Parable of the Madman by Nietzsche - Literature review Example

In Nietzsche’s ‘Parable of the madman’, he essentially explores the the death of God and what that death implies for humanity. This is to say that God is no longer to be taken as a matter of faith, but that God has to satisfy the standards of reason. Faith having failed the rationality standard, then it must be discounted, and it is this sense that the death of God can be proclaimed. Rationality here is also science, and the replacement of the belief in God by modernity. In the early part of the parable this is clear. The madman is seen as mad precisely because he went around in the heat and brightness of day carrying a lantern and shouting that he was looking for God. The passage notes that during that time many of the people who were non-believers in God were out and about, in an atmosphere of being sure of their grip on reality. It was the madman who seemed doubly mad, one for carrying on like he needed the lantern while the sun was out, and second for looking for God, who for the non-believers did not exist. This was the double madness of the madman. The madman cried out specifically that he was seeking God. To mock him for his seeming folly, the non-believers shouted at him, asking whether God was hiding, afraid of the crowds, afraid of rationality. We understand that the context of this mocking by the crowd of the manner and actions of the madman was that they had replaced a belief or a faith in God with a faith in humanity’s own powers to comprehend reality without God. There was the sun, visible to the eye, to be felt and perceived empirically by those two senses of sight and touch. There was the brightness, and man’s reason seemingly enabling him to flourish in the market, with his buying and selling to procure his needs and those of his family. The non-believers from the onset seemed to have no need for any God, and it was the madman who seemed indeed out of place and acting out his appropriate role of being out of touch with the outward reality of the senses. Nietzsche here is saying that God cannot be found, because in essence the lack of belief among men in God, replaced as he had been by a different kind of faith in a different kind of human certainty removed from God by that point. Humanity had killed God in essence by taking him out of the equation of human life, by making him irrelevant and no longer needed (Nietzsche; Cavalier; Jackson). At the end of the parable too, Nietzsche reinforces his message about the death of God, and of man killing God in essence, when he referred to the churches as nothing more than God’s tombs and final resting places. It is symbolic because just like men have their tombs, by killing God, God too has come to be relegated to the realms of the dead, and the churches become like the ordinary tombs of the dead. This has symbolic and practical consequences for the men who no longer had any faith in God and who had taken God so to speak out of the equation of daily lived life and in the life of the society or community. This symbolic emtombment of God can be seen as also having its psychological parallel in the way men had psychologically and practically shifted their allegiances away from God and towards more practical and physical-reality-based “gods”. Here the death of God is not just something that is in the mind, not something that is merely theoretical. In the realm of spirituality and in the psychic reality of the community God truly is dead and no longer exerted any influence. He had been cast aside in favor of more materialistic, atheistic values. If God were alive then the churches would be the home of God, and psychologically the community would treat the churches as something similar to the house of someone alive. On the other hand, the psychic shift is evident in the way Nietzsche came to regard the church, taking the perspective of ordinary people, as the place of the dead, a place where there is nothing active going on, where there is no living reality to be engaged with. No one expects anything out of a dead God, and so no one really needs anything anymore with the places of worship, which, if God is dead, are nothing more than the tombs of the dead (Nietzsche; Cavalier). In between these two sets of passages Nietzsche expounds on the madman’s perspective on the death of God and how all of them had killed God. It was not symbolic but something that had real consequences in the psychic reality and the psychological makeup of the society. The danger is that having killed God, there was nothing that man could come up with that could replace God. In reality nothing in man’s capacity to create could replace God, and so the madman talks about a kind of dislocation and a kind of uprooting of the human psyche as a result of man killing God. Having killed God, how was man supposed to go on instead? The madman says too, in a sense, that what had happened had repercussions on the life of man that as yet had not yet fully ripened, in the same way that an explosion in the far universe, the light of a star, would need time to reach the earth and the eyes of men. The madman said that he had arrived early and that his message needed time to ripen. The madman was seeing farther than anyone in the crowd, who only imagined that they could live normally in the absence of the God that they killed, when in fact that act of killing God had repercussions for humanity that were essentially catastrophic from that point onwards. In fact the search for God’s replacement was incessant since his death, and men had thought that they could rely on their rationality and their mastery of the material and social aspects of their lives. On the other hand the madman saw that none of that could really take the place of God, and as murderers of what was the most holy in them, God, they yet needed something that was just as holy in order to remain together, as men.Men needed God in that manner, yet man thought at that time that they no longer needed Him. The problem is that from that point on there was nothing that man could procure or invent that would equal what the world had lost when man killed God (Nietzsche; Jackson; Cavalier). The implications of the death of God are dire, even as men at that point could not see what was coming. Their hopes in what they had, and in what they could get in place of God through their own designs, are misplaced.The madman in the end is trying to say that man, having killed God, did not know then that nothing that they could do, or get, or hope for, could take the place of the God that they had killed. Their rationality, their systems of thought, their money and their society,their laws- none of that in the end will be able to take the place of God. On the other hand, there is no going back, because God was dead. Man had killed him. The consequences of that are slow to come, they will take time to arrive. The madman saw nevertheless that they were on the way. The parable is a warning for what was to come after the death of God. When that time comes, man will understand what he had done, and that indeed nothing could replace God, but it will be too late (Nietzsche; Jackson; Cavalier). 1 2 Works Cited Cavalier, Robert. “The Story of the Madman”. Online Guide to Ethics and Moral Philosophy Carnegie Mellon. 2002. Web. 10 May 2014. Jackson, Roy. “Nietzsche- The Key Ideas: God is dead”. TeachYourself. 2010. Web. 10 May 2014. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Parable of the Madman”. Fordham University Modern History Sourcebook. 1882. Web. 10 May 2014. Read More