ABSTRACT
The most common and the easiest theological response to the epistemology and ontology associated with the Nietzschean tradition is to simply deny its veracity, claiming – the world and people in it are simply not like the portrayal of Nietzschean thought as articulated in the first two chapters of this book. There are a wide variety of ways of doing this, the most common, and to my mind the least impressive is to rearticulate a modernist anthropology, fanning the dying embers of the enlightenment tradition and seeking out that which is universal in human experience to ground a notion of self, thought, text and that core concept of the modern, ‘humanity’. This seems only possible, in light of the fundamental logic of evolution through natural selection, with the belief in an an evolved mode of human being in the world, naturally selected to manifest attributes traditionally associated with ‘goodness’. Of course, as Nietzsche well understood, such a response has two main difficulties, firstly, in genetic terms a Lion assuming the leadership of a pride seeking out and destroying the cubs of his predecessor, recently hidden by their on watching lioness, is doing something no different in genetic terms from a sunflower, outgrowing other sunflowers. Both what we would see as beautiful and what we would see as brutal are simple manifestations of the same evolutionary principles. The barbed purity of evolution through natural selection is no less the case in cooperation as it is in more obvious attempts at maximizing our potential for genetic replication. The fundamental ontology, the basic governing principles, are not altered, even if, as is the case in some of today’s capitalist societies, the mechanism for biological self assertion is cloaked by the precise nature of its performance. Our matrix supplies the means through which we seek to provide ourselves the maximum potential for genetic replication. This may lead us to striving for wealth through crime and violence or through the more socially accepted forms of business. In Belfast children from differing communities grow up, for the most part, either Protestant and unionist or Catholic and nationalist, so although radically opposed the same processes are at work. They are shaped by the forces of evolution to seek maximisation of potential within a set social matrix, for Nietzsche to seek power, the means through which they do this are supplied by their experiential lexicon. And so an evolved sense of social responsibility, in genetic or Nietzschean terms is no different from a much more commonly found radical individualism leading to direct confrontation in either subtle or explicitly violent ways, with one’s environment or other inhabitants of that environment.
