Beyond Redemption: Is Human Perfection Rational or National?

Abstract

‘Know then thyself not God to scan,

The proper study of Mankind is man.

It says how man achieves perfection by knowing himself. Plato in his ‘Republic’ says that know thyself is doctrine of enlighten despotism. Truth, beauty and goodness are fundamental virtue realized through unique system of equation with Plato’s which is fulfilled by rationalism. For him, the ultimate reality is change. We cannot step twice into the same stream. For Plato, the unchanging thing in the world is called idea. Plato discusses how man achieves perfection through education and realizes it through division of labor which makes man rational. This chapter analyses Richard Wagner and Frederick Nietzsche’s opinion regarding advent of Christianity and romanticism. It also describes how Hitler comes between two. This also discusses how Hitler of Germany abandoned rationality. Hitlerism explains his ideals of creating a better world by using the full coercive power of the state to eliminate obnoxious.  Nazism therefore appears as a form of slavery because it based on conformism. Richard Wagner was a German Philosopher. His extensive writing on music, drama and politics have attracted extensive comment in the recent decade, he wrote a notable essay ‘The Art Work of Future’ (1849). Nietzsche set himself in opposition to German Culture as expressed in Hegel and Wagner, In being anti- Wagner, he was very deeply opposed to the whole way of thought and feeling that relates to fascism and Hitler. There is essentially survival need for redemption and salvation. But Nietzscheism is an explicit rejection of Wagnerism (an extension of Hitlerism) as essentially a doctrine of subjugation. Frederic Nietzsche proposed Wagner’s music as Dionysian rebirth of European culture in opposition to Apollonian rationalist decadence. There is a bourgeois false consciousness and alienation of art from its social context. Adolf Hitler was an admirer of Wagner’s music and saw it as an embodiment of his own vision of German Nation. There continues the debate about the extent to which Wagner view might have influenced Nazi thinking or supposed the rest.