Postface: The Transmigration of Homo Natura

Abstract

For Nietzsche, the problem of nihilism and its overcoming resides in the memory-making or mnemotechnical operation of the organism which corresponds or perhaps even coincides with its psycho- physiological functions of individuation and individualization. The violence of inscribing singular and collective memory into the animal organismproved to be a technical transformation at the level of human consciousness (‘bad conscience’) and culture (‘slave morality’). Although Nietzsche views the mnemotechnics of nihilism as fundamentally degenerate and ultimately degenerative, he knows that this too must be subject to the law of Dionysus, and so it may nonetheless lead to a large-scale material transformation of life. This is one important context in which Nietzsche’s ‘great politics’ as the ‘creation of new values’ must be read.

Nothing is more erroneous than to make of psychical and physical phenomena the two faces, the two revelations of one and the same substance. Nothing is explained thereby: the concept ‘substance’ is perfectly useless as an explanation. Consciousness in a subsidiary role, almost indifferent, superfluous, perhaps destined to vanish and give way to a perfect automatism–

WP 523

Tim said, ‘Goethe wrote Part Two [of Faust] just a year before his death. I remember only one German word from that passage: verdienen. Earns. “Earns his freedom.” […] Perhaps it went, “Verdient seine Freiheit —” […] “Earns his freedom who daily conquers it — them, freedom and existence — anew.” The highest point in German Enlightenment. From which they so tragically fell.’

Philip. K. Dick, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer We are tired of the human …

GM I, 12