Was Nietzsche Right?
Gott ist tot. God is dead.
Those were Nietzsche's famous sentiments.
He gained acclaim in the late 19th century, but in some ways he was the continuation of the Enlightenment era thinking that first germinated hundreds of years before.
Before the Enlightenment, Western European thought was marked by deeply held religious beliefs. In many ways this dated back to Constantine’s Edict of Milan in 313 AD that first made Christianity a legal faith. Since that time, faith in God had been deeply woven into the fabric of society.
For better or worse, truth was faith. Faith was truth.
But with the Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries came new ways of defining truth.
Human reasoning, testing, and rational analysis became the order of the day. Faith was no longer primary, as this Britannica article explains.
…the great idea of the Enlightenment: that man, guided by the light of reason, could explain all natural phenomena and could embark on the study of his own place in a world that was no longer mysterious. [source]
Truth came to rest on science. On observation, testing, and discovery. And God seemed less and less necessary as human beings discovered more and more.
In 1882’s “The Gay Science” Nietzsche pronounced the supernatural obituary:
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
No More God
For many, this surely came as welcome news.
After all, the God of the Bible was difficult to understand. How could a God of love do things that didn’t always seem so loving? How could He allow suffering? How could He ask humans to trust Him despite all the unanswered questions?
If He was real, it really left humans in quite the bind.
After all, if there actually is a God who created the universe (and us), humans have only two real choices: to learn to trust and obey Him, or to convince ourselves we don’t need to trust and obey.
The first seems hard and no fun. The second seems risky.
But if He was well and truly dead, we’re kind of off the hook, right?
Humankind could then do what we all want to do anyway. No fear of breaking any supernatural rules that might have some claim on us. We would be free to construct a society based on what we discover to be true and what we like and what feels right.
In many ways, that has become the prevailing worldview in Western culture today. In some way, we want to be objective and put our trust in things that we can prove to be true. And also, we want to do what we want and don’t like it when other people suggest otherwise.
And if we had to pick one of those two things — searching for objective truth or searching for our personal truth — many of us today prefer the latter.
It’s a fairly apt summary of postmodern thinking in Western cultures today. We thought we killed God with rationality and testing in the Enlightenment. And now we want to make sure He’s dead by working to reject the idea of any objective standards whatsoever.
Nietzsche: The Forefather of Postmodern Thought
A postmodernist thinker would say all truth claims are power plays. And since a hallmark of postmodern thought is skepticism of any who would assert power, we naturally reject claims of truth.
Here’s a short summary of postmodern philosophy.
As a philosophy, postmodernism rejects concepts of rationality, objectivity, and universal truth. Instead, it emphasizes the diversity of human experience and multiplicity of perspectives. [source]
Since we are all different and have different experiences, we should all follow our own paths and speak our own truths. There are not universal moral standards that should govern our lives but only experience and the search for meaning. There is no right or wrong, only what is right or wrong for me.
And this is what Nietzsche predicted.
The death of God leads not only to us rejecting a belief in a cosmic order, but also to rejecting all outside values in themselves. And without objective truth outside of ourselves, we must construct it for ourselves and become our own gods.
The Rise of the Superman
Without God, Nietzsche believed there would be new possibilities for humans.
The new frontier was constructing new lives without God being in the way. To do this, Nietzsche believed humans needed both creativity and courage. He saw our essential purpose was to go on a quest to become one of the Übermenschen, the “superior humans” or superhumans.
Belief in God, Nietzsche conceded, had once provided a value system and given meaning to life. So with no God, the übermensch must create new values and new meaning.
The primary goal?
To create progress by casting off antiquated objective thinking. To define oneself and one’s own value system and to give meaning to a new generation.
This superior man would not be a product of long evolution; rather, he would emerge when any man with superior potential completely masters himself and strikes off conventional Christian “herd morality” to create his own values, which are completely rooted in life on this earth. [Source: Britannica, Superman Philosophy]
The engine fueling the drive for progress was something Nietzsche thought lived in all of us.
He called it the “will to power” that all living things desire power and are motivated to endlessly expand that power.
The Will to Power
Nietzsche knew that once God was out of the picture humanity would need a new way to create morality. He knew the stakes.
Here’s the rest of the quote from the time he eulogized God in his published writing.
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? 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? — Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882)
Nietzsche knew that humankind, the übermensch, would now bear the burden of creating our own meaning and purpose.
But what if the “superior humans” driven by the will to power were interested only in their own selfish interests and not in humanity overall?
The Will to Power in Nazi Germany
Nietzsche was not anti-Semitic himself, but his ideas were appropriated by Hitler and the Nazis.
Here’s how Hitler explained his völkisch (entho-nationalist) belief that all of life is separated into the ubermensch and untermensch (inferior).
From Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”):
By recognizing that they are different, the völkisch concept separates mankind into races of superior and inferior quality. On the basis of this recognition it feels bound, in conformity with the eternal Will that dominates the universe, to postulate the victory of the better and stronger and the subordination of the inferior and weaker — Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (1925)
When Hitler came to power in 1933, 8 years after the publication of Mein Kampf, the idea of the superior Aryans asserting dominance quickly gained traction within the culture.
The inferior “subhumans” were to be identified, separated from the Aryans, and ultimately eradicated. The Nazis didn’t start by murdering everyone they saw as different and unworthy. But it didn’t take them long to get there.
Here is how that idea comes to light in Der Untermensch, a 1942 Nazi brochure.
Just as the night rises against the day, the light and dark are in eternal conflict. So too, is the subhuman the greatest enemy of the dominant species on earth, mankind. The subhuman is a biological creature, crafted by nature, which has hands, legs, eyes and mouth, even the semblance of a brain. Nevertheless, this terrible creature is only a partial human being.
Although it has features similar to a human, the subhuman is lower on the spiritual and psychological scale than any animal. Inside of this creature lies wild and unrestrained passions: an incessant need to destroy, filled with the most primitive desires, chaos and coldhearted villainy.
A subhuman and nothing more! — Der Untermensch, Nazi brochure edited by Heinrich Himmler, 1942
Faith in Human Power Instead of God
Hitler despised Christianity.
He saw it as a faith for slaves. And while he made a Nazified version of the faith that ignored the story of the Hebrews (the German Christian Faith Movement), he continued to hate the influence of a faith that worshipped a God who would lay down his life for his enemies.
He described the influence of Christian churches as “the evil that is gnawing our vitals.” (from Hitler, A Study in Tyranny), and believed it was destined to fail.
The dogma of Christianity gets worn away before the advances of science … Gradually the myths crumble. All that is left to prove that nature there is no frontier between the organic and inorganic. When understanding of the universe has become widespread, when the majority of men know that the stars are not sources of light, but worlds, perhaps inhabited worlds like ours, then the Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity. [Source Hitler, A Study in Tyranny]
Yet it was Hitler who failed, and his bloody power trip ended when he killed himself in a Berlin bunker on April 30th, 1945.
Nietzsche Was Right…and Wrong
Nietzsche was right that without God humans would be able to invent their own standards. That the most powerful would crave more power and set themselves up as the rulers above all.
But he was proven wrong that the unregulated internal human drive to become theübermensch would lead to something good.
Instead, depraved minds took his ideas and twisted them to suit their own selfish ends. Those who would harness the “will to power” to pursue their völkisch racial ideologies would end up killing millions.
What The Bible Says
Does that mean that everyone becomes a Nazi without objective standards of truth and morality?
Of course not.
But it does mean that if there are no objective standards of morality and goodness that exist outside of us, those with power can make whatever rules they want.
Might makes right.
Power craves more power.
The Bible also has a word for that fierce egocentric drive living in human hearts. But instead of the “will to power” the Bible calls it “sin.”
The Bible says it’s the problem that every one of us has.
It dates back to the Garden of Eden when humanity first chose not to trust in God and do what seemed right in our own eyes.
The Bible says that God has been working since that time to put things right again. That He’s been calling and loving humanity ever since. And that work was finished when He came to Earth to live and die on a Roman cross outside of Jerusalem.
The Bible also says that He is not dead at all. In fact, He is Risen.
And He invites us to turn from our own will to power to follow Him. To die to ourselves and find new life in Him and finally find ourselves.
