The death of God and the death of man

Abstract

The death of God and that of Man represent respectively the modernist and the contemporary rejection of the two foundations of objective truth. In the past, many notions have been put forward to provide the ultimate grounds of secure knowledge about the nature of being: the Platonic immutable Forms, the Logos of Stoicism, the medieval God and the rational self of modernity, amongst others. This formulation of knowledge, generally interpreted as a "decline of human creative capacities [ ... ] which began with Socrates and Christianity" by most contemporary thinkers, has been historically accompanied by yet another attempt to furnish history itself with a meaning, or a direction, as seen in Plato's demiurge, Augustine's God and Hegel's Absolute Spirit. Being and Metaphysics It is sometimes argued that past attempts at challenging metaphysical thought-including the materialism of the early naturalists, the scepticism of post-Socratic thinking and the empiricism of modernity-can only be historically defined in that same metaphysical framework they had originally sought to challenge.