www.mbapathshala.

com
https://t.me/mba_pathshala

mba_pathshala_
MBA Pathshala
Contact :- +916396163711, +918171833400

www.mbapathshala.com
 Readers’ Digest

God is Dead: Nietzsche’s Most Famous Statement

Explained

Philosophy Break
 MBA Pathshala
God is Dead: Nietzsche’s Most Famous Statement Explained

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous declaration that God is dead echoed down the 20th century. This article explains
what Nietzsche really meant by the oft-misunderstood statement.

“God is dead,” the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously declares in his 1882 work, The Gay
Science: “God remains dead. And we have killed him.”

By these words, Nietzsche does not so much mean that atheism is true — indeed, in the passage from which
they’re taken, these words are presented as fresh news to a group of atheists — he more means that, because
“the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable”, everything that “was built upon this faith, propped
up by it, grown into it”, including “the whole of our European morality,” is destined for “collapse.”

Nietzsche was writing, of course, in the aftermath of the Enlightenment, a time in which science, mathematics,
and philosophy arose across Europe to displace Christianity as the guiding authority on truth about life and the
universe. For centuries, Christianity’s teachings about reality — that there exists a Creator outside time and
space, and that we should abide by the rules of this Creator to ensure a good afterlife — were entirely
dominant.

www.mbapathshala.com MBA Pathshala

 MBA Pathshala

“Portrait of Friedrich Nietzsche”, by Edvard Munch, c. 1906

However, the scientific revolution and the separation of Church and State across Europe pulled the
authoritative rug from underneath Christianity’s feet. Atheism became not only acceptable among citizens, but
popular.

www.mbapathshala.com MBA Pathshala

 MBA Pathshala
Without a divine power underpinning our existential situation and moral outlooks, however, our paths into the
future became rather uncertain. “How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?” Nietzsche
questions:

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?

In other words: where do we go from here? If God’s authority is no longer unquestionable, how on Earth
should we live our lives?

We must face up to the enormity of the death of God

The appropriate response to the age of Enlightenment leading to the death of God, Nietzsche argues, should
not be a jeering celebration, nor a shrug of indifference, but a period of deep disorientation and mourning.
God was not just an innocuous source of faith and worship, Nietzsche recognizes: God was the indubitable
authority that lent power and legitimacy to Judeo-Christian moral values.

www.mbapathshala.com MBA Pathshala

 MBA Pathshala
While Judeo-Christian moral values aren’t exactly Nietzsche’s preference (he argues in On the Genealogy of
Morality, for instance, that Christianity is characterized by an ascetic ideal, the twisted, harmful
condemnation of desires we cannot help but have, like those for food and sex) — he sees their sudden
removal as dangerous.

Indeed, regardless of its degenerative, life-denying properties (i.e. the valorization of self-denial in the name
of ‘virtue’), the Judeo-Christian moral system is at least a mechanism for value creation, Nietzsche says. And
this mechanism is so deeply embedded within Western culture — with many of its values like pity, altruism,
and compassion regarded as commonsensical or even natural — that coming to terms with its collapse will be
painful, psychologically damaging, and extremely difficult.

We thus face a long, daunting task of dismantling our now foundationless values to rebuild them in healthier,
life-affirming ways. After all, as Nietzsche puts it (in a typically pithy statement that features in our list of
Nietzsche’s cleverest quotes):

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.

www.mbapathshala.com MBA Pathshala

 MBA Pathshala
Overcoming nihilism
Nietzsche worries that, if we fail to vanquish and decisively replace the shadow of values derived from
God, we risk our culture slipping into a deep nihilism.

The death of God means there is no going back: we either find a new mechanism for value creation — a
“revaluation of values”, as Nietzsche puts it — or we will eventually descend into a world where,
recognizing our values are ultimately foundationless and meaningless, we will become apathetic and
cynical — even despairing.

As Kierkegaard also suggests when discussing the meaning of life, removing the comfort of God, Judeo-
Christian morals, and an afterlife, and having nothing to really replace them with — moving from certainty
about what life is for, to uncertainty about what life is for — could lead to an all-pervading numbness or
anguish about our lives not mattering in a seemingly pointless universe.

If we are unable to become our own determiners of value (the blueprint for which Nietzsche famously hints
at with his character of the ‘Übermensch’ or ‘superman’, as well as his doctrine of the eternal recurrence),
then we’ll inevitably respond, Nietzsche laments, by burying our existential angst deep down, and by
distracting ourselves with meaningless entertainment.

www.mbapathshala.com MBA Pathshala

 MBA Pathshala

Nietzsche characterizes this predicament in his 1883-5 work. Thus Spoke Zarathustra (which features in
our reading list of Nietzsche’s best books), presenting us with a devastating sketch of an apathetic,
shallow, distracted humanity:

Behold! I shall show you the Last Man....The earth has become small, and upon it hops the Last Man,
who makes everything small... A little poison now and then: that produces pleasant dreams. And a lot of
poison at last, for a pleasant death. They still work, for work is entertainment. But they take care the
entertainment does not exhaust them... No herdsmen and one herd. Everyone wants the same thing,
everyone is the same: whoever thinks otherwise goes voluntarily into the madhouse... ‘We have
discovered happiness,’ say the Last Men, and blink.

Perhaps we can recognize aspects of ourselves in Nietzsche’s sketch of the Last Man; perhaps we might
think he’s being a little dramatic.

Regardless, his questions stand: if there is no longer an absolute, incontestable authority telling us how
to live our lives, then how should we go about living? How can we evolve our values to avoid slipping
into meaninglessness and nihilism?

www.mbapathshala.com MBA Pathshala

Like

Share

Subscribe