The Story of Nietzche: The Man Who Killed God

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. The words of Friedrich Nietzsche have echoed through generations. Although many know the statement and even quote it, only a few people truly understand its meaning. Because, just like much of Nietzsche's work, there's more than meets the eye.

This is the story of Nietzsche, the man who killed God. At face value, the statement "God is dead" means that God existed and no longer exists, or, in a more philosophical sense, God only exists in the hearts of those who believe. And so, at a time when it seemed like Europe was turning towards atheism, God no longer existed. God was dead. Well, this was certainly part of what Nietzsche meant; it wasn't the full story. Nietzsche wasn't praising atheism or the fact that belief in God was dying; he was just explaining how a decline in the belief in God creates both a crisis and an opportunity.

"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement? What sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?" Although the first line of the statement is the most well-known, the last line is the one that tells us Nietzsche's true intent. He believed that to fill the void created by a lack of belief in God, humans would need to become gods ourselves, creating our own values and morals. For some, this was liberating and comforting, but for others, it was the validation they needed to commit heinous crimes against humanity.

After dropping the most lethal weapon humanity had ever created, J. Robert Oppenheimer lamented, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." He realized he had opened Pandora's box and had forever put humanity in mortal danger. I can't help but wonder if Nietzsche would have felt the same way if he saw the results of his philosophy in our world, or is it something he would have condoned or even encouraged? To figure that out, we have to go back to the beginning of his life and his philosophy.

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Back to our story. Ironically, Friedrich Nietzsche was born to a town pastor, Carl Ludwig Nietzsche, and his wife, Francisca Nietzsche, in 1844. His uncle and both of his grandfathers were Lutheran ministers, and his grandfather, on his father's side, was a scholar who wrote about the survival of Christianity. It’s safe to say Nietzsche grew up surrounded by Christianity. When he was five, he lost his father to a brain hemorrhage; his 2-year-old brother died six months later. Nietzsche and his younger sister, Elisabeth, were left in the sole care of their mother. Losing both his father and younger brother so young had an impact on his personal beliefs, and these tragic events stayed with him his entire life.

Growing up, he was interested in music and literature. He was notably fond of the composer Richard Wagner. He appreciated romantic writers like David Strauss, who wrote the infamous Life of Jesus, a critically acclaimed book that demythologized Jesus Christ and was controversial for obvious reasons. Nietzsche went to boarding school and eventually enrolled at the University of Bonn in 1864, where he studied theology, the study of religion, and philology, the historical study of literary and mechanical texts. During his time as a student, his peers and teachers considered him a brilliant scholar. He quickly directed his focus to philology and pursued it at the University of Leipzig.

There, he started reading the works of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer and was impressed by his godless worldview and the value of art in his philosophy of pessimism. Schopenhauer also understood humanity's main motivation, which he described as an aimless striving or desire. He believed that the will could never be satisfied; it always wants something, and when it gets what it wants, it wants something else. This insatiable will inevitably leads to suffering; there's never satisfaction. If this sounds familiar, it's because Schopenhauer's pessimism was inspired by Buddhism. The Buddha insisted that craving was the source of human suffering, which is very similar to Schopenhauer's philosophy.

Schopenhauer believed humans had to deny their will to be compassionate and good. This involved living a life of self-denial, rejecting earthly pleasures, and denying one's desire as much as possible. Filled with inspiration from Schopenhauer and Wagner, Nietzsche wrote his first book, The Birth of Tragedy. In it, he laments the loss of Dionysian energy in Western society. In Greek mythology, Dionysus is the god of fertility, wine, pleasure, and theater. Dionysian energy refers to the sensual, spontaneous, and emotional aspects of human nature. Nietzsche believed that since the time of Socrates, Western society had become too focused on logic and rationality, to the point where society had become repressed and even unhealthy.

"Perhaps there is a realm of wisdom from which the logician is exiled; perhaps art is even a necessary correlative and supplement for science." Nietzsche described reality and creativity as non-rational. This Dionysian spirit of embracing primordial creativity and the joy of existence was best expressed in art and music. In his time, there was what Nietzsche considered a rebirth of the tragic spirit in music by the likes of Wagner, Beethoven, and Bach. He felt their music was filled with Dionysian energy and could help save European culture from repression.

At the University of Leipzig, Nietzsche met the German composer Richard Wagner, whom he admired greatly. Nietzsche enjoyed an almost familial friendship with Wagner, even though the composer was of a similar age to his father. They bonded over their appreciation for the philosophy of Schopenhauer, and, of course, music. Even though the friendship was filled with conflict, Nietzsche was very proud to have Wagner as a friend. Their fights affected him deeply. After writing The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche turned away from Schopenhauer and Wagner, rejecting what he saw as a life-denying philosophy on one hand, and art of the past on the other.

He wrote his second work, Human, All Too Human, which was more science-inspired. It moved away from the idea that art and tragedy would restore culture and toward a culture grounded in scientific knowledge. Amid the different philosophical trajectories, Nietzsche's friendship with Wagner ended. Human, All Too Human marks the first time Nietzsche started writing in short passages and aphorisms as a style to reflect his new philosophical direction. He didn't give a comprehensive account explaining why he started writing this way; still, it did allow him to explore different themes and perspectives in each book, and it likely also worked better for him due to his frequent bouts of illness.

Nietzsche was very sick throughout his life. At the age of 23, he was injured in military service. He suffered a chest wound that took a long time to heal. At 25, he contracted diphtheria while taking care of wounded soldiers in the Franco-Prussian War. At 34, Nietzsche resigned his position as a professor at Basel University due to his health issues. He had eyesight problems, migraine headaches, and was prone to vomiting. His health deteriorated so much that he was unable to function in his role.

While Nietzsche struggled with his physical health, he pursued the value of good psychological health in his work. For that, it meant avoiding the abyss of nihilism while, at the same time, staying far away from biblical values that he considered unhealthy. In one of his works, The Gay Science, he famously declared that "God is dead." He believed that belief in the Christian God was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain and that it was destined to collapse. This wasn't surprising, as Nietzsche was writing after the Age of Enlightenment in Europe.

The Age of Enlightenment was an intellectual and philosophical movement in Europe around the 17th and 18th centuries. During this period, there was a scientific revolution, and religion started to take a backseat in favor of reason and the scientific method. The power of religious authority, which had been dormant for over a millennia, was shrinking in its influence over European society. Atheism was becoming more accepted and popular. However, unlike most other atheists at the time, Nietzsche wasn't interested in proving that God didn't exist; he considered that a given. So, he focused on preparing society for the inevitable absence of a god figure and the long shadow it would cast on humanity.

Without God, the morals of Judeo-Christianity lost their foundations for belief. Philosophers in Nietzsche's time tried to find a rational justification for these same values, but Nietzsche thought this was naive. Without God, these values would ultimately vanish, but they're thoroughly ingrained in the psyche of the Western world. To uproot them, Nietzsche took it upon himself to deconstruct the origin of these values by demonstrating that they don't have a foundation in rational thought. In his book The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche deconstructed values in the Bible to show that they come from slaves' resentment toward their masters, rather than a rational concern for others.

He described the dominant emotion that created slave morality as slaves' prejudice against their masters, who had achieved the kind of happiness they could not. Before the dominance of slave morality, the masters, or nobles, evaluated people using a good-and-bad framework. They valued people based on their qualities. Nietzsche referred to the way nobles valued things as "master morality." Given that the nobles were masters of the slaves, slave morality took the noble's values and condemned them as evil, and the opposite to be morally good. Any harm towards another person was considered morally wrong. This was their philosophical revenge against the masters, born from resentment.

Christianity was Nietzsche's primary example of slave morality, valuing equality, humility, selfless concern for others, love, and forgiveness. He cites the vengeful outbursts in the Bible as more evidence for his foundation in resentment for a religion based on love and forgiveness. There are quite a few vengeful moments in the Bible, such as passages on brimstone, hellfire, and damnation. These values and condemnations seem at direct odds with each other. In addition to them having an irrational foundation, Nietzsche believed that biblical values were actually harmful to one's psychological health.

Guilt plays a significant role in the Christian psyche. Nietzsche suggests that it's very similar to the notion of indebtedness. When we harm someone, slave morality binds us to them, or to be punished by owing the victim something. This relationship between compensation and immoral action is internalized. When someone commits an immoral act, they feel indebted, negatively impacting their sense of self-worth; they feel guilt. Moral guilt is internalized in a very intense way. It applies to any violation of the rules, regardless of whether there's an actual victim. Anyone can resent and blame the rule breaker, regardless of whether they're a victim or not. Guilt even becomes free from rules to form a pathological desire for self-punishment.

"We want to be punished to alleviate ourselves from the feeling of indebtedness," or striving for purity. The ascetic priest had obviously been victorious; his kingdom had come. People no longer protested against pain; they thirsted after pain. The logical conclusion of this way of thinking ultimately leads to becoming an ascetic, someone who rejects self-indulgence and practices extreme self-discipline. The only way to live free from the feeling of indebtedness is to always be punishing yourself. According to Nietzsche, this harms a person's sense of self-worth.

A big problem for Western society is that the death of God leaves a void that humans need to fill as valued creatures. Nietzsche believed it was the role of philosopher-types, like himself, to create these values. Nietzsche is often labeled a nihilist, as many may have assumed. Although he's usually credited as the father of nihilism, he's actually protested against it, while acknowledging that there's no inherent value in anything. Nietzsche believed that living in this valueless state can lead to despair and suicide, and as a result, should be avoided. That's why Nietzsche spent much of his time writing, proposing new values for humanity.

However, how he intended his proposed values to be understood isn't 100% clear. He most likely didn't mean for them to be taken as objective truths, because he insisted that values must be created; they don't exist in the world to be discovered. In this way, Nietzsche believed in perspectivism—the philosophy that we don't have access to objective truth in the world because we always view things from a perspective. We can't access an independent point of view like some omniscient god. When philosophers write about an objective truth, Nietzsche suggests they're speaking more about themselves and their perspective rather than the truth. He seems to think of value creation almost as an artistic expression, but just as he assessed biblical values by how they impact psychological health, his own values are intended to produce a healthier mind.

The ultimate goal of his values is to create the conditions for a healthier psyche in a post-God world, where slave morality rejects so much of life, like bodily pleasures and excellence. Nietzsche's values align with life itself. This couldn't be more present than in his value of affirmation. Affirmation is about saying yes to life; all the pain, joy, and pleasure. It's about saying yes to every detail of our past, present, and future. It's taking what is necessary in life and finding it beautiful.

"I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things. A morality, let that be my love henceforth. I don't want to wage war against what is ugly. I don't want to accuse; I don't even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation." And all in all, and on the whole, "Someday I wish to be a only yes-sayer." Nietzsche's affirmation rejects nihilism, which finds no value in life. It also undermines values that reject the fundamental parts of life, like the slave morality he described.

Christianity requires repenting our life on Earth to access Heaven, a more pure plane of existence. It asks us to turn against ourselves and our bodies, and it wants us to negate life. Nietzsche asks us to affirm it. Now, it's important not to confuse affirmation with hedonism. Nietzsche criticized hedonism for making pain and evil unacceptable. Not only is pain a fundamental part of life, but it's instrumental in our ability to overcome and affirm life.

Being sick and recovering allows you to appreciate life more, which wouldn't be possible without the pain of sickness. Without experiencing pain, we would never be able to appreciate pleasure. Where Christianity asks you to reject sensuality in your desire for excellence, Nietzsche's affirmation asks you to embrace them. His value even asks you to say yes to those rejecting life through slave morality, pessimism, and nihilism. This doesn't mean you accept their beliefs but embrace their presence and necessity in life.

In each doctrine on the eternal recurrence, he tests your ability to affirm life. Imagine that you'll live your life the exact same way over and over again for eternity. Your life, as it's lived, is a cycle that will keep repeating. Can you say yes to your most painful, embarrassing memories? Can you allow them to happen again and again for eternity? Will you live the rest of your life in a way you can affirm?

This test helps you affirm that everything that has happened to you in your life up until this moment was necessary and teaches you to strive towards a life that you would be willing to live over and over again—not just the good parts of life. You say yes to everything, from the highs of a young romance to the lows of your most painful breakup. After Nietzsche left his university position, he lived a nomadic life, traveling Europe looking for a more accommodating climate for his health.

He became friends with an academic named Lou Salomé, with whom he had a strong intellectual connection. Nietzsche's friend Paul Rée and Salomé planned to move in together to form an intellectual commune, but both Nietzsche and Paul developed romantic feelings for Salomé. She left to go live with Paul after Nietzsche proposed to her unsuccessfully, and it was a painful end to their collective relationship.

In his writing, Nietzsche described a person capable of affirming their life entirely as superhuman, or Übermensch. In his text Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the prophet Zarathustra prepares his disciples for the coming of this superhuman. The Übermensch wasn't a specific person or race destined to enslave others, as some have carelessly interpreted; it's just somebody who embodies Nietzsche's value of affirmation to its fullest extent—someone who embraces all of life, not rejecting it as the worshippers of slave morality do.

If we were to affirm everything of life itself, for Nietzsche, that means embracing an undeniable internal drive that is present in all living things. This internal drive is what he called a "will to power," an ingrained inclination towards growth, strength, and expression. We find happiness in overcoming resistance to achieve our end, which ultimately gives us a sense of power and satisfaction. "Life will grow, spread, seize, become dominant—not from any morality or immorality, but because it's living, and because life simply is 'will to power.'"

If this rubs you the wrong way, you're not alone; it's one of the most controversial parts of Nietzsche's philosophy. He believed our will to power is inescapable as it's a fundamental component of life. To express our will to power is to live more healthily. While this view encourages mastery in the form of self-overcoming, it also seems to encourage domination over others. Nietzsche believed we shouldn't pretend all humans are equal and that the more powerful and skilled people should lead the weaker ones.

The problem with this ideology is that, while it might seem healthier for the individual to express their desire to expand and dominate, that domination comes at the expense of another person who is dominated and not free to pursue their own will to power. It's because of this that many people blame Nietzsche's philosophy for the rise of Nazi Germany and other totalitarian states. Although some scholars have suggested that Nietzsche put a much bigger emphasis on self-mastery rather than the domination of others, that notion continues to be debated.

In reality, Nietzsche was never a big proponent of nationalism, and in fact, he greatly opposed the state and nationalism. References to his work from the Nazis were extremely superficial. Hitler read very little of his work and even professed that he had no use for Nietzsche's complex ideas. Nietzsche's philosophy was non-racial, and he openly opposed the growing anti-Semitism in Germany. He even refused to go to his sister's wedding because she was engaged to an anti-Semite. Nietzsche was also deeply troubled by his friend and composer Richard Wagner's antagonism towards Jews.

In 1889, Nietzsche collapsed trying to defend a horse from being whipped. He became an invalid for the remaining 11 years of his life. His sister, Elisabeth, from a failed Aryan colony, took care of him and looked after his body of work. She published a book from his scattered writings called The Will to Power. Its status among Nietzsche's texts is somewhat questionable since someone with an ideological agenda put it together, but there are plenty of consistencies with Nietzsche's other work to warrant consideration.

Another core value of Nietzsche is his commitment to truthfulness. If we are to affirm life in its entirety, we have to be honest about it. We shouldn't be satisfied by a notion of truth simply because it makes us feel a certain way or has a practical benefit. Nietzsche was critical of the Christian apologetic argument that claims that since Christianity can make us feel good, it must be true. Few would accuse Nietzsche of not being boldly honest; his writing is often slanderous and scathing in critique. Few people in this world have thrown such scathing words towards priests as Nietzsche; he even accused them of exercising their dominion over others for satisfaction while guilting Christians for harboring the same sinful desires.

At the same time, Nietzsche warns that an unconditional devotion to the truth can harm the values that make life worth living. Too much honesty about the world can lead to nausea and suicide. You can see how he always tried to avoid the pit of nihilism in his work. Our demands for truth can also never be fully satisfied; we're cognitively limited and are prone to delusion and error. We have to be satisfied with appearances over objective knowledge. Nietzsche believed art could work as a good will to appearance, to alleviate the burden of honesty. It can make the breath of life beautiful, even when it's painful.

He encourages a level of illusion to make affirming life more palatable. "Knowledge kills action, for action requires the state of being in which we are covered with the bauble of illusion." If Nietzsche's value of truthfulness and art as unnecessary illusion seem like contradictions, that's because, well, they are. Nietzsche's values don't work as a perfect system, which can confuse readers of his work. But it all makes a bit more sense if you consider another important value of his: pluralism. According to Nietzsche, we only have perspectives on truth, but to make our best attempts at knowledge, we need to be able to use different outlooks, values, and perspectives to evaluate something.

"The more eyes, different eyes, we know how to bring to bear on one and the same matter, that much more complete will our concept of this matter, our objectivity be." In this way, having multiple competing values would help one find a superior way to evaluate things in life. Understanding Nietzsche's values in this way makes sense; they support each other but also oppose and limit each other. His value of affirmation supports his value of life and power. To affirm all of our existence, we need to acknowledge our desire for power.

However, his value of honesty runs into limitations when considering that we need useful illusions to avoid nihilism. While Nietzsche's values were important to him, he never wanted them to be adopted the way a student adopts facts. He wanted his followers to create themselves and their own values. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the prophet Zarathustra is greatly disappointed when his followers simply adopt his teachings. He offers this departing advice: "Now I go alone, my disciples; you too go now alone. Thus I wanted to go away from me and resist Zarathustra. And even better, be ashamed of him. Perhaps he deceives you. One pays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil."

"Now I bid you to lose me and find yourselves. And only then, when you have all denied me, will I return to you that I may celebrate the great noon with you." Nietzsche wanted us to create values like artists making art. Despite the case he makes for his own, it's unlikely he thought value creation should end with him. Nietzsche encouraged people to be free spirits, to embrace self-determination, and to reject committing to the values of others.

However, Nietzsche clarifies that individuality alone doesn't give someone value. A person has to work on value creation and self-governance, not just on being unique. Nietzsche believed you should give yourself laws to follow and exercise self-control based on them. Most importantly, you shouldn't blindly follow and worship the values of others. Fanaticism is the opposite of what Nietzsche had in mind.

Nietzsche routinely described higher and lower types in his work. The higher ones are people like Napoleon and the writer Goethe, who he believed were able to achieve excellence and live without the constraints of traditional morality or slave morality. They have a psychophysical makeup that enables them to pursue greatness. Importantly, they were autonomous in nature, exuding qualities of a free spirit. These higher types could commit all of themselves to a greater purpose of their own design. They weren't perfect examples of what Nietzsche values, nor should they be examples of Nietzsche's higher types. Most were artists and intellectuals; Napoleon is the only example of a person who pursued the domination of others through war.

The lower types are those who slavishly obey traditional values and seek to bring the higher types down to their level. They are weaker individuals by comparison, resenting anyone who embodies excellence and a free spirit. Nietzsche didn't imply that these types could be divided based on race or class but could be recognized by key traits. The traits aren't mutually exclusive; Nietzsche insists many individuals have both higher and lower traits.

There's a strong element of determinism in Nietzsche's writing; being born a higher type is described a bit like winning the genetic lottery. But again, it's not race-based. He also criticized the idea that we're in full control of our actions, as implied by Christian doctrine. It's a source of debate whether Nietzsche was a hard determinist or believed in some freedom of will. He does seem to imply that our wills are determined to be weak or strong, but a will that is not free at all would undermine his notion of creating yourself.

This could be an example of Nietzsche deploying different perspectives to better understand the will. He may also have held a more deterministic position earlier in his writing, only to later criticize hard determinism for making the weak will worse off. While Nietzsche admired the higher types, he didn't think just anyone should pursue greatness. If people are content with being Christians, he suggests they may as well stay that way.

Some scholars believe that Nietzsche wrote about Christianity in such an incendiary way to discourage believers in God from even considering his work. Nietzsche's writing is for those who look into the abyss of nihilism and need help pursuing meaning despite it. His work is intended to solve a crisis of nihilism, after all—not to convince people that God doesn't exist.

Nietzsche had never laid out a political program or aligned himself with ideology. There were clues, however, to his political leaning. He wasn't an egalitarian and wasn't a proponent of democracy. He appreciated the competitive spirit of the Greeks before Plato, which fostered a healthy spirit of striving for greatness. He describes great festivals of music, tragedy, and athletic contests. There was competition, hierarchies, and a level of ingenuity that Nietzsche appreciated. His description is part history, part myth, but most importantly, it exemplifies a world that allowed great humans to rise.

Nietzsche clarified that he didn't think the Greeks should be taken as a political paradigm for the future. He resisted developing that kind of political program, insisting that a political position would defeat the purpose of Nietzsche's philosophical aims. He wanted to lead people from nihilism to pursue meaning in overcoming oneself and creating new values. Deciding those values for you would undercut our pursuit of meaning. Just as he wanted great people to be able to rise, he didn't want to tell them exactly what to become.

That's why his descriptions of people he admires as higher types aren't very specific. Nietzsche was also concerned that people might use his authority as an author to give rise to disaster— and to some extent, that has been the case. Nazis borrowed bits and pieces from his work superficially to bolster their justification of war, domination, and racial superiority. Writing in an obtuse fashion like he did carries a real risk. Most of his books comprise aphorisms, which are short, punchy, disconnected paragraphs. He was very hard to interpret by any standard, and after a century of unpacking his body of work, scholars still have plenty of disagreements over what he truly intended.

It's probably expecting too much of your average reader to see Nietzsche's values in the proper light, even if such a feat has been achieved. People are prone to taking a profound idea as if they were the word of God; you can say it's psychologically ingrained in many of us. His approach was a bit reckless in hindsight, but then his project of inspiring you to create your own values seems to depend on this ambiguity. It almost seems necessary; if he had been more concise in making this point, people would have taken his word as law. They would no longer strive to create their own morality.

And while willful misinterpretations of his work likely contributed in a small way to the rise of Nazism, more thoughtful interpretations had a big influence on psychology, sociology, philosophy, and the arts. Nietzsche's work greatly influenced well-known psychologists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Freud likely borrowed from the ideas of repression and the unconscious mind that Nietzsche explored in The Gay Science: "Man thinks continually without knowing it. The thinking that rises to consciousness is only the smallest part of all of this." Freud denied having read any Nietzsche, but a strong paper trail of correspondence and interviews suggests otherwise.

I can think of a few Nietzschean values Freud undermined with this calculated move, and a couple he would have affirmed. Psychologist Alfred Adler developed an individual psychology that was heavily influenced by Nietzsche's values of self-creation and striving. In modern psychology, it's now referred to as self-actualization, which you're probably pretty familiar with. Nietzsche also greatly influenced post-modernism, as expressed by philosophers Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Existentialist philosophers who follow Nietzsche, like Heidegger and Albert Camus, often drew on Nietzsche in their work.

Like Nietzsche believed, we needed to create values to avoid nihilism. Camus thought we should always try to create meaning in our lives despite life's inherent meaninglessness. Nietzsche's influences can also be found in the works of countless authors like Hermann Hesse, Knut Hamsun, and Eugene O'Neill. And let's not forget that he did help us think more deeply about how to move on from God and the values of slave morality.

Did the belief in God truly die? No. God is obviously still around. As Nietzsche himself predicted, "God is dead, but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown." And we have to vanquish his shadow too. But thanks, in part, to Nietzsche, a wider variety of values has become more commonplace in society. The values of self-creation and rejecting societal norms are very popular, to whatever extent you can credit Nietzsche for them. And we're a bit more accepting of excellence, for better or worse.

After seeing the influence of his work, do you think Nietzsche would affirm the world he had a part in shaping? I like to think he would, because what happened is necessary. If he were as strong as his philosophy, he would allow it to happen over and over again for eternity—precisely the same way.