Philosophy Discussion

The Madman and the Death of God

Nietzsche is here pointing to the gradual erosion of religious belief already visible in late nineteenth-century Europe. The belief in God, the parable suggests, has lost its hold on the collective consciousness of the West. The morning newspaper has replaced the morning prayer. Our concern with what St. Thomas Aquinas called the Summum Bonum (salvation and eternal life, the highest objects of human striving) has been supplanted by the petty bourgeois virtues of industriousness, thrift, and enlightened self-interest—all with an eye toward achieving no higher goal than mere comfortable self-preservation (what Nietzsche elsewhere refers to as “the green meadow happiness of the herd”). The great cathedrals of Europe are fast becoming “the tombs and monuments of God,” mere tourist attractions much like the Parthenon in Athens is today.

What are the implications of this momentous event? For Nietzsche they are catastrophic. The death of God signals a crisis of meaning the likes of which mankind has never before seen; the entire horizon that once gave the West its unique cultural identity and self-understanding has been wiped clean. To invoke Plato’s famous allegory, there are no longer any shadows on the cave wall because the fire has been extinguished. The sun (representing God), which once formed the moral and existential center of our universe, has been torn away from us. The madman carries a lantern in the morning light because only he recognizes that the world has been cast into the darkness: “I come too early…I am not yet at the right time. This prodigious event is still on its way, and is traveling—it has not yet reached men’s ears.” His prophetic insight into the frightful consequences of the death of God is thus seen by his derisive and uncomprehending fellow unbelievers as a sign of madness.

Ivan Karamozov, one of the chief characters in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1880 masterpiece The Brothers Karamozov, famously proclaims: “If God does not exist, then nothing is true and everything is permitted.” What he means is that, without the Creator God of Judeo-Christianity, man has no essence or nature, and hence no intrinsic purpose. The universe is devoid of any eternal, divine, or natural law in the Thomistic[1] sense (since there is no God to conceive it), and without these there can be no cosmic basis for justice or morality. We are slowly becoming conscious of inhabiting a world deprived of any moral absolutes, a world in which there are no longer any restraints on our conduct other than those established by human law or custom. We are literally free-falling in the Abyss ; “Whither do we move? Away from all suns? Do we not dash on unceasingly? Backwards, sideways, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness?” The death of God has ushered in the single greatest crisis in human history: Nihilism , the bleakest and most destructive of worldviews, which finds its most eloquent expression in the following lines spoken by Shakespeare’s Macbeth:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

What is Noble?

According to Nietzsche, the elevation of the human species necessitates the establishment and maintenance of an aristocratic society—“a society believing in a long scale of gradations of rank and differences of worth among human beings, and requiring slavery in some form or other.” Unlike most Westerners today, Nietzsche vehemently opposes the doctrine of egalitarianism. That all men are created equal, as the U.S. Declaration of Independence asserts, is not in Nietzsche’s eyes a “self-evident truth,” but rather a self-evident lie.

The aristocratic caste creates and embodies the system of values (“master morality”) that ennobles, enriches, and beautifies their civilization. Whereas in liberal democratic societies each individual is free to pursue his or her particular vision of the good life, for Nietzsche civilization exists solely in order to produce those rare and gifted creatures which are its crowning glory. The multitude of men possesses value only insofar as they are useful subordinates to the ruling class; their principal virtues are obedience and submission.

How do aristocratic societies come into being? In a word, through conquest: “Men with a still natural nature, barbarians in every terrible sense of the word, men of prey, still in possession of unbroken strength of will and desire for power, threw themselves upon weaker, more moral, more peaceful races…” For Nietzsche, life is will-to-power, which “is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity….and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation.” All living things, from the unicellular organism to the human being and even whole societies, exhibit the will-to-power. (Suffice it to say that aristocratic individuals possess far more strength and vitality than the slavish multitudes.) Exploitation, which in Nietzsche’s time (no less than our own) is viewed disparagingly as belonging “to a depraved, or imperfect and primitive society,” is in fact identical with the “Will to Life.” This is an indisputable fact which many of us are only too eager to deny: “the truth is hard.”

Master and Slave Morality

Nietzsche recognizes two fundamentally distinct types of morality in the world, what he terms master morality and slave morality. The former has always originated in the noble or aristocratic caste, the latter among the slave or dependent class. The two value terms that are applied in master morality are “good” and “bad.” The aristocratic man—who according to Nietzsche finds historical embodiment in “the Roman, Arabic, German, and Japanese nobility,” as well as among the Homeric heroes and Scandinavian Vikings—“conceives the root idea ‘good’ spontaneously and straight away, that is to say, out of himself.” “He honors whatever he recognizes in himself: such morality is self-glorification.” But what precisely are the qualities that characterize the aristocratic soul, qualities that find concrete expression in the formulation “good”? “The noble man,” Nietzsche explains, “honors in himself the powerful one, him also who has power over himself…who takes pleasure in subjecting himself to severity and hardness, and has reverence for all that is severe and hard.” Thus self-mastery, above even the brute physical strength used to subjugate others, emerges as the defining characteristic of nobility. As Nietzsche asserts in the previous section (What is Noble?), the aristocrats’ “superiority did not consist first of all in their physical, but in their psychical power—they were more complete men…” The aristocratic caste, as the incarnate will-to-power, is fiercely proud of its superior strength and elevated stature. This “instinct for rank” impels the nobles to segregate themselves from the lower beings, those who possess “the opposite of this exalted, proud disposition,” the multitude of slaves and weaklings of all sorts, toward whom the nobles (who have duties only to their equals) may act in whatever manner they wish.

While master morality spontaneously conceives the idea “good” as the embodiment of the nobles’ defining qualities (self-mastery, pride, physical strength, ambition, etc.), the concept “bad” is more of an afterthought: it encompasses all that is devoid of “goodness” and thus rightly deserving of scorn: “the cowardly, the timid, the insignificant, those thinking of narrow utility…” as well as “the distrustful…the self-abasing, the dog-like kind of men who let themselves be abused, the mendicant flatterers, and above all the liars.” So it is that the antithesis “good” and “bad” in master morality “means practically the same as ‘noble’ and despicable.’”

Whereas master morality is properly speaking active, originating out of the spontaneous assertion of the aristocratic caste’s essential qualities as “good,” slave morality, by contrast, is more aptly characterized as passive or reactive: “slave morality says ‘no’ from the very outset to what is ‘outside itself,’ ‘different from itself,’ and ‘not itself,’: and this ‘no’ is its creative deed.” Slave morality is born out of the resentment experienced by “the abused, the oppressed, the suffering, the unemancipated, the weary, and those uncertain of themselves,” who tremble in fear at the “power and dangerousness,” the “dreadfulness, subtlety, and strength” of the noble caste and thus who, “deprived as they are of the proper outlet of action, are forced to find their compensation in an imaginary revenge.” Instead of asserting their will by way of direct action and manly self-assertion (of which only the “well-born” are capable), the impotent multitudes must resort to contriving a system of values whereby they exact “an imaginary revenge” on their betters by consigning them to the illusory category of evil—“the original, the beginning, the essential act in the conception of a slave morality”—in contrast to which the slave caste, by a wild leap of self-delusion, elevates itself to the status of “good”: The “‘tame man,’ the wretched mediocre and unedifying creature, has learnt to consider himself a goal and a pinnacle, an inner meaning, an historic principle, a ‘higher man.’” The transition from master to slave morality therefore looks like this:

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Slave morality, Nietzsche explains, is essentially the morality of utility. Those qualities “which serve to alleviate the existence of sufferers,” to make their lives less painful, less insecure, less contemptible, and therefore more tolerable, are enshrined in the morality of the lower class:

It is here that sympathy, the kind, helping hand, the warm heart, patience, diligence, humility, and friendliness attain to honor; for here these are the most useful qualities, and almost the only means of supporting the burden of existence.

As Nietzsche restates in Goodness and the Will to Power, “good” in the aristocratic sense (which Nietzsche fully endorses as the valuation that best corresponds to “the nature of the living being as a primary organic function”) is constituted by “all that enhances the feeling of power.” “Bad,” by contrast, is that which “proceeds from weakness.” True happiness, then, is the “feeling that power is increasing—that resistance has been overcome.” The happiness of the noble caste is thus inseparable from activity, as opposed to the sham happiness “of the weak and oppressed, with their festering venom and malignity,” for whom happiness “appears essentially as a narcotic, a deadening, a quietude, a peace, a ‘Sabbath,’ [i.e., a break from activity]…in short, a purely passive phenomenon.” The aristocrat’s inherent vigor and vitality reveal themselves in his “contempt for safety, body, life, and comfort, [his] awful joy and intense delight in all destruction, in all the ecstasies of victory and cruelty…” The diffident, slavish man, on the other hand—represented by modern egalitarians who “believe almost instinctively in ‘progress’ and the ‘future’”—desires nothing more than comfort and safety, which accounts for Nietzsche’s chilling observation that

The profound, icy mistrust which the German provokes, as soon as he arrives at power—even at the present time—is always still an aftermath of that inextinguishable horror with which for whole centuries Europe has regarded the wrath of the blonde Teuton beast…that lies at the core of all aristocratic races.