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Nietzsche and the Death of God
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Nietzsche and the Death of God
In this course, Professor Ken Gemes (Birkbeck, University of London) explores the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. The course begins with the famous ‘death of God’ speech from ‘The Gay Science’, and focuses on what Nietzsche meant when he spoke about the ‘death of God’. In the second module, we turn to Nietzsche’s concept of nihilism—the denial that there are any existential values in the world—before moving on to his critique of Christianity and Christian morality in the third module. In the fourth module, we explore how Nietzsche envisioned the creation and mass adoption of new value, before thinking in the final module about who Nietzsche thought his readership was, and the purpose of his philosophy for this intended audience.
Nietzsche and the Death of God
In this module, we explore Nietzsche’s concept of the death of God, an idea that involves not only the rejection of the ontological claims of Christianity, but also its core values of truth and compassion.
the madman.
00:00:03Have you not heard of that madman who little lantern in the
00:00:05bright morning hours ran to the market place and cried incessantly?
00:00:08I seek God. I seek God
00:00:12as many of those he did not believe in God was standing around just then
00:00:15He provoked much laughter
00:00:18as he got lost. Questioned one.
00:00:20Did he lose his way like a child Queried another?
00:00:22Or is he hiding?
00:00:25Is he afraid of us?
00:00:27Has he gone on a voyage? Emigrated
00:00:28thus they yelled and laughed.
00:00:31The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his cry.
00:00:33Whether is God, he cried.
00:00:37I will tell you.
00:00:40We have killed him. You and I, all of us are his murderers.
00:00:41But how did we do this?
00:00:46How could we drink up the C?
00:00:48Who gave us the sponge? To wipe away the entire risen?
00:00:50What were we doing when we unchained the earth from its sun?
00:00:53Whether is it moving now?
00:00:57Whether are we moving
00:00:59away from all sons? Are we not plunging continually? Backwards?
00:01:00Side word for word in all directions.
00:01:04Is there still any up or down?
00:01:06Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing
00:01:08Do we not feel the breath of empty space?
00:01:13Has it not become colder?
00:01:16Is not night continually closing in on us?
00:01:18Do we not need to like land in the morning?
00:01:21Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the grave diggers who are burying God?
00:01:23Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition
00:01:27Gods to decompose.
00:01:31God is dead.
00:01:33God remains dead
00:01:34and we have killed him.
00:01:36How shall we comfort ourselves? The murderers of all murderers.
00:01:39What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death
00:01:43under our knives.
00:01:47Who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?
00:01:49What festivals of atonement. What sacred games shall we have to invent?
00:01:53Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us?
00:01:58Must we ourselves not become God simply to pay worthy of it?
00:02:01There has never been a great indeed.
00:02:05And whoever is born after us for the sake of this deed,
00:02:07he will belong to a higher history in all history.
00:02:10Hitherto,
00:02:14he had the madman fell silent
00:02:17and looked again at his listeners.
00:02:19And they too were silent.
00:02:22instead at him in astonishment.
00:02:24At last, he threw his landing on the ground
00:02:27and it broke into pieces
00:02:30and went out.
00:02:31I have come too early,
00:02:33he said, And then
00:02:35my time is not yet.
00:02:37There's a tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering.
00:02:40It has not yet reached the ears of men.
00:02:44Lightning and thunder required time. The light of the stars requires time.
00:02:46Deeds, though done still require time to be seen and heard.
00:02:50This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars,
00:02:55and yet they have done it themselves. Hello, I'm Ken Jeans.
00:03:00I'm a professor of philosophy from Birkbeck College, the University of London
00:03:05and the passage I read to you from this book. The Gay Science.
00:03:10And it's often called The Madman Passage or the Death of God Passage,
00:03:14because the philosopher I'm going to talk
00:03:18to you about today is Friedrich Nietzsche,
00:03:20and he's very much known as the philosopher of the philosopher of the Death of God.
00:03:22The death of God for nature
00:03:28signifies a crisis of modernity,
00:03:30and another way we can think of nature is
00:03:33the philosopher of a particular crisis of modernity.
00:03:35What is that crisis? Well, it's a crisis of the full understanding
00:03:38of the meaning of the death of God. You recall in the passage I just read.
00:03:44When he goes to the marketplace, the madman to announce the death of God.
00:03:48The people laugh. It's a big joke. They whoop it up. Has he emigrated?
00:03:53Has he gone on a holiday?
00:03:56So the people here addressing are already atheists.
00:03:57You can think of them as parts of secular, modern Europe of the 19th century,
00:04:00when nature was writing, and they've already reached atheism.
00:04:05So for them that he hears, there's no problem here.
00:04:08It's a joke that someone should announce the death of God.
00:04:12But then he pierces them with these questions.
00:04:15Who has wiped away the horizon, whereas the sun is it not continually night?
00:04:18Whether are we travelling? And that is nature's point.
00:04:22You see many philosophers before nature,
00:04:25and many people before nature have been atheists,
00:04:27but they haven't truly, according to Nietzsche appreciated the death of God.
00:04:31Most people think of the death of God in terms of what we call in philosophy,
00:04:36ontology or metaphysics.
00:04:40Questions about what exists, so to be an atheist, is to give up on,
00:04:41perhaps on God on the notion of a soul and the notion of an act of divine creation.
00:04:46So those are questions about what exists or events that have happened,
00:04:52Whereas nature wants to say that is not the true meaning of the death of God.
00:04:55That is not true atheism, he says.
00:05:01The true meaning of the death of God is to question
00:05:04the values that have been based on that metaphysics or ontology.
00:05:07That isn't the belief in God, the belief in the soul,
00:05:11the belief in a divine act of creation.
00:05:13And it says we haven't yet done that.
00:05:16And that is what he is getting to that when he says I've come too early,
00:05:18My time is not yet.
00:05:22The light from the distant stars takes time. That's
00:05:24the meaning of the Death of God has not truly been appreciated yet in modernity,
00:05:28because a lot of us,
00:05:34even if we say secular humanists or people of
00:05:36the Enlightenment people who may be thoroughgoing atheists,
00:05:39for instance,
00:05:42still cling onto values that are basically values
00:05:43that were originally undergirded by belief in God.
00:05:47To give you two of the main values which
00:05:50he thinks are central to the Judeo Christian tradition.
00:05:52The value of truth,
00:05:56Jesus said.
00:05:59I'm the way I am,
00:05:59the truth and implicitly you must believe in me and you must believe in God.
00:06:00You must worship the truth and the value of compassion and the golden rule.
00:06:05Treat your neighbour as you would be treated yourself.
00:06:10So those are the two cardinal values we might say of Christianity,
00:06:13their ultimate values, the value of truth and the value of compassion.
00:06:17Now think of your typical secular humanist or your follow the Enlightenment.
00:06:20What do they care about? They care about education.
00:06:25They care about knowledge. They care about truth.
00:06:28And typically they think by knowing the truth, we will raise the stakes.
00:06:31We will raise the well being of everyone in society.
00:06:35That is a manifestation of compassion.
00:06:38So from nature's point of view, secular humanists
00:06:40enlighten us. Atheists.
00:06:46All are just a continuation of the Judeo Christian tradition.
00:06:48You see,
00:06:53the Enlightenment has this heavy investment in insisting
00:06:53that the core of the Judeo Christian,
00:06:58the Judeo Christian beliefs,
00:07:00the Judeo Christian religion,
00:07:03is a set of
00:07:06ontological commitment, the commitment to the God,
00:07:08the immortal soul divine creation,
00:07:11and that way they can separate themselves from the religious view.
00:07:15The people of modernity say a word different.
00:07:18Those beliefs belonging to the age of the childhood of man
00:07:21when man believed in superstitions that was the age of religion.
00:07:24We are the age of modernity. We believe in truth and science and objectivity.
00:07:27Nietzsche disagrees with this. He says no.
00:07:33The core of religion is never its ontological beliefs about what exists.
00:07:36The core of a religion is its values and you secular humanists.
00:07:40You've just got rid of the ontology,
00:07:45the beliefs about what exists that the parts of Christianity.
00:07:47But you've kept the core of Christianity, the Judeo Christian value.
00:07:50You've kept these beliefs on the ultimate value of truth.
00:07:54Everything is to be sacrificed, the truth and the value of compassion.
00:07:58To really appreciate the death of God is to call into question those values,
00:08:01and that is what nature is doing.
00:08:07It may be very hard for us because we are still.
00:08:10So even if a secular humanist still so
00:08:12under the influence of Judeo Christian values,
00:08:15it's very hard for us to see Well, how could we question truth?
00:08:17How could we question compassion, but as we'll see,
00:08:21I think as these lectures develop,
00:08:25nature gives us a point in our cave from which we can look down and say,
00:08:27Maybe there could be alternative values to truth and compassion.
00:08:30But I want to emphasise the force of nature's point.
00:08:34We are still so under the influence of Judeo Christian values.
00:08:37It's hard for us, even if we are atheists,
00:08:42to imagine what that could be like now to return to my earlier point.
00:08:44What nature wants to say is the Enlightenment,
00:08:49with its insistence on the importance of one's belief about what exists.
00:08:52The Enlightenment emphasise this break between the
00:08:56religious view and the modern view,
00:08:59whereas Nietzsche says no, the real break.
00:09:02The really important break is between the pagan view,
00:09:04the view of the world that the ancient Greeks and the Romans held
00:09:07and the Judeo Christian view that is a decisive break because, he says,
00:09:12that is where we have a break in values from the Enlightenment.
00:09:16We just have a continuation of the values of truth and the
00:09:19values of compassion to look at a society with alternative values.
00:09:22We don't have to go back to the Religious times.
00:09:26We have to go beyond Judeo Christian to the Romans and Greeks,
00:09:28where they cared mainly about their culture values with nobility
00:09:32and honour.
00:09:35Nature believes that as we develop in modernity,
00:09:36we are going to truly appreciate the death of God.
00:09:39And we are going to eventually question the value of compassion.
00:09:42Why should I care about my neighbour? Why should I care about the truth?
00:09:46Think about newspapers today. Do they really care about the truth anymore?
00:09:49They just care about entertainment.
00:09:54Nature may have been right about the trajectory of the death of God,
00:09:56but what nature wants to do is he wants to find a space for the creation of new values.
00:10:00So what we'll be doing in the rest of these lectures is
00:10:06looking at how Nietzsche says we are going to fall into a state
00:10:09where Judeo Christian values do fall away from us and look at his
00:10:12ideas for the possibility of a space of creation of new values.
00:10:17
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Gemes, K. (2018, August 15). Nietzsche and the Death of God - Nietzsche and the Death of God [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/nietzsche-and-the-death-of-god
MLA style
Gemes, K. "Nietzsche and the Death of God – Nietzsche and the Death of God." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 15 Aug 2018, https://massolit.io/courses/nietzsche-and-the-death-of-god