Nietzsche is one of those names I've always heard thrown around school and discussions, always told myself I should be familiar with and yet never gotten around to getting to know. I've been reading Ravi Zacharias' The End of Reason and he makes some very interesting points about his philosophy that has me even more curious. They're summed up pretty well in the quote below.
". . . [Nietzsche] had the good manners to despise Christianity, in large part, for what it actually was--above all, for its devotion to an ethics of compassion--rather than allow himself the soothing, self-righteous fantasy that Christianity’s history had been nothing but an interminable pageant of violence, tyranny, and sexual neurosis. He may have hated many Christians for their hypocrisy, but he hated Christianity itself principally on account of its enfeebling solicitude for the weak, the outcast, the infirm, and the diseased; and, because he was conscious of the historical contingency of all cultural values, he never deluded himself that humanity could do away with Christian faith while simply retaining Christian morality in some diluted form, such as liberal social conscience or innate human sympathy."
— David Bentley Hart (Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies)
Thanks...I have had the same question. But you did the work for me. Sometimes I wonder how much we gain by studying people like Nietzsche..but good to know a bit about them.
ReplyDeleteDouglas, I wonder the same thing. I definitely believe it's worth understanding philosophers like him, but I question how valuable deep study can be.
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