Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche, trained as a classical philologist, left the university early and wrote as an independent critic of European culture. In The Gay Science the madman announces that God is dead and that we have killed him. The claim is a diagnosis. The Christian foundation of Western values has collapsed, and neither Kantian morality nor Hegelian history can replace it without cost. He asks what new values can be created once the old guarantee is gone. Later discussions of nihilism, truth, and the will begin from that challenge.