Revisiting the Will to Power: Active Nihilism and the Project of Trans-human Philosophy

Abstract

This chapter undertakes an investigation of the productive possibilities engendered by nihilism for the experimental project of ‘trans-human’ philosophy. While viewed by some critics as an event of strictly negative and stultifying consequence, the advent of European nihilism may actually furnish an interpretive context within which philosophers might finally ‘let drop’ their nagging anthropocentric prejudices. Against the blighted backdrop of European nihilism, that is, philosophers might progress significantly toward (and eventually complete?) the untimely agenda set for them by Friedrich Nietzsche: ‘to translate man back into Nature’ (Nietzsche 1989, 230), and thus behold the world in its sheer, amoral immanence.

And do you know what ‘the world’ is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world, a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself. … This world is the will to power, and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power — and nothing besides!

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §1067.

The perfect nihilist — the nihilist’s eye idealizes in the direction of ugliness and is unfaithful to his memories: it allows them to drop, lose their leaves; it does not guard them against the corpselike pallor that weakness pours out over what is distant and gone. And what he does not do for himself, he also does not do for the whole past of mankind: he lets it drop.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §21.