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.
