GESTIÓN DEL TALENTO HUMANO

To my knowledge, the expression “last human” appears in the published works only four times and in two senses. In the enigmatic aphorism 49 of D, it is given the biological sense of the last representative of the human species. It represents the extinction of mankind. I will return to this aphorism in a moment. In the other three mentions of the phrase, the “last human” is understood in a sharply different sense. The last human is she who won’t

disappear. Far from being the “end of the human,” she rather represents the “human of the end," the individual who has attained the much-anticipated “realm of the ends”. All three other mentions of the last human are made in the context of Z.151 In Z, III the “last human” is associated with the “end” of creative

150 _{See for example Kathleen, M. Higgins, who also calls the “last man” a “caricature” in}

“Zarathustra’s Midlife Crisis: A Response to Gooding-Williams” in the Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 34: 2007, 48.

existence and the “the greatest danger of all human future.”152 This associates the last human with sickness here understood as the inability to create. The theme of the last human was introduced by Zarathustra and given a prominent place as early as the book’s “prologue.” Here, Zarathustra describes the last human as sterile soil. This sterility comes not from a lack but from an excess of cultivation: the last human’s soil is “poor from cultivation, and no tall tree will be able to grow from it." Culture is sterility because it is internalization, the inability to create.153 Most importantly, the last human is a master of survival: “Its race is as inexterminable as the ground-flea; the last human lives the longest” says Zarathustra. Therefore, the “last human” typifies the ultimate product of the ideology of survival and provides a supplementary qualification for it: survival is the concern for longevity154. The last human is not subject to change, she is outside becoming, because she is an obstacle to the future. Of course, this is not

152_{Z, III, “On the Old and New Tables,” 26-27.}

153 _{On the sterility of the last human, see Kathleen Higgins: “A second challenge for the potential}

creator of values has to do with the cultural climate. Zarathustra’s caricature of ‘the last man,’ the person so concerned with his own comfort that he aspires toward nothing, describes the condition of much of modern society. The strategy of the last man, geared as it is toward self-protection, is inimical to fervent involvement in anything. A society full of last men is incapable of generating new values because they lack the passionate basis for doing so. Indeed, Nietzsche sees many of the conditions of modern society as passion-eradicating. This raises the question of how Zarathustra could propose new values that would actually result in cultural transformation." Kathleen Marie Higgins, “Zarathustra’s Mid-Life Crisis,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 34, 2007, 47

154 _{See also, Z, I, “On Free Death” where Zarathustra refers to the “good” as “the preachers of}

to say that the last human’s life does not take place in time, but rather that the time in which she lives has lost its creative (incorporative) power. In the world of the last human, becoming (in the sense of creative time) becomes separated from timeliness. The last human has timeliness, but no becoming. She is a “standstill” says Zarathustra. He further expresses this by saying that the last human has eradicated all “chaos” from his being:

“‘I say to you: one must still have chaos within, in order to give birth to a dancing star. I say to you: you still have chaos within you. ‘Alas! The time will come when the human will give birth to no more stars. [...] ‘Behold! I show to you the last human.”

There is strong evidence in Nietzsche’s writings that he does not believe chaos can be entirely eradicated from an individual. In GS, 109, Nietzsche states explicitly that “the total character of the world is, [...] in all eternity, chaos,” and in a note contemporaneous to Z, he writes:

“‘Timelessness’ to be rejected. At any precise moment of a force, the absolute conditionality of a new distribution of all its forces is given: it cannot stand still. ‘Change’ belongs to the essence, therefore also temporality: with this, however, the necessity of change has only been posited once more conceptually.”155

Moreover, even though Nietzsche describes the last human’s activities as very minimalistic, he nonetheless attributes her some activities (“One continues

155_{WP 1064 [1885], See also for example, WP, 83 [Spring-Fall 1887]: “‘Without the Christian} faith,’ Pascal thought, ‘you, no less than nature and history, will become for yourselves un monstre et un chaos.’ This prophecy we have fulfilled, after the feeble-optimistic eighteenth century had prettified and rationalized man” and WP 639 [Spring-Fall 1888]: “That the world is not striving toward a stable condition is the only thing that has been proved. Consequently one must conceive its climactic condition in such a way that it is not a condition of equilibrium—“

to work, for work is entertainment.”; “One has one’s little pleasure for the day and one’s little pleasure for the night”). Yet, for Nietzsche, “every activity is an overcoming of difficulties and resistances”156 any activity involves some degree of ‘chaos,' and indeed, there is no eradicating chaos.