“God is dead” – Nietzsche
“Nietzsche is dead” – God
The Madman – Have you not heard of the madman who in the bright morning light switched on a torch and ran on to the University Campus crying incessantly: ‘I am looking for Nietzsche! I am looking for Nietzsche!’ – As many of those who took no heed of Nietzsche were present he excited considerable laughter. Have you lost him then? said one. Did he lose his way like a child? said another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? Or emigrated? – thus they shouted and laughed. The madman sprang into their midst and pierced them with his glances. ‘Where has Nietzsche gone?’ he cried. ‘I shall tell you. We have killed him – you and I. We are all his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up his criticism? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away his thought? What where we doing when we unchained this earth from its gravity? Where is it moving now? Where are we moving now? Free from gravity are we not perpetually falling? Why do we not see that we are falling through infinite nothing? Do we imagine our treasured facts are gravity enough?! Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Have you not noticed the cold? Do you not perceive the darkness? Do you imagine our torches will us show the way? Why do we imagine a vain thing? Do you not know? Have you not heard? What in the last resort are the truths of mankind? – They are the irrefutable errors of mankind. Did we not hear anything of the noise of the gravediggers who were burying Nietzsche? Did we not smell anything of his decomposition? Scepticism decomposes too. Nietzsche is dead. Nietzsche remains dead. We have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of scepticism, console ourselves? Do we imagine we are the superman? Has Zarathustra spoken? Where is the Wiseman? Where is the writer? Where is the disputer of this world? That which was holiest and mightiest of all that we possessed has bled to death under our knives – who will wipe away the blood from us? Did we imagine Darwin and Einstein gave us the blades? Is it not yet dawning upon us that science, too, is but an interpretation and exegesis of the world made to suite us and not an explanation of the world? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games do we need to create? What great stadium can we build, what sports can we play? Is not the scale of this deed too great for us? Must we not all become Olympians simply to seem worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed, even the death of God has been wiped out! We laugh at the fundamentalists who laugh at us! God has been recreated in our own image. Whoever shall be born after us, for the sake of this deed shall be a part of a higher history than all hitherto existing human history.’ Here the madman fell silent and again regarded his listeners: they too were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his torch to the ground, breaking it. ‘I have come too early,’ he said, ‘my time has not yet come. This tremendous event is still on its way, still travelling - it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time, deeds require time even after they have been done, before they can be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the distant stars - and yet they have done it themselves.’ It has been further related that on that same day the madman entered various Shopping Centres and there sang John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’. Led out and quieted by Security, he is said to have retorted each time: What are these Shopping Centres if they are not the tombs and sepulchres of Nietzsche?’
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