Page 125 - Eclipse of God

98 Chapter 6

same, which he himself calls “the extremest form of nihilism”
and the eternalization of the meaningless.
Nietzsche knew, so basically as not many modern thinkers
before him, that the absoluteness of ethical values is rooted in
our relationship to the Absolute. And he understood this hour
of human history as that in which “the belief in God and in
an essential moral order can no longer be held.” His decisive
utterance is the cry “God is dead.” But he could bear this proc-
lamation only as a turning- point, not as an end- point. Time
and again he seeks a conception that will show a way out that
might save God for those who had become godless. “Religions
are wrecked by their belief in morality,” he says. “The Christian
moral God is untenable.” But this does not yet lead to simple
atheism “as though no other kinds of gods could exist.” From
within man himself must come forth, if not the new god him-
self, at least a valid substitute for God, the “Superman.” But
this is at the same time the measure of the new, life- affirming
values; on this concept is founded the new biological scale of
values in which the values good- evil are replaced by the val-
ues strong- weak. And again Nietzsche does not notice that all
the ambiguity that has ever attached itself to the values good-
evil is fatally surpassed by the intrinsic ambiguity of the values
strong- weak. “The Sophists,” says Nietzsche, “have the courage
common to all strong spirits of knowing their immorality. The
Sophists were Greek; when Socrates and Plato took the part of
virtue and righteousness, they were Jews or I know not what.”
Nietzsche himself wanted to conquer the nihilism which he
himself had consummated; as a result he came to grief. This is
not meant in the sense in which one could say of Plato that he
came to grief because he had no success in the historical course
of events. What is meant, rather, is that in contradistinction
to the doctrine of Ideas, the “teaching of the Superman” is no
teaching at all and that in contradistinction to the value- scale