Nietzsche's Death of God
Michael Vossen

108. New battles. After Buddha was dead, they still showed his shadow in a cave for centuries- a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way people are, there may still for millennia be caves in which they show his shadow. –And we- we must still defeat his shadow as well!
-Fredrick Nietzsche, The Gay Science

209. A way of asking for reasons. There is a way of asking us for our reasons that not only makes us forget our best reasons but also awakens in us a defiance and resistance towards reasons in general- a very stultifying mode of asking and a trick used by tyrannical people!
-Fredrick Nietzsche, The Gay Science

God is dead. This statement, asserted in various places of Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, is never directly explained. This absence of explanation and justification functions as to “awaken defiance and resistance” in readers towards the claim, in such a manner that it forces them to engage with it. Indeed, the shock value, boldness, and perhaps blasphemy of the claim are necessary for it to function as it does; as a way of asking for reasons. Further, once the more defensive “What do you mean and how do you know” questions are accounted for, the ‘is dead’ relation invites questions of a more mundane sort-gay in their incongruence with the claim’s gravity- questions whose playfulness obscures their importance. Examples of such questions are:

How did he die? What size is his coffin? Where shall we bury him? What (if any) eulogies should we give? How does one mourn the death of a god? Who will take his place; come Monday, we’ll all have to go back to work again, and we’ll need someone do his job? What was his job again? Who is qualified to replace him? Who is even arrogant enough to suggest a fitting replacement now that God is dead! Or can we get by without him...? Who or what killed him? Man, you say man killed him? Why did man kill him? How did man kill him? Was it voluntary or involuntary god-slaughter? What punishment fits this crime? Or perhaps, what was the price on his head?

Given The Gay Science’s playful yet serious style, it is neither unreasonable nor inappropriate to hold that these more playful questions invoked should be read as the more serious questions posed by the work. This essay, after dealing with the more defensive questions, will attempt to answer questions of the mundane sort.

The questions “What do you mean by ‘God is dead’ and how do you know” are defensive in that they are generally made in reaction to the claim, and perhaps seek to refute or rebut it; in asking for an explanation and proof, the asker seeks some erroneous premise that has led to the false claim. For example, it is easy to see how a philosopher or theologian might view the claim that “God is dead” as false and even contradictory, as it naturally can be read as an ontological claim. However, taking the claim as such misses Nietzsche’s point. The claim can be taken ontologically in that it seems to concern the existence of God-he is dead, existing no more- and appears false and contradictory in that it takes God to be the sort of being that can die. Note that this claim is different than a flat out proclamation of atheism- the denial of God’s existence- in that in relating God to a living thing, Nietzsche suggests God existed for a period of time, and then ceased to exist, which is different than saying God does not exist. Latching on to the ‘existed, now cease to exists’ difference, a philosopher or theologian might press Nietzsche on his claim:

“Nietzsche”, says the philosophogian, “You might not realize it, but you are committed to a controversial metaphysical claim. You say that God is dead, however, the death of God implies that he was living at some point, for to die is to cease to live. Thus you must hold that God existed at some point in time, for that which lives exists. But who is this god that can die? For if you mean God, that which nothing greater can possibly be conceived, that who’s essence is existence, then you falsely eulogize. For if you can conceive of a god who dies, then you can conceive of a greater being, a god who’s death is impossible; greater than this even, inconceivable, beyond human thought. And we hold that God is that which nothing greater can possibly be conceived, so this corpse you have can’t be our God. And anyone who knows the nature of God couldn’t make the error in identifying that John Doe, you have there, so you must not have known. Now that you have this knowledge you should recognize that your claim was in error, and you can avoid this mistake in the future. Or perhaps you mean something different? Are you an atheist? Are you trying to say that God doesn’t exist? If so, then you’ve chosen a poor way in which to say this!”

It is easy to imagine Nietzsche sitting, listening to such an account with a hidden grin, as an expert politely listens to the passionate and proud criticism of an initiate who has mistaken him for a novice. Unless Nietzsche is taken as dense enough not to recognize the contradiction present in his assertion, a characterization that any careful reader of The Gay Science would be apt to avoid, the assertion should not be taken as simply a metaphysical claim.

Further reading in The Gay Science suggests two ways that Nietzsche could respond to this metaphysical objection. The first way is suggested by passage 335, where Nietzsche says of Kant “Yet it had been his strength and cleverness that had broken open the cage!” Here, the cage that is broken open is the use of concepts such as ‘God’, ‘soul’, ‘freedom’, and ‘immortality’. Nietzsche may be assuming that Kant had destroyed any rational position that makes use of such concepts, as they are beyond a human capacity to know. The breaking of the cage is the writing of The Critique of Pure Reason, in which Kant refutes the type of ontological proof given by the philosophogian, and separates these concepts from good metaphysics. This line of response is weak in that it commits Nietzsche to a- at least- Kant like metaphysical position, and thus leaves him vulnerable to attacks on this position. Further, Nietzsche does not seem interested in giving metaphysical arguments, so while this is a possible way for Nietzsche to reply to the metaphysical objection, it is not the best reply he can give.

The second way of responding is stronger. Here, the claim that God is dead is taken as a claim on the use of the concept of God in giving lives meaning. The ontological status of God is irrelevant on such an account; God may exist, but belief in God no longer fulfills the same role it once did; as a matter of historical fact, the world is moving away from using God as a source of meaning. This account is suggested through consideration of his earlier work, The Birth of Tragedy. In this work, Nietzsche examines different ways of dealing with the “wisdom of Silenus”; that life is not worth living and we are better off dead. The concept of God deals with such wisdom as by connecting man to the absolute; this world may be imperfect and not worth living, but humans are connected to God, and via good action and belief, humans can become part of an eternal realm of happiness. In this way, human life has meaning, alibi from a certain mythological perspective. While this may be a useful way of deceiving oneself, and worked for a period of time, man has moved away from such mythologies, and the modern man must now make do without this deception.

If Nietzsche is responding along this line, the fact that the madman in passage 125 speaks to atheists and not believers is partially explained. The death of God may, at first, only impact the lives of atheists; there are still some people who believe in God that have not yet heard of the death of God, and Nietzsche seems reluctant to disturb them, most likely because they are still deceiving themselves well. The death impacts the atheists for they would be among the first to deal with the loss of God. Interestingly, the atheists in passage 125 have not been affected by the death of God in the same way the madman has. The madman’s explanation, that “...deeds need time, even after they are done, in order to be seen and heard...” fits the model of the death of God as a historic event. While God is dead-modern society needs him no longer-, it may take some time for people to realize this. Further, there may still be “shadows of God”(passage108) that must be recognized and overcome before society can move on. Thus, while the atheists do not understand the madman yet-the news hasn’t reached them-, they are presumably some of the first people positioned to see and recognize this event.

This line of response may also help explain the cause of God’s death. If the concept of God is needed only in so far as it is a useful self-deception, then when the concept is no longer useful or deceptive, the concept of God will not be needed. Given that the madman claims “We have killed him -you and I!”, suggesting that man is the cause of God’s death, God’s death may be caused by man no longer needing the idea of God to play a certain role in life, or through man pursuing reason to its ends and discovering that he is no longer able to deceive himself. If this is the case, then God’s death should be thought of as caused by a trend in thought across time rather than the result of a single event; there may be many events that helped make the idea un-useful or implausible- many causes of God’s death.

Finally, the model of God’s death as an inability of the concept to fulfill its role in human life helps explain why the more mundane questions arising from the statement “God is dead” are the most interesting. Since the concept of God “is gone”, its absence leaves a void in the lives of people that needs to be filled; God is dead, what do we do now, how do we go on living? Again, the madman provides the beginning of an answer: “Do we not ourselves have to become gods merely to appear worthy of it?” This suggestion, coupled with the claim in passage 108 that we must fight off the shadows of God, suggests that the answer to such questions is to take up the job of God ourselves; it is also a mistake to try to replace God with a shadow of him or some other metaphysical placebo. Explaining what taking up the job of God entails is a bigger question than can be taken up in this essay- “Even less may one suppose many to know at all what this event really means...”(passage 343)- however, in a general sense it seems safe to say that the job will require strong judgment and responsibility of one’s self. In this way, we can see why Nietzsche might write at passage 275 “What is the seal of having become free?-No longer to be ashamed before oneself.”






Works Cited:

Nietzsche, Fredrick. The Birth of Tragedy. Edited by Raymond Geuss, Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Nietzsche, Fredrick. The Gay Science. Edited by Bernard Williams, Cambridge University Press, 2001.