Nietzsche’s Critique of Enlightenment: Nihilism and the Death of God
The Crisis of Enlightenment Reason: Nihilism
Nihilism encompasses all of Western culture: metaphysics, epistemology, anthropology, morality, and religion. Western metaphysics (Platonic-Christian) has created an illusory and unreal world. All of this is a manifestation of humanity’s helplessness to accept life’s irrationality, its blind and senseless path, and therefore, its horror and pain. The same can be said of religion and values.
Nietzsche understands nihilism (from *nihil* = nothing) as the inability to love and appreciate life in the affirmative. Humans prefer not to want anything, to accidentally invent a world, rather than face the tragic truth.
Two Kinds of Nihilism
- Passive Nihilism: Expresses the will to power as weakness. It is the psychological state that occurs when one realizes that what they believed in and what gave meaning to their life is falling apart because it is nothing.
- Active Nihilism: Expresses the strength of the will to power. This leads to a reassessment of life. This new assessment is not done through rational reflection, but by something “instinctive.”
Atheism and the Transvaluation of Values
Transmuting values does not mean eliminating them, but changing them. Before proposing this change, Nietzsche undertakes the destruction of all traditional values. The idea of God (perfect, truth, goodness, and supreme beauty) represents for Nietzsche the maximum realization of the values of Judeo-Christian deception to submit to humanity, and the underestimation of the human. Nietzsche is forced to kill and bury this idea.
“God is dead” means that without the transcendent world as the source of all reality, humanity is without sense or guidance to give to this life. Without God, humanity has lost all direction in the world.
The conclusion is that there is no place for God in contemporary culture. Moreover, the “Death of God” is the greatest of facts because it is an event that divides the history of humankind.
The Death of God and the Crisis of Values
Although the idea of God represents for Nietzsche the maximum realization of the values of Judeo-Christianity, God is only the appearance or most powerful manifestation of something more general, namely, “slave morality,” the morality of the weak and resentful. Nietzsche explains how the original moral categories “good” = “noble” and “bad” = “commoner” are transformed by the weak and resentful.
Two Types of Morality
- Slave Morality: The morality of the weak, failing to realize life’s values. It presents as “good” the values of resignation, obedience, patience, and suffering. It considers as “bad” all human values of life such as enjoyment and liberty.
- Master Morality: The morality of the strong, who can realize the values of life and are not subject to any will. They are the people who love life and pleasure, and in whom reason is driven by instincts.
Atheism was a necessary phase. Accepting atheism with all its consequences is the starting point to begin a new era. The affirmation of life’s history had to pass through the desert of pessimism and nihilism in order to begin again.