The Importance of Arendt’s Reflection about the Crisis of the Authority for a Possible Political Interpretation of the Nietzsche’s Sentence “God is Dead"

Abstract

The work consists in demonstrate the importance of Arendt's reflection on the crisis of authority for a possible political interpretation of the nietzschean sentence "God is dead". The thinker exposes her concept of authority in the work “Between the past and the future”, in the chapter “What is authority?”, distinguishing it from persuasion and violence. These, respectively, need argument and force to be effective in the world, while authority resorted to its own tradition. However, according to the Arendt's diagnosis, authority enters into crisis in the modern world, since the tradition in which it has anchored dissolves. In this way, the work presents Nietzsche's critique of tradition, inferring that the sentence “God is dead” is the end of the authority analyzed by Arendt. Acoording to the philosopher, it will be thought how, after the "death of God", modern man finds for him a substitute. It is the state that, without a tradition to legitimize its authority, of authoritarian becomes totalitarian.