Saturday, September 28, 2013

Value-Creation and Social Engineering

A society is shaped by its values.  Thus, Nietzsche's value-creators are creators of societies.  Now, such creativity is, according to Beyond Good and Evil #212, informed by the concept of a "new greatness in man", with 'greatness' constituted by "wholeness in manifoldness".  Thus, the creativity aims at the construction of a "more comprehensive" (#257) society.  However, these value-creators are also experimenters, so the success of their projects is never guaranteed in advance.  Thus, Nietzsche's concept of History, at least as expressed in these passages, contrasts, on the one hand, with various Determinisms--Mechanical, Teleological, Dialectical--and, on the other, with randomly successive Oligarchisms.  Instead, it anticipates the Progressivism of Dewey, a doctrine more recently often characterized by some opponents as 'social engineering'.

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