Hello, I'm Catherine Carr, producer of Talking Politics. In today's episode of History of

Ideas brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books, David looks at

the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the most influential and controversial philosophers

of modern times. Nietzsche wanted us to rethink almost everything we believe about morality

and to question the conventional difference between good and evil. Was he mad? Or was he

on to something?

In the first series of History of Ideas, I sometimes associated the authors I was talking

about with a catchphrase, so Hobbes famously had nasty brutish and short. Tockville, the

tyranny of the majority, Hannah Arendt, the banality of evil, and so on. The author I'm talking

about today, Friedrich Nietzsche, had two catchphrases. They literally are almost

t-shirts slogans. You can see them on posters, on t-shirts, along with his extraordinary haunted

face and his even more extraordinary bushy moustache, he is extremely recognizable. The two

catchphrases are God is dead and the will to power. And between them, they give a kind

of very pithy summary of Nietzsche's genius, but they don't give a summary of his genius

on their own. So if you take them separately, there is nothing particularly profound about

them, or really particularly original to Nietzsche. So the idea that God is dead is essentially

saying that religion, particularly Christian religion, has been exposed. It's been revealed

as a kind of construct. It's not something that comes to the human experience from outside

from above. It comes from inside. We made it. It's an expression of us. It's not a way

of defining us through something supernatural. And that idea that it's a construct, and therefore

it's a kind of veil. It was an original to Nietzsche and many people in the second half of the 19th

century when he lived when he rode. We're saying something similar. So this was a thought that came to

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