Deconstructing the Death of God
by Kevin Hart
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 60
Autumn 1998

Introduction

Nietzsche, Derrida and deconstructing the true gospel

Kevin Hart
Kevin Hart is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Monash University. He is the author of The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology and Philosophy (CUP, 1989), A. D. Hope (OUP, 1992) and Economic Acts: Samuel Johnson and the Culture of Property (CUP, forthcoming). He is the editor of The Oxford Book of Australian Religious Verse (1994). His verse is gathered in his New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins, 1995). This essay was written in 1992.

IN A STRIKING PASSAGE of The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche imagines a madman who "lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: 'I seek God! I seek God!'" The madman is mocked by the people until he cries, "Whither is God? I will tell you", he says to them, "We have killed him you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this?"

The madman vividly pictures life after this cosmic murder. "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?" And he sums up his message: "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him."

The simple phrase "God is dead" resonates for a long time. You can hear it echo throughout our century. It resounds in the treatises of Freud, Heidegger and Blanchot; it partly shapes the writings of Beckett, Celan and Kafka; it broods over the films of Fassbinder and Pasolini; and it calls forth the theologies of Bonhoeffer, Jungel and Tillich. These thinkers may worry at the question: Is God dead? but all too often the issue is not even formulated as a question, let alone an urgent one. As Heidegger observed, what is frightening in the modern world is not that people believe that God is absent but that God's presence or absence has lapsed as a matter for thought.

What did Nietzsche mean by the statement God is dead? In the first place, he thought that people no longer act and think as though the Christian God has power over them. They may read the Bible, they may go to church, but Christianity is no longer absolutely central to their lives. God is no longer affirmed with a passionate inwardness.

Yet Nietzsche also thought that the expression "God is dead" means something else, something far more general. It means that all transcendent values have slowly fallen into disrepute and, with them, all the ideals and principles that have traditionally given meaning to human life. "Is there still any up or down?" the madman asks, "Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing?"

This situation in which we feel that everything is without meaning, that there is no firm ground on which to stand, is what Nietzsche called nihilism. In 1887 he wrote in a notebook: "What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; 'why?' finds no answer." So nihilism is not a new philosophy, a break with the past. It is the slow degeneration of the highest values.

The notion of reality, Nietzsche argued, has been in decline for the last two and a half thousand years. Plato contended that the real was the eternal, and could be attained by the virtuous man. The early Christians diluted that a little, Nietzsche tells us, and proposed that the real was the eternal but could only be believed in, not known. And so the decline goes on, century after century, until people hold that reality is not the eternal but rather the material world about us. Then even that view fades, and we live in a time when the very idea of reality has been abolished. We live in the age of nihilism, when there is no sharp distinction between reality and appearance.
The proper response to nihilism, Nietzsche suggested, is a revaluation of all values. We must test all the fundamental concepts we have inherited-God, morality, reason, truth and all the others-and see whether they are as solid as they seem. In Nietzsche's judgement they were mostly hollow, mere idols, and in dire need of replacement.

To: Part 2