German philosopher whose "History of an Error" gives Cameron McEwen the descent that becomes the cul-de-sac — the West's long advance into a dead end. Cameron wrote his Princeton undergraduate thesis on Nietzsche, studied him under Walter Kaufmann and then in Germany, and in Dialogue 04 traces the six-step error while noting that McLuhan, when pressed, dismissed the whole line of thought as "conceptual thinking."
History of an Error
From "History of an Error" (Twilight of the Idols) — the six steps by which Western thought advanced into, and finally disclosed, its cul-de-sac:
- Plato — "I, Plato, am the truth." Nietzsche: makes sense.
- Church — truth mediated through dogma and sacraments; the "feminization" of the Platonic idea.
- Kant — thing-in-itself unknowable but still directive; "a pale Königsbergian fog."
- Positivism — thing-in-itself is useless; "cock-crow of positivism."
- Materialism — no reason to call materialism "reality" over anything else; keep it for utility only.
- Nihilism — real world abolished → apparent world disappears too → no world: "If all we have is the apparent world, then we have no world."
Across the dialogues
The source of the cul-de-sac — Nietzsche names the dead end but, on Cameron's reading, finds no way out
When Cameron tried (in fall 1968) to interest McLuhan in Nietzsche's problems, McLuhan brushed them off as "conceptual thinking."
"I tried to convince, or at least to interest, McLuhan in the idea that there were problems in philosophy that had existed at least since the time of Nietzsche, that his work might answer."
McLuhan once told a seminar that "Nietzsche studied effects" — coming close to casting him as an early media ecologist.
"One night in a McLuhan seminar, Monday night seminar, he was talking to somebody, and I was standing there eavesdropping. And he started going on about how Nietzsche studied effects. He was almost saying Nietzsche was an early media ecologist."
On Cameron's reading, Nietzsche named the cul-de-sac but never found the exit — he came to the edge but would not jump into the abyss of percept.
"If we take my view, then it is that Nietzsche defined the cul-de-sac, but did not define a way out of it."
Invoked as the diagnostician of the present — his definition of nihilism supplies Cameron's answer when Bob demands evidence that the world is really in crisis
Pressed by Bob for proof the world is in crisis, Cameron reaches for Nietzsche's definition of nihilism — the unanswered "why," values with no ground, reason "petering out" — and casts the cul-de-sac as merely its effect.
"The question why goes unanswered."
Read into the Tech Body’s own words — Cameron hears the interview’s "you don’t know" imperatives as the nihilism Nietzsche specified in the 1870s and 1880s, only now becoming legible
Cameron reads the Tech Body’s "you don’t know where you live / who you are" as Nietzschean nihilism — specified in the 1870s–80s and only "now" becoming legible.
"It brings up what I would call Nietzsche nihilism."
Credited with the whole diagnosis the session runs on — the lost orientation named as the cul-de-sac he foresaw a century and a half ago, down to "wars of unprecedented devastation"
Cameron pins the present directly on Nietzsche — the "lost orientation" everyone feels is the cul-de-sac he "predicted, foresaw, investigated" in the 1870s–80s, "including wars of unprecedented devastation," so the 21st-century condition is a prophecy 150 years in arriving.
"and that's the cul-de-sac, which Nietzsche predicted, foresaw, investigated in the 1870s and 1880s, so 150 years ago."
Pulled into the tech-body finale — "the power that flew itself" routed through the will to power, which Heidegger’s reading collapses into "the power to power," one more face of Gutenberg conflation
Cameron routes the Tech Body’s obsession with power back to Nietzsche — "the power that flew itself" arrives where Nietzsche arrived, at The Will to Power, his final, unfinished book.
"the book he was writing when he went insane, was called the will to power."
Slotted into the session's periodization as the man the telegraph reached — credited with completing German idealism because he had thirty years of electric effect the idealists did not
His difference from the idealists is made technological rather than intellectual — the same problem worked on inside a new environment.
"probably Nietzsche completes those guys. In a certain way, yeah. He has the advantage of a telegraph for 20, 30 years. So he's getting the electric effect, which the idealists didn't have in the first half of the 1800s."
Used as the instrument that dissolves Bob's novelty claim — every formulation Bob offers as post-McLuhan is shown to be already Nietzsche's, so the philosopher stops being a stage in the story and becomes the test any claim to newness has to pass
Bob's newest formula is identified with the oldest diagnosis in the archive, which is Cameron's standard method for refusing historical novelty — not disputing the description but dating it.
"There's very little to Nietzsche other than user as content consuming form. That's the death of God. That's nihilism."
The dating is made textual — Cameron catches Bob's own word in Bob's own paragraph and hands it back with a century's provenance.
"already in the 1880s, Nietzsche pointed out that disappearing, which is a word that you use in the middle of that paragraph, that form was disappearing."
The correction that blocks Bob's optimistic reading of the flip — content cannot survive the form it was content of, so a world of pure content is not a new condition but an absence mistaken for one.
"If you think that when form disappears, then you still have content, then you're just hallucinating. Because when you lose form, there's nothing left of content."
The endpoint given a date and a definition, which is what lets Cameron treat infinite fragmentation as arrival rather than as crisis — the fragmenting had nowhere further to go.
"where Nietzsche left us in 1889 was with nihilism, and nihilism is the complete absence of everything."
Recruited to a question that is not about him — brought in to underwrite an account of disappearance Bob had sourced to the postmodernists, and the substitution holds, which quietly re-dates the whole theme by a century
Cameron's precision about what Nietzsche actually claims — not that things vanished but that the category which made them appear did, which is a stronger and stranger loss than the postmodern version Bob had reached for.
"that things disappeared so far as he says that there is no more apparent world."
The dating does the work of a rebuttal — it strips the disappearance of its postmodern authorship and makes it a nineteenth-century event, which Bob immediately re-reads as a telegraph effect.
"Nietzsche already in the 1880s was talking about the disappearance of reality and along with reality of everything."
Connections
Cameron takes the cul-de-sac from Nietzsche's reading — the West entering a dead end with Plato, with no exit defined.
Cameron studied Nietzsche at Princeton under Kaufmann, then in Germany — the scholarly ground beneath the whole framework.
Among the subjects Rorty taught the undergraduate Cameron was Nietzsche — then still outside his public reputation.
"The dean of Nietzsche interpretation in the United States" for decades — the lens through which Cameron first read Nietzsche.