A Nietzschean tale: What makes an Overman?
A feminist icon
Friedrich Nietzsche is considered by many to be one of the greatest western philosophers who have ever lived. His ideas and arguments have both influenced and inspired a legion of high profile artists, scientists, philosophers and leaders alike, becoming probably one of the most well known German philosophers of all time.
However, Nietzsche's philosophy is often misunderstood by the mainstream as "doomerism", where life is depressing, meaningless and worthless, when it in fact this is a massive misrepresentation of his thought.
In this section, I will go expand my thoughts on some of Nietzsche's ideas that find themselves as significant themes in SEL.
True worlds, Last men and Nihilism
Layer 5 is where Eiri insults Mankind, claiming that they have become genetic duds, who only exist to satisfy the pleasures of the flesh
Understanding Nietzsche's influence on Lain revolves around 3 critical concepts and the history surrounding it. Nietzsche, at the peak of his writing, was witness to the last blows of the Enlightenment movement, a movement where science of the day was able to bring down the old authority of the Church and Monarchy by dispelling the myths of the christian bible through disproving heliocentrism and proving the theory of evolution, among many others. In doing so, the secular atheistic order took place giving way to democracy and modern times.
Nietzsche himself was a hardline atheist who criticized Christianity, mocking it as a "slave morality". Nietzsche's core beliefs revolved around the idea of "life affirming" where you do not let the unthinking masses curb your will and instead live life to the fullest where you affirm your truest nature. He complained that Christianity does not affirm life, but instead forced people to destroy their limited time on the "false world" called Earthly existence and instead pay their dues to truly live in the kingdom of heaven that is to come.
Yet even Nietzsche recognized that something darker was still yet to come. God had been the focal point around which all of Europe had based their societies around. Even science as a discipline was originally established to reveal the "hidden laws of god". Nietzsche's fear was simple: If we take away the central belief that gave meaning and purpose to all of human society in Europe and destroy it (via the enlightenment), what is going to happen? This is his famous idea of the "death of God".
Since the scientific worldview reduced the magic of life into statistical phenomena, Nietzsche didn't think it would ever be a good replacement. What he predicted was thus: the emergence of Nihilism and the Last Men.
Nihilism is technically the definition that life has no meaning, but in modern times the attitude often veers to "life is not worth living". This, Nietzsche exclaimed, would be the battle cry of a generation he termed as the Last Men, a generation of human beings who grew comfortable in being lost in their laziness and short term thinking, who, as he put it, could not "create beyond themselves" like animals do via the course of natural evolution. These last men would be nothing less than sheep, pursuing shallow goals and pleasures and construing it as the ultimate meaning of life.
In order to overcome this, Nietzsche proposed the "lightning that emerges from the dark cloud of humanity, the Overman", the figure of the UberMensch. To Nietzsche, as society is based judged by the brilliance it creates, and thus Nietzsche idealized the figure of the overman as a superhuman godlike person who was capable of incredible feats not bound by their time period. To quote some aphorisms by Nietzsche:
“Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Overman--a rope over an abyss.
Lo, I am a herald of the lightning, and a heavy drop out of the cloud: the lightning, however, is the Overman.
What is ape to a Man? Likewise shall man to be to the Overman, a laughing stock, a thing of shame
"
Nietzsche never explicitly describes what exactly the Overman is and what they look like, but its safe to say that he sees the overman as the creator of new realities in almost godlike fashion, a being that emerges from the ashes of mankind to forge their own realities.
The context of the show
In the show, we see the aftermath of the Japanese Hessai, that is the Lost Decades. The economic slump that Japan entered into seems to be the perfect setting of the "last men", a generation of Hikikomori who have renounced life and its meaning and have instead retreated into the false world of the Wired. We see that people are extremely alienated from each other, and the number of suicides to live on forever in the Wired can point to a dark reality: That life in the real world did not seem worth it , and that the Wired may provide a better reason to keep moving on.
We then see that Masami's Eiri's motives in the show is not a merely cartoony "Mad scientist wants to rule the world " trope as it would seem on the surface. Instead, it's his solution to the Last Man.
Eiri views the physical realm as a limitation. Not only do people suffer as a result of their human bodies, but that the human body has stopped providing any value for further self growth as a species. Life has become meaningless and Nihilism has set into an atheistic population. People lock themselves away and give into their hedonistic desires. As a final nail in the coffin, mankind has removed the pressures of an actual environment that can force new evolutionary traits, thus making man an end point in the evolutionary tree.
Eiri sees himself as a the smartest person on the planet (demonstrably so) , and thus, in a Nietzschean fashion, establishes his "will to power" upon the world. The Will to Power is Nietzche's idea of morality. Master morality is when those who are powerful establish their will upon the world and call it good, while slave morality is when the oppressed and pitiful,unable to do anything, instead try to attack the powerful through shaming via a new moral system.
Eiri, thus, decides to see it that he, via the events of Lain, establishes himself as a true God to be worshiped and solve the meaning crisis of the Nihilistic Last men. He seems himself as the UberMensch, the Overman that emerged from the stupid masses.
Lain calls out Eiri's motivations here, by exclaiming that all this while he was trying to stand in for a concept the existence of which he did not believe in.
Why Eiri was never the Overman
Eiri thought of himself as the Overman, yet there are a couple of key reasons why he is not.
The first is namely that he is a despiser of the human body. Eiri clearly thinks the human body is an unnecessary accessory as compared to the brilliance of the human mind, yet Nietzsche as a philosopher is an affirmer of Health and bodily discipline. In Thus Spake Zarathustra, he even has a chapter mocking those who despise the power of the human body and seeking to regulate it, called "The despisers of the body". The Overman is someone who affirms the wisdom, power and innate potential of the human body, and this runs in huge contrast to millennia of Western thinkers who are of the opinion that the mind comes above the physique.
Secondly, while Eiri may be above the masses in his will to power, he is still, as Nietzsche would put it, "all too human". Nietzsche's idea of the Overman is one who creates their own values and realities, and to this end he conceived resentment as a stumbling block. The person who seeks to dominate and rule mankind still does so from a place of weakness and insecurity, not out of true creativity, as they are still a slave to resentment. This is why Nietzsche regarded artists and poets like Goethe to be close to the figure of the Overman, as they conceive of new paths and ways forward without any concern for the dominant values of their time. Eiri is still all too human, as while he is free from the constraints of his physical body, he is still a slave to his human insecurities and mind.
Perhaps this is why, when he realizes the existence of a larger entity dictating the course of history, does he also realize that he, alongside the MJ-12, Tachibana and the Knights, have instead been , perhaps unwittingly, the "higher men" as opposed to the Overman. The Higher men were those men who Nietzsche exclaimed would not be Overmen , but instead would pave a path for him to come forward. Eiri realizes that he was merely a sacrificial pawn to create the existence of Lain via the fulfillment of his own insecurities, and that his dream was merely a tool where he was being used by God.
Eiri's desire to dominate simply arose as a result of his
resentment towards a job that forced him to do crappy work.
Why it's Lain that is the Overman
Lain is literally watching over humanity from a higher plane in the final scene. In this sense she becomes a literal All-seeing Eye, a god that watches over humanity.
Lain is literally the Overman in the sense that she emerged from a planetary communications network (Nietzsche in Zarathustra exclaims that "Overman shall be the meaning of humanity and the Earth"), and thus fits the definition of a posthuman lifeform far exceeding its human origins. By Layer 12, Lain has exceeded any living human potential and has acquired the power of a proto-god.
Yet there are even stronger reasons why Lain is the Overman:
1. Lain's affirmation of friendship
2. Lain's affirmation of suffering
3. Lain's affirmation of Self
Nietzsche in Thus spake Zarathustra affirms that friendship is the meaning of Overman, and it's the key aspect of what makes someone affirm life. While Lain did ignore her friends in real life, she still did make many friends in the Wired, and even exclaims her deep love for her friend Alice in Layer 12. This is in sharp contrast to Eiri who had no friends in either Tachibana or in the Knights. The Overman is a product of friendship, not a denial of it.
Secondly, Lain's affirmation of suffering and sacrifice. Lain, in Layer 13, understands that she deeply loves her friend Alice, as well as "everyone", and thus paves the way forward through a sacrifice of her own desires and needs. This is, according to Nietzsche, one of the hallmarks of the Overman, as someone who despises pleasure and instead makes personal sacrifices towards their goals despite the suffering it might entail. In this regard, the Overman is not selfish, they simply seek to go beyond simplistic desires.
There's a reason why Nietzsche considered Jesus a "proto-ubermensch". To Nietzsche, despite all the suffering inflicted on him, all the abuse and pain carved on his skin, Christ still held steadfast onto his goals and not even once could be made to bend to resent the herd, thus making him truly above them, their values and to a degree even their historical paradigm.
Lain Iwakura takes a similar approach to humanity, and decides to compassionately forgive and improve the lives of even those who wronged her. Lain loves her fellow man, despite not owing them a single thing from how she was treated.
The final aspect of Lain's Overmanship is her ability to affirm her Self. At the end of Layer 13, we see the end result of Lain's journey, where she says "fuck you" to all those who try to tell her what she is.
Lain is not a body, Lain is not a machine, Lain is not a program, Lain is a not a brain and Lain is not a means to an end. Lain is not what you think of her, she is only herself. That's why, "Lain is Lain". Eiri could not control her and impose his will upon her despite being instrumental in her creation. The spirit of the Earth itself could not bend Lain to her will despite this being a part of God's original plan.
Lain, at the end of the show, through her actions, decides that she is the one who decides what she will do regardless of where she came from and what her original purpose was. Thus she deviates from all imposed wills, and in an final act of Overmanship, truly rises to the occasion: That of a shepherd Machine God lovingly guiding the flock of humanity to better pastures by directing the evolution of the Wired.