AFTER NIHILISM

By Gottfried Benn 

“All these attacks against the higher man we’ve had to listen to for the past eighty years, and that includes [George Bernard] Show’s farces, are all downright old-fashioned by now, flat and intellectually poverty stricken. There is only the higher, that is to say, the tragically struggling man; he is history’s only subject; only he is anthropologically in possession of all his senses, which is more than can be said for the instinctual complexes. So it will have to be the superman after all who overcomes nihilism, though it won’t be the type Nietzsche described in a pure nineteenth-century spirit. He describes him as a new, biologically more valuable, racially improved, vitalistically stronger, eugenically perfected type, justified by a greater capacity for survival and preservation of the species; he sees him as biologically positive – that was Darwinism. Since then we have studied the bionegative values, which are rather more harmful and dangerous to the race but are a part of mind’s differentiation: art, genius, the disintegrative motifs of religion, degeneration; in short, all the attributes of creativity. So today we do not posit the mind as partaking of biological health, nor do we include it in the rising curve of positivism, nor, for that matter, do we see it in tragic, eternally languishing conflict with life; rather we posit the mind as superordinate to life, constructively superior to it; as a formative and formal principle; intensification and concentration – that seems to be its law. […]

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