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Nietzsche's Concept Of God Analysis

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The Concept of God in the Philosophy of Nietzsche

Introduction
Nietzsche is well known as the proclaimer of the death of God. Yet there are passages in a number of his writings in which the concept of God is treated very differently. In these he does not use the word ‘God’ as label for the belief of traditional religion, but instead uses it as a symbolic key for some of his own most profound philosophical thoughts. I shall argue here that one of its uses is a symbol for the highest form of the will to power. I will attempt to show that analysis of this concept of God reveals Nietzsche’s conception of the highest will to power to be quite different from the familiar interpretation of this theme.

The Hero and the God
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Creation is symbolized as the play of a child. Play, it seems, is an activity whose freedom is that of the will to creation. It is true that play may be in one sense serious. In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche advises us to regain “the seriousness of the child at play” but this is not the seriousness of the spirit of gravity, the enemy of Zarathustra. That is a function of authority and law, purpose and necessity. In contrast it is the self-containment or self-absorption of play that constitutes its ‘seriousness’ of the spirit of gravity. Nor as we have seen is it the other kind of ‘seriousness’ that belongs to the second metamorphosis of the spirit: the heroism of the …show more content…

If solemnity and ugliness are the features that Zarathustra mocks in the sublime individual, then the qualities that he finds lacking are two: the first is beauty, and the second that quality of high spirits or exuberance. “As yet,” Zarathustra says, he has not learned laughter or beauty. For both of these one must have ‘light feet’. But that is why they must lie beyond the heroic will. “For the hero beauty is the hardest of all things: it is precisely for the hero that beauty is unattainable and unachievable.” The barrier that separates the hero from this higher state of being is heroism

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