Nietzsche matters because, at the close of the 19th century, he saw with unflinching clarity the intellectual and, lacking a better term, spiritual exhaustion of Europe.
He matters because, in his own way, he wagered his intellectual life on offering Western civilization (so-called) a new way forward. Understanding, of course, that, ex nihilo nihil fit, Nietzsche ransacked European intellectual and religious history for sources of inspiration. He found it in Montaigne and Schopenhauer--in many ways as unlikely a pair of bedfellows as one could hope to meet; but that was yet another example of Nietzsche's genius.
Montaigne's uncommon common sense and clear-eyed acceptance of humankind with all of its faults and foibles reflects to an uncomfortable degree the 16th century gentleman's retirement to his country estate; on the cusp of the 20th century, his meditations seemed to Nietzsche to lack something--a je ne sais quoi. The missing ingredient was supplied by the acerbic punch of Schopenhauer's blindly self-assertive Wille.
One can certainly quarrel with the proportions Nietzsche chose for his recipe--Schopenhauer is a stiff drink and a little bit of him goes a long way. But the powerful mixture certainly caught the attention of the most important thinkers to follow in Nietzsche's wake--Heidegger, Sartre, and Marcel among them. Indeed, one might say that this Nietzschean cocktail determined the direction of European philosophy throughout the 20th century and remains, to this day, the narrow gate through which one must pass to productive thinking.
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