (1883-1885), starts the decline of the solitary thinker: “It is necessary for me like to lay down you, me, as say the men towards whom I want to go down” (“the prolog of Zarathoustra”). Zarathoustra is thus the key of the thought nietzschéenne; it is there that Nietzsche declares, always by the voice of Zarathoustra: “I teach you the superman. The man is something which must surmount”, and in same time, the author saw this advertisement as the mark of his own decline. Because, for that which wants to be a bridge towards the superman, the publication of a book to the use of these “last men” who are “what there is of more contemptible” constitutes a suffering than Nietzsche will compare to the passion of Christ, as will testify to them the last tickets which it will address to his friends in January 1889 and which he will sign “the Crucified person”.  

Thus Zarathoustra spoke described the fight between the will for power, which in particular the will translates to announce the superman, and this compassion for the men, who, by dominating it finally, led Zarathoustra to its decline, to approach the men, or, which returns to same, Nietzsche to publish this book. Thus, Zarathoustra is the work of a thinker who analyzes his own decline, but it is more than that: it is this decline by the fact even of its publication - and Nietzsche will try to recover certain specimens of the fourth part, printed with his expenses, which according to him had been too hastily entrusted. To this question of the decline which is in the middle of the thought nietzschéenne, will Heidegger devote a course, published under the title That invites one to think? , where it analyzes one of the sentences of the book, “the desert grows. Misfortune with that which protects the desert”, affirming in particular: “Which is that with which this cry of “Misfortune!” addresses itself? It is the superman. Because that which goes “with-delà'” must be that which declines; the way of the superman starts with his decline.”  

Beyond good and badly was published in 1886 on account of author; Nietzsche carries out “the combat against Plato to it, or to speak in terms more comprehensible and accessible to the “people”, the combat against the thousand-year-old oppression of the Christian Church - because Christianity is a Platonism for the “people””. Again, the work finishes on the bitterness which Nietzsche feels by delivering his “impure thoughts”: already they are, according to him, “about to becoming truths”, which is the supreme misinterpretation for which claims to shake any morals and to exceed any certainty.  

The Genealogy of morals, published the following year, continues the work started since Zarathoustra; Nietzsche regarded it as “a small work of polemic”, which was undoubtedly written in hardly a week. The “death of morals” is depicted there like the “imposing” work and “terrifying” which must from now on be accomplished: “Christianity as a dogma was ruined by its own morals; thus Christianity as a morals must also go to its ruin.”  

Tension and final crisis
As of this time, Nietzsche becomes a thinker about which Europe speaks: Taine writes to him; in 1888, the Dane Georg Brandès gives, in Copenhagen, the first public course on Nietzsche, and holds this one with the current of gained success. Nietzsche accomplishes its first stay in Turin of April 5th on June 5th, 1888, and enters a phase of intense production, the whole in an extreme tension which announces to it near final crisis: the Case Wagner is made up in May 1888; the Twilight of the idols follows, or How to philosophize with blows of hammer, completed on on September 30th, 1888; meanwhile, Nietzsche wrote, in a few days, the Antichrist; at the beginning of November, it is Ecce Homo. How one becomes what one is; finally, Nietzsche against Wagner is completed in December 1888. Thus, the very last works are composed or re-examined at the time of the second and last stay in Turin, of September 21st, 1888 on January 9th, 1889.  

The two lampoons on Wagner do not bring anything to criticism that Nietzsche carries to the musician; it is rather a question of attacking in “Wagnerian” Germany and the “stupidity of Bayreuth”. The Twilight of the idols is “a declaration of war. As for the idols which it is a question of auscultating, they are not this time not idols of the time, but of the eternal idols, which one strikes here of the hammer like tuning fork”. The work, of a rare violence, takes for target the reason, of Socrate with Kant, that Nietzsche regards as a proof of decline. With Ecce Homo, Nietzsche recalls his own route and the genesis of his thought, as if it knew that its end was close and that it was time to begin again what had been known as. He criticizes his posterity in advance, for example when it is the “superhuman” word: “Almost everywhere, in all innocence, one gave him a significance which puts it in absolute contradiction with the values which were affirmed by the character of Zarathoustra, I want to say that one made of it “the idealistic” type of a higher species of man, with half “saint”, half “genius”.”

Lastly, the Antichrist appears in his composition even like a species of prelude to the crisis which, a few weeks later, was going to carry Nietzsche; its thought is there indeed like fragmented, launching overall features, and it gives thus taken to all kinds of interpretations, contradictory the ones with the others. There so some believed to see a total criticism of the Christian religion, one can also interpret this ultimate work like a recognition of the importance of the life of Jesus: whereas Jesus, far from defending oneself in front of his judges and his torturers, went until causing his torment, thus rejecting any concept of culpability, it is the Christianity which imposed this idea of fault that Nietzsche criticizes between all because it is the cause of the resentment of poor and of the control of the men.  

On January 3rd, 1889, Davide Fino, the landlord of Nietzsche to Turin, draws it from an assembly that this one because: he precipitated with the neck of an old horse drawing a hackney carriage and sobs. This table of the final crisis is not without recalling, almost milked for feature, a dream of Raskolnikov, the hero of Dostoïevski, in Crime and Punishment, work that Nietzsche had read a few years earlier and who had impressed it much. On January 10th, his/her friend Overbeck brought back Nietzsche to Basle, and, from there, it was transferred to the psychiatric private clinic from Iéna which it left in March 1890. Nietzsche lived then in Naumburg, with his mother, in a quasi total dumbness, before dying, on on August 25th, 1900, in Weimar.  

In 1901, his/her sister, Elizabeth Fœrster-Nietzsche, widow of a notorious anti-semite, published an ultimate work of Nietzsche, the Will for power. However, if the author himself had indeed projected such a publication, it was far from to have completed the composition of it, and the classification of the aphorisms was carried out by his/her sister, assisted of Gast. In the years 1930, Fœrster-Nietzsche accepted the visit of Hitler, which confirmed, to the eyes of many commentators of Nietzsche, the fallacious character of the Will for power.  

Beyond the polemic which surrounds this work, the question which is posed is that of the possibility “of translating” Nietzsche, to interpret it. However, is it undoubtedly to take a risk to try to give a comment - which can be only one interpretation? - of a thinker who declared: “The innovation of our philosophical position is an unknown conviction of every former century: that not to have the truth.”  

Refusal of the philosophical language
Refusing by principle of fixing the verb inspired by the instinct, the thought of Nietzsche, with his discontinuity, even its ambivalent or contradictory dynamics which does not obey the regulation of the reason, is in major rupture with all the dialectical, systematic and deductive tradition which characterizes the Western thought since Plato. Nietzsche uses the aphorism and the fragmentation of the speech which makes it possible to restore with the word lives its character spell-binding, prophetic or enigmatic: they are the présocratiques ones and the Greek tragedies, except Euripide, evacuating the pathos suitable for the psychological analysis, which are the references asserted by Nietzsche. According to him, the “disease of the Occident” begins with Socrate, the man of the theory, which wanted to make use of the reason like wire of ARIANE to guide the man in the labyrinth of reality.  

Nietzsche reverses the classical architecture of the systematic thought founded on the non-contradiction and identity principles by subjecting it to a formal treatment baroque, proliferating, which breaks the unit semantic of the concepts. He refuses the simplifying character of the language which makes to identical the irreducible variegated differentiation of the world: the traditional philosophical language appears particularly inadequate to him for the expression of the expressive poetic fulgurances of a volcanic, eruptive and moving life interior. For him, the concept has something of prison, which solidifies living it, always singular.  

Against the Platonism
The universal abstract is considered to be illusory by Nietzsche. This is why the weather is the strange and revealing consent of its step, which is not, finally, that a debate with oneself and not a dialog with others, or a teaching step in the manner of great classics: “One does not only make a point of being understood when one writes, but also certainly not the being. It is by no means a sufficient objection against a book, if any nobody the incomprehensible judge.” There is aristocratic esotericism in this claim of the right to the radical subjectivity which goes hand in hand with the combat against the fatal and vulgar languages intended for the “people”, like this plebeian Platonism - morals of slaves based on the hatred of the life and the resentment - that was for him Christianity.  

Transcendence with the genealogy of the values
Since Parménide, the research of the truth in Western philosophy rests on the distinction between the Being, “which only is”, and appearance, the phenomenon which is not supposed to offer the truth to that which seeks it. The essential principle of the Greek thought is to be a metaphysical ontology, i.e. a research of the knowledge Être as Being, which is regarded as a transcendent unit with the significant and multiple reality of nature phusis. Nietzsche challenges the validity even concept of truth, and calls “back-world” this reality stable, identical to oneself, eternal, impassive, being unaware of the change, the fight, the pain and the death, which precisely characterizes the human condition and its load of anguish.  

The illusion of the “back-world”
The Western illusion crystallizes in the concept of substance, inducing a dualism which implies the “discrepancy of the values”, of the good and the evil, beautiful and ugly, truth and the forgery. Nietzsche as well raises this design in the Platonic Idea as in the ousía (“substance”) of Aristote, the LMBO Cartesian, the substance spinozist or the thing in oneself Kantian. The man, he affirms, projects his impulse with the truth out of oneself by building the ideal back-world, illusory lining of significant reality. This illusion is accentuated by the fact that the substance, identified with the good and divine, is regarded as the base of the values morals.  

This ideal conceived like transcendence, like truth and morals, moves the center of the human existence and devaluates the significant life without never examining its own titles of legitimacy.  

Declining will and will for power
All that exists is, in its bottom, will for power, which is the gasoline of the world, the life, to be it, the “most elementary fact”. Far from subscribing to the assertion of Schopenhauer which there exists one to want universal constituting the en-soi of the things, Nietzsche reaffirms that there is no substantiality of the will, neither behind the phenomena nor even behind ego. The will, like the conscience and the thought, is the remote echo of an in-depth combat already disputed, at the night level of the impulses. To want, it is to feel the triumph of a force which cut through a path without our knowledge, and the supreme illusion consists in taking this feeling for a free causality.  

In its broadest significance, the will for power governs the organic world (impulses, instincts, needs), the psychological and moral world (desires, motivations, ideals), and even the inorganic world, insofar as “the life is only one particular case of the will for power”.  

Any force takes part of the same gasoline: “It is the same force which is spent in artistic creation and the sex act; there is only one force.” It requires its own demonstration insatiably. To want, it is to want its own increase. The internal requirement of the will for power, it is to be more: it is a requirement which leaves the choice only between the fact of exceeding itself ad infinitum or that to decline. If any power is indeed overpower, to want it can try to conceal itself with itself and the law of its own increase: there is then declining will which refuses “to admit the fundamental conditions of the life” and which chooses the will of nothing. The ascetic ideal is an extreme example.  

There are thus two types of forces or life: the active force and the reactive force, ascending life and declining life. The powerful man is that which assumes the task to face his impulses by acquiring some the control instead of driving back them in attitudes of defensive denial. It is with this control that refer the expressions “great style”, “large teacher”, “great hope”, etc  

Nihilism
Nietzsche indicates by “European nihilism” the internal logic of the Occidental culture under the terms of which the values which reigned there since Plato are currently staggering. It is thus especially in the form of abandonment of the old values that the nihilism attacks the man and the culture, leading to the rout of any direction. This shock of the direction (moral, religious, metaphysical) results in the “great dislike” of the man for itself and all. Nothing is worth any more, all is thus worth: truth, the forgery, the good, evil. This anguish of the direction ends up anaesthetizing even the concern, which is transformed into a poor satisfaction: not seeking the direction more, the dark man in lazes intellectual and moral. Thus, this nihilism against which Nietzsche fights is refusal of the man, of what it could be, of what it could become.  

“God died”
“God died”: these words pronounced by Zarathoustra and recoveries in the Merry Knowledge (eminently Christian formula, which appears in a canticle of Bach) summarize this collapse of all the values. Nietzsche does not grant any deferment either to the substitutes claiming to relay the late values, that it is the Kantian morals, which postulates another world, or the laic ideals: faith in progress, religion of happiness-for-all, socialism, mystic of the culture or the man. But Nietzsche is not delighted by this death of God: it announces it only because this appalling news is still been unaware of of all, and that he judges that what is to be come, following this death of God, will be terrible.  
 Nietzsche privileges a vision of becoming marked by the ludic innocence of childhood and the intuition of eternity secretly immanent at the moment, vision which would escape the idea that all that passes merit to pass, that all is vanity. Moreover, to become it is not only one flow which would run out of the past towards the future. Paradoxically, there is a being of becoming: its permanence comes from what it does not cease returning on oneself, forming the large circle of the eternal return of same.  

Eternal return and destiny
Nietzsche celebrates this eternal return, who abolishes the vain distinctions of the Good and the Evil, under the name of amor fati (“love of the destiny”), which consolidates freedom paradoxically when this one is seen forced to adhere to an irrational need: “I am myself the destiny, and since eternities it is me which determines the existence.” This jubilation which the dissolution of ego personal in the assertion of the ego destiny involves signs the final death of the inheritance conquered so hard by Europe through the centuries, that of personalization, the assertion of the absolute value of each individuality. “At the bottom, all the names of the history, it is me”, he in Burckhardt writes, underlining by there the interchangeable character of the indefinitely masked identities. But this loss of ego, fictitious center or reality which the language ensured, means the coincidence of ego with the totality of the history: it is the negation of ego and the history, the return to the paramount Chaos, this “that” impersonal animated tensions and oppositions, and deprived by structure owing to the fact that the multiple seized the only will which could have organized it.  

Ego of Nietzsche, burst, hidden under the mask of Dionysos, cannot speak any more on its behalf: its dumbness according to the crisis of 1889 is perhaps the ransom of the subversion which he wanted to subject the language to free themselves from the common direction, including reflexive (philosophical), and to exorcize the interior tragedy which was his but to which he did not conceal himself, until losing the reason there. This dumbness perhaps also makes even more complex the continuation of the work of that which wrote, on on January 4th, 1889 with his/her friend Brandès: “After you discovered me, it was not an exploit to find me: the difficulty is now that to lose me. The Crucified person.”