I will here summarise my answer to the question Jakob asked in the OP of his Why is God dead? thread.
“God”, i.e., the “moral” God, i.e., the slave- or herd-moral God, was “an antidote to the first nihilism” (Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 114). This nihilism would follow from “the experience of being powerless against men, not against nature”, since that “generates the most desperate embitterment against existence.” (ibid., 55.) “It was morality [i.e., slave- or herd-morality] that protected life against despair and the leap into nothing” (ibid.), i.e., against the despair that would follow from said experience, and the leap into nothing that would in turn follow from this despair.
We no longer need (to believe in) the slave- or herd-moral God because “we have no longer such need of an antidote to the first nihilism: life in our Europe is no longer that uncertain, capricious, absurd” (ibid., 114), since in our Europe, men are no longer that powerless against men.
So that encompasses a lot of different things. I’d argue that these struggles still exist though to a large extent though, and I’d also say that God is dead because of the academic explosion of the last couple of centuries. Unless you wanted to argue that that very academic explosion has aided the liberation of the herd - I suppose that could be argued.
To say that god has died must not one first say that god lived? What would it mean for an all powerful entity to “die”? I mean when humans die they are still around, just that we can’t perceive them with our senses limited to three dimensions.
I suspected there was some internal definitions present there that I was not aware of, but his text made me think and I love sharing my thoughts.
I can’t say that I’m well familiarized with Nietzsches philosophy, maybe I will one day when I have a lot of time. Always had an interest in him but I was kind of detered when I found out he ate dung for a month and the extreme arrogance he displays in his later works.
If anyone cares to fill me in on the definitions needed maybe I can make some actual contribution to the conversation.
Not to worry, it’s kinda the point to share your points on a forum I guess.
The pivotal idea surrounding Nietzsche’s death of God refers to a metaphorical death. Here is the infamous passage from The Gay Science:
If you try and see past all the poetry and the cryptic nature of his writing, you should observe that the metaphor (‘we have killed him’) comes from the progress of rationality and reason eradicating the need for God. When the men laugh and sneer at the madman, he realises that ‘my time has not come yet’ - that religion is still prevalent and although the advances of logic and science are available to us we haven’t yet incorperated it into society. God is dead but the news hasn’t reached us yet. This is pretty incredible stuff considering it was written over 100 years ago.
Anyway, I wouldn’t recommend diving straight into Nietzsche if you haven’t done much else moral and religious philosophy. I would advise to read up on Schopenhauer, Kant’s ethics, Utilitarian ethics, all the traditional stuff. That way you appreciate Nietzsche a lot more, it is astonishing stuff once you get into it.
But why would reason and rationality eradicate the need for a god? I hardly believe all the religious people throughout the centuries believed themselves to be irrational.
It’s not something that has actively been pursued (though Nietzsche was contantly calling for a new era of thought), the death of Gid is just something that was immanent with the progress i science and reason. The growth of atheism was something that was predicted by Nietzsche, and consequently something that he was incredibly afraid of.
Also, I have no idea why sauwelois hasn’t contributed to his own thread but I’m sure he would give you a good idea of a first book to crack into. I would myself but I have only read about half of his entire works so wouldn’t be the best advisor.
Now that I come to think about it, it counts for both the OP and Friedrich. Do you see what I mean with my claim about existence? I don’t see why the state of “death” is not just another form of existence? We must first tackle the idea of existence before we can draw any conclusions of whether being alive or dead both fall under this concept of existence.
Yeah man, gotcha. Gunna try and stay as on topic as possible, here…
I’m not sure how familiar with ‘The Gay Science’ you are, but that is kind of what the madman passage is all about (quoted above). You might say that God still exists even in his death because we still adhere to the values that religion preach - much of our moral code is moulded by it. Our society is riddled with it. Much in the sense that Shakespeare is dead but we use hundreds of his words without even realising it (well that’s my analogy now, not Nietzsche’s). So in that context God lives on in effect but not in force.
There is a lot more to Nietzsche’s philosophy than this by the way, this is just a small part of the bigger picture.