Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844 in Ršcken, Germany, the son of a Lutheran minister. His father went insane and died while Nietzsche was quite young, and young Friedrich grew up the only boy in a household of women. He was an excellent student, and so impressed his professor at university that he was granted a doctorate and a professorship in philology at the age of 24, before he had even written a dissertation. At this time, he was deeply impressed with the philosophy of Kant and Schopenhauer, though he would later come to criticize both these figures.
In 1870, the young Nietzsche served as a medical orderlie in the Franco- Prussian War, where he contracted dysentery, dyptheria, and perhaps syphilis. He suffered from increasing ill health, migraines, indigestion, insomnia, and near blindness for the rest of his life.
While the philosophy of Nietzsche's day was marked by an unbridled optimism in the future of science, knowledge, and the German people, Nietzsche characterized his age as "nihilistic." He took the Christianity, nationalism, and anti-Semitism that dominated Germany at the time as signs of a degenerate culture lacking positive values. Prophetically, Nietzsche predicted that if European nihilism were to run unchecked, the following century would see wars of a kind this earth had never before experienced.
Nietzsche's first book, The Birth of Tragedy, was published in 1872, in which he praised Richard Wagner, who he had befriended. Nietzsche's admiration for Wagner cooled during the 1870's, largely owing to Wagner's anti-Semitism, nationalism, and Christianity. Because of Wagner's early influence, and owing also to the influence of Nietzsche's sister who was also a virulent nationalist and anti-Semite, Nietzsche was particularly outspoken against German nationalism and anti-Semitism (not to mention Christianity) throughout his career.
Nietzsche's mature period began with the publication of Human, All- Too-Human in 1878, and culminated with Thus Spoke Zarathustra, published in four parts between 1883 and 1885. As Nietzsche's health quickly declined, his writing became more and more prolific, and he wrote Beyond Good and Evil, On The Genealogy of Morals, The Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Ecce Homo, The Case of Wagner, and Nietzsche Contra Wagner between 1886 and 1888. In January 1889 he collapsed in the street and became insane. He remained a vegetable for the last eleven years of his life, and died in 1900.
Nietzsche's sister was his literary executor, and she used her brother's fame to advance her own proto-Nazi views, distorting Nietzsche's opinions and publishing selectively to make Nietzsche seem to support her cause. For the first half of the twentieth century Nietzsche was largely misconstrued as being the primary philosopher of Nazism even though he is quite explicit about his hatred for German nationalism and anti-Semitism in many of his writings.
Nietzsche has influenced twentieth century thought more than almost any other thinker. He has been an inspiration to almost every new movement in Continental philosophy in this century, and his critiques and methodology were far ahead of his time. Among those who owe a debt to Nietzsche are Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Thomas Mann, George Bernard Shaw, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

That a thing has a meaning at all means that there is some will dominating it, bending it toward a certain interpretation. That a thing may have different meanings over time suggests that different wills have come to dominate it. For instance, the concept of "good" was once dominated by the will of healthy, strong barbarians, and had the opposite meaning that it does now that it is dominated by the will of weak, "sick" ascetics.
According to Nietzsche, then, a belief in an absolute truth or an absolute anything is to give in to one particular meaning, one particular interpretation of a thing. It is essentially to allow oneself to be dominated by a particular will. A will that wishes to remain free will shun absolutes of all kinds and try to look at a matter from as many different perspectives as possible in order to gain its own. This doctrine that has deeply influenced postmodern thought is called "perspectivism."
Nietzsche's inquiries are thus conducted in a very irreverent spirit. Nothing is sacred, nothing is absolute, nothing, we might even say, is true. Our morality is not a set of duties passed down from God but an arbitrary code that has evolved as randomly as the human species itself. The only constant is that we, and everything else, are constantly striving for more power, and the only constant virtue is a will that is powerful, and free from bad conscience, hatred, and ressentiment.
Nietzsche's main project in the Genealogy is to question the value of our morality. Nietzsche concludes that "man would rather will nothingness than not will."