Sri Aurobindo refutes Nietzsche

[Nietzsche, Descartes, Lacan and the Death of God Posted by larvalsubjects 11 Comments May 21, 2006

What strikes me as crucial in this passage is Nietzsche’s remark that we have wiped away the horizon, that we now move without direction, that we are suspended in an infinite void and cold, empty space. The death of God therefore seems to signify a world that has lost its coordinates (what else is a horizon if not a way of co-ordinating our movement?) and where the ground has disappeared beneath us. I take it that the term “God” is a generic term for any sort of transcendental term that would fix meaning and identity. It would be a mistake to assume that “God” simply refers to the God of organized religion. Rather God is a generic term referring to anything on the order of a form, essence, transcendence, identity, substance, permanence, ideal, wholeness, totality and so on.]

[April 9, 2007 at 7:46 am Coming across in a hymn of Martin Luther what Hegel described as the cruel words, the harsh utterance, namely, God is dead, the latter was perhaps the first great philosopher to develop the theme of God’s death according to whom, to one form of experience God is dead. Commenting on Kant’s first Critique, Heinrich Heine spoke of a dying God. Heine influenced Nietzsche. Since Heine and Nietzsche the phrase Death of God became popular. (K. Satchidananda Murty, The Realm of Between, IIAS, 1973)]

[The Human Aspiration « Sri Aurobindo Studies 30 Aug 2009 – Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

The earliest formula of Wisdom promises to be its last,—God, Light, Freedom, Immortality. These persistent ideals of the race are at once the contradiction of its normal experience and the affirmation of higher and deeper experiences which are abnormal to humanity and only to be attained, in their organised entirety, by a revolutionary individual effort or an evolutionary general progression… The greater the apparent disorder…, the stronger is the spur…]

The firmness with which Sri Aurobindo refutes Nietzsche’s playful affirmation is a milestone in the history of human thought. For long, philosophy has been hostage to a science fiction style of writing or abstract painting. Happily, fatigue has set in and that epoch is fast coming to a close. Further, defending Marx, which was considered pivotal to theory, is no longer that sacrosanct. These are welcome developments but without Sri Aurobindo a satisfying ontological framework is difficult to put together. [TNM55]