Paul Strathern

Early in the Christian era, philosophy fell asleep. These slumbers eventually produced the philosophic dream known as Scholasticism, based on Aristotle and the teachings of the church.

They soon responded to Descartes’s rational claim by insisting that our knowledge is not based on reason but on experience.

these British empiricists soon destroyed all semblance of reason – reducing philosophy to a series of ever-diminishing sensations. Philosophy was in danger of going to sleep again.

Then, in the middle of the eighteenth century, Kant awoke from his dogmatic slumbers and produced an even greater philosophical system than the one which had put philosophy to sleep throughout the Middle Ages.

In previous centuries philosophy had been dangerous for philosophers; with Nietzsche it becomes dangerous for everyone.

Nietzsche ended up by going mad, and this begins to show in the tone of his later writings.

shows ominous signs of recurrence today.

Nietzsche’s larger philosophical ideas are barely worthy of the name – whether he’s talking about supermen, eternal recurrence (the idea that we live our lives again and again throughout eternity), or the sole purpose of civilisation (to produce “great men” such as Goethe, Napoleon, and himself).

His use of the Will to Power as a universal explanation is either simplistic or meaningless – even Freud’s monism is more subtle, and Schopenhauer’s less specific concept is more convincing.

Like any good conspiracy theory, Nietzsche’s doctrine of the all-pervasive Will to Power contains the usual element of paranoia.