Classical philology was the craft of dating a text, catching an interpolation, showing that a revered document had a messy history someone later tidied away. German scholarship had turned that craft on the Gospels, reading them as documents with sources, motives and later editors, and geology and Darwin took apart the timetable those documents assumed. By the middle of the nineteenth century educated Europe had largely stopped believing the Christian account of the world and had changed almost nothing else. The moral furniture stayed where it was: pity, humility, equality, guilt, the duty to put oneself last — still binding, no longer explained. Almost no one treated this as a problem.
Nietzsche treated it as the only problem, and he had been trained in exactly the discipline that caused it. He was good enough at it that Leipzig awarded his doctorate on the strength of published articles, without thesis or examination, and Basel handed him a chair at twenty-four. Then he pointed the method at morality. His claim, in ordinary words: our values are the outcome of an old fight rather than discoveries about the world, and the fight can be dated.
The profession answered his first attempt by shutting the door. The Birth of Tragedy, published in 1872, argued that Greek culture was a form built directly over a clear view of how terrible existence is, rather than the serene thing it had been taken for — and argued it without the apparatus a philological monograph was supposed to carry. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff replied with a thirty-two-page pamphlet, Zukunftsphilologie!, which quoted him inaccurately and declared him unfit for the field. That winter his lecture course on Greek eloquence drew two students. He never again wrote a book his colleagues could grade.
Illness accounted for much of the rest: he reckoned migraine cost him close to a third of every year, his eyesight was failing, and in 1879 he resigned the chair and took a pension. A decade in boarding houses followed — summers at Sils Maria, winters near the Mediterranean, most of it thought out while walking and written in the gaps between attacks. Those conditions shaped the work into aphorisms and numbered sections rather than systems, and they did not supply the argument.
The argument arrived whole in 1887, in On the Genealogy of Morality. Good and evil are not two halves of a permanent fact, Nietzsche wrote, but the result of a reversal, in which people with no power to strike back made their own condition — meekness, restraint, endurance — into virtue, and their opponents' strength into sin. He named the motive ressentiment and treated the whole transformation as history rather than revelation. The line he is quoted for, that God is dead, published five years earlier in The Gay Science, belongs to that same argument, and it is a report rather than a boast: the belief had stopped doing any work, and nobody had noticed that the morality resting on it would have to go too.
Nobody read this: he paid for Beyond Good and Evil himself, printed six hundred copies, and a year later had sold a hundred and fourteen. The fourth part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra he printed privately in forty copies and handed to seven friends. In 1888 the Danish critic Georg Brandes lectured on him in Copenhagen and called his position aristocratic radicalism, a phrase Nietzsche accepted with delight. Months later, in January 1889, he collapsed in Turin. He lived eleven more years and wrote nothing.
The manuscripts went to his sister Elisabeth, who had followed her husband to Paraguay to found an antisemitic colony; on her return she built an archive around her brother, assembled his notebooks into a book he never wrote — The Will to Power — and steered the result toward a nationalism his published pages attack directly. That was the version the Nazi state adopted, and undoing it took decades of argument, from Walter Kaufmann, R. J. Hollingdale and Georges Bataille, and finally the Colli–Montinari critical edition, which established what he wrote and in what order. The repair held, but one residue has not settled: scholars still disagree about how much weight those notebooks should carry against the books he sent to press.