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| Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (Photo by F. Hartmann, 1875) _________________________________ |
NOTE BY DOOYEWEERD REGARDING "GROUND-MOTIVES"
'The religious [ultimate] ground-motives in the development of Western civilization are basically the following:
1. The "form-matter" ground-motive of Greek antiquity in alliance with the Roman power motive (imperium).
2. The Scriptural ground-motive of the Christian religion: creation, fall, and redemption through Jesus Christ in communion with the Holy Spirit.
3. The Roman Catholic [Thomistic] ground-motive of "nature-grace", which seeks to combine the two mentioned above.
4. The modern humanistic ground motive of "nature-freedom", in which an attempt is made to bring the three previous motives to a religious synthesis concentrated upon the value of human personality.'
(Herman Dooyeweerd, Roots of Western Culture: Pagan, Secular, and Christian Options, Paideia Press, 2012, p15)
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Herman Dooyeweerd: Nietzsche
The transformation of historicism into naturalistic evolutionism.
At about the middle of the 19th century historicism took a new turn in evolutionism. The dogma of evolution spread from biology to all the branches of science. Thus there began a new triumphal march of the classic deterministic science-ideal in its historical transformation. Since ROUSSEAU and KANT religious primacy had been ascribed to the motive of freedom. But now the religious dialectic again led Humanistic thought to the acceptance of the primacy of the nature-motive. Freedom-idealism began to collapse. Marxist sociology transformed the idealistic dialectic of HEGEL into a historical-materialism. The latter explained the ideological super-structure of society in terms of a reflection of the economic mode of production. Marxism and Darwinism united, but they, too, did not carry historicism to its extreme relativistic conclusions. Both still believed in a final goal of development which is itself outside of the historical relativity. The religious ground-motive of Humanism dominates the trust of both in objective science and in its freeing activity for humanity.
The first expression of the spiritual disintegrating process in Historicism. NIETZSCHE's religion of power.
However, in the latter half of the 19th century the process of spiritual uprooting began to reveal itself in historicism in an almost pathological form. NIETZSCHE'S gospel of the super-man is the first manifestation of this process.
In his first period NIETZSCHE was under the influence of German Romanticism and idealism from which he fell under the domination of Darwinian evolutionism. In the third and final phase of his thought, however, he developed a religion of power which completely broke away from the Humanistic motive of nature and freedom in its original religious sense.
The view of NIETZSCHE is based upon the Darwinian basic tenets and upon a radical historistic vision of reality. Proceeding on this foundation he views man only as an "animal", which is not yet "fixed", and whose sole superiority to other species of animals consequently consists in the fact that man is not bound to static instincts and to a statically circumscribed "Umwelt".
In the historical development of culture man has his destiny in his own hands, and thereby displays an absolutely dynamic nature. NIETZSCHE wishes to build his anthropology exclusively upon the positive data of "nature and history". He fulminates against the fact that man overestimates his own importance, views the whole cosmos as related to himself, and imagines himself to be a free rational personality, radically elevated above the animals.
Man is a "phantastic animal" that from time to time has the need of reflecting upon the goal of his existence and thus posits ideologies concerning God and morality. However, science has progressed so far that man has killed his gods, and now only retains his own historical future. But history — in spite of all Christian and Humanistic ideologies — is nothing but a struggle for power (2).
_________________________(2) In our analysis of the modal structure of the historical aspect in Vol. II, we shall see that domination or power is indeed the nuclear moment of this aspect.
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Thus the "Wille zur Macht" is the only existential escape for man from the nihilism to which historicism leads.
The kingdom of the "super-man", of the "blond beast", in which this will to power will assume super-human forms, can only be established through an "Umwertung aller Werte" (transvaluation of all values) on the ruins of Christian and Humanistic ideologies.
The ideal of science and the ideal of personality of Humanism are both rejected. NIETZSCHE considers science only as a biological aid in the struggle for existence. It only has a pragmatic value. Consistent historicism can no longer have faith in scientific truth. Nor can it believe any longer in the Idea of humanity which was rooted in the religious motive of freedom. Thus NIETZSCHE introduced into Humanistic philosophy the great process of religious decay. And this would soon enough lead to a radical spiritual crisis in the culture of the West, accelerated by the two world-wars.
(Herman Dooyeweerd, New Critique of Theoretical Thought, Vol I/ Part 2/ Chapt 1 /§4 pp 207ff)
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The tension of the ideals of science and personality in NIETZSCHE's development. Biologizing of the science-ideal (DARWIN).
The Humanistic ideal of personality in its irrationalist turn was confronted with a new development of the natural science-ideal which, since the second half of the nineteenth century under the mighty influence of DARWIN's evolution-theory, pervaded the new "historical mode of thought". As we shall presently show, this new "historical mode of thinking" originated in the irrationalistic turn of the Humanistic freedom-idealism. This dialectical struggle between the two basic factors of the Humanistic transcendental ground-Idea in their new conception discloses itself in a truly impressive manner in the dialectical development of NIETZSCHE, whose final phase, as we observed in an earlier context, is the announcement of the beginning of the religious uprooting of modern thought as a result of a dialectical self-destruction of the Humanistic ground-motive in a radical Historicism.
We have only to compare NIETZSCHE's first romantic-aesthetic period, influenced strongly by SCHOPENHAUER and RICHARD WAGNER, with the second positivistic phase beginning in 1878, in which the biological ideal of science gains the upper-hand, and the last period of the culture-philosophy of the "Superman", beginning in 1883. In this last period, the science-ideal has been entirely depreciated. Henceforth, science is viewed as a merely biological means in the struggle for existence, without any proper truth-value. BERGSON and other modern philosophers of life took over this pragmatist and biological conception of the theoretical picture of the world, created by scientific thought.
It would be false to suppose that the irrationalist philosophy of life preached chaos. On the contrary, it does not intend to abandon order. But, as the rationalist types of Humanist philosophy make the concept of the subject a function of the concept of the law in a special modal sense, and thus dissolve the former into the latter, so, in a reverse manner, the irrationalist types reduce the "true" order to a function of individual subjectivity. [Maar, gelijk de rationalistische typen der humanistische wijsbegeerte het subjectsbegrip tot een functie van het wetsbegrip maken en de subjectsidee in diepste wezen in een rationalistische wetsidee opheffen, zoo herleiden omgekeerd, de irrationalistische typen de ‘ware’ wetmatigheid tot een functie der individueele subjectiviteit. Hier is de zelfstandigheid der wet ten bate van de subjectieve individualiteit opgeheven: de wetsidee is in een irrationalistische subjectsidee overgegaan! (WdW Boek I p 433)]
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