The Gay Science

Why did "God is dead" come from this book?

"God is dead", the best-known of Nietzsche's sentences, first appeared in The Gay Science of 1882. It is often taken for an atheist's slogan, but the scene Nietzsche draws in this book is far more ominous. In section 125, "The Madman", a man lights a lantern in broad daylight, runs into the market place and cries, "I seek God! I seek God!" The bystanders, who do not believe in God, laugh at him: has God got lost, has he emigrated? Then he fixes them with his eyes and says:

"God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!"

Gott ist todt! Gott bleibt todt! Und wir haben ihn getödtet!

What the madman asks is not whether God exists. It is what becomes of the morality, meaning and direction that rested on the Christian God once Europeans no longer believe in him. It is as if we had unchained the earth from its sun, he says; are we not straying through an infinite nothing with no up or down? Finally he throws down his lantern and says, "I come too early." The tremendous event is still on its way and has not yet reached people's ears.

Ich komme zu früh

This scene became a starting point for debates on nihilism, for existentialism and for twentieth-century theology. Nietzsche's idea of the death of God and the collapse of values that follows it is treated in the separate entries on the death of God and on nihilism; this entry is about the book in which the phrase appears.

How was it written, and what kind of book is it?

According to the German Wikipedia, Nietzsche planned a sequel to Daybreak soon after it appeared in early summer 1881 and wrote three books of it while spending the winter of 1881–1882 in Genoa. In August 1881, at Sils Maria in Switzerland, the thought of eternal recurrence had seized him, and he had also begun to think about the figure of Zarathustra. In spring 1882 he decided to put the material together under the title The Gay Science. Nearly blind, he prepared the printer's copy with the help of his sister Elisabeth, and he corrected the proofs with his friend Heinrich Köselitz (Peter Gast) at the time he was meeting Lou Salomé and Paul Rée. The book came out in mid-August 1882 from Schmeitzner in Chemnitz in 1,000 copies, of which only about 200 had been sold by 1886.

The first edition consisted of a prelude of 63 German verses, "Jest, Cunning and Revenge", and four books of 342 sections; the fourth book is titled "Sanctus Januarius". In autumn 1886, after Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche wrote a preface and a fifth book, "We Fearless Ones" (41 sections), added the poems "Songs of Prince Vogelfrei" as an appendix, and reissued the book with E. W. Fritzsch in Leipzig in 1887, now with the subtitle "la gaya scienza". The title comes from the gai saber of the eleventh-century troubadours of Provence, the craft of poetry. In Ecce Homo Nietzsche explained that it recalled the Provençal culture in which singer, knight and free spirit were one. Since German Wissenschaft means rigorous scholarly inquiry in general, not just natural science, the title was an attempt to join strict knowledge and artistic cheerfulness.

In aphorisms short and long the book treats knowledge and science (book one), art and artists (book two), religion and morality (book three), the affirmation of life (book four), and nihilism and the future of Europe (book five). Nietzsche himself called it, together with Daybreak, his most personal book.

How does the death of God run through the book?

"God is dead" first appears briefly before section 125, in section 108, "New Struggles". Just as people went on showing Buddha's shadow in a cave for centuries after his death, God is dead, but given the way of men there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow is shown. "And we, we still have to vanquish his shadow too!"

Und wir — wir müssen auch noch seinen Schatten besiegen!

The shadows of God are the theological habits of mind that survive the loss of faith: the belief that the world has a purpose and an order, universal morality, the absolute value of truth itself. The fifth book, added in 1887, returns to the theme in its first section, 343. Nietzsche defines "the greatest recent event" as "that the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable" and writes that it is only beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe.

dass der Glaube an den christlichen Gott unglaubwürdig geworden ist

Here the death of God is not a metaphysical thesis but a diagnosis of cultural history. And Nietzsche adds that for "us philosophers and free spirits" the outcome need not be gloomy decline but may be like a dawn and an open sea.

How were eternal recurrence and Zarathustra announced?

The fourth book, which closed the 1882 edition, is about affirming life. In section 276 Nietzsche wishes for the new year to learn more and more to see what is necessary in things as beautiful, and writes: "Amor fati: let that be my love from now on!"

Amor fati: das sei von nun an meine Liebe!

Section 341, "The Greatest Weight", puts forward eternal recurrence for the first time, but as a question. If a demon stole into your loneliest loneliness and told you that you would have to live this life again in the same order innumerable times, that "the eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again", would you gnash your teeth and curse him, or answer that you had never heard anything more divine?

Die ewige Sanduhr des Daseins wird immer wieder umgedreht

Nietzsche says that this question, "Do you want this once more and innumerable times more?", would lie on every action as the greatest weight. The thought is explained in the separate entry on eternal recurrence. In the following and final section, 342, "Incipit tragoedia", Zarathustra, who at thirty left his home and his lake and spent ten years in the mountains, addresses the sun and goes down to men. This section became, almost unchanged, the opening of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Who read it, and how?

From the Marxist tradition, Nietzsche's death of God is both strange and familiar. In the 1844 Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right the young Marx wrote that for Germany the criticism of religion was essentially complete and that the criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism. For the Young Hegelians since Ludwig Feuerbach, God was man's own essence projected outside himself, and removing God was the starting point of human emancipation. Nietzsche's diagnosis points elsewhere. For him the death of God is not emancipation achieved but the crisis of a whole modern culture that clings to Christian morality without God. In section 202 of Beyond Good and Evil he wrote that "the democratic movement is the heir of the Christian one", and he regarded socialism and the ideal of equality as further shadows of God.

The opposition echoed within the Russian revolutionary movement. In the 1900s the God-building of Anatoly Lunacharsky and Maxim Gorky sought to raise, where God had died, a new religion in which humanity worshipped itself, and Lenin attacked it sharply as a compromise with religion. György Lukács read Nietzsche's critique of religion in The Destruction of Reason as "indirect apologetics", a form of irrationalism that blocks the road to socialism without openly defending capitalism.

On another side the book became a source of existential philosophy. In his 1943 lecture "Nietzsche's Word: 'God is Dead'" (published in Holzwege, 1950), Martin Heidegger interpreted the phrase as the event in which the whole of Western metaphysics is completed as nihilism. Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre took up the problem of how humans must make meaning and values for themselves in a world without God. Giorgio Colli, who edited The Gay Science, called it in his preface to the Italian edition the "central" book among Nietzsche's works, one in which art and science are held in rare balance.