Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844 as the son of a minister in Rocken near Lützen in Saxony. After beginning a study on theology he changes to filology. His studies resulted in a professorat in Basel in 1896. There he met Wagner. His first book The Geburt der Tragödie (1872) however had a cool reception. After he had to stop his military service as a result of falling of his horse, his headaches and bad sight worsened that bad that he had to retire already after 10 years. Travelling up and down from Swiss to Italy he wrote six books, namely Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, Jenseits von Gut und Böse and Zur Genealogie der Moral until in 1889 he mentally collapsed in Turin. Nursed by his family, but completely in comunicado, he lived on until the end of the century. In 1900 he died in Weimar.

If ever there has been a life of a tormented soul, the life of Friedrich Nietzsche is a candidate. Not only because of his chronic headaches and as a result of lack of recognition during his life, but also because of the radicality of his philosophy. Nietzsche's philosophical life was governed by a total rejection of the intellectual, cultural and emotional achievements of christian culture. He focuses on a revaluation of all values. Initially inspired by Schopenhauer and filled with enthousiasm of Wagner's musical ideas and music he already takes his distance from both in order to systematically dismantle philosophical notions of the `true', `good' and `beautiful' and pulverize the metaphysical foundation of reality and the world The One and God with blows of his philosophical hammer. Travelling between Italian and Swiss cities, living from one New Years depression to the other, during hours long moutainwalks in the light headed mountain air Nietzsche devotes his time to a double task: on the one side the destruction of christian values and description of the nihilism that is inherent to it, on the other side the articulation of his abyssal insights: the Will to Power, the Eternal Return and the Superman. According to the philosopher with the hammer human will and action are not constituted by the autonomy of the subject God on earth but by a dynamic field of forces. Even less the order of things is determined by an quest for a heavenly or worldly paradise, but rather by the return and embodiment of the same intensities that every being unwillingly has to recapture again and again. And finally the autonomous subject is not the ultimate being that crownes evolution as most 19th century scientists stated, but this yet has te be transgressed into another form of life. In Also sprach Zarathustra Nietzsche explains these endterms of his philosophy as abyssal thoughts in what seems to be a parody of the Bible. The entanglement of his thought within itself comes to the fore in a chapter called “On vision and riddle”. Zarathustra is climbing the mountain to the gate on top of which is written: `Augenblick' (Moment) As a transgression of everything that already happened and all that yet is to come, this moment destroys liniair time as the imprisonment of modern man. The Moment as momentum contains everything that has happened and still has to happen. Even the very thought Zarathustra has of this very moment: “Aand this sluggish spider that crawls in the moonshine, and this very moonshine, and I and you standing at this gate, whispering together,whispering of eternal matters have not we been here before already?”