Übermensch or Last Man - Which one are we heading to?
19th century german philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche came with two interesting and profound concepts about the future of humanity as a whole, the Übermensch and the Last Man.
To explain both of them:
"Übermensch" is a concept developed on the book "Thus spoke Zarathustra", upon which Nietzsche allegorically builds up the thought that humanity, as species, is outdated for the kind of society and knowledge that we cultivated in our millenia of existence, and the answer for this problem is the Übermensch, that we should in some kind of way "surpass" ourselves, creating in some form or another, other evolved species, so that we could coup with the advance in technology, morals, ethics, etc... (Übermensch translates to "Beyond-Man", "Superman", "Overman", etc).
"Last Man" is the second concept developed on the same book, and it is the antithesis of his superior, more evolved being, the Übermensch. According to Nietzsche, the last man is the goal that modern society and Western civilization have apparently set for themselves, with lives of pacifism and comfortableness, with no more distinction between ruler and ruled, strong over weak or supreme over the mediocre. Social conflict and challenges are minimized and every individual lives equally and in "superficial" harmony.
With characteristics like "equality", acceptance of the status quo, decadece, hedonism, comfortableness, nihilism, etc. I can only say, with regret, that we are going straightfoward towards the latter.
So, what are your thoughts about it?
To explain both of them:
"Übermensch" is a concept developed on the book "Thus spoke Zarathustra", upon which Nietzsche allegorically builds up the thought that humanity, as species, is outdated for the kind of society and knowledge that we cultivated in our millenia of existence, and the answer for this problem is the Übermensch, that we should in some kind of way "surpass" ourselves, creating in some form or another, other evolved species, so that we could coup with the advance in technology, morals, ethics, etc... (Übermensch translates to "Beyond-Man", "Superman", "Overman", etc).
"Last Man" is the second concept developed on the same book, and it is the antithesis of his superior, more evolved being, the Übermensch. According to Nietzsche, the last man is the goal that modern society and Western civilization have apparently set for themselves, with lives of pacifism and comfortableness, with no more distinction between ruler and ruled, strong over weak or supreme over the mediocre. Social conflict and challenges are minimized and every individual lives equally and in "superficial" harmony.
With characteristics like "equality", acceptance of the status quo, decadece, hedonism, comfortableness, nihilism, etc. I can only say, with regret, that we are going straightfoward towards the latter.
So, what are your thoughts about it?
Comments (22)
He speaks of new philosophers. He expresses contempt for humanism for the sake of humanism.
How one generation would pass that on to another is one of the biggest questions he approaches.
He doesn't help the reader in this regard to find their bearings but his clear contempt for nationalism might be a clue.
Nietzsche, on his works, never fully explained the concept of "Übermensch". He left it open to interpretations, because neither he, as a human to be surpassed, could fully comprehend it.
To not ask this question would suggest he did not hear his own contradictions as he put them forward.
He seems like a pretty smart guy who would dodge that bullet.
Perhaps it is human nature to be haunted by the superman, what humans might become. We are endlessly transgressive. Our wicked hearts crave the beyond.
I love Nietzsche, but let's add to this picture. What do we do with our modern comfort? We watch TV and movies full of violence and drama. We have our cake and eat it too. And even Nietzsche did this. When was he violent?The last man might just be a reader of Nietzsche who still obeys the traffic lights and pays taxes. Or are we to read Nietzsche as a thug?
It's hard if not impossible to create new values.
Yes, even Nietzsche did this, and he confirmed, but his point was that to feel comfortable with it, and not attempt to change, is the greatest error that humanity ever did. Life is tragic, tough, but to not fight back, and feel that what you did was worth living, could only be the will of the "Last Man".
Quoting Eee
It's not impossible, because we already did it before, examples like the Roman Empire, Christianity, Enlightenment, etc. In all of this cases, we took our daily values, and rethink how to "best" design them for the future, more or less, creating new values.
Nietzsche was/is a highly complex personality.
[quote=Nietzsche]
I am not a man, I am dynamite. And with it all there is nought of the founder of a religion in me. Religions are matters for the mob; after coming in contact with a religious man, I always feel that I must wash my hands.... I require no "believers," it is my opinion that I am too full of malice to believe even in myself; I never address myself to masses. I am horribly frightened that one day I shall be pronounced "holy." You will understand why I publish this book beforehand—it is to prevent people from wronging me. I refuse to be a saint; I would rather be a clown. Maybe I am a clown.
[/quote]
Maybe I am a clown!
Nietzsche was sometimes possessed by a kind of mystic passion. His madness was articulate. At other times he was a master of suspicion.
I take it that you like his mystic side more. All I can say is examine the vagueness of your mystic song. What exactly are you proposing? From my point of view, you are high on abstractions, high on the indeterminate promise of the superman.
I love both Nietzsches, the vague, "mystic" one, and the rational, "logic" one. He molded both in a way that each one complements the other, something few philosophers have been able to do.
Quoting Eee
I'll only dance to a melody that represents the world in its most "real" form.
Quoting Eee
And what isn't abstract? The concept of Overman is molded by my mind, to the most functional notion for me. If the Superman is inderteminate, make it the best concept you can, for yourself.
An attempt to make the minimum wage in the US exactly $15 per hour. Outlawing the sale of trans-fat in Sedona. An upper limit on credit card interest rates. And so on.
Quoting Gus Lamarch
But then we're back to ordinary reality. We are already consumers who are free to dream our own dreams.
You're free to dream what society says you can. Liberty in this case doesn't exist, but then we are arriving on my philosophical thought, and that's not what this discussion is about.
What kind of society are you living in? In the US we can dream whatever we want. That's what we do now. We get home from work (which might be staring a screens) and stare at more screens.
Quoting Gus Lamarch
My comments seem on topic. Though I'll leave you alone if you resent criticism. If you push all criticism away, though, you are wasting the forum. And people will just tune you out as someone lost in a dream he refuses to clarify or modify.
I didn't say that I "resent criticism", but only that if the discussion was leaning towards my own philosophical thought, this is not the "discussion to discuss it". I've already a discussion only about that topic. Search for "Immodesty of an Egoist Mind" if you're curious.
Equality?
https://equitablegrowth.org/the-distribution-of-wealth-in-the-united-states-and-implications-for-a-net-worth-tax/
Are the little people running things? Are the laws set up by and for the sheep?
Harmony? Minimized social conflict? We are living in intense polarization.
Quoting Gus Lamarch
I thought that maybe we were cooking the planet, not creating an end-of-history utopia where everything is safe and cozy for the non-egoist.
To be a little fairer to you, I think there is some fascinating content in Stirner and egoism. By becoming conscious of the 'the sacred' as a generalized X to which causes appeal, Stirner achieved or re-achieved the position of irony or skepticism. Hegel already sketched the position, but Stirner wrote a book about the position from that position, while Hegel went on to criticize its blindspot, which is a desire for recognition in the real world. Moreover the liberated ego is only substantial in terms of quasi-universal values that exceed that ego. Kant already identified enlightenment with autonomy.
I suggest checking out Marx's criticism of Stirner.
[quote=Marx]
Hitherto men have constantly made up for themselves false conceptions about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relationships according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The phantoms of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations. Let us liberate them from the chimeras, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings under the yoke of which they are pining away. Let us revolt against the rule of thoughts. Let us teach men, says one, to exchange these imaginations for thoughts which correspond to the essence of man; says the second, to take up a critical attitude to them; says the third, to knock them out of their heads; and -- existing reality will collapse.
These innocent and childlike fancies are the kernel of the modern Young-Hegelian philosophy, which not only is received by the German public with horror and awe, but is announced by our philosophic heroes with the solemn consciousness of its cataclysmic dangerousness and criminal ruthlessness. The first volume of the present publication has the aim of uncloaking these sheep, who take themselves and are taken for wolves; of showing how their bleating merely imitates in a philosophic form the conceptions of the German middle class; how the boasting of these philosophic commentators only mirrors the wretchedness of the real conditions in Germany. It is its aim to debunk and discredit the philosophic struggle with the shadows of reality, which appeals to the dreamy and muddled German nation.
Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity. If they were to knock this notion out of their heads, say by stating it to be a superstition, a religious concept, they would be sublimely proof against any danger from water. His whole life long he fought against the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful results all statistics brought him new and manifold evidence. This valiant fellow was the type of the new revolutionary philosophers in Germany.
[/quote]
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/preface.htm
I don't think Marx says the final word, but integrating Marx's criticism leads IMO to a richer, more defensible position. While the mystical egoist can in theory shrug all of this off, his mere appearance on a forum betrays a desire for recognition as a measure of substance.
Marx was very clever indeed, to the point that he read and plagiarized with other words some of Stirner's ideas. They even frequented the same philosophical group in their early era. (Check, Die Freien)
Both have developed in some kind or another, the same philosophical thought, the only difference between Marx and Stirner is that Marx didn't accepted the "true egoist" that he was, Stirner on the other hand, accepted it fully. Now, I have a question for you:
What is more egoist and "evil"?
A) Developing a entire philosophical thought about the true nature of egoism, and trying to explain that you, indeed, is egoist, and that you have to accept the fact that all you do is only for your own benefit.
B) Developing a entire philosophical thought about how to, in supposedly "harmony and altruism", confiscate everything from everyone on behalf of "Communism".
Quoting Eee
I'd rather prefer to call it a dystopia.
I prefer the honest of position A, and indeed I have largely been a kind of egoist in the past. I have even written my own The Ego and His Own type of philosophy, where I 'fixed' Stirner or at least tried to clarify his text in my own preferred direction. So I don't at all simply take Marx's side. I take a position with distance from both of them. And maybe Stirner himself did, the man from his text.
Truly I think I 'got' Stirner in a way that put him far above politics as a kind of ironic mystic. The mysticism involved was his feeling of transcendence and liberation. Nietzsche also nailed this in his stronger passages. And it's from within this sense of freedom that I can enjoy criticizing Stirner, in the same way that I like to think Stirner could laugh at himself through a Marx that he already contained.
I also love Feuerbach. Personally I think one ought to read Stirner in that context, as a response to Feuerbach, as a semi-prankish attempt to out-Feuerbach Feuerbach. For me Stirner is still right in his sense of play and transcendence against a background of 10,000 solemn humanisms. Maybe I'm challenging you because I think you are reading Stirner too politically. The union of egoists is, as I like to read it, the friendship between radically free but essentially noble individuals. A friendship between kings (or queens) who respect one another's domains. The handshake of the free and godless who live beyond all causes except for the friendship beyond all other causes. (I can't sing this as the final song.)
If it is your philosophical thought, but just being influenced by Stirner's, there is no problem in saying that's your own philosophy. All philosophers had and still have influences. I have a certain disgust with today's way of thought on the philosophical realm. No one can create or interpret something "new" because his/hers influences were of someone else, it's almost like a creative barrier.
Quoting Eee
I respect Feuerbach as he was one of the firsts to see religion more or less as a human construction to project something else, although i disagree with his position as to "what" the projection is (inner nature of the human being).
Quoting Eee
We can read the same philosopher with the eyes of a student, of a politician, and even as of a curious child, but in the end, all of these points of view are only contribuing to one opinion. - That of your Ego -
Maybe this demise is the so called "transcendence"? I cannot know, because i'm not yet an "Übermensch", maybe i'll never become one, No one knows...
First:
How can you see "extreme libertarianism/individualism" on Fascism? To clear your mind here is a quick link to the wiki page about Fascism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism
Quoting ovdtogt
Second:
The Nazi party, with the support of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche (Sister of Nietzsche), re-edited Nietzsche's manuscripts so that they seemed to support german ultranationalism and racism. Heres the link to the wiki page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche
And here is a quote from the same page:
"After his death, his sister Elisabeth became the curator and editor of Nietzsche's manuscripts, reworking his unpublished writings to fit her own German nationalist ideology while often contradicting or obfuscating Nietzsche's stated opinions, which were explicitly opposed to antisemitism and nationalism. Through her published editions, Nietzsche's work became associated with fascism and Nazism"
So, no friend, i can for surely say that neither the Übermensch is something about human facism, or that the Last Man is something about human communism. Sorry for saying but you're wrong.
"How can you see "extreme libertarianism/individualism" on Fascism?
"many Germans discovered his appeals for greater heroic individualism and personality development"
"See Hitlers admiration of Nietzsche's ideas."
Other authors like Melendez (2001) point out to the parallels between Hitler's and Nietzsche's titanic anti-egalitarianism,[9] and the idea of the "übermensch",[10] a term which was frequently used by Hitler and Mussolini to refer to the so-called "Aryan race",
Didn't you read this part?