Friedrich Nietzsche and Richard Rorty

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Is postmodernism a new idea? Friedrich Nietzsche seems to usher in this new “philosophy”, a word he would not use, of life about embracing the will to power as the “Übermensch” followed by Richard Rorty’s expounding views of pragmatic ideals as the “Liberal Ironist”. Nietzsche has had an undeniably profound influence on the development of twentieth century thought. He has played a role in the birth of almost every modern theoretical movement—his philosophical insights and methods were simply decades ahead of their time. Richard Rorty has also made profound leaps and bounds into the vastness of nothing being new. He picks up where Nietzsche leaves off and perpetuates the extinction of truth as making it relative to oneself within pragmatic notions found in his book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Both men can see that the ends are more important than the means as long as human life is triumphant just as long as “it escapes from the inherited descriptions of the contingencies of its existence and finds new descriptions. This is the difference between thinking of redemptions as making contact with something larger and more enduring than oneself and redemption as Nietzsche describes it: ‘recreating all “it was” into a “thus I willed it’” (Rorty, 29). In “The Antichrist”, Nietzsche sets out to denounce and illegitimize not only Christianity itself as a belief and a practice, but also the ethical-moral value system which modern western civilization has inherited from it. This writing can be considered a further development of some of his ideas concerning Christianity that can be found in Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, particularly the idea that the present morality is an inversion of true, noble morality. One of the most important of these ideas is that Christianity has made people nihilistic and weak by regarding pity and related
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