dimanche 10 octobre 2010

Defending My Old Pal Nietzche..Please be Kind.

By : khairi janbek (kj)





" ......have you heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly, I seek God ! I seek God!. As many of those who do not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Whither is God he cried. I shall tell you. We have killed God killed him- you and I. All of us are murderers. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him." (Friedrich Nietzche. The gay Science, section 125. 1882 .

Now before you jump on your high horses in the eternal Arab way, and start foaming in the mouth, count to five and listen for a change. Just as Shakespeare didn't say "To be or Not To be"; for he wrote it and Hamlet said it, Nitzche did say "God is did" it was a madman who said it. While it is true that Nitzche dies at 45 as madman, yet, there is a big diffrence between life and philosophy.

So what does the madman mean?. Not that there are unbelievers in the world, for that is always true, nor to that effect that God doesn't exist. For if "God is dead" then he must have once been alive, which is in itself rather paradoxical, since if God were ever alive, He, being eternal, could never actually die.

So the madman doesn't speak of the God of the believers, whom always was and always will be, but rather, of what God represented and meant to his culture. This God was a shared belief in God, and it is such a belief that, in 19th century Europe, was expiring. Where once God stood; at the centre of knowledge and meaning, there was then a void. Science and philosophy treated God as irrelevant, and once again, man became the measure of all things.

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