On my religious position, I have been classified as a Protestant, a Catholic, an anti-semitic, and as a typical Jew; politically, as a Liberal, a Fascist, a National Socialist, and a Conservative; and on my theoretical position, as a Platonist, a Neo-Augustinian, a Thomist, a disciple of Hegel, an existentialist, a historical relativist, and an [...]
Our stark choice is indeed as Nietzsche puts it, says René Girard. It is a choice between Dionysus and the Crucified: between the Biblical concern for the mob’s victim, on the one hand, or, on the other hand, the justifications and defenses of the lies of myth. The lies of myth are offered in the [...]
We should learn to cultivate the unwillingness to tolerate the unwitting, untold lie in the soul, and the wit and wisdom to transmute the unavoidable lying of any utterance into the telling lies that reveal truth. The first lecture of the school year is, by an old tradition, dedicated to the freshmen among us. Whether you [...]
I suppose we all have guilty pleasures. One of mine is reading the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. I can sit down, day or night, with any one of his works and be a rather—at least intellectually, if not spiritually—happy man. Yes, I know he was somewhat crazy, descending into a greater and greater madness until [...]
In the musical Oklahoma! Ado Annie and Will Parker sing, “With Me It’s All or Nuthin’ is it All or Nuthin’ With You?” I like to imagine the duet being sung by Thérèse of Lisieux and Friedrich Nietzsche. I can just see the sweet little French girl and the skinny German with his big moustache, [...]
Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rope” is ultimately an allegory for the modern world: Clean, shiny, polished, and deadly. I am not exaggerating when I claim this movie to be one of the greatest works of art ever to emerge out of Hollywood. Each person has “the right to live, to work, and to think as an individual, [...]
In 1990 the American philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre published Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, Tradition.[1] The last chapter of this book is titled “Reconceiving the university and the lecture,” and it ends with a proposition: in academic discourse we should “introduce” ourselves before we start speaking. The introduction should be a statement revealing [...]
A Review of William H. F. Altman’s Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: The Philosopher of the Second Reich (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2013). In this imaginative and refined commentary on Nietzsche’s political thought, Altman provides an incisive critique of the achievement of Nietzsche, as well as his limitations. The work is the third volume of a trilogy on German [...]