Christmas Beyond Good and Evil
At the start of this semester in which we are going to be confronting our own uncertainties about the age we live in, there's a particular aptness to starting the study of our century with Friedrich Nietzsche. He died in 1900, and ever since people have seen something symbolic in that event and date. For Nietzsche laid down a challenge to the modern age which we are still wrestling with, and if we say, as we can, that one of the defining features of the twentieth century is great uncertainty about our traditions, then Nietzsche, more than anyone else, is the eloquent spokesperson for the creation of that uneasy situation.
