The Scientific Revolution disrupted the centuries-old Aristotelian system of the Church and universities. It all began in 1542, when the Pole Nicolaus Copernicus published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. This work challenged the geocentric system of Aristotle and Ptolemy in which the Earth—and, more importantly, man—stood proud and unmoving at the centre of the universe.
It is arguably Newton who completed the Copernican Revolution, and put the nail in the coffin of the Aristotelian system, with the publication, in 1687, of his Principia mathematica. In this work, which is deemed impenetrable, he introduced his three laws of motion along with the Law of Universal Gravitation. In the mid-1660s, Newton kept a notebook with the title, Certain Philosophical Questions. Above this title, he inscribed the motto (which is a paraphrase of Aristotle): Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but truth is a greater friend still.
The Scientific Method
Also contradicting the Aristotelian worldview were William Harvey’s demonstration of the circulation of blood, published in his De motu cordis of 1628, and Galileo’s discovery that falling objects undergo uniform acceleration irrespective of their mass, published in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (i.e. the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic and the Copernican) of 1632. Aristotle had held that heavier objects fall faster, and that blood is constantly produced in the liver and consumed in the body’s periphery.
More radically, both Harvey and Galileo privileged experiment and observation over the authority of Aristotle, Ptolemy, Galen, and the Bible. Only a decade earlier, in 1620, Francis Bacon had formalised the modern scientific method in his Novum organum, which sought to undermine and replace Aristotle’s canonical treatise on logic, the Organon (hence the title, Novum organum, or New Organon). Galileo even published in Italian rather than the de rigueur Latin.
The Search for a New Metaphysical System
The demise of the Aristotelian system, for all its promises, left a void that needed filling, ideally by some all-encompassing metaphysical system on the scale of the old, Aristotelian one. If the Earth no longer stood at the centre of the cosmos, was man not the glory of creation, as affirmed in the Bible (1 Corinthians 11:7)? In this new mechanistic, atomistic world of matter in motion, where might God and the immaterial soul fit in? Where freedom and justice? And where, therefore, heaven and hell?
The three seventeenth century philosophers who rose to the challenge of formulating a comprehensive metaphysics were René Descartes (1596-1650), Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716).
Leibniz and the Principles of Logic
Leibniz built his system of monads on just two fundamental principles, the principle of non-contradiction and the principle of sufficient reason, which are rooted in Aristotle’s Organon. The principle of non-contradiction states that a proposition and its negation cannot simultaneously be true; therefore, if the one is true, the other must be false, and vice versa. The principle of sufficient reason states that everything must have a reason or cause, even when those reasons cannot be known to us. There are no brute facts. Later philosophers, such as Hume, Kant, and Hegel, would not deviate an inch from these two sacrosanct principles of logic, established by Aristotle and Leibniz. Nietzsche, with his perspectivist theory of truth, would be the first to do so.
The Parable of the Madman
In The Gay Science (1882), which consists of 383 aphorisms, Nietzsche pulls the rug on the projects of his predecessors to rescue the old order, that is, to somehow reaffirm, through abstract logic and elaborate metaphysics, the place of God and the dignity of man. Nietzsche could not have been more categorical about this: God, he says, is dead.
The Gay Science is especially remembered for Aphorism 125, the so-called Parable of the Madman, announcing the death of God under the weight of reason and science. In the Parable of the Madman, a madman lights a lantern in the bright morning hours, runs into the marketplace, and cries incessantly, “I seek God! I seek God!” When the people laugh and jeer at him, he jumps into their midst and pierces them with his eyes: “Whither is God? … I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the seas? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?”
What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the din of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. [Gott ist tot! Gott bleibt tot! Und wir haben ihn getötet!]
Later that same day, the madman forces his way into several churches to strike up a requiem for God. When dragged out and called to account, he always replies, “What after all are these churches now if not the tombs and sepulchres of God?”
Was sind denn diese Kirchen noch, wenn sie nicht die Gräber und Grabmäler Gottes sind?
In response to the death of God, Nietzsche advocates a so-called “gay science”: a skeptical, light-hearted, artistic approach to life.
What Nietzsche Meant by the Death of God
God is dead. And we have killed him. But who or what are we going to replace him with?
While we wait for the enormity of what we have done to sink in, God’s shadow lingers on, not only in our empty churches but in our groundless morals and values. But what are these towering edifices without their fount, reason, and justification? Merely the “tombs and sepulchres of God”.
Instead of facing up to this crisis, we linger in a state of denial and false hope, like Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon, who lend their lives structure and meaning by waiting for Godot.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) had been the first openly atheistic philosopher. His response to the demise of the old world order had been a “passive nihilism” or “will to nothingness”. But for Nietzsche, it is only when the nihilism is overcome that life and culture can be reborn.
If Nietzsche sought to accelerate and precipitate a crisis of meaning, it was only to hasten humanity’s arrival into the sunlit uplands that lay beyond it.
Neel Burton is the author of the newly published The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.