Friedrich Nietzsche: God is Dead

It’s been 134 years since Friedrich Nietzsche declared: “God is Dead” (or Gott ist tot, in
German), giving philosophy students a collective headache that’s lasted from the 19th century
until today. It is, perhaps, one of the best known statements in all of philosophy, well known
even to those who have never picked up a copy of The Gay Science(1882), the book from
which it originates. But do we know exactly what he meant? Or perhaps more importantly,
what it means for us?

Nietzsche was an atheist for his adult life and didn’t mean that there was a God who had
actually died, rather that our idea of one had. After The Enlightenment( or Age of Reason
emerged out of Renaissance Humanism), the idea of a universe that was governed by physical
laws and not by divine providence was now reality. Philosophy had shown that governments
no longer needed to be organized around the idea of divine right to be legitimate, but rather by
the consent or rationality of the governed — that large and consistent moral theories could exist
without reference to God. This was a tremendous event. Europe no longer needed God as the
source for all morality, value, or order in the universe; philosophy and science were capable of
doing that for us. This increasing secularization of thought in the West led the philosopher to
realize that not only was God dead but that human beings had killed him with their scientific
revolution, their desire to better understand the world.

The death of God didn’t strike Nietzsche as an entirely good thing. Without a God, the basic
belief system of Western Europe was in jeopardy, as he put it in Twilight of the
Idols(1889): “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…
Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one
main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole.”

Nietzsche thought this could be a good thing for some people, saying: “... at hearing the news
that 'the old god is dead', we philosophers and 'free spirits' feel illuminated by a new
dawn.” A bright morning had arrived. With the old system of meaning gone a new one could
be created, but it came with risks—ones that could bring out the worst in human nature.
Nietzsche believed that the removal of this system put most people at the risk of despair or
meaninglessness(nihilism). What could the point of life be without a God? Even if there was
one, the Western world now knew that he hadn’t placed us at the centre of the universe, and it
was learning of the lowly origin from which man had evolved. We finally saw the true world.
The universe wasn’t made solely for human existence anymore. Nietzsche feared that this
understanding of the world would lead to pessimism, “a will to nothingness” that was
antithetical to the life-affirming philosophy Nietzsche prompted.

His fear of nihilism and our reaction to it was shown in The Will to Power(1901), when
he wrote that: "What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is
coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism... For some time now
our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe." He would not
have been surprised by the events that plagued Europe in the 20th century. Communism,
Nazism, Nationalism, and the other ideologies that made their way across the continent in the
wake of World War I sought to provide man with meaning and value, as a worker, as an Aryan,
or some other greater deed; in a similar way as to how Christianity could provide meaning as
a child of God, and give life on Earth value by relation to heaven. While he may have rejected
those ideologies, he no doubt would have acknowledged the need for the meaning they
provided.