Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, whose book American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas was reviewed in COMMENTARY, published an essay in The Wilson Quarterly on how Friedrich Nietzsche was embraced by Americans eager to see in him a reflection of their own image. In summarizing the German philosopher’s views, Ratner-Rosenhagen writes:
Friedrich Nietzsche thought that if a culture was clutching calcified truths, one needed to sound them out relentlessly. And that’s exactly what he tried to do… this “philosopher with a hammer” (as he came to identify himself) spent his career tapping that hammer against Western ideals turned hollow idols. Central to his philosophical project was challenging the notion of eternal truth. Nietzsche sought to demonstrate that nothing is inherently good or evil, but rather that all values are culturally and historically contingent. Likewise, he argued that all claims to truth are nothing more than “human, all-too-human” desires for a particular version of the good life, not mirrors of a supra-historical reality.
While Nietzsche sought to dismantle the notion of universal morality, so too did he try to upend his readers’ faith in God. He shocked them with the declaration that “God is dead,” and disturbed them with his insistence that God had not created man in his image; it was man who had created an image of God in order to give his life meaning, purpose, and a moral center. According to Nietzsche, the entire basis of modern Western culture was a slippery slope of lies: transcendent truth, the Enlightenment faith in reason and scientific objectivity, absolute morality, a Supreme Maker. These were mere fictions, products of human imagination and the struggle for power.
From time to time, Nietzsche put down his hammer as he tried to imagine a world after moral absolutes. Even he wondered what would happen once every article of faith had been shed and every claim to universal truth exposed as a human construct.
Nietzsche was right to wonder, and Ranter-Rosenhagen’s work raises an old and enduring set of questions. Is there such a thing as a universal moral law, truths that are objective and permanent rather than subjective and contingent, ethical codes that are anchored in God rather than human choice, human desires, and human invention?
During the years, I’ve asked friends of mine, including several very intelligent and well-read atheists, the grounds on which a person who doesn’t believe in God makes the case for inherent human dignity. Absent a Creator, what is the argument against capriciousness, injustice, and tyranny? How does one create a system of justice and make the case against, say, slavery, if you begin with two propositions: one, the universe was created by chance; and two, it will end in nothing? How do you derive a belief in a moral law that is binding on you and others apart from theism? How do you get from the “is” to the “ought”?
To press the point a bit further, why would a materialist or a relativist have any confidence that their beliefs are (a) rooted in anything permanent and (b) applied to themselves and to others? It’s not obvious what the response is to a Nietzschean who says, “Your belief is fine for you, but it is simply non-binding on me. God is dead – and I choose to follow the Will to Power. You may not agree, but there is no philosophical or moral ground on which you can make your stand.”
Steve Hayner, president of Columbia Theological Seminary, once told me something that adds an important layer to this discussion. We believe we have worth because we are created in God’s image, he said. But even more basic is the declaration that we have value simply because God values us. Gold is valuable because someone values it, not because there is something about gold that is intrinsically of worth.
Sure, gold is aesthetically beautiful and has particular physical qualities which set it apart (it is highly conductive, non-corroding, et cetera). But gold would not be valuable if it were not thought to be so by someone. In this case, value is attributive. Similarly, human beings are of worth simply because we are valued by God. Indeed, God demonstrated the value of humanity by His continuing involvement with us.
It is the attributive quality of worth which underlies Christian and Jewish anthropology. Comparative worth opens the door to an economic or utilitarian assessment of the value of an individual. Intrinsic worth may also be open to some debate. But attributive worth, according to Hayner, is not derived from culture or circumstances. Here, worth comes from the understanding that all people are precious in God’s sight.
It’s still unclear to me, then, on what basis we can argue that people can have intrinsic or attributive worth if we deny God and transcendent truth. I’m not claiming it can’t be done; I’m simply asking what a non-theistic moral code would be grounded in. Those who embrace atheism/anti-theism and the philosophy of Nietzsche would do well to understand, as he did, just how ugly and terrifying a world after moral absolutes would be.
It turns out taking a hammer to God doesn’t damage Him; but it does damage us.
Hume thought it was human nature to feel sympathy for others, and similarly I believe that it is human nature to consider individual human life valuable. God is not necessary for morality or for belief in the nvalue of human life.
The great non-theist systems of the last century the Soviet Union and Red China did not consider individual human life valuable; they murdered tens of millions for their own ends. WWII stopped the slaughter in the Soviet Union as did Stalin’s death afterward. The greatest good for the greatest number sounds good until applied to you. The most expendable rights are those of the other which a third atheist system National Socialism was only too happy to curtail. Hinduism believes you have gotten what you deserve be it Braham or outcast status, all theism is not equal either.
Zen Buddhism is non-theistic and even traditional Buddhism with its semi-deification of the Enlightened Ones, the bodhivistas, teaches a compassion which is not an external necessity or the gift of a transcendent source of value but a necessary truth that is learned from within and entirely natural. Hate your enemy? Have compassion. Hate yourself? Have compassion.
Oddly, Peter's insightful essay never uses the word existential, which Nietzsche certainly was. As an existentialist, Nietzsche believed that authenticity was the only path to personal meaning. Of course, to him God was dead, so the only one left was Ego, which had to be overcome (the mis-appropriated Übermensch). But to someone like Kierkegaard, a generation before Nietzsche, the question wasn't so much God's existence as His silence. The solution for Kierkegaard and Nietzsche was, that we just have to leap. Or, as an old philosopher prescribed, When you're falling, dive. n nAnd this is where "attributive worth" comes in. I think the phrase is another way of saying æsthetic. It's why Nietzsche was also an art critic, indeed why so much existentialism is literary and why so much art is existential. Kierkegaard said one can only communicate your passionate interest — for truth, love, beauty — indirectly. Another sage once said, you don't learn by precept but by example. It's the witnessing that's important, whether it be a story, a painting or a life. (The Nazi ideal was an æsthetic, but the ugliness of the means they used to achieve that æsthetic completely nullified it.) n nThe attributive worth of gold is its beauty. The attributive worth of God is the beauty of His mythos. The same with the beautiful stories of the Buddha and Jesus and Confucius. Or of Isis and Osiris, which stood the Egyptians for millennia. Or the Olympians. Or Parcival. It's not just their pedagogy, it's their stories or, If you will, their literature. n nIndirect communication is like this: non-fiction communicates fact, fiction communicates truth. Holy scriptures are not meant to convey history but TRUTH. It's their insistence on historicity that traps Judaism and Christianity in the field of time and its contingencies. n nI think it the height of hubris to say God is Dead — not asserting its truth but proclaiming it loudly, as Hitchens and his sort have done. Some of us are emotionally equipped to be existentialists and, like Sisyphus, valiantly turn around and push the boulder up that hopeless hill. Or make that leap into the unknown. But most individuals need faith in something palpable outside themselves, something that transcends mortality, a reason to believe in the future, instead of the black wall of mortality that breeds cynicism and despair. n nConsidering the fatuous, feckless, licentious world in which we have immersed ourselves — to consider that in 2001, instead of a mission to "Jupiter and beyond," which we had considered plausible during Apollo, we were wallowing in earthbound self-absorption, self-indulgence and death — it's clear to me that the human race is far better off with a JudeoChristian-Buddhist-Confucian God than without one.
I fail to see the problem. Without God as a source of values, we nonetheless reason to the inherent dignity of all. God need not have anything to do with it. We need only apply the categorical imperative and we have a secular and rational way of reasoning to ethical principles. Saying that man created God, too, does not take away from our ability to conceive the good. n nAs Mark Lilla has shown, the grand theological reversal in effect asked, if there were a God, what conception of the good could be derived and then proceeded to argue, as did Hegel, for the centrality of the church, even for a national church, as a technique of social and ethical cohesion. As Alexander Meiklejohn argued, the brotherhood of man, our common kinship, was a moral legacy of an outmoded Christianity, but of no less force or universal application for that reason. n nAlso, considering the separation of state and any kind of religion (generically the church) the state must be understood to be a secular entitty and therefore in constant need of justifying its first principles and modifying them and their application when the force of reason and justice require that. There is a legacy in those subsisting first principles derived from Judeo-Christianity to be sure, but, again, this is of no consequence in relation to any argument that this day without a belief in God we fall into a moral abyss, that in effect anything goes without God, as Dostoyevsky inscribed in The Brothers Karamazov. n nThat is a mode of infantilism. n nFor even in that masterful novel it is common humanity manifest in compassion and sympathy that concretely provide ethical ground. n nAfter all, Ivan, whose cynicism is an experiment in finding meaning, and Smerdyakov, his intellectual disciple but pathologically malign and very smart, albeit poisonsously so, both run feelingly and experientially into the limits of moral anarchy without God by confronting the overall impact of Smerdyakov's murder of Fyodor in their three final conversations, and especially the last one. Those conversations raise and amplify the moral meaning of the murder in their consciousnesses. n nThey don't need, don't have, faith at the moment of their realization, but their guilt, Smerdyakov's legal guilt, and Ivan's spiritual or moral guilt–that latter needing some parsing, now's not the time–drives the first to suicide and tips Ivan over into physiological (brain fever leading to a coma) and mental breakdown. (What the future holds for Ivan, we of course don't know.) n nSo their realization suggests a ground for seeing morality within the novel not needing to be based on faith. So do the various acts of goodness, love forgiveness and reconcilation–such as the final one between Dmitri and Katerina and the partial one, still in the works, so to speak, between Katerina and Grushenka. So does the most powerful and beautiful relationship in the entire novel, between Ilyusha and his father. Familiality, filiality and literal brotherliness, for three integrally related instances, are sources for natural, intuitive and from-the-ground-up human bonds not needing God or faith for their formation. n nNone of any of these instances, arguably, need faith at their base and thus speak to an ethic of compassion, pity, love and fellow feeling based on common humanity in a tragic world, a vale of tears marked in part by the reality of unspeakable evil, with religion being one mode of the representation of, struggle with, that overarching compexity and moral range in existence.
Is murder and viciousness and criminality wrong — or are they only wrong because God says they are wrong.r nr nDo people deserve dignity and do people deserve to be valued as individuals — or is it only wrong to de-humanize individuals because God says it is wrong to dehumanize them?r nr nIf God changes his mind, do individuals lose their humanity, do they no longer deserve to be treated with dignity and as valued persons with their own ends and their individual worth?
God is dead – Nietzsche n nNietzsche is dead – God
Bird lives