Basic Concepts life, will, evolution

eternal return, God is dead
intuition and understanding
culture and civilization
masses, elite, superman

Lyrics Will to Power, Gay Science
People Nietzsche, Bergson, Simmel

God is dead: but such is the nature of people that for thousands of years there may still exist caves in which his shadow is shown. - And we - we must also defeat his shadow!

God is dead! God will not rise again! And we killed him! How comforted we are, murderers of murderers! The most holy and powerful Being that ever existed in the world bled to death under our knives - who will wash this blood from us?

The greatest of new events - that "God is dead" and that faith in the Christian God has become something unworthy of trust - is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe.

Before Nietzsche

In Nietzscheanism

Nietzsche did not believe that a personal God ever lived and then literally died. The death of God should be understood as a moral crisis of humanity, during which there is a loss of faith in absolute moral laws and cosmic order. Nietzsche proposes to reassess values ​​and reveal deeper layers of the human soul than those on which Christianity is based. The book “Limoniana or Unknown Limonov” contains Dugin’s first publication in the newspaper “New Look” (1993), in which the author noted:

“God is dead” - the oblivion of precisely this formula was revealed by postmodernists. The “new” here is precisely that people forgot not only about God, but also about his death, that proposals for possible answers overshadowed the question itself, and the passionate process of overcoming the tragedy made them forget what it was...

In Heidegger

Heidegger, like Nietzsche, addressed the theme of the “death of God.” For Heidegger, it is the end of metaphysics and the period of decline of philosophy itself. God is “the goal of life, which rises above earthly life itself, and thereby determines it from above and, in a certain sense, from the outside.”

In theology

In the 1960s, a movement of “theotanatologists” was formed, which included Christians G. Vahanyan, P. van Buren, T. Altizer (author of the book “The Death of God. The Gospel of Christian Atheism”) and the Jew R. Rubenstein. Some of them demanded a new experience of divinity, others believed that God literally died or dissolved at the creation of the world.

Notes

Links

• Nietzsche F. Gay Science
• Selivanov Yu. Theology of the death of God
• Heidegger M. Nietzsche's words “God is dead”

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See what “God is dead” is in other dictionaries:

- “It is very difficult and perhaps impossible to give a definition of the word “God” that would include all the meanings of this word and its equivalents in other languages. Even if we define God in the most general way as “superhuman or... Philosophical Encyclopedia

GOD- an object of faith and cult among people. The existence of God. There are two types of theoretical evidence in favor of the existence of God: 1) so-called cosmological evidence (from the Greek kosmos world), which through a chain of causes goes back to... ... Philosophical Dictionary

Blessed someone with something. People's Who has L. everything is going well in some area, area of ​​life. DP, 36. God [in, on] help (help)! to whom. Razg. Obsolete; Bashk., Psk. Greetings to those working, wishes for success in work. FSRY, 39; SRGB 1, 47,… … Large dictionary of Russian sayings

Noun, m., used. compare often Morphology: (no) whom? God, who? God, (see) who? God, by whom? God, about whom? about God; pl. Who? gods, (no) who? gods, who? gods, (see) who? gods, by whom? gods, about whom? about the gods 1. The Creator is called God,... ... Dmitriev's Explanatory Dictionary

GOD- 1. (God - in monotheistic religions - a single supreme being who created the world and controls it; also as part of a combination of interjection and evaluative types; see also GOD THE FATHER, GOD, RAVEN GOD, CRY GOD, RAW GOD, FATHER, FATHER , SWEAR GOD, MIDNIGHT STRIKES... Proper name in Russian poetry of the 20th century: dictionary of personal names

GOD- [Greek θεός; lat. deus; glory related to ancient Indian lord, distributer, allocates, divides, ancient Persian. lord, name of deity; one of the derivatives of common slavs. rich]. The concept of God is inextricably linked with the concept of Revelation. Subject... ... Orthodox Encyclopedia

Series Lost Title in Russian = God from the Machine Title in original language = Deus Ex Machina Photo: Episode number = Season 1, Episode 19 Memories of a Hero = John Locke A Day on the Island = 39 − 41 Scriptwriter = Carlton Cuse Damon Lindlof... ... Wikipedia

God cleaned up- whom. Outdated Someone died, died. Forty years ago, Afanasy Egorovich was the head of the house... The first mistress gave birth to a bunch of children, but God took them all away (Melnikov Pechersky. Balakhontsevs)... Phraseological Dictionary of the Russian Literary Language

What does the jungle hide? Deus Ex Machina Episode of the television series “Lost” Episode number Season 1 Episode 19 Director Robert Mandel Screenplay by Carlton Cuse Damon Lindelof Memoirs of the hero Locke A Day on the Island 39 − 41 ... Wikipedia

Many researchers and thinkers talk about the time starting from the end of the twentieth century as the beginning of a new one, or at least as the end and decline of an old era in the history of the development of Western culture. Indeed, over the past two centuries, enormous changes have occurred in almost all spheres of culture: many of the ideas that for centuries founded and determined the thinking of European people have undergone a radical reassessment, many of the ideological, moral, religious, ethical and social strongholds on which Western civilization rested have collapsed . During the twentieth century, a variety of “declines,” “ends,” and “deaths” were repeatedly proclaimed: “the end of metaphysics,” “the end of philosophy,” “the death of the Author,” “the death of the subject,” “the death of man,” etc. The view of modernity as one of the turning points in history has become familiar and even commonplace for us. However, with all this, we still do not have a clear idea of ​​the origins and causes of the changes taking place around us.

In this context, the task of searching for a certain model that would give us the opportunity to present all the changes that have occurred in the bosom of European culture as consequences and manifestations of a single event becomes very relevant. The author of this work believes that it is possible to use Nietzsche’s idea of ​​the death of God as such a model. The basis for this assumption is the fact of the presence of the following phenomena in the context of the culture of the 20th century: firstly, the crisis of Christianity, the total loss of faith, the collapse of spirituality and the devaluation of “old” values; secondly, the transformation of this idea in the work of such thinkers who played a decisive role in the formation of the spiritual situation of the 20th century, such as M. Heidegger, J. Deleuze, M. Foucault; finally, the emergence in our time of the so-called “theology of the death of God.”

Chapter 1.
General characteristics of Nietzsche's idea of ​​the death of God

Apparently, the work of no other thinker has caused as much controversy, misunderstandings and misconceptions as the legacy of Nietzsche. And one should “blame” for this not so much Förster-Nietzsche, fascist ideologists or any other “distorters”, but rather the philosopher himself. Works, books, style of thinking and writing serve, perhaps, as the best illustration of the worldview of an apologist for formation, fragmentation and diversity of “points of view,” a critic of Identity and Unity. An aphorism, as the main means of expression, “implying a new concept of philosophy, a new image of both a thinker and thoughts” and relating to systematized thinking “like vectorial geometry to metric, like a labyrinth to an arrow with the inscription “exit””, turns the reading into a “paleontology of thought , where one found “tooth” requires one to recreate an unknown whole at one’s own risk” [ibid.].

If we add to this a whole string of masks and a gallery of characters (a romantic pessimist, a Wagnerian, a skeptic-positivist, a nihilist, Antichrist, Zarathustra, Ariadne, Dionysus, the Crucified and, finally, “illness as a point of view on health” and “health as point of view on illness") through which he conveys his philosophy to his readers and behind which Nietzsche simultaneously hides, then the variety of misunderstandings and errors that develops around Nietzsche’s main ideas, including his words about the death of God, becomes unsurprising and even natural.

Indeed, it is difficult to avoid misinterpretations where, instead of a certain holistic concept with a system of argumentation and evidence, so “natural” for European philosophy, we are dealing with only a few allegorical aphorisms scattered throughout the thinker’s work, saying that God is dead.

Misunderstandings arise already at the very beginning when trying to attribute Nietzsche to one camp or another, “to evaluate the proclamation of the “death of God” from the diametrically opposed, but ideologically stable positions […] of orthodox Christianity and equally orthodox atheism.” It is clear that for a Christian we can only talk about atheism here, but on the other hand it will be difficult to find or even imagine an atheist capable of accepting such atheism.

The source of such misunderstandings, apparently, is precisely the fact that we strive to see Nietzsche’s personal position in the words about the death of God, and forget Heidegger’s parting words: “it is necessary to read Nietzsche, constantly questioning the history of the West.” From this “historical” perspective, the thesis “God is dead” is no longer the point of view of a thinker on the issue of religion, but an attempt to point out a certain threshold state, a certain turning point in the destinies of the West. The words “God is dead” “turn out to be only a diagnosis and prognosis”, “a seismograph needle recording the underlying situation of the era[...]” . Thus, Nietzsche’s “atheism” is of a special kind, it is not an enlightenment whim, and not a “scientific” conviction; it has nothing in common with the “free-thinking of our gentlemen physiologists and natural scientists”, who reject God on the grounds that he cannot be found in any way in test tube If we still try to give some name to Nietzsche’s position, then he should apparently be called a “godless”: having caught the main melody of his era with a sensitive ear, he tried to “see the fatal thing up close, moreover, experience it on himself ", to carry out the act of "self-identification, voluntary assimilation of the disease." To correctly understand Nietzsche, we must keep in mind his deep personal involvement in this issue, the desire not to discuss and evaluate the reality revealed to him from the point of view of existing norms and criteria (for, on the contrary, it is this reality that sets the norms and criteria), but to accept it such as it is, and practically, experimentally, on yourself and by yourself, experience it. In general, Nietzsche was characterized by a biased personal attitude towards all the most important problems of his time: “he gave himself entirely to being devoured by gnawing anxiety for the fate of man and his existence: what will happen to him tomorrow, already today? [...] He looked closely at the greatest people of his time, and he was amazed by their calm equanimity and self-confidence: it seemed to him that they did not penetrate into the essence of the matter, did not feel the inexorable course of modern history. Of course, they could not help but notice what was happening. They often foresaw the future, but they did not let the monstrous thing they saw inside themselves, they did not penetrate it to the bones..."

However, if Nietzsche does not express his personal opinion, but speaks on behalf of a certain historical reality, and his words should affect the entire European culture, then why in our time do many remain believers, many continue to trust in the Christian God in their lives? Maybe Nietzsche's prophecy turned out to be false, maybe there was no turning point?

Such objections can be answered by pointing out that the “event” of the death of God has a completely different scale than just one or two centuries: on the one hand, “Nietzsche’s words spell out the fate of the West during two thousand years of its history,” and, on the other, On the other hand, “the event itself is still too great, too inaccessible to the perception of the majority, so that even the rumors about it can be considered to have reached us - not to mention how few people still know what actually happened here...”. In other words, we only belong to the beginning of an era permeated and defined by this “event.” “It is possible that they will believe in this God for a long time and consider his world to be “real,” “effective,” and “determining.” This is similar to the phenomenon when the light of an extinguished star thousands of years ago is still visible, but with all its luminosity it turns out to be pure "visibility". And yet, from now on, the history of the West will be determined, according to Nietzsche, by a slow but steady movement towards an increasingly clear awareness of the death of God. It is possible that such twentieth-century phenomena as the crisis of Christianity and the total loss of faith are just the first symptoms of this awareness.

Moreover, Nietzsche's idea of ​​the death of God does not simply boil down to a crisis of religion. The uniqueness of the philosopher’s position, the enormous importance of his work for understanding modern culture and the fates awaiting it lies in the fact that he tried, with his characteristic radicalism, to comprehend all the possible consequences of abandoning the idea of ​​God. And therefore, this event through the eyes of its discoverer is much larger than the prevailing ideas about it, not only in time, but also in the “spatial” dimension, in the sense of the number of spheres of culture affected by it: “[...] with the burial of this faith, everything erected on it, leaning on it, growing into it […] there will be a long abundance of collapses, destruction, deaths, collapses...” Thus, Nietzsche is talking about a revaluation and rethinking of all values, all ideological attitudes of the West, to one degree or another connected with the idea of ​​God.

First of all, such a fundamental event as the death of God should affect the most universal of worldview teachings - metaphysics. If we remember that Nietzsche considered Christianity as “Platonism for the people” [see. eg: 10, p.58], and ““God” here simultaneously serves as the leading representation for the “supersensible” in general and its various interpretations, for “ideals” and “norms”, for “principles” and “rules”, for “ goals" and "values" that are established "above" beings in order to give beings as a whole purpose, order and - as they say briefly - "meaning", then the death of God turns out to be inextricably linked with the collapse of the binary disposition of the otherworldly and thisworldly, the material and the ideal , created by Plato and for thousands of years founded, determined and dominated the thinking of Western man. The fact that for Nietzsche the words “God is dead” means, among other things, also the liberation of our ideas about existence from the yoke of Plato’s metaphysical teachings, is proven by the constant presence of the theme of “darkening and solar eclipse” in all fragments dedicated to this event. So, for example, in one of the most famous - “Mad Man” the author asks through the lips of the herald of the death of God: “Who gave us a sponge to wipe off the paint from the entire horizon? What did we do, tearing this earth away from its sun?” [ibid., p.446]. If we recall Plato’s parable, where the Sun acted as a metaphor for the sphere of the supersensible, the ideal - the sphere that formed and limited the “horizon” of thinking of Western man only within the “light” of which the existing could be visible to the eye, as it “looks”, that is, as , what is its “appearance” (idea), then the death of God, indeed, appears as “erasing paint from the entire horizon,” for from now on “the sphere of the supersensible no longer stands over the heads of people as a light that sets the measure.”

At the same time, the death of God appears for Nietzsche as the opening of a new horizon - the “horizon of the infinite,” as the widest openness that we can experience. “The world has once again become infinite for us,” because the sphere of the supersensible that closed and limited it disappears, because formation and diversity are liberated from the dominion of the “One” and “Being,” the death of God makes impossible the strategy of reducing all world diversity to a single supreme principle and reveals all the heterogeneity and pluralism of the Universe. “Being and the One do not just lose their meaning, they acquire a different meaning, a new one. For from now on, diversity as such (fragments and parts) is called One, becoming is called Being […] the unity of diversity, the Being of becoming, is affirmed.”

The world has once again become infinite for us also because from now on it appears before us as a kingdom of chance and chance, as a “divine table for divine dice,” containing an infinite variety of possibilities. With the death of the Divine Logos, who created the universe “in his own image and likeness,” another fundamental postulate for metaphysics and European culture, proclaiming the identity of Being and thinking, inevitably collapses. The “godless” Universe, freed from the dictates of subordination to the goal, from the “eternal spider-mind and its web,” appears in all its alienness to “Truth,” “logicality,” “orderliness,” any kind of universal cause-and-effect patterns, in all its “eternal chaos”. Genesis now represents an infinite variety of self-developing particles and fragments, having their own unique paths, not reducible to a single linear history and not closed by the “highest and only Limit.”

But, first of all, “the world has once again become infinite for us, since we are unable to reject the possibility that it contains infinite interpretations”: the death of God means the loss of faith in the very possibility of building a unified and systematic conceptual model of the world, a radical refusal of the claim to a comprehensive description and explanation, because the source of the universal generalizing interpretation of the Universe has disappeared. The possibility of an infinite variety of interpretations of existence from the most diverse points of view and positions opens up, equally legitimate and not reducible to one. If we use the terminology of postmodern philosophy, then the death of God is, in fact, the “death of the Author” of the “work” - the world, the meaning of which is now generated by any of its “readers”, and any of the “readings” of which is now legitimate.

A radical change in our ideas about the world after the death of God presupposes a transformation of the methods and ideals of its knowledge. Diversity and formation require not a search for the “Absolute Truth,” but interpretation and evaluation: interpretation that always assigns only a partial and fragmentary “meaning” to a certain phenomenon and an evaluation that determines the hierarchical “value” of meanings, without diminishing or abolishing their diversity.

Rejection of the idea of ​​“God's view,” that is, of “the experience of supra-historical observation, of looking-above-or-over, of a look that rises and soars imperturbably above the Past,” presupposes a rejection of the ideal of “disinterested contemplation” it defines. ", a neutral gaze in which "one must be paralyzed, there must be no active and interpretive forces, which alone make vision." Instead of the old epistemology, Nietzsche offers his concept of “perspectivism”: every need, drive, every “pro” and “con” is a new perspective, a new point of view, and the more affects we give the floor in the discussion of any subject, the more complete our idea of ​​it, our objectivity, will turn out to be. The place of the absolute, hovering-above, disinterested, serene “eye without gaze” is taken by the gaze, as a moving center of plastic forces interpreting being, for which the main element of discrimination is the will to power.

The death of God, as an absolute subject and absolute mind, on the idea of ​​which the finite subject previously relied and, in essence, duplicated its properties, should lead to the fact that in man, on the one hand, his bifurcation into “body” and “soul” is overcome, “material” and “spiritual”, but at the same time, on the other hand, there is a splitting of the individual “I” - what will later be called in postmodern philosophy “the death of the subject”. In the situation of the death of God, the centuries-old strategy of suppressing some of man's properties ("bodily", "natural"), considering them as "not truly human", at the expense of bringing others into the sphere of extra-natural Existence, becomes impossible. The “Other” in man—the “Self,” the unconscious—breaks out from under the dominance of the human mind. After the death of God, the entire dependence of the “I” on this sphere becomes obvious, and thereby its multidimensionality is revealed, the myth of its monolithicity is destroyed. Along with Christianity, the “fatal atomism that Christianity taught most successfully and for the longest time, the atomism of souls, must also disappear,” the soul must henceforth be considered as “a plurality of the subject” and “a social structure of affects and instincts” [ibid.].

But the death of God does not only mean the “death of the subject,” man himself must also “die.” If the normative and ideal model of man ceases to exist, the idea of ​​his eternal and unchanging nature disappears, then man becomes subject to evolution and can be considered as “that which must be surpassed.” "[...] Nietzsche has reached the point where man and God belong to each other, where the death of God is synonymous with the disappearance of man and where the promised coming of the superman means from the very beginning and, above all, the inevitability of the death of man."

Unfortunately, the scope of this work and its tasks do not allow us to consider in detail the key themes of modern philosophy, however, it can be noted that its main ideas, such as “post-metaphysical thinking”, “acentrism”, “death of the Author”, “death of the subject”, “ the death of man," her criticism of binarism and logocentrism, are, in fact, a continuation of Nietzsche's idea of ​​the death of God.

So, Nietzsche’s words about the death of God are not an expression of the thinker’s personal beliefs, but an attempt to give a name to a certain historical event seen in the depths of European culture, powerfully penetrating into the past and defining the present and subsequent centuries, which should lead to radical changes in our ideas about the world, about the ways of knowing it and about man.

Chapter 2.

The main causes and consequences of the event of the “death of God” in the context of European culture

“God died” - the incredible and unimaginable happened, but the enormity of this event is not yet fully clear to us, for God not only “removed from his living presence”, but was killed, killed by people: “we killed him, [...] the most the most holy and powerful Being that ever existed in the world bled to death under our knives.”

But how did this become possible? "But how did we do it? How did we manage to drink the sea? Who gave us a sponge to wipe off the paint from the entire horizon?" [ibid]. The answer, according to Nietzsche, lies in Christianity itself, in European morality itself, the death of God is the “ultimately thought-out logic of our great values ​​and ideals”, European culture has been “for a long time moving in some kind of torture of tension, growing from century to century to disaster" [ibid., p. 35]. God died because we, today, killed him, consigning him to oblivion, but, on the other hand, “necessity itself had a hand in the matter” [ibid], since the inevitability of this event was predetermined at the very beginning of European history. What in the history of the West, according to Nietzsche, predetermined the death of God? To answer this question we must understand the specifics of Nietzsche's view of history.

World history, according to Nietzsche, represents an eternal dualism, antagonism and confrontation between two types of forces - “active” and “reactive”. The first are creative forces, creating, creating, affirming difference and life. While for the latter, the primary ones are denial, resistance to everything that is different, the desire to limit, suppress everything else. Active ones constantly assert themselves by transforming their surroundings; reactive ones are only able to respond and respond to external impulses.

These two types of forces correspond to two types of morality - “master morality” and “slave morality”. However, we will distort the meaning that Nietzsche put into the concepts of “master” and “slave” if we assume that the criterion for distinguishing them is the relationship of “dominance” and “power”, for this is the ability to generate new values ​​and assessments - Will zu Macht (where “Macht” should be translated not as “power”, but as “the ability for self-realization, for self-realization, for creativity”). The “master” establishes and creates values, while the “slave” is forced to accept them: whether he wants to preserve or overthrow the “master’s” values, the “slave” still directs his power to what has already been created, and in both cases he only reacts for life, instead of creating it yourself.

“Master Morals” is created as a statement and a grateful hymn to life, life in its diversity.

“Slave morality” arises when hidden anger, hatred, vindictiveness and envy, arising from powerlessness and humiliation - the slave’s sense of ressentiment becomes a creative force that generates its own values. It begins with negation, “from the very beginning it says No to the “external”, “other”, “not one’s own”” and only later creates a kind of affirmation, affirming universally binding, “absolute” and “the only true” values ​​that burden and devalue life.

The history of Christianity and Western culture, if viewed through the prism of Nietzsche's doctrine of two types of forces and two types of morality, turns out to be a history of the triumph of negation and “reactive” man.

Already in Judaism and Platonism - the historical origins of Christianity - negation and the feeling of ressentiment play a decisive role. Judaism, according to Nietzsche, when faced with the question of being or not being, preferred to be “at any cost,” and that price turned out to be “a conscious perversion of its nature” [ibid.]: denial of life, affirmation of all decadent, decadent instincts . Judaism removed from the concept of deity “all the prerequisites for growing life, everything strong, bold, commanding, proud” [ibid.].

Platonism, for its part, having consigned to oblivion the pre-Socratic unity of thought and life, split man into two parts, forced thought to curb and cripple life, measuring and limiting it in accordance with the “highest values.” Starting with Plato, thought becomes negative, and life is devalued, reduced to increasingly painful forms. The philosopher, legislator and creator of new values ​​and perspectives, turns into a novice and guardian of existing ones.

Platonism split not only man, but the whole world into two parts, everywhere condemning and devaluing one for the sake of the other. The “this-worldly” world is deprived of its meaning, beauty, and truth, since from now on they can only belong to the “otherworldly”; diversity and becoming are condemned in the name of “Being” and “One.”

Christianity, on the one hand, being the “last logical conclusion of Judaism,” on the other hand, absorbs Plato’s concept of two worlds. It continues and strengthens the trend of world denial of its predecessors.

The Christian God, obeying the creative power of ressentiment, turns into a captious “judge” and “vindicator”, “degenerates into a contradiction with life” [ibid., p. 312]. In essence, with Christianity, which turned God into a “deified “Nothing” "" [ibid.], his "killing" begins.

It would seem that the death of God should finally liberate life from the yoke of values ​​that deny it, and mark the victory of “active” forces over “reactive” ones. However, this does not happen.

God died, but an empty place of his presence remained - the supersensible world, the orientation and criteria of positing, the definition of the essence of values ​​remained the same. The authority of God and the authority of the church disappear, but the authority of conscience and reason takes their place, “divine” values ​​are replaced by “human, too human.” Otherworldly eternal bliss turns into earthly happiness for the majority. The place of God is replaced by “Progress”, “Fatherland” and “State”. The old Christian man is replaced by the “most despicable creature” - the “last man”. He still continues to shoulder the burden of values ​​that deny and cripple life, but now he is latently aware of all their insignificance, and therefore there is no longer “chaos in him that can give birth to a dancing star” [ibid., p. 12], in him there are no longer any aspirations, he strives only for “his own little pleasure” [ibid.].

“General Progress” and “State” are not able to truly replace God, they are unable to hide people from the impending Nothing, and therefore they try to forget themselves in vain business, in the pursuit of profit and thrills. But the collapse of all previous values ​​is inevitable...

When Western man finally realizes that the other world of ideals is dead and lifeless, then a stage of “nihilism” must begin in European culture. For people, not being able to find the supersensible sphere in the world - the spheres where they placed its meaning, truth, beauty and value - will condemn it as devoid of any meaning, purpose and value at all: “the reality of becoming is recognized as the only reality and all kind of roundabout paths to hidden worlds and false deities - but, on the other hand, this world, which they no longer want to deny, becomes unbearable."

But the era of nihilistic crisis, according to Nietzsche, not only contains within itself the greatest danger, but also the greatest opportunity of our time. For after the collapse of previous values ​​and the criteria for their establishment, reality, the real world, of course, depreciate, but at the same time they do not disappear, but for the first time only achieve significance. A person must realize the true source of values ​​- his own will to power, reject and destroy the very “place” of previous values ​​- “top”, “height”, “transcendentality” - and create new life-affirming, exalting people: “probably, a person will begin to rise from there higher and higher, where it stops pouring into God."

Thus, the reasons for the death of God, according to Nietzsche, lie in Christianity itself, in the former “highest” values, which were the product of “reactive” forces and a sense of ressentimet. After the death of God, European culture will try to place in his place the human values ​​of “Progress”, “State”, etc. However, the collapse of all previous values ​​is inevitable and after it the stage of “European nihilism” must begin. This stage will lead to the disappearance of the previous goals and meanings of the world, created on the basis of ideas about the supersensible sphere rising above it, but, at the same time, the opportunity will open for a new true position of values.

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24. Heidegger M. Nietzsche’s words “God is dead” // Questions of Philosophy. 1990. No. 7. P.143 - 176

25. Shestov L. Good in teaching gr. Tolstoy and F. Nietzsche // Questions of Philosophy. 1990. No. 7 P.59 - 132

26. Shestov L. Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: philosophy of tragedy // World of Art. 1902. No. 2. P.69-88; No. 4. P.230-246; No. 5/6. P.321-351. No. 7. P.7-44; No. 8. P.97-113. No. 9/10. P.219-239.

27. Jaspers K. Nietzsche and Christianity. M., 1994.114 p.

Friedrich Nietzsche. Geniuses and Villains

Philosophy. Friedrich Nietzsche and the Eternal Return

Lecture by Mikhail Shilman “On the benefits and harms of Nietzsche for life”

We meet again with Mikhail Shilman to turn to philosophy. In this program we will not talk about its categories, but about its personalities, namely, about the well-known Friedrich Nietzsche to all of us. Let us really try to understand what he said that was heard, what he passed over in silence, and why modern philosophy demonstrates an eternal return to Nietzsche.

Nietzsche and Stirner. Alina Samoilova

"What to do?"
The philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and the theory of the superman today

[Object 22]. Friedrich Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

We talk about Friedrich Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism with Igore Ebanoidze, Candidate of Philological Sciences, editor-in-chief of the Cultural Revolution publishing house.

Philosophical readings. What is culture

Will culture disappear as an exhausted phenomenon that arose only 300 years ago? What is lack of culture? And how does the first differ from the second? A conversation about this with Vadim Mikhailovich Mezhuev, Doctor of Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

When Nietzsche was four years old, his father died of a brain disease, and six months later his two-year-old brother Joseph died. Thus, Nietzsche, at a very young and impressionable age, learned the tragedy of death, as well as the uncertainty and obvious injustice of life. His later books would contain many passages dealing with death. For example: “Let us be careful not to say that death is the opposite of life. Life is but a prototype of that which is already dead; and this is a very rare prototype".

After these events, he was raised as the only male in a family consisting of his mother Franziska, sister Elisabeth, two unmarried aunts and his grandmother - until, at the age of 14, he entered Schulforte, the most famous Protestant boarding school.

Here several significant events awaited him: he became acquainted with the literature of the ancient Greeks and Romans, with the music of Richard Wagner; wrote several “musical works that could be performed in church with all decency”; was churched at the age of 17; I read David Strauss’s controversial work “The Life of Jesus,” which had a profound influence on him.

Teaching career

At the age of 19, Nietzsche entered the University of Bonn at the Faculty of Theology and Classical Philology (study based on ancient written texts). After studying for one semester, he abandoned theology and lost all the faith he had. He moved to the University of Leipzig, where he established a reputation in academic circles by publishing articles on Aristotle and other Greek philosophers.

At the age of 21, he read Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation. One commentator writes: “Schopenhauer replaced the omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent God who rules the universe with a blind, aimless and virtually insensitive energetic impulse, which he could only describe as “blind and perfect “will”.

By this time, six years had already passed since the first publication of Darwin's book " On the Origin of Species” in English, and five years from its first publication in German. At the age of 23, Nietzsche joined the army for one year. One day, while trying to jump up, he suffered a serious chest injury and became unfit for military service. He returned to the University of Leipzig, where he met the famous opera composer Richard Wagner, whose music he had long admired. Wagner shared his passion for Schopenhauer. He was a former student at the University of Leipzig, and in age he was old enough to be Nietzsche’s father. Thus, Wagner became almost like a father to Friedrich. Subsequently, this role was occupied by a figment of Nietzsche’s imagination - the superman (German). Übermensch) - super strong not only physically, but also in all other respects, an imaginary individual with his own morality, who overcame everyone, supplanted God and became an expression of opposition to the world.

In 1869, Nietzsche renounced Prussian citizenship, without taking any other one in return. Officially, he remained stateless for the remaining 31 years of his life. That year, at the incredibly young age of 24, Nietzsche was appointed professor of classical philology at the Swiss University of Basel, a position he held for ten years. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. He served as a hospital orderly for three months, where he saw first-hand the traumatic consequences of battle, as well as diphtheria and dysentery. These battles had other consequences for him. Dr John Figgis writes: “Once, while helping the sick, and being in a frenzy of compassion, he glanced briefly at a herd of Prussian horses noisily descending from the hill into the village. Their magnificence, strength, bravado and power immediately amazed him. He realized that suffering and compassion were not, as he had previously believed in the manner of Schopenhauer, the deepest experiences in life. The power and authority were much higher than this pain, and the pain itself became unimportant - this was the reality. And life began to seem to him like a struggle for power.” .

Last years of life, madness and death

In 1879, at the age of 34, he resigned from his job at the University of Basel due to deteriorating health, after three days of incessant migraines, vision problems that caused him to be close to blindness, severe vomiting and unrelenting pain . Due to illness, Nietzsche often traveled to places with climatic conditions beneficial to his health. From 1879 to 1888 he received a small pension from the University of Basel, and this allowed him to lead a modest itinerant life as a stateless freelance writer in various cities in Sweden, Germany, Italy and France. During this time, he wrote his semi-philosophical anti-religious works, which brought him fame (or infamy), including the books " Fun Science"(1882, 1887), " Thus spoke Zarathustra" (1883–85), " Antichrist" (1888), " Twilight of the Idols"(1888), and his autobiography entitled " Ecce Homo»( this book, also called "How to Become Yourself" was written in 1888, but published only posthumously, in 1908, by his sister Elizabeth).

At the age of 44, Nietzsche lived in Turin. It is said that one day he saw a coachman beating a horse and wrapped his arms around it to protect it from the beatings. He then fell to the ground, and from that moment on, for the next eleven years, he was in a state of insanity, due to which he was unable to speak or write coherently until his death in 1900. Nietzsche's biographer Kaufmann describes these events as follows: “He fell right on the street, and after that he collected the rest of his sanity to write several crazy, but at the same time beautiful letters, and then darkness covered his mind, extinguishing all his ardor and intelligence. He completely burned out". Modern medical diagnoses describing the cause of his insanity are very varied. Nietzsche was buried in the family tomb next to the church in Recken.

The pain of unrequited love

During his visit to Rome in 1882, Nietzsche, then 37 years old, met Lou von Salomé (Louise Gustavovna Salomé), a Russian student of philosophy and theology (later Freud's assistant). They were introduced by a mutual friend, Paul Reu. She spent the entire summer with Nietzsche, mostly accompanied by his sister, Elisabeth. Salomé later claimed that both Nietzsche and Reuux proposed to her in turn (although these claims have been questioned).

In the following months, the relationship between Nietzsche and Salome deteriorated, much to his disappointment. He wrote to her about “the situation I found myself in after taking an exorbitant dose of opium – out of despair”. And to his friend, Overbeck, he wrote: "This last one a piece bitten off from life- the most difficult of all that I have ever chewed... I am crushed by the wheel of my own feelings. If only I could sleep! But the strongest doses of opiates save me only for six to eight hours... I have the greatest opportunity prove that “any experience can be useful...”

Kaufman comments: "Any experience really was useful for Nietzsche. He transferred his sufferings to books of the later period - “ Thus spoke Zarathustra" And " Ecce Homo» .

« Thus spoke Zarathustra" - Nietzsche's most famous work. This is a philosophical novel in which a fictional prophet named after Zarathustra (the Persian founder of the religion of Zoroastrianism in the 6th century BC) reveals to the world the ideas of Nietzsche himself.

In his autobiography, How to Become Yourself, Nietzsche writes: “I have not said here a word of what I said five years ago through the mouth of Zarathustra.”. Among these ideas are the idea that “God is dead,” the idea of ​​“eternal repetition” (i.e., the idea that what has happened will continue to happen again ad infinitum), and the idea of ​​the “will to power.” In the original, Nietzsche used a biblical style of writing to proclaim his opposition to Christian morality and tradition, with many blasphemous words against God.

Nietzsche and the "death of God"

Nietzsche's statements about the death of God appear in their fullest form as an anecdote or parable in The Gay Science:

“Mad man.

Have you heard about that crazy man who lit a lantern on a bright afternoon, ran out to the market and kept shouting: “I am looking for God! I am looking for God!” Since many of those who did not believe in God were gathered there, there was laughter around him. Has he disappeared? - said one. “He’s lost like a child,” said another. Or hid? Is he afraid of us? Did he set sail? Emigrated? - they shouted and laughed intermixed. Then the madman ran into the crowd and pierced them with his gaze. “Where is God? - he exclaimed. – I want to tell you this! We killed him- You and I! We are all his killers! But how did we do this?... The gods are decaying! God is dead! God will not rise again! And we killed him! How comforted we are, murderers of murderers! The most holy and powerful Being that ever existed in the world bled to death under our knives - who will wash this blood from us? …Isn’t the greatness of this thing too great for us? Shouldn't we ourselves turn into gods in order to be worthy of him? sometimes a greater deed was not accomplished, and whoever is born after us will, thanks to this deed, belong to a history higher than all previous history!” – Here the mad man fell silent and again began to look at his listeners; They too were silent, looking at him in surprise. Finally, he threw his lantern to the ground, so that it broke into pieces and went out. “I came too early,” he said then, “my hour has not yet struck. This monstrous event is still on the way and is coming to us - the news about it has not yet reached human ears. Lightning and thunder need time, starlight needs time, deeds need time after they have been done to be seen and heard. This act is still further from you than the most distant luminaries - and yet you did it!»

Not surprisingly, this passage has generated a great deal of debate about what Nietzsche meant when he wrote these lines. Here he is not talking about the death of Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity, on the cross. Such a statement was true during the three days that Christ was in the tomb, but the continuation of this reasoning was forever refuted by the resurrection of Christ from the dead.

Some have called Nietzsche's words that "God is dead" the words of a "madman." However, Nietzsche used this term many times, speaking in his own voice, not in the voice of a madman. In section 108 of the same Gay Science, Nietzsche wrote:

« New contractions . After Buddha died, for centuries his shadow was shown in one cave - a monstrous, terrible shadow. God is dead: but such is the nature of people that for thousands of years there may still exist caves in which his shadow is shown. “And we—we must also defeat his shadow!”

And in section 343 of The Gay Science, Nietzsche explains what he meant: “The greatest of new events - that “God is dead” and that faith in the Christian God has become something unworthy of trust - is already beginning to cast its first shadows on Europe.”.

In fact, Nietzsche believes that God never existed. This is his reaction to the concept of God as "the only, absolute and judgmental power interested in hidden and obscene personal secrets". But here another problem arises. If God is dead, then who will save us now? Nietzsche offers a solution consisting of three elements. In Twilight of the Idols he writes:

Philosophy teacher Giles Fraser writes: “The struggle that Nietzsche is waging is not a struggle between atheism and Christianity; this, as he explicitly writes, is the struggle of Dionysus with the Crucified. The whole point here is the spiritual superiority of Nietzsche's faith over Christianity. This, contrary to the view which commentators readily accept, is not a struggle against faith, but a struggle between faiths, or rather a battle between competing soteriologies.".

Nietzsche against the book of Genesis

In his book Antichrist, Nietzsche pours out a torrent of insults against God and the story of creation, the Fall and the Flood of Noah as told in the book of Genesis:

“Have you understood the famous story that is placed at the beginning of the Bible - the story of God’s hellish fear of science?.. They didn’t understand her. This priestly book par excellence begins, as one might expect, with the great inner difficulty of the priest: he has only one great danger hence, God only has one great danger. The old God, the “spirit” entirely, the real high priest, the true perfection, is strolling in his garden: the only trouble is that he is bored. Even the gods fight in vain against boredom. What is he doing? He invents man: man is entertaining... But what is it? and the person is also bored. God's mercy is limitless for that one disaster from which no paradise is free: God immediately created other animals. First God's mistake: man did not find animals entertaining - he dominated them, he did not want to be an “animal”. - Because of this, God created woman. And indeed, the boredom was over, but not yet the other one! The woman was second God's failure. - “A woman is essentially a snake, Heva,” - every priest knows this; “Every misfortune in the world comes from a woman,” every priest also knows this. " Hence, from her comes science”... Only through a woman did man learn to eat from the tree of knowledge. - What happened? The old God was gripped by hellish fear. The man himself became greatest God's blunder created in him a rival: science makes him equal to God - the end of priests and gods comes when man begins to learn science! - Morality: science is something forbidden in itself, it alone is forbidden. Science is the first sin, the seed of all sins, firstborn sin. This alone is morality. - "You Not must cognize"; everything else follows from this. - Hellish fear does not prevent God from being prudent. How defend yourself from science? - this became his main problem for a long time. Answer: get man out of heaven! Happiness and idleness lead to thoughts - all thoughts are bad thoughts... A person does not must think. - And the “priest in himself” invents need, death, pregnancy with its danger to life, all kinds of disasters, old age, the hardship of life, and above all illness - all the right means in the fight against science! Need not allows a person to think... And yet! terrible! The work of knowledge rises, rising to the skies, darkening the gods - what to do? - The Old God invents war, he separates peoples, he makes it so that people mutually destroy each other (the priests always needed war...). War, along with other things, is a great obstacle to science! - Incredible! Cognition, emancipation from the priest even increases, despite the war. - And now the last decision comes to the old God: man has learned science, - nothing helps, you need to drown him!»

The first reaction of anyone will be to ask: “How could a person in his right mind write such nonsense? And perhaps the most merciful answer is that these senseless insults were a foreshadowing of the madness Nietzsche suffered in the last 11 years of his life.

Nietzsche vs Darwin

In the book " Thus spoke Zarathustra", Nietzsche reveals his superman to the world, in the evolutionary words of his prophet:

“I teach you about the Superman... You have made the journey from a worm to a man, but much still in you is from a worm. Once you were apes, and even now man is more of an ape than any of the apes.”

However, contrary to expectations, Nietzsche, being an obvious evolutionist, opposed Darwin and Darwinism. If there was a doctrine to which he was slightly inclined, it was Lamarck's theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. In fact, Nietzsche had his own theory to explain evolution. He called it “the will to power,” which was actually the will to superiority.

The important factor for Nietzsche was not the number of offspring produced by any individual or species, as for Darwin, but the quality of those offspring. And Darwinism was not the basis and did not even influence this worldview. Nietzsche said that Darwin was wrong in four fundamental aspects of his theory.

1. Nietzsche questioned the mechanism of formation of new organs through small changes, because he understood that a half-formed organ had absolutely no survival value.

In his book " Will to power" he wrote:

“Against Darwinism. The usefulness of an organ does not explain its origin, on the contrary! Indeed, during the very long time that is necessary for the emergence of a certain property, this latter does not preserve the individual and does not bring him any benefit, least of all in the fight against external circumstances and enemies.”

2. Nietzsche questioned Darwin's worldview of natural selection because in real life he saw that the weak rather than the strong survive.

In Twilight of the Idols he wrote:

“Anti-Darwin. Regarding the famous “struggle for existence”, then it seems to me, however, more the fruit of an assertion than a proof. It happens, but as an exception; there is a general view of life Not need, not hunger, but, on the contrary, wealth, abundance, even absurd extravagance - where they fight, they fight for power... Malthus should not be confused with nature. - But let us suppose that this struggle exists - and in fact, it occurs - in this case, it, unfortunately, ends contrary to what the Darwinian school wishes, as perhaps we would you dare to desire with her: it is precisely unfavorable for the strong, for the privileged, for the happy exceptions. Childbirth Not grow in perfection: the weak constantly become masters over the strong again - this happens because there is a great number of them, that they also cleverer... Darwin forgot about his mind (that's in English!), the weak have more intelligence... One must need intelligence in order to acquire intelligence; it is lost when it becomes no longer necessary. He who has power renounces the mind (“Get lost!” they think in Germany today, “ empire should still remain with us”...). As you see, by mind I understand caution, patience, cunning, pretense, great self-control and everything that is pretense (the latter includes b O most of so-called virtue).

3. Nietzsche also questioned Darwin's theory of sexual selection, since he did not observe that it actually takes place in nature.

In the book " Will to power" Under the heading "Anti-Darwin" he wrote:

“The significance of the selection of the most beautiful has been so exaggerated that it has gone far beyond the limits of the beauty of our own race! In fact, the most beautiful creature often mates with very disadvantaged creatures, the highest with the lowest. We almost always see males and females coming together through some chance meeting, without being particularly discriminating.”

4. Nietzsche argued that there are no transitional forms.

In the same section entitled "Anti-Darwin" he writes:

“There are no transitional forms. It is claimed that the development of beings is moving forward, but there is no basis for this assertion. Each type has its own boundary - beyond it there is no development. Until then - absolute correctness."

Nietzsche then offers us another lengthy chapter, again entitled “ Anti-Darwin»:

« Anti-Darwin. What strikes me most when I mentally cast my gaze over man’s great past is that I always see in him the opposite of what Darwin and his school currently sees or wants to see, i.e. selection in favor of stronger, more successful ones, progress of the species. Just the opposite is evident: extinction happy combinations, the uselessness of higher order types, the inevitability of the dominance of average, even lower average types. Until we are shown why man should be an exception among other creatures, I am inclined to suppose that the school of Darwin is mistaken in all its assertions. That will to power, in which I see the final basis and essence of any change, gives us the means to understand why selection does not occur in the direction of exceptions and happy cases, the strongest and happiest turn out to be too weak when they are opposed by organized herd instincts, timidity weak, numerical superiority. The general picture of the world of values, as it seems to me, shows that in the area of ​​​​the highest values ​​that hang over humanity in our time, the predominance belongs not to happy combinations, selective types, but, on the contrary, to types of decadence - and perhaps there is nothing more interesting in the world than this disappointing spectacle... I see all the philosophers, I see science on its knees before the fact of the perverted struggle for existence, which the school of Darwin teaches, namely: I see everywhere that those who compromise life remain on the surface, experience the value of life. The error of Darwin's school took the form of a problem for me - to what extent must one be blind in order not to see the truth here? That species are the bearers of progress is the most unreasonable statement in the world - they so far represent only a known level. That higher organisms developed from lower ones has not yet been confirmed by a single fact.”

Kaufmann writes lucidly about this: “[Nietzsche] has in mind his “fortunate predecessors” Socrates or Caesar, Leonardo or Goethe: people whose power gives them an advantage in any “struggle for existence”, people who, even if they outlived Mozart, Keats or Shelley, did not abandon after themselves children or heirs. However, it is these people who represent the “power” that all people crave. After all, the basic instinct, according to Nietzsche, is not their desire to preserve life, but the desire for power. And it should be obvious how far apart Nietzsche’s “power” is from Darwin’s “adaptability.”.

In light of the above, it is not surprising that in his book “ Ecce Homo“Nietzsche calls scientists who believe that superman is a product of Darwinian evolution “bulls.”

Nietzsche, of course, was a philosopher, not a scientist, and he does not explain the subtleties of how the "will to power" works in an evolutionary scenario - other than that superior individuals have always had and will have the power to rebel over their contemporaries in their journey from apes in the past to a highly evolved superman in the future.

This has led some modern commentators to go out of their way to emulate Nietzsche and Darwin, for example in books such as Nietzsche's New Darwinism» John Richardson.

Nietzsche, Darwin and Hitler

Nietzsche may not have foreseen the events of the twentieth century, but the main modern example of his “superman”, a strong personality who lived by the laws of his own morality, was Adolf Hitler. Hitler accepted both Darwin's "science" and Nietzsche's philosophy. For him, Darwin's notion that the strong dominate the weak was the greatest good. At the same time, he considered himself a superman, according to Nietzsche's philosophy, and used Nietzsche's idea of ​​superior individuals to convince the German nation that they were a "superior race." Hitler took both of their ideas about morality to their logical conclusion, leading to the sack of Europe and the murder of over six million innocent people in the Holocaust.

What motivated Nietzsche?

In his autobiographical book " Ecce Homo", Nietzsche leaves us in no doubt about his own self-perception and about his books.

He took the title for his book, Ecce Homo (meaning “Behold the Man!”) from Pilate's description of Jesus Christ in John 19:5. The four chapters that make up the book are titled: "Why I'm So Wise," "Why I'm So Smart," "Why I Write Such Good Books," and "Why I'm Fate." In a chapter entitled “Why I Am So Wise,” he wrote:

“I am militant in my own way... Task Not is to overcome resistance in general, but one on which you need to expend all your strength, dexterity and skill in wielding weapons - resistance equal enemy..."

So, Nietzsche chose not just anyone but Almighty God himself as his “equal” opponents! Compare this with Eve's first temptation by Satan in the Garden of Eden - the serpent promised Eve that they would become "like gods" (Genesis 3:5). In this “competition” Nietzsche stands side by side with Dionysus. He wrote: “I am a disciple of the philosopher Dionysus: I would rather be a satyr than a saint.”. In fact, Dionysus was not a philosopher, but the Greek god of wine, the inspirer of ritual madness, ecstasy and orgiatic excess. Dionysus is the embodiment of everything that the Apostle Paul calls “sinful nature”:

“The works of the flesh are known; they are: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, quarrels, envy, anger, strife, disagreements, (temptations), heresies, hatred, murder, drunkenness, disorderly conduct and the like. I warn you beforehand, as I warned you before, that those who do these things will not inherit the kingdom of God” (Galatians 5:19–21).

This self-identification with Dionysus gives Nietzsche the right to call himself the first immoralist and lies at the basis and is also the result of his entire anti-divine, anti-Christian moral theology. The very last sentence of the book " Ecce Homo" sounds like this: “Did you understand me? – Dionysus vs. Crucified…» .

We know that his mind was filled with the works of atheists and skeptics such as Strauss and Schopenhauer. He also talks about having "no pleasant memories of his childhood or youth." Some have suggested that Nietzsche's anger against Christianity conveyed unconscious feelings, repressed from childhood, towards the "benevolent" spinster aunts and other women who lived with him. One commentator goes so far as to write: “We just have to replace the phrases “my aunts” or “my family” with the word “Christianity” and his angry attacks will become clearer.”.

In one of the chapters of the book Ecce Homo entitled "Why Am I So Clever", Nietzsche writes:

“It completely escaped me how “sinful” I could be. Likewise, I have no reliable criterion for what remorse is. ... “God”, “immortality of the soul”, “salvation”, “otherworldly” - all concepts to which I never gave either attention or time, even as a child - perhaps I was never child enough for this? – I know atheism not at all as a result, still less as an event: it is implied in me instinctively. I'm too curious, too not obvious, too passionate to allow himself an answer as rough as a fist. God is an answer as rude as a fist, indelicacy towards us, thinkers - in fact, even just rude as a fist, ban for us: you have nothing to think about!..”

Was it really true that at Nietzsche’s young age, no one explained that the world had ceased to be the way God created it in the first place, that sin had entered the world, and that the world was cursed, that God, the Great Judge, whom Nietzsche hated so much because he was Accountable to him is also the loving God who sent His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, to die on the cross and rise again so that He could forgive us our sins?

However, in his work Antichrist, as well as in many other books, Nietzsche demonstrates that he was well aware of all these concepts, but vehemently rejected them. Many people have tried to counter the concept of future judgment, for example by claiming that there is no absolute good and evil. Nietzsche took a more radical approach: he proclaimed the death of the Judge!

Conclusion

In the last chapter of the book " Ecce Homo", Nietzsche culminates in his angry outpourings against "God", "truth", "Christian morality", "salvation of the soul", "sin", etc. He sums it all up in his screaming climax: “Did you understand me? – Dionysus vs. Crucified…».

However, wait a minute, Nietzsche, you chose Almighty God as your “equal” opponent! It may seem that you have failed your final blow against God by your extreme reverence for Christ, (unwittingly?) recognizing that He, the Crucified One, is Almighty God.

Nietzsche shook his fist at God, but Nietzsche himself is now dead, and God is not. Therefore, the final word remains with God.

“The fool said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’” (Psalm 14:1).

“For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written: I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will destroy the understanding of the prudent.” (1 Corinthians 1:18–19)

Nietzsche's popularity

Nietzsche's works did not gain widespread popularity among his contemporaries. First edition of the book Thus spoke Zarathustra"was published in a circulation of only 400 copies. However, after his death, as the wave of evolutionary atheism swept the world in the 20th century, he became one of the most widely read philosophers due to the fact that his books were translated into many languages ​​and many authors cited them for their own fame. Contemporary political leaders have claimed to have read his works - among them Mussolini, Charles de Gaulle, Theodore Roosewelt and Richard Nixon.

In the Encyclopedia Britannica“The following is said: “The associations with Adolf Hitler and fascism that we have in connection with the name of Nietzsche are mainly due to the way his sister Elisabeth, who married one of the leaders of the anti-Semitic movement, took advantage of his works. Despite the fact that Nietzsche was an ardent opponent of nationalism, anti-Semitism and power politics, his name was subsequently used by the fascists to promote ideas that were disgusting to him.”

During the First World War, the German government published a book “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” edition in 1,150,000 copies, and they were issued to German soldiers along with the Gospel of John. " Encyclopedia Britannica“With a touch of slight irony, he comments on this situation as follows: “It is difficult to say which of the authors was more compromised by such a gesture.”

Links and notes

1. Nietzsche carefully wrote his works in numbered sections (sometimes these sections are numbered throughout the book, sometimes by chapter) and thanks to this, any quotation can be easily found in any translation and any edition by section number. In this article we will resort to this practice by citing the works of Nietzsche.

Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the most influential and odious philosophers of the 19th and 20th centuries, ironically turned out to be the most profaned. His ideas, picked up and distorted by the Nazis, became overgrown with myths and painted in diabolical tones for many decades to come, although in most cases they had nothing in common with what they were presented as.

It is not surprising that the legends continue to live to this day, despite the fact that researchers have convincingly proven that the Germans relied not so much on Nietzsche’s views as on the ideological compilation of the philosopher’s works (the collection “The Will to Power”), which was made by his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche , having received after the death of his famous brother the exclusive right to his archives.

Source: Flickr

Perhaps today, like ancient wandering stories, there are three main myths about Nietzsche and his philosophy:

1. Nietzsche is a preacher of Nazism, an anti-Semite (see above about this);

2. Nietzsche is a misogynist (the phrase from his book “when you go to a woman, don’t forget the whip” has excited and outraged ladies of all stripes for more than a hundred years);

3. Nietzsche is the Antichrist who proclaimed the death of God (the book “Antichrist” is a sufficient basis for such accusations, according to some).

Well what can I say? Everything is bad.

First myth Doctor of Philology Greta Ionkis perfectly debunks it in her article “Friedrich Nietzsche and the Jews.” In short, for all his ambiguous attitude towards Jews, Nietzsche was not an anti-Semite. Here are the words from the philosopher’s letter to his friend Franz Overbeck, written in 1884:

Damn anti-Semitism caused a radical collapse between me and my sister...Anti-Semites need to be shot.

Of course, it cannot be said that Nietzsche had great sympathy for them, but the criticism mainly concerned only one point and boiled down to the fact that the Jews were the source of the emergence of Christianity with its morality of equality and justice, which, according to the philosopher, weakened the will to power most strong minority and made it possible for the weak and faceless to equal the chosen ones and even surpass them in life status. This is all that Nietzsche accused them of. On the other hand, he understood how much this unique people had done for European civilization and took off his hat to them for this. As Nietzsche admitted in Human, All Too Human, the Jews are a people “who, not without our collective guilt, have had the most painful history of all peoples and to whom we owe the noblest man (Christ), the purest sage (Spinoza) , the most powerful book and the most influential moral law in the world."

Regarding the Myth of Nietzsche's Misogyny you can think for a very long time, since the philosopher’s attitude towards women is as ambivalent as any of his other views. However, it is worth noting that the most ardent rejection on the part of the fair sex is caused by a single phrase, taken out of context (the words “When you go to a woman, don’t forget to take a whip” found in the work “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” and does not even belong to Zarathustra himself, but to the old woman teaching him).

And here are other statements by Nietzsche, which allow us to see in the philosopher not so much a misogynist, but a person who fears intimacy with these creatures. Well, it happens.

This is what Nietzsche writes in “Beyond Good and Evil” (Book 7, Af. 239):

What inspires respect for a woman, and quite often fear, is her nature, which is “more natural” than a man’s, her true predatory, insidious grace, her tigress’s claws under her glove, her naivety in selfishness, her inner savagery that cannot be educated, incomprehensible, immense, elusive in her desires and virtues... What, with all the fear, inspires compassion for this dangerous and beautiful cat, “woman”, is that she is more suffering, more vulnerable, more in need of love and more doomed to disappointment than any other animal. Fear and compassion: with these feelings the man has stood before the woman, always with one foot already in the tragedy that torments him, at the same time enchanting him.

This confession is taken from the treatise “The Gay Science” (Book 2, Af. 70):

A low, strong viola suddenly raises before us a curtain of possibilities in which we usually do not believe: and we immediately begin to believe that somewhere in the world there may be women with high, heroic, regal souls, capable and ready for grandiose objections, decisions and victims, capable and ready to dominate men, because the best that is in a man has become an embodied ideal in them, regardless of gender.

I don’t think that a man whose fantasies rise to such heights can be called a misogynist. Moreover, we all know that Nietzsche’s relationships with women never worked out: there was unhappy love, but there was no connection (as you know, the philosopher abstained from sex all his life, explaining this by the fact that such “purity” contributes to special poignancy and the richness of his thoughts, and ecstatic insights bring him pleasure comparable to orgasm). In light of this, all the statements of the “great and terrible” Frederick take on a completely different character, in which there is more personal and abstract than what claims to be an objective and well-founded view.

And here concept "God is dead"(Gott ist tot), which is being replicated today with or without reason, needs additional clarification - first of all, what Nietzsche himself put into his words. Of course, you need to read about this from Nietzsche himself. The idea of ​​the death of God was first voiced in 1882 in the work “The Gay Science” (“La gaya scienza”) in this form (excerpt “The Madman”):

Madman.- Why, you haven’t heard anything about that crazy man who lit a lantern in broad daylight, went to the square and there shouted without a break: “I’m looking for God! I’m looking for God!”?! And there were just a crowd of unbelievers who, hearing his screams, began to laugh loudly. “Is he lost?” - said one. “Isn’t he lost like a little child?” - said another. “Or did he hide in the bushes? Or is he afraid of us? Or did he go to the galley? Said overseas? - they made noise and cackled incessantly. And the madman rushed into the very crowd, piercing them with his gaze. “Where has God gone? - he cried. - Now I’ll tell you! We killed him - you and me! We are all his killers! But how did we kill him? How did they manage to exhaust the depths of the sea? Who gave us a sponge to erase the entire firmament? What did we do when we uncoupled the Earth from the Sun? Where is she going now? Where are we all going? Away from the Sun, away from the suns? Are we falling continually? And down - and back, and to the sides, and forward, and in all directions? And is there still up and down? And are we not wandering in the endless Nothing? And isn’t the emptiness yawning in our faces? Hasn't it gotten colder? Isn't it night that comes every moment and more and more Night? Don't you have to light lanterns in broad daylight? And can’t we hear the pick of the grave-digger burying God? And our noses - don’t they smell the stench of a rotting God? - After all, even the Gods smolder! God is dead! He will remain dead! And we killed him! How can we, the murderers of murderers, console ourselves? The most sacred and powerful thing that the world has possessed until now - it bled to death under the blows of our knives - who will wipe the blood from us? What water will we cleanse ourselves with? What redemptive festivals, what sacred games will we have to invent? Isn't the greatness of this feat too great for us? Will we have to become gods ourselves in order to be worthy of it? Never before has such a great deed been accomplished - thanks to it, whoever is born after us will enter into a history more sublime than everything that happened in the past! They were silent and looked at him with distrust. At last he threw the lantern to the ground, so that it broke and went out. “I came too early,” he said after a pause, it was not my time yet. A monstrous event - it is still on the way, it wanders its way - it has not yet reached human ears. Lightning and thunder require time, the light of stars requires time, deeds require time for people to hear about them, for people to see them already accomplished. And this act is still farther than the most distant stars from people. - and yet they did it!”... They also say that on the same day a madman broke into churches and began to sing “Requiem aeternam” there. When they took him out by the hand, demanding an answer, he answered each time with the same words: “What are all these churches now, if not the tombs and tombstones of God?”

It seems that in this fiery speech there is as much militant atheism, with which Nietzsche’s ideas are often confused, as there are scientific terms in the speeches of the Pope.

What do we see here? The tragedy of the loss of something important, absolute, some guarantor of meaning and order, the feeling of a free fall into the unknown, the loss of all sorts of guidelines - a state that can probably be designated as the onset of a moral - or even existential - crisis of humanity. This is not about whether God exists or not, but about the fact that the time has come for a reassessment of values, a deeper look at human nature, because Christian morality no longer “works” - it does not bear fruit, does not correspond to a person’s knowledge of himself, does not participate in life.

This is how Heidegger comments in his article “ Nietzsche's words "God is Dead" this snippet:

However, in the face of such a shaken dominance of former values, one can try to do something different. Namely: if God - the Christian God - disappeared from his place in the supersensible world, then this place itself still remains - even if it is empty. And this empty region of the supersensible, the region of the ideal world, can still be retained. And the empty place even cries out to be occupied, replacing the disappeared God with something else. New ideals are being erected. According to Nietzsche ("The Will to Power", aphorism 1021 - dates back to 1887 12), this happens through new teachings that promise to make the world happy, through socialism, and equally through the music of Wagner - in other words, everything this happens everywhere where “dogmatic Christianity” has already “outlived its time.”

That is, Nietzsche’s philosophy is a breakthrough philosophy that appeared at a turning point, requiring a new model of the world, a new model of man and relations between people. Probably, at a time when old values ​​are becoming obsolete, life itself begins to give rise to such powerful concepts aimed at re-creating the world. Which of these revolutionary ideas will take root is another matter. Judging by the myths that exist around Nietzsche’s philosophy, there is nothing to take root yet, because Nietzsche is still not fully understood and we still have to take a fresh look at his creative legacy.

Moreover, it seems that those processes that he wrote about more than a hundred years ago have received a new round of development in our era - and the round, alas, is not the most successful: despite Nietzsche’s proclaimed death of old Christian values, which have lost their meaning for humans , they have not lost anything, freedom of choice in the 21st century has turned into, and Nietzsche’s superman, his beautiful blond beast, is given an ever smaller role in the world, .

That's how we live. But these are other stories, follow the development of which in our new articles.

Finally, three videos about Nietzsche and his ideas, in order, so to speak, to consolidate the material.

Igor Ebanoidze: “Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism”

In the Mayak radio studio, Igor Ebanoidze, candidate of philological sciences and editor-in-chief of the Cultural Revolution publishing house, reflects on the ambivalence of Nietzsche’s ideas, their connection with the work of Schopenhauer, the relationship between the world and the individual in Nietzsche’s work, the specific religiosity of the philosopher, his concept of death God, relationships with women and much more. In general, a universal conversation about Nietzsche the philosopher, Nietzsche the artist and Nietzsche the man.

Valery Podoroga: “The History of God in Modern Times”

What is the highest happiness? How are death and a person’s awareness of his “I” connected? Is it possible to live correctly and die correctly?

In a very meditative lecture, Doctor of Philosophy, Head of the Analytical Anthropology Sector of the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Professor of the Russian State University for the Humanities Valery Podoroga talks about the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, about the aphoristic field with which he worked, about the metaphysics of death and how “Nietzsche’s calling card” was born - formula "death of God". Cholerics are contraindicated.

The philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and the theory of the superman today

In Vitaly Tretyakov’s program “What to do?” Several modern philosophers met at once to discuss the main ideas of Nietzsche, the philosopher’s place in the pantheon of thinkers of human civilization and the significance of his work for the modern world. Why did Nietzsche come to the conclusion about the death of God? On what basis did he derive the thesis about the appearance of a superman? What is the essence of Nietzsche’s moral doctrine, is it a doctrine of immorality? Is Nietzsche responsible for those political and ethical views that in the twentieth century directly appealed to his philosophical heritage? How popular is the idea of ​​a superman among today's youth, who largely adhere to the values ​​of individualism? Here is the range of issues discussed in the program.

Based on materials: Nietzsche F. Complete works in 13 volumes;
radio "Mayak", TV channel "Russia - Culture", Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center.

The God Who Never Was Rajneesh Bhagwan Shri

Chapter 1 GOD IS DEAD AND MAN IS FREE... FOR WHAT?

GOD IS DEAD AND MAN IS FREE... FOR WHAT?

Responsibility belongs to those who have freedom of action. There is either God or freedom; they cannot coexist. This is the basic meaning of Friedrich Nietzsche’s saying: “God is dead, therefore man is free.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, for the first time in human history, declared: “God is dead, therefore man is free.” This is an amazing saying and it has many meanings. First I would like to discuss the saying itself.

All religions believe that God created the world and man. But if someone created you, then you are just a puppet in his hands, you do not have your own soul. And if someone gave you life, then he can take it away from you at any moment. He didn't ask you if you wanted life to be given to you, and he's not going to ask you if you wanted it to be taken away from you.

God is the greatest dictator, if you accept the fiction that he created the world and man. If God is real, then man is his slave, his puppet. All the strings are in his hands, even your life. Then there can be no talk of enlightenment. Then there can be no Gautama Buddha, because freedom does not exist. God pulls you by some strings - you dance, by others - you cry, by others - you start killing others, committing suicide, inciting war. You are just a puppet, he is the puppeteer.

Then there can be no talk of sin and virtue, of sinners and saints. There is no good and evil because you are just a puppet. A puppet cannot be held accountable for its actions. Responsibility belongs to those who have freedom of action. There is either God or freedom; they cannot coexist. This is the basic meaning of Friedrich Nietzsche's saying: "God is dead, hence, man is free."

Neither theologians nor the founders of religious movements ever thought that if you accept God as Creator, you destroy all the dignity of consciousness, freedom and love. You deprive a person of responsibility and freedom. You reduce all of existence to the whim of some strange guy called God.

However, Nietzsche's statement is only one side of the coin. He is absolutely right, but only as far as this side of the coin is concerned. He made a very important and significant statement, but he forgot one thing, which was inevitable because his statement is based on rationality, logic and intelligence, and not on meditation.

Man is free, but free For what? If there is no God and man is free, this means that man can now do whatever he wants: both good and bad; no one will judge him, no one will forgive him. Such freedom would simply be licentiousness.

Friedrich Nietzsche knew nothing about meditation - this is the other side of the coin. Man is free, but his freedom can bring him joy and bliss only if he is immersed in meditation. Take God away from man - this is completely normal, he represented a huge danger to human freedom - but give him meaning and significance, creativity, receptivity, a path to knowledge of the eternal being. Zen is the other side of the coin.

There is no God in Zen, and that is the beauty of it. But Zen has tremendous knowledge about how to transform your consciousness, how to make you so aware that you cannot commit evil. This is not an order from the outside, it is an impulse from your innermost being. Once you know your deepest essence, once you realize that you are one with the cosmos - and the cosmos was not created, it existed and will exist forever - once you realize your inner light, your inner Gautama Buddha, you cannot do nothing bad, you cannot commit evil, you cannot sin.

Shortly before his death, Friedrich Nietzsche almost completely lost his mind. He was hospitalized and kept in a psychiatric hospital. What happened to this giant of thought? He concluded, “God is dead,” but that is a negative conclusion. He became free, but his freedom turned out to be meaningless. There was no joy in it, because it was only freedom from God, but For what? Freedom has two sides: “from” and “for”. The other side was missing, and it drove Nietzsche crazy.

Emptiness always drives people crazy. We need some kind of foundation, finding a center, some kind of connection with existence. God is dead and your connection with existence is severed. God is dead and you are uprooted. And a person, just like a tree, cannot live without roots.

God didn't really exist, but he was a good consolation. Although he was a deception, he filled the inner world of people. After all, even a lie, if repeated thousands of times over thousands of years, becomes almost true. God was a great consolation for people in their fear, in their horror of aging and death, of what awaits them after death - of the unknown darkness. Although God was a lie, he was a tremendous comfort to people. You must understand that lies can truly be comforting. Moreover, a lie is more pleasant than the truth.

They say that Gautama Buddha wrote the following words: “Truth is bitter in the beginning and sweet in the end, and lies are sweet in the beginning and bitter in the end.” A lie is bitter when it is discovered. Then it becomes terribly bitter because all this time your parents, teachers, priests and so-called leaders have deceived you. You were constantly deceived.

This disappointment leads you to stop trusting anyone at all. “You can’t trust anyone...” The result is a vacuum.

So, at the end of his life, Nietzsche not only went crazy, his condition was an inevitable consequence of his negative mental attitude. The mind can only be negative: it can argue, criticize, be sarcastic; but he is not able to nourish you. A negative point of view cannot serve as a support for you. Nietzsche lost God, lost consolation. He was free to go crazy.

This did not only happen to Friedrich Nietzsche, so it cannot be said that there was just one such accident. So many great thinkers ended up in mental hospitals or committed suicide because it is impossible to live in negative darkness. Everyone needs light and a positive, life-affirming experience of truth. Nietzsche destroyed the light and created a vacuum for himself and his followers.

If deep inside you feel a vacuum, a completely meaningless emptiness, then you owe it to Nietzsche. Based on Nietzsche's negative approach to life, an entire philosophical school grew up in the West.

Søren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Marcel, Jaspers, Martin Heidegger - all the great philosophers of the first half of the 20th century - spoke of meaninglessness, pain, suffering, anxiety, fear, horror and longing. This philosophical movement was called existentialism in the West. But this is not existentialism, but anti-existentialism. It destroys everything that gave you comfort.

I agree with such destruction because what gave man comfort was a lie. God, heaven, hell are all fictions created for the comfort of man. It’s good that they are destroyed, but at the same time the person remains in a complete vacuum. Existentialism is born from this vacuum, which is why it speaks exclusively about the meaninglessness of existence: “Life has no meaning.” He does not talk about your importance: “You are an accident. Whether you exist or not is indifferent to existence.” And yet these people call their philosophy existentialism. They should call it "randomism." You are not needed; you appeared completely by accident somewhere on the outskirts of existence. God has made you a puppet, and these philosophers, from Nietzsche to Jean-Paul Sartre, are making you an accident.

However, a person must necessarily be connected with existence. He must take root in it, because only when he is deeply rooted in existence will he blossom into millions of flowers and become a buddha, and his life will no longer be meaningless. Then his life will overflow with meaning, significance, bliss; it will turn into a permanent holiday.

But the so-called existentialists have come to the conclusion that you are not needed, that your life is meaningless and stupid. Creation doesn't need you at all!

So, I want to finish the work that Nietzsche began, because it is not finished. In this form, it will lead all of humanity to madness, just as it led Nietzsche to madness in his time. Without God you are, of course, free - but for what? You are left empty-handed. Before this, you were, in fact, empty-handed, because they were filled with lies. Now you are very clearly aware that your hands are empty and you have nowhere to go.

I heard this story about a very famous atheist. He died, and his wife, before laying him in the coffin, dressed him in his best suit, best shoes and most expensive tie. She wanted to give him a grand farewell, to say goodbye to him properly. He was dressed as never before in his life.

Friends and neighbors came to the funeral. And one woman said: “Well, wow! So dressed up, and nowhere to go.”

This is exactly how any negative philosophy leaves all of humanity: beautiful and smart, but with nowhere to go! This situation leads to madness.

It was not by chance that Friedrich Nietzsche went crazy; it was a natural consequence of his negative philosophy. That's why I call this series of conversations: "God is Dead, Now Zen is the Only Living Truth."

As for God, in this I completely agree with Nietzsche, but I want to complement his statement; he himself was not able to do this. He was not awakened, he was not enlightened.

Gautama Buddha also had no God, just like Mahavira, but they did not go mad. All the Zen masters and all the great Tao masters - Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Li Tzu - none of them went crazy, although they did not have God. They had neither hell nor heaven. What's the difference? Why didn't Gautama Buddha go crazy?

And not only Gautama Buddha. Over twenty-five centuries, hundreds of his followers achieved enlightenment, and they did not even say a word about God. They don't even say that there is no God, because it makes no sense: they are not atheists. I'm not an atheist, but I'm not a theist either. There is simply no God, therefore there can be no talk of either atheism or theism.

I am not crazy. You yourself are witnesses to this. The absence of God does not create a vacuum in me, on the contrary, thanks to this I have acquired the dignity of a free individual - free to become a Buddha. This is the highest goal of freedom. If freedom does not become the flowering of your awareness, if the experience of freedom does not lead you to Eternity, does not lead you to your origins, to the cosmos and existence, you will go crazy. And until then, your life will have no meaning and no meaning, no matter what you do.

Existence, according to the so-called existentialists, followers of Friedrich Nietzsche, is completely unreasonable. They got rid of God and think - this is quite logical - that since there is no God, then existence is also dead, there is no mind or life in it. Previously, God was life and consciousness. Previously, God was the meaning and the very essence of our existence. Since God is no more, the whole existence becomes soulless, life becomes a by-product of matter. Therefore, when you die, you will die completely and completely, and there will be nothing left after you. And it doesn’t matter at all whether you did evil or good. Existence is absolutely indifferent; you don’t care about it at all. God used to take care of you. Once God was rejected, there was a deep alienation between you and existence. There is no connection between you, you are not interested in existence, it is not Maybe is interested in you because it is no longer conscious. It is no longer a sentient universe, it is just dead matter, just like you. And the life you perceive is just a consequence.

The effect disappears as soon as the elements that create it are separated. For example, according to some religions, man consists of five elements: earth, air, fire, water and ether. Once these elements are combined, life arises as a consequence. When these elements are separated, death occurs and life disappears.

To make it clear to you, let me give you this example: when you start learning to ride a bicycle, you constantly fall. I also learned this, but I didn’t fall, because at first I watched other students and tried to understand why they fell. They fell because they lacked self-confidence. It takes a tremendous amount of balance to stay on two wheels, and if you start to wobble... it's like walking on a tightrope. If you doubt for even a second, two wheels will not support you. You can only balance on your wheels at a certain speed, and a beginner always drives very slowly. And this is obvious and reasonable - beginners should not drive fast.

I watched all my friends learn to ride a bike, and they kept asking me, “Why don’t you learn too?”

I answered: “First I need to observe. I’m trying to understand why you fall and why you stop falling after a few days.” Once I realized why this was happening, I got on my bike and rode as fast as I could!

All my friends were amazed. They said: “We have never seen a newbie go so fast. A beginner must fall several times, only then will he learn to maintain balance.”

I said, “I watched and understood the secret. You just lack confidence and understanding that in order for the bike to move, you need a certain speed. It’s impossible to sit on a stationary bike without falling, you need acceleration, and to do this you have to pedal.”

Once I realized what the problem was, I got on the bike and pedaled as hard as I could. The whole village was alarmed: “How is it possible, he doesn’t know how to ride a bicycle, but he rushes at such speed!”

I didn't know how to stop: I thought that if I stopped, the bike would immediately fall off. So I had to go to a place near the railway station, almost three miles from my house, where there was a huge bodhi tree. I ran these three miles at such a speed that people parted and moved aside. They said: "He's gone crazy!"

But my madness was well founded. I drove straight up to the tree because I knew it was hollow inside. I drove my front wheel into it and thus was able to stop and not fall.

One of my fellow villagers, who was working in the field, saw this. He said: “Strange! And if there were no such tree, how would you stop?

I replied, “Now I have learned to stop because I just did it; I won't need the tree anymore. But this was my first experience. Before this, I had not seen others stop, I only saw them fall. So I had no experience stopping and I was racing as hard as I could to get to that tree.” It was a giant tree, and one part of it was completely hollow, so I knew that if I drove my front wheel into it, it would support the bike and I could stop. But once I stopped, I learned how to do it.

When I decided to learn to drive a car, my teacher was a man named Majid, he was a Muslim. He was one of the best drivers in the city and loved me very much. By the way, he was the one who chose my first car. So he told me:

I'll teach you.

I don't like being taught. “You just drive very slowly so I can watch and observe,” I replied.

What do you mean?

I can only learn by observing. I don't need a teacher!

But it's dangerous! - he exclaimed. “A bicycle is one thing: in the worst case, you could hurt yourself or hurt someone else, and that’s all.” But a car is a very dangerous thing.

And I am a dangerous person. Just drive the car slowly and tell me everything: where is the gas pedal, where is the brake. Then you will drive slowly, and I will walk alongside and watch what you are doing.

If you want it so much, I can do it, but I am very afraid for you. If you do the same thing you once did with a bicycle...

That's why I try to observe as closely as possible.

Once I realized what was going on, I asked him to get out of the car. And I did exactly the same as I once did with the bicycle. I drove very quickly. Majid, my teacher, ran after me and shouted: “Not so fast!” There were no speed limit signs in that city, because in India you can only drive on the streets at a speed of fifty-five kilometers per hour; and there is no need to put up signs everywhere that the speed is limited to fifty-five kilometers per hour, because it is impossible to exceed this speed anywhere.

The poor guy was very scared. He ran and ran after me. He was a very tall man, a first-class runner, and had every chance of becoming the Indian champion or even taking part in the Olympics. He tried his best to keep up with me, but I was soon out of his sight.

When I returned, he was praying under the tree for my salvation. When I approached him, he jumped up, completely forgetting about prayer.

Don't worry. I learned to drive a car. What have you been doing?

I ran after you, but very soon you disappeared from sight. Then I thought that all I can do is pray to God to help you, because you don’t know how to drive at all. You got behind the wheel for the first time and sped off to an unknown place. How did you turn around? Where did you turn back?

I had no idea how to turn around, because you drove straight the whole time, and I walked next to you. So I had to travel around the whole city. I had no idea how to turn around or what signals to give because you never gave any signals. But I managed. I drove through the whole city so fast that everyone gave way to me. So I went back.

- Khuda hafiz,” he said, which means “God saved you.”

“God has nothing to do with it,” I replied.

Once you understand the need to maintain a balance between the negative and the positive, you will become rooted in existence. One extreme is to believe in God, the other is not to believe in God, and you must be exactly in the middle, maintaining complete balance. Then neither atheism nor theism matters anymore. But through balance there is a new light, a new joy, a new bliss, a new understanding, not from the mind. This understanding, which is not of the mind, allows you to realize that everything that exists is incredibly intelligent. It is not only alive, but also sensitive and intelligent.

Once you reach a state of balance, silence and tranquility in your being, doors that have been closed by your thoughts open with ease and a clear understanding of all existence comes to you. You are not an accident. You are needed by existence. Without you, there will be something missing in existence, and no one can replace you.

Understanding that you will be missed by existence will give you a sense of self-worth. Stars, Sun, Moon, trees, birds and earth - the whole universe will feel that some place remains empty without you, and no one but you can't fill it. The feeling that you are connected to existence, that it cares about you, will fill you with boundless joy and satisfaction. Once you are cleansed, you will see endless love pouring into you from all sides.

You are at the highest stage of the evolution of existence, the mind, and existence depends on you. If you outgrow your mind and its understanding and reach the understanding of no-mind, there will be a celebration for existence: another person has reached the top. One piece of existence suddenly rose to the highest potential of every person's inner potential.

There is a parable according to which on the day when Gautama Buddha became enlightened, the tree under which he was sitting suddenly began to sway its branches without any wind. He was very surprised, because there was no wind, and not a single tree or leaf moved around. But the tree under which he was sitting swayed as if it was dancing. The tree has no legs, it is chained to the ground by its roots, but it can still demonstrate its joy.

A very strange phenomenon: some chemical elements that contribute to the development of your intellect and mind are found in large quantities in the bodhi tree. So it is no coincidence that the tree under which Gautama Buddha became enlightened is named after him. Bodhi means enlightenment. And scientists have discovered that this tree is smarter than all other trees in the world. It is simply overflowing with chemical elements responsible for mental development.

It is said that when Manjushri, one of the Buddha's closest disciples, became enlightened, the tree under which he was sitting began showering him with flowers, although trees do not bloom at this time of year.

Perhaps these are just parables. But they indicate that we are inseparable from existence, that even trees and stones share our joy with us, that our enlightenment becomes a holiday for all existence.

It is meditation that fills your inner being and that vacuum that was previously filled with lies called God and other fictions.

If you stay with negativity, sooner or later you will go crazy, because you have already lost touch with existence, your life has lost its meaning, and you do not have the slightest chance of finding it. You have gotten rid of lies, which is very good, but it is not enough to find the truth.

Drop the lies and try to go within and find the truth. This is the whole art of Zen. That's why I called the series of talks: "God is Dead, Now Zen is the Only Living Truth." If God is dead and you have not had the Zen experience, you will go mad. Your mental health now depends solely on Zen, for this is the only way to comprehend the truth. Only then will you become one with existence, you will no longer be a puppet, you will be a master.

A person who knows that he is deeply connected with existence can never harm it, will never go against another life. This is simply impossible. He can only shower on you as much bliss, grace and mercy as you are willing to accept. Its sources are inexhaustible. When you find your inexhaustible source of life and bliss, then it will not matter at all whether you have God or not, whether hell and heaven exist. It won't make any difference.

When religious people begin to study Zen, they are extremely amazed because there is nothing in it that they were taught before. It has strange dialogues in which No There is no place for God, no heaven, no hell. This is a scientific religion. The search for Zen is not based on faith, but on experience. Just as science relies objectively on experiment, Zen subjectively relies on experience. Science is immersed in the outer world, Zen in the inner.

Nietzsche had no idea how to enter into the inner world. The West is not a suitable place for people like Friedrich Nietzsche. If he lived in the East, he would be a master, a saint. He would belong to the same category of people, to the same family as the Buddhas.

But, unfortunately, the West did not learn a lesson from Nietzsche's fate. He continues to persist in working on the outside world. Just one tenth of his energy would be enough to find inner truth. Even Albert Einstein died in deep disappointment. His disappointment was so great that before his death, when he was asked: “If you were born again, what would you like to be?”, he replied: “Anything but a physicist. I'd rather be a plumber."

The greatest physicist in the world was dying in such disappointment that he wanted nothing to do with physics and science in general. He would prefer to have a simple profession, such as a plumber. But this won't help either. If physics did not help, if mathematics did not help, if such a giant of thought as Albert Einstein died in disappointment, the work of a plumber will not help. The person still remains in the outside world. A scientist may be very much absorbed in it, a plumber less so, but still he works outside. Being a plumber would not have given Einstein what he needed. He needed the science of meditation. It is in its silence that meaning, meaning and immeasurable joy blossom from the realization that your birth is not accidental.

I am teaching you true existentialism, and what the West calls existentialism is just “accidentalism.” I teach you how to get in touch with existence, how to find the place where you are connected, connected with existence. Where do you get life from every moment? Where does your mind come from? If existence is unreasonable, how You can you be reasonable? Where does your intelligence come from?

When you saw a rose bloom, did you ever think that this color, this tenderness, all this beauty was once hidden in a seed? But the seed by itself cannot become a rose; it needs the support of existence - earth, water, sun. Then the seed will disappear into the ground and a rose bush will begin to grow. He needs air, water, earth, sun, moon. All this transforms the seed, which was previously like a dead stone. Suddenly there comes a transformation, a metamorphosis. These flowers, these colors, this beauty, this fragrance can only appear from a seed if they are already present in existence. They can be hidden, hidden in the seed. But if something comes into being, it means that it already existed before - as a potential possibility.

You have a mind...

I told you the story of Ramakrishna and Keshav Chandra Sen. Keshav Chandra Sen was one of the smartest people of his time. On his intellectual philosophy brahmasamaj, which means "society of God", he founded a religion. Hundreds and thousands of the smartest people became his followers. He was very surprised why this uneducated Ramakrishna, who had not even completed primary school - in India, primary school, the very first stage of education, includes four years of study, and he studied only two - why did this idiot attract thousands of people? This thought haunted Keshav Chandra Sen.

In the end, he decided to go and defeat Ramakrishna; he did not even think that this man could not be defeated in an argument. He simply couldn't imagine it. This idiot from the village gathers thousands of people around him every day! People come from far and wide to see him and touch his feet!

Keshav Chandra, through his followers, informed Ramakrishna: “I am coming on such and such a day to call you to account on all points of your faith. Get ready!

Ramakrishna's disciples were very afraid. They knew that Keshav Chandra was a great logician; poor Ramakrishna will not be able to answer any question. But Ramakrishna was happy and began to dance. He said:

I've been waiting for it for a long time. When Keshav Chandra comes, it will be a day of great joy!

What are you saying? - the students exclaimed. - It will be a day of great sorrow, because you will not be able to argue with him.

Wait. Who's going to argue with him? I don't need to argue with him. “Let him come,” answered Ramakrishna.

But the students still continued to tremble with fear, because they were very afraid that their master would be defeated, crushed. They knew Keshav Chandra, at that time he had no equal in intelligence in the whole country.

Keshav Chandra came with one hundred of his best disciples so that they could witness this argument, this debate, this duel. Ramakrishna met him on the road, quite far from the temple in which he lived. He hugged Keshav Chandra, which embarrassed him a little. Then his embarrassment continued to grow.

Ramakrishna took him by the hand and led him to the temple. He said:

I've been waiting for you for a long time. Why didn't you come earlier?

Strange man, he doesn't seem to be afraid at all. You understand? I came to argue with you!

Yes, of course,” answered Ramakrishna.

They sat down in a very beautiful place under a tree, near a temple on the banks of the Ganges.

“Begin,” said Ramakrishna.

What are you saying about God?

Should I say something about God? Can't you see it in my eyes?

Keshav Chandra was a little puzzled:

What kind of argument is this?

Can't you feel God in my hand? Sit closer, son.

What kind of argument is this?

Keshav Chandra has taken part in many debates, he has defeated many great pundits, and this hillbilly... In Hindi, "idiot" is ganwar, but the word actually means “village dweller.” Saop- village, ganwar means "from the village." But ganwar also means “stupid”, “mentally retarded”, “idiot”.

If you understand the language of my eyes, if you understand the energy of my hand, it proves that existence is intelligent. Where do you get your mind from?

This was a serious argument. Then Ramakrishna said:

If you have this great mind - I know that you are a very smart person, I have always loved you - tell me where it came from? If existence is devoid of intelligence, you cannot have it either. Where can it come from? You yourself are proof that existence is rational, that's what God means to me. For me, God is not someone sitting on a cloud. To me, God means that existence is intelligent. Our universe is intelligent, we belong to it, and it needs us. She rejoices with us, celebrates with us, dances with us. Have you seen my dance?

And Ramakrishna began to dance.

What is this? - exclaimed Keshav Chandra.

But Ramakrishna danced so beautifully! He was a good dancer because he used to dance in the temple from morning to evening - without a coffee break! He danced and danced until he fell to the ground.

So he started dancing with such joy, with such grace that suddenly a transformation took place in Keshav Chandra. He forgot his logic, he saw the beauty of this man, he felt a joy that he had never felt before.

All his intellect, all his arguments were superficial, and inside there was complete emptiness. This same person was overwhelmed. He touched Ramakrishna's feet and said:

I'm sorry. I was deeply mistaken. I didn't know anything, I was just philosophizing. You know All and don't say a word.

“I will forgive you only on one condition,” answered Ramakrishna.

I'm ready for any your terms.

The condition is this: from time to time you must come to me, challenge me to a duel, discuss and argue with me.

This is what mystics do. Keshav Chandra was crushed. He became a completely different person, he began to come to Ramakrishna every day. Soon his disciples abandoned him: “He has gone mad. I got infected from that madman. There was one crazy person, now there are two. They even dance together."

Keshav Chandra, who was previously a miserable person, who grumbled and complained constantly because he lived in negativity, suddenly blossomed, joy and a new flavor appeared in his life. He completely forgot about logic. Ramakrishna helped him get a taste of what cannot be comprehended by the mind.

Zen is a way to go beyond the mind. Therefore, we will talk about both God and Zen together. You need to reject God and embrace Zen with your whole being. We need to destroy the lies and reveal the truth. That's why I decided to talk about God and Zen together. God is a lie, Zen is the truth.

Now - your questions...

First question:

Is God really dead? The very thought of his death inspires great anxiety, fear, horror and melancholy.

From my point of view, God never existed at all, so how can he die? First of all, he was never born. It was invented by priests, and it was for these reasons that people experienced anxiety, fear, horror and melancholy.

When there was neither light nor fire - just imagine that time: wild animals prowl around, dark night, no fire, terrible cold, no clothes, and wild animals roam in the night in search of food, people hide from them in caves or sit in the trees... During the day, they can at least see the lion approaching and try to escape from it. But at night they are completely at the mercy of wild animals.

Then people discovered that time comes and somehow they grow old and one day someone dies. They couldn't understand what was happening. Just now he was talking, breathing, walking, and was completely fine. And suddenly he no longer breathes or speaks. This shocked primitive man so much that death became taboo: one could not talk about it. Even talking about death inspired fear - the fear that sooner or later you, too, would stand in this line and it would become shorter and shorter with every second. One person dies and you come closer to death; one more dies, and you are even closer to death.

Thus, even talking about death became taboo, and not only for simple primitive people, but also for the most educated. The founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, hated the word “death.” No one was even allowed to utter this word in his presence, because the mere mention of death could cause him to have a fit, lose consciousness and foam. So great was the fear of the man who founded psychoanalysis.

One day, Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung, another great psychoanalyst, traveled together to America to lecture on psychoanalysis at various universities. While on the deck of the ship, Carl Gustav Jung mentioned death. Sigmund Freud immediately fell to the deck. It was for this reason that Sigmund Freud expelled Jung from psychoanalysis, and he had to found his own school. He called it analytical psychology. Just a different name, but the essence is the same. But the reason for his exclusion from the ranks of psychoanalysts was the mention of death.

Two things have become taboo in our world, and these two things are two poles of the same energy. One of them is sex: “Don’t talk about it,” the second is death: “Don’t talk about it.” Both phenomena are interconnected: in the beginning - sex, in the end - death; sex brings death.

There is only one living organism that does not die, and that is the amoeba. You know this very well - Pune is full of amoebas. I specifically chose this place because amoebas are immortal creatures. And their immortality is due to the fact that they are not sexual. They are not the result of sex, so there is no death for them. Sex and death are deeply intertwined. Try to understand this.

Sex gives you life, and life ultimately ends in death. Sex is the beginning, death is the end. In the middle is what is called life.

Amoeba is an asexual creature, the only monk in the world who has taken a vow of celibacy. She reproduces completely differently than humans. God should be infinitely pleased with amoebas (if there is one), they are all saints. They just constantly eat, get fat and at some point split in two. Once the amoeba becomes so large that it can no longer move, it divides into two parts.

This is another way of reproduction. But since it is not associated with sex, there is neither female nor male. Both amoebas begin to feed again. Soon they will become large again and separate. Thus, they reproduce in a “mathematical way.” There is no death, an amoeba never dies - unless it is killed! She can live forever if doctors don't kill her. The immortality of amoebas is due to the fact that they are not a consequence of sex. Any animal born as a result of sex will inevitably die; its body cannot be immortal.

So, There are two taboos in the world: sex and death. Both are hidden.

I was condemned all over the world just because I openly talk about taboos, because I want to know everything about life - from sex to death. Only then can sex and death be overcome. Once you gain understanding, you can begin to approach what is beyond sex and death. This is your eternal life, your life energy, pure energy.

As a result of sex, your body is born, but not you.

As a result of death, your body dies, but not you.

All over the world, religions and especially priests of all religious denominations have always exploited human fear, consoling people with God - a fiction, a lie, which, at least temporarily, covered their wound. “Don't be afraid, God is taking care of you. Don't worry, God is there and everything is okay. All you have to do is believe in God and his representatives, the priests, and believe in the scriptures that God has given to the world. All you have to do is believe." This faith covered your anxiety, fear, horror and melancholy.

Therefore, when you hear that God is dead, the very thought of his death is alarming. This means your wound is opening. But a covered wound does not mean a healed wound; in fact, in order to heal a wound, it must be opened. Only then, under the sun's rays, in the open air, will it begin to heal. A wound should never be bandaged because once you cover it, you forget about it. You want to forget about her. Once the wound is bandaged, neither others nor you can see it. And under the bandage the wound turns into cancer.

Wounds should be treated without bandaging. Bandaging won't help. God was the bandage, which is why the very thought of God being dead causes fear. Whatever you felt: acute anxiety, fear, horror, melancholy, the priests covered it all up with the word “God.”

But by doing this, they hindered man's evolution to the level of Buddha, they interfered with the healing process, and did not allow man to seek the truth. The lie was presented as truth, and, naturally, you didn’t have to look for it, you already had it.

It is absolutely necessary that God be dead. But I want you to understand mine point of view. It's good that Friedrich Nietzsche said that God is dead. I declare that he was never born. This is a fiction, an invention, not a discovery. Do you know the difference between an invention and a discovery? Discovery is about truth; invention is your doing. This is a man-made fiction.

Of course, this is a consolation, but consolation is not the truth! Consolation is opium. It does not allow you to see reality, and life passes you by very quickly - seventy years fly by.

Anyone who imposes any belief on you is your enemy, because the belief becomes a blindfold over your eyes and you do not see the truth. The very desire to seek the truth disappears.

But in the beginning, when you are deprived of faith, it hurts a lot. Fear and anxiety that you have suppressed for millennia, but which are still alive, immediately come to the surface. God cannot save you from them, only the search and experience of the truth - and not faith - can heal your wounds and heal you, make you a whole person. And a holistic person for me is a holy person.

So, if there is no God and you begin to feel fear and horror, anxiety and anguish, it simply indicates that God is not a cure. He was just a trick to keep your eyes closed. It was a way of blinding, to keep you in darkness and to give you hope that after death there would be heaven. Why after death? Because you are afraid of death; the priest talks about heaven after death to calm your fears. But fear does not disappear, it is simply suppressed and goes into the subconscious. And the deeper it goes into the subconscious, the more difficult it is to get rid of it.

Therefore, I want to destroy all your beliefs, all your theological theories, all your religions. I want to open all your wounds to heal them. The real cure is not belief, but meditation.

Once you get rid of God, of course you become free. But as a result of such freedom, you are filled with anxiety, fear, horror and melancholy. If you don't go deep within yourself to find your true self, your real face, your buddha, you will tremble with fear, your whole life will be ruined, and you may go mad like Friedrich Nietzsche.

And he is not the only one who has lost his mind. Many philosophers have committed suicide because they discovered that life is meaningless; they never tried to look inside themselves. They learned that life has no meaning or significance... so why continue to live?

One of the greatest novels, perhaps the greatest novel of all time, is The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. It is much more important to read it than the Bible, the Koran, the Gita individually, or all these books together. "The Brothers Karamazov" reveals the deepest understanding of the essence of so many things... But Fyodor Dostoevsky went crazy.

He wrote the greatest novel in the world, but he himself lived a very unhappy, sad and fearful life. There was no joy in him, but he had an amazing ability to penetrate - intellectual penetration - into any problem that a person inevitably faces in his life. He touched on all existing problems. The Brothers Karamazov is such a great novel that no one reads it today; people love to watch TV. The novel is about a thousand pages long and full of heated debate.

The younger brother - there are only three brothers - is a very pious, religious and God-fearing young man, he wants to become a monk and live in a monastery. The second brother is categorically against God, against religion, and he constantly argues about this with his younger brother. He says, “If I ever meet God, the first thing I will do is give him my ticket to heaven and say, ‘Keep it. I don't need your eternal life, it's meaningless. Show me where the exit is, I don't want to be in this world anymore. I want to come out of existence; death seems calmer to me than your so-called life. Take your ticket back, I don't want to take this train anymore. You never asked me, it's against my wishes. You forced me onto this train and now I am suffering needlessly. I don't have freedom of choice. Why did you give me life?’”

This is what he was going to ask if he met God: “On what grounds did you give me life? You created me without my permission. This is real slavery. And one day, without asking, you will kill me. You have placed in me all kinds of illnesses and all kinds of sins for which I am blamed, because of you I have become a sinner.”

Who put sex in you? It must be God who created man and who told Adam and Eve to go into the world and multiply and have as many children as possible. Obviously he made them sexy, he created a couple.

Ivan Karamazov, the atheist brother, says: “If I find him...” - who knows, maybe he is still alive, and Friedrich Nietzsche was wrong - “... I will kill him. I will be the first to free all humanity from this dictator, who, on the one hand, instills sex, violence, anger, greed, ambition and all kinds of other poisons, and on the other hand, his intermediaries hammer into you that sex is a sin, that you must remain celibate. Strange".

George Gurdjieff said: “All religions are against God.” This statement has deep meaning. Gurdjieff was not the kind of person who makes any statements without deep, serious understanding. When he says that all religions are against God, he means that God gives you sex and religions teach you celibacy. What do they mean by this? God gives you greed, and religions teach you to be non-greedy. God gives you violence and religions teach you non-violence. God gives you anger and religions say no to anger. This is a clear argument that all religions are against God.

Ivan Karamazov says: “If I meet him somewhere, I will kill him, but before I kill him, I will ask him all these questions.”

The entire novel is a tense argument. The third brother is actually not a real brother. He was born from a woman who was not their father's wife, she was just a servant. The third brother is kept away from society, so he grows up mentally retarded. He is treated like an animal: he eats, sleeps and lives in a dark closet in the huge Karamazov mansion. Naturally, his life is completely meaningless.

Ivan Karamazov says: “Think about our half-brother, the illegitimate one, God created him too. What is the meaning of his life? He can't even go out into the sun, into the air. Our father keeps him locked in the dark. No one comes to him, no one even greets him. He doesn't have a single friend in the whole wide world. He doesn't know anyone. He can't even speak properly because he's never talked to anyone. He lives like an animal: eats, drinks, sleeps; eats, drinks, sleeps... He will never know a woman, he will never know love. What will happen to his sexual instinct?

The novel has a very deep discussion of all the problems that any intelligent person faces. Ivan brings up all these issues: “What do you think God will say about my half-brother? What is the meaning of his life? Why did he create it this way? If anyone is to blame, it is himself, and I am going to take revenge on him. Just let me find him! And I hope,” says Ivan Karamazov, “that Nietzsche is wrong, and he is alive.” Otherwise I won't be able to kill him. I want to kill him to free all humanity from him.”

But once humanity becomes free... It will be freedom for what? For fear? For death? For suicide? For theft? Freedom for what?

One existential novel tells how a young man ends up in court for killing a stranger on the beach - a man whose face he had never even seen. He came up from behind this man, who was sitting and watching the sunset, stuck a knife in his back and killed him. He didn't even see who it was.

It was a very strange thing. If there is no hostility, anger, or revenge, then usually they do not kill. But they didn't even know each other, they weren't even friends. You can kill a friend - friends kill each other all the time - but he wasn't even a friend, let alone an enemy? Someone can become your enemy only after they have become your friend. This is a necessary condition: first a friend, then an enemy. A person cannot immediately become your enemy. This requires some kind of acquaintance, friendship.

The court was at a loss. The judge asked him: “Why did you kill a stranger whose face you did not see and whose name you did not know?”

The defendant replied: “It doesn’t matter. I was very bored and wanted to do something so that my photograph could appear in all the newspapers. It happened - I'm not so bored now. One way or another, life has no meaning. What was this idiot doing? What would he have done if I hadn't killed him? He would do the same thing he had done many times before. So what's all the fuss about? Why was I brought to court?

CHAPTER 4 NEW MAN What do Drop and I understand by such a loud brand “new man”? Since school, we have heard about evolution, scientific and technological progress. And, if the second corresponds, with great stretch (caused by the service of science to violence) to reality, then

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