Retailer of Rejuvenating Violence

“When Heidegger laments modernity’s reluctance to exercise the ‘will to mastery,’ it should be remembered that his lament is being expressed in a University of Freiburg lecture hall in 1935, at the height of Germany’s Nazi frenzy. Given that historical setting, how is one to assess Heidegger’s grandiloquence, delivered to those whose ears were ringing …

Literary “Realism” Mistaken for an Argument

“Authors, restrained by our laws against obscenity—rather silly laws, it may be—from using half a dozen monosyllables, felt as if they were martyrs of science, like Galileo. To the objection ‘This is obscene’ or “This is depraved’, or even to the more critically relevant objection ‘This is uninteresting’, the reply ‘This occurs in real life’ …

Longing for a Return to Sacrifice

“It was Nietzsche, after all, who had scoffed at the merely sane among the philosophers and who predicted that these timid remnants of philosophy’s bygone age would soon be shoved aside by the throng of ecstatic Dionysiac revelers with no qualms about delivering a coup de grace to the philosophic tradition. Nietzsche’s influence in this …

Uptight Grammarians, Out With Whom We Do Not Wish to Hang

“I am thinking of what I call Style-mongers. On taking up a book, these people concentrate on what they call its ‘style’ or its ‘English’. They judge this neither by its sound nor by its power to communicate but by its conformity to certain arbitrary rules. Their reading is a perpetual witch hunt for Americanisms, …

Scandalizing Philosophy

“On the rare occasions when the New Testament deigns even to mention philosophy, it treats it as a garrulous Greek exercise that must not be allowed to distract the serious-minded from discovering the truth-telling power of the gospel . . . And now that ‘writing off’ philosophy has become philosophy’s most intellectually stimulating undertaking, perhaps …