The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "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 sea? 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 noise 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.
"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us---for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto."
Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars---and yet they have done it themselves.
It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"The Gay Science (1882), Friedrich Nietzsche
Existentialism is nothing less than an attempt to draw all the consequences of a coherent atheistic position. It isn't trying to plunge man into despair at all. But if one calls every attitude of unbelief despair, like the Christians, then the word is not being used in its original sense. Existentialism isn't so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn't exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing. There you've got our point of view. Not that we believe that God exists, but we think that the problem of His existence is not the issue. In this sense, existentialism is optimistic, a doctrine of action, and it is plain dishonesty for Christians to make no distinction between their own despair and ours and then to call us despairing.
Being and Nothingness (1943), Jean-Paul Sartre
Here you have two philosophers who lived lives in despair. Nietzsche ended up in a mental hospital, and Sartre went through World War II still believing in man only and in no way believing in God. The parable of the madman is very telling of the philosophy of Nietzsche: God is dead. God was an invention to impose slave morality, but it was time for the Ubermensch (superman) to rise up through bloodshed and destruction to claim what was rightfully theirs. It is also interesting to see that Nietzsche thought himself that his ideas would be played out in reality and that the 20th century was to be the bloodiest of all centuries, a prediction that definitely came true. Hitler was not naive to this, he openly handed out different copies of Nietzsche's works at party rallies in the 1930's. Hitler was the Ubermensch, a fact all too surreal when he initiated blitzkrieg on all of Europe. One quote from Hitler that is on my facebook page is all too revealing in his thinking of what he had created: "When we meet here, do we not feel the wonder of it all? Not every one of you can see me, and I cannot see every one of you. But I feel you, and you feel me. It is faith in our nation that has made small people great, that has made anxious people courageous, and has joined us together." From one philosopher's pen anxiously writing about God being dead, to a man having no moral sense and killing about 11 million innocent people. This never ceases to amaze me how one man okayed the immoral with his pen, and the other man okayed the acting out in utter immorality for all of the world to see.
Sartre saw a concentration camp firsthand, but said that it was from there that he gained a greater faith in man, not God. To hear that makes my heart sink, for to come from an utterly despairing setting and still denounce God takes more pride and arrogance than any human can imagine. To claim that existentialism is optimistic and that it is for that reason that he is an existentialist (not part of this quote but is stated latter in his book) is a grossly misunderstood man. To not trust in a sovereign God who has extended His grace through his Son Jesus Christ when experiencing utter despair like a concentration camp, and in turn reaffirm your faith in man and existentialism is utterly depressing itself. That is all that must be said for now because of the despair of these two men's lives.
