Encyclopedia of Philosophy: NIETZSCHE

In the nineteenth century, all that Kierkegaard stood for was bombastically rejected by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). While for Kierkegaard aesthetic enjoyment was the lowest form of individual existence and Christian self-denial the highest, Nietzsche regarded Christianity as the lowest debasement of the human ideal which finds its highest expression in purely aesthetic values.  After a Lutheran upbringing by his pious mother and aunts, Nietzsche felt a sense of liberation when, at the University of Leipzig in 1865, he encountered Schopenhauer's atheism. Henceforth he presented himself consistently as an opponent of the Christian ethos and the personality of Jesus. His conviction that art was the highest form of human activity found expression in his own philosophical style, which is poetic and aphoristic rather than argumentative or deductive. Appointed at the age of twenty-four to a Chair in philology at Basel, he dedicated to Richard Wagner his first book The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. In it he draws a contrast between two aspects of the Greek psyche: the wild irrational passions personified in Dionysus, and the disciplined and harmonious beauty represented by Apollo. The greatness of Greek culture lay in the synthesis of the two, which was disrupted by the rationalism of Socrates; contemporary Germany could be saved from the decadence which then overtook Greece only if it looked for its salvation to Wagner.