OFF THE BEATEN TRACK
unreal [unwirklich]. This is the metaphysical sense of the metaphysically thought word "God is dead."
Are we going to continue to close our eyes before the truth of this word that is to be thought in this way? Even if this is oUT intention, Nietzsche's word will not lose its truth through this unaccountable blindness. God ceases to be a living God if in our continuing attempts to master the real we fail to take his reality seriously beforehand and question it, if we fail to reflect whether man has so matured toward the essence into which he is forced from out of being that he withstands this destiny that sends him out of his essence, and does so without the false relief of mere expedients.
The attempt to experience the truth of that statement of God's death without illusions is something different from a confession of faith in Nietzsche's philosophy. Had that been our intention, then thinking would not be served by such assent. We attend to a thinker only by thinking. This requires that we think everything essential that is thought in his thought.
If God and the gods are dead in the sense of the metaphysical experience described above, and if the will to power is consciously willed as the principle behind every setting of conditions on beings, i.e., as the principle of the dispensation of value, then mastery over beings as such in the shape of mastery over the earth passes over to the new human willing, determined by the will to power. Nietzsche closes the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (written in 1883, a year after La Gaya Scienza) with the sentence: "All the gods are dead: it is now our will that the overman live!"
It is possible, thinking crudely, to believe that Nietzsche's word says that mastery over beings passes from God to man, or, even more crudely, that Nietzsche sets man in the place of God. Those who take it in that way, however, are not thinking very divinely about the essence of the divinity. Man can never be set in God's place because the essence of man never attains the essential realm of God. On the contrary, compared with that impossibility, something far eerier happens, the essence of which we have scarcely begun to reflect upon. The place which, metaphysically thought, is proper to God is the region of causal effectivity and the preservation of beings as created beings. This region for God can remain empty. In its place, another (i.e., a place that corresponds to it metaphysically) can open up that is identical neither to the essential realm of God nor to the essential realm of man, who, however, is again entering into a distinctive relationship with this other place. The overman does not, and not ever, step into the place of God; rather the place for the overman's will is another realm of another grounding of beings in their other being. This other being of beings has
190