I’ve been drawn to philosophy since my mid-teens. But, despite all the books I read, all the classes I took at university, and all the conversations I had with friends, philosophy didn’t truly come alive to me until, at the age of twenty-six, I had a sudden philosophical awakening.

I was taking a post-grad course in outdoor education and I’d been revisiting the philosophers and psychologists who’d influenced me. Outdoor education, for me, was a tool for personal development and I wanted to have a clear sense of what personal development really meant.

One evening during the Christmas holidays, I sat down in a friend’s cottage with some books by Nietzsche. The wood-burning stove made the room warm and snug, and my friend was busy making twine out of nettles that he’d collected earlier in the year.

We’d spent the day running steep rivers in our kayaks, so perhaps dealing with danger all day long had made it easy for me to contemplate the nature of life and of death. Perhaps the fatigue in my muscles made it easy for my mind to focus. Perhaps I’d just reached a new level of maturity. One way or another, certainly, Nietzsche’s thinking hit home in a way it never had before. I read page after page, absorbing his thinking, and then saw in a flash that he was right — and not just right in the trivial sense of his reasoning being correct. I saw that his whole way of looking at things was valid. He’d been using his high rhetorical style to reveal flaws in the whole project of western philosophy, and I suddenly saw that those flaws were real. There genuinely was no bedrock underpinning the moral philosophies that Nietzsche was attacking. The philosophical systems were shaped by historical forces and personal stories of the philosophers, not by underlying truths. There were no solid foundations, not in logic, nor in a scientific understanding of the world.

I then aimed Nietzsche’s methods at my own ethical beliefs and, at that point, everything in my life changed. My beliefs fell apart. Yet being an ethical person was a core part of my identity. I was a vegetarian for ethical reasons. I’d stood for election for the Green Party. I’d even chosen to work in outdoor education because I saw it as an ethical career path. But was it? For my choices to be justifiable, I had to assume that some possibilities were better than others in some fundamental sense. But what could those fundamentals be? I didn’t know. I felt exposed. Excited. Intimidated. The ground had disappeared from beneath me.

So I set out on a philosophical quest, determined to find an intellectually solid foundation upon which to build the rest of my life.