Philip Kretsedemas

Reflections on Slavery, Nietzsche and Self Knowledge

Philip Kretsedemas — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:13:09 GMT

It’s taking me longer than expected to upload the next episode of my podcast series. But it occurred to me that some people might find these notes (which I was planning to share along with the podcast) interesting enough on their own.

The podcast episode explores all of these themes in more depth but not necessarily in the same order as presented here. Hope you find these notes of interest, as a preview of what’s to come.

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Here’s a photo from my childhood.

I’m the brown-skinned boy, just barely in frame on the left side of the photo (in the red and blue top).The older lady in the middle is Auntie Colby.She used to babysit me and my sisters (who are standing on either side of Auntie Colby) and many other children in Old Windsor, England, which is where this photo was taken.

I wasn’t actually related to Auntie Colby, of course, but all of the kids called her Auntie. Unfortunately, I don’t remember the name of the little boy on the right hand side of the photo. He was probably one of the other children Auntie Colby used to babysit or maybe he actually was related to her.

You may be wondering, what does any of this have to do with the title of this entry? (which is also going to be the title of my next podcast episode when I finally get around to releasing it).

The short answer to that question is, you’ll have to listen to the episode to find out.

But if you’re impatient for an answer, here’s a little more context—which could end up making you even more impatient, because I’m not really going to answer the question … but I’ll at least give you the beginnings of an answer.

My visits with Auntie Colby are one of the many fond memories I have of the years I spent growing up in England.

For example, I’m pretty sure that this photo was taken from a special trip to the grounds of Windsor Castle (home of the Queen of England, at that time, and now the King).This trip was arranged by Auntie Colby. She had special access because she would babysit for children who lived at the castle, who I’m assuming were children of the royals. I knew this detail about her on reputation (whispered by other kids; my parents might also have told me) but I never had the nerve to ask her what life was like at the castle.

If you look at the top right hand corner of the photo you’ll see a structure that looks like a castle turret. I think I’m out of frame, because whoever was taking the photo probably wanted to get that turret in the picture… my point being that this photo was probably taken on or very near the castle grounds. It also bears noting that this visit took place sometime in the mid-1970s. I’m guessing that castle security is a lot tighter now.

So this is an example of one of my many happy memories from the years I spent in England.

My time in England was also marked by some very difficult experiences, which weren’t unique to my time in England btw. My family traveled around quite a bit when I was younger, from Canada, to the Bahamas and then England, before finally settling down in the US.

But getting back to life in England … when were living there, I was bullied at school on a fairly regular basis. I was confronted by little kids and teens who liked to hurl the “N-word” at me, or call me a gollywog. Sometimes they would just name call; sometimes things got violent.

On one occasion, a group of at least twenty kids (maybe more) lined up to jeer me as I tried to make my way to the front doors of my school. Perhaps it goes without saying, but I was the only black kid at that school (if there were any other black kids, they did a good job of hiding, because I never saw them).

I think my parents decided to send me to a private school—that was slightly more diverse—to get me out of that environment. And that’s how I ended up at Haileybury Junior School.

Haileybury was intense in its own way, but compared to the school I had just left, it was a safe haven. I also learned quite a lot at Haileybury, including the story I tell in this episode about “How the English were named.”

This story dates to the time before England was “England”—back to the time when it was a colonial outpost of the Roman empire. At that time, most of the ancient peoples who would later identify as the native-stock of England were subject populations of the Romans. The Romans also enslaved many of these people.

Years later, I learned that Haileybury was founded the British East India company, which played no small part in orchestrating and profiting from the trafficking of enslaved Africans in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

I also happen to be a distant descendant of African people who were sold into slavery by the English and who later became British colonial subjects in the Caribbean.

It’s not lost on me that there are parallels between these details of my Caribbean family history (on my mother’s side) and the stories about the ancient peoples of the British Isles who were enslaved by the Romans, that I was learning about at this school that had been founded by a business enterprise that was one of the pillars of the transatlantic slave trade.

Hopefully, the title of this entry (and the podcast episode, to come) is starting to make a little more sense now—although I haven’t explained everything.

I also want to emphasize that although there are deep historical connections between the founders of Haileybury and the enslavement of my ancestors; I still had a positive experience at the school. It bears repeating that Haileybury was a safe haven, compared to the environments I had to endure before I began my education there.

One thing I learned from revisiting these memories … is that the circumstances of the present are always more complex than the grand narratives that we use to tell the story of macro-historical events, like the Roman conquests and the rise and fall of the transatlantic slave trade.

The shockwaves of these historical events still reverberate today … but not always in the ways that you’d expect; especially if you’re trying to connect the dots between these grand historical events and the details of your personal life.

In my next podcast episode, I’m going to use these reflections from my childhood years in England to thread some of these connections, with help from the genealogical method (which I’ve been discussing for the past few episodes).And this is where Nietzsche comes in because, as I explained n the last episode, you can’t discuss the genealogical method without engaging Nietzsche.

I also use these personal reflections to explain why the distinction that Nietzsche makes between the value system of the noble and the slave has resonated so powerfully for me - being mindful of all the historical and cultural baggage that’s loaded on that word “slave.”

So … why would someone like myself, a descendant of enslaved people and target of racial bullying (for most of my life, in different iterations) find value in one of Nietzsche’s most famous genealogical distinctions which criticizes the slave mindset—and why would I find this distinction useful, precisely because it has helped me to diagnose the kinds of stressors and toxic sentiments that I’ve recounted here?

It’s a long question. And it’s a lot to unpack.

I’ll do my best to connect the dots between all of these things in my next episode.

The future belongs to those who master the arts of engagement

Philip Kretsedemas — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:52:09 GMT

When we defend ourselves we manufacture solutions that produce a protective outer layer for ourselves which is reminiscent of the mollusk’s shell; and there’s nothing inherently wrong with this.

I also realize that it’s practically impossible to follow the guidance “never defend yourself” in all situations. Plus, it’s not always advisable to follow this guidance.

So I’m not trying to say, “never, ever defend yourself.”

I’m just noting that we all have an instinctive tendency to defend, and I’m also gently suggesting that it could be worth your while to pay more attention to the things that trigger your defensive tendencies.

And again, this doesn’t mean that you should try to stamp out these tendencies.

Just take notice. Reflect and evaluate.

We defend, at times, when there is no need. Even if we really are under threat, the defensive tactics that we turn to so readily, aren’t always our most effective method of response.

When we hunker down and defend, we ignore many things that don’t synch with our habituated understanding of the world, but which could improve our ability to affect the situation we’re in, and navigate beyond it.

And it may not always be obvious to you when you are in a defensive mode.

You may need to do a little more reflection.

What are the distinguishing qualities of an idea or an emotion that make it “defensive”?

Again, this is not always an obvious question to answer. Any answer that will be truly useful for you will probably have to account for a history cognitions and experiences that are unique to your life story.

Once you’ve cultivated this kind of self knowledge, you may be able to refine your habituated methods of defense so that they complement and enhance your capacity for engagement.

Yes, defense and engagement don’t have to be mutually exclusive things.

It’s not easy to do, but it really is possible to transcend the conceptual dichotomies that you use to organize your experience of the world (and create better dichotomies or, maybe even, create better schemas that aren’t so dependent on dichotomous habits of thought).

It’s an amazing magic trick if you can pull it off—the first step on your path to mastering all sorts of transformations.

And maybe it seems like I’m back-tracking on everything I’ve just written.

Maybe there’s nothing wrong with being defensive after all, so long as you can figure out how to defend yourself in ways that don’t impede your ability to engage.

But in order to figure out this trick, of turning qualities that appear to be opposites into a mutually reinforcing dynamo—so that you can engage-better and defend-better, all at the same time—you’re going to have to gather some new intel, and try out a few new things.

In other words, you’re not going to be able to figure this all out if you’re always on the defensive.

And that’s why the future, ultimately, belongs to those who master the arts of engagement.

The worst kind of reactionaries ... people who react without actually acting

Philip Kretsedemas — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 01:49:27 GMT

The first post in this series explained (with some help from Nietzsche) why being reactive isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But there are other ways of reacting which are truly poisonous … and the thing that makes this kind of reactivity so poisonous is not the reaction itself, it’s the swallowing of the reaction.

The desire to react—to lash out in anger, to act on false and distorted assumptions—may be problematic, but the swallowing of the desire only compounds the problem. This is why Nietzsche’s advises that the best course of action is to flush the desire out of you in some way.

If you repress the desire, it just ends up festering inside you. And since you never own up to the fact that you have these desires, they start to own you.

Because you don’t act on them, you never allow these reactive desires to be tested and transformed by the (re)actions of others … and so they congeal inside you, into this ugly, unspoken truth that you refuse to name, but which is always whispering its dark secrets to you.

These dark secrets can grow into a strange kind of shared, unspoken knowledge. You instinctively connect with others who have repressed their reactions in the same way.

Over time, these repressed reactions can sediment into social structures, institutionalized modes of social organization, etc.

It’s not difficult to see why a society that has been unable to control the spread of these layers of repressed reactive-desire would be fertile ground for methods of sedation.

The sedatives make everything easier to swallow.

Other Posts
Anything can become a monster if you give yourself over to it entirely
Zombie morality - Philip Kretsedemas
The obligation trap - Philip Kretsedemas
It's OK to feel your feelings without naming them

Being reactive isn't necessarily a bad thing

Philip Kretsedemas — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 01:05:53 GMT

Since I’ve begun discussing Nietzsche on my podcast, it seems like an appropriate time to upload a few Nietzsche-themed reflections that I’ve had on the backburner for a few months.

This post is the first of a series that explores what it means to “act your reactions.”

I haven’t been able to track down a passage from Nietzsche that uses these exact words (though I recall Nietzsche writing something very similar in one of his many books).

Here is a passage from On the Genealogy of Morals (section ten) that captures the gist of the idea.

Ressentiment itself, if it should appear in the noble man, consummates and exhausts itself in an immediate reaction, and therefore does not poison: on the other hand, it fails to appear at all on countless occasions on which it inevitably appears in the weak and impotent.

Nietzsche rarely has anything commendable to say about resentment or reactivity. He usually treats these qualities as something like a spiritual sickness that saps people of their vitality.

This is why Nietzsche’s writing on the resentment of noble types is so interesting. He uses the example of the noble type to describe what a healthy response to resentment looks like. His main point is that it’s better for you to (re)act immediately when you feel the pangs of resentment. Reactivity is a way of clearing the resentment from your system, before it starts to poison you.

What I’ve just shared is my attempt at providing a faithful summary of Nietzsche’s advice.

In the rest of this post I’m going to get a little more creative.

So, here goes.

When we criticize people for being reactive, we are usually counseling them against letting the urgent demands of a situation overdetermine their response to this situation. But it’s worth noting that reactivity is, at least, a kind of action.

I’m sure we all have some experience dealing with people who are able to drum up an endless of supply of good reasons not to act at all.

We can also make a distinction between the redundant, short sighted reactivity that I’ve just described and another quality that I’ll call “perceptual speed”—the art of spotting the singular qualities of a situation, and knowing how to quickly respond to these emergent qualities without compromising your goals and values.

So you could say that the noble type has a knack for converting their resentment into reactivity and their reactivity into perceptual speed. Even if they react in precisely the wrong way, they are still going to work through all of the distortions and dead-ends of their reactive response, more quickly, than if they hadn’t reacted at all.

To boil this all down a bit more, the noble type will always take the risk of doing the wrong thing over doing nothing at all; and they are more likely to end up creating compelling solutions (in the short or long run) because they’ve taken these chances, compared to people whose sole purpose in life is to avoid making mistakes.

I suppose this is just another take on what it means to fail forward.

So that’s part one. I’ll share part two a few days from now.

Other Posts
Always Attack: Redux - Philip Kretsedemas
Why I wish God wasn't dead - by Philip Kretsedemas
Is Harry Potter a Nietzschean hero? (Yes)
Prometheus revisited - by Philip Kretsedemas
The Curse of a Dying God - by Philip Kretsedemas

Lessons on self care from Nietzsche's genealogical method

Philip Kretsedemas — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:31:40 GMT

In the last few episodes of this series I’ve explained what the genealogical method is, and how it can be used to help people get more in touch with their own feelings.

In this episode, I discuss a few of the defining features of Friedrich Nietzsche’s approach to the genealogical method (since Nietzsche is one of the first, and arguably, most influential, innovators of the method), and I explore the practical implications of his insights for the choices and challenges we face in our everyday lives.

Here are prior episodes from this series (each is about 12-15 minutes in length).

Episode 5 Using the genealogical method to get more in tune with your feelings
Episode 4 Feelings and emotions aren’t the same thing
Episode 3 Lessons in Time Traveling
Episode 2 On Love, Faith and the Genealogical Method
Episode 1 How I Quit Drinking

A very important closing note: I’m sharing my insights on self-care methods that have worked for me, but they are not intended to substitute for any other kinds of clinical, therapeutic or group supports you have in your life. If you are getting professional support for substance abuse, anxiety, depression or any other personal wellness issue, please consult with the professionals and/or support groups you’re already seeing before making any changes to your regimen that may be informed by what I’m sharing on this podcast.

Using the genealogical method to get more in tune with your feelings

Philip Kretsedemas — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 20:53:29 GMT

This installment of my podcast series continues with the discussion of feelings and emotions, that I introduced in the last episode.

This episode is book-ended by some reflections on how the genealogical method can be used as a guiding framework for meditations on your feelings and emotions. The most important point I make (in my opinion anyway) is that a genealogical approach should be attuned to the unfolding of events and feelings that are intrinsic to the flow of your life.

The entire episode is just me making this point in different ways—peppered with stories from my life.

Like my prior podcast episodes, I describe the genealogical method with broad brush strokes. But I close the episode by sharing a little more context on the theoretical perspectives that have informed my approach to the genealogical method.

The trilogy of theorists/philosophers that I briefly discuss include:

Friedrich Nietzsche: who is widely regarded as the creator of the genealogical method, as its widely understood today, though, of course, there is no “pure origin” to the method.

Gilles Deleuze: who is important in many ways, but as it concerns the discussion I provide in this episode, is most significant for being the philosopher who got me to start seriously reading Nietzsche.

Brian Massumi: whose meditations on feelings, affects and emotions have provided the grist for my last couple of podcast episodes, and also, notably, produced several, highly impactful English language translations of Gilles Deleuze’s books, that were co-written with Felix Guattari.

So I end the episode by pointing out that there is an intellectual lineage (a genealogy in its own right) that connects Nietzsche’s genealogical method to the perspective on feelings and emotions that I’ve been using as a guide for these last two podcast episodes.

This is all a set up for the next podcast episode (that I hope to release in 1-2 weeks time) that will delve into Nietzsche’s genealogical method in a little more detail (or, as much as I can squeeze into 15 minutes).

Finally, here are some links to readings that are relevant to the content of this episode. I’ve shared all of these links in notes to prior episodes, but can’t hurt to share again—on the assumption that people aren’t tuning into every episode.

Here’s a link to one of Brian Massumi’s books (Parables for the Virtual) that discusses feelings, affects and emotions in great depth. Here’s a link to a synopsis of Massumi’s insights (if you want the cliff notes version).

You can also check out this post, on my Substack website that uses my winter holiday reflections to provide a more practical introduction to Massumi’s theory. These other posts on The Obligation Trap and Zombie Morality are also relevant to the genealogical approach to feelings and emotions that I discuss in this episode.

I’ll have more to share about Nietzsche, Deleuze and other theorists in the weeks ahead. For the time being, if you’re interested, you can check out my approach to genealogy studies, which I had the opportunity to cultivate while serving as the inaugural editor-in-chief for an open access journal titled Genealogy.

Here is a link to my inaugural editorial for the journal, and also to my editorial for the journal’s first issue (which featured discussions of theoretical and methodological issues in family genealogy research, genealogies of human rights and self care, and Darwinian and Foucauldian perspectives on genealogy, among other topics).

A very important closing note: I’m sharing my insights on self-care methods that have worked for me that you may also find useful—but they are not intended to substitute for any other kinds of clinical, therapeutic or group supports you have in your life. If you are getting professional support for substance abuse, anxiety, depression or any other personal wellness issue, please consult with the professionals and/or support groups you’re already seeing before making any changes to your regimen that may be informed by what I’m sharing on this podcast.

Feelings and emotions aren't the same thing

Philip Kretsedemas — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:48:17 GMT

This episode introduces a perspective on emotions and self-care that I’m going to build on over the next few weeks.

The main theme of this episode is that 1) your emotions and feelings aren’t the same thing and 2) you can open up new horizons for wellness and self-care by becoming more aware of this distinction.

My insights on the emotions/feelings distinction are borrowed from Brian Massumi’s writing. You can check out this link to one of his book’s that discusses this distinction in more depth. And here’s a link to a synopsis of Massumi’s insights written by someone else (if you want the cliff notes version).

You can also check out this post, on my Substack website that uses my winter holiday reflections to provide a more practical introduction to Massumi’s theory.

But if you don’t have time to read any further, here’s a really quick break down.

Affects … are stimuli or ripple effects emanating from events of any kind; understanding the event as something that is irreducibly objective (it’s its own thing, which exists independently of you).

Feelings … are the way that affects, register for us, as a personal, sensory experience, but keeping in mind that affects that can “effect” us even if we’re not consciously aware of them (in other words, we can absorb affects that never register for us as feelings).

Emotions … are the language we’ve learned to use to describe our personal sensory experiences. Feelings are irreducibly individual and don’t necessarily have “names”. Of course, most of us are in the habit of naming our feelings. But the key point is that the names (the emotional labels) that we attach to our feelings aren’t necessarily the same thing as the feelings themselves. Emotions are social. The fact that we use language to name our emotions, means that we are filtering our understanding of our feelings through all of the cultural histories and institutionalized meanings that are part and parcel of our language systems.

One of the main goals of this episode is just to introduce the distinction between these three things.

But I also have another, more practical goal…which is to point out that you shouldn’t be in such a rush to name all of your feelings.

Your feelings are probably responding to lots of stimuli (or affects) that you’re absorbing from the wider environment that aren’t well described by the emotional labels that you’ve learned to apply to your feelings.

One way to think about this is that our language conventions haven’t caught up to the speed and complexity of our lives. And we could be stressing ourselves unnecessarily, or making bad decisions, because we’re categorizing our feelings too quickly.

So those are the main points.

I don’t discuss the genealogical method in this episode, but I will circle back to it as I build out this approach to feelings, emotions, affects and self-care in the weeks ahead.

A very important closing note: I’m sharing my insights on self-care methods that have worked for me that you may also find useful, but they are not intended to substitute for any other kinds of clinical, therapeutic or group supports you have in your life. If you are getting professional support for substance abuse, anxiety, depression or any other personal wellness issue, please consult with the professionals and/or support groups you’re already seeing before making any changes to your regimen that may be informed by what I’m sharing on this podcast.

Lessons in Time Traveling

Philip Kretsedemas — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 23:55:42 GMT

This is the third installment in the “How I Quit Drinking” series.

Here are links to episodes one and two, if you’re interested in catching up on what I’ve uploaded previously.

This episode delves a little deeper into the personal application of the genealogical method that I’m using as a guide for all of these reflections.

“Lessons on Time Travelling” is a metaphor for the tracing methods that I discuss in this episode. Tracing is a process you can use to memorialize and reflect on moments in your life that made an impression on you, for one reason or another.

Tracing is a more selective process than journaling (it’s not necessary to document your personal reflections on a daily or weekly basis for the purpose of a tracing, though you can use journaling practices as an aid for tracing). And tracing doesn’t necessarily have to involve written reflections. Any creative medium that works for you will do.

Once you’ve generated a collection of tracings you can zip back and forth between them, creating new connections between these moments in your life (sort of like a time traveler) and create new emotional and conceptual pathways for yourself.

The example that I use in this episode is a piece of free writing titled, “How to Taste an Olive” that I wrote almost ten years ago, which documents a moment in my life that happened back in 1989.

I thought the event was worth writing about, but I think most people would regard it as an interesting anecdote at best (not a pivotal life event by any means). Over time, I’ve learned to apply the lessons from this inauspicious event, from way back in 1989, to many other aspects of my life (including the story of how I quit drinking, managing stress and post-divorce life, to name just a few examples).

I use time travelling as a metaphor for this process, but you can also think of it as a method for reorganizing your relationship to time, or even perhaps, liberating yourself from the chronological unfolding of time. You can use tracings to be more intentional about what you remember and how you remember.

Re-membering is a creative act, and you get better at it with practice. The creativity that goes into tracing and remembering is all part and parcel of the genealogical method, and it’s one of the reasons why genealogies are not really the same thing as a history (or a historiography) even though they are constructed out of many of the same elements as a chronological history.

If you listen to the podcast you’ll realize that these notes are more of a supplement than a summary; they highlight the main themes, but they’re also adding a bit more context to the podcast content (foreshadowing themes that I’ll be exploring in more depth in future episodes).

And here’s a little more supplemental content.

A few years ago, I served as the inaugural editor-in-chief for an open access journal titled Genealogy, which is still generating content (it recently celebrated it’s 5^th anniversary).

To my knowledge, it’s the only academic journal (and is certainly the only open access journal) exclusively devoted to the topic of genealogy studies; combining research articles on family genealogy with theoretical and interdisciplinary perspectives on the genealogical method that have been applied to topics that stretch far beyond the subject of family genealogy (check out the journal link above to see some examples).

Here is a link to my inaugural editorial for the journal, which will give you a little more context on my approach to the genealogical method.

I’ve been meaning to share this aspect of my backstory in the podcast recordings but I keep on editing it out of the final cut for the sake of time (I’m trying to keep each episode under 15 minutes). I’ll find ways to integrating my relevant academic history and expertise into the podcast contents moving forward. I’m only just getting started!

A very important closing note: I’m sharing my insights on self-care methods that have worked for me that you may also find useful—but they are not intended to substitute for any other kinds of clinical, therapeutic or group supports you have in your life. If you are getting professional support for substance abuse, anxiety, depression or any other personal wellness issue, please consult with the professionals and/or support groups you’re already seeing before making any changes to your regimen that may be informed by what I’m sharing on this podcast.

On Love, Faith and the Genealogical Method

Philip Kretsedemas — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 23:57:28 GMT

Click here to listen to episode 1 in this series.

This episode traces the connections between these three themes and explains how they all played a role in the process that led me to give up alcohol for good.

In the weeks ahead, I plan on building out these themes, to explore other aspects of self care (moving beyond the topic of sobriety).

Theme 1

The genealogical method: An analytic method that can be used to trace the transformation of anything, including your own emotional states, forms of self talk, your self concept and related things (there’s more to genealogy than the tracing family ancestries, though I do discuss family relations quite a bit in this episode). I also emphasize that you can’t apply the genealogical method to yourself unless you are prepared to be honest with yourself about what’s going on inside yourself, without judging. You can also check out this blog post which makes a similar point, but without directly referencing the genealogical method.

Theme 2

Love: Understanding love as perhaps the most important quality that is passed on through a family line (or any other series of relationships). Love is an excellent focal point for a personal genealogy. You can use the genealogical method to disentangle the love that you want to pass on (to yourself and to others) from the hurtful and alienating things that have been carried forward (along with the love) for generations…which you can decide to say “no” to – it stops here.

Theme 3

Faith: For the purpose of these podcasts, I engage faith as a perspective on spiritual practice (with the understanding that there’s a lot more to faith traditions than the spiritual practices that you can integrate into methods of self care). In this episode, I also point out that faith traditions and spiritual practices are very relevant for a personal approach to genealogy. Spiritual practices (as I understand them) are on the side of the personal/ You can use them to push back against the distractions and intimidating forces in your life, to create a space that allows you to pay closer attention to what’s going on inside you.

I also want to emphasize that I discuss my faith because it’s inextricably bound up with my story about how I quit drinking. But I know that there are many kinds of meditative/grounding practices that you can use to delve into your inner life, that don’t require a faith commitment (or at least not a conventional one that’s connected to an organized religion). So I realize that there are non-religious practices that are the functional equivalent of the spiritual practices and perspectives on faith that I talk about. Again, I talk about the kinds of practices that I use, because they are part of my story — and a personal genealogy has to be true to the details of your personal life. I’m sharing insights about my approach to faith and spirituality, not to advocate for a particular kind of faith commitment but to illustrate the method.

A very important closing note: What I’m sharing shouldn’t take the place of clinical, therapeutic and/or group-supports for substance abuse issues. I’m sharing my insights on methods that have worked for me that you may find of value, but which are not intended to substitute for any other kinds of substance abuse supports you have in your life. If you are getting professional support for substance abuse issues, please consult with this professional before making any changes to your regimen that may be informed by what I’m sharing on this podcast.

How I Quit Drinking: Part 1

Philip Kretsedemas — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 18:42:52 GMT

This is the first episode of my podcast which is devoted to methods of self-care.

This episode is part 1 of my story of how I quit drinking ... which is just my starting example. I plan on expanding the subject matter of the podcast in the months ahead.

Before I get into the summary, please consider this disclaimer.

What I’m sharing shouldn’t take the place of clinical, therapeutic and/or group-supports for substance abuse issues. I’m sharing my insights on methods that have worked for me that you may find of value, but which are not intended to substitute for any other kinds of substance abuse supports you have in your life. If you are getting professional support for substance abuse issues, please consult with this professional before making any changes to your regimen that may be informed by what I’m sharing on this podcast.

And here are the three main themes of this episode.

1. Feelings of shame are not always negative or debilitating … depending on how you choose to relate to them. There are valuable lessons that you can learn from these feelings, if you give yourself a little time to reflect.

2. Personifying the impulse to indulge and pushing back against it, the way you might push back against a manipulative person, can be an effective way of mustering up the emotional energy that you need to change a habit.

3. If you’re someone like me who was raised in a faith tradition (in my case Christianity) but are no longer observant, these tips (especially #2) can offer some practical insights into how to reconnect with the spiritual practices of this tradition (but points 1 and 2 stand on their own — you can still use them to reflect on the habit you want to change, even if you don’t think this final point is relevant for you).

And if the Christian context for point 3 is a stumbling block for you … consider this passage from the opening pages of the Ramayana.

… Valmiki searched through the world seeking open friendship, happiness and hope, and finding none of these he went alone into the empty forest where no man lived … There he sat for years without moving, so still that white ants built an anthill over him. There Valmiki sat inside the anthill for thousands of years with only his eyes showing out, trying to find the True, his hands folded and his mind lost in contemplation.

This passage reminds me that our experiences of alienation and disappointment are really just echoes of the larger human condition.

We are all suffering together, even if it doesn’t always feel that way.

Once you acknowledge that your suffering isn’t just about you, and that it’s just a condition of living, it’s possible to relate to it in a different way.

As I grew into this knowledge, it made it easier for me to quit drinking … and let go of many other escapist habits.

I stopped thinking that I was, somehow, entitled to a suffering-free life.

I realized that if I kept running away from my suffering, I’d never be able to experience the fullness of life … all of the joy and pain mixed together … it’s only then that the adventure really begins.

I don’t discuss these lessons from the Ramayana in this first episode of the podcast … just something to keep in mind … a foreshadowing.

Anything can become a monster if you give yourself over to it entirely

Philip Kretsedemas — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 14:55:18 GMT

A fatal attractor can be anything that you allow to define the limit of what it is possible for you to be.

And you may be asking, “What’s a fatal attractor?”

It’s pretty much what it sounds like, but you can check out this link for a quick summary.

When you give yourself over, entirely, to the fatal attractor you become its echo.

You lose sight of your own dreams and start taking on the dreams it has been dreaming of you.

Since I’m using the attractor-dynamic as an analog for social phenomena, it bears noting that the fatal attractor is not really a thing in itself, but the relationship you have to this thing.

An aside: I’m calling attention to my sociological treatment of this concept, because it originates from the discipline of physics. Also worth noting that fatal attractors are just one type of attractor and they’re not mentioned in the most of the attractor-typologies that were originated by physicists. Nevertheless, the terminology of “fatal attractors” is prevalent in many branches of the sciences today. You can click here and here for a couple of examples.

But enough with the digression.

The main point is this:

If you understand the “fatality” of the attractor as the product of a relationship that you’ve played a role in creating …

it follows that anything, no matter how seemingly benign, can become a monster if you give yourself over to it entirely.

So the question of whether something has become a fatal attractor for you may have less to do with any qualities that are intrinsic to this thing, and more about the way you have begun relating to it; which often has to do with a failure to maintain an appropriate distance (a.k.a. boundary maintenance) … though it also bears noting that there are people and forces in the world that are predisposed to violating and confusing our boundaries.

And here’s one of my favorites quotes on why (successful) evolutionary trajectories hinge on the avoidance of fatal attractors, which I’m planning to use in another post … but fits here too.

Living systems are perhaps best understood as systems that dynamically avoid attractors…Once such systems emerged near a critical transition, evolution seems to have discovered the natural information processing capacity inherent in these near-critical dynamics, and to have taken advantage of it to further the ability of such systems to maintain themselves on essentially open-ended transients. Christoper Langton – as quoted by Manuel Delanda in Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy 2002: 79.

Unfortunately, all versions of Intensive Science are still locked behind paywalls, but if you’re interested you can check out my unpublished manuscript (An Introverted Theory of Open Ended Processes) that elaborates on Delanda’s-and-Langton’s insights in tandem with insights from other philosophers (mainly Deleuze, Dennet and Bergson) who’ve influenced my thinking on evolutionary theory. I also present a quick synopsis (with diagram) of the main argument from this article in the meditation at the end of this piece of free writing.

Other Posts
Zombie morality - Philip Kretsedemas
A meditation on fatal attractors (revisiting the tale of the Scylla and Charybdis)
The guest at the door - by Philip Kretsedemas
How to taste an olive - by Philip Kretsedemas
It's OK to feel your feelings without naming them

Zombie morality

Philip Kretsedemas — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 17:23:47 GMT

It’s taken me a long time to learn that I should trust my feelings.

But before I could trust my feelings, I had to get better at understanding what my feelings were in the first place.

Like most people, I was carrying around a lot of stuff that I had learned to call “my feelings” that didn’t actually originate from within me. Most of this stuff could be described as emotionally charged judgements that I was applying to my inner life.

These judgements didn’t describe how I was actually feeling. They were rules that I had internalized, that were telling me how I was supposed to feel about what I was feeling (very meta-level)

This realization hit home for me when I was in the middle of one of the most stressful times of my life, dealing with a number of manipulative people.

I noticed a pattern.

All of these people were trying to control my behavior in one way or another, and they did this by trying to get me to distrust my own perception of my reality. I was constantly being told how I was supposed to think and feel.

This experience sensitized me to a kind of morality that functions by getting people to ignore all of the introspective qualities that, in my view, are essential for the cultivation of a mature morality.

Don’t take time for yourself to think and reflect.

Don’t trust your instincts

Don’t listen to that still, small voice inside you that gets so easily drowned out by the noise of the world.

Just follow the instructions of whoever happens to be yelling the loudest at you right now - in the hopes that if you obey they’ll stop bullying you at least for a little bit (and to be clear, I’m using “yelling” as a metaphor for all forms of coercion … though I’ve dealt with my fair share of bullies who like to yell).

And what’s the result of all of these repressive stimuli?

Zombie morality.

Once you’re in this headspace, you get in the habit of making decisions on the basis of advice that has no connection to how you actually feel about what’s going on in your life.

You give up on trying to interpret what’s going on …

… all of your personal experiences and aspirations become dead to you.

You allow this to happen because you’ve decided, for whatever reason, that your personal survival hinges on your ability to conform to the instructions you’re receiving from someone else.

You may even have gotten to the point of believing that it’s wrong, in principle, for you to make decisions that are informed by your true feelings about things.

If you believe this much, you probably also believe its wrong for you to make decisions that will produce outcomes that are personally beneficial for you. And you believe all of this nonsense, because … why?

Maybe you’ve learned that it’s immoral for you to desire things that seem to be in your self-interest. If you believe this, you probably don’t have much confidence in your ability to make decisions for yourself. Nothing good can from you trusting your own instincts. You must look to other people for moral leadership, but not to yourself.

Everything I’ve written so far, probably sounds pretty extreme … like the kinds of tactics that you’d imagine being used by cult leaders and con artists to control their victims.

But there are many other types of bullies in the world, besides cult leaders and con artists.

It’s also possible for this same “bullying-effect” to be produced by the messages we internalize from our social institutions, our mass culture and by the fearful ignorance of the majority opinion (whatever it happens to be at any given point in time).

We fall in line with the position we think we’re supposed to take, rather than taking a position that’s informed by our own careful assessment of the available data (which includes information that can only be accessed from mining our own life experiences).

As I’ve already noted, this is what morality means to many people.

It means acting in a way that is indifferent to your evaluation of your own experience and your own assessment of what’s in your best interest. Many people believe that there is something noble about this kind of principled indifference.

But you can also diagnose this attitude of principled indifference as a very sophisticated species of cowardice.

What appears, at first blush, to be selfless behavior is really behavior that’s motivated by fear … fear that if you stick your neck out and speak from your experience, that you could be wrong, or that you’ll be mocked and alienated by others (even if you know you’re right).

Religions often get blamed for fostering this kind of blind adherence to social norms and mores; and there is definitely some truth to these criticisms.

On closer inspection, though, I think our religious traditions offer a mixed-bag of advice. You can check out this post for an example of how Christian parables can be interpreted to affirm the interests of the individual over the collective … though I realize that people routinely use Bible teachings to reach very different conclusions.

Sociology—which is my profession—also deserves its share of blame for normalizing the idea that the truth of all things lies outside ourselves … in structural conditions, institutions and histories of inequality that precede and exceed us … so that we come to see ourselves as products of these forces rather than as agents that have the ability to create and transform them.

But again, on closer inspection, I think that sociology (and social theory more generally) offers a mixed-bag of advice.

It’s true that many (and perhaps most?) currents of social theory, from the 19^th century to the present, have normalized (or at least, failed to criticize) the zombie morality that I’ve just described – but there are countervailing tendencies.

If you’ve read a few of my posts, you’ll know that I try to highlight tendencies in social theory (and in philosophy and religious thought as well) that go against the grain of the prevailing trends.

In this spirit, I’m going to close out this essay with some reflections that are loosely informed by theoretical perspectives on feelings and emotion rules that I discussed in a prior post.

I’m not going to rehash the entire conceptual framework here (which hinges on the distinction between affects, feelings and emotions, as discussed by Brian Massumi). So I encourage readers to check out that prior post if they want more context on what I’m going to share below.

The takeaway point from that prior discussion, which I think is most relevant here is simply this:

The self/society schema that we use to organize our valuations of things are all backwards.

We see our personal lives as being necessarily “smaller” and “less important” than the happenings of the wider society.

We assume that history and social change happens “out there” in society—not in our personal lives. So it follows that the wider society (which we assume is external to the stuff of our personal lives) is the arena where all of the important moral, sociopolitical, cultural issues (and etc.) of our times are playing out.

But what if this is all completely wrong?

What if the space of our personal lives is where we encounter all of the issues that we assume are only happening “out there” in the wider society?

Plus, not only are we encountering these “bigger” social issues in our personal lives … we are also encountering versions of these issues that are stranger and more complex than the versions that you learn about in school or which get talked about on social media.

In other words, our personal lives are where all of the important mutations and transformations are actually happening.

In contrast, the narratives, identities, social problems etc. that we use to talk about what’s going on in the wider society are just air-brushed, over-simplified versions of the issues we’re dealing with in our personal lives.

This quick sketch is my attempt at turning the schematic commonsense of zombie morality inside out … with the following consequences:

Our moral value is not determined by our conformity to the rules and roles that we think we’ve been assigned, in the maps of the social world that we carry around in our heads.

We become true, moral agents when we dare to re-draw these maps to make room for the issues that we are experiencing in our lives.

But it bears emphasizing that if you head down this path, you have to be prepared to defy the expectations that others have of you.

And you will most certainly have to push back against all of the moral bullies of the world who would have us believe that these maps cannot be changed…that it’s a “sin” to even consider doing so.

Other posts
The obligation trap - Philip Kretsedemas
It's OK to feel your feelings without naming them
Prometheus revisited - by Philip Kretsedemas
A radical empiricist reading of the Good Samaritan parable
A discourse on legal vs illegal vampirism

The obligation trap

Philip Kretsedemas — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:16:05 GMT

The subtitle of this post is a story in itself.

I suppose I could have just written, “No good deed goes unpunished.” But that familiar saying begs an even more important question.

“Why?”

Why do people get punished for trying to do good deeds?

Here’s another version of this question.

How do people get caught up in psychodramas in which their desire to help gets weaponized against them … and they get manipulated into making bad decisions out of a misguided sense of obligation?

One explanation is that the person who’s being manipulated has low self-esteem. But there’s also a very specific dynamic playing out between these two people which has led the person with low self-esteem to confuse their esteem issues with their highest values.

They want to be selfless, in a noble way.

They want to put someone else’s needs ahead of their own because they think “this is what good people are supposed to do”

… and this goes even more so if you’re interacting with someone who identifies as socially-disadvantaged (and especially if this person is constantly telling you how disadvantaged they are and how privileged you are).

The relationship between these two people can be boiled down to these two narratives.

The manipulated person: Can’t you see that I’m a good person? Look at all of these things I’m doing for you.

The manipulator: No, you’re not a good person, which is why you have to keep on doing what I tell you. I’m the only moral authority in this situation.

It’s probably no surprise that I’m writing from experience, as someone who’s been on the receiving end of these kinds of relationships. But this admission sets the stage for another question.

If I understand how toxic these kinds of relationships are, then why would I ever allow myself to be manipulated in this way?

The simple answer to this question is that I had to go through it (a few times) before it all started to click for me.

There’s another, more complex, answer to this question which is not really a single answer, but an entry point into an entirely different way of thinking.

For example, my experiences with the kind of manipulation that I’ve just described have forced me to work through my own esteem issues. I’ve had to confront my people-pleasing and fawning behavior … always saying “yes” … taking the path of least resistance, so you can stay in people’s good graces.

In other words, I’ve had to stop caring so much about whether other people see me as a “good person.”

I understand now (and in a more profound way than I ever had before) that I need to accept myself as a good person because I am living-up to standards that I have set for myself—rather than chasing approval from others who try to lord their moral authority over me on the basis of their (putatively) superior commitment to social justice, the uncompromising radicality of their political convictions, or their experiences of victimization.

But this is not an easy thing to do. It means living with guilt.

And instead of doing the things that I used to do, to make the “guilt go away,” I realized that I had to start relating to these feelings of guilt in a different way.

I had to learn how to suffer these feelings of guilt without succumbing to them.

I had to be strong enough, in my knowledge of myself, to trust in my own goodness, even if others choose to view me as “evil” or just pathetic, because I don’t live up to their expectations.

This is the great moral paradox that you have to confront when you decide to honor the integrity of your own feelings and experiences.

You have to take the risk that acting on what you believe is the right thing to do, really is the best course of action, even if no one else understands, and you end up being shamed as “morally deficient” by others because you’ve actually decided to stick up for what you know is right.

It’s always possible that you may end up regretting these decisions down the road. You can at least take comfort in knowing that these bad decisions were honest mistakes that you can learn from.

But in my experience, the decisions I’ve regretted the most have been ones that I was never convinced were the truly the right thing to do, but which I chose to make anyway—out of obligation to others.

Other posts
An enlightened selfishness - by Philip Kretsedemas
A radical empiricist reading of the Good Samaritan parable
A meditation on fatal attractors (revisiting the tale of the Scylla and Charybdis)
A discourse on legal vs illegal vampirism

It's OK to feel your feelings without naming them

Philip Kretsedemas — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 03:09:41 GMT

We’re all familiar with the popular lore about the winter holiday season. On one hand, it’s a time to draw close to family and friends. On the other hand, it’s a time when people who don’t have close ties to family and friends can feel especially lonely. And there are also sensitive souls, like Charlie Brown, who can suffer holiday season malaise even when they’re surrounded by family and friends.

If you spend any time grazing the holiday-themed options on your favorite streaming platform, you’re going to run across these themes (hence, my reference to the Charle Brown). We’re constantly being peppered with these narratives by our entertainment media…which got me to thinking…

What category do I fit into?

Am I connected person, who is fortunate enough to spend time with my loved ones during the holiday season?

Or am I one of those disconnected people who is doomed to have a lonely holiday season?

These thoughts started bubbling up for me because, like so many other aspects of my life, none of these categories seem to fit the circumstances of my life.

Am I weird because I don’t feel lonely when I’m alone?

I’m divorced and live by myself. I’m going to be spending Christmas eve and most of Christmas day by myself (and same for New Years). I have acquaintances but nothing like the close friends I used to have when I was in my 20s. And except for my daughters (who I see on a regular basis, but who live with their mother), I have no immediate or extended family who live anywhere near me.

But, strangely enough, I don’t feel lonely. I don’t even feel “alone.”

Even though I don’t see my daughters everyday, we’re in regular contact via our cellphones, and the same goes for the people at my workplace and other spaces where I connect with people to share creative work.

So, even though I spend most of my hours, physically alone, I feel like I’m in pretty regular communication with lots of people on a regular basis, to the point where I actually have a hard time finding quiet time, just for myself.

So, when Christmas Eve and New Years Eve roll around, and I find myself by myself with nothing on my to do list to keep me busy…that’s actually a good thing. I need these moments to reconnect with myself and recharge.

But then I start to wonder … am I weird?

Should I be feeling different feelings than the one’s I’m actually feeling?

And what am I actually feeling at this time of year? Sad, happy, lonely, overwhelmed?

Feelings without names

I’ve found that loneliness (or at least, my experience of loneliness) is a relational phenomenon. I’ve felt my loneliest when I’ve been involved in relationships with people who don’t seem to get me. But now that I’m actually living life on my own, I don’t feel lonely at all.

And as I spend more time on my own, I’ve learned that feelings that I assumed were the polar opposites of each other can actually co-exist in a strangely harmonious way.

Over the past several years, I’ve endured things that have made me more worried—for myself, my children, and the entire world—than I’ve ever been at any other time in my life.

But this feeling of chronic dis-ease has allowed me to be more grateful for personal freedoms that I used to take for granted, and to cherish every opportunity I get to spend with the people that matter to me.

This is my best attempt at describing the way I’m feeling now. But I don’t think there’s a name for it.

The concept of the “sublime” is a pretty close fit, but only as a meta-level framework. Even sublimity doesn’t cogently describe what I’m going through on a daily basis … which is a roiling confluence of many kinds of feelings that add up to something much greater than the sum of their parts.

I’ve also come to the understanding that it is much more important for me to experience my feelings than it is to name them.

Closing thoughts on feelings, emotions and affects

I don’t think that it would have been possible for me to arrive at the understanding that I’ve just shared if it weren’t for Brian Massumi’s writings on affect, feeling and emotion.

I first encountered Massumi’s writing on this subject in the book, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. I’ve also found this much shorter synopsis by Eric Shouse which boils down the essential points into about two pages of writing (but Parables is still worth checking out if you have the time).

Massumi takes a philosophy-of-science approach to a topic that’s also been discussed in some depth by researchers who study the sociology of emotions (who I’m not going to cite right now). The sociological research literature has explained that our emotions are socially learned. Massumi, however, emphasizes that our feelings are not necessarily the same thing as these socially constructed emotions.

Here’s a very simple way to put it. There’s the way you actually feel about things … and there’s also a knowledge we’ve all acquired which instructs us on how we’re supposed to feel (sometimes referred to as “emotion rules”).

Sometimes, the things that are stressing us out are these emotion rules, and not what we’re actually feeling.

We start feeling bad because we’re not feeling the way we think we ought to feel.Or… we convince ourselves that we are supposed to feel a certain way (which is out of kilter with how we’re actually feeling) … and all the emotion-work that we put into suppressing our actual feelings (or trying to contain them with “names”) just makes our lives more exhausting that they need to be.

And there are these other sensations moving through us, which are neither feelings nor emotions.

Affects.

Affects are pre-personal and asocial. They are the forces that our feelings our responding to … they are the vibrations/sensations that are emitted by an event of any sort -- a physical explosion, the death of a loved one or the birth of a new child.

Anything—even a rock—can register the affects produced by the right kind of event.

The human body, of course, is capable of being affected by a much more diverse variety of events than a rock.

But our socially-constructed emotion rules can’t anticipate all of the affects we are absorbing and synthesizing on a daily basis … which is why we’re liable to feel things that can’t be named.

This is OK … and it’s why we shouldn’t get hung up on putting a label on everything we’re feeling.

Other Posts
An enlightened selfishness - by Philip Kretsedemas
A meditation on watchfulness - by Philip Kretsedemas
Love = accepting death gracefully - by Philip Kretsedemas
It is best to say nothing - by Philip Kretsedemas
The guest at the door - by Philip Kretsedemas

Always Attack: Redux

Philip Kretsedemas — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 17:09:22 GMT

This entry is my attempt to address an error in my speculative discussion of how Friedrich Nietzsche might have interpreted a very un-Nietzsche-like Bible teaching that many of us are probably familiar with … the one about turning the other cheek.

For people who need a quick refresher, here’s the quote from the Book of Matthew (5:39, New International Version),”But I tell you, do not resist an evil person! If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.”

The original post (titled Always Attack) was inspired by my discovery that Nietzsche’s comments on the “turn the other cheek” teaching were moderately sympathetic … which is surprisingly unlike his criticism of Christianity as a whole.

I went on to explore how the pacifistic themes of this teaching could be combined with the kind of assertive, vitalist ethos for which Nietzsche is renowned.

And that’s how I ended up with this idea that the guidance about “not resisting” the incursions of bad-minded people, doesn’t actually prohibit you from taking the initiative to confront these people about their ugly behavior.

“Don’t resist the wicked” can just be interpreted to mean … don’t let the conflict be defined by what they’re trying to do to you or take from you. Let them do what they will do, but don’t be dissuaded from speaking your truth. Hence, “don’t defend; always attack.”

Viewed in this light, the Gospel teaching could be taken as a lesson about how to live your life free of resentment (per Nietzsche’s philosophy … and Nietzsche does seem to view Jesus as a spiritual teacher who triumphed over resentment; see passage 162 in The Will to Power).

Unpacking my clumsy reading of Nietzsche

But even as I was writing this essay, I was aware that I was taking liberties with what Nietzsche had actually written about this teaching, and about Jesus more generally.

I signaled these misgivings with self-deprecating remarks about my “clumsy” interpretation of Nietzsche. After giving things a little more thought, I realized that what I was calling my “clumsiness” was really a place holder for a lot of issues that needed to be more carefully unpacked … which is why I wrote this post.

I want to emphasize, that I still stand by what I wrote in that original post.

I think I produced a plausible, Nietzschean interpretation of what it could mean to “turn the other cheek.”

But on a closer read of The Will to Power, I also have to admit that my reading of this Bible passage is, very likely, not the interpretation that Nietzsche would have landed on.

Nietzsche’s Jesus

I don’t think that Nietzsche would have balked at the bellicose overtones of an aphorism like, “always attack.” His philosophy is chock full of statements like this, which extol the life-affirming nature of our aggressive impulses; seeing them as indices of good health.

But again, on closer inspection, I realized that Nietzsche did not want to associate these kinds of healthy aggressive/assertive qualities with the Christ figure.

For example, in the passage right after he comments on the teaching about “not resisting” those who would harm you he writes, “The entire prophet and miracle-worker attitude, the anger, the calling down of judgement is a terrible corruption (e.g. Mark 6, 11)…” (The Will to Power, 163-164).

It’s worth noting that Nietzsche was always inclined to be critical of people who judge harshly—seeing this judgmentalism as the expression of a slavish, resentful mindset which is always dividing the world into the good and the evil, and defining itself by what it is not (i.e., I know I am good, because I am not evil like you).

So, the fact that Nietzsche wants to see these Gospel accounts of an “angry, judging Jesus” as a corruption of the “real Jesus,” may be an indication that Nietzsche wants to think highly of Jesus. It’s possible that Nietzsche didn’t want to associate Jesus with these ignoble traits.

But of course, Nietzsche is not a Biblical historian. He’s not attempting to construct an historically plausible account of the temperament and teachings of the “real Jesus” through a rigorous analysis of available literary texts that are read in light of available archaeological evidence.

Keeping this all in mind. Nietzsche’s musings about the “real Jesus” tell us a lot more about Nietzsche than they do about the historical Jesus … which leads me to these questions …

Who does Nietzsche “need” Jesus to be, and why?

I think these are the important questions to answer, and although I won’t be able to provide any conclusive answers in this post, I’d like to offer some suggestions.

Nietzsche’s narrative about Christianity

This passage for example, sums up Nietzsche’s analysis of early Christianity.

“Christianity: a naïve beginning to Buddhistic peace movement in the very seat of ressentiment –but reversed by Paul into a pagan mystery doctrine, which finally learns to treat with entire state organization—and wages war, condemns, tortures, swears, hates (The Will to Power, 167).

So, according to Nietzsche, Paul is the culprit who turns Christianity into a vehicle for resentment—with Paul being treated, simultaneously, as a pivotal figure in the history of Church and a persona that foreshadows (in Nietzsche’s mind) the evolving character of the entire church institution from the first century to the present day.

And since Nietzsche believes that Christianity was originally a naïve peace movement before Paul began to work his influence, it follows that for Nietzsche, the “real Jesus” has to be a very meek figure.

It’s also notable that when Nietzsche has critical things to say about Jesus, it has to do with the childish naivete of the very same pacifistic qualities that Nietzsche insisted were the hallmark traits of the “real Jesus.”

Nietzsche’s Jesus would not be the one to be casting money changes out of the Temple Mount, or driving demoniac forces out of people in the name of an Almighty Father God; and he certainly wouldn’t issue a teaching that could be interpreted to mean, “always attack.”

I want to emphasize that I’m in no better position than Nietzsche to make claims about the character of the “real Jesus.” But I still think it’s significant that Nietzsche can’t tolerate the idea of a Jesus who could be very meek in some moments, and authoritative and angry in others.

It’s also worth noting that Nietzsche’s Übermensch—his answer to the death of God—is capable of blending all of these qualities…vulnerability, graciousness, aggression, masterly confidence and more besides.

In the meditation that I included at the end of Prometheus Revisited, I noted that Nietzsche has a tendency to depict certain qualities (like selflessness or ascetic discipline) in a negative light when he associates them with Christianity, but is capable of rehabilitating these very same qualities in a positive light when he is writing about the freedom-loving, noble types that he admires.

I think that something like this is going on with Nietzsche’s ideas about the “real Jesus”. But in this case, the blockage has more do with Nietzsche being unable to see that many of the same qualities that he wants to elevate in the Übermensch could actually have been foreshadowed by ancient religious leaders, like Jesus, which he is more comfortable discussing in a patronizing way.

Nietzsche had no problem, in contrast, seeing precursors for the Übermensch in mythical figures like Prometheus and Dionysus. But if Nietzsche were to admit that there were similar continuities running between Jesus and the Übermensch, he would have had to radically revise the genealogical analysis that he uses to diagnose the nihilism of his times.

I also suspect that there are some elements of Nietzsche’s autobiography that are tangled up with his aversion to the “angry Jesus”, which led him to be particularly sensitive to being judged by pious Christians. We should also consider Nietzsche’s complicated feelings toward his father (a Lutheran priest), which seem to be a mix of resentment and admiration.

All of this context helps to explain why it’s very unlikely that Nietzsche would have agreed with my Nietzschean interpretation of “turn the other cheek.”

I don’t think that Nietzsche would have had a problem with the aphorism “always attack,” but I also don’t think he would want to imagine that kind of teaching coming from Jesus.

Other Posts
Always attack - by Philip Kretsedemas - Philip's Substack
Prometheus revisited - by Philip Kretsedemas
The Curse of a Dying God - by Philip Kretsedemas
Why I wish God wasn't dead - by Philip Kretsedemas
God is dead ... a sociological perspective
Love = accepting death gracefully - by Philip Kretsedemas
Did "God is dead" really mean "my dad is dead"?

Why I wish God wasn't dead

Philip Kretsedemas — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 21:34:56 GMT

I’m not an observant Christian in any conventional sense of the term, but I was raised Christian. I’m open to other religious traditions, but I’m old enough to know that I have a Christian soul, and I’m tired of feeling self-conscious about it. I used to struggle against it for some stupid reason (well, not so stupid really; my guilty conscience about my Christian sensibilities had a lot to do with my professional socialization) but now I just accept it for what it is.

Plus, as I’ve grown older I’ve found that I need some kind of spiritual practice to keep myself centered. I need to believe in God (even though I’m aware of all of the arguments against God), and I need to believe in the possibility of a community that is grounded in a shared reverence for the Divine, even though I’ve never exactly found a community like this to belong to (I make do with bits and pieces of community that I manage to integrate into the flow of my life).

I’m not disclosing all of this to persuade the reader about the wisdom of my approach to matters of faith. You’ve probably figured out that my approach is a bit fragmented and confused. I’m trying the best that I can but I certainly can’t hold myself up as a role model for anyone.

So I want to be clear that these disclosures are not my attempt to impart any lessons to you, dear reader, about how to believe or what it means to believe.

Everything I’ve shared so far is just a warm-up for my first attempt at explaining how I’ve come to understand the death of God on a personal level. I’m also going to use these personal reflections to explain (the best I can) how my understanding of the death of God has been filtered through the circumstances of my black experience.

The death of God: a sociological recap

I’ve already produced several meditations on the death of God (you can check them out here, here and here … and I guess you can check out here and here too). So I’m not going to rehearse all of these arguments here, except to note that this “death” is not a cause for celebration.

I’ll also point out, really quickly, that the declaration, “God is dead” comes out of the philosophical writings of Friedrich Nietzsche (just to be clear, for readers who aren’t familiar with Nietzsche’s writings, that this is not a phrase of my own invention!). You can check out the links I’ve just referenced for more context on what Nietzsche may have meant when he wrote those fateful words.

The simplest that I can think of to describe the death of God, is that it’s about the uprooting of things.

Sociologists like Anthony Giddens have described modernization as being propelled by disembedding processes that lift social relations out of local contexts and restructure them across vast spans of time and space. Nineteenth century social theorists described a similar process when they wrote about the tight-knit community-relations that were being steadily replaced by larger, more sophisticated collective living arrangements that were characterized by a more impersonal, and rational organizing logic (i.e. the rise of modern society).

It’s inevitable, I suppose, that creation and destruction go hand in hand. So, the rise of modernity (our cities, cell phones, and overall standard of living) required the destruction of all of the things that stood in the way of its progress.

But many of the things that were destroyed were never replaced or improved upon. We’re just having to learn to live without them, or learning to live with extremely diminished versions of what they used to be, and could have been.

One of the main things that was destroyed were these holistic. localized constellations of meaning that had been developed by communities, over many generations, which blended knowledge of the natural environment with the workings of their institutions and social and cultural norms and was anchored by a spiritual and cosmological understanding of their place in the universe.

Today, we are living in societies that are much wealthier, more technologically advanced and more efficiently organized than these pre-modern cultures. But they are also more abstract and more unilaterally organized.

Tight-knit communities can be suffocating. Familiarity breeds contempt, as they say. Familiarity also gives people more confidence to poke their nose in other people’s business, and pronounce all sorts of damning judgements in the name of the community’s moral values.

In the modern world, on the other hand, thousands of people can be bombed, starved to death, displaced, trafficked or tortured on an almost daily basis—and no one knows the difference. You can tune all of this out if you want to … thanks to all of our modern conveniences.

So, here’s another way to think about the death of God.

It’s about our flight from the suffocating judgementalism of these small, tight-knit communities, and our adventure into this wide-open space of endless potential, where you can recreate yourself as you like, without judgement.

No judgement means no God; no obligation to anything besides the pursuit of your own self-interest.

But these liberties are also made possible by a new kind of techno-bureaucratic structure which governs our lives in ways that stretch far beyond any conventional notion of a “politics.” I don’t think that most of us know enough about the way these new structures work (though there’s no shortage of ideas as to what may be going on; here’s one example that I just read and re-stacked).

Plus, because we live these atomized lives, we don’t have a shared understanding of the kinds of questions that we need to be raising, so that these structures can be regulated in an ethical way.

The flight from judgement, the abdication of our responsibility to create new and better and values, and the myopic effects of our atomized lives … can all be understood as cultural manifestations of the death of God.

I don’t view this situation exactly the same way as Nietzsche, but I share his overarching concern that we’re on a nihilistic path.

The Chasm

I’ve been drawn to the idea of the chasm as a way to think about this problem.

We stand on different sides of a yawning divide that is so incomprehensibly dark and deep that we can’t imagine bridging it, and so we simply pretend that it’s not there.

When I think of the chasm, the transatlantic slave trade is the first example that comes to mind for me. As many scholars have explained, blackness was created by the violence of the slave trade. Africans were converted into black people—subjected to the gaze of people whose ontological security hinged on their belief that they were “not black.” An entire structure of sentiments, identities and moralizing rationales, equal in grandeur and sophistication to the God that was killed, was created to sustain this gaze.

It’s also important to keep in mind what slaves and other forms of coerced labor were being used to do—which is to convert the lands of the “new world” into habitable and profitable territories.

The slave was a product of one of the most violent manifestations of modern disembedding and their labor was used to extend the reach of these disembedding processes—creating the “judgement free space” in which a new cast of subjects (the moderns) would recreate themselves, liberated from the shackles of tradition and etc.

The death of God (understood as a sociocultural event) also happens to coincide with the rise of the slave trade and the genocide of indigenous peoples.

It’s also important to note that this “death” doesn’t ban God-talk and public forms of religious worship—there was obviously quite a lot of that happening in the era of colonization. But the moral epicenter of the West was changing, nonetheless and religious institutions adapted to the changing times. Early on, the Catholic Church resisted the introduction of slave labor to the Americas. But in the centuries that followed, religious leaders (mostly Protestant) figured out how to justify slavery with Church doctrine.

Meanwhile, the intellectual architects of this new world order, who were just as complicit in all of the violence as anyone else, dealt with the situation by doubling-down on their progressive credentials, blaming the violence on the behavior of unenlightened Europeans who had more traditional (and by implication, conservative) values. It’s also worth noting that these Liberal-minded intellectuals held many of the same opinions about the inferiority of non-European people that had been famously attributed to these conservative-reactionary types. And I suppose, from a progressive perspective, the difference between the racist commonsense of reactionary-conservatives and the “racial opinions” of Liberal intellectuals, really were very significant. But from the perspective of the people who were tracked into slavery—and the descendants of these people, such as myself—this is all just a matter of splitting hairs.

There’s a lot more that I could write on this point but I’ll just note, for the time being, that the questions that have been raised about Immanuel Kant’s racism (which is debated, but I think the case against Kant is pretty compelling) and the role John Locke played in justifying the colonization of the Americas are two relevant examples.

So, instead of admitting that African slavery and genocidal violence against indigenous people was an endemic feature of modernization and that all of the architects of this process held some responsibility for this violence (and not just an “unenlightened” subset of Europeans), we end up with a kind of politics that is still very much with us today.

Disagreements between “liberals” and “conservatives” are used to explain all of our social problems. If only the [fill in the blank] people on the other side of the political divide would come to their senses and agree with us, everything could be fixed!

This carefully curated map of our political terrain—which ignores a whole slew of concerns that could easily produce their own “politics,” if they were given any opportunity to mature—has become one of the few publicly acceptable ways we have of addressing the big questions of our day. But it also functions, even more effectively, as a way of avoiding so many other important issues.

We are still unable to meet each other’s gaze; unable to face up to our collective complicity in the violence that made the world we inhabit.

And this is just one of the many stories that has made the chasm what it is today.

Drifting in the hollow space

Being black has allowed me to observe all of this, without getting too invested in all of it.

When I was younger, I believed that our lives, necessarily, lead somewhere. I believed that once you achieved some success that you would also have people to share it with, beyond your immediate family that is. In other words, I thought it was possible to form some kind of community. But instead I found myself in a hollow space, that kept getting hollower the more I “succeeded.”

My blackness offered me one explanation for the hollowness of things…and one price of success (i.e. achieving a relatively stable middle class existence) is that I became further and further removed from people like myself, to the point where it became almost impossible for me to identify the people who were “like myself” (considering that I’m not-the-blackest-of-black-people; my dad was white, I was raised in mostly white social settings, and on top of that, we moved from one country to the next every few years).

But these poignant complications that are more or less unique to my situation, are also reflections of a more general condition, which isn’t unique to me at all, or even to the black condition. The chasm is bigger than race and racism or any other “ism.”

We are all yelling across the chasm at each other about DEI, immigration policy and whatever else, while living our atomized lives—unable or unwilling to see that most of things we are fighting about are just symptoms of deeper problems (and that, perhaps, we are using our ideological disputes as a way of avoiding these problems).

Sifting through the embers

A closing thought: meditations on the death of God also, inevitably, become meditations about our possible futures.

The sociological canon has, generally, tried to look on the bright side of all of the changes that I’ve associated with the death of God.

I think this is partly because we’ve been socialized to believe that if you start questioning the benefits of modernity, you are giving up on the future—which means that you want to retreat to a world that is ruled by oppressive traditions.

I think Benjamin Barber has captured this dichotomy nicely with his contrast of Jihad versus McWorld, as the two forces that are contending for the future of globalization today (though it’s worth noting, and I think Barber would agree, that we aren’t limited to these two choices).

Meanwhile, our optimistic narratives about modernity continue to look away from the problem of the chasm.

They don’t acknowledge that the wonders of the modern world were made possible by disembedding processes that created an ontological tear in our concept of what it means to be human.

We’ve ripped apart something that we haven’t bothered to stitch back together.

The religious and mystical traditions of the ancient world resonate with me for this simple reason.

They allow me to catch a glimpse of what community, sacredness, forgiveness and reconciliation meant before our world was torn apart by the chasm.

Of course we still have many of these religious traditions with us today. Some of them, like Christianity, are still regarded as foundational elements of our culture (in the US at any rate). But the meaning of all of these belief systems has been distorted and diminished by the nihilistic mundanities of the chasm—overdetermining the scope and contours of the love and inclusion that we are willing to extend to others.

I sift through these traditions like the embers of a dying fire. They keep me warm. They keep me grounded in a morality and an ethics that manifests itself relationally, through sympathetic connections (rather than logical deductions).

They help me to remember that change is messy and nonlinear. My meditations on these embers have also led me to speculate that the scientific enterprise may still be in its infancy.

I have no solutions, at least not at this time. And I’m not convinced that Nietzsche’s response to the death of God (the heralding of the Übermensch) is attuned to the problem of the chasm, though I find many of his critiques and diagnostics very useful.

These are just some beginning thoughts …

Other Posts
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The Curse of a Dying God - by Philip Kretsedemas
A meditation on watchfulness - by Philip Kretsedemas
Love = accepting death gracefully - by Philip Kretsedemas
The Infancy of Science (what could this possibly mean?)
A radical empiricist reading of the Good Samaritan parable

Always attack

Philip Kretsedemas — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 00:51:35 GMT

The idea that you should “turn the other cheek” when dealing with difficult people is probably on the top 5 of most people’s lists of impractical teachings from the Bible.

The actual quote from the Book of Matthew (5:39, New International Version), which comes straight from the mouth of Jesus is, ”But I tell you, do not resist an evil person! If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.”

So if a malicious person demands things of you—or wants to do awful things to you—you’re instructed to let them have what they want, even if this means allowing your life to be turned completely upside down.

This certainly sounds like impractical advice. It also sounds like the opposite of any counsel that Nietzsche would give, considering the value he placed on strength and the pursuit of power.

1. Nietzsche’s opinion of Jesus’ instruction to “turn the other cheek”

I was surprised to find that Nietzsche’s reflections on this teaching are moderately sympathetic (and they come from The Will to Power, of all books; check out passage 163, which I’ve also discussed in the section titled Nietzsche’s Thoughts on Jesus that appears near the end of this post).

Nietzsche actually views this teaching as one of the more admirable (i.e. not-resentful) features of Jesus’ guide to living.

From a Nietzschean perspective, “turning the other cheek” could translate as something like this. Don’t get bogged down in defending yourself against what bad-minded people are trying to do to you. You will come into your own power, with fewer detours, if you resist the urge to react and continue on with what you instinctively know you must do.

But this is my elaboration. What Nietzsche actually writes is “Bliss is not something promised; it is there if you live and act in such and such a way.” He just tries to restate what he believes the message of the teaching is, without trying to synthesize it with his philosophy, as I have tried to do (and very clumsily too).

Here’s another way to think about this teaching which takes my clumsy attempt at reading Nietzsche’s will to power into Matthew 5:39, a few steps further.

2. Vulnerability and aggression are two sides of the same coin

When you “turn the other cheek” you are making yourself vulnerable. But vulnerability is not the same thing as passivity. You’re not retreating from all forms of conflict. You’re being more mindful and selective about what you’re going to fight for, and how you’re going to fight.

It’s also worth noting that there are methods of combat which understand aggression and vulnerability as two sides of the same coin.

One example that comes to mind for me are the Nordic berserkers who were famous for fighting naked, and for using their nudity to intimidate their opponents.

When you fight naked you are signaling; 1) that you are prepared to die, and 2) you are prioritizing methods of attack over methods of defense. You don’t want to be encumbered by body armor, a shield, a helmet or anything else that will impede your ability to do lethal damage to your opponent.

Early Christians figured out how to do the same thing, but without weapons. They weren’t aiming for a military victory. They had even more ambitious goals, to transform hearts and minds.

I think they understood that if you react to what other people are trying to do to you, you cede your power to them. Even if you manage to successfully defend yourself, you have begun to operate within their definition of the situation … you start living inside of the story they have about you.

Plus, if you’re reacting to people, who are themselves, highly reactive (i.e. people who need to have an enemy to rail against in order to think clearly), you will probably end up doing things that will trigger their defenses…because you’ve allowed yourself to become the demon they need you to be, so they can continue to feed their egos about their own righteousness.

And all of this reactivity and defensiveness distracts from the fight you’re trying to bring to them—which is to get them to reflect on the wisdom of their own choices, in light of the moral questions you are putting to them (which they try to evade at every opportunity).

3. Applications for us today

These insights have practical application, even for people who are not trying to change the world.

I think most of us will have a better quality of life if we can improve our ability to avoid egoistic conflicts. But avoiding dead-end conflicts is only half the challenge.

If avoidance becomes your number one goal, you are heading down a path that leads to nihilistic passivity.

It’s also important to know how to fight well. You can’t learn to do this if you’ve become habituated to thinking that all of your aggressive impulses are bad.

Taking the risks that are necessary to build bridges between people, initiating new projects, innovating new and better solutions for problems that really matter to people … all of these feats are made possible by disciplined and highly-refined aggressive impulses (which, as Nietzsche might have argued, are all iterations of the will to power).

When it is refined in this way, aggression becomes a life-affirming force which is all about creating not controlling.

When you read the teaching to “turn the other cheek” in this light, it translates into this very simple piece of advice.

Don’t defend. Always attack.

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Prometheus revisited

Philip Kretsedemas — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 00:55:31 GMT

Virtuous people should not do good things so that they can avoid the pangs of hell.

Virtuous people must be prepared to suffer the pangs of hell to bring good things into the world.

Prometheus is still chained to that rock he was fastened to thousands of years ago.

He will have his innards torn out by a screeching eagle, eternally.

If you listen to the quiet parts of your soul under the spell of midnight

you might still hear the shudders of his writhing body straining against titanium chains,

as he hangs over the cliff at the edge of the world,

where the waters of all the earth’s oceans flow into the void.

He’s taught himself to stop screaming when the eagle pierces his flesh.

He will not give his tormentor that satisfaction.

And he’s stopped waiting for us.

He knows now that we will never be able to liberate him from the burden of his impossible generosity

… especially not the creatures of our age, who like to suffocate their morality in a drizzle of thick, diabetic treacle;

a morality that seduces us into using our earthly lives as investments on heavenly real estate,

so that when we die we can eat ice cream in paradise forever, in bodies that never grow fat.

How can Prometheus make himself sensible to us?

We stupid, superstitious moderns who no longer understand the gift of fire?

How can he compete with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny?

… this victim of fickle, amoral deities, suspended from a very different instrument of torture,

who can only offer a heroic standard with no guarantees or prizes;

and instead of delivering us from eternal damnation,

tells us there are things more important than our personal salvation,

and that it would be cowardly – sinful even – to ignore a moral calling out of a concern for the particulars of our fate in the afterlife.

People who want to live forever in immaculate condos in the sky are not capable of this kind of nobility.

We have no ears for his morality today;

dismissed as the senile ramblings of an old soldier who’s confused his egoism for virtue,

and humming a mad, ancient battle tune that would lead us to the black gates of hell.

Any one of us would check ourselves into a treatment facility if we felt these Promethean impulses squirming inside, itching, kicking at our bellies.

Meditation

This piece of free writing is my attempt to distill the heroic ideal that I think is conveyed by the story of Prometheus. Since my last few posts have delved into Nietzsche’s thoughts on the death of God … and considering that the God Nietzsche had in mind was the Judeo-Christian God, I think there is some value in comparing the Prometheus story to the Christian Crucifixion.

The “two deaths” that have befallen Prometheus and the Judeo-Christian God

These are both stories about people with divine/superhuman qualities who are prepared to sacrifice their lives for the sake of humankind. And I’m leaving aside the fact that one story is a myth and the other recounts an event whose historicity has been contested but is accepted by many scholars—including Nietzsche—as something that really did happen. For the purpose of this reflection, I’m treating them both as stories that convey heroic ideals which also serve as guides for how to live our lives, and how to die with dignity.

The death of God figures into both stories in at least two ways. First there is the death (or in Prometheus case, the eternal, near-death experience) that is recounted by the story itself. These deaths are actually foundational to the belief systems that both stories are being used to convey. The question of Jesus’ divinity, for example, was answered precisely in the way that he faced up to death and conquered it.

One the other hand, when Nietzsche declares the “death of God,” he is describing something very different—the withering of the belief system that is anchored by the story of the Crucifixion. And as I’ve noted in other posts, despite his trenchant criticism of Christianity, Nietzsche did not celebrate this second death of God. He recognized that it was the harbinger of an existential crisis that could allow the nihilism—that he associated with Christianity (but not only Christianity)—to sink its roots even deeper into the cultural fabric of the modern world.

“Prometheus revisited” (the piece of free writing at the top of this page) reflects on a similar kind of death that has befallen an even more ancient concept of divinity. This is why it ends by observing how alien the Promethean heroic standard is to us today. Anyone who tried to emulate it would probably be considered mad (or to use more delicate language, they would be viewed as engaging in “self-harming behavior”).

A synopsis of the Prometheus story

For people who are not familiar with the Prometheus story, here’s a quick synopsis. Prometheus belongs to mythic race—the Titans—that predates, and was overthrown by, the Olympian gods. The battle between the Titans and the Olympians is vaguely reminiscent of the epic battle of Ragnarok from Norse mythology, except that Ragnarok spells the end of the Asgardian gods, whereas the battle against the Titans is the starting point of the Olympian mythos…plus, the Titans are usually depicted as giants.

It’s also worth noting that all of the Olympian gods are the children of Titans. Prometheus, however, is not a father-god to the Olympians. He is more like a cousin (the elder Olympians and Prometheus are all children of the first Titans. I’m also assuming that the reason why Prometheus is traditionally identified as a Titan and not as an Olympian, even though they share the same lineage, is that he wasn’t a member of the insurrection against the elder Titans, by the children of Cronos, that established the Olympians as the new, ruling gods).

There is an agonistic quality to the Titan-Olympian relationship that is reminiscent of the power struggles between deposed noble classes (the “old guard”) and a new monarch. So it’s worth noting that Prometheus had a few testy encounters with the Olympians before the fire-stealing incident. In all of these encounters, Prometheus does something to undermine the authority of Zeus, the chief God of the Olympians. The fire-stealing story is the most famous of these tales, and is also the one that seals Prometheus’ fate.

The story, in of itself, is very simple. Prometheus steals fire from the Olympian gods, gives it to humans, and is eternally punished for this act.

Prometheus doesn’t die and get resurrected. According to Greek myth, Titans are immortal like the Olympian gods, so Prometheus doesn’t become immortal after death (like Jesus), his immortality is genetic to his earthly form —which means that he has to suffer being ripped apart by an eagle eternally—a fate that seems worse than death.

There is no indication in the story that Prometheus knew his actions would be punished so severely, so he’s not set up to be viewed as a sacrificial lamb. But like the Christ-figure, he is prepared to endure this impossibly severe punishment for the sake of human kind.

Nietzsche’s thoughts on Prometheus

Nietzsche wrote favorably about Prometheus (you can check out some of his Promethean musings in The Birth of Tragedy and The Gay Science). Prometheus exemplifies the noble-heroic standard that is a running theme of Nietzsche’s writing. These are people who can behave in selfless ways because they overflow with vitality—and not out of obligation or a pathetic desire to ingratiate themselves to others.

Prometheus, for example, undergoes incredible suffering, but the punishment doesn’t kill him. He regenerates after every attack and is ready to endure a fresh round of torture the next day. His act is also completely gratuitous. He doesn’t need nor does he expect anything from the people he helped.

But here’s where I part ways with Nietzsche.

Nietzsche is inclined to view Prometheus as a prototype of the Übermensch who defines themselves through their opposition to the Divine. I’m more inclined to see the Divine as coextensive with a shared human consciousness (rather than some dread force that towers over us). I think this way of engaging the Divine makes it possible us to step outside ourselves and connect with others in ways that can actually make us more human (better humans). When I get time to write about what the death of God means to me, from a black perspective, I’ll try to explain why I conceive of the Divine in this way.

For now, I’ll just note that Nietzsche’s thoughts on Prometheus are poetically compelling but frayed at the edges. For example, he wants to depict Prometheus as a prototype for the human creative spirit, which can only come into its own by pushing back against the Divine. But of course, Prometheus is not human.

According to Greek myth, he hales from an immortal race that is even older than the Olympian gods. The ancient Greeks didn’t build temples to Prometheus (at least not that I’m aware) but he is, arguably, just as eligible for the mantle of divinity as the Olympians.

Nietzsche also liked to favorably contrast the Greek god Dionysus (god of wine and ecstatic revelry) to the staid and logical posture of Apollo (god of light and music). So it’s not surprising that Nietzsche compares Prometheus’ heroism to the qualities he admires in Dionysus. But Dionysus happens to be the son of Zeus, the tormentor of Prometheus. So, Dionysus could be viewed as a deity who shares the same divine status as Zeus, but whose divinity manifests itself through a different aesthetic of living.

Keeping this all in mind, Nietzsche is not really, categorically, rejecting the Divine. He’s making distinctions between different concepts of divinity to highlight the qualities he admires (Dionysus) and detests (Zeus and Apollo).

Nietzsche’s thoughts on Jesus

All of these reflections take me back to the Prometheus-Jesus comparison. Nietzsche admired Prometheus and was (in)famously critical of Christianity. But when Nietzsche had positive things to say about Christianity, it was usually about Jesus himself.

Consider these words, from The Will to Power (from 162 in my edition, which is not the page number btw, but the number associated with this particular passage).

“The way this Jesus suffers and dies, without rebelling, without enmity, graciously, resignedly, is the only right way.”

These words are Nietzsche’s attempt at imagining what the thief on the cross next to Jesus was thinking, as he witnessed his suffering.

Nietzsche also translates one of Jesus’ most important teachings in this way, “The Kingdom of Heaven is a condition of the heart … Not something ‘above the earth’ … it is an ‘inward change in the individual,’ something that comes at every moment, and at every moment not arrived.” (The Will to Power, 161).

It bears emphasizing that Nietzsche is summarizing these lessons from Jesus in an approving way. He also doesn’t see Jesus’ death on the cross as weak or pathetic.

I think Nietzsche understands the Crucifixion—similar to Prometheus willingness to suffer eternal punishment—as a noble act that is not performed out of obligation or out of a desire to make others obligated to you (the latter, being one of the things that Nietzsche criticizes the Church for doing with the memory of the Crucifixion).

Jesus and Prometheus behave like free people who are obligated, only, to follow their own conscience. They do what they believe is right and they are willing to pay the price without complaint—the point being that they have chosen their path, they own their life and they hold no one else responsible for it.

I was also surprised that Jesus’ instruction to “turn the other cheek” is digested by Nietzsche with relative ease (see The Will to Power, passage 163, first sentence)—considering that this is one of Jesus’ lessons that people today, including many long time believers, still have a hard time accepting.

For Nietzsche, this teaching is part and parcel of what it means to live your life without resentment. Don’t dwell on what happened yesterday, don’t harbor grudges, just let go and move on to the next thing.

And this advice doesn’t contradict Nietzsche’s guidance that “power is good.” Yes, you should strive to always increase your power; but people who are truly powerful don’t expend their energies taking revenge on others for petty slights. You have to let go of your resentment (the need to defend yourself or to take the revenge) if you want to travel down the path to power.

Given everything I’ve just shared, I hope the reader will understand that my satiric references to Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and people who want to live in “immaculate condos in the sky” is not intended as a wholesale criticism of Christianity (or other varieties of religious belief). I’m actually agreeing with Nietzsche’s insight into Jesus’ teachings, that the Kingdom of Heaven is “within” and not some place “above us.”

But it’s also worth noting that Nietzsche’s opinions about Jesus are erratic (he also has lots of critical things to say). And, especially when it comes to his views on religion, Nietzsche has a tendency to label certain behaviors and character traits as “decadent” and “resentful” and then, later in his writings, rehabilitate many of these qualities as attributes of noble types.

This is why it’s possible for Nietzsche to see the nobility in Prometheus’ endless suffering, but to view the Crucifixion (as interpreted by the Church establishment) as the triumph of resentment.

But as I’ve just pointed out, Nietzsche’s reflections on the lesson that Jesus intended to impart, with his death on cross, is a lot more sympathetic. And though Nietzsche was very critical of the Church establishment, I know from personal experience that there are many Christian believers (including members of the Church establishment, as well as people of many other faiths) who emulate the noble qualities that Nietzsche associated with Jesus.

Closing Thoughts

I don’t have a tidy resolution for everything that I’ve just shared. These meditations just provide an opportunity for me to reflect further on the things I’ve written. As always, I hope these reflections provide food for thought about the passage above. I also hope these reflections inspire people to undertake similar meditations about their own writings.

I will end with these two points which are threads that I’ll probably pick up on, in one way or another, in future posts.

First, the story of Prometheus provides a better pathway than Dionysus (who is Nietzsche’s favorite Greek god) for tracing the synergies between Nietzsche’s concept of nobility and a Christian worldview (this insight begs yet another question that I’ll have to leave for another time, of why this would be a valuable thing to do).

Second, the threads that run between both of these stories shed more light on the ramifications of the “death of God”, which are not limited to Western Christian culture (even though, as I noted at the top of this meditation, Nietzsche’s thoughts on God usually refer to the Western, Judeo-Christian God).

Nevertheless, in my meditation on The Curse of a Dying God, I speculated that the ”death of God” is an event that burns away a rich tapestry of cognitive schemas that have probably been evolving for many thousands of years. So, it’s not just the Christian concept of the Divine that’s been diminished, but a deep structure of ideas, sentiments and practices that spans many cultures.

I’ll have to end it for now. This has been more than enough writing for one day.

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The guest at the door - by Philip Kretsedemas

The Curse of a Dying God

Philip Kretsedemas — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 14:49:00 GMT

Justice!

Yelling at the sky to rain down the particles of an order that never existed;

tailored to suit the fickle tastes of a bizarre breed of people

who pursue their happiness in isolation, on islands of privation.

Their lush grass, streams and orchards are nourished

by the rotting flesh of a gargantuan celestial visitor

who they killed long ago in a fit of jealous rage.

They still build their homes in its shadow

and call on its ghost for inspiration when they need help finding a new job

or picking numbers for the lottery.

And before this creature died, drunk on their poisonous flattery,

it made two wishes

that still echo across the cavernous folds of its pursed purple lips,

that all their prayers be turned to stone

and the only justice they receive

be the just distribution of injustices.

Meditation

This piece of free writing fits in with my recent posts that have been exploring the possible meanings of Nietzsche’s impossible aphorism, “God is dead.” I actually wrote this piece years before I started actively reflecting on Nietzsche’s thoughts on God. So I suppose this topic has been haunting me long before I became consciously aware of it (I have a couple other pieces of free writing on similar themes—also written many years ago that I’m going to release soon).

I don’t think anything I have to say about this piece of writing should inhibit anyone else’s interpretations of it, especially since my understanding of the things I write evolves over time. This is one of the many reasons why I recommend this kind of free-writing as a method for self-care and personal growth.

I’ve learned a lot about myself just by taking the time to put my thoughts into words, without restricting them to the rigors of a particular genre or format (which is why this series is titled “Instead of poetry”). It would have been a lot harder for me to write if I held to the idea that “I’m trying to write a poem!” I had to get rid of the image-of-poetry that I had in my head, in order to produce poetic writing (that doesn’t aspire to be poetry).

And perhaps this also applies to Nietzsche’s declaration about God. Is he really killing God, or getting rid of a particular idea of God (a concept that has become encumbered by so much cultural baggage that it’s hard for many people to understand what it really means) so that we can reset, and engage the Divine with fresh eyes?

It also could be that Nietzsche ended up doing something like this, without realizing it … in the same way that I began writing this piece, before I had any intention about reflecting on the death of God.

But let me move on to the main goal of this meditation, which is to reflect on what this piece of writing means to me, right now.

I think there’s an inverse relationship between the cultural foundations of rights-based concepts (which are the seedlings for many of the ideas we have about justice, equality, freedom and so on) and the process that turned these concepts into an institutional fact of life. In a nut shell, I think we allowed these cultural foundations to wither and die at the same time that we were codifying these ideas about justice, universal suffrage and human rights into our laws and systems of governance.

This process is my rather abstract take on what I think Nietzsche was referring to with the death of God (also discussed here).

From a Nietzschean perspective, the sensibilities that fill the void after the death of God are ruled by resentment. And resentment is more than just a psychological trait, though many of its symptoms manifest at the level of personal psychology—the petty motivations, fear-based reasoning and bad-mindedness…focusing all of your energies on stopping other people from acting (and taking satisfaction in their failures), as a way of avoiding your own responsibility to act.

All of these resentful instincts attach, very easily, to the norms of a rights-based culture.

But there’s another genealogy of rights which is informed by instincts and sensibilities that are very different and are also much older than the modern concept of the rights-bearing individual (I’ll have to ask you to take my word on this for now, but I’m planning to substantiate this proposition in forthcoming posts).

This genealogy is sustained by a deeply felt understanding of our shared nature (which isn’t necessarily limited to our identification with other homosapiens).

You respect the dignity of the other—not just because they are a fellow member of your “tribe”, but as a singular individual who suffers and aspires to love just like you. And you can do this because you know there is something that transcends both of you, in which you are both embedded, that makes it possible for their life situation to resonate for you.

I think that our concepts of human rights, justice, civil and political rights, etc … owe their existence, in part, to these sensibilities which had been evolving in their own way, outside of our formal institutions, for many thousands of years. But the modernization process radically diminished them (the cultural equivalent of deforestation) … and so, we are left with a rights-based culture with shallow roots, that is unable to rely on there being a basic standard of dignified treatment to which all people are entitled.

The giant corpse of the celestial visitor in “The Curse of a Dying God” is my poetic distillation of the process I’ve just described.

I’ll note in closing that, while nothing I’ve written directly contradicts Nietzsche, I’m definitely doing my own thing with his ideas (more on this in forthcoming posts).

And here’s a final note about the last line of the piece of free writing that I’ve used as my excuse for this meditation—the line that ends by proclaiming a time in which the only justice anyone will receive is the “just distribution of injustices.”

I’ve described these hateful words as being uttered by the dying god (i.e. God’s resentment against us). But these words actually describe what we’re doing to each other on a daily basis. This is the situation we’ve created for ourselves.

Other Posts
God is dead ... a sociological perspective
Love = accepting death gracefully - by Philip Kretsedemas
Maybe we’re all death eaters? - by Philip Kretsedemas
It is best to say nothing - by Philip Kretsedemas
The guest at the door - by Philip Kretsedemas

God is dead ... a sociological perspective

Philip Kretsedemas — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 21:01:04 GMT

In prior posts, I’ve suggested that “God is dead” is not really an atheistic statement. I’ve also noted that the circumstances of Nietzsche’s childhood offer some insights into the personal meaning this statement may have held for him.

This is the first post in which I’m going to try to explain what “God is dead” could mean, as a social and historical event. You should also keep in mind that I’m inclined to provide a sociologically-relevant explanation of things because I’m a sociologist by training.

Anyhow, here goes.

1. “God is Dead” is not a commentary on the existence of God

I don’t think the “God” that Nietzsche is addressing with this aphorism is a Divine entity. I think he’s actually referring to the institutions and deep culture of the Western world, which had once been rooted in the belief in God - from approximately the medieval to the early modern era.

Consider, for example the Galilean revolution in astronomy which turned the ancient cosmological map of the universe upside down – by showing that the earth was just one planet revolving around the sun, which meant that it couldn’t be the center of the universe. Most people know that Galileo’s assertion of a heliocentric solar system was opposed by the Catholic Church. His books on this subject were banned by the Church for about three hundred years.

As with most things, however, the storyline gets more convoluted the closer you examine it. The Catholic Church didn’t initially crack down on Galileo in a heavy-handed way and there were personality issues on all-sides that contributed to the fracas. It’s also worth noting that the position that Church leaders were defending, about the earth being the center of the universe wasn’t a theory of their own invention—it was the reigning opinion of the international scholarly community, with respectable precedents that could be traced to the intellectual giants of the ancient world, like Plato.

2. The shifting aside

But putting all of these details aside, the Galilean controversy became one of the watershed events that signaled the waning influence of religious institutions over the orders of knowledge that were being used to make the modern world.

Nietzsche was born into a time when this process was well under way.

About twenty years before Nietzsche was born, the Catholic Church lifted its ban on Galileo’s publications on the heliocentric solar -- and Galileo’s theory had gained wide acceptance in the scientific community for almost a hundred years prior to that time. It also bears noting that Galileo’s cosmological dispute with Catholic Church was just one of many harbingers of the shifting tide.

Viewed in this light, Nietzsche’s declaration that “God is dead,” could be read as a dispassionate commentary on the times in which he was living.

So those are some points to consider, but we still have to contend with his choice of words.

3. Nietzsche’s mythic imagination

Nietzsche may have been using the “death of God” as a way of describing the untethering of religious belief systems from the domains of science and statecraft, but he clearly doesn’t write like a sociologist.

The “death of God” is poetic language, and more to the point, it’s mythic language.

When I stretch my imagination for examples of “the death of God” I have to dive into my storehouse knowledge about ancient pagan myths, like … the story of Loki killing Baldur (the Norse god of light) or the Olympian gods, led by Zeus who slay Cronos the elder god, their tyrannical baby-eating father, and so on.

Q: Who or what is powerful enough to kill a God?

A: Another God.

The concept of “God dying” or “gods dying” evokes a mythic realm, populated by beings with god-like powers. This is another reason why “God is dead” is not really an atheistic statement.

Nietzsche is also doing some very mischievous things when he uses the persona of Zarathrustra, to hale the “death of God”—considering that the “real” Zarathustra (a.k.a Zoroaster) was an ancient Persian prophet who is credited for founding the first monotheistic religion which is premised on there being a cosmic struggle between good and evil.

So what is Nietzsche up to when he announces the death of God (implicitly, the Christian God) using a character that appears to be modeled after the founder of an ancient religion that is similar, in some ways, to Christianity?

One interpretation is that Nietzsche wants to replace the Christian God with a more virile version of itself. Another interpretation is that Nietzsche wants humans to become “like Gods”—assuming the place of the God who is now dead (killed by the “ugliest man”). Or perhaps these interpretations are just two sides of the same coin.

No matter which interpretation you favor (one, the other or both) they all put Nietzsche at odds with the emergent intellectual culture of his day.

Closing thoughts (for now)

Nietzsche was not using his declaration about the “death of God” to align himself with the secular, intelligentsia of the modern world. He also doesn’t object to Christianity (or any of the kind of religious belief) simply on the grounds that it is religious—the more relevant questions for Nietzsche are, “what kind of God?”, “what kind of belief?”

Nietzsche is smashing idols (false idols in his mind) out of reverence for something truer, more worthy of emulation.

He appears to be advocating for a radically new kind of consciousness and is, at the same time, a vociferous critic of the new (or one version of it).

He unleashes a withering critique of an intellectual culture that diminishes the concept of God (though Nietzsche seems to vacillate between blaming this culture for diminishing people’s faith in God and contributing to this diminishment with his own polemics)

… but this critique also leaves a God-shaped hole in its wake, which begs a host of questions that can only be satisfactorily answered by ways of knowing—that used to be the province of spiritualists and myth-makers—which have been shunted to the margins of the modern order of knowledge.

And at the end of it all, Nietzsche declares a “pox on all houses.” He denounces both the Christian Church and the secular intellectual culture that Galileo helped establish as being complicit architects of the same nihilistic culture.

I don’t think it’s possible to boil all of this down into a coherent partisan-ideological or political position (which is one reason why people on all sides of the political divide have embraced and rejected his writings)—but I do think that Nietzsche puts his finger on most of the existential crises that are fueling the politics of our times. This may all seem abstract to some readers, but its really not.

For me, the “death of God” is an introduction to the spiritual territory that explains the frustrated desires, the disillusionment and the utopian ambitions that are behind most of the conflicts in the world today (I’ll start zeroing-in on some of these present day conflicts in later posts).

I also want to underscore that I don’t think that Nietzsche had a viable solution for the problems he diagnosed. So I don’t have any illusions about trying to “follow” Nietzsche’s path, though I don’t think he can be ignored, and I’m also not “opposed” to him. I don’t think these kinds of bifurcated schema apply to my understanding of Nietzsche (endorse/oppose, accept/reject, like/dislike).

I’ll just say, for the time being, that I’ve learned a lot from my engagement with Nietzsche’s writings, especially when it comes my revaluation of spirituality—even though the path I’ve taken is not one that Nietzsche would have travelled.

And this all begs the question, why would a black person be interested in reading Nietzsche to begin with? …. particularly, a black person such as myself? What lessons, of any value, could I derive from the work of someone who obviously wasn’t intending his writing to be read by someone like me?

These are going to be my starting questions for the next post in this series.

Other posts
Is “God is dead” really an atheistic statement?
Did “God is dead” really mean “my dad is dead”?
Love = accepting death gracefully - by Philip Kretsedemas
Is Harry Potter a Nietzschean hero? (Yes)
Maybe we’re all death eaters? - by Philip Kretsedemas