|
A peer-reviewed
electronic journal published by the Institute for Ethics and ISSN
1541-0099 21(1)
June 2010 |
Burglarizing Nietzsches
Tomb
William Sims Bainbridge
National Science Foundation*
Journal of Evolution and Technology - Vol. 21 Issue 1 June 2010 - pgs 37 - 54
http://jetpress.org/v21/bainbridge.htm
Abstract
This
essay analyzes the connection between Nietzsches philosophy and contemporary transhumanism, on the basis of
his Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy and how it articulated in late-Romantic
European culture. Nietzsches
personal insanity, and the morbidity of the Romantic Movement in general, can
serve as a warning of what transhumanism might become if it overemphasizes
individualism. Nietzsches
first great book, The Birth of Tragedy,
stresses the importance of the classical-romantic debate in serious European
music, links directly to Jewish intellectual traditions in sociology and
psychoanalysis, and provides metaphors for understanding the Nazi Holocaust.
The idea of the άbermensch,
promoted in Nietzsches Zarathustra, demands that transhumanists cross the abyss that
separates traditional religious culture from some new form of culture yet to be
discovered, or that must be created by the transhumanists themselves.
Burglarizing
Nietzsches tomb
Poor Nietzsche!
Rich Nietzsche! Never has a modern philosopher been so abused and used as he. I
have done it myself, taking the title and the eleven chapter epigrams of my
2007 book, Across the Secular Abyss,
from him. Decades ago, Walter Kaufmann (1974) rescued him from the Nazis, and
today his ghost cries for salvation from the transhumanists. Or not, as the
case may be. Perhaps Nietzsche himself was the first transhumanist (Sorgner
2009). Perhaps he really was a Nazi.
The
real Nietzsche
In the first of
Wagners Ring operas, Das Rheingold, the technologically advanced dwarf, Alberich, casts
a spell to transform himself: Nacht
und Nebel, Niemand gleich. (Night and fog, unlike anyone.) He also uses a piece of hardware called the Tarnhelm,
which can change a persons
form and even teleport to a new location. Does this make him the first
transhumanist, who used magical (or not yet existing) technology to transcend
his dwarfish limitations?
In 1941, the
Nazis used Nacht und Nebel as
the code name for an operation to cause political opponents to disappear.
Similarly, themes of transcendence and destruction run throughout the work of
Friedrich Nietzsche, who began as a Wagnerian, became an anti-Wagnerian, and
ended his life only after losing any sense of who he really was and what he had
accomplished. Tellingly, the central visual metaphor in his masterwork, Also Sprach Zarathustra, is Mitternacht Midnight, the exact
reverse of enlightenment, yet meaning the same thing. The Tarnhelm can render a
person invisible, but at
A popular myth
says that Nietzsches
late-life insanity was the result of syphilis, thus either an accident or
punishment from God for his irreligion. Perhaps he was always insane, merely
progressively so. Alternatively, Nietzsche may have been a saint, whose
suffering was the necessary result of his lifes work, which was using poetic philosophy to undercut the
illusions on which ordinary life rests. In performing this self-sacrificial
function, he has long been recognized as a precursor of the existentialists
(Camus 1946, 1955; Beckett 1954, 1956; Frankl 1967), for whom a stable personal
identity was problematic precisely because the social order had collapsed
around them. Repeatedly, Nietzsche depicted his position as that of a being
precariously but proudly perched above an abyss:
Beyond
Good and Evil: And
when you look for a long time into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.1
Human, All Too
Human: When walking around the top of an abyss, or crossing a
deep stream on a plank, we need a railing, not to hold onto (for it would
collapse with us at once), but rather to achieve the visual image of security.2
Thus
Spake Zarathustra: Ye
are not eagles; thus have ye never experienced the happiness of the alarm of
the spirit. And he who is not a bird should not camp above abysses.3
Thus Spake
Zarathustra: Man is a rope stretched between the animal
and the Superman a
rope over an abyss.4
This last
quotation from Zarathustra gave me
the title of my book, because it concerns the transition from a traditional
form of society that relied upon religion to provide coherent values, to a
post-religious society that needed to invent a new fundamental principle. Much
of my argument was sociological, assessing whether traditional religion did
indeed reduce crime, suicide and other social ills, and whether it also
encouraged sufficient fertility to sustain the human population. To the extent
that the answers were affirmative, which they certainly were in the case of
fertility, then a secular society would be a dying society. It is worth noting
that Nietzsche died childless, while Wagners children and grandchildren were powerful supporters of his
intellectual legacy. It is also worth noting, unless I am gravely mistaken,
that transhumanists under-reproduce biologically.
The
tenth chapter of Across the Secular Abyss
focuses on technological transcendence, and presents transhumanism in rather
glowing terms. It begins with this familiar quotation from Zarathustra: I teach you the Superman. Man is something
that is to be surpassed. What have ye done to surpass man?5 This
term, superman, became entangled in
Nazi ideology, and gave birth to a comic book superhero. Ideally, this essay
should be written in German, because Nietzsche (1872, 1885) wrote poetically in
that language, and not always translatably. English-speaking Nietzscheans
wishing to avoid the tragic or comic connotations of superman have used a neologism like overman, or returned to the original German, άbermensch. Some transhumanists refer to the people living on the
far side of the abyss as posthumans,
and those walking the tight-rope over the abyss are transhumans. Perhaps today we should call ourselves abyssals, but in World of Warcraft these are demonic creations similar to infernals!
Nietzsches image of a successful abyss-walker combines intellectual skill
with courage, and insight with balance. It is a temporary state that leads
either to catastrophe or, just possibly, to successful attainment of a new
state of being, beyond good and evil, as religions traditionally defined them.
Escaping this
terminological tangle, and admitting that we cannot be clear on the nature of
the άbermensch, we
can ask whether Nietzsches method of attaining that exalted state
is at all similar to that promoted by transhumanists. Superficially, they are
quite different. Nietzsche is often cited as a noteworthy pessimist, who
doubted the possibility of progress (e.g. Gilman 2003: 7), yet his writings
continually strove to achieve it. Transhumanists proclaim that human nature can
and should be transformed by technology, whereas Nietzsche seemed to believe
that refined and liberated aesthetic sensibilities, enhanced by an especially
literary approach to philosophy, could achieve the transformation. However,
this may not be so big a difference as it appears to be.
With a few notable exceptions, leading transhumanists are not
scientists or engineers, but philosophers, ethicists, even artists. Their goal
seems to be to establish the cultural preconditions for human transformation,
not to accomplish the needed technical innovations themselves. Thus in their actual
practice, many contemporary transhumanists are not that very different from
Nietzsche, working in the humanities more than the sciences, more in tune with
Romanticism than Technocracy (Elsner 1967). Furthermore, transhumanists face
Nietzsches greatest challenge, the one he demonstrably failed, about how to
achieve transcendence without alienation.
At the risk of oversimplification, we can say that the sciences
offer four potential routes across the abyss: biological, computational,
psychotherapeutic, and utopian. The first two are most often discussed today in
transhumanist publications, the third is closer to Nietzsches
approach, and the fourth deserves more attention than it currently receives.
Biological transformation assumes that new biomedical technologies
will be able to extend human life indefinitely and augment our physical and
mental abilities. A serious challenge for this perspective is the apparent
deceleration in the progress of medical technologies in recent years, as
reflected in the declining increase in the average life span, and the serious
negative side effects of some drugs that appear to enhance abilities. In
science fiction, nanites are invented that can enter the human body and change
it at the cellular level, but this notion has no connection to real
nanotechnology as it exists today (Roco and Bainbridge 2001, 2006a, 2006b). A
more technically reasonable approach, engineering viruses to do this nanoscale
repair work, is fraught with hazard notably the problem of preventing the
viruses from evolving to serve their own needs rather than ours and seems
unlikely on political and public health grounds quite apart from technical
feasibility. This is not the place to evaluate the biotechnology approach, so I
merely note that its success is uncertain, and thus we had better consider it
as one method among four that can be more effective if used in combination.
Computational transformation assumes that computers will soon achieve
the capabilities of the human brain, and that one or another method will be
found for transferring human memories or personalities into information
systems, perhaps continuing to act within the material world via teleoperation
of robots (Moravec 1988; Kurzweil 1999). I have invested a good deal of
research effort into this approach myself, and I remain optimistic (Bainbridge
2003, 2004, 2006a, 2006b). However, here too there are warning signs
(Bainbridge 2007b). The constant advance in computing capabilities, so-called
Psychotherapeutic transformation involves the use of training,
interaction, or mental discipline techniques to improve the human mind, and
these were very popular throughout the twentieth century. Clearly, such
techniques can be valuable, if one counts education in the sciences among them,
but the ability of methods like psychoanalysis, mind control, behavior
modification, or Scientology to reshape human personalities is dubious (e.g.
Salter 1952; Rachman 1971). It can even be argued that higher education in the
humanities sold itself as one of these character-building techniques, but the
idea that reading novels or poetry can improve a person is at best unproven.
This approach is especially salient here, because it is the one that Nietzsche
himself chose and through which his work had significant impact.
Utopian transformation involves revolutionary reconstruction of
society, on the assumption that the best way to make better people is to place
them in a better social system. The most vigorous variant of this approach was
Marxism, but the failure of the New Soviet Man to be any better than anybody
else put the lie to its hopes. However, there is a certain logic to the utopian
approach, in that humans are at least greatly the product of their social
environments, and human behavior is largely oriented toward serving social
demands. Most key dimensions of human action would be meaningless without
social structures: economic exchange requires a market; communication requires
a shared language; artistic creation takes place in relation to a particular
culture even when it diverges from existing standards; erotic and reproductive
behavior express themselves through families; even philosophy cannot survive
without schools. Changing the nature of these institutions, therefore, should
change the nature of the people inside them.
However, transhumanism, like Nietzsche, seems anti-social and
disinclined to find new ways for people to cooperate intimately. In his seminal
book, Are You a Transhuman?, FM-2030
argues that traditional social institutions like the family are obsolete and
fluid, self-centered lifestyles will wash them away. One could just as well
argue that new and more intensive forms of family, such as the group marriage
systems of some of the communes I have studied (Bainbridge 1978, 2002) should
be further developed by social scientists to become the futuristic norm. Let
there be no doubt: This essay will argue that the individualistic quality of
the current transhumanist movement is an arbitrary choice that has serious
consequences. To the extent that Nietzsche is a prophet of transhumanism, then
these consequences will be, on balance, negative.
The
Birth of Tragedy
Nietzsches own
personal tragedy can be said to have begun with crucial issues left unresolved
in his first great book, The Birth of
Tragedy, which actually was influential in the development of the
psychotherapeutic approach to personal transformation. The full original title
was The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit
of Music (Die Geburt der Tragφdie aus
dem Geiste der Musik), and in it Nietzsche was influenced by both Richard
Wagner and Arthur Schopenhauer, both of whom he was later to reject, especially
the former in The Case of Wagner6
and Nietzsche Contra Wagner.7
Schopenhauer (1883-1886) claimed that the world is embodied music, a seemingly
crazy notion but one very much in
tune with German idealism the philosophical
position originally enunciated by Plato that only the concepts in the mind are
real. Wagner (1849) wrote emphatically about the need to reject the
intellectualized style of music sometimes called classicism in favor of emotive romanticism,
and he did so in the wake of the revolutions of
Among the most
familiar pieces of serious music today is precisely Also Sprach Zarathustra, which was used as the leitmotif for the
mysterious monolith in Stanley Kubricks
prophetic 1968 movie, 2001: A Space
Odyssey. It is a tone poem based on Nietzsches masterwork, by the best of the Wagnerians, Richard
Strauss, whose other symphony-length tone poem, Ein Heldenleben, has a similar ethos. Less well known is The Mass of Life by Frederick Delius,
also based on Zarathustra, as is the
third movement of Gustav Mahlers
third symphony. Half a century ago I was surprised to discover in the Yale
music library scores of the songs Nietzsche himself composed, finding them
remarkably bland. For those who want to delve into this aspect of his
creativity, the Nietzsche Music Project was founded in 1990.8 The
point relevant here is that the debate over the direction that serious German
music should take in the nineteenth century romantic (Wagner) versus
classical (Brahms) is reflected in the fundamental conception of The Birth of Tragedy, which is based on
a cultural typology.
Most
influential for later writers is the Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy, which
Nietzsche derives from his reading of ancient Greek history and culture. Named
after the comparable but competing Greek gods, Apollo and Dionysus, these two
archetypes represent opposite modes of response to human existence. The Apollonian is cool, rational, classical,
and when it does not speak in grammatical sentences expresses itself through
the visual arts. The Dionysian is
hot, lustful, romantic, and when it does not roar with animal noises expresses
itself through music and dance. From Schopenhauer, Nietzsche also took the idea
that Apollonianism was the principium
individuationis the principle of individuation which marked solitary
philosophers who sought to understand the world through private contemplation
or the exercise of their individual intellects. In contrast, Dionysianism is a
form of extreme collective intoxication experienced in emotional group rituals
and drunken festivals.
Nietzsche
conflated two distinguishable dichotomies here, cold versus hot and individual
versus collective. When she applied Nietzsches concepts to anthropology in her book Patterns of Culture, Ruth Benedict (1934) was not convinced these
dualities were connected in the same way he thought, and she suggested
Dionysians could be individualistic. Consider one of the science-fiction
expressions of the cold-hot dimension: logical Vulcans versus passionate
Klingons in Star Trek. Both are
collectivist. Although Klingons are expected to compete with each other for
status, they do within their rather hidebound society.
Setting
temperature of the temperament aside, consider the individualist versus
collectivist dimension. Nietzsche actually hints at a third orientation toward
life, the Buddhist, marked both by denial of individual will and the longing
for nothingness. However, just as the Buddhist abjures personal feelings, he
detaches himself from social sentiments. The Apollonian emphasizes the self and
deemphasizes the collective. The Dionysian emphasizes the collective and
deemphasizes the self. The Buddhist deemphasizes both self and society.
Logically, there must be a fourth type, which emphasizes both.
Common in German
intellectual circles in Nietzsches
day, and often perhaps erroneously attributed to Hegel (1830), was the triad:
thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Apollonian and Dionysian are thesis and
antithesis to each other. A true synthesis of them would not involve each
negating the other to produce a bland mixture, but some kind of transcendence
that preserved both at full strength while resolving the conflict between them.
It was Nietzsches
tragedy that he never was able to achieve that synthesis, which would be both
logical and ecstatic, individualist and collectivist.
Later writers
in roughly his tradition, if not explicitly basing their work on The Birth of Tragedy, have speculated
about what the synthesis might be. On the positive side, Abraham Maslow (1954,
1970) wrote about the self-actualizing personality, who would be joyfully
socially engaged rather than isolated. On the negative side, Karen Horney
(1945) suggested a formulation that could describe the Nazis as the synthesis.
Instead of Apollonian, she referred to moving
away from people in search of autonomy. Instead of Dionysian she referred
to moving toward people in search of
affection and approval. The negative synthesis is moving against people in search of power and prestige, which in the
extreme seems to typify the Nazis.
One would have
hoped that the synthesis would be the Zarathustran mode, achieved by the άbermensch.
However, Zarathustra has withdrawn from society, and after collecting a group
of disciples, abandons them. Similarly, after his break with Wagner, Nietzsche
seems never to have been able to develop strong bonds with other human beings,
and his growing madness either expressed or exacerbated this social isolation.
Not
surprisingly, something very much like the Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy
figures in classic psychoanalytic theory: the hysterical versus
obsessive-compulsive dichotomy. Freud (1924) had much greater apparent success
with Dionysian hysterics, who after all were histrionic personalities quite
ready to play roles, including pretending to be cured. At the other extreme,
obsessive-compulsives refused to form a proper transference relationship with
the psychoanalyst, because their Apollonianism kept them at a distance from
other people, and thus they refused to wear the mask of a satisfied customer.
David Bakan (1965) says that Freuds
system derived from Jewish mysticism, just as Nietzsches thesis derived from Greek mysticism, and both were shaped
by the German tendency to erect strict categories of thought. Interestingly, anthropologist
Anthony F. C. Wallace (1959) says that primitive psychotherapies alternate
between being control-oriented versus cathartic Apollonian versus Dionysian
always offering the exact opposite of the emphasis in the wider society.
Whether Freud could have cured Nietzsche seems doubtful. Equally likely would
have been for Freud to contract Nietzsches malady.
Three decades
ago, I published Satans
Power, a book about The Process, a polytheistic,
psychotherapeutic, communal cult that conceptualized its four deities as ideal
personality types: Jehovah, Lucifer, Christ and Satan. I wrote, The duality Jehovah:Lucifer described two alternate social approaches to human
life, rather similar to the Apollonian:Dionsyian
dichotomy of Nietzsche, or the familiar cold:hot,
rigid:flexible, conservative:liberal dichotomies of common language (Bainbridge 1978: 181). Christ, in this
typology, was the unifier, whereas Satan was the separator. Christ sought to
bring the stern female principle Jehovah together with the permissive male
principle Lucifer, in a marriage to overcome the conflict between them. In so
doing, Christ risked becoming the victim of their divine dispute. Satan, in
contrast, sought to drive Jehovah and Lucifer further part, and to isolate
Christ from the other divine principles. In so doing, Satan happily split
herself into fragments.
The over-all
conception of the system was that God had broken himself into innumerable
fragments, the large chunks being the gods, and the small splinters being the
people, in order to play a game. In a grand cycle of explosion and compression,
the Christian principle of unification was in the process of resolving all
conflicts in order to reassemble God. Later, God would fragment again, in the eternal recurrence of which Nietzsche
writes in The Gay Science.9
Calling The Process the Power in order (temporarily) to protect its
members from journalistic scrutiny, I wrote:
To a
great extent, the cultists did not believe
their tenets in the conventional sense. For them, the Power culture was not a
series of statements about a real, external world. Rather it was a collection
of attractive and powerful symbols through which they could express themselves.
The Power was a kind of living theater. A waking dream, a fantasy that made no
apologies to reality. The Power enjoyed playing with itself. It was
simultaneously real and fictitious, not a lie but a work of art. In the
nineteenth century, Richard Wagner tried to create total works of art in his
operas, unions of all forms of artistic creation in one. He only half
succeeded. The true total work of art would be an artistically created human
community with a distinctive lifestyle and culture. The Power is a total work of art. (Bainbridge 1978: 149.)
The central
members of The Process were artists and architects who considered their
creative work to be religious engineering.
They saw nothing inappropriate or insincere about consciously scripting
religious rituals, designing clerical garb, writing sacred texts, publishing
surrealist tracts, composing hymns and chants, or re-inventing their own
personalities. Historically, The Process was a sect that had split off from
Scientology, and it adapted for its own use Scientologys communication training routines, past lives regression
techniques, and E-meter processing routines, in an elaborate system of
processes designed to transform the self (Bainbridge 2009). Indeed, the group
got its name from the processes it
inherited from Scientology.
If The Process
was living theater, then Scientology is a game in which people climb a ladder
of fictive social status, and the difference between them is that between
Dionysus and Apollo. Members of The Process sought to transform themselves
collectively. Scientology focused on the individual and is very weak in group
activities. They both are relevant here, not merely because of the parallels
with Nietzsche, but also because both are in a sense transhumanist, seeking to
use psychotherapeutic technology to transcend the ordinary limits of human existence.
Googling Scientology Transhumanism reveals what one might expect, that some
opponents of transhumanism view it as a cult comparable to Scientology, whereas
transhumanists strictly distinguish themselves from Scientology. Much of the
rhetoric revolves around the word cult,
on the assumption that cults are disreputable, but I do not think that
Nietzsche would have allowed his thinking to be distorted by the stigmatizing
labels applied by journalists to unpopular groups. Perhaps unconsciously, cults
are modern attempts to revive the original human social form of hunter-gather
bands, and thus are quite natural phenomena. Put in terms relevant for culture
and personality research: Cult is culture
writ small.
Again, the
form of culture most relevant to Nietzsches tragedy
thesis is classical music. We can think of Nietzsches scheme in
terms of cultural genetics, following
his structuralist conceptual approach but thinking in terms of evolutionary
alternatives. Equivalent elements of culture which may be substituted for each
other in a cultural structure may be called alleles or allelomorphs,
following the terminology of biological genetics. Alleles are alternative genes
which play the same role and have the same place in the genetic structure but
give discernibly different results. Thus, Apollonian, Dionysian, Buddhist and
Zarathustran could be alternative alleles at the same site in the cultural
genetic code.
Early in
Western classical music, there developed a general assumption that musical
tones must be chosen from fixed scales. Alleles of this high-level gene, each
different from the others, were developed by Indian (raga) music, classical
Greek (tetrad) music, and by African-American (sliding tones) singing, which do
not involve fixed tones in a scale. But under the musical scale
assumption are several alternatives. The West chose, first of all, septatonic
(7-tone) scales, in contrast to the pentatonic (5-tone) scales of
The years
passed, and thousands of little innovations added up to great change. The most
specific of the three genes, modality, was transformed by a gradual
rationalizing process into a distinctly different allele, tonality. This
shift necessitated an adjustment of the septatonic scales to permit modulation
from one key (tonality) to another so that, for example, intervals of fifths
between tones were no longer perfect, but all the semitones were equal ratios.
While no single innovator can claim credit for this gene substitution, the
obvious culmination of the process is Bachs Well-Tempered
Clavier. Over the century-and-a-half which followed Bach, the tonal system
was modified further through acceptance of more and more complex harmonies
until the notions of key and predictable modulations between keys became
quite ambiguous while more attention was given to highly complex musical
chords. Thus appeared a third allele, chromatic music.
The best
well-known example is Wagners Tristan
and Isolde, the quintessential
Romantic Dionysian work. Finally, before World War I, this evolution was
taken to its logical extreme, atonal music, a fourth allele. In atonal
music, the tones of the well-tempered scale became equal partners in a music
which explicitly rejected the sense of a tonal home base. The tonality allele
was linked (and such strong but partial linkage is well-known in biological
genetics) to the original septatonic gene which was replaced by a dodecatonic
gene twelve equally-separated tones to the octave.
Two twentieth-century
German-language composers, Arnold Schoenberg (Jewish) and Carl Orff (possibly
Nazi), produced radically different schools of composition by making different
allele substitutions in the existing structure, especially relevant to the
present discussion because they drew upon competing cultural traditions, the
Hebrew and the Greek, over which Nietzsche himself struggled. Schoenbergs
early works, notably the Wagnerian Gurre-Lieder,
were also chromatic and romantic. But in seeking to take Romanticism to its
extreme, Schoenberg participated in the nihilistic but highly emotional
artistic movement of Expressionism, and substituted atonality for the related
allele of chromaticism. The result was such atonal pieces as Pierrot Lunaire or Erwartung. Although Schoenberg incorporated some intellectual
innovations, he continued to write highly expressive rather than intellectual
music. The result, for Schoenberg as for many listeners, was very disturbing
but still rather Wagnerian.
It must be
understood that the Romantic movement in European cultural history had a very
pronounced morbidity, and both Wagner and Nietzsche were examples of it. Every
German intellectual, and half the general literate population it seems, was
depressed by Goethes 1774 Sturm und Drang
novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther,
in which Werther commits suicide because he cannot be united with the girl her
loves.10 Several of Wagners operas end
similarly. Tannhδuser weeps at the bier of
Many consider
the greatest example of the atonal Expressionist style to be Wozzeck, by Schoenbergs
student Alban Berg, an opera of madness, depravity, and death. Remarkably, it
is based on the drama Woyzeck by
Georg Bόchner who died in 1837, and thus reaches back to the early Romantic
Movement. Perhaps more relevant for transhumanists, the protagonist, Wozzeck,
is driven mad by scientific experiments designed to see how humans can be
transformed, and he ultimately drowns himself. The exceedingly expressive music
depicts Wozzecks drowning, from his own
perspective. If we were standing on the shore, watching him drown, we might
expect musical tones to descend as his body sinks. Instead, the tones rush
upward, expressing Wozzecks own
perception of the water rushing upward as he sinks downward. In such music, the
emotions are riled up without there being any satisfaction of the tensions thus
produced.
Schoenbergs
aesthetic response to this challenge was essentially religious, a quest for
meaning which eventually found Gods Law in this
chaotic modern world of atonal music. Originally, this sense of divine order
had been achieved through modality in the service of liturgical text (Gregorian
chant) or tonality made especially meaningful by classic structures (Bach). But
in atonality there was madness. A new set of commandments from the Lord was
required to tell the composer which combinations of tones were good and which
were forbidden, since in atonality all laws from previous dispensations had
been lost. And thus, Schoenberg discovered the Apollonian system of composition
called serial dodecaphony or 12-tone. This method of composition
gained wide acceptance for a time among composers of serious music (if far from
universal praise) in great measure because it provides coherent rules (norms)
for composition, and it is attractive to composers who have rejected the older
forms and who therefore may be suffering from alienation. The religious nature
of the twelve-tone solution for Schoenberg is shown by his biblical opera, Moses und Aron, where Gods
law is represented by a single 12-tone row which provides the musical material
for the entire long work.
Carl Orff
went in a very different direction from that taken by Schoenberg. Orffs
career began later than Schoenbergs, but in the
same cultural place, the shadow of the late Wagnerians. There is some dispute
to what extent he embraced Nazism, but he did write music for the regime. At
the beginning of the 1930s, when all
Throughout
his career, however, Orff repeatedly admitted his Nietzschean pessimism, his
lack of faith that the Greeks and Romans could save us, for example in the
sensuous but bitter Catulli Carmina.
Near the end of his life, Orff abandoned all hope in his last great work, De Temporum Fine Comoedia, and his
attempt to return from chromatic-romantic to modal-romantic led him to that
brave but maladaptive genotype which drove Schoenberg to his own religious
conversion, atonal-romantic. In this work, all of human history, even time
itself, ends in an atheism so profound that no basis for any kind of meaning
can survive.
The
death of God
Emile Durkheim,
the great French sociologist who thought like a German perhaps because he was
Jewish and born in the borderland between the two countries can help us
unravel what the death of God means. God, Durkheim (1915) explained, is a
personification of society. Religion is sacred because society must protect the
principles on which it is based. The afterlife is a metaphor for the living
influence the dead person has through the effect of his or her past deeds and
relationships upon society. Thus, to become an atheist is to resign from the
community, and indeed my own empirical research has found that atheists (like
myself I must admit) have an unusually weak sense of personal connection to
other people, including weak social obligations (Bainbridge 2005). Of course
there are different conceptions of what a community is, and Durkheim's
contemporary, Ferdinand Tφnnies (1957) distinguished community (Gemeinschaft) from society (Gesellschaft), so it is possible to have
somewhat well-ordered social relations without community. However, Durkheim
(1897) argued that excessive individuation was objectively pathological.
Thus when
Nietzsche withdraws from society, God becomes unreal for him. So too, for
Zarathustra and the existentialists. So too, for transhumanists. I cannot cite
exact data, but I wager that transhumanists have less stable, less intense
social bonds than the average person. My unsystematic experience in
transhumanist meetings and groups is that they are a collection of very
individualistic individuals, often unwilling to cooperate meaningfully with
each other for more than a short time. This marks them as Apollonians, and many
of them seem to get more passionate about logic than about anything else. These
observations are not intended to be insults, but assessments of how
transhumanism fits into Nietzsches
scheme.
Apollonian
transhumanists would naturally be enthusiastic about the more apparently rational
routes to transcendence, biotechnology and computer technology. Accordingly,
they would be less enthusiastic about the psychotherapeutic and utopian routes
again Apollo versus Dionysus. Yet logic on the level of synthesis suggests
that all four routes are equally necessary. Any essay about Nietzsche must be
based on the fundamental concept of culture, and transhumanist culture appears
to be Apollonian. However, cultures often are most creative when they fuse, or
interact in a grand dialog that enriches them both.
That is the
second tragedy of the Nazi-Jewish Holocaust! Yes, millions of innocent people
were killed, and that primary tragedy was an incalculably great loss to them
and to humanity. But the second tragedy was also a shame: the alienation of two
cultures that had much to give each other: German and Jew. This is relevant to
Nietzsche both because the Nazis treated him as one of their own, and because
his philosophical system reveals much about the tragedy. It is relevant to the
relationship between Nietzsche and transhumanism because it highlights the
difficulty of distinguishing between the άbermensch, the
posthuman, and the Master Race. The first section of chapter LXIII in Zarathustra contains two provocative
references to Jews:
Populace-hodgepodge:
therein is everything mixed with everything, saint and swindler, gentleman and
Jew, and every beast out of Noahs
ark.
...
Neer sank the world so low!
The first of
these raises the often unasked question: Why Zarathustra? Why would Nietzsche
choose this character to write a book about? He was the historical figure and
religion-founder commonly named Zoroaster in English. Zoroastrianism is
dualist, conceptualizing the universe as a cosmic struggle between opposites.
The first quotation from Zarathustra above decries the mixture of opposites,
almost like the kosher pollution that occurs when meat and dairy products are
mixed (
The
Belgian-Jewish-French neo-Durkheimian structuralist anthropologist, Claude
Levi-Strauss (1962, 1967, 1970) claimed that thinking in terms of dualities is
a universal human habit, built into the structures of the mind. Yes, it is
found everywhere, but it is not universally significant. Some cultures and
minds rely more upon it than others. One of his book titles, The Raw and the Cooked, illustrates this
style of thinking. Sometime when you are eating sashimi with Japanese people,
ask them whether it is raw or cooked? Has a salad been cooked? If cooked means
heated: no. If cooked means prepared: yes. If it means both: maybe.
The
Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy actually incorporates two mental methodologies
that may be more important in Jewish and German culture (or continental
European culture, recalling that Nietzsche was ethnically Polish and
Yes,
stereotypes can have evil consequences, even if they are a necessary feature of
human thought (Allport 1954; Bainbridge 1995). The injustice of German upon Jew
in Europe was not very much more fierce than the injustice of White upon Black
in the
Prior to
writing about how God was a personification of society, Durkheim had written
two books discussing anomie, a
concept very close to alienation in meaning that has been very influential in
sociology, perhaps precisely because different sociologists have been able to
give it different meanings for their own purposes. He introduces it near the
end of his 1893 book The Division of
Labor in Society and devotes extensive attention to it in his 1897 book, Suicide. Both books relate to Nietzsches thesis about the death of God, because
they concern the development of cosmopolitan or fragmented societies that offer
poor platforms for consensus about the sacred.
In Suicide, Durkheim sought to prove that
sociology is important because it can explain variations in suicide rates when
psychology cannot. He does so by presenting what amount to three ideal types
that describe different factors that lead to self-murder. It is worth noting
the irony that chapter XXI of Zarathustra
begins with the admonition, Die
at the right time!, yet
Nietzsche himself failed to kill himself when he had his great mental
breakdown, which would logically have been the right time for him. One of
Durkheims forms of
suicide would not have been appropriate, however, altruistic suicide, because it constituted the sacrifice of ones life for the benefit of society. Both of
the other main types could easily have applied to Nietzsche.
Anomic
suicide resulted from the loss of cultural values, in Durkheims system, and egoistic suicide resulted from the loss of stable social bonds such
as friendships and family ties. Later sociologists have had difficulty
distinguishing the two, because each pathological condition seems to imply the
other. Some of the virtues of Apollonialism may be seen as compensating for anomie, egoism, and alienation. Notably,
the reliance upon logic to determine moral standards or reasonable courses of
actions can substitute for merely doing what the ambient culture demands, for
people who are estranged from that culture.
Mertons (1938) formulation of anomie emphasizes two cross-cutting
dualisms that both reflect the Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy, if we continue
to stress the asocial-social definition of it that Nietzsche got from
Schopenhauer. On a deep level, according to Merton, people may either accept or
reject the values of society. On a more superficial level, they may accept or
reject societys
norms. But the values of a society are the goals people are supposed to seek,
and the norms are the means they are supposed to follow to achieve the goals. A
conformist accepts both societys
value and norms. A ritualist rejects the values perhaps because the
individual is unable to achieve them because of incompetence or unfair
discrimination, while still following the norms. A retreatist, like a hermit or
street bum, rejects both, and this category might include both Nietzsche and
Zarathustra. The fourth category, innovation, involves seeking societys goals but without following the norms.
Merton placed creative scientists and artists in this fourth category, but
before we rush to place transhumanism there, we should know that the most
numerous kind of people he called innovative in this sense were criminals.
Rosabeth Moss
Kanter (1972) applied a similar kind of thinking to the question of what
factors commit people to a society, using utopian communes as her example of
extreme commitment. She identified six factors, which can be combined into
three dimensions, each of which requires giving up an aspect of individualism
and receiving the corresponding aspect of collectivism. First, people sacrifice individual material rewards
such as money by making an investment
in the collective. Second, renunciation
of individual social relationships replaces them by group communion. Third, along the dimension of personal identity, mortification of the self leads to transcendence through the group. Each of
the most successful communes, as measured by how many years the commune
survived, was highly religious. This reinforces Durkheims belief that high-solidarity societies
must of necessity have a religious basis.
It is not safe
to stop this analysis of dualism in Nietzsches predicament without mentioning that dualism itself is only
one of at least two alternatives. Recall this proverb: The lumper and the
splitter met on the street. The lumper proclaimed, There are two kinds of people, lumpers who place everything
in a very small number of categories, and splitters who make many fine
distinctions across many categories. The
splitter disagreed, saying, Two
kinds of people is a gross underestimate. So, if we admit the possibility of just two categories,
what is the second one, different from dualities?
The obvious
alternative to static dualities is dynamic networks. As if to show that
cultural stereotypes have their limits, perhaps the key person in the history
of social network research was a Rumanian-Austrian-Jewish-American named Jacob
Moreno, who competed with Freud by devising psychodrama group therapy, and who
offered his new science of social networks to the world, calling it sociometry, in a marvelous 1934 book provocatively
titled Who Shall Survive? Setting
aside the fact that his grandiosity led him late in life to talk directly with
God, his fundamental idea was actually quite reasonable. The First World War
had demonstrated that humanity had reached the brink of collective madness a
diagnosis later confirmed by the Second World War and a new science of
society was required to cure this otherwise fatal malady. Sociometry analyzed
society not in terms of mutually-exclusive ideal types arranged in dualities, but
in terms of social network connections between individuals.
This mode of
analysis was very well suited to Anglo-Saxon culture, which since the time of
Adam Smith (1776) had preferred to think of social relations as economic
markets or social systems based on millions of tiny interactions between
individual people, rather than in terms of large categories (Iannaccone and
Bainbridge in press). Continental Europeans are lumpers; the English and
Americans are splitters, relatively speaking. A key concept of the Chicago
School of Sociology was social
disorganization, comparable to Durkheims anomie-egoism but based in a much more concrete image of
social instability in the relations surrounding the individual (Anderson 1923;
Thrasher 1927; Faris and Dunham 1939). More recently, Mark Granovetter (1973)
launched an entire new industry of social network research by focusing on how
fine details in the shape of a network especially its degree of
interconnectivity shaped the fates of individuals.
However, even as
Transcendence
or alienation?
Why does my
title speak of Nietzsches
tomb? Nietzsche said God is dead. God said Nietzsche is dead. Both were
correct. Why does my title speak of burglary? Because we take ideas from
Nietzsche without permission, and use them in our own manner for our own
purposes.
We cannot be
certain what Nietzsche himself would have said about transhumanism or its
connection to his own system, in great measure because much of what he wrote
was gloriously incoherent, in the way that poetry can mean more than it says by
leaving much to the imagination. Pro-Wagner or anti-Wagner, Apollonian or
Dionysian, healthy or morbid, from moment to moment he was any combination of
these. If we cannot translate his words exactly, but are influenced by them, do
we distort or do we plagiarize? I suggest the best thing to do is draw upon
Nietzsches work as a
resource, chiefly to identify issues that transhumanists must face, rather than
as a guide for the direction we must go.
One organizing
principle for Nietzsche was the will to
power. A Wikipedia article on the subject describes this elegantly: The will to power describes what
Nietzsche believed to be the main driving force in man; achievement, ambition,
the striving to reach the highest possible position in life, these are all
manifestations of the will to power.12 As
the article notes, this idea was central to Alfred Adlers (1929) version of psychoanalysis, and
(as it happens) Adlerian therapy combined with Scientology to form the initial
self-transformative vision that motivated The Process described above. Both The
Process and Scientology express the wills to power of their founders, through
dominance of other people, but The Process had the flavor of Dionysianism,
whereas Scientology was more Apollonian. The Buddhist mode of existence seeks
power in retreat, and one might hope that the Zarathustran mode seeks power
through mutual engagement, even though Nietzsche himself, and his character
Zarathustra, failed in this. Is it possible for transhumanists to exercise
their own will to power, without doing it at the expense of other people,
through admirable accomplishments rather than domination?
The road to
Hell is marked with many warning signs. Consider how the Nazis treated the
Jews, not physically but conceptually (Bainbridge 1985). German society was
fragmented by region and social class, and it underwent repeated shocks from
the defeat in the First World War through the financial disasters of 1923 and
1929. Nazi ideology was actually a synthesis of right-wing and left-wing; Nazi is short for National
Socialist. Yes, the Nazis
allied themselves with the more traditional right-wing political party, the
Nationalists. But the form of society they created might be called industrial feudalism, in which people
with political connections exercise individual power over major industries, and
that is today the case in the two largest post-Marxist societies, Russia and
China, the latter of which remains avowedly Maoist. Truth to tell, both wings
of ideology use ideas cynically to control the masses.
The twentieth
century was a great debate among three competing systems: Capitalism, Marxism,
Fascism. Many people falsely believe that this was a moral contest, and the right faction won, western Capitalism under American hegemony. My
own view is that while I vastly prefer living under the American system, it is
no more moral than the other two. It won the contest simply because it began
with more resources and territory. Both Marxism and Fascism have intellectual
foundations equally logical in my view that their proponents cast in moral
terms. Of course, Nietzsche would remind us that moral arguments are typically
just rhetoric designed to give power to the moralizers, as he stated forcefully
in The Genealogy of Morals.13
It is
remarkable that contemporary intellectuals give far more credit to Marxist
ideas than to Fascist ones. Partly this is the accidental result of the order
in which the two systems were defeated by Capitalism; Marxism lived longer, so
far more Marxist books were published. The two systems murdered comparable
numbers of people, but the Nazis made the mistake of persecuting the Jews,
whereas Marxism was founded by some of them. By killing many Jews, the Nazis drove
the rest out of Europe and gave some of the brightest of them good motivation
to propagandize against the Nazis even long after Hitler had committed suicide.
The ironies are legion. Two of my Harvard mentors, Seymour Martin Lipset and
Daniel Bell were sons of Jewish immigrants (as was Merton), deeply affected by
the Holocaust. They began as socialists, published books against the political
right wing (Bell 1963; Lipset and Raab 1970), and then morphed into
Neoconservatives whose disciples pushed
What, then, is
the intellectual core of Nazism, if we can wash the blood off their small
library of books to read them clearly? It begins with Spenglers (1926-1928) observation that, like
More to the
point here, Nazi theoretician Alfred Rosenberg (1930) argued that the way to
save
Cultural
revival is actually a reasonable strategy for a falling civilization. The
Russian-American sociologist, Pitirm A. Sorokin (1937-1941), who fled Russia
for his life when the Bolsheviks took over, expanded on this idea to suggest
that great civilizations can go through multiple cycles of rise and decline. He
did not use Nietzsches
terminology, but his ideas were quite similar. A civilization begins in a
bloody period of conquest by one particular set of beliefs, what Sorokin called
an ideational period but could just
as easily been called Dionysian except drinking blood rather than wine. As
the civilization matures, it loses its passionate faith and gradually becomes
cooler, more rational, even more scientific, what Sorokin called the sensate period but could have called
Apollonian. Then the civilization falls, setting the stage for another
ideational period.
This suggests
the uncomfortable possibility that transhumanism might merely become a footnote
in a future history comparable to Gibbons Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire (1776-1788). No transhumanist would want to follow the
Nazi strategy for cultural renewal, because transhumanists are better prepared
to plant the seeds of the civilization to follow the next Dark Age, than to
harvest the corpses of the impending collapse, and because despite their heated
debates they are actually rather non-violent by nature. How can we organize the
New Civilization, bringing people together, without making the terrible
mistakes of Fascism and Marxism?
Perhaps with
cynical intent but very cleverly, the Nazis used their anti-Semitism to bring
Germans together under their banner. Their stereotype (ideal type?) of Jews was
a synthesis of both capitalist and communist, money-lender and rabble-rouser.
Thus the stereotype combined the things both left-wing and right-wing Germans
hated about each other, and encouraged them to hate the Jews instead. Jews
after all were a German minority and thus both capable of representing the
things the Germans hated about themselves, and dispensable because their
numbers were relatively small.
This rhetorical
tactic was facilitated by the fact that Jews have symbolic significance for
Christians. Throughout history, this has led Christians to be either
anti-Semitic (Glock and Stark 1966) or philo-Semitic (Edelstein 1982), but not
to treat Jews are what they really are, namely people. To the extent that the
Jews really thought of themselves as the
chosen people,
they became a target for the Nazis, who claimed that title for themselves. If
the Nazis had really been able to prove they were the Master Race, they would
have defeated that enemy race that lived just off the European continent and
spoke a mongrel Germanic language, which is to say the English. But, failing
that, it was much easier for them to defeat the Jews instead. Thus, much of the
claim to power by the Nazis really expressed their most profound weakness.
What does that
tragedy have to do with transhumanism? First, transhumanists have already
learned the lesson that they must not presume already to be posthumans,
superior to everybody else, and should not seek to rise up by climbing on top
of others. Yes they must proclaim transcendence of the current human condition
as their ideal, and this irritates people who do not share their hopes.
For many
transhumanists, Christianity is a cop-out that pretends transcendence has
already been achieved supernaturally, so there is no need to pursue it by means
of science and technology. For their part, anti-transhumanists may find it
useful to defame transhumanists as Nazis, and the ambiguities around Nietzsche
merely cloud that issue. A war may be brewing, in which the Christian
establishment seeks to suppress transhumanism, energized by the agonies of a
falling civilization. As a tiny minority, the transhumanists would do well to
remember the suffering of the Jews.
The best
defense is knowledge. To the extent that transhumanists debate the tough
issues, on the basis of close study of the evidence and logical discussion,
they will be best prepared to communicate with and at times persuade people who
are not or not yet transhumanists. Nietzsche helps here by raising some of
the most thorny issues, and issues that are painful if fully grasped, as is
generally the case for thorns. Thus it is entirely appropriate that the first
generation of transhumanists have chiefly been philosophers. They deserve the
greatest honor, and the movement will continue to benefit greatly from later
generations of transhumanist philosophers.
It may be time
to begin to transcend philosophy, however. Instead of merely standing on this
side of the abyss and contemplating the other, we should step out on the ropes
all four of them and begin our terrifying journey across to the other side.
The ghost of Nietzsche would dance along beside us!
Notes
[*] Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Part Four,
Aphorisms and Interludes, Section 14, translated by Ian Johnston, http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/Nietzsche/beyondgoodandevil4.htm
2
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, Chapter IX, Paragraph 600,
Translation by Helen Zimmern, Published 19091913.
3 Friedrich
Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Part 30, translated by Thomas Common,
online at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1998.
4
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Prologue 4, http://www.gla.ac.uk/~dc4w/laibach/nietzar.html.
5
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Prologue 3, http://www.gla.ac.uk/~dc4w/laibach/nietzar.html.
6 http://www.geocities.com/thenietzschechannel/wagner.htm.
7 http://www.geocities.com/thenietzschechannel/ncw.htm.
8 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nietzsche_Music_Project.
9 http://www.textlog.de/21554.html.
10 http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2527.
11 http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1998/1998.txt.
12 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_to_power.
13 http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/Nietzsche/genealogytofc.htm.
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[*] The
views expressed in this essay do not necessarily represent the views of the
National Science Foundation or the