Nietzsche

I think, like many continental philosophers, Nietzsche studied himself and his own inclinations and universalised them to the world. he found that his will to power was the dominant force in his psyche. To me the genealogy of morals is an interesting historical myth, through the lens of which we see one man's attempt to understand why his contemporaries so slavishly accepted the norms of their society without question or critical thought. It must have been hard for Nietzsche. In the introductory passages he acknowledges three, at most four, people who truly influenced and revolutionised his thinking. How lonely for a man so a head of his time to struggle to find mental stimulation and peers in a world that shone a flame so dull in comparison to an intellect that burned so bright.

For someone hailed as a nihilist, right-winger, or anti-humanist for me his writing is exceedingly humanitarian, exemplified - for me - by the first passages of the untimely meditation on the comparative advantages and disadvantages of history for life. He is a beautiful writer, and I love his secular myth - the Zarathustra.