We're in Nietzsche’s World Now

In my Masters thesis written in 2000 I referenced Nietzsche as THE philosopher for the postmodern mind. By the year 2000 Nietzsche had already been dead for a hundred years but his influence over that time had become significant in many circles of thought, both philosophical and sociological. His writing was prolific. His life was a sad and sordid tale. He had almost no influence while he was alive. But his writings were incredibly influential following his death because he was the first, and most eloquent, philosopher to take seriously the realities of the Enlightenment.

Let me explain.

Nietzsche understood that the Enlightenment project of elevating reason and the human person to the highest place was a turn away from God. It was a dramatic move. A move from which there is no return. A move which resulted in the death of God. A move which has massive consequences.

In The Gay Science, Book Three, section 125, Nietzsche tells the tale of a madman who had grasped the reality that other atheists in the town had acknowledged but not fully understood -- God is dead. The madman runs into the marketplace of a town of atheists in the morning hours and exclaims, “I seek God! I seek God!” The crowd filled with unbelieving atheists laughs at him and mocks him, thinking him to be, as his name suggests, insane.

In answer to their mockery the madman exclaims that he too knows that God is not real. But he alone truly understands the consequences of the Enlightenment and its concomitant confession of atheism. The problem, as the madman saw it, was that the townspeople still live as though God was alive and still mattered to their existence when in fact, he was dead. They needed to be freed from this cognitive dissonance in order to be truly free.

The madman declares,

‘Whither is God? I shall tell you. We have killed him -- you and I. All of us are his murderers… Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the grace diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

Notice what he is saying. Society has eliminated the need for God. He has no direct influence on anything they do, and thus they have, in the madman's words, killed God. He tells them that they have the blood of the Divine on our hands. They are the “murderers of murderers.” God has “bled to death under [their] knives.” This blood cannot be washed off. There is no atonement nor sacred games to clean them.

How do people now respond to such a brazen act? Nietzsche saw only one way. The ones who rose up to kill God must now become gods themselves. They cannot now live as though God were still alive. They must take their place as the gods they are and live like it. They answer to no one but themselves. They are to value nothing above the human plane. They are to pursue only that which they desire. They are their own goal, purpose, and teleology.

In Nietzsche’s day he believed and lived in this way. But he also believed that the people of his day were not ready to hear his message; the madman had come too early. In the story, the madman’s preaching falls on deaf ears. So he states, “I have come too early, my time is not yet... This tremendous event is still on its way.” Though God was truly dead, it was too early for late 19th Century people to live with the fullness of the consequences of that terrible act.

Fast forward 120 years and it seems as though our time is the time about which the madman prophesied.

Soli Deo Gloria