NIETZSCHE

Nietzsche: God is dead



Nietzsche: God is dead

Introduction

The opinion of Nietzche, that is God is dead, is wrong as there are various factors or indications from which it can be observe that the God is present as he is keeping his eye on the humans. Nietzche believed, he was kindling a spiritual war that would define the coming centuries and decide the fate of humankind. “God is dead,” Nietzsche said and added that God deserved to die, because the spiritual force behind the idea of a transcendent god is the judgment that life is no good. The result was that Nietzsche became best known for his NEGATIONS and grasped as one whose essential work was critical or destructive; however, various past researchers do not agree with his opinion.

Discussion

Nietzsche's influence on postmodernism is perhaps unmatched. One might argue that postmodernism as a philosophical phenomenon began with the publication of Gilles Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy in 1963, which championed Nietzsche's affirmative challenge to a Hegelian articulation of the religious and the secular. To an extent, Nietzsche himself thinks within this opposition, but he also disrupts it. The death of God is the death of the Christian God, the God of metaphysics or “onto-theology” In the wake of this passing, however, one finds the affirmative language of divinity inscribed throughout the margins of Nietzsche's later work in the figures of Dionysus, eternity and in the saturnalias of his Nietzschean affirmation. A similar tension is found in considering Paul Ricœur's description of Nietzsche, with Marx and Freud, as a “master of suspicion.” Each developed complex hermeneutical strategies for unmasking dynamics of power and motivation, but where Marx and Freud sought to ground their unmaskings “scientifically,” in the material codes of society or psyche, Nietzsche's suspicion extended to the ideal of enlightenment itself: he never simply rejected enlightenment, but he constantly sought to identify and disrupt the limits of reason and consciousness. His thought oscillates, therefore, between the promise of enlightenment and its impossibility, leading some to condemn his thought as nihilistic and others to celebrate his liberation from the metaphysics of conceptual, ethical, and religious foundationalism (Lefebure, 1981).

Nietzsche's aphoristic and stylistically plural writing has inspired postmodern critiques of dichotomies that privilege content over style, concept over figure, and consciousness over body. His genealogical method, a radical historicizing of concepts and values, and particularly his genealogies of the “will to truth,” the “ascetic ideal,” and western metaphysics, has raised epistemological and ethical questions with which we continue to grapple today. Indeed, without these critical resources neither Jacques Derrida's deconstruction nor Michel Foucault's genealogical analyses of power, knowledge, and sexuality would have been possible. But Nietzsche's legacy also raises complex questions about the nature of postmodernity itself, and its relation to modernity. Consider the most famous sentence in Nietzsche's writing: “God is dead.” Though for modernists and postmodernists alike, this pronouncement can point to the end of religion, it only does so if one remains bound by the modern distinction between the religious and the secular (Santaniello, ...