Enjoying the view from Limbo
by Daren Jonescu · Published November 13, 2018 · Last modified November 22, 2018
During his final sane months, in a whirlwind of productivity, Nietzsche wrote three important works, the greatest of which was Twilight of the Idols, or, How to Philosophize with the Hammer, a terse but sweeping synopsis of his entire philosophy. Though in form a small book, in content, implications, and influence, it is enormous as only a handful of works have ever been....
by Daren Jonescu · Published June 4, 2018 · Last modified December 21, 2020
From Twilight of the Idols: To live alone one must be an animal or a god — says Aristotle. There is yet a third case: one must be both — a philosopher. (R.J. Hollingdale translation, 1968.) True — but why does Nietzsche assume that Aristotle had not thought of that? My suggestion: the hubris of exceptional youth. Nietzsche completed Twilight of the Idols...
On Friday, Ireland, a traditionally Catholic country, voted overwhelmingly to legalize abortion, which means that if you walk the streets of Dublin today, most of the people you meet will be supporters of killing human life to facilitate irresponsible pleasure. Meanwhile, halfway around the world in Korea, a democratically elected Korean president embraced and held hands with a grotesque brute responsible for the...
by Daren Jonescu · Published January 30, 2018 · Last modified February 6, 2018
Those of us who believe we are living through a moment of final civilizational decline — to be clear, that’s “final” as in “last stage,” not “the absolute end of everything” — often cite late modernity’s fall into nihilism as either a symptom of the decline, a cause of it, or both. Nihilism — broadly, the belief in nothing (nihil), i.e., the rejection...
A couple of days ago, I spent an idle hour rifling through Nietzsche’s Gay Science, one of my personal favorites among his books. Reading various familiar but half-forgotten aphorisms almost at random, I came across the following excellent passage discussing a very “German” topic on which Nietzsche is always profound, scholars. Specifically, Nietzsche is addressing the problem of the scholar through the lens...
America Descending / Ideas and Reflections
by Daren Jonescu · Published November 30, 2017 · Last modified December 1, 2017
Back when the world was young — August 3rd, 2012, to be exact — I published an essay at American Thinker entitled “Conservatives Have a Secret,” in which I explained the inevitability of America’s collapse into progressive chaos, but argued that this inevitability itself could be turned into a weapon of mass renewal, if serious conservatives played their cards right. Things haven’t gone...
On November 8th, the United States of America is staging (I choose that word carefully) a presidential election that will go down (and I also choose that word carefully) in history as the most terrifying, banal, hideous, and irrational exercise in the entire spotty narrative of Western democracy. The nation on whose fate largely rests that of the whole Earth at this moment–the nation with the most money,...
Follow: