Posted on 08/31/2010 2:03:23 PM PDT by NYer
I have often learned my most valuable lessons from my worst enemies. In graduate school I spent several years wrestling with the texts of the atheistic philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who taught me one unforgettable lesson: Those who lack the tragic sense of life are apt to invent realities to replace the one they cannot face.
Nietzsche aimed his argument at Christianity, with its supposed invention of an otherworldly paradise. He was wrong on this score, however: The Christian faith affirms the inevitability of suffering. The cross is a perennial reminder of the tragic limitations that all human beings must not only bear but choose.
But if you look at post-Christian America from Nietzsche's vantage point, you'll see that it lacks that tragic sense. Witness especially America's current mania for creating and destroying human life for the sake of treating disease. Everything is curable, we're told, regardless of its cost in terms of other human lives.
Celebrities such as Michael J. Fox, Mary Tyler Moore, and the late-Christopher Reeve have urged Congress to support the destruction of human embryos to extract stem cells for the treatment of spinal cord damage and childhood diabetes. Not far behind the stem cell debate will come a debate on human cloning, the possibility of making "another you" to provide replacement body parts as needed. In fact, some U.S. scientists have announced they intend to clone human embryos for the sole purpose of research.
Doesn't anyone recognize that there are limits to what should be done to avoid suffering and death? Or has the avoidance of suffering become a kind of greatest good, conferring legitimacy on all deeds done for its sake?
When we feel our natural aversion to suffering and death, we are faced with a broad range of choices. Without the moral sense conferred by the tragic, people assume that suffering can be avoided by any means necessary, including the taking of human life.
This option was brought home to me dramatically on my family's 2001 trip to Romania to adopt my now-twelve-year-old son, Cyprian. On the day we arrived, the Romanian government announced a temporary suspension of international adoptions. Why? More than 200 adopted Romanian children were missing, and it was feared that they had been taken across the border and killed for their body parts.
How is it possible to understand such cruelty? My friend, music critic and writer Robert Reilly, once remarked to me that the loss of the tragic sense is closely linked to atheism (Nietzsche was an exception). Without God, predestination becomes scientific determinism; the immortality of the soul becomes the immortality of the body.
This makes sense as an explanation for our current willingness to dissect human lives into whatever pieces we deem scientifically useful. Our infatuation with scientific progress and our toleration of the horrific program of harvesting body parts are nothing less than a misplaced desire for God -- for immortal life -- brought to bear on the treatment of illness. Avoidance of death has replaced union with God as our ultimate goal.
Reilly also pointed out to me that nature loses its moral power when God is removed from the picture, and the natural and social sciences replace theology as the highest source of intellectual authority. Believing that scientists speak the truth on all subjects, legislators and administrators tend to accept their pronouncements, even on moral matters outside their purview.
Those who accept life's tragic limitations, however, view existence as a gift -- something they may not and should not try to manipulate. They accept that there are moral limits on what the human will can accomplish in the face of death.
Over and over I hear that such attitudes change when it is your son, daughter, father, mother, wife, or husband who could be helped by embryonic stem cell research or cloning. If such a predicament should befall my family, I pray that God will give me the strength to bear my tragic circumstances without seeking to take advantage of the living.
In a country renowned for its optimism, we Americans go too far when we assume that sorrow and suffering can be avoided, and that, by manipulating life, we can beat death. The reality that we create as we try to escape our mortality will be stranger and even more cruel than the Brave New World that we were taught to fear as schoolchildren.
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Nietzsche was tragic in several ways. He was genuinely mentally disturbed to the point of forced institutionalization. I never felt he was railing so much at God Himself as at Europe for forsaking Him; even if in Nietzsche’s estimation He didn’t exist, God was still vitally necessary as a source of ethics and morality. Outside of religion there was nihilism - he was right about that - which he hoped would be addressed by the advent of an Ubermensch who never came. He looked at the Void and came back screaming, IMHO.
Nietzsche is dead.
God, still very much alive, reigns.
I'm a deist and have thought the very same thing about modern Americans.
It's one of the reasons I respect our Judeo-Christian roots, emphasizing a moral compass and recognition that life is tragic requiring courage.
Modern liberals keep running away from the rules and pitfalls of nature.
They fear their own emotions. They fear the inevitability of death. They fear armed conflict, which is inevitable when a country is ruled mercilessly by power hungry men.
They fear pain of any kind and try to avoid it at all cost, inevitably causeing pain to those around them or if they are in Congress to everyone in the country.
They fear failure which is why they hate competition and capitalism because they will have to deal with their own shortfalls and possible embarrassment they cause. They fear pain before death, which is why they embrace euthanasia. Of course, that pain, I can't say I'm not fearful of in some way.
But the point is that you must not give into fear. Fear eats away at our happiness and ability to live a productive life.
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For nearly two centuries, Secular Humanist/Atheist thinkers have sought to replace Christian moral values with ideas they envision will enhance human development and social progress. The ideas and philosophies of men and women such as Marx, Freud, Darwin, Nietzsche, Lenin, Stalin, Russell, Heidegger, Adorno, Lukacs, Gramsci, Sanger, Dewey, Kinsey, Sagan, Derrida, Foucault, and others have led to an array of practices and lifestyles contrary to biblical values. These practices include free love, pornography, aberrant sex education, homosexuality, shacking up, teen pregnancy, abortion, assisted suicide, euthanasia, unrestricted embryonic stem cell research, cloning, out of wedlock children, irresponsible parenting, etc.
My understanding of Nietzsche who did go insane and had horrible health—migraine headaches, etc., during long periods of his adulthood, understood clearly how all the post-modern German philosophers had actually destroyed God—killed off the Creator. He was passionate about what their ideas meant to humanity and summarized it perfectly by shouting, “God is dead!” because their philosophy left no room for God, the Creator, or a soul.
He knew they were idiots in killing off that important part of humanity that had existed throughout all of history up until his time of Marx, etc., and he knew that concept of God was needed for hope, creativity, wonder, etc. He despised Marx’s concept that everyone was “equal”.
Nietzsche described postmodernism as nihilism—he understood it and described the abyss—the void—it would create. I think that there are many who could and do say he did believe in God, as well as those who could argue that he didn’t. He certainly didn’t like some of the prevailing organized religions though, and thought those Christian religions were destroying themselves internally, and were also leading people into the abyss.
There are many different translations and ambiguity of Nietzsche and a lot are misleading and incorrect as were things published by his anti-Semitic sister, who he despised while sane, but who had control over his work after he was institutionalized and died.
His creation of an Ubermensch was for the way out of this abyss—this total destruction of all values and meaningless life.
The point is not so much that Neitzsche asked the wrong questions, only that he got the wrong answers. I found Neitzsche to be very valuable to me on my path before I became a Christian. He blows away many of the anti-Christian arguments. Basically, Christianity cannot be explained away, ignored, it must be confronted. If Christianity is right, then all of this is wrong, and if Christianity is wrong, then Neitsche was the only one who was right.
The debate is not between truth is relative and truth is absolute. If Truth exists then she is absolute, if she does not then, all there is left is the void.
Yeah, and this is why Neitzsche is far more helpful than all of these folks. Neitzsche saw through what they were preaching, especially the socialists, essentially, ‘crafting their own God’, because they could not accept the Christian one. Neitzsche saw this as completely worthless because if God existed, then their systems were useless, because Christianity was right.
If God did not exist, then it was entirely unnecessary to ‘craft your own God’.
Very good post; great thread. Thanks to every poster.
My experience was somewhat as you describe. I was immersed in Protestant Christianity until my late teens. I was a believer, or at least tried to be, but I wasn’t “saved” per se. In college my philosophy professor was a Methodist Bishop but he did not push a point of view. Instead he allowed us to find our own way.
After a year of searching for “proof” of God I gave up and became an atheist. Strangely, I felt as if great chains had been lifted from my shoulders. I was liberated, liberated from sin. Liberated from trying to follow the subtle nuances and seeming contradictions of Christianity. That felt great!
After a few years I discovered atheism wasn’t the answer either. You can’t disprove God any more than you can prove Him. So, I became an agnostic, the most intellectually honest approach, or so it seemed to me at the time. A few years of that were unsatisfactory, too. I then determined that if I could prove neither, but not taking a stand was just as unsatisfying, I decided if either atheism or God was true, which was likely to bring the best personal results. I decided that belief held the best possibilities so I set out to gain as much evidence as I could that God was true.
Along the way I reached the conclusion that to believe in God one had to first be satisfied that there was no God, that there was nothing after death except nothingness, for ever and ever. Once one could satisfy himself that was the truth and yet not be concerned about it, could be perfectly happy with that prospect, then one had a basis from which to start believing. Otherwise, the fear of death would color his efforts.
I was able to achieve that. I was able to be perfectly happy that nothingness was my ultimate fate and still not be bothered by it. Life was no longer the ultimate, the thing I had to protect above all else. The fear of death was gone.
Had I eliminated the tragic in life? I think I had and I was still able to function without depression. Still, there was that vague emptiness in my chest, that I only occasionally noticed, but there was never the feeling of peace and satisfaction with life.
I eventually learned that to try to prove God is a fools errand. To prove God is to destroy Him. Proof makes God finite and he is infinite by definition.
I fell back on my early conditioning and recommenced my Bible reading. Soon, through God’s grace, I was saved. The entire story in the New Testament suddenly came to life for me and the truth seemed so clear. I saw it and I felt it.
I told this long story for a purpose. My experience showed me that the tragic can be handled without a belief in God. It is all a matter of values and attitude being in sync.
God is not about the afterlife, God is about living now! The afterlife is just a bonus. Although the sense of the tragic can be handled without a belief in God, peace does not come without Him. Once we no longer depend on ourselves for survival, when it is no longer us against the world, when we put it all in God’s hands, peace is inevitable. Strangely, most of life’s mysteries also disappear and a clarity enters our mind. Being God-centered instead of self-centered solves a lot of problems.
Any thoughts about my ideas? I respect your opinion.
OUTSTANDING post in a great thread! I have “The Will to Power” given to me by my cousin (RIP) Steve (fan of Nietzsche). I have read parts of it but know very little in regards to Nietzsche. I clicked on this thread because seeing the title reminded me of Steve.
I am humbled by the compliment, and if I may return one...you are one of the great posters on this forum, Mind-numbed Robot as evidenced by the honesty of your post and the questioning of your own self/experiences...not to mention your other outstanding contributions to this forum throughout the years.
Thank you. I always enjoy our exchanges.
I first read Nietzsche as “opposition research” and then couldn’t help but like the guy.
hasn’t he taught us enough?
And what was worse, the Void looked into him.
Actually it just occurred to me, the Void looked into his mustache and jumped back screaming, IMHO.
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