Nietzsche and Marx: Critiques of Religion and Morality

Nietzsche's Critique: Master Morality and the Death of God

Friedrich Nietzsche identifies two types of men and corresponding moralities:

• Gentlemen: In which active forces are imposed on the reactive. They possess natural moral values that promote life.
• Slaves: The opposite case. They possess a moral resentment opposing values to life.

Before Socrates, culture was Dionysian and possessed an aristocratic morality. But since Plato and Christianity, morality has become Apollonian, where slaves were led to believe the gentlemen that their values are defects. European culture is a nihilist culture, hating values that support life. As a result, God is dead; there are no spiritual values respected by society.

Christianity, Nietzsche argues, rejects all values of life, seeking its own destruction by trying to fix the world. For Nietzsche, this is the human fate: man is reactive, and even superior men only serve to prepare for the arrival of the Superman (Übermensch), a new species beyond good and evil. The Superman will triumph in the struggle against the reactive forces, transmuting values and making an unconditional affirmation of life.

Religious Alienation: Marx and Nietzsche's Critique

Nietzsche thinks that Christianity promulgates a slave morality, a nihilist morality that weakens men, making them ignore their real life in favor of institutions promising life after death.

Karl Marx also denounces religious ideology, which insists on resignation and the inevitability of evil, proposing a better life after death. Religion exerts a narcotic effect; it is the opium of the people, holding intellectually weak and alienated men within the structures of the production system (the slavery system).

Alienation is a part that has separated from a whole and acts against it. The most important forms of alienation are:

• Economic Alienation: Exemplified by surplus value (the profit generated by the worker is not returned to them).
• Social Alienation (Ideological): Religion, morality, and philosophy are ideologies that distort social reality—a mystification that tricks people trying to gain knowledge through them.

Ideologies are a form of alienated social consciousness, used as a tool by the proprietors of the means of production to prevent the transformation of property relations.