All posts filed under: Christianity

Evaluating Value

Tuesday, February 12, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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aristocracy / Christianity / evaluation / evil / good / human / judgment / life / morality / nobility / origin of language / power / psychoanalysis / question / reality / subject / the future / utility / value

Under what conditions did men invent for themselves these value judgments good and evil? And what inherent value do they have? Have they hindered or fostered human well-being up to now? Are they a sign of some emergency, of impoverishment, of an atrophying life? Or is it the other way around—do they indicate fullness, power, a will for living, courage, confidence, the future? Friedrich Nietzsche, Preface to the Genealogy of Morals Why is this work […]

The Will to Virtue and the Morality of Capture

Wednesday, December 5, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
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capture / Christianity / domestication / herd morality / individual / Manu / morality / Nietzsche / power / virtue / war / Zarathustra

    “Neither Manu, nor Plato nor Confucius nor the Jewish and Christian teachers have ever doubted their right to lie. They have not doubted that they had very different rights too. Expressed in a formula, one might say: all the means by which one has so far attempted to make mankind moral were through and through immoral” (Twilight, 505). Nietzsche despises the improvers of mankind because they have typically been priests, otherwise known as […]

Nietzsche, Pity and Virtue: From the Superfluous to the Exceptional

Thursday, November 29, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
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Antichrist / breeding / Christianity / corruption / exception / individual / kant / morality / Nietzsche / overman / pity / power / species / Spinoza / suffering / superfluous / values / virtue

The weak and the failures shall perish: first principle of our love of man. And they shall even be given every possible assistance (The Antichrist, 570). In the opening sections of The Antichrist, Nietzsche raises the question of what type of man shall be bred, continuing a line of thought developed in Twilight of the Idols in relation to the Laws of Manu. In former times, Nietzsche argues, the exceptional human was a fortunate accident; […]

‘The Teacher of the Destruction of the Law:’ Introduction to Alain Badiou’s St. Paul

Friday, September 21, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
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anti-philosophy / atheism / badiou / Christianity / declaration / event / fidelity / Paul / universal politics

Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul: The Foundations of Universalism. Trans. Ray Brassier. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003. Badiou starts off his book with an interesting definition of the fable: A ‘fable’ is that part of a narrative that, so far as we are concerned, fails to touch on any Real, unless it be by virtue of that invisible and indirectly accessible residue sticking to every obvious imaginary (4). Thus Badiou asserts that Paul reduces the Christian narrative […]

‘A Doctrine for Specialists and Philosophers:’ Sartre’s Existential Universalism

Sunday, September 16, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
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Christianity / existentialism / freedom / marxism / ontology / project / responsibility / Sartre / subjectivity / teleology / universal

In his Existentialism and Human Emotions published in 1947, Sartre notes that what existentialists have in common is the fact that “they believe that existence comes before essence—or, if you will, that we must begin from the subjective” (3). Yet immediately after establishing this as his existentialist slogan, Sartre begins to argue that objects have essence because they were made according to a certain plan and because they serve a definite purpose. So the essence […]