ABSTRACT
It’s the openness of postmodernity that causes fear; and in the century that has passed since Nietzsche was writing, the ‘open sea’ has flooded yet more of the land on which intellectual foundations can be built. Unsurprisingly, as there has never been more sea, there has never been more fear. Our age has recently been characterised by one intellectual historian as one of ‘pervasive cultural disquietude’, beset as it is ‘with problems of anxiety, alienation, and emptiness’; and a theologian has described how ‘we have, for all our ingenuity, become increasingly confused’, no longer knowing ‘what to say or do or value, or how to realise the goals we seek . . . like children in the forest, lost’.2 Yet, as Nietzsche declares, openness can be viewed more positively: liberated from ‘single vision’, it’s possible to see, not just one, but a variety of alternative ‘world[s] to discover’.
