Question

Discuss the meaning and implications of Nietzsche's "mad man" scenario as it plays itself out in The Ga.y Science?

Answer 1

• Madness is a specific way of valuing or “bestowing” value on something, as we will see. As a kind of valuation, it is intricately bound up with Nietzsche’s rhetoric about “high” and “low,” and therefore with noble and common types as well—for according to the most popular version of Nietzsche, the different ways in which noble and common types value is a point of obsession for him.
• He states namely that there are strong (noble, roughly) and weak (common, roughly) human types who give rise to master and slave moralities respectively. In his account of human history, in which humanity is reduced to these two types, he recounts with disgust of the “slaves” who wage an underhanded war on the “masters” using Christian morality as their chief weapon. In Nietzsche’s final accounting, the meek have at last inherited the earth in the mobbed-up, equality- and freedom-loving modernity we know so well.
• Conversely, in The Ga.y Science, Nietzsche tells another story of noble and common, their history and interaction with one another. He dispenses with his distinctions of strong and weak and employs a subtler rhetoric and storytelling in scattered aphorisms, centering on the phenomenon of madness. Noble and common are renamed as the exception and the rule, the difference being that the exception—the noble type—is mad.
• The madman is basically saying, that mankind in general (in his society anyway) thought they did not need God anymore, so they basically ignored him, but in so doing they killed him in their consciences.
• Nietzsche despised Christianity. According to him Christian beliefs are the highest form of hypocrisy humans are capable of. Christian compassion, according to him, is a huge weakness, a disease that is rotting the core of humanity from inside. "God is dead", but what he truly means "Christian God is dead". The modern man (the madman), who once had believed, is now confused and lost and directionless. The modern man had once been mad enough to believe in Christian values, but now he does not have even that.
• "God will remain dead" I personally think it's an allusion to Jesus. According to Bible, men had once been godless or had believed in false gods. Then came Jesus, preached true religion and godless men killed him. It is his sacrifice that brought redemption to godless men, let them see the light. But then Jesus was resurrected.
• I doubt Nietzsche saw it as an actual physical resurrection, but as a metaphor for how the enlightened men did not let Jesus' vision die with him. But the modern man is different, he let those values die, he killed God and no sacrifice will move the modern man to revive them. The modern man lives in a perpetual state of confusion, which drove him into insanity.Nietzsche thought that modern society needed new values, new vision.
• Nietchze viewed the individual and the modern nation with suspicion as he saw the potential for darkness and misfortune as neither were capable of self-governance due to the primal nature of each.
• It was Nietchze's belief that both the individual and the modern nation were violent and predatory by nature and people easily overlooked this with ease as myth always overroad reality setting the modern world up for shock when reality came to the forefront.
• He wrote that man was not mentally equipped to deal with the truth about his violent inner self and the true origins of the modern nation. He predicted that chaos would incur when political and economic events conspired to lay bare the true colors of man and nation.