Nihilism According To Nietzsche

Nietzsche was a revolutionary author and philosopher who has had a tremendous impact on German culture up through the twentieth century and even today. Nietzsche's views were very unlike the popular and conventional beliefs and practices of his time and nearly all of his published works were, and still are, rather controversial, especially in On the Genealogy of Morals. His philosophies are more than just controversial and unconventional viewpoints, however; they are absolutely extreme and dangerous if taken out of context or misinterpreted. After Nietzsche's death it took very little for his sister to make some slight alterations to his works to go along with Nazi ideology.

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?”(Nietzsche 2005). This quote holds a dark truth: mankind brought God to His End.

Nietzsche is widely known as a critic of religion. In fact, he talks in depth about morality in regards to religion in his essays about the genealogy of morals. But the problem is not within religion itself or within morals. The problem is involved in the combination of the two to create society’s understanding of morality through a very religious lens. In fact, Nietzsche has criticism for almost any set of morals constructed by a group of individuals and meant to be applied to society as a whole. True morality, according to Nietzsche, requires a separation from these group dynamic views of morality- or at least a sincere look into where they originated and why they persist- and a movement towards a more introverted, and intrinsically personalized understanding of what morals mean in spite of the fact that “the normative force to which every member of society is exposed, in the form of obligations, codes of behavior, and other moral rules and guidelines, is disproportionally high” (Korfmacher 6).

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

Today's social vocabulary frequently uses the word “nihilism” interchangeably with the word “pessimistic,” such as abstinence and celibacy. Admittedly, famous celebrities and philosophers, with these characteristics, do share resemblances in their personality traits. Historically, in the mid to late nineteenth century, the term Nihilism had a completely different meaning. While under the rule of Czar Nicholas II, the working class complained about how he treated the majority of the nation and demanded immediate reform. After refusing to acknowledge the pleas of the citizens, the last Russian Czar and his family were assassinated systematically by those he was set to govern. Afterwhich the people decided to form a new government, which resulted in the creation of Socialism. Despite its’ original ideology nihilistic mindsets do not occur naturally, rather they are a result of traumatic experiences.

“As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples.” Nietzsche was one of the first modern philosophers to rebel against rationalism and when World War I came about, the revolution against religion truly became a legitimate statement. Friedrich Nietzsche strongly believed that many of those that practiced religion were led to the acceptance of slave morality. Religion had always played a fundamental role in society as it sets strict boundaries and standards of what is morally correct and incorrect. However, Nietzsche claims that, “Human nature is always driven by “ ‘the will to power’ ”, but religion will tell one otherwise, saying that one should forbid their bad desires. In Nietzsche’s

Progress is complacency. Mankind lazes around in the incandescent knowledge of ostensible progress, illiterate in the true nature of man. Progress is movement towards a destination, not a destination in and of itself. Presently, our world has progressed only marginally since the 19th century, when the world of enlightened thinkers shifted away from Nihilism towards Modernism. Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the seminal thinkers of the era, rejected nihilism and the essence of life. For Nietzsche, “we are simply random gatherings of molecules that cohere and experience consciousness for a short time before dissolving again into nothingness” (Backman, 860). An assorted collection of Nietzsche’s texts, including The Gay Science and ‘Good and Evil,’ ‘Good and Bad,’ suggest that Nietzsche would be inordinately condemnatory of the present state of the West, incredulous to the false notion– myth¬– of progress. Undergirded by democracy, “a political system that gives fools an equal share of influence” (Backman, 861) Nietzsche would argue that Western society has eschewed

God the creator of the universe, earth and ourselves can he really be dead as the madman has proclaimed him to soon be in Nietzsche’s “Madman”. To understand if we have killed God in this postmodern world and become all of his murders we need to analyze religion, technology and what the meaning of belief is. In all honesty we are closer than we were before to understanding what Nietzsche was trying to communicate in “The Madman” and “New Mortality”, this is greatly due to technological advances in the twentieth and twenty first century. Things such as space exploration, computers, general acceptance that anyone can believe anything they choose to, have opened the world up to more things than ever could’ve been imagined in 1882. These

In 1882 a German philosopher named Friedrich Nietzsche made the statement that, “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” By saying this he meant that moral principles should not be based off of god.

Nietzsche lived his life as a man critical of nearly everything in his life, provided that in influenced morality. Religion influenced people who, in his eyes, could do greater if their ideals weren’t held back by their preconceived ideas of morality. He frequently attacked philosophies that disagreed with him, claiming that they stood in the way of the benefit of mankind. His belief of abandoning preconceived notions of a code of morality is his own philosophy, Nihilism. Everything Nietzsche worked on became Nihilism. It is a shame that Nietzsche fell out of contemporary view because of the edits made by his sister that caused people to associate him with the hateful views of nazism and

What did Nietzsche mean by his statement ‘god is dead’? On the surface, it may appear that he was referring to the observation that belief in the monotheistic god of Christianity was on the decline. However, such a view is not particularly accepted by contemporary philosophical scholars. Rather, many suggest instead that Nietzsche wanted to symbolize his conviction that faith in true worlds theories was deteriorating. Nietzsche was unique in recognizing what would happen when individuals could no longer retain their faith in true world theories. The consequences of such a realization, according to Nietzsche would be potentially devastating. Nietzsche thought that when true world theories lost their influence, individuals would be torn from

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.

The fact that he gave up and refused to fight back gives room for more findings. He disagrees with the Christian community for making Jesus a martyr and sees that in so doing, they had made the Christ teachings vague. Nietzsche wrote his works in the process of rebuilding the damage caused by Christians during the ancient days. His inclination was to show the true way in which God wanted human beings to live as opposed to what Christians were doing.

With this said, Nietzsche would not agree with Craig. His idea on perspectivism also shows that he would not agree. One idea is the real verse the apparent world, which he states that language and grammar tricks us to imagine there is an "essence" for what makes up the things we see. For example the idea that "lightening flashes" is false because in reality the lightening is the flash. He would use this in his argument towards the existence of moral values and God because not everyone sees things the same way. Nietzsche's examples show that he does not believe in moral values and does not believe in God. Craig argues back with Nietzsche's idea that proclaimed that the death of God meant the destruction of all meaning and value in life. In William's excerpt he says that Nietzsche is right but we've got to be careful because the question is not "must we believe in God in order to live a moral life?" Craig doesn't believe that we do. Nor is the question: Can we recognize objective moral values without believing in God? Because he does believe that you can recognize them. Rather, the question is: If God does not exist, do objective morals exist? Craig proves that they do by explaining that actions such as rape, torture, and child abuse aren't just socially acceptable behavior. And that they are moral abominations and that there are some things that are really wrong and everyone knows it. Craig also says in his excerpt that even

“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.