Nihilism: Active vs. Passive and the Death of God
Nihilism: A Disease of Western Culture
In the Nietzschean conception, nihilism is not a theory but a way of life, a way of feeling and acting. More strictly, nihilism is a disease. It is the broken line of Western culture from Socrates until now. As Heidegger says in the Introduction to Metaphysics, nihilism is the destruction of the earth and of man’s gregarization. We call “nihilism” the unhappy consciousness and lack of ability to create that characterizes Western man. We are all immersed in the nihilism that has forged the philosophical language and understanding of the world (resentful, gloomy, fixated on finding the meaning of life outside of life itself) that is the bone marrow of our decadent culture.
The Error of Seeking Truth Outside of Life
Since Socrates and Plato, the West remains in the same error: seeking the truth in the Suprasensible world (Ideas) and, instead, neglecting life. Therefore, nihilism is not a theory but a diagnosis: we are sad to suppress life. In nihilism, the master died in this flight, alive. Nihilism is “bad repetition” where everything is the same as it always was: insignificant and miserable. We do not know what is wanted or what power is. Gray triumphs over green living.
Nihilism has come to form the bone marrow of Western thought. We know we cannot think straight about life as an adventure: we have had to reduce it to a dead letter, mediocre and meaningless.
Active vs. Passive Nihilism
Nihilism can be active or passive. As in the book Thus Spoke Zarathustra (in the chapter “Of the Three Metamorphoses”), the symbol of passive nihilism is the camel (submissive, head bowed, capable of crossing the desert that is the existential vacuum). However, the symbol of active nihilism is the lion that kills in rage and wants to be lord of the desert. Camel and lion have in common the fact that they are symbols of a miserable consciousness; they think of life in terms of pain and morality, judged as a form of evil. So they can never be Supermen. Being Superman means going beyond both the camel and the lion. So the symbol of the Superman is the child: the child is innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a game, a wheel that spins itself, a first movement, a sacred “yes.” Only the baby’s innocence, openness to life, pure potentiality, pure creation, and future. In the child, life begins again and reinvents itself as pure potential.
Passive nihilism represents the subjugation of life to ideas. The camel kneels, crosses the desert burdened by the weight of its own load. Also, the nihilist man kneels before that which he does not understand and accepts that guilt and sin are the lack of meaning of life. What is heavy? Asks the spirit that knows how to bear, and the camel kneels, and is loaded to go… love those who despise us and give the phantom a hand.
Active nihilism represents the inability to create and resentment. In the lonely desert, the camel becomes a lion. But the lion is powerless to create. It knows what not to do, but it does not know what to do and therefore cannot be a Superman.
The Fatal Error of Nihilism
Although nihilism is a disease, the nihilists construct “other worlds” because they are afraid of this world, the only true one: they willingly fled from their own skin. So listen to the preachers of death and preach other worlds themselves. Better than my brothers, you should listen to the voice of the healthy body: this is a more honest and pure voice. More honest talk, pure and healthy body, perfect body and well built: and speaking of the meaning of the earth. (Zarathustra, Book I, “Of the Afterworldly”). The fatal error of nihilism and all European culture is to place life outside the walls of life itself. They believed that ideas (dead) can govern life, and this is their big mistake: underestimating the will to power.
The Death of God and the Superman
The term God is dead. This phrase is central to Nietzschean thought that refers to the fate of more than two thousand years of Western thought (Judeo-Christian) stained with nihilism. God is dead means that the Suprasensible world lacks operating force and dispensation of life. Western metaphysics, understood as Platonism, is over. Nietzsche understands his own philosophy as a movement opposed to Platonism, as anti-metaphysics. The whole history of Western thought has been that of metaphysics. So saying the death of God is equivalent to considering that nihilism has reached its culmination, from Socrates and Plato to Kant’s categorical imperative, philosophy has always taught to repress desire and subordinate it to the ideal (having to be Kantian). We have always had a God (a value that weighs more than life). But modern man discovered the death of God as a central issue of our time. God is not dead, but a vulgar question of atheism. Atheism would be a private matter between a man and his God; someone might stop believing what he had believed until then, but it would be a purely private matter. The death of God, however, is an argument that affects us all. It means that everywhere we run out of criteria and, therefore, we lack a first truth from which to assess things. God was the name given to the predominance of sad ideas about life; therefore, his death means that an initial lack of truth from which to value things, there is no criterion to model order because God was Suprasensible and image. Now the death of God means the complete and total subversion of values. We have lost not only the Christian God but the supreme criterion that allowed us to evaluate. The loss of confidence in the value of the Suprasensible is essential to transvaluation. So far, we judged (and condemned) life from the Ideas. Now life appears as an independent criterion. So the book Thus Spoke Zarathustra ends proclaiming: Dead are all Gods: now we want the Superman to live; this may once, at the great noon, be our last will. The death of God opens the way for a Superman with a sense of the earth. But attention should be paid because this is usually misunderstood. In no way does it mean that the Superman is the new god. What this means is that the time needed for the gods is over forever. God is a concept alien to Nietzsche’s life. If God is dead, his throne is empty. Now begins a new era devoid of gods: the will to power and the Superman. God is a symbol of anguish, sacrifice, submission to death. Therefore, he cannot have a successor: any attempt to fill his emptiness with idols (the masses in socialism that Nietzsche hated) is doomed, doomed as are the parodies. With the death of God, a period in the history of philosophy is closed. From now on, a new period begins based on the will to power. Nietzsche summed up the struggle that begins with a phrase: Dionysus against the Crucified. Dionysus was the Greek god of the festival of theater and wine, a symbol of the will to power. The Crucified One, however, is the symbol of death, anguish, and pain that must be passed through for the great “yes” to life that begins the time of gods without the will to power.