When Nietzsche's madman tries to proclaim that God is dead, he soon realises that his intervention is premature. Although his audience already think of themselves as atheists, the madman sees that they don't really understand what that means; self-comprehension is still on its way to them, like light from a remote star. Nowadays, many philosophers who take this aspect of Nietzsche's work seriously tend to write about the death of God as if it were old news - rather more than a century and half old. They take God's death for granted as a widely accepted fact of modernity, and ask what the significance of that death is for our moral and political values, and, more generally, for the idea of human life as having significance or meaning. But judging the madman's message to be old news is precisely what his fellow citizens do in the parable - a judgment that betrays their lack of self-awareness, and shows these men of knowledge to be unknown to themselves. How, then, should we judge our contemporary men of knowledge?

LRB 22 September 2005 | PDF Download