I
One of the great critiques of ‘philistinism’ — or what today we could call badauderie — is Nietzsche’s four 1873–76 essays published together as Unfashionable Observations. To the surprise of anyone who mistakes Nietzsche — as he so often is mistaken — for a sieg-heiling proto-fascist, we do not find him here proudly marching at the front of Germany’s victory day parade after the 1870–71 Franco-Prussian war. On the contrary, Nietzsche expresses his concern that Germany will become convinced that it stands as the utmost height of perfection without needing to improve or develop itself in any way.
All of us [Germans] are convinced that … everything of any consequence has long been discovered and accomplished—in short, that the finest seeds of culture have been sown, and that in some areas they are already pushing up their green shoots or even standing in full flower.1
As Nietzsche sees it, the German culture of his day is plagued by the megalomaniacal conviction that it marks the end of history at which point everything has already been discovered, created and learnt such that all there is left to do is monotonously discuss the past, reproducing it with all the meticulous fidelity of a forger of fine paintings. If the nineteenth century German philosophers and artists mark the last judgement on all things worthwhile, any new efforts to achieve any further feats of intellectual and creative daring can only be denigrated as unhealthy and problematic; an utter degeneration from the perfect and perpetual present that must be repressed. All we are left with is the comfort and security found in mediocrity and convention.
With that cunning characteristic of lower creatures, he [the ‘philistine’ or badaud] exploited the opportunity to throw suspicion on the act of seeking as such and to promote instead the comfort of finding. The joys of philistinism unfolded before his very eyes: He fled from all that wild experimentation into the idyllic, and opposed to that unsettlingly creative drive of the artist a certain contentedness, a contentedness with his own narrowness, his own untroubledness, dined, even with his own limited intelligence.2
With the present taken to be the peak of artistic and scientific perfection, any trivial trend or cultural vibe shift becomes something that the badaud gawks at in amazement with a gape practically indistinguishable from a yawn.
In the first essay ‘David Strauss the Confessor and the Writer’ (1873), Nietzsche gives the example of the now practically forgotten writer Strauss’s opposition to Schopenhauer. Nietzsche and even Strauss viewed Schopenhauer as a much more intelligent philosopher in his relentless questioning of all things. Only for Strauss, unlike for Nietzsche, it is for that very reason of Schopenhauer’s higher intelligence that he is condemned as unhealthy, unprofitable and needing to be placed ‘under the control of reason’:
Strauss, a true satisfait with the state of our cultivation and a typical philistine, speaks at one point in a characteristic turn of phrase of ‘Arthur Schopenhauer’s admittedly wholly intelligent, but yet in many respects unhealthy and unprofitable philosophising.’ It is, of course, a cruel fact that ‘intelligence’ tends to be especially fond of settling down on whatever is ‘unhealthy and unprofitable,’ and that even the philistine, if he for once is honest with himself, experiences in the philosophemes that those of his own ilk bring to the world and to market something that is in many respects an unintelligent, but nonetheless still thoroughly healthy and profitable philosophising.3
In the second essay ‘On the Utility and Liability of History for Life’ (1874), Nietzsche tells us that the further cultivation of intelligence and creativity is also being undermined by German culture’s obsession with ‘antiquarian history’, according to which the best and brightest have already existed long ago in the past. Consequently, the only thing left for those living in the present to do is to preserve and reproduce what the ancients have taught us. For the antiquarian historian, all that the future should ever look like is a closely guided tour through a museum of ancient history.
What is sorely lacking here is a ‘critical history’ that does not only identify the past’s successes and strengths but also criticises its failures and weaknesses. As much as the critical historian is just as transfixed by the past as the antiquarian, it is in the belief that many of the statues it has erected ought to come crashing down. Even worse, there is also lacking a ‘monumental history’ that does not look back at the past’s achievements as a final resting spot to be monotonously imitated on end, but rather as a spur to compete with their greatness through further forward-thinking acts of invention and originality. In a thought as becoming as a bride on her wedding day, Nietzsche writes:
For antiquarian history understands only how to preserve life, not how to create it; therefore, it always underestimates those things that are in the process of becoming because it has no divining instinct—as, for example, monumental history has. Thus, antiquarian history impedes the powerful resolve for the new, it lames the person of action, who, as person of action, must always offend certain acts of piety.4
In the final analysis, Nietzsche traces the badaud who ‘conceives of only himself as real and treats his own reality as the measure of reason in the world’ to a reaction on the part of the idle and the complacent against the further cultivation of excellence, so as to ensure that ‘everything had yet to remain as it was.’5
II
Flashforward to 2024 and the 150th anniversary of the essays in Unfashionable Observations, first written and published in 1874. Has Nietzsche’s portrait of the badaud faded into irrelevance today? Or has the badaud not simply found better means of camouflaging themselves so that they have been steadily growing, building up their forces and defences, until they have mushroomed like a nuclear cloud to positively existential proportions?
In the first few months of 2023, the fear not unlike what Nietzsche diagnoses in Strauss of something like a superintelligence was suddenly being discussed all over the mainstream news and social media. The catalyst for this was the release in November 2022 of the tech company OpenAI’s ChatGPT3 — a large language model AI chatbot that is able to provide articulate responses to users’ inquiries across many different domains of knowledge. In March 2023, the limited release of ChatGPT4 only added more fuel to the media firestorm as it already exhibited remarkable improvements over its only recently released predecessor. Of course, not even ChatGPT4 is an example of full-blown artificial superintelligence. It is nonetheless notable that the company behind it, not to mention other major players like Google’s DeepMind, has bigger ambitions than what ChatGPT4 or any other existing AI can currently do, with its stated mission being to generate an ‘artificial general intelligence’ (AGI) at least as smart, if not even smarter, than humans. In the words of OpenAI’s CEO and real life Bond supervillain Sam Altman, ‘our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence – AI systems that are generally smarter than humans – benefits all of humanity.’6
In an age of advanced AI tools like ChatGPT4, even many Silicon Valley tech bros have begun to question, in between their lifting sessions and yoga retreats, the wisdom of building machines smarter than humans. In the same month as ChatGPT4’s release, the Future of Life Institute — an organisation dedicated to studying existential catastrophic risks to humanity — published an open letter called ‘Pause Giant AI Experiments.’ Signed by hundreds of prominent figures in the tech industry, like Elon Musk and computer scientist Yoshua Bengio, the letter noted that, in a time when ‘contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks [...] we must ask ourselves: [...] Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?’7Much as Strauss holds that we must place an unhealthy and unprofitable higher intelligence under the control of a more conservative reason, so does the open letter argue that ‘AI research and development should be refocused on making today’s powerful, state-of-the-art systems more accurate, safe, interpretable, transparent, robust, aligned, trustworthy and loyal.’ The letter thus proposed a six-month moratorium on developing any AI systems more advanced than ChatGPT4 to give governments and tech companies time to devise a set of international regulations and safety checks on future research.
As if he was determined to match the speed of ChatGPT’s development itself, a week later, Eliezer Yudkowsky, one of the pioneers of the field of AI safety and what is precisely known as AI’s ‘control problem,’ published a Time article in which he ramped up the letter’s worries about ‘what happens after AI gets to smarter-than-human intelligence.’8 Just as humans wiped out the neanderthals in part thanks to our greater intelligence, so does Yudkowsky starkly warn that we might meet the same fate at the hands of our artificial creations if they were to become even smarter than us.
Many researchers steeped in these issues, including myself, expect that the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die.9
Since we do not have any known method for ensuring that an artificial superintelligence would remain our loyal servant while technological capabilities continue to race on ahead, Yudkowsky concluded that we simply need to ‘just shut it all down…’
Whether we are really on the verge of creating an artificial superintelligence is not something I can adequately address here. But unless we want to stubbornly stick like a tragic hero blinded by their hubris to the anthropocentric conceit that humanity is the utmost height of creativity and intelligence, then we at least need to consider the possibility of intelligences far surpassing our own. What I in any case want to suggest here is that these doomsday warnings betray something with which Nietzsche was already quite familiar. What we see among all the Silicon valley soy faces are the familiar tropes of the gaping badaud that Nietzsche found infecting his German culture in its efforts to repress ever greater intelligence and creativity for the sake of preserving the status quo. But there is an added twist or software update here that racks things up a notch to positively existential proportions. This twenty-first century badauderie is not a reaction against an outside culture or even the generational vibe shifts in one’s own culture, like a not-so-ok boomer or geriatric millennial freaked out by zoomers dancing on TikTok while dripped out in Drain Gang and Opium fits. What we might call today’s techno-badauderie is rather a reaction of human culture tout court against an inhuman culture that marks the end of humanity altogether as we give way to an alien superintelligence. Far from becoming extinct, if badauderie is relevant today more than ever, it is because we are now confronted by the very real possibility of intelligences vastly more creative and cunning than anything we could conceivably achieve. Badauderie has become humanity’s pre-eminent survival mechanism, our last ditch defence against our own imminent extinction. So badauderie won’t be going anywhere as long as the human is around, because the only possible futures for us are badauderie or death.
[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche 2: Unfashionable Observations, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995, p. 7.
[2] Ibid., p. 14.
[3] Ibid., pp. 22, 16-7.
[4] Ibid., p. 106.
[5] Ibid., p. 15.
[6] Sam Altman, ‘Planning for AGI and Beyond,’ OpenAI, 24 February 2023, https://openai.com/blog/planning-for-agi-and-beyond (accessed 28 February 2023).
[7] Future of Life Institute, ‘Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter,’ Future of Life Institute, 22 March 2023, https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/ (accessed 24 March 2023).
[8] Eliezer Yudkowsky, ‘Pausing AI Developments Isn’t Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down,’ Time, 29 March 2023, https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-not-enough/ (accessed 30 March 2023).
[9] Ibid.
