for a human life seems to be less than human if it is lived without having raised certain fundamental questions about the place of human life within the whole of things. Among these fundamental questions the question “why?” stands as primary.
Put simply, a genuinely human life seems to require a meaning: like a word or sign it must point beyond itself if it is not to lack all sense and significance
in, it was Nietzsche who was the first to articulate this possibility. In his discription of the “last man” he gave vivid representation to the shape that such a non-human human life might take. The last man, as described by Nietzsche, is the kind of being into which man devolves when his belief in God has been thoroughly extinguished, or when “the death of God,” as Nietzsche’s Zarathustra calls it, has been accomplished. Perhaps somewhat suprisingly though, Nietzsche sees the worst effect of the death of God not in convulsive despair or destructive rage, but in a self-satisfied forgetfulness—God is truly dead and buried, and with him all genuinely human life, only when human beings no longer feel that it is urgent to ask and answer the fundamental questions, when they no longer feel that it is necessary to raise the primary question “why?.”
The sun that has stood above and delineated the spiritual horizon of the West has always been setting.
If God is identified with truth, then the will to belief in God is conjoined with the will to knowledge of the truth. But the will to truth, as always demanding a clear and intelligible ground for all belief, must lead, sooner or later, to calling all belief into question, including the belief in God.
However, the goodness or desirability of truth is, according to Nietzsche, itself merely a conviction or an article of faith. In other words, the will to possess the truth as the effort to find clear and intelligible grounds for all belief cannot be self-grounding.
Nietzsche locates the principal cause of the West’s adoption of a self-destructive ideal, that is, of nihilism or the death of God, in man’s relationship to time, a relationship which is characterized, on the human side, by a resentment against time, time’s passing and the past. His Zarathustra calls this resentment the “spirit of revenge,” and locates the foundation of this revenge in the will. “This, indeed this alone, is what revenge is: the will's counter-will against time and its ‘it was’ (Diess, ja diess allein ist Rache selber: des Willens Widerwille gegen die Zeit und ihr ‘Es war’).”2 But this counter-will against time lies at the heart of what Zarathustra names “the disease called man.”
According to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra it is the willful effort to justify the passing of the present into oblivion and to redeem the irrevocable past--that is, to show the meaningfulness of everything that is, has been and will be, or to show that there is a reason for all that comes to pass in time-that has given rise to the spiritual disease with which man has been afflicted: the counter-will against time.
Now Nietzsche seems to believe that nihilism or the disease called man can be cured only if this disease is brought to a crisis and completion. In other words, nihilism can be “overcome" only if it is consummated. It is for this reason that Zarathustra insists that man must be “overcome” or “go under” in order to make way for something more than man, for what Zarathustra and Nietzsche call the “overman.” The alternatives facing humanity then are not, on the one hand, its spiritual preservation, and on the other, its spiritual extinction; rather man must"go under,” his only choice involves whether, in going under, he will make way for the last man or the overman.