12.23.08
Nietzsche, evolution and the ’superman’
The question of Nietzsche and evolution, cf. Nietzsche, prophet of Nazism, and Nietzsche et al. and the Darwinist evolution lunatics: a self-defense, is complex, but there is nothing complex about the blunders that Nietzsche fell into as he came under the influence of Darwinism (and the fact that he later critiqued Darwin doesn’t change the issue): the idea of man’s future evolution is in principle a valid one, but armed with the assumptions of Darwinism, and his rejection of the implications he had at first embraced in Schopenhauer, he ended up with a totally absurd view of something he called a ’superman’, a contradictory idea that makes no sense in the formulation Nietzsche was forced into by his physicalist assumptions.
Failure to consider the issues of Indic religion, also very tricky, made his ‘blond beast of prey’ a truly ridiculous notion, assuming it hadn’t turned out to be monumentally dangerous, an invitation to all the completely stupid fringe criminals to think themselves the vanguard of future evolution.
The idea of the ’superman’, or better the ‘over’-man is an ancient idea, one of whose partial realizations is the yogic seeker attempting to ‘realize his potential self-consciousness’. The problem with the idea of evolution here is that this ‘realization’ is as ancient as man, and hardly needs to evolve, since it is already there! Completely disconnected from this tradition and stuck inside the realms of scientism Nietzsche, for all his protestations of decadence in others, does the most decadent thing imaginable, by promoting the physical aspect of force and violence, and the rejection of ‘will’ (as in Kant/schopenhauer) for the ‘will to power’.
You have to wonder, sometimes, what was Nietzsche thinking? Squandering so much genius on this second-rate venue and getting away with it to the degree of transfixing every amateur philosophic idiot with an admittedly powerful style (genius!), is a baffling outcome to the great ascent of the summit we see in German classical philosophy.
Ironically, however, Nietzsche precipitates the question of man’s evolution via his very ignorance of the subtle psychology of man, the invisible half of his ’self’ that he never sees, and which Darwinism cannot take into account (a potential self can hardly evolve via processes of adaptation).
Nietzsche’s curious ’spiritual’ assumptions (the overman) mixed with his semi-Darwinian framework produces a completely abortive result.
The current New Age movement is making a variant of this mistake. The fact is that we can’t quite see into the future to consider what man could/should evolve into, and in any case, the ought to be something more than rehashed Buddhistic evolutionism, degenerated in figures such as Blavatsky et al. , that presume a great spiritual esoteric knowledge but bomb out with a mess of pottage, as confused as anything in Nietzsche.
In the meantime the quesions of Semites and Aryans, which the Axial Age successors tried to braid together in a higher unity (whether successfully or not) is dismantled by Nietzsche in his war on Judeo-Christian semitism, in a regressive and violent of cultural idiocy that is associated now with the disaster of the Holocaust.
In any case, man, and all men by species definition, are already the ‘over man’, all he has to do is realize that by understanding himself. The part of you that is ‘over’ man is there already, you have to find it.
The idea of breeding some ‘beast of prey’ beyond ethics and filled with a will to power to exterminate the remnant is an idea so dangerously crackpot that it should be grounds for the immediate disavowal of the whole Darwinian misunderstanding that led to it.