On the Outgrowth of Modernity and the Musings of Her Children 8/31/13 [Revised 05/07/14]

As it is well known by now, Miley Cyrus' new single "We Can't Stop" had drawn the media's attention as millions of people rushed to criticize Cyrus for her raunchy, offense song and dance routines. Perhaps out of sheer desperation, Cyrus attempted to make a final stand against the dread of her waning youth by throwing obscene vulgarities upon an unsuspecting and scornful crowd. Their jaws dropped and so did mine. They became deaf; my Christian ears bled.

Friedrich Nietzsche

With that said, however, too many of us paid little to no scrutiny to the contents of her lyrics which portray even more perverse transgressions. By tracing our steps back to roots of this ideological pedigree, we will have a clearer understanding of what is at stake. If we assume that our ethical notions follow upon our convictions about nature, then a careful treatment on nature will uncover the principles of the ethical attitudes that we have. If we also assume that most people take for granted what their superiors tell them, and if those superiors take for granted what their superiors tell them, then only those who have thought for themselves about nature and ethics will truly be the ones influencing the rest. In other words, past thinkers have unknowingly influenced our culture towards greater emphases on subjectivism and value relativism. From the ivory watchtowers to the average households, ideas take root slowly but surely. They nestle in the minds of many and influence their course of action as they trickle down from the highest scholar to the unsuspecting person. Sooner or later, they become us.

From the sixteenth century onwards, as more thinkers became increasingly skeptical of tradition and of our claims to certain knowledge, many philosophers and scientists worked towards Enlightenment idealism, the quest for man's domination over nature. In Rene Descartes' Principles and Meditations, after having rendered the quest for epistemological certainty in nature null and void, Descartes retreats into his own interiority, finding solace in his famous Latin phrase, Cogito Ergo Sum, "I think therefore I am." His ideas were a radical departure from pre-modern thought, which held in high esteem man's co-partnership with nature, the study of being (esse). Soon enough, modern thinkers such as John Locke and David Hume reduced our ideas to impoverished sense impressions, ebbing and flowing with the passage of time (Essay Concerning Human Understanding II, I, 2 and 5, vol. 1; A Treatise of Human Nature, I, 1, 1 p. 7). How was one to make sense of unchanging moral principles, the ideas of which had continually fallen privy to change and corruption? Did we need Immanuel Kant to save the day, or should we have reassessed the situation entirely?

Miley Cyrus

After all, if the world cannot provide for moral laws and absolutes, and if our interiority does not suffice for that matter, where do we go from here? Friedrich Nietzsche, a nineteenth century German philosopher, stared head-on at the resultant pessimism that overshadowed the modern struggle, which he saw as being expressed in Greek tragedies. Having expanded upon the Greek tragedies' resonance with Arthur Schopenhauer's Kantian phenomenalism --- and later rejecting it --- Nietzsche initially overcame existential pessimism by finding consolation in tragedies that draw us in toward the Real: the eternal reality of the will. He thought that we could find joy and have our "greatest dignity in our meaning as works of art --- for only as an aesthetic phenomenon are existence and the world justified to certainty" (The Birth of Tragedy, 5, 38). Nietzsche later reneged on his previous claims by suspecting that any undertakings by traditional philosophers toward uncovering realism only revealed a projection of their own moral impositions (Beyond Good and Evil, 6, 8-9). Nietzsche's suspicions about meta-realist claims later churned out an emerging nihilism, a conception of a world with values not inherent to its order but rather as revelries of our make-shift paradigms: "[T]here are no moral facts at all. Moral judgment has this in common with religious judgment, that it believes in realities which do not exist. Morality is merely an interpretation of certain phenomena, more precisely a misinterpretation. . . . In this respect moral judgment should never be taken literally" (The Twilight of the Idols, 33). We can read more about Nietzsche's doctrine of self-determination and "will to power" in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which he develops the ideal Übermensch as someone who has thrown off the shackles of oppressive morality, or we can listen to Cyrus' new song, "We Can't Stop."

Now it seems we have come full circle as our culture now dreamily intimates notions of supreme superiority over all forms of moral objectivism. Cyrus' "We Can't Stop" represents the logical absurdities of a culture already saturated in Übermensch-think, and she's not alone. She represents the victor of a rival ideology to which we have allowed ourselves to be succumbed, yet many of us today have difficulty realizing this to be the case. In other words, Cyrus' teddy-bear dance routines and aggressive lyrics are, together in their unity, a bleak omen prefiguring notions of unrestrained freedom for our future generations to embrace. Hopefully, some good will come out of this; we can assure ourselves of that fact, at least. But for now, be prepared for more Miley.