The Sickness Unto Life: Nietzsche's Diagnosis of the Christian Condition

Insufficient attention has been given to Nietzsche's critique of Christianity as a disease, while too much has been given to the theme of the death of God. Nietzsche's use of the language of health to describe Christianity is not a mere side-effect of his mid-career embrace of the natural sciences; rather, it develops out of his early investigation of the tragic and Socratic responses to nausea, a debilitating condition of the will. Over the course of his career, Nietzsche turns his focus from Socratism to Christianity, coming to believe that the latter response to nausea is a cure that is worse than the condition it is meant to treat. He comes to see Christianity as more relevant than Socratism to the modern European condition, and he distinguishes the two on the basis of their respective attitudes toward death (the topic of suicide) and pity (metaphysical comfort). Nietzsche develops a broadly naturalistic critique of Christianity that describes it as the lowest possible affirmation of life - something akin to a living death. As such, it is a force that disintegrates and decomposes healthy bodies - both individual and social - and produces a new kind of group - the anarchistic "herd" - that promotes the interests of the "priestly" type of human being. By focusing on the physiological, psychological, and social dimensions of Nietzsche's critique rather than its theological claims, we come to see the extent to which this critique is not limited by - and, indeed, challenges - the secular/religious divide, and how it problematizes long-held assumptions about the essence and identity of Christianity in the modern world

A Psychological Approach to the Character of Wotan in Richard Wagner's Der Ring Des Nibelungen

The ancient Germanic god that Richard Wagner resurrected in his operatic style Der Ring des Nibelungen was worshiped and feared from Greenland to Asia Minor for 1,000 years after the birth of Christ. This thesis examines the psychological aspects of Wotan as he appears in the opera

Some aspects of the concept of unconscious purpose in modern philosophy

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University, 194

The Routes of Philosophy: Paul Deussen, Indian Non-Dualism and Universal Metaphysics

It is the nature of comparative philosophy to reflect on different orders of knowledge and different forms of discourse. The question of the validity of knowledge is essential to the comparative works of Paul Deussen. By analysing metaphysics into its basic elements, he was able to gather and compare the efforts of many different times and places. This is to say that Deussen endeavoured to use the elements of metaphysics to reconcile the mutually incompatible claims of Reason and Revelation. He pursued this reconciliation in a non-Hegelian manner which did not exclude revelation and which allowed the status of religion, philosophy and science to be preserved, whether eastern or western in origin. While Deussen agrees to an extent with the Hegelian postulate that philosophy only ever emerges in a particular alignment with science and ethics, he insists on including religion in the account of the origin of philosophy. For this reason, he was able to include India's exegetical traditions of the fundamentally theologico-philosophical treatises of the Veda in his comparative and historical work. This was an entirely unprecedented and an untimely philosophical enterprise, and one which remained unparalleled for almost half a century. My thesis explores the manner in which he articulates and validates a unified, universal science of metaphysics. It examines his transformation of the scientific resources of physiology and psychology into the principle of the Will and follows his elaboration of a metaphysical morality based on the negation of this Will. However I also explore the potential in the most significant text for this thesis, The System of the Vedanta (1883), for a non-metaphysical way of thinking and acting. I argue that Deussen's text marks the creation of a singular relation to the Outside of the type of existence ordered by western thought. Deussen's history of philosophy leads me finally to evaluate his project for the renewal of philosophy and culture on the basis of universal metaphysics. From this emerge the suggestions for further work concerning Nietzsche's relationship to the Vedantic concept of 'beyond good and evil' in particular and to Indian philosophy and the revaluation of all values in general

On the Possibility of Authentic Christian Spirituality In The Post-Critical Age.

This project consists of three of my books (plus 2 chapters in another) and a summary statement on the topic entitled above. The books are: Being Saved (London, SCM 1985); Death Be Not Proud (London, Collins Fount 1989); Reason To Believe (London, Sinclair-Stevenson 1995); and the chapters appear in Anderson and Mullen ed; Faking It: The Sentimentalising of Society (London, The St Edmundsbury Press 1998). In Being Saved I made an extended comparison between the doctrines of traditional Christianity and the psychological theory C.G. Jung showing how these systems can cross-reference and cross-fertilise each other; and concluding that authentic spirituality can be enriched by such a comparison, but explicitly not concluding that Christian doctrine can be reduced to Jungian terms. In Death Be Not Proud I attempted a phenomenological study of the idea and experience of death and considered how this may be approached from the point of our awareness of the certainty of our own death and from the point of the bereaved. The book includes a sympathetic reflection on suicide and an argument for the trith of the doctrine of the resurrection to eternal life. Reason To Believe is a book of apologetics for the principal doctrines of Christianity as found in the Apostles' Creed, an argument for traditional texts in religious education and worship and a defence of the institutional church. In Faking It evidenced the widespread sentimentality in much contemporary worship and religious teaching and I identified this as an example of sentimentality which, religiously applied, I identified as inauthentic spirituality. The works show a continuity and development of though supported by a considerable project of reading and reflection which can be traced in the notes and bibliography

Myth, Music & Modernism: the Wagnerian dimension in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and the waves and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake

The study of Wagner's influence on the modernist novel is an established field with clear room for further contributions. Very little of the criticism undertaken to date takes full cognizance of the philosophical content of Wagner's dramas: a revolutionary form of romanticism that calls into question the very nature of the world, its most radical component being Schopenhauer's version of transcendental idealism. The compatibility of this doctrine with Wagner's earlier work, with its already marked privileging of myth over history, enabled his later dramas, consciously influenced by Schopenhauer, to crown a body of work greater than the sum of its parts. In works by Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, the "translation" of Wagnerian ideas into novelistic form demonstrates how they might be applied in "real life". In Mrs Dalloway, the figure of Septimus can be read as partly modelled on Wagner's heroes Siegfried and Tristan, two outstanding examples of the opposing heroic types found throughout his oeuvre, whose contrasting attributes are fused in Septimus's bipolar personality. The Wagnerian pattern also throws light on Septimus's transcendental "relationship" with a woman he does not even know, and on the implied noumenal identity of seemingly isolated individuals. In The Waves, the allusions to both Parsifal and the Ring need to be reconsidered in light of the fact that these works' heroes are all but identical (a fact overlooked in previous criticism); as Wagner's solar hero par excellence, Siegfried is central to the novel's cyclical symbolism. The Waves also revisits the question of identity but in a more cosmic context – the metaphysical unity of everything. In Finnegans Wake, the symbolism of the cosmic cycle is again related to the Ring, as are Wagner's two heroic types to the Shem / Shaun opposition (the Joyce / Woolf parallels here have also been overlooked in criticism to date). All three texts reveal a fascination with the two contrasting faces of a Wagnerian hero who embodies the dual nature of reality, mirroring in himself the eternal rise and fall of world history and, beyond them, the timeless stasis of myth

Values in life and literature : a comparative reading of the depiction of disintegration, insecurity and uncertainty in selected novels by Thomas Mann, William Faulkner and Thomas Pynchon

The reading of selected literary texts in this thesis traces the changes from a divinely ordered world of stability (Thomas Mann's Bud<lenbrooks) to surroundings characterized by insecurity (William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury) to an unstable environment giving rise to largely futile attempts at finding answers to seemingly illogical questions (Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49). As a product of the accelerated speed of technological progression and the information revolution in the twentieth century, man is more often than not incapable of adjusting to changed circumstances in a seemingly hostile environment. Indeed, instability and unpredictability are external factors determining the sense of insecurity and uncertainty characterising the 'world' depicted in the literary texts under consideration. For this reason judicious use will be made of philosophical and psychoanalytical concepts, based, amongst others, on Nietzschean and Freudian theories, to explain the disintegration of families, the anguish experienced by individuals or, indeed, the shifting identities informing the portrayal of character in selected literary texts.Afrikaans and Theory of LiteratureD.Litt. et Phil. (Theory of Literature

Book reviews

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45784/1/11153_2004_Article_BF00140614.pd