The Western Hall

In 1513 Niccolò Machiavelli had lost everything. For fourteen years he had been a senior official of the Florentine Republic, a diplomat who met kings, popes and the ruthless Cesare Borgia face to face. Then the Medici family returned to power. He was dismissed, accused of plotting against them, imprisoned and tortured, and finally released to a small farm outside Florence.

There he wrote a famous letter to a friend. By day he caught thrushes, chatted with woodcutters and played cards in the local inn. But in the evening, he said, he took off his muddy clothes, put on courtly robes, and entered his study to "converse with the ancients", the great historians and statesmen of Rome, asking them why they had acted as they did. Out of those conversations came a short book: The Prince.

It shocked people then, and it still does, because it describes how power actually works rather than how it ought to. A ruler, Machiavelli says, must sometimes be a lion, to frighten off wolves, and sometimes a fox, to see through traps. He must understand fortune, which he compares to a flooding river: you cannot stop it, but you can build dykes and banks in calm weather. And he must have virtù, not virtue in our sense, but energy, skill and nerve.

As the physicians say it happens in hectic fever, that in the beginning of the malady it is easy to cure but difficult to detect, but in the course of time, not having been either detected or treated in the beginning, it becomes easy to detect but difficult to cure.

The Prince, chapter 3, tr. W. K. Marriott

His most famous question is whether it is better to be loved or feared. His answer is more careful than people remember: it is best to be both, but since that is hard, if you must choose, it is safer to be feared. Then he adds a warning that is often forgotten: never be hated.

Machiavelli was, at heart, a psychologist of power. He watched how people respond to hope, fear, gratitude and injury. He noticed that small injuries make people want revenge, so that harm, if it must be done, should be done once and finished. Shifu has traced that same cold logic far from any palace, in the way organised crime controls the young people it uses.

Arthur Schopenhauer was born in Danzig in 1788, the son of a rich merchant who wanted him to go into business. When his father died, probably by suicide, Arthur left the counting house for philosophy. His mother, Johanna, became a successful novelist with a glittering salon in Weimar, where Goethe was a regular. Mother and son quarrelled bitterly and did not see each other for the last twenty-four years of her life.

At thirty he published his great work, The World as Will and Representation. Almost nobody bought it. He became a lecturer in Berlin and, with breathtaking confidence, scheduled his lectures at exactly the same hour as those of Hegel, the most famous philosopher in Germany. Hegel's hall was packed. Schopenhauer's was nearly empty, and after one term the course was dropped.

His central idea is unsettling. Behind the world we see, and behind every reason we give for what we do, is something blind and restless he called the Will: a hungry striving that drives the plant towards light, the animal towards food and mate, and us towards our endless wants. We think we choose our desires. Mostly, Schopenhauer says, our desires choose us, and our intellect invents good reasons afterwards.

A number of porcupines huddled together for warmth on a cold day in winter; but, as they began to prick one another with their quills, they were obliged to disperse.

Parerga and Paralipomena (Studies in Pessimism), tr. T. Bailey Saunders

That is why he is famous as a pessimist. Wanting is painful; getting brings only a moment of relief before boredom and the next want arrive. Life, he wrote, swings like a pendulum between pain and boredom.

But he also offered three ways out. Art, and above all music, lets us forget the Will for a while and simply see. Compassion, which he made the foundation of all morality, comes from recognising that the suffering in another is the same suffering as in yourself; at bottom, we are not separate. And the quiet letting go of the saints and ascetics, which he admired in Christian mystics, in Hinduism and in Buddhism alike.

Fame came at last in his sixties, through a collection of essays. He spent his final years in Frankfurt, walking his poodle every afternoon, a celebrity at the dinner table of the Englischer Hof. His ideas went on to shape Wagner, Tolstoy, Freud's thinking about the unconscious, Einstein and Wittgenstein.

In 1865 a twenty-one-year-old student in Leipzig picked up a second-hand book in a shop, took it home, threw himself on the sofa and read it for days. It was Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation. Friedrich Nietzsche had found his first great teacher.

He was brilliant. At twenty-four he became a professor at the University of Basel, before he had even finished his doctorate. He became a close friend of the composer Richard Wagner. Then, one after another, he broke with them: with Wagner and with Schopenhauer himself, and then with the university. Plagued by migraines and failing eyesight, he resigned in 1879 and spent ten years wandering between boarding houses in Switzerland and Italy, writing book after book that almost nobody read.

Schopenhauer had looked at the endless striving of life and said: this is suffering, let it go. Nietzsche looked at the same striving and said: this is life, say yes to it. He called it the will to power, not power over others so much as the drive in every living thing to grow, to overcome, to become more than it was. The highest form of it is self-overcoming.

He was a fierce critic of morality, by which he meant the unexamined values we inherit. Where did "good" and "evil" come from, he asked, and whose interests did they serve? He insisted that every view is seen from somewhere: there is no view from nowhere, only perspectives. And he noticed how often people hide behind masks, even from themselves.

God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!

The Gay Science (The Joyful Wisdom), section 125, tr. Thomas Common

His most famous line, "God is dead", is spoken in his book The Gay Science by a madman who runs into the marketplace in broad daylight carrying a lantern. It is not a cheer. It is a cry of alarm: if the old foundations are gone, what will hold our values up now?

His answer was a thought experiment. Imagine a demon tells you that you must live your life again, exactly as it is, every pain and every joy, over and over for ever. Would you curse him? Or could you love your life so much that you would say: Once more? That is the eternal recurrence, and Nietzsche's ideal was amor fati: love of one's fate.

In January 1889, in Turin, he collapsed. The story goes that he had flung his arms around the neck of a horse being whipped in the street. He never recovered, and spent his last eleven years in the care of his mother and his sister, who later edited his notes into a book and twisted his ideas to fit her own antisemitic views. Nietzsche, who had despised antisemitism, died in 1900, just as the world began to read him.