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Although Dostoyevsky’s thinking was quite radical at the time, it still contained some sort of conception of reason and still gave it some significance. ... During the Medieval period, there was a God that gave man a moral code to follow and a role in society. But sometime between his lifetime and then, man killed God. Man outgrew God’s system of order.
…To look upon nature as if it were a proof of the goodness and care of a God; to interpret history in honour of a divine reason, as a constant testimony to a moral order in the world and a moral final purpose; to explain personal experiences as pious men have long enough explained them, as if everything were a dispensation or intimation of Providence, something planned and sent on behalf of the salvation of the soul: all that is now past, it has conscience against it, it is regarded by all the more acute consciences as disreputable and dishonourable, as mendaciousness, feminism, weakness and cowardice-- (Baumer, 614)
Those few who realized that they were living in a society based around a dead god were absolutely terrified. People had always used God as their security blanket and now it was as if they were drifting in a boat with no land in sight with no north, south, east or west. ...
Just as Nietzsche begins to empower man more than ever, claiming that there will be an “ubermensch” that will save civilization by showing us the way out of a life devoted to God, Freud identifies the three blows to narcissism. ...
The 19th and 20th centuries were defined by the radical thought of some, most importantly Nietzsche and Freud and to a great, sometimes unrealized, extent, Nico Machiavelli, who laid the foundation for the sacrilegious attitudes of more modern philosophers. All these ways of thinking were based around the self-empowerment of man at their root and around a freedom from the chains of religion and the morality of the medieval period.
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