Week Six
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
The last person of Lutheran background we discuss this year, Nietzsche attacked the false clarities of Enlightenment rationality—as well as the pre-modern philosophical tradition behind it. He hammered the bourgeois Christianity he knew up close—but also reached to the religion’s actual core. He recognized the crisis of European humanism: how to maintain faith in humanity when “God is dead”? De-dogmatized Christianity had become humanitarianism, a religion of the comfortable. Attempts were being made to synthesize conventional morality with evolutionism. Nietzsche instead wanted a humanism grounded in the human potency to be one of the outstanding individuals recorded in history. Otherwise, we are left with capitalist conformism and culture-philistinism, as well as right-Hegelian idolatry of the nation-state. He wanted to affirm the irrational exuberance of life and power. With his breathtaking rhetoric, he inspired existentialism, postmodernism, and post-structuralism, movements modern in their prevailing tendency to seek emancipation from Christianity and metaphysics once and for all.
“Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves.”
The son and grandson of Lutheran ministers, Friedrich Nietzsche was born in a little town near Leipzig, in Prussian Saxony, in 1844. His father died five years later, leaving him and his younger sister Elisabeth to be raised by his mother (as well as by a grandmother and two aunts). He studied classical philology at the University of Bonn and also theology, planning to become a minister—though he soon lost his Christian faith entirely, not least due to the Young Hegelian influence of Feuerbach. Continuing his studies at Leipzig, he discovered Schopenhauer and read Lange’s History of Materialism. Schopenhauer presents a strange new trajectory for post-Kantianism, rejecting the Hegelian idealist arc stemming from Fichte’s elimination of Kant’s thing-in-itself. He deduces from our practical sense of unconditional freedom that the world-in-itself is Will: groundless, purposeless, ceaseless striving.
The Davenant Institute on the key to Martin Luther’s theology, and view of eternal life.
Remarkably, Nietzsche obtained the chair of classical philology at the University of Basel at the age of twenty-four. Renouncing his Prussian citizenship before moving there, he would be a man without a state for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, he volunteered for service in the Prussian medical corps during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), which was crucial in catalyzing the unification of Germany and shifting the continental balance of power to that nation. At Basel, the Wagner villa became a second home. In the Emersonian essays collected as Untimely Meditations, he attacks the philistinism of the “German Empire” taking shape under Bismarck. Nietzsche attended the premiere of the complete Ring cycle at Bayreuth in 1876, but was appalled at Wagner’s pandering to German nationalism. Here the breach began. In 1878, Nietzsche had to resign his Basel chair due to poor health. He went insane in January of 1889. Twilight of the Idols belongs to his last months of lucidity.