If one takes a course on 19th century philosophy or reads a majority of commentaries on the topic, one will come across the assertion that it was Nietzsche who first, in the modern era, pronounced the death of God and saw clearly the problematics this creates for European man and his conception of himself, for morality and meaning, for man's understanding of his place in the universe. This assertion that it was Nietzsche who first grappled with this concept rests either on an ignorance of the history of philosophy or its intentional distortion. Either way, the claim that Nietzsche was really the first to think this problem through is factually not true. It is true Nietzsche made this remark, and that he thought about its implications, but it is not true that he was the first. The latter is an oversimplification and distortion, and it serves to bolster the flattering picture of Nietzsche as a profoundly original thinker who picked himself up by his own bootstraps. As to whether thi
Here is a passage from Hegel's philosophy of religion, in which one can see where Marxism found its inspiration for its atheism and naturalism, and also perhaps where the idea of a logical derivation of the state or capital came from: "Knowledge so far aims at that which *is*, and the *necessity* of it, and apprehends this in the relation of cause and effect, reason and result, power and manifestation; in the relation of the Universal, of the species and the individual existing things which are included in the sphere of contingency. Knowledge, science, in this manner places the manifold material in mutual relations, takes away from it the contingency which it has through its immediacy, and while contemplating the relations which belong to the wealth of finite phenomena, encloses the world of finiteness in itself so as to form a system of the universe, of such a kind that knowledge requires nothing for this system outside of the system itself. For what a thing is, what it is i