European Roots of Postmodern Thought and Culture

by Don Swift


The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche , who proclaimed that God was dead, had a profound impact on both modernists and postmodernists. He meant God was dead both because people simply paid no attention to him and because there weas so much evil in the world that the notion of there being a God was unfathomable.
This left western humankind adrift between a civilization and one that was yet to emerge. In proclaiming that God was dead, he was arguing and celebrating the discovery that men no longer believed in Him. This proclamation was somewhat premature, but he clearly foresaw the coming of post-Christian Europe and the moral vacuum that would accompany its emergence. Albert Camus suggested that in Nietzsche "nihilism [ nothingness] became conscious for the first time."
Nietzsche did not think nihilism would be something permanent and called it a “a pathological transitional state.” His assault on traditional values involved much more than an attack on Christianity. He fired the opening salvos in the attack on the Enlightenment project. He saw the Enlightenment as another form of fidelism, and ridiculed its belief in progress and fixed truths. Nietzsche thought that all truth was contingent, and worried that the masses -- the great "herd"-- could not live with this, and he feared that morals would gradually perish. He welcomed this development only in the sense that he thought that others would eventually replace values based on religion that would be more consistent with human nature. A new person would emerge -- probably first in the United States, who was a decadent nihilist weakling who had no understanding of life but was quick to tell you that "In the past, all the world was mad."
He was concerned that liberalism, capitalism, democracy, and modernism had all but snuffed out man’s atavistic instinct to struggle for recognition. It was this drive, he believed, that enabled people to shape their own morality, to pursue excellence, and exercise their creative powers. Modern conditions restrained this impulse and unleashed human desires and emphasized reasoned calculations. Bourgeois man aspires to little more than confortable self-preservation. At best, they pursue economic gain rather than glory. He wanted “my Dionysian world” where man again responded to his instincts and desires and said “This world is the will to power … And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides.” However, only superior creatures would be able to respond to this craving to exercise power. because “egoism belongs to the nature of the noble soul.” Nietzsche saw Socrates as an historical villain because he opposed Dyonesian revelry and people’s quest to accept illusion. Socrates further erred by insisting that possessing knowledge is a virtue and that something cannot be beautiful if it was not intelligible. Nietzsche went so far as to say that “truth is ugly.”
To Nietzsche, the masses would wallow in the empty meaningless of nihilism until a race of Overmen emerged to create a new culture; yet, he also suggested that only a superior being should create a law only applicable to himself. These supermen would possess a “master morality” that would resemble that of noble “uncaged beasts of prey.” These noble beasts “savor a freedom from all social restraints and might come away from admittedly despicable acts “exhilarated and undisturbed of soul.” Their conduct would reflect the prime human characteristic and motive, the will to power.
His praise for “blonde beasts”, contempt for Christian morality, and glorification of violence and power made him particularly attractive to the Nazis, but it must be noted that he opposed anti-Semitism and would not have condoned their monstrous actions. In noting the need for a new morality to replace Christianity and in exulting the will over reason, Nietzsche laid out the philosophical agenda of the Twentieth Century and planted the seeds of postmodern culture. Nazism and Stalinism were to represent the triumph of the will above all other considerations. This line of thought has made it possible to reduce some people to the level of mere things. The Nazis scrapped history, aesthticicized politics, adopted a barbarous irrationalism, and “staked all on the charisma of those who told the stories.”. These are all tendencies that can be found in postmodernism. Certainly, most postmodern thinkers have tried to avoid these pitfalls, but the fact remains that exultation of desire and the will above all else sweeps aside restraints to rise of totalitarian philosophies and states.

Nietzsche was both a father of modernity and postmodernity. He understood what Hegel meant when he said that modernity can be seen as “Good Friday without Easter.” While there was much optimism about humankind’s prospects while he was alive, both he and Hegel knew that the rationalism, skepticism, and scientism of thir age would erode the Christian heart of Western culture. Without it, there was no solid basis for proclaiming the dignity of man, for pursuing liberalism, or identifying good and evil. Believing with Schopenhauer that true life is pure will, he was not surprised by the dog eat dog tactics of capitalism. Anticipating postmodernity, he saw that the Christian civilization would eventually be replaced by the age of the autonomous individual, in which the strong would do as they wished and even prey upon others. These people, by their own efforts, could evolve into gods. He toyed with the idea of a future in which the strong would rule and their slaves would go about their tasks in equanimity because their lives were enveloped in illusions.

Despite his remarkable ability to identify cultural trends, he was very much a man of his times. He feared democracy, scorned shopkeepers, and thought that women should be considered possessions. Nietzsche feared the moral vacuum that would exist in the period between the collapse of Christian civilization and the construction of new values by his overmen. In the age of nihilism, the herd would be better off adhering to the values of discredited Judeo-Christian culture. There are useful myths that the herd should accept; "We have a need of lies ... in order to live." If there is anything like truth, he held, people could not live with it.
Nietzsche feared creeping mediocrity and saw the coming of many people who were the opposites of his Ubermenschen. His name for this contemptible being was “the last man”, someone who lacked ambition, was preoccupied with health matters and life’s little pleasures.” The last man is incapable of despising himself, and in his age, “Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same; whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse…..” In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the people shouted “Turn us into these last men!” The death of God was fo be followed by an age of anomie, in which people experienced meaninglessness, rootlessness, despair, and angst. Nihilism would afflict many with spiritual torpor and debasement.
For Nietzsche, there were no facts, only interpretations. As William Butler Yeates expressed it, "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." While he attacked conventional morality, saying “everything praised as moral is identical in essence with everything immoral,” he did not advocate much of the conduct then called immoral. He wrote that “I do not deny—unless I am a fool—that many actions called immoral ought to be avoided and resisted, or that many called moral ought to be done and encouraged….” His quarrel was reasons advanced for supporting conventional morality. Nietzsche sneered that “truth” was “a moveable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphism”, and this view was eventually to become the fashionable in today’s institutions of higher learning.
Michel Foucault once wrote that the best tribute to Nietzsche’s thought was “use it, to deform it, to make it groan and protest.” This is precisely what will happen to the work of both these writers in this essay. Each possessed great sociological insight. Neither saw the emergence of nihilism as an unmixed blessing. Neither believed in God, but both thought the Deity was permanently locked into our grammar and. Foucault thought “God is perhaps not so much a region beyond knowledge as something prior to the sentences we speak.” That line is pregnant with possibilities. They meant this only in a linguistic sense, but there might be a deeper truth here. Paul Tillich’s contended that God is the ground of being. It can be argued that without God as the basis of life and existence, there can be no way of giving life meaning and coherence. Aristotle saw God as a necessary mechanism for sustaining being. Socrates knew that being or life meant little unless it was the good life.
In saying with Tillich that God is the ground of being, we adopting this Socratic understand . This makes the purpose of life pursuing the good life for ones self and society. Tillich knew that the two were the same and spent most of his energies in pursuit of the Kingdom of God. Modern relativism is based more on linguistic than philosophical argument. Earlier forms of relativism relied heavily upon formal logic and very high standards of proof, which made it difficult to find meaning in anything or find systematic explanations for complex matters. The linguistic approach is even more devastating. Its first premise is that sign systems have no reference to reality; that makes nihilism almost inevitable. .