The Courage to Be

1 Pages 332 Words

December 18, 2001

Tillich’s Response to the Madman
In some ways, Paul Tillich’s book The Courage to Be responds to Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea of “the death of God.” To understand Nietzsche’s Madman’s announcement, one must first understand Nietzsche’s idea of God. Within the subject-object structure of reality, God as a subject makes people into objects. This objectivity of humans deprives us of our subjectivity because He is all-powerful and all-knowing. We revolt and try to make Him into an object, but the revolt fails and we become desperate. In our desperation we see God as the invincible tyrant, for He is with freedom, power and knowledge, and we are without. “This is the God Nietzsche said had to be killed because nobody can tolerate being made into a mere object of absolute knowledge and absolute control.” (Tillich 185)
In Nietzsche, we find a predominance of the threat of meaninglessness. As a result of this threat, we see what Tillich describes as the courage to be as oneself. Only with the death of Nietzsche’s God can one truly have the courage to be as oneself, because the death of that god represents the death of the whole system of values and meanings in which one lived (Tillich 143). Consequently, one must look within oneself, in this time of meaningless, to develop a new self-affirmation under new ideas of meaningfulness. According to Nietzsche, this is the act of humans becoming gods.
The courage to be as oneself will not give the final solution, however (Tillich 141). The courage to be is rooted in the God above God. Nietzsche’s death of God is the death of a particular idea of God, not the God above God. But his “death of god” may convince others that God above God is dead, or that He is only a background figure. This is unfortunate, because only after realizing a God above God can one truly experience the courage to be....