The Godless Existential Burden
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“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?”
Thus wrote Nietzche in The Gay Science. The character making this statement is known as the Nietzchean madman. What he talks about in the dialogue is replacing the meaning that God provided. The consequences of eliminating God, in Nietzche’s view, are pervasive and not easily dealt with.
This is in contrast to Humanist philosophers from the Enlightenment like Rousseau and Spinosa who removed God, but kept Christian morality. They claimed reason as their foundation for their morals instead of God. The scene takes place in a bar with Humanists, so they make fun of the madman who keeps saying “I seek God.”
The smart-alecky people in the bar, representing Enlightenment thinkers, suggest God is hiding, or is afraid or that He’s lost. They insult God since they don’t believe in Him. The madman’s answer, that God is dead, is the apex.
Base Layer Belief
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"You have unchained the earth from the sun, a move of incalculable significance."
The madman’s lament is really about how God is a foundational belief. Removing God removes a whole host of beliefs which depend on God. If God doesn’t exist, what does morality look like? What gives life meaning? For what purpose does anyone do anything? To remove God is to remove the basis for all of those things, as Nietzche recognized, but Enlightenment thinkers did not. Philosophically, there was a gaping hole left by removing God.
Let’s look at morality, for example. In a philosophy that has no God in it, how do you determine what is a good or bad action? Can you go from descriptive statements like “all men are mortal” to imperative statements like “thou shalt not murder”? In philosophy, this is known as the is-to-ought problem and there aren’t any good solutions. The intellectually honest solution, according to Nietche and many others, like Hume, is that such a derivation doesn’t exist.
In other words, without God, there is no basis for moral imperatives. The very concept of good and evil requires re-examination, which is what Nietche considered in his books. Even seemingly obvious moral imperatives like “we should not torture children” or “we should not commit genocide” need to be questioned once you remove God from the equation.
Nietzche argued that the Enlightenment thinkers were wrong in keeping Christian morals. They couldn’t logically generate morality, or meaning or purpose through facts, because of the is-to-ought problem. Therefore, the morality they espoused was intellectual cowardice. They wanted the comfort of a Christian world view while rejecting the God that undergirds it all. With God, the oughts come naturally. Without God, there requires a whole new set of justifications for any sort of ethics.
The madman was pointing out that they had killed not just God, but all the things dependent on God, including morality, meaning and purpose.
Will-to-power
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Nietche’s conclusion was that if you really removed God and all the morals, meaning and purpose that depend on God, then you are left with strength. The philosophy he espoused is one of being honest about that massive metaphysical hole and facing it with courage.
If God is dead, one has the daunting task of filling that hole, of creating meaning, purpose and ethics. If you reject God, you must also reject everything built on God and come up with another way to live, wholly different from how Theists live.
For many, removing God from their lives is an attractive proposition. They have the freedom to change morals to suit their needs. Indeed, humanism, a child of the Enlightenment, has very similar morals as Christianity, except a few changes, mostly around sex. Yet as Nietzche points out, such arbitrary tweaking is cowardly and intellectually lazy because it doesn’t go far enough. All morals have to be thrown out with the denial of God and a brand new form of godless morality, one that is philosophically consistent, has to take its place.
Nietzche’s morality comes down to the strong ruling over the weak, a might-makes-right philosophy. It can only be described as sociopathic, where anything is permissible and nobody has any inherent worth.
Burden of Meaning
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Few people have sociopathic morals, but the influence of Nietzche continues to the present day. The default societal assumption is godlessness and each person has the burden of finding meaning.
For example, modern people see jobs as the source of meaning. They are presumed to be where individuals can find self-actualization and metaphysical fulfillment. Jobs have taken on an additional burden and are no longer a place to just make money.
Without God in the picture, each person has to find meaning and many try to do so through their jobs. Success in a job takes on existential significance and there are two godless ways to measure it.
The first way is essentially some sort of status game where doing better than others is the metric. This could be salary, honors, recognition or something else. The meaning comes from others’ approval, which is not easily earned and is at best temporary even when you get it.
The second is a subjective metric based on internal feeling. Being subjective, the metric can and does change and is like a compass pointed in towards yourself. There’s no real direction or progress and a lot of meandering. A subjective measurement is unstable because what makes you happy one day might not the next.
Neither of these measurements are ultimately satisfactory.
Which brings us back to the beginning. Removing God means having to define meaning ourselves. Defining meaning for ourselves is an enormous burden, a gargantuan task and is a heavy existential load to bear. The ubiquitous questions of moderns like “What should I do with my life?” and “How can I be happy?” are really presenting symptoms of this underlying philosophical disconnect.
The madman’s question shines a light on the gaping hole of godless meaninglessness. How shall we comfort ourselves?
