Going beyond good and evil means we are in territory not covered by traditional morality. If we are to see the truth, we need to go beyond good and evil. Reality is brutal enough, so we supplement it with an invented, ideal world of fairness, justice, and beauty. Therefore, to speak of good and evil is to speak of human illusions, of false concepts according to which we find it necessary to live. Nothing in nature has intrinsic value, or value for its own sake. “God is dead, and we have killed him.” Along with God died our immutable, perfect source of morality. He had been the fount of why we exist the way we do: we, human beings, created in His image, able to tell right from wrong. Ultimately, we existed to become One with Him when our earthly time ran out. Likewise, God also lay behind earthquakes, volcanoes, lightning, and tornadoes.Īpart from being the source, or efficient cause, of everything, God had been also our ultimate aim: we existed to please Him, to become like Him. He (invariably male) was the reason why mountains, sunny days, butterflies and beluga whales exist. God was the answer to the question, why do we exist. Arguably, the one phrase with which Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) has entered public consciousness is his infamous God is Dead.įor centuries, the Christian God had been the background on which the West had sprung its cultural identity.
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