An Atheism of the Will: A Critique of 19th Century Anti-Theism Represented in Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols and Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed

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An Atheism of the Will: A Critique of 19th Century Anti-Theism Represented in Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols and Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed

"Of the different movements and schools of thought in the history of philosophy, there might be none more rhetorically powerful than the writings of the atheist philosophers of the 19th century. These atheists include the likes of Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche. According to the 20th century theologian, Henri De Lubac these men are more fittingly called “anti-theists” than atheists, as they sought not just to disbelieve in God, but to forcefully remove God from the minds of men. God, to them, was a vampiric projection, feeding on the blood of humanity and draining man’s being to sustain his own, and thus must be slain. This exorcism of God is celebrated, for example, by Nietzsche in his work The Gay Science. “God is dead! ... And we have killed him! How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed, has bled to death under our knives…” In the literary world the same ideas were given expression with comparable force by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the great Russian novelist. In his work The Possessed, the atheist Kirillov says, “I have no higher idea than disbelief in God. I have all the history of mankind on my side. Man has done nothing but invent God so as to go on living, and not kill himself; that's the whole of universal history up till now.” Yet for all their energy of expression, their atheism is less of an argument from reason as much as it is a choice of the will. Arguments for God’s existence, thought Nietzsche, will always reoccur in every generation, regardless of how thoroughly they have been refuted. Theoretical arguments, then, are futile because as long as God is resurrected in the mind of man he will be alienated from his true self. Atheism must be the act of will to remove God from the mind once and for all. The goal, then, of this paper is to demonstrate that 19th century atheism is primarily an “atheism of the will” by laying out Nietzsche’s anti-rationalist critique of God in his work Twilight of the Idols, examining three varying degrees of 19th century atheism in Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed, as well as offering a critique of the 17th and 18th century metaphysical skepticism which made 19th century anti-theism possible."