In 2023, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen released a document called “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” in which he proclaimed himself a de facto spokesman of the “effective accelerationist” movement. E/acc, as it is known in online spheres, is billed as a rejoinder to effective altruism and has gained traction in recent years among Silicon Valley technologists and the new right. The fundamental idea of e/acc is that accelerating technological development is the best way to resolve most of our cultural problems. The policy corollary is that we should therefore deregulate the tech industry, especially with respect to AI, nuclear power and nanotechnology.
But Andreessen’s manifesto is not focused on policy. Rather, it is an expression of what we might call “superhumanist” discourse. By this I mean that his proclamations largely revolve around the idea that humankind already possesses the power to become superhuman, if only we could get around a thoroughly nihilistic establishment. In a section headed “The Enemy,” he writes, “Our enemy is deceleration, de-growth, depopulation—the nihilistic wish, so trendy among our elites, for fewer people, less energy, and more suffering and death.” Nihilism is, for Andreessen, generally associated with progressivism, though he is careful not to openly avow either right- or left-wing politics. He concludes: “Our enemy is Friedrich Nietzsche’s Last Man.”
This citation is perhaps apt: Nietzsche developed his idea of the Übermensch in contrast with the “last human beings,” those who have lost the capacity to become something higher, who no longer have the energy to “give birth to a dancing star.” In another section boldly titled “Becoming Technological Supermen,” Andreessen writes: “We believe in deliberately and systematically transforming ourselves into the kind of people who can advance technology.” Later, he exhorts us to transform ourselves into such “technological supermen,” positioned against the “last men” of our time—the regulators, the experts, the ivory tower.
Who are Andreessen’s superhumans? Where will they come from? Andreessen borrows the concept of the “techno-capital machine” from accelerationist philosopher Nick Land to describe markets as “the engine of perpetual material creation, growth, and abundance.” Andreessen proclaims, “We believe the techno-capital machine of markets and innovation never ends, but instead spirals continuously upward.” We will be transformed by a runaway growth pattern of “intelligence,” leading to a cybernetic symbiosis between human and artificial life forms. Andreessen reassures the reader that “intelligent machines augment intelligent humans, driving a geometric expansion of what humans can do.”
Andreessen isn’t alone in dreaming of transcending humanity through technology. Nick Bostrom, founder of the Oxford University “Future of Humanity Institute,” has argued that posthuman life is not only “possible” and “desirable,” through the use of nanobots, AI or other technologies, but that “it could be very good for us to become posthuman.” Yuval Noah Harari, popular medieval-historian-turned-prophet-of-doom, predicts with some trepidation that in this century “the third big project of humankind will be to acquire for us divine powers of creation and destruction, and upgrade Homo sapiens into Homo deus.” Ray Kurzweil, Google’s bewilderingly optimistic “AI visionary,” recently predicted that by 2045 we will have achieved “singularity,” where human and artificial intelligence will be so integrated that “we will … become superhuman.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the modern technological superman is most often associated with the archetype of the Silicon Valley mogul. On a podcast in 2022, Andreessen described Elon Musk as the closest thing we have to a Nietzschean Übermensch today. (Other candidates floated on the episode include Trump and Kanye.) What Andreessen admires about Musk is his dictatorial approach to running his companies, which he likens favorably to Nietzsche’s conception of “master morality.” This kind of man isn’t bogged down by regulations, bureaucratic structures or the petty concerns of the ethics department; he simply pursues, unrestrainedly, what he thinks is good.
Philosopher Charles Taylor has argued that our “secular age” has been defined by the possibility of an “exclusive humanism”—in other words, a “humanism accepting no final goals beyond human flourishing, nor any allegiance to anything else beyond this flourishing.” But one could make the case that, at least in some circles, superhumanism is becoming our new guiding star. The “death of God” may have paved the way for human flourishing to become our supreme value, but that very supremacy has led humanity in turn to pursue self-deification. The same old humans, in other words, but made invulnerable to suffering, tricked out in fancy gadgets and, just maybe, immortal. Elon ex machina.
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As a kid, I sincerely believed that I would grow up to be a Jedi. I watched Luke Skywalker’s training sequence, the part where he carries Yoda around on his back, not so much for entertainment but as an instruction manual for learning to use the force. In my friend’s backyard, we took turns blindfolding each other with a bandanna to see if we could repel Nerf darts with a wiffle bat, a stand-in for the lightsabers we would surely get our hands on one day. Excepting some exhilarating Nerf deflections, our psychic force-powers never did manifest themselves. My friend became an accountant; I became an academic. In short, growing up meant, for us, accepting the disappointing limits of all-too-human life.
My own experience in the ivory tower has taught me that Andreessen is certainly correct, in part, about the sluggish tendencies of academic thinking. The stuffiness and bureaucracy of the university undoubtedly proved a corrosive atmosphere for my own childhood dreams of being a Jedi. Yet the same excitement about superhuman things, about powers, ideals and forms of life beyond the banality of the human, have continued to quietly propel my studies. Though Nietzsche didn’t have lightsabers or Ewoks within his horizon, his ideal of the “free spirit,” his hopes for a “philosophy of the future,” and especially his itinerant, pseudo-shamanic avatar “Zarathustra” all captured the same part of my imagination that had previously been fixated on learning the ways of the force.
So, secretly following my own interest in the superhuman, I began to study Nietzsche in earnest. Through this tutelage, my own ideas about transcending the human were transformed. I realized that what Nietzsche means by super—the Über in Übermensch—is almost the opposite of how most of us have come to understand it. The transcendence of the human is, for Nietzsche, very different from those powers and transformations imagined in today’s comic books and cinematic universes.
In his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche defined nihilism as a response to the emergence of scientific forms of knowledge, and the inevitable failure of scientific optimism, the spirit that continues to animate today’s technological thinking. He decried 1870s bourgeois Germany as dominated by a naïve faith in science, a fatal optimism that he laid at the feet of Socrates: “Socrates is the archetype of the theoretical optimist whose belief that the nature of things can be discovered leads him to attribute to knowledge and understanding the power of a panacea, and who understands error to be inherently evil.” Nietzsche claimed that modern culture had been seduced by this Socratic worldview into believing that knowledge and technology would eliminate suffering from the world: “What I understand by the spirit of science is the belief … that the depths of nature can be fathomed and that knowledge can heal all ills.”
Rather than solving the problem of suffering and revealing eternal truths, Nietzsche foresaw science uncovering the limits of human knowledge. Science would lead not to an understanding of the fundamental truths of nature, but rather to the realization that humanity is wandering through an endless hall of mirrors. (As with so many of Nietzsche’s ideas, there’s an uncanny prescience to this thought: just a few decades after his death, physicists would undertake experiments that showed that when we examine the universe at the most granular level, we find something like a reflection of ourselves.) He thought that for most people, this knowledge would be devastating and would lead to nihilism, a loss of faith in the value of life.
In later works, Nietzsche’s understanding of nihilism shifts, emphasizing the meaninglessness of suffering as the heart of the problem. In On the Genealogy of Morals, he claimed that for millennia people tried to imbue suffering with redemptive purpose by creating gods and moral systems, but as these theological dreams (purportedly) gave way under the secularizing pressure of knowledge, humans transferred those fantasies to the realm of science and technology, which promises to deliver genuine salvation in this world. But this optimism, Nietzsche argued, is no less illusory than divine salvation. Socratic optimism necessarily turns on itself and “finally bites its own tail,” forcing modern humanity into a harrowing confrontation with meaningless suffering, which technology is powerless either to banish or assuage.
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Having diagnosed the affliction of nihilism, Nietzsche set out to prescribe an antidote. In The Birth of Tragedy, he developed an initial plan of treatment along aesthetic lines, arguing that “only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified.” According to this first plan, art would serve as a palliative to console a species trapped within its existential cage. Scientific optimism of course provides its own sort of comforting illusion, but one that fails because it can never deliver on its promises.
The sort of art that the young Nietzsche had in mind was tragedy. Unlike scientific optimism, tragic pessimism celebrates human finitude. Rather than denying human limits and promising immortality, tragedy represents even the best of us—heroes, titans, demigods—as victims of fate. Oedipus will sleep with his mother, and Pentheus will be shredded and eaten by his. Yet, through these stories, tragedy sublimates the necessity of suffering, beautifying and celebrating that very necessity. In this way, tragedy provides spectators with an “aesthetic justification” of existence, an artistic reason to go on living.
As he matured, Nietzsche would abandon the idea of consolation and embrace a thoroughly Promethean philosophy. Whereas the young philosopher saw humans as desperate creatures in need of comforting meanings to soften the blows of an irredeemably tragic reality, the older Nietzsche had learned to ask a different question: What kind of creatures are humans such that they long for consolation in the first place?
Most, maybe all living organisms experience pain and suffering in some form, and self-preservation and the avoidance of danger are near-universal traits of animal and maybe also plant life. But only for humans does this lead to questions about the value of life. With this new insight in hand, Nietzsche recognized his own early theory of aesthetic consolation as just another expression of the human longing for the end of suffering, a desire for the world to be other than it really is. Discarding all mawkish prophylactics, he now sought to envision a superhuman being, a new form of life for whom suffering would not be a reason to question the value of life, but a goad to celebrate and affirm life itself.
Enter “Zarathustra,” Nietzsche’s most famous and puzzling creation—an itinerant teacher resembling both Jesus and Socrates, who journeys to the “blessed isles,” encounters jesters and hermits, has visions of “butterflies the size of children” and even sees his own ghost flying through the sky. His quest begins when he preaches the coming of the “Übermensch” in the marketplace. His very first words to the crowd are “I teach you the superhuman. Human being is something that must be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?” From his first word, Zarathustra defines the superhuman in terms of the overcoming of the human—überwinden, or literally superior to, as in above, humanity. This teaching unfolds in the subjunctive mood: Zarathustra doesn’t implore humanity to try to act in superhuman ways, but rather to prepare for the arrival of a superhuman future.
According to Zarathustra, humans are works in progress rather than finished products. What is distinctive about humans is their mutability, the potential that they might become something else: “Mankind is a rope fastened between animal and superhuman—a rope over an abyss. … What is great about human beings is that they are a bridge and not a purpose: what is lovable about human beings is that they are a crossing over and a going under.” Humans are not sufficient unto themselves: we are a means rather than an end, a question to which the superhuman must be the answer.
This passage also hints at Zarathustra’s prescriptions for what humans should do to cultivate future superhumans. Most important is the idea of going under—Untergehen in German—which denotes drowning. Zarathustra seems to mean this literally: “I love the one who makes of his virtue his desire and his doom: thus for the sake of his virtue he wants to live on and to live no more.” Humans must be willing to perish, to give up self-preservation and to sacrifice themselves to “build a house for the superhuman.” Zarathustra’s lesson is that we must embrace human life, especially its limitations and its finitude, if we wish to give birth to the superhuman who will transcend us.
Yet Zarathustra—Nietzsche, too—is quite cagey about what superhumans might be like. We are told that the superhumans would be the “new meaning of the earth,” and the sea in which the “polluted stream” of humanity can be cleansed, but these are highly elliptical statements. The most informative passage on the Übermensch is also perhaps the strangest episode in the book. Zarathustra encounters a shepherd lying sick by the side of the road and choking on a black serpent that has slithered into his throat. The black serpent represents nihilism under another name, presenting once again the problem of meaningless suffering. The shepherd is, in effect, suffocating from his own confrontation with nihilism. Zarathustra shouts that the shepherd must “bite down!” and he does, beheading the serpent, leaping to his feet and letting out a burst of laughter:
No longer shepherd, no longer human—a transformed, illuminated, laughing being!
Never yet on earth had I heard a human being laugh as he laughed!
We might say that the problem of meaningless suffering is, for this superhuman, no longer a problem but a joke; no longer a tragedy but a grand comedy.
The most concrete prophecy that Nietzsche ventures about the superhumans to come is that they will no longer experience meaningless suffering as a problem. Neither Zarathustra nor his followers have achieved anything close to this, nor presumably have Nietzsche or any of his readers. In the face of nihilism, humans require consolation. But the superhumans will not.
There is undoubtedly something unsatisfying in Nietzsche’s Promethean picture, a vagueness that has spurred generations of scholars to offer convoluted theories of the Übermensch, or to suspect that for Nietzsche the idea was merely a rhetorical red herring. This indeterminacy is part of what permits people like Musk and Andreessen to proclaim Nietzsche as a forerunner. The problem is that, for us mere mortals, it’s very difficult, perhaps impossible, to imagine what it would be like to experience meaningless suffering as laughable, or as something worth celebrating. What would it mean to pursue such an ideal? What can these elliptical prophecies teach us?
Nietzsche was, I believe, intentionally vague about the details of superhuman life because he wanted to highlight how limited our own human perspectives are. Most of the hints he provides about what the transition to superhumanity might require are so outlandish that many philosophers reject them outright as mystical fantasies, or the ravings of a man swiftly on his way to madness. But this overlooks a key part of Zarathustra’s teaching: superhumans will be different from humans, so different in fact that we may not recognize ourselves in them at all. And in this era of accelerationist fervor, exemplified in the breakneck spread of AI into every corner of culture, Nietzsche reminds us that even as we pursue superhuman life, as we conspire to steal fire from the gods, we must do so humbly. Maybe the superhumans will resemble Luke Skywalker, heroes who seek to overthrow tyranny in the name of the good. Maybe they will be more like Darth Vader, authoritarians willing to sacrifice countless lives for power. Or they will resemble neither of these images, which are of course, all-too-human fantasies.
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Through studying Nietzsche, my own superhuman fantasies matured. But in Silicon Valley superhumanism, childish notions of what it means to be “super” are never outgrown. Andreessen writes:
The myth of Prometheus—in various updated forms like Frankenstein, Oppenheimer, and Terminator—haunts our nightmares.
We are told to denounce our birthright—our intelligence, our control over nature, our ability to build a better world.
We are told to be miserable about the future.
Nietzsche might in some sense condone the idea of a Promethean birthright, but he would never accept Andreessen’s contentions that “there is no material problem—whether created by nature or technology—that cannot be solved with more technology,” or that “the ultimate moral defense of markets is that they divert people who otherwise would raise armies and start religions into peacefully productive pursuits.” Indeed, it’s hard to square Andreessen’s own valuation of superhuman strength and adventurousness with the goal of diverting people into “peacefully productive pursuits.” Working for a tech company is the province of the “last man,” not the Übermensch.
Elon Musk’s Neuralink project also locates the “super” in a painfully shrunken human image. Musk envisions human enhancement as an increase in human “compute,” a speeding up of the electrical processes that, he believes, give rise to human consciousness. Just as our hardware has progressed from early PCs that took up whole rooms to today’s pocket smartphones, so too shall our bodies and intellects progress from human to superhuman. Faster, leaner, more affordable, better UI. But isn’t it strange to model our superhuman future on machines that we invented to mimic only the thinnest sliver of our experience? There’s still no evidence that computers will ever be capable of “states of consciousness” (whatever those are) saturated by affect, emotion, intensity, beauty, pain and memory. To imagine the mind in terms of what it can “compute” is to take the smallest and most mathematical part of what it is to be human and mistake it for the entirety. It is to subordinate superhuman potential to an optical illusion in humanity’s self-conception.
Neither Musk nor Andreessen’s visions, then, come close to living up to Nietzsche’s superhuman mandate. But this critique goes way beyond misreadings of Nietzsche, or the boyish fantasies of the tech CEO. If Nietzsche was correct that we need the superhuman to overcome nihilism, then these technological superhumanists are effectively prescribing for the disease of nihilism the amplification of nihilistic values. Andreessen’s “technological supermen” would not be Übermensch but the “last men” par excellence. While Andreessen and his ilk fantasize about the end of suffering and the elimination of threats to human well-being, Nietzsche dreamed of a superhuman for whom hardship, including the hardship of finitude, would be no objection to life. The Übermensch would overcome the fear and hatred of suffering, not seek to leave suffering behind. What we see in Silicon Valley superhumanism is not the way out of nihilism but its most dangerous instantiation.
This is the extraordinary beauty, and difficulty, of Nietzsche’s vision. The first step on the road to superhumanity is to end our campaign of revenge against the painful and frightening elements of human life. This is how we, as humans, might begin to resemble something superhuman, something above and beyond what we are now. Zarathustra declares special love for those who do not want to preserve themselves: “Those who are going under I love with my whole love: because they are going over.”
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The history of humanity’s Promethean ambitions has made it seem that we have only two options: throw off the cumbersome shackles of humility and boldly seize divine power, or humble ourselves and embrace human finitude. But Nietzsche envisioned a third way, recognizing that superhuman life can only emerge out of a reckoning with our humanity in all its miserable and wonderful smallness. In his own way, Nietzsche was an accelerationist. He believed that the only way through nihilism was in effect to radicalize it. But he saw that that would mean embracing, rather than fleeing from, our human limitations.
My own superhuman dreams never truly died, but they did change. To imagine that making life longer, faster, that speeding up our thoughts and shielding ourselves from suffering would make us superhuman, is to make the same mistake that I made as a child watching Star Wars. When I was young, the most alluring thing about the force was the abilities it granted: the superfast reflexes, the telekinetic powers, the lightsaber skills. But such skills do not make a Jedi. Luke becomes a Jedi by releasing all thoughts of revenge and resentment: rather than avenging himself against his tyrannical father, he throws down his weapons. His power and triumph don’t lie in domination but in his capacity to forgive. He embraces his fate even though it will likely mean his death. This is how he saves both himself and Darth Vader, and how he begins to reflect the glimmer of something superhuman.
Nietzsche teaches that as we grow up, as we encounter death, suffering, betrayal and disappointment with the squalid pettiness of the human world, we must also learn to love that world, to affirm this life, if we can. The eternal recurrence asks how we would respond, faced with the eternal repetition of our finite, human lives: “Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine.’” This is a different vision of immortality, an eternal life that is precisely this life, your finite life as you are currently living it. The desire to escape from the pain of life was, for Nietzsche, the essence of nihilism. If the superhuman is to be the solution, then it will be so by teaching us to renounce the desire for escape, the desire for a different life than the one we now live. This is of course a logical paradox. But perhaps it is possible to imagine that the superhuman will not be restrained by logic in the same way we are.
Image credit: K-putt (Flickr / CC BY-NC 2.0)
In 2023, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen released a document called “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” in which he proclaimed himself a de facto spokesman of the “effective accelerationist” movement. E/acc, as it is known in online spheres, is billed as a rejoinder to effective altruism and has gained traction in recent years among Silicon Valley technologists and the new right. The fundamental idea of e/acc is that accelerating technological development is the best way to resolve most of our cultural problems. The policy corollary is that we should therefore deregulate the tech industry, especially with respect to AI, nuclear power and nanotechnology.
But Andreessen’s manifesto is not focused on policy. Rather, it is an expression of what we might call “superhumanist” discourse. By this I mean that his proclamations largely revolve around the idea that humankind already possesses the power to become superhuman, if only we could get around a thoroughly nihilistic establishment. In a section headed “The Enemy,” he writes, “Our enemy is deceleration, de-growth, depopulation—the nihilistic wish, so trendy among our elites, for fewer people, less energy, and more suffering and death.” Nihilism is, for Andreessen, generally associated with progressivism, though he is careful not to openly avow either right- or left-wing politics. He concludes: “Our enemy is Friedrich Nietzsche’s Last Man.”
This citation is perhaps apt: Nietzsche developed his idea of the Übermensch in contrast with the “last human beings,” those who have lost the capacity to become something higher, who no longer have the energy to “give birth to a dancing star.” In another section boldly titled “Becoming Technological Supermen,” Andreessen writes: “We believe in deliberately and systematically transforming ourselves into the kind of people who can advance technology.” Later, he exhorts us to transform ourselves into such “technological supermen,” positioned against the “last men” of our time—the regulators, the experts, the ivory tower.
Who are Andreessen’s superhumans? Where will they come from? Andreessen borrows the concept of the “techno-capital machine” from accelerationist philosopher Nick Land to describe markets as “the engine of perpetual material creation, growth, and abundance.” Andreessen proclaims, “We believe the techno-capital machine of markets and innovation never ends, but instead spirals continuously upward.” We will be transformed by a runaway growth pattern of “intelligence,” leading to a cybernetic symbiosis between human and artificial life forms. Andreessen reassures the reader that “intelligent machines augment intelligent humans, driving a geometric expansion of what humans can do.”
Andreessen isn’t alone in dreaming of transcending humanity through technology. Nick Bostrom, founder of the Oxford University “Future of Humanity Institute,” has argued that posthuman life is not only “possible” and “desirable,” through the use of nanobots, AI or other technologies, but that “it could be very good for us to become posthuman.” Yuval Noah Harari, popular medieval-historian-turned-prophet-of-doom, predicts with some trepidation that in this century “the third big project of humankind will be to acquire for us divine powers of creation and destruction, and upgrade Homo sapiens into Homo deus.” Ray Kurzweil, Google’s bewilderingly optimistic “AI visionary,” recently predicted that by 2045 we will have achieved “singularity,” where human and artificial intelligence will be so integrated that “we will … become superhuman.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the modern technological superman is most often associated with the archetype of the Silicon Valley mogul. On a podcast in 2022, Andreessen described Elon Musk as the closest thing we have to a Nietzschean Übermensch today. (Other candidates floated on the episode include Trump and Kanye.) What Andreessen admires about Musk is his dictatorial approach to running his companies, which he likens favorably to Nietzsche’s conception of “master morality.” This kind of man isn’t bogged down by regulations, bureaucratic structures or the petty concerns of the ethics department; he simply pursues, unrestrainedly, what he thinks is good.
Philosopher Charles Taylor has argued that our “secular age” has been defined by the possibility of an “exclusive humanism”—in other words, a “humanism accepting no final goals beyond human flourishing, nor any allegiance to anything else beyond this flourishing.” But one could make the case that, at least in some circles, superhumanism is becoming our new guiding star. The “death of God” may have paved the way for human flourishing to become our supreme value, but that very supremacy has led humanity in turn to pursue self-deification. The same old humans, in other words, but made invulnerable to suffering, tricked out in fancy gadgets and, just maybe, immortal. Elon ex machina.
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As a kid, I sincerely believed that I would grow up to be a Jedi. I watched Luke Skywalker’s training sequence, the part where he carries Yoda around on his back, not so much for entertainment but as an instruction manual for learning to use the force. In my friend’s backyard, we took turns blindfolding each other with a bandanna to see if we could repel Nerf darts with a wiffle bat, a stand-in for the lightsabers we would surely get our hands on one day. Excepting some exhilarating Nerf deflections, our psychic force-powers never did manifest themselves. My friend became an accountant; I became an academic. In short, growing up meant, for us, accepting the disappointing limits of all-too-human life.
My own experience in the ivory tower has taught me that Andreessen is certainly correct, in part, about the sluggish tendencies of academic thinking. The stuffiness and bureaucracy of the university undoubtedly proved a corrosive atmosphere for my own childhood dreams of being a Jedi. Yet the same excitement about superhuman things, about powers, ideals and forms of life beyond the banality of the human, have continued to quietly propel my studies. Though Nietzsche didn’t have lightsabers or Ewoks within his horizon, his ideal of the “free spirit,” his hopes for a “philosophy of the future,” and especially his itinerant, pseudo-shamanic avatar “Zarathustra” all captured the same part of my imagination that had previously been fixated on learning the ways of the force.
So, secretly following my own interest in the superhuman, I began to study Nietzsche in earnest. Through this tutelage, my own ideas about transcending the human were transformed. I realized that what Nietzsche means by super—the Über in Übermensch—is almost the opposite of how most of us have come to understand it. The transcendence of the human is, for Nietzsche, very different from those powers and transformations imagined in today’s comic books and cinematic universes.
In his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche defined nihilism as a response to the emergence of scientific forms of knowledge, and the inevitable failure of scientific optimism, the spirit that continues to animate today’s technological thinking. He decried 1870s bourgeois Germany as dominated by a naïve faith in science, a fatal optimism that he laid at the feet of Socrates: “Socrates is the archetype of the theoretical optimist whose belief that the nature of things can be discovered leads him to attribute to knowledge and understanding the power of a panacea, and who understands error to be inherently evil.” Nietzsche claimed that modern culture had been seduced by this Socratic worldview into believing that knowledge and technology would eliminate suffering from the world: “What I understand by the spirit of science is the belief … that the depths of nature can be fathomed and that knowledge can heal all ills.”
Rather than solving the problem of suffering and revealing eternal truths, Nietzsche foresaw science uncovering the limits of human knowledge. Science would lead not to an understanding of the fundamental truths of nature, but rather to the realization that humanity is wandering through an endless hall of mirrors. (As with so many of Nietzsche’s ideas, there’s an uncanny prescience to this thought: just a few decades after his death, physicists would undertake experiments that showed that when we examine the universe at the most granular level, we find something like a reflection of ourselves.) He thought that for most people, this knowledge would be devastating and would lead to nihilism, a loss of faith in the value of life.
In later works, Nietzsche’s understanding of nihilism shifts, emphasizing the meaninglessness of suffering as the heart of the problem. In On the Genealogy of Morals, he claimed that for millennia people tried to imbue suffering with redemptive purpose by creating gods and moral systems, but as these theological dreams (purportedly) gave way under the secularizing pressure of knowledge, humans transferred those fantasies to the realm of science and technology, which promises to deliver genuine salvation in this world. But this optimism, Nietzsche argued, is no less illusory than divine salvation. Socratic optimism necessarily turns on itself and “finally bites its own tail,” forcing modern humanity into a harrowing confrontation with meaningless suffering, which technology is powerless either to banish or assuage.
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Having diagnosed the affliction of nihilism, Nietzsche set out to prescribe an antidote. In The Birth of Tragedy, he developed an initial plan of treatment along aesthetic lines, arguing that “only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified.” According to this first plan, art would serve as a palliative to console a species trapped within its existential cage. Scientific optimism of course provides its own sort of comforting illusion, but one that fails because it can never deliver on its promises.
The sort of art that the young Nietzsche had in mind was tragedy. Unlike scientific optimism, tragic pessimism celebrates human finitude. Rather than denying human limits and promising immortality, tragedy represents even the best of us—heroes, titans, demigods—as victims of fate. Oedipus will sleep with his mother, and Pentheus will be shredded and eaten by his. Yet, through these stories, tragedy sublimates the necessity of suffering, beautifying and celebrating that very necessity. In this way, tragedy provides spectators with an “aesthetic justification” of existence, an artistic reason to go on living.
As he matured, Nietzsche would abandon the idea of consolation and embrace a thoroughly Promethean philosophy. Whereas the young philosopher saw humans as desperate creatures in need of comforting meanings to soften the blows of an irredeemably tragic reality, the older Nietzsche had learned to ask a different question: What kind of creatures are humans such that they long for consolation in the first place?
Most, maybe all living organisms experience pain and suffering in some form, and self-preservation and the avoidance of danger are near-universal traits of animal and maybe also plant life. But only for humans does this lead to questions about the value of life. With this new insight in hand, Nietzsche recognized his own early theory of aesthetic consolation as just another expression of the human longing for the end of suffering, a desire for the world to be other than it really is. Discarding all mawkish prophylactics, he now sought to envision a superhuman being, a new form of life for whom suffering would not be a reason to question the value of life, but a goad to celebrate and affirm life itself.
Enter “Zarathustra,” Nietzsche’s most famous and puzzling creation—an itinerant teacher resembling both Jesus and Socrates, who journeys to the “blessed isles,” encounters jesters and hermits, has visions of “butterflies the size of children” and even sees his own ghost flying through the sky. His quest begins when he preaches the coming of the “Übermensch” in the marketplace. His very first words to the crowd are “I teach you the superhuman. Human being is something that must be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?” From his first word, Zarathustra defines the superhuman in terms of the overcoming of the human—überwinden, or literally superior to, as in above, humanity. This teaching unfolds in the subjunctive mood: Zarathustra doesn’t implore humanity to try to act in superhuman ways, but rather to prepare for the arrival of a superhuman future.
According to Zarathustra, humans are works in progress rather than finished products. What is distinctive about humans is their mutability, the potential that they might become something else: “Mankind is a rope fastened between animal and superhuman—a rope over an abyss. … What is great about human beings is that they are a bridge and not a purpose: what is lovable about human beings is that they are a crossing over and a going under.” Humans are not sufficient unto themselves: we are a means rather than an end, a question to which the superhuman must be the answer.
This passage also hints at Zarathustra’s prescriptions for what humans should do to cultivate future superhumans. Most important is the idea of going under—Untergehen in German—which denotes drowning. Zarathustra seems to mean this literally: “I love the one who makes of his virtue his desire and his doom: thus for the sake of his virtue he wants to live on and to live no more.” Humans must be willing to perish, to give up self-preservation and to sacrifice themselves to “build a house for the superhuman.” Zarathustra’s lesson is that we must embrace human life, especially its limitations and its finitude, if we wish to give birth to the superhuman who will transcend us.
Yet Zarathustra—Nietzsche, too—is quite cagey about what superhumans might be like. We are told that the superhumans would be the “new meaning of the earth,” and the sea in which the “polluted stream” of humanity can be cleansed, but these are highly elliptical statements. The most informative passage on the Übermensch is also perhaps the strangest episode in the book. Zarathustra encounters a shepherd lying sick by the side of the road and choking on a black serpent that has slithered into his throat. The black serpent represents nihilism under another name, presenting once again the problem of meaningless suffering. The shepherd is, in effect, suffocating from his own confrontation with nihilism. Zarathustra shouts that the shepherd must “bite down!” and he does, beheading the serpent, leaping to his feet and letting out a burst of laughter:
We might say that the problem of meaningless suffering is, for this superhuman, no longer a problem but a joke; no longer a tragedy but a grand comedy.
The most concrete prophecy that Nietzsche ventures about the superhumans to come is that they will no longer experience meaningless suffering as a problem. Neither Zarathustra nor his followers have achieved anything close to this, nor presumably have Nietzsche or any of his readers. In the face of nihilism, humans require consolation. But the superhumans will not.
There is undoubtedly something unsatisfying in Nietzsche’s Promethean picture, a vagueness that has spurred generations of scholars to offer convoluted theories of the Übermensch, or to suspect that for Nietzsche the idea was merely a rhetorical red herring. This indeterminacy is part of what permits people like Musk and Andreessen to proclaim Nietzsche as a forerunner. The problem is that, for us mere mortals, it’s very difficult, perhaps impossible, to imagine what it would be like to experience meaningless suffering as laughable, or as something worth celebrating. What would it mean to pursue such an ideal? What can these elliptical prophecies teach us?
Nietzsche was, I believe, intentionally vague about the details of superhuman life because he wanted to highlight how limited our own human perspectives are. Most of the hints he provides about what the transition to superhumanity might require are so outlandish that many philosophers reject them outright as mystical fantasies, or the ravings of a man swiftly on his way to madness. But this overlooks a key part of Zarathustra’s teaching: superhumans will be different from humans, so different in fact that we may not recognize ourselves in them at all. And in this era of accelerationist fervor, exemplified in the breakneck spread of AI into every corner of culture, Nietzsche reminds us that even as we pursue superhuman life, as we conspire to steal fire from the gods, we must do so humbly. Maybe the superhumans will resemble Luke Skywalker, heroes who seek to overthrow tyranny in the name of the good. Maybe they will be more like Darth Vader, authoritarians willing to sacrifice countless lives for power. Or they will resemble neither of these images, which are of course, all-too-human fantasies.
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Through studying Nietzsche, my own superhuman fantasies matured. But in Silicon Valley superhumanism, childish notions of what it means to be “super” are never outgrown. Andreessen writes:
Nietzsche might in some sense condone the idea of a Promethean birthright, but he would never accept Andreessen’s contentions that “there is no material problem—whether created by nature or technology—that cannot be solved with more technology,” or that “the ultimate moral defense of markets is that they divert people who otherwise would raise armies and start religions into peacefully productive pursuits.” Indeed, it’s hard to square Andreessen’s own valuation of superhuman strength and adventurousness with the goal of diverting people into “peacefully productive pursuits.” Working for a tech company is the province of the “last man,” not the Übermensch.
Elon Musk’s Neuralink project also locates the “super” in a painfully shrunken human image. Musk envisions human enhancement as an increase in human “compute,” a speeding up of the electrical processes that, he believes, give rise to human consciousness. Just as our hardware has progressed from early PCs that took up whole rooms to today’s pocket smartphones, so too shall our bodies and intellects progress from human to superhuman. Faster, leaner, more affordable, better UI. But isn’t it strange to model our superhuman future on machines that we invented to mimic only the thinnest sliver of our experience? There’s still no evidence that computers will ever be capable of “states of consciousness” (whatever those are) saturated by affect, emotion, intensity, beauty, pain and memory. To imagine the mind in terms of what it can “compute” is to take the smallest and most mathematical part of what it is to be human and mistake it for the entirety. It is to subordinate superhuman potential to an optical illusion in humanity’s self-conception.
Neither Musk nor Andreessen’s visions, then, come close to living up to Nietzsche’s superhuman mandate. But this critique goes way beyond misreadings of Nietzsche, or the boyish fantasies of the tech CEO. If Nietzsche was correct that we need the superhuman to overcome nihilism, then these technological superhumanists are effectively prescribing for the disease of nihilism the amplification of nihilistic values. Andreessen’s “technological supermen” would not be Übermensch but the “last men” par excellence. While Andreessen and his ilk fantasize about the end of suffering and the elimination of threats to human well-being, Nietzsche dreamed of a superhuman for whom hardship, including the hardship of finitude, would be no objection to life. The Übermensch would overcome the fear and hatred of suffering, not seek to leave suffering behind. What we see in Silicon Valley superhumanism is not the way out of nihilism but its most dangerous instantiation.
This is the extraordinary beauty, and difficulty, of Nietzsche’s vision. The first step on the road to superhumanity is to end our campaign of revenge against the painful and frightening elements of human life. This is how we, as humans, might begin to resemble something superhuman, something above and beyond what we are now. Zarathustra declares special love for those who do not want to preserve themselves: “Those who are going under I love with my whole love: because they are going over.”
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The history of humanity’s Promethean ambitions has made it seem that we have only two options: throw off the cumbersome shackles of humility and boldly seize divine power, or humble ourselves and embrace human finitude. But Nietzsche envisioned a third way, recognizing that superhuman life can only emerge out of a reckoning with our humanity in all its miserable and wonderful smallness. In his own way, Nietzsche was an accelerationist. He believed that the only way through nihilism was in effect to radicalize it. But he saw that that would mean embracing, rather than fleeing from, our human limitations.
My own superhuman dreams never truly died, but they did change. To imagine that making life longer, faster, that speeding up our thoughts and shielding ourselves from suffering would make us superhuman, is to make the same mistake that I made as a child watching Star Wars. When I was young, the most alluring thing about the force was the abilities it granted: the superfast reflexes, the telekinetic powers, the lightsaber skills. But such skills do not make a Jedi. Luke becomes a Jedi by releasing all thoughts of revenge and resentment: rather than avenging himself against his tyrannical father, he throws down his weapons. His power and triumph don’t lie in domination but in his capacity to forgive. He embraces his fate even though it will likely mean his death. This is how he saves both himself and Darth Vader, and how he begins to reflect the glimmer of something superhuman.
Nietzsche teaches that as we grow up, as we encounter death, suffering, betrayal and disappointment with the squalid pettiness of the human world, we must also learn to love that world, to affirm this life, if we can. The eternal recurrence asks how we would respond, faced with the eternal repetition of our finite, human lives: “Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine.’” This is a different vision of immortality, an eternal life that is precisely this life, your finite life as you are currently living it. The desire to escape from the pain of life was, for Nietzsche, the essence of nihilism. If the superhuman is to be the solution, then it will be so by teaching us to renounce the desire for escape, the desire for a different life than the one we now live. This is of course a logical paradox. But perhaps it is possible to imagine that the superhuman will not be restrained by logic in the same way we are.
Image credit: K-putt (Flickr / CC BY-NC 2.0)
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