July’s Post_The Great Unlearning. Nietzsche’s Prophecy.

The media are having a heyday with the assorted moral and legal challenges that are splitting and coring the traditionally held socio-religious beliefs and practices that permeate our societies. The recent affirmation of gay marriage by the US Supreme Court has effectively guillotined the conventionally held American and Christian belief that marriage is between one man and one woman. And obviously, as has been asserted by some, when traditionally held moral beliefs and religiously held opinions begin dropping like flies on the table, all things then become possible in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. There is no doubt about it: it is mighty slippery on society’s slopes, and the Times They (still) Are A Changing.

            Activist singer Bob Dylan is no doubt surprised to have lived long enough to see the Supreme Court declare de facto, by proclaiming unconstitutional the Voting Rights Act, that race is no longer an issue in America (evidence being, obviously, our Kenyan-born black president); and Republican Congressional Representative Louie Gohmert has lived long enough to predict, in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s willingness to consider alternative social forms of marital union, that bigamy and polygamy will also eventually become legal forms of American family-making and breaking. The Future attends us, and we wait breath abated.

            So what if all this social change and all these challenges to traditional morality really do portend the dawning of a new age for America? Is doomsday at hand? Will America, as we know her, cease to exist? Well, yes, and no. Already in the late 19^th century Nietzsche gave prophetic voice to the inevitable advent of profound philosophical changes that would one day come about both in our actions as well as in our moral consciousness – because we have been too long Christianized. It would seem that the bill is finally coming due for 2000 years of Christian influence. So We the People are once again become the pioneers in a New World adventure. This time, though, Manifest Destiny is leading us into a philosophical wilderness beset with novel and diverse pitfalls and traps, and, failing the emergence of a new Natty Bumppo to lead us through the wild highways and byways of this changing landscape, the only reliable Pathfinder we have in this new intellectual and moral world order is Intelligent Reasoning.

My Meditative Philosophical Meandering this month strives to shadow some after-effects of an Idea expressed by Nietzsche perhaps most clearly in The Antichrist, which is the only book completed in what was to have been a four volume series entitled the Will to Power.

            Now for reasons that must make sense to them, philosophers and other Nietzsche interpreters have chosen to translate Nietzsche’s formulation of this Idea, the Umwertung aller Werte, through an unenlightening, immensely unattractive, and scrupulously pompous locution – rendering it as the Transvaluation of Values. Yes, the German expression does mean quite textually: transforming the value of our values; but it is also patently obvious that the English translation is, among many other not-so-nice things, pompous, because it carefully seeks to obscure through hoity-toity and self-important scholarly lingo a rather straightforward philosophical idea – that a time of Great Unlearning is dawning for western Christianized people.

           So while my present meditation is entirely that of a freewheeling libre-penseur, no blame can be traced back to Nietzsche for this. However, the springboard that propels me into this, my philosophical free-fall, yet remains faithful to Nietzsche’s original idea—the idea of the Great Unlearning of western peoples.

For Nietzsche, in a world in which an individual’s existence is the only anchor for any possible truth about Life and living, the foundational experience for an authentic life must take place in the moment of the Great Unlearning. This is in fact the story of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, who was himself destined to become the first voice of this Unlearning, who was himself an isolated prophet, much like his antagonistic prototype John the Baptist, crying out in the desert a new message of good news—“make straight the way of Man.” The Prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra is important precisely because Zarathustra had himself also to become aware of, and then deliberately unlearn, all the hidden little beliefs, opinions, unarticulated principles, and culturally inherited ethical practices (e.g., dead bodies and their need to be honored) that were imperceptibly, but effectively framing and therefore defining the possibilities of his Thinking. Zarathustra had to unlearn Himself before he could get on with the job of becoming a proto-Jack Kerouac come to lay out before the world of the 19^th century the story of a new “road trip” in which the hero, Man, journeys from Über-Tier (more-than-animal) to nothing-more-than-Tier (Human All too Human § 40).

            The details of this psychological journey, this road trip toward the freedom of the individual mind, are then made explicit in Zarathustra’s First Discourse (“The Three Transformations of the Mind”). The first leg of our cognitive transformation comes about when we realize that the Self is a Beast of Burden (= camel = Beast + Burden), when we become aware that we carry around in our minds, for the duration of our stopover in this twilight zone, the Burden of inherited cultural and intellectual baggage. The second leg of our transformation comes about when we seek, and find, the courage to accept the Self as Hero (= lion), when we realize that we must stand, oh how alone!, in the desert of our minds to fight against the phantasmagoric onslaught of our inherited superstitions and beliefs and values. Finally, the ultimate leg of our transformative journey into freedom, which is to say into the possession of our own minds, comes about when we awaken to the Self as New-born (= child), when we have become The Ultimate Outsider, alone in a world packed full of constructed values, now able to “see” that, like a great symphony, the World is also a composition, which is only heard as, in, and through a perceptual and conceptual paradigm called Kosmos. As the Child, the Outsider to the Kosmos, we are finally now free to follow unconstrained the paths that the World opens up before us.

            In Nietzsche’s vision of the world, for the individual to become free, for him to enter into the possession of himself as a specific distinct Self, there must be a very deliberate Unlearning of those “culturally” incrusted values that mold and frame us in our perceptions and conceptions. We must, each and every one individually in the privacy of our own solitude, shake ourselves loose from society’s “one size fits all” cupcake mold.

            To be sure, Nietzsche’s Great Unlearning was directed principally at any oppressive and anti-human-life moral beliefs that grow up out of the religious mind like great unwieldy weeds; but of course his greatest battle was pitched against the Dragon of the West, which has been too long protecting the deep-rooted weeds sprung up out of Christian death-inducing morality. So the Great Unlearning in the world of the west would be to become aware of the pervasiveness of the weed-bearing root-system of Judeo-Christian morality, then to fetch the weed-whacker of Reason and whack those weeds into individual and thus collective oblivion, and then to start all over again with constructing for ourselves suitable and life-affirming values and principles for action, which would flow out of an essentially pro- and fully- human space. So he writes in the Will to Power (Der Wille zur Macht, n. 30; 1888)

“The time is coming when we must pay the bill for having been Christian for 2000 years: we have squandered the Center of Gravity [das Schwergewicht] that allows us to live, and for a while we will not know whence we have come or wither we are going. With precisely that same abundance of energy that has generated among men such extreme over-estimations of mankind, we continue unexpectedly to collide with contradictory estimations.”

           

When we are born, we are not simply neutrally popped out into the world at large, and voilà presto, we begin growing as pure, self-defining plants. Rather, we are seeded into a cultural context that, quite independently from our bodies and brains, actually serves, unbidden and automatically, to provide the necessary and invisible cultural “shape” for our personal Self. The answer to the question, Who am I?, is not something physical, nor even a brain function; but this “who” is constructed like a puzzle: carefully, unconsciously at first, and piece by piece, out of all the various and sundry cultural influences that surround us. This is one reason why education is so important, and why the study of feral children so fascinating. The one teaches us about journeys whither—toward visions of what we can become if we choose to go on the various journeys the world has on offer; the other shows us a possible journey whence—from what we were and will likely remain, in maybe a more measured, perhaps softer form, if, by choice or laziness, we disregard the Life-world of journeys through the wasteland.

The philosophical quest prophesized by Nietzsche now stands before us to accomplish—to transvalue our inherited values. What is it that we most value? Justice? Equality? Goodness? Power? Peace? Money? Life? Why is it that we value these ideas, and are these ideas fundamental to the Human Animal in his full glory as both wholly human and profoundly animal?

            On the American journey to We the People we are now come upon a philosophical fork in the road. In one direction the socio-religious life unfolds before us with its gaping maw yawning like the doors of the prison it is, predictable because long familiar. In another direction there is the secular life- the new, the unthought-of, the untested, the unbounded, the free. What is left for us to do as individuals of interest, as We the People approach by fits and starts this fork in the road? To the Magical Man: it is left to you to drop to your knees to appeal to the Outrageous Deity of the “steep heavens,” and thereby to enter into the Great Silence of the impotent skies. For you others, the Thoughtful Ones, put on your thinking caps, become involved in the life of the people—there is much work, much thinking to be done.

            Thinking philosophically is a dangerous and lonely game—and certainly not an attractive or comforting enterprise for the normal clan-animal. Especially when the quest that Nietzsche has put before us is nothing less than to see the world of men with new eyes, to reconsider, and to recast the exposed and crumbling intellectual foundations of the moral self in a world becoming new. The bill has come due.