Nietzsche and Marx: Critique of Religion and Values
Nietzsche’s Key Concepts
Explanation of Terms
- Christian Morality: Nietzsche criticizes Christian morality, claiming it promotes “slave morality”—values like humility, submission, and weakness. He sees it as vulgar, resentful, and destructive of the noble values of the ancient world. Christianity, in his view, is the “mortal enemy of the higher type of man.”
- Life: Nietzsche contrasts Christian values with a Dionysian life, characterized by disorder and licentiousness. He argues that religion suppresses human freedom and intentions.
The Death of God and its Consequences
The Death of God, the Superman, and the Eternal Return
Nietzsche posits that following the “death of God,” atheism becomes the path to strength, freedom, and independence of spirit. Humans can occupy the space left by God, becoming creators of values. The loss of faith in God liberates humanity to focus on the present world, rather than a hypothetical afterlife.
With God’s death, the Superman emerges. This represents the human will to self-improvement and self-overcoming. The Superman embodies dissatisfaction with the current state and strives for a higher standard of living, rooted in earthly existence.
The Superman embraces life as it is. Nietzsche introduces the concept of *eternal recurrence* – the idea that reality repeats itself in an infinite cycle. This contrasts with a linear view of time. If time is infinite, everything that can happen has already happened and will happen again.
Marx and Nietzsche on Religion
Critique of Religion and Values
Nietzsche views religion as arising from fear and helplessness. He argues that religion is based on lies, giving reality to transcendental entities. Christianity, specifically, transmutes Dionysian values by inventing an ideal world and disregarding the real one. He sees religion as a rebellion of the ordinary against the powerful, identifying religious values with those of the lower classes. Religions, for Nietzsche, are obstacles to progress, opposing life’s fullness and the drive for self-improvement; in short, they represent moral cowardice. The Christian God must be banished because, through the concept of sin, he poisons values like beauty, health, and bravery. Jesus, in this view, is not the son of God but merely a humble and charitable man.
Marx, on the other hand, believes that religious experience is not an encounter with something that truly exists. Aside from his doctoral thesis, *Differences Between the Natural Philosophy of Epicurus and Democritus*, where he addresses traditional arguments for God’s existence, his philosophy does not explicitly argue for atheism. Instead, atheism is a starting point. Marx does not focus on refuting arguments for God’s existence but rather on analyzing religion as a form of *alienation*. He argues that religion must be studied objectively, like any other human manifestation, examining its relationship to other human experiences, particularly the economic and social conditions of the society that produced it. In this sense, Marx criticizes religion as a form of alienation.