'God Is Dead', and What Follows

The line is announced by a madman, in a marketplace, and the crowd laughs at him. That detail is skipped in almost every quotation of it, and skipping it inverts the meaning.

Nietzsche's madman runs in with a lantern in the morning, shouting that he is looking for God. The bystanders, who do not believe, find this funny. Then he turns on them: God is dead, and we have killed him. He asks who gave them the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon, what water there is to clean the blood off, what festivals of atonement they will have to invent. Then he falls silent, looks at them, and says he has come too early. The deed is done. The news has not arrived.

So this is a diagnosis, not a victory announcement, and it is addressed to unbelievers rather than believers. Nietzsche's claim is that European morality was underwritten by a divine guarantor, that the guarantor has quietly gone, and that the values are still standing only because nobody has felt the load-bearing wall come out yet. The danger he names is nihilism: not a fashionable gloom but the collapse of the sense that anything is worth pursuing, arriving late and without warning.

The method he brings to this is what makes him more than a prophet of decline. He was a classical philologist by training, and he reads moral concepts the way you read a text: by tracing where the words came from and what they meant before. He calls it genealogy.

Applied to good and evil, it produces his most explosive claim. There was an older scheme, he argues, in which the strong and confident called their own traits good, and called everything else bad in a way that carried no great charge; bad meant roughly common, unfortunate, not worth much attention. Then came an inversion, driven by ressentiment, the reactive resentment of the powerless. The powerless could not act, so they judged. They called the strong evil first, and derived their own goodness from that opposition. Humility, meekness, patience and obedience became virtues, which, Nietzsche notes drily, is exactly what you would expect if the value scheme had been designed by people with no alternative to possessing them.

He illustrates it with lambs and birds of prey. The lambs judge the birds evil; the birds do not judge back, being merely hungry. What would it mean for a bird to be good by the lambs' standard? It would mean being a bird that does not act like a bird. His charge is that slave morality asks strength to be weakness and then calls the weakness a virtue.

The obvious objection is that this is the genetic fallacy. Where a belief came from tells you nothing about whether it is true, so tracing the pedigree of compassion cannot refute compassion. Nietzsche's defence is that he is not refuting it. He is removing its appearance of necessity (its air of having always been there and always been obvious) which forces a separate question: does this value still serve life, or does it now work against the people holding it?

Whether that is a legitimate move or a rhetorical one is genuinely argued. What is not argued, though it is endlessly repeated, is the Nazi association. Nietzsche attacked antisemitism and German nationalism repeatedly and broke with Wagner partly over it. The book called The Will to Power was assembled by his sister Elisabeth from notes he had discarded, after his collapse, while she courted the nationalist right. The misuse was real and the text was hers.