The Trouble with Creating Values after God’s Death

Abstract

Nietzsche inscribes “God is dead” above the doorway to the modern world, and the weight of that loss varies across its grieving inhabitants. This essay focuses on the value creators—specifically philosophers—and the way in which their task is complicated by the impossibility of legitimating norms through appeals to Hinterwelten. Plato convinced himself that his creations were really “the eternal treasure that just happened to have been found on his path” (WTP §972). Homer and other poets called on the Muses. The new godless philosophers, I argue, must bear the full weight of authority, i.e., they must command. I thus interpret Nietzsche’s claim that philosophers are “commanders and legislators” (BGE §211) as describing, in part, the internal struggle of treating self-created values as binding despite knowing they are products of an all-too-human will: their own.