Harold and Maude, towards an Aesthetic Hedonism

Friedrich Nietzsche’s vision for humanity after he declares the death of God is both atheistic and aesthetic, the freedom to live life as it comes (amor fati). Therefore, we can call his existential vision aesthetic atheism. Maude, in the movie Harold and Maude, has a different take on living without God. Rather than take down Christianity, she tries to reform it. She lives freely but is not the intellectual free spirit that Nietzsche hoped would emerge after his proclamation. Rather, her way of existence we can call aesthetic hedonism. She understands that life is contingent, but she loves life for what it is and tries to free others, including animals, saints, and Harold, to experience the same. She does not urge the atheistic turn. I turn to Quentin Meillassoux’s notion of cosmological necessary contingency that, while he agrees with Nietzsche that God is at present inexistent, a necessary contingent cosmology cannot rule out the emergence of a divinity. He wonders just what kind of divinity might emerge. I argue that the divinity that might emerge, using Meillassoux’s term ‘divinology’, would depend upon the prevailing attitude, and consider this through both aesthetic atheism and aesthetic hedonism attitudes towards the world.

As consequências do niilismo sobre Kiríllov, Stavróguin e o Adivinho | The Consequences of Nihilism over Kirillov, Stavroguinand the Soothsayer

O objetivo deste trabalho é comparar as consequências que o fenômeno do niilismo tem sobre algumas personagens das obras de Nietzsche e Dostoiévski. Tentaremos mostrar que Kiríllov e Stavróguin, personagens de Os Demônios, e o Adivinho, deAssim falou Zaratustra,padecem de um certo distúrbio paradoxal de personalidade. Qual seja, para Nietzsche, a desagregação dos instintos ou, em termos dostoiévskianos, a consciência cindida.Palavras-chave: Niilismo; Kiríllov e Stavróguin; Adivinho; Dostoiévski; Nietzsche. AbstractThis paper’s goal is to compare the consequences that the phenomenon of nihilism has over certain characters of Dostoevsky’s and Nietzsche’s work. We shall demonstrate that Kirillov and Stavróguin, from Demons, and the Soothsayer, from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, suffer from a certain paradoxical disturb of personality. That is, for Nietzsche, the breakdown of instincts or, in Dostoevskian terms, the divided conscience.Keywords:Nihilism; Death of God; Values; Kirillov; Soothsayer. ORCIDhttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-1926-1716https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7857-247Xhttps://orcid.org/0000-0003-3690-6288

Kultura i mit — iluzje demitologizacji

One of the most fundamental existential experiences is the “indifference of the world”. Faced with the awareness of the insignificance of human fate, the lack of meaning, the indifference of the world, man creates various strategies of depotentialising reality. One of them is “story-telling”, working on a myth. Nietzsche also believed that “life needs a protective atmosphere woven from illusions, dreams, delusions”, so he tried to create a myth to fill the void left by the “death of God”. He began with Wagner’s “aesthetic myth” and went on to create a “myth of the aestheticisation of existence”. His next attempts to give meaning to human life were the story of the Übermensch and the revitalization of the myth of eternal return. Another myth which can be found at the core of Nietzsche’s philosophy is “the myth of the myth-maker”.

Social Consequences of the Pandemic in the Context of Modern Education Problems

The article is dedicated to the analysis of the main trends of evolution of the educational sphere of society and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on it. There are four basic trends in the development of education. The first is the audiovisual turn in modern culture accompanied by a crisis of "book culture". New learning technologies, making the material extremely accessible, do not developing the basic cognitive abilities of the individual. The "will to know" is not formed», as well as the desire and willingness to overcome the inevitable difficulties that arise in its course. The next factor is the total commercialization and consumerization of educational activities. Education is increasingly understood not as a selfless transfer of the accumulated experience of civilization, but as the provision of paid services. This gives its consumer additional rights and it creates unreasonable expectations. The third circumstance is devaluation of the classical interpretation of education as a unity of teaching and upbringing. There was a clear bias towards the first one. Education, understood as the process of forming a harmonious personality, it was in the background. The final trend in the development of education is the spreading of postmodern theories and related practices into it («postmodernization»). The pandemic is proving to be the most important factor in accelerating it. Due to the distance learning format the educational space is fragmented, atomized – both physically and intellectually. Its universal principles, goals, and content are being eroded. The social experiment launched by the pandemic proved that mostly distance education is technically possible, economically profitable, increases the emphasis on the pragmatic component of education to the detriment of the axiological one and contributes to the progressive postmodernization of education. In conclusion, it is pointed out that Western philosophy in the works of its most prominent representatives repeatedly played with the metaphor of death of God (Nietzsche), subject (Foucault), author (Barthes). By analogy, the thesis is put forward (accelerated witch pandemic) about «the death of a Teacher», manifested primarily in loss by the pedagogical community and society as a whole a view of the importance of the Teacher's social mission.

The Universe Is on Our Side

There has been a breakdown in American public life that no election can fix. Americans cannot even converse about politics. All the usual explanations for our condition have failed to make things better. Bruce Ledewitz shows that America is living with the consequences of the Death of God, which Friedrich Nietzsche knew would be momentous and irreversible. God was this culture’s story of the meaning of our lives. Even atheists had substitutes for God, like inevitable progress. Now we have no story and do not even think about the nature of reality. That is why we are angry and despairing. America’s future requires that we begin a new story by each of us asking a question posed by theologian Bernard Lonergan: Is the universe on our side? When we commit to live honestly and fully by our answer to that question, even if our immediate answer is no, America will begin to heal. Beyond that, pondering the question of the universe will allow us to see that there is more to the universe than blind forces and dead matter. Guided by the naturalism of Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy, and the historical faith of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., we can learn to trust that the universe bends toward justice and our welfare. That conclusion will complete our healing and restore faith in American public life. We can live without God, but not without thinking about holiness in the universe.

The Age of Evasion

America is now in the Age of Evasion. Our public events are scripted and phony. Our political rhetoric is filled with lies. Our symbols are fake. Our proposals are unreal. Virtue signaling has replaced reflection. We avoid deep questions, such as, in the abortion controversy, when life begins. Cancel culture has drowned rational debate. Politics are narrow and frozen. We long for more in our public life but feel that it is out of reach. We evade out of fear of the consequences of the Death of God. We do not want to acknowledge how alone we feel. We need a new story.

The Arrival of the Death of God

While there are many sincere religious believers, this culture no longer believes in God. That is why the Covid-19 pandemic did not raise serious issues of theodicy publicly. Friedrich Nietzsche’s Madman announcing the Death of God in 1882 concluded that he had come too early. His time is now. The Death of God unfolded through the disenchantment described by Max Weber and arrived with full force with the New Atheists in the early part of this century. Sam Harris announced the end of faith, which turned out to mean, in its denial of binding authority and objective justification, the death of truth. Now we each judge everything ourselves. The New Atheists also undermined human solidarity in politics. The breakdown in public life is the final flowering of the Death of God.