The Last Man

Nietzsche's nightmare

In Zarathustra's prologue, Nietzsche describes what he feared was the endpoint of modernity. The Last Man has come after humanity has lost the drive for creation, risk, and self-overcoming. They have abolished hardship. They live in warmth. They have small pleasures, equal small vices, and regard anyone who wants more as slightly eccentric.

"What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?" the Last Man asks, and blinks.

Nietzsche's crowd of Last Men cheers. They ask Zarathustra to make them into Last Men too. They have invented happiness. The crowd delights in this.

That delight is the horror. The Last Man is not miserable. He does not know he is missing anything. This is what Nietzsche found most alarming: a civilization that had optimized for contentment had abolished the very categories by which its poverty could be named.

What the Last Man represents

The Last Man is the terminus of a particular trajectory: a society that values comfort, safety, equality, and the absence of suffering above all else will eventually produce human beings who want nothing more.

For Nietzsche, this was not progress but a form of spiritual exhaustion. Human greatness, art, philosophy, heroism, discovery, all required the willingness to suffer for something, to take risks for something, to be unequal in pursuit of something. The Last Man has traded all of that for a warm room and a harmless life.

This is also an indictment of certain strains of utilitarianism. If the goal of civilization is to maximize aggregate comfort and minimize suffering, the Last Man might be the goal achieved. Nietzsche thought that meant the goal was wrong.

The challenge the Last Man poses

The Last Man is a provocation, not a rigorous argument, and Nietzsche's critics have always been ready with a response: he is expressing aristocratic contempt for ordinary human life, romanticizing struggle, and dressing up elitism as philosophy.

This objection is not nothing. Nietzsche was drawn to images of heroism, solitude, and creative greatness that look suspiciously like the preferences of someone with independent means and a high opinion of their own sensibility. The suffering he romanticizes is often other people's.

But the harder version of his challenge doesn't require accepting any of that. The question is narrower: is there something lost in a life organized entirely around comfort and the avoidance of difficulty? Can a person or a civilization be impoverished in a way that shows up not as unhappiness but as a kind of vacancy? That question doesn't require Nietzsche's specific values to feel pressing.