by Kevin Cole

Created on: February 14, 2009

Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of the "death of God" is extremely well-known in popular culture, but rarely understood. The best passage on God's death is offered by Nietzsche in "The Gay Science" in section 125, entitled "The Madman." There Nietzsche describes a man who enters a town market or bazaar and cries out loudly, "I seek God! I seek God!" He encounters a group of mocking atheists who laugh at him until the Madman tells of God's death. He proclaims: "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?"

All of the best scholarly interpretations of this passage resist a literal reading that might understanding God's death as a passing away of the divine being in a manner similar to human passing. Neither should Nietzsche's proclamation be seen as a more grandiose way of expressing unbelief. As Martin Heidegger said, "The pronouncement does not mean - as though it were spoken out of denial and common hatred - there is no god." These are simply shallow understandings of Nietzsche that are without merit.

There are two dominant readings of the Madman passage within the philosophic community. The first might be termed the "secularization thesis." On this account, Nietzsche is proclaiming the impending dissolution of a shared Christian vocabulary and the end of Christianity's religious hegemony, ie impending secularization. Christianity, it was thought, would wane and eventually become passe or irrelevant. This is often the interpretation more mainstream sources ascribe to, but a closer reading of Nietzsche (both in "The Gay Science" and his other texts) reveals it to be insufficient and untenable.

The better interpretation might be termed the "ontotheological thesis," articulated by thinkers like Heidegger and, more recently, John Caputo and Merold Westphal. This reading sees Nietzsche's proclamation as the death of a very specific conception of God - the death of the "God of the philosophers," to use Pascal's phrase. This ontotheological God is the God of Descartes and Kant, the "causa sui" and "unmoved mover" of classical philosophy. Nietzsche was particularly thinking of Kant's view of God, a highly moralizing conception of God that sees God solely as a guarantor of morality, not as a real actor or being. It's a clear lineage from Descartes to Kant to Nietzsche. Increasingly philosophy was "using" God to merely fill-in or ground philosophical discourse, and the act Nietzsche commits in the end - murder - was written into the project from the very beginning.

Note too, how distraught Nietzsche's Madman is. The market is filled with unbelievers who do not understand the implications of their unbelief. Nietzsche is saying that without this very specific picture of God, all our ethics have become unmoored, spinning through the nihil. The "we" in the phrase "we have killed him" is a reference to these God-seekers, of which the Madman was one. In primarily thinking of God as "Being" and "suprasensory ground and goal of all reality" (Heidegger's phrase), they have created a God wholly unlike the one they originally began with.

It was thus necessary to kill off this God and begin again. Christians, such as a Kierkegaard and Pascal, welcomed this death as it allowed them to rediscover the true God of Scripture, not of the philosophers. Unbelievers, on the other hand, followed Nietzsche down a re-evaluation of all morality and an invention of new ways of being that was "beyond good and evil."

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