Finding the Übermensch in Nietzsche’s Genedlogy of Moralityi
Although scholars quite reasonably tend to assume that Nietzsche’s later thinking supersedes his earlier thinking (see, e.g., Clark 1990), he himself instructs his readers to think of his analysis in the Genealogy as preemptively superseded by the philosophy of his earlier Zarathustra. GM, he writes, is a “fish hook” meant to attract and prepare readers for the superior insights of his earlier Z. GM, he tells us is a No-saying, destructive book focused on the contemporaneous; while his earlier Z is a Yes-saying, constructive book focused on the future (EH “BGE”). In this chapter, I will show more specifically how Nietzsche’s supposedly immature and discarded Z concept of the Übermensch does indeed supersede his supposedly mature and final ideas in GM II.1
The most obvious candidate for the Übermensch in the Genealogy is Nietzsche’s famous “sovereign individual.” In GM 11:2 and 3 Nietzsche praises this sovereign individual as the completion of humankind, as emancipated from morality, and as the master of a free will with power over himself and over fate. This is why Simon May, for example, writes that the sovereign individual is “none other than the Übermensch: for in mastering every obstacle to promising himself, he, like the Übermensch, has nothing left to overcome” (May 1999, 117).2 However, as Christa Davis Acampora has recently argued, there are several good reasons for rejecting this suggestion (Acampora 2004). First, the sovereign individual is not mentioned or cele-brated anywhere else in Nietzsche’s published writings, nor is he explicitly linked anywhere to the Übermensch. Second, the introductory section to GM II celebrates the instinctive, regulative, and active force of forgetting and warns about the costs of countering it. In the mnemonic sovereignty, by contrast, no room is left in consciousness for the proper oligarchic functioning of our instincts. Third, the kind of freedom and autonomy Nietzsche associates with the sovereign individual—responsibility, promise-keeping, accountabitify—are traced by him in the first essay to slave morality, and so cannot be regarded as his ideal. Finally, although Nietzsche says that the sovereign individual represents the already-attained completion of humankind, Zarathustra insists that humankind must be overcome in the future Übermensch.
I do not agree completely with Acampora’s reasons, however. First, although Nietzsche does praise animal forgetting, it is clear that he does not atavistically think that humankind can somehow go back to this state (TI “Skirmishes” 43, 48–49). Yet Acampora valorizes the pre-human forgetting of GM II:1 and does not say anything about what Nietzsche thinks forgetting might look like after our millennia-long history of mnemonic breeding. I will do so. Second, Nietzsche claims at the end of GM II that Zarathustra will employ the resources of bad conscience, rather than abolish it. This suggests that Acampora is too quick to dismiss the sovereign individual’s perfection of bad conscience. Although she rightly notes Nietzsche’s depreciation of the sovereign individual’s talent for responsibility and autonomy, she assumes without much argument that these qualities are in themselves depreciated by Nietzsche.3 But this assumption is contradicted by Zarathustra’s extravagant praise and exemplification of these qualities: as obtaining, for example, in the self-legislator who must obey his own laws and commands (Z:II “On Self-Overcoming”); or, more radically, in the spirit-become-child and self-propelled wheel that wills its own will (Z:I “On the Three Metamorphoses”). So perhaps Nietzsche depreciates the sovereign individual because he is not responsible and autonomous enough—compared, that is, to Zarathustra or the Übermensch. I shall argue that this is indeed the case. Finally, although I think Acampora is right to cite Zarathustra’s claim that the already-completed human must be overcome in the future Übermensch, this citation assumes precisely what Nietzsche scholars usually deny (see, e.g., Leiter 2002, p. 115n2) and what I aim to show here: namely, that the Z concept of the Ubermensch continues to play a crucial role in the later Genealogy.
A key to understanding this role is Nietzsche’s claim that the sovereign individual is the ripest fruit of bad conscience. But bad conscience, he argues further, is an illness, in fact the worst illness ever contracted by the human animal, one from which it has not yet recovered, one that makes the human animal the sickest animal on earth (GM II:13, 16, 19; see also GM III:20). As Nietzsche vividly describes the terms of this illness, it involves above all a kind of social incarceration or imprisonment in which the will to power cannot be externally discharged and therefore must be turned inward so as to inflect self-torture, self-punishment, and self-cruelty. According to Nietzsche, the conquered, imprisoned, and tamed human animal invented bad conscience in order to hurt itself. Worse yet, it then seized upon the presupposition of religion so as to drive its self-torture to its most gruesome pitch of severity and rigor. Whereas previously the human animal felt itself able to repay its debts to its ancestors and gods (for example, through sacrifice and achievements), the aim now was to invent a holy God so as to preclude pessimistically, once and for all, the prospect of a definitive repayment. In this new psychic cruelty, where the human will now infected the fundamental ground of things with the problem of eternal guilt and punishment, Nietzsche finds an unexampled madness and insanity of the will, an earth that has become a madhouse (GM 11:21; see also GM 111:20).
Now, as far as I know, no one has yet pointed out that these famous remarks contain clear allusions back to Nietzsche’s earlier Thus Spoke Zarathustra, chapter, “On Redemption” (Z:11). For Zarathustra speaks there of the human will as a prisoner in chains or fetters, as being powerless and impotent, as foolishly trying to escape its dungeon by seeking a revenge that it calls “punishment,” and finally as becoming insanely obsessed with finding this punishment in the very nature of existence. Even more specifically, Nietzsche’s analysis of bad conscience and guilt in GM 11 alludes back to Zarathustra’s further claim in that same speech that the prison of the human will is the past.4 For although Nietzsche emphasizes the role that social confinement plays in the inhibition and suppression of the human animal’s instincts (so that they are eventually internalized), his deeper point is that the socially-bred memory faculty is the true inhibitor and suppressor of these instincts.5 This is because the memory faculty suspends or disconnects (ausgehangt) active forgetting and represents an active will not to let go, to keep willing, that which it once willed in the past (GM 11:1–3). But this means that the remembering human animal is forced to recognize for the first time an entire arena of possible willing—much more extensive than the sphere outside society—that is completely and forever outside of its reach: namely, that which was willed and can now never be unwilled, deeds that can never be undone, in short, the past, the “it was.” Before socially bred memory, the prehuman will actively forgot anything outside the present moment that could confine its activity. But with the advent of society and its mnemo-techniques, some things were impressed upon the moment-centered animal affects so that they remained there—inextinguishable, omnipresent, fixed—just as they once were. The human will therefore now perceived itself as confronted with a new stone, a new barrier, “that which was,” which it could not move and in relation to which it felt impotent and inhibited.
It is ironic, then, that the start of GM II emphasizes the power and freedom of the sovereign individual. For insofar as this power and freedom depend upon the sovereign individual’s highly developed faculty of memory, they are in fact sharply curtailed. Unlike the mere animal, the sovereign individual that is the completion of the human animal is at each and every point confined and burdened, not only by his own immovable “it was,” but also by the “it was” of the whole human prehistory of custom and tradition that has led up to him. The sovereign individual may seem to have power and mastery over circumstances, nature, accidents, fate, himself, and others less reliable than himself. But since he has no power over any of the “it was” that determined all of these, he ultimately has no power over these either. Indeed, because the sovereign individual’s mnemonic will has itself been determined by a past that is fixed and gone forever, it cannot be said to ordain the future in advance after all. So the sovereign individual’s power over time turns out to be illusory. This is why Nietzsche describes the sovereign individual in terms that he has already criticized in Z as being linked to the spirit of the camel and the spirit of gravity: namely, as bearing on his strong shoulders a tremendous responsibility and weight that makes him proud, self-conscious, measured, controlled, serious, solemn, and grave.
So what is required for the human will to free itself from the prison of the past imposed by its socially bred millennia-old capacity of memory? Nietzsche suggests at the end of GM 11 that Zarathustra—the man of future who makes the will free again—must turn bad conscience against the unnatural inclinations. But bad conscience is fundamentally memory, and the unnatural inclinations are all traceable to bad conscience. Further, the law of life, the law of necessary self-overcoming, dictates that all great things are the cause of their own destruction (GM 111:27). Hence, in an act of self-cancellation, memory must be turned against memory itself so as to bring about the kind of forgetting that Zarathustra equates with freedom and the absence of guilt (Unschuld, usually translated as “innocence”): “Innocence is the child and forgetting, a new beginning, a play, a self-propelling wheel, a first movement, a holy Yes-saying” (Z:I “On the Three Metamorphoses”).6 However, this cannot be a going back to the forgetting of our animal ancestry, to the “partly obtuse, partly flighty understanding of the moment (Augenblicks-Verstande),” or to “the moment-enslaved (Augenblicks-Sklavert) affects and desire” (GM 11:3). Nor should we hope for such a return (TI “Skirmishes” 43).7 Instead, Nietzsche suggests, we must go forward and exploit to its fullest the very illness that is also a pregnancy in order to attain a new and abermenschlich forgetting.
What Nietzsche means by this is that memory—or the suspension of mere animal forgetting—is what forces the human will to hold on to the past, to fix the past, and thereby to recognize an immovable “it was” in relation to which it feels impotent and inhibited. Memory is what teaches the human animal that it cannot will backward. In order to liberate itself, therefore, the human animal must employ this same memory to recover the past so deeply and so completely that it is led to forget the past in a new and iibermenschlich sense—that is, to let go of the past, to unfix the past, and thereby to recognize that the “it was” is not immovable after all. But what causes the human will to perceive the “it was” as immovable is its limited perspective on time that shows it running forward in a straight line for eternity. From the perspective of the human animal’s present willing, the “it was” always appears behind and gone forever out of reach. As Zarathustra says in his redemption speech, the will sees that everything passes away and that time devours her children. The human animal must therefore use its memory to recover the past so thoroughly that it recognizes that time actually circles back upon itself and that the “it was” always returns. Hence Zarathustra’s new teaching: “Do not be afraid of the flux of things: this flux turns back into itself it flees itself not only twice. All ‘it was’ becomes again an ’it is.’ All that is future bites the past in the tail” (KSA 10:4[85]). With such a mnemonic self-overcoming, the human animal learns how to will backward, how to break time and its desire, and how to gain a true power over time (something higher than mere reconciliation with time).
These ideas refer us of course to Zarathustra’s doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same.8 As Nietzsche describes it in Ecce Homo, this is a cosmological theory of the unconditional and endlessly repeated circular course of all things (EH “BT” 3).9 Because he rejects any conception of universal and absolute time wherein time exists independently of these things, it follows for him that time itself has an endlessly repeated circular course.10 And from this there follows the unconditional and endlessly repeated circular course of every human life (KSA 9:11 [148]).11 Thus, from his proof of the circular course of all things, Zarathustra deduces that he and his dwarf-archenemy must have already encountered each other before eternally and must return to encounter each other again eternally (Z.III “On the Vision and the Riddle” 2). And Zarathustra’s animals know that he teaches “that all things recur eternally and we ourselves with them, and that we have already existed an infinite number of times before and all things with us.” Similarly, from the revolving great year of becoming, these animals know Zarathustra’s deduction that “we ourselves resemble ourselves in each great year, in the greatest things and in the smallest.” And they know as well what he would say to himself if he were about to die: “But the complex of causes in which I am entangled will recur—it will create me again! [...] I shall return eternally to this identical and self-same life, in the greatest things and in the smallest” (Z:III “The Convalescent” 2).12
According to Zarathustra, therefore, every human animal has lived its qualitatively identical life innumerable times before. And since every human animal possesses a faculty of memory, it must be possible for it to remember these innumerable identical previous lives. More precisely, as we have seen, Nietzsche defines human memory as a counterfaculty by means of which animal forgetting is suspended or disconnected. And animal forgetting, he writes, is
an active and in the strictest sense positive faculty of repression that is responsible for the fact that what is only absorbed, experienced by us, taken in by us, enters just as little into our consciousness during the condition of digestion (one might call it “inpsychation”) as does the entire thousandfold process through which the nourishing of our body (so-called “incorporation”) runs its course. (GM 11:1)
Thus, every human animal subconsciously absorbs and experiences the reality of its innumerable identical previous lives, but this reality is actively forgotten and suppressed for the sake of psychic room and order. Still, this forgetting and suppression can be suspended, in which case the cosmic reality of eternal recurrence will enter into human consciousness and thought.13
Now, it might seem impossible that any human animal could ever remember the recurrence of its life. For any such memory would add something new to that life and thereby violate Nietzsche’s insistence on the qualitative identity of that life.14 However, this objection presupposes some initial or original life in which there was not yet a recollection of its eternal recurrence. On Nietzsche’s view, there is no such original life, and as long every recurring life contains the qualitatively identical recollection of this recurrence, there is no inconsistency in supposing that there could be such a recollection. Indeed, quite the reverse: given Nietzsche’s anthropological account of the human animal as the remembering animal, and given Zarathustra’s cosmological teaching of the eternal recurrence of the human animal’s qualitatively identical life, it must be the case that every human animal has the potential to recall this recurrence.
So why did Nietzsche emphasize Zarathustra’s doctrine of eternal recurrence if he thought that this was something every human animal could remember on its own? The reason is that he did not think that anyone belonging to his age was strong or healthy enough to affirms the thought of an eternally recurring life. In fact, he admits this even of himself “I do not want life again. How have I borne it? Creating. What has made me endure the sight? the vision of the Übermensch who affirms life. I have tried to affirm it myself—alas!” (KSA 10:4[81]). Due to their base-line life-impoverishment, he and his contemporaries were far from being well-enough disposed toward themselves and their lives to desire their identical return. In GS 341, Nietzsche imagines that he and his contemporaries would feel the thought of eternal recurrence as a crushing one: the question in each and every thing, “do you want this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon their actions as the greatest heavy weight. He even imagines that he and his contemporaries, upon hearing the news of eternal recurrence, would throw themselves down, gnash their teeth, and curse the bearer of this news as a demon.
But, according to the doctrine, this messenger, this news-bearer, must be memory itself. And according to Nietzsche’s proto-Freudian psychology, the human animal will repress any memory that is too painful to bear: “‘I have done that,’ says my memory. ‘I cannot have done that,’ says my pride, and remains unyielding. Eventually—memory yields” (BGE 68). Extrapolating from GS 341, Nietzsche directs us to suppose a similar sequence of psychological events with respect to our memory of eternal recurrence: “I have lived this identical life innumerable times before,” says my memory. “I cannot have done that,” say my life-hatred and my self-hatred, and remain unyielding. Eventuatty—memory yields.15 In terms of Nietzsche’s definition of memory, although we may at some point be led to suspend our forgetting of the recurrence-reality that we have subconsciously experienced, we will certainly return to this forgetting if the recurrence-reality is too painful to bear. On Nietzsche’s epistemic account of eternal recurrence, there is thus no important distinction to be drawn between the question whether we are able to know eternal recurrence and the question whether we are able to affirms it.16
In GS 342, Nietzsche presents us with his contrasting vision of a far stronger and healthier future age (enabled by Nietzsche himself) in which there will arise an individual, Zarathustra, so overflowing with energy and vitality that he is completely well-disposed toward himself and toward his life. Such an individual, he proclaims, will long for nothing more fervently than for the eternal recurrence of his identical life. For this reason, he will bless the news of such recurrence as an eternal confirmation and seal, and he will regard the bearer of such news as a god. This affirmation, Nietzsche predicts, will be the start of the “great noon” [Grosse Mittag] hour for humankind, that is, the hour in which the shadows of God cease to darken the human mind and the sun of human knowledge stands at its peak: “And in every ring of human existence as such there is always an hour in which the mightiest thought emerges, at first for one, then for many, then for all—the thought of the eternal recurrence of all things” (KSA 9:11[148]).17 This is why Nietzsche ends GM 11 by proclaiming Zarathustra as “this bell-stroke of noon” [dieser Glockenschlag des Mittags] and why he begins GM by alluding to Zarathustra as “one divinely preoccupied and immersed in himself into whose ear the bell has just boomed with all its strength the twelve strokes of noon [and who] awakens all at once and asks himself: ‘what really was that which just struck?’” (GM P:1).
By way of preparing Zarathustra’s great-noon affirmation, Nietzsche spends some time showing that he carries within him a latent knowledge of his life’s eternal recurrence. 18 For example, after his terrifying prevision of the serpent biting itself fast in the throat of the shepherd, Zarathustra speaks of having been bitten himself by the silent, burrowing and blind worm of his most abysmal thought (Z:III “On Involuntary Bliss,” “The Convalescent”). This poetic image, with its allusion to death (worms burrowing in corpses), and to the ancient ouroboros symbol (a worm that bites its own tail), captures Nietzsche’s idea that Zarathustra’s eternally recurring life is a closed circle in which the end always returns to the beginning. Zarathustra’s knowledge of eternal recurrence is most abysmal (abgriindlicher) and blind because it lies burrowing in the darkest depths of his subconscious. And it is silent and sleeping because Zarathustra has so far repressed and buried it in subconscious depths where it is then carried as a fearfully heavy weight. This is why Nietzsche is especially interested in depicting Zarathustra’s experience of falling asleep, when his conscious intellect drops away and “no time” passes for him until he awakens. In this blink of an eye (Augert-blick) between falling asleep and waking, Zarathustra paradoxically feels himself falling into “the well of eternity” (den Brunnen der Ewigkeit) and sleeping “half an eternity,” in which he perceives the world as a perfect “golden round ring” (Z:IV “At Noon”). With these metaphors, Nietzsche indicates the descent of Zarathustra’s sleeping mind into its subconscious awareness of his eternally recurring life. This awareness, Nietzsche suggests, necessarily has an infinite depth that is beyond the scope of Zarathustra’s waking consciousness’s comprehension (Z:III “Before Sunrise,” “On the Three Evils”).
At the right time, however, Zarathustra must choose to deliberately awaken and summon up his dormant knowledge so that it may speak to him directly (Z:III “On Involuntary Bliss”). Since the rest of humankind will still be concerned to keep this reality suppressed, Zarathustra will have to escape collective thought and choose the most solitary solitude (einsamste Einsamkeit) as a means of diving, burrowing and sinking into reality (GS 341; Z:III “On the Vision and the Riddle” 1; GM 11:24). So in Z Nietzsche poetically imagines the strong and solitary Zarathustra summoning and awakening his knowledge of eternal recurrence out the darkness of his deepest depths (Z:III “On the Vision and the Riddle” 2; “The Convalescent” 1). This invocation leads to an awakening or enlightenment in which Zarathustra’s long-hidden knowledge is finally revealed in the full light of day and rationally understood at a surface conscious level.19 In the concluding chapters of the published ending of Z—and in keeping with the prevision in which Zarathustra sees himself springing up, no longer human, a transformed being, radiant, laughing a laughter that is no human laughter (Z:III “On the Vision and the Riddle” 2)—Nietzsche depicts the soul of this enlightened, laughing Übermensch as affirming and blessing the seal of eternal recurrence in just the manner he had anticipated in GS 341–42 (Z:III “The Seven Seals”).
According to Nietzsche, then, the experience of the reality of the eternally repeating cosmos cannot be incorporated by mere animals (not even Zarathustra’s) because they have no faculty of memory. Nor, however, can it be incorporated by most human animals, because their ill-disposition toward themselves and their lives keeps them from suspending their forgetting of this experience. Only an exceptionally strong and self-loving individual like Zarathustra, who fervently longs for nothing more than his own eternal recurrence, is able finally to recover and incorporate his deeply buried subconscious experience that this is actually the case. As a result, however, his relation to time is completely transformed. Since it is a cosmological truth that Zarathustra will eternally relive the qualitatively identical life he has already lived, his faculty of memory is no longer confined just to the “it was” of his life. Whereas mere animals can live only in their present moment, and whereas human animals can also mnemonically live in their past, Zarathustra’s recovered memory of his eternal recurrence allows him to live even in his future. This is why Zarathustra calls himself a prophet (Wabrsager) throughout the narrative of Z, and this is why Nietzsche calls attention to Zarathustra’s prophetic ability by constructing crucial narrative episodes in which Zarathustra has previsions that are later fulfilled. Although these previsions are usually interpreted as literary devices meant to convey Zarathustra’s psychological states, Nietzsche’s claim that eternal recurrence is the basic conception (Grundeorrception) of Z (EH “Z” 1 ) suggests instead that they are devices meant to convey the manifestations of Zarathustra’s eternally recurring life.20
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, then, Nietzsche imagines a future Zarathustra who employs his memory against itself so as to attain a kind of second forgetting of the remembered past that previously seemed fixed and gone forever. Unlike the mere animal, he still has a memory-faculty that allows him to transcend the present moment. But also, unlike the merely human animal, he is able to employ this faculty so as to transcend the past as well. Because he has a recovered memory of the entire circular course of his life, Zarathustra no longer shares the limited human perception that there is an asymmetry between the past and the future such that the past is always fixed and gone forever compared to the future. Instead, his recurrence-memory shows him that his eternally returning past also lies ahead of his present and is therefore just as open to his will’s influence as is his future. Of course, this does not mean that Zarathustra can change or alter the past, or that he can undo what is already done. Nowhere does Zarathustra claim to have stopped the flow of time or reversed the direction of this flow.21 In fact, he goes out of his way to trace the origins of such “stomach-turning” ideas to the thought of God (Z.11 “Blessed Isles”). Instead, Zarathustra’s recurrence-memory shows him only that what he has already done may be such precisely because of the influence of his willing in the present or even the future. Speaking to his “it was,” he may therefore say: “But thus I will it! Thus I shall will it!” (Z:II “On Redemption”).
Indeed, considered more closely, it is precisely Zarathustra’s faculty of memory that makes his “backward-willing” influence possible. For by impressing or storing mnemonic messages, commands, or reminders to himself at an “earlier” stage in his life, the fully developed and perfected Zarathustra can transmit this very same development and perfection throughout his entire life so as to guarantee it meaning, necessity, and wholeness.22 Alluding to Socrates’ daimonion (BT 13–14; TI “Socrates”), as well as to the Christian conception of conscience as a kind of divine “voice” that conveys warnings or instructions (GS 335; BH “GM”), Nietzsche imagines that Zarathustra will hear disembodied whispers calling to him, admonishing him, and commanding him at critical times in his life when he is tempted away from himself or does not feel adequate to his destiny (see especially Z:II “The Stillest Hour”). Because this voice is easily identified as that of his own self at a “later” point in the narrative, Nietzsche imagines that Zarathustra will possess a kind of second conscience, a recurrence-conscience, that enables him to keep promises to his future self and to become who he is in the future (GS 270, 335). In fact, Nietzsche suggests, it is this very backward-willing that allows Zarathustra to affirm his life in such a way that he is led to long for its eternal recurrence and thereby becomes able to recover the experience of recurrence that teaches him backward-willing.23 Zarathustra’s self liberated will is thus a truly sovereign “self-propelled wheel” (ein aus sich rollendes Rad) or circulus vitiosus (BGE 56) that wills its own will and that enables Zarathustra to become a fully self-actualized poet-artist-creator of his own life and self (GS 290, 299).24
To return to Nietzsche’s famous formulation, human memory is an illness as pregnancy is an illness. By increasing its power and sophistication to a horrific and deforming extent, the human animal is at the very limit finally able to recover its deeply forgotten experience of life’s eternal recurrence. Because this new knowledge releases and opens up an arena of possible willing that had seemed forever blocked, the self-overcoming human animal is once again free to fully externalize and express its instincts. This time, however, its will to power extends vastly further, and is directed in a vastly more focused manner, than that of his merely animal ancestor tethered to the present moment. Since the past is now just as open and malleable as the future, there is no longer any deterministic influence of the past to chain, imprison, haunt and burden its present willing. And because the “it was” is also the “it shall be,” its memory (a suspension of its first forgetting) is now precisely the means whereby the self-overcoming human animal is able to attain a new kind of forgetting of the “it was” and to influence its own development in a way that truly grants it freedom, autonomy, and self-mastery. This new forgetting will extend to the past millennia of breeding and custom that produced its faculty of memory in the first place. Hence, the crushingly heavy debt of millennia that once seemed irredeemable will finally be lifted and redeemed.25 From the womb of bad conscience, a new child will be born: self-propelled, free, weightless, innocent, affirming, joyful, and at play with novelty and creation.26
Abel, Giinter. Nietzsche: Die Dynamik der Willen zur Macht und die ewige Wiederkehr, 2. Attflage. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1998.
Acampora, Christa Davis. “On Sovereignty and Overhumanity: Why It Matters How We Read Nietzsche’s Genealogy II:2.” In International Studies in Philosophy 36:3 (2004): 127–45.
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Clark, Maudemarie. Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Gooding-Williams, Robert. Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.
Gödel, Kurt. “A Remark about the Relationship between Relativity Theory and Idealistic Philosophy.” Pp. 557–62 in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist. The Library of Living Philosophers, Vol. VII, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp. Evanston, IL: Open Court, 1949.
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Klossowski, Pierre. Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. Trans. Daniel W. Smith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Leiter, Brian. “The Paradox of Fatalism and Self-Creation in Nietzsche.” In Nietzcche, ed. John Richardson and Brian Leiter. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001: 218–321.
————. Nietzsche on Motality. New York: Rourledge, 2002.
Loeb, Paul S. “The Moment of Tragic Death in Nietzsche’s Dionysian Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence: An Exegesis of Aphorism 341 in The Gay Science.” In International Studies in Pfiilosophy 30:3 (1998): 131–43.
————. “The Conclusion of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.” In International Studies in Philosophy 32:3 (2000): 137–52.
————. “Time, Power, and Superhumanity.” In Journal of Nietzsche Studies 21 (2001): 27–47.
————. “Identity and Eternal Recurrence.” Pp. 171–88 in A Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson. London: Basil Blackwell, 2006.
May, Simon. Nietzsche’s Ethics and His “War on Morality.” Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999.
Moles, Alistair. “Nierrsche’s Eternal Recurrence as Riemannian Cosmology.” In International Studies in Philosophy 21 (1989): 21–35.
————. Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Nature and Cosmology. New York: Peter Lang, 1990.
Richardson, John. “Nietzsche on Time and Becoming.” Pp. 208–29 in A Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson. London: Basil Blackwell, 2006.
Ridley, Aaron. Nietzsche’s Conscience: Six Character Studies from the Genealogy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.
Savitt, Steven F. Time’s Arrows Today: Recent Pbysical and Philosophical Work on the Direction of Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Soll, Ivan, “Reflections on Recurrence: A Re-examination of Nietzsche’s Doctrine, Die Ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen.” Pp. 322–42 in Nietzsche: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert C. Solomon. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973.
Stambaugh, Joan. The Other Nietzsche. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994.
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Yourgrau, Palle. Godel Meets Einstein: Time Travel in the Gödel Universe. Chicago: Open Court, 1999.
In the original complete publication of this chapter, I provide further evidence for my claim that Nietzsche instructs us in this fashion about the relation between GM and Z. I also provide an explanation as to why he does so.
See also Ridley 1998, 18, 143–45. However, May argues that Nietzsche does not actually endorse this figure as an attainable or desirable ideal but rather as an ironic depiction of the human “urge to be insulated from contingency” that he “so powerfully decries in its metaphysical or religious manifestation.” By contrast, I argue below that the reason Nietzsche does not endorse the GM II sovereign individual as his übermenschlich ideal is that he is not sovereign enough.
The closest Acampora comes to making such an argument is her suggestion that the ideal of a reliable promise-keeper is at odds with Nietzsche’s philosophy of becoming, especially as applied to the subject: “how could it be that the Nietzsche who so emphasizes becoming, and who is suspicious of the concept of the subject (as the ‘doer behind the deed’), could think that it is desirable—let alone possible—thar a person could ensure his or her word in the future? How could one promise to do something, to stand security for something, that cannot be predicted and for which one is, in a sense, no longer the one who could be responsible for it?” (Ibid., 134–35; see also p.138). I think that Acampora is right to raise the question whether promise-keeping is really possible for the sovereign individual and I argue below that, because of the “it was” problem, Nietzsche himself ultimately denies that it is. But this does not mean that he denies this capacity to the Ubermensch who has solved the “it was” problem through Zarathustra’s teachings of eternal recurrence and backward-willing.
Nietzsche also anticipates his later GM II analysis of guilt when he has Zarathustra teach that it is not a deed, but rather the pastness of a deed, its undoability, that leads to self-lacerating guilt: “No deed can be annihilated: how could it be undone through punishment! This, this is what is eternal in the punishment ‘existence,’ that existence too must be an eternally-recurring deed and guilt (Schuld)!” (Z:II “On Redemption”). Here and throughout this chapter I have consulted the translations of Nietzsche’s writings by Kaufmann, and the translations of GM by Kaufmann and Hollingdale.
See, by contrast, Henry Staten’s claim (1990, 51, 61, 65ff.) that for Nietzsche the imprisonment in society is an empirical condition of humankind, while the imprisonment in the “it was” is a transcendental condition of life. But Nietzsche’s emphasis on the mere animal’s ignorance of the past, and on the human animal’s socially inculcated and memory-enabled awareness of the past, shows that he considers the “it was” to be equally an empirical condition of humankind.
Most Z commentators (see Gooding-Williams 2001, 43–44) fail to notice this important link between Zarathustra’s “Three Metamorphoses” speech on forgetting and Unschuld, on the one hand, and Nietzsche’s GM II analysis of memory and Schuld, on the other.
See, by contrast, Joan Stambaugh’s suggestion (1994, 105ff.) that Nietzsche aims for us to regain the state (as described by him at the beginning of HL) in which we live “totally in the moment, in the present.”
Nietzsche first proposes this theory when, in GS 341, he has the demon make a categorical assertion as to the cosmological truth of eternal recurrence: “The eternal hourglass of being is turned over again and again.” He returns to this same description in Z when he has Zarathustra’s animals proclaim what they know his teaching must be: “You teach that there is a great year of becoming, a colossus of a year: this year must, like an hourglass, turn itself over again and again, so that it may run down and run out anew: so that all these years resemble one another, in the greatest things and in the smallest” (Z:III “The Convalescent” 2). And he expands upon this theory in Z when he has Zarathustra present a dialectical proof in support of cosmological eternal recurrence that is drawn from his own notebook proofs in support of what he called the most scientific of all possible hypotheses (Z:III “On the Vision and the Riddle” 2; KSA 12:5[71]).
As Günter Abel (1988) and Alistair Moles (1989, 1990) have shown, most of the ostensibly rigorous objections to the scientific status of Nietzsche’s cosmological doctrine presuppose an outdated Newtonian physics of absolute universal time that was rejected by Nietzsche himself when formulating his premises for eternal recurrence. Most of these objections are also quite uninformed about the diversity and peculiarity of recent cosmological theories. In particular, Gödel’s 1949 valid solutions to Einstein’s GRT field equations, widely discussed today, certainly allow the kind of global closed time-like curve that seems described in EH. For a philosophical examination of Gödelian spacetime structure and its implications, see Yourgrau (1999) and the essays by Paul Horwich and John Earman in Savitt (1995). For a physics-based examination of other possible global time-like curves, see Gott (2001).
In Loeb 2001, I argue that Zarathustra’s dismissal of the dwarf’s assertion that time itself is a circle (Z:III “On the Vision and the Riddle”) is not a dismissal of circular time. This is because the dwarf’s Platonic answer assumes a background of atemporal reality compared to which time itself is an illusion.
Since Nietzsche holds a perspectival view of time, and since one’s perspective does not exist in the time observed by others between one’s death and one’s recreation, one’s last conscious moment is immediately followed by one’s first conscious moment (KSA 9:11 [318]). See Loeb 2006 for a further explanation of this argument that an individual’s eternally recurring life has a self-enclosed circular course.
Commentators since Heidegger have pointed to the convalescent Zarathustra’s ambivalence toward his animals’ speeches, but have failed to note Nietzsche’s careful narrative distinction between what Zarathustra’s animals say that eternal recurrence is for those who think as they do, on the one hand, and what they say that eternal recurrence is according to Zarathustra’s teaching, on the other (Z:III “The Convalescent” 2). Also, in his preparatory notes for Z, Nietzsche has Zarathustra himself teach all of what the animals in Z say they know Zarathustra teaches (KSA 11:25[7]). Nietzsche’s point, therefore, is not that Zarathustra’s animals do not know what he teaches, but rather that they are not able to understand why this new teaching should cause him such pain, nausea and sickness. This point derives from Nietzsche’s claim that mere animals have no memory, and therefore cannot be nauseated or burdened as Zarathustra is.
There are of course strong affinities between this epistemology of eternal recurrence and Plato’s theory of anamnesis, and Nietzsche himself points to this influence when he alludes to Plato’s Phaedo in GS 340–41 (see Loeb 1998) and when he depicts Zarathustra’s dialectical contest with the Socratic dwarf (Z:III “On the Vision and the Riddle” 1). Although Pierre Klossowski is famously concerned to show that “[a]namnesis coincides with the revelation of the [Eternal] Return” (1997, 57), his point is quite different from mine. Whereas I am arguing that for Nietzsche forgetting eternal recurrence is a suspendable condition of psychic efficiency, Klossowski argues (see also Allison 2001, 122) that forgetting eternal recurrence is an unsuspendable condition of the truth of eternal recurrence (59).
See, for example, Ivan Soll’s claim that “[a] person can have no direct memories of earlier recurrences.” For if he did, “the increment of his mental life would make him different from his predecessors and hence not an identical recurrence of them” (Soil 1973, 340). I discuss this objection at length in Loeb 2006.
In Loeb 1998, I argue that GS 340–41 convey Nietzsche’s conjecture that Socrates’ hatred of life led him to conceal from himself his subconscious knowledge of his life’s eternal recurrence until his deathbed daemonic reminder loosened his tongue and led him to take revenge on life. In Loeb 2006, I show how Nietzsche leads us to interpret the demon’s message in GS 341 as a recollection of life’s eternal recurrence.
Hence Zarathustra’s challenge to the dwarf who is a symbol of the weak human: “I, however, am the stronger of us both—: you do not know my most abysmal thought! That— you could not bear!” (Z:III “On the Vision and the Riddle”).
See KSA 9:11 [196); GS 108–109; Z:I, “On the Gift-Giving Virtue”; and TI “World.” Although Zarathustra announces the dawn of his great-noon day at the ending of Z:IV, I argue in Loeb 2000 and 2004 that Nietzsche intended us to read this ending as leading chronologically into the start of the “Convalescent” chapter where the fully ripened and lion-voiced Zarathustra awakens his thought of eternal recurrence during the high-noon moment of this same great-noon day.
Although Nietzsche most often characterizes Zarathustra’s doctrine of eternal recurrence as his “most abysmal thought” [abgründlicher Gedanke], he also has Zarathustra agree with his stillest hour that he “knows” [weiss] his teaching but will not speak it (Z:II “The Stillest Hour”). And Zarathustra’s animals ask him if perhaps a new, bitter and oppressive “knowledge” [Erkenntnis] has come to him once he has awakened his most abysmal thought (Z:III “The Convalescent” 2).
See TI “Socrates,” for Nietzsche’s equation of surface and daylight with consciousness and reason, and of depth and darkness with the unconscious and instinct.
In particular, and most important, the convalescent Zarathustra tells his animals that his confrontation with his most abysmal thought was a horrific torture and crucifixion (Z:III “The Convalescent” 2). Since Nietzsche argues that pain is the most powerful aid to memory, it should be the case that he depicts this experience as the one Zarathustra remembers the best. And, indeed, in the “Prophet” and “Vision and Riddle” chapters, we see the younger Zarathustra having an accurate prevision—that is, recurrence-memory—of this later experience. In Loeb 2001, I offer a further analysis of this scene that shows more precisely how Zarathustra’s psychic pain is an aid to his recurrence-memory.
See, by contrast, Joan Stambaugh’s interpretation of literally willing backward in time as “reversing the direction of time” so as to “change what has already occurred” (85–86). Given this extreme interpretation of literal backward-willing, Stambaugh (along with most other commentators), sees herself as forced to choose instead a merely metaphorical interpretation of backward-willing that “at least makes more sense”—namely, “to will things and events back, to will them to come again, to return.” But Zarathustra’s whole point in his redemption speech is that we already do will things and events to return, and that it is precisely this willing that founders against the immovable stone “it was.” We will things and events in the past to return, but our willing seems impotent. Stambaugh’s interpretation thus merely poses the terms of Zarathustra’s problem without offering a reading of his solution.
See Loeb 2001 for an exegesis of Z that explains, supports, and illustrates this claim.
This interpretation should be sharply distinguished from the usual one according to which backward-willing is merely metaphorical and Zarathustra retrospectively reinterprets his past in such a way that he finds it all worthy of affirmation (see, for example, Richardson 2006, 224–25). In GS 277 Nietzsche argues that such metaphorical backward-willing must at some point involve some kind of self-deception and therefore never actually succeeds.
On my interpretation, then, Nietzsche’s claim that Zarathustra succeeds in giving aesthetic style to his life and self depends on his assumption of the literal truth of cosmological eternal recurrence. As such, my interpretation helps to explain Nietzsche’s famous but puzzling praise of physics (Physik) as the means whereby certain unique and incomparable individuals may become those they are, give laws to themselves, and create themselves (GS 335). By contrast with Walter Kaufmann’s dissatisfying explanation of Nietzsche’s term “Physik” (in his footnote to his translation of GS 335, also adopted by Leiter 2001, 315–16), my account explains Nietzsche’s characterization of physics—“the study of everything that is lawful and necessary in the world”—as naturally pointing forward toward his unveiling, six aphorisms later, of the cosmological doctrine that “the eternal hourglass of being is turned over again and again” (GS 341). In addition, my interpretation shows how Nietzsche’s doctrines of eternal recurrence and backward-willing allow him to conceive of a truly radical self-creation that does not depend upon the causa sui theory of free will that he criticizes in BGE 21 and that does not conflict with his teaching of amor fati (Leiter 2001, 292–93 and 286–89; see also Acampora 2004, 132–33, 140). By contrast, Leiter writes that we need to acknowledge “that by ‘creation,’ Nietzsche really doesn’t mean ‘creation’ in its ordinary sense” (2001, 317) and that “his talk of ‘creating’ the self is merely the employment of a familiar term in an unfamiliar sense, one that actually presupposes the truth of fatalism” (2001, 319).
Nietzsche thus depicts Zarathustra’s übermenschlich forgetting as lifting the weight of the past from his soul and as rendering him weightless so that his body dances and his spirit flies like a bird (Z:III “The Seven Seals” 6–7). Also, in contrast to the regular, calculable, and predictable sovereign individual of GM II, Zarathustra’s übermenschlich soul is sudden like lightning and earthquakes, stormy like the wind, chance-governed like the dancing stars, playful like the gambling gods, and adventuring like the seafarer (Z:III “The Seven Seals” 1–3, 5).
At the published end of Z, Zarathustra describes his own redeemed soul as a newborn child that is just washed, naked, innocent, yes-saying, free, tied to time’s umbilical cord, baptized with new names, and playing with colorful toys (Z:III “On the Great Longing”).