All language subtitles for S01E02 - 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.

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.

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.

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.