122 Nietzsche
struct. For some, the proposition described things as they were; for oth-
ers, things as they should be. They shared, however, the conviction that
society and history represented dimensions of truth.
In the pre-Hegelian tradition, this conviction was not as self-evident
as it appears today. Before Hegel, people thought in binary oppositions
of God and the world, man and nature, man and being. After Hegel, an
intervening world of society and history was inserted between these
pairs. This intervening world subsumed everything into itself. The old
metaphysics of the whole—God, being, man—was transformed into a
metaphysics of society and history, and talk of the individual became
meaningless and poindess because the individual was seen as deter-
mined by society and history. The intervening world of society and his-
tory allowed for only a single point beyond, which was nature, both
human and nonhuman. As a creature of nature, though, man was, of
course, even much less than an individual creature; he was only an
exemplar. Metaphysics had been an endeavor to create a spiritual
expanse for man. Now the expanse was narrowing. People wriggled
about inside the harness of social and historical and natural exigency.
The debate in the second half of the nineteenth century was ultimately
about which of the exigencies would predominate. Hegel, and later
Marx, believed in the victory of social and historical necessity. Hegel
spoke of the "spirit that finds itself" and Marx of the "abrogation of
naturalness." For both, these were paths to freedom, which they regarded
as a social product of history. The materialists, on the other hand,
believed in the superiority of natural necessity. They too, however, gen-
erally secularized the old metaphysical promise of salvation and inter-
preted the evolutionary history of nature as an upward development.
Thus, philosophical thought at the onset of the machine age saw the
remaining dimensions of being, nature, and history beginning to evolve
into a kind of machine. One could entrust the production of the suc-
cessful life to "machines," according to the optimists among Nietzsche's
contemporaries, assuming that one behaved accordingly. Nietzsche sub-
dy depicted how the Hegelian '^historical process" had been converted