Nietzsche

19th Century History

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Perhaps the most famous German atheist, and with the waning influence of Marxism the one whose influence carries down most directly to the present day, is Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). Nietzsche, like De Sade (who bears a striking intellectual resemblance to his German philosophical successor, all the more striking in light of the fact that there seems to have been no direct intellectual influence of the latter on the former) is most notorious for his amoralism. As Minois observes, Nietzsche concluded that the undermining of Christianity by German Idealism and biblical criticism would inevitably lead to an unprecedented crisis of values in the West.[1]

Like De Sade, Nietzsche considered that traditional morality could not survive the death of God; if God is dead, morality would need to be recreated, which would require a transvaluation of values. Nor is it any longer to the point as with the earlier atheists of the French eighteenth century to disprove God's existence, but rather to explain how it arose.[2]

Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844 - 1900) circa 1875.

In Nietzsche's view, there are many atheists (The New Atheists could serve as contemporary examples here) who reject God but wish to hold onto conventional morality; however, from a Nietzschean perspective this is just a form of self- deception, since traditional morality (whether in its religious or allegedly 'post-religious' or humanist form) stands or falls with religion, and the death of God demands the creation in total freedom of a new, genuinely post-religious morality.

Nietzsche sees true morality as the morality of the hero, rather than the slave (religious). His affirmation of power and its exercise by the amoral superman is the opposite of Schopenhauer's promotion of compassion as the most adequate and authentic response to life's meaninglessness in a Godless world, and the difficult question of the influence of Nietzsche's ideas on European Nazism in the twentieth century is still a subject of considerable controversy.[3]

References

Minois, Georges. Histoire de L'atheisme. La Fleche: Fayard, 1998.
Wicks, Robert. "Friedrich Nietzsche." In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed Edward N. Zalta. Place Published, 2007.

Bibliography

Footnotes

[1]↑ Georges Minois, Histoire de L'atheisme (La Fleche: Fayard, 1998), 509.
[2]↑ Ibid., 511.
[3]↑ See, for example, Robert Wicks. "Friedrich Nietzsche." In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed Edward N. Zalta. (2007), Online entry., section 7.

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