“Total Economic Management of the Earth”. Nietzsche on the Economics, Nihilism, and the Übermensch
This essay ways first published by Logoi.ph
The title of this conference is, as most in attendance will be aware, “Nietzsche Today.” This could be just another benign title as we have become so used in the everyday busyness and operations of Academy, where Nietzsche Today is to say, if it says anything, that nothing in Nietzsche at all or in any way is profoundly pertinent and of utter urgency to our time. In fact, the ordinary operations of Academia are such that no one is to take anything seriously beyond the confines of illusory problems about which one can quip endlessly. Nietzsche Today then says nothing other than what it usually says when such titles and conferences announce themselves: we communicate here from within the safe already known confines only that which is already agreed upon. Or perhaps we take the title to say something else, to be a warning, the echo of a warning that is only now really coming towards us, as modernity is ending its final stages and the death drive of the occidental civilisation is truly coming to the fore. For is not Nietzsche’s name, as he says himself and if we take him seriously, a fate, or a destiny, depending on how we translate the German word Schicksal. Nietzsche’s name itself a fate, a sending, a destiny. Hence the title “Nietzsche Today” can twist free from its apparent harmlessness, and say that we today, if we genuinely read him, are confronted with the fate of our epoch, of our today, for which Nietzsche foresaw the utmost need of a transvaluation of values. He foresaw, more precisely, the collapse of the metaphysical dimension and how this would set free the unrestrained operations of the will to power. With the collapse of the ideal Platonistic world, also the world of appearances becomes a fable, as he writes in Twilight of the Idols. Thus, an entirely new world is set to emerge, to wit: a world of management through formats.
In Beyond Good and Evil, a text pregnant with the future, Nietzsche at once aims to increase the tension of the bow so that a new future can be born while he also has to attest to the inevitable reality of the last man and his mediocrity. «The mediocre alone have the prospect of continuing, of propagating themselves — they are the human beings of the future, the only ones who will survive» (§262). Nietzsche clearly attests that mediocrity will not only survive but thrive. They are mediocre, for they are content to sink back into the tensionless realm of an overcome Christian morality now without roots and because they agree with and even want the levelling of the niveau of man. There is a great tension of the bow that is Europe, to use Nietzsche’s image, because of Christianity’s suppression of higher artistic drives and instincts. Christianity is Platonism for the masses. The world-historically unique tension of the European soul is one that has emerged through its suppression by the poison that is Christianity and the empty promises of an ideal world or the Platonic Good in itself. To Nietzsche this was a necessary nightmare. The unique distress which this “bite of the tarantula” has caused is precisely the tension of the bow of the European soul which brought forth its unique capacity to aim beyond itself, beyond in fact the nightmare that has festered in its midst, beyond the artificial confines of Platonism and Christianity. The last man is content to sink back into a tensionless realm, into the “distress of distresslessness” of which Heidegger speaks, for he does not aim beyond himself. The last man is called thus, for he is content with the unabated rule of the Christian moral hypothesis, which with the death of God becomes groundless, and which no longer generates genuine distress or tension. While the values of Christian morality have been utterly devalued due to the death of God, their remnants, now void, continue to rule in the name of liberalism. Sinking back into the remnants of the Christian moral-hypothesis is without tension for the mediocre last man precisely because of its emptiness. It no longer demands anything but subjection to a process which is familiar to everyone and which remains inconsequential. Hence the blinking of the last man. This is what Nietzsche elsewhere refers to as incomplete nihilism. Only the very free spirits, Nietzsche writes in Beyond Good and Evil, still have «the complete emergency of spirit and all the tension of its bow! And perhaps also the arrow, the task, and, who knows? the aim…». Nietzsche wrote these words in Sils Maria in 1885. A new goal to aim at is required precisely because all highest values have devalued themselves. Hence, what good poison Christianity may have been, the healthy tension it produced, the interiority which it gave to Europeans, it can no longer produce. Hence what is necessary is a transvaluation of the highest values, or else the now emptied values become operational simulacra. Still, here it seems as though Nietzsche wants to aim beyond a mere transvaluation. After all mere transvaluation is also a sign of decline. Also, the will to power, whose operations fully break out after the death of God, requires an aim – for the will without aim would rather will nothingness than not willing at all. In a posthumously published note we find a pivotal explication to understand better what Nietzsche sees as inevitable in the age of decline.
In this remarkably detailed note from 1887 Nietzsche remarks on the economic-ecumenical future of the world. In this note, which we will refer to as the Wheelwork Essay, Nietzsche also remarks, but already less confidently than in the preface to Beyond Good and Evil, that a new ‘what for’ is required. A new what for that can aim beyond the story of the next two centuries, of which Nietzsche speaks in a fragmentary preface to the Will to Power, and which is to him inevitably nihilism. The greatest danger would be to remain stuck in an incomplete nihilism, which means to remain stuck with the moral-hypothesis of Christianity that now translates into the promises of socialism and democratisation. This, to Nietzsche, is degeneracy of spirit. The wheelwork essay should be read as complementing the fragmentary preface to the Will to Power, in which Nietzsche foretells of the necessity of nihilism as the destiny, Geschick, of the next two hundred years. In fact, Nietzsche ends this fragmentary preface with the remark that we need to find out «what actually was the value of these ‘values’ […],» and only then will we «at some point […] need new values […]». This economic use value of the overcome values, which now should not be recycled, but re-evalued as to their final value in order to be used as the fuel for new values. It is the devaluation of all highest values, themselves deeply nihilistic, i.e., life-denying, that gives rise to nihilism and hence, says Nietzsche, «we must first experience nihilism.» The living through nihilism, only on the surface romanticised by Nietzsche as being able to withstand greatest loneliness and despair, is in fact nothing but the cold act of discounting to present-day value what certain moral values have been worth. What living through nihilism means becomes apparent only in the Wheelwork Essay, which is a late echo of an earlier remark in Dawn, Nietzsche may not want to admit this to himself. His notion of striding through nihilism in order to bring forth the new world beyond the last man, is itself purely and only economical and in that sense in the service of the will to power and its operations. This includes the Übermensch who is fully in the service of the demands of the calculative will to power.
Consider §24 in Human, All Too Human. Nietzsche here considers the becoming-conscious of history itself, of man as a historical being who gazes upon the vast fields of history, of the objectified past. This objectification of the past grants at least the potential of steering the future. Nietzsche hence in Dawn also has to agree that progress is possible. Not necessary but possible precisely because of the historico-destinal becoming-conscious of man. The other path of the ‘old culture’, i.e., of tradition, has already ended, he attests. Those who deny this are Romantic dreamers. Today, Nietzsche remarks, through his higher spirited consciousness the human being can set the conditions for better education, for generating a higher culture, from the vast riches of history itself. However, Nietzsche here also says the following: humans are now capable of «economically managing the earth as a whole». In the Wheelwork Essay, as we shall see, Nietzsche radicalises this even further and ties it together with his later notions of the Übermensch and nihilism.
It is all the more striking that in the wheelwork fragment Nietzsche seems to bemoan the «ever more economic consumption of man and humanity». Of course, this will turn out to be a necessity of the coming age. At once we find in Nietzsche one of the most sober estimations of what the future and indeed our ‘Today’ already has in store for us. In the Wheelwork Essay Nietzsche speaks of the «inevitably approaching general economic administration of the earth» in which humanity will finds its «best sense» or ‘new meaning’ as machinery. Note that Nietzsche explicitly speaks of sense, not any sense, but of the ‘best sense.’ Humanity’s best meaning will be, and inevitably so, when it begins to understand itself as machinery and as resource. This sense is the sense of utter senselessness, of directionlessness after the ‘horizon has been wiped away’. Humanity will be an «uncanny, unhomely [unheimlich] wheelwork of ever smaller, ever more finely adapted wheels» in which all «dominating, commanding forces» will have been made superfluous. So, we see Nietzsche bemoans not the reduction of mass man, but of the strong and higher type. This wheelwork is for Nietzsche exemplary of socialist solidarity, it depicts a «maximum of the exploitation of man». Nietzsche does not bemoan this exploitation per se. Quite the opposite. He would bemoan this «reduction of man — a kind of standstill of the level of man» only if the eerie wheelwork failed to serve as the economic basis for a new higher type: the Übermensch. The reduction of man to an adapted wheel is at once the peak of nihilism and also the necessary precondition for the production of the Übermensch. The Übermensch himself is not born, but produced, viz., by the operations of the uncanny wheelwork as a luxurious surplus or excess. It is significant to note that the Dionysian element is in fact found again in the luxury overproduction which leads to the Übermensch, but now the Dionysian forms part of the production, its exuberance is integrated into the wheelwork. Nietzsche here no longer even speaks of breeding or rearing. Instead, he refers to the Übermensch as the result of excess production which is a necessary countermovement, itself emerging from the wheelwork. His remark that man is the not yet fully established animal also finds a final response here: man is the work animal enforcing his own self-reduction in the service of the operations of the wheelwork. This reduction Nietzsche likens to a «value-reduction of the type of man.» His economic worth is diminished in the overall cosmic bookkeeping. In how far?
For the reduction of man to machinery cannot be an end in itself. More precisely, the wheelwork, foreseeing the cybernetic enclosed circuit, does not produce any excesses. Nietzsche foresees that the mere reduction of humanity to a finely adapted eerily well-functioning wheelwork that computes and meets all needs and desires is dangerous, not primarily because of the levelling and equalising of the masses, but because this levelling could dwarf any and all excess production of higher types. Without naming it Nietzsche here addresses the ‘economic problem’ which is predicated and itself the result of the fundamentally mistaken arrival of scholé in the midst of the polis, which to this plays itself out in the superficial leisure-work-dialectic. Whichever solution to the economic problem, be it communism, socialism, liberal capitalism, stakeholder capitalism, is presented, it will be at fault and fail insofar as here what never comes to be seen is that scholé is the essence of man, and not some contingent free-time from work. Hence, the solutions to the economic problems rarely differ much. The 1970s film Network, presents without ideological blindness the truth at the heart of the superficial dialectic between capitalism and communism, to wit: that their respective aims are the same, an aim which Nietzsche sees but cannot accept. To quote the capitalist CEO Jenson in the film: «And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality — one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused». This is precisely the wheelwork which Nietzsche fears, for here in this perfected, sterilised and tranquillised world nothing extraordinary will be able to emerge anew. This, to Nietzsche, constitutes a decline, a Rückgang as he writes in the German, which indeed can also be translated as ‘recession’ of the grandest style. A recession in the total economy of humanity, a collapse unto the smallest common denominator. Such a wheelwork ever more finely attunes its wheels and cogs and crowds out all dominating and commanding forces.
At the heart of the solutions to the so-called economic problem, which again is at the heart of the motion and unfolding of the Occident and which has arisen, for scholé still has not been seen as the proper essence of Occidental man, we always find utopian economic optimism, of which also Nietzsche was aware. Be it Marx who proclaimed the necessary possibility of communism, in which the material problem was supposed to have been solved by liberating man to be a functionary of the machine in such a way that in the morning he can be deployed to be a factory worker and in the afternoon he can be deployed to be a musician - as according to the demands of the machine. Or be it Keynes’ frantic dreams of the Promised Land, as he calls it, of abundant «Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren» which can be reached, as he writes in 1928, if for one century men use greed to overproduce such a vast economic substance so that the children of the 21st century will no longer have to work. Or be it, to give a final example, the technocratic idea of Bertrand Russell to re-introduce ‘idleness’ and ‘leisure’ into society only when because of full automation workers will have nothing better to do than being content with knowing how to be idle again, as they once were much more often during feudal times than in liberal democracies, as Russell admits. Until either of those dys-utopian Isms has been reached, there will have been a tremendous cost to be paid by many. Nietzsche is aware of this calculation. He writes in the Wheelwork Essay: «One can see that I oppose economic optimism: as if with the increase the costs for everyone also everyone’s utility increased. The opposite seems to be the case: everyone’s expenses sum up to a total loss». This, again, is so because of the reduction of man. Hence, what is desperately required is someone or something that justifies this eerie process. Note that the Übermensch is only to justify the process. The Übermensch is not to overcome or even break the wheel.
Thus, Nietzsche himself remains trapped within the dialectic of the economic problem. His thinking in terms of values and the need to transvalue, or better, to re-evaluate and recalculate the worth of some values over others, is at the very edge of the dialectic which begins with Aristotle and which silently spurs on the motion of the Occident, which has by now thanks to globalisation and the global liberalisation of labour and financial markets, entirely colonised the globe with its economic problem — a problem so deeply-seated it has rarely ever occurred to anyone.
Still, Nietzsche sees the necessity of a counter-movement, as he writes in the Wheelwork Essay. Put differently, he rather wishes to ‘demonstrate’ or ‘evince’ such a necessity. But it is entirely unclear why the Übermensch is really necessary because the reduction of man to a mere mass is inevitable. As just mentioned, Nietzsche foresees the necessity of a counter-movement not against the wheelwork and its operations, but against the reduction of man. This counter-movement is the higher type of man: the Übermensch. The Übermensch is, as we learn in the prologue of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, supposed to be the meaning of the earth, or more honestly as Nietzsche is in the Wheelwork Essay, the Übermensch «shall be the meaning of the earth!» qua Nietzsche’s wilful nominalistic positing. One should not let oneself be misled by the poetic tone of the Zarathustra. The preparation for the arrival of the Übermensch is but an economic-calculative one. To quote from Zarathustra: «I love the one who works and invents so that he may build a house for the Übermensch and to prepare the earth, animals, and plants for him: for thus he wants his going under». This erection of the house for the Übermensch is precisely the overall total economic management of the earth as it is honestly and soberly spelled out in the wheelwork essay. The house of the Übermensch is the wheelwork essay. The ‘going under’ is the moving into the wheelwork where the last man is optimally deployed. The Übermensch is the new ‘what for’ which Nietzsche austerely warns will be necessary to justify the entire unstoppable and unsurpassable process of the complete development, organisation and planning of the earth, which also the Faust in Goethe’s Faust II foresees and enacts, an earth from which all gods have fled.
Thus Nietzsche has his Zarathustra say: “‘Dead are all gods: now we want the Übermensch to live.’ – this shall once be our last will at the great noon!”. In context of the Wheelwork Essay this rather exuberant proclamation at the end of the first part of Zarathustra reads: the Übermensch is the one who can provide justification for this eerie process of total economisation and management, which is all that is left after the death of God. The Übermensch for his very being is justifying and synthesising. The necessity, and this truly is the horror of the complete nihilism Nietzsche foretells as the future which is our Today, which is the clear light of the ‘great noon,’ now this horrifying necessity is that the higher type, the Übermensch, only serves to synthesise and justify through invention, as Nietzsche writes in the Wheelwork Essay, i.e., through wilful but arbitrary positing, the senselessness of the operations of the wheelwork! That is but the task of the Übermensch! The Übermensch, himself an excess luxury product of the wheelwork does not counter the wheelwork. No, he justifies its inevitable existence by sanctifying its senselessness, by turning its senselessness into a surrogate of sense insofar as the Übermensch needs for his survival the wheelwork as a ‘pedestal.’ The new ‘what for’ for which the text calls hence is the non-circular but excess production of this higher type that can and will justify the utter senselessness of the operations of the wheelwork which is inevitably and inescapably the future of our Today. Nietzsche’s opposition to economic optimism, which is at its core a nihilistic utilitarian computation and evaluation, results in a full embrace of senselessness as the new pedestal for the Übermensch who is, as we know from the Zarathustra, supposed to replace God, i.e., any transcendent divinity. The operations of the wheelwork are not broken by the Übermensch. He instead uses the wheelwork, of which he is a product, to generate for himself a counter-pole which he senselessly opposes only in order to oppose it, only in order to distance himself from it while remaining entirely and totally immanent to and dependent upon it. What becomes apparent here is the cybernetic feedback-loop of the wheelwork to which the Übermensch is integral.
God is dead. The transcendent God has spent Himself, emptied Himself into the world and immanentised all transcendence. At the end of the process of the transcendent God emptying Himself into immanence all that remains is to re-evaluate. Only in light of the wheelwork essay does one begin to see the true scope of the Übermensch as presented in Zarathustra. Hence we now understand what Nietzsche truly meant when he wrote: «Could you create a god? – So be silent about all gods! But you could well create the Übermensch». The later Nietzsche is more honest: The Übermensch is not a creation, but a product, a luxury-surplus, but still a product.
It is however noteworthy that Nietzsche speaks also of Ausscheidung not only of Überschuss. Thus, there is mention of excess and not only surplus. That is to say that here in Nietzsche there is still, more than in Marxian or Keynesian economic theory, the possibility of irrational exuberance, of an excess that has not been calculated for. Marxian surplus theory assumes that value is generated from labour and as workers in Capitalism are not paid enough for their work they are exploited and the owner of the means of production uses this surplus value to make a profit. But the surplus value is accounted for in precise terms. It is precisely this exploitation of the workers which according to Marx depicts the instability of the capitalist system and hence will lead to its breaking point. Even the notion of Luxus-Überschuss, luxury surplus, is impossible in Marxian economics because exchange value is produced by exploited labour. There can therefore be no luxury-surplus, no superfluousness in Marxism. In Nietzsche’s wheelwork however, even though it is supposed to serve the purpose of suppressing all higher instincts and drives and all exuberance, the wheelwork inadvertently over-shoots, nearly ecstatically exacerbates and in this way produces the Übermensch. The wheelwork, because it produces excesses and luxury, i.e., the utterly unnecessary, hence is even more stable than Marx’s version of capitalism. In Marx Communism is a theoretical inevitability precisely because of the exploitation of labour. Capitalism will begin to destruct itself. Not so in Nietzsche, if we want to speak of Capitalism here. The integrated excess of the wheelwork guarantees the stability of the wheelwork. The production of the unnecessary, i.e., the luxury good that is the Übermensch, proves to serve as its justification. Through the ‘maximum of exploitation’ which the wheelwork is, it can become even more stable if it brings about the type of the Übermensch, if it allows for exuberance and excess. En passant Nietzsche’s continuous use of the word ‘type’ should also give us pause: a type is what can be reproduced. This inherent reproduction of total immanence, of which the Übermensch as the one going-beyond is integral part, also allows for the steering and control of the history of the future.
In addition to the aforementioned §24 in Human, All Too Human, §203 in Beyond Good and Evil provides the reader with Nietzsche’s more concrete notions about the commanding type of the future and also with Nietzsche’s criticisms of socialism and democracy. The chapter immediately begins with the same sort of economic evaluating language as the wheelwork essay. Nietzsche speaks of the reduction of man and of the lowering of his value or worth. In fact, here we find nearly a blueprint on how to, if not breed, then at least how to rear and cultivate the future type of the Übermensch and to end history, which he refers to here as «the frightful rule of folly and chance». To end this folly of chance hitherto called ‘history’ «a new type of philosopher and commander» must be put in charge. Here Nietzsche does not speak of the Übermensch. Nietzsche calls upon the free spirits to see and admit that the conditions are indeed now perfect for these new commanders of the wheelwork to emerge. Those conditions, Nietzsche admits, are again also to be wilfully created. The Wheelwork Essay again sheds light on how and why this type can and needs be produced. If the Übermensch fails to rise to his task of justifying the wheelwork by becoming its luxury excess, then as Nietzsche attests here in Beyond Good and Evil the socialist «universal degeneracy of the human being» will rule unabatedly, where man gets reduced and dwarfed «to an absolute herd animal». To use the language of the Wheelwork Essay: the human being gets reduced to a finely adapted and oiled cog in the wheelwork. We can see here that Nietzsche wants to get rid of history, of contingency and folly while at once he despairs at the socialist promise of just that. Hence, he proclaims here also «how unexhausted man still is for the greatest possibilities and how often in the past the type man has stood in presence of mysterious decisions and new paths». Thus, one must attest that the fundamental difference between Nietzsche and the socialists’ dream is that the latter knows no tragedy at the heart of existence, which Nietzsche however does uphold. Hence, even though Nietzsche proclaims to «teach man the future of man as his will, as dependant upon a human-will [Menschen-Willen]», he is aware that the transvaluation of values is a tragic task, not a melodramatic or utopian one. Tragic in the sense that the wheelwork is and remains for us inevitable. That for now at least no yonder yet has shown itself, that even the notion of the Übermensch as the one who is to overcome not only man but also himself, is still ultimately and fully integrated into the wheelwork, provides no way out. Still, the socialist differs from the commanding philosopher of the future precisely because the former is not able to transvalue the Christian moral hypothesis. Socialism is Neo-Christianity rehashed for the masses.
Tragic is the commanding philosopher not least because he can fail and deteriorate but also because he will necessarily be overcome, just as the Übermensch, insofar as he is born from the unexhausted possibility that is man which however will exhaust him and inevitably so in order to bring forth another man needed for his time - where the socialist wishes to end time and remain stuck in the overcome values of Christo-Europe and the dialectic of the economic problem. Thus, the uncanny wheelwork appears to be the necessary first step to go beyond Christian morality through total economic management of the earth. Injecting a ‘Christian ethics’ into its operations would for Nietzsche be tantamount to injecting simulacra with the consequence of entirely baring a new beyond. The uncanny wheelwork thus ultimately reveals itself as a first necessary catharsis, a bleak prospect of desertification necessary ultimately for new creation once the wheelwork will have run its course.