At least to a certain extent. My commitment to this argument is timid at best but it is something I’ve been contemplating a lot recently. Here it goes:
Nietzsche was, in all seriousness, a savior to philosophy. He is pivotal to what it is and has become. But there are some conclusions that he made that seem to me to be a sort of cop out (how ironic is it to say that of Nietzsche). It’s extremely difficult to in any way properly summarize his overall assertions, given that there is so much depth, interpretation, and contradiction to wade through. But since his arguments are the premises to my argument, I’ll do my best to rectify them. In all likelihood, the major fallacy of this argument may be my very interpretation of Nietzsche’s ideas.
Philosopher’s during Nietzsche’s time were much like alchemists; they melted and melded values and philosophies in an attempt to find the philosopher’s stone, so to speak. The holy grail of philosophy. Foundation. Nietzsche, despite how he himself might not admit it, was quite similar in the beginning. The primary difference is what was regarded as the end-all consummation of philosophy, as foundation. As Nietzsche experimented and poured forth values into his flaming cauldron, reducing them to base properties and thereafter reducing those same properties into their base properties, he began to touch upon infinite reduction. While other philosophers melted down values in hopes of reducing them to their final state, their core being, he began to realize that no such thing(s) existed. Que in the existential angst. So what was he to do? If there was no underlying foundation to anything, what was the point of anything? Even if we did dive in to the abyss, reducing everything to infinity like raving madmen, we’d eventually become a part of infinity; might as well slit one’s own wrists. But wait, there may be hope yet!
Humanity.
Or rather, human-ness. That is, Nietzsche came to see that we were utterly contingent upon our perspectives and thus limited in the extent to which we could reduce things. If that was so, then we all share a similar scope of observation, manifesting the human perspective. To Nietzsche, despite the never-ending infinity that reduction eventually brings, we can at least stop short of this infinite regress. We can melt values down to their core components through a human template. All of the intrinsic and instinctual components of our mind were the stop signs of reduction. Even though he knew that these instinctual components (i.e., the will to power) were made of smaller components, it was our human perspective that restricted us from melting the wholeness of these instinctual components down any further.
And so a foundation was laid and all rejoiced.
Nietzsche even predicted the ramifications of this foundation, claiming the eventual uprising of the Ubermensch. To him, a superior breed of human-thought based on his foundation would take over. These Ubermensch would revel in their human perspective, taking great pride in their human-ness and the foundation upon which being a human is built on.
All of this is good and well when under the complete assumption that the human perspective is static. It is my belief that it is not. For fuck’s sakes, we live in a postmodern world lathered in nihilism. Foundation of any kind never stands firm, even a purely human one. Our reductive abilities are bloating with the marching of our technological advancements. We’re beginning to reduce all the great mysteries of the natural world to bland infinity. We’re becoming secular, politically correct, tolerant of others’ opinions. Opinions themselves are losing foundation.
Nietzsche accurately predicted the coming of nihilism, I just don’t think he accurately predicted its ending. I ask, will the Ubermensch survive through this postmodern epoch? My personal answer is that it will not. The way I see it, humanity will go on reducing everything around it to piles of dust, like the raving madmen I mentioned before. Eventually, we will reduce the Universe down to the nothingness that it is. This process, as so long as the species survives immense catastrophe, will never end. If we have to, we will become the very machines we’ve created, simply to reduce.
Nietzsche’s Ubermensch was the only glimmer of hope he could muster; any more and he’d contradict his own hopeless philosophy. So Dr. Nietzsche wasn’t so much wrong in how he diagnosed the world, just in the prescription he wrote for it.
There is no cure for this disease.
