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God and state: Nietzsche explained horrors of modern world best

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Omair Ahmad
Omair AhmadMar 30, 2016 | 13:17

God and state: Nietzsche explained horrors of modern world best

Of all the modern philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche remains one of the most difficult to grasp. This may be for a variety of reasons, not least because syphilis was driving him slowly insane towards the end of his life. His misogyny does not make him very likeable, nor does his anti-Semitism, and the fact that Hitler spoke of him as his favourite philosopher, and had a picture taken standing next to Nietzsche's bust, did make him at least a little unlovable.

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Nevertheless, you do not have to be a nice guy to have important insights. As Pratap Bhanu Mehta wrote about VS Naipaul, "What kind of a writer does it take to access these truths? Naipaul disconcerts because he raises the disquieting possibility: a pretty nasty one." And there are few writers who could compete with the level of nastiness that Nietzsche could summon up, such as saying, "When you go to woman, take the whip along."

It is not in his misogyny or his anti-Semitism (and anti-Christianity) that Nietzsche's most brutal insight lay, but in his understanding of the nature of humans to conform. And his ubermensch, badly translated as "superman", was not the Aryan master of the Nazi imagination. In fact, the ubermensch that Nietzsche imagined was "neither master, nor slave", but a free human being, an individual.

More than any other philosopher, Nietzsche was able to see the development of individualism in modern society, of the glory that could be revealed in a human who neither served others, nor sought to make others serve him (for Nietzsche it was always "him", not "her"). And Nietzsche glimpsed this possibility in the break that science had created, showing that life developed not through some mystical process, but through the workings of evolution and genetic mating. Suddenly it was difficult to see god in everything, and a society defined by moral rules arising out of religion, started to seem unstable.

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 ISIS and others are trying to recreate a world where science and reason can be denied.

In The Gay Science he wrote, "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?... Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?" And here Nietzsche touched on the most important issue. If god was dead, if a moral order could not be built merely on religion, what would it be built around, ourselves, humans?

For most people this was too great a thought and that is why, in Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche wrote of how difficult it was for such men to appear, these "ubermensch", the "greater men". Even worse, some people, now that god, or religion, had been deposed, would not create a new morality, but would end up worshipping "a new idol". And this new idol was the state, "the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly lies it also; and this lie creeps from its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people.' … Towards the throne they all strive: it is their madness as if happiness sat on the throne! Oftentimes sits filth on the throne. And oftentimes also the throne on filth."

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More than any other analysis, Nietzsche's description fits our world today. Unable to deal with a world where religion is no longer dominant, groups like the ISIS and others are trying to recreate a world where they can dream that science and reason can be denied, and a human does not have to take responsibility for himself or herself. In response, many countries are emphasising the worship of a state, saying that the greatest thing that a person can do is to sacrifice their lives, their freedoms and even their reason at the altar of the state, before a throne that may rest on filth, and upon which may also sit humans that are worse than filth.

More clearly than others Nietzsche saw how much the displacement of religion would shake up humanity, and his insight was that we would not use the opportunity to gain freedom, but instead enslave ourselves again, to the state. He died in 1900, but nobody since then has explained the horrors and despair of the modern world better.

Last updated: March 31, 2016 | 12:38
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