Posted on 02/01/2003 3:57:47 PM PST by MadIvan
I had occasion the other night to reread a number of the key aphorisms concerning Nietzsche's "death of God" in Die Froehliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science), as my daughter asked me about them in connection with her AP European history class. I was again struck by the extent to which Nietzsche emphasized that although the deed had been done by man himself, we were as yet unaware of what had been done, and that the deed was so grand that no one had a clue as to the implications. Hardly the rousing affirmation that's often assumed to be Nietzsche's view. He also noted that this sense of the death of God was liberating to artists and intellectuals, who also didn't have a clue as to what it would really mean in the long run. Wow, I was really struck how much Europe, and perhaps the left intellectuals in the US, live in a post-Nietzschean world that they don't understand. Unfortunately, no one much reads Nietzsche seriously in Europe, and the best edition of his works has been out of print for 75 years.
At any rate, if you want to understand what's going on in Europe, you need to understand the absolute vacuity in European spiritual life and the way in which modern Europeans are nihilists even though they don't know it. It's worth learning German just to read Nietzsche in the original!
Copyright is not a property right. So that solves your problem.
The post-Christian world view that has taken root in Europe is not perceived by the secular intellectuals in this country, and the Europeans don't understand what it is that they've lost, as you point out.
America is mocked and derided for its religiosity by both European and American intellectuals.
Your comments about Nietzsche are very apt; everyone quotes him, but in reality few have read him, and even fewer see how his predictions have played out.
I'd have to do considerable work on my German to read Nietzsche !
Do it! It's absolutely worthwhile. Aside from Goethe (more of an 18th century figure, who lived into the early 19th century), Nietzsche wrote what many consider to be the finest German prose in the 19th century. It really is gorgeous German, and he is a profoundly stimulating (even when wrong) thinker. I hesitate to call him a philosopher because he was (1) in no way as systematic in his work as I think philosphers should be, and (2) mad as a hatter in his later years, and in and out of madness earlier. Still a very great mind who has been thoroughly misunderstood, willfully so, beginning with his execrable sister. As annoying as Walter Kaufmann can be, his book on Nietzsche in English is the starting point for serious reading, and his translations are the most reliable. Even so, I have differed with him on particular points of translation (while acknowledging he is a native speaker and much better philosopher than I am).
One of the reasons almost all Americans, and most Europeans, haven't a clue what's going on in Western civilization today, is that too few of us have had an education in which we read the classics and the seminal works of modern times. Most people don't read much at all, and never did. Those who went to college mostly majored in subjects other than those which would have given them a good rounding in the Western canon. And most of those who read now, find it much easier to read the latest Clancy, King or Patrick O'Brien novel, than to tackle serious history, philisophy or literature, or even theology. It's sad, and I'm glad to learn that many colleges have reinstituted the general education requirements that existed in my day some 35-40 years ago, so that undergraduates might at least see an outline of what they ought to have read, and might at least sample a very small part of it.
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