ABSTRACT
Friedrich Nietzsche’s “disbelief” in God stems from a new way of thinking that means to escape from, or altogether recast, the age-old philosophic distinction between opinion and knowledge, nature and convention. Nietzsche finds in the prephilosophic Greeks and Romans a developed and sublimated, but nonetheless highly revealing, example of a predominantly master morality. Among the strongest thinkers and artists Nietzsche finds what he calls “active nihilism” or the “German form of skepticism” – a determined will to complete the process of criticizing and even ridiculing our inherited values. The counterpart of such men on the political plane of action is the type of an Alcibiades, who finds in the release from tradition, and the confusion of all standards, an exhilarating opportunity to assert his individuality against the prevailing democracy, in a magnificent but fundamentally aimless urge to dominate.
