Nietzsche Contra Olaf Stapledon on the Death of Man

The nihilist and the transcendental idealist

 

 

Recently, I started exploring the speculative writings of British philosopher and sci-fi author Olaf Stapledon, whose fame rests mostly on two hugely influential works: Last and First Men (1930) and Star Maker (1937). 

 

So far, however, I've not been terribly impressed: for no matter how vast the range of material covered by Stapledon - how numerous the ideas or how sensational the imaginative experience offered - there is, as D. H. Lawrence would say, no sense of release. One comes away from his work feeling that one is still trapped within the same old moral-rational universe full of spiritual values and, behind it all, a disembodied consciousness or cosmic supermind.

 

And, even after 2000,000,000 years and eighteen distinct species of human being, when Stapledon decides the game is up and a death sentence can finally be passed on mankind via solar catastrophe, he can't help hoping that we might yet find some way to spunk our essence into the wider galaxy and thus disseminate among the stars the seeds of a new humanity. 

 

And nor can he help coming to the final conclusion: 

 

"Great are the stars, and man is of no account to them. But man is a fair spirit, whom a star conceived and a star kills. He is greater than those bright blind companies. For though in them there is incalculable potentiality, in him there is achievment, small, but actual. Too soon, seemingly, he comes to his end. But when he is done he will not be nothing, not as though he had never been; for he is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things." [1]

Obviously, as a Nietzschean and as a nihilist, I can't let that pass and I would refer readers (once more) to the little story that Nietzsche tells us:

 

"Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of 'world history', but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die." [2]

 

Nietzsche comments:

 

"One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no additional mission which would lead it beyond human life." [3]     

 

Push comes to shove, I think Nietzsche is on the money and that Stapledon - like all idealists - is kidding himself. As Ray Brassier notes: 

 

"Nietzsche's 'fable' perfectly distils nihilism's most disquieting suggestion: that from the original emergence of organic sentience to the ultimate extinction of human sapience 'nothing will have happened'. Neither knowing nor feeling, neither living nor dying, amounts to a difference that makes a difference – 'becoming aims at nothing and achieves nothing'. [4]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men, (Gollancz, 2004), pp. 303-304. 

[2] Nietzsche, 'On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense', in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale, (Humanities Press, 1979), p. 79.

 

[3] Ibid. 

 

[4] Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 205-206. 

 

For a sister post to this one, on visions of the last men in Nietzsche and Stapledon, click here.  

O Superman

 Atanas Botev: Thus Spoke Zarathustra (2004)

Nietzsche's great concept of the Übermensch remains something to ponder and to play with. But there are still those who just don't get it and insist on believing that the overman is merely a higher type of human being - a tendency that has not been helped by the unfortunate and misleading English translation of the original German term as 'superman'.

Thus, amongst our transhumanist friends for example, we still find those who naively think of the idea exclusively in terms of genetic engineering and contrived evolutionary advance. But the metaphysical, moral and material overcoming of man is absolutely not the same thing as his biological self-preservation and enhancement.

To be fair, Zarathustra doesn't help matters by initially speaking about worms and apes and describing man as a rope fastened between animal and Übermensch. But he is later at pains to point out that his primary concern is not with what might or what should succeed mankind in the sequence of species and that his teaching is not a variety of Darwinism.

What then is the concept of the Übermensch all about?

For me, the best reading is developed in the work of Michel Foucault in terms of forces and forms; the latter defined as a compound of relations between the former. In this interpretation, our humanity is understood as a non-predetermined form which results when forces internal to ourselves as a species (such as imagination and memory) enter into a historical relationship with certain external forces (be they natural, artificial or virtual).

Thus Man - with a capital M and by which we mean the hu-man - has not always existed and will not exist forever. Our humanity is a contingent form and as internal and external forces as well as the relations between them change, so our form changes. This is why Foucault famously writes of Man being nothing but a face drawn in the sand that is destined to be erased by the incoming tide.

The Übermensch is thus simply another word for these external forces: the sea which receives us; the lightning that licks us with its tongue; the madness with which we might be cleansed. In other words, it is that which frees the life within us and reconfigures form in a manner that is not only posthuman, but genuinely transhuman and inhuman.