Monday, January 29, 2018

All the Little Nietzsches--Where Do They All Come From?

Actually, all those "will to power" critters came from the Enlightenment.  You can read the rest of the essay (and you should) but here's the graf that is most disturbing.

...The triumph of the will, of individual autonomy over truth and reason, is the most prominent fruit of the Enlightenment. We were to be freed from tradition, and religion, so we might instead follow reason, but reason itself, along with human nature, has been found by many to be too much of an obstacle to freedom. Reality itself has become such an obstacle. The choice between reason and Christianity was always understood to be a false choice, at least by anyone who had read the Church Fathers, but the Enlightenment was never really about enlightenment at all. It was, at root, about liberating man from God. One become “enlightened” by accepting the lie that man didn’t need God, that he could save himself from whatever ailed him.   This is the philosophy under which many in the West now live. Whether God exists or not is beside the point; God is simply unnecessary, or so it is said. The problem for these rebels, increasingly in power, is what to do with anyone who dares to disagree. It is increasingly a problem, too, for those who disagree....

Yes, "those who disagree" are a problem.  Especially if they have large quantities of ammo. 

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