Saturday, March 30, 2024

The Face Of Fear: The Ubermensch

The novel The Face of Fear by Dean Koontz features a pair of antagonists, Frank and Bill, who aspire to be among the first of the "supermen" that Nietzsche predicted.  Serial killers initially targeting women because they think that the superman, sometimes elsewhere called the Ubermensch, is of a superior race that only men can rise to, the two are devoted to explicitly Nietzschean concepts.  The loss of Christianity's cultural prominence, or "Christianity's" since there has never been a time on the historical record when Biblical Christianity rather than some major distortion was popularly recognized for its actual nature, provoked Nietzsche to anticipate people who would shirk away from what he considered unhealthy, confining Christian values and live for their own arbitrary moral intuitions or preferences.  The pair thinks they are to help usher in a better world in their own image.

Frank tells Billy that Nietzsche "has" to be right about people, or human males in particular according to them, being in an intermediate evolutionary stage because otherwise everything is so pointless.  This, of course, is a non sequitur.  Unless something is true in itself like logical axioms or in light of some other necessary truth, it does not matter what the personal, pragmatic, or broader metaphysical ramifications are as far as whether or not it is true is concerned; just as it does not follow from how the uncaused cause has to have a moral nature for good and evil to exist that therefore it does have a moral nature, because otherwise life has no objective value, it does not follow even if otherwise "everything is so pointless" that the Nietzschean philosophy of the Ubermensch is true, or that it is verifiable even if it was true.

Still, The Face of Fear has its villains assume that the Ubermensch, though they call it the "superman" instead of using that word, must be male, which does not follow from the basic concept of the Ubermensch in itself, and that this person represents a new "race" of humans.  When one of the pair wonders early in his descent into greater stupidity how he can reconcile his current left-wing political philosophy with that of the Ubermensch, he is told, "Pure, hard-core liberals believe in a superior race.  They think they're it".  Liberals do often think they are superior to others even while at the same time hypocritically and erroneously thinking all notions of superiority are false, but this is usually on ideological and not racial grounds.  Supposing that liberalism and the misogynistic superman are compatible, in order to accelerate their ascension to formal power, the duo plans to create chaos by pitting men and women and various racial groups against each other by means of murdering or mutilating people from each category and blaming it on some supremacist organization from the other demographic.

No actual feminist--an egalitarian who neither dismisses nor privileges men or women with matters like domestic abuse, mental health, workplace leadership, or any stereotype, all of which are fallacious--would ever do the things that Frank and Bill sought to blame on a fictitious feminist group, though they hoped, without understanding the misconception themselves, to benefit from broader societal misunderstandings of basic, logically necessary philosophical truths about gender equality.  Of course, the Ubermensch is not a race either, so the antagonists' fallacies are numerous; it is a status that would be achieved through ideological and introspective means on an individualistic basis, one that could be voluntarily accepted or rejected.  There is nothing about it that would only pertain to men, as much as Nietzsche is supposed to be misogynistic and as sexist against women as Frank and Bill are, and it is not a true physical or phenomenological evolution.

Now, detective Ira Preduski says in the epilogue that Nietzsche was a brilliant but misunderstood philosopher, a total error!  At most, a very select number of details in his worldview are accurate and deep, such as what he said about sensory-projected idealism [1] and the practice on the part of historical "Christians" of killing anyone who they perceived to be heretical [2] (as if many popular ideas about Christian theology are not utterly unbiblical [3]), but as a non-rationalist, Nietzsche was by necessity a total fool who could not have known when he happened to be right due to being a non-rationalist.  He denied the absolute certainties of the inherent truths of logic and knowing one's own conscious existence [4], and thus he could not have known anything that hinges on those truths either metaphysically or epistemologically, which is all things.

His idiocy would not be totally erased even if Nietzsche's philosophical ideas were/are not sexist towards one gender or the other.  Is Nietzsche misunderstood?  Yes, including by people I have met who claim Nietzsche was somehow not a moral nihilist [5].  Some of them might think that the Ubermensch was actually something meant to keep humanity away from nihilism rather than to express a false moral subjectivism or a relativistic, egoistic bent, as if living for one's own personal values is not nihilistic or relativistic at its core.  Since it is far more irrational to deny the intrinsic truth of logical axioms and the absolute certainty of the existence of one's own mind than it is to be sexist, for the falsity of sexism is dictated by reason rather than the other way around, and because one could not perceive other people of any gender without already existing as a consciousness, Nietzsche was an utter fool in the worst of ways already.  His selective stumbling upon truth as addressed here [1] is really still him arriving at a conclusion that happens to be right since he rejected reason and its absolute certainty, whereas Frank and Bill sidestep the core issues of metaphysics and epistemology altogether, being even shallower than the fool they thought of as a visionary.






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