05.10.10

After Religion Fizzles, You’re Stuck With Kant

Posted in General at 12:40 pm by nemo

I am a little puzzled by Hedges’ column this week: After Religion Fizzles, We’re Stuck With Nietzsche

An unfortunate piece of indirection, irony, or stupidity from a journalist I have followed for some time. What’s up here. Has Mr. Hedges lost his faith? Is he trying to get market share from the Dawkins groupies?

What is Hedges’ game here: maybe he is slightly ironic and trying to scare the New Atheists by bringing out the Nietzschean subtext in their cult.
Hard to say, and I think we deserve a clarificaton from Hedges’. He surely can’t believe that the remedy for the stupidity of the Pope is Nietzsche????

Nietzsche is for suckers, beware of him. Can’t we be spared Nietzsche at the graceful end of Christianity, a legacy of the Axial Age?

The passing of the Axial religions is so old hat for those who lived in the New Age moivement seventies that I have to wonder where everyone was. Rajneesh proclaimed the end of Christianity shouting from the rooftops. He also provided a new post-religion in the form of a new upsurge of humanity’s oldest and best religion, in the traidition of primordial Jainism/Buddhism/Shaivism, updated for the future. Whatever the result, the solution to the passing of the Axial Age religions is NOT Nietzsche.
Nietzsche was the fart end of Schopenhauer who spoke much more deeply of the legacy of Classical German Philosphy from the period of the Kantian englightenment. Before getting into Nietzsche prattle it is important to backtrack to study the greats. If you can’t handle Kant, Nietzsche’s seductive style and and pseudo-philosophy of the will (that parody of Schopenhauer) is the royal road to your nihilist dog days, keeping in mind the nice fascist consequences, denied by the scholarly faithful in the Nietzsche cult. Do you really want to be a Nietzschean nihilist. Think carefully.

Perhaps Hedges is ironically exposing the new atheists to themselves, or else doing a leftist take on the ‘last man’ and bourgeois economics.
Nietzsche really failed to understand the question of the ‘last man’, and the ‘overman’.
His version is a primitve regression to say the least.

We need a clarification from Hedges as he goes in my crosshairs.

Kant is a far better endpoint in the decay of the Axial religions, long prophesied. Darwinism/scientism/and the Dawkins cult are not anything like relief from the confusions of religion.

You will taken thence to a place of Kantstudien, deprived of the facile idiot style of the mesmerist Nietzsche, and made to study philosophy until your metaphysical tendenciesenter consciousness.
Nietzsche is a truly demonic masterpiece, and a satanic Faust in disguise: use a great literary style to wreck havoc in sentimental literati of the oulala bent, and screw them really well, til bourgeois society is finished forever. What was it with Nietzsche’s fascination with Conan the Barbarian. Great vehicles to trigger an evil movement. All the bad guys sufi demons like Gurdjieff popped out of the woodwork licking their chops.

True, Kant is a terrible stylist,and his main text almost impossible to grasp, but don’t be put off, jump around the wrong-headed complexity: find some secondary sources and start there. His style has made a demonic play on styles a la Nietzsche a devil’s game. Be wary.

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