Saturday, March 6, 2010

"Devastating"

It's amazing how often in reading postmodernists we will come across the claim that a particular critique was "devastating". Thus Nietzsche's devastating critique of religion.

And yet the very protestant religion Nietzsche aimed all this devastation at is still around. And we use concepts from Nietzsche all the time—lifestyle &c—the man's influence is clearly felt. It's just that he had no influence whatsoever on his primary target. The same is true of Freud, absolutely useless as a psychologist but influential in all sorts of other areas. And Marx, tens of millions of people were killed in his name but had no impact at all in the one area he thought his theories applied to.

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