Posted on 12/26/2003 4:58:06 PM PST by Federalist 78
On the birthday of Christ, it is appropriate to compare Jesus with four Westerners who influenced the mental development of the world.
The Athenian philosopher Plato was admired at Western universities throughout the millennium of their existence. Plato ascribed his wisdom to Socrates, who was generally considered, among the educated in the West and Russia even in the 20th century, the wisest person who ever lived, the sage of sages.
Published in 1987 by Professor Allen Bloom was a study entitled "The Closing of the American Mind." What is the cause? American universities do not pay sufficient attention to Plato and Socrates.
The best-known book of Plato-Socrates, written by Plato, since Socrates did not write but expressed himself orally, describes the ideal State and hence is entitled "The State," mistranslated into English as "The Republic," though "republic" is a Latin, not Greek, word that appeared after Plato’s death.
The ideal State of Plato-Socrates resembles the tyrannical Sparta, a mortal enemy of Athenian democracy, but this ideal State of Plato-Socrates is far more Spartan than Sparta. It is a countrywide cattle-breeding farm on which pedigree human cattle are raised.
Men and women live separately, and a man and a woman, selected by the proper authorities to produce pedigree progeny, meet only for this "pairing" or "coupling," the resulting child being taken away from them for proper collective upbringing and education – provided the child satisfies the pedigree standards; otherwise, the child is destroyed. If it is born without the due pairing or coupling authorization, it is destroyed ipso facto then and there.
If someone is so sick that he or she cannot work, he or she should not be treated, but should be allowed to die as not fit for survival. If alive, he or she will mar the pedigree purity of the human cattle as a whole. The weak, the sick, those unable to work must die off and thus make the pedigree human cattle as a whole stronger and healthier.
About 23 centuries after Plato, an English clergyman studying nature and named Darwin discovered that man had evolved from the monkey. All the more reason to breed human cattle on a countrywide cattle-breeding farm (or a zoo?). Darwin’s contemporary (and disciple!) Nietzsche contended, with triumph, that man is the most predatory animal, a super-beast, a "bestia."
The Romans used to say, "Man to man is a wolf." But wolves have not been especially noted for attacking one another. On the other hand, a Mongol army, a pack of Mongols, would attack a city and, unless it surrendered, the attackers not only killed its entire population but also smashed all the buildings into stones so small that it was impossible to find that the city ever existed.
If wolves could invent and write down proverbs, a wolf, wishing to put down wolves, would say: "Wolf to wolf is a man."
Marx invented not a ruthless war of nations or religions, but a ruthless war of classes. The rich are the enemy. The rich do not surrender. The rich should be destroyed. As sung in "The Internationale," the anthem of communism, "The entire old world of coercion we will raze to the ground." As the Mongols razed to the ground a city that would not surrender.
Christ was born to a Jewish woman, named in English "Mary"; grew up as a Jew; spoke, read and wrote no language except Hebrew; lived his life and died in a Jewish country and had only Jews as disciples.
According to Luke 2:47, when Jesus was 12, Mary and Joseph discovered the boy in the Temple (in Jerusalum), "sitting among the Teachers" – the rabbis. Jesus was a prodigy, matching at 12 the Teachers of 40 or 80: "Everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers."
Jesus did, indeed, become, when he was "about thirty years old" (Luke 3:23), a Teacher, teaching his disciples not within orthodox synagogues but in the streets and the bosom of nature. Jesus said that he was not to "abolish the Law and the Prophets [that is, Judaism], but to fulfill them." (Matthew 5:17).
To put this into modern lay language, it can be said that thus a scientist of genius does not abolish the science created before him, but "fulfills" it. Accordingly, the Christian Holy Bible consists of the Judaic (Hebrew) Old Testament Christ knew so well already at the age of 12, and the New Testament Christ created, to "fulfill" the Old Testament.
What was it that Christ created to "fulfill" Judaism?
Nietzsche applied to himself the name "anti-Christ." He used to say that Christianity is the worst evil in history. Had Jesus been an essayist, able to see his opponents for 20 centuries ahead and five centuries behind, he would have called himself anti-Plato, anti-Nietzsche, anti-Darwin and anti-Marx.
The first and the last (in the social hierarchy or in Plato’s opinion) may be the last and the first (in human value). If you are rich, give away your wealth to the poor. Do not resist evil with equally evil or more evil evil. Blessed are not the strongest fighting men, but the weak (such as women and children), the meek, the suffering, the poor, the unfit for survival, and they need thy compassion, pity and help.
Of course, for example, the notion of charity looms large in Judaism. But Christ made it a critical spiritual need, as did Nietzsche when he protected a horse against blows with his own body (see below).
To the four opponents, Christ would have said:
What happened in the fourth century is as strange as Nietzsche’s attempt to protect a horse with his own body. The Roman Empire, obsessed with power, including wars of expansion, and with wealth, including wars of acquisition of wealth, adopted the teaching of Christ after three centuries of Christian persecution, beginning with the crucifixion of Christ.
How did Christianity change Christendom? Wars continued, but there appeared a Christian-aristocratic knighthood, chivalry, rules of war – while two Chinese colonels published at the close of the 20th century the book "Unrestricted Warfare," denying any rules. Infectious microbes were discovered in 19th century Europe, which has not, however, waged bacteriological war.
Christendom never practiced Mongolic, Chinese, Nazi or Soviet mass exterminations, though the British Empire came close in its imperial zeal, helped by Herbert Spencer, who coined the phrase "the struggle for the survival of the fittest," used by Darwin as basic to his theory of evolution. Spencer argued that the British were the fittest for survival, and a high death rate among colonial nations merely contributed to the pedigree health of the human race.
Charity became a common notion, as it was in Judaism. Many Americans do not understand that "democratic socialism" and Christian Socialists in Europe had nothing to do with Marx. The word "socialism" came into use in France and England soon after 1825 and had been probably coined by Auguste Comte, a mathematician and the founder of sociology (also his word).
What has been called in the United States "social benefits," "social security," "welfare," etc., can also be called socialism, which sprang from the same Judaic-Christian notion of charity. The manifesto that Marx and Engels published in 1848 was entitled "The Communist [not Socialist!] Manifesto" and proclaimed a world proletarian revolution – that is, a world class war to seize power all over the world. They condemned peaceful socialism, stemming from the Christian notion of charity, and Christianity itself as enemy devices to delay a world proletarian revolution.
Lenin and his Bolsheviks, or Communists, persecuted the Russian democratic socialists as their worst foes, traitors and criminals.
As for sociology, even after the death of Marx and Engels, the orthodox Marxists (in Soviet Russia and post-1949 China, for example) considered it a "bourgeois pseudo-science" up to the 1960s!
The suspension of Christianity in Lenin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany, as well as the advent of Marxism in Mao’s China, led to class or ethnic mass exterminations, with the implication that human beings can be exterminated the way animals are, for human beings are animals that should be bred like cattle, and the war for survival must be as ruthless as unrestricted warfare in the two Chinese colonels’ recent book.
This may have been the hidden poison in Western civilization. In the West, conservative and traditionalist Christians have long held the notion that 'classical education' consists of sending their children to universities to learn Plato and Socrates. Then they're surprised when their children come home espousing socialism and homosexuality.
Heck, you can do that with the Bible. Get wid' it, JoeSchem.
Scatalogically put. Since I am not a believer, I have a different take; though somewhat in agreement.
The likes of Molly Ivins and Richard Dawkins are so utterly wrong in their condemnation of religion, the Judeo-Christian in particular since its positive importance to the development of our culture can hardly be overestimated.
I don't find the emanations of these two to be evil on account of their ridiculous prejudices and blindness to the nature of life in front of them. But it is true IMO that each of the thinkers mentioned - Plato, Nietzsche, Darwin, and Marx have conveyed certain ideas which can be dangerous if used incorrectly.
Then they're surprised when their children come home espousing socialism and homosexuality.
Jefferson didn't need the Greeks for a solution to homosexuality.
Amendment VIII: Thomas Jefferson, A Bill for Proportioning Crimes ...
Whosoever shall be guilty of Rape, Polygamy, or Sodomy with man or woman shall be punished, if a man, by castration, if a woman, by cutting thro' the cartilage of her nose a hole of one half inch diameter at the least.
I've posted the Christmas essay State of the Faith Anno Domini, 2003 (Michael Novak) that references Richard Dawkins. Y'all come.
Nietzsche, Darwin, and Marx have conveyed certain ideas which can be dangerous if used incorrectly.
January 2003 issue Cardozo Law Review is still effervescing over Nietzsche…determined, no doubt, to create a 1000 year Reich here.
Ahem, I am sorry but socialism is not related to Christianity, but a distortion and an evil extention of charity through government. As this communist would say: " I do not want charity business but social justice."
1. Charity in Christianity is handed out to those who are charitable to themselves: i.e. help those who want to do good, i.e. but do not help those who ask you to help them party or sniff drugs. Socialism makes no difference as to whom receives the help. Government is not about sanctioning morality but productivity at best, and, then, not even so, because the productive tax payer is not encouraged by the welfare system it views with suspicion and on which it has little control.
2. When the socialist government owns the means of production, how can one distinguish a punishing government from one who hands out jobs? If a felon wants to revenge against government, then, as an employee of government, the felon can sabotage the workplace. On the other hand, if private and public are separated, if the punishing entity differs from the job handing entity, we do not have such criminal Marxist subversion of government possible. One becomes his own government and jurisdiction with his own private and local public means to oppose government in legal checks and balances. In Judeo-Christianity this is called "let my people go" or the "crucifiction", all selfinsulation from sin and taking the fall for future generations' sake and salvation, as opposed to a socialism which enslaves and destroys any hope of slavation, separation and washing of past sins and evils, a new improved world at every generation. The way the socialists plan things for everything precludes people from learning from their mistakes. People only make mistakes that the state views as mistakes and live in a world completely disconected from reality and real mistakes, but mistakes as seen by the state.
3. Also the planification nature of socialism implies the same deal as Plato, whereby the state of life is enforced philosophicaly and can only be argued philosophicaly through superliterate "proofs" in all virtuality that are not related to reality. Compare that to Christ's more optionable and market oriented idea of a virtualy private government you choose, who said "you will know them by their fruits", and one sees quickly how results and free choice beats any proof or any enforced philosophy that precludes choice and real life testing of those choices - if ever those choices are difficult and may lead one to personal catastrophy, taking the fall is the idea. Compare the tenured professor who has no respect for the poor with gut instincts and no education but who through goodness and instinct is able to survive and build an empire of his own to become rich. This is the result of true charity vs. philosophical self defeating alibis and human laboratory experiments to do harm to others. One is responsible for himself and is his own lab, let not others be involved with such experiments against their will or through "scientific" deceptions and alibis.
The problem with tenured philosphers and philosophies is that one has no option but to apply them thoroughly and dangerously in order to "prove" their validity. One cannot deviate for them even if they lead to disaster. There is no option out of the classroom of a professor who insists you deserve a bad grade because your methods are new or not approved. However there is plenty of options in the market to make your ideas work and people choose the man with the right idea, even if this idea is latter seen as ridiculous and has evolved.
This is getting quite sexual, 78. Electrical Engineers do it fine without Poincaré.
I read Rudiger Safranski's book on Heidegger which in the end gave me a sense of his dark side and made me rather ill. There is no doubt whatsoever that Heidegger was anti-enlightenment and consulted with Faustian Principalities and Powers.
My reading of Postmodernism and Nihilism places Heidegger and his children (Marcuse, Arhendt, and a few others)at the epicenter of Postmodernism and Nihilism.
In conclusion I consider Heidegger a reckless mind and philo-tyrannical.
Nietzsche is in a class of his own and falls within the highest ranks of human philosophy. Those who deny his importance and effects on 20-21st century thought are either willfully disregarding that truth or just do not know.
It seems that Critical Theory and Consciousness Studies have supplanted old fashioned Philosophy.
We have been betrayed by most of the so-called intellectuals. Postmodernism has overrun American Academia where Foucault and Derrida still live on.
I live in Raleigh, NC where Duke University has become one of the beachheads of Postmodernism.
In addition, European style socialism is more akin to a pharisean catholic church cult enforcement, seeking to replace the late Temple Mount priestly extortions with its own anarchic antigod and pro-priests anarchic schemes, alibis and "criss-cross" evil bonds in the Vatican. It has little to do with the traditional Juedo-christian trend as portrayed in the Dead Sea scrolls, for example.
Christianity is merely, IMO, an extention of Judaism, as the flight from Egypt is a flight from the oppression and sins of gentiles against Jews, Christ going to the cross can also be interpreted as a Jew escaping oppression from fellow Jews. The man accepts banishment. That said the crucifiction also as many other added significances, such as God taking the fall for us, and kind of thanking us for choosing Him and allowing the final fall of the antichrist.
Nietzsche did make many correct predictions about the softening nature of man. Unlike Marx's "predictions" which are corrupting and based into this utopia of a masterless society through the submission of a single master, Nietzsche's was more an observer than a charlatan like Marx who makes people believe his prediction of a masterless society through the reality of a masterful world plantation type scheme. Marxists always mix lies with truth to make the lies believed, and the lie of the masterless society is believed in the scheme of the obvious trend toward a single masterful world society.
Except that while Nietzsche's super men do rely on other supermen of lower ranks. With Marx, no such thing exists, as the lower and middle class ranks are all destroyed to make us all slaves under a single master man behind the curtain whose lower level masters are only slaves doing his bidding and not real lords or scholars thinking for themselves. Under Marxism, the destruction of current masters is appealing but indeed a faustian deal in which only one master remains and profits from the downfalls of the competition at the hands of a manipulated proletaria which is urged to carry on the destruction. Master and slaves hence share something in common: they both distrust mid-level masters.
And which writings of Jesus are those? Could you please supply a list.
Last but not least, Darwin forgot to see that there is some contradictions between Darwin's evolving generations through a spontaneous genetic modification with Pasteur's own hard work at proving that spontaneous generations simply do not exist. Infection is the main mean of adaptation and multiplication and diversity, not spontaneity of life. Proving the spontaneity of life on Earth has been attempted, but it has been less than convincing. In fact this all important subject is completely ignored by Darwinists, who instead emphasis genetic modification of things already existing, and who ignore D'Embricourt's work on the existence of a strange attractor in Chaotic type Darwinist evolution.
Darwin was an anarchist pre-communist who promoted full Brownian type chaos to explain evolution, while the existence of design and chaos with strange attractor has been reversed engineered in many processes and good matching models of evolution.
Agreed and why they refer to Nietzsche as the first Psychologist (and before Frued). Hegel was a charlatan according to Schopenhauer who educated Nietzsche. I accord both men allot of respect although it amazes me how much a philosophers own temperment, in addition to his/her times effects his/her philosophy.
"Human nature as such is at stake, and even though it seems that these experiments succeed not in changing man but only in destroying him . . . one should bear in mind the necessary limitations to an experiment which requires global control in order to show conlcusive results."When I read this sentence, I could hardly believe my eyes. "nature" is a philosophical concept; it denotes that which identifies a thing as a thing of this kind and not of another one. A "nature" cannot be changed or transformed; a "change of nature" is a contradiction of terms; tampering with the "nature" of a thing means destroying the thing. To coneive the idea of "changing the nature" of man (or of anything) is a symptom of the intellectual breakdown of Western civilization. The author, in fact adopts the immanentist ideology; she keeps an "open mind" with regard to the totalitarian atrocities; she considers the question of a "change of a nature" a matter that will have to be settled by "trial and error"; and since the "trial" could not yet avail itself of the opportunities afforded by a global laboratory, the quesiton must remain in suspense for the time being . . . These sentences . . . reflect a typically liberal, progressive, pragmatist attitude toward philosophical problems. We suggested previously that the author's derailments are sometimes more interesting than her insights. And this attitude is, indeed, of general importance because it reveals how much ground liberals and totalitarians have in common; the essential immanentism that unites them overrides the differences of ethos that separate them. The true dividing line in the contemporary crisis does not run between liberals and totalitarians, but between the religious and philosophical transcendentalists [Plato, Jesus] on the one side and the liberal and totalitarian immanentist sectarians on the other side [Comte, Freud, Darwin, Marx].
It is sad, but it must be reported, that the author herself draws this line. The argument starts from her confusion about the "nature of man": "Only the criminal attempt to change the nature of man is adequate to our trembling insight that no nature, not even the nature of man, can any longer be considered to be the measure of all things"--a sentence that, if it has any sense at all, can only mean that the nature of man ceases to be the measure, when some imbecile conceives the notion of changing it. The author seems to be impressed by the imbecile and is ready to forget about the nature of man, as well as about all human civilization that has been built on its understanding.
The "mob," she concedes, has correctly seen "that the whole of nearly three thousand years of Western civilization . . .has broken down." Out go the philosophers of Greece, the prophets of Israel, Christ, not to mention the patres and scholastics; for man has come of age, and that means "that from now on man is the only possible creator of his own laws and the only possible maker of his own history."
This coming-of-age has to be accepted; man is the new lawmaker; and on the tablets wiped clean of the past he will inscribe the "new discoveries in morality," which Edmund Burke had still considered impossible.
It sounds like a nihilistic nightmare
You make a slight point. But most often this is reactive fallout from hippie griping or media reverberation. To the dismay of the anything-goes crowd and the Cartesian "I knew that" there is a tradition, there are ways of doing things, and protocol, and rules of civility. Either you adopt the procedure or join FR ;)
Arhendt- allot of it having to do with her love affair with Heidegger in her late teens and admiration until his dying days.
The Origins of Totalitarianism is considered by many to be a masterwork on Totalitarianism in the 20th century. Ortega y Gasset also mention the mob in Revolt of the Masses.
Passive Nihilism becomes a nightmare when intellectuals are like children or adolescent youths who fail to realize that 2500-3000 year's of cultural evolution has taken us to this point and they want to trash traditional values without creating new ones or accepting these values as evolved from much struggle.
You need only watch MYV, E Entertainment and many other platforms which actually make money by undermining the intellectual and cultural capital that Western civilization has amassed.
Foucault died of AIDS and likely carried this disease to many homosexual frequenters of bathhouses and orgiastic encounters in California. He died a pitiable death which I hope will apply to the Postmodern project we see ourselves exposed to.
I will always cast my lot with a C S Lewis rather than Foucault.
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