‘God is dead’.
These are the most famous words attributed to the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche 1844–1900.In fact he pinched them from Hegel 1770 -1831.
But how could God die? God is supposed to be immortal. Immortals don't die.
That's why God's death sounds so odd:
Nietzsche wasn't saying that God had been alive at one time and now wasn't; rather that belief in God had stopped being reasonable and that it left us without a basis for morality.
Our ideas of right and wrong and good and evil make sense in a world where there is a God. They don't in a godless one.
A starting point may be Kant 1724-1808 who pre dates Nietzsche and was held in the highest regard by many philosophers
Kant insisted that although we cannot prove the world has a purpose, we must look upon it as if it had. Kant did not deny evil, ugly and apparently purposeless aspects of the world, but he thought they counted for a lot less than their more uplifting opposites.
Human reason cannot prove the existence God because God exists outside the physical world that our minds can perceive
We must rationally assume that God exists to ensure that justice, virtue and happiness ultimately align in an afterlife. Without God the moral purpose of the highest good would feel pointless or irrational
Schopenhauer (1788-1860) and then Nietzsche took this point of view,
and challenged the underlying premise and came to depressing conclusions
Schopenhauer famous work was the World as Will and Representation
The Will is not God but a blind directionless meaningless force so
Life is painful and it would have been better not to have been born
Only Art and particularly Music can make life bearable
Nietzsche was heavily Influence by these ideas and was to meet Wagner who also held similar views
We then went on to discuss the extent parents, upbringing and the influence of the time in which we live.
According to Seneca - Roman Philosopher of first century AD
The values of whoever in his thinking takes note of only his own age will influence just a few
Remember Nietzsche and Schopenhauer were German, living in 19th Century Germany and they both had odd upbringings
Nietzsche went insane when he was 56 and his works were taken over by his sister who controlled and edited his work turning his writings into propaganda for the Nazis
Come and join us for the next philosophy group meeting on the 4th Tuesday of the month at Enterprise House 10 – 12noon. All are welcome.
Report by Wallace Anderson