In a long riff on Nietzsche and the “death of God,” Terry Eagleton encourages us to follow the German philosopher in recognizing that you can’t ditch the divine “while still clinging to religious values”:
Reluctant atheism has a long history. Machiavelli thought that religious ideas, however vacuous, were a useful means of terrorizing and pacifying the mob. Voltaire feared infecting his own domestic servants with his impiety. Gibbon, one of the most notorious skeptics of all time, considered that the religious doctrines he despised could nonetheless prove socially useful. There is something unpleasantly disingenuous about this entire legacy. “I don’t happen to believe myself, but it is politically expedient that you should” is the catchphrase of thinkers supposedly devoted to the integrity of the intellect. One can imagine how they might react to being informed that their own most cherished convictions—civil rights, freedom of speech, democratic government and the like—were of course all nonsense, but politically convenient nonsense, and so not to be scrapped. It took the barefaced audacity of Friedrich Nietzsche to point out that the problem was less the death of God than the bad faith of Man, who in an astonishing act of cognitive dissonance had murdered his Maker but continued to protest that he was still alive. It was thus that men and women failed to see in the divine obsequies an opportunity to remake themselves.
Meanwhile, Peter Watson, author of the recently published The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God, explains why he chose to begin his account of atheism with Nietzsche:
In 1882 Nietzsche declared, roundly, in strikingly clear language, that “God is dead”, adding that we had killed him. And this was a mere twenty years after Darwin’s Origin of Species, which is rightly understood as the greatest blow to Christianity. But Nietzsche’s work deserves recognition as a near-second. Darwinism was assimilated more quickly in Germany than in Britain, because the idea of evolution was especially prevalent there. Darwin remarks in one of his letters that his ideas had gone down better in Germany than anywhere else. And the history of Kulturkampf in Germany – the battle between Protestantism and Catholicism – meant that religion was under attack anyway, by its own adherents. Other people responded to Nietzsche more than to anyone else – Ibsen, for example, W. B. Yeats, Robert Graves, James Joyce. In Germany there was the phenomenon of the Nietzschean generations – young people who lived his philosophy in specially-created communities. And people responded to Nietzsche because, his writing style was so pithy, to the point, memorable, and crystal clear. It is Nietzsche who tells us plainly, eloquently, that there is nothing external to, or higher than, life itself, no “beyond” or “above”, no transcendence and nothing metaphysical. This was dangerous thinking at the time, and has remained threatening for many people.
The Dish’s recent thread on atheism is here.
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