Friedrich Nietzsche was a classical scholar and philologist whose interest in ancient Greek religion led him to ask the question 'What happens to morality when religion dies?' His answer is that what dies is slave morality, and that humans have to find the basis for a new morality within themselves in the will to power. This leads him to the idea of the Superman, the creator of a master morality free from all values except those he himself chooses. Such morality finds expression in independence, creativity, and originality. Nietzsche has been blamed unfairly for the rise of Nazism. By rights he should be seen as the champion of the human spirit against politicised and repressive religion on the one hand, and nihilism on the other.
