Good (notes for an) essay today. Your final section is very similar to my relationship to Judaism and the humanistic, George Steiner, Isaac Deutscher, our-homeland-the-text thing. I still find it very attractive as an idea and a mode of being but over the last 18 months I have come to think there's a sort of moral vanity to it, requiring as it does the "real" believers, the fanatics to do the dirty work of actually carrying out the Law. You can't really sustain a people on a certain set of values, especially what are just cultivated middle-class ones in the end. But I suppose it has led me down the opposite path to you -- not further from God necessarily but certainly further from the tradition. It has me struggling to see any value in that tradition at all if all it was leading to was modern Israel, but it's also its own form of moral vanity to believe that the last 5000 years were just a journey to the edge of the cliff (I suppose I know the Christian answer to this, lol). Anyway, I am wary of doing spiritual autobiography on this website but your writing has a way of getting it out of me-- best of luck on your continued journey.
I've read all of Nietzsche, from beginning to end; I am not post-left but paleo-left, a class-based thinker, so you might assume that I'd be against him. But I performed a simple act of division: I thought about but rejected his political ideas, while absorbing and doing battle with his psychological thought. How he thought society should be organized I totally reject, yet I was first pierced and then transformed by his insights into resentment, into the ways people lie to themselves, and most of all, into the post-Christian dedication to self-abasement, self-erasure, and life-negation. I believe we have a duty to others, that the individual must be balanced against the community, but that Nietzsche is some of the best medicine for twisted complexes we've inherited from our society. After all, we must clear away the brush of what we've been taught, in order to choose our own relation to society. We should serve Society, and not society.
His golden period, for me, was the trilogy from Human, All Too Human; Dawn; and The Gay Science, which I'd recommend for anyone torn up by feelings of guilt, insufficiency, etc. He helped me destroy not my belief, which was already dead, but my post-Catholic complex. Which however took many years to fully dismantle.
One could even integrate his insights without losing Christianity, since after all the type of Christianity he attacked is only a specific, historical instantiation which doesn't ring true for many Christians, especially the more complex ones of the present day.
Nietzsche is an extraordinarily complex thinker; but like every philosopher who tackled the broadest questions at such length, his work is a curate's egg. I'm convinced there is much to be learned from him, essential tools and insights. But on the other hand, some of his most popular books, particularly the last ones, aren't very good anymore. They are shrill, half-insane. The Antichrist is a sad jumble of raving, nowhere near the crystalline perfection of his best aphorisms. And of course, his ideology of the Great Man--though he would hate me saying this--is pure Romanticism filtered through the head of a sick man dreaming of strength.
Some interesting stuff in here. I also went through a Nietzsche phase when younger, only to quietly move on and move onto other thinkers, only to then wonder if I really had moved on when I read Losurdo's big tome on him.
Also the bit about the secular Christianity being a justification of asceticism for the sake of someone else's lawn was interesting. I'm not a Christian, but am drawn heavily to Kierkegaard partly for his critique of Christianity's domestication. Funnily enough I also just read this essay on Simone Weil's own process of domestication for perhaps similar purposes. Good luck with the faith thing I guess.
Stimulating as always and I'm looking forward to that essay. Congrats on the decision to officially become a Christian, even if that is not a path that I see open to me right now. If Christians were all as thoughtful as you are, we'd probably be in a much different situation right now!
"If none of this is real than everything every atheist has ever said is true and you are asking people to take up their cross and deny themselves for the good of your lawn, your stock portfolio and your HBO tragicomedies, and fundamentally this is not enough."
I was going to say "have I ever mentioned that I hate Brideshead Revisited" but then I remembered that in that very post I think I mentioned that I hate Brideshead lol
Good (notes for an) essay today. Your final section is very similar to my relationship to Judaism and the humanistic, George Steiner, Isaac Deutscher, our-homeland-the-text thing. I still find it very attractive as an idea and a mode of being but over the last 18 months I have come to think there's a sort of moral vanity to it, requiring as it does the "real" believers, the fanatics to do the dirty work of actually carrying out the Law. You can't really sustain a people on a certain set of values, especially what are just cultivated middle-class ones in the end. But I suppose it has led me down the opposite path to you -- not further from God necessarily but certainly further from the tradition. It has me struggling to see any value in that tradition at all if all it was leading to was modern Israel, but it's also its own form of moral vanity to believe that the last 5000 years were just a journey to the edge of the cliff (I suppose I know the Christian answer to this, lol). Anyway, I am wary of doing spiritual autobiography on this website but your writing has a way of getting it out of me-- best of luck on your continued journey.
Henry, you are not alone. I’ve had similar thoughts.
Congratulations on coming to the faith! (It’s such a lame phrase for what you’re receiving, but it’s worth saying nonetheless, praise God.)
Interesting thoughts here, as always. Do you know that essay on the gentle Nietzscheans, I think by Conor Cruise O’Brien?
I have not! I’ll be sure to!
I've read all of Nietzsche, from beginning to end; I am not post-left but paleo-left, a class-based thinker, so you might assume that I'd be against him. But I performed a simple act of division: I thought about but rejected his political ideas, while absorbing and doing battle with his psychological thought. How he thought society should be organized I totally reject, yet I was first pierced and then transformed by his insights into resentment, into the ways people lie to themselves, and most of all, into the post-Christian dedication to self-abasement, self-erasure, and life-negation. I believe we have a duty to others, that the individual must be balanced against the community, but that Nietzsche is some of the best medicine for twisted complexes we've inherited from our society. After all, we must clear away the brush of what we've been taught, in order to choose our own relation to society. We should serve Society, and not society.
His golden period, for me, was the trilogy from Human, All Too Human; Dawn; and The Gay Science, which I'd recommend for anyone torn up by feelings of guilt, insufficiency, etc. He helped me destroy not my belief, which was already dead, but my post-Catholic complex. Which however took many years to fully dismantle.
One could even integrate his insights without losing Christianity, since after all the type of Christianity he attacked is only a specific, historical instantiation which doesn't ring true for many Christians, especially the more complex ones of the present day.
Nietzsche is an extraordinarily complex thinker; but like every philosopher who tackled the broadest questions at such length, his work is a curate's egg. I'm convinced there is much to be learned from him, essential tools and insights. But on the other hand, some of his most popular books, particularly the last ones, aren't very good anymore. They are shrill, half-insane. The Antichrist is a sad jumble of raving, nowhere near the crystalline perfection of his best aphorisms. And of course, his ideology of the Great Man--though he would hate me saying this--is pure Romanticism filtered through the head of a sick man dreaming of strength.
Thank you for your insights!
Some interesting stuff in here. I also went through a Nietzsche phase when younger, only to quietly move on and move onto other thinkers, only to then wonder if I really had moved on when I read Losurdo's big tome on him.
Also the bit about the secular Christianity being a justification of asceticism for the sake of someone else's lawn was interesting. I'm not a Christian, but am drawn heavily to Kierkegaard partly for his critique of Christianity's domestication. Funnily enough I also just read this essay on Simone Weil's own process of domestication for perhaps similar purposes. Good luck with the faith thing I guess.
https://www.thedriftmag.com/whose-weil/
Stimulating as always and I'm looking forward to that essay. Congrats on the decision to officially become a Christian, even if that is not a path that I see open to me right now. If Christians were all as thoughtful as you are, we'd probably be in a much different situation right now!
Thank you for your support! I look forward to your response to it lol!
"If none of this is real than everything every atheist has ever said is true and you are asking people to take up their cross and deny themselves for the good of your lawn, your stock portfolio and your HBO tragicomedies, and fundamentally this is not enough."
This, this, so much THIS.
I was going to say "have I ever mentioned that I hate Brideshead Revisited" but then I remembered that in that very post I think I mentioned that I hate Brideshead lol
You do lol, but I’d love to hear more about it sometime!