/lit/ - Literature

>>18071899
>yeah no wonder why lefty/pol/ trannies shill him all the fucking time.
>t.brainlet
All Commies are Christians.

>Mitchell’s thesis is both simple and elegant: he contends that the worldview underlying a great deal of today’s progressive activism is a curious admixture of Friedrich Nietzsche’s reduction of all ethics to power and the zealous moralism of America’s Puritan heritage. Despite their seemingly irreconcilable presuppositions, the two paradigms nonetheless make up a distinctly American brew.

>But, as Mitchell correctly points out, few of Nietzsche’s latter-day disciples go this far. Instead, “Nietzsche’s Puritan Warriors” prefer to hover at the level of surface criticism, decrying modern civilization as pervasively oppressive while simultaneously immunizing their own premises from critique.
>The contemporary campus left simply lacks the courage to embrace the full force of Nietzsche’s work; the philosopher who urged his successors to go Beyond Good and Evil would treat today’s students of critical theory as “craven fools who are unwilling to take the final leap and discard the Christian ideals whose foundations they have sought so assiduously to destroy.”

>On the Dionysian reading, Nietzsche situates the true end of humanity—that is, the sacred—in the full flowering of passion and material desire, which was lost when the “priests” seized control of the West.

>Smith explains that the ascetic or “eternal-looking” dimensions of Christianity—avoidance of gluttony, sexual restraint, renunciation of hedonic desire—were profoundly offensive to a pagan society that located the divine in transient matter and sensation.

>Indeed, Nietzsche’s legendary madman, after proclaiming the death of God, asks, “What water is there to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?”
>And that pre-Christian ideal may be surprisingly attractive to modern minds. One need only consider the themes of much contemporary progressivism—sexual liberation, biological heritage, environmental apocalypticism, idealization of preindustrial society, experience-based epistemology, and so forth—to see that there are numerous points of correspondence with the “this-worldly” religiosity of the classical age.

>From this perspective, the deconstructionist tendencies of “Nietzsche’s Puritan Warriors” become easier to explain: despite their use of Nietzschean methods, they are not übermenschen but, in an ironic twist, reactionaries. Their demand to deconstruct the “systems of oppression” upon which modern civilization rests is the necessary condition for the full expression of a non-transcendent religiosity, one that promises full liberation from oppressive dogma and all transcendent claims. Theirs is not a cowardly reading of Nietzsche, but simply a bastardized one.


https://kirkcenter.org/reviews/nietzsches-puritan-warriors/

>>17813952
>Go back to /pol/ Bernd.
Kek