Friedrich Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil, targets Christianity, in the form most accessible to him: Catholicism. He critiques the virtues it fosters and the religion’s effects, particularly highlighting Christianity’s stance on suffering. On the other hand, Martin Luther King Jr. rejects Nietzsche’s accusations of Christian notions encouraging mediocrity and weakness. Despite the philosophers' adherence [...]
Macbeth loses his head and soul in the unknowing clouds of his own sin-deceived ego. So does Nietzsche. Far from seeing life as a quest for truth, they are left with nothing but their own bitter inquest on life, “signifying nothing”. This is the “deepest consequence” of their rejection of faith and reason. I’ve recently [...]
Rooted in Nietzsche’s idea of the ”Superman” is the idea is that a new breed of humanity will emerge who will be superior to the old, joyless Judeo-Christian ethic. Striding confidently into a brave new world, this new super-humanity will rise above the old humanity groveling before their gods. “I am better than everybody else” [...]
Does “Paradise Lost” succeed as a poem qua poem, but not as a didactic theological poem? If we lived four hundred year earlier, might we suggest Milton pit Satan primarily against St. Gabriel or St. Michael? The concepts of the Apollonian and Dionysian are famously invoked by Nietzsche in the context of Greek drama, but not [...]
Do you believe in a higher power, something that transcends the “human organism”? If this question is trivialized or ignored, we enter the very sound and soul of despair. Anthropology is the scientific study of human beings. Philosophy, literally translated, is the love of wisdom. Philosophical anthropology, then, is the scientific study of humans for [...]
Among the critics of the Enlightenment faith in science, Friedrich Nietzsche stands out as among the most profound. In “Beyond Good and Evil,” Nietzsche argues that the enthronement of science has created a new class of elites known as the scholars, who seek to impose the assiduous, calculating, and “objective” spirit of science on every [...]
Only by recognizing the divine mystery that predicates existence in the world can one reclaim his individuality. Only then will he be capable of searching for meaning generated outside the human intellect. Humans can never be gods, but they need God to live meaningful lives. Most students I teach believe that reality is subjective and [...]
What Nietzsche calls Christianity is, in fact, a twisted form of the Judeo-Christian faith. Of course, there are people who use humility as their trump card, their piety to blackmail others, their meekness to manipulate, and their obedience to secretly dominate. Perhaps this is all the Christianity young Nietzsche saw in his Protestant pastor father’s [...]
During the last fifty years we have seen the cities of America crumble into race riots time and again. The problem of racism is solved by the way of the cross, by the way of the ordinary person who, filled with transcendent insight, sees a problem, owns it, then rolls up his sleeves to do [...]
The sheer power and magnitude of Wagner’s “Parsifal”—the fruit of his recent conversion to a vague form of Christianity—shook the resolve and philosophy of his long-time disciple, Friedrich Nietzsche, to their foundations. Having recently watched a superb and breathtaking performance of Wagner’s last and perhaps greatest work, I feel constrained to share some thoughts on [...]
Paul Elmer More offered one of the single best critiques of Friedrich Nietzsche, delving deeply into the essence of his thought, in both attraction and repulsion, finding that it is in the attempt to reconcile the love and apprehension about Nietzsche that best allows one to understand him. “Who has ever been concerned for me [...]
A philosopher in his own right, and more impressively, an autodidact, Nicolás Gómez Dávila contributed some of the most thoughtful analyses of twentieth-century thought through one of the least conventional ways of political interpretation: aphorisms. Civilization is not an endless succession of inventions and discoveries, but the task of ensuring that certain things last. [...]
Friedrich Nietzsche has long been smeared as a ghastly nihilist who repudiated all conceptions of morality. Critics point to the title of his famous work, Beyond Good and Evil, which appears to call for the repudiation of morality, as well as contain his vociferous condemnations of eternal moral standards. With his proclamation that “God is [...]
We should learn to cultivate the unwillingness to tolerate the unwitting, untold lie in the soul, and the wit and wisdom to transmute the unavoidable lying of any utterance into the telling lies that reveal truth… The first lecture of the school year is, by an old tradition, dedicated to the freshmen among us. Whether you [...]