He described “the urgency of [Nietzsche’s] task” : after the death of God, when divine explanations are untenable and naturalistic explanations fail to give human experience any dignity or meaning, the solitary individual must confront his awesome aloneness in an indifferent universe.51 Nihilism is no option, for it is simply a retreat into wornout habits of thought characterized by the conviction that the world is only meaningful if it has one meaning. Kaufmann tentatively and even cautiously defined these elements of Nietzsche’s thought as existential.
