American Culture Wars: Two sides of the same Nietzschean coin

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From my latest piece in Newsweek about Nietzsche and the American “Culture Wars”:

Nietzsche's rejection of foundational truth claims and authorities external to the self, his extreme self-reliance and strongman ethic, left him in misery toward the end of his life. Lonely, physically ailing, and mentally deteriorating, his philosophical vision didn't exactly carry him to the heights he expected them to.

As he conceded in The Gay Science, Nietzsche's "urge for the truth," for something greater that transcended himself, persisted until the very end. As much as he "detested it," he couldn't deny that his self-referential ideology didn't provide him the fulfillment he longed for. As he wrote in one letter, "my life now consists in the wish that it might be otherwise with all things that I comprehend, and somebody might make my 'truths' appear incredible to me." He went as far as admitting that he was "in a mood of fatalistic 'surrender to God.'"

A close reading of Nietzsche's influence on American culture ought to call into question whether the mainstream Left and Right represent two combatants in a deadlocked culture war—or two sides of the same coin of American individualism. Perhaps the way forward is not to buckle down in the name of one's preferred ideology, but rather to look beyond it. The answer more likely lies somewhere outside the paradigm of strongman self-reliance and self-determined identity. As Nietzsche himself intuited toward the end of his life, it may be revealed instead in the forging of meaningful relationships that can enable one to discover their "true self."

Read the full article here.

Also check out my pieces about Tate at the American Spectator and on Substack, as well as my piece about Peterson in NCR.

You can read the full content of the Nietzsche exhibit here.

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