ABSTRACT
Friedrich Nietzsche’s declaration ‘God is dead’ made him notorious as a stringent critic of Christianity and all forms of otherworldly religion. His criticisms are part of a more general philosophical rejection, on both metaphysical and ethical grounds, of all ideas of transcendence (such as classical Platonism). Nietzsche (1844-1900), born into a family of Lutheran ministers, became a professor of classical philology while young, and wrote a series of polemical books against much traditional religious and philosophical culture; he sharply criticized many nineteenth-century attempts to reconcile science and religion. Philological scholarship involved intense study of deconstructive readings of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures by higher critics such as Strauss and Wellhausen. Many nineteenth-century philosophers and scientists were atheists or agnostics because they accepted Kant’s denial of knowledge of things in themselves and saw the consistency of a scienti c naturalism that could be expanded with Darwinian explanations of human behavior and culture. Yet Nietzsche dismissed the naive ‘enlightenment’ view that people would abandon religion simply because of rational argument, and warned that an enlightened scienti c culture, having marginalized religion, would be faced with a total crisis of meaning or nihilism. While Nietzsche’s antipathy to western monotheism is obvious, it is necessary to attend to the strategy and rhetoric of his attacks, which are frequently deployed against disguised forms of religion (including the scienti c way of life and modern atheism). Nietzsche’s judgments about Christianity are typically directed to speci c gures, events, and movements; so he is surprisingly sympathetic to Jesus, but a erce critic of Paul and Luther and of the German idealism which he saw as their heirs. At the same time, Nietzsche’s conception of the human (or posthuman) good is related to Plato’s conception of the philosopher as ultimate legislator of values, a role envisioned as involving a wise use of religion as communal bond and ground of culture. In this perspective some of Nietzsche’s own distinctive ideas, like that of the posthuman (Übermensch) and eternal recurrence can be seen as elements of a naturalistic religion. In the late twentieth century some attention has been focused on Nietzsche’s complex assessments of a number of non-Christian religions, including Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism.
