Eliot the conservative, continued...

Critic Donald Davie wrote of Eliot:

...when it came to deciding what Christian sect he should join, it was of the utmost importance to him that he choose what should seem to be not a sect at all but a national norm, its normality shown in that it was backed by the secular and institutional forces of the nation-state.' (Davie, Eliot in His Time, p. 186)

What a strange thing to be said of the author of Murder in the Cathedral! Thomas is depicted as unable to accept this kind of version of Christianity (as I read it, anyhow), because it so badly domesticates Christianity... This version of Christianity's role in society owes more I think to Kant and his idea of 'religion' than it does to authentic Christianity. For his part of course Nietzche couldn't see this normality of Christianity; but then, as some have argued, Nietzche understood Christianity in its true genius better than almost anyone...

Notes on Humility V

Of course, Nietzsche hated the humility of Christianity and derided it as servile, base, low and disgusting. Oh, and womanly. It was ignoble, and not worthy of the great-souled individual.

1 Peter specifically addresses wives and slaves and asks that they be humbly submissive. That much perhaps we may have expected - isn't this cringing debasement precisely what is most natural to women and slaves (to channel N for a minute? But it also enjoins all citizens to submit to the emperor; and young men to submit to elders in the church.

How Nietzschean is contemporary culture? Well certainly I think it has adopted a belief that only through the spirited action of the great souled individual will humanity ever be truly free. Perhaps we are more democratised than he would have been. But still, the desire to soar, to be great, and glorious: is this not Nietzchean?

As he writes in Beyond Good and Evil: 'The noble soul has reverence for itself'. I don't think he means a cringing vanity here, nor even that bizarre self-reflexivity you encounter when sportspeople refer to themselves in the third person: rather, the noble soul is in thrall to its own destiny to the point of religious fervour. This is more worshipful a reverence...

Alasdair MacIntyre: encyclopaedia and geneaology

Simon and a French goat. They seem pretty much the same as other goats.

MacIntyre's Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry begins with a narrative about the creation of the Gifford lectures themselves - which is a brilliant, almost funny, self-referential move. The conceit is 'should these lectures really be given'? - which of course, MacIntyre undoes by, well, giving them.

The 19th C. Scottish academics with whom MacIntyre begins are exemplars of the 'encyclopedic' view of truth and knowledge. The genre that represents what they assumed best is the encyclopedia article - comprehensive, conclusive, prolix, 'scientific', based on facts, authoritative, 'expert'. This was not a discussion of authoritative texts, but rather was its own authoritative text.

The geneaologist on the other hand, of whom Nietzche is the supreme example, repudiated the very structures of knowledge and the institutions that produced it - and furthermore, the genres that represent it. So, Nietzche's personal journey led him away from the academy and into the Alps. His writing became prophetic, allusive, even self-contradictory, proverbial and with the appearance of incompleteness.

As MacIntyre points out: the geneaologist has (in his book) won a decisive victory over the encyclopedist in exposing his/her assumptions and pretensions. However, it is not clear how the geneaologist has escaped the charge that he has levelled at his opponent. Foucault, for example, undoubtedly a neo-Nietzchean, became more an icon of academic authority as his career went on, and did not dissuade his very deferential interviewers from their sycophancy, nor shatter his own idol once it had been built.

I have yet to read about the third rival version, namely 'tradition'. However, it strikes me that Kierkegaard could be an interesting mediating figure here, though perhaps on the geneaological side. It further strikes me that in Christian theology there remain those who take an encyclopedic approach and those who take a more 'geneaological' approach. They are as apparently incommensurate in this context as they are in philosophy...

Hart on the bad taste of Nietzche

Hart's argument in The Beauty of the Infinite is that Christianity is jolly well the most attractive thing around, if you think about it. And other ways of thinking are, well, dog-ugly...

So he writes about Nietzche:

The most potent reply a Christian can make to Nietzche's critique is to accuse him of a defect of sensibility - of bad taste. And this, in fact, is the last observation that shuld be made at this point: Nietzche has atrocious taste. (p. 125)

!

I always thought that this ought to the Christian strategy to counter the rise of queer culture: camp is not just bad morality: it is bad art.