Powerful and
destructive is the criticism moved by german
philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who''s the red-hot spirit of the
late romanticism and decadentism icon, which turns against Christianity. The entire author''s life, with all the reflections which have shaken and churned his spirit, is a comparison locked with the values of the Christian moral - as well as a comparison with all the moral doctrines that men admit. Nietzsche has asserted God''s death, and the contemporary age has received this voice. After God''s death, his idols remain. These idols are like images produced by God''s reflexing on mirrors, but Nietzsche want demonstrate that every mirror is a man''s product, and here the people see only what they want to see. God''s form is filled only by human substance. At last, so, only the human being remains. Also the Christian moral remains, but at this time it''s only the cumbersome box that''s containing now nothing more than dust. And what''s to do, with this dust? It disheartens the human existence, refrains the natural passions, binds human stories to sideboards and superstitions, and at last it decides about man''s judgement. Men cannot think for themselves, without concepts taken by innate ideas.
Also being dead, God would leave humankind to its leash. And man doesn''t know how to emancipate himself from God''s shadow.
Protagonist of this great parabola is Zarathustra, a Persian preacher who claims the transfiguration of the moral values, who arrives in a world where the human stories are ruled by Christian moral. Zarathustra observes the suffering of the men, where this suffering is consequent to the application of divine laws. The preacher''s work turns now in a strange way: he starts to teach to refuse every preech, to refuse to believe to any moralizer.
A question that rises, from the reading of these pages so rich and hot, is: Nietzsche has meant to destroy the Christian moral in order to replace it with his own new moral? Or, it has simply meant to destroy the Christian moral thus as it refuses every truth who exceeds the human sphere? We have the impression that Nietzsche has remained oscillating for a long period between these two possibilities. If the right answer has been the first case, we must remark that the nietzschean attempt has been a failure. The author and his character just don''t found anything: they are only
destructive, undermine the base of every certainty, as well the certanties located at the base of the Christian society institutions. If we consider the second case, we should remark the lack of contructiveness in Nietzsche''s criticism: the
philosopher''s route is - according to the expression used by great scholar Hans Wolff - a "road towards the nothing".
Nevertheless Nietzsche has a shattering effect. He''s perhaps the author who has more deeply influenced the European culture in the twentieth century. The largest part of last century philosophers resumes and elaborates its theses, and contemporary artists have used Nietzsche''s ideas in order to create new horizons of representations.
It is not erroneous to assert that Nietzsche was a very influent co-responsible father, also with Max Stirner, of the contemporary atheism which today has become such popular.
Marzio Valdambrini