The Philosophy of Nietzsche

"I fear we shall never be rid of God because we retain our faith in grammar" is the culminating sentence in Friedrich Nietzsche's argument (in Twilight of the Idols) concerning the relationship between a belief in God and grammatical habit--our tendency to see things in terms of subject/object. This argument is itself a "working-through" (Verwindung) of one of the ramifications of Nietzsche's famous dictum that "God is dead," which is generally accepted as being …

…of the larger questioning of (and culmination of) Enlightenment questions about the nature of the individual, society, and the possibility of knowledge. For this reason, I have chosen to "break" Nietzsche's sentence at the start of this section, in order to consider the effects of hypertextual linkage upon this problematic. I make no grand claims for this experiment, for if anything is "dead" here, it is the era of "grand claims"--programmatic proclamations of totality.