Our Nietzschean Future
Paul O’Mahoney considers the awful fate Nietzsche predicts for humanity.
Under these conditions [above], the appropriate conception of life would be that of a game: a grand, ongoing, purposeless and all-encompassing piece of play, each person with no more agency than a cast die or caroming billiard ball. The cosmos as a game was a metaphor of which Nietzsche himself was fond. Seeing the cosmos as a game is precisely the kind of god’s-eye view appropriate to the philosopher, who looks down on creation from a standpoint beyond good and evil.
Yeah, that is basically the frame of mind that any number the sociopaths embody in their own day to day interactions with others. The "what's in it for me?" game in which others are just a means to that end. And it's beyond good and evil precisely because "in the absence of God all things are permitted." Providing, of course, you don't get caught. But that's human justice. You might get tossed in jail. God and religion are then embraced in order to raise the stakes. Only even the sociopaths are as well wholly in sync with the only possible reality?
On the other hand, Nietzsche is often connected [philosophically or otherwise] to the Overman mentality. And here one chooses one's behaviors with considerably more deliberation...sophistication. You are on the top and not the bottom because you deserve to be. You triumph because you are among the "masters of the universe". It may be a game, but you are entitled to make up [and then enforce] the rules.
But then back to the part where Nietzsche is said to be...a determinist?
The idea, along with the thought that not truth but illusion sustains life, is prominent in Nietzsche’s early, unpublished writings from the 1870s (for example in the essay ‘Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks’ and the abandoned Philosophenbuch). Both sentiments also recur prominently in Nietzsche’s mature work, Beyond Good and Evil, which he calls ‘A prelude to a philosophy of the future’.
Or is this just one more attempt to make Nietzsche a compatibilist? The illusion of free will sustains life. But somehow Nietzsche's own philosophy -- his own thinking -- is still more insightful than those who refuse to share it. How then is that explained?
It is less of a surprise than one might think that in ruminating on the philosopher’s possible role in the future freedom-free world, Nietzsche, the great anti-Christian, holds in high regard the most genuinely religious nature – the committed mythmaking instinct of the religious leader or founder. It is even less surprising that, against the traditional picture, the future philosopher is no slave to or even servant of truth, and is instead closer to the artist.
The philosopher. The artist. The atheist. The myth-making religionist. And all while interacting with others in a "freedom-free world".
Or is this all really about word games? Making words mean what you want them to mean [in your head] so that they all fit snuggly into your own "thought up" "objective" assessment of both Nietzsche and the human condition itself? Past, present and future?
Then for all practical purposes whatever this means:
The future philosopher must move in a world where the deadliest knowledge has been disseminated and accepted; he is no longer the repository of dangerous or unendurable wisdom he traditionally was. He will be, says Nietzsche, a tempter and experimenter among humankind – and how indeed could he be otherwise, when the game is all?
The "no free will" game. He'll move in the world...he'll be a tempter and experimenter. He'll do all of this while wholly in sync with the laws of matter...but not really. Only some of us are still rather confused regarding how exactly this "not really" works.