Authority and Revelation

Abstract

This chapter tracks the ascetic ideal from its religious point of origin to some of its key manifestations in the realms of morality and aesthetics. It relates Nietzsche’s original critique to Kierkegaard’s critical advocacy of Christianity, and uses Cavell to show how the latter can help us to understand twentieth-century artistic modernism as genealogically related to religious and moral concerns. It also argues that contemporary debates between moral individualists and moral philosophers influenced by Wittgenstein (such as Raimond Gaita and Cora Diamond) can be understood as arguments over contemporary manifestations of the ascetic ideal in both religion and morality. The central themes of the chapter are then brought together in a reading of a novel by William Golding.