What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism. This history can be related even now; for necessity itself is at work here. This future speaks even now in a hundred signs, this destiny announces itself everywhere; for this music of the future all ears are cocked even now. For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end…¹

Since Copernicus man has been rolling from the center toward X….²

What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; “why?” finds no answer.³

Why has the advent of nihilism become necessary? Because the values we have had hitherto thus draw their final consequence; because nihilism represents the ultimate logical conclusion of our great values and ideals; because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value these “values” really had.⁴

Radical nihilism is the conviction of an absolute untenability of existence when it comes to the highest values (…) — the realization that we lack the least right to posit a beyond or an in-itself of things (…). This realization is a consequence of the cultivation of “truthfulness” — thus itself a consequence of the faith in morality.⁵

The Will to Power is a collection of Nietzsche’s notes published after his death (he lived from 1844 to 1900 but was incapacitated after 1889) in a series of different renditions.⁶ In it, as in a number of the books Nietzsche published in his lifetime, problems are posed concerning the logical, psychological, social, political and war and peace consequences of nihilism.

The potential significance of any work published after Nietzsche hangs on the question of whether or not it addresses the problems of nihilism specified by him. 

Now McLuhan was, of course, a Catholic convert. If his conversion and his work generally are to have significance for us today, 120 years after Nietzsche’s death and 40 years after McLuhan’s, it can only be because he, like Nietzsche, “lost his way (…) in every labyrinth of the future” and so “lived through the whole of nihilism, to the end, leaving it behind, outside himself”. It is such a past that has been passed through, and such a passed past alone, that could provide McLuhan with a methodical basis for his work — if that work is to command our attention today.⁷ The great question is whether he, too, was “a soothsayer (…) who looks back [to the threading of those labyrinths] when relating what will come” — whether in his work, too, “a countermovement [to nihilism] finds expression, regarding both principle and task; a movement that in some future will take the place of this perfect nihilism — but presupposes it, logically and psychologically, and certainly can come only after and out of it.”⁸

The first aphorism in The Will to Power is one of Nietzsche’s many drafts of an outline for a book he never came to write. He formulates this outline in 8 points:⁹

1. Nihilism stands at the door: whence comes this uncanniest of all guests? Point of departure: it is an error to consider “social distress” or “physiological degeneration” or, worse, corruption, as the cause of nihilism. Ours is the most decent and compassionate age. Distress, whether of the soul, body, or intellect, cannot of itself give birth to nihilism (…). Such distress always permits a variety of interpretations. Rather: it is one particular interpretation [of reality], the Christian-moral one, in which nihilism is rooted.¹⁰ (…)
2. The end of Christianity — at the hands of its own morality. (…)
3. Skepticism regarding morality is what is decisive. The end of the moral interpretation of the world, which no longer has any sanction after it has tried to escape into some beyond, [all this] leads to nihilism. [Nihilism as both a rigorous philosophical conclusion (by some) and a social whirlwind (of all) is the finding that] “Everything lacks meaning” — the untenability of one interpretation of the world, upon which a tremendous amount of energy has been lavished, awakens the suspicion that all interpretations of the world are false.¹¹ (…)
4. [Hence any new beginning must be made] against “meaninglessness” on the one hand, [but also] against moral value judgments on the other. (…)
5. The nihilistic consequences of contemporary natural science [must be demonstrated:] (…) [It must be shown how] the industry of its pursuit eventually leads to self-disintegration [and thence to] an antiscientific mentality [in society generally and even in science itself]. (…)
6. The nihilistic consequences of the ways of thinking in politics and economics, where all “principles” are (…) histrionic: the [general] air of mediocrity, wretchedness, dishonesty, etc [all this, too, must be set out]. 
7. (…) The position of art (…) in the modern world [must be shown as] absolutely lacking in originality. (…)
8. [The key:] Art and the preparation of nihilism: romanticism.¹²

Many of Nietzsche’s points here are familiar in McLuhan’s work. For example, from his earliest essays onward he argued that the intellectual tenability and even the historical survival of Catholicism depended upon the depth investigation of the Church’s own roots — by the Church itself and its faithful. Such an investigation entailed a familiarity with contemporary art and science¹³ and, as McLuhan began to see somewhat later, also with the evolving technological environments in and through which the Church attempted to express its message. 

McLuhan’s conversion is therefore the crucial question at the bottom of all his work.¹⁴ After the insight of Nietzsche — and after all those McLuhan haphazardly lumped in Nietzsche’s company (Hegel, Marx, Darwin, Sorel, Proudhon, Freud, Bergson, Spengler, Joyce, Stein, Proust, Eliot, Pound, Picasso, Rodin, Benda, Einstein, Lewis and Jung)¹⁵ — how was conversion possible in an intellectually cogent manner? In an authentic manner? In a manner we can respect and learn from today? And — most importantly — what has such a possibility to do with our desperate need to extricate ourselves from the cul-de-sac in which we find ourselves in extremis even now?

As insistently described by Nietzsche, the great necessity was to enter and to thread “every labyrinth”. And, indeed, from start to finish, McLuhan never tired of pointing to the significance of Poe’s Maelstrom¹⁶, of the vortices of Pound and Lewis and of the ubiquitous labyrinths in modern art, especially in Joyce.¹⁷

Further, again like Nietzsche, McLuhan repeatedly insisted that values had no place in his analysis. If they appeared at all, they did so as explanandum, not explanans¹⁸ — as what had to be investigated, not as providing any sort of accepted basis from which investigation might be initiated.

Crucially, for both Nietzsche and McLuhan, the cul-de-sac in which the western tradition has eventuated is no merely logical or psychological event. It is above all a global social event in which commerce and government are even more caught up than are the arts. Analyses of the labyrinths exposed at the end of the western tradition are therefore consequential first of all for our communal, national and international lives, and especially for war and peace, as no analysis has ever been before.

We have no choice. We have either to surpass any previous age or to collapse into a new Babel. For our problems, like our means and opportunities, are of a scope beyond those of any previous age. (Symbolist Communication, 1953)

Lastly, the very key to this social event which has come to dominate the world like a cloud of poisonous gas, was, for both Nietzsche and McLuhan — romanticism!¹⁹ Nietzsche ends his 8-part aphorism above with references to this fact (and therefore to his many discussions of it in his published work²⁰). For his part, McLuhan saw in romanticism an “automatic closure or involuntary fixing of attitude”²¹, which necessarily disintegrated when that “fixing” was exposed and could not account for the privilege implicated in “fixing” whatever it had fixed!²² As a result, he fully agreed with Nietzsche “that we lack the least right to posit a beyond or an in-itself of things” since these could not be anything but Gutenberg galaxy “fixings” whose legitimacy passed away with it.

All the art and science of any consequence following romanticism could be seen as documenting this disintegration, as can the millions upon millions of deaths in the unending wars waged in its continuing wake. 

The great question, which cannot be repeated often enough, was whether a “counterblast” or “countermovement [to nihilism] finds [open!] expression, regarding both principle and task; a movement that in some future will take the place of this perfect nihilism — but presupposes it, logically and psychologically, and certainly can come only after and out of it.” Any other “movement”, one with a different presupposition, could not withstand the force of nihilism, could not be true,²³ and could not win and hold our acceptance.