Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher and cultural critic, born on 15 October 1844 in Röcken, in the Kingdom of Prussia. He trained as a classical philologist and became a professor at Basel while still in his twenties. Poor health forced him to resign in 1879, and he spent the following years moving between lodgings in Switzerland, Italy and France, writing steadily.

His books mix argument, aphorism, poetry and polemic. He questioned inherited ideas about morality, religion, truth and the value of suffering, and he asked how people might create meaning in a world without fixed certainties. In 1889 he suffered a mental collapse and wrote nothing more. He died on 25 August 1900. His influence on philosophy, literature, psychology and art in the twentieth century was immense, though his ideas have often been misread and misused.