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Despite the fact that he was a late-nineteenth-century thinker, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) provided arguments that challenge and undermine many of the assumptions that we still hold dear today. It is difficult for us to imagine a world without common sense, the distinction between truth and falsehood, the belief in some form of morality or an agreement that we are all human. But Nietzsche did imagine such a world and he also argued that we should write and think in such a way that we would realize this world. Nietzsche was not just another philosopher or thinker: he challenged the very concepts of knowledge and thought. More importantly, he insisted that through transforming how we write and think we might transform who we are.

Nietzsche's philosophy insists that we ask questions about a range of issues that we assume to be matters of common sense. Whereas most philosophers are content to find a place for themselves within the received history of thought by analyzing and refining the function of concepts, Nietzsche posed the radical questions: What is thought for? What does it mean to "think" and how is thinking related to other forces within life? When we say that our culture and way of life reflect our "values", how do we create values and how do they express the way we do or should live? We assume, he explained, that humanity is born with an innate moral sense and that truth is an objective and ideal standard by which we regulate our ideas and actions. But what if we discovered that "morality" is the historical effect of regimes of cruelty, violence and force and that "truth" is merely a particular perspective we impose upon life in order to render it explicable in moral terms? Could we possibly conceive of a way of living beyond the moral dichotomy of good and evil? And if we could do so, what might such a life look like?

The challenge of Nietzsche's work consists in the questions he poses concerning the meaning and value of life. Nietzsche felt compelled to pose these questions because he believed that modern life was characterised by a fateful form of "nihilism". Nietzsche employed the term "nihilism" to describe the sense of emptiness or "nothingness" befalling a people that had no faith in the standards and values that regulated its daily life, but who could find no way to bring new values into being. The problem for humanity today, he argued, is that it no longer believes in the moral ideals that shaped the Christian view of the world, but lacks the power to create values capable of underpinning a new vision of life. All around him Nietzsche saw men and women who could no longer believe in the transcendent value of Christian divinity, but felt unable to dispense with the rules and prohibitions of Christian morality. As he wrote in Twilight of the Idols, first published in German in 1889, "They have got rid of the Christian God, and now feel obliged to cling all the more to Christian morality" (1990b: 80).

Nietzsche's famous declaration in The Gay Science, first published in German in 1882, of the "death of God" was intended to alert humanity to this "twilight of the Idols" and to underline the necessity of producing an interpretation of life unconstrained by the Christian inheritance.

What distinguishes Nietzsche from other nineteenth-century critics of religion, morality and nineteenth-century life is that he does not search for a more effective moral life; he attempts to save life from morality itself. He argues that nineteenth-century culture experiences life as a form of nihilism because it has invented a series of moral concepts such as "truth", "selflessness" and "equality" that have been raised above life in order to regulate and judge life. Not only do these moral values repress what Nietzsche took to be the most profound instinctual forces of life; they also encourage us to live reactively according to an inflexible and timeless moral law instead of creating our values actively for ourselves. For Nietzsche, the moral circumscription of life evacuated thought of positive content. "Morality is merely sign-language, merely symptomatology," he complained; "one must already know what it is about to derive profit from it" (1990b: 66). He worked tirelessly against what we might call the "transcendence" of thought: the subjection of life to concepts that determine the form and content of life. Instead, he sought to develop a principle of life that was interior to life and which might enable him to forge a connection between the most powerful forces of existence and the creation of new values. . .

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