Nietzsche Said It Before John Lennon

Nietzsche Said It Before John Lennon

There’s an ancient story, passed down by the Hebrews unto modern day, which tells of a monumental tower reaching higher up than any structure ever before, a way to elevate humanity up to God’s level. Well, God can’t have that now can he? Of course not, so he destroys the tower and scatters the humans building it across the world, instilling in them different languages so that they would never try and touch him again. Similarly, the ancient Greeks also possess stories that tell of what happens when humans try to fly too close to the sun, they always fall. And yet, as the years went by humanity continued to progress, to reach further than any thought imaginable, to reach into the realm of gods. However, whenever they got too high, too close to the sun, they always fell, same as Icarus and Bellerophon. Until they didn’t. It was in the late 18th century when mankind first pushed the limits of God without punishment. In the two industrial revolutions that followed, mankind progressed further technologically then they had in the past thousand years combined. Their towers touched the clouds without issue, their medicine cured the diseases that had inflicted mankind for millennia, and, most importantly, for the first time they were able to fly close to the sun without getting burned. The world was changed, science now explained things that religion could not, it was science, and not faith in God that was propelling man forward. It was in this era, this changing world, when German philosopher named Friedrich Nietzsche first uttered “Gott ist tot,” God is dead. By that phrase Nietzsche never meant that God was physically dead (although he never believed in God in the first place), but more that his lessons and values, passed down from the ancients through the Bible were dead, outdated. In a world where science was king, what good were the 2000 year old values that had been written at a time where man could not even fathom the technology humans possessed in the 19th century? To Nietzsche, the Bible was in need of a second edition, one where all the old, outdated values were thrown out, and replaced with new relative ones. He did just that in the publishing of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, his masterpiece, in which a new prophet, Zarathustra, spoke thus of the new values for mankind while proclaiming the ultimate truth, the death of God. Thus, the philosophy of Nietzsche as well as his book ThusSpoke Zarathustra serve as a response to the death of God and the values that died with him, by allowing the active nihilism that follows God’s death to create new values and morals, and better fit the changing world of industrialization that ruled the nineteenth century.