Monday, February 02, 2009

Hard to pin down ...

... Thus Spoke Nietzsche. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I certainly this is true:
Christians of the Right are free to take or reject any part of his thinking, but to treat Nietzsche as a forerunner of student rebels of the 1960s or the present swarm of Obamaites is both ludicrous and dishonest. By now this capriciously made connection is becoming part of a program of deception. It is one in which quintessentially leftist notions are made into “permanent things” or “values,” while the anti-egalitarian Right is dismissed as Nazi or nihilistic. Nietzsche has been counterfactually forced to do double duty, as a rightwing nihilist and as the father of the value-relativist Left.


More interesting to me, though, is this: "Like Nietzsche, [Heidegger] insists that a wrong turn had been taken by abandoning an earlier Greek attitude toward the mystery of being for what became with Socrates rationalism and a rationally accessible theology." I think that rationalism (not to be confused with the exercise of reason) is inadequate to deal with the mystery of being, but I don't think pagan fatalism is the only or the best response to that mystery.

1 comment:

  1. It's important to contextualize Nietzsche as well — he wrote to effect a shift of culture in his time, working against the attitudes of the late Victorian era. To forget that is to fundamentally misinterpret his work.

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