Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“The best response to anyone who wants to take seriously Nietzsche’s fantasies about savage hunters chopping pieces off each other’s bodies for failure to remit are the words of an actual hunter-gatherer-an Inuit from Greenland made famous in the Danish writer Peter Freuchen’s Book of the Eskimo. Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home…
“An old monk on Mount Athos in Greece once told me that people rejoice in the thought of hell to the precise degree that they harbor hell within themselves. By which he meant, I believe, that heaven and hell alike are both within us all, in varying degrees, and that, for some, the idea of…
“Peterson’s writings are a hodgepodge of Christian existentialism, Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal, and E. O. Wilson. But the main philosophical issue is his Nietzschean conception of power. Only a strong will, exercising itself against a contingent and meaningless world — and against the weak — can ever hope to flourish […] Peterson’s…
“But Nietzsche’s influence saturated Rand’s writing in a deeper way, one emblematic of the overall trajectory of the right since its birth in the crucible of the French Revolution. Rand was a lifelong atheist with a special animus for Christianity, which she called the “best kindergarten of communism possible.” Far from representing a heretical tendency…
“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness…
“If Whitehead’s universe is really god-infused, the materialists say, then his speculative adventure in cosmology is for that reason also made irretrievably irrelevant for any modern, scientific, rational investigations of nature…The problem with this assessment of Whitehead’s scheme, as I understand it, is that the story of modern scientific rationality and its technological mastery over…
The best individual, as conceived by Aristotle, is a very different person from the Christan saint. He should have proper pride, and not underestimate his own merits. He should despise whoever deserves to be despised. The description of the proud or magnanimous man is very interesting as showing the difference between pagan and Christian ethics,…
What Luther discovered, which we too often hide from, is the theological and existential discovery that God is crucified, that the monster takes God, that death and separation destroy God. And this is not to be celebrated, but despaired. Just like Paul, we are in much fear and trembling. For Luther, like Nietzsche, God is…
What Luther discovered, which we too often hide from, is the theological and existential discovery that God is crucified, that the monster takes God, that death and separation destroy God. And this is not to be celebrated, but despaired. Just like Paul, we are in much fear and trembling. For Luther, like Nietzsche, God is…