As someone else put it at the end of group tonight, "G-d is dead" presumes he ever existed. Do "atheists" believe that g-d ever existed? I hadn't thought so. Anyway, I found this online:
Is Nietzsche's "God is dead" misunderstood?
Many people don't seem to realise that Nietzsche's "God is dead" speech was directed at atheists. The point is that if you "kill" God, what then? If you destroy that which was most holy, the fulcrum of belief of billions of people, do you just shrug your shoulders and declare yourself to be a liberal humanist like Richard Dawkins? Dawkins would have nauseated Nietzsche with his bland and banal statements about "morality". Nietzsche's position was that if you kill God you must live up to that astounding act by doing astounding things yourself. "We are the new, the unique, the incomparable, those who impose on themselves their own law, those who create themselves," he said.God is the creator and if we kill him we must become creators in his place. In fact we must become gods in God's place to justify our assassination of him. In short, we must become ubermenschen. Can anyone seriously imagine that a world of atheist ubermenschen would in any way resemble a world of Dawkins-style atheists?So, where do others stand on the Nietzsche/Dawkins atheist spectrum?Do you believe, like Dawkins, in God without God (liberal humanism is morally indistinguishable from Christianity hence can be described as "God without God"). Or do you believe in creating new values, challenging all conventions, proposing radical new moralities - like Nietzsche.How about a new book: The Liberal Humanism Delusion? Or is that too radical for the likes of Dawkins?
I have heard read Dawkins and heard him speak: sounded to me as if he had created an anti-religion religion of his own.
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Afterwords
Did you miss the meeting? Or did we fail to discuss all the questions? Perhaps something slipped your mind, or only occurred to you later. If so, here's your chance to continue the conversation. For the time being, this blog is open for comment only to registered members of the book group. Other readers may contact me at hcrane@cambridgema.gov. Please, no flaming or cussing.
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2 comments:
In my mind, "God is dead" doesn't imply that Nietzsche/Zarathustra thought there ever had been a god, except in the sense that peoples or individuals create values for themselves which they live by (to them, their gods are alive). His section on "The Thousand and One Goals" details these (somewhat complicated by his statement at the end that "humanity still lacks a goal"). In Western culture, the god being talked about would clearly be the God of Christianity, and I think that is Zarathustra's target because he talks so much about the "despisers of the body," the "afterworldly," and, in another place, "love of the neighbor" (which Zarathustra is strongly against). Since in Nietzsche's time European society was secularizing, I would take the statement "God is dead" as a metaphor for that loss of faith.
Did Nietzsche have any sorts of religious beliefs himself that are expressed indirectly in Zarathustra, or anywhere else? I think that if religious belief has anything to do with a spiritual world or dimension outside of this one--or even permeating this one--the answer would have to be no. Zarathustra makes the point many times that there is no afterlife, no soul that survives death, no gods. Some quotes from Z.: "There is no devil and no hell. Your soul will be dead even before your body." "This god whom I created was man-made and madness, like all gods!" "...body I am entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body." In other words, there is nothing but biology, and biology (the human body) has created the concepts of good and evil and gods for its own purposes (the will to power).
One could argue that there are hints Nietzsche embeds a spiritual force or energy in nature itself, in biology. What creates the creators? Where does the will to power come from? But the fundamental difference, as I see it, with any kind of pantheism, even one that equates nature and God, is that pantheisms see a unity underlying everything, so that we as individuals are part of a larger whole. We are a fragment of God, in some sense. Behind the veil of appearances lies a deeper reality. I think Nietzsche was saying exactly the opposite: we are either human trash (the herd), or unique overmen, a product of evolution. There are only appearances, there is no underlying unity; there are not even natural laws; there is only the blinding driving force of the will to power. There is no overarching meaning that can ultimately unify all experience: only a few individuals who can create out of nothing a meaning for themselves (or sometimes for a people).
But in the end there is an existential dimension to Nietzsche's thought that might be thought of as his substitute for what had been lost by "the death of God," his own "table of good and evil." It is at least an attitude toward life, maybe even a faith, which probably ends up contradicting some of his statements on religion if you think about it long enough. He called this "amor fati" (love of fate) or the Dionysian attitude or the "sacred Yes." It means saying yes to every experience in life, good or bad, pleasurable or painful. Out of that affirmation of life comes joy. It's not just "accepting the universe," which is what Ivan in The Grand Inquisitor cannot do, because of innocent suffering, but even going beyond that to embracing everything and maybe even reveling in it: cruelty, pain, death, beauty, love, the works! The true test about whether one has achieved this state is at the end of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where Z. proposes "eternal recurrence," the idea that history is cyclical and we repeat our lives over and over again. Only the person who can will an endless repetition of their life with all of its joys and sorrows has fully reached the Dionysian state. I'm not sure, but maybe this is the same as becoming an overman for Nietzsche, in which case there is a kind of enlightenment at the end of the process of metamorphosis. And images of sleep and waking, and talk of being "awakened" or "the awakened one" occur throughout the text. Maybe it's just the result of Nietzsche's irony in using a religious figure, religious imagery, and scripture-like storytelling to present his attacks on religion, or maybe deep down inside he couldn't fully overcome the "death of God." At the very least, he seems to have been going through a grieving process.
Thank you Chris. That was beautiful. As for Nietzsche, I'll bet he read the Upanishads.
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