Thucydidean Answers to Nietzschean Questions: Das religiose Wesen.

Interested Reader--Questions of nature's role in politics--what constitutes a people, justice, necessity--thread together into a singular significant problem: what is religious? This essay proposes that within the framework of religiosity we can better understand nature's place in politics. This being so, it is in contrast to Weber's Sociology of Religion that I begin with the desire to define religiosity--to say what it is. Das religiose Wesen is not so much intent on illuminating the various expressions of religion as it is preoccupied with understanding its essence. To provide answers, Thucydides serves as an invaluable educator.Thucydides' History provides us with a case study like no other. With it we can analyze human nature writ large: we see the rise of a people, observe their division, note the dissolution of their ancestral, and finally question the cancer of self-doubt that sets in as to the justness of their Justice--I meant to say: their crisis of faith.Das religiose Wesen takes into account the whole of Thucydides' History, but focuses on three particular sections. The Archaeology treats the constitution of the human edifice [1.1-19]. The speeches of the Athenians at Sparta [1.73-77] and Melos [5.85-111] discuss its dissolution. Throughout it all, nature's role in politics is increasingly revealed as a matter of "religiosity". As with Thucydides' History, this essay considers the Nietzschean corpus, but focuses on one article in particular, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life. The central questions Nietzsche raised here not only preoccupied his later writings but are most relevant and revealing to the topic at hand.Divided into two parts, the first part of Das religiose Wesen examines the nascent emergence and mature decline of a people, the second strives to grasp the modus operandi behind it-- ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]