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Support for deflationism depends upon the possibleness of showing that its axiom instances of the equivalence schema unsupplements by any further analysis, will suffice to explain all the central facts about truth, for example, that the verification of a proposition indicates its truth, and that true beliefs have a practical value. The first of these facts follows trivially from the deflationary axioms, for given ours a prior knowledge of the equivalence of p and The a propositions that p is true, any reason to believe that p becomes an equally good reason to believe that the preposition that p is true. We can also explain the second fact in terms of the deflationary axioms, but not quite so easily. Consider, to begin with, beliefs of the form that if I perform the act A, then my desires will be fulfilled. Notice that the psychological role of such a belief is, roughly, to cause the performance of A. In other words, given that I do have belief, then typically.

I will perform the act A

Notice also that when the belief is true then, given the deflationary axioms, the performance of 'A' will in fact lead to the fulfilment of ones desires, i.e., If being true, then if I perform 'A', and my desires will be fulfilled.

Therefore, if it is true, then my desires will be fulfilled. So valuing the truth of beliefs of that form is quite treasonable. Nevertheless, inference has derived such beliefs from other beliefs and can be expected to be true if those other beliefs are true. So assigning a value to the truth of any belief that might be used in such an inference is reasonable.

In philosophy of mind and language, the view that what is thought, or said, or experienced, is essentially dependent on aspects of the world external to the mind of the subject. The view goes beyond holding that such mental states are typically caused by external factors, to insist that they could not have existed as they now do without the subject being embedded in an external world of a certain kind. It is these external relations that make up the essence or identify of the mental state. Externalism is thus opposed to the Cartesian separation of the mental from the physical, since that holds that the mental could in principle exist as it does even if there were no external world at all. Various external factors have been advanced as ones on which mental content depends, including the usage of experts, the linguistic, norms of the community. And the general causal relationships of the subject. In the theory of knowledge, externalism is the view that a person might know something by being suitably situated with respect to it, without that relationship being in any sense within his purview. The person might, for example, be very reliable in some respect without believing that he is. The view allows that you can know without being justified in believing that you know.

However, atomistic theories take a representation’s content to be something that can be specified independent entity of that representation’ s relations to other representations. What the American philosopher of mind, Jerry Alan Fodor (1935-) calls the crude causal theory, for example, takes a representation to be a |cow| - a menial representation with the same content as the word ‘cow’ - if its tokens are caused by instantiations of the property of being-a-cow, and this is a condition that places no explicit constraints on how |cow|’s must or might relate to other representations. Holistic theories contrasted with atomistic theories in taking the relations representation bears to others to be essential to its content. According to functional role theories, a representation is a |cow| if it behaves like a |cow| should behave in inference.

Internalist theories take the content of a representation to be a matter determined by factors internal to the system that uses it. Thus, what Block (1986) calls ‘short-armed’ functional role theories are internalist. Externalist theories take the content of a representation to be determined, in part at least, by factors external to the system that uses it. Covariance theories, as well as telelogical theories that invoke an historical theory of functions, take content to be determined by ‘external’ factors. Crossing the atomist-holistic distinction with the internalist-externalist distinction.

Externalist theories (sometimes called non-individualistic theories) have the consequence that molecule for molecule identical cognitive systems might yet harbour representations with different contents. This has given rise to a controversy concerning ‘narrow’ content. If we assume some form of externalist theory is correct, then content is, in the first instance ‘wide’ content, i.e., determined in part by factors external to the representing system. On the other hand, it seems clear that, on plausible assumptions about how to individuate psychological capacities, internally equivalent systems must have the same psychological capacities. Hence, it would appear that wide content cannot be relevant to characterizing psychological equivalence. Since cognitive science generally assumes that content is relevant to characterizing psychological equivalence, philosophers attracted to externalist theories of content have sometimes attempted to introduce ‘narrow’ content, i.e., an aspect or kind of content that is equivalent internally equivalent systems. The simplest such theory is Fodor’s idea (1987) that narrow content is a function from contents (i.e., from whatever the external factors are) to wide contents.

All the same, what a person expresses by a sentence is often a function of the environment in which he or she is placed. For example, the disease I refer to by the term like ‘arthritis’, or the kind of tree I refer to as a ‘Maple’ will be defined by criteria of which I know next to nothing. This raises the possibility of imagining two persons in rather different environments, but in which everything appears the same to each of them. The wide content of their thoughts and sayings will be different if the situation surrounding them is appropriately different: ‘situation’ may include the actual objects they perceive or the chemical or physical kinds of object in the world they inhabit, or the history of their words, or the decisions of authorities on what counts as an example, of one of the terms they use. The narrow content is that part of their thought which remains identical, through their identity of the way things appear, regardless of these differences of surroundings. Partisans of wide content may doubt whether any content in this sense narrow, partisans of narrow content believer that it is the fundamental notion, with wide content being explicable in terms of narrow content plus context.

Even so, the distinction between facts and values has outgrown its name: it applies not only to matters of fact vs, matters of value, but also to statements that something is, vs. statements that something ought to be. Roughly, factual statements - ‘is statements’ in the relevant sense - represent some state of affairs as obtaining, whereas normative statements - evaluative, and deontic ones - attribute goodness to something, or ascribe, to an agent, an obligation to act. Neither distinction is merely linguistic. Specifying a book’s monetary value is making a factual statement, though it attributes a kind of value. ‘That is a good book’ expresses a valu judgement though the term ‘value’ is absent (nor would ‘valuable’ be synonymous with ‘good’). Similarly, ‘we are morally obligated to fight’ superficially expresses a statement, and ‘By all indications it ough to rain’ makes a kind of ought-claim; but the former is an ought-statement, the latter an (epistemic) is-statement.

Theoretical difficulties also beset the distinction. Some have absorbed values into facts holding that all value is instrumental, roughly, to have value is to contribute - in a factual analysable way - to something further which is (say) deemed desirable. Others have suffused facts with values, arguing that facts (and observations) are ‘theory-impregnated’ and contending that values are inescapable to theoretical choice. But while some philosophers doubt that fact/value distinctions can be sustained, there persists a sense of a deep difference between evaluating, or attributing an obligation and, on the other hand, saying how the world is.

Fact/value distinctions, may be defended by appeal to the notion of intrinsic value, as a thing has in itself and thus independently of its consequences. Roughly, a valu statement (proper) is an ascription of intrinsic value, one to the effect that a thing is to some degree good in itself. This leaves open whether ought-statements are implicitly value statements, but even if they imply that something has intrinsic value - e.g., moral value - they can be independently characterized, say by appeal to rules that provide (justifying) reasons for action. One might also ground the fact value distinction in the attributional (or even motivational) component apparently implied by the making of valuational or deontic judgements: Thus, ‘it is a good book, but that is no reason for a positive attribute towards it’ and ‘you ought to do it, but there is no reason to’ seem inadmissible, whereas, substituting, ‘an expensive book’ and ‘you will do it’ yields permissible judgements. One might also argue that factual judgements are the kind which are in principle appraisable scientifically, and thereby anchor the distinction on the factual side. This ligne is plausible, but there is controversy over whether scientific procedures are ‘value-free’ in the required way.

Philosophers differ regarding the sense, if any, in which epistemology is normative (roughly, valuational). But what precisely is at stake in this controversy is no clearly than the problematic fact/value distinction itself. Must epistemologists as such make judgements of value or epistemic responsibility? If epistemology is naturalizable, then even epistemic principles simply articulate under what conditions - say, appropriate perceptual stimulations - a belief is justified, or constitutes knowledge. Its standards of justification, then would be like standards of, e.g., resilience for bridges. It is not obvious, however, that there appropriate standards can be established without independent judgements that, say, a certain kind of evidence is good enough for justified belief (or knowledge). The most plausible view may be that justification is like intrinsic goodness, though it supervenes on natural properties, it cannot be analysed wholly in factuel statements.

Thus far, belief has been depicted as being all-or-nothing, however, as a resulting causality for which we have grounds for thinking it true, and, all the same, its acceptance is governed by epistemic norms, and, least of mention, it is partially subject to voluntary control and has functional affinities to belief. Still, the notion of acceptance, like that of degrees of belief, merely extends the standard picture, and does not replace it.

None the less, for which of passing, Aristotle maintains that there is a way of discovering and appealing to some authority outside any particular game to adjudicate moral and knowledge claims that arise in particular games or in conflicts between different games. Plato, of course, also believed in the existence of such a standard, but proposed a different route to discovering it.

Now Nietzsche emphatically denies this possibility. Anyone who tries to do what Aristotle recommends is simply inventing another game (we can call it Super-sport) and is not discovering anything true about the real nature of games because they do not organize reality (that has the wilderness surrounding us) as a game. In fact, he argues, that we have created this recreational complex and all the activities that go on in it to protect themselves from nature (which is indifferent to what we do with our lives), not to copy some recreational rule book that wilderness reveals. Human culture exists as an affirmation of our opposition or to contrast with nature, not as an extension of rules that include both human culture and nature. That is why falsehoods about nature might be a lot more useful than truths, if they enable us to live more fully human lives.

If we think of the wilderness as a text about reality, as the truth about nature, then, Nietzsche claims, we have no access at all to that text. What we do have accessed to conflicting interpretations, none of them based on privileged access to a "true" text. Thus, the soccer players may think them and their game is superior to rugby and the rugby players, because soccer more closely represents the surrounding wilderness, but such statements about better and worse are irrelevant. There is nothing a rule bound outside the games themselves. Therefore, all dogmatic claims about the truth of all games or any particular game are false.

Now, how did this situation come about? Well, there was a time when all Europeans played almost the same game and had done so for many years. Having little-to-no historical knowledge and sharing the same head coach in the Vatican and the same rule book, they believed that the game was the only one possible and had been around for ever. So they naturally believed that their game was true. They shored up that belief with appeals to scripture or to eternal forms, or universal principles or to rationality or science or whatever. There were many quarrels about the nature of ultimate truth, that is, about just how one should tinker with the rule book, about what provided access to God's rules, but there was agreement that such excess must exist.

Take, for example, the offside rule in soccer. Without that the game could not continue in its traditional way. Therefore, soccer players see the offside rule as an essential part of their reality, and since soccer is the only game in town and we have no idea of its history (which might, for example, tell us about the invention of the off-side rule), then the offside rule is easy to interpret as a universal, a requirement for social activity, and we will find and endorse scriptural texts that reinforce that belief. Our scientists will devote their time to linking the offside rule with the mysterious rumblings that come from the forest. From this, one might be led to conclude that the offside rule is a Law of Nature, something that extends far beyond the realms of our particular game into all possible games and, beyond those, into the realm of the wilderness it.

Of course, there were powerful social and political forces (the coach and trainers and owners of the team) who made sure that people had lots of reasons for believing in the unchanging verity of present arrangements. So it is not surprising that we find plenty of learned books, training manuals, and locker room exhortations urging everyone to remember the offside rule and to castigate as "bad" those who routinely forget that part of the game. We will also worship those who died in defence of the offside rule. Naturally any new game that did not recognize the offside rule would be a bad game, an immoral way to conduct one. So if some group tried to start a game with a different offside rule, that group would be attacked because they had violated a rule of nature and were thus immoral.

However, for contingent historical reasons, Nietzsche argues, that situation of one game in town did not last. The recreational unity of the area divides the developments in historical scholarships into past demonstrations, in that all too clearly there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that all the various attempts to show that one specific game was exempted over any of all other true games, as they are false, dogmatic, trivial, deceiving, and so on.

For science has revealed that the notion of a necessary connection between the rules of any game and the wider purposes of the wilderness is simply an ungrounded assertion. There is no way in which we can make the connections between the historically derived fictions in the rule book and the mysterious and ultimately unknowable directions of irrational nature. To conform of science, we have to believe in causes and effects, but there is no way we can prove that this is a true belief and there is a danger for us if we simply ignore that fact. Therefore, we cannot prove a link between the game and anything outside it. History has shown us, just as Darwin's natural history has proved, that all apparently eternal issues have a story, a line of development, a genealogy. Thus, notions, like species, have no reality-they are temporary fiction imposed for the sake of defending a particular arrangement.

So, God is dead. There is no eternal truth anymore, no rule book in the sky, no ultimate referee or international Olympic committee chair. Nietzsche did not kill God; History and the new science did. Nietzsche is only the most passionate and irritating messenger, announcing over the PA system to anyone who will listen that an appeal to a system can defend someone like Kant or Descartes or Newton who thinks that what he or she is doing grounded in the truth of nature has simply been mistaken.

This insight is obvious to Nietzsche, and he is troubled that no one is worried about it or even to have noticed it. So he's moved to call the matter to our attention as stridently as possible, because he thinks that this realization requires a fundamental shift in how we live our lives.

For Nietzsche Europe is in crisis. It has a growing power to make life comfortable and an enormous energy. However, people seem to want to channel that energy into arguing about what amounts to competing fictions and to force everyone to follow particular fictions.

Why is this insight so worrying? Well, one point is that dogmatists get aggressive. Soccer players and rugby players who forget what Nietzsche is pointing out can start killing each other over questions that admit of no answer, namely, question about which group has the true game, which ordering has a privileged accountability to the truth. Nietzsche senses that dogmatism is going to lead to warfare, and he predicts that the twentieth century will see an unparalleled extension of warfare in the name of competing dogmatic truths. Part of his project is to wake up the people who are intelligent enough to respond to what he is talking about so that they can recognize the stupidity of killing each other for an illusion that they misunderstand for some "truth."

Besides that, Nietzsche, like Mill (although, in a very different way), is seriously concerned about the possibilities for human excellence in a culture where the herd mentality is taking over, where Europe is developing into competing herds -a situation that is either sweeping up the best and the brightest or stifling them entirely. Nietzsche, like Mill and the ancient pre-Socratic Greeks to whom he constantly refers, is an elitist. He wants the potential for individual human excellence to be liberated from the harnesses of conformity and group competition and conventional morality. Otherwise, human beings are going to become destructive, lazy, conforming herd animals, using technology to divert them from the greatest joys in life, which come only from individual striving and creativity, activities that require one to release one's instincts without keeping them eternally subjugated to controlling historical consciousness or a conventional morality of good and evil.

What makes this particularly a problem for Nietzsche is that he sees that a certain form of game is gaining popularity: Democratic volleyball. In this game, the rule book insists that all players be treated equally, that there be no natural authority given to the best players or to those who understand the nature of quality play. Therefore the mass of inferior players is taking over, the quality of the play is deteriorating, and there are fewer and fewer good volleyball players. This process is being encouraged both by the traditional ethic of "help your neighbour," now often in a socialist uniform and by modern science. As the mass of more many inferior players takes over the sport, the mindless violence of their desires to attack other players and take over their games increases, as does their hostility to those who are uniquely excellent (who may need a mask to prevent themselves being recognized).

The hopes for any change in this development are not good. In fact, things might be getting worse. For when Nietzsche looks at all these games going on he notices certain groups of people, and the prospect is not totally reassuring.

First there remain the overwhelming majority of people: the players and the spectators, those caught up in their particular sport. These people are, for the most part, continuing as before without reflecting or caring about what they do. They may be vaguely troubled about rumours they hear that their game is not the best, they may be bored with the endless repetition in the schedule, and they have essentially reconciled them that they are not the only game going on, but they had rather not thought about it. Or else, stupidly confident that what they are doing is what really matters about human life, is true, they preoccupy themselves with tinkering with the rules, using the new technology to get better balls, more comfortable seats, louder whistles, more brightly painted side lines, more trendy uniforms, tastier Gatorade-all in the name of progress.

Increasing numbers of people are moving into the stands or participating through the newspaper or the television sets. Most people are thus, in increasing numbers, losing touch with themselves and their potential as instinctual human beings. They are the herd, the last men, preoccupied with the trivial, unreflectingly conformist because they think, to the extent they think at all, that what they do will bring them something called "happiness." Yet they are not happy: They are in a permanent state of narcotized anxiety, seeking new ways to entertain themselves with the steady stream of marketed distractions that the forces of the market produce: Technological toys, popular entertainment, college education, Wagner's operas, academic jargon.

This group, of course, includes all the experts in the game, the cheerleaders whose job it is to keep us focussed on the seriousness of the activity, the sports commentators and pundits, whose life is bound up with interpreting, reporting, and classifying players and contests. These sportscasters are, in effect, the academics and government experts, the John Maddens and Larry Kings and Mike Wallaces of society, those demigods of the herd, whose authority derives from the false notion that what they are dealing with is something other than a social-fiction.

There is a second group of people, who have accepted the ultimate meaninglessness of the game in which they were. They have moved to the sidelines, not as spectators or fans, but as critics, as cynics or nihilists, dismissing out of hand all the pretensions of the players and fans, but not affirming anything themselves. These are the souls who, having nothing to will (because they have seen through the fiction of the game and have therefore no motive to play any more), prefer to will nothing in a state of paralysed skepticism. Nietzsche has a certain admiration for these people, but maintains that a life like this, the nihilist on the sidelines, is not a human life.

For, Nietzsche insists, to live as a human being, is to play a game. Only in playing a game can one affirm one's identity, can one create values, can one truly exist. Games are the expression of our instinctual human energies, our living drives, what Nietzsche calls our "will to power." So the nihilistic stance, though understandable and, in a sense, courageous, is sterile. For we are born to play, and if we do not, then we are not fulfilling a worthy human function. Also, we have to recognize that all games are equally fictions, invented human constructions without any connections to the reality of things.

So we arrive at the position of the need to affirm a belief (invent a rule book) which we know to have been invented, to be divorced from the truth of things. To play the best game is to live by rules that we invent for ourselves as an assertion of our instinctual drives and to accept that the rules are fictions: they matter, we accept them as binding, we judge ourselves and others by them, and yet we know they are artificial. Just as in real life a normal soccer player derives a sense of meaning during the game, affirms his or her value in the game, without ever once believing that the rules of soccer have organized the universe or that those rules have any universal validity, so we must commit ourselves to epistemological and moral rules that enable us to live our lives as players, while simultaneously recognizing that these rules have no universal validity.

To base one's life on the creative tensions of the artist engaged with creating a game that meets most eloquently and uncompromisingly the demand of one's own irrational nature-one's wish-is to be most fully free, most fully human.

This call to live the -created life, affirming one in a game of one's own devising, necessarily condemns the highest spirits to loneliness, doubt, insecurity, emotional suffering, because most people will mock the new game or be actively hostile to it or refuse to notice it, and so on; Alternatively, they will accept the challenge but misinterpret what it means and settle for some marketed easy game, like floating down the Mississippi smoking a pipe. Nevertheless, a -generated game also brings with-it the most intense joy, the most playful and creative affirmation of what is most important in our human nature.

Noting here that one’s freedom to create is important one's own game is limited. In that sense, Nietzsche is no existentialist maintaining that we have a duty and an unlimited freedom to be whatever we want to be. For the resources at our disposable parts of the field still available and the recreational material lying around in the club house-are determined by the present state of our culture. Furthermore, the rules I devise and the language for which I frame them in will ordinarily owes a good deal to the present state of the rules of other games and the state of the language in which those are expressed. Although in changing the rules for my game, my reference point, or the rules, I have existentially placed in change. It is, nonetheless, a given application that has been allotted to me by way of my moment in history, in that of creating something that will transcend the past. These, of existing diversions are ramifications that expose in the materials from which I have fashioned in a new, and, perhaps, more effectively of a dividing source of entertainment.

Thus, the new philosopher will transcend the limitations of the existing games and will extend the catalogue of games with the invention of new ones, but that new creative spirit faces certain historical limitations. If this is relativistic, it is not totally so.

The value of this endeavour is not to be measured by what other people think of the newly created game; Nor does its value lie in fame, material rewards, or service to the group. Its value comes from the way it enables the individual to manifest certain human qualities, especially the will to power. Nonetheless, it seems that whether or not the game attracts other people and becomes a permanent fixture on the sporting calendar, something later citizens can derive enjoyment from or even remember, that is irrelevant. For only the accidents of history determination of whether the game invented is for my-own attractions in other people, that is, becomes a source of value for them.

Nietzsche claims that the time is right for such a radically individualistic endeavour to create new games, new metaphors for my life. For, wrongheaded as many traditional games may have been, like Plato's metaphysical soccer or Kant's version of eight balls, or Marx's materialist chess tournament, or Christianity's stoical snakes and ladders, they have splendidly trained us for the much more difficult work of creating values in a spirit of radical uncertainty. The exertions have trained our imaginations and intelligence in useful ways. So, although those dogmatists were unsound, an immersion in their systems has done much to refine those capacities we most need to rise above the nihilists and the herd.

Now, In have put this analogy on the table to help clarify some central points about Nietzsche. However, the metaphor is not so arbitrary as it may appear, because this very notion of systems of meanings as invented games is a central metaphor of the twentieth century thought and those who insist upon it as often as not point to Nietzsche as their authority.

So, for example, when certain postmodernists insist that the major reason for engaging in artistic creativity or literary criticism or any form of cultural life be to awaken the spirit of creative play that is far more central than any traditional sense of meaning or rationality or even coherence, we can see the spirit of Nietzsche at work.

Earlier in this century, as we will see in the discussions of early modern art, a central concern was the possibility of recovering some sense of meaning or of recreating or discovering a sense of "truth" of the sort we had in earlier centuries, or, as we will see in the poetry of Eliot, lamenting the collapse of traditional systems of value. Marxists were determined to assist history in producing the true meaning toward which we were inexorably heading. To the extent that we can characterize post-modernism simply at all, we might say that it marks a turning away from such responses to the modern condition and an embrace, for better or worse, of Nietzsche, joyful -affirmation in a spirit of the irrationality of the world and the fictive qualities of all that we create to deal with life.

After this rapid and, in hope, useful construction and description of an analogy, as only one final point that remains: So how have we responded and are we still responding to all of this? What of an impact has this powerful challenge to our most confident traditions had? Well, there is not time here to trace the complex influence of Nietzsche's thought in a wide range of areas. That influence has been immense and continues still. However, In would like to sketch a few points about what may be happening right now.

Here I must stress that in an offering a personal review, which comprehensively does not affect this question. Still, any general reading in modern studies of culture suggests that responses to Nietzsche are important and diverse. His stock has been very bullish for the past two decades, at least.

One group we can quickly identify is those who have embraced Nietzsche's critique, who appeal to his writing to endorse their view that the search to ground our knowledge and moral claims in Truth are futile, and that we must therefore recognize the imperative Nietzsche laid before us to -create our own lives, to come up with new -descriptions affirming the irrational basis of our individual humanity. This position has been loosely termed Antifoundationalism. Two of its most prominent and popular spokespersons in recent years have been Richard Rorty and Camille Paglia. Within Humanities departments the Deconstructionists (with Derrida as their guru) head the Nietzschean charge.

Antifoundationalists supportively link Nietzsche closely with Kuhn and with Dewey (whose essay on Darwin we read) and sometimes with Wittgenstein and take central aim at anyone who would claim that some form of enquiry, like science, rational ethics, Marxism, or traditional religion has any form of privileged access to reality or the truth. The political stance of the Antifoundationalists tends to be radically romantic or pragmatic. Since we cannot ground our faith in any public morality or political creed, politics becomes something far less important than personal development or else we have to conduct our political life simply on a pragmatic basis, following the rules we can agree on, without according those rules any universal status or grounding in eternal principles. If mechanistic science is something we find, for accidental reasons of history, something useful, then we will believe it for now. Thus, Galileo's system became adopted, not because it was true or closer to the truth that what it replaced, but simply because the vocabulary he introduced inside our descriptions was something we found agreeable and practically helpful. When it ceases to fulfill our pragmatic requirements, we will gradually change to another vocabulary, another metaphor, another version of a game. History shows that such a change will occur, but how and when it will take place or what the new vocabulary might be-these questions will be determined by the accidents of history.

Similarly, human rights are important, not because there is any rational non-circular proof that we ought to act according to these principles, but simply because we have agreed, for accidental historical reasons, that these principles are useful. Such pragmatic agreements are all we have for public life, because, as Nietzsche insists, we cannot justify any moral claims by appeals to the truth. So we can agree about a schedule for the various games and distributing the budget between them and we can, as a matter of convenience, set certain rules for our discussions, but only as a practical requirement of our historical situation, least of mention, not by any divine or rationality that of any system contributes of its distributive cause.

A second response is to reject the Antifoundationalist and Nietzschean claim that no language has privileged contact to the reality of things, to assert, that is, that Nietzsche is wrong in his critique of the Enlightenment. Plato's project is not dead, as Nietzsche claimed, but alive and well, especially in the scientific enterprise. We are discovering ever more about the nature of reality. There may still be a long way to go, and nature might be turning out to be much more complex than the early theories suggested, but we are making progress. By improving the rule book we will modify our games so that they more closely approximate the truth of the wilderness.

To many scientists, for example, the Antifoundationalist position is either irrelevant or just plain wrong, an indication that social scientists and humanity’s types do not understand the nature of science or are suffering a bad attack of sour grapes because of the prestige the scientific disciplines enjoy in the academy. The failure of the social scientists (after generations of trying) to come up with anything approaching a reliable law (like, say, Newton's laws of motion) has shown the pseudoscientific basis of the disciplines, and unmasks their turn to Nietzschean Antifoundationalism as a feeble attempt to justify their presence in the modern research university.

Similarly, Marxists would reject Antifoundationalism as a remnant of aristocratic bourgeois capitalism, an ideology designed to take intellectuals' minds off the realities of history, the truth of things. There is a truth grounded in a materialist view of history, renouncing that simply of diverting intellectuals away from social injustice. No wonder the most ardent Nietzscheans in the university have no trouble getting support from the big corporate interests to and their bureaucratic subordinates: The Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Within the universities and many humanities and legal journals, some liveliest debates go on between the Antifoundationalists affiliation of oneself in accompaniment the Deconstructionists under the banner of Nietzsche and the historical materialists and many feminists under the banner of Marx.

Meanwhile, there has been a revival of interest in Aristotle. The neo-Aristotelians agree with Nietzsche's critique of the Enlightenment rational project-that we are never going to be able to derive a sense of human purpose from scientific reason-but assert that sources of value and knowledge are not simply a contingent but arise from communities and that what we need to sort out our moral confusion is a reassertion of Aristotle's emphasis on human beings, not as radically individual with an identity before their political and social environment, but moderate political animals, whose purpose and value are deeply and essentially rooted in their community. A leading representative for this position is Alisdair McIntyre.

Opposing such a communitarian emphasis, a good deal of the modern Liberal tradition points out that such a revival of traditions simply will not work. The break down of the traditional communities and the widespread perception of the endemic injustice of inherited ways is something that cannot be reversed (appeals to Hobbes here are common). So we need to place our faith in the rational liberal Enlightenment tradition, and look for universal rational principles, human rights, rules of international morality, justice based on an analysis of the social contract, and so on. An important recent example such a view is Rawls' famous book Social Justice.

Finally, there are those who again agree with Nietzsche's analysis of the Enlightenment and thus reject the optimistic hopes of rational progress, but who deny Nietzsche's proffered solution. To see life as irrational chaos that we must embrace and such joyous affirmation as the value-generating activity in our human lives, while at the same time recognizing its ultimate meaninglessness to the individual, too many people seem like a prescription for insanity. What we, as human beings, must have to live a fulfilled human life is an image of eternal meaning. This we can derive only from religion, which provides for us, as it always has, a transcendent sense of order, something that answers to our essential human nature far more deeply than either the Enlightenment faith in scientific rationality or Nietzsche's call to a life of constantly metaphorical -definition.

To read the modern debates over literary interpretation, legal theory, human rights issues, education curriculums, feminist issues, ethnic rights, communitarian politics, or a host of other similar issues is to come repeatedly across the clash of these different positions (and others). To use the analogy In started with, activities on the playing fields are going on more energetically than ever. Right in the middle of most of these debates and generously scattered throughout the footnotes and bibliographies, Nietzsche's writings are alive and well. To that extent, his ideas are still something to be reckoned with. He may have started by shouting over the intercom system in a way no to which one bothered to attend; now on many playing fields, the participants and fans are considering and reacting to his analysis of their activities. So Nietzsche today is, probably more than ever before in this century, right in the centre of some vital debates over cultural questions.

You may recall how, in Book Ten of the Republic, Plato talks about the "ancient war between poetry and philosophy." What this seems to mean from the argument is an ongoing antagonism between different uses of language, between language that seeks above all, denotative clarity the language of exact definitions and precise logical relationships and language whose major quality is its ambiguous emotional richness, between, that is, the language of geometry and the language of poetry (or, simply put, between Euclid and Homer)

Another way of characterizing this dichotomy is to describe it as the intensive force between a language appropriates and discovering the truth and one appropriate to creating it, between, that is, a language that sets it up as an exact description of a given order (or as exactly presently available) and a language that sets it up as an ambiguous poetic vision of or an analogy to a natural or cosmic order.

Plato, in much of what we studied, seems clearly committed to a language of the former sort. Central to his course of studies that will produce guardian rulers is mathematics, which is based upon the most exact denotative language we know. Therefore, the famous inscription over the door of the Academy: "Let no one enter here who has not studied geometry." Underlying Plato's remarkable suspicion of a great deal of poetry, and particularly of Homer, is this attitude to language: Poetic language is suspect because, being based on metaphors (figurative comparisons or word pictures), it is a third remove from the truth. In addition, it speaks too strongly to the emotions and thus may unbalance the often tense equilibrium needed to keep the soul in a healthy state.

One needs to remember, however, that Plato's attitude to language is very ambiguous, because, in spite of his obvious endorsement of the language of philosophy and mathematics, in his own style he is often a poet, a creator of metaphor. In other words, there is a conflict between his strictures on metaphor and his adoption of so many metaphors (the central one of some dramatic dialogues is only the most obvious). Many famous and influential passages from the Republic, for example, are not arguments but poetic images or fictional narratives: The Allegory of the Cave, the image of the Sun, the Myth of Er.

Plato, in fact, has always struck me as someone who was deeply suspicious about poetry and metaphor because he responded to it so strongly. Underlying his sometimes harsh treatment of Homer may be the imagination of someone who is all too responsive to it (conversely, and Aristotle’s more lenient view of poetry may stem from the fact that he did not really feel its effects so strongly). If we were inclined to adopt Nietzsche's interpretation of philosophy, we might be tempted to see in Plato's treatment of Homer and his stress on the dangers of poetic language his own "confession" of weakness. His work is, in part, an attempt to fight his own strong inclinations to prefer metaphoric language.

If we accept this characterization of the "ancient war" between two different uses of language, then we might want to ask ourselves why they cannot be reconciled. Why must there be a war? This has, in part, to do with the sorts of questions one wants to ask about the nature of things and about the sorts of answers that the enquiring mind requires. For traditionally there have been some important differences between the language of mathematics or geometry or a vocabulary that seeks to approximate the denotative clarity of these disciplines and the language of poetry. The central difference In would like to focus on is the matter of ambiguity.

The terminological convictions of mathematics and especially of Euclidean geometry, are characterized, above all, by denotative clarity and of precise definitions, clear axioms, firm logical links between statements all of which are designed to produce a rationally coherent structure that will compel agreement among those who take the time to work their way through the system. The intellectual and aesthetic pleasures of Euclid, In would maintain, arise, in large part, from this. People who want this sort of clarity in their understanding of the world will naturally be drawn to define as acceptable questions and answers which frame themselves in a language that seeks this sort of clarity.

Poetical language, by contrast, is inherently ironic, ambiguous, elusive. When I move from clear definition to metaphor, that is, to a comparison, or to a narrative that requires interpretation (like the Book of Exodus, for example, or the Iliad) then my statement requires interpretation, an understanding that an appeal to exact definitions and clear rules of logic cannot quickly satisfy. To agree about metaphor requires explanation and persuasion of a sort different from what is required to get people to accept the truths of Euclidean geometry.

For example, if I have trouble with the statement "The interior angles of a triangle add up to two right angles," In can find exact definitions of all the terms, In can review the step-by-step logical process that leads from -evident first principles to this statement, and In then understand exactly what this means. In am rationally compelled to agree, provided the initial assumptions and the logical adequacy of the process do not disturb me. In am able to explain the claim to someone else, so that he or she arrives at the same understanding of the original statement about the sum of the interior angles (the compelling logic of this form of language is, of course, the point of the central section of Plato's Memo, Socrates's education of Memo's slave in the Pythagorean Theorem)

Nonetheless, a claim like "My love is like a red, red rose" is of a different order. In can check the dictionary definitions of all the words, but that by it will not be enough. How do In deal with the comparison? In can go out and check whether my love has thorns on her legs or her hair falls off after a few days standing in water, but that is not going to offer much help, because obviously In am not meant to interpret this statement literally: a comparison, a metaphor is involved. An understanding of the statement requires that In interpret the comparison: What is the range of association summoned up by the metaphor that compares my beloved or my feelings for my beloved to a common flower?

On this point, if we sit discussing the matter, we are likely to disagree or at least fail to reach the same common rational understanding that we derived from our study of the first statement concerning the interior angles of the triangle. If we want to agree on the metaphor, then we are going to have to persuade each other, and even then our separate understandings may not be congruent.

We have had direct experience of this in Liberal Studies. When we discussed Euclid, we had nothing to argue about. The discussions focussed on whether or not everyone understood the logical steps involved, the definitions and axioms, and possible alternative logical methods. Nevertheless, no one offered seriously as an interpretative opinion that the interior angles of a triangle might add up to three right angles or one and a half right angle. If someone had claimed that, then we would have maintained that he or she had failed in some fundamental way to follow the steps in the proofs. By contrast, when we discussed, say, King Lear or the Tempest or Jane Eyre or Red and Black, we spent most of our time considering alternative interpretations of particular episodes, and we did not reach any precisely defined shared conclusion. Nor could be that we, if we spent the entire if times debating the issue?

It looks of no doubt a vast oversimplification to present the issue of language solely about these two diametrically opposed ways, but for the sake of discussion it is a useful starting point. We might go on to observe that, again to make a vast oversimplification, people tend to prefer one use of language over another: Some like their verbal understandings of things clear, precise, logically sound, so that there is the possibility of a universally recognized meaning with minimum ambiguity, or as close as we can get to such a goal. Others prefer the ambiguity and emotional richness of metaphor, although (or because) the price of such a language is an inherent irony, a multiplicity of meanings, the suggestion of no simple, shared, precise, final meaning.

The question of the language appropriate to a proper understanding of things is particularly important for a comprehension of the history of Christianity, too, because, as we all know, Christianity takes as its central text a book full of poetry, narrative, imagery. Faith in what this book "means" or what it "reveals" about the nature of the divinity is a central part of being a Christian. Many, urgent and contumacious disputes in the history of Christianity have arisen out of the metaphorical nature of this holy text: Since metaphors and metaphorical narratives are inherently ambiguous, they need interpretation, whose interpretations are decisive in any disagreement becomes a vital concern.

Controlling the text and maintaining the authority to determine interpretations of the holy text were always a central imperative of the medieval Catholic Church, which recognized very clearly and correctly that to give people (even parish priests) access to the Bible would result in interpretative anarchy. So, the Catholic Church's strict control of the book, its refusal to distribute it widely or to translate it into the common language of the people, and its insistence that the basis for popular sermons should be, not the Bible it, but the clear and unambiguous official interpretations condoned by the Vatican.

The Church's suspicion of the anarchy that would follow upon any general access to the Bible revealed it as correct once Luther's Reformation made the holy text generally available in translation. Suddenly, the enforced interpretative consensus dissolved, and scores of competing sects arose, each claiming a correct version of the truth derived through an interpretation of the metaphorical constructions in the Bible. An extreme (but not altogether uncommon) example was the war between the followers of Zwingli and the followers of Muntzer, two Protestant leaders, over whether the communion wafer was the body of Christ or symbolized the body of Christ and over the interpretation of baptism. Many thousands died in the quarrel over these interpretative questions.

Today such issues that involve killing others over the ontological status of a biscuit or bathwater may seem ridiculous, but the issue is not. An authority that derives from a poetical metaphorical text must rest, not on that text, but on a particular interpretation of it. Whoever is the spokesperson for the official interpretation has official power. Thus, from this point of view, one can interpret the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as quarrelsome interpretation run amok.

Surely, the conclusion of the religious wars brought with it a demand to clean up language, to be wary of metaphors and especially of writing that was highly metaphorical, and to place our verbal understandings of the world and ourselves on a more rationally clear basis in a language more appropriate to such a requirement.

It is no accident that the period following the religious wars (the mid-seventeenth century) marks the beginning of an interest in dictionaries (whose major goal is to promote accuracy of shared denoted meanings), a revival of interest in Euclidean geometry, developing distrust of political and philosophical arguments based upon scripture, a rising criticism of extravagant rhetorical styles (like those of Shakespeare or John Donne or "enthusiastic" preachers), the beginning of a concerted attempt to understand moral and judicial questions mathematically, and a rising demand for a language as empty of ambiguous metaphor as possible.

We witness this in several writers, above all in Hobbes. As we discussed, Hobbes' major concern in Leviathan is to recommend practices that will minimize a return to the civil chaos of the religious wars and the English Civil War. Hobbes is centrally concerned about language. Over half of Leviathan is concerned with religion, above all with the question of interpretation of scripture. For Hobbes is deeply suspicious of literary interpretation and has a clear preference for the language of geometry, the argumentative style of Euclid - not necessarily because that language provides a true description of the nature of the world (although many people claimed and still claim that it does) but only that a little deductive clarity-based on clear definitions and fundamental principles of deductive logic - can win wide agreement, can, that is, promote social harmony essential to political peace and "commodious living."

The reason for this preference in Hobbes seems clear enough. Metaphorical language breeds arguments over interpretations; Such arguments breed civil quarrels, civil quarrels lead to a break down in public order and foster a return to a state of nature. A different language, one based on the precision of geometry, can foster agreement, because we all can occupy the same understanding if definitions are exact and the correct logic.

One attraction of the new science (although there was considerable argument about this) was that it offered an understanding of the world delivered in the most unambiguous way, in the language of mathematics rather than of scripture. Newton's equations, for those who could follow the mathematics, did not promote the sorts of arguments that arose from, say, the text about Ezekiel making the sun stands still or Moses parting the waters of the Red Sea or God's creating the world in a week. What disagreement or ambiguity’s Newton's explanation contained could be resolved, and was resolved, by a further application of the method he displayed (in the "normal science," as Kuhn calls it, which took place in the generations after Newton).

Throughout the nineteenth century, the rising success of the new science was delivering on the promise of an exact description of the world. The application of this spirit of empirical observation and precise, unambiguous description to an understanding of history and morality, of the sort offered by Karl Marx, set up the hope of a triumph of the language of philosophy (as defined earlier) over the language of poetry (in spite of the objections of the Romantics).

It was an alluring vision, because it promised to lead, as Hannah Arendt points out, to the end of traditional political argument. Since we would all have a full and shared understanding of the way a just state really does work, we wouldn't need to argue about it any more than we argue about the Pythagorean Theorem. Anyone could govern, since governing, traditionally the most challenging task in human affairs, would be simply a matter of applying known and agreed upon rules, something a technician could do. As Lenin observed, governing would be for cooks, because the truths of political life would be expressed in a language coherent to anyone, a language that did not require interpretation of any sort.

There was an enormously arrogant confidence or, if we think about classical tragedy, of hubris about this, especially between some scientists and social scientists, who firmly believed that there are various contentious moral, political, and scientific questions would soon be settled for all time. The future of physics, said.

A. Mitchelton in 1894, in so that it persists concisely of little more than "adding a few decimal places to results already known."

Nietzsche, as we have already seen, sets his sights firmly against such a confidence that language, any language, can provide an accurate description of the Truth. That was, in the nature of things, impossible, because language is inherently metaphorical, it coincides to some invented fiction, with a history, a genealogy, a contingent character.

For Nietzsche, the belief that the sort of language developed by Euclid or the new science with its emphasis on precision and logical clarity - is somehow "true to nature" is, like beliefs that any system is true, plainly incorrect. All language is essentially poetry, inherently metaphorical, inherently a fabrication. Those who, like so many scientists, make claims that their descriptions of the world are true or even more accurate than alternative languages are simply ignorant of the metaphorical nature of all language.

In other words, for Nietzsche there is no privileged access to a final definitive version of life, the world, or anything else, and thus no privileged language for achieving such knowledge. Truth is, in Nietzsche's pregnant phrase, "a mobile army of metaphors," a historical succession of fictions, which does not, as Kant and Marx claimed, reveal any emerging higher truth, like progress or the march to a final utopia or a growing insight into how reality really works. In Nietzsche's view of language there is no final text available to us; There is only interpretation, or, more accurately, an unending series of freshly created interpretations, fresh metaphors.

Thus, as Rorty has observed, Nietzsche is announcing the end of the ancient war between poetry and philosophy by indicating that all we have in language is metaphor. We were mistaken in believing that the language of Euclid was anything but of another than what appears as fiction. It is not. Therefore, it has no special preeminence as the language most appropriate to a description of reality.

Since there is no privileged language and since accepting as true any inherited system of metaphor is limiting one to a herd existence, our central purpose is the construction of new metaphors, the assertion of new values in a language we have made ourselves. Thus, central to Nietzsche's vision of how the best human beings must live their lives is the insistence that individuals must create for themselves a new language, fresh metaphors, original -descriptions. To escape the illusions of the past, to release the arrow in flight, these activities are linked to the creative ability to construct in one's life and language new metaphors.

Therefore, under the influence of this idea, a major part of the cultural imperative of the Twentieth Century artist has been a craze for originality, something that has produced a bewildering succession of styles, schools, experiments. When we explore Hughes', one of the first impressions is the almost overwhelming range of different subject matters, different styles, the pressure, even in the context of a single artist's life, constantly to invent new perspectives, new - descriptions, new ways of metaphorically presenting one's imaginative assertions, in Nietzsche's phrase, one's will to power.

The same is true in many aspects of art: in prose style, in poetry, in architecture, in music, and so on. The influence of Nietzsche on this point (which is, as it has been argued, as an extension of one stream of Romanticism) has been pervasive. This phenomenon has had some curious results.

First, the constant emphasis on individualist - assertion through new metaphors has made much art increasingly esoteric, experimental, and inaccessible to the public, for the Nietzschean imperative leaves no room for the artist's having to answer to the community values, styles, traditions, language, and so on. Thus, the strong tendency of much modern art, fiction, and music to have virtually no public following, to be met with large-scale incomprehension or derision.

This, in turn, has led to a widening split between many in the artistic community and the public. Whereas, in a great deal of traditional art, the chief aim was to hold up for public contemplation what the artist had to reveal about the nature of his vision (e.g., public statues, church paintings, public musical recitals, drama festivals), in the twentieth century the emphasis on avant garde originality has increasingly meant that much art is produced for a small coterie who thinks of them as advanced in the Nietzschean sense-emancipated from the herd because only the privileged can understand and produce such "cutting-edge " metaphors. The strong connections between much "radical" modern art and intellectual elitism characteristic of an extreme right wing anti-democratic ideologies owe much to Nietzsche's views, since the aristocratic elitism of Nietzsche's aesthetic links it easily enough to political systems seeking some defence of "aristocratic" hierarchies (even if the understanding of Nietzsche is often skimpy at best).

Therefore, as Hughes points out, there has been a drastic decline in much high quality public art. To be popular, in fact, becomes a sign that one is not sufficiently original, a sign that one's language is still too much derived from the patois of the last people. There is still much public art, of course, especially in state architecture and market-driven television, but, as Hughes points out, the achievements in these fields are generally not impressive and may not be improving. Some, the art that commands the attention of many artists these days is increasingly private.

In the universities, Nietzsche has, rightly or wrongly, becomes the patron saint of those who believe that novelty is more important than coherence or commitment to anything outside a rhetorical display of the writer's own originality. To object that this ethos produces much irrational individualistic spouting is, its defenders point out, simply to miss the point. The creative joy of affirmation through new language is the only game in town, and traditional calls for scientific scholarship or social criticism on Marx's model are simply reassertions of dogmatism. There are some English departments now, for example, where in the job descriptions, the writing’s one has to produce for tenure can include confessional autobiography; in effect, to produce an aphoristic description, whether that is at all interesting or not, qualifies one as a serious academic scholar and teacher in some places.

Given that most of the society, including those who are maintaining the traditional scientific and economic endeavour launched in the Enlightenment, pays this sort of talk very little attention, finding most of it hard to grasp, there is thus a widening gap between much of what goes on in our society and many of its leading artists and intellectuals. The legacy of Nietzsche may cheer them up, and, in variously watered down versions, especially on this side of the Atlantic, he clearly gives them license to be strident while declaring their own superiority, but just what he offers by way of helping to cure this dichotomy (if it needs to be cured) is a question worth exploring.

The philosophical problem of reflective thought, the conditions of Mind reflecting it, of consciousness observing its own actions and processes. The dilemma of Goedel's theorem regarding referential systems, can be overcome by applying a transcendent thinking method. This higher thought provides complete knowledge of the system, but only if the individual mind is surpassed and merged with the universal mind that allows reflective thought to be perfectly legitimate. To reach true objectivity of mind means leaving the subjective mind behind, and with it, the object-subject dualism so inveterate in our ordinary thought.

How is it possible that consciousness can observe consciousness It? How is it possible to think reflectively at all? Can we take a stance outside consciousness to observe it? Can we think about thinking per se? Can we observe thought processes, which are generally performed unconsciously? Is it possible to examine consciousness or mind with consciousness or mind of it?

These questions have often influenced exaggerated skepticism or to a negative criticism concerning the limitation of our knowledge about our mind. Some even say, which because of the fact that we have no other means of investigating consciousness than consciousness it, this can never lead to a complete understanding of consciousness. Advocates of this view come mostly from the scientific field. Science tries to objectivise its subject matters, so that they can take a stance outside the object and look at it. The means of investigation within experimental sciences are always to mean independence of the object, although this situation must be restrained to the field of classical physics. In Quantum physics, however, experiments cannot be measured without the observer as a conscious living being. As a crucial point, it can be stated generally, that we can have completed knowledge of an object only when we are independent and outside it at the moment of observation.

The problem of completeness of knowledge is encountered when you leave the rigid field of natural sciences. Any attempts to apply the completeness theorem to social sciences, such as psychology and sociology are doomed inevitably, because in those sciences, the object of investigation is identical with the investigator. A psychologist, for example, cannot investigate the psychical processes of another individual in the way a natural scientist investigates physical processes.

First of all, psychic events are not describable as to physical properties and therefore seem evasive. Second, we deal here with a much more complex structure than we ever meet in the physical world. This complexity entails necessary incompleteness. The structure we deal here is not only more complex but also is what we call consciousness or mind. Here we have the identity of the object and its investigator, which was absent in natural sciences. So, are we human beings ever able to know what consciousness and mind really are or are we left forever in the dark and allowed only partial knowledge?

The answer to this question depends on our current understanding of what consciousness or mind is. If we reduce mind to a set of physical properties or equal it with emergent properties of the brain (materialistic and epiphenomenalistic view), we are held to believe, that it will one day is possible to know everything about consciousness. Ever more, however, scientists leave the terrain of a mere materialistic or reductionistic view of the mind and come to the conclusion, that mind is more than the sum of the brain's physical properties or more than a complex structure that emerged from the brain during the evolution of the human being. There are a lot of arguments against the reductionism of mind.

If we tend to believe that consciousness and mind are more than physicalism probably cannot describe, we are still left with the question whether we will be able to resolve this uncertainty of knowledge concerning the nature of our mind. The ordinary view of consciousness is, that it is local to every individual. If we take this as a fact, we will never be able to explain consciousness completely, because now we ran into Goedel's Theorem of the incompleteness of any - referential system.

In brief, Goedel's theorem states that for any formal system there is certain referencing assertion about the system that cannot be evaluated as either wholly true or false. They remain insoluble for our human reasoning. This paradox is originally attributed to the Cretan Epimenides who presented the statement "I am lying" for being undecidable concerning truth or falsity. If it is true that I am lying, then the statement is false, and if it is false, that I am lying, then the statement is true.

This theorem sets a considerable limitation to our reasoning and thus to the ability of investigating our own consciousness or mind. It says, that we cannot make any generally accepted assertions about our mind since it is mind it that asserts something about the mind. It can therefore not decide with certainty or finality whether any statements about our mind or consciousness are logically and factually true or false. This point is only eligible if we uphold the position, which in order to acquire a complete and consistent knowledge of something, we have to be outside it, independent of it, at least formally. We can observe cells or atoms, they are part of our body, but we do not watch cells by means of cells, or atoms by means of atoms. To comprehend a system fully, we have to transcend it, by objectifying it. Only then is it open to analysis. To understand the physical world, we do not have to undertake strenuous efforts to transcend the system, because we as complex living organisms are already in a state of transcendence in relation to inanimate systems. The same applies to biological systems insofar as we are human beings have furnished the highly complex functions of consciousness, and, are again, already in a higher state than a mere biological system, even such as our body. That is not true when considering the next higher system after biology: Consciousness and mind. Where is the next higher level, from which we can study the mental system as we studied the physical and biological system from mind? Is there anything higher than mind? Can we enter supra-consciousness to study normal consciousness?

If there is something like higher consciousness or a supra-individual mind then Goedel's theorem is resolved, since then it will become possible to decide with certainty any -referential assertions. What is more important, we are enabled, from this higher point of view, to have a complete knowledge of our ordinary consciousness or mind? This would be a revolution in modern science, such as was the Copernican Revolution or Relativity Theory or Quantum Physics: In would say, the greatest revolution of humankind until now. There would be an unlimited expansion of consciousness, of faculties of mind and with that of our knowledge of the world and ourselves.

Contemporary theologies are unquestionably in a state of crisis, perhaps the most profound crisis that Christian theology has faced since its creation. This crisisis specifies in three areas? (1) in the relation of a dogmatic theology to its biblical ground, a crisis posed by the rise of a modem historical understanding; (2) in the relation of Theology to the sensibility and Existenz of contemporary man, a crisis created by the death of God; and (3) in the relation of the community of faith to the whole order of social, political and economic institutions, the collapse generated a crisis as of Christendom. In intend to focus upon the second of these areas, although it can only be artificially isolated from the other two. Furthermore, we will simply assume the truth of Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God, a truth that a contemporary theology has thus far ignored or set aside. This means that we will understand the death of God as a historical event: God has died in our time, in our history, in our existence. The man who chooses to live in our destiny can neither know the reality of God’s presence nor understand the world as his creation; Or, at least, he can no longer respond either interiorly or cognitively to the classical Christian images of the Creator and the creation. In this situation, an affirmation of the traditional forms of faith becomes a Gnostic escape from the brute realities of history.

Sören Kierkegaard founded A modern Theology, as we will understand it: Founded not simply in response to the collapse of Christendom, but more deeply in response to the arrival of a reality that was wholly divorced from the world of faith, or, as Kierkegaard saw, a reality created by the negation of faith. While employing the Hegelian categories of the "universal" and the "objective" for understanding the new reality created by modern man, Kierkegaard came to understand the modern consciousness as the product of a Faustian choice. Modern philosophy is, as Kierkegaard argued in The Sickness Unto Death, simply paganism, its really secret being: "cogito ergo sum" - In think is to be; Whereas the Christian motto, on the contrary, is: "As thou believest, so art thou; To believe is to be." Here, cogito and credo are antithetical acts: Modern or "objective" knowledge is not religiously neutral, as so many theologians have imagined; it is grounded in a dialectical negation of faith. Again, to know "objectively" is to exist "objectively." Such existence is the antithetical opposite of the "subjectivity" which Kierkegaard identified as faith. With the birth of objective knowledge, reality appeared as an objective order, and God was banished from the "real" world. However, for Kierkegaard, who was living at a moment when Christian subsistence was still a possibility, it was not only God but also the concretely existing individual who was banished from the world of the "universal." Already, in Fear and Trembling, the minor themes that ". . . the individual is incommensurable with reality threatens the major theme of the ‘knight of faith, that, . . . subjectivity is incommensurable with reality.’ So radical is this incommensurability that the existing individual and objective reality now exist in a state of dialectical opposition: to know objectively is to cease to exist subjectively, to exist subjectively is to cease to know objectively. Moreover, it was precisely Kierkegaard’s realization of the radically profane ground of modern knowledge that made possible his creation of a modern Christian mode of dialectical understanding. Existence in faith is antithetically related to existence in objective reality; now faith becomes subjective, momentary and paradoxical, least of mention, existence in faith is existence by virtue of the absurd. Why the absurd? Because faith is antithetically related to ‘objectivity,’ . . . therefore, true faith is radical inwardness or subjectivity, it comes into existence by a negation of objectivity, and can only maintain it by a continual process, or repetition, of negating objectivity.

Kierkegaard’s dialectical method is fully presented in the Postscript, but it was a method destined never to be fully evolved. Quite simply the reason that this method never reached completion is that it never - despite his initial effort in Fear and Trembling - moved beyond negation. Although biographically his second conversion or "metamorphosis hardened Kierkegaard’s choice of a negative dialectic," a conversion that led to his resolve to attack the established church, and therefore to abandon philosophy, it is also true that he could limit faith to a negative dialectical movement because he could identify faith and "subjectivity." In the Postscript, subjective thinking is "existential," and ". . . passion is the culmination of existence for an existing individual." Nonetheless, "passion" is radical inwardness, and true inwardness is "eternity" (an identification first established in The Concept of Dread). To be sure, "eternity" is a subjective and not an objective category, and therefore it can only be reached through inwardness. Nevertheless, the crucial point is that Kierkegaard could identify authentic human existence with existence in faith. Kierkegaard knew the death of God only as an objective reality: Indubitably, it was "objectivity" that had created by its means ion the death of God. Accordingly, the negation of objectivity makes faith possible, and since "objectivity" and "subjectivity" are antithetical categories, it follows that faith can be identified with "subjectivity." Today we can see that Kierkegaard could dialectically limit "objectivity" and "subjectivity" to the level of antithetical categories because he still lived in a historical time when subjectivity could be known as indubitably Christian. Less than a hundred years later, it will be little less than blasphemy to identify the truly "existential" with existence in faith. However, in Kierkegaard’s time the death of God had not yet become a subjective reality. So authentic human existence could be understood as culminating in faith, the movement of faith could be limited to the negation of "objectivity," and no occasion need arise for the necessity of a dialectical coincidence of the opposites. Yet no dialectical method can be complete until it leads to this final coincidental oppositorum.

If radical dialectical thinking was reborn in Kierkegaard, it was consummated in Friedrich Nietzsche: The thinker who, in Martin Heidegger’s words, brought an end to the metaphysical tradition of the West. His most important work, Sein und Zeit, 1927, in English as, Being and Time, 1962, clears the space for the quest for Being and only a favoured few have any hope of recapturing oneness with Being. Especially belief in the possibility of escaping from metaphysics and returning into an authentic communion with independent nature, least of mention, saying anything about Being as this is difficult, so what in effect replaces it is peoples’ own consciousness of their place in the world, or of what the world is for them (their Dasein), which then becomes the topic. Before its central themes had become, they became the staple topics of ‘existentialism’, they had a more sinister political embodiment: Heidegger became more inclined to a kind of historical fatalism, and is sometimes seen as an heir to the tradition of Dilthey. Heidegger’s continuing influence is due at least in part to his criticism of modernity and democracy, which he associates with a lack of respect for nature independent of the uses to which human beings put it. However, he has also been hailed (notably by Rorty) as a proponent of ‘pragmatism’, and even more remarkable many French intellectuals have taken him as a prophet of the political left. When he writes that "from a metaphysical point of view, Russia and America are the same, the same dreary technological frenzy, the same unrestricted organization of the average person" (An Introduction to Metaphysics, 1953) forging that his contempt for the mass culture of the industrial age springs from nationalistic and middle-class élitism, rather than from any left-wing or egalitarian illusions.

Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God shattered the transcendence of Being. No longer is there a metaphysical hierarchy or order that can give meaning or value to existing beings (Seiendes); as Heidegger points out, now there is no Sein of Seiendes. Nietzsche was, of course, a prophetic thinker, which means that his thought reflected the deepest reality of his time, and of our time as well; For to exist in our time is to exist in what Sartre calls a "hole in Being," a "hole" created by the death of God. However, the proclamation of the death of God - or, more deeply, the willing of the death of God - is dialectical: a No-saying to God (the transcendence of Sein) makes possibly a Yes-saying to human existence (Dasein, total existence in the here and now). Absolute transcendence is transformed into absolute immanence: It’s positive actualization has characterized the particularized occupancy to a position of the Here and Now. Only, by ways of post-Christian existential "now-nesses," are we drawn into ourselves, if only in those powers that were once bestowed upon and beyond: Consequently, Nietzsche’s vision of Eternal Recurrence is the dialectical correlate of his proclamation of the death of God, least of mention, that since death is the cessation of life, it, . . . cannot be experienced, nor be harmed nor a proper object of fear. So, at least, have argued many philosophers, notably Epicurus and Lucretius. A prime consideration has been the symmetry between the state of being dead, and the state of ‘being’ not yet in existence. On the other hand death is feared, and thought of as a harm (even if it is instant: it is not the process of dying that make the difference). The alternative, immortality, sounds better until the detail is filled, when it can begin to sound insupportable. The management of death is one of the topics of ‘bioethics’. All in the same, the assertion that God is dead, but that we have to vanquish his shadow, first occurs in Nietzsche’s "The Gay Science." Nietzsche tells of the madman who hails it as the greatest achievement of mankind, to have killed God and turned the churches into tombs and sepulchers of God. Nevertheless, people do not listen to the madman for ‘the deed is still more distant from them than the most -distant stars - and yet they have done it themselves’.

. . . Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, and everything blossoms again; Eternally runs the year of being. Everything breaks, and everything is joined anew; Eternally the same house of being is built. Everything parts, but everything greets every other thing again, least of mention, that the eternal ring of being remains faithful to it. In every NOW, being begins; Round every here roll the sphere. There. The centre is everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity.

Only when God is dead can Being begin in each now. Eternal Recurrence is neither the cosmology nor a metaphysical idea: it is Nietzsche’s symbol of the deepest affirmation of existence, of Yes-saying. Accordingly, Eternal Recurrence is a symbolic portrait of the truly contemporary man, the man who dares to live in our time, in our history, in our existence. Have enslaved man into the alienation of "being" and to the guilt of "history." Yet now the contemporary Christian can rejoice because the Jesus whom our time has discovered is the proclaimer of a gospel that makes incarnate a Kingdom reversing the order of "history" and placing in question the very reality of "being." Perhaps we are at last prepared to understand the true uniqueness of the Christian Gospel.

The history of religions teaches us that Christianity stands apart from the other higher religions of the world on three grounds: (1) Its proclamation of the Incarnation, (2) its world-reversing form of ethics, and (3) the fact that Christianity is the only one of the world religions to have evolved or, in some decisive sense, to have initiated a radically profane form of Existenz. Christendom imagined that the Incarnation meant a non-dialectical (or partial) union of time and eternity, of flesh and Spirit; by that it abandoned a world-reversing form of ethics and ushered in the new age of an absolutely autonomous history (profane Existenz). What we know as the traditional image of the Incarnation is precisely the means by which Christendom laid the grounds for the fatefully willing death of God, for this traditional image made possibly the sanctification of "time" and "nature," a final sanctification leading to the transformation of eternity into time. If this process led to the collapse of Christendom, it nevertheless is a product of Christendom, and faith must now face the consequences of a non-dialectical union of time and eternity. Is a form of faith possible that will affect a dialectical union between time and eternity, or the sacred and the profane? Already we can see significant parallels between Nietzsche’s vision of Eternal Recurrence and Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom of God. By accepting "Being begins in every now" as the deepest symbolic expression of contemporary Existenz, we can see that modern profane existence knows a form of the Incarnation. Like its New Testament original, the profane form of the Incarnation isolates authentic existence from the presence of "being" and "history," and it does so dialectically. The Yes-saying of Eternal Recurrence dawns out of the deepest No-saying, and only when man has been surpassed will "Being" begin in every "Now." Let us also note that modern Existenz has resurrected a world-reversing form of ethic, e.g., in Marx, Freud, Kafka, and in Nietzsche him. May the Christian greet our Existenz as a paradoxical way through which he may pass to eschatological faith? Surely this is the problem that the crisis of theology poses for us today.

The aforementioned, as we have attempted to portray Nietzsche's fundamental thought - the eternal returns of the same - in its essential import, in its domain, and in the mode of thinking that is expressly proper to the thought it, that is, the mode demanded by the thought as such. In that way we have laid the foundation for our own efforts to define Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position in Western philosophy. The effort to circumscribe Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position shows that we are examining his philosophy as for the position assigned it by the history of Western philosophy until now. At the same time, this means that we are expressly transposing Nietzsche's philosophy to that sole position in which it can and most unfold the forces of thought that are most proper to it, and this from inescapable confrontation with prior Western philosophy as a whole. The fact that during our presentation of the doctrine of return we have come to cognize the region of thought that must necessarily and preeminently take precedence in every fruitful reading and appropriating of Nietzschean thought may be an important gain; yet when viewed for the essential task, namely the characterization of Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position, such a gain remains merely provisional.
We can probably define Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position in its principal traits if we ponder the response he gives to the question concerning the constitution of being and being's way to be. Now, we know that Nietzsche offers two answers regarding being as a whole: Actualized wholeness is willed top power, and being as a whole is eternal occurrence of the same. Yet philosophical interpretations of Nietzsche's philosophy have up too now been unable to grasp these two simultaneous answers as answers, are, in fact, answers that necessarily cohere, because they have not recognized the questions to which these answers pertain; That is to say, prior interpretations have not explicitly developed these questions because of a thoroughgoing articulation of the guiding question. If, on the contrary, we approach the matter as to the developed guiding question, the word "is apparently" in these two major statements -being as a whole is willed to power, and being as a whole is eternal recurrence of the same in each case suggests something different. To say that being as a whole "is" eternal recurrence of the same means that being as a whole is, for being, in the manner of eternal recurrence of the same. The determination in the "will to power" replies to the question of being with respect to the latter's constitution, in that for the determination forwarded to the "eternal recurrence of the same" that it replies to the question of being with its own respectful manner, to its ways that it is to be. Nonetheless, constitution and manner of being do cohere as determination of the beingness of beings.
Accordingly, in Nietzsche's philosophy will to power and eternal recurrence of the same belongs together. It is thus right from the start a misunderstanding -better, an outright mistake of metaphysical proportions when commentators try to play off will to power against eternal recurrence of the same, and especially when they exclude the latter together from metaphysical determinations of being. In truth, the coherence of both must be grasped. Such coherence is it essentially defined by the coherence of the constitution of beings also specifies in each case their way to be - keeping steadfast in their peculiarities, only for which they bear their own proper grounds.
What fundamental metaphysical position does Nietzsche's philosophy assume for it because of its response to the guiding question within Western philosophy that is to say, within metaphysics?
Nietzsche's philosophy is the end of metaphysics, since it reverts to the very commencement of Greek thought, taking up such thought in a way that is peculiar to Nietzsche's philosophy alone. In this way Nietzsche's philosophy closes the ring formed by the very course of inquiry into being as such as a whole. Yet to what extent does Nietzsche's thinking revert to the commencement? When we realize this question, we must be clear about one point at the very outset: Nietzsche hardly recovers the philosophy of the commencement in its pristine form. But, it is nonetheless, shown in the attendance of what is presently a matter of the reemergence of the essential fundamental positions of the commencement in a transformed configuration, in such a way for these positions interlock.
What are the decisive fundamental positions of the commencement? In other words, what sorts of answers are given to the yet undeveloped guiding question, the question what being, is?
The one answer -roughly speaking, it is the answer of Parmenides- tells us, that being is. An odd sort of answer, no doubt, yet a very deep one, since that very response determines for the first time and for all thinkers to come, including Nietzsche, the meaning of ‘is and Being’ - permanence and presence, that is, the eternal present.
The other answer - roughly speaking, that of Heraclitus - tells us that being becomes. The being is in being by virtue of its permanent becoming. It’s -unfolding and eventual dissolution.
To what extent is Nietzsche's thinking the end? That is to say, how does it stretch back to both these fundamental determinations of being so that they come to interlock? Precisely to the extent that Nietzsche argues that being is as fixated, as permanent, and that it is in perpetual creation and destruction. Yet beings are both, not in an extrinsic way, as one beside another; rather, being is in its very ground perpetual creation (Becoming), while as creation it needs what is fixed. Creation needs what is fixed, first, to overcome it, and second, ion order to have something that has yet to be fixated, something that enables the creative to advance beyond it and be transfigured. The essence of being isortsighted, depending on perspective repeating a small scale, as it was, the tendency of the whole. What all life exhibits, to be observed as a reduced formula for the universal tendency: Hence a new grip on the idea "life" as will to power. Instead of "cause and effect," the mutual struggle of things that becomes, often with the absorption of the opponent: The enumeration of things of becoming non-constant. Inefficacy of the old ideals for interpreting the whole of occurrence, once one has recognized their animal origins and utility, all of them that are contradicting life.

Inefficacy of the mechanistic theory-gives the impression of

Meaninglessness. The entire idealism of humanity until now is about to turn into nihilism - into belief in absolute worthlessness, which is to say, senselessness. Annihilation of ideals, the new desert, the new arts, by means of which we can endure it, amphibians’ presupposition: Bravery, patience, no "turning back" not hurrying forward. (Zarathustra, always parodying prior values, based on his own abundance.)

What is this receiving, in which whatever becomes comes to be being? It is the reconfiguration of what becomes as its supreme possibilities, a reconfiguration in which what becomes is transfigured and attains subsistence in it’s very dimensions and domains. This receiving is a creating. To create, in the sense of creation out beyond one, is most intrinsically this: to stand in the moment of decision, in which what has prevailed hitherto, our endowment, is directed toward a projected task. When it is so directed, the endowment is preserved. The "momentary" character of creation is the essence of actual, actuating eternity, which achieves its greatest breadth and keenest edge as the moment of eternity in the return of the same. The receiving of what becomes into being - will to power in its supreme configuration - is in its most profound essence something that occurs in the "glance of an eye" as eternal recurrence of the same. The will to power, as constitution of being, is as it is solely from the way to be which Nietzsche projects for being as a whole: Will to power, in its essence and according to its inner possibility is eternal recurrence of the same?
The aptness of our interpretation is demonstrated unequivocally in that very fragment that bears the title "Recapitulation." After the statement we have already cited - "To stamp Becoming with the character of Being - that is the supreme will to power" - we soon read the following sentence: "That everything reverted may bring the close’s approximation of a world of Becoming to one of Being: peak of the meditation." Saying it in a more lucid fashion would scarcely be possible, first, how and on what basis the stamping of Being on Becoming is meant to be even and precisely during the period when the thought of will to power appears to attain preeminence, remains the thought that Nietzsche's philosophy things without a cease.

Nevertheless, we ought to pay close attention to the phrases that follow the god's name in these titles: "Philosophy of eternal return," or simply "philosophos."
Such phrases suggest that what the word’s Dionysos and Dionysian mean to Nietzsche will be heard and understood only if the "eternal return of the same" is thought. In turn, which eternally recurs as the same and in such wise is, that is, perpetually presences, has the ontological constitution of "will to power." The mythic name Dionysos will become an epithet thought through in the sense intended by Nietzsche the thinker only when we try to think the coherence of "will to power" and "eternal returns of the same." That means only when we seek those determinations of Being that from the outset of Greek thought guides all thinking about being as such and as a whole. (Two texts that appeared several years ago treat the matters of Dionysos and the Dionysian: Walter F. Otto, Dionysos: Myth and Cult, 1933. Karl Reinhardt, "Nietzsche's 'Plaint of Ariadne, ‘" in the journal Die Antike, 1935. Heidegger's original manuscript from the summer of 1937 does not show these paragraphs. Surprisingly, there is no extant, Abschrift or typescript of this course; nor is the typescript that went to the printer in 1961 available for inspection. As a result, the date of the passage remains uncertain. My own surmise is that Heidegger added the note not long after the semester ended, the reference to students questions and to those tow works on Dionysos that had recently been published make it highly unlikely that the note was added as late as 1960-61. The work’s Heidegger refers us to are of course still available - and is still very much wroth reading. Walter F. Otto, Dionysos: Mythos and Kultus (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1933): Reinhardt's Nietzsche's "Klage der Ariadne, appears now in Karl Reinhardt, Vermachtrus der Antike Gesammelte Essays zur Philosophie und Geschichtsschreiburg, edited by Carl Becker (Gottingen: Vandernhock & Ruprecht, 1960).

Nietzsche conjoins in one both of the fundamental determinations of being that emerge from the commencement of Western philosophy to wit, being as becoming and being as permanence. That ‘one’ is his essential thought - the eternal recurrence of the same.
Yet can we designate Nietzsche's way of grappling with the commencement of Western philosophy as an end? Is it not rather a reawakening of the commencement? Is it not therefore it a commencement and hence the very opposite of an end? Nonetheless Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position is the end of Western philosophy. For what is decisive, is not that the fundamental determinations of the commencement are conjoined and that Nietzsche's thinking stretches back to the commencement, what is, metaphysically essential it the way in which these things become known? The question is whether Nietzsche reverts to the incipient commencement, to the commencement as a commencing. Here our answer must be: no, he does not.
Neither Nietzsche nor any thinkers before him - even and especially not that one who before Nietzsche first thought the history of philosophy in a philosophical way, namely, Hegel - revert to the incipient commencement. Rather, they invariably apprehend the commencement in the sole light of a philosophy in decline from it, a philosophy that arrests the commencement - to wit, the philosophy of Plato. Here we cannot demonstrate this matter in any detail Nietzsche him quite early characterizes his philosophy as inverted Platonism. However, the inversion does not eliminate the fundamentally Platonic position. Rather, precisely because it seems to eliminate the Platonic position, Nietzsche's inversion represents the entrenchment of that position.
What remains essential, however, is the following: when Nietzsche's metaphysical thinking reverts to the commencement, the circle closes. Yet because it is the already terminated commencement and not the incipient one that prevails there, the circle it grows inflexible, loses whatever of the commencement it once had. When the circle closes in this way, it no longer releases any possibilities for essential inquiry into the guiding question. Metaphysic - treatment of the guiding question - is at an end. That seems a bootless, comfortless insight, a conclusion that like a dying tone signals ultimate cessation. Yet this is not so.
Because Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position is the end of metaphysics in the designated sense, it performs the grandest and most profound gathering - that is, accomplishment - of all the essential fundamental positions in Western philosophy since Plato and in the light of Platonism. It does so form within some fundamental position remains an actual, actuating fundamental metaphysical position only if it in turn is developed in all its essential forces and regions of dominion in the direction of its counterpoison. For thinking that looks beyond it. Nietzsche's philosophy, which is inherently a turning against what lies behind it, must it become a forward-looking counter position. Yet since Nietzsche's fundamental position in Western metaphysics constitutes the end of that metaphysic, it can be the counter position. For our other commencement only if the later adopts a questioning stance compared with the initial commencement - as one that in its proper originality is only now commencing. After everything we have said, the questioning intended here can only be the unfolding of a more original inquiry. Such questioning must be the unfolding of the prior, all-determining, and commanding question of philosophy, the guiding question, "What is being?" out of it and out beyond it.
Nietzsche once chose a phrase to designate what we are calling his fundamental metaphysical position, a phrase that is often cited and is readily taken as a way to characterize his philosophy armour factum, love of necessity. Yet the phrase expresses Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position only when we understand, the two words armour and factum - and, above all, their conjunctions about Nietzsche's own-most thinking, only when we avoid mixing our fortunately familiar notions into it.
Often enough, In have asked my if In am not more profoundly indebted to the most difficult years of my life than to any of the others. What my innermost nature instructs me is that all necessity - viewed from the heights, about an economy on a grand scale - is also what is inherently useful: one should not merely put up with it, one should love it . . . Armour fati: That is, the innermost nature. Nietzsche repeats the formula twice in An Ecce Homo, the first time as the ultimate explanation of his "discernment."
"My formula for greatness in a human being armour fati - love of necessity: That one does not will to have anything different, and not to be placed forward or back nor in any which way that proves immeasurably eternal. Not merely to bear necessity, though must less to cloak it - all Idealism is mendacity in the face of necessity - but to love." Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.

Nietzsche had first cited the formula six years earlier, at the outset of Book IV of The Gay Science, as the very essence of affirmation": In want to learn better how to see the necessity in things as what is beautiful - in that way In will become one of those who make things beautiful. Armour fati: let this be my love from now on.
He had written to Franz Overbeck, also in 1882, that he was possessed of "a fatalistic trust in God which he preferred to call armour fati. He boasted, "In would stick my head down a lion's throat, not to mention. . . . " The fullest statement concerning Amor fati, however appears from spring-summer, although the note as a whole. The action produced by instincts e merit reprinting, and rereading, the following extract contains the essential lines. Nietzsche explains that his experimental philosophy, which aims to advance beyond nihilism to the very opposite of nihilism.
To a Dionysian yes-saying to the world as it is, without reduction, exception, or selection; it wants eternal circulation - the same things, the same logic and dialogic of implication. Supreme state to which a philosopher may attain; taking a stand in Dionysian fashion on behalf of existence. A formula for this is armour fati.
Amor - love - is to be understood as will, the will that wants whatever it loves to be what it is in its essence. The supreme will have this kind, the most expansive and decisive will, is the will as transfiguration. Such a will builds and exposes what it wills in its essence to the supreme possibilities of its Being.
The thinker explores its being as a whole and as such, in that, the world for-itself might be conceived of as such. Thus with his very first step he always thinks out beyond the world, and so at the same time back to it. He thinks in the direction of that sphere within which a world becomes the world. Whenever that sphere is not incessantly called by name, called aloud, wherever it is held silently in the most interior questioning, it is thought most purely and profoundly. For what is held in silence is genuinely preserved, as preserved it is most intimate and actual. What to common sense looks like "atheism," and has to look like it, is at bottom the very opposite. In the same, wherever the matters of death and of nothingness is treated. Being and Being alone is thought most deeply - whereas those who ostensibly occupy themselves solely with "reality" flounder in nothingness.

Atheism, is the denial of or lack of belief in the existence of a god or gods. The term atheism comes from the Greek prefix , meaning "without," and the Greek word theos, meaning "deity." The denial of god’s existence is also known as strong, or positive, atheism, whereas the lack of belief in god is known as negative, or weak, atheism. Although atheism is often contrasted with agnosticism-the view that we cannot know whether a deity exists or not and should therefore suspend belief-negative atheism is in fact compatible with agnosticism.

Atheism has wide-ranging implications for the human condition. In the absence of belief in god, ethical goals must be determined by secular (nonreligious) aims and concerns, human beings must take full responsibility for their destiny, and death marks the end of a person’s existence. As of 1994 there were an estimated 240 million atheists around the world comprising slightly more than 4 percent of the world’s population, including those who profess atheism, skepticism, disbelief, or irreligion. The estimate of nonbelievers increases significantly, to about twenty-one percent of the world’s population, if negative atheists are included.

From ancient times, people have at times used atheism as a term of abuse for religious positions they opposed. The first Christians were called atheists because they denied the existence of the Roman deities. Over time, several misunderstandings of atheism have arisen: that atheists are immoral, that morality cannot be justified without belief in God, and that life has no purpose without belief in God. Yet there is no evidence that atheists are any less moral than believers. Many systems of morality have been developed that do not presuppose the existence of a supernatural being. Moreover, the purpose of human life may be based on secular goals, such as the betterment of humankind.

In Western society the term atheism has been used more narrowly to refer to the denial of theism, in particular Judeo-Christian theism, which asserts the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good personal being. This being created the universe, took an active interest in human concerns, and guides his creatures through divine disclosure known as revelation. Positive atheists reject this theistic God and the associated beliefs in an afterlife, a cosmic destiny, a supernatural origin of the universe, an immortal soul, the revealed nature of the Bible and the Qur'an (Koran), and a religious foundation for morality.

Theism, however, is not a characteristic of all religions. Some religions reject theism but are not entirely atheistic. Although the theistic tradition is fully developed in the Bhagavad-Gita, the sacred text of Hinduism, earlier Hindu writings known as the Upanishads teach that Brahman (ultimate reality) is impersonal. Positive atheists reject even the pantheistic aspects of Hinduism that equate God with the universe. Several other Eastern religions, including Theravada Buddhism and Jainism, are commonly believed to be atheistic, but this interpretation is not strictly correct. These religions do reject a theistic God believed to have created the universe, but they accept numerous lesser gods. At most, such religions are atheistic in the narrow sense of rejecting theism.

One of the most controversial works of 19th-century philosophy, Thus, Spake Zarathustra (1883-1885) articulated German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s theory of the Übermensch, a term translated as "Superman" or "Overman." The Superman was an individual who overcame what Nietzsche termed the "slave morality" of traditional values, and lived according to his own morality. Nietzsche also advanced his idea that "God is dead," or that traditional morality was no longer relevant in people’s lives. In this passage, the sage Zarathustra came down from the mountain where he had spent the last ten years alone to preach to the people.







In the Western intellectual world, nonbelief in the existence of God is a widespread phenomenon with a long and distinguished history. Philosophers of the ancient world such as Lucretius were nonbelievers. Even in the Middle Ages (the 5th thru into the 15th century) there were currents of thought that questioned theist assumptions, including skepticism, the doctrine that true knowledge is impossible, and naturalism, the belief that only natural forces control the world. Several leading thinkers of the Enlightenment (1700-1789) were professed atheists, including Danish writer Baron Holbach and French encyclopedist Denis Diderot. Expressions of nonbelief also are found in classics of Western literature, including the writings of English poets Percy Shelley and Lord Byron; English novelist Thomas Hardy; French philosophers’ Voltaire and Jean-Paul Sartre; Russian author Ivan Turgenev; also, included is the American writer’s Mark Twain and Upton Sinclair. In the 19th century the most articulate and best-known atheists and critics of religion were German philosopher’s Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche. British philosopher Bertrand Russell, Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, and Sartre are among the 20th century’s most influential atheists.

Nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was an influential critic of religious systems, especially Christianity, which he felt chained society to a herd morality. By declaring that "God is dead," Nietzsche signified that traditional religious belief in God no longer played a central role in human experience. Nietzsche believed we would have to find secular justifications for morality to avoid nihilism - the absence of all belief.

Atheists justify their philosophical position in several different ways. Negative atheists attempt to establish their position by refuting typical theist arguments for the existence of God, such as the argument from first cause, the argument from design, the ontological argument, and the argument from religious experience. Other negative atheists assert that any statement about God is meaningless, because attributes such as all-knowing and all-powerful cannot be comprehended by the human mind. Positive atheists, on the other hand, defend their position by arguing that the concept of God is inconsistent. They question, for example, whether a God who is all-knowing can also be all-good and how a God who lacks bodily existence can be all-knowing.

Some positive atheists have maintained that the existence of evil makes the existence of God improbable. In particular, atheists assert that theism commonly defends the existence of evil by claiming that God desires that human beings have the freedom to choose between good and evil, or that the purpose of evil is to build human character, such as the ability to persevere. Positive atheists counter that justifications for evil in terms of human free will leave unexplained why, for example, children suffer because of genetic diseases or abuse from adults. Arguments that God allows pain and suffering to build human character fail, in turn, to explain why there was suffering among animals before human beings evolved and why human character could not be developed with less suffering than occurs in the world. For atheists, a better explanation for the presence of evil in the world is that God does not exist.

In an Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (first published in 1748 under a different title), Scottish philosopher David Hume offers several criticisms of religious belief, including an argument against belief in miracles. According to Hume, testimony about the occurrence of miracles should be subjected to rational standards of evidence.

Atheists have also criticized, but historical evidence used to support belief in the major theistic religions. For example, atheists have argued that a lack of evidence casts doubt on important doctrines of Christianity, such as the virgin birth and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Because such events are said to represent miracles, atheists assert that extremely strong evidence is necessary to support their occurrence. According to atheists, the available evidence to support these alleged miracles-from Biblical, pagan, and Jewish sources -is weak, and therefore such claims should be rejected.

Atheism is primarily a reaction to, or a rejection of, religious belief, and thus does not determine other philosophical beliefs. Atheism has sometimes been associated with the philosophical ideas of materialism, which holds that only matter exists: Communism, with which it asserts that religion impedes human progress, and rationalism, for which of emphasizing analytic reasoning over other sources of knowledge. However, there is no necessary connection between atheism and these positions. Some atheists have opposed communism and some have rejected materialism. Although nearly all contemporary materialists are atheists, the ancient Greek materialist Epicurus believed the gods were made of matter in the form of atoms. Rationalists such as French philosopher René Descartes have believed in God, whereas atheists such as Sartre are not considered to be rationalists. Atheism has also been associated with systems of thought that reject authority, such as anarchism, a political theory opposed to all forms of government, and existentialism, a philosophic movement that emphasizes absolute human freedom of choice; There is however no necessary connection between atheism and these positions. British analytic philosopher A. J. Ayer was an atheist who opposed existentialism, while Danish philosopher S ren Kierkegaard was an existentialist who accepted God. Marx was an atheist who rejected anarchism while Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, a Christian, embraced anarchism. Because atheism in a strict sense is merely a negation, it does not provide a comprehensive world-view. It is therefore not possible to presume other philosophical positions to be outgrowths of atheism.

Intellectual debate over the existence of God continues to be active, especially on college campuses, in religious discussion groups, and in electronic forums on the Internet. In contemporary philosophical thought, atheism has been defended by British philosopher Antony Flew, Australian philosopher John Mackie, and American philosopher Michael Martin, among others.

Supremely thoughtful utterance does not consist simply in growing taciturn when it is a matter of saying what is properly to be said; it consists in saying the matter in such a way that it is named in nonsaying. The utterance of thinking is a telling silence. Such utterance corresponds to the most profound essence of language, which has its origin in silence. As one in touch with telling silence, the thinker, in a way peculiar to him, rises to the rank of a poet, yet he remains eternally distinct from the poet, just as the poet in turn remains eternally distinct from the thinker. Everything in the hero's sphere turns to tragedy. Everything in the demigod’s sphere turns to play and in God’s sphere turns to . . . to what? "World" perhaps? Erschweigen, an active or telling silence, is what Heidegger elsewhere discusses under the rubric of sigetics (from the Greed sigao, to keep silent). For him it is the power "logic" of a thinking that looks into are made into.

In the months before his final descent into madness, Friedrich Nietzsche made the following declaration and prediction: "In know my destiny. Someday my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous, a crisis like no other on earth, the profoundest collision of conscience, a decision conjured up against everything believed, required, and held sacredly up to that time. In am not a man; In am dynamite."

So he was. The man who practised and perfected the art of "philosophizing with a hammer," who pronounced that "God is dead," who called on his readers to follow him in exploring regions "beyond good and evil," who gleefully declared him the Antichrist, who unconditionally denounced human equality and democracy, who claimed that "a great war hallows any cause," who praised the "blond beast" who "might come away from a revolting succession of murder, arson, rape, [and] torture with a sense of exhilaration and emotional equilibrium, as if it were nothing but a student prank"-this man was indeed explosive. One might even say that today, more than one hundred years after European intellectuals discovered his work, Western culture has yet to come to terms with the fallout produced by the detonation of his most volatile ideas.

In the epilogue to his Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, Rüdiger Safranski catalogues the philosopher's influence, and it reads like a comprehensive intellectual history of the twentieth century. The irrationalist vitalism that helped to inspire fascism, artistic movements from symbolism to art nouveau, expressionism, and Dada, wherefore Ernst Jünger's high-spirited militarism and Heideggerian existentialism, also an antimodernism for which the Counter-Enlightenment critical theory of the postwar Frankfurt School, began its vicious surrealism of Georges Bataille, and through him, the varying postmodern irrationalisms of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida: The neopragmatic conviction that "truth is an illusion that helps us cope with life" - as, these and many other radical cultural, intellectual, and political movements descend directly from Nietzsche: They are his legacies to our time.

For some-primarily those who take their intellectual bearings from outside the thorough Nietzscheanized humanities departments of the modern university, and the handful of conservative dissenters within them-there will be little in this legacy of atheistic immoderation to admire. However we judge the often decadent productions of twentieth-century high culture, and Nietzsche him continues to merit the most serious attention, and not merely because of his considerable influence. The fact remains that Nietzsche is one of the most brilliant philosophers and prose stylists in the history of Western letters. His formidable challenge to so much that so many of us continue to hold dear cannot simply be ignored by thoughtful men and women.

Yet how ought we to approach the task of evaluating Nietzsche's work? The answer is far from clear. For Nietzsche is a deeply contradictory thinker, and glancing at the dozens of books devoted to his thought in the philosophy section of any good bookshop, it can seem that there are, in fact, many of Nietzsche. Most scholars have assumed that his work amounts to a defence of radical right-wing politics, but many today think him more compatible with the far left. His books contain many misogynistic passages, but that has not discouraged feminists from claiming to find support for their program in his ideas. Some think his teaching is meant to inspire public actions, but many others have seen in his writing an aesthetic calls to private cultivation and creativity. Competent scholars have declared that his work is hopelessly incoherent, while at least one leading philosopher has claimed that Nietzsche was the "last great metaphysician in the West." Then there are those who think that Nietzsche's texts can and should mean anything to which their readers want them. This abundance of interpretations makes any attempt to render an informed and comprehensive judgment of his work exceedingly difficult.

Safranski also is a master of what might be called philosophical narration, drawing on just the right amount of detail from Nietzsche's personal background and historical milieu to provide a context for his philosophy while rarely allowing those details to overshadow the ideas that form the core of Nietzsche's life.

The Nietzsche that emerges from Safranski's study is a man who, from his teenage years until his mental collapse at the age of forty-five, tirelessly devoted his formidable intellect to making sense of the world about its intrinsic meaninglessness. The case of Nietzsche thus presents us with the peculiar spectacle of a philosopher who began his intellectual life, not from a position of openness to an elusive truth not yet grasped, but than from an unshakable conviction that he had already found it -and that all of the human experiences and history had, had to be reconceived in its light.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844 in the small village of Röcken, Germany. His father, Pastor Karl Ludwig Nietzsche, died five years later of "softening of the brain," leaving Nietzsche to be raised (along with his sister Elisabeth) by his mother, Franziska, and two unmarried aunts. The young Nietzsche was both intellectually precocious and astonishingly -absorbed. He wrote his first philosophical essay, "On the Origin of Evil," at the age of twelve. By thirteen, he had written his first autobiography. He would go on to write eight more over the next ten years, each of them concluding that, in Safranski's words, "his life was exemplary."

Despite Nietzsche's early penchant for an aggrandizement, -a tendency that would mark all of his written work-both he and his family believed for some time that he would follow in his father's footsteps to become a pastor. However, at some point between 1859 and 1861, while Nietzsche attended an elite boarding school, he began to break decisively with his faith. Although he asserted in his 1859 autobiography that "God has guided me safely in everything as a father would be his weak little child," by May 1861 he had concluded that the idea of God was, in Safranski's words, "unfathomable," because there were simply "too much intense injustice and evil in the world."

Others quickly followed these first tentative steps away from Christianity. In an essay composed on his Easter vacation in 1862, the seventeen-year-old Nietzsche would wonder "how our view of the world might change if there were no God, immortality, Holy Spirit, or divine inspiration, and if the tenets of millennia were based on delusions." Safranski explains how this thought quickly generated a series of puzzles that would set Nietzsche's philosophical agenda for the rest of his life: "Might that we have been 'led astray by a vision' for such a long time? What kinds of reality are left behind once religious phantasms have been taken away?"

Over the next few years, Nietzsche would wrestle with his suspicion that all received truths are illusory. Although he had planned to study theological and classical philology at the University of Bonn when he arrived there in the fall of 1864, he dropped his concentration in Theology after a single semester. By the following summer, he would write to his sister that, although continuing it believing in the comforting tales of their youth would be easy, "the truth is not necessarily in a league with the beautiful and the good." On the contrary, he wrote, the truth can be "detestable and ugly in the extreme."

From this point on, Nietzsche would devote his life to breaking from-and then reflecting on how people might thrive after having left behind"the first and last things." Early in his university education, Nietzsche thought of him as continuing the work of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, whom he described as his "liberator" from dogma and tradition. As Safranski writes, Schopenhauer confirmed Nietzsche's youthful intuition that "the inner nature of the world is based not on reason and intellect but on impulses and dark urges, dynamic and senseless." "True life," Schopenhauer claimed, is pure "will," which "roars behind or underneath it." The challenge was learning how to live because of the truth that all apparent meaning and purpose in life is in fact an illusion. At first Nietzsche was intrigued by Schopenhauer's own proposal-the - negation of the will, culminating in quasi-Buddhistic peace and passivity - but he soon rejected it on the grounds that it amounted to an attitude of defeat in the face of "nothingness." Nietzsche longed to find a way to love and affirm life, despite its meaninglessness.

Such concerns preoccupied his thinking as he continued his education in classical philology under the renowned scholar Friedrich Ritschl, first at Bonn, and then at the University of Leipzig. So impressed was Ritschl by his student that in 1869 he recommended Nietzsche for a professorship at the University of Basel before he had completed either his dissertation or postgraduate thesis-an honour as rare in the nineteenth century as it is today. When Nietzsche finally produced a monograph, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), the expectations were thus very high among his colleagues. They did not anticipate that Nietzsche would completely forsake the scholarly norms of the philological profession to write a highly speculative, even revolutionary account of ancient Greek culture that his own existential fixations largely inspired.

All of Nietzsche's work begins from the assumption that, viewed in it, the world is a meaningless and purposeless chaos. As he would write in his notebooks in 1888, less than a year before his mental breakdown, "For a philosopher to say, 'the good and the beautiful are one,' is infamy; if he goes on to add, 'also the true,' one ought to thrash him. Truth is ugly." In the Birth of Tragedy and the shorter essays he wrote in the early and mid-1870s, Nietzsche proposed that human beings "can become healthy, strong, and fruitful" only when they live within an "enveloping atmosphere" that protects them from having to face this ugly truth without mediation. The enveloping atmosphere consists of protective illusions that come to be taken as truths by those who live within its "horizon," which enables them to "endure without being destroyed." Nevertheless, these second-order truths-or "myths"-must not entirely conceal the meaninglessness over which they cover. Rather, the myths must grant partial access to the authentic truth. In its translucence to truth, the mythical horizon allows human beings to both face and "forget" the ugliness in just the right proportions.

The Birth of Tragedy is an interpretation of how the ancient Greeks achieved this balance between truth and untruth more perfectly than any other culture in history and why that balance eventually collapsed; it also suggests how German culture might find an analogous state of equilibrium in modern times. Nietzsche associates the impulses or drives that enabled the Greeks to live and thrive in the partial light of the "terror and horror of existence" with the Olympian gods of Apollo and Dionysus; he claims that in different but complementary ways they made possibly the "continuous redemption" of the "eternally suffering and contradictory" character of the world.

The first of these impulses - the Apollonian responded to the "mysterious ground of our being" by answering our "ardent longing for illusion." It used beauty and artistry, measures and proportion to conceal from the Greeks, at least partially, the "substratum of suffering and of knowledge," and left the individual half-conscious "in his tossing bark, amid the waves" of human existence, in a kind of "waking dream." According to Nietzsche, Sophocles' Antigone, with its stark and yet balanced conflicts between competing duties, stands as a particularly vivid example of the Apollonian in action.

Nevertheless, conceiving it cannot grasp the full accomplishment of Greek tragedy entirely about Apollonian dreams. The contrary Dionysian impulse must complement it, which pulled in a very different direction. In a frenzy of intoxication, which Nietzsche associates with the orgiastic violence of the ancient world's Bacchic festivals, the Dionysian at once exposed the "mysterious primordial unity" from which all things spring and produced ‘complete-forgetfulness’ by individuals. This ‘mystic feeling of oneness’ culminated in a transfiguring experience in which man ‘feels him a god [and] walks about enchanted, in ecstasy, like the theologies he saw walking in his [Apollonian] dreams.’

According to Nietzsche, the Greeks achieved greatness by synthesizing their Apollonian and Dionysian drives in the tragic dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles. In the greatest of their plays, the Greeks were exposed to the ideal quantities of truth and illusion. In a play such as Oedipus Rex, they were granted a glimpse of the abyss, and yet that glimpse was so artfully presented in "an Apollonian world of images" that their "nausea" was transformed into "notions with which one can live."

Nonetheless, the tragic balance was extremely difficult to maintain. Nietzsche claims that the democratic character, heightened - consciousness, and "cheerfulness" of Euripides' plays signalled that the tragic age of Greece was ending. Yet the deepest cause of its demise could be found elsewhere, in a "newborn demon," whose approach to life so opposed the Dionysian element in Aeschylean tragedy that it was subsequently vanquished from the Greek stage, and from now on from the history of the West. That demon was none other than Socrates.

The middle chapters of The Birth of Tragedy contain what might be the most forceful critique of Socrates since Aristophanes lampooned him in The Clouds during the ancient philosopher's own lifetime. Nietzsche contends that Socrates stood in profound opposition to the "drunken revelry" of tragedy, falsely teaching human beings that "using the thread of causality, [they could] penetrate the deepest abysses of being." Even worse, he taught that "to be beautiful" something must be "intelligible," and that "knowledge is a virtue." The Socratic "theoretical man" lives to uncover the truth at all costs, if doing so will be an unambiguous benefit to people. While the tragedians had understood the importance of the surface of things, the Socratic philosopher, stubbornly and naively convinced of the goodness of truth, pursues it without restraint and the results are catastrophic.

In the first formulation of an argument he will greatly refine in his later work, Nietzsche claims that the philosopher's headlong lunge toward the truth ends up exposing the "lies concealed in the essence of logic." When this happens when the philosopher uncovers the fact that logic is a human construction imposed on the chaos of reality - logic effectively "bites its own tail" and refutes it. In Nietzsche's view, this is exactly what has happened in the hyperlogical culture of the modern world: The theoretical optimism first defended by Socrates had reached a kind of end in which human beings begin to sense the awful truth that its most fundamental premises are fictions. They have thus also begun to grasp (in Nietzsche's own work) the wisdom of the pre-Socratic tragedians, who understood, if only half-consciously, that people "needs art as a protection and a remedy" for truth.

That modern man confronts an unprecedented crisis of meaninglessness is a view that Nietzsche would hold throughout his career. What changed was his account of how it came about and his proposal for how we should respond to it. In his early work, he believes that modern man requires a new "beautiful illusion" to replace the crumbling Socratic culture of the West. This new mythology would serve the same function that the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles did for the Greeks. When it comes to specifying where we might find a new mythology to accomplish this much needed "rebirth of tragedy," Nietzsche announces with considerable bombast that it will arise from the neopagan, mythopoetic operas of Richard Wagner.

Nietzsche had met Wagner in 1868 and quickly developed an intense friendship with the composer and his wife, Cosima von Bülow. Over the next few years, the three shared their innermost cultural and philosophical hopes with one another-so much so, in fact, that by the time of the publication of his first book, Nietzsche could write to a friend that "In have formed an alliance with Wagner. You cannot imagine how close we are now and how fully our plans mesh." Those plans, unveiled in the final third of The Birth of Tragedy, involved nothing less than the satiation of modern man's spiritual "hunger" by giving him a neotragic horizon within which the "significance of life" could be "redeemed" just as it had been for the pre-Socratic Greeks.

It is hardly surprising that Nietzsche's colleagues greeted his book with a mixture of incomprehension and disdain. Expecting the philological prodigy to produce an exercise in meticulous scholarship, they were shocked to discover that he had chosen instead to issue a rallying cry to cultural revolution. What Safranski fittingly describes as Nietzsche's academic "excommunication" began almost immediately. Over the next few years, he divided his time between convalescing from a series of illnesses, reaching a handful of students he deemed "incompetent," and writing most brilliantly but decidedly nonacademic essays on Schopenhauer, Wagner, David Friedrich Strauss, and "The Benefits and Drawbacks of History for Life." His alienation from academic life finally culminated in his resignation from the University of Basel in 1879. He would spend the next ten years as a nomad travelling throughout Germany, Switzerland, and Italy while devoting him almost entirely to philosophical reflection and writing.

Although Nietzsche's work continued to show signs of Wagner's influence for several years after the publication of The Birth of Tragedy, the two men gradually drifted apart during the 1870s. As Safranski suggests, Nietzsche eventually became disillusioned with his own early proposals to cure modern disillusionment. While Nietzsche once hoped that Wagner could inspire a renewal of meaning and purpose in modernity, by the end of the decade he had come to consider the composer a purveyor of kitsch who embodied the most decadent aspects of modern culture. It is even possible to say that Nietzsche wrote his next major work, Human, All Too Human (1878), to inure him against the kinds of hopes that Wagner's music had inspired in him.

If Nietzsche began his earliest philosophical reflections from the assumption that "truth is ugly"- and that all meaning arises out of a creative attempt to cope with this ugliness-the post-Wagner Nietzsche was, if anything, more radical in his refusal to accept any "metaphysical solace." As before, modern man had fallen into meaninglessness, but now there was no possible redemption from it - and this we were supposed to accept as good news. In Human, All Too Human and Daybreak (1881), and scarcely Voltarean, as Nietzsche exulted in his own capacity to endure with a smile what Pascal had described as the "horror at the infinite immensity of spaces." Not until 1882's The Joyful Science did Nietzsche open upon his developing profundity that characterizes his mature and most justly admired work.

Like its immediate predecessors, The Joyful Science is a collection of numbered aphorisms ranging in length from a few words to several pages. This style, which Nietzsche employs in most of his later works, enables him to shift topics in unpredictable ways. One on art, science, religion, psychology, German Idealism, newspapers, ancient philosophy, Renaissance history, or modern literature might follow an aphorism on politics. Sometimes one aphorism builds on another, producing a sustained argument or interpretation; at other times the jarring juxtaposition between them leads and deliberates disorientation. It is amid the chaotic stream of brilliantly disjointed insights and observations that the reader of The Joyful Science comes upon an aphorism, "The Madman."

Nietzsche begins this one-and-a-half-page masterpiece of modern disenchantment by describing a madman who "lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace, and cried incessantly: 'In seek God! In seek God!'" Then, as those in the square gawk and laugh at the lunatic with embarrassed disapproval, he cries out: "Where is God? . . . In will tell you. We have killed him-you and me. All of us are his murderers. . . . God is dead. God remains dead, and we have killed him.

Nietzsche was hardly the first modern figure to espouse atheism. The most radical writers of the Enlightenment suspected that God was a fiction created by the human mind. G.W.F. Hegel famously declared that modernity is "Good Friday without Easter Sunday." Throughout the nineteenth century, a series of authors, from Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx to Charles Darwin, claimed that religion is a human projection onto a spiritually lifeless world. Nietzsche agreed with this tradition in every respect but one. Whereas most modern atheists viewed their lack of piety as an unambiguous good - as a mark of their liberation from the dead weight of authority and tradition - Nietzsche responded to his insight into the amoral chaos at the heart of the world with considerable pathos. If in Human, All Too Human and Daybreak he flirted with the facile cheerfulness so common to his fellow atheists, beginning with an aphorism of The Joyful Science, Nietzsche showed that he now understood with greater depth that the passing of God has potentially devastating consequences for Western Civilization. This is the madman's requiem aeternam deo: 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? Where is it moving now? Where 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?

If God is dead, then man has completely lost his orientation. There are no human dignity, no equality, no rights, no democracy, no liberalism, and no good and evil. In the light of Nietzsche's insight, a thinker such as Marx looks extraordinarily superficial, railing against religion on the one hand while remaining firmly attached to ideals of justice and equality on the other. He has failed to grasp the simple truth that if God is dead, then nothing at all can be taken for granted-and absolutely everything is permitted.

Still, how could God be dead? The paradox has permeated the idea. If God is who he claims to be, then it is obviously impossible for him to have "bled to death under our knives," as the madman declares. (Of course Christians believe that, as the Son, God did die at our hands, but Nietzsche intends the madman's statements to apply to the triune God in his monotheistic unity.) God may come to be ignored by a world too fixated on earthly goods to notice him, but clearly he is not vulnerable to human malice or indifference. Unless, of course, He never existed in the first place. Perhaps then it would make a kind of poetic sense to speak of God "dying" once people have ceased to believe in him. Here, man would not simply be responsible for killing God, but also for having given birth to him in the first place. Much of Nietzsche's late work defends just such an interpretation, arguing that Western man is equally responsible for creating and destroying God. The most thorough statement of this view can be found in The Genealogy of Morals (1887), which purports to tell the hidden history of morality from its origins to its collapse in the modern age.

At first, there was chaos. All of Nietzsche's books begin from this assumption. The Genealogy departs from those works in asserting that this primordial anarchy consisted of an unfocused, undifferentiated, and purposeless "will to power" that permeated all things. (Whether the will to power merely animates living creatures or acts as a metaphysical force that pervades all of the nature remains unclarified.) The pointless, anarchistic violence that characterized the prehistoric world ended when certain individuals began to focus their will to power on the goal of decisively triumphing over others. When they finally succeeded, these victorious individuals, whom Nietzsche dubs "the strong," foisted the first "moral valuation" onto mankind.

In the strong (or "noble") valuation, the good are nothing other than an expression of what the members of the victorious class do and what they affirm. What they do is triumph ruthlessly over the weak by violence. Likewise, the opposite of the good or the bad - is defined by the convincingly powered, as weakness, or the inability to conquer the strong. Nietzsche illustrates the dynamics of the strong valuation with an infamous image of birds of prey devouring defenceless lambs. The birds of prey do not choose to eat the lambs; There is thus no free will involved and nothing blameworthy about their viciousness. It is simply what they do; what they do is the essence of whom they are; and who they are serves as the measure of good and bad.

Once the meaning of good and bad has been established, a theory of justice grows up on its basis. Justice for the strong amounted to a simple sense of proportionality: when an individual incurs a debt, he must discharge it by repaying it and submitting to retributive punishment. Nietzsche implies that, for the strong, facing wrongdoing and accepting punishment was largely a matter of honour, so in societies governed by the noble valuation justice was usually meted out quickly and brutally.

The preconditions were now in place for the birth of the gods. In Nietzsche's view, polytheistic religions emerged out of the stories that the strong told themselves about their long-forgotten, prehistoric origins. First, they imagined that the founders of their community were just like them, only stronger - and they developed rituals of sacrifice that enabled them to express gratitude and discharge imagined debts to these founders. Then, as their community grew in power and extent over time, the founders that the strong projected onto the past became even stronger. Eventually, the founders became thought of as gods, who served as noble ideals for the strong to emulate as they sought to cultivate their power and cruelty.

According to Nietzsche, it was within this context of divinely sanctioned oppression that an epochal "transvaluations of values" took place. This "slave revolt in morality" began when the weak-out of what Nietzsche calls their ressentiment and their "spirit of revenge" against the strong-started to teach a series of radically new and ingenious ideas. To begin with, they claimed for the first time that there is such a thing as free will, so the brutal actions of the strong, far from being simply "what they do," came to be understood as the result of a choice. The weak then likewise asserted that their own failure to triumph over the strong was a result of the choice to refrain from such actions, rather than an inability to do so. For the slavish revolutionaries, "sin" tempts all human beings to engage in "evil," and the strong are noteworthy above all else for their decision to embrace and even encourage such behaviour, while the weak define their lives by the struggle to resist it. Thus it comes to be that what was formerly considered bad-namely, weakness - is christened as the highest good, while the formerly good-namely, strength - is transformed into evil.

In this way, the slaves (obviously the Jews and their Christian descendants) fashioned a life-denying "ascetic ideal" to replace the life-affirming valuation of the strong. Along with it comes the notion of a new kind of deity - God above all other gods, to whom each of us owes a debt - an "original sin" -so great that we are powerless to discharge it on our own, without his gratuitous gift of redeeming grace. Unlike the gods of the strong, who behaved like outsized brutes whose cruelty served as an attainable ideal for the strong to emulate, the God of the slaves is so transcendently good that all attempts to approximate his holiness inevitably fall short. Far from serving as a healthy ideal, then, the ascetic God ends up negating the world and everything in it, including human beings, by his very existence.

The ascetic ideal that gives birth to God is thus much more complicated than the valuation that preceded it. Whereas the noble valuation grew out of and enhanced the - affirmation of the strong, the slaves believe an ideal that denigrates pride and therefore seeks to diminish and humiliate, yet it, like all valuations, arises from out of and its will to power. As Nietzsche writes in Human, All Too Human, "Man takes positive pleasure in violating him with excessive demands and afterwards idolizing this tyrannically demanding something in his soul. In every ascetic morality, man worships one part of him as a god and in doing so demonizes the other part." In the Genealogy, Nietzsche describes this violent "-, splitting" as an example of how "life" can turn "against life," and, in turn, actually enhance life in new and interesting ways. In seeking to attain the impossible-to become "worthy" of a God whose goodness transcends the world-the ascetic slave directs his own will against it, and thus creates a wholly new form of cultural life founded on guilt and bad conscience. It is a culture of psychological depravity, as individuals, tutored by a new ruling class of priests, come to despise themselves, and never so much as when they begin to experience the least bit of happiness or success.

The priest helps to relieve or avoid the depression caused by the helplessness and homelessness of those unable to express their will to power more directly. For the herd, turning aggression against in the context of the ascetic ideal, than leading to depression, actually relieves or helps to avoid depression related to helplessness and hopelessness. For Nietzsche every sufferer instinctively seeks a cause for his suffering more exactly an agent, still more specifically a guilty agent who is susceptible to suffering - in short, some thing upon which he can, on some pretext or other, vents his effect, actually or in effigy, for the venting of his effect represents. This constitutes the actual physiological cause of ressentiment, vengefulness, and the like: A desire to deaden pain by means of effects.

While Nietzsche is aware of a course in which the individual avoids looking into him and finds an enemy on which to vent his affects, the ascetic priest also helps the suffering individual to seek the cause of his suffering ‘in him, in some guilt, in a piece of the past, he must understand his suffering as a punishment’. The resulting ‘orgy of feeling’ (which would include - pity) is the most effective means of deadening dull, paralysing, protracted pain’. Aggressive drives are also satisfied for the priest and the herd in the fantasies and beliefs about the fate of unbelievers and others who opposes them. Nietzsche refers to Aquinas’ words: ‘The blessed in the kingdom of heaven will see the punishment of the damned in order tat their bliss be more delightful for them’. There is also the more earthbound project of infecting nobler type’s wit bad conscience.

Nietzsche goes on to discuss how philosophers themselves have utilized the ascetic priest as a model, with the ascetic ideal providing a form through which to think, when they posit timeless, changeless, perfect realms of being in relation to which absolute truth is attained and is valued absolutely, animal nature is transcended for pure spirit and death avoided. Nietzsche acknowledges considerably of modern scholarship and science (in the broadest sense of the word as pertaining to various disciplines of contemporary scholarship) as ‘the latest and noblest form’ of the ascetic ideal. (The ascetic priest form of the ascetic ideal is not characterized as noble, perhaps, as White suggests, due to its slave morality and condemnation of sensuality.) Nietzsche writes of philosophers that ‘they all pose as if they had discovered and reached the real opinions through the - development of a cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic.

According to Nietzsche, the faith in truth, in the absolute value of truth, is this metaphysical value, stands or falls with the ascetic ideal. Such faith, with its ‘unconscious imperative’ involves ‘the desire to keep something hidden from one: Science as a means of -narcosis, do you have experience of that? (Of course this does not mean that science must function as -narcosis) The rigid and unconditional’ faith in truth commits one to ‘that venerable philosophers’ abstinence . . . that desire to halt before the factual the factum brutum. . . . That general renunciation of all interpretation’. Among the things thus kept hidden is that what we regard as knowledge involves interpretation - however, from the moment faith in the God of the ascetic ideal is denied, a new problem arises: That of the value of truth [not the possibility of the ruth] . . . the value of truth must for once be experimentally called into question.

In the Genealogy Nietzsche writs on the origin of morality and of the origins and maintenance of civilization as inextricably links with the suppression and then regression instincts, the direction of these instincts turned inward, and ‘internalized of man, with particular emphasis on internalized guilt, including its use for power and control by the likes of the ascetic priest. To adhere in addition of, was for Nietzsche, one of the ways to contain of a bad conscience; develop on the historical plane is by the ‘masters’ or ‘blond beasts of prey’ violently expelling freedom and imposing from upon the ‘slaves’ with the result that the ‘instinct for freedom [is] forcibly made latently - this instinct for freedom pushed back and repressed, incarcerated within the finally able to discharge and vent it only on it: That, and that alone, is what the bad conscience is in its beginning. In this same passing, Nietzsche even goes so far as to state that this initial disaster. . . . Precluded all struggle and even all ressentiment.

Both Jung and Freud were well aware of Nietzsche’s analyses of the ascetic ideal and the ascetic priest (who differs in some ways from the more secluded anchorite) and of his conception of sublimation, including sublimated sexuality and will to power. Nietzsche, writes both of attempts at extirpation of the drives an of how, for example, ‘in Paul the priest wanted power’ and used concepts and symbols to tyrannize, power is sought more than one as well as or others. Nietzsche also specifically wrote of the ‘men and women of sublimated sexuality [who] have made their find in Christianity,’ Freud points out that the anchorite is not one who has necessarily withdrawn his libido into him, but may have found pathology (losing the contact with reality results from such an introversion of the libido.

Paul is a ‘great man’ in Nietzsche’s eyes, and there may even be an identification with him as Nietzsche refers to both Paul’s idea and his own eternal recurrence with the phrase ‘idea of ideas’. Nietzsche considers Pau asa type of ascetic priest who, in the words of Salaquarda, is strong enough ‘to channel the ‘will to nothingness’ of the decadents for a time into another direction. But he also had a hatred of Paul, a hatred of what he felt was Paul’s life - negating attitude toward the things of this earth, particularly his attitude toward the ’flesh’ (or should, one say Paul was not life affirming in a manner Nietzsche would regard creatively and more affirmative than his provisional life-affirming approach channel the will to nothingness?

Nietzsche's account of how the ascetic ideal gives birth to God is ingenious. Still, no less so is his narrative of how it leads to God's death, and its own - destruction. Nietzsche's narrative derives much of its shock effect from the fact that it so profoundly contradicts the dominant story of the rise of modern science, in Nietzsche's time and ours. While modern intellectuals typically argue that science arose opposing the Church, Nietzsche considers science to represent the "perfection" of the same ascetic ideal that originally gave birth to Christianity.

In Nietzsche's view, an unwavering belief in the goodness marks science of truth - and the conviction that one reaches this truth by negating the world in a way that is similar to, but much more radical than, the method employed by Christianity. Christianity claims, for example, that sin stains human life and then negates the former by calling on the righteous to overcome the latter. Nevertheless, science goes much further in its negation of the world, to deny the distinction - or, at least to stress the similarities - between man and "lower" entities. Biology reduces us to the level of other organisms, chemistry tells us that we consist of the same elements as inanimate objects, and physics underlines the continuity between human beings and all the matter in the universe. In the light of modern science, the differentiation of the human world into kinds of things lacks a foundation in the natural world. Science thus dissolves the distinctions that generate meaning as for being possible.

Of course most professional scientists do not follow through so rigorously on the implications of their approach to understanding the world, but that is irrelevant to Nietzsche. What matters to him is that an ethic permeates modern Western culture of ascetic reductionism that seeks to tear down all existing cultural structures. One need not work in a laboratory to further the ascetic ideal. On the contrary, as we learn toward the end of the Genealogy, Nietzsche understands his own thought to represent the ultimate consummation of the ascetic ideal at the moment at which "science" unmasks it as the perfection of the ascetic ideal, and, in turn, discovers that this ideal is an arbitrary valuation projected onto reality to derive a sense of purpose in the face of chaos. It is in this way that the ascetic ideal manages both to give birth to and then to kill the Christian God.

Nietzsche thus concludes the Genealogy as he began The Birth of Tragedy, by asserting that, when faced with the ugly truth of things, humans respond by producing illusions that come to be taken as true-until they are eventually exposed for the lies that they are. The Genealogy adds the twist that this very process is said to be driven by the character of the lies in which Western man has believed. That is, the ascetic ideal is a lie that eventually demands its own exposure as a lie. As Nietzsche writes in the penultimate aphorism of the Genealogy, Unconditional honest atheism . . . is the awe-inspiring catastrophe of two thousand years of training in truthfulness that finally forbids it the lie involved in belief in God.’

How are we to respond to the complete collapse of the moral valuation that has reigned for two millennia? Nietzsche offers no answer in the Genealogy, which ends as it began - with meaningless chaos. Other works are somewhat more helpful, however. The speech of the "madman" from The Joyful Science, for example, provides a hint. Shortly after declaring that we have killed God, the madman asks a series of rhetorical questions: How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was 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 ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

Here Nietzsche shows that the death of God requires that we take his place by becoming a race of gods. The meaning of this extraordinary suggestion is elaborated most fully in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-1885), easily the most difficult book in Nietzsche's corpus.

In one of the most fascinating passages of his biography, Safranski recounts how Nietzsche first came to the idea of writing Zarathustra by way of a quasi-revelatory experience of inspiration near the Surlej boulder in the Upper Engadine mountains of Switzerland on August 6, 1881. There, on the shores of an alpine lake, Nietzsche felt as though he were "a mere incarnation, a mere mouthpiece, a mere medium of overpowering forces." The religious character of his experience is fitting, for the book he was inspired to write stands as Nietzsche's answer to the Bible. It tells the story of a man named Zarathustra, who, at the age of thirty, "left his home . . . and went into the mountains" for a life of complete solitude. Then, ten years later, he resolves to return to civilization, to share his incomparable wisdom with humanity.

Upon his return he discovers that, although his fellow human beings are oblivious to the fact that "God is dead," His passing has begun to have significant detrimental effects on people. Among the most memorable passages in Zarathustra is the account of the "last man," who, in God's absence, believes he has "invented happiness." This last man no longer strives for anything great, he is too cautious to stand out from the "herd," he consumes various "poisons" to ensure an "agreeable sleep" and an "agreeable death," and he looks back on all of human history with a smug sense of his own superiority. Such a man is one step away from becoming so "poor and domesticated" that he will no longer "shoot the arrow of his longing beyond man." Without a God to look up to, man is on the verge of becoming less than human.

Yet ours is not an age for despair. As Nietzsche's Zarathustra declares as he gazes in disgust at the last man, "The time has come for man to set him a goal. The time has come for man to plant the seed of his highest hope." The death of God therefore presents, in addition to great dangers, an extraordinary opportunity. While we may very well become subhuman, we may also transform ourselves into something superhuman. Thus does Zarathustra describe his purpose: "In teach you the Overman." Combining the Social Darwinism so common in the late nineteenth century with his own unique brand of anthropo-theological speculation, Nietzsche's Zarathustra announces that "man is something that will be overcome."

What is the ape to man? A laughing stock or a painful embarrassment, and man will be just that for the Overman: A laughing stock or a painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much as its still the worm that lives . . . Man is a rope tied between beast and Overman-a rope over an abyss. Dangerously across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.

Man, then, is poised to evolve into a god through his own efforts. Still, what will make possible such a monumental transformation? The answer stretches out in the most peculiar doctrine of Nietzsche's philosophy: The "eternal recurrence of the same," which he first (and most lucidly) presented in an allegorical aphorism of The Joyful Science titled "The Greatest Weight." It is worth quoting in its entirety: What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you, "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live again and innumerable times more. There will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything immeasurably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and In my. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again, and you with it, a speck of dust!" Would you not throw your down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him, "You are a god, and never have In heard anything more divine." If this thought found its possession of you, it would change you as you are, or perhaps crush you. The question in each thing, "Do you desire this again and innumerable times more?" Would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight? Or how well disposed would, but you have to become to your and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

While this passage makes it sound as if the doctrine of the eternal recurrence serves as a quasi-mythical Kantian postulate-proclaiming that we should act as if it were true despite knowing that it is not - Safranski shows that Nietzsche experienced a kind of euphoria upon discovering what he thought was definitive scientific evidence for its reality and truth. Apparently Nietzsche believed that the finite amount of matter and energy in the universe, combined with its temporal infinity, implied (in Safranski's words) that "all possible events concerning both the animate and the inanimate realms have already taken place, and . . . will recur without end."

No matter whether Nietzsche considered the doctrine to be scientifically verifiable or merely a substitute for the neopagan Wagnerian myths he embraced in his youth, there can be no doubt that he thought of it as the key to man's absolute affirmation of him and the world - and even (what may amount to the same thing) his own - divination. As the allegory of the demon makes clear, Nietzsche believed that if human beings could come to incorporate the eternal recurrence into their view of the world-to view every second of their lives as a moment worthy of being repeated infinite times, rather than as a prelude to a truer or better world to come-they would, in effect, confer the dignity of the eternal onto this world. As Safranski writes, "All the ecstasy, all the bliss, all the ascensions of feeling, all the hunger for intensity previously projected into the beyond would now be concentrated in the immediate life of the here and now. Preserving the powers of transcendence designed the doctrine of the eternal recurrence to function for immanence or, as Zarathustra proclaimed, remaining 'faithful to the earth."

Still, what about the past? Even assuming that we could come to believe in the truth of the eternal recurrence, would we not face the dilemma that, as Martin Heidegger put it, each of us is "thrown" into a world we did not create? Whereas our present and future emerge, at least to some extent, out of our choices, our past is given to us. Nevertheless, Nietzsche appears to have believed that once we had affirmed our present and future, affirmation of our past would follow in its wake. After all, if the person I am today is worthy of affirming for all eternity, so, then, the person that must have been me was once to happen in that I must be equally worthy, since my past made my present possible. When I begin to think of the many ways that mine is this way, In not only accept the necessity of my fate and its role in making me who In am, but In also come to love that fate (Amor fati). In fact, my affirmation of my own past can expand to such an extent that I would begin to act as if I could will it. When that happens, my will comes to fill the entire meaningful universe-past, present, and future. In such a world, man has definitively replaced God. Or, as Nietzsche's Zarathustra puts it in a cryptic but crucially important passage: . . . as creator, guessers of riddles, and redeemer of accidents, In taught them to work on the future and to redeem with their creation all that has been. To redeem what is past in man and to recreate all "it was" until the will says, "Thus I willed it so." "Thus I will it not" -, this particular I is called redemption, and this, and in this alone, I taught them to call redemption.

Nietzsche wanted nothing less than to make us totally at home in the world, and he understood that this monumental task could be accomplished only by convincing us, least of mention, in that we possess the power to redeem it, all by ourselves, without God.

Nietzsche devoted the final years of his sanity to thinking through the conundrums generated by his antitheological angriness. For some time he hoped to present a systematic summary of the views he first sketched in Thus Spake Zarathustra. However, the book he envisioned, tentatively titled The Will to Power: Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values, was not to be. Although he produced a flood of aphoristic and increasingly hyperbolic books between 1886 and 1888-Beyond Good and Evil, The Genealogy of Morals, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, the autobiographical Ecce Homo, and hundreds of pages of notebook entries that have been subsequently (and somewhat deceptively) published as The Will to Power -his, Greatest achievements never became real.

Yet we have reason to think that Nietzsche came to believe, in his madness, that he had attained the divination for which he longed. In January 1889, just after his hysterical collapse in the streets of Turin at the sight of a carriage driver beating a horse, and a few weeks before being institutionalized in a psychiatric clinic, Nietzsche wrote a letter to the esteemed historian Jacob Burckhardt, in which he declared that "in the end In would much rather be a Basel professor than God: Yet I have not undertaken to embrace of my own private egotism, in that, if, and only if, its guiding crescendo, for which that it may be, in that, I would renounce the beingness of man from the creation of the world." Then there was the letter to a friend, Peter Gast, containing a single sentence: To my maëstro Pietro: Sing me a new song: the world is transfigured. All the heavens are full of joy. The Crucified. Nietzsche went on to live eleven years in a semicatatonic state, dying in 1900, on the threshold of a century that he had predicted would be the one worldwide war and unprecedented violence.

Ever since he slipped into a psychosis, it has been a

Commonplace for romantic interpreters of Nietzsche's life and thought to conclude that he, like Novalis, Friedrich Hölderlin, and many other modern philosophers, poets, and artists, were driven mad by his own heroic efforts to grasp the truth in all of its horror. For these admirers, Nietzsche deserves to be considered a less martyr to thinking in its purist form. Besides the fact that such an interpretation simply dismisses the theory accepted by most scholars - namely, that an advanced case of syphilis-it caused Nietzsche’s breakdown also accepts without question that Nietzsche was right to think that the truth stands radically opposed to the beautiful and the good. Since nearly every word he ever wrote flows from this assumption, any attempt to evaluate Nietzsche's work on the whole must first and courageously confront it head on.

Unfortunately, Safranski contributes little to such a confrontation. At some points he offers the banal observation that the "will motivates Nietzsche’s books to an unceasing adventure in thinking." At others, he ventures a more creative, but no less unhelpful, suggestion that Nietzsche should have consistently advocated a "bicameral system of culture." Building on an image Nietzsche employed in Human, All Too Human Safranski suggests that conceiving of a culture in which is possible on Nietzschean grounds "one chamber [is] heated up by the passions of genius while the other [is] cooled off with principles of common sense and balanced out with collective pragmatism." Safranski believes that if Nietzsche had endorsed such a twofold conception of truth - one for radical artist-philosophers, another for moderate practical men - he could have pursued his adventure in thinking without "abandoning the idea of democracy and justice.

As appealing as Safranski's proposal might sound as enabling to achieve for we are to have, as it was, the best of both worlds-it has many problems. To begin with, as Safranski points out, Nietzsche would have judged the attempt to hold on to any form of democratic morality an example of the "feeble compromise [and] indecisiveness" that he associates with the nihilistic "last men." Then there is the more fundamental difficulty that in Nietzsche's thought everything flows from his conviction that the truth is meaningless chaos and flux. For Nietzsche, being two equally valid truths is simply impossible for there; There can only be the ugly truth it and the noble lies that mask it to one degree or another. Although in places Nietzsche does suggest an aristocratic arrangement in which an elite of philosophic geniuses pursues the truth while their slaves go about their lives immersed in illusions, one assumes that this is not what Safranski has in mind.

However, if Safranski's explicitly critical suggestions do not help us to assess Nietzsche's ideas, he does prepare more philosophically of the serious reckoning with them by showing so clearly that atheistic meaninglessness is the premise, rather than the conclusion, of his thought. How can we begin to evaluate this Nietzschean antifaith? We find a compelling suggestion in the thought of Nietzsche's early unbeatable opponent, Socrates. In two of Plato's dialogues, Socrates confronts characters who espouse proto-Nietzschean views. For both Thrasymachus in the Republic and Callicles in the Gorgias, morality has no foundation in the order of things, which is utterly indifferent to human concerns, and justice is nothing other than "the rule of the stronger." The parallels to Nietzsche's view, especially as he articulates it in the Genealogy, are uncanny.

It is instructive that in examining the opinions of these sophistical antimoralists, Socrates does not attempt to refute them using logic or empirical evidence of one kind or another. Rather, he takes what might be called a psychological approach. He attempts to show them that they are less consistently opposed to the good than they profess themselves to be. In Thrasymachus, for example, Socrates' dialectical questioning reveals a fundamental tension in his soul. On the one hand, Thrasymachus believes that "might makes right"-that the victor in a struggle for power demonstrates that he deserves his victory in the very act of winning it. However, on the other hand, he admires the intelligence and cunning that enable certain individuals to triumph over others-so much so, in fact, that he finds the thought of an unintelligent man winning power to be deeply distasteful. Such a brute would not, in other words, deserve his victory. Thrasymachus, it seems, looks up to something besides mere power. Although he claims to orient his life toward nothing but force and violence, such that belong as part of his believes in the greater good.

Might not Nietzsche be vulnerable to a similar - refutation? In his case, the tension arises from his reaction to the triumph of the weak over the strong in the slave revolt. From the theory sketched in the Genealogy, there is no basis for opposition to their victory. As it was for Thrasymachus, the very act of victory demonstrates that the triumphant party deserves to rule. One might even say that in the act of overpowering the strong, the weak effectively become the strong and thus by that very fact deserving of power.

Yet, Nietzsche reacts to the overthrow of the noble valuation with anything but equanimity. Not only are his works suffused with grand schemes to bring about a rebirth of a brutal aristocratic order in the modern period, but Safranski helpfully notes that, when it came to the public policy debates of his day, Nietzsche invariably sided against the vulnerable. He rejected "shortening the length of the workday from twelve hours a day to eleven in Basel." He was "a proponent of child labour, noting with approval that Basel permitted children over the age of twelve to work up to eleven hours a day." He opposed the education of workers and thought that the only consideration in their treatment should be whether (in Nietzsche's words) their "descendants also work well for our descendants." Nietzsche was a consistent partisan of the strong against the weak in every aspect of life.

The reason Nietzsche took such a brutal position becomes apparent in a passage of Twilight of the Idols (1888) in which he rails against the French Revolution and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's defence of the average person: What I hate [about the French Revolution] is its Rousseauean morality that in the so-called dominion of ‘truth’ there is within the Revolution under which it still works and attracts everything shallow and mediocre. The doctrine of equality. There is no more poisonous poison anywhere: For it may be preached by justice it, whereas it really is the end of justice. "Equal to the equal, unequal to the unequal"- that would be the true slogan of justice - and its corollary: "Never make equal what is unequal."

What is astonishing about this passage is not so much what it says about justice; Virtually every political philosopher in Western history would have agreed that justice demands "equal to the equal, unequal to the unequal." What is remarkable about the statement is that Nietzsche endorses its truth and resolves on its basis that human equality is fundamentally contrary to justice. One cannot help but conclude that Nietzsche - the man who gleefully proclaimed in a book titled Beyond Good and Evil that it was his goal to "sail right over morality"-was a perverse kind of moralist concerned above all about the injustice of shallowness and mediocrity. It is even possible to speculate that Nietzsche's visceral hostility to democracy, compassion, peace, equal human dignity, and perhaps even God Him, may have been motivated by a love for a particularly one-sided, profoundly distorted vision of justice. (Our best guide to the half-hidden moral dimension of Nietzsche's thought is Peter Berkowitz's masterful study, Nietzsche: The Ethics of an immortalist [1995)

At the very least, despite Nietzsche’s obviously Nietzsche's incessant denial of any possible foundation for the distinguished appreciation in the order of events, he could not help but presuppose that such a righteous existence that the rise of social and political equality has violated. The presence of a similar psychological dynamic in Thrasymachus and several of Socrates' other interlocutors eventually led Plato to conclude that the Idea of the Good exceeds all things-even being it"in dignity and power." Aristotle likewise chose to begin the Nicomachean Ethics with the declaration that "every art and inquiry, and similarly every human action and deliberate choice, . . . aims at some good." Of course neither philosopher meant that every human action nor idea truly is good; indeed, philosophizing consists in ascending from wrong opinions about the good to knowledge of what it truly is. However, they did mean to suggest that, even when we choose or contemplate evil, we do so at least in part because, somewhere in our souls, we mistake it for the good. For the ancient philosophers, love of the good is coeval with the human condition.

For such a statement, as for so many others, Nietzsche would have nothing but contempt. No doubt he would describe it yet another example of unwarranted Socratic "optimism." Perhaps it is. Nothing in the texts of the philosophers can prove that the good as they conceived it truly exists-that it is not merely a beautiful illusion we project onto the void. Yet there it is, there it has always been, and there it will remain-our lodestar and magnetic north, determining the shape of human reflection even among those who devote their lives to cutting themselves off from it.

Psychoanalysis, is the name applied to a specific method of investigating unconscious mental processes and to a form of psychotherapy. The term refers, as well, to the systematic structure of psychoanalytic theory, which is based on the relation of conscious and unconscious psychological processes.

In 1909 pioneers of the growing psychoanalytic movement assembled at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, to hear lectures by Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. The group included, A.A. Brill, Ernest Jones, Sandor Ferenczi, and bottom row, Freud, Clark University President C. Stanley Hall, and Swiss psychiatrist Carl G. Jung. Freud’s visit, the only one he made to the United States, broadened the influence and popularity of psychoanalysis.

In the late 19th century Viennese neurologist Sigmund Freud developed a theory of personality and a system of psychotherapy known as psychoanalysis. According to this theory, people are strongly influenced by unconscious forces, including innate sexual and aggressive drives. Freud recounts the early resistance to his ideas and later acceptance of his work. Freud’s speech is slurred because he was suffering from cancer of the jaw. He died the following year.

The technique of psychoanalysis and much of the psychoanalytic theory based on its application was developed by Sigmund Freud. His work concerning the structure and the functioning of the human mind had far-reaching significance, both practically and scientifically, and it continues to influence contemporary thought.

Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, compared the human mind with an iceberg. The tip above the water represents consciousness, and the vast region below the surface symbolizes the unconscious mind. Of Freud’s three basic personality structures - id, ego, and superego - only the id is totally unconscious.

The first of Freud's innovations was his recognition of unconscious psychiatric processes that follow laws different from those that govern conscious experience. Under the influence of the unconscious, thoughts and feelings that belong together may be shifted or displaced out of context; two disparate ideas or images may be condensed into one; Thoughts may be dramatized in the form of images rather than expressed as abstract concepts. Certain objects may be represented symbolically by images of other objects, although the resemblance between the symbol and the original object may be vague or farfetched. The laws of logic, indispensable for conscious thinking, do not apply to these unconscious mental productions.

Recognition of these modes of operation in unconscious mental processes made possibly the understanding of such previously incomprehensible psychological phenomena as dreaming. Through analysis of unconscious processes, Freud saw dreams as serving to protect sleep against disturbing impulses arising from within and related to early life experiences. Thus, unacceptable impulses and thoughts, called the latent dream content, are transformed into a conscious, although no longer immediately comprehensible, experience called the manifest dream. Knowledge of these unconscious mechanisms permits the analyst to reverse the so-called dream work, that is, the process by which the latent dream is transformed into the manifest dream, and through dream interpretation, to recognize its underlying meaning.

A basic assumption of Freudian theory is that the unconscious conflicts involve instinctual impulses, or drives, that originate in childhood. As these unconscious conflicts are recognized by the patient through analysis, his or her adult mind can find solutions that were unattainable to the immature mind of the child. This depiction of the role of instinctual drives in human life is a unique feature of Freudian theory.

According to Freud's doctrine of infantile sexuality, adult sexuality is a product of a complex process of development, beginning in childhood, involving a variety of body functions or areas (oral, anal, and genital zones), and corresponding to various stages in the relation of the child to adults, especially to parents. Of crucial importance is the so-called Oedipal period, occurring at about four to six years of age, because at this stage of development the child for the first time becomes capable of an emotional attachment to the parent of the opposite sex that is similar to the adult's relationship to a mate; The child simultaneously reacts as a rival to the parent of the same sex. Physical immaturity dooms the child's desires to frustration and his or her first step toward adulthood to failure. Intellectual immaturity further complicates the situation because it makes children afraid of their own fantasies.

The conflicts occurring in the earlier developmental stages are no less significant as a formative influence, because these problems represent the earliest prototypes of such basic human situations as dependency on others and relationship to authority. Also, basic in moulding the personality of the individual is the behaviour of the parents toward the child during these stages of development. The fact that the child reacts, not only to objective reality, but also to fantasy distortions of reality, however, greatly complicates even the best-intentioned educational efforts.

The effort to clarify the bewildering number of interrelated observations uncovered by psychoanalytic exploration led to the development of a model of the structure of the psychic system. Three functional systems are distinguished that are conveniently designated as the id, ego, and superego.

The first system refers to the sexual and aggressive tendencies that arise from the body, as distinguished from the mind. Freud called these tendencies Triebe, which literally means "drives," but which is often inaccurately translated as "instincts" to indicate their innate character. These inherent drives claim immediate satisfaction, which is experienced as pleasurable; the id thus is dominated by the pleasure principle. In his later writings, Freud tended more toward psychological rather than biological conceptualization of the drives.

How the conditions for satisfaction are to be brought about is the task of the second system, the ego, which is the domain of such functions as perception, thinking, and motor control that can accurately assess environmental conditions. In order to fulfill its function of adaptation, or reality testing, the ego must be capable of enforcing the postponement of satisfaction of the instinctual impulses originating in the id. To defend it against unacceptable impulses, the ego develops specific psychic means, known as defence mechanisms. These include repression, the exclusion of impulses from conscious awareness, its elevating projection, the process of ascribing to others one's own unacknowledged desires, whereby is the result to act. Reaction formation, the establishments of a pattern of behaviour directly opposed to a strong unconscious need. Such defence mechanisms are put into operation whenever anxiety signals a danger that the original unacceptable impulses may reemerge.

An id impulse becomes unacceptable, not only as a result of a temporary need for postponing its satisfaction until suitable reality conditions can be found, but more often because of a prohibition imposed on the individual by others, originally the parents. The totality of these demands and prohibitions constitutes the major content of the third system, the superego, the function of which is to control the ego in accordance with the internalized standards of parental figures. If the demands of the superego are not fulfilled, the person may feel shame or guilt. Because the superego, in Freudian theory, originates in the struggle to overcome the Oedipal conflict, it has a power akin to an instinctual drive, is in part unconscious, and can give rise to feelings of guilt not justified by any conscious transgression. The ego, having to mediate among the demands of the id, the superego, and the outside world, may not be strong enough to reconcile these conflicting forces. The more the ego is impeded in its development because of being enmeshed in its earlier conflicts, called fixations or complexes, or the more it reverts to earlier satisfactions and archaic modes of functioning, known as regression, the greater is the likelihood of succumbing to these pressures. Unable to function normally, it can maintain its limited control and integrity only at the price of symptom formation, in which the tensions are expressed in neurotic symptoms.

A cornerstone of modern psychoanalytic theory and practice is the concept of anxiety, which institutes appropriate mechanisms of defence against certain danger situations. These danger situations, as described by Freud, are the fear of abandonment by or the loss of the loved one (the object), the risk of losing the object's love, the danger of retaliation and punishment, and, finally, the hazard of reproach by the superego. Thus, symptom formation, character and impulse disorders, and perversions, as well as sublimations, represent compromise formations-different forms of an adaptive integration that the ego tries to achieve through more or less successfully reconciling the different conflicting forces in the mind.

So we are faced with a choice. We can follow Nietzsche in refusing to take our philosophical bearings from prephilosophical intimations of the good. Or we can place our trust in those intimations, allowing the good reflected in common opinion and experience to serve as an indication-however tentative, ambiguous, or elusive-of what is likely to be true. Attempt to break from the good or accept that, in the end, it is the only orientation we have: those are the options. After a very long century of delusional and bloody experiments against the good, we do not lack for reasons to turn our backs on Nietzsche's truth.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is a writer whom professional philosophers have often discounted because he is too literary, and whom professors of literature have passed over because he is too much of an abstract thinker. Nietzsche's work, in other words, defies the usual academic division of labour. Yet, Nietzsche has played a prominent role in Western thought. He was one of the most brilliant and profound forerunners of such movements as Psychoanalysis and Existentialism, and a radical critic of Western philosophy and culture. His observations and ideas inspired scores of twentieth centuries intellectuals - including those who misconstrued his work as a proto-fascist doctrine.

Nietzsche explicitly refused to develop a philosophical system, suggesting that individual, seemingly disconnected analyses, expressed in short, well-written aphorisms, are more honest and insightful than lengthy, scholarly treatises that tend to bend everything to fit a comprehensive theory. Thus, his writings may sometimes be - contradictory. The way to read Nietzsche is not to figure out how the many things he wrote can be fitted into one abstract formula, a procedure that would be more appropriate for such philosophers as Plato or Kant, but to consider every one of his pieces as a thought experiment that succeeds or fails on its own.

The Victorian conventionalism and complacency of Nietzsche's cultural environment made any success during his relatively short lifetime impossible. Nietzsche even had to pay for the publication of some of his books. He did not become truly famous until the time when the reigning pretenses of European culture were headed for their massive breakdown at the time of World War I. Not until the mechanized brutality of the "Great War" had shattered the vain image that Europeans had of themselves, as stalwarts of some advanced civilization of their own doing, that practised readers begin to gauge the seriousness of Nietzsche's critical analysis of the Western mind. Because of his precocious facility with edifying speech, he was nick-named "the little pastor." As an adolescent he attended Pforta, one of Germany's elite schools, where he received a solid classical education. His subsequent university training was in classical languages and ancient culture, and he became a professor of Greek language at the exceptionally young age of twenty-four. For about ten years he taught Greek at the University of Basel in Switzerland, during which time he developed a profound admiration for and friendship with the composer Richard Wagner (a friendship that in later years turned into passionate enmity).

Around 1879 Nietzsche became chronically ill, and he retired from teaching on a moderate pension. During the following ten years he wrote in rapid succession all the books that were to make him posthumously famous -Human, All Too Human, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and, The Joyful or Gay Science, and The Case of Wagner, including, Beyond Good and Evil and The Antichrist, and Twilight of the Idols and more. During most of this time he was physically in miserable condition. He had no permanent residence, preferring to take up temporary lodgings in various places in the Swiss Alps or on the Mediterranean coast. He grew increasingly critical, and even contemptuous, of Germany - at a time when Germany tried to rival such world powers as England and France by way of aggressive military and industrial expansion.

Because of his near-blindness his doctors advised him to abstain from reading, but he kept reading and writing at a furious pace as best as he could. He fought his insomnia with opiates and Veronal, drugs that upset his delicate stomach. He frequently suffered from migraine headaches that prompted him to experiment with further drugs. He endured, partly by choice, a loneliness that included both social isolation and a general misunderstanding of his philosophical ideas even among friends. At the beginning of 1889 he suffered a major collapse that resulted in permanently insanity-possibly the consequence of untreated syphilis. His sister, as his guardian during the last years of his life, and as his - appointed literary executor, seems to have destroyed and falsified part of Nietzsche's unpublished writings, by that furthering the dubious interpretation of her brother's work that made the philosopher look like a forerunner of Nazism.

The predominant view in Western philosophy that human beings have a twofold nature - a nature composed of a mind and a body - and that there is a constant struggle between the two components, a struggle that ideally results in the dominance of the mind over the body. It is this dualistic view of human nature that Nietzsche combats throughout his philosophy; he calls this dualism "childish." The mature view, according to him, consists in recognizing that mind and body are one, and that what is called the mind or the soul is nothing but one aspect of the basically physical nature of human beings - one of the many organs that the body needs to survive. Which is thus under the overall control of the physical organism as a whole? In the chapter called "Of the Despisers of the Body" in Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche writes: "In am body and soul"-that is what a child would say. Why shouldn't one talk like a child? Still, the adult, the knowledgeable person, says: "In am body thoroughly, and nothing beside it. Soul is nothing but a word for something belonging to the body."
The body is one great reason, a variety with one sense, a war and a peace, a herd and a herder. A tool of your body is also your little reason, my brother, which you call "spirit"- a little tool and toy of your great reason.
In your body he resides; He is your body. There is more reason in your body than in, and who knows to what end your body needs your best wisdom?

The body, in other words, is not the external tool of an inner sovereign mental ego, but an organism within which the ego, or mind, plays a merely subordinate role. To think that the mind is, or can even be, in control of the body is one of the most preposterous illusions that Western civilization has produced, according to Nietzsche, and one of the most damaging as well. It is one of the crucial assumptions that would have to be overcome in a future and more healthy civilization.

By saying that the true is the body, Nietzsche does, of course, not deny that people have feelings, inner experiences, and ideas, or that they can be very intelligent or thoughtful. He also does not deny that people can overcome such things as physical cowardice, laziness, or fatigue by an exertion of their wills, or that they can achieve impressive feats even if their physical condition happens to be an obstacle more than a help. Such - mastery is, indeed, one of the most fruitful manifestations of what Nietzsche elsewhere calls "the will to power." Nevertheless, what superficially looks like a mind operating on its own, or like a victory of the mind over the body, is ultimately nothing but a demonstration of the power of the body as a whole-the temporary strength of one part of the organism over another part. (The body is, after all, a complex, multi-faceted organisms, a herd and a herder, a war and a peace.) For if one asks for the ultimate source of such things as will power, determination, or whatever else goes into the cause of extraordinary achievements, one will have to explore those aspects of a person that are sometimes called the unconscious-aspects that are intricately connected with the physiological and neurological functions of the organism. Will power, keen intelligence, or any other mental phenomenon is not the emanation of some nonphysical entity "inside" the body, but, the expressions of a dynamic and multifaceted physical being.

Nietzsche had been brought up within a Christian tradition according to which the body was something bases, filthy, or evil, and in many theological analyses the very centre of depravity and sin. Throughout his adult years Nietzsche was in revolt against this tradition, and the reconstitution of the body as something wonderful and as a source of great achievements can be described as one of the principals aims of Nietzsche's entire philosophy. Therefore Nietzsche eagerly embraced much of the scientific materialism that developed during the 19th century. During the previous two centuries scientific progress had primarily been made in the area of physics, the science of inanimate bodies. The 19th century, by contrast, was the period of rapid advances in chemistry and biology. Darwin's publication of The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) was only one of the significant scientific developments that took place during Nietzsche's life time, although it turned out to be a particularly spectacular and controversial one.

Among the reading public philosophical materialism became something like a popular movement that at times found expressions that were rather pithy and polemical. Robert Buchner, for example, submitted that the brain produces thoughts in the way kidney’s produce urine, and he coined the famous ditty "Man is what he eats" (which in the original German is a pun: "Der Mensch ist was er isst"). Nietzsche's materialism was generally far more sophisticated than that, and he were also rather critical of Darwin. His thinking, however, fit into and was part of a broad trend that characterized much of 19th century culture. Impressed by what modern biologists and physiologists kept in the finding account that out and about are the intricate workings of the body, Nietzsche observed:

Whoever has even an idea of the body-of its many simultaneously working systems, of its many cooperative and conflicting activities, of the delicacy of its balances, etc.-will judges that all consciousness is, by comparison, something poor and narrow; he will judge that no mind will even remotely be adequate for that what the mind would have to do here, and perhaps that the wisest teacher of morality and legislator would have to feel clumsy and amateurish in the midst of this turmoil of war and duties and rights. How little becomes conscious to us? How often does this little lead to error and confusion? Consciousness is a tool, after all, and considering how much and what great things are accomplished without it one cannot call it the most necessary or the most admirable tools. On the contrary, there is, perhaps, no organ that is so poorly developed, or one that works with so many flaws. It is just the youngest organ, still in its infancy - let's pardon its childish pranks (To these pranks belong, among many other things, our morality, the sum of all past value judgments about the actions and attitudes of humanity.)

The discovery of the body that took place during the 19th century scandalized many conservatives, and it offended the moral sensibilities of what then was still the cultural mainstream. In 1857, for example, two of the most important literary works of that century were published in Paris: Charles Baudelaire's collection of poems called The Flowers of Evil, and Gustave Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary. Both books were immediately banned by the French courts because of their alleged "indecency," and outside France most publishers would not even think about publishing such material. Baudelaire's poems were considered offensive because they too were frequently dwelling on the pleasures of the flesh, and Flaubert outraged his critics by describing in some detail the pleasant feelings of a woman's orgasm. Much of the official public was simply not ready to acknowledge the reality and importance of the physical aspects of human existence openly; the definition of the human as mind or spirit still prevented people from acknowledging such things as the pervasive power of sexuality or the determining force of physical conditions in human history. Yet, for a significant minority the discovery of the richness of the physical universe, and of the human body in particular, was both revelation and liberation. Walt Whitman's "In Sing the Body Electric" (published by him in 1855 in the first edition of Leaves of Grass) testifies to this new enthusiasm about the physical nature of human beings. Like Nietzsche, Whitman postulates the basic identity of body and soul: "Sing the body electric, as this is the armies of those I love ungirth me, and I ungirth them." If those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead? If the body does not aspire as fully as that of the soul? If the body were not the soul, what is the soul

To conceive of the body, and not the rational mind, as the true is part of a change in perspective that has far-reaching implications. One implication for Nietzsche was a deep appreciation of the many non-rational faculties that emanate from or are connected with the drives and passions of the body, and the darker and more unconscious regions of the soul. In his first major work, The Birth of Tragedy (1871), Nietzsche developed a theory of art that highlights the importance of visionary dreams and inspiring intoxication, while debunking the role of reason and rational calculation in the creative process. (A presentation of Nietzsche's theory of art, including his discussion of Apollinian dream visions and Dionysian intoxication. In his later works Nietzsche continues to emphasize the power and fruitfulness of all the faculties connected with the physical nature of human beings, and he continues to expose the allegedly delusional character of - conceptions that are based on the idea of a disembodied mind.

By insisting that the mental or spiritual can ultimately not be separated from physical matter, Nietzsche rejected the metaphysical thinking that had dominated most of the traditional philosophies, until then. The best-known division of reality into a physical and a nonphysical realm is, of course, Plato's separation of the imperfect and changing world of the senses from the timeless and perfect world of ideas (or "forms"). With this separation Plato provided the basic model of a twofold reality that subsequently spawned several variations of it in Western thought. The most popular of these variations is the metaphysical system of Christian Theology, which Nietzsche dubbed "Platonism for the people," with its sharp division of reality into the temporal world here and now and an eternal hereafter. Still, later variations of the same basic model were the philosophical systems of Descartes, Kant, and many of subordinate Idealist thinkers. What most of these dualistic conceptions of reality has in common is the additional notion that the physical world is inherently inferior to the spiritual world, and that therefore enlightened individuals will not attach their allegiance to this less valuable part of reality, to the deficient and corrupting world of the body and the senses. Ever since Socrates and Plato, according to Nietzsche, the West has been on the road of degeneracy because of this misguided devaluation of matter and its corresponding over-valuation of a seemingly supernatural spirit or mind. For Nietzsche this wrongheaded valuation of things amounts to nothing less than a wholesale betrayal of the earth - with all the consequences that such a betrayal of the natural cosmos implies.

One reason that people devalue the physical world, according to Nietzsche, is their fear of life-of life’s innumerable uncertainties, sufferings, and its inescapable finality. It is because of these deep-seated anxieties that people seek refuge in an ideal and imaginary world where they seem to find everlasting peace and relief from all the ailments that besiege them on earth. People do this naivety, by imagining "another world" in which people somehow continue to exist in the way they do in this world, only more perfectly, or they do it in more sophisticated ways, the way’s philosophers like Plato or other teacher of a spiritual life recommend. Nevertheless, in whatever way people try to escape the imperfections and ailments of the physical world, their retreat is always a manifestation of weakness, an inability to face reality in the way strong individuals would. Stronger persons would not only take suffering and other adversities in a stride, they would in a sense even welcome them as inevitable aspects of the very nature of life. As there is no life without death (eventual death being part of the very definition of what it is to be alive), there is also no experience of health without sickness, no enjoyment of wealth without poverty, and no appreciation of happiness without a real knowledge of pain. "Live dangerously" is one of Nietzsche’s well-known pieces of advice. It is his reminder that the most exuberant and ecstatic experiences of life do not grow out of a well-protected existence where risks and extremes are anxiously kept at bay, but out of a courageous exposure to the forces and conditions of life that begins the best of a person’s powers. A good horseback rider will not beat a spirited horse into submission to have an easy ride, but rather learn how to handle a difficult mount. Similarly, a strong and healthy person will not shun the dark and often dangerous sides of the world by retreating to some metaphysical realm of comfortable peace, but rather embrace life in its totality, its hardships and terrors and its splendours and joys.

It is, incidentally, for this that one has to read Nietzsche’s notorious reflections on "master" and "slave" moralities in his Beyond Good and Evil. As a species, according to Nietzsche, human beings will naturally tend to cultivate either of two moralities. "Master moralities" are developed and embraced by naturally strong and - confident people. They value most highly such things as strength, intelligence, courage, strife, and an inclination to rule over things and other people. Pride for such people is not a sin. They generally despise traits like meekness, timidity, simple-mindedness, and fear. In their eyes humble people are "bad."

"Slave moralities" are developed by just such weak or timid people. They tend to flourish among downtrodden populations. "Slave, and moralities" value most highly such things as sympathy, pity, kindness, humility, patience,-effacement, and charity. The worst features in their estimate are aggressiveness and being dangerous to others. People who embody such aggressiveness are shunned or denounced as "evil’ (as opposed too "bad").

Nietzsche’s prime example for a "master morality" is the ethos of Pre-Socratic Greece - embodied in the attitudes and deeds of those tribal heroes that Homer described in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Nietzsche’s prime example for a "slave morality" is the ethical teachings of Christianity. Although Nietzsche claims that, in analysing these two kinds of morality, he does nothing more than describe impartially certain psychological and anthropological facts, he clearly considers only variations of the "master morality" as suitable designs for a future with any hope. Only individuals who feel at ease among strong and daring people would be ready to face the darkness and dangers of the real world with confidence and an enterprising spirit. Only they could live without comforting metaphysical myths and imaginary hopes. They would intensively live their lives here and now, cheerfully or otherwise, and be content with being gone once their chosen tasks are accomplished.

Although Nietzsche thought of all metaphysical systems as so many forms of illusion, he was not blind to the great importance that these systems have had for the shaping of Western civilization. In a sense he saw them as necessary illusions, illusions that indirectly taught people - discipline and propelled them forward to heroic undertakings and significant accomplishments. Nietzsche was keenly aware of how much in Western civilization depended on the beliefs and attitudes that Christianity had imposed on people in the course of many centuries, and in his own way he took the modern decline of Christianity as a cultural organizing force much more seriously than most ordinary Christians.

Nietzsche discusses the cultural significance of Christianity in connection with his often quoted remark "God is dead." By coining this phrase Nietzsche did, of course, not make any statement about the existence or nonexistence of God. What he offered, rather, is an observation concerning the idea of the deity, and the idea’s crucial role as a foundation of the general culture. In a nutshell Nietzsche’s reasoning was this: In a universe conceived in strictly scientific terms God has no intelligible place anymore, no meaningful role in the explanation of the workings of the world. In a culture that depends as much on sober scientific research and thinking as ours, talk about God has become peculiarly vacuous and oddly inappropriate.

Ancient Greeks thought of the awesome power of thunderstorms in terms of Zeus and his greatly feared thunderbolts. People familiarly with the theory and various manifestations of electricity, by contrast, will hardly have any other than a poetic use of the Olympian god and his bolts; as an explanation of natural phenomena Zeus has been rendered irrelevant by the discoveries of science. That, in the context of modern technological civilization, has happened to all deities in all traditional cultures. People who think in scientific terms do not refer to divine powers when exploring or discussing earthquakes, volcanoes, draughts, or the atomic bomb. Some scientists may continue to talk about God, but there is no real opportunity anymore to demonstrate any provable effects of a divine existence or power. Where people used to assume heaven, they now measure intergalactic space; where once they experienced the wrath of God, they now pinpoint viruses that spread in populations without immunity. Mention of God in laboratory reports or professional conferences would dumbfound the scientific community.

The very concept of God becomes difficult to grasp when people are used to the discipline of logic, and when the furnishing of evidence in support of important contentions has become standard practice in everyday life. What kind of being could God possibly be? How could one recognize God if one encountered him (or her) or heard "his" voice? Can we have any trust at all in our hopelessly anthropomorphic notions of God? How exactly is a noticeable Supremacy of Gods being is different from a God that does not exist? Is there anything left of our belief in God except dubious talk and vague desires?

Because of such difficulties and uncertainties, God has become less and less of a palpable factor in modern life; the scientific-technological world has grown used to functioning without any theological basis. Today science alone provides the decisive standards of what is true and what works. Whenever there is a conflict between science and religious doctrine, science will not accommodate religion anymore, but religion will adjust it to scientific conclusions. It is this cultural situation that prompted Nietzsche to talk about the "death" of God.

Nietzsche did not present the statement "God is dead" as his own, but rather as that of a "madman" whom he describes in a sort of parable in The Joyful Science. This madman, talking to an unsympathetic crowd in the marketplace, raises some noteworthy questions concerning God’s death: Where has God gone? I will tell you. We have killed him-you and me. We are all his murderers! Nevertheless, how did we manage to do so? How were we able to drink up the ocean? Who gave us the sponge with which we wiped away the horizon? What did we do when we loosened the earth from its sun? Where is it headed now? Where are we headed? Away from all suns? Aren't we in a free fall? Disappearing backward, sideways, forward-in all directions? Is there still an above and/or below? Are we not stumbling as through an infinite nothing? Isn't empty space breathing on us? Didn't it get colder? Isn't night coming on all the time, and more of the night? -God is dead! God remains dead! We have killed him! How shall we console ourselves-the most murderous of murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has ever had have bled to death under our knives. Is not the magnitude of this deed too great for us? Shall we not have to become gods ourselves to seem worthy of it?

The madman in Nietzsche's story is not mad because he talks nonsense, for his speech, when looked at closely, makes a good deal of sense. The speaker only appears crazy because he is excited about something the crowd has not yet become aware of-because he is too far ahead of his time. The fact that "God is dead" in it is no news to the crowd; many of them have been faithless for some time. What is news to them, is that it is they who have killed God, that it was their own doing (by developing a modern civilization of scientific thought and sophisticated technology) that has led to the demise of the Supreme Being in their world? What the crowd also fails to realize is the enormity of the consequences that are bound to follow from their deed. For so far most people have continued living as if nothing had happened, as if the world in which God’s authority had once been supreme were still intact. Nevertheless, that the stability of a well-ordered and comfortable world, as the madman insists, does not exist anymore. Unnoticed by the crowd, the world as a whole has become a dark, cold, and frighteningly confusing place:

Mention of the "wiping out of the horizon" is a reminder that the comfortable narrowness of traditional views of the world has irremediably vanished: Everything has opened up to infinities that render the familiar world utterly strange. In a narrow world person can find their bearings; in an infinite universe people will feel at a loss. A comforting conception of the universe where everybody and everything have its proper function and place -a universe designed and ruled over by God-is not tenably any more in the light of advanced modern knowledge. Science has increasingly depicted the universe as a puzzling riddle, not as a place that we know, and where we can feel comfortably at home.

The madman’s talk of "the earth loosened from its sun" indicates humanity’s loss of a centre-of a God and divine order that could give orientation and meaning to human lives and endeavours. That the earth is in "free fall" implies that humanity has lost all control over its destiny, and that no new "suns" are in sight. There is no "above" and "below" anymore: Everything has become equally important or unimportant, equally valuable or valueless. Solid orientation has become impossible where there are no absolutes and firm guide posts. Anyone who cares to think honestly about the modern condition is bound to uncover a measure of nothing and prevail upon a pervasion of foolish senselessness, mixed by means of over-flowing emptiness.

"God remains dead," the madman contends. The frightening vision of the modern world may prompt many to go back to the past, to escape the modern "wasteland" by seeking refuge in old cosmologies and faiths. Still, there is no plausible going back. Once the rational and critical thinking, which is the basis of science, technology, and our actual survival, has taken hold of a culture, people cannot simply become childlike believers again. Once scientific skepticism, reliance on solid evidence, and precise analytic thinking have become an integral and necessary part of a society’s life and survival, returning it to any naive faith without incurring the reproach of intellectual dishonesty or lack of integrity is impossible. Once God has been "murdered" there is nothing left but to acknowledge the great darkness and to move forward under radically new conditions.

One particularly prominent aspect of the general loss of orientation and meaning invoked by the madman is the felt absence of absolute standards and values. If there is no list of moral principles or rules like the Ten Commandments, and if there is no divine authority to back them up, all people are left with being a number of competing moralities-and no impartial criteria by which they could tell which of these competing systems might be valid or best. People would find themselves in a situation of complete moral relativism, a relativism that may easily and logically lead to a denial of morality together, to total moral nihilism. "If God did not exist, everything would be permitted," we can read in Dostoyevsky’s the Brothers Karamazov, and that is how Nietzsche’s madman sees the matter as well. "Are there still an above and a below?" he asks, and the answer is, of course, that without a God and a divine order of the world there is not. To help others in need and to share one’s wealth may be a high priority for some, but for others such a principle may be of little importance-or even reprehensible. Without the absolute authority of God there is no telling who is right and who is wrong. Killing for political ends, abortion, eating meat, adultery, censorship, capital punishment, pre-emptive war—dozens of principles and practices are accepted or rejected upon the basis by the nonentity grounded in trustworthy regional traditions, entrenched authorities, unexamined habit, or just "how people feel" at anyone time. Without God there are only the multitude of cultural prejudices and personal bias—void of any authoritative validation.

Since science was instrumental in the "murdering" of God, some theoreticians were inclined to think that science can also help to create a new value system, a system that would have both the authority and assumed impartiality of the God of the past. Nothing came of this idea, however. On the contrary, the reigning consensus between scientists and most philosophers of science has been that a thoroughly scientific view of the world is inherently amoral. For the sciences make it their business to recognize only facts, and facts in themselves, according to that consensus, are neither good nor bad. All facts or state of affairs is equally valuable or valueless, and science, for this reason, has to remain value-neutral. From a strictly scientific point of view one could not say whether helping other people is better, to leave them separate, or even to exploit recklessly or "liquidate" them. The scientific investigation of any conceivable course of action would produce just so many more facts, but absolutely no value conclusion. Scientists can only say what is, not what ought to be; Science implies a "fact-value gap" as part of its methodology; Facts by themselves can offer no moral guidance. Science, in other words, did not only fail to establish a new value system, but vigorously reinforced the moral disorientation of modernity by emphasizing its principled incompetence with regard to matters of ethics.

The proclaimed value-neutrality of the sciences is an integral part of the grim scenario painted by the madman. Remembering the scruples that some of the Manhattan Project physicists had when they wondered whether they should unleash the ominous powers that went into the atomic bomb, one could say that the proclaimed value-neutrality of the sciences is just the sort of thing that makes the scenario of modernity described by the madman so grim. For once genies like nuclear fission or fusion are out of the bottle, without a solid moral framework in place within which such powers could be managed, it is no mad exaggeration to speak of the earth or humanity as in some sort of free fall.

The people in the marketplace do not see any of this. They all have their personal concerns and short-term goals, and they routinely go about their mundane businesses, including the business of making every day, moral decisions. It is only the "madman" who sees the ultimate implications of the death of God, and who is alarmed by the great moral and existential void in which they all live. "Europe has yet to face the reality of Nihilism," Nietzsche once remarked. The entirety of Western civilization still functions within a mind-set that thousands of years of theistic training and practice have created. At the time of his writing Nietzsche thought that it may yet take some two hundred years until the truth of their situation would dawn on the majority of people. Accordingly the madman concludes his lament with the words: In come too early. In am not yet at the right time. This enormous event [the death of God] is still on its way; it is travelling. It has not yet reached the ears of the crowd. Lightning and thunder needs time, the light of the stars needs time, deeds need time-even after they are done-to be seen and heard. This deed is as yet farther from them than the farthest stars-and yet they have done it!

It was not until the 20th century that philosophers began to reflect systematically on the situation outlined by Nietzsche’s madman. Jean-Paul Sartre and other Existentialists understood themselves to be thinkers who have finally fully realized the implications of the death of God (which is one reason that they considered Nietzsche as one of their most important forerunners). Sartre, in his essay "Existentialism is a Humanism" of 1946, quotes, with approval, Dostoyevsky’s contention that everything would be permitted if God did not exist. Sartre derides the traditional secular humanists for thinking that the absence of God is not much of a problem for ethics. "Nothing will be changed if God does not exist," he describes these humanists as saying. "We will rediscover the same norms of honesty, progress and humanity, and we will have disposed of God as an out-of-date hypothesis that will die away quietly of it." Existentialist humanists see things quite differently.

Existentialist, by contrast, finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There can no longer be any good deductivity, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. It is nowhere written that "the good" exists, that one must be honest or must not lie, since we are now on a plane where there are only men.

Existentialists, in other words, take very seriously what Nietzsche’s madman says, and their description of the human condition as one without any preordained moral system or orientation, without, indeed, any authoritative way of making sense of the world and human life, is exactly the scenario that Nietzsche invokes in The Joyful Science. Existentialists explicitly define human existence as an undetermined being in a meaningless universe, and as an anguished freedom that has to create all values and purposes out of it. As Existentialists had witnessed such events as two ferocious world wars, the holocaust, the atomic incineration of whole cities, and the continuing death by malnutrition of millions of children every year (together with the worldwide productions of an entertainment industry that can plausibly be described as organized idiocy on a massive scale), the absence of any authoritative ethics or established moral framework had become a particularly urgent problem for them. It was in the existentialists’ famous expressions of absurdity, loss, abandonment, and despair that Nietzsche’s dark vision of things found its final manifestation.

The madman is to exclaim of the cognitional framework as it was layed down by Nietzsche, having to say, that of who had been killed, but not expected he was to say of an indirect attestation, that, his audiences were thereby the one’s that did not hear of that very same madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, and ran to the marketplace and cried incessantly? "In seek God! In seek God"- As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, but 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. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Where is God?" he cried. "I will tell you. We have killed him-you and me! All of us are his murderers! Yet 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? Where is it moving now? Where 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? Do we not hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? -Gods, too, decompose! God is dead God remains dead! We have killed him! How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was 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 ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed-and whoever is born after us, for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto"- Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners: they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern to the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. In have come too early, he said then; My time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, but wandering - it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder requires time; The light of the stars requires time; The deed though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most-distant stars-and yet they have done it themselves"-It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"

Friedrich Nietzsche's vehement attacks upon Christianity, encapsulated in his famous dictum that "God is dead," pose a problem for the reader who agrees with Nietzsche and yet does not wish to give up a certain basic Christian belief. However, careful analyses of both Nietzsche and the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) reveal an interesting pattern: the elements that Nietzsche opposes do not appear in the teachings of Jesus at this point, but rather in John and the writings of the Church fathers. In the synoptic Gospels, the earliest extant writings we posses, Jesus and Nietzsche often parallel each other, teaching similar doctrines.

Jesus did not teach the will to death and the ascetic ideal, but rather a strong individualism compatible with Nietzsche's philosophy. If this is the case, God need not die, even if the Church preaches dogma that appears to make that necessary for the free spirit to liberate it from the yoke of the herd and its guilt. An extensively modified, but still religious, Christianity can complement and reinforce the Nietzschian world-view. Using the Gospels to find the true message is difficult, for they are evolving documents that have been modified by the Church more than two millennia. However, enough support can be found, even with the warping of the originals, to support the view that Jesus originally taught something very differently from the Christian religion as we know it.

The worst thing about Christian belief, according to Nietzsche, is that it encourages, indeed requires, what he terms afterworldliness: "a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want anymore." Here the believer despises this life and this world in favour of some promised world, accessible only after death, which is the truly good one. Nietzsche contends that we should live in this world, and that a yearning for another world is symptomatic of an unhealthy hatred of life: "It was the sick and decaying who invented the heavenly realm." Thus, the afterlife is an artificial creation used by the unhealthy to justify their hatred of life. The healthy soul lives and rejoices in this world, no longer willing to "bury one's head in the sand of heavenly things, but [willing instead] to bear it freely, an earthly head, which creates meaning for the earth.

While Jesus does promise an afterlife, he never suggests that his followers should despise this life or be in a hurry to get elsewhere. Indeed, the parable of the talents clearly shows that we are supposed to make the best of this life and the abilities we are given: The servants who increased the money their master had given them were rewarded, while the servant who simply hid his money and waited for the return was punished. The lovers of death here clearly contradict the teachings of their supposed master, who teaches that life is a gift of God and is not to be wasted. More support for the dictum that we should not hurry toward death is in the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus says "Do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for it. Let the day's own trouble be sufficient for the day." While this, comes at the end of a speech on not becoming attached to materiality. Thus, Nietzsche and Jesus are compatible in affirming this life and warning against concentrating on the next.

Nietzsche also criticizes the ascetic ideal for being opposed to life. Asceticism results from after worldliness; "Once the soul looked contemptuously upon the body, and then this contempt was the highest: She wanted the body meagre, ghastly, and starved. Thus, she hoped to escape it and the earth." Suicide is the goal, and asceticism the only form of suicide allowed by the Church. This is clearly antithetical to the love of life that Nietzsche claims as characteristic of the free spirit; Nietzsche sees this hatred of life, expressed through the ascetic ideal, as so entwined with Christian belief that only the death of God can eliminate its effects and allow man to love life. In other words, conventional Christian belief so thoroughly poisons the believer that only its extirpation can give him a chance to be free.

However, we have already seen that Jesus did not preach after worldliness; could asceticism be yet another apocryphal addition to his message? Jesus, we are told, went into the wilderness to fast for forty days, which is clearly an ascetic act. However, this does not mean that he subscribed to the ascetic ideal as it would later be defined. First of all, Nietzsche agrees that asceticism is favourable for the philosopher: "We have seen that implications of asceticism, which is to say a strict yet high-spirited continence, is among the necessary conditions of strenuous intellectual activity as well as one of its natural consequences." So Jesus was not seeking death but rather the optimum environment for thought and creativity before embarking upon his ministry, even as Nietzsche has Zarathustra do on more than one occasion. The need for a materially simple lifestyle to be creative also accounts for Jesus's repeated injunctions against worldly wealth; if one wishes to develop spiritually, one's energy must be directed in that direction, not the acquisition of material goods: "For going through the eye of a needle is easier for a camel than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God." There is another reason that Jesus would spend time in the wilderness, related to the time in which he lived. Two thousand years ago (and still today in some cultures), time spent alone in contemplation was considered a prerequisite for holiness and wisdom, a sort of credentialing. People at that time would not have taken Jesus seriously if he had not been out fasting; it is noteworthy that no gospel ever mentions him fasting again.

Not only was Jesus not an ascetic him, he did not encourage his followers to abuse their bodies. The closest Jesus comes to approving of fasting (the primary ascetic act in his time) is when he tells his followers to show no outward signs if they fast, for that makes a vain display out of what is supposed to be a mystic act. He was criticized for not making his disciples fast, but he answered "Can the wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them?" Even his death was not to be a permanent reason for - abuse, for after having said the above, he stated after Easter that "I am with you always, to the close of the age." Thus, the true Christian has no excuse for fasting or other asceticism on religious grounds. The lack of asceticism in Jesus's teaching makes perfect sense once one accepts that he did not teach after worldliness.

When confronted with the idea that Jesus did not preach after worldliness, the conventional believer is likely to ask, "But what of the Kingdom of God?" Indeed, the Gospels are full of references to the Kingdom of God, but these are not necessarily (or, if one were to wish independently) references to life after death. The Kingdom of God is something that a person can achieve in this life: "For beholding, the Kingdom of God is within you." This concept can be better understood as a different mode of existence, of a person who is no longer like he was before, which corresponds to Nietzsche's idea of the overman. Like the overman, the Kingdom of God cannot be reached through the application of reason, intelligence, or wisdom: "Whoever does not receive the Kingdom of God like a child will not enter it." In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the coming of the overman cannot be known, even by Zarathustra him, until it happens. Jesus says the same about the Kingdom of God, in that "Watch therefore, for you do not know on which day your Lord is coming." Entering the Kingdom of God, like becoming the overman, is a leap, not a gradual process that can be rationally understood; Once, again, Nietzsche and Jesus converge and coincide. Both the Kingdom of God and the overman are described in terms that make it absolutely clear that these states represent a transcending of ordinary humanity, a step beyond what we are capable of imagining today: Nietzsche says of the overman that "He is this lightning, he is [the] frenzy" while Jesus says "The kingdom of heaven is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened." Although the imagery is different, both are describing a state of transformation, of great change, which is the object of life.

Jesus, like Nietzsche, had very little regard for priests and their rule. The gospels are full of the taunts and criticisms of the Pharisees, the priests of Judaism. Jesus and his disciples constantly violated the laws of the pharisees where it would be known. Jesus healed on the Sabbath, and when the Pharisees asked him why, he answered "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath" In other words, a law, or morality, is to be followed only as long as manning it is beneficial; this teaching is antithetical to the rules of any priestly caste. He rejected the priestly notion that external signs are indicative of inner health; After violating the Mosaic dietary laws, Jesus stated that "Not what goes into the mouth defiles a man, but what comes out of the mouth, this defiles a man." Jesus is preaching an independence from the law that constitutes the first step toward the Kingdom of God. This attitude is crucial: The Mosaic law was the foundation of the morality of the society Jesus moved in, and therefore by rejecting it he was rejecting the morality of his society. One of the central tenets of Nietzsche's philosophy is that the overman requires independence from the old morality, as the very title of Beyond Good and Evil confirms. Jesus and Nietzsche continue to walk the same path.

The two teachers also coincide in asserting that their teachings cannot be adopted by more than a few of those who hear them. Zarathustra finds that he must "speak not to the people but to companions," companions who like him have left the herd and are thus ready to hear what he has to say. One of the leitmotifs of Nietzsche's work is the crushing influence of the herd and therefore the necessity to reject it, as painfully as this may be, in order to develop. Similarly, although Jesus spoke to the masses, he was under no illusions as to their ability to hear him: in the parable of the wheat and the tares, only a very few of the seeds sowed bear any fruit. He only bothered explaining his parables to the apostles, his companions. Jesus also preaches the need to free one from the bonds of society, and warns of it hatred for those who do so, "Beware of men, for they will deliver you up to councils, and flog you in their synagogues. You will be dragged before governors and kings for my sake." Nietzsche also warns of the wrath of the herd: Since I do not join their dances Tied to their old rope, In am followed by their glances, Sweetly poisoned envy without hope.

Both Nietzsche and Jesus realize that the man must separate him from the herd in order to live, but that the inevitable corollary of this act is that he will be despised, feared, and envied by those still within the herd.

One of Nietzsche's central tenets is that man is "that which must always overcome it." One must always survive the overcoming one, with no thought of a time when overcoming will no longer be necessary; as long as something is, there is always something to be overcome. Interestingly, there is a similar message in the teachings of Jesus, who exhorted his listeners to "Be perfect, even as your heavenly Father is perfect." Attempting to achieve perfection would be an identical process too - overcoming, when one considers Jesus's contempt for the mosaic law, his society's expression of morality. The believer who took Jesus's words to heart would have continually to reexamine him, change him, improve him without a firm guide. In other words, he would have continually to overcome him in the pursuit of perfection. Jesus and Nietzsche teach the same thing, although in different languages.

On the theme of -judgement, an even greater difference in method obscures a similarity in aim. Nietzsche proclaims the doctrine of the eternal recurrence, where we must believe that we will live our lives again and again, with no changes. Thinking about this force’s one to come to grips with what one really thinks about one's life; if one has accepted one's life, then the idea of repeating it is appealing, but if not, then it is terrifying. Jesus achieves the same goal by postulating judgement by an omnipotent being who can see through all one's lies, even the ones one tells one. Again, faced with a postulated eventuality, but one must take honest stock of how he has lived. In this case the difference in method stems from Nietzsche's rejection of and Jesus's acceptance of the idea of an afterlife; Their intentions are identical, to require their listeners to judge themselves far more harshly than they would ordinarily.

One crucial issue remains to be dealt with, that is humility. Humbleness appears again and again in the message of Jesus. "If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all," Jesus tells his disciples. Here Jesus and Nietzsche appear to be invariably at odds, since the last thing Nietzsche taught was humility. Yet the apparent divide is not as great as it would seem. One must always survive to overcome one, and to defy the herd requires a lot of pride; ought not that this childish, immature pride be the first thing to be overcome? Only with a harsh appraisal can one become in knowing one, and pride would prevent this. Thus pride must be overcome in order to know one and thus be wisely proud. The humility Jesus teaches need not be the grovelling - abasement the Churches have said it is. Could this humility not be the inevitable humility of one who has looked at him clearly, realistically, warts and all? This humility would lead not to weakness but to greater strength and better overcoming. Jesus did not intend for us to be weak, but to be strong and sure of ourselves; That is why he said to "turn to him [the other cheek] also," for he who is truly strong is in control of him and will respond, not on impulse, but at the proper time, under perfect control. This interpretation is compatible with Nietzsche's philosophy, but rather complements and expands it.