Twentieth-Century Nihilism: Death of God
Nietzsche’s parable is well-known enough. A madman lights a lantern in the early hours and runs into a market place, shouting, “I seek God!” Reacting with indignation to the laughter of the townspeople, he jumps in their midst and cries, “Where is God? I will tell you…God is dead. And we have killed him…How shall we comfort ourselves, murderers of all murderers?”
It was the year 1891. Friedrich Nietzsche published the final instalment of his philosophical novel, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, naming therein a spectre which, having emerged fifty years earlier in Russia, had begun to cast its dark shadow over Western Europe: the spectre of nihilism.
At first glance, the above-quoted parable may appear hyperbolic. But when Nietzsche spoke of deicide, he was not posturing for dramatic effect. The ‘de-theification’ of all human thought which was first set in motion in Renaissance Italy, had by the end of the nineteenth century reached a point of such all-encompassing influence as to be virtually undeniable by any serious thinker as the new intellectual paradigm. ‘God is dead’, to Nietzsche, meant ‘god is irrelevant’ (which, needless to say, wouldn’t have had the same ring to it). Given the philosopher’s strong atheistic bent, it doubtless also meant ‘god never existed at all’.
This declaration of godlessness, brazen though it may sound, should come as no surprise; the centuries-long progression just mentioned had more than paved the way for it.
The non-existence of god was not a new idea; medieval theologians like Thomas Aquinas and St Ambrose had gone to great lengths to rebut it. Before the nineteenth century, however, atheism was a mere thought experiment; a hypothetical non-reality utilised by religious thinkers as a tool to consolidate their theistic convictions. But hypothesis had now morphed into a very vivid and, in certain respects, nightmarish reality.
Suddenly, without an all-powerful and all-loving being at its helm, the universe was cold and empty, with nothing but dead, mechanistic forces animating its movements and determining its fate. Man was left alone in the dark, with no benevolent father looking down on him, no infinitely just judge ensuring a blissful eternal life as reward for a pious earthly one.
And now for Nietzsche’s coup de grace. In this godless world order, he argued, not only would you have to renounce happiness in the afterlife; you would most probably have to resign yourself to misery and chaos in this one as well. For if god didn’t exist, there was no one to help us tell right from wrong, no one to inform us how to live justly.
Worse still, with no morally infallible being to decree it from on high, there could be no right or wrong in the first place, no good or evil – only relative judgments thereof, which, because they were man-derived, could by necessity be nothing but arbitrary.
This is the nihilistic argument in a nutshell. If god alone can determine Truth, universal and eternal, then in a godless universe, there can exist no such Truth.
This is the nihilistic argument in a nutshell. If god alone can determine Truth, universal and eternal, then in a godless universe, there can exist no such Truth.
And in a world with no Truth, there can be no immutable values; no single way of living that, by universal consensus, can be judged just and good across all times and cultures. If this was true, Nietzsche asked, how then were we to live? If there was no Truth, no infallible font of right and wrong, from where were we to derive a coherent morality? Or a sense of purpose and meaning? What would prevent social order from degenerating into chaos?
This ethical quandary had been pre-empted by, arguably, the century’s greatest moralist and an idol of Nietzsche’s: Fyodor Dostoevsky. In Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov (1880), Ivan, the most coldly intellectual figure in the novel, is debating with his deeply religious brother Alexey, when he orgiastically affirms: “If God doesn’t exist, all is permitted!”
Here, Dostoevsky was articulating a bone-chilling fear that had plagued him his entire creative life. Having noted the moral nihilism that had first emerged in the 1840s with anarchist thinker Mikhail Bakunin, Dostoevsky, a devout Orthodox Christian, decided to combat it head on, and wield his literary gift to help divert the terrifying lawlessness he felt it was sure to bring about. In his last fifteen years, in fact, he produced most of his greatest masterpieces: Crime and Punishment (1866), The Possessed (1872), The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877) and The Brothers Karamazov. All of these are dedicated precisely to this urgent moral task.
Nietzsche and Dostoevsky’s fears of a godless chaos are, for the most part, unjustified. Nonetheless, it is important to keep in mind that, to a newly atheistic people still grieving the loss of a heavenly father, they would have felt very real. Let us furthermore not underestimate their long-term tenacity. The ethical stresses arising out of a godless universe have persisted to the present, and the history of philosophy of the next 130 years can, with little exaggeration, be seen as a drawn-out attempt to satisfactorily allay them.
The earliest of these attempts was, I dare say, an immature one: if god doesn’t exist, then man is god. In the absence of a divine commander, man can do whatever he wants, and become whoever he wants. He could devise his own morality and, if whim gets the better of him, discard and refashion it.
Dostoevsky and Nietzsche both explicitly proposed this solution, in differing contexts: Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov: “Once humanity has rejected God…the man-God will be born”; Nietzsche, in Zarathustra with his notorious Übermensch theory: “Man is something to be overcome… The Übermensch is the lightning and the thunder.”
Writing some sixty years later, the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre provided his own spin. “Existence precedes essence,” he wrote in Existentialism is a Humanism (1946) – roughly meaning this: because there is no ‘one’ cosmic Truth, we all come into this world void of eternal, immutable qualities. We’re born, in other words, simply existing – tabula rasa, one might almost say. The various bits and pieces that come to constitute our essence, we acquire slowly over time and mostly in haphazard fashion.
Ultimately, this meant one thing for Sartre: we are free – completely and utterly. If the qualities we possess are all acquired and not innate, it means we can deselect them at will, and replace them with others of our choosing. We are, in other words, man-gods, able to make of ourselves what our fancy desires, and limited in this respect by our ambition and imagination alone.
As leftfield a proposition this may seem, it is far from a historical anomaly. The death of a metaphysical god was, after all, declared just as the godliness of the individual was in the ascendancy. The Romantics had not yet anointed themselves as divine but, convinced as they were of their priestliness, of their mystical (and very godlike) powers, they had been but a small step away. With the advent of nihilism, they were able to take the final plunge.
The individual was, no longer sage and sorcerer, but supreme deity; no longer shaper, but creator of destinies; no longer a conduit of the transcendent, but its lord and master. Like Napoleon a century earlier, modern man had removed god’s crown and placed it on his own head. Individualism and nihilism had fused to form an existentialist’s solution to godlessness.
