To kill God, either by denying his existence or at least the coherence of claims to knowledge of him (as David Hume arguably did) or by making him nothing more than a necessary presupposition for moral discourse, the Enlightenment effectively tore out the foundations from under the polite bourgeois morality that it wished to maintain. You cannot do this, says Nietzsche. You have unchained the earth from the sun, a move of incalculable significance. By doing so, you have taken away any basis for a metaphysics that might ground either knowledge or ethics. In killing God, you take on the
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