Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most provocative, misunderstood, and electrifying thinkers in the history of philosophy. He wrote with a hammer. That is not a metaphor — he literally described his method as 'philosophising with a hammer', smashing apart the comfortable assumptions that Western civilisation had built its moral and spiritual life upon. He was a 19th-century German philosopher, a classicist by training, who became convinced that the entire moral framework of European culture was built on a lie — and that confronting that lie was the most urgent task of his age. His ideas were later grotesquely distorted by the Nazis, with the help of his antisemitic sister Elisabeth, who edited his unpublished notes after his death and twisted them in directions he would have despised. Nietzsche himself was scathingly critical of German nationalism and antisemitism. Getting Nietzsche right matters, because when you do, you find not a prophet of domination, but a philosopher obsessed with one question: how do we create a meaningful, life-affirming existence in a world that no longer has God at its centre?

To understand Nietzsche, you need to understand the earthquake he believed his century was living through. In 1882, he wrote one of the most famous passages in all of philosophy. A madman runs into a marketplace, lantern in hand, crying: 'I seek God! I seek God!' The crowd laughs at him. And then the madman says: 'God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.' This was not a triumphant declaration. It was a diagnosis of catastrophe. Nietzsche was not celebrating the decline of religious belief in Europe — he was warning about its consequences. If God is the foundation of morality, of meaning, of purpose, then when that foundation crumbles, everything built on top of it crumbles too. The values that had guided Western life for two thousand years — humility, pity, self-denial, equality before God — had lost their grounding. Nietzsche called this crisis nihilism: the collapse of all values, the sense that nothing matters, that life has no meaning. His entire philosophy can be read as an attempt to answer the question: what do we do now?

Before we can understand Nietzsche's solutions, we need to follow him into his diagnosis of the problem. And that means confronting one of his most controversial ideas: his critique of morality itself. Nietzsche was not simply saying that some moral rules are wrong. He was saying that the entire moral framework that Western civilisation had inherited — what he called 'slave morality' — was a kind of psychological sickness. A brilliant, corrosive, historically successful sickness. To understand what he meant, we need to go back to ancient Greece and Rome.

In ancient aristocratic societies, Nietzsche argued, morality worked very differently from how we think of it today. The powerful — warriors, nobles, rulers — defined what was good simply by looking at themselves. They were strong, vital, creative, self-affirming. So 'good' meant: strong, noble, excellent. And 'bad' meant: weak, common, base. This was not a moral judgement about others — it was a celebration of one's own power and vitality. Nietzsche called this 'master morality'. It was not humble. It was not meek. It said: I am good. My strength, my creativity, my will to flourish — these are good things. The opposite of good, in master morality, is simply 'bad' — meaning mediocre, low, lacking in excellence. There is no deep resentment here. The noble warrior does not hate the weak. He simply does not think much about them at all.