★How did Nietzsche's declaration of "the death of God" give birth to a postmodern fragmented society?
★An intellectual book that breaks down professional barriers, a feast of ideas that refuses to be simplified.
★From the collapse of classical antiquity to the 21st century, a journey of exploration by adventurers of human thought in one hundred and thirty years
★Is it a spiritual regression, or a return to fanaticism? Where will humanity, standing at a divergent point in history, go?
[About the author] Peter Watson, born in 1943, is a British intellectual history scholar, founder and editor-in-chief of "Race Today" magazine, deputy editor-in-chief of "New Society" magazine, former reporter and columnist for "The Times", "New York Times", "Observer" and other newspapers, Cambridge University A researcher at the Macdonald Institute of Archeology, he is famous in the Western world for his magnificent works on the history of ideas, including "History of Ideas: From Fire to Freud", "History of 20th Century Ideas: From Freud to the Internet", "German Genius", "The Great Separation: The History of the Parting of the Old and New Continents", etc.
[Introduction] This is a fascinating story about human exploration and creation, failure and success in an isolated world.
In 1882, Nietzsche announced that "God is dead." As a sign, the Western world entered the era of atheism. The shock caused by the collapse of religious belief gave birth to a flourishing of all fields from the ideological world to the art and culture. Philosophers, poets, playwrights, painters, psychologists, scientists... Tens of thousands of outstanding individuals devoted their creative energy to designing a lifestyle without God, facing hope and disappointment alone on the ruins of the collapse of ultimate values, refusing to compromise, and demonstrating human dignity and courage. Today, their story is told in full for the first time.
As one of the most outstanding intellectual historians of our time, Peter Watson takes the ideological shock caused by Nietzsche at the turn of the century as the starting point and examines how this shock invades all aspects of spiritual life, ranging from Dostoevsky, Jung, Husserl, and Ibsen to Picasso and Bob Dylan, from psychology, phenomenology, and theosophy. To Impressionism, Pop Art, Jazz, from Auschwitz, Hiroshima, the Great Purge to Woodstock, and "9·11". Connecting the dots, he uses elegant and precise strokes to unearth the orderly context behind seemingly unrelated phenomena, and draws an ideological map from the era of classical collapse to the bizarre postmodern era.
Although atheism-oriented life is by no means a perfect life, the human soul always refuses to sink into a dark place. For more than a century, the pursuit of the meaning of existence and the enlightening answers of these best minds have merged into a grand theme of life. For those who want to know the meaning of life, or those who want to understand the era in which we live, discovering the "Age of Nothingness" will be a surprising spiritual experience.
