Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is the wild man, the self-proclaimed anti-Christ, of Western thought. A brilliant polemicist, he champions energy over reason and art over science while contmptuous of the quiet, "timid" virtues of domesticity, democracy, and peace. He is absolutely central to modern and postmodern attempts to rethink the Western tradtion's most fundamental assumptions.
He was born in Röcken, a small village in Prussian Saxony. He was the son and grandson of Lutheran ministers. Having received his doctorate at the University of Leipzig, Nietzsche was appointed professor of philology at the Univeristy of Basel in Switzerland in 1869. He met Wagner and Cosima von Bülow in late 1868, and his first book, The Birth of Tragedy(1872), combines a new theory of Greek tragedy with an extended argument that Wagner's work constitutes a German rebirth of that ancient form.
On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense

What do human beings really know about themselves? Are they even capable of perceiving themselves in their entirety just once, stretched out as in an illuminated glass case? Does nature not reman silent about almost everything, even about our bodies, banishing and enclosing us within a proud, illusory consciousness, far away from the twists and turns of the bowels, the rapid flow of the blood stream and the complicated trembling of the nerve-fibres? Nature has thrown away the key...

• Truth is a comfortable lie; it suggest that "the world [is] something which is similar in kind to humanity," and it boosts self-confidence, the untroubled conviction of being right. While Nietzsche is scornful of this smug"Anthropomorphism," he does underline its utility.
• This "first metaphor" introduces an unbridgeable gap, which leas Nietzsche to conclude that " subject and object" are "absolutely different spheres."
• Once Nietzsche pulls the veil of illusion from our eyes and shows that truth is a "mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms,"

The Birth of Tragedy

In the views described here we already have all the constituent elements of a profound and pessimistic way of looking at the world and thus, at the same time, of the doctrine of the Mysteries taught by tragedy: the fundamental recognition that everything which exists is a unity; the view that individuation is the primal source of all evil; and art as the joyous hope that the spell of individuation can be broken a premonition of unity restored.