metonymy4u

Following Augustine and Rousseau, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard both accepted the risk of writing their own philosophical legends. Why did they do this? I think it was because they realized that the time had come for the individual to step onto the world stage. The categorical imperative for them was an imperative for an individual. A real living breathing individual and not just an individual as a representative of an ideal category or universal world spirit. For them, to kill reason and save belief intimated a faith that required the individual to risk everything in an uncertain universe of brute force. It was (and is) time for Aristotle’s hero of individuality, the epiphany of each and every singularly unique substance, to climb out of the shadows. For “what a real living human being is made of seems to be less understood today than at any time before, and people — each one of whom represents a unique and valuable experiment on the part of nature — are therefore shot wholesale nowadays.”