scholarly journals Nietzsche's Pelagianism: Dionysus versus the Crucified

The Agonist ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 61-74
Author(s):  
Bradley Kaye
Keyword(s):  
Human Beings ◽  
Will To Power ◽  
Tree Of Knowledge ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Will ◽  
Ecce Homo ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
Will Power ◽  
Good And Evil ◽  
The Devil

When Nietzsche writes in Ecce Homo: “Theologically speaking - listen closely, for I rarely speak as a theologian - it was God himself who at the end of his days work lay down as a serpent under the tree of knowledge: thus he recuperated from being God. - He had made everything too beautiful. - The devil is merely the leisure of God on that seventh day.”  (Ecce Homo, “Beyond Good and Evil,” §2) He is insinuating an alliance with an uncited source - Pelagianus Hereticus who believed there was no ‘original sin’ but that the will power of human beings could bring humanity to salvation.  A method that bears stark affinities with Nietzsche’s writings on will to power in the sense that human will power wills a transcendence to what is, rather than the metaphysics of a transcendent God providing grace to those in need of salvation from above. This marks an interesting detour in church orthodoxy, a path not taken and one has to wonder that given Nietzsche’s reputation as a well read historian of ideas and theology whether he was writing a sort of theological exegesis through ressentiment.  A history of ideas for the future through the eyes of those who lost as a kind of error, a kind of pathos. In this paper, I try to explore this treatment of Nietzsche’s work to bring a new interpretation onto his work, one that is hidden in plain sight in lieu of his work on pushing ethics beyond good and evil, his views on phantasmagoria, and the penultimate writings at the end of his productive years where he describes his writings as “Dionysus versus the Crucified.”

The Flame of Eternity

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Michalski
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
The Body ◽  
Will To Power ◽  
Death Of God ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Will ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
Main Ideas ◽  
Good And Evil ◽  
Eventual Death

This book provides a reexamination and new interpretation of Nietzsche's philosophy and the central role that the concepts of eternity and time, as he understood them, played in it. According to this book, Nietzsche's reflections on human life are inextricably linked to time, which in turn cannot be conceived of without eternity. Eternity is a measure of time, but also, the book argues, something Nietzsche viewed first and foremost as a physiological concept having to do with the body. The body ages and decays, involving us in a confrontation with our eventual death. It is in relation to this brute fact that we come to understand eternity and the finitude of time. Nietzsche argues that humanity has long regarded the impermanence of our life as an illness in need of curing. It is this “pathology” that Nietzsche called nihilism. Arguing that this insight lies at the core of Nietzsche's philosophy as a whole, the book seeks to explain and reinterpret Nietzsche's thought in light of it. It maintains that many of Nietzsche's main ideas—including his views on love, morality (beyond good and evil), the will to power, overcoming, the suprahuman (or the overman, as it is infamously referred to), the Death of God, and the myth of the eternal return—take on new meaning and significance when viewed through the prism of eternity.

Methods of Communicative Intention Explication of the Phraseological Unit with Biblical Expression «Forbidden Fruit» (Diachronic Section)

2020 ◽  
pp. 65-76
Author(s):  
Olga Lomakina ◽  
Oksana Shkuran
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
Communicative Intention ◽  
Tree Of Knowledge ◽  
Media Space ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Semantic Value ◽  
Book Of Genesis ◽  
Good And Evil

The article analyzes methods of explication of the traditional and widely used stable biblical expression «forbidden fruit». The study is based on a diachronic section – from the interpretation of the biblical text to the communicative intention of dialogue participants in the media space illustrating nuclear and peripheral meanings. The analysis includes biblical texts that realize the archetypal meaning of the biblical expression «forbidden fruit» in which it is called the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The secularized interest in the kind of tree, on which forbidden fruits grew, is motivated by a realistic presentation of a sad history of the first people’s fall in the Book of Genesis. Scientific hypotheses have their origins since the Middle Ages, when artists recreated the author’s story of eating the forbidden fruit. For religion, the variety of the fruit is not of fundamental importance, however, visualization in the works of art has become an incentive for the further use of the biblical expression with a new semantic segment. Modern media texts actively represent the transformation of the biblical expression«forbidden fruit» for different purposes: in advertising texts for pragmatic one, in informative, educational, ideological texts for cognitive one, in entertaining textsfor communicative one, lowering the spiritual and semantic value register of the modern language. Therefore, the process of desemantization and profanization of the biblical expression results in the destruction of national stereotypes in Russian people’s worldview.

Conclusion

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Hingley
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Roman History ◽  
King Arthur ◽  
State Control ◽  
Scottish Highlands ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
Extension Of State ◽  
The Devil

The works examined above have been explored through a chronological study based upon the four overlapping themes of civility/ Romanization, the walling out of humanity, Roman incomers, and ruination, emphasized through a reading of the sources to explore how the discovery of objects and sites has helped to inform a number of contrasting interpretations that went in and out of fashion. A number of more local and fragmented tales have also been addressed in passing and it is evident that a very different account could have been articulated if I had drawn more directly upon such ideas. Tales, such as those of Onion the Silchester Giant, Graham’s creation of a breach in the Antonine Wall, King Arthur and his ‘O’on’ at Camelon in central Scotland and the activities of the devil at Rodmarton, provide information about how local people interpreted the physical remains of the Romans in Britain. The focus on elite tales in this book should not detract from the potential of local myths, but a thorough study of such material remains to be undertaken. Instead, this book has emphasized stories that have been told about the pre- Roman and Roman history of Britain that served to develop relevant national and imperial tales. The significance of the civilizing of the ancient Britons drove a particular approach to the ancient sources during the early seventeenth century that emphasized the passing on of Roman civility to people of England (or Lowland Britain). From this point of view, the ruined Roman Walls projected the territorial limit of civility, beyond which were the lands of barbarians. Towards the end of the century, a new interpretation arose that placed emphasis on the Roman settlers, their ‘stations’, and roads, reflecting the contemporary military aspect of society while envisaging England (or Lowland Britain) as the inheritor of Roman civility. This military conception was redefined and updated during the succeeding centuries as an analogy for the extension of state control over the Scottish Highlands and later for the exploration, documentation, and domination of territories in India and elsewhere.

Paul Ricœur: Symbols of Good and Evil in History, the Bible and in our Time.

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 161
Author(s):  
Marieke Maes
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Paul Ricoeur ◽  
Human Consciousness ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Paul Ricœur ◽  
The Will ◽  
Different Cultures ◽  
Good And Evil

In his The Symbolism of Evil Ricœur explores the dynamics of human consciousness of evil in different cultures and times. Consciousness of evil is examined by looking at the different prevailing symbols wherein human beings confess their experience with evil. Although appeared in 1960, this study is still cited in recent publications in psychology, cultural anthropology and religion. In this article I describe the context of The Symbolism of Evil as the last part of Ricœur’s study of the will and give a summary of its relevant content.

The Dialectic of “Enscentment”: Patrick Süskind's Das Parfum as Critical History of Enlightenment Culture

PMLA ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 108 (3) ◽  
pp. 489-505
Author(s):  
Richard T. Gray
Keyword(s):  
Young Women ◽  
Instrumental Reason ◽  
Will To Power ◽  
Literary Practice ◽  
Critical History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Will ◽  
Dialectic Of Enlightenment

Patrick Süskind's best-selling novel Das Parfum applies the postmodern literary practice of pastiche and playful allusion to pursue a critical purpose: an adumbration of the destructive logic that underpins the instrumental reason of Enlightenment culture. Süskind's critique is informed by ideas put forward by Horkheimer and Adorno in their Dialektik der Aufklärung and by the sociohistorical methodology of the Annales historiographers. In the Active history of Grenouille, the monstrous master perfumer who murders young women to capture and exploit their aromatic “essences,” Süskind depicts the will to power and overpowering fundamental to enlightened reason. This parabolic histoire des mentalités of Enlightenment culture is thrown into relief by two strategic moves: the transposition of the Enlightenment's visual prejudices into the olfactory domain and the contextualization of Grenouille's development as perfumer in the history of Western aesthetics. Süskind thereby implicates modernist aesthetic sensibilities in the dialectic of Enlightenment. (RTG)

“Non potest non peccare”: Karl Barth on original sin and the bondage of the will

2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-207
Author(s):  
Shao Kai Tseng
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Original Sin ◽  
Karl Barth ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Church Dogmatics ◽  
Historical Condition ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Will

Summary This article offers an exposition of Karl Barth’s actualistic reorientation of the Augustinian notions of original sin and the bondage of the will in § 60 and § 65 of Church Dogmatics IV/1–2. Barth redefines human nature as a total determination of the human being (Sein/Dasein) “from above” by the covenantal history of reconciliation. Human nature as such remains totally intact in the historical state of sin. The human being, however, is also determined “from below” by the Adamic world-history of total corruption. With this dialectical construal of sin and human nature, Barth redefines original sin as the radically sinful activities and decisions that determine the confinement of human beings to the historical condition of fallenness. Barth also challenges the famous Augustinian account of the bondage of the will to which original sin gives rise, and uses the present active indicative to express his actualistic reorientation of the Augustinian notion of the bondage: “non potest non peccare”.

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