04.29.09
Up from Nietzsche
Nietsche among the sans-culottes
One reason I am wary of the New Atheists, despite some sympathies with the study of atheism, is that Nietzsche, most strangely, destroyed the basis for an intelligible atheism by the extremes to which he went.
This tradition will always lurk in the minds, consciously or unconsciously, of those who wish to realize atheism in his wake.
One of the pitfalls of twentieth century thought is the confusing influence of Nietzsche, evident in the references to the ‘last man’ in Fukuyama’s title. With Lange’s History of Materialism and in a play on the noumenal in Schopenhauer, Nietzsche proceeds to a Kantian decadence in an externalization of the will that is a poor continuation of a basic breakthrough. We can see already that Nietzsche’s views on history are wildly off the mark. If there is no direction to history, that is one thing. If we find there is, Nietzsche is plainly wrong, and might simply be a reactionary, the onset of the Rightist Terror, quite terrifying indeed, wherein he is a bit player, rapidly changing gears as his suspicions arise. Nietzsche is the first Darwin casualty, and strangely blind in his failure to see the place of equalization in world history. Nietzsche’s views are, of course, very complex, and it is also true he was a cogent critic of Darwinian natural selection. His challenge to Kantian foundationalism is ambiguous, and he triggers an immense subsequent confusion.