Sunday, March 17, 2019

Will to Power, Evolutionism, Pragmatism

Schopenhauer modifies Kant's Noumenon-Phenomenon distinction to Noumenon-Epiphenomenon.  At the outset of The Gay Science, the studies corresponding to the latter two realms are Psychology vs. Morality.  Also there, Nietzsche characterizes the Noumenal Psychological principle as the Survival of the species, at the unwitting service of which is Individualistic Morality.  Now, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the Survival of the species is replaced with the goal of its Overcoming, i. e. by the Overman.  In other words, Nietzsche now seems to be be advocating a variety of Evolutionism.  However, it is unclear if Evolution is in this context merely an Epiphenomenal fiction designed to replace Survival.  Nevertheless, Will to Power, as replacing the passive Will to Live with an active principle in relation to the given, has concrete potential Evolutionist significance--the emergence of Adaptation-Of, from traditional Adaptation-To, as the predominant mode of the Human Species-Environment relation.  The overwhelming evidence, in even the 19th-century, of the efficacy of Technical Reason proves that predominance.  So, even if the Overman is just another fiction, a Morality of Will to Power is patently not, therefore indicating that the new hierarchy of Values that it entails is indeed a concrete expression of a possible variety of Evolutionism, and no mere Epiphenomenon.  Regardless, this 'Philosophy of the Future' may be more contemporary than he seems to realize--Pragmatism, already emerging, though far away from the European traditions that he seeks to overcome, in which efficacious Technical Reason is recognized as a fundamental fact of Human experience.

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