6.5 KiB
Nietzsche's rational!Genesis
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Author: u/_ShadowElemental Sufficiently Analyzed Magic*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2pbshk/nietzsches_rationalgenesis/
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Score: 0
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Created: 2014-12-15T04:09:38
Post:
—Has any one ever clearly understood the celebrated story at the beginning of the Bible—of God’s mortal terror of science?... No one, in fact, has understood it. This priest-book par excellence opens, as is fitting, with the great inner difficulty of the priest: he faces only one great danger; ergo, “God” faces only one great danger.—
The old God, wholly “spirit,” wholly the high-priest, wholly perfect, is promenading his garden: he is bored and trying to kill time. Against boredom even gods struggle in vain. What does he do? He creates man—man is entertaining.... But then he notices that man is also bored. God’s pity for the only form of distress that invades all paradises knows no bounds: so he forthwith creates other animals. God’s first mistake: to man these other animals were not entertaining—he sought dominion over them; he did not want to be an “animal” himself.—So God created woman. In the act he brought boredom to an end—and also many other things! Woman was the second mistake of God.—“Woman, at bottom, is a serpent, Heva”—every priest knows that; “from woman comes every evil in the world”—every priest knows that, too. Ergo, she is also to blame for science.... It was through woman that man learned to taste of the tree of knowledge.—What happened? The old God was seized by mortal terror. Man himself had been his greatest blunder; he had created a rival to himself; science makes men godlike—it is all up with priests and gods when man becomes scientific!—Moral: science is the forbidden per se; it alone is forbidden. Science is the first of sins, the germ of all sins, the original sin. This is all there is of [religion].—“Thou shall not know”:—the rest follows from that.—God’s mortal terror, however, did not hinder him from being shrewd. How is one to protect one’s self against science? For a long while this was the capital problem. Answer: Out of paradise with man! Happiness, leisure, foster thought—and all thoughts are bad thoughts!—Man must not think.—And so the priest invents distress, death, the mortal dangers of childbirth, all sorts of misery, old age, decrepitude, above all, sickness—nothing but devices for making war on science! The troubles of man don’t allow him to think.... Nevertheless—how terrible!—, the edifice of knowledge begins to tower aloft, invading heaven, shadowing the gods—what is to be done?—The old God invents war; he separates the peoples; he makes men destroy one another (—the priests have always had need of war....). War—among other things, a great disturber of science!—Incredible! Knowledge, deliverance from the priests, prospers in spite of war.—So the old God comes to his final resolution: “Man has become scientific—there is no help for it: he must be drowned!”...
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Antichrist, section 48.
edit: formatting
Comments:
u/None [+7] (7 hours later)
Ah, nothing like watching a batshit-insane large ham do a speech about Original Sin.
u/chaosmosis [+2] and with strange aeons, even death may die (2 days later)
He's interpreting the Bible in ways that are unfair and probably distort the text. However, I don't think his argument is unreasonable. (In this passage, when he uses phrases condemning science, I think he's speaking from the standpoint of the priests/God.)
He's pretentious and elitist. And he had severe headaches that eventually drove him mad, but that doesn't ever seem to hurt the quality of his work (for a contrasting example, see Time Cube). I've found many insightful ideas in Nietzsche. Why don't you like him?
u/None [+3] (3 days later)
When I call someone "batshit insane", it's a compliment. That said, I don't much like obscurantist styles of speaking or writing. I think profundities can be spoken straightforwardly even better than in code.
u/krakonfour [+1] (13 hours later)
Batshit-insane, but has access to a thesaurus...
u/notmy2ndopinion [+8] Concent of Saunt Edhar (8 hours later)
I haven't read Genesis or Nietzsche... but this strikes me more like a Hermeneutical critique of God's mismanagement of an intelligence explosion by one of His creations and then labeling many of Man's deeds as sin (guilt borne from knowledge of right and wrong.)
If Nietzsche was the first philosopher to reinterpret the Bible this way and successfully avoid persecution while proselytizing an alternate message, he gets mad props.
All that said... his writing does come off as over the top and it isn't exactly rational. At least, I have a hard time following his logic.
u/xamueljones [+2] My arch-enemy is entropy (an hour later)
Eeeeeeh, the idea that disaster and conflict keeps man from advancing science and becoming godlike doesn't make sense to me. War is one of the greatest incentives for progress we have. After all, necessity is the mother of innovation. We invented a ton of new technologies and fields of science to better defend ourselves and to destroy others. For example, we discovered the power of the atom via the Manhattan Project.
Although this raises the opposite question. Would we have had any technological advancement (or at the very least advanced more slowly) if we had everlasting peace?
u/PeridexisErrant [+7] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (4 hours later)
I think this link only formed in the industrialisation of war during the twentieth century; before that war definitely inhibited scientific progress.
u/chaosmosis [+2] and with strange aeons, even death may die (2 days later)
Nietzsche's work on suffering actually argues that it can be a major force for developing inner character and strength. I don't think this passage was saying that war prevents technological growth, rather he was saying that people have been indoctrinated to view conflict as evil and thus shy away from it and are unable to develop themselves.
u/Bowbreaker [+1] Solitary Locust (11 hours later)
If humans were somehow made to never collectively enact violence on another group of people than problems which had been minor would become major. And those problems would probably drive technology just as well, though into a different direction.