Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau
- Part II Responses to (and Partial Incorporations of) Civil Religion within the Liberal Tradition
- Part III Theocratic Responses to Liberalism
- Part IV Postmodern “Theism”
- 29 Nietzsche, Weber, Freud
- 30 Nietzsche's Civil Religion
- 31 Heidegger's Sequel to Nietzsche
- Conclusion
- Index
- References
29 - Nietzsche, Weber, Freud
The Twentieth Century Confronts the Death of God
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau
- Part II Responses to (and Partial Incorporations of) Civil Religion within the Liberal Tradition
- Part III Theocratic Responses to Liberalism
- Part IV Postmodern “Theism”
- 29 Nietzsche, Weber, Freud
- 30 Nietzsche's Civil Religion
- 31 Heidegger's Sequel to Nietzsche
- Conclusion
- Index
- References
Summary
Jehovah, collector of prepuces, is no more.
– James JoyceIn this final part of the book, my main purpose is to present Nietzsche as a resumption (and terminus?) of the civil-religion tradition. Before I begin that presentation of Nietzsche, though, it might be helpful to situate him briefly in relation to two of his most important successors – namely Sigmund Freud and Max Weber. Both Freud and Weber take Nietzsche, in a sense, as their starting point. Both accept the Nietzschean axiom that we now live in a godless, or god-divested, world – that is, a radically post-Christian, post-Judaic moral universe. Nevertheless, they offer philosophical responses to this Nietzschean universe that diverge radically from Nietzsche's own position. Of the three thinkers, Freud adheres most closely to the classical Enlightenment view. In Freud's Future of an Illusion, his position is basically this: We now live in a world where God is dead, where we have killed Him with our modern, scientific ways of thought. Great! Good riddance to all that. Religious ideas of a great providential Divine Benefactor were really just a lot of infantile neurosis, the product of a cowardice to face up to the terrors of an adult world. We are grown up now, and we can finally (with the aid of science) face up to our responsibilities as adults. Our major challenge as individuals is to put the Oedipal Complex behind us, and the same is true of ourselves as a civilization or as a species – namely, to outgrow our collective Oedipal Complex in relation to the Divine Father, and this is precisely what the death of God represents: long-delayed adulthood. Needless to say, this is not Nietzsche's position. To be sure, he anticipates some of this celebratory rhetoric, or “Promethean” rhetoric, but he thinks the legacy of God's death is much more culturally ambiguous, and much more fraught with peril, and he certainly cannot bring himself to celebrate the Enlightenment in the way that Freud so cheerfully does. Freud ends The Future of an Illusion with paeans to the god of Logos. This, however, is certainly not Nietzsche's god!
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- Chapter
- Information
- Civil ReligionA Dialogue in the History of Political Philosophy, pp. 371 - 373Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010