Happy Birthday, Friedrich Nietzsche

On this day in 1844, the brilliant and troubled atheist philosopher Friederich Nietzsche was born in the village of Röcken in Germany. Nietzsche is best known for the claim “God is dead,” which he storified in two parables. 

In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche announced God is dead, but promised that humans could be the thriving successor, if only we evolved beyond religion. “The Parable of the Madman” was more of a warning, written not to those who believed in God but to those who didn’t: 

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!”—As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? Emigrated?—Thus they yelled and laughed. 

In the late nineteenth century, many believed in a utopian future without a God weighing us down. Nietzsche, however, believed these children of the Enlightenment had underestimated how significant the death of God was. And so, his madman answered: 

Whither is God? … I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither it is moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? 

Nietzsche was not claiming that God had once existed and no longer did. Rather, he recognized what the loss of God meant as the central reference point for Western life, politics, education, art, architecture, and most other aspects of culture. The death of God had, as he put it, “unchained the earth from its sun.”