Nietzsche!
DON’T GET ME STARTED!
Albert Einstein, Theoretical Physicist said:
“The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate, but almost disqualified for life.”
Vs.
Fritz Nietzsche:
“I will now disprove the existence of all gods. If there were gods, how could I bear not to be a god? Consequently, there are no gods.”
Ahem, and, just who were Nietzsche’s sources of inspiration or Professor/teachers?
Jean Jacques Rousseau believed that humans are inherently good; yet he saw that goodness did not prevail. His political theory described social contracts that would capitalize on this innate goodness. But such notions were soon overturned in the flames of the French Revolution. Any philosophy that assumes that man is innately good finds its optimism ever disappointed, and disproved by history.
In addition to Jean Jacques Rousseau, we should mention Schopenhauer!
By 1865, Nietzsche gave up the study of theology and began to devote increasing amounts of his attention to philology, the science of language. While in Leipzig visiting a friend, Nietzsche happened across a philosophical work which would influence his thought in profound ways. That book was Arthur Schopenhauer’s two volume, The World as Will and Representation, published in 1819.
Schopenhauer was a strange man. He was educated at Germany’s finest institutions including Gotha, Weimar (the home of Goethe) and Jena. In 1819, he became a lecturer at the University of Berlin. While at Berlin Schopenhauer held his lectures at the same time as Hegel but without success. No one came to hear Schopenhauer lecture.
His major contribution was his concept of Subjective Idealism — that the world is my idea, a phantasm of the mind, and therefore, in itself, meaningless. Will, the active side of our nature, or Impulse, is the key to the one thing we know directly from the inside — the self, and therefore the key to the understanding of all things.
It gets better:
Although the will is entirely real, it is not free, nor does it have any ultimate purpose. Rather, it is all-consuming, pointless, and negative, “all life is suffering.”
His ideas were strongly influenced by the Upanishads and Buddhism. Schopenhauer was the first major European philosopher to make a point of atheism; however, he admired the asceticism of Christianity and Buddhism, declaring that after removing the dogmas these religions have as their philosophical underpinning the abolition of the will.
Ha!
So much for the Happy Buddha! (smile)
Schopenhauer’s strongest influence was on Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein, and musician Richard Wagner, whose Tristan and Isolde puts to music the BLIND WILL. (Yeah, That Blind Will tune must have been Hitler’s favorite - Hitler was a spiritual child of Neitzsche;)
See:
http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/civilization/cc0009.html
Friedrich Nietzsche was influenced by Rousseau and later was to call himself “the Anti-Christ,” and wrote a book by that title. He argued for atheism as follows:
He scorned reason as well as faith, often deliberately contradicted himself, said that “a sneer is infinitely more noble that a syllogism” and appealed to passion, rhetoric and even deliberate hatred rather than reason.
He saw love as “the greatest danger” and morality as mankind’s worst weakness. He died insane, of syphilis, at home with his Mother, but just after leaving an asylum. He signed his last letters “the Crucified One.”
In his book:[B]“The Genealogy of Morals”[/B], he claimed that morality was an invention of the weak (especially the Jews, and then the Christians) to weaken the strong. The sheep convinced the wolf to act like a sheep. This is unnatural, argues Nietzsche, and seeing morality’s unnatural origin in resentment at inferiority will free us from its power over us.
What would replace God?
The same being who will replace man; the Superman or [i]Übermensch[/i] Nietzsche’s magnum opus and masterpiece, [B]“Thus Spake Zarathustra”[/B], celebrates this new god.
Nietzsche call “Zarathustra” the new Bible, and told the world to “throw away all other books; you have my “Zarathustra.” It is intoxicating rhetoric, and it has captivated adolescents for generations. It was written in only a few days, in a frenzy, perhaps of literally demon-inspired “automatic writing.” No book ever written contains more Jungian archetypes, like a fireworks display of images from the unconscious.
Nietzsche wrote of his: Overman, who was superman—humanity that had evolved beyond our current state into a more powerful and more awesome form. Thus humanity was between superman and beast. Nietzsche wrote:
[INDENT]What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for Overman…[We] have made our way from worm to man, and much in [us] is still worm…[So] man is a rope tied between beast and Overman…[and so] what is great in man is that he is bridge and not an end.[/INDENT]
Thus Nietzsche looked forward to man evolving into superman.
See also:
http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/education/ed0245.html
The Breakdown of Morals and Christian Education, by ÉTIENNE GILSON (Adapted)
This, “God is Dead” revolution was meant to be the most tremendous revolution that ever took place in world history. At the very beginning, those who envisaged a godless society experienced a feeling of liberation. At last, man was going to be free!
However, it was Nietzsche himself who had been fully aware of the fact that, when man should at last be liberated from the authority of God, he would find himself face to face with the entirely new task of creating his own moral values, that is, determining what should be considered as right or wrong, good or evil.
Next came Jean Paul Sartre, a typical representative of the French school of existentialists. And, expounding on this philosophy, at the 1950 philosophical Congress of Bordeaux (France), another French philosopher, Polin, calmly announced that he was going to speak against the traditional notion of moral “wisdom” because, so far as he could see, there were no objective moral values. (Bingo, but perhaps it was Nietzsche or Rosseau who said it first.)
Only that is morally good, he said, which we declare to be so, and only what we specifically affirm to be morally wrong is actually morally wrong. Man, said Polin, is the creator of moral values. Now this is a very extreme position indeed, especially for a “professor of Moral Philosophy and of the Science of Education” in a State university, yet, after all, it is a consistent one.
[B]For indeed, if there is no God, who but man himself can teach man the distinction between what is right and what is wrong?[/B]
This is perfectly logical. However, when all is said and done, there is still one more question to be answered.
[B]What do we mean by man?[/B]
Man in general does not exist; there are individual men only, and who, among them, will have authority to teach us the distinction between good and evil? Thus far, no one. And this is what I call the true breakdown of morals, not indeed the all too frequent breaking of a moral code, but the new fact that today there is no moral code to break.[/size][/font]
Quoted in part and adapted:
Étienne Gilson. “The Breakdown of Morals and Christian Education.” (Candlemas Day 1952).
This lecture was delivered in the Adult Education Program of St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto.
THE AUTHOR
Étienne Gilson was born in Paris, France, in 1884. He was educated at the University of Paris, and for eleven years was a member of its faculty. From 1932 until 1951, he was Professor of Mediaeval Philosophy at the College de France. He was guest professor at various universities such as the Angelicum (Rome), Oxford, Cambridge, Aberdeen, Harvard, ....
Gilson is a favorite, but I have read nothing by him for many years.
Thank you for this post.
I am not surprised that the church of Rome disagrees with Nietzsche - they have the problem of the filioque which is a basis for the problems that Nietzsche saw in some Christian religions.
Tell me, how does Nietzsche’s criticism of the “herd mentality” differ from Freepers criticism of “PC”?