Friedrich Nietzsche

German · 1844–1900

German philosopher whose work — most of it written in the 1880s before mental collapse silenced him at 44 — sits behind much of twentieth-century existentialism, postmodernism, and continental philosophy. He is best known for the declaration that "God is dead," the figure of the Übermensch in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, his attack on Christian morality as a "slave morality" born of resentment, and the idea of eternal recurrence. He wrote in aphorisms and provocations rather than systems, which has made him uncommonly easy to misread and misappropriate. Camus claimed Nietzschean vitalism as a major influence and rejected the existentialist label he is usually given alongside Sartre.

Wikipedia