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In 1934, a photograph was taken here
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which epitomised the extraordinary influence
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of one of the most provocative and uncompromising thinkers
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of the 19th century.
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It's an image of Adolf Hitler
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standing next to the bust of Nietzsche here
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in Weimar where the philosopher lived.
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- With chilling eloquence, this tells us what many Nazis believed
- -
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that Nietzsche was the brilliant mind, the inspiration,
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behind the terrifying ideologies of the Third Reich.
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Yet if Nietzsche had been alive to see it, he would have been appalled.
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His philosophies were being distorted by a regime
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that stood for so much that he'd have loathed.
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Nietzsche was one of the most dangerous minds of the 19th century.
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Nietzsche thinks we have blood on our hands.
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Because we haven't just killed God -
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we've killed that which gave our lives meaning.
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Nietzsche lived in a century in which Europe
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was witnessing unprecedented change.
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Where the authority of Christianity was being challenged.
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Radical breakthroughs in science were redefining belief.
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And thinkers like Freud, Marx,
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and Nietzsche were suddenly free to unleash ideas that
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in previous centuries would have seen them burnt at the stake.
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Yet they heralded nothing less than the modern world.
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In 1882, one of the greatest minds of the 19th century
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predicted a crisis.
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One that he believed would be without equal on Earth,
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and which would be triggered by nothing less than the murder of God.
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"God is dead, and God remains dead, because we have killed him.
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"What was holiest and most powerful
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"of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our eyes.
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"Who will wipe the blood from our hands?"
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These are the visceral, challenging words of Friedrich Nietzsche.
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The crisis that he proclaimed was a wave of disbelief in Christianity
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that he predicted would crash through Europe.
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And the raw,
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brutal language that he chose to describe this death of God
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is a measure of just how terrifying he thought the consequence would be.
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For what Nietzsche saw, with disturbing, prophetic clarity,
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was that without a belief in God,
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there was no authority for the moral values
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that had underpinned European society across 2,000 years.
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He was declaring our freedom from God, our mastery of our own fates.
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No longer controlled by divine laws,
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we were now liberated, or condemned, to create our own values.
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But what haunted and tormented Nietzsche was his realisation that
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this was a freedom that came at a terrible price.
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The loss of religious belief would bring with it nothing less than
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a vacuum of meaning in human existence.
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It was a crisis that Nietzsche would wrestle with
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for the rest of his life.
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BELL RINGS
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MUSIC: Messiah by Handel
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The childhood of the man who would come to call himself the Antichrist
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was, with no little irony,
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one infused with the joy of Christianity.
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When Nietzsche was just nine years old,
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he heard Handel's Messiah for the first time.
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And he said he felt he had to join in the joyful singing of the angels
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on whose billows of sound Jesus ascended to heaven.
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The man who would spend his life as an adult with a mission to attack
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everything that Christianity stood for
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started off in life as the son of a Lutheran pastor,
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here in the very cradle of Protestant Christianity.
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Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche grew up in the village of Rocken in Prussia,
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now northern Germany.
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And as a boy, he was passionately pious.
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This is the parsonage where Nietzsche was born.
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His father, Carl Ludwig, had a very simple faith,
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and the household lived and breathed Christianity.
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Nietzsche's early years were settled and sheltered.
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His parents had two other children.
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When he was two, his sister Elisabeth was born,
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followed a year later by a brother, Joseph.
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But in the autumn of 1848, when Friedrich was only four years old,
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his childhood was ripped apart.
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His father became mentally ill,
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and was diagnosed with a terminal brain disease.
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It was a torturous decline.
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He went blind and eventually was bedridden.
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One year later, he was dead.
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An autopsy revealed that a quarter of his brain was missing.
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This must have been a truly horrific end.
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The suffering of his beloved father marked Friedrich for life.
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As a teenager, he wrote about his father's funeral
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in this church where he had once preached.
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"Oh, never will the deep-throated sound of those bells quit my ear.
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"The organ resounded through the empty spaces of the church."
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For Nietzsche, the death of his father posed a profound question.
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Why had this God,
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whom his father had so loved and to whom he dedicated his life,
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punished a good man with such torment?
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It was the start of a journey into doubt that would come to define
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Nietzsche's life.
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Despite the loss of his father, in 1864, at the age of 20,
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Nietzsche arrived in Bonn to study theology at the university,
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contemplating a future as a Lutheran pastor.
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But it was during his time here that he came under the influence of
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a controversial new method of studying the Bible,
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known as Biblical criticism.
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And it scandalously suggested that this sacred text wasn't a credible
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historical work, but largely myth.
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It was radically undermining the authenticity of the scriptures.
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And for Nietzsche, it had a dramatic impact.
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If his father's death and suffering had made him question
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the idea of God emotionally,
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then this gave him the intellectual grounds on which to
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construct his doubt.
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Nietzsche's loss of belief caused an immediate rift with his family.
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At Easter, he refused to attend church,
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crushing his mother's dreams
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that he would follow his father to the pulpit.
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And his sister, who had always hero-worshipped her brother,
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found her own faith thrown into chaos.
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But for Nietzsche, his journey into doubt wasn't just a source of hurt
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for those close to him.
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It was the start of an all-consuming dissection
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of the moral and religious beliefs with which he had grown up.
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He began to regard Christianity not just as a faith regretfully lost,
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but as a pernicious influence that encouraged
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an unhealthy disengagement from the world.
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Christian teaching, he argued, focused on the next life,
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with disastrous consequences.
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Earth became a place of bleak exile from God.
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Life was a thing of pain and suffering to be endured,
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not celebrated.
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And this emphasis on the life to come robbed the here and now of its
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sublime meaning.
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This was a conviction that would dominate his life and his work
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for the next two decades.
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Rejecting Christianity forced Nietzsche
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to flee his theological studies,
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and to seek out a new direction.
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Right from the start,
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Nietzsche realised that his loss of faith wasn't the path to
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a life of contentment.
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In 1865, Nietzsche wrote to his sister, and said,
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"If you wish to seek peace of mind and happiness, then believe.
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"If you wish to be a disciple of truth, then investigate."
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Nietzsche was living in an age dominated by the rise of science,
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where the search for objective truth was all-consuming.
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But what Nietzsche saw with searing clarity was that the triumph of
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objectivity deprived humanity of something fundamental.
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Without Christianity,
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there was no set of binding moral rules by which we could all live.
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There was no solution to man's fear of death.
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And perhaps most importantly,
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with eternal salvation no longer mankind's prime goal,
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life itself didn't have a higher spiritual purpose.
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It was to finding new meaning in a godless universe that Nietzsche now
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dedicated himself.
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And his first glimpse at an answer came at the age of 21.
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He decided to become a student of philology,
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the study of the ancient civilisations and the philosophies of Greece and Rome.
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And he was in a book shop when he came across a work that would
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influence the way he thought and acted for the next decade.
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It was called The World As Will and Idea,
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and it was written by a German philosopher called Schopenhauer.
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As he read it, Nietzsche was transfixed.
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Schopenhauer was an atheist,
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who had also grappled with the purpose of life.
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But his conclusions were beyond pessimistic.
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Faced with the problem of life's endless sufferings,
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Schopenhauer's bleak conclusion
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was that it was best never to be born at all.
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He argued that human beings were in a state of constant desire.
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If we didn't achieve these desires, then there was discontent,
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and even if we did, then discontent would set in anyway.
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His solution was to face up to the fact that fulfilment is impossible.
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He encouraged us not to strive for happiness
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in order to avoid the anxiety and trouble in trying to achieve it.
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The happiest man, he said,
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is the one who gets through life with the minimum of pain.
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Nietzsche said it was like looking into a mirror
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that reflected the world, life,
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and his own mind with hideous magnificence.
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But whilst he accepted Schopenhauer's diagnosis
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that life was just a cycle of suffering,
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he passionately disagreed with his life-denying,
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nihilistic conclusions,
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the idea of giving up on life and the pursuit of one's desires.
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Instead, he was determined to find a way of affirming existence
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in spite of its pain.
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In 1869,
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the brilliant Friedrich became a professor of philology
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here at Basel University at the age of only 24,
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the youngest in its history.
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With his first book, which he wrote while he was here,
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he began to gain a reputation as a radical and subversive thinker.
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In his work, which he called The Birth of Tragedy,
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he started to grapple with the issue of how to deal with suffering
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in a world devoid of God.
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And for inspiration, he turned to the ideas of the Greeks,
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and a new focus of his devotions - the German composer Richard Wagner.
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On the 22nd of May 1872,
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the foundation stone was laid for Wagner's Festival Theatre.
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One of the guests at the ceremony was Nietzsche.
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The two men had met six years before when Nietzsche was just a student,
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and immediately he was smitten.
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Wagner became both an obsession and an inspiration.
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Nietzsche would come to believe that in Wagner's work,
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he had glimpsed what it was that made life itself worthwhile - art -
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and that the greatest art form of all was music.
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DOOR OPENS
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MUSIC: Entrance of the Gods into Valhalla
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from Das Rheingold by Wagner
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Nietzsche believed Wagner to be an artistic genius
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whose music was going to bring about
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a cultural rebirth based on the classical Greek model of tragedy.
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It was an art form that Nietzsche was convinced could transform
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a world full of suffering into something beautiful and meaningful.
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How did Nietzsche come to write The Birth of Tragedy?
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What was he trying to do with this book, do you think?
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Nietzsche wrote The Birth of Tragedy after a series of incredibly intense
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conversations with Wagner.
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Wagner was developing a revolutionary theory of art,
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where art could transform society.
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Nietzsche wanted to provide the philosophy for that.
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He found in Greek tragedy a model for that thinking.
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Greek tragedy tells these extremely visceral stories of human beings
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in conflict, suffering, destructive.
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Yet it was the dominant genre of thinking about the glory of Greece.
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Consequently, he found in Greek tragedy
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a way of talking about the human being today,
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the human being's suffering, finding meaning in life,
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finding the truth.
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So what is so explosive about what he is putting down on the page?
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Well, Nietzsche structured his book around an opposition
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between two Greek gods - Apollo and Dionysus.
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Apollo stood for light, for the truth of logic, for control.
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And since the beginning of Germans' love of Greek,
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they associated Greece with rationality,
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the beginnings of philosophy.
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But Nietzsche decided he wanted to focus more on Dionysus,
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the figure who confuses boundaries,
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who discovers ecstatic group activity,
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dancing, wildness, the visceral feelings.
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And he made that the centre of his tragedy.
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So he was standing against philosophy, against his own subject,
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against that sense that logic is the way to truth.
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He wanted to find another sort of truth, another transformative power.
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But how did he think that Dionysus,
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with all his darkness, and as you say, chaos, sometimes,
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and loss of control - how is that going to help mankind?
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Nietzsche was reacting against the dominant German intellectual tradition,
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which focused on the individual hero, the Oedipuses, if you like.
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And they saw that the individual who suffered could somehow
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transcend themselves through suffering.
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A very Christian message. Nietzsche reversed that,
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and saw instead that the individual somehow lost themselves in
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the collective, and found in a group experience
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an ecstatic transformational experience.
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That's what he saw in Wagner's music,
255
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and that's what he saw in tragedy,
256
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so that somehow the suffering that was everybody's condition
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was transformed through this ecstatic experience
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into an affirmation of life, this life, here and now.
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It's a bit like that sense of a rock concert -
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the idea that you somehow lose yourself in this great, ecstatic, collective experience.
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And one should never forget that opera in the 19th century
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was the rock music of its time, and Wagner was the rock icon of his day.
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And Nietzsche believed
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that was the way that society could be transformed,
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through a sense of the collective experience,
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from which you could go out and change the world.
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Wagner's theatre was a temple to his brilliance.
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But it was also the place where Nietzsche
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fell violently out of love with his hero.
270
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When Nietzsche came here to watch a performance of Wagner's opera
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The Ring, he hated what he found.
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Rather than a place of revolution,
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the theatre was stuffed with the great and the good of Europe,
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and the man that he'd revered as a radical,
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who he thought would catalyse the birth of a brave new world,
276
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was just the hero of a self-satisfied festival of opera,
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revelling in his own glory.
278
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Nietzsche stormed out of the theatre mid-performance.
279
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It marked the beginning of the end of their friendship,
280
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and a new phase in Nietzsche's philosophical quest.
281
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Nietzsche's rejection of Wagner
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coincided with a similarly radical change in his own life and work.
283
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Whilst he continued to teach in Basel,
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he began to have severe doubts as to whether it was here
285
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that his future lay.
286
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He still believed that it was through liberating the creative Dionysian spirit
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that greatness could be achieved.
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But he began to doubt that the answer
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00:20:52,720 --> 00:20:57,040
lay with the transformation of the masses.
290
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Instead, it was the flourishing of great visionary individuals
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00:21:00,200 --> 00:21:03,200
that would hold the key to the future.
292
00:21:03,200 --> 00:21:07,440
And he was convinced that the petty responsibilities of academic life
293
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were suffocating his own creative genius.
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He conceived a deep dread of coming back here to lecture,
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to what he called the greatest curse of his life.
296
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Depressed and anxious, he developed what he called Baselophobia.
297
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Nietzsche longed to break free.
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The key to life, he wrote, was to live dangerously.
299
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On the 2nd of May 1879, he resigned his professorship.
300
00:21:49,640 --> 00:21:54,760
As Nietzsche left Basel, he was gripped by debilitating ill-health.
301
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Since childhood, he had been plagued by violent stomach pains
302
00:21:58,000 --> 00:22:01,800
and blinding headaches.
303
00:22:01,800 --> 00:22:04,760
And haunted by the fear that he, too, would be struck down by
304
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the disease that killed his father.
305
00:22:07,160 --> 00:22:09,760
Nietzsche's physical challenges had been the final trigger
306
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for his resignation.
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Although his doctors warned that excessive reading and writing
308
00:22:17,720 --> 00:22:19,360
would cause him to go blind,
309
00:22:19,360 --> 00:22:24,160
nothing was going to stop his pursuit of a life of philosophy.
310
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Nietzsche began to crisscross Europe,
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staying in hotels and guesthouses,
312
00:22:39,200 --> 00:22:42,640
and climates that alleviated his medical symptoms.
313
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He would spend the rest of his sane adult life
314
00:22:47,880 --> 00:22:50,520
in a state of nomadic solitude.
315
00:22:52,040 --> 00:22:57,640
You can just imagine him, ill, troubled, increasingly isolated,
316
00:22:57,640 --> 00:23:01,840
and yet with this extraordinary mind for company.
317
00:23:01,840 --> 00:23:03,200
Over the next decade,
318
00:23:03,200 --> 00:23:06,280
the ideas and thoughts that poured onto the page
319
00:23:06,280 --> 00:23:08,800
were simply astonishing.
320
00:23:11,280 --> 00:23:16,120
His ill-health would mean that he could only write in bursts of 20 minutes at a time,
321
00:23:16,120 --> 00:23:19,920
so his books were full of incisive aphorisms, pithy statements,
322
00:23:19,920 --> 00:23:22,360
rather than long philosophical treatises.
323
00:23:23,480 --> 00:23:25,280
And it was on a train in 1881
324
00:23:25,280 --> 00:23:28,200
that he was told about somewhere that would
325
00:23:28,200 --> 00:23:32,680
provide the inspiration for many of these great works.
326
00:23:34,560 --> 00:23:38,480
A fellow traveller recommended that he visit a place called Sils Maria.
327
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Just a tiny little farming village in the Swiss mountains.
328
00:23:42,360 --> 00:23:45,480
He followed their advice and discovered the place
329
00:23:45,480 --> 00:23:48,200
that would become his spiritual homeland.
330
00:24:05,800 --> 00:24:09,520
On Monday the 4th of July 1881,
331
00:24:09,520 --> 00:24:12,960
Nietzsche fell in love at first sight with Sils Maria.
332
00:24:14,720 --> 00:24:19,280
Its mountains and forests inspired his most life-affirming ideas.
333
00:24:19,280 --> 00:24:26,880
Its beauty reinforced for him the sheer magnificence of existence.
334
00:24:26,880 --> 00:24:30,640
And it was on one of his walks here, a month after he'd arrived,
335
00:24:30,640 --> 00:24:35,840
that Nietzsche had what he believed was the most important thought
336
00:24:35,840 --> 00:24:37,280
he'd ever conceived.
337
00:24:38,800 --> 00:24:41,080
He was walking by this lake when he stopped
338
00:24:41,080 --> 00:24:44,720
next to this rock and suddenly had a vision.
339
00:24:44,720 --> 00:24:47,440
This was a thought experiment that Nietzsche believed
340
00:24:47,440 --> 00:24:50,280
would help us all to analyse every action,
341
00:24:50,280 --> 00:24:52,800
every decision of our lives,
342
00:24:52,800 --> 00:24:55,320
so that we could live those to the full.
343
00:24:55,320 --> 00:24:57,400
This was his question -
344
00:24:57,400 --> 00:25:02,000
if a demon were to whisper in your ear that you had to live your life
345
00:25:02,000 --> 00:25:06,080
as lived time and time again throughout eternity,
346
00:25:06,080 --> 00:25:09,240
with all the pain and with all the greatness,
347
00:25:09,240 --> 00:25:13,880
would you fall to the ground and gnash your teeth and curse that demon,
348
00:25:13,880 --> 00:25:19,800
or would you say that he was a god and that his utterances were divine?
349
00:25:24,120 --> 00:25:29,800
It was an idea that became known as the eternal recurrence of the same,
350
00:25:29,800 --> 00:25:34,280
and it formed the very essence of Nietzsche's attitude to life,
351
00:25:34,280 --> 00:25:37,440
to both its joys and its hardships.
352
00:25:39,440 --> 00:25:42,560
Nietzsche believed that even though we all have things that we might
353
00:25:42,560 --> 00:25:46,040
consider failures - the break-up of a relationship,
354
00:25:46,040 --> 00:25:52,800
or the death of a loved one - we should be happy to relive those events, too.
355
00:25:52,800 --> 00:25:57,560
Just as a pianist learns to master improvisations, so we should
356
00:25:57,560 --> 00:26:01,920
learn to incorporate mistakes and imperfections and sorrows
357
00:26:01,920 --> 00:26:04,000
into the beauty of the whole.
358
00:26:04,000 --> 00:26:08,640
We should construct our lives so we are our own heroes.
359
00:26:08,640 --> 00:26:12,000
Basically, we should decide who we want to be,
360
00:26:12,000 --> 00:26:16,160
how we want to live our life, and then love the choices that we've made.
361
00:26:16,160 --> 00:26:21,160
So that the thought of reliving our existence, for good and for bad,
362
00:26:21,160 --> 00:26:26,240
can be greeted with a life-affirming "Yes".
363
00:26:29,760 --> 00:26:35,280
The eternal return was an exuberant and optimistic embrace of life.
364
00:26:36,960 --> 00:26:40,560
Suffering wasn't something that you had to be redeemed from,
365
00:26:40,560 --> 00:26:43,000
as Christianity taught,
366
00:26:43,000 --> 00:26:46,160
or avoided at all costs, as Schopenhauer argued.
367
00:26:47,680 --> 00:26:51,960
Instead, it was to be embraced, mastered.
368
00:26:51,960 --> 00:26:58,280
To live life most fully, one had to risk suffering and overcome it.
369
00:27:00,000 --> 00:27:01,960
What doesn't kill you makes you stronger
370
00:27:01,960 --> 00:27:04,520
is one of Nietzsche's most iconic phrases.
371
00:27:04,520 --> 00:27:06,440
And it was one that he himself
372
00:27:06,440 --> 00:27:09,080
was just about to have to put to the test.
373
00:27:11,720 --> 00:27:15,440
The philosopher was about to face one of the greatest disappointments
374
00:27:15,440 --> 00:27:17,000
of his life.
375
00:27:31,120 --> 00:27:35,960
It was in the beautiful town of Lucerne that, in the spring of 1882,
376
00:27:35,960 --> 00:27:39,680
Nietzsche contemplated abandoning his life of seclusion
377
00:27:39,680 --> 00:27:44,480
for a life of love with a woman he was entranced by.
378
00:27:46,440 --> 00:27:48,520
Her name was Lou Salome.
379
00:27:48,520 --> 00:27:53,240
She was 21, Russian born, clever, beautiful,
380
00:27:53,240 --> 00:27:56,240
and fascinated by his ideas.
381
00:27:56,240 --> 00:27:59,280
Nietzsche was lost.
382
00:28:02,640 --> 00:28:05,320
Nietzsche and Lou spent hours walking together,
383
00:28:05,320 --> 00:28:10,120
discussing philosophy, absorbed in their own world.
384
00:28:13,160 --> 00:28:15,320
And Nietzsche brought her here,
385
00:28:15,320 --> 00:28:20,120
to what was known as Lion Garden, in the centre of Lucerne, to propose.
386
00:28:22,480 --> 00:28:25,160
He'd already asked for her hand in marriage once before,
387
00:28:25,160 --> 00:28:29,240
through his friend Paul Ree, and she had refused.
388
00:28:29,240 --> 00:28:32,320
Convinced that Ree hadn't done the job properly,
389
00:28:32,320 --> 00:28:35,640
Nietzsche was determined to try again.
390
00:28:35,640 --> 00:28:40,520
But Salome just wasn't interested in a conventional relationship.
391
00:28:40,520 --> 00:28:42,840
She was feisty and original,
392
00:28:42,840 --> 00:28:47,320
and had no intention whatsoever of being trapped in a life of Victorian
393
00:28:47,320 --> 00:28:52,120
domesticity, and so she'd pledged never to give herself to a man.
394
00:28:52,120 --> 00:28:55,200
So when Nietzsche proposed for a second time,
395
00:28:55,200 --> 00:28:57,800
the answer was still no.
396
00:29:02,840 --> 00:29:06,640
He was devastated by the rejection,
397
00:29:06,640 --> 00:29:10,360
made worse by the fact that his meddling sister Elisabeth
398
00:29:10,360 --> 00:29:14,080
was jealous of Lou's youth and wild charm,
399
00:29:14,080 --> 00:29:18,280
and determined to disrupt any potential romance.
400
00:29:19,840 --> 00:29:23,440
Elisabeth reported details of Nietzsche's passion for Lou
401
00:29:23,440 --> 00:29:26,800
to their mother, who responded by spitting out
402
00:29:26,800 --> 00:29:31,640
that her son was a disgrace to his father's grave.
403
00:29:31,640 --> 00:29:34,160
Their relationship was shattered,
404
00:29:34,160 --> 00:29:37,480
and Nietzsche was utterly despondent.
405
00:29:43,480 --> 00:29:47,240
What followed was one of the most miserable periods in his life.
406
00:29:48,720 --> 00:29:51,240
But one in which he had the chance
407
00:29:51,240 --> 00:29:54,440
to test his own philosophy of suffering.
408
00:30:01,840 --> 00:30:05,080
Nietzsche fled, in bleak mood.
409
00:30:07,480 --> 00:30:09,360
His books weren't selling.
410
00:30:09,360 --> 00:30:13,000
He was in bad health, and often suicidal.
411
00:30:16,480 --> 00:30:21,320
In March 1883, Nietzsche wrote, "In the deepest part of me,
412
00:30:21,320 --> 00:30:25,640
"an immovable black melancholy holds sway.
413
00:30:25,640 --> 00:30:29,360
"I cannot see even a reason to live beyond six months."
414
00:30:30,480 --> 00:30:33,840
He realised that this was a true test of his own ability
415
00:30:33,840 --> 00:30:36,440
to face suffering and to overcome it.
416
00:30:37,600 --> 00:30:42,440
"I am exerting every ounce of self-mastery," he wrote.
417
00:30:42,440 --> 00:30:47,440
"Unless I can discover an alchemical trick to turn this muck into gold,
418
00:30:47,440 --> 00:30:49,200
"I am lost."
419
00:30:51,120 --> 00:30:52,960
But in the depths of his misery,
420
00:30:52,960 --> 00:30:56,640
he poured himself into writing a new book,
421
00:30:56,640 --> 00:31:00,520
one which would prove him to be just such an alchemist.
422
00:31:02,200 --> 00:31:05,720
It was the work that he considered to be his greatest.
423
00:31:05,720 --> 00:31:09,640
MUSIC: Also sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss
424
00:31:09,640 --> 00:31:11,640
Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
425
00:31:23,960 --> 00:31:26,480
Zarathustra had huge impact.
426
00:31:26,480 --> 00:31:30,000
It inspired composers, like Richard Strauss, and writers,
427
00:31:30,000 --> 00:31:34,040
from Joyce and Kafka to Yeats and Camus.
428
00:31:34,040 --> 00:31:38,600
A parody of the Bible, that Nietzsche referred to as the fifth gospel,
429
00:31:38,600 --> 00:31:41,640
it centred around the spiritual journey of a mysterious,
430
00:31:41,640 --> 00:31:45,520
mystical character called Zarathustra, and in it,
431
00:31:45,520 --> 00:31:49,480
the philosopher introduced one of his most notorious concepts -
432
00:31:49,480 --> 00:31:52,440
the Ubermensch, or Superman.
433
00:32:00,560 --> 00:32:04,640
The book is a parable on the importance of self overcoming.
434
00:32:06,720 --> 00:32:09,200
The imagery is of the mountains,
435
00:32:09,200 --> 00:32:13,880
and the figure of Zarathustra echoes Nietzsche himself.
436
00:32:19,520 --> 00:32:21,800
Two of its four books were written here,
437
00:32:21,800 --> 00:32:24,640
in the guesthouse where Nietzsche often stayed.
438
00:32:25,640 --> 00:32:27,400
It is remarkable being here, isn't it?
439
00:32:27,400 --> 00:32:29,520
Because it's in this room that Nietzsche wrote
440
00:32:29,520 --> 00:32:33,120
one of his most groundbreaking and influential works.
441
00:32:33,120 --> 00:32:36,960
This is the place where he first had the ideas
442
00:32:36,960 --> 00:32:39,280
about Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
443
00:32:39,280 --> 00:32:42,600
Zarathustra is a prophet who comes down the mountain,
444
00:32:42,600 --> 00:32:48,680
and he wants to talk to people in the town about this great event,
445
00:32:48,680 --> 00:32:54,240
that God is dead, that Christianity, with all its certain, universal,
446
00:32:54,240 --> 00:32:58,280
absolute moral values, is no longer believed in,
447
00:32:58,280 --> 00:33:02,200
and that the question of what it is to be human,
448
00:33:02,200 --> 00:33:08,360
and how one is to live as a human, needs to be answered anew.
449
00:33:08,360 --> 00:33:11,200
But nobody listens to Zarathustra.
450
00:33:11,200 --> 00:33:15,080
And one of the mechanisms to deliver that is this difficult concept,
451
00:33:15,080 --> 00:33:18,440
the Ubermensch, the Overman or the Superman.
452
00:33:18,440 --> 00:33:21,520
Who or what exactly is that?
453
00:33:21,520 --> 00:33:23,720
It's easier to say what it is not.
454
00:33:23,720 --> 00:33:26,200
It's not a biological concept.
455
00:33:26,200 --> 00:33:29,200
It's not some kind of superior human race.
456
00:33:29,200 --> 00:33:33,480
An Ubermensch is someone who is no longer reliant
457
00:33:33,480 --> 00:33:39,680
on inauthentic external goals society gives him or her -
458
00:33:39,680 --> 00:33:41,600
parents, religions.
459
00:33:41,600 --> 00:33:47,680
It's someone who is able to commit to goals that you set yourself.
460
00:33:47,680 --> 00:33:49,520
You offer humanity goals,
461
00:33:49,520 --> 00:33:53,000
and Nietzsche thinks it's a terrifyingly difficult task,
462
00:33:53,000 --> 00:33:55,600
because the guidelines are missing.
463
00:33:55,600 --> 00:33:57,640
There are no blueprints.
464
00:33:57,640 --> 00:34:04,400
And whilst you full well know that whatever task you set yourself isn't
465
00:34:04,400 --> 00:34:07,240
universal, isn't good for all,
466
00:34:07,240 --> 00:34:10,040
it's nevertheless one you commit yourself to.
467
00:34:10,040 --> 00:34:12,240
It's one you strive towards.
468
00:34:12,240 --> 00:34:15,760
The Ubermensch is someone who can shift
469
00:34:15,760 --> 00:34:19,440
and see that the responsibility
470
00:34:19,440 --> 00:34:24,320
and the joy of creating life lies not with some transcendent God,
471
00:34:24,320 --> 00:34:25,760
but lies within oneself.
472
00:34:27,400 --> 00:34:30,560
In pouring himself into writing Zarathustra,
473
00:34:30,560 --> 00:34:35,600
Nietzsche and not only gave his own life meaning in the face of suffering,
474
00:34:35,600 --> 00:34:40,400
but he also began to see that suffering itself
475
00:34:40,400 --> 00:34:44,840
was the key to unlocking the elusive secret of happiness.
476
00:34:45,840 --> 00:34:48,760
So what do you think happiness is for Nietzsche?
477
00:34:48,760 --> 00:34:52,960
We traditionally see happiness in opposition to pain, exertion,
478
00:34:52,960 --> 00:34:57,080
suffering, etc. For him, that is not the case.
479
00:34:58,280 --> 00:35:00,880
It's striving towards something,
480
00:35:00,880 --> 00:35:05,280
it's suffering through that great task you've set yourself.
481
00:35:05,280 --> 00:35:10,920
So just flying up onto the summit of a high mountain in a helicopter will
482
00:35:10,920 --> 00:35:14,080
not give you the kind of feeling of happiness
483
00:35:14,080 --> 00:35:18,040
that you experience when you have spent 15 days
484
00:35:18,040 --> 00:35:20,520
walking towards the summit.
485
00:35:20,520 --> 00:35:25,720
It's overcoming obstacles that resist you achieving that goal
486
00:35:25,720 --> 00:35:29,400
that is part of the experience of happiness.
487
00:35:29,400 --> 00:35:32,600
So it's not just pleasure, but pain that can be happiness.
488
00:35:32,600 --> 00:35:36,800
Pain is almost an enabling condition for happiness.
489
00:35:41,640 --> 00:35:44,040
Nietzsche never found love again.
490
00:35:44,040 --> 00:35:49,000
But he'd succeeded in transforming his despair into a work whose vision
491
00:35:49,000 --> 00:35:53,360
would go on to resonate with generations of artists and thinkers.
492
00:35:54,520 --> 00:35:58,480
He'd become a living testament to his idea of the eternal return.
493
00:36:00,080 --> 00:36:04,320
And he now turned his attention away from the loss of the meaning created
494
00:36:04,320 --> 00:36:09,760
by the murder of God to the crisis of values left in its wake.
495
00:36:18,840 --> 00:36:21,920
Nietzsche continued his restless journey around Europe.
496
00:36:23,280 --> 00:36:25,480
Although his health was deteriorating,
497
00:36:25,480 --> 00:36:29,120
it didn't stop him from writing a subversive work
498
00:36:29,120 --> 00:36:32,240
called Beyond Good and Evil.
499
00:36:35,360 --> 00:36:38,360
Nietzsche himself thought the book was terrifying,
500
00:36:38,360 --> 00:36:40,640
a squid-like work that confronted
501
00:36:40,640 --> 00:36:45,120
all the dark realities that 19th-century science had laid bare.
502
00:36:46,880 --> 00:36:49,120
He couldn't find anybody to publish it,
503
00:36:49,120 --> 00:36:51,280
so he paid for it to be printed himself.
504
00:36:51,280 --> 00:36:56,040
And when it was released in 1886, the reviewers hated it.
505
00:36:56,040 --> 00:36:59,440
They described it as dangerous dynamite.
506
00:37:02,320 --> 00:37:06,320
Both this book and his next, The Genealogy of Morality,
507
00:37:06,320 --> 00:37:10,560
were fired by Nietzsche's utter dismay at the persistence of
508
00:37:10,560 --> 00:37:12,560
Christianity's moral values.
509
00:37:13,640 --> 00:37:16,200
Whilst many 19th-century intellectuals
510
00:37:16,200 --> 00:37:19,720
had rejected the faith, they maintained its values.
511
00:37:21,120 --> 00:37:23,480
For Nietzsche, this was a catastrophe.
512
00:37:25,200 --> 00:37:29,360
For him, they no longer just lacked divine authority -
513
00:37:29,360 --> 00:37:33,280
they were a threat to the future of humanity itself.
514
00:37:35,200 --> 00:37:38,320
Why should we try to understand this book of his, Beyond Good and Evil,
515
00:37:38,320 --> 00:37:40,600
if we're going to try to understand Nietzsche?
516
00:37:40,600 --> 00:37:43,760
Well, this is the book where he really begins his incredibly intense
517
00:37:43,760 --> 00:37:46,200
campaign against Christianity.
518
00:37:46,200 --> 00:37:49,760
And he says, the real logic of Christianity
519
00:37:49,760 --> 00:37:53,880
is a hatred of our own human, all too human nature.
520
00:37:53,880 --> 00:37:56,880
That is, we have various drives, according to Nietzsche -
521
00:37:56,880 --> 00:38:00,000
sexual drives, aggressive drives, drives to dominate.
522
00:38:00,000 --> 00:38:03,280
And Christianity says those drives are an affront to God.
523
00:38:03,280 --> 00:38:05,480
We need to push those drives down.
524
00:38:05,480 --> 00:38:09,040
But for Nietzsche, that means we need to push ourselves down.
525
00:38:09,040 --> 00:38:14,520
So he thinks that Christianity teaches us kind of a self-evisceration, a self-hatred.
526
00:38:14,520 --> 00:38:17,080
That is his critique of Christianity.
527
00:38:17,080 --> 00:38:19,560
And what does he think is wrong
528
00:38:19,560 --> 00:38:22,040
with a fundamental Christian moral value?
529
00:38:22,040 --> 00:38:24,360
Well, he looks at Christianity,
530
00:38:24,360 --> 00:38:26,560
and he very disparagingly calls it slave morality.
531
00:38:26,560 --> 00:38:29,800
And he calls it slave morality because he thinks it's a morality
532
00:38:29,800 --> 00:38:31,960
that is focused on the worst off.
533
00:38:31,960 --> 00:38:35,640
That is, the slaves of ancient Rome, who were the weak ones,
534
00:38:35,640 --> 00:38:39,320
and needed a religion that gave them a sense of meaning,
535
00:38:39,320 --> 00:38:41,320
a sense of power.
536
00:38:41,320 --> 00:38:43,920
But they had no power in this world, so they tried to...
537
00:38:43,920 --> 00:38:46,160
He says, and he puts it so powerfully,
538
00:38:46,160 --> 00:38:48,720
they lie their weakness into a strength.
539
00:38:48,720 --> 00:38:53,880
So he thinks these Christian values - humility, poverty, meekness -
540
00:38:53,880 --> 00:38:58,680
he thinks these are values that make it safe for the weakest in society,
541
00:38:58,680 --> 00:39:00,680
but he thinks eventually,
542
00:39:00,680 --> 00:39:03,920
when these values triumph and become everyone's values,
543
00:39:03,920 --> 00:39:06,720
they inevitably make for mediocrity.
544
00:39:06,720 --> 00:39:09,560
But his criticism of the weak really troubles me,
545
00:39:09,560 --> 00:39:13,640
because these are works that have no time, it seems to me, for the weak,
546
00:39:13,640 --> 00:39:15,880
- for compassion.
- Yeah.
547
00:39:15,880 --> 00:39:18,520
It's not that Nietzsche thought we should step on the weak.
548
00:39:18,520 --> 00:39:20,920
What he thought is, we shouldn't be obsessed with the weak.
549
00:39:20,920 --> 00:39:24,520
And that is so strange to us, because we think, "And what's wrong with compassion?"
550
00:39:24,520 --> 00:39:26,680
But he did have a problem with compassion.
551
00:39:26,680 --> 00:39:28,440
Is this one of the reasons that
552
00:39:28,440 --> 00:39:30,880
he is so anti the emerging isms of the day?
553
00:39:30,880 --> 00:39:32,640
So socialism, communism...
554
00:39:32,640 --> 00:39:34,680
Well, a lot of communists,
555
00:39:34,680 --> 00:39:38,200
a lot of socialists, may no longer believe in God,
556
00:39:38,200 --> 00:39:42,160
but they still have this core Christian value of compassion.
557
00:39:42,160 --> 00:39:44,960
And Nietzsche says, when you're obsessed with compassion,
558
00:39:44,960 --> 00:39:47,400
when you're obsessed with how the worst off are doing,
559
00:39:47,400 --> 00:39:51,960
that gets you into a mentality where what is valued is contentment.
560
00:39:51,960 --> 00:39:55,600
He calls that herd happiness, and he says that is only worthy of animals.
561
00:39:55,600 --> 00:39:57,800
We are worthy of so much more.
562
00:39:57,800 --> 00:40:01,200
He says, if you gear everything to making the worst off as well as
563
00:40:01,200 --> 00:40:06,440
possible, you take your eyes off the idea of the great individuals who
564
00:40:06,440 --> 00:40:10,640
often are extremely egotistical, we would say selfish.
565
00:40:10,640 --> 00:40:13,680
But he says they need that selfishness to make their achievements,
566
00:40:13,680 --> 00:40:19,200
because it's their achievements that really drive civilisation and culture at its highest peaks.
567
00:40:20,520 --> 00:40:23,360
Christian morality was something that Nietzsche believed
568
00:40:23,360 --> 00:40:27,600
was positively dangerous for the future of mankind.
569
00:40:27,600 --> 00:40:31,640
If humanity was to survive, it needed the great individuals,
570
00:40:31,640 --> 00:40:37,880
the very geniuses that he thought the slave morality of Christian culture was holding down.
571
00:40:40,560 --> 00:40:43,440
But there was a system of values that he did admire.
572
00:40:44,920 --> 00:40:47,040
He also talks about master morality.
573
00:40:47,040 --> 00:40:49,160
What's going on there?
574
00:40:49,160 --> 00:40:53,040
He's harkening back to the world of the ancient Romans and the ancient Greeks.
575
00:40:53,040 --> 00:40:55,480
They were both massive slave-owning societies.
576
00:40:55,480 --> 00:40:59,440
He said, these people were masterful in a way that, with their gods,
577
00:40:59,440 --> 00:41:01,560
they celebrated themselves.
578
00:41:01,560 --> 00:41:05,280
Someone like Achilles, the great warrior - he could worship Ares,
579
00:41:05,280 --> 00:41:08,720
the God of War, but in doing that, he was worshipping himself.
580
00:41:08,720 --> 00:41:13,120
So he says, the masters have a religion that affirms themselves,
581
00:41:13,120 --> 00:41:17,000
whereas the slaves have a religion of Christianity
582
00:41:17,000 --> 00:41:20,000
which actually disavows their nature.
583
00:41:22,000 --> 00:41:25,560
The master morality of the Greeks, as Nietzsche saw it,
584
00:41:25,560 --> 00:41:31,920
glorified ambition, strength and power, and despised compassion.
585
00:41:33,600 --> 00:41:36,960
Nietzsche was convinced that a revision of moral values
586
00:41:36,960 --> 00:41:39,760
was needed for a post-Christian future,
587
00:41:39,760 --> 00:41:43,600
and that such a morality needed moral legislators.
588
00:41:45,600 --> 00:41:49,880
In his letters, he announced that his next task was a magnum opus,
589
00:41:49,880 --> 00:41:55,480
in which he would lay out a new value system to fill the void.
590
00:41:56,880 --> 00:41:58,480
But it wasn't to be.
591
00:42:09,560 --> 00:42:12,800
In April 1888, Nietzsche moved to Turin.
592
00:42:14,200 --> 00:42:18,040
This would be his home for the rest of his sane life.
593
00:42:18,040 --> 00:42:22,000
When he arrived here, he was at his most brilliantly productive.
594
00:42:22,000 --> 00:42:24,640
In an almost constant state of euphoria,
595
00:42:24,640 --> 00:42:27,080
he produced four books in a year,
596
00:42:27,080 --> 00:42:31,440
and as he walked through the city, he said he felt like a god.
597
00:42:34,240 --> 00:42:37,080
But it was in the beauty of this Italian city
598
00:42:37,080 --> 00:42:40,080
that Nietzsche's mind began to decay.
599
00:42:42,320 --> 00:42:45,440
And it's in the letters he wrote at the start of 1888
600
00:42:45,440 --> 00:42:48,920
that the very first signs of his madness can be glimpsed.
601
00:42:53,800 --> 00:42:55,800
These letters give us a troubling insight
602
00:42:55,800 --> 00:42:58,560
into Nietzsche's state of mind at the time.
603
00:42:58,560 --> 00:43:02,320
Rather than the brilliance that once poured onto the page,
604
00:43:02,320 --> 00:43:05,000
these are bizarre and deranged.
605
00:43:06,400 --> 00:43:08,280
Here he is writing to Bismarck,
606
00:43:08,280 --> 00:43:10,760
one of the most powerful statesmen in Prussia,
607
00:43:10,760 --> 00:43:14,080
but he signs himself the Antichrist.
608
00:43:14,080 --> 00:43:17,840
On others, he calls himself Dionysus, the Greek god.
609
00:43:17,840 --> 00:43:22,480
And here he simply ends, "the crucified one".
610
00:43:26,040 --> 00:43:28,800
Nietzsche had megalomaniac tendencies,
611
00:43:28,800 --> 00:43:32,840
claiming that he was preparing an event which had the potential
612
00:43:32,840 --> 00:43:36,440
to split the history of humanity into two halves.
613
00:43:38,480 --> 00:43:41,600
The owners of the house where he was staying were alarmed
614
00:43:41,600 --> 00:43:43,320
by his ecstatic piano playing.
615
00:43:43,320 --> 00:43:46,200
Sometimes they could just about make out that he was
616
00:43:46,200 --> 00:43:49,760
leaping about his room stark naked, yelling,
617
00:43:49,760 --> 00:43:52,880
as if he was recreating a Dionysian orgy.
618
00:43:59,480 --> 00:44:03,360
Events came to a climax in one of Turin's piazzas.
619
00:44:04,880 --> 00:44:08,480
Nietzsche saw a coachman thrashing his horse with a whip.
620
00:44:08,480 --> 00:44:11,040
He flung his arms around the animal's neck,
621
00:44:11,040 --> 00:44:14,680
and with tears streaming, collapsed to the ground.
622
00:44:15,680 --> 00:44:20,160
The final sane act of a man who had spent his life criticising
623
00:44:20,160 --> 00:44:22,920
the weakness of human compassion
624
00:44:22,920 --> 00:44:25,760
was one of profound pity.
625
00:44:29,600 --> 00:44:34,640
Seven days later, he was incarcerated in an asylum in Basel.
626
00:44:46,720 --> 00:44:48,920
Nietzsche never regained his sanity.
627
00:44:50,080 --> 00:44:51,480
At the age of 44,
628
00:44:51,480 --> 00:44:55,720
one of the most searing philosophical minds in human history
629
00:44:55,720 --> 00:44:57,280
had disintegrated.
630
00:44:58,880 --> 00:45:03,880
For the next decade, until his death in 1900, he'd write nothing.
631
00:45:06,000 --> 00:45:09,120
When he arrived at the clinic, the friend who brought him wrote,
632
00:45:09,120 --> 00:45:12,520
"He suffers from delusions of infinite grandeur.
633
00:45:12,520 --> 00:45:14,080
"It's hopeless.
634
00:45:14,080 --> 00:45:18,000
"I've never seen such a horrific picture of destruction."
635
00:45:28,600 --> 00:45:34,320
No-one knows exactly what caused Nietzsche's descent into madness.
636
00:45:34,320 --> 00:45:36,960
But while Nietzsche's mind collapsed,
637
00:45:36,960 --> 00:45:40,600
his work started to take on a life of its own.
638
00:46:01,040 --> 00:46:06,760
In 1887, Nietzsche was brought here, to his sister Elisabeth's house,
639
00:46:06,760 --> 00:46:09,200
to live out his remaining years.
640
00:46:26,080 --> 00:46:30,240
Declared clinically insane, until his death,
641
00:46:30,240 --> 00:46:32,440
Elisabeth would be his sole carer.
642
00:46:34,040 --> 00:46:35,720
While Nietzsche lived here,
643
00:46:35,720 --> 00:46:39,440
Elisabeth treated her brother like an attraction in a sideshow.
644
00:46:39,440 --> 00:46:41,760
She invited visitors in to stare at him,
645
00:46:41,760 --> 00:46:44,880
and she held soirees for his disciples,
646
00:46:44,880 --> 00:46:48,360
while his disturbed groaning could be heard from upstairs.
647
00:46:50,480 --> 00:46:52,960
Today the house is a shrine to Nietzsche,
648
00:46:52,960 --> 00:46:54,920
created by his younger sister,
649
00:46:54,920 --> 00:46:57,960
who dressed him in white as if a prophet.
650
00:46:57,960 --> 00:47:02,720
Yet its pristine rooms are chillingly devoid of any trace of his personality.
651
00:47:05,560 --> 00:47:08,800
Elisabeth collected together Nietzsche's writings,
652
00:47:08,800 --> 00:47:11,680
including notebooks for an unpublished masterwork
653
00:47:11,680 --> 00:47:16,040
that Nietzsche had planned before his mind shut down.
654
00:47:17,120 --> 00:47:21,280
Notebooks he'd never intended the world to see.
655
00:47:24,600 --> 00:47:27,360
What exactly is it that we're looking at here?
656
00:47:27,360 --> 00:47:30,200
So here we're looking at two notebooks of Nietzsche's,
657
00:47:30,200 --> 00:47:35,080
in which he is working up to this great work called The Will to Power,
658
00:47:35,080 --> 00:47:38,440
a work of tremendous ambition, because what he's attempting,
659
00:47:38,440 --> 00:47:42,960
you can see from this notebook here, is a revaluation of all values.
660
00:47:42,960 --> 00:47:45,440
I mean, it's extraordinarily exciting to see this,
661
00:47:45,440 --> 00:47:49,360
because here he is trying to overturn the whole of Western morality,
662
00:47:49,360 --> 00:47:52,560
because people deep down no longer believe in it,
663
00:47:52,560 --> 00:47:56,960
though they are going on, like the herd, as he calls most of us,
664
00:47:56,960 --> 00:48:00,720
living their lives by it, but there is no longer a god to back it up.
665
00:48:00,720 --> 00:48:03,200
So he's saying, we need to find a new morality,
666
00:48:03,200 --> 00:48:06,000
and that's his fundamental task.
667
00:48:06,000 --> 00:48:07,560
Is it as simple as it sounds?
668
00:48:07,560 --> 00:48:11,600
The Will to Power - is he saying that power is the identifying,
669
00:48:11,600 --> 00:48:13,760
organising principle for humanity?
670
00:48:13,760 --> 00:48:15,320
He's saying, actually,
671
00:48:15,320 --> 00:48:19,040
if we look at how people live and behave and strive,
672
00:48:19,040 --> 00:48:23,560
really what they're after in life, from infancy onwards, is power.
673
00:48:23,560 --> 00:48:27,000
And therefore, any morality that's going to fit with human nature needs
674
00:48:27,000 --> 00:48:32,520
to be a morality that sees power as the goal that we all seek,
675
00:48:32,520 --> 00:48:34,680
albeit in very different ways.
676
00:48:34,680 --> 00:48:36,520
So it's more than just something -
677
00:48:36,520 --> 00:48:40,000
because we've got Darwin at this time, with his survival of the fittest.
678
00:48:40,000 --> 00:48:43,160
- We do.
- But Nietzsche is taking that idea way beyond what Darwin is saying.
679
00:48:43,160 --> 00:48:46,120
He is. Superficially they sound similar, but in fact,
680
00:48:46,120 --> 00:48:47,920
they're profoundly different.
681
00:48:47,920 --> 00:48:51,440
Nietzsche despised Darwin,
682
00:48:51,440 --> 00:48:57,040
and he has contempt for any way of living life that simply seeks to
683
00:48:57,040 --> 00:49:00,080
preserve yourself and your progeny.
684
00:49:00,080 --> 00:49:03,200
And the real difference is that the will to power
685
00:49:03,200 --> 00:49:05,960
is concerned that human beings should do more than
686
00:49:05,960 --> 00:49:07,640
merely preserve themselves.
687
00:49:07,640 --> 00:49:10,840
They should aim for great things.
688
00:49:10,840 --> 00:49:13,000
They should aim to be great statesmen,
689
00:49:13,000 --> 00:49:16,880
or to be great philosophers, and design new worlds, as it were.
690
00:49:16,880 --> 00:49:19,480
And that might involve sacrificing preservation.
691
00:49:19,480 --> 00:49:20,920
It might involve an early death.
692
00:49:20,920 --> 00:49:22,680
It might involve leaving no children.
693
00:49:22,680 --> 00:49:27,720
For him, the will to power is about seeking the exceptional.
694
00:49:29,640 --> 00:49:33,280
But Nietzsche seems to have recognised the flaw in his own idea.
695
00:49:34,480 --> 00:49:38,320
Perhaps his last sane act was the decision
696
00:49:38,320 --> 00:49:41,440
not to publish what he'd written.
697
00:49:41,440 --> 00:49:44,960
Nietzsche was himself against all philosophies
698
00:49:44,960 --> 00:49:48,080
that attempted to reduce the world to one principle,
699
00:49:48,080 --> 00:49:50,200
whatever that principle might be.
700
00:49:50,200 --> 00:49:55,080
And in a sense, his attempt to reduce the world to the will to power was,
701
00:49:55,080 --> 00:49:58,360
as he would put it, intellectually unclean,
702
00:49:58,360 --> 00:50:02,480
and I think that's why this work ultimately failed.
703
00:50:02,480 --> 00:50:07,280
Because he realised that he was being untrue to himself.
704
00:50:07,280 --> 00:50:11,280
And what clues are in these notebooks themselves
705
00:50:11,280 --> 00:50:13,000
that he has given up?
706
00:50:13,000 --> 00:50:15,320
Well, I mean, there are small signs
707
00:50:15,320 --> 00:50:17,800
- for example, here, in this version,
708
00:50:17,800 --> 00:50:22,240
he's written a shopping list over these profound thoughts.
709
00:50:22,240 --> 00:50:25,400
And here we have the word toothbrush. Zahnburste.
710
00:50:25,400 --> 00:50:28,680
So I think if you start writing shopping lists over your great
711
00:50:28,680 --> 00:50:32,960
masterworks, that suggests that you no longer have respect for them.
712
00:50:36,720 --> 00:50:39,680
But the work he abandoned WAS published,
713
00:50:39,680 --> 00:50:42,160
with devastating consequences.
714
00:50:43,880 --> 00:50:46,680
Nietzsche died here of a stroke in 1900.
715
00:50:47,800 --> 00:50:50,680
But his death gave Elisabeth the opportunity
716
00:50:50,680 --> 00:50:54,160
to appropriate not just the dog days of his life,
717
00:50:54,160 --> 00:50:56,200
but his life's work.
718
00:50:57,560 --> 00:51:00,120
Elisabeth had hero-worshipped her brother,
719
00:51:00,120 --> 00:51:02,560
and lived her life in his shadow.
720
00:51:04,640 --> 00:51:06,400
Now, as literary executor,
721
00:51:06,400 --> 00:51:09,160
she set about publishing Nietzsche's notebooks,
722
00:51:09,160 --> 00:51:12,720
in a collection entitled Will to Power.
723
00:51:14,160 --> 00:51:16,200
Although she worked with various editors,
724
00:51:16,200 --> 00:51:20,040
she simply dismissed them if they disagreed with her.
725
00:51:20,040 --> 00:51:23,840
Nietzsche's work was edited and manipulated
726
00:51:23,840 --> 00:51:27,040
to suit her own political ends.
727
00:51:29,120 --> 00:51:31,760
Elisabeth was a supporter of the Nazis,
728
00:51:31,760 --> 00:51:35,360
and began to court the party's leaders.
729
00:51:35,360 --> 00:51:39,680
In 1934, Adolf Hitler visited this house,
730
00:51:39,680 --> 00:51:42,560
and she even gave him her brother's walking stick.
731
00:51:45,360 --> 00:51:49,720
Elisabeth was so extraordinarily successful in promoting her brother
732
00:51:49,720 --> 00:51:53,520
and his works that by the end of the 1930s,
733
00:51:53,520 --> 00:51:58,440
Nietzschean thought and themes pervaded German society.
734
00:52:00,120 --> 00:52:03,720
And this was disturbingly reflected in one of the most compelling
735
00:52:03,720 --> 00:52:06,720
propaganda films of all time.
736
00:52:18,800 --> 00:52:22,560
In 1934, Nazi supporters gathered in Nuremberg
737
00:52:22,560 --> 00:52:25,160
to hear their leader speak.
738
00:52:28,080 --> 00:52:33,080
It was a moment captured in a film commissioned by Hitler himself.
739
00:52:33,080 --> 00:52:35,640
Terrifying, electrifying,
740
00:52:35,640 --> 00:52:40,640
the words and rituals of the Nazis echo Nietzschean thought.
741
00:52:41,680 --> 00:52:44,840
It was called Triumph of the Will.
742
00:52:50,680 --> 00:52:53,960
The film begins with Hitler descending from the clouds,
743
00:52:53,960 --> 00:52:55,680
echoing Zarathustra,
744
00:52:55,680 --> 00:52:58,320
an Ubermensch coming down from the mountains
745
00:52:58,320 --> 00:53:01,800
with his new morality to be greeted by the herd.
746
00:53:03,400 --> 00:53:05,840
An Ubermensch offering a system of morality
747
00:53:05,840 --> 00:53:09,880
in which traditional Christian values are to be inverted.
748
00:53:17,120 --> 00:53:19,800
Where the state will exert the will of the most powerful,
749
00:53:19,800 --> 00:53:22,520
and the weak and the helpless will be destroyed
750
00:53:22,520 --> 00:53:24,960
to generate a greater humanity.
751
00:53:37,120 --> 00:53:41,400
So closely associated had Nietzsche's ideas become with the aims of
752
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the National Socialists that one of its most influential thinkers,
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Alfred Baeumler, said, "When we call out heil Hitler,
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"we greet with the same cry Friedrich Nietzsche."
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And yet, had he lived to see this, Nietzsche would have been horrified.
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His Ubermensch wasn't a master of eugenics.
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He was he was a symbol of man's potential.
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His will to power was not a call to nationalism, which he despised,
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but a recognition of our drive to overcome our limitations.
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And he was vocally opposed to anti-Semitism.
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The Nietzsche of the Nazis was a hideous parody.
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Just months before his final collapse, Nietzsche wrote,
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"I confess that the deepest objection to the eternal recurrence,
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"my truly most abysmal thought, is always Mother and Sister."
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How prophetic his words turned out to be.
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And yet perhaps the blame for his misuse is not entirely Elisabeth's.
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Nietzsche would never have advocated Hitler's Final Solution,
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but he was naive if he thought that his work would not be misunderstood.
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Evil loves nothing better than a void, and the philosopher's clever,
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ambiguous aphorisms could easily be put to the service of evil.
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Even when he was entirely sane,
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Nietzsche said that bad would be done in his name.
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The sister and the brother must share responsibility
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for the life that his work took on after his death.
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A century after Nietzsche's death,
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the crisis created by the murder of God
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may seem exaggerated to us today.
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The modern world hasn't collapsed.
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God as the unchallengeable source of moral values seems to have stepped
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aside relatively quietly.
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But maybe that's because we lack Nietzsche's unsettling prophetic vision,
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his wild imagination.
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If we choose to wear the blinkers of the herd,
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could it be that we are staring with unseeing eyes into the very abyss
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that he predicted?
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00:56:28,120 --> 00:56:31,320
He believed that what would fill the void was
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a chaos of cultural preferences.
788
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A mess, an overload of personal choices.
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00:56:38,800 --> 00:56:41,080
Pernicious, in Nietzsche's eyes,
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because they perpetuated the empty values
791
00:56:43,920 --> 00:56:47,800
of the herd that he so despised.
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00:56:50,040 --> 00:56:52,400
And perhaps Nietzsche's most chilling vision
793
00:56:52,400 --> 00:56:57,200
was of the humanity that would populate this post-Christian world.
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These people he called the last men, and for them,
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he reserved his most fervent fury.
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00:57:07,920 --> 00:57:09,280
These were men and women
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00:57:09,280 --> 00:57:12,040
who'd turned their backs on challenging ideals,
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but felt they were content.
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00:57:15,880 --> 00:57:18,840
They had a banal existence.
800
00:57:18,840 --> 00:57:22,880
They did everything in their powers to limit excesses of joy or sorrow.
801
00:57:24,800 --> 00:57:28,720
Their concern was the trivial and the narcissistic,
802
00:57:28,720 --> 00:57:32,520
and so they lived lives of timid mediocrity,
803
00:57:32,520 --> 00:57:34,960
fooling themselves that they were happy.
804
00:57:36,560 --> 00:57:39,560
They bought into what Nietzsche described
805
00:57:39,560 --> 00:57:42,520
as the religion of comfortableness.
806
00:57:44,440 --> 00:57:48,880
Could this be a devastating description of the modern world?
807
00:57:48,880 --> 00:57:52,640
A world that shies from the risk of striving for greatness.
808
00:57:52,640 --> 00:57:57,480
A world that shuns higher values and celebrates the mundane.
809
00:57:57,480 --> 00:58:00,640
The last men are Nietzsche's greatest fear.
810
00:58:01,680 --> 00:58:03,360
They look at a star,
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by which he means the fiery potential of beautiful lives fully lived,
812
00:58:08,480 --> 00:58:10,840
the meaning of all existence,
813
00:58:10,840 --> 00:58:14,280
and they have no desire even to pursue it.
814
00:58:15,800 --> 00:58:17,360
They merely blink.
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00:58:19,800 --> 00:58:22,840
Before Nietzsche fell into madness he wrote,
816
00:58:22,840 --> 00:58:25,800
"If you stare long enough into the abyss,
817
00:58:25,800 --> 00:58:28,240
"the abyss will stare back into you."
818
00:58:31,600 --> 00:58:36,160
The chaos that confronted Nietzsche in his final moments of sanity is
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00:58:36,160 --> 00:58:37,520
arguably our own.
820
00:58:38,880 --> 00:58:42,480
The question of not just how we should live,
821
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but the point of our lives,
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is still one of the greatest challenges of the modern world.
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If the mind of Nietzsche has made you think,
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then explore further with the Open University
825
00:59:03,560 --> 00:59:07,840
to discover how other great minds have influenced our world today.
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Go to the address at the bottom of the screen
827
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and follow the links to the Open University.
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