Predicament of Human Incompetence 17
silly will.’ ” People on the edge of desperation always be-
gin to talk that way.
It was Nietsche, with his philosophic mind and rapier
wit, who put ordinary nihilism into a program for life. A
young man of fastidious and aristocratic taste, he was nau-
seated by the mediocrity of Christian life that had lost its
fear of God and degenerated into an easy-going morality
with no bite in it. It had become complacent, amiable, in-
effective, watered down to comfortable charity and good
will toward the weak. He was equally disgusted with the
irreligious ambition of the secular world trying for universal
happiness by easing all difficulties.
When he turned his back on the false show, he sought to
define what men must do in a world where “God was dead.”
He believed that God was dead, and dreaded the conse-
quences when men realized there was no fixed and universal
meaning to which they were responsible—nothing but the
incoherent mixture of life that was cruel, contradictory, and
senseless.
He proposed that man must put his own meaning into
the senselessness. He called others to join him in creating
a company of supermen who, with unlimited power, could
somehow hold all the contradictions together and achieve
perfection. This perfection would include all the extremes of
cruelty and kindness, falsehood and honor, force and gentle-
ness. With God gone, he wished to create men who would
be as gods in their own right. This theoretical solution of
deifying man, when actually worked out in practice by hu-
man beings, is now before us in the horrors of Nazism,
which doubtless would have shocked Nietsche as it does us.
To Nietsche all the laws by which life evolves seemed to
contradict the values by which we live. He insisted this was
“the secret trouble” that gave the tragic character to our
modern world.
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