If there are still such things, in this ironic postmodern age, as dangerous thoughts, surely no book is more overflowing with them than Friedrich Nietzsche's Will to Power. No other great work of recent literature has heralded the decline of modern Western civilization as emphatically. In The Will to Power many of Nietzsche's fundamental insights are encountered as they first inspired the thinker and as he first wrestled them into words. Moreover, Nietzsche's central theme of nihilism - the uncanny and pervasive feeling that life is devoid of all meaning, purpose, and value - is subjected here to a more thoroughgoing and multifaceted examination than can be found anywhere in his finished writings.