Philosophy, and life in general, is full of misunderstandings, but one man stands alone by being perpetually misunderstood, especially by angsty teens and people who live in basements, and that is Nietzsche. “God is dead” has been misappropriated for years, and I’m here to set the record straight.

Possibly.

After Buddha was dead, people
showed his shadow for centuries afterwards in a
cave,—an immense frightful shadow. God is dead:
but as the human race is constituted, there will
perhaps be caves for millenniums yet, in which
people will show his shadow.—And we—we have
still to overcome his shadow

§108 The Gay Science

The madman.- Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place. and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!” -As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated? -Thus they yelled and laughed.

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you … God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

§125 The Gay Science

The single introduction paragraph (for me, it is in section 108 of The Gay Science) has been shortened to a pithy comment and emblazoned on t-shirts and posters makes a much more interesting reading when you spell it out at length, especially when combined with the madman section. The quote is from The Gay Science (you should call your next band that), a collection of poems and aphorisms, and was published in 1882.

The explanation

If you remember history from the Foucault article, Nietzsche was writing after the age of reason, and after Darwin’s magnum opus, so making an atheistic point was not the cutting edge that Nietzsche was looking for.

If we look at the second quote above, Nietzsche does not have the madman talk to religious people, but to atheists, atheists who then mock the madman and ask if he is looking for god, is god only hiding, which is still a trope to this day. Here, we can see that Nietzsche is questioning the atheists, not the religious.

Who are the atheists?

God and the associated religious powers are a metaphor for the single-geared bike; the atheists are coming with patents for gearing systems for bikes. As a tangent here, did you know that the US patent office in the 1880s had two offices, one for bikes and one for everything else?

Nietzsche is pessimistic about these new developments and the atheists. Nietzsche worried that these developments could separate us from the human experience and lead us to apathy and the “will to nothingness.” Gearing systems were not life-affirming; with that lack of affirmation, we were on the slippery slope to nihilism.

The will to leg power

What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism… For some time now our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe. 

The Will to Power

As you can see, Nietzsche correctly worked out that gearing systems would lead us to catastrophes of Nazism, nationalism, totalitarianism, and, worst of all, Scott bikes.

These ideologies rose as we sought to move on from fixed-gear bikes and our humanity. Simply put, humanity was trying to fill the gaping hole where we ignored skids and leg power in favour of fake progress.

The Übermensch of tracklocross

Nietzsche wasn’t stupid, and he offered humanity a way out of this, another of his ideas that people who dwell on the internet have twisted, corrupted, and just can’t understand what he meant.

Eventually, he said people would come who create a new meaning in life simply by living it. They would create meaning in life simply by their will for it to be.

For the game of creation, my brothers, a sacred yes is needed: the spirit now wills his own will.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

He called these people the Übermensch, which is German for those who ride tracklocross.