Nietzsche, the Madman, and Modernity’s Void |
The demise of the old Aristotelian order left a void that needed filling.
For centuries afterwards, philosophers sought to reaffirm the place of God and the dignity of man.
Nietzsche pulled the rug on these projects by announcing the death of God.
Nietzsche saw overcoming nihilism as essential for cultural rebirth and future human flourishing.
The Scientific Revolution disrupted the centuries-old Aristotelian system of the Church and universities. It all began in 1542, when the Pole Nicolaus Copernicus published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. This worked challenged the geocentric system of Aristotle and Ptolemy in which the Earth—and, more importantly, man—stood proud and unmoving at the centre of the universe.
It is arguably Newton who completed the Copernican Revolution, and put the nail in the coffin of the Aristotelian system, with the publication, in 1687, of his Principia mathematica. In this work, which is deemed impenetrable, he introduced his three laws of motion along with the Law of Universal Gravitation. In the mid-1660s, Newton kept a notebook with the title, Certain Philosophical Questions. Above this title, he inscribed the motto (which is a paraphrase of Aristotle): Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but truth is a greater friend still.
The Scientific Method
Also contradicting the Aristotelian worldview were William Harvey’s demonstration of the circulation of blood, published in his De motu cordis of 1628, and Galileo’s discovery that falling objects undergo uniform acceleration irrespective of their mass, published in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief........