Friedrich Nietzsche:

Full disclosure: the first time i read Nietzsche i felt that his books were just a ridiculous collection of nonsense, written in poor German, and largely based on an embarrassing degree of ignorance about anthropology, sociology, art and science; and i haven't changed my mind since then. I still have to understand why he became so famous. I am not sure that he also became influential because i think the century that followed had little use for his philosophy and/or his method (assuming he had one).

This book contains 638 aphorisms. There is some coherence in them but it takes a lot of patience to find it. The vast majority of sentences are either enigmatic, gratuitous or both. The format follows (but does not match in quality) Montaigne's "Essays", LaRochefoucauld's "Sentences and Maximes", and Schopenhauer's "Aphorisms for Practical Wisdom". The content is mostly negative: Nietzsche specializes in demystifying what millions of people hold dear, and in this he (and his era in general) certainly succeeded.

He claims that dreams were the origin of all metaphysics, especially during an earlier stage of Homo Sapiens when hallucinations were ordinary (no evidence provided for this), and then proceeds to discuss the "logic of dreams". What he concludes out of the chapter on metaphysics is that truth is constantly changing and relative, and ultimately unattainable. We cannot know the metaphysical/religious world (not even whether it exists).

The two chapters on morality is more interesting. He objects that Kant's ethics would create a world of humans who behave identically, and that might not be as desirable as one thinks. He mentions that the irrational is unavoidable and it is actually good. There are no goals in the human condition: what drives the history of Homo Sapiens is merely the struggle between pleasure and pain. This also means that we are not responsible for anything: we are just driven by natural instincts. The sense of guilt for our actions that hurt others is based on the incorrect assumption that we control our actions; but we are not responsible for our nature, and our deeds follow from our nature. If self-defense is moral, then anything is, because all our actions, driven by our nature, are ultimately meant to preserve ourselves. There is no difference between good and evil: there is only human nature. We are all innocent. Society invented the idea of "morality" and initially it simply meant that every individual had to behave according to customs/tradition, which enforced "habits" in the individual, and habit is usually felt as a pleasure. Rules were initially enforced by violent means and then, once accepted, became virtues. We now live in the stage of moral humanity, and he hopes that the next stage will be of wise humanity.

The chapter on religion is mainly an attack against Christianity, especially compared with Greek religion. In Greece humans and mortals were simply two coexisting castes. He even makes fun of "saints", who are extremists which would normally be considered dangerous if they weren't inspired by religion. At the very end he upholds Buddhism as a much better religion.

The chapter on art is all pomp and speculation. After reading that chapter, i feel like never listening to music again. We also learn that Voltaire was the last great dramatist. The only great insight of this chapter comes towards the end, where Nietzsche argues that the "scientific man" is an evolution of the "artistic man". He doesn't explain how he reached that conclusion (mainly because he totally missed the great scientific revolution of his time) but that statement got me thinking.

He keeps talking about the "free spirit", the person who "thinks otherwise than would be expected" (actually, not a person but a "man" because the free spirit is consistently male). This free spirits "live for knowledge alone", and "higher knowledge is always misunderstood". Nietzsche advises free spirits not to get married but "to fly alone". He ends a chapter with Socrate's invocation "Take these women away!"

Turning finally to politics, Nietzsche calls socialism "reactionary", praises Jews for having saved Western civilization, and thinks that war is essential and that surrogates such as violent spectacles and voyages of exploration won't do.

• Main article
• "Human all too Human"
• "Thus Spoke Zarathustra"
• "Beyond Good and Evil"
• "Twilight of the Idols"
• "The Anti-Christ"
• "Ecce Homo"