Some further thoughts on themes about Fukuyama and how his ideas about Hegel and Nietzsche are represented in Taylor Sheridan's Yellowstone:
The concern of the last part of Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man is the "Last Man" part. The Last Man is Nietzsche's counterpoint to Hegel's First Man, the warrior aristocrat who is willing to risk his life in a prestige battle to the death. [See Note 1] Yellowstone's John Dutton is a victorious First Man in this sense, who is the successor of a patrilineal line of First Men. The First Man ethics defines the logic by which the show establishes that the lawless, violent things the Duttons do are in fact worthy or our admiration. They live something intensely real that the rest of us in Blue Liberalstan don't.
The Duttons are Hegelian-Nietzschean First men, not Hobbesian/Lockean Last Men. The first have spirit; the second are timorous animals who are motivated by nothing higher than avoiding pain and seeking pleasure. [See Note 2] For the Las Man only lives for pleasure. He's analogous to Kierkegard's human who lives only on the aesthetic, a man who is in despair and doesn't know it. He thinks his shallow life is just great, that it can't get any better. That, at least, is what he keeps telling himself.
John's daughter, Beth, is also a First Man. If you didn't understand this already, this week's Season 5 Yellowstone episode makes it clear. Beth and the hated eco-activist Summer have a First Man prestige battle. They traded punches to the face until one gave up. It was brutal. Beth, of course, long inured to cowboy ethics, would have died rather than concede, but she also knew that it was just a question of time before Summer would, and she did.
Summer gets props for lasting longer and punching harder than anyone thought she would, but it's clear from the get-go who's superior and who's inferior. In a previous episode John describes Summer as one of the sheep, and she scolds Beth for taking advantage of her. Well, Summer proves she's better than a sheep by cowboy standards, but let's not get carried away. She's still a member in good standing of the Liberal Order to which the Duttons are sworn enemies. If her character is redeemable in Yellowstone world, it will be by her conversion to the cowboy ethic and in her ceasing to be such a sanctimonious, Liberal prig.
Later John is talking to Rip about the fight and says that there is no one he knows whom he envies--except Beth, because she is so uninhibitedly free. She is made of pure Hegel First Man stuff, and there's a Nietzsche vibe in it that echoes a scene from Season 3--
Beth: I subscribe to Nietzsche’s thoughts on right and wrong.
Rip: Hmm?
Beth: He was a German philosopher who died of syphilis after he cornholed some prostitute, so not exactly a life to model yours after, but his thoughts on right and wrong, good and evil.
Rip: Which were: there’s no such thing.
Beth: That, I believe. I believe in loving with your whole soul and destroying anything that wants to kill what you love.
Rip: That’s it.
Beth: That’s all there is.
Beth might seem like a deeply troubled, vengeful psychopath to the uninitiated observer, but the show doesn't think of her that way. She's a megalothymic First Man. Her apparent psychopathy is what makes her admirable precisely because it's so uncivilized by standards set by the Liberal Order. She simply will not be ruled by that order. Sheridan clearly admires Beth precisely because she is a wild woman who doesn't care what anybody thinks about her. She's the opposite of the Last Man that is produced by the Hobbesian/Lockean culture that emphasizes bodily security and material comfort.
It could be argued that the whole show is an argument about how the post-Industrial Revolution Liberal Order produces spiritless, weak Last Men ruled by nothing more than their appetites. And really, the show asks, wouldn't the world be better if aristocratic barbarian warlords like John Dutton with Beth-like lieutenants ran things on Master Slave principles? Is any other kind of human truly worthy of our respect? These are intensely real humans, not snowflakey fools Isn't that really at the heart of alt Right fantasies about destroying the administrative state? Sheridan has protested that his show has no partisan axes to grind, but it's clear where his sympathies lie.
But is Beth an exemplary uebermensch? I don't think that Nietzsche in his saner moments has someone like Beth in mind. My reading of Nietzsche's uebermensch focuses on the 'ueber', which is often translated as 'super' as in 'superman', but also sometimes as 'overman'. I prefer the second because it suggests 'overcomingman' or 'selftranscendingman', which comes closer to the Hegelian and German Romantic idea of the human being as free and undetermined, a being whose dignity lies in his or her capacity to transcend culturally imposed limitations. Beth has some of that, but I think that Nietzsche had a nobler kind of post-conventional human being in mind, someone like Lou Salome, a highly cultured human being, not a neoprimitive defined by her brutality.
But then, there's this photo(?) of Salome, Nietzsche, and his friend Paul Ree. It's clear who's the Master and who the slaves:
Nevertheless, I think that given the choice between someone like Hillary Clinton or Beth Dutton, Nietzsche would certainly prefer to hang out with Beth. I think the same might be true if he were given the choice between Beth and someone like Jane Addams. Addams is more my idea of a 'selftranscendingman'. But more on that another time.
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Note 1: Fukuyama writes:
But Hegel’s “first man” differs from the animals in a second and much more fundamental way. This man wants not only to be recognized by other men, but to be recognized as a man. And what constitutes man’s identity as man, the most fundamental and uniquely human characteristic, is man’s ability to risk his own life. Thus the “first man”’s encounter with other men leads to a violent struggle in which each contestant seeks to make the other “recognize” him by risking his own life. Man is a fundamentally other-directed and social animal, but his sociability leads him not into a peaceful civil society, but into a violent struggle to the death for pure prestige. This “bloody battle” can have one of three results. It can lead to the death of both combatants, in which case life itself, human and natural, ends. It can lead to the death of one of the contestants, in which case the survivor remains unsatisfied because there is no longer another human consciousness to recognize him. Or, finally, the battle can terminate in the relationship of lordship and bondage, in which one of the contestants decides to submit to a life of slavery rather than face the risk of violent death. The master is then satisfied because he has risked his life and received recognition for having done so from another human being. The initial encounter between “first men” in Hegel’s state of nature is every bit as violent as Hobbes’s state of nature or Locke’s state of war, but issues not in a social contract or other form of peaceful civil society, but in a highly unequal relationship of lordship and bondage.
The End of History and the Last Man, pp. 146-47
In other words, the Hegelian account of the move out of the state of nature into society is more historically accurate. The social contract idea was completely new, modern idea. But the point that Fukuyama emphasizes is that the Hegelian account is more psychologically astute. What makes the human human is not to be merely well fed and secure like our animal pets, but to have a self-consciousness. And Hegel picks up on the Fichtean theme that self-consciousness is awakened in conflict. We coast along in a dream until reality snaps us out of it, and, and we are most aware and self-conscious when we confront death.
Animals fight, but they don't do it with the self-consciousness of risking death, and so the human being proves himself to be superior to the animals in his self-conscious choice to transcend animal instinct and to risk his life in mortal combat, to "live free or die", so to say. This is the Dutton ethic. But it's also the motto of those that stormed the Capitol on J6. These are people who want to prove to themselves that they are truly human.
Someone like Beth Dutton is smart enough to see that these people are all deluded, but she would respect them for their willingness to fight. It's the same respect she seems willing to afford Summer after their fight. She still thinks Summer is deluded, but at least she was willing to fight. It is honorable to fight and lose than not to fight at all. If you don't understand that about what's happening on the far Right in the U.S. today, you don't understand what's at stake for them, this is what it means to be red-pilled. Their radicalization correlates with their waking up to what it means to have dignity as a human, which apparently they had not experienced before in such a powerful way. This is not something that can be understood in Lockean/Hobbesean terms except with horror. Through a Hegelian/Nietzshean lens it looks quite different. See Note 2.
Note 2: Fukuyama--
One might think that to uncover the real meaning of liberalism, one would want to go even further back in time to the thought of those philosophers who were the original source of liberalism, Hobbes and Locke. For the oldest and most durable liberal societies—those in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, like England, the United States, and Canada—have typically understood themselves in Lockean terms. We will in fact return to Hobbes and Locke, but Hegel is of particular interest to us for two reasons. In the first place, he provides us with an understanding of liberalism that is nobler than that of Hobbes and Locke. For virtually coeval with the enunciation of Lockean liberalism has been a persistent unease with the society thereby produced, and with the prototypic product of that society, the bourgeois. That unease is ultimately traceable to a single moral fact, that the bourgeois is primarily preoccupied with his own material well-being, and is neither public-spirited, nor virtuous, nor dedicated to the larger community around him or her. In short, the bourgeois is selfish; and the selfishness of the private individual has been at the core of critiques of liberal society both on the part of the Marxist Left and the aristocratic-republican Right.
Isn't this kind of selfishness the core animating spirit of leave-me-alone Libertarianism? Keep your nose out of my business, and I'll keep mine out of yours. So scram. Get off my lawn.
Hegel, in contrast to Hobbes and Locke, provides us with a self-understanding of liberal society which is based on the non-selfish part of the human personality, and seeks to preserve that part as the core of the modern political project. Whether he ultimately succeeds in this remains to be seen: the latter question will be the subject of the final part of this book.
The second reason for returning to Hegel is that the understanding of history as a “struggle for recognition” is actually a very useful and illuminating way of seeing the contemporary world. We inhabitants of liberal democratic countries are by now so used to accounts of current events that reduce motivation to economic causes, so thoroughly bourgeois in our own perceptions, that we are frequently surprised to discover how totally non-economic most political life is. Indeed, we do not even have a common vocabulary for talking about the prideful and assertive side of human nature that is responsible for driving most wars and political conflicts. The “struggle for recognition” is a concept as old as political philosophy, and refers to a phenomenon coterminous with political life itself. If it seems to us today a somewhat strange and unfamiliar term, it is only because of the successful “economization” of our thinking that has occurred in the past four hundred years. Yet the “struggle for recognition” is evident everywhere around us and underlies contemporary movements for liberal rights, whether in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Southern Africa, Asia, Latin America, or in the United States itself.
The End of History and the Last Man, pp. 146
Hobbes/Locke vs. Hegel/Nietzche = Hamilton vs. Jackson. See "Some Thoughts on Election Day" where I explicate the Jacksonian/Hamiltonian dyad. Old School Democrats are captured by economic thinking, but the far Right and Left by identity thinking. It's not the economy, stupid, but identity and recognition that is the true driver of politics nowadays. Neither the cultural Left nor the cultural Right will allow politics to be about what is proper to politics, which is solving practical problems concerning the common good in ways that require mutual respect, compromise, and working things out. The culture warriors on both the Left and Right are bent on a prestige battle to the death. Isn't that what this Supreme Court case about the anti-gay wedding website designer is all about? It's certainly not about working out this conflict in a way that solves the practical problem. Rather, one side or the other must have complete victory because to lose is to become the slave to the other.
The problem of the Last Man in the world technocapitalism is creating is crucial for Liberal Democracies to resolve if they are to survive into the 22nd Century. Fukuyama takes it on in the final part of this book, and, imo, fails to envision a satisfying solution. For as the robots do more of the work, and humans have more leisure, Lockean/Hamiltonian presuppositions lead to a society envisioned in Huxley's Brave New World in which everyone has time but doesn't know what to do with it. In a utilitarian Lockean desire culture the end is pleasure--sex, drugs, escape into virtual games in which we pretend to be First Men. It's all a dream. What else is there? The other Hegelian/Nietzschean/Jacksonian possibility would be a reversion to a battle of all against all. We'll all become First Men again. Primitive, but intensely real. In the first, everyone is bored to death; in the second we live in a neo-barbaric Westworld except it's not a virtual game. Isn't it clear which world Sheridan would prefer to live in? Isn't Yellowstone the non virtual reality of Westworld?