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One of the most famous philosophers of recent memory is Friedrich Nietzsche, whose aggressive style, bombastic claims, and prescient analysis have made his intellectual legacy one of the most compelling in the Western canon. Writing in the second half of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche’s scathing critiques of traditional European value systems, and grave concern at what would come to replace them, represent one of the most insightful diagnoses of Western metaphysical ailments ever to be produced.
Indeed, throughout many of his works, Nietzsche is primarily concerned with values, the metaphysical beliefs that drive them, and their resulting expression in societies. One of his most provocative concepts, later appropriated by the Nazi regime, was the übermensch or “overman”, someone who determined and pursued their own values through force of will. A person who failed to do so was, in Nietzsche’s opinion, doomed to nihilism and decadence – a self-destructive lifestyle.
One of Nietzsche’s main targets of criticism was Christianity, which he correctly intuited to lack a coherent metaphysical substructure for the values it had imposed on Europe for centuries. Writing in the wake of Darwin’s discoveries, as well as the momentous 1860 exchange between Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas Henry Huxley on the topic of evolution, Nietzsche foresaw what he called the death of God – the collapse of a widespread belief in Christianity, as well as the propagation of atheistic and nihilistic value systems throughout the void that would be created:
“Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him… What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”
Although Nietzsche’s fictional and poetic expression of these ideas can make it challenging to grasp their full meaning, his primary concern with the nineteenth-century collapse of Christianity is the resulting metaphysical and moral degeneration he foresaw in its wake. The “festivals of atonement” and “sacred games” alluded to in The Gay Science turned out to be nothing of the sort, with orgiastic destruction made the rule in Japan’s Unit 731, the Soviet gulags, and the Nazi death camps throughout the twentieth century. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 78)
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