Ikigai Daily
Menu
WonderPhilosophy idea

When Friedrich Nietzsche wrote 'God is dead' in The Gay Science (1882), he was not celebrating. He meant that belief in God no longer held European culture together, and that the morals built on it would lose their footing too.

Philosophy

PhilosophyReligion & Belief

The story behind the card

Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher and the son of a Protestant pastor. He put the famous line in the mouth of a madman who runs into a marketplace with a lantern in broad daylight, looking for God. The unbelievers standing around laugh at him, and he tells them that 'we have killed him': modern science and ways of thinking had made the old faith hard to hold. The danger he saw was nihilism, the sense that nothing has value once its old foundation has gone. His answer, developed in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885), was that people would have to create new values for themselves, an ideal he called the Übermensch, or 'overhuman'. The line became one of the most quoted in modern philosophy, and thinkers from Heidegger to the theologians of the 1960s argued over its meaning.

Türkçe oku
Friedrich Nietzsche 1882'de Şen Bilim'de “Tanrı öldü” diye yazarken bir kutlama yapmıyordu. Tanrı inancının artık Avrupa kültürünü bir arada tutmadığını, bu inanca dayanan ahlakın da dayanağını yitireceğini söylüyordu.

Alman filozof Nietzsche (1844–1900) bir Protestan papazın oğluydu. Ünlü sözü, güpegündüz elinde fenerle pazar yerine koşup Tanrı'yı arayan bir delinin ağzından söyletir. Çevrede duran inançsızlar ona güler; deli de onlara Tanrı'yı “bizim öldürdüğümüzü” söyler. Nietzsche'ye göre modern bilim ve düşünce, eski inancı ayakta tutmayı zorlaştırmıştı. Asıl kaygısı nihilizmdi, yani eski dayanak çöktüğünde hiçbir şeyin değeri kalmadığı duygusu. Böyle Buyurdu Zerdüşt'te (1883–1885) geliştirdiği yanıta göre insanlar değerlerini kendileri yaratmak zorunda kalacaktı; bu ideale Übermensch, yani “üstinsan” adını verdi. Söz, modern felsefenin en çok alıntılanan cümlelerinden biri oldu; Heidegger'den 1960'ların ilahiyatçılarına kadar pek çok düşünür anlamını tartıştı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: God is dead
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

WonderPhilosophy

Pascal's wager, set out by the 17th-century French thinker Blaise Pascal, argues that believing in God is the rational bet: if God exists the believer gains infinitely, and if not, little is lost.

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) was a mathematician and physicist who, with Pierre de Fermat, laid the foundations of probability theory; he also built one of the first mechanical calculators. In later life he turned to religion and began notes for a defence of Christianity. He died before finishing it, and the notes were published in 1670 as the Pensées (“Thoughts”). The wager is not a proof that God exists. It is a decision argument: when reason cannot settle a question, weigh the possible gains and losses of each choice. For that reason it is often described as the first use of decision theory. Critics objected that many religions make similar promises, so the bet does not say which god to back, and that belief cannot simply be chosen. Pascal's answer was to act as believers do until belief follows.

PhilosophyRead card
StillnessArt

Tibetan Buddhist monks build sand mandalas, intricate circular pictures of a deity's palace, grain by grain over days or weeks. Then they ceremonially sweep them away and pour the sand into flowing water.

The coloured sand is poured through narrow, ridged metal funnels called chak-pur: rubbing a rod along the ridges makes the sand trickle out a few grains at a time. Each mandala is a flat plan of a three-dimensional sacred palace; the Kalachakra mandala alone contains 722 deities. When it is finished, the monks hold a dissolution ceremony. They sweep the design into a heap, collect the sand in a jar wrapped in silk and carry it to a river or other moving water, so that its blessing spreads out into the world. The whole ritual is a lesson in impermanence, the Buddhist teaching that nothing material lasts.

Tibetan Buddhist art (sand mandala)Read card
WonderHistory

Ise Grand Shrine, the holiest site of Shinto, Japan's native religion, takes down its main sanctuaries every 20 years and rebuilds them exactly on the plot next door. The custom began in 690 and, despite some long interruptions, continues today; the next rebuilding is due in 2033.

The rebuilding is called Shikinen Sengū. Along with the buildings, the shrine's furnishings and sacred objects are made anew, and the wooden Uji Bridge at the entrance is rebuilt too. The timber is hinoki, a Japanese cypress. Power tools are not allowed within the shrine grounds, so the work falls to miyadaiku, carpenters trained in traditional shrine building; less experienced carpenters usually learn on the bridge before they work on the sanctuaries. Shinto calls the idea tokowaka, 'ever young': renewing a sacred building keeps it fresh and passes the skills from one generation to the next. The present buildings, from 2013, are the 62nd set. Wars have delayed the cycle more than once, most notably for over a century during Japan's civil wars of the 15th and 16th centuries.

Ise Shikinen SenguRead card
WonderPhilosophy

The Muslim scholar al-Ghazali (c. 1058–1111) described in Deliverance from Error how he lost trust in both his senses and his reasoning. A shadow looks still, yet it moves; might reason, too, have limits it cannot see? Certainty returned, he wrote, only through a light that God cast into his heart.

Al-Ghazali was a theologian, jurist and Sufi mystic from Tus, in Persia. In 1095, while a celebrated professor at the Nizamiyya college in Baghdad, he went through the crisis he later described: he could barely speak, could not teach, and left his post to spend years travelling as a Sufi, a follower of Islam's mystical path. Deliverance from Error, written in his last years, tells that story. He is also known for The Incoherence of the Philosophers, which argued that thinkers such as Ibn Sina could not prove some of their key claims, including that the world has always existed. About seventy years after his death, Ibn Rushd answered it in The Incoherence of the Incoherence.

Al-GhazaliRead card
WonderPhilosophy

Ibn Rushd, a 12th-century philosopher and judge in Muslim Spain, argued in The Decisive Treatise that Islamic law did not merely allow philosophy: for those able to reason rigorously, it could make it a duty. Truth cannot contradict truth, he held, so where proof and the literal words of scripture clash, the passage must be interpreted.

Ibn Rushd (1126–1198), known in medieval Europe as Averroes, served as a judge in Seville and Córdoba and later as court physician to the Almohad rulers of Muslim Spain and North Africa. His detailed commentaries on Aristotle were translated into Latin and Hebrew, and Christian and Jewish scholars called him simply 'the Commentator'; Thomas Aquinas argued with his views directly. In The Incoherence of the Incoherence he replied point by point to al-Ghazali, who had attacked the philosophers nearly a century earlier. The Decisive Treatise makes the case in a shorter form, as a legal opinion: it asks, as a judge would, whether the law forbids, allows or requires the study of philosophy.

Ibn Rushd (Averroes)Read card
Next card in the archiveDo not do to others what you would not want done to yourself.Read next →