A Book on Ethics and the Philosophy of Values

the French flag

c) Creative Subjectivism as a Symptom of Absolute Anthropocentrism

Interestingly, subjectivism—both classical and creative—is often regarded as a resistance to anthropocentrism, with Nietzsche himself claiming to challenge human pride.
For Nietzsche, humanity's ultimate presumption lies in its pursuit of an inherent, objective value: The whole pose of "man against the world," of man as a "world-negating" principle, of man as the measure of the value of things, as judge of the world who in the end places existence itself upon his scales and finds it wanting--the monstrous insipidity of this post has finally come home to us and we are sick of it. We laugh as soon as we encounter the juxtaposition of "man and world," separated by the sublime presumption of the little world "and." 1.

Similarly, he rejects all morality, regarding the moralist's attempt to judge others as an act of presumptuous arrogance: Let us finally consider how naive it is altogether to say: "Man ought to be such and such!" Reality shows us an enchanting wealth of types, the abundance of a lavish play and change of forms--and some wretched loafer of a moralist comments: "No! Man ought to be different." He even knows what man should be like, this wretched bigot and prig: he paints himself on the wall and comments, "Ecce homo!" 2
In essence, Nietzsche regards the act of judging—whether humankind or the world—and of proposing any model, including his own concept of the superhuman, as inherently pretentious. This raises the question of whether, in attempting to avoid such pride, Nietzsche inadvertently succumbs to a deeper form of it: anthropocentrism.

Freud, in his celebrated Introduction to Psychoanalysis, offers a theorisation of anthropocentrism that serves as a useful starting point.
It begins with Copernicus, whose heliocentric theory revealed that the Earth—and, by extension, humanity—is not the centre of the universe around which all other stars revolve. Darwin, in turn, demonstrated that humanity is merely the product of a lengthy evolutionary process, rather than the perfected creation of a benevolent God. Finally, psychoanalysis (Freud modestly refraining from naming himself) revealed that humanity is not purely rational but is instead governed by an unconscious that subjects individuals to impulses from which they seek escape: The ego of each one of us […] is not even master in his own house.

Freud thus optimistically anticipated a decline in human pride and anthropocentrism during the twentieth century, envisioning a convergence of the sciences that he believed would bring this about.

The Copernican theory primarily refuted 'spatial' anthropocentrism—the belief that humanity occupied the centre of the universe in spatial terms. When this notion was overturned, humanity may initially have felt it had lost everything. It soon became apparent, however, that new grounds for pride could be established, allowing humanity to reclaim its position as the centre of the universe, albeit in a manner no longer defined by spatial coordinates.

Within the doctrine of creative subjectivism as outlined above, the universe is devoid of intrinsic value; humanity creates values and, in its benevolence, bestows them upon the universe, thereby positioning itself as the source of all value in the world. Humanity thus assumes the role of the universe's axiological—rather than spatial—centre. Metaphorically, one might say that humanity no longer occupies the centre of the 'painting', as traditional anthropocentrism once held. Instead, it has stepped outside the painting, observing it from all perspectives, perceiving its lack of 'beauty', and subsequently endowing it with beauty: this is the new anthropocentrism.


1. The Gay Science, V, §346
2. Twilight of the Idols, Morality as Anti-Nature, 6