Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Nietzsche has a complex relation to Romanticism. On the one hand, Nietzsche (hereinafter N) might be considered a Romantic himself—indeed a culminating figure of Romanticism—because he provides the most thoroughgoing and profound philosophical grounding of the idea of creativity. On the other hand, he provides a searching and often scathing critique of many of the most important Romantics and of the phenomenon of Romanticism as a whole. We can see the complexity of N’s relation to Romanticism in the complexity of his relation to Richard Wagner. N first hailed Wagner as the redeemer of European art—destined to restore the power of native Germanic myth and usher in a great new era of tragic art, comparable to that of 5th-century BC Athens. N became a propagandist for Wagner. But as Wagner became more successful, and began to play the role of the Master, N finally felt he had to break with him for the sake of his independence of soul. N always claimed that this was the most difficult decision of his life. Wagner gave N a chance to encounter Romanticism in person and observe it up close. He was tremendously attracted to it, but in the end felt compelled to reject it. For N Romanticism is a phenomenon of decadence, of declining life—and it leads to nihilism. N was the first to admit that he was a decadent himself, but he hoped he had been able to fight the decadent instincts in his soul. N’s critique of Romanticism inaugurated what we think of as modernity. Much of what is important in 20th-century philosophy and literature has its roots in N.
You might still wonder what Nietzsche is doing in this course. None of his works are examples of the genre of theogony. The only one that presents its material in a mythic manner is Thus Spoke Zarathustra (hereinafter TSZ), but it does not contain a myth of creation. On the contrary, the main narrative purpose of TSZ is to present a myth of something N calls the eternal recurrence of the same (ER), which apparently substitutes for a myth of creation. The point of the doctrine of ER is that the world had no beginning in time. This seems to take us back to the classical as opposed to the biblical understanding of the world. Recall Plato’s Timaeus—that which truly is, has existed from all eternity. The Ideas are not themselves created, but are the models according to which all creating, divine or human, takes place. As we saw, this doctrine of the eternity of the Ideas deprecates the value of creativity. The activity of making is subordinate to the activity of understanding the Ideas. But this cannot be N’s understanding of creativity—he cannot signal a simple return to the ancient Greek standpoint. He is the great philosophical proponent of the ideal of creativity. So this is the fundamental problem for us to consider: in N, we have a premium on creativity but no myth of creation. N clearly marks some form of departure for us; he severs his understanding of creativity from a myth of creation. In fact, as we will see, he thought the myth of the ER would provide a sounder basis for the ideal of human creativity than any myth of creation could.
Here’s a preliminary indication of the importance of the ER—it denies that the world had a beginning; at the same time, it denies that the world will have an end. This shows that what N was doing with the ER was breaking with the apocalyptic mode of Romantic thinking. We’ve seen that in Romantic thought he idea of the creation is inextricably linked with the idea of the apocalypse. Creation points to apocalypse. We could even say that the apocalypse is the guiding idea of Romanticism—the Romantics begin with an ideal they project into the future—a total transformation of the human condition into some kind of paradise. Whatever stands in the way of the realization of this future ideal is then shown to be the product of man’s past. The Romantics expect that if they can show how man came to be what he is, they can then show him how to become something better. Think of Frankenstein’s hope of remaking man. That’s why the pattern of a fall is so common in Romantic myth. For every paradise lost, there is a paradise regained. The problem with Romantic apocalyptic thinking is that it does not offer man the total freedom it at first sight seems to. Recall the original motive for the break with traditional creation accounts—you don’t want man to be subject to external standards of value—you don’t want man to be subject to the dictates of reason or revelation. You don’t want man to be judged by a standard not of his own creation. But the Romantics run into trouble because of their desire to project their ideal back into a mythic past. You can see the problem already in Rousseau. He still feels it necessary to speak of a state of nature, which he uses as a standard for judging the deficiencies of the state of civil society. Rousseau would deny that he was taking nature as a standard; he is not returning to the classical position. For Rousseau, nature doesn’t show man what he should become; at most you can say that nature just forces man to become something other than what he originally was. He’s on his own as to what he chooses to become. But still nature seems to be serving as some kind of standard in Rousseau. Civilized men can be guided by their understanding of natural man to recapture their original freedom and self-sufficiency. This would be to produce a type of man better than nature could ever have produced on its own, but in some sense nature would still have pointed the way to this creation.
This difficulty is clearer in Blake, especially when he speaks of man’s original state as Eternity rather than the state of nature or innocence. Blake makes the original state sound perfect in itself—but then man from the very start had an eternal standard of perfection in reference to which he must always judge himself. In Book of Urizen and Four Zoas, Blake suggests that originally man did have wholeness. His faculties worked together in harmony. It’s almost as if Blake were saying that it is man’s nature for his reason and his passions to cooperate and not be at war. But if he did say that, that would be taking nature as a standard and setting limits to man—exactly what Blake often claimed he did not want to do. What the Romantics in some sense ought to have said is: man’s reason and passions have never been in harmony, but we foresee that someday they could be. You can see the difficulty with that approach—you get accused of idealism and impracticality. That’s why the Romantics project their ideal back into the past—what man once was, he can be again. But then it becomes difficult to speak of man creating this standard of the harmony of reason and the passions. Blake does not claim just to foresee it; he looks back and discovers it: a job for Epimetheus rather than Prometheus.
You can look at this problem another way: there is a grave difficulty with idealism—it asks men to sacrifice themselves for a future goal—it can become very confusing if men can’t agree what that goal is. If you can make reference to an original state all men once were in, that gives you a common standard. All men can strive to recover that one original state. But doesn’t that set limits on human freedom? Apparently men can’t choose their goals—they have to be guided by considerations of the ideal original state. There is an interesting problem in Blake—he claims that everything that lives is holy. Does that include the miser, the policeman, and the priest? There is a tension in Blake’s thought between license and prescription. He wants to tell men that they’re free to develop in any way they choose. But then he shows that some directions should be forbidden. He claims they’re not really development; some ways of life involve the chaining up of energies rather than their liberation. This suggests that Blake has standards for judging development—development in itself cannot be the only standard. Blake talks as if a man can become anything he wants. Actually he has a fairly specific model in mind of what a man should become—he should become an artist, like Blake. This suggests that Blake’s myths were, to paraphrase what Nietzsche said of Plato, a circumlocution for the sentence “I, William Blake, am the truth.” This is a Romantic brand of sophistry. They really have a conception of human nature different from that of the classics, but they don’t want to argue on that plane. They don’t want to have to argue about the facts of human nature, so they claim that man doesn’t have a fixed nature.
This is what happens if you look at Romantic creation myths—if they talk about some higher or better state from which man fell, that state seems to set limits on human freedom. In particular, it provides some kind of universal standard—this is what man as man once was; this is what man as man can become again. This point becomes clearer if you look at the apocalyptic pole of Romantic myth. The great temptation is to project the apocalypse as a final state. Man can be transformed once and for all into a better being. What’s more, all men will achieve this state, at pretty much the same time (the apocalyptic moment). This sounds very much as if the Romantics snuck teleology through the rear door back into human history. The apocalyptic final state—this suggests that man has an end in history; man is striving for an end. Doesn’t that end now set limits to human freedom? Do we have the freedom to go back to some time prior to the apocalypse? There are grave difficulties to any notion of an end of history, as you find in philosophers as well, such as Hegel and Marx. Man seems no freer than he was in traditional schemes of thought. Whether he likes it or not, he’s being drawn inexorably toward a final state of history. The notion of the march of history is born—it can’t be resisted. Recall what Percy Shelley said about the force of poetry in his Defence. It accomplishes its purposes no matter what men consciously will. Here’s an even graver problem to the end of history: what happens to man once it has been reached? All human dignity has been staked on the struggle to achieve the final state. All dignity is in fact to be found in the struggle—man struggling to create himself or re-create himself. Once man reaches the final state, there is nothing to strive for anymore. If all value is in creativity, what do you do once man has successfully and definitively created himself? Utopia is fine as long as, like Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, you’re on the road to utopia. Once you’ve gotten there, utopia loses its value. There’s a bit of a letdown to the apocalypse. Man is limited by his own ideals; by his own realization of them if he ever achieves utopia.
The Romantic ideal of human freedom thus seems hemmed in on both sides—by visions of man’s beginning and man’s end. Perhaps the difficulty here is inherent in the ideal of creativity itself. The premium on creativity demands that man seek out what is eternally new, and thus demands ceaseless striving. But this can easily lead to weariness of spirit and a longing for some kind of final state. A paradox results—ceaseless striving must be grounded in the hope of an ultimate goal—you need something to strive for, to justify all the effort and struggle. The great temptation is to picture the ultimate goal as a final state, that is, a resting place—a state in which man no longer has to strive. But the notion of such a final state is not compatible with the idea of total human freedom. It implies that man has a goal he is directed toward and that sets limits to man. This also often implies an original state man fell from. That suggests there was an original human nature—man is not infinitely malleable; on the contrary, all he is trying to do is bounce back to his original form, undoing the distortions it has undergone in history. The ultimate goal of the Romantic quest is the perfect human being, as Mary Shelley suggested in Frankenstein. The perfect man is something definite; the notion of perfection implies wholeness and thus implies limits. The idea of perfection is bound up with the idea of completion and finality. Nietzsche understood that you could not have both human perfection and human freedom as the Romantics understood the 2 concepts. Expressed another way: N understood that the value of creativity is not wholly compatible with Romantic apocalyptic thinking. The notion of the ER was needed to give man real freedom. Specifically: you have to abandon the quest for human perfection if you want to preserve human freedom. Man cannot achieve anything eternal—that will last forever. Everything man builds he will eventually have to tear down and build anew, even himself. Nothing in man is ever grounded in the eternal. For example, man’s thought does not give him access to an eternal order of reason, as the ancients claimed.
There is a real renunciation of eternity in Nietzsche. Here is a characteristic passage in an early fragment: “In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the haughtiest and most mendacious minute of “world history”—and yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die” (Portable Nietzsche, p. 42; from “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense”—1873). You can see how different this is from the framework of Romantic thought, except for Byron. Even Byron expected man to rebel against an existence without eternity. But N will want man to accept it—not just accept it, but in fact to affirm it, to will it. That we will see is the meaning of the ER in TSZ. You can see what the basis of such an affirmation would be. Man’s life must be devoid of any eternal significance if man is to be the sole creator of all his values. Any attempt to give eternal support to man’s values requires going outside of the self-contained horizons of human life, it requires assuming something greater than man. It requires in short God—or a reasonable facsimile thereof. And God is an affront to human dignity for N. His most revealing admission is: “if there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god! Hence there are no gods” (TSZ, PN, 198). For N, if man is to be truly creative, he must renounce God, and that means to renounce eternity. The idea of the ER is that all things will recur over and over again with no escape from the cycle. Man does not come from Eternity and he is not headed toward Eternity. Man’s only “eternity” is an eternal cycle of all things recurring. To affirm the ER is to renounce the traditional idea of eternity, as well as the Romantic hope for a world-altering apocalypse.
Nietzsche’s Critique of Romanticism
The most general level of N’s critique of Romanticism is this: Despite all its differences from traditional religion, Romanticism is unwilling to give up completely what traditional religion knew as God. The moderns have just come up with substitutes for God, appearing under names like Nature or History. The key point for N is that the Romantics have taken their conception of truth from traditional religion. They still talk as if God stood behind their truths. They want their truths to be eternally and universally valid. Their message is directed to and applies to all human beings at all times. And it is of cosmic importance. That is why writers like Blake end up sounding like traditional prophets. Percy Shelley in his Defence speaks of poets revealing an eternal order to man. He even invokes Plato in support of his notions, with no apparent sense of how incompatible Plato’s concept of an eternal order of Ideas is with the Romantic ideal of creativity. It’s an odd phenomenon: the Romantic appropriation of Plato, expropriation of Plato. Shelley’s Defence is thoroughly ambiguous—he sometimes talks as if the poet merely divines an eternal order that is already somehow out there, independent of human beings. At other times, he talks as if the poet is a second God; he creates the order of the world himself.
N detected this ambiguity in Romanticism; it wants the best of both worlds. It wants to replace God with man, and yet retain all the traditional prerogatives of God for man. It wants to be able to say that man creates his own values and yet treat those values as if they had the absolute validity of the Ten Commandments. N claims: if you’re going to give up God, you have to give up the notion of truth that God underwrote. N offers a powerful formulation of the modern historicist position. There is no Truth, only truths. There are no eternally valid truths, only historically conditioned truths. All human truths and values are a product of human history. Truth is something man makes. Therefore he can unmake it. Strict adherence to the ideal of human creativity demands the renunciation of eternity. N’s quarrel with Romanticism is over its lack of consistency. N is trying to force a choice—he wants Romanticism to purge itself of the remnants of traditional religion.
For N, Romanticism is not a break with traditional religion but a transformation of it. The issue goes deeper than the quasi-religious absolutism of Romanticism. N was very suspicious of the secret sympathy for Christianity the Romantics displayed. Often it was not all that secret. N’s main objection to Wagner is that he did not remain true to his original paganism; he compromised with Christianity—Parsifal was only the final confirmation of this point for N. N noticed that the Romantics often craved the name of Christians for themselves and not just as a matter of prudence. They wanted to show that they were the only true Christians, truer to the real message of Christ than conventional Christians. We find Blake and Percy Shelley doing this. Blake in The Everlasting Gospel, for example, or Shelley in the Defence. They often spoke well of what they regard as true Christianity. For N, the Romantics never really subjected traditional religion to a thoroughgoing critique. They accepted a great deal from it even when they were throwing out other elements. N did not know of Blake (he did know of Percy Shelley’s poetry), but it’s not hard to tell what he would have thought of Blake. Remember what I said of Blake’s originality—he was the first to see morality as a problem. But N would have said that Blake did not really see Christian morality as problematic. Blake objects to one aspect of Christian moralism—the effort to restrain the passions. But by and large he does not object to the content of Christian morality. The values Blake preaches are derived from Christian teaching. Blake praises charity, brotherhood, compassion—the virtues of love, the soft virtues. Essentially what Blake was saying is that historical Christianity had been untrue to Christ’s original message of human brotherhood. It had let the goal of restraining the passions interfere with the greater goal of brotherhood. Blake was willing to accept Christian values; he just wanted to free them from historical corruption. His basic point was that the teachings of Jesus have been corrupted by power-hungry priests. As N viewed the Romantics, if anything, they were more fanatically true to Christian values than conventional Christians. Christian values had dominated Europe for so long, they had become a kind of habit according to N; they had come to seem almost second nature. People who thought they were free thinkers had not really freed themselves from Christian morality. They had given up God but had not re-examined the values He stood for and stood behind. See N’s comment on George Eliot: “They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality. That is an English consistency; we do not wish to hold it against little moralistic females à la Eliot. In England one must rehabilitate oneself after every little emancipation from theology by showing in a veritably awe-inspiring manner what a moral fanatic one is. That is the penance they pay there. . . . The origin of English morality has been forgotten, such that the very conditional character of its right to existence is no longer felt. For the English, morality is not yet a problem” (Twilight of the Idols, PN, 515-16).
N’s originality was this—for him Christian morality truly became a problem. He was willing to re-think the matter of values and see if traditional values could stand up to a real critique. You have to rethink the matter of God—not whether He exists but whether it is a good thing for Him to exist. Recall what we saw in Byron’s Cain. The Romantics hungered for the God of traditional religion. They would like a God who takes care of humanity, and supports human brotherhood and love. Their objection to traditional religion was that it doesn’t really provide such a god. N wouldn’t want such a god, even if He were available: “That we find no God—either in history or in nature or behind nature—is not what differentiates us, but that we experience what has been revered as God, not as “godlike” but as miserable, as absurd, as harmful, not merely as an error but as a crime against life. We deny God as God” (Antichrist, PN 627). Consider Voltaire’s famous one-liner: “If God did not exist, he would have to be invented.” N would restate it: “If God did exist, he would have to be abolished.” There is a good summary of N’s critique of Romanticism in one of his notes left in manuscript—published by his sister as Will to Power (sect. 331, pp. 184-6 in Kaufmann’s translation): “The very obscure and arbitrary idea that mankind has a single task to perform, that it is moving as a whole toward some goal, is still very young. . . . When Christian prejudice was a power . . . meaning lay in the salvation of the individual soul. . . . For every soul there was only one perfecting; only one ideal; only one way to redemption—Extremest form of equality of rights, tied to an optical magnification of one’s own importance to the point of insanity. . . . No man believes now in this absurd self-inflation . . . . Nevertheless, the optical habit of seeking the value of man in his approach to an ideal man remains undisturbed: fundamentally, one upholds the perspective of personalization as well as equality of rights before the ideal. In summa: one believes one knows what the ultimate desideratum is with regard to the ideal man---This belief, however, is only the consequence of a dreadful deterioration through the Christian ideal: as one at once discovers with every careful examination of the “ideal type.” One believes that one knows, first that an approach to one type is desirable; secondly, that one knows what this type is like; thirdly, that every deviation from this type is a regression. . . . In this way a goal seems to have entered the development of mankind: at any rate, the belief in progress towards the ideal is the only form in which a goal in history is thought of today. In summa: one has transferred the arrival of the “kingdom of God” into the future, on earth, in human form—but fundamentally one has held fast to the belief in the old ideal.”
N disagrees with the Romantic understanding of history; he focuses on the French Revolution. It provides an effective touchstone for evaluating 19th-century thinkers: how they reacted to the French Revolution reveals most clearly where they stood. N’s differences from the Romantics are evident in his repeated attacks on Rousseau. Look at sect. 18 of Twilight of the Idols: “I still hate Rousseau in the French Revolution: it is the world-historical expression of this duality of idealist and rabble. The bloody farce which became an aspect of the Revolution, its “immorality,” are of little concern to me: what I hate is its Rousseauan morality—the so-called “truths” of the Revolution through which it still works and attracts everything shallow and mediocre. The doctrine of equality! There is no more poisonous poison anywhere; for it seems to be preached by justice itself, whereas it really is the termination of justice” (PN 553). Notice N’s difference from the Romantics; they supported the ideals of the FR wholeheartedly—the famous triad of liberty, equality, fraternity. What upset the Romantics is the fact that the FR did not live up to its ideals, as shown by the violence of the Reign of Terror and the Napoleonic wars. The latter aspect of the FR didn’t bother N; in fact the section on Rousseau in Twilight begins with praise of Napoleon as the only authentic case of a “return to nature.” What N objected to in the French Revolution was precisely what the Romantics admired—its ideals. Here is the focus of N’s attack on Romanticism—its ideal of equality. That’s why N felt the Romantics had not sufficiently broken with Christianity—they carried over the Christian idea of the brotherhood of man, the equality of men before God. N’s disagreement with the Romantics was that he did not believe that the ideals of equality and creativity are compatible. For N, not all men can be creators; creators are a special class of human beings for N. It requires something he called the pathos of distance. You have to feel elevated above other people to have the strength to create new values. See TSZ (PN 213): to advance, life “requires height, it requires steps and contradictions among the steps and the climbers.” In Beyond Good and Evil, sect. 257 N argues: “Every enhancement of the type ‘man’ has so far been the work of an aristocratic society. . . . Without that pathos of distance which grows out of the ingrained difference between strata—when the ruling caste constantly looks afar and looks down upon subjects . . . . that other, more mysterious pathos could not have grown up either—the craving for an ever new widening of distances within the soul itself” (BGE 201).
N is again sensing a contradiction in the Romantics. On the one hand, they advocate the equality of man; on the other hand, they see themselves as raised above the common run of humanity by virtue of their special powers of vision. [“My struggle against romanticism, in which Christian ideals and the ideals of Rousseau unite, but compounded with nostalgia for the old days of priestly-aristocratic culture. . . something extremely hybrid,” Will to Power, section 1021, p. 529] This contradiction is particularly apparent in aristocratic democrats like Byron and Percy Shelley; there is almost a noblesse oblige attitude in their humanitarianism. This contradiction is evident in the duality of the Romantic self-image or the ambiguity of Romantic posing. They present themselves as men of the people but also as lonely misunderstood geniuses, often at one and the same time. Wagner was the prime example of this. He thought of himself as a political revolutionary, fighting on behalf of the common people, but he craved an aristocratic lifestyle for himself. For N, the way of the creator is necessarily lonely. Creativity is precisely being able to stand on one’s own. Therefore, you cannot look ahead to an apocalypse when the creator will be relieved of the burden of loneliness. This is a strong motive of Romantic apocalyptic thinking—to foresee a time when the burdensome loneliness of the Romantic ego can be relieved. They want to end the painful isolation of the Romantic ego by spreading the creativity around. Here is N’s objection to apocalyptic thinking. The Romantics long for and foresee a time when value can be created without struggle; creativity will have no costs. For N, even creativity would lose its value if man did not have to pay a price for it. N has a different attitude toward suffering. The Romantics are willing to justify their creative suffering but only as something temporary—they have to see it as a stage—they will not accept suffering as a permanent part of human life (except perhaps Keats).
The Romantics see both the suffering creature and the powerful creator in man, but they hope that the former is only a stepping stone to the latter. N is closer to the understanding Mary Shelley embodied in Frankenstein—man is both creature and creator, and the two sides are continually at war. They can destroy each other if the creator in man is unwilling to acknowledge the creature, or the creature is unwilling to acknowledge the creator. N is concerned with showing that suffering is a necessary part of human existence, perhaps because his own life involved so much misery—see especially the epilogue to Nietzsche contra Wagner (PN 680-3). Suffering is essential to creativity—that is something the Romantics certainly realized in their own cases, and yet according to N, they weren’t willing to face up to the full implications of this fact. Hence they were always looking forward to abolishing suffering in some future state. For N, their concern was all for the creature in man. N feared that by trying to eliminate creaturely suffering, they would destroy the basis of human creativity. See Beyond Good and Evil, sect. 225 (BGE 154): “In man creature and creator are united; in man there is material, fragment, excess, clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos; but in man there is also creator, form-giver, hammer hardness, spectator divinity, and seventh day: do you understand this contrast? And that your pity is for the “creature in man,“ for what must be formed, broken, forged, torn, burnt, made incandescent, and purified—that which necessarily must and should suffer? And our pity—do you not comprehend for whom our converse pity is when it resists your pity as the worst of all pamperings and weaknesses?” N’s formulation is this: the Romantics pity the creature in man; he pities the creator in man. This is something like the idea of the 2 pities in Blake in Urizen—there is a pity that merely tries to alleviate man’s suffering as he is; then there is a pity that would try to force man to become something better. But N’s higher pity requires a greater toughness than Blake’s. You cannot pity all men because all men do not have the true creator in them. This is clear in TSZ. N’s pity is only for the higher men, and he feels that Zarathustra must overcome even that. The hardness of the creator is the theme of sect. 29 of the “On Old and New Tablets” in the 3rd part of TSZ (N. liked this passage so much, he used it as an epilogue to Twilight of the Idols).
N’s praise of hardness—what does this mean? Hardness is essential to the creator. Creativity requires discipline; it requires training, learning techniques, submitting oneself to the discipline of forms; in short, it requires effort. The Romantics often speak of creation as if it were merely a matter of inspiration. The poet just opens his mouth and out comes Prometheus Unbound fully formed. The Romantics often deny the necessity for conscious planning. This corresponds to Blake’s attitude toward reason and the passions; we can just let our passions go. The belief in the inspirational character of poetic creation is tied to the Romantic doctrine of equality. If creativity is just a matter of inspiration, it might be available to all. If poetic creation requires special talents and discipline, it may turn out to be in short supply. The Romantic belief in inspiration is contradicted by Romantic practice. Just look at the manuscripts of Romantic poems—we find lines crossed out, new words substituted, whole new drafts attempted. Look at the revisions Keats made between Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion. Blake’s “The Tyger” famously went through several versions. Artistic creation involves hard work. The Romantics, by making creativity seem to be more readily available than it is, decrease the chances of people developing the requisite discipline.
Consider section 188 of Beyond Good and Evil (pp. 100-1). “all there is or has been on earth of freedom, subtlety, boldness, dance, and masterly sureness, whether in thought itself or in government, or in rhetoric and persuasion, in the arts or in ethics, has developed only owing to the ‘tyranny of such capricious laws.’. . . Every artist knows how far from any feeling of letting himself go his ‘most natural’ state is—the free ordering, placing, disposing, giving form in the moment of ‘inspiration’—and how strictly and subtly he obeys thousandfold laws precisely then.” Recall that I read part of this passage to illustrate a point in Blake about how “fire delights in its form.” Now you can see the difference. N is speaking out in favor of lawfulness, insofar as it helps man develop discipline. Life is not a matter of just letting go; man shows his humanity in his ability to impose discipline upon himself. It may sound as if N is returning to a classical position. But again not quite. N does not return to the classical understanding of the relation of reason to passion. N’s emphasis on hardness, discipline, and self-restraint doesn’t reflect a return to the classical principle that reason should rule the passions. N was as much of a spokesman for liberating the passions as any of the Romantics. But in N it’s a different set of passions. N claims that the Romantics put too heavy an emphasis on one set of passions—the desires—the outgoing impulses: reaching out for things (appetites) and reaching out for other people (love)—the force of eros in man. This is not the only side to human nature, however. There are other passions: aggressiveness, pride, anger, spiritedness. The Romantics don’t praise those passions (even though they indulged in them)—in fact, they talk as if they wanted to eliminate them. They see them as barriers to man’s happiness because they interfere with the free satisfaction of the desires. Recall that Blake wanted to compensate for the one-sided emphasis on reason as against the passions in traditional thought. N wanted to make up for the one-sided emphasis on the soft passions as against the hard passions in Romantic thought.
Some of man’s passions don’t involve just letting go, surrendering to one’s desires, losing one’s self in something one desires. Some passions lead man to tense up, to develop muscle tone of the spirit, so to speak. This is what is involved in pride—taking pride in one’s work; this leads men to make sacrifices to achieve success. A proud man scorns mere pleasure; he’s willing to give up ordinary satisfactions for his goals. These passions give man the power to discipline himself. Notice N’s difference from the traditional view, the classical view. It’s not a matter of reason controlling the passions but of one set of passions controlling another. Man’s pride works to keep his desires in line. In some ways this idea is ultimately derived from the classical understanding of human nature. In Plato’s Republic there are 2 irrational parts of the soul: eros (the desiring part) and thumos (the source of man’s pride, his spiritedness). Spiritedness can work to control the desires. In the Republic reason needs spiritedness as an ally to control the desires. See Plato, Timaeus, 70A: “That part of the soul, then, which partakes of courage and spirit [thumos], since it is a lover of victory, they placed more near to the head, between the midriff and the neck, in order that it might hearken to the reason, and, in conjunction therewith, might forcibly subdue the tribe of the desires whensoever they should utterly refuse to yield willing obedience to the word of command from the citadel of reason.” But in N there is less sense that reason is in control; instead, one irrational part of the soul fights the other.
Still you can say that N was getting closer to the classical understanding of man. As N saw it, Christianity had distorted man’s understanding of his spirited side. It made pride into one of the 7 Deadly Sins. Christianity gave man a bad conscience about everything that should develop his self-respect. The Romantics had carried on this false evaluation of pride; they view it as an aggressive instinct—pride must be overcome for the sake of human harmony. In a way, N’s fundamental mission was to restore human pride, to return men to a good conscience about their pride. N’s program could be described as the rehabilitation of thumos. In this sense, what he did was to subject Christian morality to a critique from the standpoint of classical values. N gets us out of the limited horizons of one morality by exploring others, indeed the main alternative. The widening of N’s horizons is related to his training as a classical philologist; he was the most profound student of the Greeks in his day. You can see their influence at many points. N’s own ethical ideal is closely related to Aristotle’s concept of the great-souled man in the Nicomachean Ethics. [One way of formulating N’s distinctive position is this: he accepts Aristotle’s praise of the great-souled man, but without Aristotle’s qualification that the great-souled man points beyond himself to the higher type of the philosopher. N—like Machiavelli—prefers ancient practice to ancient theory, reflected in his preference for Thucydides over Plato (Twilight, PN 558). N uses ancient practice as an argument against modern morality, Christian morality. Here is the interesting contrast between Blake and N. Blake constantly attacks the way Christianity has been corrupted by the classical tradition—Greek rationalism is superimposed on Christian belief in revelation, and for Blake this suppresses the imagination. N is just the opposite—he attacks the way the classical tradition has been corrupted by the Christian tradition—this is the main theme of Genealogy of Morals and The Antichrist.]
A key to understanding N is this: he provides a critique of Christian values in light of classical values, but without a straightforward return to classical values. Always remember that his views on creativity separate him from Plato and Aristotle. Also, for N discipline is not so much a result of reason but of the hard passions. But still, in opposition to the Romantics, N emphasizes the need for discipline for the sake of creativity. One way of understanding this point is to compare N and Blake on the subject of good and evil. Both agree that men have artificially divided into opposite qualities what in fact go together to make up the whole of life. For Blake, life requires both reason and energy. As Blake writes in Plate 3 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good and Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.” Blake says we shouldn’t call reason good and try to promote it, while calling energy evil and trying to eliminate it. N is remarkably similar: “This mode of thought, with which a definite type of man is bred, starts from an absurd presupposition: it takes good and evil for realities that contradict one another (not as complementary value concepts, which would be the truth), it advises taking the side of good, it desires that the good should renounce and oppose evil down to its ultimate roots—it therewith actually denies life, which has in all its instincts Yes and No. Not that it grasps this: it dreams, on the contrary, that it is getting back to wholeness, to unity, to strength of life: it thinks it will be a state of redemption when the inner anarchy, the unrest between those opposing value drives, is at last put an end to,” Will to Power, section 351, p. 192.
N’s critique is this: Blake was not willing to go far enough in embracing the whole of life. He still is bound by the Christian understanding of things. He wants to reject the aggressive and combative impulses of man, everything that leads him to struggle, therefore to grow and create. This shows the influence of Christianity on Blake—he wants to liberate man’s desires but not his pride, his power. [As we have seen, Blake does have his Nietzschean moments, particularly in his Marriage of Heaven and Hell; there in his Proverbs of Hell he celebrates the tough passions: “The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.” “The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.” “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.” In this one work, Blake takes the side of the strong against the weak and virtually articulates N’s theory of the slave revolt in morality, as the weak turn the tables on the strong: “The Giants who formed this world into its sensual existence and now seem to live in it in chains; are in truth the causes of its life & the sources of all activity, but the chains are, the cunning of weak and tame minds which have the power to resist energy, according to the proverb, the weak in courage is strong in cunning.” But Marriage is unusual among Blake’s works is these strongly Nietzschean positions.] Generally Blake disagrees with orthodox morality insofar as he doesn’t want to impose restraints on desire, but he still has a notion of evil; he’s opposed to hurting other men, opposed to war. For N, man’s highest achievements are bound up with what people normally think of as lowest in him, his animal instincts. Consider this early statement (PN, 32, “Homer’s Contest,” 1872): “When one speaks of humanity, the idea is fundamental that this is something which separates and distinguishes man from nature. In reality, however, there is no such separation: “natural” qualities and those called truly “human” are inseparably grown together. . . . Those of his abilities which are terrifying and considered inhuman may even be the fertile soil on which alone all humanity can grow in impulse, deed, and work.”
N’s study of the Greeks taught him that the greatest achievements of Greek culture grew out of the fundamental Greek principle of the agon—contest—struggle. Everyone was trying to outdo everyone else. Think of the drama contests in Athens. N even views the Platonic dialogue as a mode of contest—Socrates triumphing over all his dialogue opponents. You cannot separate the higher from the lower. If you strip man of his aggressive drives, you will strip him of what impels him to his creative heights. TSZ: “man needs what is most evil in him for what is best in him, that whatever is most evil is his best power and the hardest stone for the highest creator; and that man must become better and more evil” (PN 330-31). Here is N’s idea of sublimation—all higher culture is a spiritualization of lower drives—men learn to fight it out with words instead of fists. This is how N tries to arrive at a true monism—understanding all phenomena in terms of one principle, the will to power. See TSZ chapter on “Self-Overcoming.” As we saw, Blake was always liable to dualism. He tries to portray reason as growing up out of energy, but he’s always forced somehow to give reason some separate energy in order to restrain the desires. For N—there is only one force—will to power. In its highest form it becomes spiritualized. Power imposes restraints on itself for the sake of even greater power. As in Blake, in N there is no separation of body and soul; soul is only an extension of the body. “The creative body created the spirit as a hand for its will” (TSZ, PN 147). “Spirit is the life that itself cuts into life” (TSZ, PN 216). This gives N a single standard—degrees of will to power. To nourish power, one must nourish what is regarded as evil by Christianity—the aggressive impulses--this holds true for both bourgeois morality and the Romantics alike. This explains N’s praise of war and cruelty. “You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause. War and courage have accomplished more great things than love of the neighbor. Not your pity but your courage has so far saved the unfortunate” (TSZ, PN 159). All creators must be cruel warriors, they must be cruel in their war against themselves. Attempts to civilize man have been attempts to tame him. In the process, he loses his force, force of will. This is what N argues against. Blake by contrast spoke out vehemently against war, and in fact attributed it to the classical influence on Europe. In Blake’s note “On Homers Poetry,” he writes: “The Classics. It is the Classics! & not Goths nor Monks that Desolate Europe with Wars.”
We must understand the context of N’s praise of hardness. It is necessary to make up for centuries of praise of softness. N’s hardness is a response to the modern premium on equality. It’s required by N’s historical circumstances. One can conceive of circumstances in which he would argue for equality but not in his own day. See section 212 of Beyond Good and Evil: “At the time of Socrates, among men of fatigued instincts, among the conservatives of ancient Athens who let themselves go. . . and who at the same time still used the old ornate words to which their life had long ceased to entitle them, irony was perhaps necessary for greatness of soul—that Socratic sarcastic assurance of the old physician and plebeian who cut ruthlessly into his own flesh, as well as into the flesh and heart of ‘nobility’ with a glance that said unmistakably: ‘Don’t try to deceive me by dissimulation. Here we are equal.’” (PN 445-6). N was forced into his praise of hardness by the demands of his historical era. That leads us to the Prologue to TSZ—an imaginative portrait of the historical context of N’s thought.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
First let me say a few words about TSZ as a book. It may seem odd to turn to reading it after hearing so much about N’s anti-religious and anti-Romantic fervor. The model for the book seems to be the Bible, in particular the New Testament. If N is casting himself in the role of Z, he seems to be casting himself in the role of a prophet. Insofar as the book tells a story, it’s about Z’s wanderings, his withdrawals from men, the temptations he encounters, his search for companions and disciples. It sounds very much like Jesus when you put it that way. Most of the book is made up of Z’s speeches—often in the form of parables. Most chapter are self-contained sermons on various topics. Again this recalls the New Testament. Some of the chapter titles are even more clearly reminiscent of the NT: “Upon the Mount of Olives.” “The Last Supper.” N seems to be writing in a religious mode. The closest analogue to TSZ seems to be Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell. N presents unconventional ideas in conventional forms, just as Blake does in his Proverbs of Hell. In Blake’s terms, N also seems to be attempting a Bible of Hell—using the genre of religious prophecy to announce a heretical message about religion and to overturn religious orthodoxy. It begins to look as if N were a Romantic prophet in the tradition of Blake or Percy Shelley.
We have to look, then, at the way N uses the Bible. His basic technique is parody. He makes fun of the Bible by echoing it. One thing always to remember about TSZ: It’s a funny book. Very playful, even on the level of word play. One of N’s charges against Romanticism is that it lacked a sense of humor: “What has so far been the greatest sin here on earth? Was it not the word of him who said, ‘Woe unto those who laugh here’?” (TSZ, PN 405). The culmination of the playful parody in TSZ is the Ass Festival in Part IV: Z says of the ass: “He carries our burden, he took upon himself the form of a servant” (PN 424). This is normally said of Jesus. Or see p. 381: “Except we turn back and become as cows, we shall not enter the kingdom of heaven. For we ought to learn one thing from them: chewing the cud. And verily, what would it profit a man if he gained the whole world and did not learn this one thing: chewing the cud!” (381). Another example of parody comes at the end of TSZ Part I: ”Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you” (190). Again Z sounds like Jesus, but notice that the verbal similarity conceals a basic difference in idea. N uses the language of a prophet to deny for himself the role of a traditional prophet. The last thing in the world N wants is to become a revered sage—a master with disciples: “One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil” (190).
N’s contempt for religion is so strong that he can even risk adopting a religious stance. He knows that he will never accept the role of a prophet. See the end of note 617 of Will to Power: “Zarathustra adopts a parodistic attitude toward all former values as a consequence of his abundance” (p. 331). N is strong enough to overcome the Bible even when working within the forms and idiom of the Bible. This also helps explain N’s choice of Z as his mouthpiece. Z is Zoroaster, the founder of Zoroastrianism, an ancient Persian religion. According to N, this was the first great example of dualism—moral dualism. The basic idea of this religion is: the Good and Evil forces in the universe are coeternal. Thus for N, Z was the first to make the great mistake in history—to interpret the world as a moral phenomenon, to view it moralistically, to assume that good and evil are diametrically opposed forces and not complementary qualities. [See section 2 of Beyond Good and Evil.] N felt that, since Z was the first to make the error of radically separating good from evil, he should be given the first chance to correct the mistake, to take the first to step beyond good and evil, to get over thinking of these forces as simple opposites. N puts himself in the role of Z to undo the work of Z—that is the significance of all the religious trappings in the work. N steadfastly refuses to look at his experience as religious, even when he has what people normally regard as a religious experience, namely a revelation. [Gay Science, section 319; Will to Power, section 1038].
In his autobiography, Ecce Homo (p. 300), N describes his experience of writing TSZ and sounds as inspired as any Romantic. And yet N refused to ascribe the revelation to any force outside of him. He does not succumb to the Romantic temptation—he refuses to speak of God or Eternity here. N refuses to mythologize his poetical experience—he avoids a typical Romantic problem. Remember what Blake and Percy Shelley say—men have moments of inspiration, expressive experiences—they try to capture these moments in fixed form. To do that they project the experiences in the form of gods. The experiences then lose their vitality. Man becomes subject to the creations and projections of his own imagination. N avoids this by not mythologizing his own moments of inspiration. He doesn’t project his inspiration as the gift of a god. Yet in some ways N became the captive of his own creations. He does project his insights into mythic forms and they attained a life of their own. To see that, one need only look at the Prologue to TSZ, where N develops a complementary pair of myths—the overman and the last man.
The Overman
The prologue to TSZ raises the issue of N’s audience. Who can he speak to? This problem is raised by the subtitle of the work: “A Book for All and None”—which is it? Z withdraws from humanity but finds that he is not self-sufficient. He feels a need to communicate his wisdom to other men. On his way back to human society, he encounters a hermit—a pious man. He shocks Z: “Could it be possible? This old saint in the forest has not yet heard anything of this, that God is dead!” (124). This is N’s most famous coinage—it first appears in sect. 125 of The Gay Science (PN p. 95). This is the premise of N’s writing: the props have fallen out from underneath all European values. The only reason they haven’t fallen over yet is that nobody has given them a strong enough push. Philosophers have undermined all traditional religious beliefs. But they left the old morality standing partially just as a matter of habit. In that sense, in N’s time almost nobody in Europe knows yet that God is dead. They have not drawn the practical consequences of their theoretical premises or their lack thereof. That is why in Gay Science N originally called the death of God “distant” (PN 96). News of the death of God has not yet reached the mass of humanity, but it will eventually get there. This places N in a pregnant moment—pregnant with possibilities—pregnant with dangers. Now that the ground of the old values is gone, it’s possible to re-examine the whole matter of values. That is the prelude to the creation of new values. N was aware of the link between creation and destruction. Destroying the old is always the prelude to creating the new. That’s the theme of the long section “On Old and New Tablets.” The danger of the death of God is the extinction of all values—nihilism. Man has gotten used to deriving his values from something external—take away that something and the world seems to lose all value. Will to Power, section 1, p. 7: “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.”
Romanticism cannot solve the problem of the death of God, because in effect it’s been promising a rebirth of God in the form of man. Romanticism pins its hope on an apocalypse. But if that’s delayed, it will lead to another collapse into nihilism. The only proper response to the death of God for N is to welcome it. It’s time for man to give his own meaning to his life. In Section 3 of the Prologue, Z comes to the marketplace to proclaim this idea to humanity. This takes the form of the doctrine of the overman. It’s a very difficult concept. It’s in some ways an unfortunate coinage, and not just because it’s usually translated as “superman” and conjures up an image of a man in blue tights with a cape. It’s all too easy to confuse the overman with the kind of apocalyptic thinking N was fighting against. The term makes it sound as if N is trying to achieve something beyond man, a state that would transcend human existence as we know it, a higher stage of humanity. This is exactly what N does not have in mind. And yet unfortunately the first statement of the idea of the overman cannot help but give that false impression.
“All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape” (124 PN). We can’t help thinking of Darwin when we read this and think that N is talking about some process of Darwinian evolution. We must immediately bear in mind what Z says right after this: “Behold, I teach you the overman. The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes!” (125). Here is an explicit denial of apocalyptic hopes. The Overman is not a new type of man; he is the same old man who has, however, learned to understand himself differently, as a creature purely of the earth. That means with no eternal points of reference or standards of value. He is thus able to create values for himself. In short, the overman is a man who has come to accept and will the Eternal Recurrence. 2 mythic ideas are presented in TSZ: the overman and the ER. It is essential to see that the 2 go together—either one loses its meaning without the other. The notion of the ER shows that the idea of the overman cannot be apocalyptic. N cannot be looking forward to some future moment when man will reach a higher stage once and for all, because N expects every single moment to return again. At the same time, the notion of the ER without the Overman would make human existence look meaningless. N’s hope is this: the idea of the ER can be the means of achieving the Overman. The renunciation of eternity leads to a new creative power for man in the here and now.
N’s Overman was a myth that got out of hand—it became N’s Frankenstein monster in the hands of the Nazis. In some ways N’s mythic power was too great for his own good. People pick up a few striking phrases out of N and make slogans out of them. They forget all the subtleties of N’s thought, but he does leave himself open to this as no other philosopher ever did. This results from N’s total lack of moderation and his making a virtue out of immoderation. He does not try at all to conceal his differences from common opinion. On the contrary, when he can make an idea sound more shocking and offensive to his audience than it need be, he does. Other philosophers have prudently concealed their differences from Christianity via esoteric writing. N was not so reticent. Here’s what N has to say about Christianity at the end of The Antichrist; he is pretty blunt: “I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great innermost corruption, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means is poisonous, stealthy, subterranean, small enough—I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind” (PN 656) (This despite the fact that, as we will see, N did have some good things to say about Christianity and understood what it has contributed to human development.) This kind of over-the-top rhetoric makes it very easy to misinterpret N—and to misuse him, as the Nazis did. And yet N felt that this form of rhetoric was necessary, and the reason why is supplied by the Prologue to TSZ. Men have to be shocked because the one great danger has become their complacency. Anything is better than allowing men to settle down into a comfortable state of contentment. N makes this point mythically in Z’s vision of the last man—section 5—an example of what you might call negative apocalyptic thinking or anti-utopian thinking.
In a way N accepts the Romantic vision of history. European man is moving toward a state of equality. It’s more clearly stated in the Marxist vision—man is moving toward a state of universal, homogeneous, classless society, with no order of rank. N accepts this prophecy but evaluates it differently. This end of history must be avoided at all costs. It would take all the meaning out of human existence. At the beginning of section 5 of the prologue, Z realizes that he is not being understood. It’s too easy to confuse his message with that of other men. It’s too easy to assimilate his truly revolutionary ideas to conventional meanings. So he gives the men in the marketplace his vision of the last man. It’s a savage parody of all the Romantic hopes for European development, of both the liberal and the socialist visions of human progress: “The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea-beetle; the last man lives longest. ‘We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink. They have left the regions where it was hard to live, for one needs warmth. One still loves one’s neighbor and rubs against him, for one needs warmth. . . . No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse” (129-30). For N, enough strength remains in man for him to create new values, but that strength is slipping away fast. The danger of modern hopes for man is that they appeal to the lowest common denominator in man and therefore really may lead to a final state. In the past, all moralities have demanded something of man. See the chapter on “1001 Goals”, especially p. 170: “Praiseworthy is whatever seems difficult to a people; whatever seems indispensable and difficult is called good.” The goals men set for themselves used to be mutually exclusive. That led to struggle and struggle keeps men on their toes. If you could settle on one universal goal, that would destroy the productive tension in human existence.
The 19th-century has settled upon that universal goal—pleasure, contentment for all human beings. Notice what happens when Z presents the vision of the last man to his audience. They don’t catch his sarcasm; they want the state he despises. “Give us this last man, O Zarathustra” (130). This result leads Z to renounce the role of the prophet explicitly: “let Zarathustra speak not to the people but to companions. Zarathustra shall not become the shepherd and dog of a herd” (135). He renounces the Romantic aim—to be able to speak to all men. He feels his message will inevitably be corrupted if he tries to address it to everybody. N’s aim is to speak to the higher men, men who by virtue of one characteristic or another have the strength to understand and accept his message. This process is dramatized in Part IV—Z assembles a whole menagerie of higher men—the work becomes almost like a Platonic dialogue. It dramatizes the effect of the philosopher on various human types. We see which prejudices in men the philosopher has to overcome, but we see also where he gets his foothold, which forces in the human soul he can appeal to. Z deals with a much more motley crew than Plato’s Socrates ever does, not to mention Xenophon’s. We don’t have time to examine in detail the way Z educates his band of higher men. We can just note N’s problem. He doesn’t know who constitutes his proper audience. All previous philosophers knew who they were talking to—the wise as opposed to the unwise. Hence they resorted to esoteric writing. By contrast, N doesn’t know who the potential overmen are or even just the higher men. Hence he has to speak to all and none at once. He has to shout out his wisdom, not conceal it. That’s why his rhetoric is so different from other philosophers’.
The general aim of Z and N is to restore to higher men a good conscience about their superiority, and thereby to prevent the waste of the best energies of men. Here’s the difficult question in understanding N--what is the relation between the higher men and the overman? It’s clear that Z does not regard the higher men he assembles as adequate. They are not his true companions. Is Z himself the overman? Sometimes N speaks as if Z is only the prelude, the overture, to the overman. Z points the way to the future, just as Beyond Good and Evil is subtitled “prelude to a philosophy of the future.” At other times N speaks of Z as the overman already realized: in Ecce Homo, he says of Z: “Here man has been overcome at every moment; the concept of the ‘overman’ has here become the greatest reality” (Kaufmann 305). This question obviously also applies to N himself: is he or is he not the overman? Will the overman be an entirely new type of man? How will we recognize him when he arrives? Will he be a beast or a god? Or is he an old type of man reinterpreted? N holds up many examples of the peaks of humanity—sometimes artists and sometimes philosophers: Socrates, Shakespeare, Goethe. Sometimes world conquerors: Alcibiades, Julius Caesar, Napoleon. The overman is the great man of the past who now, thanks to N, understands the basis of his creativity. Creativity is the absence of any eternal standards. But would these men have been as great if they had acted in the framework of the Eternal Recurrence? Did they have to think of their achievements as somehow eternal? The mythic image of the overman raises grave difficulties—perhaps as many problems as Romantic apocalyptic hopes do.
The Idea of the Eternal Recurrence
The other great mythic idea in TSZ is the Eternal Recurrence. N called it the main idea of the book: “the fundamental concept of this work, the idea of the eternal recurrence, this highest formula of affirmation that is at all attainable” (Ecce Homo, 295). N speaks of it as a revelation. I must say immediately that N did not regard this idea as simply a myth. He thought it could be proven by modern science; in fact, he thought the idea is demanded by science. There’s a good summary of his argument in Will to Power, section 1066—p. 549. N’s central point is: we have to consider what results from the conjunction of a finite world and infinite time. Given an infinity of time, in a finite world every possible combination of atoms and forces must eventually recur in the same fashion, and do so again and again eternally. But we find these proofs of the ER only in N’s unpublished notes. They never found their way into the works he himself prepared for publication. This may be just the result of the time pressures he worked under. He was working on many philosophical projects at once in the last decade of his productive life. Still this may be an indication that N was not wholly satisfied with these proofs. When the ER appears in N’s published writings, he presents it mythically as a vision, as in TSZ, Third Part, “On the Vision and the Riddle” (p. 270)—and N puts every point in the form of a question. In any case, the scientific idea of the ER was nothing new—it had been kicking around for a long time—at least since Lucretius. We’ve already seen it in Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. What is important is the new use to which N puts the idea. Remember how calmly Hume’s Philo presents his doctrine of ER. Not so in N—there is a tremendous struggle for Z to accept the idea. That provides the main dramatic movement of the work. This is most striking in “On the Vision and the Riddle”—p. 271—a truly weird nightmare vision—biting off the head of the snake of eternity. This shows how the myth of the ER functions in N—it is something to be overcome, it serves as a test, a touchstone. It shows whether you’ve created a life for yourself you can be satisfied with—so satisfied with it you’d be willing to live it over and over again without any hope that it’s ever going to be any different. N wants to use the myth of ER to force men to be creative, to create the overman—to force men’s backs against the wall so that they have to create value for themselves.
For N, the idea of the ER is a way of injecting great seriousness and significance into the present moment—because ultimately there is nothing beyond the present moment. Man cannot look ahead to heaven to give his life meaning; he cannot even look ahead to some future point in history. He has to find a way of being satisfied with the present moment because no matter what happens, he’ll be forced to live through this exact same moment an infinite number of times. We can learn a lot from the first appearance of the ER in N’s writing: The Gay Science, sect. 341 (pp. 101-2 in PN): “The greatest stress. How, if some day or night a demon were to sneak after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you, ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sign and everything immeasurably small or great in your life must return to you—all in the same succession and sequence--. . . even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over and over, and you with it, a dust grain of dust.’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or did you once experience a tremendous moment when you would have answered him, ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more godly.’ If this thought were to gain possession of you, it would change you, as you are, or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, ‘Do you want this once more and innumerable times more?’ would weigh upon your actions as the greatest stress. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?” N casts the challenge of the ER as an uncanny moment and calls it “the greatest stress.” In some ways he never formulated the challenge more forcefully. He recognizes that the thought of the eternal recurrence of the same could be a paralyzing moment to anyone, especially someone contemplating how base and meaningless many moments in human life can be. But N also realized that the contemplation of the ER might energize people to come to terms with the threat of meaninglessness in their lives and force them to make their lives become meaningful.
What concerns N in human life is not pleasure or pain but achieving satisfaction with oneself, knowing that one has accomplished something, created something, in particular created oneself. This is how N blends aesthetics and ethics. He blurs the line between art and life. Life becomes a matter of creating oneself, like a work of art—an idea we’ll see picked up by Yeats. The best formulation of this idea is in Gay Science, section 290: “One thing is needful. ‘Giving style’ to one’s character—a great and rare art! It is exercised by those who see all the strengths and weaknesses of their own nature and then comprehend them in an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason and even weakness delights the eye. Here a large mass of second nature has been added; there a piece of original nature has been removed: both by long practice and daily labor. Here the ugly has been reinterpreted and made sublime. . . . It will be the strong and domineering natures who enjoy their finest gaiety in such compulsion, in such constraint and perfection under a law of their own. . . . Conversely it is the weak characters without power over themselves who hate the constraint of style. . . . For one thing is needful: that a human being attain his satisfaction with himself—whether it be by this or by that poetry and art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is always ready to revenge himself therefor” (PN 98-99)
This is a central passage in N—you can see his difference from the Romantics here. And yet in some sense N’s ideas are an extension of Romantic ideas. Man’s aim is to create himself. The self is not a fixed given; it becomes a product of man’s will. This is N’s distinction from the Romantics: N doesn’t talk about creating Man as a generalized species. TSZ: “This is my way; where is yours?”—thus I answered those who asked me ‘the way.’ For the way—that does not exist” (PN 307). For N, each man creates himself, creates his own particular destiny. The subtitle of N’s autobiography, Ecce Homo, is “How One Becomes What One Is.” N’s notion of destiny is his way of justifying suffering. He shows the interconnection of pleasures and pains, joy and grief. You have to realize how both sides of life are interconnected. You can’t have one without the other. You must see how grief contributes to joy because it contributes to growth, to creativity. All events in life are interconnected. What you are at any given moment is the product of everything that went before. If you’re satisfied with what you’ve become, you would be willing to accept and affirm everything that went before as contributing to what you’ve become. N’s highest moment of affirmation is poetically presented in the “Drunken Song” in TSZ—435: “Have you ever said Yes to a single joy? O my friends, then you said Yes too to all woe. All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored; if ever you wanted one thing twice, if ever you said, ‘Yes please me, happiness! Abide moment!’ then you wanted all back. All anew, all eternally. . . . For all joy wants—eternity” (435). This idea is more soberly presented in the epilogue to Nietzsche contra Wagner: ”I have often asked myself whether I am not more heavily obligated to the hardest years of my life than to any others. As my inmost nature teaches me, whatever is necessary—as seen from the heights and in the sense of a great economy—is also the useful par excellence: one should not only bear it, one should love it. Amor fati: that is my inmost nature. And as for my long sickness, do I not owe it indescribably more than I owe my health?” (PN 680).
For N, man must accept what comes to him in life and try to turn it to his advantage. He should make use of it in creating himself: “I taught them all my creating and striving, to create and carry together into One what in man is fragment and riddle and dreadful accident; as creator, guesser of riddles, and redeemer of accidents, I taught them to work on the future and redeem with their creation all that has been. To redeem what is past in man and to re-create all ‘it was’ until the will says, ‘Thus I willed it! Thus I shall will it’—this I called redemption and this alone I taught them to call redemption” (TSZ 310 PN). This is N’s conception of redemption. There is one limit on Romantic creativity as we’ve seen it thus far—it can will the future, but it can’t will the past. It can redeem the present moment by looking toward the future, but the Romantics have a tough time redeeming the past. They want to turn their backs on it, reject it completely. The future is a human creation, but the past is non-human. It confronts man as a given. For the Romantics, it was created for man by an improvident creator; or man created it himself via a part of himself he must reject. N doesn’t want creativity to be limited by the dead weight of the past. See the chapter “On Redemption”— “To redeem those who lived in the past and to recreate all ‘it was’ into a ‘thus I willed it’—that alone should I call redemption” (TSZ 251 PN). This is what creates the need for the myth of the ER—it’s the only way to redeem the past. To affirm the ER is to affirm the past—to understand how it is justified in the process of growth. According to N, the noble soul knows how to make use of the past. He doesn’t just reject it. This is the way to give the will total creativity: TSZ—“I led you away from these fables when I taught you, ‘The will is a creator.’ All ‘it was’ is a fragment, a riddle, a dreadful accident—until the creative will says to it, ‘But thus I willed it.’ Until the creative will says to it, ‘But thus I will it; thus shall I will it’” (PN 253).
The Eternal Recurrence becomes the way for man to inject his will into the whole world, the past as well as the future—the whole world becomes the product of man’s will. In a way, N returns to the idea of the whole. The idea of the ER provides man with a way of making a whole out of the world again, also a whole out of himself. The idea of the ER makes a whole out of the world without making it something static; it reconciles the opposites of being and becoming. “To impose upon becoming the character of being—that is the supreme will to power. . . . That everything recurs is the closest approximation of a world of becoming to a world of being,” Will to Power, section 617, p. 330. N’s criticism of Romanticism is that man has lost his sense of wholeness. Modern men are only fragments. N praised Goethe for pursuing totality: “he disciplined himself to wholeness, he created himself” (Twilight 554 PN). As Goethe shows, a man must limit his horizons to achieve wholeness (“he surrounded himself with limited horizons”). N turns against Romantic infinity (as Hegel did and as Goethe did in Faust). It’s a kind of “bad infinity”—merely a negation of the finite and therefore not something positive. N realizes that the loss of a cosmic whole has led to a loss of human wholeness. In so far as the world is intelligible as a whole, it’s only the result of human will: “A will to the thinkability of all beings: this I call your will. You want to make all being thinkable, for you doubt with well-founded suspicion that it is already thinkable. But it shall yield and bend for you. Thus your will wills it” (TSZ 225 PN). Here N is much closer to Rousseau and the Romantics than to Plato. For him there is no intelligible order in nature (no Platonic Ideas)—no rationality. All intelligibility is the product of will. N gives a clear-cut statement of the modern principle—we understand only what we make. The primacy of the will in N is one of his debts to the biblical tradition. Remember: that was the point of contrasting the Genesis creation account with that in Plato’s Timaeus. In the Biblical tradition, God is characterized by his willfulness, not his rationality. We see the same point in N’s understanding of man. We don’t have time to go into N’s theory of the will and of will to power. He has many difficulties in trying to reduce all phenomena to an expression of will. I just wanted to point out the connection between the ER and N’s theory of will.
To return to the question of the status of the idea of ER: in some ways it seems to have a very special status indeed. It’s the cornerstone of N’s whole ethical message. Notice N cannot remain a skeptic like Hume. He cannot just raise the ER as one possibility among many, and leave the question open. N cannot afford to be metaphysically neutral like Hume. N presents the idea of the ER with quasi-religious fervor. He feels he must settle the issue of eternity. As long as the issue remains unsettled, men will be tempted by dreams of an apocalypse. N needs the idea of the ER to close off hopes of eternity once and for all. He wants to take linearity out of our vision of history: there is no special moment in human history. History is not building up to any apocalypse or a revelation. And yet what about the moment when N conceived of the ER? It’s presented with a lot of fanfare when N talks about it in his autobiography: “Till then one does not know what is height, what depth; one knows even less what truth is. There is no moment in this revelation of truth that has been anticipated or even guessed by even one of the greatest. There is no wisdom, no investigation of the soul, no art of speech before Zarathustra” (Ecce Homo 305). This sound very Romantic. This is a special moment indeed. The truth of the ER is in a category of its own. When Z realizes this truth, it is not the end of human history, to be sure, but it does seem to be its culmination—the moment that gives every other moment its meaning (like the end of history in Hegel). The truth of the ER involves a logical contradiction. What is realized? That nothing is eternal, there is no eternal truth. But is this truth itself eternal or not? Is the realization that all truth is historically conditioned itself historically conditioned? There are no easy answers to these questions.
Truth and Myth in Nietzsche
N looks at the history of philosophy and sees one doctrine after another undermined by the passage of time. This leads to the notion of the relativity of truth, but is this doctrine also destined to be overturned over time? Here’s the real question: is N’s view one among many or does he have a claim to a special perspective, outside the limited perspectives of earlier philosophers? Does Z come at a special moment, when he can achieve a synoptic view, when he is able to see the whole of human life? [as Hegel claimed to do] That’s what is implied in the passage I read from Ecce Homo, but that work shows the effects of N’s approaching insanity. He lost almost all sense of moderation and made the most titanic claims for himself and his works. The sections of the book are: “Why I Am So Wise,” “Why I Am So Clever,” and “Why I Write Such Good Books.” But perhaps N reveals himself most clearly in that work, when he drops his inhibitions. N claims that Z is the only true wise man, the only one able to see and judge the whole of human life. Z seems to attain a position outside and above human life, a position that N at many points denies is available to human beings. This question is raised by the narrative structure of TSZ itself. It would have been possible to give the book a circular structure to correspond to the idea of the ER. As we will see, both Beckett and John Barth attempt this in their works. But there is a pronounced linear character to the narrative in TSZ. It builds up to the acceptance of the ER in all its ramifications. And the book has a distinctively apocalyptic ending for a work that preaches the doctrine of the ER: “‘Well then! The lion came, my children are near, Zarathustra has ripened, my hour has come: this is my morning, my day is breaking: rise now, rise, thou great noon!’ Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and he left his cave, glowing and strong as a morning sun that comes out of dark mountains” (439 PN). The powerful image of a day breaking feels like a moment out of Blake’s prophecies.
You might say that TSZ is circular in its pattern—it begins and ends with Z leaving his cave, but the work is circular only in the sense that many Romantic narratives are circular. That means it’s more like a spiral—we return to the beginning but at a higher level. We get a totally different feeling when Z leaves the cave at the end than when he does so at the beginning. At the beginning, he feels a need for companions; he leaves the cave out of need, a sense of emptiness. In a way, it’s like a Romantic fall. N calls it Z’s “going under.” Z must experience the failure of his attempt to find companions among men in order to see why he must be independent of all companions. He returns to his solitude at the end of the work but now with a new appreciation of it. When he leaves at the end of the work, it’s out of a sense of fullness and self-sufficiency, and not to seek companions but to accomplish his task. TSZ serves as N’s justification for his self-imposed solitude. Ecce Homo: “My whole Zarathustra is a dithyramb on solitude” (234). The book seems to have a dialectical structure, like R’s 2nd Discourse or Romantic myths.
If you consider the ER as a truth, you run into trouble keeping N consistent, because it sounds very much like a final truth, an eternal truth. In many respects, it’s better for N to regard the ER as a myth. Myths are something that man can make himself—they have a functional role to play in human life. Don’t think of them abstractly—as abstract truths; you have to view them in concrete human contexts. N’s criterion for evaluating the idea of the ER is: not whether it fits some abstract standard of truth but: what practical effect will it have? Will it make men better to view the world in terms of the ER? That is why N put all the emphasis on willing the ER. It’s not just a truth to be understood on an abstract plane. You have to feel it in your blood, so to speak; it’s something to base your life on. It’s a truth man must make for himself; he has to want the world to be characterized by the ER for the idea to be effective. And that of course is the point about the idea for N. It is effective; it makes man creative. N’s criterion for judging truths is whether they are life-enhancing or not. This shows how a thoroughgoing critique of existing truths and values can be positive, how nihilism can be a source of strength, instead of weakness.
N claims that there are no eternal truths, no objective standards of value. There is no “true” world behind the apparent world, no eternal world of being behind our transient world of becoming. We thus lose the criterion for distinguishing between truth and illusion, between true and false, between truth and myth, also between theoretical and practical. Therefore man is free to make his own truths and values, to make his myths. If everything is in some sense illusion, man is free to choose his illusions. He should choose those that enhance his life, enrich his existence, increase his power, not those that impoverish and enervate him. The ER is such a life-affirming myth. Even if it is an illusion, it’s an illusion that makes man stronger because it makes him face up to the task of creating his values. You might say it’s the overarching illusion in the context of which man sets up the individual illusions of his life. N’s thought on illusion takes a familiar dialectical structure. Man begins in the security of inherited illusions—usually conventional opinions—pieties. Then you break through these illusions, you see that they have no objective basis. This is a painful process of disillusionment. You experience nihilism. After going through this “fall,” you can return to illusions, return from the depths to the surfaces of things. Now you can recognize illusions for what they are. You no longer feel subject to them. On the contrary, they are now seen to be a field for human creativity. This is the basis for N’s new cheerfulness. In short: this is very similar to the pattern of: innocence/experience/return to innocence on a higher level. N speaks of the process as a return to childhood: “Only great pain, that long, slow pain in which we are burned with green wood, as it were—pain which takes its time—only this forces us philosophers to descend into our ultimate depths and to put away all trust, all good-naturedness, all that would veil, all mildness, all that is medium—things in which formerly we may have found our humanity. I doubt that such pain makes us ‘better,’ but I know that it makes us more profound. . . . What is strangest is this: afterward one has a different taste—a second taste. Out of such abysses, also out of the abyss of great suspicion, one returns newborn, having shed one’s skin, more ticklish and sarcastic, with a more delicate taste for joy, with a more tender tongue for all good things, with gayer senses, with a second dangerous innocence in joy, more childlike and yet a hundred times more subtle than one has ever been before” (Nietzsche contra Wagner, PN 680-81).
This celebration of surfaces becomes N’s justification for art: “Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearances, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance. Those Greeks were superficial—out of profundity. And is not this precisely what we are again coming back to, we daredevils of the spirit who have climbed the highest and most dangerous peak of present thought and looked around from up there—we who have looked down from there? Are we not, precisely in this respect, Greeks? Adorers of form, of tones, of words? And therefore—artists?” (NcW PN 683). We cannot just remain content with the surface of life as we originally find it. We must be willing to probe beneath it. Indeed to slash through it. But ultimately our aim must be to return to the surface of things, with a new appreciation for it. N’s thought on illusions is equivalent to his thought on myth.
N’s thought on the subject of myth is thus at the heart of his philosophy as a whole and his ethical thought in particular. The problem with traditional myths—specifically Christian myths—is that they have not been life-enhancing. On the contrary, by leading men’s hopes off into a beyond, they have drained their life here and now of meaning. Myths of a beyond arise out of dissatisfaction with life in the here and now, an unwillingness to face up to the task of making oneself presentable to oneself. See the chapter “Of the Afterworldly”: “It was suffering and incapacity that created all afterworlds—this and the brief madness of bliss which is experienced only by those who suffer most deeply. Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds” (TSZ 143 PN). Man must create new myths that will restore meaning to the earth. That is one reason N looks back to pagan Greece—to a time when men did not have afterworldly myths. On the contrary, they had myths that made earthly existence meaningful. There is an interesting passage on myth in the first work N published: The Birth of Tragedy: “But without myth every culture loses the healthy natural power of its creativity; only a horizon defined by myths completes and unifies a whole cultural movement. . . . By way of comparison let us now picture the abstract man [of today], untutored by myth; . . . let us imagine the lawless roving of the artistic imagination, unchecked by any native myth; . . . And now the mythless man stands eternally hungry. . . . The tremendous historical need of our unsatisfied modern culture. . . . what does all this point to, if not to the loss of myth, the loss of the mythical home, the mythical maternal womb?” (Birth of Tragedy 135-6).
This is why N at first hailed Wagner—he thought he was reviving pagan myth in the modern world. It was thus a source of great bitterness for N when he began to think that Wagner was just redoing Christian myths in the guise of Germanic paganism. N soon decided that he himself had to do what he at first thought Wagner was doing. He realized that when he had been praising Wagner, he was predicting what he himself would do—Ecce Homo, p. 274—as for “my essay on Wagner in Bayreuth: in all psychologically decisive places I alone was discussed—and one need not hesitate to put down my name or the word ‘Zarathustra’ where the text has the word ‘Wagner’”. His studies of the Greeks were to point the way to a revival of the pagan understanding of the world, a non-Christian understanding. His study of Greek tragedy was his first treatment of how suffering in life must be accepted as part of the highest affirmation. This insight was embodied in Greek mystery religion, the cult of Dionysus. In his later writings, N speaks more and more of Dionysus. He identified with the figure and cast himself in this role from Greek myth. See the last section of Twilight of the Idols (562-63 in PN). N returns to Greek myth to find forms for his thought, but once more it cannot be a simple return. We cannot go back to the simple pieties of Greek shepherds. We cannot ignore Christianity—it has intervened between modern man and ancient myths. That makes more meaningful N’s affirmation of paganism. He has to overcome Christianity to accomplish that. N’s willing of the ER is more meaningful than that of any ancient Greek’s because N truly has to renounce eternity. Because of Christianity, he has had a taste of apocalyptic hopes—he knows what it is to dream of heaven. N’s vision of history is almost Romantic; it bears a striking resemblance to Romantic dialectical cycles. For N, the Greeks (the Pre-Socratic Greeks) represent the Golden Age, the age of innocence, of paganism—faith in the earth. Socrates represents the fall, the questioning of myth in the name of reason. Socrates breaks apart the unified world into two realms, questioning the concrete world of becoming in the name of the abstract world of being. This is Platonism and leads to Christianity for N, which he calls Platonism for the people. Christianity undermines the pagan faith in the earth with dreams of a transcendent world. This is worked out in Twilight of the Idols in the section called “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable” (PN 485-6). Here’s a diagram:
How the “True World” Finally Became a Fable
Tragic Age Socrates Plato Christianity Kant Positivism
of Greece The “Fall”
Unified Reality Reason Being Heaven Thing-in-Itself ? Reunified
Passions Becoming Earth Appearance Facts Reality
N’s mission is to overcome Christianity and bring back paganism, but it will be a new paganism: a higher form because it has undergone and overcome the Christian challenge. “We few or many who again dare to live in a dismoralized world, we pagans in faith: we are probably also the first to grasp what a pagan faith is:--to have to imagine higher creatures than man, but beyond good and evil,” Will to Power, sect. 1034. N tends not to say anything good about the Judeo-Christian tradition, but he does often imply that it deepened man’s understanding of himself, particularly in terms of the phenomenon of will. See Beyond Good and Evil, sect. 52 (PN 443)—the Bible introduces new human types, deeper types. Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, sect. 7—“Human history would be altogether too stupid a thing without the spirit that the impotent [Christians] have introduced into it” (33). It is surprising to see that N often contrasts Christian profundity with Greek superficiality, as in this letter to his friend Franz Overbeck, Feb. 23, 1887: “Incidentally, these Greeks have a lot on their conscience—falsification was their true trade; the whole of European psychology is sick with Greek superficiality, and without that little bit of Judaism—etc., etc., etc. . . . “ (PN 455). It’s necessary for N to find something positive in Christianity, which he can then say contributed to his own development. See this discarded draft for Ecce Homo: “Even Christianity becomes necessary: only the highest form, the most dangerous, the one that was most seductive in its No to life, provokes its highest affirmation—me”—p. 343.
In his notes, N identifies Christianity’s contribution to human thought: “If Christianity has done anything essential psychologically, it is that it raised the temperature of the soul among those cooler and nobler races that were then on top; it was the discovery that the most wretched life can become rich and inestimable through a rise in temperature,” Will to Power, sect. 175, 106. In a rare moment in an early, unpublished work, “The Struggle Between Science and Wisdom” [1875], Nietzsche praises the Christian Middle Ages at the expense of the Greeks: “Men became more clever during the middle ages. Calculating according to two standards, the sophistry of conscience and the interpretation of texts: these were the means for this development. Antiquity lacked such a method for sharpening the mind under the pressure of a hierarchy and theology. On the contrary, the Greeks became credulous and shallow under their great freedom of thought. . . . The Greeks were not very clever, that is why Socrates’ irony created such a sensation among them,” Breazeale, p. 136. N must give credit to Christianity for advancing beyond the ancients. Otherwise he can’t show that he marks an advance beyond both the Christians and the ancients.
Greek heroes are too superficial, they have no insides, we view them externally in Homer. We don’t see their inner struggles. There’s no Abraham in Homer. Even the Greek gods lack inwardness. Christianity gives us a God of mystery. He’s known only by His revelations. A genuine ancient hero has no inwardness because he does not struggle with himself internally. Ancient heroes parade around like matadors; they think they’re gods. They don’t understand the basis of their own greatness. Greek nobles don’t understand the sense in which men really are equal in the human, all-too-human characteristics that all men share. This is what Socrates had to do—Beyond Good and Evil, sect. 212—faced with the bogus doctrine of inequality among decadent Greek aristocrats, he asserted the equality of men. Christianity did a thorough job of discovering this kind of equality in false aristocratic situations. Christianity forces man to probe beneath the surfaces of virtue—to discover the hidden depths of the human soul. “That species that derived its advantage from depriving man of his self-satisfaction (the representatives of the herd instinct; e.g., the priests and philosophers) became subtle and psychologically astute so as to demonstrate how nonetheless selfishness ruled everywhere. Christian conclusion: ‘Everything is sin; even our virtues.’ . . . Christianity thus demonstrates an advance in the sharpening of psychological insight. La Rochefoucauld and Pascal. It grasped the essential equivalence of human actions and their equivalence of value in essentials (--all immoral)”, Will to Power, sect. 786, pp. 414-15. This is what Christianity calls the depravity of man; it introduces the notion of hidden motives into psychology.
For N, this marks an advance beyond the ancient Greeks and Romans: “When we today, trained in the Christian school of skepticism, read the moral treatises of the ancients—for example, Seneca and Epictetus—we have a diverting sense of superiority and feel full of secret insights and over-sights: we feel as embarrassed as if a child were talking before an old man, or an over-enthusiastic beauty before La Rochefoucauld; we know better what virtue is” (Gay Science sect. 122, p. 178 Kaufmann). Eventually of course this kind of psychology could be turned against Christianity itself. See Gay Science, sect. 122, p. 178: “In the end, however, we have applied this same skepticism also to all religious states and processes, such as sin, repentance, grace, sanctification, and we have allowed the worm to dig so deep that we now have the same sense of subtle superiority and insight when we read any Christian book.” For modern psychological skepticism turned against religion, see Freud, Future of an Illusion. For the ancients, it was easy to assert the inequality of man; they were born and bred to it. For N, this assertion now becomes a real achievement because he’s been born and bred to the notion of equality. He has to experience the Christian critique of ancient virtue and only then overcome it. For N, nothing great happens without struggle.
To make Greek superficiality something profound, you have to go through the experience of Christianity. This should remind you of the epilogue to Nietzsche contra Wagner, as if human history took the dialectical pattern described in those pages. N marks a higher stage in history, a synthesis of paganism and Christianity. See N’s famous formula for the overman: sect 983 of Will to Power: “The Roman Caesar with Christ’s soul” (p. 513). N’s ideal is: ancient greatness of soul, deepened by a modern understanding of the depths of the soul. Z is in fact an example of the Roman Caesar with the soul of Christ. He experiences—and overcomes—the temptation that the ancients were immune to: pity. Z experiences a greater range of experience —he comprehends what are normally thought of as opposites. We have had trouble all along lining up N with his predecessors. Sometimes he seems to be a classic, sometimes a Romantic. The reason is that in some ways N attempted a synthesis of the ancients and the moderns. He uses ancient values to criticize Christianity and modernity in general. And yet he goes on to try to re-establish ancient values on the basis of modern principles—the principle of creativity, the principle of will. This is the meaning of N’s program—the revaluation of all values, the synthesis of ancient and modern. This is a very difficult magic trick to bring off. The one thing he certainly succeeded in doing—he kept the memory of the ancient Greeks alive in Western culture. Just when they seemed about to be forgotten—or worse, distorted in interpretation beyond all recognition—N forced a re-examination of what the Greeks meant; he made them appear once more as a genuine alternative to modernity. This program was carried on by Heidegger and his students.
I want to conclude by comparing N with the ancients, and then with the Romantics. 1st question: does N mark an advance beyond the ancients? It’s a fair question—N’s charge against the Romantics is that they did not create any new values; they just provided a new foundation for Christian values. Is N’s position any more creative vis-à-vis the ancients? Does he end up attempting merely to provide a new foundation for Greek values? When you get right down to it, there is not one virtue praised by N that is not praised by Plato, and even more clearly by Aristotle. Look at Alcibiades’ praise of Socrates at the end of Plato’s Symposium and compare it with sect. 295 of Beyond Good and Evil. Even N did not invent new virtues. Sometimes when he speaks of the overman as a phenomenon of the future, he suggests that the overman will have virtues we have no idea of, but then the overman becomes as vague as any Romantic ideal. Insofar as N is specific about the characteristics of the overman, they are recognizable as old virtues, and more often than not the classical virtues. N’s problem—the Greeks got there first, they got to define all the virtues. This is exactly what he says about the masters in Genealogy of Morals. The slaves then can only invert the values of the masters. N’s only task would then be to revalue the values of modernity—to return to the master’s values—but that’s not something new. What changes in N is the relationships among the virtues, the hierarchy of the virtues. The famous 4 virtues of the Greeks are courage, wisdom, temperance, and justice. [contrast Beyond Good and Evil, sect. 284] One way of understanding N is: he severs his understanding of courage, wisdom, and temperance from his understanding of justice. In the process he remakes wisdom and temperance into forms of courage. See section 283 of Gay Science: “For, believe me, the secret of the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously! Build your cities under Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors, as long as you cannot be rulers and owners, you lovers of knowledge!” (PN 97). N’s aim is to reduce all virtue to private virtue—the virtue of great individuals—he will not speak of social virtues. This is what it means to cordon justice off—there’s no problem of justice in N—no Republic for N. Moreover, he reduces all private virtue to courage—all virtue is virtue of the will. In this sense, the expansion of horizons N promises to bring about suddenly appears to be a contraction. Perhaps N offers less than the ancient philosophers, not, as he claims, more.
As for N’s relation to Romanticism, I said at the outset that it is complex, because he felt a deep attraction to Romanticism but at the same time felt that he had to overcome it. All his conscious life he fought against Romanticism, but his secret sympathy for Romanticism was betrayed in his madness. Here is the 1st sign of his madness: “in Turin, [he] saw a coachman flog a horse, rushed toward the horse, and collapsed with his arms around it” (PN 684). This is an odd finish for N—going insane out of compassion for an animal—this seems to be the reverse of all he stood for—he shows compassion for the creature instead of the creator. The last few letters he wrote suggest even more clearly that his madness took the form of the welling up of a long repressed Romanticism. This shows what a struggle it was for him to fight his Romantic impulses. In a letter to his musician friend Peter Gast on January 4, 1889, N wrote: “Sing me a new song: the world is transfigured and all the heavens are full of joy. [signed] The Crucified” (PN 685). This shows N haunted by Romantic apocalyptic dreams; art will bring heaven to earth (very Blakean); and he adopts the role of Christ himself. His most remarkable letter was written to N’s old colleague at the University of Basel, the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt. We see N experiencing in his own life the torture of the isolated creative ego we observed in Wagner’s Ring Cycle: “What is disagreeable and offends my modesty is that at bottom I am every name in history” (PN 686; January 6, 1889). This is not just lunacy. This is the ultimate consequence of N’s philosophy. Here we see the whole world as the product of the self. The ultimate in creativity results in the ultimate in solitude. N sees himself as every man in history. The opening of the letter mirrors the agony of all the creator gods of Romanticism, but here not projected outward into myth, but appropriated by the self: “In the end I would much rather be a Basel professor than God; but I have not dared push my private egoism so far as to desist for its sake from the creation of the world. You see, one must make sacrifices however and wherever one lives” (PN 685). Ultimately N paid a terrible price for his creativity. In a profound irony, his last coherent statement was a gesture of Christian sacrifice.
N was the most profound critic of Romanticism, but in the end he was perhaps also its most tragic victim.
ADDITIONAL MATERIAL
Notes on Nietzsche’s Novelty—Several Possibilities
1)He truly invents new virtues. But what would they be? It’s hard to imagine what a new virtue would involve. How would we know what N was talking about? Look at Walter Kaufmann, Faith of a Heretic—he invents a virtue he calls “humbition.” We balk at that. Is it anything other than a fusion of humility and ambition?
2)”Tis new to thee.” N deals with values new to his time. This is the philosopher’s function according to N—to be a man of tomorrow. Beyond Good and Evil, sect. 212. It doesn’t matter if the values have been upheld by someone previously if they appear new to the creator’s society. The idea of the ER supports this idea by erasing the distinction between oldness and novelty.
3)He’s dealing with the old virtues, but he provides a new foundation for them and a new understanding of them. This raises the question of whether N’s new foundation is superior to the old foundation.
4)He’s attempting a synthesis of virtues hitherto thought to be incompatible. A synthesis of classical and Christian virtues. The question is whether this can be done at all, and whether one form will end up prevailing over the other.
5)He’s reordering the virtues, providing a new hierarchy. For N all virtues culminate in courage. But if this is N’s novelty, his novelty depends on a conventional opinion one does not find in the ancients. That is N’s heritage from the Biblical tradition—the idea that knowledge is a Forbidden Fruit. He reacts to the forbidding differently, but still for him knowledge is virtuous because it takes courage to violate the taboo against knowledge. N is in awe of his own activity as knower, whereas the ancients were in awe of that which they knew (the Ideas).
Notes on Nietzsche and Christianity
For N nobility is the self-overcoming of Christianity. Nobility requires the pathos of distance. For the philosopher, this means serving as the bad conscience of his day. He must be in opposition to his contemporaries. In N’s day, that means in opposition to Christianity. Thus for N nobility is historically determined. To be noble in N’s day is different from being noble in the ancient Greek world. Ironically, then, nobility becomes reactive for N in his day. His nobility is not spontaneous and original. He forms his idea of nobility by reacting against Christian morality. This reaction grows out of Christianity itself. Christianity demands truthfulness; eventually this truthfulness turns on Christianity itself. N is a radical Protestant; he carries Luther’s critique of the Church to Christian faith itself. N is more ascetic than a Christian priest. He is also more noble than an ancient noble—his nobility is more a matter of overcoming and self-overcoming; it’s more of a struggle; it displays more virtue. N’s nobility cannot simply be a matter of returning to ancient virtue. The intervening Christianity makes N’s nobility more profound. It’s now a matter of conscious choice. It’s a matter of will. Will—the principle of modern democracy, not of aristocracy. The ancient noble did not will his nobility. He inherited his nobility. It was derived from the past. Modern nobility is a project, a projection into the future.
BGE sect. 287 (p. 228)—N’s Protestantism. He affirms “faith” over “works.” He acknowledges this is an old religious formula. He gives it a new sense. This shows that for N, nobility has become something inward.
BGE sect. 269 (p. 220)—N’s amazing identification with Jesus. He starts talking about Jesus and pretty soon he is talking about himself and his desperate need for love, and his relationship to his friends. Hamlet’s “something too much of this” mode can be seen in the way N ends this passage. N’s identification with Jesus may be his oddest moment of self-revelation.
Notes on Nietzsche and Napoleon
N on Napoleon—very much like Hegel’s attitude. Napoleon is an example of the Overman, which is N’s equivalent of Hegel’s world-historical individual. N sees that Napoleon is a return to ancient heroism but on a modern basis. He is in effect the Roman Caesar with Christ’s soul; he combines ancient aristocracy with modern democracy. The difference is that Hegel grew disillusioned with Napoleon precisely because he failed to institutionalize his achievement, whereas N liked him for just that reason.
[This lecture was heavily influenced by Walter Kaufmann’s interpretation of Nietzsche. For more on Nietzsche’s evaluation of classicism and Christianity, see Paul A. Cantor, Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy: The Twilight of the Ancient World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), especially pp. 100-159]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Daniel Breazeale, ed. and trans. Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the early 1870’s. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979
David V. Erdman, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982
Walter Kaufmann, ed. and trans. The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Viking Press, 1968
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1967
Friedrich Nietzsche. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974
Friedrich Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1966
Friedrich Nietzsche. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1969
Friedrich Nietzsche. The Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1968.
Plato. Timaeus. Trans. by R. G. Bury. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966
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