Burglarizing Nietzsche’s Tomb
نویسنده
چکیده
This essay analyzes the connection between Nietzsche’s philosophy and contemporary transhumanism, on the basis of his Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy and how it articulated in lateRomantic European culture. Nietzsche’s personal insanity, and the morbidity of the Romantic Movement in general, can serve as a warning of what transhumanism might become if it overemphasizes individualism. Nietzsche’s first great book, The Birth of Tragedy, stresses the importance of the classical-romantic debate in serious European music, links directly to Jewish intellectual traditions in sociology and psychoanalysis, and provides metaphors for understanding the Nazi Holocaust. The idea of the Übermensch, promoted in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, demands that transhumanists cross the abyss that separates traditional religious culture from some new form of culture yet to be discovered, or that must be created by the transhumanists themselves. Burglarizing Nietzsche’s tomb Poor Nietzsche! Rich Nietzsche! Never has a modern philosopher been so abused and used as he. I have done it myself, taking the title and the eleven chapter epigrams of my 2007 book, Across the Secular Abyss, from him. Decades ago, Walter Kaufmann (1974) rescued him from the Nazis, and today his ghost cries for salvation from the transhumanists. Or not, as the case may be. Perhaps Nietzsche himself was the first transhumanist (Sorgner 2009). Perhaps he really was a Nazi.
منابع مشابه
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and Parodic Style: On Lucian’s Hyperanthropos and Nietzsche’s Übermensch
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