Friedrich Nietzsche was a prodigy of classical philology, awarded a professorship at the University of Basel at the age of twenty-four — before he had even finished his doctorate. Chronic migraines, near-blindness, and violent digestive collapse forced his resignation ten years later. What followed was a decade of restless wandering through the boarding-houses of Switzerland, Italy, and southern France: no chair, no institution, no permanent address — just notebooks, a failing body, and an output of extraordinary density.
He did not write treatises. He wrote aphorisms — compressed, provocative, deliberately unsystematic — and poetry disguised as philosophy in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. "I philosophize with a hammer," he said of his method: not to smash, but to test — to tap the great idols of morality and listen for the hollow sound.
In January 1889, in a piazza in Turin, he collapsed — reportedly weeping over a horse being whipped — and never regained his sanity. He spent his last eleven years in mental collapse, cared for first by his mother, then by his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, an antisemitic nationalist who edited his unpublished notebooks into a book he never wrote, The Will to Power, and later courted the Nazi party with a curated, distorted version of her brother's thought. It is one of history's great ironies: Nietzsche broke with his friend Wagner partly over antisemitism, and despised German nationalism outright.