The German Genius

the completion of Western metaphysics” with the interpretation of Being as the will to power, he “realised the most extreme possibility of philosophy.” 12 Among modern philosophers, Nietzsche’s influence has been reflected most keenly in the work of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Richard Rorty (who characterizes the entire present age as “post-Nietzschean”), Alexander Nehamas, Eugene Fink, and Jacques Derrida. As Bernd Magnus and Kathleen Higgins put it, “Nietzsche’s influence has become unavoidable in our culture.” 13
    That culture is “modernity” and in his quest to understand and explain modernity, Nietzsche in effect tells us that the search for “absolute truth, universal values and complete liberation” is impossible. 14 Our profound psychological/philosophical condition in the modern world, says Nietzsche, is that we long to believe the old, the traditional certainties, but we cannot, we are trapped on the far side of scientific discoveries that destroy the old beliefs while replacing them with—nothing. Progress, philosophical progress, has reached an impasse: “…it is the disorganising principles that give our age its character.” 15
    Nietzsche called this condition, the absence of any moral purpose to the world, any direction, “nihilism,” and it had three—at least three—important consequences: there is no meaning to events, we lose faith that anything is to be achieved , or can be achieved; there is no coherent pattern in history; and there is nothing universal that we can all agree upon or aspire to. Our world is motivated mainly by our own inner psychological needs, rather than by any “truth” (a meaningless and malleable commodity, the only purpose of which is to enhance our feeling of power). He thought that our main psychological need was just that—the celebrated “will to power” and, for himself, felt that the only basis for any judgment, now that all other bases had disappeared, was the aesthetic one.
    Even in making aesthetic judgments, since we have no grounds for agreement in any “deep” or universal sense, because there is no longer any basis for meaning, the only criterion by which originality or creativity or beauty may be judged is by their “newness.” Even here, however, newness will be obsolete more or less immediately because it can have no meaning over and above the fact that it is new. This applies to changes in ourselves as much as in conventional works of art or developments in history or fashion. There can be no direction in our personal development, only meaningless change, change for the sake of it.
    This is, needless to say, arguably the bleakest analysis of the human condition there has ever been, and Nietzsche intended it as such. (“I am by far the most terrible human being that has existed so far,” he said in a famous passage. “This does not preclude the possibility that I shall be the most beneficial.”) He thought there was no escape, that he was—we are—living at a unique time in history, when a sea change in philosophy and psychology was taking place, a “new man” was being born. It was this chilling message that echoed down the twentieth century and was only slightly alleviated by what Max Weber observed.
    Just as Nietzsche’s most famous aphorism was that “God is dead,” so Weber’s was that we now live in a world that is in a state of Entzauberung , that is “disenchanted.” Weber made two main claims about modern life. One, its discontents were brought about, as Lawrence Scaff glosses it, by capitalism, technology, economic rationalism, and the institutionalization of instrumentalism—in other words, the main aim now is to control the world in an abstract, intellectual manner rather than to enjoy it in an aesthetic or sensual way. The modern condition is that we have to choose between knowledge that in Weber’s words is “untimely and troubling” or undergo a “sacrifice of the intellect” as when we embrace a religious faith or a closed philosophical system like Christianity, Marxism, or Hegelianism. 16 We believe we can master all things by calculation—there is now a “romanticism in numbers”—and that science can preserve life. At the same time science cannot “answer whether the quality of the life preserved is worth having.” 17 The idea of a “unified self” simply lies beyond our grasp in the modern world. 18
    Weber’s other argument was that modernity involved a heightened