Our Nietzschean Future
Paul O’Mahoney considers the awful fate Nietzsche predicts for humanity.
The Future of Philosophy
There is no doubt that the renunciation of the idea of freedom would represent an irreversible debasement of humanity as traditionally understood, inducing a kind of vertigo in our species. That such a renunciation might be inevitable, and belief in freedom irrecoverable, is however not at all difficult to imagine. How might a person orient themselves in this vertiginous climate?
Again, however, how far is he going with Nietzsche and determinism?
To wit...
"
Here, the conviction that a human being cannot realistically be held accountable for their actions is the norm. This would be a world in which there is no longer any concept of criminal responsibility. No longer would blame or merit be possible. The task confronting humanity as a whole is to wrestle with and reckon with the consequences of this new conventional wisdom. There are good reasons to believe that humanity, confronted with this refutation of its most cherished and sustaining illusions, would ultimately destroy itself."
Think this through as I do...
If we cannot be held accountable for our actions, and our actions are a result of what we think and feel, then how is the task confronting humanity not the same thing? We carry out the task but we are not accountable -- responsible -- for doing that either. And did the author and Nietzsche bring determinism all the way back to themselves? The author wrote this article and Nietzsche wrote those aphorisms only because they were never able not to? And we are reading them because we were never able not to?
The quandary at the heart of it all?
It must first be said that, despair-inducing though this future scenario might seem, it is likely also, after some period of adjustment, to be a spur to liberation – from responsibility, from hierarchy, and from fear.
Yeah, it can always work both ways. Despair because we must. But because we must despair it comes back to the illusion of despair. The matter that is my brain compels me to despair. But it's all embedded in the mystery of my mind itself. I despair in my dreams. It's all a chemical and a neurological despair. I'm sound asleep, not really feeling despair at all as I might in the waking world. But what of that despair in the waking world? Is that too all just the brain doing its thing in a wholly, totally inevitable world?
That's the part I can never untangle in my head. That's the part I can never be absolutely certain is a bona fide option for me.
Unafraid, more willing to wager the self on an action, in this future many human beings will come by default into possession of those Nietzschean virtues of daring and honesty that mark them as ascending types. That no attitude or action will be accounted their own choice, or worthy of praise or merit, will only sharpen the sense of fearlessness and commitment.
Again, the part where the author imagines this somehow in sync with a world "where human beings cannot realistically be held accountable for their actions"...a world where "no longer would blame or merit be possible."
Okay, an individual becomes one of the Übermensch...or an individual becomes one of the Last Men. So what? He can no longer embrace the merit of one or accept the blame for the other because merit and blame themselves are but inherent manifestations of the only possible world.