Abstract

This essay analyzes the connection between Nietzsche’s philosophy and contemporary transhumanism, on the basis of his Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy and how it articulated in late-Romantic European culture. Nietzsche’s personal insanity, and the morbidity of the Romantic Movement in general, can serve as a warning of what transhumanism might become if it overemphasizes individualism. Nietzsche’s first great book, The Birth of Tragedy, stresses the importance of the classical-romantic debate in serious European music, links directly to Jewish intellectual traditions in sociology and psychoanalysis, and provides metaphors for understanding the Nazi Holocaust. The idea of the Übermensch, promoted in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, demands that transhumanists cross the abyss that separates traditional religious culture from some new form of culture yet to be discovered, or that must be created by the transhumanists themselves