Here is a concise and relatively complete analysis of Nietzsche's views on morality and god. This was part of a paper I wrote last year on The Genealogy of Morality that I think is pretty good:
Nietzsche cast a historical gaze on modern morality and saw the development of a modern ascetic morality that was diametrically opposed to the instinctual desires of man. According to Nietzsche, we humans have been making ourselves sick since the beginnings of society, and our only hope to escape our self-imposed torture lies in overthrowing our current self-denying morality and replacing it with a “supermorality” that celebrates natural human desires.
For Nietzsche, our self-imposed sickness is a complicated concept that began to develop when the demands of society forced humans to subjugate their natural desires to their wills, which, when compounded with the society-created idea of guilt, caused man to torture his own soul and create a self-denying morality. With the creation of society, man “[fell] under the pressure of that most fundamental of all changes he ever experienced – the change of finding himself enclosed once and for all within the sway of…peace” (56). Man found himself caged and “had to create out of himself an adventure, [and] a place of torture” (57) – he created a soul that was necessarily at war with the demands of society.
After man had been tamed enough through the use of punishment as a form of “memory creation,” the ideas of value, debt, and the marketplace (concepts that society demands to keep chaos from ensuing) appeared and sank into man’s sickly soul. The idea of guilt came forth as a grander and more distorted cousin of the concept of the exchange value of objects – man felt the benefits of living in a protective society, and, because his ancestors were the ones who created the society, man felt he had “to repay them through sacrifices and achievements, … [and] thereby acknowledge[d] a debt that was continually growing” (60). What eventually resulted was “the progenitor…transfigured into a god” (61) that, in the mind of man, demanded payment for every transgression against the norms of society, or, in other words, for every expression of man’s natural animal desires.
As a means to escape his ever-growing society-created guilt, man began to “[take] all the ‘no’ that he [said] to himself, to nature, to naturalness, the facticity of his being and [cast] it out of himself as a ‘yes,’ as existing, corporeal, real, as God, as holiness of God” (63), and started glorifying those things which are ascetic and self-denying, and, up until then, weak and unhealthy.
What then? How does this affect modern man as we see him today? Precisely in the way man actually views the world and himself. Nietzsche sees modern man casting “the tired pessimistic glance” (43) towards his own nature and saying an “icy ‘no’ of disgust [to] life” (43). Because we constantly make ourselves suffer, we attempt to find relief in tedium and “mechanical activity” (97). In the rote exploration of the details of scientific or historical fact; the reading of a novel full of adventurous characters who take what they can of life; or even the intense yet unconscious stare of a child at a television screen; we see the human mind allowing itself to rest, to “self-anesthetize” (108) and prevent itself from actually “coming to consciousness” (108) of the terrible self-mutilation that we are constantly inflicting upon our own souls. When we finally do see any expression of man’s natural desires, we self-denying humans normally see it as another reason to “say ‘no’ to life” (43).
Why do we harmless humans find it so difficult to tear our eyes away from some act of cruelty, provided that it is inflicted under the guise of punishment? We, who are never really allowed to express our drive for power, find it extremely satisfying to see someone who is “permitted to vent his power without a second thought on the one who is powerless” (41) because this ability to express power is that thing we desire most deeply. We need to realize that temptation is not something that comes from the outside to tap us on the shoulder – it is man desperately trying to get out!
So who are we then, simply slaves who now realize that we are in bondage? Does the ascetic morality that we have been breeding have any benefit to us at all? Nietzsche responds with a resounding “Yes!”. The “taming” (57) of man “with the help of the morality of custom and the social straightjacket [has made him] truly calculable,” (36) and is a necessary step on the path to becoming a human being free from any type of self-denying morality. Society’s enforcement of the self-denying morality through punishment has created a man who is predictable to himself, and is therefore “able to vouch for himself as future” (36). The problem with our current ability to promise is that it rests on the conditions of social morality and the continued existence of society itself, not on one’s own self- knowledge. The individual that Nietzsche sees as “the ripest fruit on [the tree of social morality is] the sovereign individual,” (36) who possesses “the extraordinary privilege of responsibility…[and a] power over oneself and fate [that has] sunk into his lowest depth and has become instinct” (37). The “sovereign individual” has overcome asceticism and relies on his desires as a moral guide – he no longer needs to have society telling him what is right and wrong. Our current self-denying morality actually helps us become this new species of “supermoral” man by giving us “more eyes, different eyes,” (85) so that we are able to view a problem from all sides and make an educated and fully conscious decision. What Nietzsche envisions as the pinnacle of humanity is an “atheism and a kind of second innocence” (62) that renounces our current society and God-dependent morality in favor of one that comes from within ourselves.
Rather than having our wills and our desires as separate and opposite entities, they would become one in the same – we would resemble prehistoric man in the fact that we would no longer be slaves to self-denial, but, instead of being amoral, we would be “supermoral” and “permitted to promise” (36) according to our own self-understanding. In the concept of the “second innocence,” we find Nietzsche the optimist and ultimate humanist – we are not some sort of broken creature as Christianity would have us believe, but rather an animal that simply needs to believe in itself and the value of its natural desires.
Poll
Topic: Is there a God?