The ideas and methods of Friedrich Nietzsche are the ideas and methods of modern thought. His is, arguably, the first philosophical voice of modern philosophy: the first to truly face the world without presupposition, the first to question everything that we have believed and that has enabled us to live for millennia. God, truth, "the good," morality, equality, democracy, reason itself: all are cast before the cold - or not so cold - eye of his scrutiny and none emerges the same ? some must die, some must humble themselves, some must run in fright - but none escapes examination. Nietzsche revolutionized both the lexicon and the style of philosophical thought. As magnificent as the writing of the Pre-Socratics, of Plato, of the philosophies of Hume, Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer can be, nothing prepared the world for the writing of Nietzsche; and no one came before him in opening up the scope of philosophical questioning to the entire range of human nature. In the eyes of Freud, he is the first psychoanalyst; he structured the primacy of language. The idea of "perspective," which revolutionized the study of man, is his; he created the method of immanent critique. The man who "philosophized with a hammer," who exhorted the "free spirits of Europe" to "smash the old tables of value," who wrote the obituary of God, for "a people is but a detour of nature to produce five or six men... and then, yes, to get beyond them as well." (Clive. pg. 43) Nietzsche's work has the impact of an opened fire door - perhaps the door to hell itself, and one is easily lost among the hundreds of experiments in thought which Nietzsche has outlined - almost any one of them is enough to deeply shake the world of any one of us. To become comfortable in Nietzsche's work would be the work of a lifetim ...