Enjoying the view from Limbo
Nietzsche is, without question, the most influential philosopher in today’s world, and his influence has grown steadily for more than a century. While it is probably true that more people read Nietzsche’s words these days than those of any other major philosopher, book sales are certainly not the way a philosopher achieves profound influence. Rather, the great philosophers influence the world to the...
Decadence, in normal language, means “deterioration” or “decay.” (The Latin root suggests falling down and the French derivative form suggests decaying.) For a long time in English, the word has been used only about human behavior and social conditions. If we say someone is decadent, we are saying his way of life is deteriorating or wasteful, such as one who lives for luxury...
As Nietzsche has become far and away the most dominant thinker of the age, his most savage and radical ideas have (as he himself may have foreseen) become trivialized and democratized — a pair of adjectives Nietzsche would have regarded as a redundancy. In other words, what is dominant today is not so much Nietzsche’s own ideas, but his words shrunken in the...
In his final sane treatise, The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche praises Descartes as the first philosopher with the audacity to describe animals as machines, i.e., as material mechanisms devoid of soul (§14). As the pioneer of this ingenious and ultra-modern idea, however, Descartes, so says Nietzsche, lacked the necessary critical distance from his religious-metaphysical inheritance to take the next step, namely to concede that man...
by Daren Jonescu · Published February 16, 2021 · Last modified February 24, 2021
This age has pushed its rational minority to the edge. It has become difficult to walk out amongst one’s fellow human beings today without being intermittently struck by the thought of how embarrassing it is to belong to the same species as these others — these bipedal sheep, these regressed pre-individuals. But there is a hint of madness in such a musing, of...
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