Radical critique of reason and truth in favor of perspectivism; his genealogical critique of religion and Christian morality, and his related theory of master–slave morality; his aesthetic affirmation of existence in response to the "death of God" and the profound crisis of nihilism; his notion of the Apollonian and Dionysian; and his characterization of the human subject as the expression of competing wills, collectively understood as the will to power.

Precursor to expressionism, existentialism, and postmodernism.

W. B. Yeats and Arthur Symons described Nietzsche as the intellectual heir to William Blake.

German philosopher and critic of culture, who influenced a number of the major writers and philosophers of the 20th century Germany and France. Nietzsche`s most popular book, Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-1885), went ignored at the time of its appearance. Full of provocative ideas, Nietzsche was a master of aphoristic form and use of contradictions. Before and after the rise and fall of the Nazis, he was widely misrepresented as an anti-Semite and a woman hater, and many philosophers found it difficult to take his writings seriously. Like the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard (1813-1855), Nietzsche often contradicted himself. 

Friedrich Nietzsche born as the son of a Lutheran pastor and a devout hausfrau. His father died - mad - in 1849. Rejecting his father`s faith, Nietzsche became a lifelong rebel against Christianity. "In truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross", he wrote in DER ANTICHRIST (1888). Nietzsche was brought up by pious female relatives.

In 1872 Nietzsche published his first book, DIE GEBURT DE TRAGÖDIE AUS DEM GEIST DER MUSIK (The Birth of Tragedy). He diagnosed in it human beings as subject to unconscious, involuntary, overwhelmingly self-destructive Dionysian instincts. According to Nietzsche, against this tendency the Greeks erected the sober, rational, and active Apollonian principle. 

In January 1889 Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown in Turin, Italy. He was found in a street, weeping and embracing a horse. Nietzsche lived first in an asylum and then in his family`s care. His insanity was probably due to an early syphilitic infection. During his disease Nietzsche was almost invariably gentle and pleasant, and in lucid hours he engaged in conversation. Nietzsche spent his last decade in mental darkness and died in Weimar on August 25, 1900.