Reaching Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche, the posthuman, and beyond.
To declare something as posthuman is to draw a line between what is human and something that is not. In Nietzsche’s Posthumanism (University of Minnesota Press, 2023), Edgar Landgraf proposes Friedrich Nietzsche’s “overhuman” (Übermensch) as well as the cyborg as shorthands for the posthuman.
Landgraf quotes Bernard Stiegler, who, summarizing French paleontologist André Leroi-Gourhan’s prehistorical research, argued that “it is the tool that invents the human, not the human who invents the technical.” We invent ourselves by externalizing our thoughts and ideas—“by becoming exteriorized techno-logically” in Stiegler’s terms. As John Culkin wrote describing Marshall McLuhan’s work, “we shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.” In other words, humans and technology are always already co-constituting each other. Nietzsche saw the influence of technology as a matter of degree, not one of “absolute difference,” once writing that “our writing tools are also working on our thoughts.” He was writing specifically about his new typewriter, but the sentiment is easily more broadly applicable to the massive changes in media technology—and its human users—since.
“The best we can do is to confront our inherited and hereditary nature with our knowledge of it, and through a new, stern discipline combat our inborn heritage and implant in ourselves a new habit, a new instinct, a second nature, so that our first nature withers away.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life
D. Harlan Wilson, author of over 30 books, among which are several biographies including Nietzsche: The Unmanned Autohagiography (Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2023). Some of these 123 chapters read like the journal entries of a man grappling with not only Nietzsche but himself. Its pithier entries, some only a sentence or two long, read like David Markson’s meandering novels of aphorisms and out-loud thoughts. In addition, the book even includes a set of 26 “Aborted Chapters” and Appendices at the end.
Wilson has also written similar “biographies” of Sigmund Freud, Adolf Hitler, and Frederick Douglass, as well as a more traditional one of J.G. Ballard. If you’re looking for an off-beat view of any of these thinkers and their thoughts, D. Harlan Wilson has your fix.
As always, thank you for reading and responding,
-royc.
http://roychristopher.com
So true, and very much so for artists, whose media of choice resist or constrain their actions. Artists don't have an idea that is then translated into a chosen medium, rather they work with that medium such that it becomes in effect a co-creator of the work (without wishing to ascribe agency per se to matter).