![\"\"](\"https:\/\/schoolofvice.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/Kierkegaard-203x300.jpg\")
<\/p>\nMike Tyson, as a boxer, has been called The Baddest Man on the Planet, one of the greatest punchers of all time, the hardest hitter in the history of heavyweight boxing, the scariest boxer ever, and perhaps the most ferocious fighter to step into a professional ring and one of a very small group of men to have regained a heavyweight championship title after losing it. \u00a0In short, he is one of the greatest boxers of all time.\u00a0 On the flip-side to his success as an athlete, Mr. Tyson is a convicted rapist, a registered sex offender, a bankrupt (after a reported lifetime earnings of $300 million), thrice married, an alcoholic, a self-professed drug abuser, and suffers bipolarism.\u00a0 One is always tempted to ask, do Mr. Tyson\u2019s personal troubles have anything to do with his success in the ring?<\/p>\n
Regardless, readers of the Wall Street Journal may recall an essay of Mr. Tyson\u2019s describing his readings in philosophy.\u00a0 At first glance, the rigorous intellectual discipline of philosophy seems to be outside the ken of a personality such as Tyson\u2019s; but, it was a nice piece, nonetheless.\u00a0 One of the writers mentioned was the Danish philosopher, S\u00f6ren Kierkegaard (1813-1855).\u00a0 Writing widely and covering topics in morality, ethics, religion and psychology, some elements within Kierkegaard\u2019s thinking are considered the wellspring of Existentialism.\u00a0 Existentialism, as a body of thought, was more fully developed by later writers such as the Russian Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821\u20131881), the Frenchman Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), and finally the undisputed, all-time Heavyweight Champion of Existentialism, the German Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900).<\/p>\n
To clarify, Kierkegaard is not considered an Existentialist, but his ideas can be traced into the more expanded Existentialist views developed later on by others.\u00a0 And why isn\u2019t Kierkegaard considered a bone fide Existentialist?\u00a0 Because he maintained a belief in God.\u00a0 In fact, the Dane strongly reaffirmed the traditional theistic notion of the will of God and God himself as being so utterly incomprehensible to the human mind\u2026any human mind\u2026that religious faith necessarily must be an irrational prospect (1).\u00a0 That is, the human capacity for reason is inadequate to fully and totally comprehend the infinite nature of the Divine.\u00a0 To be sure, the totality of what God encompasses is beyond human ability to conceptualize or adequately describe.\u00a0 Simply put, humans lack the capacity to comprehend the Infinite Almighty.<\/p>\n
Existentialism, regardless of man\u2019s ability to perceive, rejects the idea of God completely.\u00a0 It dispenses with the need for God, regardless of how abstract the conceptualization; whether as, father, son, incorporeal spirit, mystical deification of an esoteric, the absolute summum bonum<\/em> or even the abstractions of all abstractions\u2026the monistic substrate.\u00a0\u00a0 Existentialism, as a body of ideas, took decades to develop; again, with Nietzsche as the dominant exponent. \u00a0To give you an idea of the revolutionary nature of Nietzsche\u2019s thinking, he also didn\u2019t believe in reason, free will, or morality.\u00a0 He dispenses with them all!\u00a0 (Somewhat odd that a philosopher who did not believe in reason would be\u2026well\u2026taken seriously in the first place; but that\u2019s where we\u2019ve come to reside in an intellectual sense within the last 150 years.)\u00a0 Without God, death becomes a fixed entity, with human life ending without purpose or higher justification.\u00a0 In other words, death becomes an absurdity that negates the ethical basis of human existence.\u00a0 The consequence of the absurdity is a philosophy that emphasizes negativity, emptiness and alienation (2).\u00a0 Nietzsche being the ultimate dead-ender, declared God to be totally and finally dead; and, human intellect was the thing that killed Him.<\/p>\n You see, Nietzsche saw religion as a clever and invented response to the social hierarchy of the ancient and Medieval worlds, which was economically and politically tilted towards the rich and powerful in the form of a hereditary aristocracy; particularly true in the case of ancient Rome.\u00a0 Christianity, for instance, upended the social hierarchy by promising a revision of the status quo; i.e. the rich and powerful are evil while faithful Christians are good, thus creating an inverted hierarchy.\u00a0 Christianity was a morality, according to Nietzsche, based in a slave mind-set; and a mind-set wishing for a social reversal of the slave\u2019s life.\u00a0 In other words, God is used as a projection into an illusory beyond in order to deal with an unpleasant now.\u00a0 Never mind that over a period of centuries, Christianity displaced paganism as the state religion in Rome and the religion of slave and emperor alike.\u00a0 But, philosophers philosophize according to the dictates of their discipline and not according to historical fact.<\/p>\n Without God and human death as an absurdity where does that leave us?\u00a0\u00a0 An amoral Darwinism, that\u2019s where. \u00a0Similar to other nineteenth century revolutionary thinkers, Charles Darwin (1809-1882) also helped overturn the predominantly theist mindset of the time.\u00a0 Darwin\u2019s Theory of Evolution bled into the intellectual firmament and through osmosis, incorporated into other thinking, including Nietzsche\u2019s.\u00a0 More to the point, Nietzsche substituted God with a new gospel; the gospel of social Darwinism.\u00a0 Completely misunderstanding the process of natural selection, Nietzsche substituted the innate urge for survival into a conceived and fabricated ideological Will to Power.\u00a0 The Will to Power, as an ideology, was practiced at the personal and institutional level; a profoundly irrational leap to be sure.\u00a0 The Nietzschian Will to Power became a Master Morality displacing the Slave Morality of Christianity.\u00a0 Once displaced, only then would an honest dynamic take hold and a cosmologically ordained law be finally allowed to express itself without the need for a law-giver (i.e. Moses).\u00a0 Wow, baby!\u00a0 Wow!\u00a0 And then one thing leads to another and Nietzschism rationalizes the political movements of Nazism and Stalinism.\u00a0 Bada-bing-bada-boom\u2026World War II, the Soviet Union and 90 million dead people.<\/p>\n Now, here, in the first part of the 21st<\/sup> Century, the psychological substitutes have proliferated dramatically to fill the void left by the vacuum.\u00a0 The bigger the vacuum, the more that rushes in to fill it.\u00a0 The substitutes all boil down to an aimless hedonism expressed through a common culture of electronic media.\u00a0\u00a0 For lack of a more succinct term, let\u2019s call the basic human hedonistic tendencies as developed into the current zeitgeist Moralistic Therapeutic Secularism.\u00a0 Moralistic because there are always morals.\u00a0 There is never a lack of morals.\u00a0 They may be negative morals (i.e. the morality of a cannibal or mass murderer) but when there are two or more people in a room, morals exist.\u00a0 Therapeutic because we are sick, you see.\u00a0 We are sick either because society makes us sick (Freud) or inherently sick as individuals (too many western philosophers to name).\u00a0 And sickness, of course, requires therapy (3).\u00a0 Secular because God is dead.\u00a0 Nietzsche said so.<\/p>\n To summarize\u2026while various forms of atheism have been inherent in the culture of man from the beginning, Friedrich Nietzsche gave the fullest modern expression to atheism in a life-time work of negativity and denial. \u00a0Why expend a life-time of literary and philosophical work negating the existence of God?\u00a0 To create substitutes.\u00a0 Like nature, the human collective psyche abhors a vacuum.\u00a0 Nietzsche alone didn\u2019t create the vacuum.\u00a0 He\u2019s had a considerable amount of help over the decades from other writers, academics, social scientists and even those who are supposedly defenders of faith itself, organized religion.\u00a0\u00a0 Nietzsche merely threw the first switch on a pump with multiple switches that sucks the theological oxygen out of our collective cultural existence.\u00a0 Once the oxygen was extinguished, in rushed all manner of modernist, progressive thinking; Freud, Marx, and the most powerful influence of them all, Nietzsche\u2019s Will to Power.<\/p>\n So\u2026Christianity\u2026the first inversion of values that has provided spiritual nourishment to billions of people over two millenia.\u00a0 Nietzschism as a second attempted inversion that took the Western world decades to work through and reject at a cost of tens of millions of lives.\u00a0 Marxism as the third with an equally appalling cost.<\/p>\n Francis versus Tyson\u2026to be continued\u2026<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Mike Tyson, as a boxer, has been called The Baddest Man on the Planet, one of the greatest punchers of all time, the hardest hitter in the history of heavyweight boxing, the scariest boxer ever, and perhaps the most ferocious fighter to step into a professional ring and one of a very small group of men to have regained a heavyweight championship title after losing it. \u00a0In short, he is one of the greatest boxers…… <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/schoolofvice.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/nietzche-221x300.jpg\")
Add fifty or sixty years, and ninety million dead people notwithstanding, the far ranging influence of existentialist philosophy on the current cultural ambiance continues unabated. Throw in some Marxism on the economic side and Freudianism as a psychological under-current, strains of existentialist thought have seeped into every nook and cranny.\u00a0 They can be traced into the visual arts, the performing arts, literature, politics, intellectual history, education and journalism; almost every corner of Western culture as it exists today.\u00a0 If the reader doubts this statement, I would ask him or her to consider a cover from Time magazine from 1966 asking \u2018Is God Dead\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s almost a direct quote!\u00a0 (But never properly attributed.)\u00a0 Institutional, nationalistic and other collective forms of the Will to Power are still with us, but have been and are counterbalanced by the Democratic impulses inherent to American hegemony.\u00a0 The intellectual void remains at the personal level, however; and within the religious institution most associated with doctrinal orthodoxy\u2026The Roman Catholic Church.\u00a0\u00a0 The idea of hierarchical inversion was also carried off by Marx.\u00a0 Marxism is dying slowly; but, unfortunately his ideas still appeal.\u00a0 They are repackaged by elitist academics and now expressed as cultural Marxism rather than the original economic version.<\/p>\n\n