Genius of the Modern World (2016) s01e02 Episode Script
Nietzsche
In 1934, a photograph was taken here
which epitomised the extraordinary influence
of one of the most provocative and uncompromising thinkers
of the 19th century.
It's an image of Adolf Hitler
standing next to the bust of Nietzsche here
in Weimar where the philosopher lived.
- With chilling eloquence, this tells us what many Nazis believed
- -
that Nietzsche was the brilliant mind, the inspiration,
behind the terrifying ideologies of the Third Reich.
Yet if Nietzsche had been alive to see it, he would have been appalled.
His philosophies were being distorted by a regime
that stood for so much that he'd have loathed.
Nietzsche was one of the most dangerous minds of the 19th century.
Nietzsche thinks we have blood on our hands.
Because we haven't just killed God -
we've killed that which gave our lives meaning.
Nietzsche lived in a century in which Europe
was witnessing unprecedented change.
Where the authority of Christianity was being challenged.
Radical breakthroughs in science were redefining belief.
And thinkers like Freud, Marx,
and Nietzsche were suddenly free to unleash ideas that
in previous centuries would have seen them burnt at the stake.
Yet they heralded nothing less than the modern world.
In 1882, one of the greatest minds of the 19th century
predicted a crisis.
One that he believed would be without equal on Earth,
and which would be triggered by nothing less than the murder of God.
"God is dead, and God remains dead, because we have killed him.
"What was holiest and most powerful
"of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our eyes.
"Who will wipe the blood from our hands?"
These are the visceral, challenging words of Friedrich Nietzsche.
The crisis that he proclaimed was a wave of disbelief in Christianity
that he predicted would crash through Europe.
And the raw,
brutal language that he chose to describe this death of God
is a measure of just how terrifying he thought the consequence would be.
For what Nietzsche saw, with disturbing, prophetic clarity,
was that without a belief in God,
there was no authority for the moral values
that had underpinned European society across 2,000 years.
He was declaring our freedom from God, our mastery of our own fates.
No longer controlled by divine laws,
we were now liberated, or condemned, to create our own values.
But what haunted and tormented Nietzsche was his realisation that
this was a freedom that came at a terrible price.
The loss of religious belief would bring with it nothing less than
a vacuum of meaning in human existence.
It was a crisis that Nietzsche would wrestle with
for the rest of his life.
BELL RINGS
MUSIC: Messiah by Handel
The childhood of the man who would come to call himself the Antichrist
was, with no little irony,
one infused with the joy of Christianity.
When Nietzsche was just nine years old,
he heard Handel's Messiah for the first time.
And he said he felt he had to join in the joyful singing of the angels
on whose billows of sound Jesus ascended to heaven.
The man who would spend his life as an adult with a mission to attack
everything that Christianity stood for
started off in life as the son of a Lutheran pastor,
here in the very cradle of Protestant Christianity.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche grew up in the village of Rocken in Prussia,
now northern Germany.
And as a boy, he was passionately pious.
This is the parsonage where Nietzsche was born.
His father, Carl Ludwig, had a very simple faith,
and the household lived and breathed Christianity.
Nietzsche's early years were settled and sheltered.
His parents had two other children.
When he was two, his sister Elisabeth was born,
followed a year later by a brother, Joseph.
But in the autumn of 1848, when Friedrich was only four years old,
his childhood was ripped apart.
His father became mentally ill,
and was diagnosed with a terminal brain disease.
It was a torturous decline.
He went blind and eventually was bedridden.
One year later, he was dead.
An autopsy revealed that a quarter of his brain was missing.
This must have been a truly horrific end.
The suffering of his beloved father marked Friedrich for life.
As a teenager, he wrote about his father's funeral
in this church where he had once preached.
"Oh, never will the deep-throated sound of those bells quit my ear.
"The organ resounded through the empty spaces of the church."
For Nietzsche, the death of his father posed a profound question.
Why had this God,
whom his father had so loved and to whom he dedicated his life,
punished a good man with such torment?
It was the start of a journey into doubt that would come to define
Nietzsche's life.
Despite the loss of his father, in 1864, at the age of 20,
Nietzsche arrived in Bonn to study theology at the university,
contemplating a future as a Lutheran pastor.
But it was during his time here that he came under the influence of
a controversial new method of studying the Bible,
known as Biblical criticism.
And it scandalously suggested that this sacred text wasn't a credible
historical work, but largely myth.
It was radically undermining the authenticity of the scriptures.
And for Nietzsche, it had a dramatic impact.
If his father's death and suffering had made him question
the idea of God emotionally,
then this gave him the intellectual grounds on which to
construct his doubt.
Nietzsche's loss of belief caused an immediate rift with his family.
At Easter, he refused to attend church,
crushing his mother's dreams
that he would follow his father to the pulpit.
And his sister, who had always hero-worshipped her brother,
found her own faith thrown into chaos.
But for Nietzsche, his journey into doubt wasn't just a source of hurt
for those close to him.
It was the start of an all-consuming dissection
of the moral and religious beliefs with which he had grown up.
He began to regard Christianity not just as a faith regretfully lost,
but as a pernicious influence that encouraged
an unhealthy disengagement from the world.
Christian teaching, he argued, focused on the next life,
with disastrous consequences.
Earth became a place of bleak exile from God.
Life was a thing of pain and suffering to be endured,
not celebrated.
And this emphasis on the life to come robbed the here and now of its
sublime meaning.
This was a conviction that would dominate his life and his work
for the next two decades.
Rejecting Christianity forced Nietzsche
to flee his theological studies,
and to seek out a new direction.
Right from the start,
Nietzsche realised that his loss of faith wasn't the path to
a life of contentment.
In 1865, Nietzsche wrote to his sister, and said,
"If you wish to seek peace of mind and happiness, then believe.
"If you wish to be a disciple of truth, then investigate."
Nietzsche was living in an age dominated by the rise of science,
where the search for objective truth was all-consuming.
But what Nietzsche saw with searing clarity was that the triumph of
objectivity deprived humanity of something fundamental.
Without Christianity,
there was no set of binding moral rules by which we could all live.
There was no solution to man's fear of death.
And perhaps most importantly,
with eternal salvation no longer mankind's prime goal,
life itself didn't have a higher spiritual purpose.
It was to finding new meaning in a godless universe that Nietzsche now
dedicated himself.
And his first glimpse at an answer came at the age of 21.
He decided to become a student of philology,
the study of the ancient civilisations and the philosophies of Greece and Rome.
And he was in a book shop when he came across a work that would
influence the way he thought and acted for the next decade.
It was called The World As Will and Idea,
and it was written by a German philosopher called Schopenhauer.
As he read it, Nietzsche was transfixed.
Schopenhauer was an atheist,
who had also grappled with the purpose of life.
But his conclusions were beyond pessimistic.
Faced with the problem of life's endless sufferings,
Schopenhauer's bleak conclusion
was that it was best never to be born at all.
He argued that human beings were in a state of constant desire.
If we didn't achieve these desires, then there was discontent,
and even if we did, then discontent would set in anyway.
His solution was to face up to the fact that fulfilment is impossible.
He encouraged us not to strive for happiness
in order to avoid the anxiety and trouble in trying to achieve it.
The happiest man, he said,
is the one who gets through life with the minimum of pain.
Nietzsche said it was like looking into a mirror
that reflected the world, life,
and his own mind with hideous magnificence.
But whilst he accepted Schopenhauer's diagnosis
that life was just a cycle of suffering,
he passionately disagreed with his life-denying,
nihilistic conclusions,
the idea of giving up on life and the pursuit of one's desires.
Instead, he was determined to find a way of affirming existence
in spite of its pain.
In 1869,
the brilliant Friedrich became a professor of philology
here at Basel University at the age of only 24,
the youngest in its history.
With his first book, which he wrote while he was here,
he began to gain a reputation as a radical and subversive thinker.
In his work, which he called The Birth of Tragedy,
he started to grapple with the issue of how to deal with suffering
in a world devoid of God.
And for inspiration, he turned to the ideas of the Greeks,
and a new focus of his devotions - the German composer Richard Wagner.
On the 22nd of May 1872,
the foundation stone was laid for Wagner's Festival Theatre.
One of the guests at the ceremony was Nietzsche.
The two men had met six years before when Nietzsche was just a student,
and immediately he was smitten.
Wagner became both an obsession and an inspiration.
Nietzsche would come to believe that in Wagner's work,
he had glimpsed what it was that made life itself worthwhile - art -
and that the greatest art form of all was music.
DOOR OPENS
MUSIC: Entrance of the Gods into Valhalla
from Das Rheingold by Wagner
Nietzsche believed Wagner to be an artistic genius
whose music was going to bring about
a cultural rebirth based on the classical Greek model of tragedy.
It was an art form that Nietzsche was convinced could transform
a world full of suffering into something beautiful and meaningful.
How did Nietzsche come to write The Birth of Tragedy?
What was he trying to do with this book, do you think?
Nietzsche wrote The Birth of Tragedy after a series of incredibly intense
conversations with Wagner.
Wagner was developing a revolutionary theory of art,
where art could transform society.
Nietzsche wanted to provide the philosophy for that.
He found in Greek tragedy a model for that thinking.
Greek tragedy tells these extremely visceral stories of human beings
in conflict, suffering, destructive.
Yet it was the dominant genre of thinking about the glory of Greece.
Consequently, he found in Greek tragedy
a way of talking about the human being today,
the human being's suffering, finding meaning in life,
finding the truth.
So what is so explosive about what he is putting down on the page?
Well, Nietzsche structured his book around an opposition
between two Greek gods - Apollo and Dionysus.
Apollo stood for light, for the truth of logic, for control.
And since the beginning of Germans' love of Greek,
they associated Greece with rationality,
the beginnings of philosophy.
But Nietzsche decided he wanted to focus more on Dionysus,
the figure who confuses boundaries,
who discovers ecstatic group activity,
dancing, wildness, the visceral feelings.
And he made that the centre of his tragedy.
So he was standing against philosophy, against his own subject,
against that sense that logic is the way to truth.
He wanted to find another sort of truth, another transformative power.
But how did he think that Dionysus,
with all his darkness, and as you say, chaos, sometimes,
and loss of control - how is that going to help mankind?
Nietzsche was reacting against the dominant German intellectual tradition,
which focused on the individual hero, the Oedipuses, if you like.
And they saw that the individual who suffered could somehow
transcend themselves through suffering.
A very Christian message. Nietzsche reversed that,
and saw instead that the individual somehow lost themselves in
the collective, and found in a group experience
an ecstatic transformational experience.
That's what he saw in Wagner's music,
and that's what he saw in tragedy,
so that somehow the suffering that was everybody's condition
was transformed through this ecstatic experience
into an affirmation of life, this life, here and now.
It's a bit like that sense of a rock concert -
the idea that you somehow lose yourself in this great, ecstatic, collective experience.
And one should never forget that opera in the 19th century
was the rock music of its time, and Wagner was the rock icon of his day.
And Nietzsche believed
that was the way that society could be transformed,
through a sense of the collective experience,
from which you could go out and change the world.
Wagner's theatre was a temple to his brilliance.
But it was also the place where Nietzsche
fell violently out of love with his hero.
When Nietzsche came here to watch a performance of Wagner's opera
The Ring, he hated what he found.
Rather than a place of revolution,
the theatre was stuffed with the great and the good of Europe,
and the man that he'd revered as a radical,
who he thought would catalyse the birth of a brave new world,
was just the hero of a self-satisfied festival of opera,
revelling in his own glory.
Nietzsche stormed out of the theatre mid-performance.
It marked the beginning of the end of their friendship,
and a new phase in Nietzsche's philosophical quest.
Nietzsche's rejection of Wagner
coincided with a similarly radical change in his own life and work.
Whilst he continued to teach in Basel,
he began to have severe doubts as to whether it was here
that his future lay.
He still believed that it was through liberating the creative Dionysian spirit
that greatness could be achieved.
But he began to doubt that the answer
lay with the transformation of the masses.
Instead, it was the flourishing of great visionary individuals
that would hold the key to the future.
And he was convinced that the petty responsibilities of academic life
were suffocating his own creative genius.
He conceived a deep dread of coming back here to lecture,
to what he called the greatest curse of his life.
Depressed and anxious, he developed what he called Baselophobia.
Nietzsche longed to break free.
The key to life, he wrote, was to live dangerously.
On the 2nd of May 1879, he resigned his professorship.
As Nietzsche left Basel, he was gripped by debilitating ill-health.
Since childhood, he had been plagued by violent stomach pains
and blinding headaches.
And haunted by the fear that he, too, would be struck down by
the disease that killed his father.
Nietzsche's physical challenges had been the final trigger
for his resignation.
Although his doctors warned that excessive reading and writing
would cause him to go blind,
nothing was going to stop his pursuit of a life of philosophy.
Nietzsche began to crisscross Europe,
staying in hotels and guesthouses,
and climates that alleviated his medical symptoms.
He would spend the rest of his sane adult life
in a state of nomadic solitude.
You can just imagine him, ill, troubled, increasingly isolated,
and yet with this extraordinary mind for company.
Over the next decade,
the ideas and thoughts that poured onto the page
were simply astonishing.
His ill-health would mean that he could only write in bursts of 20 minutes at a time,
so his books were full of incisive aphorisms, pithy statements,
rather than long philosophical treatises.
And it was on a train in 1881
that he was told about somewhere that would
provide the inspiration for many of these great works.
A fellow traveller recommended that he visit a place called Sils Maria.
Just a tiny little farming village in the Swiss mountains.
He followed their advice and discovered the place
that would become his spiritual homeland.
On Monday the 4th of July 1881,
Nietzsche fell in love at first sight with Sils Maria.
Its mountains and forests inspired his most life-affirming ideas.
Its beauty reinforced for him the sheer magnificence of existence.
And it was on one of his walks here, a month after he'd arrived,
that Nietzsche had what he believed was the most important thought
he'd ever conceived.
He was walking by this lake when he stopped
next to this rock and suddenly had a vision.
This was a thought experiment that Nietzsche believed
would help us all to analyse every action,
every decision of our lives,
so that we could live those to the full.
This was his question -
if a demon were to whisper in your ear that you had to live your life
as lived time and time again throughout eternity,
with all the pain and with all the greatness,
would you fall to the ground and gnash your teeth and curse that demon,
or would you say that he was a god and that his utterances were divine?
It was an idea that became known as the eternal recurrence of the same,
and it formed the very essence of Nietzsche's attitude to life,
to both its joys and its hardships.
Nietzsche believed that even though we all have things that we might
consider failures - the break-up of a relationship,
or the death of a loved one - we should be happy to relive those events, too.
Just as a pianist learns to master improvisations, so we should
learn to incorporate mistakes and imperfections and sorrows
into the beauty of the whole.
We should construct our lives so we are our own heroes.
Basically, we should decide who we want to be,
how we want to live our life, and then love the choices that we've made.
So that the thought of reliving our existence, for good and for bad,
can be greeted with a life-affirming "Yes".
The eternal return was an exuberant and optimistic embrace of life.
Suffering wasn't something that you had to be redeemed from,
as Christianity taught,
or avoided at all costs, as Schopenhauer argued.
Instead, it was to be embraced, mastered.
To live life most fully, one had to risk suffering and overcome it.
What doesn't kill you makes you stronger
is one of Nietzsche's most iconic phrases.
And it was one that he himself
was just about to have to put to the test.
The philosopher was about to face one of the greatest disappointments
of his life.
It was in the beautiful town of Lucerne that, in the spring of 1882,
Nietzsche contemplated abandoning his life of seclusion
for a life of love with a woman he was entranced by.
Her name was Lou Salome.
She was 21, Russian born, clever, beautiful,
and fascinated by his ideas.
Nietzsche was lost.
Nietzsche and Lou spent hours walking together,
discussing philosophy, absorbed in their own world.
And Nietzsche brought her here,
to what was known as Lion Garden, in the centre of Lucerne, to propose.
He'd already asked for her hand in marriage once before,
through his friend Paul Ree, and she had refused.
Convinced that Ree hadn't done the job properly,
Nietzsche was determined to try again.
But Salome just wasn't interested in a conventional relationship.
She was feisty and original,
and had no intention whatsoever of being trapped in a life of Victorian
domesticity, and so she'd pledged never to give herself to a man.
So when Nietzsche proposed for a second time,
the answer was still no.
He was devastated by the rejection,
made worse by the fact that his meddling sister Elisabeth
was jealous of Lou's youth and wild charm,
and determined to disrupt any potential romance.
Elisabeth reported details of Nietzsche's passion for Lou
to their mother, who responded by spitting out
that her son was a disgrace to his father's grave.
Their relationship was shattered,
and Nietzsche was utterly despondent.
What followed was one of the most miserable periods in his life.
But one in which he had the chance
to test his own philosophy of suffering.
Nietzsche fled, in bleak mood.
His books weren't selling.
He was in bad health, and often suicidal.
In March 1883, Nietzsche wrote, "In the deepest part of me,
"an immovable black melancholy holds sway.
"I cannot see even a reason to live beyond six months."
He realised that this was a true test of his own ability
to face suffering and to overcome it.
"I am exerting every ounce of self-mastery," he wrote.
"Unless I can discover an alchemical trick to turn this muck into gold,
"I am lost."
But in the depths of his misery,
he poured himself into writing a new book,
one which would prove him to be just such an alchemist.
It was the work that he considered to be his greatest.
MUSIC: Also sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss
Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Zarathustra had huge impact.
It inspired composers, like Richard Strauss, and writers,
from Joyce and Kafka to Yeats and Camus.
A parody of the Bible, that Nietzsche referred to as the fifth gospel,
it centred around the spiritual journey of a mysterious,
mystical character called Zarathustra, and in it,
the philosopher introduced one of his most notorious concepts -
the Ubermensch, or Superman.
The book is a parable on the importance of self overcoming.
The imagery is of the mountains,
and the figure of Zarathustra echoes Nietzsche himself.
Two of its four books were written here,
in the guesthouse where Nietzsche often stayed.
It is remarkable being here, isn't it?
Because it's in this room that Nietzsche wrote
one of his most groundbreaking and influential works.
This is the place where he first had the ideas
about Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Zarathustra is a prophet who comes down the mountain,
and he wants to talk to people in the town about this great event,
that God is dead, that Christianity, with all its certain, universal,
absolute moral values, is no longer believed in,
and that the question of what it is to be human,
and how one is to live as a human, needs to be answered anew.
But nobody listens to Zarathustra.
And one of the mechanisms to deliver that is this difficult concept,
the Ubermensch, the Overman or the Superman.
Who or what exactly is that?
It's easier to say what it is not.
It's not a biological concept.
It's not some kind of superior human race.
An Ubermensch is someone who is no longer reliant
on inauthentic external goals society gives him or her -
parents, religions.
It's someone who is able to commit to goals that you set yourself.
You offer humanity goals,
and Nietzsche thinks it's a terrifyingly difficult task,
because the guidelines are missing.
There are no blueprints.
And whilst you full well know that whatever task you set yourself isn't
universal, isn't good for all,
it's nevertheless one you commit yourself to.
It's one you strive towards.
The Ubermensch is someone who can shift
and see that the responsibility
and the joy of creating life lies not with some transcendent God,
but lies within oneself.
In pouring himself into writing Zarathustra,
Nietzsche and not only gave his own life meaning in the face of suffering,
but he also began to see that suffering itself
was the key to unlocking the elusive secret of happiness.
So what do you think happiness is for Nietzsche?
We traditionally see happiness in opposition to pain, exertion,
suffering, etc. For him, that is not the case.
It's striving towards something,
it's suffering through that great task you've set yourself.
So just flying up onto the summit of a high mountain in a helicopter will
not give you the kind of feeling of happiness
that you experience when you have spent 15 days
walking towards the summit.
It's overcoming obstacles that resist you achieving that goal
that is part of the experience of happiness.
So it's not just pleasure, but pain that can be happiness.
Pain is almost an enabling condition for happiness.
Nietzsche never found love again.
But he'd succeeded in transforming his despair into a work whose vision
would go on to resonate with generations of artists and thinkers.
He'd become a living testament to his idea of the eternal return.
And he now turned his attention away from the loss of the meaning created
by the murder of God to the crisis of values left in its wake.
Nietzsche continued his restless journey around Europe.
Although his health was deteriorating,
it didn't stop him from writing a subversive work
called Beyond Good and Evil.
Nietzsche himself thought the book was terrifying,
a squid-like work that confronted
all the dark realities that 19th-century science had laid bare.
He couldn't find anybody to publish it,
so he paid for it to be printed himself.
And when it was released in 1886, the reviewers hated it.
They described it as dangerous dynamite.
Both this book and his next, The Genealogy of Morality,
were fired by Nietzsche's utter dismay at the persistence of
Christianity's moral values.
Whilst many 19th-century intellectuals
had rejected the faith, they maintained its values.
For Nietzsche, this was a catastrophe.
For him, they no longer just lacked divine authority -
they were a threat to the future of humanity itself.
Why should we try to understand this book of his, Beyond Good and Evil,
if we're going to try to understand Nietzsche?
Well, this is the book where he really begins his incredibly intense
campaign against Christianity.
And he says, the real logic of Christianity
is a hatred of our own human, all too human nature.
That is, we have various drives, according to Nietzsche -
sexual drives, aggressive drives, drives to dominate.
And Christianity says those drives are an affront to God.
We need to push those drives down.
But for Nietzsche, that means we need to push ourselves down.
So he thinks that Christianity teaches us kind of a self-evisceration, a self-hatred.
That is his critique of Christianity.
And what does he think is wrong
with a fundamental Christian moral value?
Well, he looks at Christianity,
and he very disparagingly calls it slave morality.
And he calls it slave morality because he thinks it's a morality
that is focused on the worst off.
That is, the slaves of ancient Rome, who were the weak ones,
and needed a religion that gave them a sense of meaning,
a sense of power.
But they had no power in this world, so they tried to
He says, and he puts it so powerfully,
they lie their weakness into a strength.
So he thinks these Christian values - humility, poverty, meekness -
he thinks these are values that make it safe for the weakest in society,
but he thinks eventually,
when these values triumph and become everyone's values,
they inevitably make for mediocrity.
But his criticism of the weak really troubles me,
because these are works that have no time, it seems to me, for the weak,
- for compassion.
- Yeah.
It's not that Nietzsche thought we should step on the weak.
What he thought is, we shouldn't be obsessed with the weak.
And that is so strange to us, because we think, "And what's wrong with compassion?"
But he did have a problem with compassion.
Is this one of the reasons that
he is so anti the emerging isms of the day?
So socialism, communism
Well, a lot of communists,
a lot of socialists, may no longer believe in God,
but they still have this core Christian value of compassion.
And Nietzsche says, when you're obsessed with compassion,
when you're obsessed with how the worst off are doing,
that gets you into a mentality where what is valued is contentment.
He calls that herd happiness, and he says that is only worthy of animals.
We are worthy of so much more.
He says, if you gear everything to making the worst off as well as
possible, you take your eyes off the idea of the great individuals who
often are extremely egotistical, we would say selfish.
But he says they need that selfishness to make their achievements,
because it's their achievements that really drive civilisation and culture at its highest peaks.
Christian morality was something that Nietzsche believed
was positively dangerous for the future of mankind.
If humanity was to survive, it needed the great individuals,
the very geniuses that he thought the slave morality of Christian culture was holding down.
But there was a system of values that he did admire.
He also talks about master morality.
What's going on there?
He's harkening back to the world of the ancient Romans and the ancient Greeks.
They were both massive slave-owning societies.
He said, these people were masterful in a way that, with their gods,
they celebrated themselves.
Someone like Achilles, the great warrior - he could worship Ares,
the God of War, but in doing that, he was worshipping himself.
So he says, the masters have a religion that affirms themselves,
whereas the slaves have a religion of Christianity
which actually disavows their nature.
The master morality of the Greeks, as Nietzsche saw it,
glorified ambition, strength and power, and despised compassion.
Nietzsche was convinced that a revision of moral values
was needed for a post-Christian future,
and that such a morality needed moral legislators.
In his letters, he announced that his next task was a magnum opus,
in which he would lay out a new value system to fill the void.
But it wasn't to be.
In April 1888, Nietzsche moved to Turin.
This would be his home for the rest of his sane life.
When he arrived here, he was at his most brilliantly productive.
In an almost constant state of euphoria,
he produced four books in a year,
and as he walked through the city, he said he felt like a god.
But it was in the beauty of this Italian city
that Nietzsche's mind began to decay.
And it's in the letters he wrote at the start of 1888
that the very first signs of his madness can be glimpsed.
These letters give us a troubling insight
into Nietzsche's state of mind at the time.
Rather than the brilliance that once poured onto the page,
these are bizarre and deranged.
Here he is writing to Bismarck,
one of the most powerful statesmen in Prussia,
but he signs himself the Antichrist.
On others, he calls himself Dionysus, the Greek god.
And here he simply ends, "the crucified one".
Nietzsche had megalomaniac tendencies,
claiming that he was preparing an event which had the potential
to split the history of humanity into two halves.
The owners of the house where he was staying were alarmed
by his ecstatic piano playing.
Sometimes they could just about make out that he was
leaping about his room stark naked, yelling,
as if he was recreating a Dionysian orgy.
Events came to a climax in one of Turin's piazzas.
Nietzsche saw a coachman thrashing his horse with a whip.
He flung his arms around the animal's neck,
and with tears streaming, collapsed to the ground.
The final sane act of a man who had spent his life criticising
the weakness of human compassion
was one of profound pity.
Seven days later, he was incarcerated in an asylum in Basel.
Nietzsche never regained his sanity.
At the age of 44,
one of the most searing philosophical minds in human history
had disintegrated.
For the next decade, until his death in 1900, he'd write nothing.
When he arrived at the clinic, the friend who brought him wrote,
"He suffers from delusions of infinite grandeur.
"It's hopeless.
"I've never seen such a horrific picture of destruction."
No-one knows exactly what caused Nietzsche's descent into madness.
But while Nietzsche's mind collapsed,
his work started to take on a life of its own.
In 1887, Nietzsche was brought here, to his sister Elisabeth's house,
to live out his remaining years.
Declared clinically insane, until his death,
Elisabeth would be his sole carer.
While Nietzsche lived here,
Elisabeth treated her brother like an attraction in a sideshow.
She invited visitors in to stare at him,
and she held soirees for his disciples,
while his disturbed groaning could be heard from upstairs.
Today the house is a shrine to Nietzsche,
created by his younger sister,
who dressed him in white as if a prophet.
Yet its pristine rooms are chillingly devoid of any trace of his personality.
Elisabeth collected together Nietzsche's writings,
including notebooks for an unpublished masterwork
that Nietzsche had planned before his mind shut down.
Notebooks he'd never intended the world to see.
What exactly is it that we're looking at here?
So here we're looking at two notebooks of Nietzsche's,
in which he is working up to this great work called The Will to Power,
a work of tremendous ambition, because what he's attempting,
you can see from this notebook here, is a revaluation of all values.
I mean, it's extraordinarily exciting to see this,
because here he is trying to overturn the whole of Western morality,
because people deep down no longer believe in it,
though they are going on, like the herd, as he calls most of us,
living their lives by it, but there is no longer a god to back it up.
So he's saying, we need to find a new morality,
and that's his fundamental task.
Is it as simple as it sounds?
The Will to Power - is he saying that power is the identifying,
organising principle for humanity?
He's saying, actually,
if we look at how people live and behave and strive,
really what they're after in life, from infancy onwards, is power.
And therefore, any morality that's going to fit with human nature needs
to be a morality that sees power as the goal that we all seek,
albeit in very different ways.
So it's more than just something -
because we've got Darwin at this time, with his survival of the fittest.
- We do.
- But Nietzsche is taking that idea way beyond what Darwin is saying.
He is. Superficially they sound similar, but in fact,
they're profoundly different.
Nietzsche despised Darwin,
and he has contempt for any way of living life that simply seeks to
preserve yourself and your progeny.
And the real difference is that the will to power
is concerned that human beings should do more than
merely preserve themselves.
They should aim for great things.
They should aim to be great statesmen,
or to be great philosophers, and design new worlds, as it were.
And that might involve sacrificing preservation.
It might involve an early death.
It might involve leaving no children.
For him, the will to power is about seeking the exceptional.
But Nietzsche seems to have recognised the flaw in his own idea.
Perhaps his last sane act was the decision
not to publish what he'd written.
Nietzsche was himself against all philosophies
that attempted to reduce the world to one principle,
whatever that principle might be.
And in a sense, his attempt to reduce the world to the will to power was,
as he would put it, intellectually unclean,
and I think that's why this work ultimately failed.
Because he realised that he was being untrue to himself.
And what clues are in these notebooks themselves
that he has given up?
Well, I mean, there are small signs
- for example, here, in this version,
he's written a shopping list over these profound thoughts.
And here we have the word toothbrush. Zahnburste.
So I think if you start writing shopping lists over your great
masterworks, that suggests that you no longer have respect for them.
But the work he abandoned WAS published,
with devastating consequences.
Nietzsche died here of a stroke in 1900.
But his death gave Elisabeth the opportunity
to appropriate not just the dog days of his life,
but his life's work.
Elisabeth had hero-worshipped her brother,
and lived her life in his shadow.
Now, as literary executor,
she set about publishing Nietzsche's notebooks,
in a collection entitled Will to Power.
Although she worked with various editors,
she simply dismissed them if they disagreed with her.
Nietzsche's work was edited and manipulated
to suit her own political ends.
Elisabeth was a supporter of the Nazis,
and began to court the party's leaders.
In 1934, Adolf Hitler visited this house,
and she even gave him her brother's walking stick.
Elisabeth was so extraordinarily successful in promoting her brother
and his works that by the end of the 1930s,
Nietzschean thought and themes pervaded German society.
And this was disturbingly reflected in one of the most compelling
propaganda films of all time.
In 1934, Nazi supporters gathered in Nuremberg
to hear their leader speak.
It was a moment captured in a film commissioned by Hitler himself.
Terrifying, electrifying,
the words and rituals of the Nazis echo Nietzschean thought.
It was called Triumph of the Will.
The film begins with Hitler descending from the clouds,
echoing Zarathustra,
an Ubermensch coming down from the mountains
with his new morality to be greeted by the herd.
An Ubermensch offering a system of morality
in which traditional Christian values are to be inverted.
Where the state will exert the will of the most powerful,
and the weak and the helpless will be destroyed
to generate a greater humanity.
So closely associated had Nietzsche's ideas become with the aims of
the National Socialists that one of its most influential thinkers,
Alfred Baeumler, said, "When we call out heil Hitler,
"we greet with the same cry Friedrich Nietzsche."
And yet, had he lived to see this, Nietzsche would have been horrified.
His Ubermensch wasn't a master of eugenics.
He was he was a symbol of man's potential.
His will to power was not a call to nationalism, which he despised,
but a recognition of our drive to overcome our limitations.
And he was vocally opposed to anti-Semitism.
The Nietzsche of the Nazis was a hideous parody.
Just months before his final collapse, Nietzsche wrote,
"I confess that the deepest objection to the eternal recurrence,
"my truly most abysmal thought, is always Mother and Sister."
How prophetic his words turned out to be.
And yet perhaps the blame for his misuse is not entirely Elisabeth's.
Nietzsche would never have advocated Hitler's Final Solution,
but he was naive if he thought that his work would not be misunderstood.
Evil loves nothing better than a void, and the philosopher's clever,
ambiguous aphorisms could easily be put to the service of evil.
Even when he was entirely sane,
Nietzsche said that bad would be done in his name.
The sister and the brother must share responsibility
for the life that his work took on after his death.
A century after Nietzsche's death,
the crisis created by the murder of God
may seem exaggerated to us today.
The modern world hasn't collapsed.
God as the unchallengeable source of moral values seems to have stepped
aside relatively quietly.
But maybe that's because we lack Nietzsche's unsettling prophetic vision,
his wild imagination.
If we choose to wear the blinkers of the herd,
could it be that we are staring with unseeing eyes into the very abyss
that he predicted?
He believed that what would fill the void was
a chaos of cultural preferences.
A mess, an overload of personal choices.
Pernicious, in Nietzsche's eyes,
because they perpetuated the empty values
of the herd that he so despised.
And perhaps Nietzsche's most chilling vision
was of the humanity that would populate this post-Christian world.
These people he called the last men, and for them,
he reserved his most fervent fury.
These were men and women
who'd turned their backs on challenging ideals,
but felt they were content.
They had a banal existence.
They did everything in their powers to limit excesses of joy or sorrow.
Their concern was the trivial and the narcissistic,
and so they lived lives of timid mediocrity,
fooling themselves that they were happy.
They bought into what Nietzsche described
as the religion of comfortableness.
Could this be a devastating description of the modern world?
A world that shies from the risk of striving for greatness.
A world that shuns higher values and celebrates the mundane.
The last men are Nietzsche's greatest fear.
They look at a star,
by which he means the fiery potential of beautiful lives fully lived,
the meaning of all existence,
and they have no desire even to pursue it.
They merely blink.
Before Nietzsche fell into madness he wrote,
"If you stare long enough into the abyss,
"the abyss will stare back into you."
The chaos that confronted Nietzsche in his final moments of sanity is
arguably our own.
The question of not just how we should live,
but the point of our lives,
is still one of the greatest challenges of the modern world.
If the mind of Nietzsche has made you think,
then explore further with the Open University
to discover how other great minds have influenced our world today.
Go to the address at the bottom of the screen
and follow the links to the Open University.
which epitomised the extraordinary influence
of one of the most provocative and uncompromising thinkers
of the 19th century.
It's an image of Adolf Hitler
standing next to the bust of Nietzsche here
in Weimar where the philosopher lived.
- With chilling eloquence, this tells us what many Nazis believed
- -
that Nietzsche was the brilliant mind, the inspiration,
behind the terrifying ideologies of the Third Reich.
Yet if Nietzsche had been alive to see it, he would have been appalled.
His philosophies were being distorted by a regime
that stood for so much that he'd have loathed.
Nietzsche was one of the most dangerous minds of the 19th century.
Nietzsche thinks we have blood on our hands.
Because we haven't just killed God -
we've killed that which gave our lives meaning.
Nietzsche lived in a century in which Europe
was witnessing unprecedented change.
Where the authority of Christianity was being challenged.
Radical breakthroughs in science were redefining belief.
And thinkers like Freud, Marx,
and Nietzsche were suddenly free to unleash ideas that
in previous centuries would have seen them burnt at the stake.
Yet they heralded nothing less than the modern world.
In 1882, one of the greatest minds of the 19th century
predicted a crisis.
One that he believed would be without equal on Earth,
and which would be triggered by nothing less than the murder of God.
"God is dead, and God remains dead, because we have killed him.
"What was holiest and most powerful
"of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our eyes.
"Who will wipe the blood from our hands?"
These are the visceral, challenging words of Friedrich Nietzsche.
The crisis that he proclaimed was a wave of disbelief in Christianity
that he predicted would crash through Europe.
And the raw,
brutal language that he chose to describe this death of God
is a measure of just how terrifying he thought the consequence would be.
For what Nietzsche saw, with disturbing, prophetic clarity,
was that without a belief in God,
there was no authority for the moral values
that had underpinned European society across 2,000 years.
He was declaring our freedom from God, our mastery of our own fates.
No longer controlled by divine laws,
we were now liberated, or condemned, to create our own values.
But what haunted and tormented Nietzsche was his realisation that
this was a freedom that came at a terrible price.
The loss of religious belief would bring with it nothing less than
a vacuum of meaning in human existence.
It was a crisis that Nietzsche would wrestle with
for the rest of his life.
BELL RINGS
MUSIC: Messiah by Handel
The childhood of the man who would come to call himself the Antichrist
was, with no little irony,
one infused with the joy of Christianity.
When Nietzsche was just nine years old,
he heard Handel's Messiah for the first time.
And he said he felt he had to join in the joyful singing of the angels
on whose billows of sound Jesus ascended to heaven.
The man who would spend his life as an adult with a mission to attack
everything that Christianity stood for
started off in life as the son of a Lutheran pastor,
here in the very cradle of Protestant Christianity.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche grew up in the village of Rocken in Prussia,
now northern Germany.
And as a boy, he was passionately pious.
This is the parsonage where Nietzsche was born.
His father, Carl Ludwig, had a very simple faith,
and the household lived and breathed Christianity.
Nietzsche's early years were settled and sheltered.
His parents had two other children.
When he was two, his sister Elisabeth was born,
followed a year later by a brother, Joseph.
But in the autumn of 1848, when Friedrich was only four years old,
his childhood was ripped apart.
His father became mentally ill,
and was diagnosed with a terminal brain disease.
It was a torturous decline.
He went blind and eventually was bedridden.
One year later, he was dead.
An autopsy revealed that a quarter of his brain was missing.
This must have been a truly horrific end.
The suffering of his beloved father marked Friedrich for life.
As a teenager, he wrote about his father's funeral
in this church where he had once preached.
"Oh, never will the deep-throated sound of those bells quit my ear.
"The organ resounded through the empty spaces of the church."
For Nietzsche, the death of his father posed a profound question.
Why had this God,
whom his father had so loved and to whom he dedicated his life,
punished a good man with such torment?
It was the start of a journey into doubt that would come to define
Nietzsche's life.
Despite the loss of his father, in 1864, at the age of 20,
Nietzsche arrived in Bonn to study theology at the university,
contemplating a future as a Lutheran pastor.
But it was during his time here that he came under the influence of
a controversial new method of studying the Bible,
known as Biblical criticism.
And it scandalously suggested that this sacred text wasn't a credible
historical work, but largely myth.
It was radically undermining the authenticity of the scriptures.
And for Nietzsche, it had a dramatic impact.
If his father's death and suffering had made him question
the idea of God emotionally,
then this gave him the intellectual grounds on which to
construct his doubt.
Nietzsche's loss of belief caused an immediate rift with his family.
At Easter, he refused to attend church,
crushing his mother's dreams
that he would follow his father to the pulpit.
And his sister, who had always hero-worshipped her brother,
found her own faith thrown into chaos.
But for Nietzsche, his journey into doubt wasn't just a source of hurt
for those close to him.
It was the start of an all-consuming dissection
of the moral and religious beliefs with which he had grown up.
He began to regard Christianity not just as a faith regretfully lost,
but as a pernicious influence that encouraged
an unhealthy disengagement from the world.
Christian teaching, he argued, focused on the next life,
with disastrous consequences.
Earth became a place of bleak exile from God.
Life was a thing of pain and suffering to be endured,
not celebrated.
And this emphasis on the life to come robbed the here and now of its
sublime meaning.
This was a conviction that would dominate his life and his work
for the next two decades.
Rejecting Christianity forced Nietzsche
to flee his theological studies,
and to seek out a new direction.
Right from the start,
Nietzsche realised that his loss of faith wasn't the path to
a life of contentment.
In 1865, Nietzsche wrote to his sister, and said,
"If you wish to seek peace of mind and happiness, then believe.
"If you wish to be a disciple of truth, then investigate."
Nietzsche was living in an age dominated by the rise of science,
where the search for objective truth was all-consuming.
But what Nietzsche saw with searing clarity was that the triumph of
objectivity deprived humanity of something fundamental.
Without Christianity,
there was no set of binding moral rules by which we could all live.
There was no solution to man's fear of death.
And perhaps most importantly,
with eternal salvation no longer mankind's prime goal,
life itself didn't have a higher spiritual purpose.
It was to finding new meaning in a godless universe that Nietzsche now
dedicated himself.
And his first glimpse at an answer came at the age of 21.
He decided to become a student of philology,
the study of the ancient civilisations and the philosophies of Greece and Rome.
And he was in a book shop when he came across a work that would
influence the way he thought and acted for the next decade.
It was called The World As Will and Idea,
and it was written by a German philosopher called Schopenhauer.
As he read it, Nietzsche was transfixed.
Schopenhauer was an atheist,
who had also grappled with the purpose of life.
But his conclusions were beyond pessimistic.
Faced with the problem of life's endless sufferings,
Schopenhauer's bleak conclusion
was that it was best never to be born at all.
He argued that human beings were in a state of constant desire.
If we didn't achieve these desires, then there was discontent,
and even if we did, then discontent would set in anyway.
His solution was to face up to the fact that fulfilment is impossible.
He encouraged us not to strive for happiness
in order to avoid the anxiety and trouble in trying to achieve it.
The happiest man, he said,
is the one who gets through life with the minimum of pain.
Nietzsche said it was like looking into a mirror
that reflected the world, life,
and his own mind with hideous magnificence.
But whilst he accepted Schopenhauer's diagnosis
that life was just a cycle of suffering,
he passionately disagreed with his life-denying,
nihilistic conclusions,
the idea of giving up on life and the pursuit of one's desires.
Instead, he was determined to find a way of affirming existence
in spite of its pain.
In 1869,
the brilliant Friedrich became a professor of philology
here at Basel University at the age of only 24,
the youngest in its history.
With his first book, which he wrote while he was here,
he began to gain a reputation as a radical and subversive thinker.
In his work, which he called The Birth of Tragedy,
he started to grapple with the issue of how to deal with suffering
in a world devoid of God.
And for inspiration, he turned to the ideas of the Greeks,
and a new focus of his devotions - the German composer Richard Wagner.
On the 22nd of May 1872,
the foundation stone was laid for Wagner's Festival Theatre.
One of the guests at the ceremony was Nietzsche.
The two men had met six years before when Nietzsche was just a student,
and immediately he was smitten.
Wagner became both an obsession and an inspiration.
Nietzsche would come to believe that in Wagner's work,
he had glimpsed what it was that made life itself worthwhile - art -
and that the greatest art form of all was music.
DOOR OPENS
MUSIC: Entrance of the Gods into Valhalla
from Das Rheingold by Wagner
Nietzsche believed Wagner to be an artistic genius
whose music was going to bring about
a cultural rebirth based on the classical Greek model of tragedy.
It was an art form that Nietzsche was convinced could transform
a world full of suffering into something beautiful and meaningful.
How did Nietzsche come to write The Birth of Tragedy?
What was he trying to do with this book, do you think?
Nietzsche wrote The Birth of Tragedy after a series of incredibly intense
conversations with Wagner.
Wagner was developing a revolutionary theory of art,
where art could transform society.
Nietzsche wanted to provide the philosophy for that.
He found in Greek tragedy a model for that thinking.
Greek tragedy tells these extremely visceral stories of human beings
in conflict, suffering, destructive.
Yet it was the dominant genre of thinking about the glory of Greece.
Consequently, he found in Greek tragedy
a way of talking about the human being today,
the human being's suffering, finding meaning in life,
finding the truth.
So what is so explosive about what he is putting down on the page?
Well, Nietzsche structured his book around an opposition
between two Greek gods - Apollo and Dionysus.
Apollo stood for light, for the truth of logic, for control.
And since the beginning of Germans' love of Greek,
they associated Greece with rationality,
the beginnings of philosophy.
But Nietzsche decided he wanted to focus more on Dionysus,
the figure who confuses boundaries,
who discovers ecstatic group activity,
dancing, wildness, the visceral feelings.
And he made that the centre of his tragedy.
So he was standing against philosophy, against his own subject,
against that sense that logic is the way to truth.
He wanted to find another sort of truth, another transformative power.
But how did he think that Dionysus,
with all his darkness, and as you say, chaos, sometimes,
and loss of control - how is that going to help mankind?
Nietzsche was reacting against the dominant German intellectual tradition,
which focused on the individual hero, the Oedipuses, if you like.
And they saw that the individual who suffered could somehow
transcend themselves through suffering.
A very Christian message. Nietzsche reversed that,
and saw instead that the individual somehow lost themselves in
the collective, and found in a group experience
an ecstatic transformational experience.
That's what he saw in Wagner's music,
and that's what he saw in tragedy,
so that somehow the suffering that was everybody's condition
was transformed through this ecstatic experience
into an affirmation of life, this life, here and now.
It's a bit like that sense of a rock concert -
the idea that you somehow lose yourself in this great, ecstatic, collective experience.
And one should never forget that opera in the 19th century
was the rock music of its time, and Wagner was the rock icon of his day.
And Nietzsche believed
that was the way that society could be transformed,
through a sense of the collective experience,
from which you could go out and change the world.
Wagner's theatre was a temple to his brilliance.
But it was also the place where Nietzsche
fell violently out of love with his hero.
When Nietzsche came here to watch a performance of Wagner's opera
The Ring, he hated what he found.
Rather than a place of revolution,
the theatre was stuffed with the great and the good of Europe,
and the man that he'd revered as a radical,
who he thought would catalyse the birth of a brave new world,
was just the hero of a self-satisfied festival of opera,
revelling in his own glory.
Nietzsche stormed out of the theatre mid-performance.
It marked the beginning of the end of their friendship,
and a new phase in Nietzsche's philosophical quest.
Nietzsche's rejection of Wagner
coincided with a similarly radical change in his own life and work.
Whilst he continued to teach in Basel,
he began to have severe doubts as to whether it was here
that his future lay.
He still believed that it was through liberating the creative Dionysian spirit
that greatness could be achieved.
But he began to doubt that the answer
lay with the transformation of the masses.
Instead, it was the flourishing of great visionary individuals
that would hold the key to the future.
And he was convinced that the petty responsibilities of academic life
were suffocating his own creative genius.
He conceived a deep dread of coming back here to lecture,
to what he called the greatest curse of his life.
Depressed and anxious, he developed what he called Baselophobia.
Nietzsche longed to break free.
The key to life, he wrote, was to live dangerously.
On the 2nd of May 1879, he resigned his professorship.
As Nietzsche left Basel, he was gripped by debilitating ill-health.
Since childhood, he had been plagued by violent stomach pains
and blinding headaches.
And haunted by the fear that he, too, would be struck down by
the disease that killed his father.
Nietzsche's physical challenges had been the final trigger
for his resignation.
Although his doctors warned that excessive reading and writing
would cause him to go blind,
nothing was going to stop his pursuit of a life of philosophy.
Nietzsche began to crisscross Europe,
staying in hotels and guesthouses,
and climates that alleviated his medical symptoms.
He would spend the rest of his sane adult life
in a state of nomadic solitude.
You can just imagine him, ill, troubled, increasingly isolated,
and yet with this extraordinary mind for company.
Over the next decade,
the ideas and thoughts that poured onto the page
were simply astonishing.
His ill-health would mean that he could only write in bursts of 20 minutes at a time,
so his books were full of incisive aphorisms, pithy statements,
rather than long philosophical treatises.
And it was on a train in 1881
that he was told about somewhere that would
provide the inspiration for many of these great works.
A fellow traveller recommended that he visit a place called Sils Maria.
Just a tiny little farming village in the Swiss mountains.
He followed their advice and discovered the place
that would become his spiritual homeland.
On Monday the 4th of July 1881,
Nietzsche fell in love at first sight with Sils Maria.
Its mountains and forests inspired his most life-affirming ideas.
Its beauty reinforced for him the sheer magnificence of existence.
And it was on one of his walks here, a month after he'd arrived,
that Nietzsche had what he believed was the most important thought
he'd ever conceived.
He was walking by this lake when he stopped
next to this rock and suddenly had a vision.
This was a thought experiment that Nietzsche believed
would help us all to analyse every action,
every decision of our lives,
so that we could live those to the full.
This was his question -
if a demon were to whisper in your ear that you had to live your life
as lived time and time again throughout eternity,
with all the pain and with all the greatness,
would you fall to the ground and gnash your teeth and curse that demon,
or would you say that he was a god and that his utterances were divine?
It was an idea that became known as the eternal recurrence of the same,
and it formed the very essence of Nietzsche's attitude to life,
to both its joys and its hardships.
Nietzsche believed that even though we all have things that we might
consider failures - the break-up of a relationship,
or the death of a loved one - we should be happy to relive those events, too.
Just as a pianist learns to master improvisations, so we should
learn to incorporate mistakes and imperfections and sorrows
into the beauty of the whole.
We should construct our lives so we are our own heroes.
Basically, we should decide who we want to be,
how we want to live our life, and then love the choices that we've made.
So that the thought of reliving our existence, for good and for bad,
can be greeted with a life-affirming "Yes".
The eternal return was an exuberant and optimistic embrace of life.
Suffering wasn't something that you had to be redeemed from,
as Christianity taught,
or avoided at all costs, as Schopenhauer argued.
Instead, it was to be embraced, mastered.
To live life most fully, one had to risk suffering and overcome it.
What doesn't kill you makes you stronger
is one of Nietzsche's most iconic phrases.
And it was one that he himself
was just about to have to put to the test.
The philosopher was about to face one of the greatest disappointments
of his life.
It was in the beautiful town of Lucerne that, in the spring of 1882,
Nietzsche contemplated abandoning his life of seclusion
for a life of love with a woman he was entranced by.
Her name was Lou Salome.
She was 21, Russian born, clever, beautiful,
and fascinated by his ideas.
Nietzsche was lost.
Nietzsche and Lou spent hours walking together,
discussing philosophy, absorbed in their own world.
And Nietzsche brought her here,
to what was known as Lion Garden, in the centre of Lucerne, to propose.
He'd already asked for her hand in marriage once before,
through his friend Paul Ree, and she had refused.
Convinced that Ree hadn't done the job properly,
Nietzsche was determined to try again.
But Salome just wasn't interested in a conventional relationship.
She was feisty and original,
and had no intention whatsoever of being trapped in a life of Victorian
domesticity, and so she'd pledged never to give herself to a man.
So when Nietzsche proposed for a second time,
the answer was still no.
He was devastated by the rejection,
made worse by the fact that his meddling sister Elisabeth
was jealous of Lou's youth and wild charm,
and determined to disrupt any potential romance.
Elisabeth reported details of Nietzsche's passion for Lou
to their mother, who responded by spitting out
that her son was a disgrace to his father's grave.
Their relationship was shattered,
and Nietzsche was utterly despondent.
What followed was one of the most miserable periods in his life.
But one in which he had the chance
to test his own philosophy of suffering.
Nietzsche fled, in bleak mood.
His books weren't selling.
He was in bad health, and often suicidal.
In March 1883, Nietzsche wrote, "In the deepest part of me,
"an immovable black melancholy holds sway.
"I cannot see even a reason to live beyond six months."
He realised that this was a true test of his own ability
to face suffering and to overcome it.
"I am exerting every ounce of self-mastery," he wrote.
"Unless I can discover an alchemical trick to turn this muck into gold,
"I am lost."
But in the depths of his misery,
he poured himself into writing a new book,
one which would prove him to be just such an alchemist.
It was the work that he considered to be his greatest.
MUSIC: Also sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss
Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Zarathustra had huge impact.
It inspired composers, like Richard Strauss, and writers,
from Joyce and Kafka to Yeats and Camus.
A parody of the Bible, that Nietzsche referred to as the fifth gospel,
it centred around the spiritual journey of a mysterious,
mystical character called Zarathustra, and in it,
the philosopher introduced one of his most notorious concepts -
the Ubermensch, or Superman.
The book is a parable on the importance of self overcoming.
The imagery is of the mountains,
and the figure of Zarathustra echoes Nietzsche himself.
Two of its four books were written here,
in the guesthouse where Nietzsche often stayed.
It is remarkable being here, isn't it?
Because it's in this room that Nietzsche wrote
one of his most groundbreaking and influential works.
This is the place where he first had the ideas
about Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Zarathustra is a prophet who comes down the mountain,
and he wants to talk to people in the town about this great event,
that God is dead, that Christianity, with all its certain, universal,
absolute moral values, is no longer believed in,
and that the question of what it is to be human,
and how one is to live as a human, needs to be answered anew.
But nobody listens to Zarathustra.
And one of the mechanisms to deliver that is this difficult concept,
the Ubermensch, the Overman or the Superman.
Who or what exactly is that?
It's easier to say what it is not.
It's not a biological concept.
It's not some kind of superior human race.
An Ubermensch is someone who is no longer reliant
on inauthentic external goals society gives him or her -
parents, religions.
It's someone who is able to commit to goals that you set yourself.
You offer humanity goals,
and Nietzsche thinks it's a terrifyingly difficult task,
because the guidelines are missing.
There are no blueprints.
And whilst you full well know that whatever task you set yourself isn't
universal, isn't good for all,
it's nevertheless one you commit yourself to.
It's one you strive towards.
The Ubermensch is someone who can shift
and see that the responsibility
and the joy of creating life lies not with some transcendent God,
but lies within oneself.
In pouring himself into writing Zarathustra,
Nietzsche and not only gave his own life meaning in the face of suffering,
but he also began to see that suffering itself
was the key to unlocking the elusive secret of happiness.
So what do you think happiness is for Nietzsche?
We traditionally see happiness in opposition to pain, exertion,
suffering, etc. For him, that is not the case.
It's striving towards something,
it's suffering through that great task you've set yourself.
So just flying up onto the summit of a high mountain in a helicopter will
not give you the kind of feeling of happiness
that you experience when you have spent 15 days
walking towards the summit.
It's overcoming obstacles that resist you achieving that goal
that is part of the experience of happiness.
So it's not just pleasure, but pain that can be happiness.
Pain is almost an enabling condition for happiness.
Nietzsche never found love again.
But he'd succeeded in transforming his despair into a work whose vision
would go on to resonate with generations of artists and thinkers.
He'd become a living testament to his idea of the eternal return.
And he now turned his attention away from the loss of the meaning created
by the murder of God to the crisis of values left in its wake.
Nietzsche continued his restless journey around Europe.
Although his health was deteriorating,
it didn't stop him from writing a subversive work
called Beyond Good and Evil.
Nietzsche himself thought the book was terrifying,
a squid-like work that confronted
all the dark realities that 19th-century science had laid bare.
He couldn't find anybody to publish it,
so he paid for it to be printed himself.
And when it was released in 1886, the reviewers hated it.
They described it as dangerous dynamite.
Both this book and his next, The Genealogy of Morality,
were fired by Nietzsche's utter dismay at the persistence of
Christianity's moral values.
Whilst many 19th-century intellectuals
had rejected the faith, they maintained its values.
For Nietzsche, this was a catastrophe.
For him, they no longer just lacked divine authority -
they were a threat to the future of humanity itself.
Why should we try to understand this book of his, Beyond Good and Evil,
if we're going to try to understand Nietzsche?
Well, this is the book where he really begins his incredibly intense
campaign against Christianity.
And he says, the real logic of Christianity
is a hatred of our own human, all too human nature.
That is, we have various drives, according to Nietzsche -
sexual drives, aggressive drives, drives to dominate.
And Christianity says those drives are an affront to God.
We need to push those drives down.
But for Nietzsche, that means we need to push ourselves down.
So he thinks that Christianity teaches us kind of a self-evisceration, a self-hatred.
That is his critique of Christianity.
And what does he think is wrong
with a fundamental Christian moral value?
Well, he looks at Christianity,
and he very disparagingly calls it slave morality.
And he calls it slave morality because he thinks it's a morality
that is focused on the worst off.
That is, the slaves of ancient Rome, who were the weak ones,
and needed a religion that gave them a sense of meaning,
a sense of power.
But they had no power in this world, so they tried to
He says, and he puts it so powerfully,
they lie their weakness into a strength.
So he thinks these Christian values - humility, poverty, meekness -
he thinks these are values that make it safe for the weakest in society,
but he thinks eventually,
when these values triumph and become everyone's values,
they inevitably make for mediocrity.
But his criticism of the weak really troubles me,
because these are works that have no time, it seems to me, for the weak,
- for compassion.
- Yeah.
It's not that Nietzsche thought we should step on the weak.
What he thought is, we shouldn't be obsessed with the weak.
And that is so strange to us, because we think, "And what's wrong with compassion?"
But he did have a problem with compassion.
Is this one of the reasons that
he is so anti the emerging isms of the day?
So socialism, communism
Well, a lot of communists,
a lot of socialists, may no longer believe in God,
but they still have this core Christian value of compassion.
And Nietzsche says, when you're obsessed with compassion,
when you're obsessed with how the worst off are doing,
that gets you into a mentality where what is valued is contentment.
He calls that herd happiness, and he says that is only worthy of animals.
We are worthy of so much more.
He says, if you gear everything to making the worst off as well as
possible, you take your eyes off the idea of the great individuals who
often are extremely egotistical, we would say selfish.
But he says they need that selfishness to make their achievements,
because it's their achievements that really drive civilisation and culture at its highest peaks.
Christian morality was something that Nietzsche believed
was positively dangerous for the future of mankind.
If humanity was to survive, it needed the great individuals,
the very geniuses that he thought the slave morality of Christian culture was holding down.
But there was a system of values that he did admire.
He also talks about master morality.
What's going on there?
He's harkening back to the world of the ancient Romans and the ancient Greeks.
They were both massive slave-owning societies.
He said, these people were masterful in a way that, with their gods,
they celebrated themselves.
Someone like Achilles, the great warrior - he could worship Ares,
the God of War, but in doing that, he was worshipping himself.
So he says, the masters have a religion that affirms themselves,
whereas the slaves have a religion of Christianity
which actually disavows their nature.
The master morality of the Greeks, as Nietzsche saw it,
glorified ambition, strength and power, and despised compassion.
Nietzsche was convinced that a revision of moral values
was needed for a post-Christian future,
and that such a morality needed moral legislators.
In his letters, he announced that his next task was a magnum opus,
in which he would lay out a new value system to fill the void.
But it wasn't to be.
In April 1888, Nietzsche moved to Turin.
This would be his home for the rest of his sane life.
When he arrived here, he was at his most brilliantly productive.
In an almost constant state of euphoria,
he produced four books in a year,
and as he walked through the city, he said he felt like a god.
But it was in the beauty of this Italian city
that Nietzsche's mind began to decay.
And it's in the letters he wrote at the start of 1888
that the very first signs of his madness can be glimpsed.
These letters give us a troubling insight
into Nietzsche's state of mind at the time.
Rather than the brilliance that once poured onto the page,
these are bizarre and deranged.
Here he is writing to Bismarck,
one of the most powerful statesmen in Prussia,
but he signs himself the Antichrist.
On others, he calls himself Dionysus, the Greek god.
And here he simply ends, "the crucified one".
Nietzsche had megalomaniac tendencies,
claiming that he was preparing an event which had the potential
to split the history of humanity into two halves.
The owners of the house where he was staying were alarmed
by his ecstatic piano playing.
Sometimes they could just about make out that he was
leaping about his room stark naked, yelling,
as if he was recreating a Dionysian orgy.
Events came to a climax in one of Turin's piazzas.
Nietzsche saw a coachman thrashing his horse with a whip.
He flung his arms around the animal's neck,
and with tears streaming, collapsed to the ground.
The final sane act of a man who had spent his life criticising
the weakness of human compassion
was one of profound pity.
Seven days later, he was incarcerated in an asylum in Basel.
Nietzsche never regained his sanity.
At the age of 44,
one of the most searing philosophical minds in human history
had disintegrated.
For the next decade, until his death in 1900, he'd write nothing.
When he arrived at the clinic, the friend who brought him wrote,
"He suffers from delusions of infinite grandeur.
"It's hopeless.
"I've never seen such a horrific picture of destruction."
No-one knows exactly what caused Nietzsche's descent into madness.
But while Nietzsche's mind collapsed,
his work started to take on a life of its own.
In 1887, Nietzsche was brought here, to his sister Elisabeth's house,
to live out his remaining years.
Declared clinically insane, until his death,
Elisabeth would be his sole carer.
While Nietzsche lived here,
Elisabeth treated her brother like an attraction in a sideshow.
She invited visitors in to stare at him,
and she held soirees for his disciples,
while his disturbed groaning could be heard from upstairs.
Today the house is a shrine to Nietzsche,
created by his younger sister,
who dressed him in white as if a prophet.
Yet its pristine rooms are chillingly devoid of any trace of his personality.
Elisabeth collected together Nietzsche's writings,
including notebooks for an unpublished masterwork
that Nietzsche had planned before his mind shut down.
Notebooks he'd never intended the world to see.
What exactly is it that we're looking at here?
So here we're looking at two notebooks of Nietzsche's,
in which he is working up to this great work called The Will to Power,
a work of tremendous ambition, because what he's attempting,
you can see from this notebook here, is a revaluation of all values.
I mean, it's extraordinarily exciting to see this,
because here he is trying to overturn the whole of Western morality,
because people deep down no longer believe in it,
though they are going on, like the herd, as he calls most of us,
living their lives by it, but there is no longer a god to back it up.
So he's saying, we need to find a new morality,
and that's his fundamental task.
Is it as simple as it sounds?
The Will to Power - is he saying that power is the identifying,
organising principle for humanity?
He's saying, actually,
if we look at how people live and behave and strive,
really what they're after in life, from infancy onwards, is power.
And therefore, any morality that's going to fit with human nature needs
to be a morality that sees power as the goal that we all seek,
albeit in very different ways.
So it's more than just something -
because we've got Darwin at this time, with his survival of the fittest.
- We do.
- But Nietzsche is taking that idea way beyond what Darwin is saying.
He is. Superficially they sound similar, but in fact,
they're profoundly different.
Nietzsche despised Darwin,
and he has contempt for any way of living life that simply seeks to
preserve yourself and your progeny.
And the real difference is that the will to power
is concerned that human beings should do more than
merely preserve themselves.
They should aim for great things.
They should aim to be great statesmen,
or to be great philosophers, and design new worlds, as it were.
And that might involve sacrificing preservation.
It might involve an early death.
It might involve leaving no children.
For him, the will to power is about seeking the exceptional.
But Nietzsche seems to have recognised the flaw in his own idea.
Perhaps his last sane act was the decision
not to publish what he'd written.
Nietzsche was himself against all philosophies
that attempted to reduce the world to one principle,
whatever that principle might be.
And in a sense, his attempt to reduce the world to the will to power was,
as he would put it, intellectually unclean,
and I think that's why this work ultimately failed.
Because he realised that he was being untrue to himself.
And what clues are in these notebooks themselves
that he has given up?
Well, I mean, there are small signs
- for example, here, in this version,
he's written a shopping list over these profound thoughts.
And here we have the word toothbrush. Zahnburste.
So I think if you start writing shopping lists over your great
masterworks, that suggests that you no longer have respect for them.
But the work he abandoned WAS published,
with devastating consequences.
Nietzsche died here of a stroke in 1900.
But his death gave Elisabeth the opportunity
to appropriate not just the dog days of his life,
but his life's work.
Elisabeth had hero-worshipped her brother,
and lived her life in his shadow.
Now, as literary executor,
she set about publishing Nietzsche's notebooks,
in a collection entitled Will to Power.
Although she worked with various editors,
she simply dismissed them if they disagreed with her.
Nietzsche's work was edited and manipulated
to suit her own political ends.
Elisabeth was a supporter of the Nazis,
and began to court the party's leaders.
In 1934, Adolf Hitler visited this house,
and she even gave him her brother's walking stick.
Elisabeth was so extraordinarily successful in promoting her brother
and his works that by the end of the 1930s,
Nietzschean thought and themes pervaded German society.
And this was disturbingly reflected in one of the most compelling
propaganda films of all time.
In 1934, Nazi supporters gathered in Nuremberg
to hear their leader speak.
It was a moment captured in a film commissioned by Hitler himself.
Terrifying, electrifying,
the words and rituals of the Nazis echo Nietzschean thought.
It was called Triumph of the Will.
The film begins with Hitler descending from the clouds,
echoing Zarathustra,
an Ubermensch coming down from the mountains
with his new morality to be greeted by the herd.
An Ubermensch offering a system of morality
in which traditional Christian values are to be inverted.
Where the state will exert the will of the most powerful,
and the weak and the helpless will be destroyed
to generate a greater humanity.
So closely associated had Nietzsche's ideas become with the aims of
the National Socialists that one of its most influential thinkers,
Alfred Baeumler, said, "When we call out heil Hitler,
"we greet with the same cry Friedrich Nietzsche."
And yet, had he lived to see this, Nietzsche would have been horrified.
His Ubermensch wasn't a master of eugenics.
He was he was a symbol of man's potential.
His will to power was not a call to nationalism, which he despised,
but a recognition of our drive to overcome our limitations.
And he was vocally opposed to anti-Semitism.
The Nietzsche of the Nazis was a hideous parody.
Just months before his final collapse, Nietzsche wrote,
"I confess that the deepest objection to the eternal recurrence,
"my truly most abysmal thought, is always Mother and Sister."
How prophetic his words turned out to be.
And yet perhaps the blame for his misuse is not entirely Elisabeth's.
Nietzsche would never have advocated Hitler's Final Solution,
but he was naive if he thought that his work would not be misunderstood.
Evil loves nothing better than a void, and the philosopher's clever,
ambiguous aphorisms could easily be put to the service of evil.
Even when he was entirely sane,
Nietzsche said that bad would be done in his name.
The sister and the brother must share responsibility
for the life that his work took on after his death.
A century after Nietzsche's death,
the crisis created by the murder of God
may seem exaggerated to us today.
The modern world hasn't collapsed.
God as the unchallengeable source of moral values seems to have stepped
aside relatively quietly.
But maybe that's because we lack Nietzsche's unsettling prophetic vision,
his wild imagination.
If we choose to wear the blinkers of the herd,
could it be that we are staring with unseeing eyes into the very abyss
that he predicted?
He believed that what would fill the void was
a chaos of cultural preferences.
A mess, an overload of personal choices.
Pernicious, in Nietzsche's eyes,
because they perpetuated the empty values
of the herd that he so despised.
And perhaps Nietzsche's most chilling vision
was of the humanity that would populate this post-Christian world.
These people he called the last men, and for them,
he reserved his most fervent fury.
These were men and women
who'd turned their backs on challenging ideals,
but felt they were content.
They had a banal existence.
They did everything in their powers to limit excesses of joy or sorrow.
Their concern was the trivial and the narcissistic,
and so they lived lives of timid mediocrity,
fooling themselves that they were happy.
They bought into what Nietzsche described
as the religion of comfortableness.
Could this be a devastating description of the modern world?
A world that shies from the risk of striving for greatness.
A world that shuns higher values and celebrates the mundane.
The last men are Nietzsche's greatest fear.
They look at a star,
by which he means the fiery potential of beautiful lives fully lived,
the meaning of all existence,
and they have no desire even to pursue it.
They merely blink.
Before Nietzsche fell into madness he wrote,
"If you stare long enough into the abyss,
"the abyss will stare back into you."
The chaos that confronted Nietzsche in his final moments of sanity is
arguably our own.
The question of not just how we should live,
but the point of our lives,
is still one of the greatest challenges of the modern world.
If the mind of Nietzsche has made you think,
then explore further with the Open University
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