So, God is dead: the awfulness of men killed him – this is a theme, and the spirit of, much of the Zarathustra book. It makes the message mournful, too.
Against it the explosion of playfulness in The Science of Joy sets humanity the – perhaps impossible – task of complete self-reinvention in order to live truly here, in this world.
The context in which this reinvention had been taking place since before Nietzsche was "materialism", which, in the philosophical sense, was the position opposite to the idealism of Hegel and Schelling. Ludwig Feuerbach set it out in the 1830s, and this, as is well known, gave Marx his philosophical starting point.
This is not to say Nietzsche is a Marxist. Far from it. But it means that even his thinking did not come into being ex nihilo. He was carried forward on the most radical spirit of the times in which was born, and which he lived through in his own way: as a German writer, as an anti-idealist and an anti-Christian. The title of his book Der AntiChrist, in German, means "Anti-Christian" just as much as it means "Antichrist".
The other narrative that already in the mid-19th century told the western world God had died was, of course, Darwin's. Nietzsche was not part of post-Darwinism, but what he had to say fed into the 20th-century "after God" cultural steam.
Most important when we consider him in the context of today's atheists is to remember that he didn't elevate reason to a god either, and that his involvement in the spiritual tradition he was trying to leave was intense.
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