In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

VIII NIETZSCHE Nietzsche’s Horizon O    the founding experience of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy is the experience of the death of God. It is announced, like Plato’s thought, in poetic form through the Parable of the Madman in The Gay Science. Nietzsche describes a madman who lit a lantern in the morning hours and went in search of God, like Diogenes, who claimed that the light of day was not sufficient to reveal an honest man. The madman ’s audience of unbelievers mocked him, asking whether God had gotten lost or emigrated. The madman proclaimed that God was dead and that he and they together had killed Him. He wondered at the power that made this possible, for the act was equivalent to drinking up the sea of meaning within which we swim, wiping away the horizon that locates us, unchaining the earth from the sun, which, holding us in place, illuminates us. And with that act there is no longer any absolute direction, no up or down. We stray as through an infinite nothing, feeling the breath of empty space, the chill that sets in without the sun, the darkness. God is dead and is in the process of decomposition. Yet people are still oblivious to it. It takes time for the stench to reach their nostrils. They have not yet attained the ears to hear the proclamation of the event. The madman, realizing he had come too soon, threw down his lantern, and its flame was extinguished . But he went about the churches, tombs of the dead God, singing: Requiem aeternam deo. Eternal rest unto God!¹ Nietzsche here hearkens back to Plato’s Republic and the notion of the Good symbolized by the sun.² That dialogue attempted to determine, by its argument, its structure, and its action, an absolute “up” and “down” for human existence. It begins “down in the Piraeus” and goes down further in reflection to Hades, from which it rises through the construction of several levels of a city until it reaches the highest level that is drawn “out of the Cave” upward to the sunlight of the Good. Inside the Cave is the realm of matter and change, of nature and history; outside the Cave is the realm of Forms, eternal measures, universal and changeless, illuminated by the unifying power of the One/Good. This constitutes one of the two roots of the Western tradition. The Judeo-Christian tradition is the other root, gathering all explanation and all aspiration into Yahweh/God. The two roots, Platonic and Hebrew-Christian, came together in Patristic theology and governed together the entire Western tradition until relatively recently. Today, in the era of deconstruction, there is no longer any sun, any single center of reference. There is a pluralism in principle, with not even the dream of a totality or of any kind of a fundamental principle or foundation, any kind of ultimate point of reference. There is no longer a measure, no up or down. And what follows from it is an experience of emptiness.³ If we look back over some of the thinkers from the modern era I have covered in this text, we see a transformation of the Platonic-Christian center . In Kant we see the beginning of an inversion of the tradition in this sense, that the summum bonum, the highest good, is not God as it was for the medievals or, in a sense, for Plato (insofar as the Agathon functioned as the highest end). Rather, for Kant the summum bonum is the coming together in a human afterlife of happiness and deservedness to be happy for which God is the guarantor. It is not God that we seek, but our own final happiness .⁴ Correlative to this, the aesthetic experience of the sublime is transformed from that which pulls us out of ourselves and might become symbolic of the divine, to that which reminds us of our own sublimity.⁵ In the ancient-medieval tradition seeing God is our final happiness.⁶ In Hegel the notion of the divine is the notion of an eternally antecedent realm that by itself is mere possibility. For Hegel what we call God in the Christian tradition is, before creation, possibility of realization. God is unconscious or not fully self-conscious and comes to consciousness in Nature and in History, which are His own self-unfolding. When we say that God realizes Himself in the realization of full humanness, we are saying in effect...

Share