Explain t shirt and god said... ...and then there was light
The archetype of the individual who can do this has a name that has also reached our popular consciousness: the Übermensch. Of course, as Nietzsche saw this coming, he offered us a way out: The creation of our own values as individuals the creation of a meaning of life by those who live it. Although he may have rejected those ideologies, he no doubt would have acknowledged the need for the meaning they provided.
Communism, Nazism, nationalism, and the other ideologies that spread across the continent in the wake of World War I sought to provide man with meaning and value, as a worker, as an Aryan, or some other greater deed in a similar way as to how Christianity could provide meaning as a child of God, and give life on Earth value by its relation to heaven. Nietzsche would not have been surprised by the events that plagued Europe in the 20th century. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism… For some time now our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe.” His fear of nihilism and our reaction to it was shown in The Will to Power, in which he wrote: “What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. Europe no longer needed God as the source for all morality, value, or order in the universe philosophy and science were capable of doing that for us. This increasing secularization of thought in the West led the philosopher to realize that not only was God dead but also that human beings had killed him with their scientific revolution, their desire to better understand the world. Philosophy had shown that governments no longer needed to be organized around the idea of divine right to be legitimate, but rather by the consent or rationality of the governed - that large and consistent moral theories could exist without reference to God.
After the Enlightenment, the idea of a universe that was governed by physical laws and not by divine providence had become mainstream. Nietzsche was an atheist for his adult life and so he didn’t mean that there was a God who had actually died, but rather that our idea of one had. But do we know exactly what he meant - or, perhaps more importantly, what it means for us? It is, perhaps, one of the best known statements in all of philosophy, well known even to those who have never picked up a copy of The Gay Science, the book from which it originates. It has been more than 130 years since the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche declared: “God is Dead” (or Gott ist tot, in German), giving philosophy students a collective headache that’s lasted from the 19th century until today.