Nietzsche, Kant, Socrates, and the Roots of Western Culture

The World Against Chaos: Opposing Forces and Eternal Return

The world against chaos, the irreducible presence of opposing forces and the eternal return, the predominance of consciousness and rationality over the instincts, and the existence of a punitive God with the intention of weakening desires, feelings, the will to power, pride, ambition, the instinctive, the natural, and the passionate, will be collected by Judeo-Christianity, which sets the Jewish character of sin and resentment. The Jewish priest, due to his inability to satisfy their instincts, reverses the true values: good, noble, powerful, happy, and loved by God become miserable, poor, powerless, inferior, suffering, abstinent, sick, and deformed, while good and beloved by God become general laws and universally valid ethical principles to hold another of its misery, driven by resentment.

Kant's Influence

Kant, influenced by Hume, recognized that knowledge cannot be obtained of that which transcends experience, such as the existence of God, human freedom, and the immortality of the soul. Therefore, nothing should be based on God, as had been the case: neither morality nor the knowledge of reality. But he did not dare to conclude the death of God, as Schopenhauer would say, and found in the categorical imperative a new base to support a belief in a free and immortal soul and an omnipotent God. He attacked the theological dogmas of the Church, its obscurantism, and temporal power, but he respected the confidence in the objectivity of language, the belief in natural regularity, the possibility of knowledge, and the essence of Christianity: its dualism and its promotion of weakness and resentment. God was still the sense of the world, the security of political institutions, and the support of authority, the court sustaining moral reward and punishment, the creator, maintainer, and rescuer of the dignity of man, the enabler of the existence of knowledge of natural laws and the laws of logic, and the cause of the stable existence of things and our personal identity. The "death of God" was reduced to a demolition of the privileges of the Church. Nietzsche recognizes this in his Genealogy of Morals: "The Church is repugnant, but not its venom."

Nietzsche's Critique of Western Thought

Nietzsche, with a metaphorical and aphoristic style, without worrying about the truth or falsity of statements but rather their vital power, without claiming to be objective, and against the spirit of the system, suspected man - a herd animal, alienated and neurotic - of not knowing true reality. Thus, along with Marx and Freud, he was considered one of the "philosophers of suspicion" who rebelled against rationalism, the overvaluation of consciousness, and the infinite faith in the possibilities of science.

The Origin of Western Culture

Socrates and the Invention of Moral Conscience

Socrates, with his theory of "daimon" - against sophistic moral conventionalism - invented moral conscience in science. Virtue, which at first was happy action, becomes the conscience that dictates action to be happy, becoming the renunciation of passions, wealth, ambition, the predatory warrior's joys, and the honor and pride of public life. The joys of consciousness - science, argument - replace all the others. By definition and induction - used to refute hasty definitions - he propelled the possibility of scientific knowledge. Against relativism, skepticism, and the awareness of the separation of language and reality of their own sophistry, he made us believe that truth exists, that it is within our grasp, and that language can accurately express reality.

Plato's Continuation of the Socratic Task

Plato, continuing the Socratic task, opposed the intelligible world - real, immutable, and eternal - to the sensitive world - false, changeable, and perishable - with reason being what will lead us to virtue and happiness. He established truth over instincts - killing Callicles - despised the sensible, material, and subjective, and held the immortality of the soul, the feeling of "guilt" for not submitting to the dictates of reason, and the existence of reward and punishment in the afterlife for offenders. They knew no resentment but followed a wrong path.

Christianity's Adoption of Socratic-Platonic Dogmas

Christianity adopted all these Socratic-Platonic dogmas to defend the order, intelligibility, and purpose of the world.