Volume 47, Number 12 · July 20, 2000
East and West: The Reach of Reason
By Amartya Sen
W.B. Yeats wrote on the margin of his copy of The Genealogy of Morals, 'But why does Nietzsche think the night has no stars, nothing but bats and owls and the insane moon?' Nietzsche outlined his skepticism of humanity and presented his chilling vision of the future just before the beginning of the last century—he died in 1900. The events of the century that followed, including world wars, holocausts, genocides, and other atrocities that occurred with systematic brutality, give us reason enough to worry whether Nietzsche's skeptical view of humanity may not have been right.
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