Commenting on Mendacity

Tomorrow I am to make a talk to the Spinoza Society in D.C. I'm a trifle queasy about this. The audience consists of genuinely knowledgeable people, several of them professors and professors emeritus, all of them certainly with more education than the Mouse got at Murphy High School and night school classes at the University of Alabama Mobile Extension.

But it's not the talk that concerns me. It's the Q & A session afterwards. While I think I know as much as the next guy about my subject, the chances approach unity that I'm wrong about that. If it weren't that they are all nice guys and gals who can be trusted to go easy on a poor defenseless mouse, I'd really be scared.

In any case, I'm so uptight I can't think today of anything original to post here, so I'll just cut and paste a couple of paragraphs from my talk. I trust I have selected a passage that does not contain too many references outside itself. In any case, it's the best part (from which you may judge my reasons for being frightened about the reception the rest will receive).

---------Excerpt Follows----------

The “last man” aspect of his thesis reflects a fundamental flaw in Fukuyama’s understanding of what humanity is all about. By connecting the evident emergence of liberal democracy to an imagined struggle for recognition, Fukuyama repeats Nietzsche’s claim that, in the modern world, the slaves and their mentality have won the day. Consequently, the “last man” – a Nietzschean construct – is seen as a subhuman specimen who has “[given] up prideful belief in his or her own superior worth in favor of comfortable self preservation.” Fukuyama’s belief in this regard could easily have been derived from the Herbert Spencer oration that I called to your attention earlier, that nature drives the human species ever upward by natural selection of “the fittest.” But whereas Spenser regarded the search for knowledge as a virtuous adaptation, Fukuyama, echoing Nietzsche, believed that what is truly and uniquely true of human beings is their willingness to risk their lives for something other than the rational ends of “mere” survival, or “mere” enjoyment, or “mere” knowledge. By that way of thinking, mankind grows toward the Ubermensch only by recognizing the hollowness of the rabble’s supposed virtues. Nietzsche for certain believed that man is distinguishable from “the other animals” by his desire to transcend the herd mentality. To Fukuyama/Nietzsche, those “last men” who find comfort in equality stand as barriers on the bridge between man and Superman. Nietzsche regarded the destructive behavior of Hegel’s “first men” as the cutting edge of a purifying spirit barging its way through history, destroying pedestrian banality by tooth and claw. He attributed to the Ubermensch the ultimate “good,” which is essentially to escape the comforts of the monkey-like masses. When Nietzsche claimed that the ideals of Ubermensch go “beyond good and evil,” he was being ironic; he meant simply that the real good consists in exactly that frame of mind held by the iconoclastic Superman, that the virtues that are are by definition evil.

But if the struggles of Hegelian “first men” were actually pissing contests between libido-driven madmen, what then would we say about the triumph of the so-called slave class? What if the real thread running through history has not been a struggle for recognition, but a striving of man’s existential freedom to discover and to live by the dictates of right living? If that has been the case, then in history’s approach toward an end point we would expect to see among the “last men” a gradually unfolding awareness of the illness of history’s “great men” and a diminishment of ignorance. We would expect to see the irrational search for recognition being replaced by an intensifying attempt to identify what is good for man and what is not.

[Wish me luck]