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On 15 October 2013, I originally posted these commentaries individually as part of my remembrance of Friedrich Nietzsche’s birthday, both on my own profile and in my other relevent Facebook groups. I thought the posts merited rescue from the certain doom of Facebook obscurity, so I combined and edited them into a single document, added text as needed, and posted the whole to Facebook Notes on 19 October 2013.
Nietzsche's Birthday 2013 Commentaries
by Matt Wallace
This page was last modified on 7 September 2014.
Contents
A Young Nietzschean's Paean to the Master
A Nietzschean Response to Abortion
A Nietzschean Critique of the "New Atheists"
A Young Nietzschean's Paean to the Master
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
15 October 1844 - 25 August 1900
From my English 101 Journal (UNC-G Fall 1983):
"October 14, 1983 —— Tomorrow is Friedrich Nietzsche’s birthday. What I owe him is inestimable. I’ve discovered an awful lot about myself and the world through my contact with him. I can often correlate my experiences with his insights. Reading his thoughts is like thinking my own thoughts. I think I have an awful lot in common with him. I think that I could have been the disciple he always sought— “Yeah Fritz, but...” As I discover more and more of myself, I may lose much of my admiration for him. As I become more aware of myself, I’ll lose much of my need for him; I’ll stand on my own two feet. I’ll become myself at his expense; he would be pleased."
I wrote this after having read Nietzsche rather seriously for just over four years. When I started with him, I was eighteen, and all I knew was that he had said "God is dead" which was enough to get a teenage atheist's attention. I soon learned that taking this (and any of his thought) at face value is usually a mistake as his provocation is always the spearpoint of a more penetrating analysis; sound familiar? My youthful apprehensions notwithstanding, my admiration has not waned, and my gratitude has only grown. I still identify myself as a Nietzschean, and I recognize "The Compleat Heretic" as Nietzscheanism in practice.
The Compleat Heretic's Site Index: C: "Compleat Heretic"
http://www.CompleatHeretic.com/siteindex/c.html#ch
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A Nietzschean Response to Abortion
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
15 October 1844 - 25 August 1900
From my "Webmaster's Response" to a visitor on my personal site:
"Nietzsche's ultimate object is the affirmation of life. Through both positive (the Übermensch, amor fati, Eternal Recurrence, etc.) and negative (the Death of God, the Anti-Christ, etc.) means, he calls on us to embrace life in its totality, to accept our responsibility for living our lives to their fullest, and to rout all that stands in the way of our doing so. Abortion is a fundamental denial of life in that it both utterly destroys the life of an innocent human being and is a complete repudiation of personal responsibility on the part of the child's parents. As such, opposition to abortion practiced as a form of birth control falls in line with Nietzschean principles."
Brian Plunkett's Guestbook entry of 26 May 2008
http://www.CompleatHeretic.com/guestbook/gb25.html#080526
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A Nietzschean Critique of the "New Atheists"
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
15 October 1844 - 25 August 1900
I should think that Nietzsche would share my skepticism of the "new atheists," but then said skepticism is Nietzschean:
Why atheism today?—"The father" in God has been thoroughly refuted; ditto, "the judge," "the rewarder." Also his "free will": he does not hear—and if he heard he still would not know how to help. Worst of all: he seems incapable of clear communication: is he unclear?
This is what I found to be the causes for the decline of European theism, on the basis of a great many conversations, asking and listening. It seems to me that the religious instinct is indeed in the process of growing powerfully—but the theistic satisfaction it refuses with deep suspicion.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 53 (Walter Kaufmann, trans.)
And from my notes to myself:
12 October 2013, ~0531 — The problem with the "new atheists" is that they aren't humanists, and they adhere to the dogma of Scientism, that is, "Science and Reason." The fact of the matter is that they never abandoned religion, but rather merely turned to face in the opposite direction and now worship different gods...
18 September 2013, ~0756 — Some atheists argue against religion by pointing out its murderous history and potential; ironically, more than a few of these atheists are also Marxists.
30 July 2013, ~1135 — In reality, there is very little difference between "God said it, I believe it, that settles it." and "I believe in science and reason."; both are expressions of an unthinking dogmatism which brooks no opposition. Both are declarations of a mutually exclusive faith which mindlessly seeks the destruction of all competing faiths. As such, Fundamentalism and Scientism are equally dangerous.
11 July 2013, ~0903 — The main failing of scientism, and its greatest danger, is that it lacks the moral underpinning that serves as a potential brake in its religious equivalents. While religious extremism carries the cure for its most virulent dogmatism within the tenets of its underlying faith, there is no such antidote within scientism which allows the poison to run its course...
30 July 2013, ~1156 — "But Matt, you don't sound like an atheist..." What does an atheist "sound like"? As an atheist, I have no dogma, no church, no god. I am a free lance and a ronin; I have no master and am free to roam where I please and to fight battles of my choosing.
I am using "scientism" specifically, and the term is not to be confused with "science." Pulling out my old Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (p. 1051), scientism is "an exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science applied to all areas of investigation (as in philosophy, the social sciences, and the humanities)." Science has value primarily as a metaphysical tool which allows us to determine, more "objectively" than we otherwise could, what exists and the nature of that existence, and that is the extent of its usefulness. While science can be used to inform other areas of human activity, it is not the limit of human knowledge and, more importantly, of human experience. When science is wrongly asserted to be the only legitimate source of "facts" and "understanding" (as the "new atheists" do), science is corrupted into the nontheistic religion of "Scientism" which is as dogmatic as any other faith tradition.
Also, in my construction "Science and Reason," I am not referring to science and reason per se, but merely parroting the expression of faith by which these "new atheists" identify themselves. From both online and direct contact, I have observed that the affirmation of a belief in "science and reason" is an implicit claim that the believer's opinions are based on "facts," thus are the only legitimate expressions of "understanding." Too often, these "facts" are simply negations of former religious beliefs, and these "understandings" are nothing more than a reflexive opposition to the abandoned religion. Contradiction by nonbelievers (theistic or nontheistic) of the "facts" and "understandings" whether by submitting opposing evidence or offering an alternative interpretation, is answered not with "reason," but rather something more akin to the sanctimonious rage which accompanied the burning of heretics.
And for the record, I have always valued both science and reason. Given my predilections, some of the other children gave me the mocking nickname "Scientific Man" as a boy. I abandoned Christianity at age twelve and became an open and avowed atheist in the Bible Belt at age thirteen primarily through the exercise of both reason and science. (Please refer to "Seeing the Light; or, How I Became a Godless Heathen" in the "Autobiography" section of my personal site.) In high school, ten of my twenty-one credits were in math and science: four years of math, including AP Calculus, and three each in both the biological and physical sciences. Accordingly, I started college as a Zoology major. After taking a break or two, I switched over to Philosophy as it better encompassed the breadth of my interests, but I continued to take science and math courses as a double major in History and Philosophy of Science. I require no sermons on the power of human reason and the usefulness of the scientific method to understand both the human condition and the Cosmos.
And again for the record, speaking as a man who owes his existence in no small part to "the most horrifically destructive excesses of the dark heart of religious mania," I require no lectures on the inherent dangers of "unthinking dogmatism which brooks no opposition." In the late 1600s and the first half of the 1700s, many, if not most, or even all, of my immigrant European ancestors were forced into exile across a dangerous ocean and took refuge in a wilderness populated with hostile natives and wild beasts precisely because of such excesses and dangers. My English Quaker and Scottish Presbyterian ancestors sought to escape much of the harassment of the Anglican Church. My French Huguenot and Moravian and other ethnic German Protestant ancestors fled the all-too-often-murderous persecution by the Catholic Church. I recognize my skepticism of organized religion and my wariness of its potential as a weapon of oppression by the state as damn near instinctive.
In the aphorism provided, Nietzsche is lamenting a post-Darwinian European intellectual class which has complacently abandoned Christianity only to replace it with a godless faith in "science" and "progress." The problem isn't so much the loss of the old faith, but rather the irony of the new faith's arising from the same "religious instinct" as the old faith. I recognize the "New Atheism" as a self-consciously nontheistic manifestation of "the religious instinct [which] is indeed in the process of growing powerfully." As in Nietzsche's time, once again "that old time religion" is being rejected and is being replaced with another, perhaps more dangerous faith, Scientism.
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For more on Friedrich Nietzsche, please see The Compleat Heretic's Site Index: N: Nietzsche, Friedrich.
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