God Is Dead. Now What?

By Neel Burton | May 23, 2026

How Would You Respond to Nietzsche’s Madman?

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 15 August 2026.

The Scientific Revolution disrupted the centuries-old Aristotelian system of the Church and universities. It all began in 1543, 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. The Aristotelian system had provided not only a scientific model but also a moral and metaphysical order, with everything in its proper place. To overthrow it was to overthrow everything.

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. These laws applied to the celestial spheres as much as to a falling apple—with the implication that the heavens were not some separate, higher realm, but of one piece with your backyard.

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 More Radical Revolution

Also undermining 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. Old 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 had the gall to publish in Italian rather than the de rigueur Latin.

The revolution was not merely in what people believed, but in how they came to believe it—and who they should believe.

In Search of a Hero

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?

Consider the scale of the imaginative shift required. In 1588, as a young mathematician, Galileo had been invited to address the Florentine Academy on the location, size, and arrangement of hell as described in Dante’s Inferno. The Scientific Revolution had begun to dismantle the circles of hell, and everything else, while remaining silent on what might replace them.

The three men who rose to the almost impossible challenge of weaving a new metaphysics that could accommodate the Scientific Revolution and make sense of man’s place within it were René Descartes (1596–1650), Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716).

Each offered a radically different solution. Descartes preserved God and the immortal soul by splitting reality into mind and matter. But in so doing, he created the problem of how such radically different substances might interact. Spinoza went in the opposite direction, collapsing mind and matter by identifying God with Nature. Leibniz sought another way out of the mind-body problem: his universe consisted not of interacting minds and bodies but of immaterial ‘monads’, co-ordinated by God in a ‘pre-established harmony’. Whereas Descartes and Leibniz sought to salvage what they could, and reaffirm man’s position in the order of things, the ‘heretic’ Spinoza provided no such comforts.

In November 1676, Leibniz travelled to The Hague to meet the dying Spinoza. He had been troubled by Spinoza’s still-secret metaphysics, and spent hours in discussion with him. If God and Nature were one and the same, and everything followed necessarily from the nature of God, what became of freedom, providence, and man’s special place in creation? Leibniz’s own metaphysics—the monadology—can be read as an attempt to solve Descartes’s mind-body problem without falling into Spinozism.

Nietzsche’s Break

By Nietzsche’s time, the great metaphysical systems had begun to look like what they were: elaborate attempts to salvage God and the soul of man from the assaults of science.

In The Gay Science (1882), Nietzsche calls time on the projects of his predecessors. Nietzsche could not have been more categorical about this: God, he declares, is dead.

Nietzsche was not simply announcing his atheism. By the late nineteenth century, there would have been nothing new in that. Instead, he was pointing to the consequences of unbelief: if our highest values—human dignity, moral obligation, justice—are founded in God, what happens to them if we can no longer believe in this God? Do we just go around pretending as if nothing had changed? Or do we invent ourselves anew?

The Gay Science is especially remembered for Aphorism 125, the so-called Parable of the Madman. In it, 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?]

The townspeople are not scandalised by the Madman’s atheism. They are themselves unbelievers, which is why they laugh at him. The joke, however, is on them. They have abandoned God without thinking it through. The Madman has arrived, then as today, ‘too early’.

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.

In response to the death of God, Nietzsche advocates a so-called ‘gay science’: a sceptical, light-hearted, artistic approach to life. Nietzsche’s response to the collapse of certainty is not despair, as is often thought, but freedom, creation, and experimentation: the courage to live without assurances and treat life as something to be interpreted, repurposed, and affirmed.

Not simply hanging around, unsure whether to stay or leave.

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into The German Greeks, my history of German philosophy.

You may also enjoy

Explore all German Philosophy essays

Explore all Self-Deception essays

Explore all Success & Failure essays

Nietzsche’s Prophetic Vision of the Last Man

By Neel Burton | May 17, 2026

And His Challenge to Us: The Übermensch

NIetzsche's tightrope walker over an abyss — Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Übermensch—a rope over an abyss.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 13 August 2026.

In 1882, Nietzsche entered into a love triangle with the beautiful Lou Salomé and their friend Paul Rée. On Nov. 5, in Leipzig, Salomé and Rée suddenly vanished from his life, without word or trace. He knew not where, nor why. Some days later, when what had happened had sunk in, he confided to his friend Franz Overbeck, ‘So I really am going into utter solitude.’ He never saw Salomé or Rée again.

Naturally, Nietzsche’s already fragile health suffered. He began taking heavy doses of chloral hydrate and opium. In mid-December, he sent out letters mentioning overdoses and suicide. On Christmas Day, he wrote to Overbeck: ‘This last morsel of life was the hardest I have yet had to chew… Unless I discover the alchemical trick of turning this muck into gold, I am lost.’

Fortunately, Nietzsche did discover the alchemical trick, and the result was his masterpiece, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It is his most famous work, and he insisted that everything he wrote afterward was mere commentary on its themes. In his autobiography, Ecce Homo, he goes so far as to call Thus Spoke Zarathustra the greatest gift humanity has ever received.

The book is an act of self-overcoming of the kind that Nietzsche came to preach. Out of rejection, illness, and despair, he produced his magnum opus. He turned muck into gold.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Thus Spoke Zarathustra is written as a stylised, biblical, and poetic narrative about a prophet, Zarathustra, who isolates himself in the mountains with his animals, a snake and an eagle. After ten years of solitude, he comes down to share his wisdom with humanity in the form of speeches, parables, and aphorisms. When the masses laugh at him, he recruits an elite band of followers.

But he remains ambivalent about having followers: ‘You are my believers, but what matter all believers? You had not yet sought yourselves, and you found me. Thus do all believers; therefore, all faith amounts to little.’ He instructs his followers to leave him and become free thinkers: ‘I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only then… will I return to you.’

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche proclaims the death of God and, consequently, the inability of conventional religion and morality to provide modern man with structure and meaning. Instead, the prophet Zarathustra advocates a radical, earthly, and life-affirming philosophy. In so doing, Zarathustra introduces some of Nietzsche’s most famous themes, including the Übermensch and Last Man.

The death of God presents us with both a crisis and a choice. If our inherited values can no longer sustain us, we must either create new values of our own or retreat into self-deception, conformity, and comfort. We can be Last Men, or rise towards the Übermensch.

The Übermensch

Zarathustra exhorts his followers to remain faithful to the earth. Instead of harbouring otherworldly hopes, they should embrace life as it is and take responsibility for creating their own values. The meaning of the earth is the Übermensch, a higher, self-overcoming type of human that is yet to exist.

The Übermensch is sometimes misunderstood as a biologically superior ‘Superman’, or as someone who seeks power over other people. But Nietzsche’s emphasis is on power over oneself: on self-creation, self-mastery, and, above all, self-overcoming.

Humanity is not an end, but a bridge between its animal past and its Übermensch future. Humanity is a ‘rope over an abyss’—’a dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and standing still’—that most people fail to cross, falling instead into nihilism, that is, into despondency and mediocrity.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end in himself: what can be loved in man is that he is a going over and a going under.

Was groß ist am Menschen, das ist, daß er eine Brücke und kein Zweck ist: was geliebt werden kann am Menschen, das ist, daß er ein Übergang und ein Untergang ist.

Zarathustra delivers these words to a crowd that has gathered to watch a tightrope walker, who sets out along a rope stretched between two towers. The performance ends in disaster: the tightrope walker loses his footing and plunges into the void. The safe alternative would have been not to cross at all.

Although the Übermensch is a future concept—not even Zarathustra is an Übermensch—in later works Nietzsche discusses certain ‘higher men’ who approached the ideal, like Julius Caesar, Leonardo da Vinci, Napoleon, Goethe, and Beethoven. The Übermensch rises above the conventional morality of the herd to become a law unto himself.

The Last Man

The antithesis of the Übermensch is the Last Man, a mediocre, apathetic, comfort-seeking creature who fears risk and struggle and chooses security over greatness. Without the drive to create or achieve, the Last Man focuses only on ‘little pleasures for the day and little pleasures for the night’ while maintaining a strict regard for his health. Unlike the tightrope walker, he lacks the gumption, or even the vision, to cross and risk himself.

Have you noticed how, when people are overwhelmed, they start blinking? Nietzsche famously describes the Last Man as ‘blinking’—because his vision of humanity is so small.

Last Men, who are in the overwhelming majority, arrange things so that everyone is like them, so that no one rises, or even can rise, above the herd, so that no one can dare to dream or risk having an original thought. Any deviation from the norm is interpreted as a form of madness.

Zarathustra challenges the complacency of the herd:

Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the madness by which you might be cleansed? Behold, I show you the Übermensch. He is this lightning, he is this madness.

Wo ist der Blitz, der euch mit seiner Zunge lecke? Wo ist der Wahnsinn, der mit euch ausgeimpft werden müsste? Seht, ich lehre euch den Übermenschen: er ist dieser Blitz, er ist dieser Wahnsinn.

Ironically, the crowd does not heed the warning, but cheers and demands that Zarathustra make them into these Last Men.

Nietzsche’s Last Man marks the end of human evolution and ambition. It is a prophetic warning of what humanity could become if it settles for nothing higher than material wealth, risk-aversion, technological pacification, and a culture of feeling ‘safe and happy’—in one word, for mediocrity.

The prophecy is disturbing because the Last Man does not appear miserable. On the contrary: he has engineered his world to minimise discomfort. But in removing danger, struggle, solitude, and uncertainty, he has also removed many of the conditions under which a person might overcome himself and be and become so much more.

For Nietzsche, becoming a person is not a matter merely of ‘discovering who we are’, when we are still nobody. It is the harder task of creating ourselves: of questioning inherited values, thinking our own thoughts, choosing what is worth suffering for, and accepting the danger of the rope over the abyss.

Nietzsche was writing in 1883. Since then, it has become ever more difficult to be free. I have seen it in my own lifetime. Very soon, if not already, it will be impossible to become a person.