Say who everyone is as you go along - Faculty of Philosophy ...

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This seemed to open the possibility of sweeping away the old superstitions of
theology and metaphysics forever.
It is possible to discern four phases of Nietzsche's life, three sane and one mad:
an anti Socratic phase, a positivistic pro-Socratic phase, a relativist and pragmatist
Phase, and the final mad phase.
The anti-Socratic Phase lasts from 1869 to 1876. While holding the Chair of
Philology at the University of Basel (1864-1879) Nietzsche visited Richard Wagner
at Lake Lucerne. In The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872) Nietzsche
searched for a new non-Christian ethics in the Ancient Greeks and subsequently in
Wagner. Nietzsche contrasts Greek culture before and after Socrates with German
culture before and after Wagner. He argues that life is essentially tragic and
inexplicable but transmuted by art. The affirmation of life through creative genius
transmutes life into an aesthetic phenomenon. Creative genius is the goal and
justification of culture. The Dionysian and the Appollonian were fused in the
tragedies of Aeschylus before the advent of Socrates effected their bifurcation. If
their fusion could not be reinstated, it is a model to be emulated. During this phase,
Nietzsche was heavily influenced by Schopenhauer. In Untimely Meditations (1873-
6), Nietzsche is critical of the German theologican David Strauss (1808-1874),
author of the controversial Leben Jesu (Life of Jesus) (1835) and advocates
Schopenhauer’s philosophy, and Wagner’s opera and operatic theory. In 1870
Nietzsche served as a volunteer medical orderly in the Franco-Prussian War.
The positivistic pro-Socratic phase lasts from 1876 to 1883. Nietzsche resigned
from the chair at Basel in 1879 through ill-health and spent 1879-1889 in
Switzerland, Italy, Germany, devoting his time to writing. The book Human, All-too-
Human (1898-9) is profoundly anti-metaphysical and materialist and includes
naturalistic explanations of morality. For example: that a distinction is drawn
between good and evil is a necessary condition for a society. Conscience is the
internalised voice of secular, not divine, authority: the father, the mother, the teacher.
Daybreak (1881) is a tirade against ‘morality’. There is no God, no responsibility and
no morality. Nietzsche undermines our confidence that in acting we have knowledge
of the essential nature of our actions. This is a 'terrible truth'. (116) Our actions are
never what they appear to be. Nor is there any security in the rest of knowledge:
Neither the external world nor the internal world is as it appears. There is no escape
from the perspectives of own subjectivity. Nietzsche has an existentialist
appreciation of the lived reality of one’s own existence. He says that around every
being there is a circle, which has a mid point unique to that being, but this entails a
quasi-solipsism which makes knowledge impossible. Each of us is constrained by
their senses as if in a prison. When Nietzsche says 'It is all of it an error' (D 117) he
does not mean we can be even confident of this. His scepticism implies that any
belief we hold could in principle be mistaken. Our so called ‘knowledge’ exists only
in relation to the kind of senses we have: