Eric Voegelin teaches that, in ancient civilizations, such as Egypt and Mesopotamia, the idea of "truth" was identical to that of the current social order. The notion of a divine truth superior to society and accessible to individual conscience even AGAINST the social order only appears in Greece - first in the theater, then in the life of Socrates - and is consolidated in Christianity.

Those who today stand against any idea that goes against the "establishment" still belong to a civilizational phase that has been over for many millennia.

The only knowledge that is absolutely certain, apart from formal universal truths, is that of your direct experience that only you had. I cannot prove the truth of my testimony, but I cannot escape it either. The lone witness is so lonely that others kill him to disappear with his testimony. In other words, the community denies the truth that is in the testimony of the lone witness.

So, there comes a day in your life when you have to make the following choice: I want the truth even if I can't prove it, even if I can't pass it on to anyone? Or do I just want what I can share, that I can have in common with others and be confirmed in my beliefs around the world, by all my colleagues, by all my peers and so on? In the first hypothesis you are a philosopher. In the second, you are a university professor or intellectual in the modern sense. This is an insoluble tension.

Anyone who sees the pictures of a beautiful woman at twenty and ninety immediately understands that Plato was right in saying that beauty is in form and not in matter, in the eternal and not in the corruptible. But the sight of the form dazzles, shakes and hypnotizes our material body in such a way that we are compelled to grasp it materially, which is as impossible as holding a stream of water in our hands.

If science proposes to be the free rational investigation of reality data, no conclusion that it offers about anything can be exempt from criticism and therefore none can have 'authority', except in the sense of the intellectual prestige without privileged support from the state power. The nationalization of scientific authority, to whatever degree, foreshadows the death of science and the advent of the 'scientific dictatorship' advocated by Auguste Comte, who in fact died a madman. State authority is the refuge of scientism, not science. This is what we are seem now with this mass hysteria.

Nietzsche turns his own personal (neurotic) experiences into philosophical theories. So, we read some pathetic pages where Nietzsche expresses his misogeny with ridiculous arguments, only to discover that all of that was a reaction to his failure in the love field with Lou-Salomé - the same woman who appears in the famous photo as a driver of a buggy that has Nietzsche like the horse that pulls her. In other words, the previously easily dominated Nietzsche tries to pose as superior after being dumped.

Not to mention his whole attempt to create a "superior morality" based on strength, when this is just a mask to hide his own personal emotional weakness (which we know today from the access we have to his letters). In other words, Nietzsche's books are a mere self-help made for himself.

I mean, as a theory, that sucks. As a testament to a subject with talents for psychology living in a time of madness, his books have some value. If they were written with the essence of the Confessions, losing their neurotic character, in fact the books would be much better. In that spirit, Ecce Homo would have less megalomaniacal titles.

What he writes about resentment would have a much greater validity if it had the confessional component, as he hides, it becomes a comedy. Nietzsche's work is tragicomic.

Nietzsche sometimes has brilliant insights, but it is necessary to be a bit dazzled not to realize that his philosophy contains an equally remarkable dose of grotesque childishness. When he projects his own inner mechanisms to compensate for the feeling of inferiority over the whole of civilization, it is impossible for any reader with an IQ above 12 not seeing the little slender and frightened boy there, wanting to be a strong man.