Procrast-Nation

This is a paper I wrote for a class I was taking on Nietzsche. I’m essentially arguing that Nietzsche was even more Christian than he himself was aware of, sort of that he was a secret, closeted Christian. More papers to come. I have one on Borges, one on Kierkegaard, one on Sartre, one on infinite regress and belief justification and one on methodological individualism vs. holism in the social sciences (along with random old other ones). Let me know what y’all are interested in reading. Enjoy.

Haunted: Nietzsche and the Death of God

In Section 108 of The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche writes the following; “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” (Gay Science, Sec. 108). This quotation serves as the impetus for the exploration of Nietzsche’s work here undertaken. It is eminently clear to anyone with even a passing familiarity with Nietzsche that he did not believe in God in any strict, metaphysical sense. Indeed, he has gained a reputation over the years as the philosophical atheist, and wrote a book entitled The Anti-Christ (which is also translatable as The Anti-Christian); the phrase “God is dead” has become a type of slogan for modern day atheism. However, Nietzsche’s view of God as a concept, and religion more generally, is significantly more complex than this. In some ways, Nietzsche actually saw himself and his project as not a rejection of Christianity, but rather, in some sense, only the most recent and novel iteration of Christianity. Nietzsche had no illusions that he could escape the all-pervasive historical influence that Christianity had during his time. At the same time, it seems that if we examine Nietzsche’s work closely, a strange sort of distortion becomes noticeable on this score. That is, beyond the ways in which Nietzsche consciously recognizes himself as influenced by Christianity, there appear to be other ways in which Christian concepts and attitudes infiltrate his work in ways that even he himself seems to be unaware of. In the quote mentioned earlier, Nietzsche essentially admits that his project is a type of shadow boxing; launching attacks at an enemy that he is fully aware is substanceless and, hence, immune to those attacks in principle. We might ask, if Nietzsche is indeed engaging with a shadow, what has cast this shadow? If God has indeed died, how could he be casting a shadow of any kind? Here we will attempt an answer to this question by exploring some places in which we can detect this residual specter of God that stalks through the dark corners of Nietzsche’s work, ultimately suggesting first that if God did indeed die, he is seen resurrected as a phantom in Nietzsche, and second, that Nietzsche was haunted by this phantom to a degree that even he himself was not fully cognizant of.

First I want to examine a concept in Nietzsche that, to my knowledge, Nietzsche himself never confronts directly, and one which is deeply present in his work, namely, the concept of the messiah. Before we examine how the messiah figures in Nietzsche’s thought, we first ought to understand what a messiah is and what its function is. Though different religious traditions have different ideas about who exactly the messiah is and what he will do, the basic idea is very similar across the board. The messiah is a figure, usually anointed by God (and often partly or wholly divine himself) who is meant to act as a savior or redeemer for all of humanity. The archetypical example is, of course, Christ, who is prophesied to return to Earth and raise all of the saved up to Heaven. This redeeming function is crucial to the concept of the messiah, as is its relationship to the divine. Another crucial element of the messiah figure to note is the fact that the emergence of the messiah is almost always tied to some type of eschatology. The state of the world, in messiah narratives, has deteriorated past the point of being salvageable and divine intervention and salvation is necessary.

Nietzsche, it seems, has a deep proclivity towards this type of messianism that he does not seem to be fully aware of. He is often calling for a future individual or group of individuals to pick up his work and complete his project of escaping Christian morality and the influence of Christianity in general. The clearest example of this messianic (and inherently religious) impulse can be seen in section 24 of the second treatise of On The Genealogy of Morality, where Nietzsche issues this call in its most striking form. He writes, “But someday, in a stronger time than this decaying, self-doubting present, he really must come to us, the redeeming human…” and goes on to emphasize that only this superhuman individual will be able to “bring home redemption to this reality” (Genealogy, Treatise 2, Sec. 24). All of the hallmarks of messianic thinking are present here: the focus on the fallen and corrupted nature of the current reality and the redeemer figure who will reverse the ruination and save those who remain. The only difference between Nietzsche’s messiah here and the Christ figures is that Christ was divine openly, whereas Nietzsche’s figure is not divine or chosen by God, but rather is, in Nietzsche’s words, an Anti-Christ. In his calling for a figure to come and liberate the masses of his time from the shackles that Christianity has placed on them, Nietzsche himself participates in one of the most fundamental beliefs of Christianity, i.e. messianism.

One might claim that there is something suspicious about the way Nietzsche presents his view in this passage. It may be, for example, that he is playing some type of game or joke with the reader, as the messianic language is almost comically overstated to the point that it would be almost impossible to miss the implications of the passage. Perhaps this is an instance of Nietzsche recognizing and openly acknowledging his own entrapment withing the traditional Christian framework of his time. Nietzsche may be illustrating this predicament as a way to get his readers to attempt to find other ways out of this Christian belief system that do not appeal to that system itself. Even if we grant that possibility, however, it does not absolve Nietzsche at all of the charge of messianic thinking, but only makes it somewhat more difficult to detect. If Nietzsche is indeed attempting to illustrate the pervasiveness of the Christian influence to induce more creative thinking on the part of his readers, then he has only shifted his messianic expectations from some mythic figure who will arrive in the future to his idealized vision of the reader, which still does not extract him from the messianic.

There are a number of other places throughout Nietzsche’s work where this messianic tendency shows itself as well (a fact which would lend credence to the idea that the passage discussed above from the Genealogy was not simply a one time joke). One of the key ideas that appears both in The Gay Science and Beyond Good and Evil is that of the New Philosopher(s). These figures are never described in any great detail, but are only referred to as on their way or yet to come in some sense. In section 42 of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche claims that “A new breed of philosophers is approaching”, and in the next two sections go on to describe the new philosophers variously as “friends of ‘truth’,” “free, very free spirits,” and “something more, higher, greater, and fundamentally different” (Beyond Good and Evil, Sections 42-44). Similar passages can be found in The Gay Science as well, such as in section 289, entitled “Get on the ships!” wherein Nietzsche claims that “a new justice is needed! And a new motto! And new philosophers!” (The Gay Science, Sec 289). Again it seems that the character of the new philosopher is clearly a type of messianic figure in whom Nietzsche places a high degree of faith and trust, insofar as he expects him to take up Nietzsche’s crusade in reforming morality. As we know, the concept of the new philosopher becomes even more explicitly messianic and divine later in Nietzsche’s work when it morphs into the Ubermensch, who is explicitly tied to the death of God. It is not clear that Nietzsche was aware of the messianic nature of his conceptions of the new philosopher (who is also identified closely with the related concept of the free spirit), but it does seem clear that this messianic, eschatological tendency exists in his work. In this way, the influence of God and Christianity can be seen leaking in where Nietzsche had meant to keep it out.

We should also explore the ways in which Nietzsche presents the death of God in his work, and how these might indicate the true nature of this event. The most important passage to look at to this end will be section 125 of The Gay Science, which is entitled “The madman” and in which Nietzsche gives the definitive account of the death of God. The passage relates the story of a madman who lights a lantern early in the morning and goes out into the marketplace asking people if they have seen God. After failing to garner any attention, the madman cries out that “We have killed him!-you and I! We are all his murderers!” (The Gay Science, Sec 125). The madman goes on to attempt to illustrate how the death of God will affect society and how the general population is not even aware of the magnitude of their murder of God.

A number of questions can be raised about this passage that might suggest ways in which God has somehow survived his death. Firstly we might ask about the meaning of putting this proclamation of God’s death in the mouth of a madman. This could indicate a type of subconscious uneasiness on the part of Nietzsche about how to proclaim the death of God. Importantly, Nietzsche does not identify himself with the madman and so is not himself making this proclamation, and we should note that when the death of God is mentioned again (in section 343) it is presented in quotes, never being said without qualification by Nietzsche himself. By having a madman speak it, Nietzsche leaves open two possibilities: one, that the madman is a prophet who is only mad in the context of a society still under the spell of God, or two, that the madman is actually mad and his proclamation of the death of God is not accurate. This ambiguity is further heightened by the fact that the madman himself admits that he has come too soon, and that the event “is still on its way, wandering” (The Gay Science, Sec 125). It is unclear what this phrase means. It could simply suggest that the effects of God’s death are not yet noticeable, as nobody has yet grasped the nature of a world without God. On the other hand, it could suggest that there really has been a type of rupture or disjointure in the flow of time and events (the madman lighting his lantern even though it is light outside seems related to this), perhaps allowing for God himself to slip out of his own death, or at least, perhaps, his ghost. The death of God, like God himself, seems to be a concept that is fundamentally indefinite and not easily delineated, especially within time. The madman declares that God has died, and yet that God remains dead, implying that he had been dead in the past. Given this nonlinear presentation of God’s death, it is not surprising that Nietzsche showed some discomfort proclaiming God’s death with complete certainty himself, and guessed that the shadow cast by God (or God’s ghost?) might linger on for millennia. It seems that the death of God is presented as a process which is constantly unfolding and refolding back onto itself in history (Nietzsche points to a shift in historical time after the death of God when he claims that our world appears “older” when God is dead [The Gay Science, Sec 343]), and as such can never be fully complete. The madman says “my time is not yet” and indeed it may never be, because even as God dies, he continually is resurrected as the living dead to die over again.

Given the two ideas outlined above (the pervasive influence of the messianic in Nietzsche’s work, and the profound non-finality of God’s death), it seems we have some reason to believe that Nietzsche’s project of dealing with a world after God’s death was continually intruded upon by an God who was not fully dead. While Nietzsche saw himself as Christian in many ways, it seems he was never able to fully acknowledge or understand the disquiet that came from the specter of God which he was never able to fully exorcise. For what is perhaps the most dramatic validation of this point, we ought to turn to an illustration from Nietzsche’s personal life. When Nietzsche was financially secure enough to do so, he bought a headstone for his father, who had died in Nietzsche’s childhood. On the headstone he had engraved a passage from 1 Corinthians; “Love never ceases.” On the days when Nietzsche might have visited his father’s grave, and sat with the engraved text which represented the apparition he could never be rid of, the group taken altogether could only be viewed as the most Christian of gatherings: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

Works Cited

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