Notes Along the Way 3.3 A Summer of Nietzsche

Continued from previous posts
_______________________
13. After my dissertation was submitted, I had a little time in the summer to finish out my time as a
residential (or what they used to call a "moral") tutor. Principal Day had hatched a writing project that would draw on several of us in the neighborhood. 

(I don't think I have mentioned that Robert Song had come to Cranmer by then. I believe he had replaced Michael Vasey for theology/ethics. He would go on to marry Margaret Masson, who would eventually become the Principal of St. Chads. Robert would go on to teach for the university faculty of theology.)

The project was to create something like a dictionary with an apologetics flavor. I can't remember all the details (probably never knew them). The book never happened in the end.

I took three entries: Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Foucault. I had never really read much of any of them. I'd talked a fair amount about Foucault with David Mossley (philosophy PhD student) and was quite intrigued with his work. I of course knew the stereotypical version of Nietzsche.

There was no Google. There was no AI. I would spend the better part of the summer reading Nietzsche.

14. Thus Spake Zarathustra. What a horrible novel, I thought. A madman comes to the marketplace. Everyone is celebrating because God is dead. But the madman sees the implications. The death of God means that morality is up for grabs. It is no surprise to me that Nietzsche is sometimes thought to be a prophet of the Holocaust. 

Some of Nietzsche built on those before him. Dostoevsky seems to have presented the morality of a world without God. But he stepped back from the precipice. In Crime and Punishment -- which I would make myself read the year after my PhD -- Raskolnikov can't live with himself after murdering someone for a greater good. He confesses.

(In two years, I would show my philosophy classes at IWU a clip from Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors. In that echo of Dostoevsky, a man commits a murder. Is initially troubled. But he gets over it. Typical Woody Allen. By the way, in those early days of my teaching, I often showed clips like that from movies -- on VHS -- to raise the philosophical issue of the day.)

In this novel, he also presents his idea of the "superman," the person who can create morality out of the ashes of a world without God. It didn't matter too much for him what that morality was as long as it was strong, the morality of a master -- not like Christianity with its weak slave morality.

15. Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morals. In these classic works of ethics, Nietzsche develops his concept of Christianity as a "slave morality." A line from his preface has always stuck with me. Going from memory, it's something like "As a young person, I early realized that if you were going to give God credit for the good in the world, you would also have to give him credit for the evil."

Certainly I think this is a problem for the Calvinist, less so for the Arminian (and even less so for Tom Oord.) In any case, Nietzsche basically treats Christianity as a classic, "You can't hit me because I'm wearing glasses" argument. The weak invent a system where you'll go to hell if you oppress me, even though you have the power to do so. It's a tool that a slave might use to try to manipulate his or her master into treating them well.

But Nietzsche basically says, "No, you should hit him whether he has glasses or not." The superman doesn't worry about the made-up rules of the weak.

I might point out here that MAGA Christianity is basically Nietzschian "Christianity." It is an anti-Christian philosophy. The way of Christ is the way of the cross, which Nietzsche and Trump vehemently reject.

16. At that time, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche resonated with my sense of a world without God. If there is no God, then I had trouble seeing a transcendent basis for morality. There could be social bases. There could be evolutionary bases. But what absolute basis would there be beyond advantage?

For this reason, I have not resonated with the moral argument for the existence of God. I believe morality objectively exists because of God. But it's existence does not seem obvious to me apart from prior belief in God's existence. God's existence is a tremendous boon for morality. 

But, from an evidentiary perspective, I find no obvious, intrinsic morality in the world that points to a transcendent goodness. We have a deep longing for one and perhaps that is the "God-shaped vacuum" talking. 

This of course was the basis for C. S. Lewis and Francis Collins' conversion. We can be thankful that God is good, believed by faith, nonetheless! 

For a long time, I had trouble seeing what the point was for individuals who diverted to some unorthodox conception of God. If God is not God, what's the point? In more recent years, I have at least wondered if there could be non-theistic reasons why people would believe in a spiritual dimension. 

Probably some time during my second year, I noticed that a student had put a discussion question on her door: "If evolution is true, then animals matter just as much as humans. Discuss." I was tempted to write a response: "If atheistic evolution is true, then humans matter just as little as animals."

I haven't mentioned Will yet. Will was a bright atheist who came as a fresher my first year in Durham. I remember asking him that first term what I thought was an innocent question. "So, are you a Christian?" I wasn't trying to proselytize or evangelize. St. John's was an evangelical Anglican college. There was a fair chance he identified as a Christian.

The answer was strong. "No. I'm an atheist--the thinking kind."

I would like to think that we were friends that whole time, although perhaps I have disappointed some of my Durham friends since. 

17. I didn't spend much time on Feuerbach. His argument was basically that God is a projection of all the ideal human traits. Take our best traits: wisdom, knowledge, goodness. Now imagine the perfect version of them. That, he argued, was where the idea of God came from.

I've tried to think of what a naturalist hypothesis of God's origins might be. Were many ancient beliefs in a non-personal spiritual dimension? Animism? A longing to be able to manipulate that which is beyond human control? I do think that the ancient Greeks and that layer of human history often personified various abstract categories like war, wisdom, or love.

Monotheism developed slowly, it would seem, but significant movement seems to have taken place around the sixth century BC. Scholastic conceptions of God in the middle age perhaps come closest to Feuerbach's ideas.

Still, I like to start with creation. If we assume God is the creator of the universe out of nothing, what conception of God results? I would say it comes very close to the classic view, which is also my own.

18. I found Foucault to be very enlightening, although I don't share his ultimate framework. I give credit to David Mossley for cluing me into him, although I imagine I had heard of him before.

What I find helpful is to think of Foucault as an extension of Kuhn. Paradigms are always changing. Power is inevitably associated with the dominant paradigms. This all seems overwhelmingly obvious to me. Where I would differ is his apparent sense that there is no ultimate reality or truth behind these shifting sands. I am a critical realist. 

Foucault wrote a series of historical studies -- on madness, on crime and punishment, on sexuality. I bought them all. I tried to read his three volume history of sexuality -- you'd think they'd be enaging. Not so. The French seem to obfuscate deliberately as a matter of principle.

But I can give you the comic book version. We do not have the same conception of these things as the generations before us. For example, punishment had a primary function of shaming. You behead in public so everyone can see. But in the 20th century, it became a tribute to absolute justice, held in a private ceremony.

Madness in ancient times could be a sign of interaction with the gods. "Whom the gods love, they first make mad." Then there was the concept of the Ship of Fools. The minds of these individuals are seeking their place and need to be free to find it. In the twentieth century, insanity becomes a disease and we hide such individuals away in "cuckoo's nests."

Sexuality as a category of being did not exist until the 1800s. "What orientation are you?" In older times, it was something people did on the side as a deviant activity. They were likely married and had children, but some did this activity "on the down low."

Then it became a sickness. It was put in the DSM.  Now it's an orientation.

I found this deep paradigm framework helpful in analyzing biblical culture. I was always enamored with Mary Douglas' "Dirt is matter out of place." The explanatory power of such understandings unlocked a much more profound sense of the biblical worlds to me. And I really couldn't see much to object to in these frameworks.

19. I believe it was also in my third year that I devised the following soul thought experiment, although I'm sure others have thought the same. I remember coming up with it while walking up the Bailey to Neil's flat.

Let's say that we have no soul. What then would the resurrection be? It is presumbly a re-creation of a body -- using whatever remnants of my previous body as a starting point. Then, that body would be given my memories and personality.

Now consider the possibility that you might make a 3-D scan of my brain. I do not know the particulars of how the brain "stores" memory and personality, but let's say you could re-create the physical and chemical structures of my brain at a certain point in time within some appropriate set of Ken parameters.

Next, let's say we could clone my body and, at an appropriate time, reformat its brain structures to the 3-D scan of my current brain. The resultant Ken would have my body, my memories, my personality. It would think itself Ken in the same way that I think myself Ken.

Yet, we could, in theory, both exist at the same time. Our stories could from that point diverge.

In short, that Ken is not me. It is a copy of me. I came first.

20. If there is no soul, then how would a resurrected Ken be any different? And here is the point. "Existence without continuity is not identity." (You'll recognize this as a similar question to the Ship of Theseus, although my experiment is clearer.)

This is not a proof of the soul, but it does display--I think--why the existence of something like the soul is very important for the notion of afterlife to be coherent.

After I wrote a philosophy textbook on philosophy, I pre-tended this thought experiment on the soul, but it can wait till a post many months from now.

Theories of Western Decline

I've been exploring what happened when Rome became Christian and asked when Europe became Christian. Today I want to begin exploring several theories of Western decline.

1. The Story of Progress
Before I mention several stories of decline, I might mention the story of progress. There are many who view the last five hundred years as something like a non-stop evolution to a better and better understanding. They would view the Middle Ages as something like the "dark" ages and the Renaissance as a rebirth of culture.

The Enlightenment was thus truly about becoming more reasonable, about shedding religious superstition, and so forth. The rise of science is seen as parallel to this trajectory toward reason and truth. We expect science to make the world a better and better place. At one point, we thought humanity would become more and more virtuous.

2. The Modernist Dead End
I don't know how many people still really subscribe to any strong form of the story of progress I just mentioned. Star Trek in the 80s still looked to a future where humanity was more civilized, more evolved than it is now. But the movies of the last 25 years have been much more apocalyptic. There are more zombies, more world-ending catastrophes, more post-apocalyptic reversions.

Nietzsche in the late 1800s was a herald of where modernism ended, namely, with no basis for morality other than the creation of ingenious Superman who could convince the rest of the world. Alistair MacIntyre depicted a moral world where we had fragments of a picture from the past that we could not remember. Louis Pojman's ethics text deliberately mimicked J. L. Mackie with the subtitle Discovering Right and Wrong rather than Mackie's, "inventing" right and wrong.

In Nietzsche's theory of Western decline, Socrates himself was the culprit. It was he who taught the West to ask questions, that the "unexamined life is not worth living." While Nietzsche agreed with the end of that train of thought in his own writings, he warned that it would not be good for most people to play out the train of thought. They might think that it was good for God to be dead, but it would not turn out as well as they thought. In that sense, Nietzsche is sometimes considered a prophet of the twentieth century.

3. The Story of the Protestant Principle
According to Paul Tillich, it was inevitable that Protestantism would splinter into tens of thousands of little groups once it made a text the center of authority. Texts are polyvalent. They are susceptible to multiple interpretations. So each little group, reading the Bible "alone," becomes confident that it knows exactly what God thinks... and it splinters off from its parent body. And it then goes on to hereticize everyone who disagrees... until the next group splits from it.

Brad Gregory, in Unintended Reformation, more or less sees the turn away from the external authority of the Church as the culprit. Left without some third party to arbitrate the meaning of Scripture, each interprets as is right in his own eyes. Most crucially, secular authority becomes the highest authority rather than religious authority. Completely unintended, Christianity hands its ultimate authority over to worldly powers. Gregory is, of course, Roman Catholic.

Nevertheless, there are plenty of almost Catholics around. There are plenty of people in Wesleyan circles who are on some version of the Canterbury Trail, although many of them stop at Episcopalian. You often get the feeling, though, that they think the Reformation was at least in part a mistake, certainly that modernism was a mistake. All we need to do is go back to some version of catholicism, even if it is the catholicism of the 400s.

In another scenario, Protestant Liberalism was a predictable trajectory for a "Bible only" approach. For once the historical consciousness of modernism comes into play, the premodern, unified text suddenly falls apart into 66 distinct books with distinct contexts addressing distinct audiences. Thus, even most evangelical biblical theologies are not divided up by theological topic, but by Paul, Matthew, and so forth.

4. Nominalist Ideas Have Consequences.
Richard Weaver, in 1948, argued that America was in a state of degradation because of a trajectory first set by the nominalists just before the Reformation. In rhetoric now very familiar, he blamed a turn to relativism and away from absolutes. I've recently written on how fallacy-ridden most of this rhetoric is. Weaver's ideal world was the Roman Catholic society of the Middle Ages (even though he was a "nominal" Protestant).

Nominalism was a rejection of the reality of universals in the late Middle Ages. It is, in my opinion, an extension of Aquinas' version of absolutes, where absolutes are not distinct from the things in which they occur. The nominalists took this concept one step further, namely, that there are just individual things. Weaver, unsurprisingly, was somewhat Platonic in orientation.

Luther's theology is often thought to have been influenced by nominalism. God deems a person righteous without a person being righteous.

5. Aquinas and the triumph of reason
Francis Schaeffer taught that Aquinas had started the decline of the West by rejecting that the human mind was fallen. No serious scholar of history or Aquinas agrees. Schaeffer was a presuppositionalist thinker who more or less held that unless God gave you the right presuppositions out of thin air, you couldn't possibly arrive at the truth.

So the introduction of reason into the equation, in his view, inevitably resulted in humanity thinking it was the authority on what was true, with a resultant decline in the West climaxing with the legalization of abortion in the 1970s.

6. James Sire and declining worldviews
In The Universe Next Door, James Sire describes the changing worldviews since the Reformation as a logical unraveling from theism to deism to naturalism to nihilism to existentialism to neo-spiritualism. In the 1500s, God was thought to exist and to be active in the world. In the 1600s and 1700s, we saw the rise of deism, which sees the world more or less as a machine that doesn't require God's intervention.

In the 1800s with evolution, we see the rise of naturalism, where God is not even thought to be needed as creator. This inevitably results in a Nietzschean nihilism. In the 1950s, existentialism rose to try to reintroduce meaning into the universe. But as it is ultimately unsatisfying, an attempt to recapture a spiritual dimension to life is seen in the new age movement and neo-spiritualism.

On Monday, I may try to evaluate these in some sort of synthetic way. What seems true about these somewhat conflicting theories?

Famous Existentialists

At a conference at Wheaton called "Government, Foreign Assistance, and God's Mission in the World." Not supposed to blog or tweet till it's over :-)
___________
Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55)
The Danish Kierkegaard is sometimes retroactively called the “father of existentialism” for the way that he focused on the centrality of human choices over ideas and the cognitive. He held that a “leap of faith,” one that could not be based on reason, was essential for a life with meaning. Although he was a Christian who talked of this leap of faith in terms of Christian faith, the subjective nature of such leaps makes him the father both of theistic and atheistic existentialism. See chapter 2.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Whether we consider the German Nietzsche a proper existentialist or not, he clearly laid the groundwork for the twentieth-century movement with this name. Atheistic existentialism starts with the inherent meaninglessness of things in order to argue that any meaning we impose on the world is as valid as anything else. Nietzsche is the starkest in his presentation of such nihilism, and he equally focuses on the human “will to power” as the human drive to force our choices to be the right ones. If we do not retroactively consider him an existentialist, we must certainly see him as its most important forerunner.

Martin Heidegger (1886-1976)
Although Heidegger (who at least initially supported Hitler) did not self-identify as an existentialist, he was a significant influence on Sartre and those who did. In Being and Time, Heidegger rejected Descartes’ attempt to separate oneself as a thinker from the world you are thinking about. Rather, you are inseparable from the world, and our fundamental existence is “Dasein” (being-in-the-world). Authentic existence is when in the midst of our caring deeply about our situation as part of the world we nonetheless make a decision to take responsibility for the situation into which we are thrown and resolutely shoulder our inherited burden.

Rudolph Bultmann (1884-1976)
The German Bultmann was perhaps the most influential New Testament scholar of the twentieth century, even if most scholars would reject his best known interpretations today. On the other hand, many who are sympathetic to Christianity but who struggle with faith still find his existentialist agenda attractive. Bultmann famously did not believe that it was possible to “use electric light and the wireless… and at the same time believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles” (“The New Testament and Mythology,” 1941). Instead, he believed that if we “demythologize” the New Testament, we would find that its core teaching is existentialist. Resurrection is the call to authentic existence in the face of death.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80)
We might consider the French Sartre the true father of modern existentialism, particularly atheistic existentialism. As mentioned in this chapter, Sartre taught that “existence precedes essence,” meaning that we have to come up with “what we are” (essence) long after our bodies are born (existence). According to Sartre, we are “condemned to be free.” We have no choice but to choose who we are, but we are free to choose any “who we are.” The classic treatment of his existentialism is his 1943, Being and Nothingness.

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86)
In contrast to Sartre’s difficult, Being and Nothingness, Simone de Beauvoir’s, The Ethics of Ambiguity, is a much more readable presentation of French existentialism. de Beauvoir was Sartre’s lifetime partner, and together they were activists for mid-twentieth century socialist and communist causes. Her work, The Second Sex, is a major piece of secular feminist literature and captured the spirit of existentialism well when she wrote that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”

Albert Camus (1913-60)
As mentioned in the chapter, the French Camus was known for the “theater of the absurd,” a school of art that portrayed things we experience as very significant in insignificant ways. In The Stranger, for example, a series of casual decisions and accidental occurrences end in murder and subsequent capital punishment, a consequence Camus portrays as rather inconsequential. His essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, portrayed life like the fate of Sisyphus, who in Hades eternally pushes a boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down as he reaches the top. So Camus would have us believe that life is truly meaningless, but we nevertheless start each day all over again as an act of rebellion.