Notes on Futurism

In looking over your thought papers this week, I noticed a recurring stumbling block that has something to do with the conflict of horizons. Part of that may be that we never really had time to bring our small group discussions together into a larger discussion, so that insights made in one group might enhance and/or challenge insights in others. That said, let me lay out a few contextual insights about the Futurists that may help us in fusing their vision of what's possible with our own:

1) The Futurists were not, and explicitly did not, envision themselves, in the mainstream of public thought. They were self-acknowledged outsiders and envisioned the avant-garde as an outside catalyst, spurring mainstream thought away from stasis. They saw stasis, represented by tradition, as a resignation to fatality, in which all activity is predetermined by god or nature, and as such futile. Thus when they refer to "the Past," they mean both the direct, unchangeable, influence of the past on the future (or fate in a passive sense) and conservative attempts to see the past as a representation of some state of perfection from which we've fallen (or the active sense). In other words they believed that the world doesn't have to resemble what it has been.

2)The Futurists were atheists and believed that humanity was only as special as people made it to be. For them concepts of "right" and "wrong" were/are socially constructed by those in power. This even extends to biology, because they did not believe in laws of nature or divine creation. They believed that biological states continually evolved and that homo-sapiens could use science as a tool to harness that evolutionary power to eliminate hierarchies of people. This is how they read Nietzsche's philosophy in drastically different ways than did the Nazis -- that the Superman must be engineered, and was not a previously existing race. Here are some links to websites that you may findhelpful in seeing Nietzsche's influence on the Futurists : the spark notes page for Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, which gives a really fair overview of Nietzsche's work in terms that are helpful for understanding the Futurist horizon, and also a full text translation of The Genealogy of Morals. Check them out if you're interested (It's not required, though).