The death of God and the collapse of metaphysics. On the “historical” character of Nietzsche’s announcement

Abstract

This article focuses on what could be called the “historical” character of metaphysics, which would account for its birth and its definitive collapse, as illustrated by Nietzsche’s announcement of the death of God. It elaborates on two aspects of this announcement. First, it compares the two characters Nietzsche relates to the death of God, the “deranged man” that appears in The Gay Science and Zarathustra, who Nietzsche had originally considered to proclaim this event, but later dismissed. Second, it proposes an interpretation of the images of the death of God as an outline of how the traditional notions of the supreme being have completely lost their meaning and, consequently, all power to move the world anymore, leaving metaphysics adrift “in the horizon of the infinite”.