The German philosopher Fredreich Nietzsche once wrote in one of the many heavy tomes of wisdom he had written over his long years of self imposed isolation that ‘God is dead, God remains dead. How may we comfort ourselves? We murderers of murderers?’ It was the 19th century and he had foreseen that a severing from the divine meant a new and perilous chapter for Mankind. Now free to create self created goals instead of following a familiar divine charted territory. He also wrote ‘I am Dynamite’ and wrote a book literally called ‘Why I am so Wise’ before spending his last years not exploding into the world like his fabled Zarathustra but alone and insane, which historians and experts have hypothesized could have been a result of either syphilis or something akin to a schizophrenic permanent break from reality. This makes Nietzsche in my mind one of the most tragic of all thinkers and is a stark reminder of how the search for deep knowledge can burn and beyond making suffering bearable does not take away the pain those same burns inflict. Perhaps in a sense he was dynamite. A mind that exploded into the future but which burnt out in a brilliant explosion of colors, as if some supernova.

Around about the same time in Germany, a contemporary of Nietzsche (One Phillip Mainlander) developed an idea so strange, so perplexing and so dark and depressing that it destroyed its creator or receiver not long after the transmission was received. Mainlander had developed a metaphysics for eternity which began with a suicide in what has been called the most nihilistic and most depressing philosophical idea ever committed to paper – the suicide of God. A few months after it was published, Mainlander was dead by his own hand, ironically hanging himself by standing on copies of his own book in an act of self destruction possibly more tragic than Nietzsche’s descent into chronic insanity.

Nietzsche once also chastised Mainlander as ‘The apostle of virginity’

This collection is a chronicle of a series of compiled challenging essays, extracts and analysis of these great premodern and modern philosophical thinkers who not only created the ideas that drive the modern world but many who continue to present challenges to our increasingly post-modern existence in the 21st Century and who remain as relevant and vital today as they were back then. The collection also includes selections from writers, poets and painters as well as ‘canon’ philosophers.