The ‘death of God’ is the second notion. Belief in God – and the values that go with such belief – is no longer possible or relevant within modernity. This is both a liberation and a crushing blow (for it means that the burden of creating and justifying values falls upon the human). Here, ‘death’ means old, weak, irrelevant, and historical, transient, and indeed not eternal.
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There are three critical aspects to the conception about death. The first and most apparent revolves around those values or beliefs that involve a denigration or even rejection of life – either this life (as opposed to the ‘afterlife’) or aspects associated with the living body (sex, passion, pleasure, etc.). A key passage in this regard would be Zarathustra on the ‘preachers of death’. The rejection of life on the ascetic priest is only clear; such asceticism is a means to carry on living despite suffering and degeneration. A related idea is a danger that the philosopher will meet in his or her attempt to overcome values. The death of the tight-rope walker, who made danger his ‘vocation’, is an example. Finally, metaphysics will often involve a conceptual rejection of becoming or positing facts and values as eternal. This is often described with metaphors of death: for example, the ‘mummified concepts.
Francois de la Rochefoucauld is seventeenth-century French author, much admired by Nietzsche both for the aphoristic form of his Maxims as for the sceptical and even cynical psychological observations about human behaviour and moral values that they have.
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