Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born to Lutheran pastor Karl Ludwig Nietzsche in the small town of Rocken, Prussia. Nietzsche's grandfathers were also Lutheran ministers, and ""his paternal grandfather was further distinguished as a Protestant scholar, one of whose books (1796) affirmed the "everlasting survival of Christianity"" (Wicks, 1997). His father died when he was just five years old and the death of

Upon investigation of Nietzsche's ideals about "will to power" I was hard pressed to understand fully what concept he was trying to get across. Motion was a concept that seemed prevalent in most of his statements about will to power. "My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (its will to power) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement (union) with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on -" (Nietzsche, 1885). Nietzsche seems to state that all living things have a "will to power". "Anything which is a living and not a dying body...will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant - not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power...'Exploitation'...belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will to life" (Nietzsche, 1888).

A good illustration of the manner in which a person who has power, in Nietzsche's sense, may hurt another incidentally without the express wish of doing so, would be Goethe, whose love Nietzsche probably had to learn by heart, like most other German students. "Goethe-as German teachers like to point out-broke Friederike's heart by lavishing his love upon her and then not marrying her: here is one of the seeds of Gretchen tragedy. Goethe however had no thought of seeing the poor girl suffer" (Cazadora, 2000). Only the weak need to convince themselves and others of their might by inflicting hurt: the truly powerful are not concerned with others but act out of fullness and an overflow.

Later on in his career Nietzsche wrote a book called Ecce Homo, How One Becomes What One Is. This book retrospectively covers all of his works and tries to explain what he was driving for in each one. He is best remembered in this book for several topics entitled, "Why I am so Wise", "Why I am so Clever", and "Why I Write Such Good Books". "Nietzsche claims to be wise as a consequence of his acute aesthetic sensitivity to nuances of health and sickness in people's attitudes and characters; he claims to be clever because he knows how to choose the right nutrition, climate, residence and recreation for himself; he claims to write such good books because they allegedly adventurously open up, at least for a very select group of readers, a new series of noble and delicate experiences" (Wicks, 1997). The conclusion to his body of vignettes is one entitled "Why I am a Destiny". He claims that he is a destiny because he regards his anti-moral truths as having the annihilating power of intellectual dynamite. "In this way, Nietzsche expresses his hope that Dionysus, the god of life's exuberance, would replace Jesus, the god of the heavenly other world, as the premier cultural standard for future millennia.

Nietzsche along with Soren Kierkegaard is considered one of the forerunners of existentialism. Existentialism, as both an attitude and a movement, developed in Germany during the First World War, in France during the Second World War and spread to Britain and North America thereafter. As with all 'isms' one must be careful in making generalizations that do not apply to the whole. Within the broad context of existentialist philosophy we find atheists and believers. Central to the concerns of Existentialists is the attempt to do philosophy from the position of the subject rather than from a detached viewpoint. They also seek to question the accepted values of the church and society to find truths, which are

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