I’ve gotten a tad bored lately with political philosophers and there’s not much more Mill left for me to read. So I’ve started reading Mencken and, as a result, some of Nietzsche’s earlier works again (e.g., Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, The Gay Science, etc.).
My argument goes as follows: Nietzsche was wrong for the same reasons that Marx was wrong. He viewed the individual in the same way that Marx viewed society, professing a “planned economy of the self” (or so I say). Nietzsche would, no doubt, scoff at this argument for being too “English” and parsimonious in nature. But, alas, such is the nature of science, both social and physical.
Laissez-faire capitalists of Nietzsche’s time rightfully saw a corollary between Darwin’s theories and economies. But they wrongfully translated “survival of the fittest” to a literal understanding of economies; they thought economies were atomistic and constituted by individuals who competed as whole, rational, comporting agents.
Economists and libertarians no longer think this. They’ve been struggling to shed this image for quite some time. The poor aren’t poor because they are “unfit.” They also aren’t poor because they’re being “exploited,” as the Marxists would have you think. Rather, the poor are poor because they aren’t being exploited enough. Economies create competition between parts of individuals as much as individuals themselves. (Think of Dawkins’ Meme Theory.) Skills and abilities are efficiently capitalized upon in a free market. In today’s society, most people possess at least basic talents of mind or body that are valued in the market. Hayek called this the “spontaneous order.” It applied to markets as well as rain forests.
Marx looked through an egregiously materialistic lens. According to him, history is dialectical. Humans and surrounding material are mutually transforming one another through the connecting force of labor. If humans can – by definition of what it means to be human – manipulate their surroundings, they should be able to cut through the feedback process that leads to human arising. We should be able to jump out of the boat and steer it from the outside. (The logical fallacy is already apparent.)
This view of history is linear and quite unlike the biology of organisms as well as the laws of thermodynamics. The spontaneous order is – without getting too immersed in religious connotations – infinitely transcendental. Microcosms are not static, nor can they be transcended and then manipulated from the outside. Everything and everybody exists on the margin. Previous critics of human valuations (like Nietzsche) were right in pointing out the relativity of values, but were wrong in ignoring their relativity to the margin (that is, the way things currently stand if they were frozen into an observable snapshot).
We can consider the universe as “lazy.” Exertions exorbitantly beyond the margin are rarely necessary. Chaos inevitably disseminates into colder states.
Nietzsche had a view of the universe and of life that ran against this model; the world was expanding and violently overtaking at an exponential rate. Excellent persons embodied this will-to-power. He railed against English utilitarians for marginalizing the world.
The utilitarians would, in more elegant words, answer, “Yes, if that’s how you choose to put it.”
But my question for Nietzsche rides on his stated goal for humanity: to achieve the highest levels of human excellence (and continuing to transcend it via the superman). I don’t ask, “Why?” I ask, “How?”
The prescription to go above and beyond marginal “insipidity” seems prima facie merely an aesthetic suggestion. But Nietzsche heavily relied on a Schopenhauerian metaphysic of Will. Like Marx – who rejected ideals of justice, morality, and even utopia on the grounds that his metaphysic of dialectical materialism made communism an inevitability – Nietzsche thought greater and greater ascendancy above the margin was "natural. " Yet, unlike Marx, he didn’t think it a predetermined inevitability per se. For him, unnatural tendencies were the norm for slave-moralities and society as a whole. Christianity was a pristine example of unnatural morality.
But how “unnatural” was this?
Scholars immediately following Darwin saw moral institutions and herd behavior as not Darwinian proper in kind. Darwin and his followers at first thought that the law of natural selection ceased when humans huddled together into self-sustaining groups. But that’s a narrow understanding Darwin held of his very own theories. The selection process is not necessarily purely biological. Early human tribes evolved language and thereby created a highly conductive circuit of information exchange, dealing more with one another than outside threats. In a way, the first primary purpose of language was to help cavemen gossip. Reputation and social bodies became very important. It makes sense that they would; purifying the social structure of threats of betrayal, murder, incest, and theft was easier than doing away with external threats of disease, animal predation, and hunger. (Remember, nature is indolent.)
So the development of morality, cooperation, and even religion was a product of evolution – at least in the beginning epochs of the species.
However, Nietzsche was quite correct in pointing out the sluggishness with which social mores evolve. If we agree that morality roughly equates with cooperation towards efficiency and expediency, as most utilitarians do, we’ll have to admit that the more intelligent members of a community surpass the efficiency of codified law. For instance, social solidarity was paramount to the hunter-gatherer tribe; these days, most of our threats are man-made. Homosexuality was a threat to the species then; now it’s just barely breaking through as acceptable – even though it hasn’t been an actual threat since the dawn of civilization. Dunbar’s Number explains the amount of individuals a person can work with socially, and it is staggeringly close to the number of people in a tribe. We still have gut reactions against incest, even if there is no chance of conception or psychological trauma. These are all throwbacks to more or less obsolete social norms.
Why does society not catch up more quickly with its greater members? Because the environment doesn’t warrant such a change. It isn’t as though morality is detrimental to the species in an evolutionary sense (yet). Sure, society could organize itself more efficiently, but only when pressured to. This is quite literally the law of the conservation of energy. Society is still resting on the margin. Why abolish social mores unless you absolutely have to?
We can interpret Nietzsche as saying that exceptional individuals are more efficient than the masses – that they are “beyond good and evil.” He often notes great persons as being highly adapted to their environment. However, we must remember that this environment, these days, is extremely social. Not only are we extrinsically instructed to have compassion for others abroad, we are also instructed intrinsically and instinctively to have compassion for more immediate scenes of suffering. Since Darwinians of his time thought the latter to be “unnatural,” so did Nietzsche. But that’s not the difficulty modern understandings of evolution give Nietzsche.
A superman as an efficient man is not enough. Rejecting Nietzsche’s and Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, we see threats spreading like liquid into the cracks, rather than accelerating into total violence. Greatness is more efficiently practiced on a shared level anymore. Talents need not be bound up tightly in a handful of individuals – they can be collectively practiced. Adaptation occurs in this landscape.
Now, Nietzsche professed radical individualism and that isn’t something we can ignore. But with a missing metaphysics, can his theories of morality survive in the normative sense? Some of his passages would allude to the impossibility of Nietzsche creating a positive ethics.
So one would think that all we can gain from Nietzsche is observance and description. In other words, all he has to offer is nihilism.
But Nietzsche made nihilism his mortal enemy; Christianity was but a particular manifestation of it. Was he right in doing so? I think he was.
Perhaps personal biases drive me to this conclusion, but I consider Marxism totally and unequivocally bankrupt. I see nothing of worth in it. Many of the past atrocities of the 20th and 19th centuries have been done in its very name, and most have been done on the same assumptions it maintains. If there’s anything Marxism has taught us, it is what not to believe in.
Nietzsche is different. I view him as pivotal to philosophy, as most philosophers do. I also consider him important in my own personal life and directly responsible for most of my beliefs today. While it may at first seem to illegitimate the concept, we need to look at the superman, again, in an aesthetic way. He is something to admire.
I think an existential Nietzsche makes more sense than a scientific Nietzsche. With the margin of living and nihilism encroaching upon us, a twinkle of sentiment explodes from within us to fight against these rather inevitable forces. The beautiful life somehow sounds better than the happy life. We would all pick being an unhappy human over a happy pig. Art isn’t valuable as it relates to market prices and forces of economy. It isn’t something we consciously do for its utilitarian ends, even if that might be the purpose it actually serves in the long run (which is arguable both ways). There’s much more to life than living on the margin. Schopenhauer mused over how humans can discover themselves with a contiguous model of causality and natural order, as well as see all of life and experience within our individual perceptions. We toggle between solipsism and empiricism with great ease. We don’t normally view our lives as nothing more than a path of least resistance. That world-view is meaningless to us.
Most people who read Nietzsche fancy themselves as the excellent persons he venerates, even if it’s quite untrue. Few think they are an obstacle to the coming of the superman, despite being just that. Nietzsche is inspirational more than anything else. He gives our lives meaning. He was an existentialist.
