7. CONCLUSION
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7. CONCLUSION |
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| 7.3.4 Nietzsche among the Sans-culottes | ||||
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One of the pitfalls of twentieth century thought is the
confusing influence of Nietzsche, evident
in the references to the ‘last man’ in There is ample place in our account for descant of this philosopher, but we should note his post-divide appearance as a counter-revolutionary dialectic. But Nietzsche is so mesmerizing that we fail to see he is simply misleading on some very basic points. Is this the naïve myth of Romantic genius who will penetrate the ultimate? Why should we replace the Kantian thing-in-itself with the spurious ‘will to power’? It’s a bad deal, and quite vulgar. Perhaps the ‘will to power’ is an exoteric booby trap for his fans among the last men. What a pity a man of such talents could not have registered eonic data and not gone off in a wrong direction. Nietzsche seems to suffer the strange vanity of thinking our downtrodden Mass Man, the bourgeois atomic individual, heretofore sans-culottes, should lament the aristocratic derelicts of the Hyperborean age, or the arrivistes of capital accumulation. Are these really expected to be our cosmic esthetes? As to the latter, Marxists should feel pity at this degraded homo-morph, as a ‘working class type’, plying his investments unwittingly for the common good. To oppose the trend toward equality seems like a Darwinian secret vice, and is contradicted by the clear evolutionary significance of equalization and integration as evolutionary trends. Disequalization, by and large, is simply ‘counter-evolutionary’, although we see the full dynamic in the dilemma of local transformation of the global whole in the part. To indict the hayseeds of the Neolithic Revolution flooding into industrial societies is a pointless gesture. In a few generations they are transformed. In any case, the fiction that aristocratic societies have some monopoly on the noble and the artistic is contradicted by the facts, among them the appearance of the very greatest art among the discoverers of the idea of freedom, the Classical Greeks, just as democracy was struggling to be born, in concert with the all-too-brief appearance of the genre of Greek tragedy. The sudden waning of tragedy, cogently spotted by Nietzsche, has another better explanation in the eonic effect. This era of the greatest art is associated with an historical transition in the center of our eonic pattern and contrasts directly with the later derivative Roman literature in the breakdown of the Republic. This Rightist nonsense was always surprising from a man like Nietzsche. Modern democratic society, even so-called, has outperformed every aristocratic society that ever existed. It is the latter that are the deadweight of history, not the energized masses of modernism.[i] [i] Cf. Nietzsche and Modern German Thought (New York: Routledge: 1991), Keith Ansell-Pearson (ed.), George Stack, “Kant, Lange, and Nietzsche: critique of knowledge”, Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), Michael Gillespie, Nihilism Before Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Art of the Modern Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), James Porter, The Invention of Dionysus (Standford: Standford University Press, 2000), Gregory Moore, Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), Peter Levine, Nietzsche and the Modern Crisis of the Humanities (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1995), Keith Ansell-Pearson, An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). |
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