Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is the most electrifying and most misread philosopher in the Western canon. "God is dead" (The Gay Science, 1882) was not triumphant atheism but a diagnosis of cultural catastrophe: without the organising fiction of God, Western civilisation faced nihilism. His answer was the Ubermensch — an individual who creates their own values in the face of meaninglessness. The will to power, eternal recurrence, and master-slave morality are among the most original ideas in philosophy. Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885) is the only major philosophical work written as prose poetry. His sister Elisabeth falsified his unpublished notes and gave his papers to the Nazis — a posthumous betrayal he would have found intolerable, having written sharp polemics against German nationalism and anti-Semitism throughout his career.