Re: Hillary Clinton and Nietzsche?

Here's some more context with Hillary, but it's still darn hard to say what she means by "nihilism." I don't want to quote any more of it, as I'm getting nervous about the copyright stuff, but here is an excerpt:

  "Late in the campaign, on October 12, the USS <i>Cole</i> was attacked by terrorists in Yemen. The powerful explosion killed seventeen American sailors and ripped a hole in the destroyer's hull....
   I despise terrorism and the nihilism it represents, and I was incredulous when the New York Republican Party and Lazio campaign insinuated that I was somehow involved with the terrorists who blew up the <i>Cole</i>."
    (from Simon & Schuster hardback edition, pgs 521-522)

"I suspect that she sees terrorists as being motivated by purely negative impulses -- destroy the bad -- rather than constructively serving a clearly articulated ideal that they're willing to see realized incrementally."

works for me

luke

-------Original Message-------
From: James Rovira <jrovira@drew.edu>
Sent: 07/15/03 02:47 PM
To: bananafish@roughdraft.org
Subject: Re: Hillary Clinton and Nietzsche?

>
> Hard to say with Hillary, but I suspect that she sees terrorists as
being motivated by purely negative impulses -- destroy the bad -- rather
than constructively serving a clearly articulated ideal that they're
willing to see realized incrementally. Hegel says some interesting
things about this near the beginning of _Elements of the Philosophy of
Right_ -- something along the lines that people who want only to
maintain the purity of their ideals will realize they're no longer ideal
once they begin to take concrete form, so any concrete realizations of
their ideals need to be destroyed.

Sheesh, what a sentence.

At any rate these people just rage against everything.

It'd be very odd to identify the terrorists Hillary probably had in mind
with Nietzche's "God is dead" philosophy since the terrorists we're most
familiar with are technically monotheists. Hillary might. Hard to tell
without more context from Hillary, though.

Jim

jlsmith3@earthlink.net wrote:

>From her new autobiography: "I despise terrorism and the nihilism it
represents." (near the end, when she discusses the New York Senate race; my
girlfriend ran off with it for the afternoon, so no page citation)
>
>I wasn't exactly sure what definition of "nihilism" Clinton is using,
when she associates it with terrorism. Does terrorism, if we might call it a
philosophy of sorts, represent Nietzsche's "God is dead!"?
>
>luke
>
>

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Received on Tue Jul 15 23:59:25 2003