When questioning the issue of our existence one must go to the basic question of "If we exist, then who created us?" Many religious and spiritual people would have a very simple answer: God. So this leads the questioning philosopher to ask how do we know that God exists? This is a question that can be looked at from a variety of different perspectives. In the section of The Gay Science, entitled The Madman, Nietzsche claims that our lack of faith has to lead to God's demise (Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 181). Without God how can we exist? Nietzsche's answer would be that it is not God's existence, but the presence of our individual autonomy, that is our existence.
             Nietzsche lived in a time of great political, social and religious change, and in his philosophical examination of society, Nietzsche found that the only philosophical ideal that could be related to these modern times, was nihilism. Nietzsche believed that because of the social instability, due to radical change, the philosophies of the ancient Greeks such as Plato as well as the philosophies of modern philosophers were no longer applicable. The reason for the lack of validity in the ideals of all other philosophers was that society had previously had religion as a fail safe. Nietzsche thought that one of the key problems with society is that individuals felt that when there was a lack of meaning in one's life religion was there to fall back on. This dependency on religion was one of society's key philosophical misconceptions. According to Nietzsche, the only way for philosophy to have any validity was through one's personal autonomy and the applying of philosophies to an individual. (Solomon, 97). Society was too unstable to be understood through all previous philosophies those of both modern and ancient times. The key problem in these predominantly Christian philosophies was that Christianity denounces the appetites of the soul, such as lust. Nietzsche was not...