DE Weekly: Vitalism, Nietzsche, & God
Below is an archived email originally sent on April 7, 2025.
Vitalism, Nietzsche, & God
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves?”
This quote from Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1882 book The Gay Science is one of his most famous.
It’s worth noting that, far be it from a triumphant declaration scribbled by an angsty teenager with newfound atheistic curiosity, Nietzsche was not at all celebrating the “death of God” when he wrote this.
Although an atheist himself, Nietzsche did not see the widespread rejection of tradition rooted in religious belief as a good thing, necessarily.
While he welcomed this new chapter of human belief in his own way, he also saw the rejection of religion and of God as a vacuum that would need to be filled.
For Nietzsche, because we “killed God”, we must now find a new mode of being in his absence.
Nietzsche was wise in his reaction to this new problem. He believed that if it was no longer credible to believe in God, then a consequence of this disbelief would cause the existing moral structures and universally accepted truths to collapse.
With it, he saw the possibility of societal collapse––a collapse attributable to the loss of the greatest moral foundation humans have ever known. Nietzsche predicted––quite astutely, I might add––this would lead to widespread nihilism.
In other words, with no God, people would have no reason to assign life any meaning or value.
One can argue the extent to which humans have reached this nihilistic view of life, but let’s not let ourselves walk such a bleak path today.
Let us instead dive into Nietzsche’s vitalism––his philosophy that life does, in fact, have inherent value, affirms its own value, and has a “will to power” as the driving force of its existence.
For Nietzsche, the vacuum left by the “death of God” brought with it an opportunity; humans now had the chance to create their own values and meaning, taking responsibility for their own existence and making it something good. In this way, he was like many of the existentialists I write about so often.
As much as he was like them, however, he was equally unlike them, too.
Nietzsche’s “will to power” was a fundamental principle in his vitalism. This principle suggested that, as humans, we are inherently and invisibly driven by a force that wills our existence. This will to power actively affirms our existence and our lives simply by being.
Therefore, too, Nietzsche and his vitalism argue, our lives are inherently meaningful. This inherent value trumps all suffering and hardship and shows us there is a meaning behind it all.
As you see, this is where Nietzsche differs from the existentialists.
In a world without a God, I’d say he differs for the better in this regard. This is especially true because Nietzsche also believed in the inevitability of suffering and hardship in life. With an indomitable will driving you to live no matter what, these hardships become easier.
With the context we’ve built around the famous “God is dead” quote, hopefully you have a better idea of what Nietzsche really meant by it.
Upon first read it could appear nihilistic, but it was Nietzsche himself who vehemently rejected nihilism as an option in the first place.
In fact, Nietzsche’s vitalism is a rejection of the nihilist’s position in itself. He believed that life does have inherent meaning and value, that there is a reason to live and to search for meaning, and that we can accomplish this as individuals.
Even in the absence of a universal purpose that transcends all of us, even in the absence of a steadfast civilizational moral underpinning, and yes, even in the absence of God.
Albert Camus himself had the same answer to purported meaninglessness; it can be simply understood as, “No purpose? Make one.”
This was Camus’s revolt. Revolt against those who say life has no meaning and seek to give it one.
The question we must ask ourselves is why do we want to live? What do we hope to accomplish when we wake up in the morning? Do not let these questions daunt you; no, let them excite and inspire.
“It’s important to have a future that is inspiring and appealing. There have to be reasons that you get up in the morning and you want to live. Why do you want to live? What inspires you? What do you love about the future?”
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
P.S.––
Outside of the bona fide existentialists, there are those I like to call “tangential existentialists” and, for me, Nietzsche is one of them. You can’t go wrong reading anything of his.
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