"God is
Dead":
A Nietzschean
Primer
[N.B.: A version of this paper was delivered at
the Comparative Literature Graduate Colloquium at SUNY Stony Brook on October
16, 1991.]
ABSTRACT
Nietzsche's concept
of nihilism has been blatantly misinterpreted through the years as merely
political phenomena. In this paper, I intended to re-evaluate Nietzsche's
utterance that "God is Dead" (Gott ist
Tot) and his issuance of a Nihilistic
process which overwhelms modern day existence in hopes to re-discover what
Nietzsche had originally proposed: the necessity of a resurgence of a
humanistic evolutionary process, not on a physical sense, but on an existential
sense.
Foreword
"A Nihilist is
the man who says of the world as it is , that it ought not to exist, and of the
world as it ought to be, that it does not exist" (Will to Power
Aph. 585 A).
With these words,
Nietzsche described the decaying state of the world which threatened to send
humanity into a stupefying void. "God is dead" and there is no way to
revive "Him". All that once was the Absolute has no reason of being.
Moral
consciousness, Christianity and supreme values, thorns thrust into humanity
back, have met their match. Yet humanity, in its search for a false sense of
belonging, has been caught by the onslaught of despair, generated by the
mediocre interpretations of historicity, thus blinding from the necessary
evolutionary process.
Nihilism, that
"evil" that surrounds us and whose sole "intent" is to
destroy the "civilized" world, has been overrated, its real purpose
lost to humanity. What is Nihilism? Why is God dead? and, What does this death
symbolize? How is it that these two seemingly "different" concepts,
are really but elements of a superior evolutionary concept?
It would be too
pretentious to state that this paper will answer these and many other questions
which haunt the subject of Nietzsche's conception of God's death and Nihilism.
The intention of this paper is to try to emphasize on those arguments which, to
my opinion, seem to be crucial to the interpretation of nihilism and its effects
on humanity as Nietzsche foresaw it.
--o--
According to
Heidegger one cannot fully comprehend Nietzsche's concept of nihilism without
first understanding Nietzsche's basis for claiming that "God is
dead". Heidegger, in his book Holzwege,
tries to emphasize the importance of understanding this key phrase, which,
according to Heidegger, sums up Nietzsche’s meaning of nihilism. Man is seen as
a historical movement discovered by Nietzsche, that has already ruled
throughout the preceding centuries and now determines our own era. Nietzsche
sums up this in a brief phrase: "God is dead" (Heidegger 177).
It is a fact
documented by mostly all who have studied Nietzsche that from an early age
Nietzsche had an idea concerning the death of God and of an extinction of all
the gods. We can perceive this in some notes taken by Nietzsche while working
on his first book
The
Birth of Tragedy
(1870), when Nietzsche writes:
"I believe in the old Germanic saying: All gods must die" (Pfeffer
73). Yet, it is not until the third book of Nietzsche's The Gay Science (1882),
that Nietzsche uses the phrase "God is dead" in the piece titled
"The Madman". Here Nietzsche writes of a madman who went to the
market place one morning with a burning lantern crying incessantly: "I am
looking for God! Where has God gone?" he cried, "I shall tell you. We
have killed him... you and I. We are his murderers". And the madman
continued, "God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!"1
Nietzsche would
again address this conviction in
Thus
Spoke
Zarathustra
(1883). In the Prologue there is a
passage where Zarathustra meets and old man in the forest: "And what doeth
the saint in the forest?" asks Zarathustra. The saint answer, "I make
hymns and sing them; and in making hymns I laugh and weep and mumble: thus do I
praise God". "Could it be possible! This old saint in the forest hath
not yet heard of it, that God is dead!" (4-6).
Later, in the
fourth book of
Zarathustra
(1891)2, Zarathustra, in the piece titled "Out of
Service", meets with the last Pope who says: "I was seeking the last
pious man, a saint and an anchorite, who, alone in his forest, had not yet
heard of what all the world knoweth at present". "What doth all the
world know at present?" asks Zarathustra. "Perhaps that the old God
no longer liveth, in whom all the world once believed?" "Thou sayest
it", replies the old Pope sorrowfully. "And I served that old God
until his last hour" (288-289).
There are many
examples which could be cited, yet it would be futile to continue, since those
cited above are proof enough of Nietzsche's persistence on God's death. It
would not be until Nietzsche's later works that he identifies this as nihilism.
If one follows
Heidegger's plan of attack, we must first take into consideration the phrase
"God is dead" and study each of its components separately, so that we
may be capable of understanding more clearly what Nietzsche means by the
utterance of these dramatic words.
According to many
of the scholars, one must not refer to "God" exclusively in the Christian
sense of the word, but it is important to take the concept in a more expansive
sense of reality. Heidegger defines God as the supersensible world as it really
exists and which rules everything, the ideals and ideas, the purpose and
motives which rule and sustain everything that exists and particular humanity,
all this which is understood as the highest values (185). Thus, God is a
transformation of all earthly and mundane values, into transcendent and
absolute values. God, as referred to by Maurice Blanchot in his article "The
Limits of Experience: Nihilism", is not only God, "but also
everything that, in rapid succession has tried to take its place - e.g., the
ideal, consciousness, reason, the certainly of progress, the happiness of the
masses, culture, etc." (121).
Still, Nietzsche
seems to think of God not only in the metaphysical sense, but in the historical
sense. Rose Pfeffer, in
Nietzsche:
Disciple of Dionysus,
interprets Nietzsche’s God, as referred
to in the madman cry in
The
Gay Science, as "the historical God of the
Christian tradition" (73). Pfeffer states that "God symbolizes the
whole Platonic-Christian realm of a transcendent reality and its supersensible,
absolute values that have dominated the Western tradition"(73). Thus
"the 'highest values',... originate from the
Platonic-Christian tradition, which placed philosophy 'under the guidance of
morality'. They are the eternal, immutable values of Plato's realm of ideas,
and the transcendent, supersensible norms of Christianity, which transformed
the Platonic 'Good' into the Christian God" (Pfeffer 73-5).
One very
interesting point to be considered before continuing is that Nietzsche never
stated that God didn't exist; only that he is dead. This is clear once one has
been able to formulate the definition of God based on the ideas stated above.
It seems Nietzsche wasn't interested in whether that concept was still valid or
not. Hence we arrive at Nietzsche's announcement of its death.
Death, in its turn,
can be defined in many ways. It could be seen as
"the total and permanent cessation of all
the vital functions of an animal or plant; the loss or absence of spiritual
life; loss or deprivation of civil life; extinction or destruction"
("Death").
Yet death, in Nietzschean sense,
refers to the annulment by man of the supersensible world. This death
implicates not only the process by which "that" existing nullifies
itself, but it also transforms into its essence (Heidegger 216).
Gathering together
the different possible meanings of death, it is possible to formulate a better
idea of the importance of Nietzsche's profound and alarming announcement of
God's death. To this extent, one can suppose, that act of killing God denotes
stripping humanity of its "vital functions" necessary to sustain life
and order, yet, it is this same spiritual and mental "crutch" which
Nietzsche wants to get rid of. This murder, in Nietzschean terms, is but the mere
annulment and transformation of those old "supreme" values which have
existed before present times, it could be said, that to Nietzsche's
understanding, "supreme" values do nothing more than cripple man's
progress through the ages. Pfeffer warns us not to take this as an
"atheistic statement, or as a cry for the revival of the old faith".
To her the phrase "God is dead" is a stand against the "Platonic-Christian"
tradition of transcendence and against those in the 19th century, who having
lost all faith, continued with the tradition (Pfeffer 74). In simpler terms
God's death is the elimination of "all" which the concept of God was
responsible for (Kockelmans 65).
This loss of the
"divine" principles, by which man had supposed the order of the
material world, is drowning. This experience of emptiness, of nothingness, can
be defined as an experience where one perceives that one's former perceptions
were arranged in an arbitrary form. Man has known of the existence of this void
for a long time, yet he has preferred to act as if this void did not exist, as
if the universe has not lost its meaning. To the majority of people, the
disappearance of God has no effect over the state of things. All remains in its
place, in harmony. Yet, Nietzsche seemed to understand, that it was time for
man to acknowledge this void for what it was: the means to create new values.
This shall be discussed later on.
Now, before
continuing it is important to introduce the concept of Nihilism. Up to now, we
have arrived at a stage where nothingness plays an important part of Nietzsche’s
concept of God's death. It was Nietzsche's understanding that this nothingness
was not limited to moral/religious themes, but that it was intrinsic to all
things, to all aspects of humanity, from political, to social, to existential,
to nature, etc… With the mention of nothingness as the product of God's death,
we can assume that Nietzsche introduces the concept of Nihilism, given that the
word "nihil" is Latin for "nothing".
Nihilism, in a
broad sense of the word, implies total negation of something. From there, one
can derive the different types of nihilism which are present in the world. To
an extent, the first philosopher to coin the word nihilism was the American
William Hamilton, who in his work Lectures on Metaphysics,3 describes
Hume's Phenomenism, which denies the existence of a substantial reality, as
nihilistic. Yet, one can find nihilistic influence as early as Gorgias (5th
century B.C.), who stated: "(a) nothing exists, (b) if anything exists, it
is incomprehensible and (c) if anything is comprehensible, it is
incommunicable" (Freeman 128). Thus, we have epistemological nihilism in
Hume's case and metaphysical nihilism, which is the negation of valid moral
values; pessimism, exemplified by Schopenhauer’s considerations of existence as
a mere "reflection " of the irrational impulse of Will; Russian
nihilism, denouncing that only destruction was creative and that all can be
destroyed, should be trashed and what survived was good (which could be
considered as influencing Nietzsche's stance on philosophizing with a hammer);
and Buddhist nihilism, which denies alternatives to a given position, and the
negation of this negation, thus the "void" is seen as true Absolute
(Ferrater Mora 2:65-7).
But what of
Nietzsche's nihilism? Why is Nietzsche's interpretation of nihilism so
fundamental for understanding the time in which Nietzsche lived, wrote and
died, and the time he foresaw? What makes thinkers like Heidegger, Camus,
Sartre and Derrida heed Nietzsche's prophetic words and try to prepare mankind
for the forecoming circumstances?
It is easily
observed that Nihilism existed well before Nietzsche's time; yet, it was
Nietzsche who dared to point out that nihilism is not the consequence of a few
scattered ideals, restricted to a very limited area, but a movement which
encompasses all mankind. And so Nietzsche defines the concept of nihilism in a
few words: "What does nihilism mean? That the highest values are losing
their power"(Will Aph.
2). Nietzsche complements the urgency of this statement by adding: " There
is no answer to the questions: ' to what purpose '?" (Will
Aph. 2). Thus Nietzsche sums it up by
stating "God is dead".
What causes this
void, this nothingness defined as nihilism, which permeates modern and
contemporary times? Why is there no more purpose? In other words, what causes
the death of God?
Going back to
madman's cry, we can observe that Nietzsche proposes humanity to be the culprit
of this "horrendous" act. Why man? And how did man commit this
"crime"? In general opinion, it was man's elevation of his own
mundane moral concepts to a superior plane in an attempt to establish moral and
absolute truths by which he could govern his acts the primordial reason of
humanity's downfall. Yet, if it was man who promoted the establishment of the
"supreme" values, as we can deduce from Nietzsche when he writes:
" The 'inferior species' ('herd', 'mass', 'society') is forgetting
modesty, and inflates its needs into 'cosmic' and 'metaphysical' values. In
this way all life is 'vulgarized': for inasmuch as the 'mass' of mankind rules,
it tyrannies over the exceptions, so that these lose their belief in themselves
and become Nihilists" (Will 27).
It is obvious, that man being an "entity" of limited capacity and
containing many faults, is logically incapable of establishing
"absolute", supreme values. Humanity's continuous search for the
Absolute, the truth, a search which is endless in form, becomes the main cause
for this prolonged void. As a consequence, if God, as a
"supersensible" principle and as a result of all that is real, is
dead, if the supersensible world of the ideas has lost its power of commitment,
and over all, its awakening and constructive power due to nihilism, then there
remains nothing that the humanity can adhere to and by which to guide itself.
Thus humanity loses all that it held as "supreme" and is left with nothingness,
a prolonged nihilism resulting in a sickening void, which humanity feels it must
recapture and refill with the lost "meaning" of life.
Another riveting
culprit of the abysmal emptiness which mankind faces today is science and the
scientific method. In a broad sense, Nietzsche is also considered a prophet of
humanity's plunge into a world of turmoil and confusion. Man's continued search
has left him orphaned of all sustaining values, abandoning him with an empty
shell which falsely supplies man with a reason to be. There is no real
knowledge left. Just a mere description of what must be the observable actions.
Science becomes the tool by which the world can be destroyed, adopting
Nietzsche's nihilism as its guide. Thus, science becomes nihilistic, "the
meaning of a world deprived of meaning" (Blanchot 122-3), and as its foundations,
there is nothing else than ignorance. And so, not needing to interpret, science
declares its own rules, rules which can lead destruction by the mere act of
transforming the world.
Not only did
Nietzsche foresee the consequences of science for the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries, but also foresaw wars of ideologies, with consequences
unimaginable to modern Europe:
"For when truth enters into a fight with the
lies of millennia, we shall have upheavals, a convulsion of earthquakes, a
moving of mountains and valleys, the like of which has never been dreamed of.
The concept of politics merged entirely with a war of spirits; all power
structures of the old society will have been exploded --all of them are based
on lies: these will be wars the like of which have never yet been seen on
earth. It is only beginning with me that the earth knows great politics" (Ecce Homo 327).
But intrinsic to
all, there seems to exist an unknown, hidden cause for nihilism's rampage
through time. A cause whose power to create existential turmoil throughout time
and space, without sparing a life, is second to none: reason. Stanley Rosen, in
his book Nihilism, describes reason as a condition which
objectives, reifies and alienates, destroying all that is genuinely human by
imposing strict, analytical, inhuman "man -made categories of mathematized
ontology" over humanity's existential essence (Rosen xv). Reason pretends
to become a tool for the achievement of human projects, yet it is not a
faultless tool, as stated by Rosen when he declares that reason "emerges
from the pre-rational stratum of desire,… to master nature" (Rosen 56).
Ultimately, reason is unable to speak of itself in terms of good and evil,
transcending these limits and resulting in nihilism (Rosen 57).
Returning to
Heidegger's interpretation, Nietzsche seems to conceive nihilism as comprised
by three distinguishable phases: (a) the complete or classical nihilism phase,
(b) the incomplete or romantic nihilism phase, and (c) the self-overcoming of
nihilism or "amor fati" phase. The complete or classical phase
is characterized by the total negation of not only the previous supreme values.
In contrast, the incomplete or romantic phase is characterized by a partial
negation of the supreme values. Nietzsche writes:
"Imperfect Nihilism --its forms: we are now
surrounded by them. All attempts made to escape Nihilism, which do not consist
in transvaluating the values that have prevailed hitherto, only make the matter
worse; they complicate the problem" (Will Aph.
28).
We have new values
taking over, but they are being elevated to the transcendental domains left
empty by the existing old supreme values. Contrary to this, the classical phase
not only destroys the old supreme values, but also their location (Heidegger 87).
Furthermore, as
stated above, Nietzsche claims that humanity is suffering from the effects of
the incomplete nihilism: "... we are now surrounded by them" (Will Aph. 28). Later on,
Nietzsche would describe the four different periods comprised by the incomplete
phase, which he subtitled "The Periods of European Nihilism" (Will Aph. 56). The first period, "The
Period of Obscurity", is the period where everything is done to preserve
the "old institution" without endangering the "new
institutions" that are emerging. In other words, it is welcoming of a new
regime without the abandonment of the old regime.
In the second
period, "The Period of Light", there is a conscious a wariness of the
opposition between the old values and the new ones, yet humanity is not ready to
leap from one to the other: "We understand the old, but are far from being
sufficiently strong for the new" (Will Aph.
56). The life threatening aspects of the old values are comprehended by all,
yet there is insufficient courage to risk jumping into the new order of life.
From there we
arrive at the third period, " The Period of the Three Great Passions:
contempt, pity, destruction", where humanity proclaims war against itself.
Finally the fourth and last period arrives, "The Period of Catastrophes",
where man, both the weak and the strong, must decide their course, between the
old and "death", and the new and "life".
Now, there is one
more phase of nihilism's history which must be discussed, the phase of the
overcoming of nihilism or the "amor fati" (love of destiny)
phase. This phase, in a sense, can be described as the key to deciphering
Nietzsche's works. Here Nietzsche proposes the end of the nihilistic process by
its own hands. Even nihilism suffers from nihilism. Thus Nietzsche calls for an
acceptance of life for what it is, accepting the negative and destructive
essence of life. "The great creator," remarks Rosen, "must also
be a great destroyer; in destroying or accelerating the natural decadence of
the past, he also destroys his own historical consciousness and becomes like a
child, freed from loyalty to and vengeance against the old world, able to
create new values in the innocence of his playful strength" (73). Hence,
the nihilistic destruction of "civilization" is accelerated by
nihilism's own internal nihilistic process, leaving the superman to raise and
create a new "civilization", free from the restraints imposed by the
old "supreme" values, as legendary Phoenix rising
from its own ashes.
There must be a
complete and total destruction of all preceding substance so "the
child" of Zarathustra's teachings may create new and better things.
Nietzsche's Zarathustra is an arsonist, whose teachings consume the decadent
civilization with its nihilistic fire, making way for the superman to rise from
the ashes (Rosen 74). And in the wake of nihilism's fire, the weak perish under
the force of its destructive hammer, leaving a chaos primed for a new creation. In his preface to Will the Power, Nietzsche writes:
"What I am now going to relate is the
history of the next two centuries. I shall describe what will happen, what must
necessarily happen: the triumph of Nihilism... This future is already
proclaimed by a hundred different homes; as a destiny it announces its
advents..."(Will Preface
2).
And later Nietzsche writes:
"... Nihilism is the only possible outcome
of our greatest values and ideals, because we must first experience Nihilism
before we can realize what the actual worth of these 'values' was... sooner or
later we will be in need for new values" (Will
Preface 4).
Thus Nietzsche can be seen as a
prophet of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as a new Zarathustra who
forewarns humanity of a necessity to which they are blind and deaf, and so far
unprepared to deal with.
Conclusion
Camus once wrote:
"In this world rid of God and of moral idols, man is now alone and without
a master" (70).
These words reflect
Nietzsche's influence on twentieth century thinking. Nietzsche Knew that man's
"logical" search through "reason" for an "absolute
truth" which would "save" man from non-being, would eventually
lead man into an empty mechanical shell. Man cannot continue to adhere to
obsolete values, as to a lifejacket, while he ponders on the viability of new
values. He must let go of these treacherous leeches which only prolong the
agony of the unending void's sapping of man's strength, and accept life and its
responsibilities for what they are; no more, no less. Life is a continuing
changing process, and only through change can it continue to thrive. Man must
now realize that he is his own master. Thus he must take over and bring to life
a new world, free from the maladies, the weakness and the sickness of the old
world and its values.
Nietzsche
comprehended that God's death was a given necessity in the nihilistic process
of the world, yet he forewarned on the dangers of not accepting God's death for
what it really was: man's liberation from mediocrity, thus allowing him to
purse his appointed self-evolution. Man's futile mediocrity has prolonged the
nihilistic process to a dangerous degree, where man will trap himself in an
unending void. Nietzsche's "solution" is to accept life, accept the
good and the bad part of the destiny which is given. To paraphrase Ludwig
Schajowicz, it does us no service to close our eyes in front of nihilism's
threats. Neither is it enough that we engage with "something" in
order to bestow meaning to our lives. If we decide to fight for a cause without
being able to believe in it, or without being able to believe that the
favorable time of the fights has arrived, we are subjecting ourselves to the
circumstances instead of assuming a destiny (Schajowicz 384). We must assume
our destinies; we must become destroyers of the "sickness", through
the disinfecting and purifying process of nihilism, so that the "children"
may "play" in a clean atmosphere, and create!
walter j mucher serra
December 1989
Revised: April 28, 2012
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Endnotes
1. Quoted in J. Kockelman's article
"Nietzsche's God is Dead" published in The Great Year of Zarathustra
(1881-1981), edited by David Goicochea (Lanham, Maryland, UP of America, 1983).
2. This fourth part of Nietzsche's Zarathustra
was published separately from the first true part in 1890. Later in 1892 it was
published in conjunction with the three previous parts.
3. Mentioned by Ferrater-Mora in Diccionario
de Filosofía. 4 vols. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1979.
