Analysis Of Nietzsche'sThe Madman And New Mortality

Friedrich Nietzsche’s protagonist, “The Madman” infamously said that ‘God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him’ (1882:125). Writing from Germany at the end of the 19th Century, Nietzsche had a front row seat to the early fracturing of Western European Christendom which, in his view had wrought iron restraints around society. Christian scholars, most notably Yoder (1984), Krieder (1999), and Murray (2004), see the end of Christendom as something to be celebrated, critiquing its pseudo-Christian roots, and the imperialistic nature of the Constantinian shift. Leithart (2010) believes these scholars have fundamentally misunderstood the historic origins of Christendom, and failed to grasp its importance as a spiritual template for modern

Friedrich Nietzsche’s own skepticism symbolized the secular changes in contemporary Western civilization, in which he details mankind’s break away from faith into a new rule of chaos. In Book 5 of The Gay Science, Nietzsche establishes that “God is dead”, meaning that modern Europe has abandoned religion in favor of rationality and science (Nietzsche 279). From this death, the birth of a ‘new’ infinite blossoms in which the world is open to an unlimited amount of interpretations that do not rely on the solid foundations of faith in religion or science. However, in contrast to the other philosophers of his age such as Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Nietzsche deviates from the omniscient determinism of history towards a

Ever since the inception of his writings, Nietzsche has been pointed to and predominately described as an atheist, however within the work, Beyond Good and Evil, it is revealed otherwise. Nietzsche considers several different roles for religion in past, present, and future polities. The roles that religion play within Nietzsche’s vision of a future creation and establishment of world-affirming values is dependent upon the class of the individual. It is found in the various sections of The religious character within Beyond Good and Evil, that religion can be utilized by different classes of people for different world affirmations. The high ranking officials are able to use religion as a tool to relate and control their subjects, while the middle

In ancient times, when humans are in the infant stage of development of human history, humans’ understandings of nature are just only based in their imagination. While facing the powerful forces of nature, people are aware of their own strength is pretty small, and their fate is controlled by an invisible power-- they called this unknown force “god”. With the passage of time, people seem to foresee the possibility of overcoming nature, and they begin to look forward to their own peers, a powerful figure, to complete the great cause of beating nature. The emergence of priests shows the beginning of religion.

Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” and Franz Kafkas “Metamorphosis" are both stories that challenge the idea of reality. Diary of a madman depicts the idea of an insane first person as he starts to visualize texts in his reading that say humans are going to eat him. “Metamorphosis” keeps the reader guessing weather Gregor is an actual insect or not through his slick metamors and vague use of language. Although “Diary of a madman” is told in first person and “Metamorphosis” is told in third person they both exemplify the human thought process and help us challenge the idea of sanity within a human being.

I believe Nietzsche means by “the death of God” is to catch people’s attention to read the whole parable. For example, the author writes, “I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I. We are his murderers.” to provide a path of interpretation for readers. Accordingly, to the madman’s quote, I suppose God was killed by the people who stopped believing in the idea of a God existing. Moreover, the madman says, “The tremendous event is still on its way, still travelling - it has not yet reached the ears of men.” since he has come too soon to ask people about God’s location. The event’s metaphor about the light from the stars is for readers to understand that God’s arrival will take time. Similarly, the madman explains that everyone born after

God’s not dead and we did not kill him, Nietzsche did. Nietzsche comes up with a claim that God is dead. He supports this claim by describing a madman frantically running around town looking for an honest person, he is looking for God. Their responses are laughter assuming the man is crazy. The madman eventually comes to the conclusion that humanity is unaware of the death of God and its significance. The significance will take time to reach the people. Nietzsche’s way of saying God is dead is a way of claiming freedom over his own life and trying to bandwagon others on to it. He feels the need to not have to obey any higher authority and in this he starts a movement of free will and justifies it by attempting to bring other people along with him. While Nietzsche can make convincing claims about the death of God, God is not dead.

     Arguing the death of God is a debate that will last until eternity. Regardless of exploration or religious zeal there are far too many human viewpoints leaning towards the idea of and the strong need for faith. Believing in God for some is as natural as walking upright and it would seem that through such unquestionable faith God would somehow still be alive. But perhaps He is only surviving with the help of life support.

This piece of work will try to find the answer to the question ‘In Nietzsche’s first essay in the Genealogy of Morals, does he give a clear idea of what good and bad truly are and what his opinion of those ideas is’. It will give a brief overview of his first essay, it will also go into greater detail of what he claims good and bad truly are, and finally look at what he is trying to prove with this argument. It will look at his background in order to see if and how that has influenced his work and opinions.

Yo, I hope you are ready to learn some really cool shizniz about how we understand other shizniz by interpreting that shizniz. Over this past term, I have learned how individuals form an interpretation. Although learning about how to interpret an interpretation was an interesting experience, it also was pretty confusing; therefore, I am going to discuss what I have learned in a way that I hope will be fun to read and easy to understand. In this, you will read about concepts introduced by Nietzsche, reinforced by Gadamer, and challenged by Schott. In each of their articles highlighted key points of how to best understand a concept called “the hermeneutical claim to universality”, which can be defined as a notion of first having an interpretation of what one wishes to understand. Basically, this means if we want to understand anything we are trying to find an interpretation.

One could counter argue that God is not dead because church and religion is still very active in today’s society. So much of our thinking revolves around God and truth. When we lose religion

Terri Murray, 2009, delivers his aspect from ‘Philosophy Now’, stating that “One may accept Nietzsche’s view, as do I, that orthodox Christianity reeks of hypocrisy”. However, although Christianity does have corrupt elements established within it, it is more complicated than simply stating the religion is corrupt. It seems logical to assume that Eli has been used as a symbol to represent all divine religions. Therefore it can be regarded as being slightly prejudice to claim Christianity as being corrupt, but rather it is used in a corrupt manner, and is tweaked and changed to suit the desires of immoral beings. Another religion seen in a similar light is Islam. This religion has been labelled as contradictory, violent and sexist as a pitiful

Although the problem of the relationship between Nietzsche and metaphysics might seem to be a settled issue, this is in fact a quite complicated and fascinating problematic. The difficulty with this subject lies in the often unacknowledged ambiguity that the term ‘metaphysics’ exhibits in Nietzsche's writing, as this word assumes different nuances and connotations in different contexts. Therefore, if we can get past the usual rhetoric on the topic, we come to realize that Nietzsche addresses the topic of metaphysics in at least two distinct ways.

Friedrich Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher and held in regard amongst the greatest philosophers of the early part century. He sharpened his philosophical skills through reading the works of the earlier philosophers of the 18th century such as Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Arthur Schopenhauer and African Spir; however, their works and beliefs were opposite to his own. His primary mentor was Author Schopenhauer, whose belief was that reality was built on the foundation of experience. Such as it is, one of his essays, Schopenhauer als Erzieher, published in 1874, was dedicated to Schopenhauer (Mencken, 2008). In the past two centuries, his work has had authority and influence in both

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” (Gay Science, 126) This harsh statement remains among Friedrich Nietzsche’s most powerful and disturbing quotes, spoken by a proclaimed Madman to a crowd of disbelievers. After making this claim, the Madman becomes horrified by his audience’s ignorance, noting that “This tremendous event is still on its way.” This has an effect of suspending the Madman’s message in time, expanding its audience infinitely, for the event of God’s death could still be on its way. Therefore, nearly 150 years after these words were written, we must ask ourselves, does God remain dead, and has our modern society killed him? This is a haunting and disturbing question, but in many ways our society does resemble Nietzsche’s masses. However, it also resembles the Madman himself, due to its inherent individualism.