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Age of Anxiety. 1894-1914. Europe after 1894. Europeans continued to believe they lived in an area of material and human progress. However, for many this progress included a struggle: Antagonisms between European countries because of imperialism
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Age of Anxiety 1894-1914
Europe after 1894 Europeans continued to believe they lived in an area of material and human progress. However, for many this progress included a struggle: • Antagonisms between European countries because of imperialism • Women’s suffrage- leader Emmeline Pankhurst in England • (earliest memory father pitied that she wasn’t born a man, led marches to Buckingham palace, women were bruised and jailed) • Cultural Uncertainty
Cultural Uncertainty • Philosophers, artists, and writers were creating expressions that questioned traditional values and incited a crisis of confidence
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) German intellectual whose radical questioning of the value and objectivity of truth lead to a movement called Nihilism “God is Dead”
Nietzsche’s Belief’s • Reason played a little role in human life because it was at the mercy of irrational life forces • Blamed Christianity • “slave morality” of Christianity had destroyed the human impulse for life and had crushed the human will • “God is dead.” Europeans had killed God and it was no longer possible to believe in some cosmic order. • Eliminate God, and hence Christian morality, make a higher kind of being called Übermenschor“superman.” • Superior intellectual freed from ordinary thinking of the masses. Übermensch acts to create new values within the moral vacuum of nihilism • Rejected political democracy, social reform, and universal suffrage • Why?
Misinterpretations of Nietzsche Nietzsche's works remain controversial. Common misinterpretations of Nietzsche include: • the notion that he rejected religious spirituality in its entirety • Nietzsche's concept that "God is dead" applies to the doctrines of Christendom, though not to all other faiths: he claimed that Buddhism is a successful religion that he compliments for fostering critical thought • that he was anti-Semitic • Nietzsche attacked the principles of Judaism, Nietzsche was not anti-Semitic: in his work On the Genealogy of Morality, he explicitly condemns anti-Semitism • that he was entirely opposed to Christian beliefs • He did not attack the teachings and examples of Jesus, but claimed that the Christian faith as practiced was not a proper representation of Jesus' teachings, as it forced people merely to believe in the way of Jesus but not to act as Jesus did • that he was an early Nazi • German and Italian fascists selectively adopted some of Nietzsche’s material, which was largely due to his sister’s misintreptration of his work
Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche • Sister of Friedrich Nietzsche. The siblings were close but grew apart when Elizabeth married a fanatical anti-Semitic agitator. • In 1889, Nietzsche suffered a mental collapse that was attributed to syphilis. He was left in care of widowed sister who had recently returned from “Nueva Germania” in Paraguay. • She became the promoter of his works. She took great liberties with his material which were misinterpreted to support fascist and anti-Semitic ideology