This affirmation of the Ubermensch is achieved not by a simple and naive will of stubbornness or betise, but an augmentation of the senses. Such an augmentation of the sense doesn’t mean today’s “human enhancement” where intagible objects or subharmonic frequencies can be seen or heard, but a development of a sensibility that transcends the limits of the five sense. In Nietzschean philosophy, this new sensibility means rapture (Rausch, sometimes rendered as “intoxication,” or “ecstasy”). In rapture, the human oversteps the limitations on the senses in everyday life. It was in this sense that Nietzsche considered art to be physiological.
(page 29)
When we say “augmentation,” we risk moving into the negative organology of current transhumanist discourse on human enhancement. A negative organology is one that only augments the “reckoning” capacity of the organic being and also undermines judgement – not only in the concept of the world, as Brian Cantwell Smith described, but also in the moral and existential judgment of good and evil. While transhumanist discourse believes that by augmenting this “reckoning” capacity we can arrive at genuine judgment, this effort does not escape the positive feedback loop that characterizes modernity as a form of alcoholism.
(page 272)
This peril first manifests as a risk or even an aesthetic catastrophe: that using these technologies in artistic creation may accelerate the poverty of sensibility and lead toward an increasing numbness. Their emphasis on lived experience, whether immersive or augmented, is nothing but mere consumption of excitement and hype, and will only close our aesthetic experience by reducing our five sense to sense data that sustain the database and algorithmic operations. Besides exhibiting the advancement of technology and so-called creativity, there is complete lack of questiong. This silence and contradiction is also the place where art can act out. The solution is open, but art has to be questioned on its capacity to question in response to today’s aestheticization of consumerism and politics
(page 276)
Hui, Yuk. Art and Cosmotechnics. University of Minnesota Press, 2021.
But the personal experience of each separate person is comparatively narrow and meagre. If one depends on it, it is easy to fall into error – sometimes a very serious or even disastrous error. Individuals, being carried away with faith in the power of unity, waste their and others’ energy attempting to unite ill assorted and incompatible elements: for example, in politics to create a bloc of socialists and liberals. Or, to take an opposite example, someone might fail several times in applying the principle of ‘in unity is strength’ and become so sceptical regarding the good of any union of heterogeneous elements that one does not permit unification where complete agreement of particulars is absent and therefore supports the subdivision of one’s party into factions on the basis of theoretical nuances and petty practical divergences. The people in both examples acknowledge that there is strength in unity, but in the interpretation, verification, and restriction of this rule, neither of them has any support other than personal experience or any criterion other than individual evaluation. The wisdom of the ages, the sum of the experiences of a long line of generations, becomes no more than a component part of a separate, individual layperson’s homemade philosophy – a philosophy that is doomed to inaccuracy, indefiniteness, and weakness in practice.
Bogdanov, Alexander. The Philosophy of Living Experience. Haymarket Books, 2016.