Nietzsche And Arendt's Influence On Religion

Our society has been shaped by countless thinkers over the ages. Western culture can be traced all the way back to ancient figures like Aristotle and Plato. As history proceeds, more and more ideas are created about various important topics. Even modern thinkers have made a vast impact on today’s society. One of the most influential philosophers in the past 200 years was Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche lived during the 1800s. Some of his more well known works include The Gay Science and On the Genealogy of Morals. His ideas that were presented in these works on morality and religion impacted the world in a massive way. Another modern figure that influenced the world was the political theorist, Hannah Arendt, who lived during the 1900s. Her
Arendt does this through her identification of the two illusions of democracy that were destroyed during the rise of totalitarian movements. She points out that the masses were more successful because of these illusions that were in place. She writes, “… democratic government had rested as much on the silent approbation and tolerance of the indifferent and inarticulate section of people as on the articulate and visible institutions and organizations of the country” (467). If these illusions had been identified and dealt with earlier, then maybe the events of Nazi Germany and Communist Russia would have been very different. In a similar way, Nietzsche criticizes democracy. Nietzsche opposed Christianity in many of his works, and he saw democracy as the result of Christianity. He held the position that democracy was established by the weak as a way to promote a group in order to reach mediocrity. He rejected this mediocrity and saw democracy as a decline in society. As can be seen, both Arendt and Nietzsche have some sort of criticism of
In one of Nietzsche’s most famous quotes he writes, “God is dead, god remains dead, and we have killed him” (352). He is not only saying that god does not exist, but that humanity has lost the ability to believe in anything like a god. Nietzsche predicts that the coming age will be an age of nihilism as a result of this. Nihilism is “a viewpoint that traditional values and beliefs are unfounded and that existence is senseless and useless” (Merriam). In the same way, Arendt explains how a loss in something to believe in occurred in totalitarian movements. She explains how this caused people in Nazi Germany and Communist Russia to latch onto their movements because it was simply something to believe in. Arendt writes, “…Nothing perhaps distinguishes modern masses as radically from those of previous centuries as the loss of faith in a Last Judgement: the worst have lost their fear and the best have lost their hope” (471). Totalitarian movements were essentially created from these people who had developed nihilism. These people were unafraid to use force and violence to achieve the goal that had been imposed on them by their leaders. This loss of something to believe in can be seen in both Nietzsche’s and Arendt’s