If we need a title for the 20th century, perhaps we should call it 'the century that denied value'.
            'Denial', of course, has wonderful overtones. While it may denote an outright rejection, as a general rule, it nowadays involves psychological implications, and, particularly, it implies the corollary function of an addiction.
            And, culturally, the 20th century involves all of these possibilities.

            If Nietzsche is honored and execrated throughout the 20th century, undoubtedly it is as much because he defined the peculiar problem of value precisely, as because of any great philosophical 'discovery' he made. But his peculiar definition was also precisely his great discovery. His disciples suggest that he leaped out beyond the zeitgeist, that in fact he was an incontrovertible prophet, a man essentially without antecedents in his thinking. But the core of his philosophy is a kind of epitome of the zeitgeist. The problem, here, is that we have failed to understand the history because it has been hijacked by factionalists.
            What Nietzsche 'discovered' is what we have already suggested here: value is essentially synonymous with the moment of experience. Since the moment of experience is also the arena of habit and concept, and since Nietzsche allowed no formal structure for the moment that would include both the creative force of value and the habitual reactive nature of our everyday experience, he had to insist on the moment as creative power, as the manifestation of the overman.
            That he brings value to rest in the moment of experience is a direct consequence of the work of the German Idealists, although apparently Nietzsche's eccentric educational path caused him to miss that fact. But the innovative power that came to rest in the moment of experience is illustrated by Einstein's work in 1905, since Einstein's relativity theory hinges specifically on the paradoxes of the moment of observation, and derives more or less directly, in that respect, from his study of Kant.

            What Nietzsche elucidated, culturally, were the primary implications of this equation. If the moment is value, then every formalization, reification and externalization of value is false. On first approach, what strikes the unprepared reader is the Nietzschean polemic. He seems to be attacking value itself. But, in fact, what he assails is not value, per se, but value presumed as external to the moment of experience. If religion assumes that it has isolated and reified value in the figure of Jesus, then Jesus is a false idol. The reification of God in the institution of the church is both an idol and a hoax. If the scientist claims that he has isolated value in the scientific fact, then the scientific fact is equally an idol. Aesthetic theories fall under the same ax. And, of course, Nietzsche is famous for his attack on logic and logicians. Value is only a function of the moment of experience - this moment, finally, as an experience of pure creativity.
            Those who can only see the relentless and apparently universal condemnation of all 'forms' of value assume that Nietzsche was a nihilist and, finally, the radical source of nihilism. That is, if we only view him as a polemicist, the scathing closure of his attack seems like the ultimate validation of the nihilistic perspective.

            But any careful reading of Nietzsche exposes not only his hunger for validity, but his sometimes covert, sometimes overt self-gratulation as the founder of a new canon of value, a canon of value for which even the word 'canon' is presumably inappropriate. The emphasis on the 'superman' or 'overman', and on the nature and necessity of power as the immediate access, tends to obscure the real Nietzschean insistence on the moment. But, of course, it would have been culturally incorrect, at that point, to emphasize the act of creativity alone, since this was the open cry of the Idealists and their followers. For those opposed to Idealism, the complex, paradoxical and finally ambiguous metaphysics, in the sophisticated Idealists, tended to discredit the ideal of creativity almost as much as the simplistic, emotion-based and finally, in some instances, simply absurd theories of creativity among their followers.
            Within the frame of the moment, power is the access to value, since all accessions of value within the frame of the moment manifest some form of power. To assert the creator as the human embodiment of power is therefore a simple transfer, although the cultural power of the creator, like the power of value itself, is commonly not altogether or even not at all obvious. The 'overman', then, is a kind of hidden genius as well as the pivot of the culture - clearly, a Zarathustra figure. And, as such, the 'overman' and the insistence on power draw the attention away from the potential metaphysics of the moment.

            So this is the paradigm definition of the cultural mindset at the beginnings of the 20th century: an ineffable yearning for value coupled with a nearly nihilistic critical outlook that denies any tangible expression of value. Nietzsche and his generation - that is, the genius figures of the generation: the inherent 'prophets' - manifested the imminence of this understanding in a peculiar collective symmetry of self-destruction. They still held the possibility of real value, and they still held a tradition that embodied the residual possibilities for the expression of values, even if the values ultimately conflicted absolutely with the tradition itself.
            But, by the beginning of the 20th century, tradition itself was under direct attack. If we look back to Baudelaire, his insurgency not only seems mild, it still walks the accepted prosodic measure of the tradition, while challenging its surface assumptions - conditions for 'prettiness' and self-censorship, of what can and can't 'be poetry', in this instance. But after the turn of the century, the prosody itself is up for grabs. 'Where is the value?' becomes the essential and dominant question. But, simultaneously, any value is suspect.
            And so we get the disassembling of the art itself.

            In these pages, I have attacked Picasso and Joyce, not because they were not prodigious talents, but because talent is not genius. Genius is earned and not given. Any legitimate critic who reads the Dubliners cannot deny the aggregate of developed talent that commonly passes for 'genius' today. The stories themselves begin to pass beyond brilliance and enter the realm of human mastery. But Joyce is clearly not satisfied. There are those who would argue that the sequence of Joyce's work demarks not only a clear line of development, but a clear line of advance. But aspects of the Artist are precious and dry. The theory behind much of Ulysses is precisely that, a theory - and a theory which involves a discredited psychology as well as a false presentation of how we think, feel and perceive. And Finnegan's Wake embodies a relentless cleverness that makes it almost unreadable.
            Are we confronting genius? Or manic brilliance? Unrelieved talent finally becomes tedious. But given the depth of Joyce's talent, how do we justify the career, if not in terms of an unrequited search for the source of value or meaning?

            But this is only the beginning of our chosen century. Joyce is among the youngest and last of that extraordinary generation of novelists that seems to bring the genre to its epitome: James, Proust, Mann, and Hamsun, among others. We can name our favorites who followed, but none seemed to have the huge, studied constructive powers as well as the pervasive insight into the inner nature of consciousness that passes beyond the wonderful storytelling and perspectives on character that dominated the 19th.
            When we look at cultures, the high point of the strictly cultural developments commonly seem to fall just after the socio-economic peak, as if the great creative outburst is the first harbinger of decline. Perhaps we could argue that European culture was beginning to fall into post-imperialist and post-industrial decline. But what about America? Instead, it would appear that the cultural peak was essentially cultural. The revolution, epitomized not only by revolution itself, but by Idealism as well - the legitimate progenitor of 'the modern' - was hitting its last high cycle. Not just the force, but the understanding that Idealism embodied - a force that had entered into the cultural tide even as the legitimating intellectual base was being explicitly rejected - falls from its peak, but produces a final creative surge. And with this fall, the rejection itself gradually takes over. By mid-century, the students of philosophy are willing to acknowledge that logic has no necessary connection to 'value' - to meaning or significance. But does this cause the 'philosophers' to abandon logic and turn back to the empiricism of value and analysis? No. They follow logic into linguistics and the formalistic patterns on the borders between logic and mathematics.

            But the truly disorienting upshot - the appalling upshot, depending on one's perspective - is that in the latter third of the 20th century, we have not only developed a theoretical justification for the lack of value, the justification has become both aggressive and pervasive. Value is not simply suspect, it is by nature void. I cannot find any better expression for the situation. To assert a value is to fall into error, since value as such does not and cannot exist. We have wonderful circumlocutions to express this orientation. The very turbidities of contemporary intellectual argument are the direct involution of this tergiversation. We cannot deny value outright. But, simultaneously, we cannot assert any accessible value. Simple statement, of itself, is inherently erroneous, since statement, by its nature, is an assertion of value.
            As a consequence, in most areas of culture formerly designated by the term 'the humanities', the argument itself is no longer accessible. In the last fifty years, academic 'philosophy' has, for the most part, simply turned its back on the problem. The arts and their criticism are a morass. And it is no longer possible to distinguish one from the other since the advent of 'conceptual' art, an oxymoron if there ever was one.
            Where we still encounter the raw argument is in the interface between culture and science. What is fascinating is that 'scientists' and 'scientific philosophers' now implicitly reference a Newtonian theory of 'matter', long exploded by modern physics (in the same latter-day surge of 'cultural' Idealism), to justify the absence of 'value' in any process of nature. The fact that consciousness emerges in the process of evolution is not a sign that evolution is either 'purposive' or otherwise value laden. And these 'philosophers' will go to one extreme, denying that in fact evolution involves any real 'development' or 'complexity', in order to deny any 'value' to evolution. Or, they will go to the other extreme, and deny consciousness itself, insisting that consciousness is somehow strictly material, although the first 'scientific' link has yet to be made.

            Consciousness is not 'material', and certainly not in the sense of Newtonian matter. But consciousness is also not 'mind'. Mind is the congeries of functions we witness between awareness and the world. To deny awareness is to deny experience, the putative foundation of science.
            What grounds science is the experience of objectivity. And the experience of objectivity is explicitly an experience of value. In the moment of objectivity, the value can be separated from the specific facts and principles. But it is precisely this 'subjective' aspect of the experience of objectivity which is the problem here. If I experience objectivity, the objectivity dawns as a subjective experience. This is not only paradoxical, it is actually mystical. That is, the experience of objectivity is in fact a spiritual and religious experience, in which we recognize the simultaneous validity of subjective and objective. But without an appropriate 'psychological' framework for the experience, it is highly addictive. Only a larger framework can save us from identifying objectivity with 'self'. And since the artifice of self is the key to addiction, what objectivity tends to produce is a primary intellectual or cultural addiction, a presumption about the objectivity of my own judgment.

            The death of value is directly correlated with the accession of this addiction as the pervasive intellectual disposition. The denial of all values except my own judgment is the corollary. Implicit in all 'post-modernist' arguments against value, whether direct or tangential, is this addictive denial function. The only antidote is to redefine 'science' as 'gnosis', and recognize the structure of awareness and self-awareness in which this gnosis opens the windows of awareness to the teleological force of value at work in the self as well as the world.