Friedrich Nietzsche said that “God is dead.”
What does this mean? I think this notion can be further understood through understanding modern philosophy.
Western thought is clearly different from Eastern thought. But the way of thinking is in danger.
This is in no way easily explained. Our thoughts work in such a way that they compile over time, we make choices based on what we think, and we base what we think on what we have experienced.
It’s paradoxical almost, yet when you start to look at it this way, everything becomes paradoxical. That is what makes it not paradoxical.
Having an understanding of a religion or a philosophy destroys the ability to actually understand it. Directly characterizing these ideas, in a sense, then, creates what it intends to be, not what it is.
When Socrates and Confucius and those dudes were thinking, we begin to conform to their ways of thinking. In order to understand understanding, you first have to understand.
Understanding is an action, it’s like working out, you don’t just workout once. If you do then you do not accomplish anything, understanding is truly a matter of constantly developing understanding.
We learn understanding through brutal ways, such as trying to make us understand things in the context in which they exist in society. Yet we need to then keep going and understand how we ourselves think.
Modern school and teaching teaches understanding through teaching knowledge. Understanding should be taught separately from knowledge. But if you are not aware of the existence of something, how can you teach it?
I would claim that every religion and philosophy comes from the same thing. The desire to bring an understanding of a seemingly greater power. So “God is dead” means that the way we see God is no longer what was intended; he is dead, merely a tool used by humans.
Holding on to things such as understanding -- which is exactly what religions and philosophies do -- prevents us from moving forward. And this is the ultimate goal, to move forward in understanding.
Is there being an ultimate understanding a paradox then? Does the existence of that understanding prevent us from moving forward? No, it doesn’t.
The understanding is to move forward, in a sense; it can’t be explained fully. To explain it is to not fully understand it. It cannot be explained.
The very existence of the idea is the hardest thing to understand. There cannot be anything harder to understand, because you are using the tool to understand itself.
This understanding has infinite depth, and yet society constantly ignores it. Religions and their different sects, all the philosophies and their different views -- they all miss the point.
Yet the religions and philosophies that get the point only understand them in a relative sense. When they spread the idea itself originally, the understanding is wrong. The understanding becomes what it is not.
“All we are is dust in the wind, dude.”
