"I know my fate. One day, my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous: a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. For when truth enters into a fight with the lies of millennia, we shall have upheavals, a convulsion of earthquakes, a moving of mountains and valleys the like of which has never been dreamed of. There will be wars the like of which has never yet been seen on earth. I am by far the most terrible human being that has existed so far. This does not preclude the possibility that I shall be the most beneficial."
That passage was written by Nietzsche at the beginning of the last chapter of his last book, in November of 1888, his autobiography. He was looking backwards at his life and forwards towards his fate. He knew that he would be intimately connected with what was coming, and he knew that what was coming would be catastrophic. He foresaw a trauma descending upon all of Western civilization, and he predicted wars the like of which humanity had never seen. The unprecedented bloodshed of the first half of the twentieth century would seem to bear him out.
He saw this coming because he himself had already lived through the experience he believed the rest of the world was approaching. He thought of himself as a prophet sent to tell us the history of the next two centuries. More precisely, he thought of himself as a canary in a coal mine. When miners descended into the earth, there was always the possibility of poisonous gas, odorless and colorless, undetectable until it was too late. So they would bring a canary with them. Because of its small size and rapid heartbeat, the poison would enter the canary's system far more quickly than it would affect the miners, and when the canary died, that was the signal to run.
Nietzsche believed he was serving exactly that function for the rest of us. He was the first person to pass through the experience he calls nihilism, a belief in nothingness that he saw coming for everyone, a force that would undermine whatever foundations we had managed to build. We have seen Descartes, Hume, and Kant laboring to construct secure foundations for human knowledge and value. Nietzsche believed all of that labor was futile, that none of it could withstand the nihilism he saw on the horizon.
His responsibility, as he understood it, was not merely to warn us but to help us find a way through. He had survived nihilism and come out the other side, and he intended to guide the rest of us through it as well.
We are now at the end of the 19th century, but we began at the start of the 17th century, in 1619, with Descartes' method of doubt. Descartes wanted science. He felt that the education available in his day, and the methods by which people gathered and established knowledge, could not produce the kinds of advances he believed were necessary for a good life. He wanted machines to help us achieve great accomplishments, and he wanted medicine that would extend our lifespan.
By doubting everything that could possibly be doubted, Descartes was able to rebuild knowledge on a stronger foundation, one that would withstand that very doubt, and upon which a reliable science could be constructed. Now, nearly 300 years later, Descartes' revolution, carried forward alongside figures such as Galileo, Bacon, and Newton, has succeeded. The Scientific Revolution has triumphed.
What Nietzsche sees, however, is that this triumph has had unforeseen consequences. The headlong rush to achieve a scientific understanding of the universe has been astonishingly successful, but that success has brought with it developments that no one anticipated.
In order for Descartes to establish a new scientific way of studying the world, he first had to dismantle the old way of understanding it. That old way rested, very simply, on the belief that we were created by a benevolent, loving God for a purpose. We were put here to serve God, to love God, to fight the cosmic battle that would determine the fate of the universe. That is pretty exciting stuff. Every day we wake up with a role to play, helping good defeat evil.
Every action you take is seen, every action matters. What you do is significant, and you will be rewarded with the ultimate prize, eternal bliss, if you do what you are meant to do. You even know what that is, because you have been given an instruction manual. The Bible tells you what it means to be human, what it means to succeed, and what the right way to live looks like. All you have to do is follow its rules. Everything that exists was placed here by God purposefully, everything that happens occurs because God allowed or arranged it, and everything means something.
But Descartes gives us a universe of material objects. All that surrounds us, on his account, are physical things, objects taking up space, possessing no significance, no meaning. He did believe in God and even offered proofs of God's existence, yet the world around us has been drained of the very dimension of meaningfulness. Science does not recognize the category of significance. It recognizes facts: what does happen, not what should happen, physical events and objects, not spiritual importance.
Descartes gave us a science that granted us many more years to live. But he took away the reason to live them.
Nietzsche sees a universe that has been stripped of meaning. We used to be at the center of the universe. All of reality was built for us, and we were both figuratively and literally at its center. It was a geocentric world. The sun revolved around us, the planets revolved around us, the stars revolved around us, because of course they did: it was all for us. Then Copernicus came along and said no. The sun is at the center, and we are just a rock orbiting it among a whole bunch of other rocks, and the sun itself is just one star among others.
The latest estimate I have read puts the number of stars in the Milky Way at 400 billion, and we happen to orbit just one of them. Our galaxy is 200,000 light years across and takes 230 million years to complete a single rotation. And there are at least 170 billion galaxies, and one higher estimate puts the number at two trillion. What do we matter? What is the point of us?
Well, at least we remained at the pinnacle of living beings. We were at the top of the food chain, the greatest of all creatures, because God gave Adam dominion over the animals. Then Darwin took that away in 1859 and said no: we are just another animal, the hairless apes. And what produced us is chance, regulated chance, but chance nonetheless. It is randomness, arbitrariness, environmental circumstances that simply happened to change, determining which species survive and which do not.
On this account, the point of life is surviving long enough to pass on your genes, so that your offspring can survive long enough to pass on theirs, so that their offspring can do the same, and that is it. There is no purpose, no creator, no reason for any of this. There is no plan, no goal. It all just happened.
This is nihilism. Nietzsche says the question why gets no answer. There is no because. There is no reason. Suffusing the universe with reasons, as science does, paradoxically took away the reason for anything, because all we have are causal explanations that give us no point, no significance, no meaningfulness. Science strips those away.
Nietzsche observed that people would rather believe in nothingness than have nothing to believe in. They will take up destructive purposes, cause harm, spill blood in the streets, rather than hold no belief at all. We are a belief-hungry species, and we need something. Yet science, the very enterprise to which Descartes, Hume, and Kant dedicated themselves, founding it, justifying it, explaining and understanding it, has taken that away from us.
Kant worried that without a basic scientific understanding of the universe, we could become rain dogs, utterly stripped of all orientation. But Nietzsche's answer is that science itself is the rain. It is science that has taken away our orientation in the world. The word orientation comes from orient: one would face east, toward Jerusalem, because just as you take your bearings in space, you take your bearings in life from where your God dwells. Without that, where are we going? Where are we heading in our lives? What does any of it matter?
This general phenomenon is what Nietzsche calls the death of God. "Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace, and cried incessantly, 'I seek God! I seek God!' As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. 'Has he got lost?' asked one. 'Did he lose his way like a child?' asked another. 'Is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a journey, emigrated?' Thus they yelled and laughed.
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. 'Whither is God?' he cried. 'I will tell you. We have killed him, you and I. All of us are his murderers. 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? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continuously, 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?
God is dead. God remains dead, and we have killed him. There has never been a greater deed, and whoever is born after us, for the sake of this deed, will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto.' Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners, and they too were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out.
'I have come too early,' he said. 'My time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering. It has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time. The light of the stars requires time. Deeds, 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.'"
This is a very famous passage, and it is worth noticing the particular phrasing Nietzsche uses: "Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? We have unchained this earth from its sun. Is there any up or down?" He is speaking about disorientation, about the loss of orientation altogether. He is describing a universe that has become completely blank, an inhospitable environment that is now merely a physical location rather than a home. This is the trauma he sees coming.
This is the catastrophe that Nietzsche thinks we are plunging headlong toward, with no idea how to handle it. We have had one way for millennia to give our lives meaning, and that way is no longer working. It has been dismantled by science. We thought we had an eternal, omnipotent being giving us meaning, a being that could never go away, as reliable a foundation as one could imagine. Then belief in that being falters, and it turns out we are the turkey, and Thanksgiving has come.
Notice something in the story that people do not usually notice. We tend to assume that the people the madman is speaking to are pearl-clutching religious believers, horrified at what he is saying, but that is not the case at all. They are atheists. They do not believe in God either. The difference is that they make light of it; they joke about it.
What the madman knows that they do not is not simply that there is no God, they all agree on that. What the madman understands is the gravity of the situation: that this is an event that splits history in two, that there is a before and an after, and that it fundamentally changes everything.
Nietzsche is not writing this to scare us or depress us, nor is he the one creating this situation. Who killed God? You and I. This is an analogy; he is not saying there was a deity who has now died. What he is saying is that for a very long time, religion sustained us as a civilization. Religion structured our lives, told us who and what we were, where we were going, what things meant, and why anything was important. That is what has gone. That is what has melted away, leaving nothing in its place.
Humans would rather believe in nothingness than have nothing to believe in. Nietzsche wants to show us that this dissolution is happening, not make it happen, and to help give us a way through it. The death of God is not a statement about any change in the status of a deity, but about the change in our belief in the deity. Nietzsche thinks there never has been a God. It has been us all along, our hand up the great sock puppet in the sky, all this time.
And that itself could be the key to our survival of this phase. He writes: "For a person can never shake off a delusion. He fancies that he is a spectator and listener who has been placed before the great visual and acoustic spectacle that is life. He calls his own nature contemplative and overlooks that he himself is really the poet who keeps creating this life." We who think and feel at the same time are those who continually fashion something that had not been there before, the whole eternally growing world of valuations, colors, accents, perspectives, scales, affirmations, and negations.
"Whatever has value in our world now does not have value in itself. According to its nature, nature is always valueless, but has been given value, and it was we who gave and bestowed it. Only we have created a world that concerns man, but precisely this knowledge we lack. We fail to recognize our best power and underestimate ourselves. We are neither as proud nor as happy as we could be."
That last line is perhaps the motto of all of Nietzsche's work: we are neither as proud nor as happy as we could be. He is trying to correct that. We labor under the delusion that we are merely spectators of the world, when in reality we are creating it, fashioning it. That should sound familiar.
You should recognize that idea, because it is Kant's transcendental illusion. Kant described the transcendental illusion as the belief that all the features of experience we are producing are actually out there in the world. It is the person wearing pink sunglasses looking at a white wall and thinking the wall is pink, rather than recognizing that their glasses are making it appear so. We take what is a subjective effect and mistake it for an objective fact outside of us.
This was Kant's great insight, what enabled him to answer the question of how a priori synthetic judgments are possible, and what allowed him to place science on firm ground. Nietzsche agrees with him here. Nietzsche says, "Yes, we are active, we do constitute the world around us." He writes, "Only we have created the world that concerns man," which is precisely what Kant argues: that our minds impose the forms of intuition and the categories of understanding to create the world as we experience it. For Kant, this is a world that is scientifically knowable, and it remains hidden from us that we have made it, we simply assume it is out there, independent of us.
But there are two very important differences between Kant and Nietzsche on this point. Nietzsche accepts Kant's account of science, but what concerns him far more is values. What we have created, above all, are the values that guide us. Here too we are under a transcendental illusion, a trance in which values appear to be objective features of the world, in which good and bad seem real and independent of us, and in which we imagine ourselves merely obeying them.
This illusion finds its ultimate expression in religion. God is conceived as the most real entity in the universe, the one who determines what is good and bad, leaving us only to recognize and obey his commands. But if there never was a God, then where did those rules come from? Where did the values come from? They were always from us.
It was always us making those values. It was always us saying, "This is good and that is bad." The commandments were written by us. We simply labored under the delusion that they weren't. We attributed them to a deity because it sounded far more authoritative. A commanding, wrathful figure in the sky carries considerably more weight than the person standing next to you. So we used that attribution as a rhetorical device to lend our values, our commandments, and our ideas greater authority. And it backfired. It worked beautifully for a long time, but it backfired the moment we could no longer believe in it.
And it has gone worse than backfire, because now that is the only kind of value we can believe in. Only a value handed down from on high feels like a true value. A value that you and I arrive at ourselves, that seems like nothing. We scoff at it. It doesn't feel significant. But that is all there has ever been. What we have been relying on all along was our own creation, something we ourselves have been writing and making. We have been the creators of all this value all along.
And it worked. We were able to create and sustain meaning for thousands of years. The only thing that has changed is that the delusion has fallen away, and now we can see our own hand inside the puppet. That is what is generating despair, because our hand inside the puppet doesn't seem like enough. If the value comes only from us, it feels as though it means nothing.
But this is precisely what Nietzsche is trying to convince us is wrong. He argues that we are underestimating ourselves, and that our greatest power is the power to create. No other species can do that.
Every other species is locked into its instincts, preprogrammed with what is good and what is bad, with what it will do. We are the species that can create. We are the species that can go beyond any biological programming built into us. This is where Nietzsche will disagree with Hume. Hume thinks we are, genetically speaking, hardwired to react in certain ways to stimuli, and Kant thinks we are hardwired with specific forms of intuition, concepts of the understanding, and ideas of reason. Nietzsche says: we are the animal with no fixed horizon.
We are the animal that overcomes limitations. We are the animal whose horizon is fundamentally open. What has been closing it has been us. Attributing our values to a deity has given them great authority, but it has also locked them in place, locked the same values in place for two thousand years while our civilization has changed fundamentally. We are still bound by the same rules, the same laws, the same ideas of good and bad, while everything else has changed.
This same idea that seems so corrosive, evolution, can also be liberating.
Evolution tells us there is no inherent purpose, but that means we can make our own purposes. It tells us there is no predetermined goal, but that means we can point ourselves in any direction we choose. Rather than fearing or being horrified by evolution's implications, we can embrace its central lesson: change and mutability are not threats but opportunities.
We can take up the power of adapting to new circumstances, a capacity that belongs, in its fullest sense, to us alone among species, and make that adaptability the core of our new values. The highest value becomes the value of making new values, the capacity to create.
Kant argued that we need to treat the ultimate goals of science as regulative rather than constitutive. The idea of arriving at complete, final answers once and for all is not something we can ever actually achieve. If we believe we can, we are thinking constitutively, and the result is either frustration at our failure or a premature settling for answers we mistake as complete. Instead, Kant said, we should treat these ultimate answers as regulative: we seek them even knowing we cannot reach them, because the seeking itself is productive and fruitful, continually provoking and driving us forward.
Nietzsche's response was to say: that is a brilliant insight, but Kant himself failed by his own standards. Kant made the most important pursuit constitutive rather than regulative, namely the pursuit of the structure of the mind. Kant decided that he had found the one and only final structure of the mind: the two forms of intuition, the twelve concepts of the understanding, the three ideas of reason, and that was it, forever. This fixed structure was supposed to guarantee that the laws we discover in mathematics and science would always be true.
The problem is that Kant effectively wrote Newtonian physics and Euclidean geometry into the permanent structure of the mind through our forms of intuition and understanding. We no longer accept those frameworks. Scientific revolutions have occurred since Kant's time: Einstein and quantum mechanics demonstrated that time and space are not Newtonian and Euclidean. Einstein's revolution in our understanding of the nature of space and time was fundamental, and if the mind were truly locked into a single fixed structure, we would not have been able to conceive of relativistic space and time at all.
The practical consequences of that inability would be significant. GPS technology, for instance, only functions because engineers account for the time dilation Einstein predicted. We navigate to our destinations using Google Maps because of Einstein. If Kant were right, if we were locked into one structure and that was the end of it, none of that would have been possible.
This is precisely what Nietzsche finds so troubling about Kant's position. Nietzsche does not want to be locked into a single structure; he wants new ideas, openness, and the perpetual possibility of growth, improvement, and becoming more than one has been. That, he argues, is how science actually works, and it is how philosophy works as well.
Each of these philosophers, Descartes, Hume, Kant, believed they had found the right answer, the final answer, until the next one came along and said, "That's great, but I can make it better." Nietzsche's point is that his answer is not simply going to take its place as yet another entry in that sequence. His answer is the whole process. His answer is the way we continuously improve on ourselves.
It's not Descartes or Hume or Kant — it's Descartes and Hume and Kant. It's the and. It's the process. It's the ever-improving, ever-changing movement of ideas. Nietzsche says we need to be creative and self-revising in relation to the very structure of our minds.
He thinks we have been far too focused on science as our exclusive model. He is not anti-science, and he is not rejecting science. But we have taken it as the paradigm on which we base everything. And he asks: what about art? Art does not try to find the one universal answer. Art celebrates multiplicity, celebrates not finding but making — not discovery, but creativity. And that, Nietzsche believes, is our greatest strength.
Nietzsche thinks the greatest artist is the artist in the medium of concepts. Every art form works in a particular medium: sculptors take stone and shape it; musicians take sound. Philosophers are artists in the medium of ideas. They are not discovering something already there — they are creating new possibilities, new ways to think, new ways to live, new ways to love, new ways to be.
Nietzsche says that around the creators of new ideas, the world turns silently, because we rarely realize it, but these are the people who push us forward, who open new paths, who advance human evolution to its next step. The conceptual structure of the mind that Kant gives us is, Nietzsche thinks, something of great value — a foundation on which the next act of creation can begin.
Here is the second difference with Kant: we have control over those concepts. They are not hardwired. They are not autonomic, like the heartbeat or digestion. For most people, most of the time, they are — but they do not have to be. We can take control over them, and that would be true autonomy, not the weak substitute that Kant gives us. True autonomy would be our remaking our own minds.
This is what Descartes did. Descartes reprogrammed his own thinking, his own mind, in order to make it better — but it was in the service of discovering reality. Nietzsche thinks Kant saved us from that ambition. Kant showed us that the idea of getting an accurate picture of the world as it is in itself is impossible. We are human beings; we will always see things from the human perspective. There is no God's-eye view, no purely neutral grasping of the world in itself.
Because that goal is impossible, we no longer have to aim at it. Instead of making our ideas accurate, why not try to make them better? Why not come up with ideas that will make life more exciting, more vivacious, more fulfilling? Some of those ideas will not work, of course — we do not have total control, and not everything we try will succeed. But we do not know what will work and what will not until we try.
We restrict ourselves. We are neither as proud nor as happy as we could be, and the limits we have are, first and foremost, limits we put on ourselves. We have been walking a very narrow path for millennia, and there is an enormous amount of other territory to explore. Kant dreaded that unmarked territory — the disoriented, uncharted land. Nietzsche says the only part of the map worth exploring is the part that is undrawn, the part where there still be dragons.
Getting lost is something you can fear, or it is something you can do on purpose — which is also called exploring.
One of the concepts that Nietzsche is trying to reconfigure is the very concept we have been discussing throughout: the concept of meaning, of meaningfulness. We have been stuck with one notion for a very long time, and it is no longer working. Nietzsche is not simply saying, "You should change your concepts, you should create new ones." He is doing it. He is showing us how it can work by taking the idea of meaningfulness and radically altering it.
What is the old notion? The old notion is that the point of life is to gain entry into the afterlife — that life as we live it is merely a prelude. The only thing that matters is what comes after, because life is temporary while heaven is eternal. Life offers some good and some bad, but the afterlife promises perfect bliss. Nothing in this world can truly matter; only what happens afterwards counts. Nietzsche believes we need an entirely new way to value our lives.
In his description of the death of God, Nietzsche writes: "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 to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?" Religion has long given us celebrations, festivals, and rituals that told us what is important and what is not. But we need new ones — an entirely new way to celebrate — and Nietzsche sets out to give us one.
Nietzsche gives us the only kind of prayer you can pray to a dead god, which is the eternal return. "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 once more, and innumerable times more, and there will be nothing new in it. And every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust.' Would you not throw yourself 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 I heard anything more divine.' If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are, or perhaps crush you. How well-disposed would you have become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate, eternal confirmation and seal?"
Nietzsche thought this was his greatest idea. It is a thought experiment: imagine that everything in your life — everything you have ever done, everything you have experienced, all the wonderful things, all the terrible things — was going to happen again, exactly the same. We fantasize a great deal about living our lives over again, but we do so in order to change things. We tell ourselves, "This time I would do it right. This time I would go out with that person, not that one. I would show up. I would work harder." The eternal return is entirely different. This is living exactly the same way, over and over again, forever. And Nietzsche's question is simply: how does that prospect make you feel?
Some people are horrified by the idea. "Oh my God, I have to go through all that again? Horrible." And Nietzsche asks: what does that say about the life you have been living, if you are horrified at having to go through it again? What kind of life would be the kind that you would embrace this possibility — that you would be exhilarated and say, "Yes, once more, again and again and again"? And why not live like that? Why aren't you living like that?
The fascinating thing about this thought experiment is that the idea of living over and over again has the exact same effect as the idea that we only live once: both give weight to our decisions. We spend so much time doing things we don't want to do, things we don't like, things we don't value, because there is some payoff at some later date, or so we think. We take these chunks of time and sell them off. The problem is that all we are, in the end, is time. That's it. That's all you have; that's all you are. And we sell ourselves so cheaply.
Nietzsche is not saying "carpe diem" — that every second should be exhilarating, that you should ride rollercoasters and never do anything you don't enjoy. He is saying: make sure it's worth it. Think about these decisions. We kill time — what a horrible expression. You really are killing something, but it is your time, your life, that you are slicing off and throwing away.
Consider school. What would you think of a class you were taking if you suddenly found out you weren't getting a grade for it, weren't getting credit, and it didn't count toward your diploma? Would you still show up? What does it say about a job that it is so unpleasant you have to be paid to appear? Why not take classes that have intrinsic value — classes you want to take for their own sake — instead of merely as a means to something else? Why not pursue work that has quality, work that you actually desire?
There are practical constraints, and those shouldn't be dismissed. But work is something we devote a huge portion of our lives and effort to, something bound up with our identity, and we tend not to take it seriously enough. Nietzsche's view is that we ought to be living a life we would want to live over and over again, because that is the only kind of life worth living even once.
And we can choose this. We can create whatever kind of life we want, whatever kind of love we want, whatever kind of values we want. No one is watching. No one is keeping score. Nothing is going on your permanent record, because in the end nothing is permanent and no one is recording it. We have so much freedom, and we use almost none of it. We follow along on the well-worn path. We are not as proud or as happy as we could be. We bang our heads against the bars of the prison cell while the door swings open. Walk out.