Nietzsche’s Warning to Humanity
Full disclosure: I’ve never been a fan of Friedrich Nietzsche. It’s not just his idea of the “will to power” that bothers me. More simply, I’ve never been able to get past the fact that the German philosopher wrote books entitled The Antichrist and Beyond Good and Evil. What good could possibly come from studying the author of such works?
In our course, “Introduction to Western Philosophy,” Dr. Nathan Schlueter encourages viewers like me to take Nietzsche’s warning and ideas seriously—to be open to the possibility that he might have something valuable to say—even if we disagree with him:
We may not agree with Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity. . . . But we might see something very true in Nietzsche’s worry about the end result of the modern project, what Nietzsche calls the last man. We might see in Nietzsche real warnings about tendencies in our own culture.
According to Dr. Schlueter in this short clip from the course, Nietzsche argued that—at its core—the great aim of modern politics is to liberate human beings from all suffering. And he recoiled at the prospect of living in such a world.
But why? Is suffering not something to be avoided? Nietzsche replies that the political attempt to eliminate all suffering cultivates “the last man.” The last man is reduced to an “animal concerned about basic biological needs” and is “motivated above all by comfortable self-preservation.” By choosing the path of least resistance, by chasing one fleeting pleasure after the next, the last man suffers from a lack of meaning in his life and ceases to be human.
It’s hard to deny that Nietzsche’s warning seems to have been prophetic on this account. All too often our society seems to place a premium on material comfort, even at the expense of far more important things like justice or liberty. Not only is this a sad state of our morality today, but it opens us to a great political danger. If our highest concern is having access to a steady stream of fleeting pleasures and material comforts, will we not make easy prey for would-be tyrants who offer frivolous comforts?
