Compare Nihilism And The Death Of God By Nietzsche

Nietzsche, Nihilism and the Death of God

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche while producing many works, consistently wrote on five main concepts: nihilism; revaluation of values; will to power; the eternal return; and the overman. Yet all these concepts stem from another concept which was not previously mentioned and is possibly what Nietzsche is most well known for. Even those who can merely utter Nietzsche’s name can usually tie it to the proclamation of the death of God. This essay aims to focus not on Nietzsche the man, but his concepts of nihilism and the death of god with reference to Nietzsche’s works themselves as well as input from secondary sources, on Nietzsche and his philosophy. However neither of these concepts can be fully
In the beginning, mankind found itself divided into the high and low classes. The higher class consisted of those that had power namely the priests or high religious officials. These priests felt a sense of superiority, which was justified by the fact that they were indeed superior and highly ranked clergymen. This sense of superiority Nietzsche called the pathos of distance in which they became alienated from the low. Through this feeling what was considered good and bad gained its meaning, that which was associated with the priests was good and that which was associated with the lower class was bad. The lower class, from this situation, began to have growing resentment of those in the higher class. The ideas of what was good and bad reversed and the low became pious and the high became impious. From this change came the slave morality, where the low were good and the high and all they possessed was bad. With the uprising of the lower class and thus the creation of the slave morality, the priests began to doubt their superiority over the low. The high succumbed to the slave morality and the way in which the high lived their lives began to be classed as sinful. From this the priests began to have guilt for their superior lives, and their values too undertook revaluation, after which they
Nietzsche believed that the whole of society around him had been affected by nihilistic thought and that not just current society but for the century preceding and the century to follow would be afflicted with nihilism. Goudsblom (1980) believed that nihilism was the path taken when existence had lost all meaning, yet he posited that there were two forms of nihilism which could be drawn from Nietzschean though; active nihilism and passive nihilism. Active nihilism is seen as a force which destroys all false values and creates a new way of thought, it does not despair woe is me, nor is it just the thought that all must be destroyed, it is action in this thought (Goudsblom 1980, p. 12). Passive nihilism is the resignation to the ever-looming hopelessness and produces active search for something to believe in, for loss of previous beliefs. Yet the common ground these two hold is purposelessness, which brings us closer to the meaning behind nihilism (Goudsblom 1980, p. 12) .Goudsblom (1980) found in Nietzsche’s words the best way to define nihilism as “that the highest values devalue themselves” (p. 11). This means that for a nihilist, all values have become obsolete; “life has no objective, that any purpose which we attribute to existence is no more than our interpretation of it, false and untenable” (Goudsblom 1980, p. 11). For the realisation of all this, the nihilist is helpless to its