A friend gave me an essay written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, On Stupidity. Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor, a leader of the “confessing church” opposing the policies of the Nazis. The Nazis aimed at eliminating Jews, promoting the ideology of Aryan purity. Bonhoeffer’s essay seems germane to our situation now, the rise of Trumpism, and…
“Effective history” deprives the self of the reassuring stability of life and nature, and it will not permit itself to be transported by a voiceless obstinacy toward a millennial ending… This is because knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting. “Effective history” deals with events in terms of their most…
Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law gradually replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination. The nature of these rules allows violence to be inflicted upon violence and…
Descent attaches itself to the body.1 It inscribes itself in the nervous system, in temperament, in the digestive apparatus; it appears in faulty respiration, in improper diets, in the debilitated and prostrate body of those whose ancestors committed errors. Fathers have only to mistake the effects for causes, believe in the “afterlife,” or maintain…
Truth is undoubtedly the sort of error that cannot be refuted because it was hardened into an unalterable form in the long baking process of history.1 Moreover, the very question of truth, the right it appropriates to refute error and oppose itself to appearance, the manner in which it was developed (initially made available…
I anticipate beginning a final revision of my comments upon selected passages from The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s writing compelled my attention upon my introduction to the late 19th century philosopher when I was much younger. I was in my late 20’s, a student. Many years have passed and somehow there remains…
…those who suffer most and are poorest in life would need above all mildness, peacefulness, and goodness in thought as well as deed –if possible, also a god who would be truly a god for the sick, a healer and savior; The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann, aphorism 370 The thought…
If we had not welcomed the arts and invented this kind of cult of the untrue, then the realization of general untruth and mendaciousness that now comes to us through science –the realization that delusion and error are conditions of human knowledge and sensation –would be utterly unbearable. Honesty would lead to nausea and…
Everything in a Greek or Christian building originally had a meaning, and referred to a higher order of things; this feeling of inexhaustible meaning enveloped the edifice like a mystic veil. Beauty was only a secondary consideration in the system, without in any way materially injuring the fundamental sentiment of the mysteriously-exalted, the divinely…
“Cause” and “effect” is what one says; but we have merely perfected the image of becoming without reaching beyond the image or behind it. In every case the series of “causes” confronts us much more completely, and we infer: first, this and that has to precede in order that this or that may then…
