Nietzsche's Philosophy: Nihilism, Death of God, and the Superman

Nietzsche's philosophy begins with the cultural diagnosis of nihilism. This nihilism is the historical event that Nietzsche called the "death of God."

From Socrates and Plato onward, the Western tradition understood that true reality, the source of meaning and intelligibility, lies in a parallel world. For Plato, this is the world of forms, and Christianity, as the heir of Platonism, calls it the "beyond."

This world of forms, or the "beyond," acted as a standard and measure of truth and goodness, the source of all that is true and good in the world. According to Nietzsche, modernity has brought about a progressive destruction of that order that gave meaning to the supersensible reality from Plato. Modern science has rendered any concept of God superfluous to explain nature, which is now understood as a great machine running through purely mechanical causes. Furthermore, the Enlightenment has provided an explanation of the moral world that gives itself the standard of action and, consequently, has freed itself from the mandate of the Decalogue.

The result of this process is what Nietzsche called the "death of God," that is, the awareness of the operability of the concept of God and the inability to continue believing in the ideals bequeathed to us by tradition. However, the collapse of the intelligible world of God implies the disappearance of that which gave meaning and substance to reality. What has emerged with the death of God is nonsense, the awareness that not only God but also truth, morality, reason, and, generally, the whole system of values and ideals of Western culture have been revealed as void. This situation is what Nietzsche called nihilism.

But the announcement of nihilism contains the need for its overcoming. With nihilism, a period in human history has come to an end. Man is something that must be overcome because there is nothing but a rope stretched over the abyss that separates the animal from the Übermensch (Superman). The Übermensch is, for Nietzsche, the man who receives the starting point of a new humanity. A Übermensch who overcomes that old separation of humanity that has died with God and that is through the creation of a new system of values as an investment or revaluation of Platonic ideals, involving the opening of man to life, a life that means as the rule of the will to power.