GOD IS DEAD! |
Nihilism is a doctrine which teaches the nonbeing in absolute or at least in relative sense. Truth is denied in the domain of knowledge, the validity of values and norms is negated in ethics, in politics it holds the refusal of all society. Altough Nietzsche was the most important teacher of Nihilism, the term nihilism had been spread by Turganev, who called in his novel "Father and Sons" the Russian revolutionists nihilists. Nietzsche taught nihilism. He rejects radically the values.
Nihilism, as such, can have two meanings: it can be a symptom of final and complete down fall and aversion to existence; but it can also be a first symptom of recovery and a new will for existence -- a nihilism of weakness or of strength. Nonetheless Nietzsche examined Nihilism enthusiastically and fearfully; sometimes by simple and radical statements, at other times by an uncertain, hesitating approach, in an impossible kind of thought.
Nihilism is not an individual experience or a philosophical doctrine, nor is it a fatal light cast over human nature eternally vowed to nothingness. Rather, Nihilism is an event achieved in history, and yet is like a shedding off of history, a moulting its direction a"d is indicated bl period, when history changes its direction and is indicated by a negative trait: that values no longer have value by themselves. There is also a positive traid: for the first time, the horizon is infinitely opened to knowledge -- "Everything is permitted." When the authory of old values has collapsed, this new authorization means that it is permitted to know all, that there is no lonqer a limit to man's activity.
Nietzsche saw with striking force that since nihilism is the possibility of all going beyond, it is the horizon for every particular science as well as for the maintenance of scientific development as such. Science can only be nihilistic. According to Nietzsche, Nihilism becomes the possibility of science -- which means that the human world can be destroyed by it.
Nihilism is "complete" now that the will to nothingness has become manifest and patent. Up to that point this nothingness was hidden behind various representations of the ideal and various fictions that Nihilism, their proper counterpart, now expatiates. The distrust that had given rise to the "true world" turns against its own creations. The sensible having been deprecited and the supersensible ceasing to be of value,the essential mctaphysical difference between truth and illusion, ends up rejected.
Nihilism is in some fashion always present, always at work, before, during, and after the moment of its violent explosion. Concurring with the very humanity of man, it can rightly be called man's "normal condition". But insofar as it is the peculiar disease of contemporary man, Nihilism is also a "passing pathological condition."
Nihilism, the experience of the exhaustion of meaning, amounts to a grand weariness, a "grand disgust", the part of man, directed will, of impotent Will to Power recoiling from an affirmation of "life" and changing into negotion.
Nietzsche, also argues Christianity. Original Christianity taught man not conform to the state and even to seperate himself from his family for the sake of the spirit. The Christian is a soldier, a judge, a patriot who knows nothing about non-resistance to evil. He defends his honor instead accepting humiliations; he is as proud as though he had never heard of the humble Galilean's teachings, and the church has become precisely that institution Jesus had wanted to abolish.
Nietzsche's thought denies Jesus' mission. The ordineryChristian is a miserable figure who does not really deserve the harsh punishment with which Christianity threatens him in afterlife. Christianity has created sin, this sickness of the soul, but the belief in Christianity's remedies is rapidly waning. The Churches are nothing!
Nietzsche calls Christianity the religion of compassion, a depressing sentiment that saps our vitality. The Christian God is a God of the sick, one who oppeses all the natural and impetuous urges of great living. Christianity has soiled and spoiled everyhthing, created a false equality and paralyzed our vital energies with the anemic ideal of hypocritical sainliness. The laws of life are high above Christian idealism. Whole generations of Christians have been reproducing themselves with a guilty conscience. The Churches have employed the fear techniques of a decaying civilization in order to stir up man's nervous energies; they make him feel sinful.
According to Nietzsche, the Christian Church is nothing but a collection of primitive and predatory cults and beliefs.
Such a basically unheroic and insincere Churh was, and is, of course, too far gone to be improved or reformed. The Reformation was nothing but the paralyzing of half of Christianity's body. It was treason of the meanest kind to revire a Church that showed all the marks of decay. Nietzsche's denunciations of Church, religion and morality intensified the existing crisis of faith. The deposition of God is a secret deed committed in the darkness of man's mind and always succceded by the enthronement of a new god.
Nietzsche's pessimistic image of man as a slave to himself and others, by implication and in open combat, attacks man's moral principles. The term of "Superman" is taken from Goethe's Faust. The Superman is not the man of today raised even to make the arbitrary his law and titanic madness his rule. The Superman is he alone who leads man to be what he is: the being who surpasses himself, who affirms the necessety to pass beyond himself and to perish in this crossing. The Superman is the being who has overcome the void because he could find the power of overcoming in this void, a power that for him has become not only power, but will -- the will to overcome himself. With the Superman, Nietzsche had a fine presentiment of a man who is indistinguishable from presentday man except by negative characteristics, and because of this, he is qualitatively different -- poorer, simpler, more moderate, more capable of sacrificing himself, slower in his resolution, quiter in his speech. Nonetheless, it is his essential trait, the will, that would make the Superman the very form of Nihilism. "Superman" meant to designate a type that has turned out supremely well, by way of an antithesis to "modern"men, to "good" men, to Christians and other nihilists --a word which, coming a Zarahustra, the annihilator of morality, becomes a very thoughtful word -- has almost universally been understood with the greatest innocence in line with the very values whose antithesis has been embodied in the figure of Zarahustra.
"God is dead"
This terrifying proclamation rallies all energies in Nietzsche to a final attac upon the sacred beliefs of Christianity. He respects, or even admires Jesus,but denies that he has any meaning for our age. Our religion is a piece of antiquity transpored into modern times.
"God is dead" summarizes the collapse of all values. For disaffection in regard to religious faith is only one sign among many indicating the banktruptcy of every ideal: not only of every ideal , but of every intelligibility, every idea. With God there disappears the guarantee for an intelligible world, and therewith the guarantee for all stable identities, including that of the ego. Everything returns to chaos. Nietzsche compares this event to a natural catastrophe: to a deluge, to an eartquake, but most often to an eclipse of the sun. The Sun of intelligibility has grown dark and the Earth has lost its orbit, becoming a roving star that suffers the eclipse by growing dark itself. This is "compete nihilism"