On Nietzsche, Art and the Environment
By Timoth de Atholia & Dr David Rathbone
Illustration by Danielle Kwan
‘Once to sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the Earth is now the most dreadful thing, and to esteem the entrails of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the Earth.’
— Thus Spake Zarathustra (Nietzsche, 1954, § 3, p. 13)
Most writing starts out relevant to its times, then gradually becomes less so, until eventually it fossilises into archive history. Yet the works of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) have done just the opposite; for it is in Nietzsche that we find the Wests first environmental philosopher. In the same breath Nietzsche uses to deliver a knockout punch to every homogenising ‘moral law’ society holds sacred, he also establishes the value of diversity — what today we call an environmental ethic.
The characterisation of Nietzsche as an environmentalist may seem bizarre to those already familiar with Nietzsche’s place in our culture. Nietzsche is famous for hell-for-leather individualism, calling on us to tear down our society’s tepid morality and obliterate all traces of banality from our lives in a ferocious fight for meaning and personal brilliance. Environmentalism asks us to tread lightly on the planet; Nietzsche beckons us to ensure that the planet never forgets us — that we become the very meaning of the planet. Environmentalism has been broadly associated with pacifism. Nietzsche’s aphorisms call passionately for a subversive, poetic aristocracy who push their pens with grazed knuckles.
However, it is a grave injustice to read Nietzsche as merely a theorist of fierce individualism, for Nietzsche denies the ultimate existence of the ‘individual’ (which he claims is just the latest in a long history of ‘soul superstitions’). The differentiation between ‘self’ and ‘world’ is, for him, a distinction that conceals as much as it reveals. The cultivation of a brilliant character can only take place in an equally brilliant culture on a no less brilliant planet.
Environmental ethics explores the ethical relationship between human beings and their ecological environment. In dissolving the distinction between mind, body and world, Nietzsche’s philosophy situates itself at the very heart of environmental ethics. For Nietzsche, any ethical consideration not only requires a consideration of the environment but acknowledges the environment as the very foundation of meaning for that ethic. Our psychological and ecological landscapes are inextricably linked. Consciousness, in spite of its pretensions to autonomy, always acts according to the perceived knowledge it has drawn from its environment and according to the effects it garners from that environment. Consciousness itself is a part of an ecological flow; its measure of value resides in instinctive intuitions (feelings of ‘good’, ‘bad’) that are ultimately grounded in our evolutionary history:
How wonderful and new, and yet how gruesome and ironic I find my position vis-à-vis the whole of existence in light of my insight! I have discovered for myself that the human and animal past, indeed the whole primal age and past of all sentient being continues to in me to love, to hate and to infer … (Nietzsche, 1974, § 54, p. 116)
Nietzsche is not suggesting that we are somehow trapped by our environmental context, forever to be ruled by survival instincts, social mores and ape-like fears of the dark. Rather, that our future development shall stem, as all other evolutionary developments, from us engaging with our ecological drives and surroundings (rather than divorcing ourselves from them). Consequently, the integrity and especially the diversity of our environment are vital to cultivating future potential.
An Untimely Man
When it first appeared about a century ago, Nietzsche’s impassioned kaleidoscope of thought was widely dismissed as the ravings of a madman. He wrote most of his works in the decade between 1878 and 1888, before suffering a manic episode and a subsequent mental collapse in 1889. At the time of his collapse, Nietzsche was a nomadic writer living on a shoestring, all but destitute. Psychiatric asylums one century ago were not sophisticated places: the homeless pauper Nietzsche was quickly misdiagnosed as syphilitic and sent home to his mother to die. Unbeknownst to the doctors, Nietzsche actually had a benign tumor behind his right eye. The tumour had been growing throughout Nietzsche’s life, slowly pressing on his right frontal lobe, resulting in crippling bouts of migraine and delirium until Nietzsche finally collapsed into a state of severe retardation.
In 1890, few could appreciate the significance of the thought labyrinth Nietzsche had left for us. It was certainly a symphony of stylistically beautiful compositions, but its central themes seemed bizarre and openly hostile to everything the establishment considered good and true. Judeo-Christian morality and scientific ‘reason’ both came under Nietzsche’s ferocious critical attack; Nietzsche even diagnoses Christianity as a symptom of a massive cultural sickness. He does not assume that humanity is the ultimate form of life but, rather, a biological stepping stone to be overcome by the arrival of the Übermensch — the ‘over’, ‘post’, or ‘super’ human. Nietzsche believes that this evolution of the human race does not depend solely upon scientific advance and technological progress but, rather, is linked to a seemingly ‘useless’ human practice: art and unstructured play. Finally, Nietzsche warns that the human race, in its current epoch of industrial, technological and military expansion, is in real danger of either obliterating itself, or losing its potential for self-overcoming.
Tragically, due to the intoxicating and often savage style of his works, Nietzsche was grossly misappropriated for political ends, resulting in him being implicated not once, but twice, in German nationalism. Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s poetic masterwork, was issued instead of the Bible to German infantry in the First World War. In the 1930s Nietzsche’s sister encouraged Hitler’s propagandists to appropriate Nietzsche as an official Nazi philosopher. These incidents occurred in spite of Nietzsche’s revulsion towards nationalism in general (‘ ... patriotism is either something dishonest or a sign of retardedness’ (Nietzsche, 1996, § 442, p. 163)) and German patriotism in particular:
Germans today [1881] exhibit now the anti-French stupidity, now the anti-Jewish, now the anti-Polish, now the Christian-romantic, now the Wagnerian, now the Teutonic, now the Prussian ... the instinct of a people whose type is still weak and indefinite, so it could be easily blurred or extinguished ... (Nietzsche, 2001, § 251, p. 141)
Ironically, due to this undeserved association with Nazism, Nietzsche was blacklisted by most of the English-speaking world. He was seen as a nationalist crackpot, and his work was omitted from serious study. It was only later, through the radically anti-fascist interpretations of the French existentialists and the artistic avant-garde, that English-speaking academics began to recognise the significance of Nietzsche’s thought. The list of artists and theorists involved in this Nietzschean revival spans the cultural spectrum from artists Dalí and Picasso to rock icons Jim Morrison and Marilyn Manson; from the radical postmodernism of Parisian cafes to the neo-liberal think-tanks of the economic elite.
As massive as his cultural impact has been, Nietzsche’s concern for our environmental and cultural diversity has been the most neglected facet of his thought. Nietzsche presents us with an exciting new measure of meaning, one that places profound value upon the diversity of both our ecosystems and our artistic culture. To determine how this aesthetic environmental ethic works, we must first take a closer look under the hood of Nietzsche’s philosophical engine — much of which is fueled by a blistering critique of reason and religion. Who is this extravagantly mustachioed man, and why has he become an avatar for those of us who believe humankind is capable of more than annihilating itself or merely maximising its ‘pleasure’ through scientific advance?
Christianity, Nihilism and the Apocalypse
To the people of the nineteenth century, the idea of global destruction in any terms other than the supernatural apocalypse seemed incredibly far-fetched. They were not aware of the possibility of the wholesale destruction of the environment that our generation has witnessed. Nietzsche foresees the degradation of our planet through the evaluative modes of the dominant ideologies of his time that he characterises as nihilistic and decadent. The roots of this decadence lie deep in the foundations of the Western belief structure — in Christianity.
Christian faith sees itself as the antidote to nihilism, or to the profound loss of meaning; yet Nietzsche posits Christianity as the ‘install program’ of nihilism. He sees it as symptomatic of a deeper cultural decadence. His bitter condemnation of Christianity centres around two observations: that Christianity radically devalues life on this planet; and that Christianity has ceased to be a passionate belief for most practitioners, and is functioning as a decorative backdrop to their industrialised lifestyles.
Most challenges to monotheism (i.e. Judaism, Christianity or Islam) centre on doubts about its ‘objective truth’. Yet Nietzsche sees that to battle with monotheism about ‘the truth’ is to unwittingly engage in the same metaphysical mindset. To think of the world as one massive ‘matter of fact’ — that there is an absolute truth to be known, and that either theism or atheism is that truth — is a stealthy thought that is installed even if one maintains that the absolute truth is that there is no God. The atheist remains defined by the same way of thinking as the theist, and so is not really thinking in a different way at all. The atheist admits that there might be a God, but believes that in fact there is not.
According to Nietzsche’s view of the creationist belief system, it does not ultimately matter if the whole planet is destroyed, for a better world lies elsewhere — in heaven. Reality is not held to be of ultimate value because it is a manufactured product of God, so it is inherently replaceable and, ultimately, disposable. Our immediate experience is devalued in favour of a highly mediated form of acting as if under constant surveillance and judgement. According to the apocalyptic prophecies of the New Testament, the planet will be destroyed, yet the saviour will descend from the heavens and justly send all souls to their doom or to paradise.
Nietzsche maintains that the effects of this belief in an afterlife are inevitably dangerous. The indirect message of Christianity is that the apparently ‘real’ world is imperfect, soiled and transient, a magic lantern of false hopes that can lure someone away from the eternal fulfilment that awaits beyond the grave. Nietzsche defines Christianity as arch-nihilism, for removing value from reality and transposing it into an abstract realm devalues experience. This form of consciousness is at once an exaggerated modesty (a consciousness unable to take itself seriously) and a kind of arrogance, for humans are understood not as part of nature but apart from nature: above it, judging it, naming it; appointed not only as caretakers, but as proprietors, managers and exploiters.
To this attitude, Nietzsche responds with Zarathustra’s cry ‘Remain true to the earth!’ Humanity is of the earth. All dreams of a better ‘elsewhere’ only lead us to denigrate and disrespect our actual source of possibility and the inescapable ground of our meaning: our planet, in its fragile finitude, as well as its infinite diversity and as yet inconceivable future potential.
As well as sapping life of the precious value to which it belongs, Nietzsche believes that Christianity has also lost the will-orienting power it once possessed. It is now no longer possible to believe in God in the same way: we have lost the necessary naivety, like children who have seen through the Santa Claus game. Try as we might we cannot regain the feeling. No longer can we know God, or even what that concept once meant to people, because ‘God is dead’: the myth has lost its force.
Nietzsche provides evidence for this claim by describing the way in which the Christian faith has become a decorative backdrop to our comfortable consumer lifestyles. The admonition of materialism and a ferocious outcry against the misdistribution of wealth are principles that once were the foundational axioms for the Christian Apostles. To see how strongly the earliest Christians rallied against the misdistribution of wealth, we need only consult the book of Acts, chapters 4 and 5, in the Bible. Here, the Apostles implore their followers to sell their property and surrender the proceeds to a centralised authority that will redistribute the wealth fairly.
Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, and laid them down at the apostles’ feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need. (Acts 4:34–35)
The early Christians pipped Marx at the post. Yet if one were to judge Christianity by the contents of its current rhetorical fervour, one would assume that the issues of homosexuality and abortion were far more important than those of poverty and egalitarianism. In ignoring these principles, Christianity exposes its ultimate subservience to industrialised commercial culture and our privileged habits of consumption. Nietzsche shows us that Christianity now merely serves as a tacit validation of our earth-degenerating habits.
Science, The Last Man and Economic Rationalism
Far from being the cure for religion, Nietzsche sees science as operating with many of the same discursive patterns. The theme of global destruction and its last-minute Messianic deliverance is constantly played out in the fictions of pop culture, as if continually salving some deeply held cultural neurosis. A similar Messianic subtext often surrounds our belief in the sciences: that once global conditions become really hostile, necessity will be the mother of all ingenuity and we will find a technological solution (or escape) from our wasted world. Such is the ideology surrounding all talk of technological solutions to global warming, or of the colonisation of other planets.
Not only does Nietzsche think that science still harbours many shadows of God (for example, that there are purposes within nature, or that nature selects) but he fears that the growing dominance of the techno-scientific perspective could seriously retard humanity’s capacity for creative growth. Science, in its drive to transform possibilities into certainties, can easily deprive life of its most profound potential — especially when taken in conjunction with the endless human capacity for hubris.
Nietzsche characterises this danger in his portrayal of the ‘last man’ in Thus Spake Zarathustra — the citizen of a banal ‘utopian’ future in which suffering, lack and uncertainty are completely eradicated by techno-science and the projects of rationality.
I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star; and I say unto you, you still have chaos in yourselves. Alas the time is approaching when man will no longer give birth to a star. Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man.
The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea-beetle; the last man lives the longest.
‘We have invented happiness’ say the last men, and they blink.
A little poison now and then: that makes for agreeable dreams. And much poison in the end, for an agreeable death …
They are clever and know everything that has ever happened ...
‘Formerly all the world was mad’ they say the most refined, and they blink. (Nietzsche, 1954, § 5, p. 17)
Far from being a vision of paradise, Nietzsche paints this strife-free world as banal and incapable of fostering any form of meaningful creativity or passion. Everything is ‘known’ in this world; there is nothing that defies immediate comprehension through a pre-defined system of categories. Art that indicates what is too subtle or too outrageous to be defined in language will become impossible. Nothing in the last man’s world exceeds communication utilised literally and pragmatically. His (as a member of an endocentric society, Nietzsche consistently uses ‘his’) planet is a closed circuit of meaning.
All human ages have sought to provide universal accounts for all phenomena. The archaic Greeks explained phenomena by appeal to the Olympian gods. In the Dark Ages, Christian ideology saw all things as created in accordance with the will of God. In the twentieth century, logical positivism in the sciences attempted to reduce everything to quantifiable parcels of positively verified information. Often, anything unmeasurable was dismissed as meaningless. Yet in each system of ideology there have been gaps — events, movements and phenomena that could not be adequately explained by the concepts available at the time — that demand the creation of new concepts. Why then, if all conceptual superstructures have so far been superseded, should Nietzsche be so concerned with the modern dominance of rational discourse?
Compared to the Christian, and the ancient Greek or ancient Roman, eras of thought, the burgeoning of the techno-scientific age has brought with it an unparalleled ability to alter the world in which we live. Techno-science has opened an astonishing number of avenues for exploration and growth, yet it has also closed many others by enabling the destruction of landscapes, life forms and cultures. This flagrant disregard for all entities that have not proven ‘useful’ to the projects of rationality betrays the underlying ideology of techno-science: instrumental rationalism. Instrumental rationalism is an evaluative regime whereby all phenomena are assessed only in relation to their ability to be used rationally. Instrumental rationalists attempt to account for natural phenomena so that they might be ‘mastered’ and exploited according to their utility. For the instrumental rationalist, a forest has value only so long as it provides resources, such as oxygen, timber and woodchips.
Instrumental rationalism, rooted in the Christian belief that man is master of the earth, is humanity’s immature attempt to grasp the meaning of our freedom. We tell ourselves that we are free to do with nature as we please. The instrumental rationalist studies and attempts to account for natural phenomena so that they might be ‘mastered’ and exploited according to their utility. This has led to the capacity that we now have at our disposal to shape our planet.
What terrifies Nietzsche is that once enough of our landscape has been instrumentalised or ‘made useful’, we might never be able to experience anything that doesn’t immediately correspond to a tidy category of use or purpose. Once enough old-growth forests have been replaced with tree plantations, we will no longer be able to see forests as anything more than oxygen-releasing carbon-fixing bio-factories. In other words, we literally won’t see the forest for the trees; all we will see is parts, no whole. Today, many landscapes already reflect our instrumental modes of evaluation. The ‘irrational’ aspects are evaporating, leaving only what is currently deemed ‘rational’ and ‘useful’.
The Übermensch, a Joyful Science and Art
While Nietzsche clearly sees that a unified theory that accounts for all phenomena and events would result in a world devoid of creativity, he does not call on us to stifle scientific inquiry. He merely sees that to force the world to conform to one system of meaning would grossly stunt our potential for growth and empowerment. For in this sense Nietzsche is an optimist: if the right conditions are maintained, the world and humankind are limitless in potential for creation, expression, discovery and self-overcoming.
The ape could not have foreseen that playing with its vocal capacities would result in the creation of language, and along with it, culture, art, war and science. It is for this reason that Nietzsche implores us to maintain and cultivate diversity, because we cannot foresee where our next catalyst for radical empowerment lies. It may lie in the genetic sequence of an Amazonian fungus, the locomotion of a bee, the uncanny practices of a dead culture. To totalise our landscapes (and consequently our culture and minds) under our current desires and regimes of ‘use’ to create what we would consider a utopia is analogous to committing ourselves to the utopian visions of our childhood (‘I want to eat sweeties ALL day, EVERY day!’). It is therefore of vital importance to Nietzsche to not annihilate the realm of the ‘useless’ — the life forms that do not ‘serve’ us, the cultural practices that are seemingly profitless — for these are the wells from which originality and inspiration spring.
As an alternative to the banal dystopia of the last man, Nietzsche conceives of the Übermensch. What we are to the apes, the Übermensch will be to us. Just as the ape cannot fathom the possibilities open to the human being, we cannot begin to imagine the experience of the Übermensch; nor can we foresee how the Übermensch might arise. Yet Nietzsche suggests how we might open up possibilities for humanity, and perhaps pave the way for the arrival of the Übermensch.
Scientific explanation will rarely (if ever) be able to foretell where new and unprecedented dimensions to life might arise, for the kind of thing it discovers will have been decided in advance by our current modes of understanding. Science can only find what is hidden in reality; for it requires a hypothesis (a theory of the way things are going to be) before its experiment. Nietzsche believes that in conjunction with the modern sciences, an open and unstructured exploration of possibilities must be cultivated — a ‘joyful science’. The ape did not ‘invent’ language by focusing on what was useful to it (gathering food or warning its pack of predators), but by playing around with the variety of sounds it could make with its mouth and vocal chords. Art, in its less structured exploration of ideas, resonates clearly with this monkeying around, with Nietzsche’s call for a rollicking (or gay/joyful) science. At its best, art can allow us to access new ways of seeing the world. Art explores the territories of the unknown, in part because it does not dictate it own meaning, and encourages interpretation. Grasping at ideas before they have been had, accessing feelings that have no adequate conceptual expression in contemporary language, art carves out new territories of expression and expands the horizons of what it is possible to think, feel and do.
However, the rollicking science is not confined solely to a practice of aesthetic production. To truly stay open to the limitless possibilities of empowerment that exist within our world, we need to see the whole of life as a work of art. Nietzsche does not merely ask us to treat life as art or nature as an artist, but to actively craft our everyday lives into works of experimental creativity.
The Eternal Return: Life as Art
Nietzsche questions any simple understanding of the distinction between self and world: just as the structure of our minds reflects the structure of the world, so the structure of the world reflects the structure of our minds; the two are interdependent. To cultivate a deep respect for the diversity of our social and physical environment, there must be a resonant cultivation of personal diversity in action and thought. Our ability to respect our ecosystems, our cultures and our histories as works of art, to the same degree as functional systems of utility, is intimately tied to the question of personal ethics — how we conduct ourselves on a day-to-day basis, and how we exercise our conception of freedom.
If the useless (that which defies instrumental rationalisation) is to continue to play an active role in our lives, we need to affirm and develop it from a number of perspectives. To explain this notion, Nietzsche uses the concept of the ‘eternal return’. On the simplest level, the eternal return is a way to determine the value of an action. Nietzsche proposed it as a replacement for Kant’s technique of determining value. Kant advocates asking yourself, when evaluating a prospective action, whether you like the idea of everybody doing it. If you do not like that thought, then the action is not moral. Yet Nietzsche thinks that evaluating ourselves generically misses everything important about ourselves. If evaluated thoroughly, no action could ever pass Kant’s test, for there is no action that can be the right thing for everyone to do. Nietzsche suggests that we ask ourselves not whether we like the idea of everyone doing the proposed action, but whether we like the idea of having to do it again, were we to live our life over — and then an infinite number of times, were our lives to recur eternally:
What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence … The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’ If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, ‘Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?’ would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal? (Nietzsche, 1974, § 341, p. 273)
Nietzsche asks us if we are able to say ‘yes’ to our life as we have lived it and desire to have nothing changed. Can we approach our experience so that the prospect of living through every aspect of our lives (including every mistake, failure, banality and weakness) again becomes exciting? Can we grow from our mistakes so much that to take them away from us would seem despicable? Can we make of our lives such a work of art that to take one element of it from the whole (even the misery or the struggle) would send the entire narrative collapsing like a house of cards?
If interpreted metaphysically rather than ethically, the eternal return is also a way to rethink time itself. While Christianity proposes a linear view of time, Nietzsche’s eternal return is a way to think of time as a whole, and experiences as echoes of that whole. Nietzsche wants us to use the thought of the eternal return not merely to evaluate our past but to orient ourselves in the present and the future. If we have lived a mundane existence up until now, can we use the banality to motivate us into leading a vivacious and passionate life, to know the prosaic so personally that we can vanquish it from our lives?
The eternal return calls on us to affirm everything we encounter. The whole plethora of being can be embraced, orchestrated and pushed till it crackles with meaning. No urge, thought or experience should be anathematised, censored or repressed. The eternal return demands the cultivation of a psychological landscape that is as diverse and vast as the world around us.
Decadence: the Autumn of a People
Diversity of environment, cultural practice and thought can be seen as the Nietzschean measure of health. A diverse environment is healthy because it allows greater scope for creativity, passion and discovery. A diverse psychology is healthy because it helps to prevent one ideological perspective (such as instrumental rationalism) from dominating.
Given this, we could be forgiven for assuming that Nietzsche might consider the most recent permutations of our consumer culture as ‘healthy’. After all, we are now living in the age of decentralised and diversified labour forces and niche market consumption. We individuate ourselves from our peers by our consumer preferences. Yet this type of diversity appears to Nietzsche as a symptom of a cultural sickness, a sickness he calls ‘decadence’.
Decadence, according to one early typology of Nietzsche’s, is part of the natural ebb and flow of cultures. First a culture would go through a dynamic expansionist phase, where all sectors of a society were engaged holistically towards a common goal. Eventually, however, that cultural dynamism would fracture, and all fragments of society would try to satisfy their own peculiar whims in the climate of economic prosperity that their dynamism had brought to fruition. The culture would become sick and fall apart.
The paradigmatic case study of a culture descending from dynamism into decadence was the Roman Empire. The expansionist phase was exemplified by the five ‘good’ emperors: Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius. Each of these emperors was engaged in the same goals: to expand and secure the borders of the empire and to honour the gods. These emperors can be contrasted with the five decadent emperors: Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero and Elagabalus, each of who seemed engaged in completely different projects. Tiberius had a lot of sex, Caligula went completely insane, Claudius was big on feasts, Nero spent a lot of money and Elagabalus made up his own religion and demanded to be called a whore. Each of these five emperors was completely alienated from the projects of the next. A sense of cultural dynamism was entirely absent; the Roman Empire had descended into decadence.
For Nietzsche, the many causes and symptoms of a decadent society are manifold, but as inevitable as the manifold signs of aging in the individual. The key cause of social decadence is the decay of the ideologies that once guided and vivified a culture. In contemporary Western society, Judeo-Christian belief structures have fallen away. A cause of societal decadence is a vast proliferation of wealth, at least within the upper classes. If individuals have the money and freedom to pursue their own choices, they will do so and in the process become alienated from engaging communally with the projects and aspirations of their neighbours. The economy, then, becomes a surrogate means of communication between alienated individuals. In contemporary society, we can no longer agree on whether we should provide welfare for those at the bottom of the economic ladder. Welfare is outsourced to the private sector, where individuals can ‘vote’ for the continued existence of a form of welfare by donating money (that is, by engaging in philanthropy).
In lieu of being able to establish the qualitative value of a good or service, the market provides a quantitative evaluation. The value of all that is circulated in this decadent culture is reduced to its quantitative measure. Instrumental rationalism transforms into economic rationalism. Any cultural or technological innovation that occurs within the sphere of commercial culture is ultimately only valuable insofar as it can make money. For this reason, the diversity offered by our commercial culture is not diversity in the Nietzschean sense. Nietzschean diversity advocates the existence of a multiplicity of ideological perspectives to cultivate and promote all kinds of difference. Economic rationalism has only one evaluative perspective: that of the market. Consequently, the diversity of our consumer culture is a diversity lacking in depth; it is a diversity happening all on the one plane of evaluation. And a flattened, universal plane of evaluation is something that Nietzsche wants to avoid at all costs, for it is the logic of the last man.
An Art for Artless Times
Nietzsche would not ask us to dismiss our decadent age altogether, even if it does appear sick and superficial. For it is in times of decadence, when society is fractured and old meanings are dying, that the possibilities of the future begin to arise. It is in an alienating society that civilisation comes closest to producing ‘individuals’:
The times of decadence are those when the apples fall from the tree: I mean individuals, for they carry the seeds of the future and are the authors of the spiritual colonization and the origin of new states and communities. [Decadence] is merely a nasty word for the autumn of a people. (Nietzsche, 1974, § 23, p. 98)
There are seeds of meaning to be found in the shallow sprawl of market, although the light in which to see that meaning might seem hard to find. Now more than ever we should plough through the vacuous aesthetics, trends and clichés of our popular culture — mashing them, battling them, dissecting them and forcing them to spark with meaning. We cannot shun them any more than we can avoid the collapse of modernity’s institutions and their failure to deliver anything other than the banal judgement of a price tag. If we are to rise to the challenge of the eternal return, even the most trite and venal aspects of our culture must be embraced as profound teachings and motivations for creativity (even if they are departure points for social critiques). Somehow, Big Brother must be affirmed.
Yet as we rollick and play our way through pop-cultural wastelands, we should ensure that our environment — both cultural and ecological — remains maximally diverse. Our culture, our ecological environment and our lives should remain potent and profound enough to catapult us into the evolutionary stratosphere.
References
Nietzsche, F 1954, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. W Kauffman, Viking Penguin, London.
Nietzsche, F 1974, The Gay Science, trans. W Kauffman, Vintage Books, New York
Nietzsche, F 1996, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. RJ Hollingdale, 2nd edn, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Nietzsche, F 2001, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. J Norman, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Published in Harvest Magazine #1
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