Revisiting the will to power

active nihilism and the project of trans-human philosophy

Daniel Conway

pp. 117-141

in: Keith Ansell-Pearson, Diane Morgan (eds), Nihilism now!, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000

Abstract

This chapter undertakes an investigation of the productive possibilities engendered by nihilism for the experimental project of "trans-human" philosophy. While viewed by some critics as an event of strictly negative and stultifying consequence, the advent of European nihilism may actually furnish an interpretive context within which philosophers might finally "let drop" their nagging anthropocentric prejudices. Against the blighted backdrop of European nihilism, that is, philosophers might progress significantly toward (and eventually complete?) the untimely agenda set for them by Friedrich Nietzsche: "to translate man back into Nature" (Nietzsche 1989, 230), and thus behold the world in its sheer, amoral immanence.

Cited authors

Nietzsche Friedrich