George Grant in Conversation by David Cayley

Author:David Cayley [Cayley, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781770890831
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc
Published: 1995-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

IV

THE THIRD WAVE

CAYLEY: Earlier we spoke briefly about what Leo Strauss calls the third wave of modernity — the philosophy of Nietzsche and Heidegger. You have paid close attention to both these thinkers, and I would now like to talk about them in more detail.

GRANT: Well, I don’t know if you think this is totally redundant, but let me say first that the great public fact of this century has been the end of Europe, caused above all by the English and the Germans fighting. And since we all live in an English-speaking society, it’s become more difficult for us to look fairly at the Germans — this great and wonderful people — because so much of our effort in this century has been to smash the Germans.

Certainly German society has been a great ambiguity in the Western world, and more so in the contemporary era, as distinct from the whole modern period. The greatest thinkers of that era have been Germans, and I would say the two supreme thinkers have been Nietzsche, about a hundred years ago, and in our present time Heidegger, Nietzsche’s great epigone. It seems to me that Nietzsche is the person, the first person, who expresses modernity at its fullest: he says it is the end of the age of reason, and he proclaims this as a great event. He says that the age of reason in the West was expressed essentially through Christianity and through the Greek philosophy that penetrated Christianity, and out of that came modern science. He calls the modern scientists “the gravediggers of the age of reason” because modern science has taught us that we cannot look at the world as if all that is is rational. Modern science has made it impossible for us to believe that what is is ultimately reasonable and proceeds from the divine reason. One only has to think for a minute of Darwin to understand what he means; Nietzsche thought Darwin was a very great genius — which indeed he was.

Nietzsche claims that the age of reason was an aberration in the history of the world; the height of the world, for him, was Greek tragedy. Greek tragedy was the understanding that life is an abyss of chaos and greatness is to be destroyed — the greatness of tragedy is seeing the beautiful destroyed by the chaos of existence. He agrees with the Greek tragedians that life is a chaos. Then Socrates came along and, according to Nietzsche, he could not face the fact that existence is an abyss of chaos, and so Socrates became the great seducer of mankind into the age of reason. Christianity was just a popularization of the age of reason, Platonism for the masses.

Nietzsche sees himself as the proclaimer of the end of that age and he recognizes that the results of that end might be simply negative. Therefore, he says, Europe is transfixed with what he calls “nihilism,” nothingness. He uses the image of the three animals. The age of reason and Christianity is the age of the camel that carries around its hump on its back.

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