Martin Heidegger was born on September 26, 1889, roughly 8–9 months after Friedrich Nietzsche’s mental collapse on January 3, 1889 (in Turin). Nietzsche remained incapacitated until his death in 1900.  Heidegger died on May 26, 1976, in Freiburg im Breisgau, West Germany, at the age of 86.  I was born about 2 months later on August 7, 1976.  I’ve always felt kinship with these thinkers.

Probably Nietzsche’s greatest legacy is the observation that life isn’t inherently positive or negative, it’s how you take it.  A lowly prisoner can enjoy dancing in her chains just as a successful lawyer can be a miserable alcoholic.  We see this thought in many aspects of modern life, such as cognitive behavioral therapy.  Schools have tried unsuccessfully to integrate this into teaching kids because while negative perspectives lose their foundation, so too do positive ones with no foundational reason to adopt a glass half full silver lining approach.

Philosophically, Nietzsche is best known for reinterpreting essence and existence as Will to Power and Eternal Return (think Ecclesiastes’ nothing new under the sun), famously noting stamping Becoming with Being is the highest form of Will to Power.

What is newer is not necessarily what is most mature, and so I am always called to Nietzsche’s earlier aphorism 399 in Assorted Opinions and Maxims (Vermischte Meinungen und Sprüche, 1879), the first supplement that forms part of Volume II of Human, All Too Human.  A standard modern English rendering (close to R. J. Hollingdale and similar translations) is:

399. Being Satisfied

We show that we have attained maturity of understanding when we no longer go where rare flowers lurk under the thorniest hedges of knowledge, but are satisfied with gardens, forests, meadows, and ploughlands, remembering that life is too short for the rare and uncommon.

Note:

Regarding the New Insights into the Hebrew Bible conference, I was blogging about, I reported on 9 of the12 presenters and was getting bad eyestrain and headaches, so I left out the last three presentations.  I tend to be, to use a phrase Dr. R Joseph Hoffmann popularized, a little intellectually impatient anyway, so here are a few thoughts on the presentations I did not comment on.

The Cargill presentation was on archaeology and Genesis, of which there is very little. I tend to think archaeology offers little positively in gaining history from Biblical texts.  Negatively, while it may be a problem that we have no material remains from the exodus, it means little for a story to reflect the archaeological record because historical fiction can also be highly reflective of the time period but still just invented in terms of content.  The Martien Halvorson-Taylor talk was situating narratives and figure in the exile, but I wasn’t feeling well and all I was getting was that you need to realize people were wandering around and so I didn’t finish that presentation.  I watched a fair bit of the Shawna Dolansky presentation, but my head was pretty sore by that time as the last presentation.  Her idea seemed to be Eve was based on a reaction to older goddess myths that went out of fashion when society became agricultural and male dominated.  In this way we get positively viewed divine females reimagined as the source of the world’s woes, as Eve is scapegoated in the garden or with the story of Pandora.

In any case, it was an interesting conference, and I recommend getting it so you can go into details with the scholars.  I have a rather unfortunate astigmatism where I get headaches pretty badly with too much screen time. I’ll go back at some point to watch the last three presentations in full.

You can find me here at Secular Frontier where I am one of the bloggers, and as an elementary school teacher I also have

The Secular Web Kids (secular children are sometimes without a voice even in our multicultural, pluralistic society)

and my published papers on Philosophy and Religion HERE