FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE FOUNDING FATHER OF POSTMODERNISM Alfred

							                             FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE:
                      FOUNDING FATHER OF POSTMODERNISM

                                        Alfred Thomas

      Alfred Thomas is a freelance writer with special interests in historiography,
      political philosophy, constitutional history, and 19th and 20th century Australian,
      English, European and American literature.

      About the ideal goal of human effort there exists in our civilisation, and for nearly
      thirty centuries there has existed, a very general agreement. From Isaiah to Karl
      Marx the prophets have spoken with one voice. In the Golden Age to which they
      look forward there will be liberty, peace, justice and brotherly love.
                                                                            Aldous Huxley

      We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered the problems of
      life have still not been touched at all.
                                                                    Ludwig Wittgenstein

In the 20th century Germany was defeated in two world wars. Yet ironically, during the same
period German thought conquered the world. The modern mind has been largely shaped by
four German thinkers: Marx, Freud, Einstein and, the more profound but less understood,
Friedrich Nietzsche.
       Briefly Nietzsche’s basic thesis was this: The historic origins and centuries–long
development of Western civilisation – which has today expanded via trade, colonisation and
Marx’s social philosophy to include the whole world – has its roots in Judaeo–Christian and
Graeco–Roman moral assumptions. Even after Graeco–Roman and Medieval Christendom’s
disintegration they survived. By the 18th century these same moral assumptions had become
secularised ‘self–evident truths’ of Nature and Reason. Social reformers and philosophers in
America, England and France then laid the foundations for the principles and social objectives
of the modern age: political freedom and socio–economic justice for all men everywhere.
Marxism, the only really important contribution to social theory since then seeks the same
objectives, rests upon the same moral assumptions (in spite of its claim to ‘scientific
objectivity’) but argues, correctly, that capitalism makes their attainment impossible.
       Nietzsche, recognising the remorseless advance of the natural sciences since the 17th
century observed, with growing consternation, that not only has science destroyed the
metaphysics of the ancient cosmology – wherein Western moral assumptions originated – the
corrosive criticism of science destroys the metaphysics of the modern cosmology as well. The
moral assumptions of our entire social theory, from the Enlightenment to Marx to
contemporary social science, stand on a foundation no more verifiable than the faith of the
ancients. Nature and Reason do not reveal ‘the rights of man’ – the secular values of
humanism which replaced a religious world view. These ‘self–evident truths’ were nothing
but metaphysical phantoms, ideological rationalisations. Science insists on knowing. How do
you verify these assertions? Where is the proof?
       Here it was that Nietzsche perceived the most terrible, the most shattering truth in man’s
age–long quest for moral–cognitive certitude. There is none – nor will there ever be. On the
very last frontier of human knowledge science declares it to be a logical and a ‘scientific’
impossibility to derive moral ‘ought’ from factual ‘is’. No fact, no possible arrangement of
facts, not even the entire universe of facts, can ever logically imply or scientifically verify the
truth of moral values. We swim, as it were, in a sea of the relativity of all facts. The Marxist
attempt to place the liberal Myth of Progress on the ‘iron rails of historical necessity’, through
the social agency of the working class, only changes one myth for another.

At the end of the 19th century Nietzsche wrote:

      The nihilistic consequences of our natural science – from its pursuits there follows
      ultimately a self–decomposition. In a frenzy of intellectual honesty, man will
      unmask as humbug and ‘meaningless’ that which he began by regarding as the
      highest values in life. The boundless faith in truth, the joint legacy of Christianity
      and Greek ‘logos’ will in the end dislodge every possible belief in the truth of any
      faith.
             People have no notion that from now onwards they exist on the mere
      pittance of inherited and decaying values – soon to be overtaken by an enormous
      bankruptcy. I foresee something terrible. Chaos everywhere. Nothing left which
      commands: Thou shalt! Thou shalt not! There will be wars such as have never
      been waged on earth.1

What began in the ancient world as a faith in the moral purpose – and, by implication, the
social progress – of mankind can never be more than just that – a faith. The moral
assumptions of Western civilisation, after centuries of vainly pursuing the chimera of
cognitive, scientific verification, will either prove their practical verification in the only way
possible, by creating a world in the image of its faith that all men ‘ought’ to have political
freedom and socio–economic justice, or the long night of 20th century barbarism, economic
exploitation and Machiavellian politics will end in the breakdown of civilisation and
ecological suicide.2


1
 Quoted in D Holbrook, Education, Nihilism and Survival (London, Longman & Todd, 1977) p 58.
2
 Ecological suicide as a consequence of economic exploitation and the materialism of morally unrestrained
western consumer societies.