Website review: Looking for Nietzsches Last Man - N...
sexualizingsanta discovered this in Philosophy
•1 reviews since Apr 17, 2008
secularism
•news.aol.com/newsbloggers/2008/04/16/looking-...
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sexualizingsanta discovered 3 months ago- From the page: "I turned on the television in my hotel room Monday night, and sure enough, there was Richard Dawkins on the Bill Maher show. With those two atheist know-it-alls, I knew I was in for something especially dark and perverted, and I wasn't disappointed. Dawkins--speaking from England and wearing his trademark scowl--remarked to Maher's great amusement that he was going to have witnesses and camera crews to record his death. Why? Because apparently religious types keep saying that atheists convert on their deathbed. Dawkins wants people and film crews there to verify that he isn't going to convert. What bravery! What intellectual panache! Lab-trained atheists like Dawkins, who have hardly any knowledge of history, seem to think that transcendence--the notion of something eternal, something "higher" than this life--is an invention of revealed religion. This is pure ignorance. An ethical code like Confucianism preserves transcendence without recourse to the gods. We also find this concept in Indian philosophy, quite apart from Hinduism. Even the Greek philosophers, such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, who were hardly religious in the sense that we understand the term, resolutely affirmed the idea of eternal truths and transcendent realities. And here is the romantic poet Wordsworth, hardly a Christian, writing that "our destiny, our nature, and our home is with Infinitude--and only there." In his latest book A Secular Age, philosopher Charles Taylor discusses how transcendence is not merely about the afterlife or the next world. The idea has for two thousand years given depth to our terrestrial existence. For instance, transcendence implies that life has meaning beyond our everyday ups and downs. Transcendence also affirms cosmic justice: there is a final reckoning in which earthly wrongs will be corrected and everything will be turned right-side-up. In life, we know that this is not always the case. So transcendence gives us what Kant called "a reason to hope." What happens when you get rid of transcendence? Nietzsche worried that you get petty, narrow, selfish and grasping human beings, what he termed the "last men." The last man has no higher aspirations but only thinks of his own comfort, lust and acquisitions. His morality is largely a pose, designed to make himself feel good. He cheats on his wife and enriches himself under the table while making exhibitionistic donations to the United Way. He is fiercely defensive about his vices and pathologies, and responds very angrily when they are pointed out. No, I'm not naming names here and so you shouldn't think "Bill Clinton." I am thinking of a social type that Camus regarded as modern European man. Camus described modern man as one who thinks no higher thoughts but merely "fornicates and reads the newspapers.""
