Why is Nietzsche so attractive to someone like me? First of all, who is 'someone like me'? I am a complex person and am not prepared to permit myself to admit I am a certain type of person. I am far from a philosopher, for I have not developed a philosophical system or destroyed one (like Nietzsche), and I am not keen to become a philosophy scholar, who spends all day in the university, delving into what has been delved into for innumerable times. Well, this term does not equal the scholastic philosophers in the Middle Ages who made groundbreaking suggestions - think of St. Anselm's Ontological Argument and St. Thomas Aquinas' Cosmological Argument. St. Augustine of Hippo's predestination affected followers and non-followers profoundly; if you look at Calvin's predestination doctrines, you will know what I mean. A philosophy scholar is likely to make one associate him with a mediocre mind these days, despite the fact that the chances are, we would find a dozen of brilliant minds at Cambridge and Notre Dame, not to mention the large numbers of liberal arts colleges in the US. The 'someone like me' becomes hard to grasp, if I am just a layman with great interest in philosophy but have no credentials to support either I am a philosopher or a philosophy scholar. A layman merely with great interest means everything but a poet without composing a single poem (paraphrasing Jean-Paul Sartre's words), and unlike Tony Blair, it seems I do not have a third way to proceed. Then, the only way out would seem to be either to develop a system or destroy one. I am complex because I believe in systematisation, for a system makes arguments easy to follow and hard to breakthrough (if properly deduced). However, obviously systems tend to be contrived and are prone to errors so I believe in pulling down systems as much as I like building them. Destruction of a system is not as easy as one might think, as the works of Nietzsche had well demonstrated. Pulling down an institution of belief is not easy but I guess it could be done with reasonably high probability. But the most difficulty part is - how to replace the institution refuted without adding back just another institution. It was the question Nietzsche was forced to confront after he proposed that God was dead. I do not have the intellectual capability and valour to confront this grand question. The 'someone like me' could be exemplified by a generalised term, of course, a consequence of systematisation, which reads, 'one who is prepared to amplify, to the farthest extent, one's life, and leap out of the morality framework, and define one's own good and evil. This sounds neat and simple, fully appreciable and totally passable. However, for the 'someone like me', it is entirely complex, since it involves something intertwined together with the deepest concerns at its ultimate level - life, morality, good and evil. These are very complicated elements which defy simple explanations.
Having said that, I like Nietzsche not only because he is groundbreaking but also because he is up to the point when our world headed to decadence. He felt it necessary to reassess the values, travesty in fact, obscenely created by Christianity. He detested Christian morality as much as secular morality. The revaluation of all values was his last words. We shall never know what this is all about. But I shall be likely to appreciate how this may lead to. His distaste to institutional Christianity does not mean that he abhorred Christ, for he said, there had been only one Christian, but he died on the Cross. At the time this Christian died, the 'Evangel' became 'Disangel'; and good news turned bad. This is absolutely appreciable when the institution of Christianity began to take shape in the shadow of Roman persecution, the essence of Christ had transformed, or transubstantiated, in much the same way as the bread and wine to the flesh and blood, into something apparently different from what was expected of from the apostolic perspective and substantially incompatible with Christ's original teachings. Nietzsche noted it well. I like Nietzsche because like Jesus, he stood firm on the new ground he built. By overthrowing religion, he created the Superman, for he claimed, man is something to be overcome. We are weak and frail, bound by evils such as morality, compassion and love of the weak man. Superman is here to overcome the weakness, to save the good from the bad morality. I like him because primarily and frankly I am a weak man but with the mind to become a strong man. I daresay I am prepared to take the good out of the bad morality; and I am ready to reassess the values conveniently built upon the morality we take for granted. I am complicated not in the sense I speculate profoundly on subjects that puzzle men of wisdom for thousands of years, not that I have on my mind a system as colossal as the Hegelian one. Instead I am as simple and open-minded in my thoughts as I am adamant in my will to disentangle life-long concerns of my own.
No comments:
Post a Comment