Matthew Flamm and Shawn Klein, my two Philosophy colleagues at Rockford College, will be leading a discussion group on Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1872 The Birth of Tragedy and his 1887 Genealogy of Morals.
The image links to the flyer (designed by Christopher Vaughan) with the schedule and location information.
Both books are wonderfully provocative. So if you haven’t already, put them on your reading list, whether you can attend the reading group or not.
I’m all confused.
The hot-headed Nietzsche’s startling line from his 1887 Genealogy of Morals has always stuck with me: “the truly great haters in world history have always been priests.”
That’s from the First Essay, Section 7, in the context of his analysis of slave morality born of ressentiment.
But now I read that, according to the judicious John Stuart Mill, in a work published in 1879: “if appearances can be trusted, the animating principle of too many of the revolutionary socialists is hate.”
That’s from p. 430 of Principles of Political Economy and Chapters on Socialism, in the context of Mill’s analysis of those socialists who seem less interested in improvement than in rage against the ills of the current system.
So who’s right?
Over a century later, in our own era of jihadists and deconstructionists, has anything changed? Do we have better evidence to say whether Nietzsche or Mill is more correct?
Nietzsche and the Nazis, A Personal View by Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.
Publisher: Ockham’s Razor Publishing, 2006.
Format: 2:45-hour DVD documentary.
Reviewed by Professor Tibor Machan.
The first several minutes of the documentary are posted at YouTube:
[Go to the Nietzsche and the Nazis page. Go to the StephenHicks.org main page.]
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