The philosophers Hegel (1770–1831) and Nietzsche (1844–1900) in many ways could hardly be more different; they differ in style, method and conclusions. Hegel is methodical and technical where Nietzsche is deliberately unsystematic and literary; this renders them both obscure and difficult to understand, but in different ways. Yet there is a connecting intellectual element, although what each makes of this common element produces quite different philosophies.

The question arises as to what extent we can have a metaphysics of reality: to what extent we can be said to have knowledge of reality: how in a general way the world necessarily is in itself, as distinct from how it merely appears. A problem arises from the apparent separation of our view of how the world is and the world itself; once this separation takes place the problem is to determine to what extent our view of the world given in the concepts can be known to correspond to the world itself: reality. One way of looking at this problem of knowledge of reality is to try to determine which of our basic concepts with which we think about the world reflect actual objective and necessary features of the world, and which of our concepts reflect the contribution of what is merely subjective or contingent. In describing reality we aim to identify features that are true from any point of view, which is, so to speak, the point of view of things themselves.