Discernment, Part 4: The Influence of Friedrich Nietzsche on Western Thought
The 17th century intellectual movement called the Enlightenment was based on the philosophical tradition of Socrates. The Enlightenment agreed with Socrates that reason should occupy the center of inquiry, although it disagreed with his pessimism regarding the relationship between the philosopher and the state. Both Socrates and the Enlightenment thinkers also believed that religious and mythical elements of thought needed to be excised from the world of ideas in favor of human reason. This would provide the path to the liberal regime based on nature which ensures that all men may safely pursue the satisfaction of their primal passions.
18th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche realized the Enlightenment was the fulfillment of Socratic thought, and launched a vicious attack on Socrates unprecedented in history. Nietzsche saw Socrates and his philosophical progeny as the enemies of all things truly human. To despise the mythical in man is to abandon the element that defines man’s very soul. It is within one’s own mythical world that one discovers his true distinctiveness as a human, the religious impulse, however irrational, that guides his actions. Therefore, it is not the philosophers of reason, but the poets and the artists who grasp the tragic essence of life’s hopelessness and creatively and courageously confront it. To flatten the terrain of existence with an egalitarianism that extinguishes one’s highest calling is to condemn a man to a prison of mediocrity for the sake of peace, a price much too high.
Nietzsche asserted that reason was the real myth. In a naturalistic world outside of which there is no supernatural being, there is no word from God, and, therefore, man is alone. There can be no rationality within such a world, no universal truth that governs all men and which all men can apprehend. There are only isolated individuals who must push courageously against the darkness, drawing their vision from deep within the irrational depths of their own souls. There is only the new and the emergent.
“God is dead,” lamented Nietzsche, “And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves?” Nietzsche clearly saw the implications of atheistic naturalism and the groundlessness of Enlightenment rationalism as a result. Nietzsche fully accepted the atheistic claims of naturalism, but found its dismal end abhorrent. He desperately sought to salvage meaning and purpose in a godless world by proposing the creative heroic visionary who irrationally yet courageously commits to a personal reality of his own making, and then seeks to bring this vision into being. The subsequent movement creates not an egalitarian wasteland, but true culture, the highest expression of man. Personal authenticity replaces distinctions of truth and falsehood, and personal values replace notions of good and evil.
Therefore, Nietzsche and the German thinkers that followed him undermined the notion of reason, objective moral truth, and the liberal democracy in favor of the emergence of individual cultures. There could be no universal culture since each culture was the emergent result of a person’s irrational religious impulse, a product of one's own soul, the existential expression of one's inner darkness. The twentieth century gave testimony to the dark power of this thought, as it was exemplified in moral and cultural relativism, religious pluralism, and the rise and fall of the Third Reich. What happened to Nietzsche’s and his German intellectual colleagues’ ideas as these ideas crossed the Atlantic to America? We will look at that in our next post.
Blessings,
Arnie Gentile
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Posted by Arnie Gentile at 3/3/2010 5:17 PM 
Categories: Cultural Apologetics
Tags: Nietzsche Objective Truth Naturalism God Philosophy Christian Apologetics
Categories: Cultural Apologetics
Tags: Nietzsche Objective Truth Naturalism God Philosophy Christian Apologetics
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