University of Richmond
UR Scholarship Repository Philosophy Faculty Publications
Philosophy
2007
Friedrich Nietzsche Gary Shapiro University of Richmond, gshapiro@richmond.edu
Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.richmond.edu/philosophy-facultypublications Part of the Epistemology Commons, and the Metaphysics Commons Recommended Citation Shapiro, Gary. "Friedrich Nietzsche." In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Religion, edited by Chad Meister and Paul Copan, 170-80. New York: Routledge, 2007.
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FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE Gary Shapiro Friedrich Nietzsche's declaration 'God is dead' made him notorious as a stringent critic of Christianity and all forms of otherworldly religion. His criticisms are part of a more general philosophical rejection, on both metaphysical and ethical grounds, of all ideas of transcendence (such as classical Platonism). Nietzsche (1844-1900), born into a family of Lutheran ministers, became a professor of classical philology while young, and wrote a series of polemical books against much traditional religious and philosophical culture; he sharply路 criticized many nineteenth-century attempts to reconcile science and religion. Philological scholarship involved intense study of deconstructive readings of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures by higher critics such as Strauss and Wellhausen. Many nineteenth-century philosophers and scientists were atheists or agnostics because they accepted Kant's denial of knowledge of things in themselves and saw the consistency of a scientific naturalism that could be expanded with Darwinian explanations of human behavior and culture. Yet Nietzsche dismissed the naive 'enlightenment' view that people would abandon religion simply because of rational argument, and warned that an enlightened scientific culture, having margin路 alized religion, would be faced with a total crisis of meaning or nihilism. While Nietzsche's antipathy to western monotheism is obvious, it is necessary to attend to the strategy and rhetoric of his attacks, which are frequently deployed against disguised forms of religion (including the scientific way of life and modem atheism). Nietzsche's judgments about Christianity are typically directed to specific figures, events, and movements; so he is surprisingly sympathetic to Jesus, but a fierce critic of Paul and Luther and of the German idealism which he saw as their heirs. At the same time, Nietzsche's conception of the human (or posthuman) good is related to Plato's conception of the philosopher as ultimate legislator of values, a role envisioned as involving a wise use of religion as communal bond and ground of culture. In this perspective some of Nietzsche's own distinctive ideas, like that of the posthuman (Obermensch) and eternal recurrence can be seen as elements of a naturalistic religion. In the late twentieth century some attention has been focused on Nietzsche's complex: assessments of a number of non-Christian religions, including Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism.