From Richard Shusterman’s essay, “Ehics and Aesthetics are One”
Taken from the anthology, After the Future
There are at least two good reasons why not even…localized human essenses can be found. First, not only in a mammoth country like America but in any advanced civilization, there is a very high order of division of labor, a division of occupational roles. The notion of a general functional human essense that Aristotle and other ethical theorists assumed and built upon seems no longer viable when men and women have so many different functional occupations that are so difficult to reconcile. How do we reconcile the functional essense of the farmer and the stockbroker, the creative artist and and factory hand, the priest and the cosmetician, the scientist and the casino operator? Much more disturbing is the fact that we not only collectively experience a conflict of divergent [occupational] functional essenses but we feel it just as powerfully on the individual personal level. The conflict between a woman’s functional essense as defined by her profession, and that defined by her role as mother is perhaps the most familiar and accute of such contemprorary problems of identity. But there are countless other examples of how our professional role or self-definitions sharply conflict or simply do not coherently mesh with our self-definition as friends, family or political agents, thus making it seem impossible to find humankind a functional essense in some coherent amalgam of its social roles.
In some respects, Nietzsche’s God-is-dead nihilism fits right into the conjectures above. After all, if God could be posited and then produced, he would then function as both the ontological rim and the teleological hub we “mere mortal” spokes would cohere to “metaphysically” on the wheel of life. Sans God, however, we need to construe a secular facsimile. But given all of the multitudinous and mutilfarious “roles” and “options” open to us in our much more profoundly fragmented contemportary world, how would we go about that? Think, for example, of how we go about “acquiring” a sense of “self” and how someone born into, say, a small aboriginal communitity in the Amazon Basin might come to understand her role re the world around her.
Yet Nietsche was himself deluded, in my view, respecting the manner in which the far more open-ended approach to identity in the “modern world” is applicable to the “will to power” and the “ubermensch”. Nietzsche still valued the manner in which some folks [like him] see through the meek inheriting the earth; and as “blond beasts”, the Supermen are willing to embrace the consequences of the dead God in order to live their lives fully and passionaitely on a more “authentic” level.
In other words, just as Sartre tended to ascribe the manner in which others are “hell” in objectifying us, Nietzsche projected the same sort of agenda into “the herd”. Yet, like Sartre, Nietzsche failed to focus the beam intensely enough in another equally crucial direction: the manner in which we tend to objectify our own self.
What we do in the modern world, of course, is to differentiate the Real Me from all the personas we adopt around others in order to “play the game”. But what if our own sense of “self” [our alleged “true self”] is just a game we play in turn? What if we are merely deluding ourselves into imagining the distinction is “authentic”?
I think, by and large, that is exactly what we do.