~by David Aiken~
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 Western societies. The affirmation of gay marriage by the US Supreme Court in 2013 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 Are (still) A-Changing.
Activist
singer Bob Dylan is no doubt surprised to have lived long enough to see the
Supreme Court reverse itself and declare de facto, by proclaiming
unconstitutional the Voting Rights Act, that race is no longer an issue in
America (evidence being, obviously, our black ‘Kenyan-born’ former president). And
US Republican Congressional Representative Louie Gohmert, “accomplished idiot”
and bigot, 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 family-making and breaking in American. 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 19th century Nietzsche gave prophetic voice to the inevitable
advent of profound philosophical changes that must eventually 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. And We the People are once again
become the pioneers in a New World adventure. This time, though, America’s 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, “near-fearless
warrior” and proto-Marvel superhero, to lead us through the wild highways and
byways of this changing intellectual and moral landscape, the only reliable
Pathfinder we have to rely on in this new world order is not our Belief, but
rather our own Intelligent Reasoning.
My
Meditative Philosophical Meandering this month strives to shadow some
after-effects of an Idea expressed by Nietzsche perhaps most clearly in his 1888
book 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, professional philosophers and
other Nietzsche interpreters have chosen to translate into English 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 peoples
and cultures.
So while my present Meditative
Philosophical Meandering 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 a Great Unlearning, an inversion of
morality that is yawning like a philosophical abyss in front of a Western European
civilization o’er-hasty for the tumble.
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,
much like his antagonistic prototype John the Baptist, an isolated prophet
crying out on the highways and byways a new message of good news—“make straight
the way of Man.” The Prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra is important to this overarching narrative
precisely because Zarathustra had himself also to become aware of, and then
deliberately unlearn, all the hidden little beliefs, opinions, unarticulated moral
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 his moral Self before he could get on with the job of becoming a
proto-Jack Kerouac
come to lay out before the world of the 19th century and beyond the
story of a new “road trip” in which the hero, Man, journeys back from Über-Tier
(more-than-animal) to nothing-more-than-Tier (Human All too Human § 40).
To be sure, Nietzsche’s Great Unlearning was directed principally at inherited moral
belief, which is intellectually oppressive precisely because it is anti-here-and-now-human-life,
and which grows up out of the religious mind like great unwieldy and bothersome
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 Judaeo-Christian death-promoting morality. So the Great Unlearning in the world
of the West would be to become aware of the pervasiveness of the weed-growing
root-system of Judaeo-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 life-affirming
values and principles for action, which would flow out of an essentially pro-
and fully- human space. So, Nietzsche 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 birthed into this place, we are not simply popped out neutrally into the
big-wide world, 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 for each one of
us a necessary and invisible cultural “shape,” an exoskeleton for our personal I/Self.
The question, Who am I?, does not reference
something physical, nor does it point to some brain function. Rather, 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 of Thinking.
The
philosophical quest prophesied by Nietzsche now stands before us to
accomplish—to transvalue, to deliberately invert 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?
Aside
from the obvious importance of the individual journey on this road to personal
psyche, there is also the collective journey. In a darker period of modern
Western history, Martin Heidegger spoke in his Kanzeler’s Address of the “geistig-volklichen
Daseins” of the German people—of
the unfolding of the Unenlightenment destiny of the German Volk and its
historical blooming into world history as a German moment of self-realization
in being-itself. The results of that awakening into Unenlightenment brought the
world to its knees, and between 70-85 million individuals, world-wide, into
their graves.
For America and the American people, however,
because of their historical commitment to Enlightenment philosophical
principles, there remain possibilities for a different historical destiny. That
said, on the American journey to ‘We the People’, we are now arrived at a
philosophical fork in the road. In one direction the road will lead us into a socio-religious
life, with its autocratic and unenlightened tendencies, which is even now unfolding
before us with its gaping maw yawning like the doors of the thought-prison it
is; but it is the predictable because long familiar road. In another direction
there is the secular life- the new, the unthought-of, the untested, the
unbounded, the free. What is left for us, individuals of interest, to do as We
the People approach, by fits and by starts, this fork in the road? That is
entirely the question. And the opportunity.
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 We the People—for 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. That bill
has now come due.
(Original essay reprised and reworked from Phrontisterion, July
2013)
Further
reading on Nietzsche’s Great Unlearning on Phrontisterion:
