Adonis Diaries

Nietzsche: “God is dead” (Part 3, started the writing on February 15, 2009)

Note: I started writing about the philosophy of Nietzsche on life on February 15.  I was caught up with publishing many other articles.  As usual, when an essay is bound to be lengthy and time consuming, I decide to divide it into chapters or parts.

I take the position that Nietzsche is an honest writer and truthful to his ideals and that is much more than anyone can expect from most authors.

He wrote once in Ecce Homo “How do we become what we are?”  (This sentence reminded me of a piece of my own auto-biography “Why I am how I am?”) 

Nietzsche replied “As to the long sickness that is wearing me down, don’t I owe it infinitely more than to my good health? I owe it my philosophy to life. Only great suffering liberate the spirit” (I might say “after suffering greatly” because physical pain in no way liberates any kinds of minds)

He publishes “The birth of tragedies” after the Franco-German war in 1870 where he pleaded to the return of the Greek genre of tragedies, but his positions are not well received and he was kind of discredited as a philologer.

In “Non current considerations” Nietzsche claims that culture is threatened internally by the learned men who are totally cut off from life’s realities and are sick in their historicism (the philistine culture). 

Nietzsche receives no recognition; his health is starting to deteriorate.

Nietzsche is in campaign to tell the world a set of truths that he is not yet ready to listen to.  He tries to win a few victories on his personal deficiencies. He writes in 1878 in “Human, much human” that he has gotten rid of “what is not compatible with his nature“.  Nietzsche wants to believe that he is “a free spirit” and declare war on idealism, on the influence of Schopenhauer and the mythology of Wagner.

The year 1880 is “a black hole” for Nietzsche but “what does not kill me is bound to strengthen me“. 

He has a renewed passion to targeting convictions that are “the enemies to truth”, and thus he proclaimed in “The happy knowledge” that “God is dead“.

It seems that many authors have the temerity of killing major concepts for the sake of recognition. 

For example, they proclaim “The end of history“, “the end of Religions“, “The end of Metaphysics”, “The end of Earth”, and “The end of Philosophy“, and that the real life is but a virtual existence. 

Nietzsche is one of a succession of authors that love to go on a rampage of assassination and thus he proclaimed “The end of God”

The reasoning is that if the systems of beliefs have managed to cater to the needs of those who instituted those systems, then after a while those systems turned against life and the moral values have lost their initial power.

The values persist on the impulse of inertia and habit.  This inertia has generated the negative movement of “nihilism”, a sickness among younger generations that devalue all kinds of moral values as “superimposed” on societies.

When Nietzsche proclaimed “God is dead” he didn’t intend a simple atheist position, but a rallying cry to “positive nihilism” for the instauration of newer set of values with purpose of disseminating a spirit of happiness and of higher power to the spirit.

The actual negative nihilism is but an intermediary stage for launching a new future and new moral values that are consistent with life and its glory.

By 1883, Nietzsche feels that “everything is boring, painful, and disgusting. I cannot fathom why I should resume living for even six more months” 

By 1888, he has lambasted the concepts of nationalism and anti-Semitism as sickness attached to symptoms of mental and emotional weaknesses and he signs his works by “The Anti-Christ”, “Dionysus“, “The Crucified”, and “Nietzsche Caesar“.