Political Philosophy in the Moment: Narratives of Freedom From Plato to Arendt by Jim Josefson

Author:Jim Josefson [Josefson, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Ideologies, Political Science, General, History & Theory
ISBN: 9780429533891
Google: u36YDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 49780821
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-05-13T12:24:41+00:00

This version of the moment comes from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The figure of Zarathustra, the man who wants to build a bridge to move beyond our traditional theological approaches to being human, is a delightfully ironic choice for naming the hero. He’s named after Zarathustra or Zoroaster, the founder of the most ancient religion we know much about, Zoroastrianism. One of that ancient Zarathustra’s great innovations was the idea that after death human souls would have to travel over a bridge to the afterlife. Along the way their souls would be tested. The good would continue over the bridge to paradise. The bad would be cast off the bridge, down into the fiery depths below. I guess Nietzsche thought, since Zarathustra was responsible for this great bridge to the penultimate moment of eternal Judgment, he just might have it in himself to build another one to the moment.

Certainly, Nietzsche thought heaven and hell were notions that push us out of the moment. Instead of being in the moment, we dream about the rewards awaiting us in the afterlife. The effect is that every good deed we may do is not really good at all. It’s merely an investment placed to win a larger return in the hereafter. The huge difference between the pleasures of heaven and the tortures of hell mean a guaranteed return on that investment. However, worry about eternity also makes us worry about the past. The bad deeds of the past can never be far from our minds, because they are never really past. They will always count against us at Judgment Day. To Nietzsche, such guilt seemed corrosive of genuine morality because it isn’t particularly guilty. It involves only apprehension over our balance of karmic debt. Thus, Zarathustra’s original bridge is another overpass that leads away from the moment.

But that’s not really Nietzsche’s central concern. The real problem according to Nietzsche is not the Zoroastrianism in Christianity but Christianity’s own core. The problem with Christianity is what many people consider its greatest strength: its emphasis on charity. See, for instance, I John 4 (“God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him”). Nietzsche’s argument is that this charity is actually a poor expression of love, because it places the lover and the beloved in a fundamentally unequal position, such that it’s not genuine love at all. A good example is the Southern expression: Bless your heart. It seems to say: I have charity towards you. But what it really means is: Well, aren’t you pathetic! We can see this in Sara Thurston’s attitude towards the people in her church. She loves them, but her pity actually means she considers them beneath her. Thus, Nietzsche’s’ story is meant to show that pity is truly just one side of a coin that has contempt on the other side.

Contempt is hatred of the inferior for their inferiority. I think of it as the opposite of envy or hatred of the superior for being superior.

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