Nietzsche, Hegel and becoming overman
“He granted himself the poetic and philosophical right to dream of machines that perhaps one day science will realise by its own means. The machine to affirm chance, to cook chance, to produce the number which brings back the dicethrow, the machine to release these immense forces by small, multiple manipulations, the machine to play with the stars, in short the Heraclitean fire machine.”
- Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophie
The above quote represents in short, the will to power: a will of unrestricted desire free from, but aware of, moralistic dogmatism. It is the final stage in Nietzsche’s metamorphosis, the lightness of the longing child. This is for Nietzsche a transcendent move where one, as the lion, overcomes the boundness to tradition and the imposed axioms of dogmatism and enters the realm of the overman. The overman is the realization of nothingness, but in it’s face the overman sees only potential for becoming — while the pitiful human (the last man) shrugs away (if his even dimly aware) from the gaping pit of the abyss.
In the abyss, the potential is that of a breeding fire machine, the machine to say the holy “yay” and affirm the chaotic status of the world. It’s the forever becoming: telling the demon that every single moment of becoming, of being, is of greatest weight and should thus be burdened accordingly.
For it’s the realization that from nothingness erupts potentiality for life — the negation of the negation — which is a realization one reaches only when all the previous values have been devaluated, and one pierces out from the ashes reborn as a phoenix, as a machine by its own components — a Heraclitean fire machine of change.
But is the overman an object or a goal in itself? Hardly! This is precisely what I think Nietzsche wants one to realize: that the overman is pure becoming, and about affirming the status of everything’s perishableness. Here we can see a direct link to Hegels philosophy of change.
Both Nietzsche and Hegel turn away from the path of western philosophy created by Plato, and instead find new paths to Heraclitus — the philosopher of change. Why this is so immanent is precisely because of the solipsism dominating philosophical tradition in their time.
For Hegel, the becoming overman, is a movement in which previous statements about the objects of consciousness are brought down in order for new objects to enter the frame of consciousness, thereby creating experience — a perspectival shift where the subject realizes its own otherness. This is a realization of the perishableness of a previous consciousness and a previous object, a vaporization and rebirth of something new.
A movement like this wouldn’t be possible for a subject barred from the world of objects, a Kantian subject. For this subject, experience is not possible due to its enclosure in its own static world. For Nietzsche, the Kantian subject would be the last man — caged in his own prison of pre-self-consciousness, constantly repeating his own objects in fear of change, impossible to gain access to new knowledge.
To counter this, is to throw oneself out to use Heideggerian lingo, out of the orderly and planned. The overman is thus a constant engagement with what is uncomfortable, something that occupies one throughout life. The overman is not a static goal in-itself, it’s a constant engagement with how you handle the perception of the world around you and yourself, to live a full and active life, in contrast to the static world of the last man.
