Nietzsche, the Madman
Consideration of the following parable may help one better understand the motivation underlying
and guiding Nietzsche’s philosophy generally:
The Madman
Have you not 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 did not believe in God
were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his
way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?
-- Thus they yelled and laughed.
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will
tell you. We have killed him -- you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could
we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing
when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away
from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? 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? Do we not need to
light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are
burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is
dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all
that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What
water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to
invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to
appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us -- for the sake of
this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto."
Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him
in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I
have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still
wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the
stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more
distant from them than most distant stars -- and yet they have done it themselves.
It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and
there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied
nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"
[Source: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882, 1887) para. 125; Walter Kaufmann ed. (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp.181-82.]
The key to understanding the parable of the Madman lies in the fact that the madman addresses selfavowed atheists who rightly find the notion of God’s death to be laughable insofar as they deny that
He ever existed, let alone lived. To them, the madman is mad because he supposes to God to have
existed, lived, and not only turned out to be mortal, but moreover was capable of being murdered by
mere human beings.
Now, obviously a theist would deny the last two claims, but let us pause to consider the possibility
that they didn’t. What could it mean to a theist were they to suppose that they had killed their God?
Much more than being the most tragic, teeth-gnashing horror imaginable, to the true theist it is
utterly inconceivable that God might be dead (or murdered), for in their deepest souls, God is not
only unquestionably, but positively the very basis and well-spring of all things. Such a supposition
then, is entirely and irrevocably at odds with their essential Being as theists. To the theist, the
thought that God is dead and we have killed Him is not only logically impossible, but existentially
also.
The only way it could even remotely coherently held that God is ‘dead’ then, is if the atheists had
been fundamentally right all along.
This, however, is not to straightforwardly side with the atheist (for remember that it is to the selfavowed atheist that the madman’s proclamation is addressed). To say that God is dead to an atheist
in such a manner as to imply that, though they do not yet appreciate it, they should and they must, is
plainly to deny the depth and conviction of their supposed atheism. Nietzsche is claiming that,
while the atheist is perhaps correct in the ontological respect of God’s non-existence, the point is
academic in the most pejorative sense possible. The atheist – no matter how much a fundamentalist
– is at heart, still a theist, according to Nietzsche. And they have no other choice in the matter. Our
very society, its social structures, institutions, concepts, understandings, relations, and goals, are all
predicated (explicitly or not) on the deep-seated conviction regarding the existence of God (or at
least transcendental telos), such that the atheistic tenet that there is no God can only ever gain
meaning or significance in contrast to an already, fundamentally presupposed (though perhaps
unconscious) belief in the existence of God.
Consider the spatial metaphor that the madman himself employs. When we take the time to think
about it, we will readily concede that there is no such thing as ‘up’ or ‘down’ in any objectively
absolute sense; up and down are always relative to a certain, somewhat arbitrary perspective. But
while we all confidently parrot these lessons of cosmology, the world we actually live in is
unquestionably grounded with a certain sense of up and down – one where the sun rises and sets
with the passing of each day. Indeed, the thought that the Earth is not the fixed centre of the
universe, but orbits the sun, which in turn, spirals around in the Milky Way, which itself is but one
of innumerable other galaxies, is a notion that we can entertain only in contrast to the lived reality
of our everyday lives.
Such thinking parallels Nietzsche’s point, not only about the supposed non-existence of God, but of
morality also. Even the most die-hard moral relativist, despite claiming that morals are but a
product of one’s culture and one’s own subjective prejudices, upon witnessing either a true act of
compassion or a cold-blooded murder will nonetheless believe in the deepest recesses of their hearts
that good or evil has thereby become manifest. Of course this isn’t to refute the central ontological
claim of moral relativism – anymore than the madman refutes the atheist (for, don’t forget, he is
mad after all). But rather, it is to deny that both atheism and moral relativism are yet live existential
possibilities for present day humans and culture. In this sense, it is meaningful to say that God is
dead, for the far-off and yet inevitably impeding true existential understanding that there is no God,
will first have to be faced by humankind as though the God we all now still believe in (theist or
otherwise) is dead and gone … and what’s more, that we have killed Him. Not only this, Nietzsche’s
madman suggests that such an enlightening process will not occur peacefully by itself. Rather, in
order to truly understand what it is to be an atheist, humanity as a collective and each an every
individual belonging to it, will have to starkly face the truly mind-blowing guilt and horror that the
as yet pinnacle of civilization was absentmindedly destroyed by us to be replaced by what??
Science? Economics? Politics? Nihilism? Or some other false idol?
Ross Barham, 2012