There probably wasn't much that Nietzsche and Pope John Paul 2 would have agreed upon. Maybe they both liked Strüdel and maybe they both knew that the word means whirlpool and the "roaring of waters." But there was something else. Both the German philosopher and the Polish Pope felt the same about Necessity and its relation to Free Will. The Pope was crystal clear: He believed in Free Will but defined it as the Freedom to do what was Necessary. And Nietzsche thought something similar. For the concept of "Law", Nietzsche substituted "Necessity." But this Necessity was not so much an established fact as an interpretation. "The total character of the world, however, is in all eternity chaos—in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms... Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is nobody who commands, nobody who obeys, nobody who trespasses. Once you know that there are no purposes, you also know that there is no accident; for it is only beside a world of purposes that the word `accident' has any meaning." Here, I'm betting Saint John Paul 2 gets off the boat. Nietzsche meant that a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. Or what a Volk has to do. Or what a Reich has to do. There were no other laws than that. Everything else was Slave Morality & Slave Mentality. John Paul's Necessity was the same but built around the opposite premise: In god man must do what god would have us do. We were therefore free to choose that path, or go to the devil. That's a fair summation of Christian Freedom: You're either on the Bus or you're off the Bus. Nietzsche's Necessity is to embrace the Chaos and do what Will allows. The Pope's Necessity is to embrace your duty Willingly. It's an argument about whether or not Freedom is - in both systems - an empty term.
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