The Death of God - a lecture on Friedrich Nietzsche - by Adam Lloyd Johnson
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Premodern Modern Postmodern Because God put it there and that s the way it s always been. Onwards and upwards with inevitable progress. Bllppggghljsdlkfjo wejfalskdjflksdjflk sjdldjl;aldflkj;;;;df
Premodern Modern Postmodern Because God put it there and that s the way it s always been. Onwards and upwards with inevitable progress. Bllppggghljsdlkfjo wejfalskdjflksdjflk sjdldjl;aldflkj;;;;df Truth comes from UP THERE Truth is found OUT THERE Truth is found IN HERE
Modernism hit a dead end when it came to love and the meaning of life.
You fall in love and have children because that s what evolution programmed you to do.
Romanticism in Literature Jane Austen - Sense and Sensibility - Pride and Prejudice Victor Hugo - Les Miserables - Hunchback of Notre Dame Thomas Carlyle Ralph Waldo Emerson John Keats Walter Scott William Wordsworth Dark Romanticism Edgar Allen Poe Samuel Taylor Coleridge Lord Byron - Don Juan Mary Shelley - Frankenstein Bram Stoker - Dracula Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Scarlett Letter
A man who as a physical being is always turned toward the outside, thinking that his happiness lies outside him, finally turns inward and discovers that the source is within him. - Kierkegaard
What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know the thing is to find a truth that is true for me, to find the ideas for which I can live and die. - Kierkegaard
Some try to put a positive spin on Nietzsche s will to power.
What is good? All that enhances the feeling of power, the Will to Power, and the power itself in man. What is bad? All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is increasing-that resistance has been overcome. Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but competence. The first principle of our humanism: The weak and the failures shall perish. They ought even to be helped to perish. Friedrich Nietzsche
Wherever I was able to find a living thing, I found a will to power. Friedrich Nietzsche
The early Greeks honored strong heroes.
These men got us off the right course by emphasizing reason.
- Reduced
Democracy represents the disbelief in all great men and in all elite societies: everybody is everybody s equal. - Nietzsche
God is dead and we have killed him. - Nietzsche
I teach you beyond Man (Uebermensch; overman-superman). Man is something that shall be surpassed. What have you done to surpass him? - Nietzsche
The over men will think with a hammer!
- The term was first used in 1917 by Rudolph Panwitz to describe the post- Nietzschean nihilism of the 1900s - The term can be used broadly to refer to any pushback against modernism - The term can also be used to describe a specific movement against modernism that developed out of post-structuralism (Derrida, Foucault, Rorty)
Truth is relative to a culture s worldview.
Will to Power All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth. - Nietzsche
Western imperialism was about imposing our truth (will) on others.
There is no truth (actual connection with reality). We live & think in competing simulated views of reality.
Foucault helped make Postmodern ideas popular. Michel Foucault (1926-1984) Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Critics of Postmodernism
Alasdair MacIntyre (born 1929) - professor at Boston University, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame, Yale, and Duke - believes the modernism project has failed - either settle moral questions via Nietzsche s will to power - or go back to the rationality rooted in the virtue of the ancient and medieval thinkers - does his work against the background of what he calls an Augustinian Thomist approach to moral philosophy
Jurgen Habermas (born 1929) For the normative self-understanding of modernity, Christianity has functioned as more than just a precursor or catalyst. Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of a continual critical reappropriation and reinterpretation. Up to this very day there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a post-national constellation, we must draw sustenance now, as in the past, from this substance. Everything else is idle postmodern talk.
Adam Lloyd Johnson www.adamjohnson.ratiochristi.org