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.It is worth pressing the question of just what is so terribly wrong withnihilism? Nietzsche s answer is effectively given, I think, in section 259. Life , it says, is the will power , that is to say, to growth : a self-overcoming which may (as in the Greek agon) involve the overcomingof others too.But without a what for , without an ideal (see p.45 above)for the sake of which one acts, there can be no growth , since growth isessentially growth-towards.So nihilism is the frustration of, in Nietzsche sview, the most fundamental of all human impulses.Nietzsche makes clear that the predicament of nihilism is not just Germany sbut that of Europe as a whole, that is, of the entire West (see chapter 5footnote 10).Behind the foreground of petty nationalisms a Europeantype of person is in the process of becoming the norm: nomadic ,undetermined by local environments, a function of artifice (art, mediaand technology) rather than nature (BGE 242).This raises the stakes.Thetask before us is the rescue of the West as a whole.And since the nextcentury will be the struggle for world domination (between the West inone corner and Islam, India and China in the other, presumably), it istime to give up the petty politics of nationalism for the sake of grand(grosse) politics (BGE 208).5 What is at stake this is the appearance of the globalisation theme once again is the future of humanity as a whole.overcoming diseased modernity: the führer principle Every enhancement of the type man , writes Nietzsche, in a muchquoted passage,has been the work of an aristocratic society and that is how it will be, again andagain, since this sort of society believes in a long ladder of rank order and valuedistinctions between men, and in some sense needs slavery.Without the pathos ofdistance as it grows out of an ingrained difference between stations, out of.theruling caste s.continuous exercise in obeying [communal ethos] andsomething (BGE 10): dying , of course, since, as Nietzsche never tires of repeating, untruth is acondition of life (BGE 4).Commitment to communal ethos this is the way to live as heexplains many times, Nietzsche regards as a faith , not the discovery of an evidence-based fact.Sothe evidence-obsessed are condemned to nihilism.5 The theme of grand politics reappears in Ecce Homo, see pp.193 4 below.Beyond Good and Evil 125commanding, in keeping away and below, that other, more mysterious pathoscould not have grown at all,that mysterious pathos which leads to expansions of distance within thesoul , to self-overcoming (BGE 257).Unless, runs this dubious argu-ment, one s social environment places one between the higher and lower(unless it places one on the midway point of Zarathustra s tight-ropewalker s rope) one will not spiritually position oneself between the higherand the lower, and hence will not engage in the self-overcoming whichconstitutes striving towards an ideal.6In understanding this argument it is important to remember that muchof Nietzsche s Europe the Prussian Reich, for example was stillfundamentally aristocratic.Democracy and other such modern ideaswere, for Nietzsche, an advancing threat rather than contemporary real-ity.So what he regards as the social environment out of which thespiritually ambitious soul grows was, in his day, more or less in place(albeit under threat).It follows that what the enhancement of the type man really stands in need of is the second, more mysterious pathos ofdistance, that which constitutes the noble soul.Nietzsche says that what(inner) nobility amounts to today is an unshakeable faith in one s ownspiritual rank and reverence for oneself (BGE 287).So what is needed arethose who stand out above the mediocrity of the majority, those who areself-consciously confident of their own spiritual exceptionality.What we need, in short, is a new spiritual aristocracy, exceptional typeswho are sent out ahead and are strong and original enough to giveimpetus to opposed valuations and initiate a revaluation and reversal of[what are wrongly, but necessarily, taken to be] eternal values (BGE203).This, of course, is a reappearance of the random mutation thesis:only the exceptional type, the creative free spirit, the one who can givebirth to a [new] star in the firmament, can rescue from decay anddisintegration a culture whose eternal values have become non-adaptive.Nietzsche says that there is a terrible danger that these new spiritual leaders (Führer) will not appear.If they do not, then we can expect that6 The argument is dubious, first, because it assumes that an hierarchical society must involve slavery in some sense.A string quartet and a rugby team involve order-givers and order-takers but theorder-takers do not, unless something has gone seriously wrong, serve the order-givers.Second, itis dubious because the hypothesis that hierarchy in the soul can only develop in a context of socialhierarchy is pretty obviously false.All that is needed to generate the notion of higher and lowerstates is an Olympic , competitive society in which there are not castes but simply winners andlosers.126 Nietzsche s Philosophy of Religionthe process of the total degeneration (Gesammt-Entartung) of humanityinto stunted little animals will complete itself (BGE 203).We can call this Nietzsche s death of man nightmare.(Zarathustra s last man is so-called, of course, because he stands at the brink of the deathof man.) To understand why the non-appearance of a new communalethos, of a new ideal that can command and commit in the current con-text, means, quite literally, the brutalisation (BGE 203), the Entartung ,7of man, we need to say something about the will to power.The reduction of man to a mere brute entails the loss of some distin-guishing feature, something unique to man.Mostly, in Beyond Good andEvil, when Nietzsche says that life is the will to power in for examplethe crucial section 259 his interest is clearly confined to human life.Sothe reduction of man to animal would entail the loss of the will to power.Unfortunately, however, Nietzsche sometimes succumbs to the tempta-tion to provide a speculative biology intended to outdo Darwin. Organiclife as a whole is, he claims, will to power.What Darwin s focus onsurvival missed, he claims, is that self preservation is only one of theindirect and most frequent consequences of this (BGE 13).(I call thistemptation to dabble in a field in which he was at best an amateur unfortunate , since, applied to animal life, Nietzsche s thesis is obviouslyfalse: with rare exceptions animal species do not attempt to colonise eachother.)Given, however, that the will to power is thus universalised, it cannotbe said to be unique to man
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