I warmly welcome you to Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the great European philosophers. Today we are dealing with the famous "will to power" and Nietzsche’s great vision of the overman. And you will see that Nietzsche has numerous ideas that are of burning topicality. And already in 1882 he formulated a small sentence which has acquired great fame. It's very short and I’ve brought it with me For you: "God is dead". This little phrase is known everywhere nowadays, not just in Europe, but also in America. "God is dead!". Everyone thinks ‘I've heard this phrase before’. Very few people know that this sentence came from Nietzsche, but it is well known. It spread around the world like wildfire because Nietzsche in saying this, brought something to expression that was to become a big problem in the next few centuries for the entire world, or at least the western world. By saying "God is dead" Nietzsche does not mean just any event, i.e. that God died suddenly. He is speaking of a process. He says: "What I’m telling is the story of the next two centuries. I am describing what is to come, what has to come: namely, the advent of nihilism." So what he says – "God is dead" – means: This is about the history of the next two centuries. He said that around 1880. If you extrapolate 1980, 2080, that's a process that's extends to our own times and it's the process of the rise of nihilism and mass atheism. And if we're honest, up to half a million people are actually leaving the churches every year. Even in this year of Luther’s anniversary Many people have left and one has to assume that in just a few years the vast majority of the European population will no longer be in the church. From that point of view, Nietzsche’s prediction was of course quite accurate. Part of the reason why this is happening, he says, is of course the emerging natural sciences. You have to remember that Nietzsche's contemporary was Charles Darwin, who was the first to say that we are not all descended from Adam and Eve, but rather we are higher mammals that have slowly emerged through evolution via the apes, via the hominids. But it wasn't just Darwin. Numerous scientists have shaken and shattered the old religious worldview in which we felt safe and secure for thousands of years. It was a time of enormous disruption: in medicine, in physics, in all areas. To take just medicine: It used to be thought that the plague, cholera, these serious diseases, especially the plague, were the work of the devil, or rather ia punishment from God. But even before 1900, a Russian scientist said: "No, it's just a bacterial infection" and everything was put to the test. At that time there was a big breakthrough. More and more doubts were raised, not only about Adam and Eve, about the immaculate conception, about the whole story of creation - but in the end also about God himself. And now Nietzsche says: "Where has God gone?" And then something exciting happens. He says: "We killed him, you and I! We are all his killers!" And what he means by that is very simple: it wasn't just Darwin and the natural scientists who killed God with their new theories explaining the world. No, we all did, because we withdrew the power that gives God existence, because we no longer believed in him in that way. Nietzsche was the first post-modern thinker. He even wrote a book called The Antichrist. He was an atheist, a committed atheist, but he was also the first post-modern thinker. Why post-modern? What does post-modern mean? What does modern mean? By modernity we generally understand this great awakening of the Enlightenment, when the natural sciences began, when the French Enlighteners – Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu – suddenly demanded the separation of powers, asked "Who shall rule the people if not the people?" and so on. That was a great awakening, the Enlightenment – or, as the French say, “illumination” – means that the light of reason should go everywhere and should illuminate and dispel, so to speak, superstition, belief, myth and ancient worldviews. That was the modern age. Nietzsche is the first post-modern thinker. Saying that is no longer enough for him. The Enlightenment was also very critical. Kant, Locke, Hume and all the Enlightenment thinkers were also critical of religion, but it is not enough for Nietzsche to criticize that. He says: the real question that Man will have to ask himself in the next few centuries is a completely different one. What happens when the last human has stopped believing in God? What happens then? That interested him. And then he says - quote: "Since the belief has ceased that a god guides the fate of the world on a large scale, people themselves have to set goals that encompass the whole earth. Herein lies the tremendous task." So if we are no longer secure in the religious worldview that life is a task that we have to fulfill in order to get to paradise, if that no longer supports us, then we have to take on this task ourselves. Humans themselves must now give themselves global goals that span the entire world in order to shape the future. And now, he says - and that's why he's considered a post-modern thinker - we have a big problem. He says that people aren't ready for it. Because, his contemporaries, he says, when he looks at them, all he can do is shake his head. As soon as God is dead, they fall into belief in false idols and new idols are erected. One of those idols, he says, is nationalism and the form of this that especially concerned him: the German one. It started then, you know, the founding of the Reich in 1870 and everything. The German nationalism and supremacism of that time got on his nerves. If there is any nation, he said, that can be proud of what they are, patriotic about their culture can be proud of, then ist is the French. And then he says here, "Is there any thought behind this herd nationalism? What value could there be in stirring up this crude selfishness now that everything points to greater and common interests?" And it always annoyed him, these fraternities, the student movements, these marching singers, the fuss with the "Kaiser", it got on his nerves. Because he says it's just a new idol. God is dead, we no longer have meaning through religion. So now we try to create the meaning we lack by saying “we're German” or “we're French” or “we’re English”. And that's wrong. The next big idol, he says, and this is even worse, is that people now derive their self-worth, after God is dead, from being higher than others and thereby feel, even within the age of nihilism, a little more important than others. And the racists are always looking for some group. For example, the anti-Semites. And then Nietzsche says: "The anti-Semites cannot forgive the Jews for the fact that the Jews have brains - and money: anti-Semitism - a name for those who have ‘come off badly’. There is no more brazen and stupid gang in Germany than these anti-Semites." I mean, Nietzsche scolded many things, but he despised anti-Semites in particular. He was friends with Wagner for a while before they naturally fell out. And there he also writes: "Lately Wagner has been unbearable. This constant anti-Semitism, he's almost as bad as my sister." Because that was deeply repugnant to him. Because he said "God is dead – so now we have to derive our self-worth from something else and it can’t be that you derive self-worth from something like that. As you can see, Nietzsche was anything but a Nazi. Any appropriation in this direction is not possible in view of these statements by Nietzsche. The only thing that Hitler really had from Nietzsche and could copy one to one was Nietzsche's original walking stick. After Nietzsche was already dead, Nietzsche's sister gave it to him, gave Hitler this walking stick, but Hitler almost certainly never read Nietzsche. Then Nietzsche goes on to say: Another great idol is also there now, which may play a role for centuries to come. He was incredibly farsighted politically and he says: It's socialism. Socialism. - You know, 1848, Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto, he of course noticed this movement, although there was not yet any existing socialist state, but his prognosis was already negative at that time. He says: "Socialism covets an abundance of state power such as only despotism has ever had. Yes, it surpasses everything that has come before it by striving for the formal annihilation of the individual, and it drives the word justice like a nail into the head of the half-educated masses to rob them completely of their minds." So he also criticized socialism as a new idol, because he says that the socialists are striving for despotic state power, in which only one party gets to govern and the party is always right and all individuals are brought into line. And then he says that socialism cannot work because people are not equal. We are not all the same. Individualism was very important to Nietzsche. And he says that if we give everyone the same amount of money, if everyone is co-ordinated and regimented, that can't go well. This abolition of the individual will take revenge. That is why socialism is also a new religion for him. He says well, God is dead, now people don't believe they're going to paradise. So what happens? They are promised a workers' paradise and a worldly promise of salvation is given instead of the metaphysical promise of salvation. But that doesn't work either. And he says it's also bad to hold on to these idols. And the fourth great idol, ladies and gentlemen, what else will that be? It is the one we believe in today. Yes, capitalism. Quote: "The commercial man examines all that is created from the viewpoint of supply and demand, in order to set a thing’s worth and value for himself. This, made a characteristic of an entire culture, is what you people of the next century will be proud of. " This is remarkable, because at that time the beginnings of globalization and capitalism were already there, but not yet fully developed. But he says that the “commercial man”, the businessman or the capitalist or entrepreneur, measures everything only according to the value of the goods on the market according to supply and demand. He rents out an apartment at the highest price at which he can still finds tenants for it. And everything is determined only by supply and demand. There are no other principles of justice any more. And everyone lives by this principle. And there is a new idolatry. People will only measure themselves according to how far they’ve “made it”, how rich they are, and so on, and worship filthy Mammon i.e. money. And this is just as much a god or idol worship as socialism and nationalism. And these idols have a chance, says Nietzsche, because they comfort us, because it is not easy to endure nihilism, the cold breath of nihilism, after God is dead. So we console ourselves with these idols. And now he asks the question: How? "How do we console ourselves, we, the murderers of all murderers? Shouldn't we become gods ourselves?" That is now the central question. This is a post-modern question. How are we to go on, now that God has lost his power to create being, and now that ever fewer people go to church and get their whole world view from it? What’s next? How do we console each other, the murderers of all murderers? Shouldn't we become gods ourselves? And here his answer is a resounding "yes". We must now take the fate of this world into our own hands. We must now take on this great task. The only problem is - and this is why we’ve repeatedly mentioned the “idols” - we're not even able to do it yet. Not yet, anyway. We don't yet have the strength to take on this task. But we must get there because: "All gods are dead, now we want the overman to live." And that's what we're going to deal with now. What is this overman? Where should we go after Nietzsche? But you see how up-to-date this actually is. He's already very close to us and that's why he's the postmodern thinker. Well - already as a 25-year-old, as a young guy, Nietzsche found the key to understanding the whole world, or he believed that he’d discovered it. Do you know where? Where did he find that key? Ironically, in ancient Greek tragedy. He says these old things, these old Greek tragedies, recognized what it is to be human and what the whole world is all about. Because in these old tragedies there are always only two major principles: the hero who fights and acts and is always torn between the Dionysian and the Apollonian principle. So I have another quote with me. He says: "There are two states in which art, i.e. the theater itself, appears like a force of nature in people: on the one hand as a compulsion to have a vision, on the other hand as a compulsion to engage in an orgy." Nietzsche says that these two principles exist in each of us - not only in the hero of ancient Greece. I'll explain this briefly. One is the Apollonian principle. This is what he calls the compulsion to have a vision. So, we want to have visions. We want to plan the world. We want to shape the world. He names this principle after the god Apollo Apollo, a Greek god, was the god of future planning, also of prophecy, the god of reason. He was the radiant god and the founder of cities. In a word, he was a doer, we would say today, but also a thinker who planned and structured. So the Apollonian principle stands for the rational, Planning element in Man. But also there is Dionysus. Everyone probably knows the good god of drunkenness, i.e. the god of wine, not of drunkenness – of wine, yes, and of drunkenness only if you overdo it. And of course Dionysus also stands for creativity, for the chaotic, for the purely emotional, for passion, for passionate knowledge. In the pictures of him he is always with women and wine. And these two principles fight against each other in every human being - even in classical tragedy. So it's often the case that we plan and do something and at the last moment we do it differently for some reason. We know what is reasonable and that what we are doing now is unreasonable but we do it anyway, and so you have to imagine that the Apollonian always tries to shape the world first and then the Dionysian makes everything dance again. An example is 'Oedipus' by Sophocles, a very old tragedy. Oedipus always tries to do everything right. He arrives in a town where there is a despotic king and he fights him, kills him, falls in love with the queen, marries her – and at some point realizes that he has married his own mother He didn't even know that because he was abandoned as a child – and then of course everything is in chaos again. That's how you have to imagine it. And Nietzsche says, that's life. The Greeks realized how our life really is. And we need 'amor fati', the love of fate and that means we never get out of suffering completely. But we have to accept these two principles, that's the way it is. But a big mistake was already made in ancient times. With Euripides, who was also a great tragic author, the Dionysian element suddenly disappeared, was suppressed, no longer really respected. Because in classical tragedy there was always a chorus, the lamentation chorus. This chorus always represented feelings and the Dionysian. And what was on the stage was more Apollonian. And at the latest under Euripides the chorus was omitted. The Dionysian played less and less of a role. The rational man became stronger and stronger in antiquity and this went even further with Plato and his main character Socrates. All of a sudden the view was that the Dionysian is bad and evil and that we have to turn ourselves upwards, toward the idea of justice, of truth, of beauty. And then suddenly being human was completely redefined. "Happiness", says Nietzsche, "just means you have to imitate Socrates and create a daylight against dark desires, the daylight of reason. Every yielding to the instincts, to the unconscious, leads us down." And then, Nietzsche says, something happens: a mind-body separation. The physical, the Dionysian, our lust, our sensuality become evil. That leads down. The spirit, the reason, the intellect, that leads us upward. And that was a fatefully bad development, because, as he then puts it: "The moralism of the Greek philosophers from Plato onwards is pathological." This trend becomes even more sick and pathological with the emergence of Christianity because Christianity is still more hostile to the body. I don't know how many of you were raised Catholic. We're in Bavaria. I learned during puberty that you shouldn't think unchastely, which of course no pubescent person can hep but do. And Nietzsche says that with Christianity this developed in a fatal way. Because in ancient times there was “the wise man and the fool”. And the wise man developed the soul upwards and the fool just followed his desires. Plato says that the latter is like the existence of a duck. One just eats and excretes and enjoys it. But in Christianity it gets much worse. Because there, there is a bipolarity. The bipolarity in Christianity is between good and evil and one can fall entirely under the sway of evil and the Devil or one can turn oneself toward God. And the body, bodily nature, temptation, these are for the Christian just secondary things. And Nietzsche criticizes Christianity on four grounds. First: "I condemn Christianity, I raise against the Christian church the most terrible of all accusations that an accuser has ever uttered. It has made a worthlessness out of every value, a lie out of every truth." In his remarks he also explains that in Christianity’s main symbol, this God on the cross, that is, this Jesus, the suffering one, everything has been lost that is actually important for us humans, namely courage, heroic struggles, standing up for oneself. This "turn the other cheek", he says, that was a mistake, that was a mistake. Secondly, he says that the pity that Christianity propagates, so to speak, is not good either. "Pity," he says, "is a waste of feelings, a parasite harmful to moral health, it cannot possibly be a duty to increase the evils in the world". For very often, he says, out of pity we give alms and other things besides and thereby prolong the suffering of people who might otherwise rebel and do something that would change society. But no, we all support this compassion which does not solve any problems. And compassion, he says, can also be a sign of contempt which is implied in someone’s feeling sorry for you. So pity is, for Nietzsche, something very bad. Incidentally, he also says: "Beggars should be abolished, because you always feel bad when you walk past a beggar. Either you give him something, then you feel bad, or you don't give him anything, then you also feel bad”. So definitely, pity, that wasn't for him. His third major criticism of Christianity was the following: It gives rise to an entirely new type of human being. He says: "Perhaps up to now there has been no more dangerous ideology, no greater nonsense in psychological matters, than this will to the good: it has given rise to the most disgusting type, the most unfree human being, the “yes-man”, people have been taught that it’s only as “yes-men” that they’re on the right path to divinity." You know that humility is very important in Christianity and that one is constantly committed to doing good, because life is a test, a task. And he says that in the end there arise thereby “yes-men”, hypocrites, and this doesn't only apply to Christianity. You know, regardless of whether it's in Islam, there's prayer and bowing down to the ground or the Christians who kneel down, he says, there results a certain kind of person. He doesn't think that's healthy. And the last thing he criticizes is the sentence: "If thine eye offends thee, pluck it out”. The Christian who follows that advice and thinks he has killed his sensuality is wrong. This sensuality lives on in an uncanny vampiric way and torments him in disgusting disguises." So Nietzsche says that we can’t just live in a purely Apollonian way and completely suppress the Dionysian. Here, by the way, he anticipates something that Sigmund Freud later said. Fundamentally, psychology as a whole, but Freud’s psychoanalysis in particular: The desires, our desires, our instincts and also the great desires in life that we suppress are not simply gone, they smolder and can even turn against us. So numerous neurotic illnesses are attributed to the fact that people had to suppress too many of their longings, lusts and desires in life for too long. And he says that that is also what's dangerous about this Christian ideology, as he calls it. All in all, this great hatred of the body bothers him, because, as we have seen, he saw from early on that everyone is also a Dionysian and that's why he says: "I am body completely and nothing else." “Body am I”, with this he contradicts the hostility to the body of the entire tradition, including that of philosophy. This tradition says we are primarily rational beings, animal rationale, and that the body is the servant of the spirit, which only carries out what the spirit decides. But it is not like that. Nietzsche, by contrast, speaks of the “great reason” of the body because he says it would also be a complete illusion to believe that our reason governs us, our consciousness. Because - by the way, today's scientists would confirm this - there has been life for an incredibly long time. Scientifically we would have to say, life has existed for about three billion years - three billion! - hardly imaginable. And also the hominids, Nietzsche speaks of the semi-animals, they've been around forever. But they were in the woods in hordes as hunters and gatherers. They weren't conscious either. And only at the very end of the history of our evolution did consciousness arise at all. But we still have that legacy within us. And that's why it can't be taken away. He then also says: "Once you were monkeys and even now Man is more monkey than any monkey." That's the tendency he has there. But given that we lived for billions of years only instinctively, according to stimulus and reaction and desire, including as protozoa and during the whole of evolution, how did it come about that today we have a consciousness at all? - And even worse, a guilty conscience? And then he wrote this famous chapter in the 'Genealogy of Morals' about the emergence of bad conscience. And he says that the whole madness came about at the moment when people left the forests and founded the first communities, villages, kraals and then also states. Because something bad happened within these communities and states. There were laws and rules. And now nobody was allowed to harm anyone anymore. But you had to suppress all the instincts you had before, the anger, the attention, the aggression, the running away. You know, in the forest, you could still hear every cracking sound, you could smell it, you knew “now I have to run away” if you were threatened or if you were attacked while hunting. We were sure in our instincts. Nietzsche says we've now lost all these instincts. The whole development of evolution has been negative. Water used to carry us when we were still in the water. Now our feet have to carry us. And it was also a very negative step when suddenly self-awareness arose through the founding of the state. Because, he says: "Suddenly all human beings’ instincts were invalidated and hung up. I don't think there was ever such a feeling of misery on earth" as when suddenly the instincts were devalued. And you know it is actually like this: the instincts are devalued - and not only devalued, they are taboo. So if we get a choleric attack at work and shout out loud because we're angry, then everyone says: “But you're aggressive”. Sure, says Nietzsche, because the instinct is still there, but it can no longer be lived out. These instincts have been hung up and devalued. And now in the state, when we live together in such large groups, it is about something else: these people, that is us, are reduced to thinking, reasoning, calculating, combining causes and effects, these unfortunates: reduced to their consciousness, to their poorest and most misguided organ!" So all of a sudden we had to rely on our poorest organ, on our consciousness, and we thought, and calculated whereas we’d been used for many years, to being completely instinctive throughout all of evolution . Now we have this loss of instinct. At that moment -- what happened? Then he says: "All instincts that are not discharged outwards turn inwards". Now it's getting exciting. Now he says: "Because we can't for example, take food when we’re hungry” – Small children still do it in the shop. If you don't guard the shopping trolley, they reach over and get the chocolate, open it and eat it, because they have instinctive confidence. get the chocolate, open it and eat. Of course, because they have instinctive confidence. Later, of course, they have to learn that things don’t work that way –.”then we turn all our instincts inwards". Aggression too. Aggression saved us for thousands of years because we defended territories, conquered new ones, because we fought against other hordes but now we have to suppress this energy of aggression which is directed inwards now and leads to self-punishment impulses. And that is the origin of the bad conscience. So he says: "The enmity t, the cruelty, the desire for persecution, for change, for destruction - all this directed against the owner of such instincts: That is the origin of the "bad conscience". The penalties, he says, do the rest, insofar as we know, of course, that if we don't follow the rules of the state we will be punished. But ultimately bad conscience is also fed by our own energy, that we know we shouldn't do that now and keep ourselves in check with our own energy. And the bottom line is: Both consciousness and conscience are very late phenomena in evolution, which didn't exist at all for a long time and which ultimately shouldn't play the decisive role in our lives either. Rather, the decisive thing is, says Nietzsche, that we still have an enormous will - and we feel that in ourselves. We have desires, we have longings, we have needs and he doesn't just mean eating and drinking. He says that all the needs, longings and desires that we have result in our wanting. Every human being has such a will. And now we are already at the heart of the matter: The will to power. Then he says: "This world: a monster without beginning, without end, is the will to power - and nothing more! And you yourselves are also this will to power - and nothing more!" How can he claim that this world, a monster of power, is the will to power? Is the world really the will to power? To this he says: Yes, the whole world is the will to power, and that is because: Every plant grows according to the sun, Extends itself, partly putting other plants in the shade, which then extend themselves too and do the same thing. But if there is a little tree and a big one, the little one usually dies or the one that grows faster stays. So there is also an unconditional will to live, to survive and to improve oneself. Also in plants and even in chemistry. He says when substances mix, You remember that from chemistry class, then The resulting substances change colour, they react with each other. Either they mix or they repel each other. But in any case, says Nietzsche, forces interact. Forces are at work in all of nature. That is why he says: the whole of nature is a monster of power. About the planets too he writes a nice sentence: The supposed laws of nature are nothing more than the balance of power. Well, the fact that the planets attract each other and have these orbits, that's calculated exactly how much attraction one has on the other, and that's how it levels out. It's about power and forces – and the same goes for people. an interesting example of the first living beings, by the way. At that time there were already microscopes and such techniques. They were able to magnify things optically. And then he says: The amoeba, the smallest little animal, also has tiny hairs and wafts around. As soon as the amoeba encounters something organic, it encloses it. And if ist likes it, then that gets integrated into the amoeba, it eats it up, so to speak. And this appropriation we have had in nature since the beginning. So, the will to power and also we ourselves as human beings, we are nothing other than this will to power. And that's why he also says: "Everything that happens can be reduced to the intention of increasing power." But that's how it works even now, he says, that we always affect others. Increasing our power can also mean hindering others in their own self-improvement. But there's no getting around it. Therefore, he says: "Life always lives at the expense of other life. Anyone who does not understand this has not yet taken the first step towards honesty." He says we can't help it. For example, if you apply for a job as a head of a department and get it, then x colleagues have applied, they won't get it and then they're sad. So, every success comes at the expense of the failure of others. Or the Olympic champion, who then stands on the podium, with the wreath, shining golden in the glory of victory, stands up there because at the same time he darkens and shadows others who are not up there. Nietzsche says we can't live at all without affecting others. That's not possible. And then he also has more subtle examples that I find very exciting. For example, he says that if two men fall in love with the same woman or even three men, and one gets her, then two others will be left behind. Or one of his most subtle examples, he was also a great psychologist: mothers. An early childhood phase is something interesting for him, because he says mothers who, shall we say, love one child more than the other or the others, back then everyone had five or six, they don't do it consciously. They are fair. They give everyone the same amount. But they can't help it, one being is somehow closer to them. And the worst thing, he says, is that the children sense it and that's why it's not the mother's fault for what she's doing. He says: you finally have to think beyond good and evil, which is the title of one of his books: Beyond Good and Evil. The mother who just loves, subconsciously, one child a bit more than another it's not her fault – not really – if she always tries to be fair and just. But the less loved child may feel neglected and has problems dealing with it. And that's why we can't avoid it: Life always lives at the expense of other life, That's how it is with us. Another nice sentence from him is: "The insects do not sting out of malice, but because they also want to live." So he means the mosquitoes. And it's correct. You always hear: Bssss! In reality, what are they supposed to do? Even if for us it's terror, which is malicious, they can't help it. And we too often cannot do otherwise. And no one goes through life without causing problems for others at some point. And because that's the way it is, he says, because we're there he says: "I judge the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and how it manages to turn these things to its advantage." He says we all have obstacles in life. But we can use resistance as an opportunity to grow and turn it to our advantage. So our self-development, our will to power, proceeds against resistance, always in life. But he just values an individual according to whether the individual manages to overcome the things that are against him and to make them into his will. Now, of course, one can say, and Nietzsche was also heavily criticized for this, that there are no limits to this! If everyone Lives out their will to power, then at some point enormous egoism will emerge. Everyone develops their will to power. What limits should it have if not even pity is a limit, if not even pity limits our egoism? Where is the limit of the will to power? Can you overpower others? Are you allowed to kill others for the sake of your development and your own higher goal? And there he says. It can actually be so. That’s quite radical - a radical thought of Nietzsche’s. He says: It may be, it may be, it is possible for each of us, "That something is a hundred times more important than the question of whether we are well or badly off and consequently whether others are well or badly off. In short; it may be that we have an end for which no one hesitates to make human sacrifices." So, it can actually be the case that, in in order to develop our highest goal and our will to power, we should not consider ourselves or others and should make the highest sacrifices - including human sacrifices. Of course, such quotations also brought Nietzsche close to fascism. And you know, Mussolini too, he really read Nietzsche and had huge monuments erected for Nietzsche. And this was because, initially, he recognized no limits to this principle. But, ladies and gentlemen, we're trying to look at it this in a non-ideological way, without immediately pushing it in any direction. And if you do this you must be honest and say that sometimes you do sacrifice yourself for a higher purpose. It doesn't matter whether you feel good or bad about it, nor how others feel. If necessary, we must make human sacrifices. Just think of the former German Chancellor, the former Federal Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. He got into a very difficult, you could say tragic situation. Because the Baader-Meinhof group were being held in prison, some of whom had been accused of murder several times. Then the terrorists who some of them accused of multiple murders. Then the Baader-Meinhof terrorists who were still outside hijacked a Lufthansa plane and also Hanns-Martin Schleyer, head of the Confederation of German Industry, and said they would release everyone provided Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader and the other Jailed terrorists were released. And this meant that Helmut Schmidt and his cabinet faced a very difficult decision. And he said, no, we won't let them go, he had the Lufthansa plane stormed. And that's why Hanns Martin Schleyer was executed, so to speak, killed by the terrorists. And that's crazy, Schmidt even sat next to Frau Schleyer at the funeral. That was a really, really hard time for him. But he said that he would make that sacrifice again. So, as you can see here, he had a higher goal, a goal of the sort for the sake of which one does not hesitate to make human sacrifices. He had that goal. His goal was reasons of state. He said that things will not work unless the rule of law convicts perpetrators and brings them to justice. let's set them free. Especially if they are murderers who might even kill again. He says: let's set them free. Anyway, if they are murderers who might even kill again. Then he says no, that's not possible. The higher goal in this case is the rule of law. And our justice must be above this release and he would basically, well, what did he mean when he said "sacrifice again" Hanns Martin Schleyer? - he didn't want to sacrifice him, of course, he deliberately risked this life and said he would do it again. And by the way he also wrote a note, a written document that he deposited saying that if he himself were kidnapped or Loki Schmidt, his wife, that they must not be exchanged. He also deposited that. So he also made the sacrifice for himself, which he now asked for. Or he would have been willing to make that sacrifice. So you see, you can also interpret it that way. Of course, Nietzsche not only extended his will to power to the individual but also said that it applies to large nations. Great peoples in history have also lived out their will to power, which, for Nietzsche, is not a bad thing. He says, for example: "Those big hothouses for the strong, for the strongest kind of man" – "the strongest kind of man", here we see this "strong and weak", which is why he is also criticized a lot. "Those big hothouses for the strong and for the strongest kind of man that has ever existed, the aristocratic polities in the manner of Rome and Venice understood freedom exactly in the sense in which I understand the word freedom: as something that one has and that one does not have , that one wants, that one conquers." So he has Rome in mind, ancient Rome and Venice. These were communities that used their freedom and their self-development to conquer, to keep and to gain what they didn’t yet have That's why Mussolini found Nietzsche so great, because he also wanted to revive ancient Rome and its old splendor. But we'll see in a moment that Nietzsche wasn't really interested in that. He also celebrates Venice. And if you then read on, he says, the northern Italian cities also developed the will to power in a great way. And I'll show you why right now. By the way, he says: In the Renaissance, at that time, when Venice and later Florence and those northern Italian cities had this crazy power, mankind took an enormous step forward. He even claims that the Europeans of today “remain at a level below the Europeans of the Renaissance in terms of their values". Well, they did something great in the Renaissance. And he wasn't concerned with the fact that Venice and its merchant fleet powerfully controlled the entire Mediterranean region, nor the Borgia ruling in Renaissance Italy but essentially with the fact that in the Renaissance an enormous act of human self-liberation had taken place. Science flourished for the first time. Doctors were allowed to dissect corpses. And for the first time human beings were freed from millennia-old medieval thinking. You know, the artists, for example Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo, were also scientists. They had a completely free, enlightened way of thinking. And for the first time perspective was also painted. The whole Middle Ages was only two-dimensional. You could see the haloes there, but they had no depth. That's when it started, when perspective was introduced. Then all the sciences blossomed. This inspired Nietzsche. Or Brunelleschi, who built his huge dome. In the Renaissance people liberated themselves. And the artists, by the way, signed their works themselves. Suddenly, beautiful naked bodies were painted. It was much more Dionysian, he says, the Renaissance. Because nudity was completely forbidden in the Middle Ages. And then of course, how should I put it, they did something exciting. The Renaissance artists simply said, yes, we paint ancient things like that, Botticelli's Venus, and of course such an ancient goddess, Venus, has to be naked. And he just liked this awakening. He writes, for example, that: "the Italian Renaissance contained the liberation of thought, the disregard for authority, enthusiasm for science, the unleashing of the individual, a fervor of veracity." enthusiasm for science, unleashing the individual, a fervor of veracity." So you see, for Nietzsche, "will to power" doesn't necessarily mean huge conquests, it's more about intellectual development, artistic development. And that brings us to our initial question and our last big topic. How does one do that? How can we develop ourselves? What is this overman that he recommends to us? "The gods are dead, now we want the superman to live." But who or what is this overman? And can those of us gathered here also become “overmen”? Let's look at that now; finally. "The overman", says Nietzsche, ""is close to my heart, that is my first and only thing and not the human being: not ‘my neighbour’, not the poorest, not the most suffering, not the ‘best’." And it's interesting that he says that the overrman is important to him and not the human being. And that this overman is something different from his “neighbour”. That’s actually clear, and not the poorest, and not the most suffering either, that's what we already know from Nietzsche, his, how should I put it, negative assessment of Christian heroes, that is, the hero on the cross, Jesus on the cross is the most suffering or the poorest. How should I say? The overman of religions is the ascetic, like Buddha, who withdraws, or just like Jesus, or also the Franciscans and other mendicant orders, who owned nothing but a rope around their stomachs and a few robes. There was this ideal of the denial of all property, of everything belonging to this world. And this Nietzsche rejected. That's not the overman. The overman is not the ascetic. You know that Nietzsche had a lot in common with Schopenhauer, and Schopenhauer says you have to be as ascetic as possible. Nietzsche says: no, no, the overman is not the one who suffers, not the poorest, not one’s needy “neighbour”, and - now it's getting exciting - he is not even “the best”. Why not the best? based on what we know from Nietzsche so far, one would think that the overman is the strongest, ergo also the best. But that is not what Nietzsche means. It's not about the overman’s being a capitalist who is incredibly successful in business, or a politician, or Alexander the Great who conquers a huge empire. He does not claim that “the best man” is is the overman. He says: "The higher nature of the great man lies in his incommunicability" – this is interesting – “in his incommunicability, not in the fact that the effects he produced may have shaken the globe." So if the higher nature of the great man leads to the overman, this is not because he he has a huge impact and shakes the whole world, but rather in his incommunicability. What does he mean by someone being “incommunicable”? And why should that be considered a good quality: that he cannot make himself understood? But Nietzsche explains this very well. He says it's ultimately about finding our own inner higher idea, that is, our innermost creative potential, our innermost higher being. If we find that, then we have to live it out. And then it doesn't matter whether we are understood and can communicate. We have to assert this idea all the same. And he writes, many great writers and also painters, they had something like that, they did their thing, regardless of whether they were understood. For example – this is not by Nietzsche himself but I think the example is quite good – Van Gogh, Van Gogh was destitute all his life. And everyone just shook their heads at his pictures. Nobody understood him because he painted in a completely new way. He is one of the founding fathers of Expressionism. When he saw a cornfield with ravens overhead and a storm came up, he painted it. It's totally spooky. He was able to bring his mood, his way of perceiving reality, directly onto the canvas and this meant the end of “idyllic” painting. And everyone said “I’m not hanging stuff like that on my wall”. So he encountered huge obstacles. No one understood this new kind of fervent painting at all. Or the sunflowers. There you can see these sunflowers - beautiful and great and powerful, vital. But you can already see a few wilted leaves and you can see this whole metamorphosis, can understand the mortality and suffering of this flower. This message is also in there. But that was not understood at all at the time, this new realism on the one hand, and on the other hand this direct way of capturing his feelings just with these dashed lines that he painted five times over. And you know Van Gogh died destitute. And today these paintings are the most expensive paintings in the whole world. Nothing else attracts such prices and Nietzsche would say: “Sure! It shouldn't matter if we get no recognition from others just now. And it shouldn't matter if one day we somehow become ridiculously rich through what we do.” So it is by no means the case that today he would say that the “overmen” are the managers and the bankers. He would consider them anything but overmen. He would say: "Look at these superfluous ones! They acquire riches and become poorer with it - these impotent ones." You notice, then, what a constantly shifting description he ultimately gives of his “overman”. And he also adds: "Passionate people think little of what others think. Their condition elevates them above vanity." That is also important to him. Of course, a lot of this comes from his own life. Because he himself, you know, was destitute, so to speak. Nobody read Nietzsche back then. They all thought he was a nutcase. Publishers stopped accepting his books And, in desperation, he had to accepting his books. Then, in desperation, he had to print them himself. It was not until towards the end of his life that his work actually fell on more fertile ground. But he was ill already, so never experienced it himself. But that's just, so to speak, a sidelight. And he just says: "Everyone has their good day, on which they find a higher self." So that's what it’s all about for him: that we find our higher self. He says everyone has moments like that. "For example, a painter should be appraised and honored for the highest vision that he was able to see and depict." And not whether he was successful or anything. It was important to Nietzsche that we realize our innermost creative potential. And to be completely free and to enter new spaces. This is, of course, difficult to understand at first and also obscure. In addition, he describes the overman in his book Zarathustra. And Zarathustra is not a conventional philosophical work. It is a poetic work where he describes his great prophet Zarathustra. At the beginning of the book Zarathustra descends from the mountains and tells the world what it should look like. So he created his own prophet. And this Zarathustra then tells us how the path to the new human being should go. And it can be argued that he is maybe more concerned here with artists, geniuses, philosophers etc. and not with ordinary folk philosophers, etc. but I maintain that but I maintain that he also has a few other quotes which show that this is not just about geniuses. So here he also writes: "Everyone has their good day" and what I also find interesting, is that in Zarathustra he gives us a hint, that I want to end by passing on to you, that, on the way to the overman, we have to go through three transformations. I'll give you that hint now. "I shall name you three transformations of the spirit” spirit." So you have to go through three transformations of the spirit: "How the spirit becomes a camel, and the camel becomes a lion, and finally the lion becomes a child." A very famous parable by Nietzsche. So the spirit first becomes a camel, then the camel becomes a lion, and finally the lion becomes a child. Exciting - why the child? By the camel he means – oh and by the way, this parable clearly refers to two things at once: our development as individuals and the history of mankind i.e. the social moment – Individually, the phase of the camel, which we all go through, is that of our training period, when we learn, when our parents, our mentors, our teachers, place more and more burdens on us. So the phase of the camel, he says, is the patient, tolerant phase that we all go through. We take on more and more knowledge, more and more morals, more and more laws, more and more patterns of behavior, etiquette, rules, etc. This is the camel's phase in our youth. Then comes the phase of the lion. In the phase of the lion we shred all this, we tear it up. We free ourselves from the old dramas, from the old traditions, from everything our parents told us. That's the phase of the lion. The lion tears everything with his teeth. It's often interpreted like this. For many, puberty is the time when you liberate yourself. For some, however, it occurs much later, in adulthood. For others, it really doesn't come until the midlife crisis. This doesn’t really matter. Let's leave that aside. In terms of mankind as a whole he means: The phase of The lion is this phase where mankind.... Sorry - let's start with the camel. In the beginning we are all believers. We live, so to speak, in humility and are at ease in the religious worldview. He calls this whole long phase the phase of the camel. But then, how should I put it, the lion – and Nietzsche didn't elaborate further but he could mean the Enlightenment, where we actually tear everything apart and question it. So the beginning of science and everything. But, he says, we mustn't stop there. We mustn't stop there with the phase of the lion: it's not enough if we just liberate ourselves, be it as individuals or as a species, that is, from the point of view of the social situation. He then says: now the transformation into the playing child must come. And then he asks an interesting question. He poses it in that slightly, how should I put it, emotive and histrionic tone that he adopts in Zarathustra, who is speaking to his disciples and to his brothers. By the way, this prophet Zarathustra is a great book, so it's fun to read it and he says: "But tell me, my brothers, what can the child do that the lion couldn't do either? I mean, so far it's been up to us. Yes, of course. The first phase is the camel, then the lion, but why is this last great transformation a transformation into a playing child? With Nietzsche, one actually expects that on the way to the overman the last transformation will be into a huge monster or an all-powerful dragon or the devil knows what. No, for the last transformation, he asks: "What can the child do that the lion couldn't do?" And he replies: "Create new values, the lion can't do that either: but create freedom for yourself to create new things, that's what the power of the lion is capable of". So the lion can only make room for us to create something new. But he doesn't set any new values yet. He doesn't create that yet. And Nietzsche also says that most people at some point in their lives succeed in freeing themselves from their upbringing, their origins, from all these things and all possible influences. But the decisive thing is now: What do we do with our freedom? what do we do with it? And he says, sometimes – he wasn't very sociable, Nietzsche, he tended to live alone – sometimes friends visited him and, as he writes very interestingly, everyone always told him what they had emancipated and freed themselves from, and what they’d finally left behind them. But he was actually more interested in what they’d become free for! Not in what they’d freed themselves from, but why, how they were now fulfilling their freedom. And he writes: "I want to hear your ruling thoughts and not that you have escaped a yoke. Free from what? What does that matter to Zarathustra! Brightly your eyes should tell me, free for what?" And that's what it's all about, that in this phase of life we find out what our own Dionysian creative potential might fit us to do, so to speak. And this is why the transformation into the child is important, into the playing child. Now we can understand why. Because in this phase after the liberation we basically have to start from scratch. Basically , we have to go back into the world with an open mind. And then he says: "The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a wheel rolling out of itself, a first movement, a holy yes-saying. Yes to the game, to the game of creation." So, he's saying here, the child is innocent, it is not bearing any burdens. And the child has this holy ability to say yes to creativity. You know how we could get into it as children and play passionately. We have to acquire this again. And he doesn't just mean the really great artists. But, of course, there is also a quote from Picasso, I think, that fits very well at this point. Even Picasso had the big problem of having left behind, how should I put it, the whole tradition through his abstract painting. For 2000 years people painted things as copies and suddenly he painted abstractly. And he didn't dare to do that right away. And Picasso once said: "It takes a long time to become young." I think that's a nice quote, which basically means exactly what Nietzsche said. It takes a long, long time to grow young. And for him, being young simply meant seeing things the way he had seen them before developing prejudices. And then he got into this abstraction. And that's what Nietzsche is all about. Hence this third transformation into the playing child. And some say that, by the overman, he meant individual outstanding personalities who come along from time to time. But I think it's permissible to consider whether that might not also apply to us all. Nietzsche has, for example, the aphorism: "Maturity.- For a man means having rediscovered the seriousness that one had as a child when playing." Maturity for a man means having rediscovered the seriousness that one had as a child when playing." The same goes for women, of course. Maturity for a woman would also mean finding the seriousness again, to passionately get involved in such a game, to immerse oneself in it, to lose oneself in it. These are the things Nietzsche cares about. These are the steps on the way to the higher self. Basically, what I'm saying, what I'm claiming, is that this “overman” idea is one big self-actualization story, “coming-out” story that he's telling us. Good, but there is a big obstacle when we now think about whether this would also be an option for us. Nietzsche writes himself about this great obstacle, namely time. He says: "Everyone still falls today, as they have at all times, Into one or another of two classes, namely: into slaves and free people. Because whoever does not have two thirds of his day for himself is a slave, whatever else he is: statesman, merchant, civil servant, scholar." So if you don't have at least two-thirds of your day to yourself, you're a slave, regardless of whether you're a minister or a businessman, you're a slave. And I often think to myself, ladies and gentlemen, when I come home in the evening and I'm exhausted after an 8-hour day, that I have no more creative thoughts in me. You turn the TV on and off. And what Nietzsche is saying is that this free time is almost a basic human right we should demand You really should have two-thirds of the day to yourself. Only then can we tap our full potential and pass it on to society. That would mean, let's assume we get up at 9, well let's say 8 a.m., and say from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., that would be the part of the day where we’re really fit and awake. And two thirds of that, that would now be twelve hours. That would be two thirds, if I calculate it correctly, we basically need, So we should really only work four hours a day. What he's proposing here is the four-hour work-day. …For example - yes, absolutely… The circle will close even more now, because I would like to bring things to a close, so to speak. So Nietzsche says, I summarize: God is dead. The “new idols”, capitalism, socialism, nationalism, racism, are not things we should worship. we don't worship. That would be wrong. Only the small minds do that, who are only capable of developing false feelings instead of developing their own lives themselves. And Rather, we must try to develop ourselves determinedly after the death of God, and to unfold our higher inner being. And here Nietzsche gives us two more hints. On the one hand, it is important that we become more Dionysian again, that is, that we live with relish, that we let the Dionysian principle that has been suppressed for centuries, the creative Dionysian, have its say again. Although I have to tell you: He also says that there are some people who have more Dionysian qualities and some who have more Apollonian ones. I myself ran a film school for years and the Dionysians – that is, my students training to be film directors – were very difficult people. Because they draw from their innermost being and then they are no longer capable of self-criticism. Because that comes from a source that is beyond criticism. With the Apollonians, who think logically, you can discuss things with them. It's about arguments. The Dionysians are difficult. But that's just a digression now. And of course they have to be like that, the creative people, you have to say that again. They have to rely on what they have recognized as innermost, highest. But Nietzsche actually advises us to consider, on our way in life, our Dionysian principle once again, to respect our intuition and secondly – which I actually find quite beautiful – this image, this thought that we should perhaps try to become a playing child again. And so I would like to close with a quote from Nietzsche: "One must still have chaos in oneself in order to be able to give birth to a dancing star." Thank you very much.