Nietzsche vs. Socrates

The New Criterion has a wonderful article discussing Julien Benda’s work, “La Trahison des clercs” (The treason of the intellectuals), and an extension of Benda’s work by Alain Finkielkraut titled, “La Défaite de la pensée” (The Undoing of Thought.)  I had heard of the term La Trahison des clercs, a kind of yuppie insult to post modern leaning college professors, but I was not actually familiar with the contents of the work. 

I found the article incredible interesting and will probably comment more on it at some other time, but what is most interesting to me is how this concept ties in with the idea of natural law (for example the destruction of diversity without a fundamental concept of the “universality of humanity”) and the effect that these concepts have on the implementation of free will.  I many ways this article acts like a philosophical discussion of the ideas presented in C.S. Lewis’s “The Abolition of Man.”