Friedrich Nietzsche

Background

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), a Lutheran pastor's son who became professor of classical philology at Basel at twenty-four and resigned for health reasons a decade later, is the nineteenth century's most radical critic of Christian morality. His method is genealogy: not refuting moral claims but unmasking their origins and function. The Genealogy of Morals locates the birth of Christian-Platonic values in a slave revolt: "The revolt of the slaves in morals begins in the very principle of resentment becoming creative and giving birth to values — a resentment experienced by creatures who, deprived as they are of the proper outlet of action, are forced to find their compensation in an imaginary revenge" (Nietzsche, Genealogy, First Essay §10).

Beyond Good and Evil (1886) frames the wider target — "the most dangerous of errors hitherto has been a dogmatist error — namely, Plato's invention of Pure Spirit and the Good in Itself" (Nietzsche, BGE, Preface) — and The Antichrist (1888) ends the polemic at maximum volume: "I call Christianity the one great curse… Why not rather [reckon time] from its last [day]? — From today? — The transvaluation of all values!" (Nietzsche, Antichrist §62).

Positions held in this wiki

• The Moral Argument for God — the genealogical critique undercuts premise 1 of the moral argument (that there are objective moral facts) rather than premise 2. The structural irony, flagged in that article: Nietzsche effectively grants the theist's conditional — subtract God and traditional Western morality does not stand unchanged — which is why the SEP describes theists "enlisting" him in support of the moral argument. Sharon Street's evolutionary debunking is treated there as the contemporary analogue of his strategy.

Key works in our corpus

• On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) — in corpus. First Essay §§2, 7, 10: aristocratic origins of "good," the slave revolt, ressentiment. (The First Essay's ethnological claims are quoted in the wiki as argument-structure, not endorsed.)
• Beyond Good and Evil (1886) — in corpus. The preface's attack on dogmatic philosophy and Platonism.
• The Antichrist (1888, Mencken trans.) — in corpus. The closing indictment of Christianity as hostile to life.

Principal critics

• William Lane Craig and Robert Merrihew Adams — the theistic metaethicians who accept his conditional and run it in reverse: if godlessness undermines objective morality, moral realism is evidence for God. The standard genetic-fallacy objection — origins do not settle validity — is also pressed against genealogy-as-refutation, a distinction Nietzsche himself concedes elsewhere in the First Essay.
• Immanuel Kant — less critic than chief target: the autonomous moral law Kant treated as reason's bedrock is exactly what the genealogy dissolves.
• Secular moral realists (Shafer-Landau, Wielenberg, via SEP; no profiles) — resist the debunking inference without theism.

See also

• David Hume — the earlier naturalistic unmasker of religion's origins.
• J. L. Mackie — twentieth-century error theory: the analytic cousin of Nietzschean anti-realism.
• Baruch Spinoza — an earlier radical critic of providential religion whom Nietzsche read as a precursor.