God is dead is probably Nietzsche's most notorious soundbite. It's a statement that has saturated
society as a cultural watershed moment. But the true meaning and power of Nietzsche's
dynamite phrase has often been missed in popular culture.
When you come across this statement in the varying corners of culture, it is often taken
as a pithy formulation of modernism's revolution. Taken this way God is dead is really just
a statement of something that had been brewing for the centuries since Copernicus and Descartes.
But that is not what Nietzsche was doing. "God is dead" isn't simply Nietzsche signing
the death certificate of the Christian God. Atheism was nothing new in his time; it may
have been controversial but it was very far from the cutting edge.
God is dead was not a stating of the obvious; it is a much more profound and much more horrifying
sentiment. When it comes down to it, this isn't a modernist statement but a postmodernist
statement. When Nietzsche says that God is dead he doesn't just mean that Christian god
is dead; God here doesn't refer to the narrow religious definition but to the broader idea
of the universal and transcendent truth. A more accurate way of expressing what he meant
would be "Truth is dead". It doesn't pack the same poetic punch but
the statement "Truth is dead" captures more of the postmodern horror that Nietzsche was
really getting at. In this episode we are going to explore the meaning of this statement
in depth and what Nietzsche really meant and why it was so much more revolutionary and
groundbreaking than a mere statement of atheism.
The madman.- Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours,
ran to the market place. and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!" -As many of those
who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has
he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding?
Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated? -Thus they yelled and laughed.
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried;
"I will tell you ... God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him."
- The Gay Science 125
In the setup of this aphorism there is something that should immediately jar with an attempt
to read this passage as modernist. The audience that the madman speaks to are not simple religious
people, they are not priests or bishops or upholders of the religious order. This is
what we'd expect of a triumphant modernist narrative which calls the religious deluded
and mocks their beliefs as insane. On the contrary, what we get is an audience
of unbelievers who mock the madman in his search for God and ask him if God is lost
or hiding. It's the same sort of condescending attitude you see with the likes of Richard
Dawkins or Sam Harris; it's the crowd that see religious belief as a childish fairytale
at best or a nefarious mind virus at worst. In speaking to such a crowd, Nietzsche is
signalling something important - the counterposition to the madman is not the religious believer
but the modernist unbeliever. Which if you think about it makes sense; Nietzsche was
at the cutting edge of dangerous thoughts and by the time he's writing at the end of
the 19th century atheism was far from the cutting edge - remember this is already decades
after Darwin had published On the Origin of Species which was really the final nail in
the Christian coffin. Proceeding beyond this declaration of God's
death, Nietzsche paints a grim rhetorical image of doom - we have murdered god and there
is some consequence to be paid for this action that we haven't reckoned with just yet.
This price is the real message of the madman. By killing God, we have exposed the devouring
vacuum of nihilism. This is the warning that Nietzsche is trying to communicate to the
modernist - the death of God presents a danger unheard of in the history of culture and we
ignore it at our own risk.
The modernist mindset hears the phrase God is dead and like the audience of Nietzsche's
madman they laugh and they mock. The death of God is a triviality. It is a non-event
that we needn't worry about. It is a great event to have put away these superstitions.
Now we are more intelligent now we are smarter and unlike our ancestors we are longer being
duped into believing silly stories. The modernist laughs sardonically at the faith
of the religious in their holy books and proudly holds up the scientific canon and all its
amazing discoveries as a counterargument. Science great science has liberated us from
the stupidity of the ages. Needless to say, Nietzsche is not so optimistic
about the modernist project. By the time of writing The Gay Science in 1882, Nietzsche
has progressed beyond his earlier adulation of the scientific worldview. He is no longer
infected with the enthusiasm of science and progress but by this time he has begun to
turn his maxims and arrows on the great mammoth that was modern scientific optimism. Hence
the madman's audience being not religious believers but modernist atheists.
Nietzsche Contra Scientism A few years after The Gay Science and his
declaration of God's death, Nietzsche takes aim at the place of science in his book The
Genealogy of Morality. In the Third Essay of the Genealogy, he is
exploring the topic of the Ascetic Ideal. This is the ideal of asceticism that Nietzsche
sees as underlying the evolution of organised religion. The belief in true reality as a
transcendental realm beyond this world is the hallmark of the ascetic ideal.
In section 24 of this essay, Nietzsche says that he has looked around for a counterideal
to this Ascetic ideal and he has found it everywhere lacking. He responds to the suggestion
that science offers a counterideal, that it "has already conquered [the ascetic] ideal
in all important respects: all of modern science is supposed to bear witness to that-modern
science which, as a genuine philosophy of reality, clearly believes in itself alone,
clearly possesses the courage for itself and the will to itself, and has up to now survived
well enough without God, the beyond, and the virtues of denial. [...] The truth is precisely
the opposite of what is asserted here: science today has absolutely no belief in itself,
let alone an ideal above it-and where it still inspires passion, love, ardor, and suffering
at all, it is not the opposite of the ascetic ideal but rather the latest and noblest form
of it. This is the beginning of Nietzsche's critique
of science. He is not attacking science itself or scientists for he says "I approve of their
work". What he is going after though is the jump between science and scientism by which
we mean Wittgenstein's suspicion of the attitude "a reaction against the overestimation of
science". This overestimation of science is what Nietzsche
is tackling. He is not anti-scientific for as we have noted he approves of the work of
scientists. But he is going after the worldview that evolves around science - the ideologizing
of science. This attitude towards science contains an
idealisation of science's capabilities. It enshrines science on the lofty pedestal once
occupied by Christianity. Science becomes the new religion.
So what Nietzsche is going after here is the atheistic science-loving type represented
in the parable of the madman by those who laugh and mock him. The ironic thing about
this type from Nietzsche's perspective is that they think they are the opposite of the
religious mindset. They think that they are better. When Richard Dawkins calls religion
a delusion, it goes without saying that he is superior to the religious mindset, that
his rational worldview is the opposite of this religious mindset. But the irony for
Nietzsche is that they are not opposites but merely varying manifestations of the same
ascetic ideal. Science like the ascetic ideal still preaches
another world - the "objective" world of things-in-themselves. "The truthful man, in the audacious and ultimate
sense presupposed by the faith in science, thereby affirms another world than that of
life, nature, and history; and insofar as he affirms this 'other world,' does this not
mean that he has to deny its antithesis, this world, our world? ... It is still a metaphysical
faith that underlies our faith in science-and we men of knowledge of today, we godless men
and anti-metaphysicians, we, too, still derive our flame from the fire ignited by a faith
millennia old, the Christian faith, which was also Plato's, that God is truth, that
truth is divine.-But what if this belief is becoming more and more unbelievable, if nothing
turns out to be divine any longer unless it be error, blindness, lies-if God himself turns
out to be our longest lie?" The fruit of questioning this ascetic ideal
which underpins Christianity and science and denying our faith in it is that a new problem
arises "that of the value of truth". This value of truth is something that we have
taken for granted but as Nietzsche notes this faith is millennia old, it is the Christian
faith which was also Plato's. He wants us to question the idea of truth's divinity.
Exploring what this looks like is beyond the scope of this video but a taster of what Nietzsche
is talking about here is given in the first section of his work Beyond Good and Evil where
he asks why we should prefer truth to untruth given that life is as reliant on untruth as
it is on truth. Above truth in Nietzsche's value scheme we find life and health and so
rather than focussing on the truth as the highest value when looking at a belief or
a behaviour we are better off asking: "to what extent it is life-promoting, life-preserving,
species-preserving, perhaps even species-cultivating" The bottom line is that Nietzsche sees science
not as the opposite of the religious mindset but as the latest manifestation of it. It
is the obsession with the universal and transcendent truth that lies beneath these manifestations
of the ascetic ideal. And so when Nietzsche tells us that God is
dead, he is not making a modernist attack on the religious mindset in the way that Dawkins
or Dennett might. He is making a postmodernist attack on the modernist worldview's idolisation
of science. He wants to reveal that this worldview is the fruit of the same tree as the religious
worldview. The Real Meaning of God's Death
The true meaning of God is dead is much deeper than what had already become a platitude by
the end of the 19th century. When he speaks about God he's speaking of a broader faith
"the Christian faith, which was also Plato's, that God is truth, that truth is divine".
This death of God is a potential calamity. To kill God in this broader sense is not just
to do away with the mythos of Christianity. By throwing out the bathwater of God we are
also casting out our epistemic certainty and the grounding of truth. We are losing solid
ground and so we are threatened with the potentially devastating problems of nihilism and relativism.
Without God Nietzsche asks: "Is there still any up or down? Are we not
straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has
it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us?"
Looking around him in the age of modernity, Nietzsche sees that this worry hasn't really
dawned on his contemporaries and he concludes that:
"Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though
done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them
than the most distant stars" 130 years on it is worth contemplating whether
this disaster has reached us yet or whether Nietzsche's analysis was mere alarmism. Perhaps
it is still too early to say. In the past decade we have seen terms emerge like post-truth
which has been defined as "the disappearance of shared objective standards for truth".
In our warped intellectual landscape where the waters of the epistemic commons grow muddier
every day it is worth reflecting on the warning of the madman.
Nietzsche's true heirs in our time are the postmodernist thinkers who have wrestled with
the problems of relativism and the value of science and for this dancing with dangerous
questions they and postmodernism itself have become boogeyman used to scare the population.
On a closing note, it is worth noting that despite the great dangers of the situation,
the "sequence of breakdown, destruction, ruin, and cataclysm that is now impending," Nietzsche
is optimistic: "Indeed, we philosophers and "free spirits
... feel, when we hear the news that "the old god is dead," as if a new dawn shone on
us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectation. At long last the
horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our
ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover
of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has
never yet been such an ''open sea!'"