Friedrich Nietzsche intuited that the European Enlightenment would self-destruct, as reason would come to ignore truth and replace it with narratives and psychological self-fulfillment. For Nietzsche, the ultimate driver of human experience is the will to power, which doesn’t subordinate itself to reality and transcendental idealisms.
Have we, in the U.S. and Europe, now come to the cultural condition of surrendering to the will to power?
Please join us at 9:00 am (CDT) on Thursday, October 23, for a Zoom round table discussion of this possibility.
The triumph of the will, as Nietzsche wrote, actually follows the second law of thermodynamics by letting loose in its victims the proclivities of entropy – the disordered disbursal of energies and the inability to accomplish work. As the individual will collapses in on itself, an implosion of psychic energy and brain and muscle matter, the person separates from society and the sustaining ecosystem.
Narcissism, nihilism – “my” truth can be any truth – splinters and disintegrates society and culture, bringing about the Hobbesian order of nature, where our lives become “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Not civilized, but savage without moral nobility, excellence of thought, elegance of word or depth of heart.
If our age is, indeed, one of nihilism, what is to become of us? What should we do – role over and play dead?
I considered his influence in my recent essay, “Friedrich Nietzsche: The Devil’s Advocate,” in August Pegasus, which you can read here.
To register, please email jed@cauxroundtable.net.
Event will last about an hour.