Dr. J. Budziszewski

I mean, everything that I'm telling you about is really sin.

It's intellectual sin, which is real sin.

But any other sin was in my mind.

I mean, I didn't cheat on my wife.

I didn't do all these other kinds of things.

Why not?

um i had no reason to but i thought i thought you may have had one eventually i had there i was coasting partly on momentum i'd had a pretty moral upbringing yeah i at one time before abandoning faith i'd been pretty pious although not good not holy and um and uh i had bought into this nietzschean idea insofar as i could speak of ideas at all that um

Rather than virtue being a quality of character that is a constituent of a flourishing life or something like that, I thought, well, there are different kinds of

souls and for one cruelty might be a virtue and for one kindness might be a virtue and um you know i belong to this i i happen to find myself belonging to this coalition of types of souls but i could just as well have belonged to another one is that because you perceived yourself to be magnanimous the kind of nietzschean idea of resentment is this you thought you were the strong man is

You know, even in my Nietzschean phase, I thought that his idea of resentment and all of those ideas were silly.

Oh, if what you mean is that there can be certain outlooks that grow from resentment, yes, I think that that's true.

Oh, yes, I think that's true.

That's the insight that I think is brilliant.

But then again, he wasn't the first one who came up with that idea.

Who came up with that idea?

No, I mean, I think that's been realized by many people all along.

But he just took it in a particular direction that needed an apologetic against Christianity.

Because you're not powerful because you're only a slave.

No, no, no.

Yeah, I knew what you meant.