Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche became a full professor of classical philology at twenty-four, the youngest in the history of the University of Basel. By thirty-five chronic illness forced him out of academic life, and he spent his last productive decade wandering Alpine villages writing the books that detonated 20th-century philosophy. In 1889 he collapsed in a Turin street, embracing a horse; he never recovered, and died eleven years later, mad.

His diagnosis: European culture has lost the Christian metaphysics that gave its values their authority, but it has not yet noticed. "God is dead" is not a triumph; it is a warning that the values built on God's existence are about to collapse and we have nothing ready to replace them. Nihilism — the realization that life has no built-in meaning — is the coming crisis.

His response is creative, not nostalgic. The task is to create values, to affirm life including its suffering (eternal recurrence: would you live this life again, exactly as it was, infinitely?), to overcome the all-too-human self in favor of a higher possibility (the Übermensch). His style — aphoristic, ironic, savage — is itself an argument.