‘The Parable of the Madman’

October 11th, 2017 – Students and Faculty alike packed into UC 217 to attend a PLACE lecture held by Dr. Doug Julien on Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘The Parable of the Madman‘. As was written on the whiteboard and as Dr. Julien affirmed, “It’s a lot for 50 minutes.”

He wasn’t wrong. In that short timeframe, Dr. Julien guided the audience through this segment of Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, wherein a raving madman claims that ‘God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.’. Dr. Julien spoke of the piece as a thought experiment, centered around two questions: Did we kill God and, if so, how did we do it?

As this piece is considered a thought experiment, a large part of the lecture focused on a thought experiment all its own – Time, illustrated best by a simple question: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Dr. Julien points out that on the one hand, at a point in our history when Religion was the driving force of society and not Science, this question would be simple to answer. In the mind of Religion, God created the chicken and thus the chicken created the egg. In more modern times, however, there is the scientific concept of mutation and the proto-chicken. In the mind of Science, then, the egg was created first through some mutation in the ‘proto-chicken’, creating the chicken.

This age-old question, which of the two came first, illustrates how Time is a subjective concept. Think of Past, Present and Future. The Present is the ‘now’, the Past is everything before ‘now’ and the Future is everything to come. The point being, our perception of the world around us is constantly changing – in particular, to Religion or Science. “We believe Science but we do not trust Science.” Dr. Julien argued. “When everyone both believes and trusts Science, change occurs.”

Back to those two questions: Did we kill God? How did we kill him? The truth, much like whether you believe the chicken or the egg came first, is largely up to the observer – the individual. Do you believe God is dead? If so, how do you believe we killed him?

It bears repeating – “It’s a lot for 50 minutes.” Every member of the audience, myself included, very well got something different out of Dr. Julien’s lecture. In talking to him afterward, I believe this was the point. “Everyone will arrive to their own, individual Truth – and this Truth will, by nature, be flawed. Only by talking with one another can we arrive at the same conclusion.”, he told me.

It’s a dialectic – an integral process of any proper discourse – that answers these questions. Perhaps whatever time Dr. Julien didn’t have for this discussion, we now have in spades.

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