Philosophy and Human Values: Nietzsche: Knowledge and Belief

While everything up to last week's lecture dealt with discussions of values and morality in terms that most folks can accept or dismiss without much controversy, the Marxist critique of capitalism discussed last week, and Nietzsche's critiques of Christianity hit a little closer to home for most Americans and can be quit disconcerting.

It is important moving forward that the critiques offered of modern society is the work of philosophy. To question the unquestioned assumptions of a particular people in a particular place and time is what philosophy is at its best. It can help us to think about our time and place differently, challenge us to more rigorously think about what we think we know, and either make us more stalwart defenders of our culture or work to improve upon it. But I have said this before. Enjoy this lecture and if you have any questions please ask them in the comments below.

Oh yeah, and the audio portion ends abruptly. No matter. Roderick was nearly finish anyhow.

LINK: Video & Transcript

AUDIO MP3 (Right click to download.)

Discussion Question:

• Why do you think Nietzsche thought that Christianity was a catastrophic development for humanity? To what extent is he correct about the inherent duplicity embedded within Christianity? To what extent his he mistaken?

Lecture Six: Nietzsche: Knowledge and Belief

I. There are no water-tight distinctions between philosophy and politics.

A. The priority of politics is marked even in the Greeks.

B. These set the necessary conditions within which human beings can pursue things, such as a good life for themselves.

C. There is a severe problem with the writings of Marx.

1. He assumed that workers shaping and forming their own modes of work would not fall victim to the power of the state.

2. The state would step in place of a capitalist class and exploit their labor.

D. The process of a world becoming bureaucratically more complex and intrusive at the level of the state is a world phenomenon, and is not localizeable.

II. Nietzsche was a critic of modernity.

A. Nietzsche held the view that knowledge is a form of power, which was the subject of his most important book, From Where Do Distinctions Come?

B. He speaks of the Greeks’ understanding of virtue, vastly different from our own.

1. They knew who and when to con.

2. Excellence was multi-dimensional and honored a fully developed person, not a proficient functionary.

C. He gives us a genealogy of our uses of words.

D. Eternal problems change radically depending on where you happen to be in history.

E. Knowledge, truth, and objectivity, good and bad, have conditions for possibility and these conditions change.

III. Nietzsche criticizes Christianity.

A. He suggests that Christianity inculcates us in bad reading.

B. Superficially, beneath the Old Testament’s doctrine of love and compassion is submerged a doctrine of resentment and hatred.

C. He argues that love is meaningless without discrimination.

D. He criticizes Christianity’s distinction between earthly and carnal kinds of love.