Reductionism is the nihilism of today...A human being is not one thing among other things. Things determine each other. Man, however, determines himself. Rather, he decides whether or not he lets himself be determined, be it by the drives and instincts that push him, or the reasons and meanings that pull him.
The nihilism of yesterday taught nothingness. Reductionism now is preaching nothing-but-ness. Man is said to be nothing but a computer or a “naked ape.” It is perfectly legitimate to use the computer as a model, say, for the functioning of our central nervous system. However, there are also dimensional differences which are disregarded and neglected by reductionism. Consider, for example, the typically reductionist theory of conscience according to which this uniquely human phenomenon is nothing but the result of conditioning processes....
The devastating impact of an indoctrination along the lines of reductionism must not be underrated.....
Viktor Frankl, 1978
The Unheard Cry for Meaning
Which brings us to the most famous statement in all of modern philosophy: Nietzsche’s ‘God is dead.’
The year was 1882…Nietzsche said this was not a declaration of atheism, although he was in fact an atheist, but simply the news of an event. He called the death of God a “tremendous event,” the greatest event of modern history.
The news was that educated people no longer believed in God, as a result of the rise of rationalism and scientific thought, including Darwinism, over the preceding 250 years. But before you atheists run up your flags of triumph, he said, think of the implications. “The story I have to tell,” wrote Nietzsche, “is the history of the next two centuries.”
He predicted (in Ecce Homo) that the twentieth century would be a century of “wars such as have never happened on earth,” wars catastrophic beyond all imagining. And why? Because human beings would no longer have a god to turn to…The blind and reassuring faith they formerly poured into their belief in God, said Nietzsche, they would now pour into a belief in barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods….
Nietzsche’s warnings of what indeed came to pass – barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods and catastrophic wars -- were relatively unique. As Michael Polayni has noted: “[W]e entered the twentieth century as on an age of infinite promise. Few people realized that we were walking into a minefield, though the mines had all been prepared and carefully laid in open daylight by well-known thinkers of our own time” (1975: 9).
But Wolfe continues:
Nietzsche said that mankind would limp on through the twentieth century “on the mere pittance” of the old decaying God-based moral codes. But then, in the twenty-first, would come a period more dreadful than the great wars, a time of “the total eclipse of all values” (in The Will to Power). This would also be a frantic period of “revaluation,” in which people would try to find new systems of values to replace the osteoporotic skeletons of the old. But you will fail, he warned, because you cannot believe in moral codes without simultaneously believing in a god who points at you with his fearsome forefinger and says “Thou shalt” or “Though shalt not.”
Tom Wolfe,1999
“Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died”
We find this prophesy frightening. But what concerns us even more -- and the issue we wish to address with you here -- concerns the apparent absence of alternatives. Nietzsche himself, for example, appears trapped in those same crippling either/or reductionisms, offering us no more and no less than those oscillations between top-down “religionism” and bottom-up “scientism.”