ABSTRACT
The issue posed by Nietzsche is how the individual shall live in the era of history following ‘the death of God’. God’s death is his metaphor not only for the dissolution of religious faith, but for ‘the devaluation of our hitherto highest values’—those of the Enlightenment and Romanticism as much as of Christianity.(1) Not only God, but Progress, the Perfectibility of Man, Historical Destiny, and Universal Morality, are dead or dying. God is dead because we killed Him, or rather abetted His suicide. That is: our hitherto highest values have destroyed themselves by being taken to their logical conclusion. In particular, the religious and moral value of honesty, together with the Enlightenment spirit of enquiry and objectivity, have conspired to display the ‘shabby origins’ of our beliefs and valuesincluding those of religion, morality, and the Enlightenment themselves. The result is that ‘the universe seems to have lost value, seems “meaningless”’.(2) The outcome is nihilism: the sense that ‘the highest values have devalued themselves. There is no goal. There is no answer to the question “Why?”’.(3)
Few would deny that our century has witnessed catastrophic events bearing the mark of nihilistic rage against traditional beliefs and values, or that each decade has spawned movements, among the young especially, which are distinguished more by their iconoclasm than their constructive programmes-Flappers, Dadaists, Futurists, Angry Young Men, Absurdists, Punks, and so on. But the young become old, and the dominant image today is not supplied by bomb-throwing Nekrasovs or abusehurling skinheads. The dominant impression is less one of aggressive, iconoclastic intellectual ferment than of comfortable acceptance of many traditional values or an equally comfortable turning aside from refl ection on matters of value, an immersion in ‘the business of life’. The end of ideology, rather than of God, seems the more manifest event of recent times.
