Earlier I wrote about Francis Fukuyama’s new book America at the Crossroads where he takes leave of neoconservatism. That compelled me to go back to Fukuyama’s 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man (German: Das Ende der Geschichte) which launched the neoconservative movement. The End of History and the Last Man is an attempt by Fukuyama to interpret the collapse of the Soviet empire through a Hegelian lens, mediated by Fukuyama’s intellectual models Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojève.
Human striving through history, Fukuyama believes, can be explained through the Greek concept of Thymos – man’s sense of self-worth and his desire for recognition. To explain human conflict Fukuyama coins a new word: megalothymia – the desire to be recognized as superior to other people.
"Megalothymia can be manifest both in the tyrant who invades and and enslaves a neighboring people so that they will recognize his authority, as well as in the concert pianist who wants to be recognized as the foremost interpreter of Beethoven. Its opposite is isothymia, the desire to be recognized as the equal of other people. Megalothymia and isothymia together constitute the two manifstations of the desire for recognition around which the historical transition to modernity can be understood." (The End of History and the Last Man, p. 182).
Fukuyama then follows this dialectic through history. With the end of the Cold War, Fukuyama believes, the Telos of history can be realized with the triumph of liberal capitalism. The genius of liberal capitalism is that it satisfies both megalothymia and isothymia, channeling these basic human motivations into the creation of wealth (here Fukuyama really needed to introduce Freud’s concept of sublimation). Looking back more than fourteen years, of course, we know that Fukuyama drew the wrong conclusions from the end of the Cold War and failed to take into account the iron economic laws of globalization, as well as the struggle for control of the earth’s diminishing resources (with disasterous consequences such as the invasion of Iraq).
Fukuyama turns to Nietzsche to explain his ambivalence over the end of history. History’s end with the triumph of liberal capitalism ensures peace and economic security, but it also leads to a relentless secularization and to the spiritual impoverishment of man. The result could be culture of passivity and consumption. This is The Last Man / Der letzte Mensch that Nietzsche warned of in Also sprach Zarathustra:
Ich sage euch: man muß noch Chaos in sich haben, um einen tanzenden Stern gebären zu können. Ich sage euch: ihr habt noch Chaos in euch.
Wehe! Es kommt die Zeit, wo der Mensch keinen Stern mehr gebären wird. Wehe! Es kommt die Zeit des verächtlichsten Menschen, er sich selber nicht mehr verachten kann.
Seht! Ich zeige euch den letzten Menschen.
“Was ist Liebe? Was ist Schöpfung? Was ist Sehnsucht? Was ist Stern?”—so fragt der letzte Mensch und blinzelt.
Die Erde ist dann klein geworden, und auf ihr hüpft der letzte Mensch, der alles klein macht. Sein Geschlecht ist unaustilgbar wie der Erdfloh; der letzte Mensch lebt am längsten.
“Wir haben das Glück erfunden”—sagen die letzten Menshen und blinzeln
I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves.
Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a star. Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man.
“What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star? Thus asks the last man, and he blinks.
The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea beetle; the last man lives longest.
“We have invented happiness,” say the last men, and they blink.
(Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, First Part, Prologue, section 5, trans. Walter Kaufmann.)
In an earlier post I wrote about the antagonism between Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt. It turns out that Strauss and Arendt were united in reading Hegel through the filter of Nietzsche. In her book The Human Condition Arendt writes about the devolution of homo faber – meaningful human activity – into animal laborans – "jobholders" performing meaningless tasks. Arendt’s end of history looks very much like that of the Straussian Fukuyama:
It is quite conceivable that the modern age – which began with such an unprecedented and promising outburst of human activity -may end in the deadliest, most sterile passivity history has ever known. (The Human Condition, p, 322)
That is the world of Nietzsche’s blinking last men.
Fukuyama neoconservatism Arendt
