The gospel contra Nietzsche: a South African literary critique of Wille zur Macht
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Date
2017
Authors
Hale, F.
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Faculty of Theology, University of the Free State
Abstract
A century of scholarship has shed countless photons of light on the reception
of Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas in numerous countries. Still largely unilluminated,
however, are South African reactions to his scepticism and moral pessimism. The
present article explores how Joseph Doke, a scholarly, transplanted Englishman
who served as a Baptist pastor in Johannesburg and elsewhere and wrote the
first biography of Gandhi, used fiction to criticise Nietzsche early in the twentieth
century. His novel The queen of the secret city (1916) embodies an explicit rejection
of this German philosopher’s pivotal notion of Wille zur Macht (will to power). It
is further suggested that Doke was probably indebted to G.K. Chesterton’s
confrontation with that idea in Orthodoxy (1908). In Doke’s critique of Nietzsche,
he also described ethnic and religious clashes and implicitly argued for the moral
superiority of Christianity and the ethical need for missionary endeavours.
Description
Keywords
Joseph J. Doke, Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to power, Gilbert K. Chesterton, Hale, F. (2017). The gospel contra Nietzsche: a South African literary critique of Wille zur Macht, 37(1), 41-55.