God is dead

This article is about the philosophical event described by Nietzsche. For other uses, see God is dead (disambiguation).

"God is dead" (German:  „Gott ist tot“ ; also known as the death of God) is a widely quoted statement by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. It first appears in Nietzsche's 1882 collection The Gay Science (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, also translated as "The science of joy")[1] However, it is most famously associated with Nietzsche's classic work Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Also sprach Zarathustra), which is most responsible for making the phrase popular. The idea is stated in "The Madman"[1] as follows:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
— Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Section 125, tr. Walter Kaufmann

But the best known passage is at the end of part 2 of Zarathustra's Prolog, where after beginning his allegorical journey Zarathustra encounters an aged ascetic who expresses misanthropy and love of God:

When Zarathustra heard these words, he saluted the saint and said "What should I have to give you! But let me go quickly that I take nothing from you!" And thus they parted from one another, the old man and Zarathustra, laughing as two boys laugh.

But when Zarathustra was alone, he spoke thus to his heart: "Could it be possible! This old saint has not heard in his forest that God is dead!"

— Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, tr. R.J. Hollingdale[2][3]

Although the statement and its meaning is attributed to Nietzsche, this was not a unique position as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel pondered the death of God, first in his Phenomenology of Spirit where he considers the death of God to 'not [be] seen as anything but an easily recognized part of the usual Christian cycle of redemption'.[4] Later on Hegel writes about the great pain of knowing that God is dead 'The pure concept, however, or infinity, as the abyss of nothingness in which all being sinks, must characterize the infinite pain, which previously was only in culture historically and as the feeling on which rests modern religion, the feeling that God Himself is dead, (the feeling which was uttered by Pascal, though only empirically, in his saying: Nature is such that it marks everywhere, both in and outside of man, a lost God), purely as a phase, but also as no more than just a phase, of the highest idea.'[5] Of course the spirit in which it is intended is a verily Nietzsche manifestation, however it is important to consider the material that gave rise to this idea.

Explanation

The phrase "God is dead" does not mean that Nietzsche believed in an actual God who first existed and then died in a literal sense. Rather, it conveys his view that because of the advances of the Age of Enlightenment, God is no longer a credible source of absolute moral principles. Nietzsche recognizes the crisis that the death of God represents for existing moral assumptions: "When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident... By breaking one main concept out of Christianity, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one's hands."[6] This is why in "The Madman", a passage which primarily addresses nontheists (especially atheists), the problem is to retain any system of values in the absence of a divine order.

The death of God is a way of saying that humans, and Western Civilization as a whole, could no longer believe in any such order. The death of God will lead, Nietzsche says, not only to the rejection of a belief of cosmic or physical order but also to a rejection of absolute values themselves — to the rejection of belief in an objective and universal moral law, binding upon all individuals. In this manner, the loss of an absolute basis for morality leads to nihilism. This nihilism is that for which Nietzsche worked to find a solution by re-evaluating the foundations of human values. This meant, to Nietzsche, looking for foundations that went deeper than Christian values.

Nietzsche believed that the majority of people did not recognize this death out of the deepest-seated fear or angst. Therefore, when the death did begin to become widely acknowledged, people would despair and nihilism would become rampant. This is partly why Nietzsche saw Christianity as nihilistic.

Nietzsche and Heidegger

Martin Heidegger understood this part of Nietzsche's philosophy by looking at it as death of metaphysics. In his view, Nietzsche's words can only be understood as referring not to a particular theological or anthropological view but rather to the end of philosophy itself. Philosophy has, in Heidegger's words, reached its maximum potential as metaphysics and Nietzsche's words warn of its demise and that of any metaphysical world view. If metaphysics is dead, Heidegger warns, that is because from its inception that was its fate.[7]

Nietzsche and others

Paul Tillich as well as Richard Schacht were influenced by the writings of Nietzsche and especially of his phrase "God is dead."[8]

William Hamilton wrote the following about Nietzsche's view:

For the most part Altizer prefers mystical to ethical language in solving the problem of the death of God, or, as he puts it, in mapping out the way from the profane to the sacred. This combination of Kierkegaard and Eliade makes rather rough reading, but his position at the end is a relatively simple one. Here is an important summary statement of his views: If theology must now accept a dialectical vocation, it must learn the full meaning of Yes-saying and No-saying; it must sense the possibility of a Yes which can become a No, and of a No which can become a Yes; in short, it must look forward to a dialectical coincidentia oppositorum. Let theology rejoice that faith is once again a "scandal," and not simply a moral scandal, an offense to man’s pride and righteousness, but, far more deeply, an ontological scandal; for eschatological faith is directed against the deepest reality of what we know as history and the cosmos. Through Nietzsche’s vision of Eternal Recurrence we can sense the ecstatic liberation that can be occasioned by the collapse of the transcendence of Being, by the death of God ... and, from Nietzsche’s portrait of Jesus, theology must learn of the power of an eschatological faith that can liberate the believer from what to the contemporary sensibility is the inescapable reality of history. But liberation must finally be effected by affirmation. ... ( See "Theology and the Death of God," in this volume, pp. 95-111.[9]

New possibilities

Nietzsche believed there could be positive possibilities for humans without God. Relinquishing the belief in God opens the way for human creative abilities to fully develop. The Christian God, he wrote, would no longer stand in the way, so human beings might stop turning their eyes toward a supernatural realm and begin to acknowledge the value of this world.

Nietzsche uses the metaphor of an open sea, which can be both exhilarating and terrifying. The people who eventually learn to create their lives anew will represent a new stage in human existence, the Übermensch — i.e. the personal archetype who, through the conquest of their own nihilism, themselves become a sort of mythical hero. The "death of God" is the motivation for Nietzsche's last (uncompleted) philosophical project, the "revaluation of all values".

Nietzsche's voice

Although Nietzsche puts the statement "God is Dead" into the mouth of a "madman"[10] in The Gay Science, he also uses the phrase in his own voice in sections 108 and 343 of the same book. In the madman's passage, the man is described as running through a marketplace shouting, "I seek God! I seek God!" He arouses some amusement; no one takes him seriously. Maybe he took an ocean voyage? Lost his way like a little child? Maybe he's afraid of us (non-believers) and is hiding? — much laughter. Frustrated, the madman smashes his lantern on the ground, crying out that "God is dead, and we have killed him, you and I!" "But I have come too soon," he immediately realizes, as his detractors of a minute before stare in astonishment: people cannot yet see that they have killed God. He goes on to say:

This prodigious event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. 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 — and yet they have done it themselves.
— trans. Walter Kaufmann, The Gay Science, sect. 125

Earlier in the book (section 108), Nietzsche wrote "God is Dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. And we — we still have to vanquish his shadow, too." The protagonist in Thus Spoke Zarathustra also speaks the words, commenting to himself after visiting a hermit who, every day, sings songs and lives to glorify his god as noted above.

What is more, Zarathustra later refers not only to the death of God, but states: "Dead are all the Gods". It is not just one morality that has died, but all of them, to be replaced by the life of the Übermensch, the new man:

'DEAD ARE ALL THE GODS: NOW DO WE DESIRE THE OVERMAN TO LIVE.'
— trans. Thomas Common, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part I, Section XXII,3

Death of God theological movement

Main article: Death of God theology

The cover of the April 8, 1966 edition of Time and the accompanying article concerned a movement in American theology that arose in the 1960s known as the "death of God". The death of God movement is sometimes technically referred to as "theothanatology" (in Greek, theos means God and thanatos means death.)

The main proponents of this theology included the Christian theologians Gabriel Vahanian, Paul van Buren, William Hamilton, John Robinson, Thomas J. J. Altizer, John D. Caputo, and the rabbi Richard L. Rubenstein.

See also

References

  1. 1 2 in sections 108 (New Struggles), 125 (The Madman), and for a third time in section 343 (The Meaning of our Cheerfulness).
  2. ↑ Penguin Classics Edition 1969 reprint p. 41
  3. ↑ Als Zarathustra aber allein war, sprach er also zu seinem Herzen: "Sollte es denn möglich sein! Dieser alte Heilige hat in seinem Walde noch nichts gehört, daß Gott tot ist!. Reclam edition 1969 p 5
  4. ↑ von der Luft, Eric (Apr–Jun 1984). "Sources of Nietzsche's "God is Dead!" and its Meaning for Heidegger". Journal of the History of Ideas (2): 263–276. See page 265.
  5. ↑ Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1845). Philosophische Abhandlungen. p. 153.
  6. ↑ trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale; Twilight of the Idols, Expeditions of an Untimely Man, sect. 5
  7. ↑ Wolfgan Muller-Lauter, Heidegger und Nietzsche: Nietzsche-Interpretationen III, Walter de Gruyter 2000
  8. ↑ Richard Schacht, After the Death of God: Friedrich Nietzsche and Paul Tillich You Tube
  9. ↑ The Death of God Theologies Today by William Hamilton
  10. ↑ Read the whole section here from Thomas Common's translation The Madman Section 125

Further reading

Precursors to "Death of God" theology

Death of God' theology

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to: God is dead
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 10/14/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.