[b]Walter Kaufmann
Man stands alone in the universe, responsible for his condition, likely to remain in a lowly state, but free to reach above the stars.[/b]
Now that is existential!
Let people who do not know what to do with themselves in this life, but fritter away their time reading magazines and watching television, hope for eternal life…The life I want is a life I could not endure in eternity. It is a life of love and intensity, suffering and creation, that makes life worth while and death welcome. There is no other life I should prefer. Neither should I like not to die.
Let’s file this one under, “it sounded good at the time”.
No other German writer of comparable stature has been a more extreme critic of German nationalism than Nietzsche.
Well, it certainly wasn’t Heidegger.
Mundus vult decipi: the world wants to be deceived. The truth is too complex and frightening; the taste for the truth is an acquired taste that few acquire…The world winks at dishonesty. the world does not call it dishonesty.
Imagine then his reaction to Trumpworld.
[b]What Pascal overlooked was the hair-raising possibility that God might out-Luther Luther. A special area in hell might be reserved for those who go to mass. Or God might punish those whose faith is prompted by prudence. Perhaps God prefers the abstinent to those who whore around with some denomination he despises. Perhaps he reserves special rewards for those who deny themselves the comfort of belief. Perhaps the intellectual ascetic will win all while those who compromised their intellectual integrity lose everything.
There are many other possibilities. There might be many gods, including one who favors people like Pascal; but the other gods might overpower or outvote him, à la Homer. Nietzsche might well have applied to Pascal his cutting remark about Kant: when he wagered on God, the great mathematician ‘became an idiot’.[/b]
Wow, this complicates things considerably.
Reason may not always tell us what to believe, but it can help us on what we shouldn’t believe.
Is it reasonable then to believe this? Or, rather, when is it not reasonable to believe this?