3: “God is Dead!"

Our story begins with Zarathustra, who has just come down from the peak of his mountain and into the forest. There he meets a saint living as a hermit in the woods, and the two begin conversing. And what does the saint do in the forest? Zarathustra asked. The saint answered, I make songs and sing them, and when I make songs I laugh, weep, and mutter, thus I praise God. With singing, weeping, laughing, and muttering I praise God who is my God. But what do you bring as a gift?

When Zarathustra heard these words, he saluted the saint and said, What should I have to give you? But let me go quickly that I may take nothing from you. And thus they parted from one another, the old man and Zarathustra laughing as two boys laugh. But when Zarathustra was alone, he spoke thus to his heart. Could it be possible? This old saint has not yet heard in his forest that God is dead. That was from the prologue to Thus Spoke Zorathustra Nietzsche's most celebrated work.

It's a book that many will speak highly of, but which few have read. There are quite a few of those, aren't there? In this scene, Zarathustra knows that God is dead and But it's something that the saint doesn't know. And this is not the only time this this happens, uh, in Nietzsche's work when a character speaks of the death of God, but the event is not yet perceived or understood by those around them. What Nietzsche means by calling this figure that Zarathostra converses with a saint

is to imply that this is a genuine religious figure. He is a model for Christian asceticism. Um the saint is elevated in comparison to the rest of mankind, and there are a number of reasons why. Nietzsche does not take a simply positive or negative view of the saints. Um which isn't surprising since Nietzsche rarely takes a simple bifurcated view of anything or anyone. But the saint is um he's the man of discipline. The person who has dedicated himself to the mastery over his passions.

the idea of the suppression of the passions, and the moral condemnation of the passions, more importantly, Nietzsche argues that these led to a sickness in European culture. But the Saint, by completely Fixing his attention on the world beyond, and rejecting everything worldly, rejecting everything of the flesh. He has gained by this token a kind of extraordinary self mastery, which allows the saint to dwell closer to God, quote unquote. You know, I ironically, he's even uh closer to nature.

As Zorathustra finds the saint at home in the woods with only animals for company. Um because by sin spending so much time focused on human nature, the saint is more in touch with his own nature. and by mastering the passions so completely, and by casting all value off into the world beyond, the saint can let go of any worldly concern, and direct his attention to the contemplation of the true. You know the the uncertain, the hidden, the abstract, the divine world.

But the saint is unaware that God has died. Uh he has not reached that summit of knowledge that Zarathustra has reached. The saint is an extraordinary type of person, um, and he has this genuine faith and and genuine discipline, but it is based all of it All of the value in the saint's model, everything extraordinary about the saint, is based on the idea of God. And Zarathustra knows that God has died.

And so we must ask what is the death of God meant to symbolize? And it is symbolic because Nietzsche's not positing the existence of a literal god and then claiming that this being who actually created the universe has now died. Um You know, and Kaufman points out in his book on Nietzsche, he's not uh this is not in

It's not a declaration of atheism in the sense of saying, you know, you have been told all these years that there is a god, but I am here to tell you that this is a lie. That's n not the message of this either. Um so what does it mean to say God is dead? That's a big question, so that'll be the topic of the the episode. It'll take me the the whole hour to answer this. But um we'll examine uh many of the places in Nietzsche's work uh in which that concept of uh you know, the death of God appears.

And we'll hear from a few different characters in his books who give us different perspectives on what the death of God means. Um the passage we just covered was in the spoke Zarathustra, as I mentioned, but that that's actually not the first time that Nietzsche announced the death of God. The first time that this is brought up is in the gay science. He makes mention of it a few times in a couple of aphorisms, and then uh there is the really famous scene

Uh where we hear from the death of God, uh, just as in this book Zarathustra, we don't hear it from Nietzsche directly. He has us hear of the death of God in the form of a character speaking about it. And this time it is the madman. This is another famous passage in Nietzsche. The madman lights a lantern in daylight, and then he goes into the marketplace. This is a reference to Diogenes who famously went into the forum with a lantern lit in broad daylight and said he was seeking for a true man.

Now, Diogenes was also considered a bit of a madman in his day, and probably rightfully so. He went around half naked, he slept in a barrel outside of town with the stray dogs. Um, you know, he lived most of his life uh with dogs. Um, you know, slept with them, lived with the you know, ate with the dogs.

Um and in fact that's where we get the word cynic. It comes from, you know, kinikos, which is the word for dog. And so thus when we say someone is being cynical, the label is indirectly derived from the w ancient Greek word for dog, um, because of the great great grand cynic Diogenes. So um because Diogenes is critical of contemporary society, critical of uh their morality, uh he he believes that civilization is taking uh

It's going down the wrong path, the wrong course. People are living fake lives. And thus he goes to find a true man in the forum and cannot find one. They are of all uh they're all living against um you know, the dictates of their own nature, so to speak. Um they're not uh they're not living in that which makes them human.

Likewise, Nietzsche's madman lights a lantern and he goes into the marketplace. Um he goes not to find a true man, but to find God. And he says, I seek God at uh towards the beginning of this passage. But actually, once he has the attention of the people there, uh we learn he's not really seeking God. This is he's simply posing this question of where God is.

as a perhaps a rhetorical device in order to then announce the death of God. And so we'll go through the passage in its entirety because it's so fun to read. The madman. Have you not heard of that madman, who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace, and cried incessantly I seek God, I seek God. As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter.

Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? Immigrated? Thus they yelled and laughed. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. Whither is God, he cried, I will tell you we have killed him, you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?

What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward in all directions? Is there any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us?

Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the grave diggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead, and we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned, has bled to death under our knives.

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? There has never been a greater deed, and whoever is born after us, for the sake of this deed, he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto.

Here the madman fell silent, and looked again at his listeners, and they too were silent, and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. I have come too early, he said then. My time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering. It has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time. The light of the stars requires time. Deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard.

This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars, and yet they have done it themselves. It has been related further that on that same day the madman forced his way into several churches, and there struck up his requiem eternum deo. Let out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchres of God?

That's from the gay science. Um it's Kaufman translation. Um so first of all How shall we regard the madman as a character? Is he a reliable source? We may remember he is associated with Diogenes, um that you know, the detail of lighting the lamp in daylight, and there is a quote attributed to Plato that when asked what sort of man Diogenes is, Plato said he's a Socrates gone mad.

And Socrates is the figure commonly associated with launching the project of philosophy. He opens up the horizon of using reason and skepticism to cull our supposed truths. Um which is, you know, using the theoretical approach to life. Diogenes is a Socrates gone mad, so he uses the tool of reason to ultimately discard all human conventions as being contrary to our nature, and ends up rejecting all progress and all the social mores that we

cherish so dear and all ambition. And so by associating Diogenes with the madman, Nietzsche elucidates, I think, this is the archetype of a this is the philosopher who's been driven mad by taking his principles and his syllogisms through to their ultimate conclusions. The madman has seen the conclusion of religious belief, whereas the atheists have not. That's why they're so initially they're very militant and dismissive in their atheism.

Um, you know, they make fun of the madman for saying God is dead. Um, and they make fun of him in much the same way we might expect that a modern atheist might poke fun at someone saying God is dead by taking the phrase literally and dismissing it as absurd. And this shows that Nietzsche is aware that people will take the proclamation literally, and he's getting ahead of that kind of bad interpretation.

Um and so we should take from this he's actually d addressing himself to the atheists in some sense. He's he's depicting the reaction of the modern secular atheistic freethinkers and what the reaction they'll have to the idea of the death of God. They're still fighting a war against God. They don't know their enemy is actually dead and doesn't need to be fought any longer. Um which is the same situation in in modern society a as well.

And so the next question inevitably arises What is it about Christian values that, when taken through to their ultimate conclusion, lead to the death of God? Quite simply it is that Christianity trained men's minds to discard the false and seek after the true. It indicted the world we live in as false, and promised us the truth in the form of a world beyond.

Jesus makes it very clear that what matters is entering the kingdom of heaven. This world is o of no value, and those who cling to it will get death, because the wages of sin is death. So in one sense, The Enlightenment and the explosion of scientific knowledge about the world These are the source of Christianity's downfall, but looked at from another angle, the Enlightenment gestated in the womb of Christendom.

It was driven by a desire to know the ultimate truth, to subject every claim to scrutiny, um, you know, as in the tradition of Socrates. So it's no wonder that the madman, he's distraught by this eventuality of the death of God, because in a sense the death of God is the death of any transcendent value of truth, the death of the world beyond, the death of an absolute truth. of you know, any sort of absolute universal objective axiom upon which to base our knowledge.

And so this is a very precarious situation for philosophy. Many philosophers will end up spiraling out into nihilism. and there will be endless subjectivity and confusion, and o all the old value structures and assumptions will become questionable and likely collapse. And so You know, we may notice the madman asks whether we can decouple the Earth from the Sun. The sun is

It's not just the source of light for us, but it's the gravitational center around which the earth orbits. It holds us into place, so we have its light, we have balance, we have order. God is to human beings what the sun is to the earth. The transcendent metaphysics of the

of yesteryears, what grounded all of our morality and values and the meaning of our lives, and so on. And so God is who We look too in times of fear, when we are seeking forgiveness, or when we're looking for hope in a seemingly hopeless situation. And so we must keep in mind this is not merely a philosophical crisis. In some sense, the priest the job of the priest was to manage the psyche of his community. So the death of God is also a psychological crisis.

And so the madman uses, you know, quite a few metaphors, including um lightning and thunder to demonstrate how an event can happen and not be perceived or felt until later. And that is the case here. Again, the atheists in the marketplace they don't know that they're not.

You know, God is dead, the madman realizes that the end he's come too early. But this does not mean that God is merely dying. Um He is in fact dead, the madman goes and pays his respect to God as the churches are now his resting place. and he treats the resting place of God with reverence. Um and of course he would, because this mad philosopher, the madman, this lunatic at the conclusion of ultimate knowledge, feels deeply he has lost something. That we've all we all have lost.

And it's just that no one else really understands what we've lost yet. And so the death of God it doesn't have to do with the existence of those who believe in God or don't believe in God. Um you know, otherwise how could how could there be atheists in the marketplace who don't know God is dead?

Um it doesn't have to do with their beliefs. So what so what is it that they don't know? Well we've spoken in symbolic terms, but we'll get literal literal here. What they don't know is that God as an idea has become unbelievable. Now belief can be unbelievable and people can still believe in it. We may say that for you know society at large, for example, astrology has become unbelievable.

Um you know, such that in ancient Greece, at the dawn of Western civilization, Hippocrates said um a physician without knowledge of astrology has no right to call himself a physician. So during that time the stars were consulted for decisions of state and architecture was erect erected following astrological principles. None of that happens anymore. And the reason is that while other

Scientific disciplines have yielded up results. Astrology ultimately does not have a good track record for making predictions. Um it's ultimately it's impossible to falsify. Um at least as far as the minds of its practitioners go.

Um'cause, you know, although the predictions of astrologers have been proven wrong many times, the true believers can always find some explanation why this happened and go on believing. But importantly, No one's ever discovered any mechanism by which astrology could, you know, actually affect human life. So that means we as a society, as a culture, over hundreds of years have moved on from the idea of astrology. That doesn't mean that in the present day no one believes in or practices astrology.

Now the decline of astrology did not happen overnight. It happened over hundreds of years and generations. But one could make the case that at a certain point the ascendancy of the scientific mindset and subjecting all these disciplines to scientific investigation, once that attitude became of a certain degree of cultural ascendancy, it bec its movement became inexorable.

Astrology was done for, even if some s large numbers still believed in it, at a certain point it becomes only a matter of time until you know that belief is going to sharply decline among the general populace. And so now in the present day, even the people who quote unquote believe in astrology don't really believe in it anymore, um at least in the sense that, you know, I would suspect most people who read their horoscope know deep down that it's a farce.

Or they just know consciously that it's a farce and they just read it for fun. But I you know, I'm I'll put it this way. I'm willing to bet that most people would not be willing to be martyred for their belief in astrology. And so that belief is weakened, it doesn't have a hold on Western society. Um

So this is analogous to Nietzsche's claim with the belief of in God. He predicts it's going the way of astrology. We just haven't quite gotten there yet. Um but the course is inexorable. God has become unbelievable.

And that as a matter of the cultural zeitgeist, God as a concept is done for. The madman His warning to the atheists of the immense danger that this poses, um it's the same danger as uncoupling the earth from the sun. It's the surrendering of all objective grounding for truth and justice and morality and so on. All of that becomes subjective and now there's n no one to go to when you're looking for hope or looking for forgiveness except yourself and other human beings.

And this hints at Nietzsche's prognosis that we'll have to become, you know, gods ourselves, or the madman actually he poses this in the form of a question, will we have to become gods ourselves? Um which would mean Y yes, there is a a you could say arrogant or um you know a grandizing element of saying we'll have to become gods. But what it means I think is more important on a psychological level means we'll have to find the hope within ourselves. We'll have to learn to forgive ourselves.

We'll have to learn to create values ourselves, all the things that God used to do to comfort the psyche, to give hope, to forgive, to create value, we will have to provide those internally of our own willpower.

The passage that lays out this aspect of it. um, is in The Gay Science as well. Um however it's in Book five, which was written a little bit later than the rest of the book. It was released after

Thus Book Zarathuster was released, or written and released after. And so this is a Um it's a Nietzsche's reflections on the death of God from a more mature perspective, you could say, after years have having conceived of this problem and grappled with And so this is an aphorism three hundred forty three entitled What our Chil Cheerfulness Signifies Quote.

The most important of more recent events, that God is dead, that the belief in the Christian God has become unworthy of belief, already begins to cast its first shadows over Europe. To the few, at least, whose eye, whose suspecting glance is strong enough, and subtle enough for this drama, some sun seems to have set, some old, profound confidence seems to have changed into doubt. Our old world must seem to them daily more darksome, distrustful, strange and old.

In the main, however, one may say that the event itself is far too great, too remote. Too much beyond most people's power of apprehension, for one to suppose that so much as the report of it could have reached them. Not to speak of many who already knew what had taken place, and what must all collapse now that this belief had bec had been undermined. Because so much was built upon it, so much rested on it, and had become one with it. For example, our entire European morality.

In fact, We philosophers and free spirits feel ourselves irradiated as by a new dawn by the report that the old god is dead. Our hearts overflow with gratitude, astonishment, presentiment, and expectation. At last the horizon seems open once more. Granting, even that it is not bright, our ships can at last put out to sea in face of every danger. Every hazard is again permitted to the discerner. The sea, our sea, again lies open before us. Perhaps never before did such an open sea exist.

My note I mean the my main notes on this passage um would be to first emphasize that he he clarifies what he means that God is dead means that the Christian God, the old God, is unworthy of belief, and he calls us a new dawn. Says the philosopher and the free spirit feel irradiated, they feel gratitude, they perceive the dangers ahead, as well as the opportunities.

The tone is overall hopeful and not regretful, and this is a bit of a tonal shift from that of the madman. But it's also worth noting that we should not necessarily take Nietzsche's characters as representing the thought of Nietzsche. The madman, as we said, somewhat, you could say one aspect. He parallels Diogenes.

So he has the knowledge of the death of God, he's the man who's seen concl the conclusion of religiosity, of truth seeking. Nietzsche himself, speaking on behalf of the free spirits You know, the free spirits being these new philosophers cut in a new mould, the philosophers of the future.

whom whom Nietzsche predicts will alive arrive at a later date. Um They're the kind of philosopher who can only come in great numbers after the death of God, and who will carry on philosophy but in a significant break from the philosophical values.

of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the whole Western philosophical tradition. They'll challenge the even the deepest axioms of that tradition. For indeed, after the death of God the possibilities are endless, and so You know, we must conclude from this reading, um The narrative that Nietzsche thought the death of God was a bad thing, or that we should return to Christian values somehow, is a misrepresentation of Nietzsche.

I cannot mention all of this without mentioning doctor Jordan B. Peterson, who, you know, he often puts it that Nietzsche's proclamation of the death of God was by no means triumphant. Now in a way, I understand the people with Peterson might be trying to answer here. You know, the scene with a madman, for example, it's not a celebration among a bunch of atheists that we've seen. triumphantly killed God, which might be the assumption that someone who's like never read Nietzsche might make.

Um just from a just from hearing the that that oh there was a guy who wrote about the death of God who was an atheist and an anti-Christian. It must have been some triumphant proclamation. Um, you know, and and Peterson points out how the madman is talking to atheists who don't understand that God is dead.

that he's trying to convey to the atheists the gravity and the severity of the event and they don't understand. We've discussed all of this, and all of this is true. So credis credit to Peterson there. But this particular passage in Book five if we, you know, look at another passage about the death of God in the very same book, um, it this seems to show quite clearly that Nietzsche was optimistic.

that the event of the death of God it it's a sociological reality, it's a prediction of the future of our culture based on its current trajectory. And w it's what Nietzsche saw as the inevit inevitability. of uh rising secularism. So in some sense, the event itself is neither good nor bad. It's simply what has happened and what Nietzsche believes is going to happen. But we must

I I think we have to understand that Nietzsche's attitude is almost never one of like lamentation or sorrow. Throughout his whole, you know, work. And that certainly is not his attitude here. Nietzsche's about accepting the truth. being able to, you know, swallow the hard hard truths, and he sees greatness as being able to Even celebrate those hardest truths. And so this passage in book five, I think, is fairly close to celebratory.

So you know, I don't think Peterson is necessarily trying to misrepresent Nietzsche. But I do think his understanding, based purely on his reading of the Madman passage, is um how can I put it? It's complete bullshit. Now for Nietzsche, this is as much of a danger and a challenge as it is a promise of a new future. Again, it's a new dawn. So he is optimistic and he is celebratory. That being said, I think it's important to point out

But Nietzsche is specifically talking about philosophers and free spirits here in the passage, what our cheerfulness signifies. He's talking about the cheerfulness of the free spirit. He isn't discussing the population at large. Who may well be negatively affected by the death of God or unable to cope with it? And this is tied in to why this is such a dangerous event and such a terrifying event.

Um you know, to repeat something he said uh in that that passage he said, quote, what must all collapse now that this belief has been undermined? um because so much was built upon it, so much rested on it, and had become one with it. For example, our entire European morality. End quote.

Senitzia is using the term morality, he uses it in many different respects or in many different senses. Here he's speaking of the historical and culturally specific type of morality, so the morality of Europe, which is based on Christianity. The free spirit, who is outside of any culturally specific morality, in terms of his own moral outlook, can look on the event with cheerfulness.

But the common person who depends on the Christian morality may well feel a sense of horror at losing it. And so this is another aspect for Nietzsche that I don't think Peterson understands, because Nietzsche rarely speaks in universalist terms. He doesn't have a universal set of values. Um he doesn't really believe in mor universalist moral ideas.

That being said, some people will take the relative they'll misunderstand Nietzsche's relativism in this in this particular context. I've heard some people say, Nietzsche's idea that God is dead only applies to Germany or that this is somehow culturally specific to Germans. And that's not right. Clearly Nietzsche expands it to all of European civilization. This passage also makes that clear. On the other hand, not everyone in Europe is equally, shall we say,

dependent on the European morality. In every society there will be free spirits. or there is the potential for there to be free spirits. But the vast majority of all Europe will consist of what Nietzsche calls bound spirits, people whose minds are tethered by culture or by nationality or by religion and so on. Uh there's a story I heard from uh Brian Leiter, I believe it was.

where Nietzsche encountered some uh an older uh some older Italian women in in Turin, when he was living in Turin, and he immediately noticed that they were wearing crosses and had rosaries and so on, and so he knew they were religious Catholics. And the old women knew that Nietzsche was a philosopher, you know, even though he wasn't very famous, I mean he published quite a few books.

Um, but it y he his books didn't sell very well. But it was sort of the talk of the piazza that a German philosopher had moved in, I suppose. So the story goes that they stopped him um you know, greeted him, sort of curious about him, asked which of his books they should read. And seeing that they were religious old women from Turin, Nietzsche told them You shouldn't read my books. My ideas are not for you.

And so this story reveals something to us about Nietzsche, and that is that he did not go around with the idea that everyone could become a free spirit, or that his ideas were for everyone, or that it would be good for everyone if they adopted his atheistic stance. And often Um

um, you know, in Beyond Good and Evil that many of his ideas are only for the few. Um, you know, he says, speaking of the free spirits that our highest insights may sound like follies and even like crimes to those who are not meant for them. The real danger of the death of God is because Nietzsche is fully aware that most people will be incapable of turning to themselves for the creation of value and depending only on themselves to be the arbiters of their own moral worth.

to forgive themselves when they fail and console themselves when they're at their lowest. In other words, unlike many, you know like the vulgar style of atheists, like the new atheists. Nietzsche thinks religion has social utility. He thinks it actually has value. And he says as much in human all too human, and that religion comforts the heart in a way that the state simply cannot ever take the place of

Um and this is a section where he's writing sort of on politics a bit. And he writes that a higher man, a noble or a prince governing, somebody governing in a tutelary government, for example, should maintain the religious traditions of his society. Even though the noble people will always be by their nature more learned and therefore a bit more independently minded. So even if you the ruler are unbounded from tradition and from religious belief, you should still profess it.

and use it, he says, as a tool to help, you know, with the management of the common people. So the parallels to Machiavelli are obvious. We know that Nietzsche read Machiavelli. Um he makes reference to him, I believe, at other times in the same text. Um but now we live in a sort of we live in a post noble world, one might say. Um

I would argue that the potential for higher people, you know, in terms of intellectual development, is possible still to some degree. I mean, I think it is possible to be free spirited, to take the free spirited approach to the death of God. I don't believe we all have to take the Jordan Peterson approach and return to religion because there's no other option. And in fact, the fear of Nietzsche is that once God becomes truly unbelievable, we cannot go back.

This is not a question of desirability of religious belief. It's about the growing impossibility of it. And so one cannot simply will themselves into believing something that, you know, one knows is not true. The truly free spirited will forge ahead without God. Um You know, the the scary thing is that the lower people, the masses, the religious, the common folk will soon face a crisis of faith and of conscience.

conscience, um, but they're they're not going to be able to go back to God. So the return to religion is not even really an option in Nietzsche's view. Um, we have to move forward in either case. It's just the masses who nietzsche worries about. And so thankfully they won't predict th or they won't perceive the death of God for some time. But the problem will become worse and worse as it as time goes on. And what Nietzsche predicts in the wake of this is the inability to believe in anything.

God grounded everything. Absolutism, certainty in one's beliefs. Once that all collapses, we enter a world that's subjective and relative, as we've said before. So it's difficult if not impossible to establish that absolute certainty ever again. For Nietzsche, true belief is not proved by argument, it's something you feel, something which is beyond doubt for you.

what you truly believe, um, you don't subject to questioning. You're going to it's going to motivate your actions regardless of, or sometimes in spite of all the intellectual arguments about it. If we're unable to truly believe in anything though, and i if we're unable to ground our moral values in any kind of transcendent metaphysics ever again, Nietzsche worries that nihilism will follow.

And again, it it is not that it is impossible to establish a new table of values from this place of relativity. It's simply not something everyone can accomplish. It's the task of the free spirit.

And um so I think that I think that elucidates that passage if we understand that he he doesn't think the death of God will mean the same thing to every to every person. So now we'll look at how the death of God is addressed by some other characters in Nietzsche's work, and all of the rest of what we'll talk about is all in book four of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. um where several characters speak about the death of God. The first passage we'll look at is um some dialogue from the Pope.

He's now retired after the death of God, and this is his soliloquy on that momentous event. And this book Zarathustra Book four, um part six. He was a concealed god, addicted to secrecy. Verily even a son he got himself in a sneaky way. At the door of his faith stands adultery. Whoever praises him as a god of love does not have a high enough opinion of love itself.

Did this god not want to be a judge too? When he was young, this god out of the Orient, he was harsh and vengeful, and he built himself a hell to amuse his favorites. Eventually, however, he became old and soft and mellow and pitying, more like a grandfather than a father, but most like a shaky old grandmother.

Then he sat in his nook by the hearth, wilted, grieving over his weak legs, weary of the world, weary of willing, and one day he choked on his all too great pity. End quote and So here Nietzsche implies how God died and um He lived out a full life cycle. He died um from natural causes. He lived from a youthful, energetic, powerful, conquering warrior god to a weak, tired old man.

So Christianity ran out of vitality, it ran out of willing, Nietzsche says. The religion became more mellow and pitying. Quite literally the Pope is saying here the religion just sort of it just ran out of energy, it ran out of steam.

So the Pope said has the believability of God, because remember that is what the death of God is, the the unbelievability of God. Um he has the believability of God ending once and for all with pity. The pity of Christianity became too great. The church and its flock became consumed by pity. Pity became the highest value. Nietzsche thinks pity is a harmful motivator of humankind because the feeling of pity is the weak inflicting pain upon the strong.

If the strong are made to feel pity they will not select out the weak. This you know this may seem rather brutal and Hobbsian, but it's it is Nietzsche's position. Furthermore, when feeling the pain of someone else does nothing to actually alleviate that pain. It only spreads the pain to another individual.

So when you go to see a sick friend, you know, s or if you see somebody who's terminally ill You know, rarely will they ask for your pity, they don't have to, they simply make a subtle show of you know demonstrating how terrible they feel, how difficult even the slightest movement is, how terrifying the prospect of the end is.

you know, consciously or or unconsciously, the sick person does this. So Nietzsche alleges that this is an expression of w the will to power, what he calls the will to power. Um that uh underlying many human actions. Um we are secretly aimed at or sometimes openly aimed at the pursuit of power. So the the sick and dying person is completely decrepit and powerless, but he still has the power to hurt. And so this is what pity does.

So as opposite of our modern values as these considerations are, this is how Nietzsche was thinking about Christian pity, one of the highest virtues of Christianity. So that it involves spreading pain. It involves spreading the sense of feeling sorry for others and feeling sorry for oneself. It's spreading weakness. To explain why this might be, Nietzsche writes in the Antichrist that he sees the instinctive hatred of reality as the only driving force at the root of the Christian religion.

And that aversion to reality he says comes from the type of soul which recoils at everything, especially at suffering and pain, and especially the suffering of others. And this extraordinary type who has such a powerful instinctive aversion to reality, um, which is rooted in an aversion to the suffering of the world. it's so profound that he actually denies the reality of the world.

Nietzsche says this is the psychological type of Jesus. So his kingdom is the kingdom of heaven, which is imminent. It's immediately available to any of his followers if they rely upon the grace of God. It's a denial of all the value in this world and a promise of the world beyond. Now, that totalizing aversion to suffering. eventually becomes the religion's undoing because it is fundamentally self-defeating.

It makes reality unendurable eventually. You know, Nietzsche writes that in past times Christianity came to gladden the heart, but in modern times it has to disturb the heart first before gladdening it. can only survive by offering salvation from its own disturbances. Christianity ultimately values the weak and the broken above all others, and so it must make its followers weak and broken. You know, convince them to be weak and broken so that they can be saved from being weak and broken.

So it's a religion that spreads and uplifts weakness ultimately. So to conclude this pope You know, N no doubt with the insight that he gleaned from working for the now dead god, basically gives us the condensed version of the Nietzschean story of the evolution of Christianity. From a hard warrior religion out of the Near East came this religion of pity.

that um you know with with the coming of Jesus basically and that eventually exhausted all its energy and it died because of the self-defeating nature of pity. you know, that the Enlightenment, the d democraticization and the socialist revolutions happening throughout Europe, and the French and the American Revolutions, and the philosophs who wrote of the universal brotherhood of men. Nietzsche thinks this is all evidence.

Of the degeneration of Christianity, of the spirit of pity taking hold and running out of control. And this is why he writes in, you know, the preface to Beyond Good and Evil that democracy is like the next phase of Christianity.

We'll look at a few more here. So th another quote about the death of God. This one is from Zarathustra himself. Uh also from Book Four of this book Zarathustra. A little bit shorter of a quote. Quote But why did he not speak more clearly? This is God he's talking of. Why did he not speak more clearly? And if it was the fault of our ears, why did he give us ears that heard him badly?

There is good taste and piety too, and it was this that said in the end, away with such a god. Rather no god, rather make destiny on one's own, rather be a fool, rather be a god oneself. End quote. So once again this passage makes clear where Nietzsche stood on how to properly proceed after the death of God, if you're a free spirit. Make destiny on your own. Be a fool. Be a god yourself. Even to be a fool in your attempt to create anew your values is still better.

than giving up and trying to just lapse back into the belief in the old God. Zarathustra begins the passage hinting at another underlying reason for God's un unbelievability, we cannot hear the voice of God any longer. We do not see God appear as a burning bush any longer. We do not see the kinds of miracles that were recorded in the Bible. In fact when we investigate reports of miracles in the modern day, uh usually what we find is a hoax or something easily ex explainable. And so

I I guess one way of explaining this is the classic God of the Gaps argument, which I'm sure many of you are familiar with. But the God of the Gaps is the idea that God only reigns over those areas that we do not yet have a full scientific explanation of. Once we attain a scientific explanation of, say, thunder and lightning, we no longer attribute that to Zeus or to Jupiter, but to a natural process.

And so while there are still plenty of people who believe that God created the universe, scientists say that they even have you know, we even have a natural explanation for the origins of the universe in the form of the Big Bang. We have the explanation for the origins of life and the theory of um, you know, evolution and abiogenesis. In Nietzsche's time at the end of the nineteenth century this was still, you know, an ongoing process. I mean, just as it is today.

But it must have seemed like at the time that the sciences were just starting to really pick up steam and knocking off all these previously mysterious domains of reality. So all these areas where we still look to God as an explanation, we're we're looking and finding instead, no, these are natural unconscious processes. And so that's how I would interpret God not speaking more clearly in Zarathostra's words.

Where man bef thought before he heard the voice of God or saw the handiwork of God or naturally felt the presence of God after the explosion of scientific knowledge or the enlightenment or whatever, we saw or heard God no longer. And you know, again, Zarathustra is very that the the important part of the passage is his reaction to this, that this is good. Away with that God who is not worthy of your belief.

Better to be a fool than to worship him. Um and you know, indeed he he echoes what the madman and the other passages in Nietzsche have said that we will have to become gods ourselves. Which um we've more or less explained that we'll have to occupy the same psychological role that God and organized religion used to fulfill for us as human beings.

The final character whose words on the death of God we will consider will be the ugliest man. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the ugliest man is identified as God's alleged killer, and he gives his motivations for doing so rather forthrightly. Quote. But he had to die. He saw with eyes that saw everything. He saw man's depths and ultimate grounds, all his concealed disgrace and ugliness.

His pity knew no shame. He crawled into my dirtiest nooks. The god who saw everything, even man, this god had to die. Man cannot bear it that such a witness should live. Um the ugliest man, I don't think he's a representation of any one person. I think he is the representative of the ugliness of all mankind. Um or he is He's our inner thoughts and feelings that we feel most ashamed of and want to hide from the world or mask.

And what this passage elucidates, I think, is Nietzsche's explanation for why, deep down, we want to be rid of God. There is an appeal to godlessness, and it is found in the escape from the ever penetrating eyes of the divine. The judgment of something external to yourself, Um which is really it's the reification of one's little self conscious voice of conscience.

you know, which Nietzsche elsewhere identifies with the the voice of the community. He writes that the morality is the herd instinct in the individual. that one learns the morality of the community or is brought up in it. and that this inculcates into us our being so thoroughly you can hear the community in the form of your conscience whenever you

Transgress against the morality, you know, your culture's morality. And so religion takes that voice and it turns it into the judgment of the divine against you. Um, you know, now God's God's pity knows no shame, according to Christian doctrine, but g you know, got'cause God has infinite mercy for mankind if they turn to his grace. Um and this God with his omniscient pity therefore crawls into our dirtiest nooks. We're pitied we're pitied by the Almighty in even our most secret moments.

So you know, the ultimate result of this is like you you know, God may not know shame, but men do know shame and We we want to be free of the constant judging eye um turned upon our deepest secrets, the most shameful truths about ourselves. And so we must remember that this is the ugliest man, so you know, he's pure ugliness. We shouldn't we should conceive of him as downright hideous. More hideous than anyone you've ever seen, you know, someone like the elephant man.

So something so repulsive you can't bear to look at him. This is what Nietzsche's trying to embody in this appeal that we find in godlessness. To Nietzsche, this is not a praiseworthy character. This is a dark desire. And when we consider it in the full light of reason we find it repugnant, and I would say Nietzsche probably finds it quite repugnant himself, the desire to rip out all restraints, that is to say all constraints.

You know, as we went over in the beginning of the episode, regarding the character of the saint, Nietzsche values discipline. He values being able to master one's passions, one's ability to not simply be controlled by whims and hungers and thirsts, to be tough in one's own virtues even in the face of hardship or want.

You know, y and he says in his notes, he wants all spirits who are of any interest of you know, any interest to him to know to know self-recrimination as a means not of condemning the self, but pushing oneself forward. The ugliest man wants to be free of all conscience and let the passions run wild without having to feel judgment, and so while Nietzsche understands that all judgments are relatives. that all moral judgments are arbitrary, which is to say, unjust to some extent,

Um, because there is no ultimate transcendent judge, it's all of us, we're then judging from an arbitrary position, an arbitrary standpoint. Nevertheless, Nietzsche recognizes that the urge to be free of judgments is not a wholesome one. It's the voice of our ugliness. It's our b our most base urges. And so

The big takeaway from what we've discussed in this episode, you know, regardless of what you think of the Death of God, having heard all of this, um whenever a philosopher is having a character do the philosophizing instead of himself or herself. There is a veil there that separates the author from the character.

So when Nietzsche is speaking through the Pope, for example, I mean how much is Nietzsche using the Pope to make a point about the the Pope or the papacy, you know, to make a point about organized religion or something of that matter? um rather than trying to elaborate on his own thoughts on the death of God. And so I think some of the misinterpretations of Nietzsche's ideas come when readers who are not you know when readers who are not careful in that respect Um

You know, uh just sort of take things that his characters say as just coming from Nietzsche directly. I think when we study what all of the characters have said. and consider it all together with what Nietzsche himself wrote, I think it forms a very clear picture of why God is dead and what that means, and how Nietzsche feels about the matter, but it's not as simplistic as it is often uh described.

So to summarize, God is dead because he ceased to be believable as a concept. We also have the second order cause of this, that Christianity was defeated by its own pity. The self defeating nature of an all encompassing pity. um which is related to a disregard of this world and a yearning for a world beyond, is what contributed to the development of reason and philosophy, and eventually science in this quest to discover the truth, to find the true world.

A quest that eventually culminates and the true world being so far out of our grasps grasp that it no longer motivates belief. We discussed this at length on the very first episode actually. Meanwhile, what science can tell us about is the physical world. And with greater exploration of the physical world, the areas where we once imagined God dwelt, they slowly vanished.

And so what the death of God means is that there's no transcendent grounding for our metaphysical and moral claims. And that means every claim is subject to relativity.

Returning to the idea of absolute truth becomes impossible, and then perhaps whole nations or cultures will collapse into nihilism. So it's not quite as simple as it being triumphant or not triumphant. Um you know, i for all the nuance that people credit Peterson with, he's not very nuanced here. Um Uh perhaps the most straightforward answer, you know, regarding Nisha's feelings on the death of God, on the on the

on the vanishing believability of the prospect of God. It's in Echehomo in the chapter Why I Am So Clever, in section one. Quote It is a matter of course with me, from instinct to I am too inquisitive, too questionable, too exuberant to stand for any gross answer. God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers. At bottom merely a gross prohibition for us. You shall not think. Kaufmann's translation here I think perfectly captures what I think is underlying all of this Nietzsche's

objection to the idea of God, and that it is bad taste in every sense of the word. It's gross, both in the meaning of an unsophisticated answer, but also gross in the sense of repulsive. It's an indelicacy. Coarse, vulgar, but also simply bad tasting. And so what is the metaphor? When you taste something it either tastes good or it doesn't. There's no argument to be had, and this is the situation with God. Nietzsche knows that God is not acceptable as an answer.

And this is why George Morgan said that, quote, beyond question, the major premise of Nietzsche's philosophy is atheism, end quote. And I think that's correct.

That's a strike against Nietzsche,'cause did he truly question everything? But I don't think atheism for Nietzsche, it's not really something worth making into an ideology. And I think that's the key difference. 'Cause it it it's his basic starting position, not as a matter of argument, but as a matter of temperament, as a matter of instinct.

That's it. Uh that's everything on the death of God, and that'll wrap up the episode for this week. Um I think that um threads at least enough of a general narrative around the death of God that If it is not completely comprehensive, is at least close to comprehensive and clears up maybe some of the confusion. um of what the death of God is and how Nietzsche felt about it. That it was not

Um it's unfortunately the reason I bring up Jordan Peterson so much, it's not that I want to. Um I don't particularly have anything against the man, by the way. But you know, I on the other hand, it's like people get get tired of the endless Peterson content, you know? It's like is he really that?

you know, deserving of that level of attention. But, you know, you have to address it when you know, uh his videos he's got a a lecture uh from his college courses on Dostoevsky and Nietzsche that's got almost a million views.

Um he I think he has another video analysing Nietzsche that has more than a million views. So he has a significant audience that he's giving his interpretation of Nietzsche to. And so whenever he's wrong or particularly, you know, just being reckless or unnuanced in the way that he talks about this, to serve his own ideological ends, has to be called out, because it's reaching an unprecedented audience.

Um and it you know, it wouldn't be the first time that people came along and wanted to appropriate Nietzsche for their own ends like Heidegger or Carl Jung or any number of other people. Um so anyway, um that's that. Uh this is Keegan, Essential Slide. Introducing myself to the other. End of the podcast. Here for nature.