@article{THESIS,
      recid = {4777},
      author = {Messerschmidt, Matthew Olav},
      title = {The Guiding Thread of Modernity: Nietzsche's Death of God  as a Physiological Event},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2022-08},
      number = {THESIS},
      pages = {303},
      abstract = {"Physiology" is fundamental to Nietzsche's understanding  of the human. I pose the question of how the death of God,  the modern event that fundamentally alters the Western  human being, can be understood physiologically. The death  of God, I argue, is triggered by modernity's awakening of a  physiological awareness that Christianity had suppressed,  but God's death in turn catalyzes a physiological crisis:  the unfettered exposure to limitless new possible values,  data, and paradigms, no longer regulated by the strictures  of faith, overruns the capacities of the finite, embodied  human, in nihilistic modernity. Since, for Nietzsche,  physiology is the study of the will to power realized as  drives, the death of God and of Christianity must be  understood as the death of a certain epoch of desire. I  read Nietzsche’s new divinity, Dionysus, as the figurehead  of a new desire in humanity, the desire for the  always-already-departed source of being – namely,  “Becoming.” Nietzsche’s ultimate decision to define  Dionysus as the “unnameable” and necessarily “unknown” god  that is more-than-Being complicates his relationship to  Christianity, inviting us to read Nietzsche’s thought as a  hard struggle to overcome Christian thinking, rather than  an easy decision to do so. Physiology is the name, I  ultimately argue, of the mode of thought that can overcome  metaphysics. },
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/4777},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.4777},
}