Nietzsche also grasped, though, that the modernist for whom "God is dead" is nihilistic; the same pragmatic evasion of reality that "kills" God also "kills" all distinctively human sources of meaning, all measures of value beyond personal preference (as pragmatically modified by social conformity). Heidegger discusses the "default of God" as becoming most desperate when the "default" is no longer sensed as such; when there is no longer any destitution-of to remark that of which we are destitute, our destitution has become so absolute as to erase itself entirely from our consciousness.

Nietzsche's response is to expect and announce the emergence of great souls who can 'transvalue values,' who can go beyond the negation of old systems of valuation to create their own-ultimate self-asserting selves. Heidegger's response is to attempt the destruction of the Western metaphysical tradition and the consideration of the basic questions whose 'answers' formed the now-dead systems; his intellectual descendant, Derrida, though, is the one who concerns us.

Derrida's strategy is different, though it contains elements of both Nietzsche and Heidegger. Derrida takes seriously the destruction of all Western metaphysics in Nietzsche and Heidegger, and examines the nihil (the abyss).

¶ 7:22 AM