Letter #61: The Nietzsche Niche

Our Way is the High Way

Monsoor Spensoir,

Looking forward to our livestream conversation on Wednesday. I’ve been thinking about where we’ve come so far.

This week on my podcast, I wanted to discuss the ideas of the 19^th century Christian philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. Now, those people who have a mental image of me lounging about the Athenaeum with a saucy courtesan balanced on one knee and a copy of Fear and Trembling balanced on the other may find this difficult to believe, but it’s actually been some years since I’ve reread Kierkegaard — although it’s entirely possible I’m the only person with that particular mental image of me, in which case never mind.

Anyway, I wrested my dusty copy of Sickness Unto Death from the bookshelf in order to review the Great Dane’s work. Looking at the 1989 introduction by the Kierkegaard scholar Alastair Hannay, I was startled by how many words Hannay dedicated to helping the reader close “the distance that separates Kierkegaard from our own, post-Nietzschean culture.”

Speaking of Kierkegaard’s ideas about “spiritual need,” Hannay writes: “The modern way with such needs would be to prevent them occurring, as if they were disorders on a par with physical ailments.”

In other words, the assumption of post-Nietzschean man is that religion is something we only used until more scientific remedies became available.

I’m fascinated by how often Friedrich Nietzsche is cited as the dividing line between the age of faith and modernity. For instance, I recently read a book on evil by a philosopher who maintained: “To lament the loss of absolute standards for judging right and wrong ought to be superfluous a century after Nietzsche.”

There’s no doubt Nietzsche understood and foresaw the moral and philosophical ramifications of the death of Christian faith more clearly than anyone except Dostoevsky. From his insights arose much of post-modern philosophy, perhaps especially that of Michel Foucault, who could be considered the forefather of such social plagues as intersectionality, transgenderism and woke.

So far, so catastrophic. But what’s odd to me is that Nietzsche should be treated as if he’d discovered a scientific fact — heliocentrism, say — and thus ushered in an age in which previous concepts — spiritual needs, absolute standards of right and wrong — have been rendered obsolete.

But really — no. Nietzsche saw that the failure of faith led down a certain path and, as a non-believer, he took that path.

Dostoevsky saw something similar but, as a Christian, he went a different way.

Which is our way here. As we said in our opening essay, the philosophies of Foucault and company are inarguable if there is no God. But, as it happens, there is.

My question is this: have the post-Nietzscheans so colonized the language of modernity that honest religious thought will necessarily sound out-of-date? With all due respect to tradition, do we need a new way of talking about God?

I await your answer in my reinforced Nietzsche Brand bunker.

Dad