Grounding the Nietzsche Rhetoric of Earth 3110180383, 9783110895230, 9783110180381

Citation preview

Adrian Del Caro Grounding the Nietzsche Rhetoric of Earth

w G DE

Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung Begründet von

Mazzino Montinari • Wolfgang Müller-Lauter Heinz Wenzel Herausgegeben von

Günter Abel (Berlin) Josef Simon (Bonn) • Werner Stegmaier (Greifswald)

Band 48

Walter de Gruyter • Berlin • New York

Grounding the Nietzsche Rhetoric of Earth by

Adrian Del Caro

Walter de Gruyter • Berlin • New York

Anschriften der Herausgeber: Prof. Dr. Günter Abel Institut für Philosophie T U Berlin, Sekr. TEL 12/1 Ernst-Reuter-Platz 7, D-10587 Berlin Prof. Dr. Josef Simon Philosphisches Seminar A der Universität Bonn Am Hof 1, D-53113 Bonn Prof. Dr. Werner Stegmaier Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität Institut für Philosophie Baderstr. 6 - 7 , D-17487 Greifswald Redaktion Johannes Neininger, Aschaffenburger Str. 20, D-10779 Berlin

© Gedruckt auf säurefreiem Papier, das die US-ANSI-Norm über Haltbarkeit erfüllt.

Library of Congress — Cataloging-in-Publication-Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from Library of Congress

ISBN 3-11-018038-3 Bibliografische Information Der Deutschen Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über abrufbar.

© Copyright 2004 by Walter de Gruyter G m b H & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin Dieses Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Printed in Germany Einbandentwurf: Christopher Schneider, Berlin Datenkonvertierung und Satz: Fabian Schwade, Berlin

For Anthony Matteo, figlio mio! John Ernest Mulhearn, Jr., 1 9 3 7 - 2 0 0 3 In loving memory.

Preface For several years I have been drawn to Nietzsche's writings insofar as they suggest any practical strategies for improving, or discovering, life on earth — like most humans on our planet I am not an environmentalist but this is becoming less and less a matter of choice, for all of us. In recent years excellent studies have appeared in which Nietzsche's thought receives its due in terms of critical analysis, and many of these studies have contributed to my book. What I rarely found, however, was explicit, deliberate reference to how Nietzsche's writings argue for and promulgate new strategies for inhabiting the earth. Even books and articles that look promising by their titles reveal little, if any interest in grounding Nietzsche's thought to the earth, and in writing about the earth as much as writing about Nietzsche himself or his seductively attractive major doctrines. It has been my sense that Nietzsche's earth rhetoric is almost systematically ignored by commentators, both because it is difficult to foreground something so central, so "built-in" to Nietzsche's thought, but also because the earth rhetoric embodies Nietzsche's "great politics" and commentators would rather steer clear of "a" political Nietzsche. What I was looking for was a book whose content would be rich in detailed analysis on how Nietzsche's major doctrines, and his overlooked minor doctrines, stand in relation to the earth. With such a book and numerous others tending to explore the meaning of Nietzsche's philosophizing in tandem with the meaning of the earth, the deep and enduring lure of Nietzsche's writings might be channeled into something greater, something useful, something helpful for our species. Without wishing to seem prophetic or dramatic, we are closer to discovering life on earth for having had Nietzsche on our planet. Mine is just another contribution in the direction of showing why we are all better off, in ecumenical terms, if we listen to voices like Nietzsche's. Over the years I developed a sense for making my own way through the labyrinth of Nietzsche's thought by following the thread of Ariadne, better known to most readers of Nietzsche as the Dionysian. There is much substance in Nietzsche's writings, both published and unpublished, allowing commentators to enter the Nietzsche landscape at virtually any point. Fearing heights as I do, I wanted to enter on low ground. By following the trail Nietzsche lays down in the form of the Dionysian, it became evident to me and has become apparent to others as well that Nietzsche's thought is indeed wide-ranging and labyrinthine, but not without consistency and its own unmistakable coherence. If one remains patient and attentive one's interest in the Dionysian can result in a view of Nietzsche that is an overview. There are other ways to develop a capacity for surveying Nietzsche's achievement, but the Dionysian is the way that works for me. And what my explorations of the Dionysian have allowed me

VIII

Preface

to see is earth, more earth than I ever thought I would be able to see — indeed more earth than I ever imagined existed. The Dionysian tends to ground. And so it became a matter of committing to paper what the Dionysian has allowed me to survey of the earth. "Grounding the Nietzsche Rhetoric of Earth" is a combination of words whose parsing suggests some of the ways in which I have endeavored to view Nietzsche and his writings. Depending on where we place an imaginary colon, different stresses emerge. "Grounding: The Nietzsche Rhetoric of Earth" proposes that the actual effect of Nietzsche's writing is one of grounding, that the word "grounding" accurately describes Nietzschean philosophizing, if not in all instances then in its major tendencies. Grounding, as the Nietzsche rhetoric of earth, is Nietzschean theory and practice, together. Using a rhetoric of earth Nietzsche grounds, and he grounds us, he grounds the earth. "Grounding the Nietzsche: Rhetoric of Earth" presents a slightly different spin. Here it is Nietzsche who is the object of grounding, though of course he is also the grounder or, properly speaking, he is the grounder perse. "Grounding the Nietzsche" suggests that grounding is a participatory, interactive activity aimed at bringing down to earth his rhetoric of earth. Those who read Nietzsche and write about Nietzsche are contributing to a rhetoric of earth. It does not bother me, as a speaker of German, that I am "grounding the Nietzsche" as though Nietzsche were some kind of thing — German after all is famous for referring to humans with definite articles, if only colloquially ("der Nietzsche ist verriickt!"). Besides, in grounding "the" Nietzsche there is a mild, perhaps even wistful element of desire — "the" Nietzsche? "a" Nietzsche, after all, beneath all those masks? Beneath all those images of Nietzsche ranging from the Italian piccolo santo to the fearful and frustrated German homosexual? And one more thing: whoever said Nietzsche was a human being in the first place? If we take him at his word in Ecce Homo, he was not a human being but dynamite . . . "Grounding the Nietzsche Rhetoric: of Earth" pulls our gaze to the earth. Implied here is the notion that all of Nietzsche's writings are about earth. Once the rhetoric is grounded, it emerges that Nietzsche's chief concern, his love, his interest, his challenge, his task — everything he stood for can be read in a rhetoric that makes earth and Nietzsche inseparable. His strategies, disguises, pleadings, blasphemies — they are all elements of a formidable rhetoric designed to be "of earth," and the rhetoric is so clever at times that we think Nietzsche is talking about — Nietzsche. "Grounding the Nietzsche Rhetoric: of Earth" also has the flourish that Nietzsche's rhetoric is not ephemeral, not made of ideals, and once grounded, it is revealed that his rhetoric is solid: of earth. "Grounding the Nietzsche Rhetoric of Earth" is what I settled on. Under this title I have attempted to explicate the phrase: "the superhuman is the meaning of the earth." Wherever Nietzsche addresses the earth, whether in The Birth of Tragedy or in The Antichrist, his earth rhetoric is at work, and earth comes into focus as the body, the physical environment in which the curious animal "human being" develops itself

Preface

IX

corporally and spiritually, and simultaneously as the ecumenical home to be, or home in the making of human beings who are only now learning that they must live up to being terrestrials. I have drawn on several hundred passages from Nietzsche's published works and unpublished notes, the Nachlaß, in keeping with Wolfgang Miiller-Lauter's view that we must incorporate Nietzsche unpublished notes in order to achieve an understanding of his late philosophy, i.e., we must construct a Nietzsche, but carefully (I, 137). And I have used my own translations into English in such a way as to make clear, again, that I am grounding my study on Nietzsche's text; in this regard, I have chosen to render Mensch wherever possible as human (noun), and human being, and to follow through by rendering Ubermensch as superhuman (noun). There are many reasons for using this convention, but here I shall give only the most important. First, the word Mensch in German is correctly translated as human being, and Nietzsche's concerns are with humans as a species, not with men only, as the translation "man" suggests. Often where Nietzsche has human beings in mind his translator, for purposes of consistency but also, in my view, from a desire to over-simplify chooses the gendered expression "man," thereby contributing to the already strong impression that Nietzsche equates being human with being male. So strong is the attraction of "man" for human in the English language that the use of "human being" in writing, and of course in thinking as well, appears clumsy and overstated — it is not overstated, and the expression "human being" is necessary, not optional. For those whose nuanced approach to Nietzsche studies has resulted in a reliance on the term "overman" for superhuman, my study will at first alienate, just as readers will experience some initial discomfort at finding themselves surrounded by human beings as opposed to men. The qualifier "super" bears the same connotations as "over" but does not always allow for the one-on-one correspondence seen in the "overman" as he "goes under." But such a lapse on the superhuman's part should not lead us to abandon attempts to regard Ubermensch as superhuman; in the course of my study it becomes apparent that superhuman more firmly anchors Nietzsche's concern for the species. Of course my use of superhuman does not imply that "overman" is incorrect, only that it is limited and specifically, more limited than Nietzsche intended, at least with respect to translating from German to English. When one has become familiar with the ecumenical Nietzsche whose interest in the entire earth is inspired by the presence of the closest things, human can no more be circumvented than earth. In his popular and critically acclaimed book The Voice of the Earth (1993) Theodore Roszak asserts: "If psychosis is the attempt to live a lie, the epidemic psychosis of our time is the lie of believing we have no ethical obligation to our planetary home" (14). When I read this statement I intuited that Roszak had heard the Nietzsche voice intermingled with the voice of the earth, but my sense was wrong. In making his valid point that "ecological ignorance" is the source of "epistemological loneliness" and other forms of modern alienation, Roszak righteously snubs "the

X

Preface

contours of Eigenwelt" that have usurped humanity's interest in Umwelt. But when Roszak lists Nietzsche, Marcel, Tillich, Sartre, Camus as "one and all specialists in the peculiar angst of modern Western man," claiming they are "the articulate symptoms of neurotic culture rather than its medicine," and furthermore referring to them as "intensely urbanized minds" (66) — I was made to wonder how Nietzsche has all along been part of the problem when I thought he was part of the solution. Others have Nietzsche sharing different company. Graham Parkes situates Nietzsche among the pre-Socratic thinkers, the Stoics, the Epicureans, certain Christian mystics, Italian Renaissance thinkers, Goethe and Germany's philosophers of nature, and Emerson and Thoreau in the United States. "What is not generally appreciated is that Nietzsche is a major figure in this minor current of thinking, and that his philosophy of nature qualifies him as one of the most powerful ecological thinkers of the modern period" (167). But Roszak may be right about Nietzsche, or perhaps there is a way to approach problems and attempt to solve them even when one is modern, neurotic, and decadent. In any case, for those who may have based their impression of Nietzsche on Roszak's polemic verdict, here is an attempt to show Nietzsche not as an urbanized, though articulate, neurotic, but as the West's first major diagnostician of ecological ignorance. Louisville, Colorado, September 2003

Adrian Del Caro

Acknowledgments I am grateful to these individuals who have helped shape my approach to Nietzsche through their comments, assistance, writings, collegiality, friendship: Steven Bruns, Daniel W. Conway, Ken Gemes, David Gross, Robert Gooding-Williams, Laurence Lampert, John Pizer, Robert Pois, John Protevi, Ann Schmiesing, Gregory Schufreider, Maria Steinbeisser (for research assistance), Katherine Wank (for research assistance), Janet Ward. I likewise extend my gratitude to the "Nietzsche students" who attended my courses on Nietzsche, since the mid 1980s, at LSU, CU, and MSU: you had a bigger hand in the writing of this book than you might think. Special thanks to Dr. Adrienne Chockley-Lyles, Dr. Linda Fallon-Duncan, Dr. Stan Spector, MA Lyle Howard, MA Claire Sandford, BA Brian Kelley, BA.MA. Aaron Perry, BA.MA. Adam Rothberg; BA Matthew Slaby, BA Jeffrey Struck. Finally, the completion of this book was made possible by a fellowship and grantin-aid from the Council on Research and Creative Work of the University of Colorado at Boulder. A version of chapter I, sections 1 and 2 appeared in Philosophy and Rhetoric 37.2 (2004); a version of chapter II, section 6 appeared in Environmental Ethics 26.3 (2004).

Contents Preface Acknowledgements Abbreviations

VII XI XV

Chapter I: On Grounding 1. The Topography of Nietzsche's Rhetoric 2. The Grounds of Philology and Hermeneutics 3. The Dionysian Used as a Ground 4. An Intellectual-Biographical Account of Nietzsche's Groundedness 5. Modernity's Groundlessness 6. The Reclamation of Ground

1 11 22 27 37 48

Chapter II: Immanence 1. O n Heightening Human Presence through Reorientation 2. How the Earth Becomes a Place of Opprobrium 3. Efforts Toward Immanence: First Steps 4. Knowledge as an Impediment to Living 5. O n Regulating the Instincts to Create Human Being 6. Environment, or What Really Surrounds Us 7. A New Hygiene on the Basis of Life 8. Immanence Manifested as Hubris, Exploitation, and Criminality

63 74 81 88 96 104 116 130

Chapter III: Nietzschean Religiosity 1. Grounding Versus Religion Founding 2. Paganism's Special Powers of Affirmation 3. The Loss of Religious Feeling 4. The Dionysian 5. Of Apotheosis and Surrogacy

153 161 167 171 184

Chapter IV: Logic and Limit in the Eternal Recurrence of the Same 1. The Finite in Relation to Potential 2. The Quotidian Nietzsche 3. Features and Failings of the Old Gravity 4. The New Gravity 5. The Sameness of Eternal Recurrence

201 212 221 230 244

XIV

Contents

Chapter V: The Ecumenical Nietzsche 1. The Right Time and the Only Place 2. Cultivating the Ecumenical Disposition 3. The Lust to Rule, Or the Bestowing Virtue Goes "World Wide 4. The Will to Power in its Empowering State

255 271 286 320

Chapter VI: Dwelling Creatively Within the Finite 1. Conservation Measures for the Spirit 2. The Conservation of Negative Traits 3. Creating With Forces and States 4. Dwelling on the Quality of Life 5. The Open

352 359 371 380 388

Chapter VII: Nietzsche and the Environmental Ethos 1. Animals and Human Animals 2. Post-Humanism Grounded in the Body

401 417

Works Cited

432

Index

439

Abbreviations Nietzsche's works are cited by aphorism number and page number according to the Kritische Studienausgabe (KSA: 15 volumes) edited by Colli and Montinari. The Nachlaß 'is cited by volume and page number only. In the case of titles with multiple parts and no consecutive aphorism numbering, the order is volume, part, aphorism (see H H below). A BGE BT CW D EH GS GM HH KSA NCW P TI UM

Z

The Antichrist Beyond Good and Evil The Birth of Tragedy The Case of Wagner The Dawn Ecce Homo The Gay Science On the Genealogy of Morals Human, All Too Human (1/1 = vol. I, aphorism 1; 11/1 1 = vol. II, part 1, aphorism 1; II/2 1 = vol. II, part 2, aphorism 1) Friedrich Nietzsche: Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Einzelbänden Nietzsche Contra Wagner For Zarathustra P = Prologue; otherwise P = Preface Twilight of the Idols Untimely Meditations (UM 1/1= essay I: David Strauss the Confessor and the Writer, sec. 1; UM 11/1 = essay II: On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Living, sec. 1; UM III/1 = essay III: Schopenhauer as Educator, sec. 1; UM IV/1 = essay IV: Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, sec. 1. Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Less frequently quoted tides for the unpublished works from 1870-73 are identified in the text.

Chapter I: On Grounding in Relation to Rhetoric and Earth 1. The Topography of Nietzsche's Rhetoric " T h e philosopher believes the value of his philosophy lies in the whole, in the structure: posterity finds it in the stone with which he built Human, All Too Human I 201

The complexity of the Nietzschean rhetoric demands first a basic working definition of rhetoric. Very much in the etymological sense of Greek rhetorike, the art of oratory, and extrapolated to include the art of communicating effectively through writing, Nietzsche's rhetoric is a highly stylized, deeply self-aware manner of expression designed to convey meaning and to appeal. In the more limited sense used for my purposes in this book, the Nietzschean rhetoric is furthermore a special type or mode of language, a discourse if you will, such that the communicative and appealing aspects of his speech are aimed at the earth for the purpose of grounding human beings. For clarity's sake it may also help to know that by "rhetoric" I do not mean the negative connotation associated with "insincere or grandiloquent language" (Webster's), though it is certainly the case that Nietzsche's rhetoric frequently takes flight and requires grounding. It is to be expected that a classical philologist by training, and both a teacher and a writer by profession, would have a close understanding and practiced application of rhetoric; the particular problem or challenge in explicating Nietzsche's rhetoric lies in the task to which his rhetoric is put, as well as in the zeal with which he pursued his task. I am not primarily concerned with what Nietzsche had to say about rhetoric as an academic lecturing at the University of Basle, though I agree that Gilman et al are right to emphasize the importance of rhetoric for the interpretation of Nietzsche's writings and in its own right as a competitor with philosophy,1 rather, I am concerned with the practice of rhetoric that distinguishes Nietzsche's writings, both published and unpublished, from the early 1870s until the so-called Wahnsinnszettel (postcards and letters of madness) written in early January 1889. I also agree with Moore, who analyzes the specifically biological and medical idiom of Nietzsche when he concludes "that new light can be thrown on [Nietzsche's]

Sander L. Gilman, Carole Blair, David J. Parent, editors Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), xii, xvi, xx. In addition to a fine introduction this volume includes a bilingual edition of N. s Basle lectures, some never given publicly, from the years 1872-75.

2

I. On Grounding

thought by situating it within the historical context of nineteenth-century theories of evolution and degeneration."2 The case for "grounding" Nietzsche's rhetoric is not made easier by the existence of these so-called Wahnsinnszettel, for they have come to exemplify what is suspicious and allegedly dubious about Nietzsche's writings. Commentators have reasoned that since these epistles are obviously the work of a madman, it is fair play to speculate, if not properly assert, that much of Nietzsche's writing beginning with Thus Spoke Zarathustra is tinged with madness and is therefore (at least) "insincere and grandiloquent" in the negative sense of rhetoric. I addressed this problem of giving too much credence to the "evidence" of the madness notes at the expense of the actual published writings in the context of deciphering and grounding what is meant by Ariadne in Nietzsche's often disguised and playful allusions to Dionysus.3 Still, the suspicion that Nietzsche's rhetoric is somehow pathological, despite the eminent readability and clarity of his style, casts a pall over the reception of his works and extends even to the views of Carl Jung, who had a lifelong interest in Nietzsche's writings and who, as a physician and a thinker, might have been in a stronger position to judge on such matters. According to Dr. Jung there is something suspicious about a man who teaches such "yea-saying" as Nietzsche — one needs to examine the effects of the teaching on the teacher's own life. Upon close scrutiny, Jung concludes that Nietzsche "lived beyond instinct, in the lofty heights of the heroic sublimity — heights that he could maintain only with the help of the most meticulous diet, a carefully selected climate, and many aids to sleep — until the tension shattered his brain."4 Clearly Jung deduces from the intense, inspirational tone of Nietzsche's life-affirming (yea-saying) rhetoric that it was ungrounded, unattached to the solid earth of instinct and good health, barely maintained and dependent on artificial means. When Jung takes one step further and judges that "Nietzsche

2

3

4

Gregory Moore, Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1-2. Moore is also engaged in grounding N., in a way, because he returns N.'s biologistic rhetoric to the field of contemporary writing on health and sickness as it was spawned by Darwin's ideas. Moore takes N. at his word when he claims, in the preface to The Case of Wagner, that the philosopher's task is to overcome his time in himself, to become timeless: " . . . I wish to portray Nietzsche's rhetoric of health and sickness as taking issue with, or more often uncritically reflecting, broad currents of thought in the post-Darwinian age . . ." 14-15. When "the philosophers task" is seen in this generalized and rhetoricized light, Moore is correct to characterize N. as a timely writer, despite N.'s claims to being untimely; however, the task N. set himself and sets for new philosophers is not properly subsumed by the phrase "to become timeless," as I shall show in the course of my book — N.'s task, and therefore his rhetoric, are larger than the issue of being timely or untimely and go straight to the earth. See Adrian Del Caro, "Symbolizing Philosophy: Ariadne and the Labyrinth" in Nietzsche-Studien 17 (1988), 125-157; reprinted in Nietzsche: Critical Assessments, ed. Daniel W. Conway, 4 vols. (London: Routledge, 1998), 58-88. C.G. Jung, Nietzsche's "Zarathustra": Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939 by C.G. Jung, ed. James L. Jarrett, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), vol. 1, xii (from the editor's introduction).

1. The Topography of Nietzsche's Rhetoric

3

was a pathological personality" (ibid), the challenge of investigating Nietzsche's rhetoric with any enthusiasm, with any hope of grounding the rhetoric and bringing it back to earth from its "lofty heights" appears formidable. Gemes therefore welcomes approaches to Nietzsche that provide "a useful corrective to those interpretations which treat Nietzsche's rhetoric as a mere character flaw to be excused," as does the work of Nehamas, and for his own part Gemes analyzes "two types of metaphors [which are] particularly striking and pervasive, namely, martial and organic metaphors." 5 Compounding the problem of unpacking Nietzsche's rhetoric by throwing down roadblocks in the form of charges of madness is Nietzsche's own complicity in the matter, aptly summarized by Conway: "Shifting masks, multiple personae, polytropaic paroxysms, nested ironies and self-referential parodies, wayward textual strategies, hastily conceived thought experiments, Zarathustrian exotericisms, hagiographic autobiographies, insincere attempts at self-criticism—all of these signature rhetorical ploys have contributed to the bewilderment of his readers. That he is not read, or not read well, may be the inevitable fruition of a self-fulfilling prophecy." 6 But as I shall argue in the course of this book, all of these devices need not signal that Nietzsche deliberately sought to remain unread, that he covered and blurred his trail in order to remain permanently concealed — that would amount, in Nietzsche's terms, to nihilism in the form of skepticism, timidity, and paralysis of the will. Instead, these signature rhetorical ploys in my view signal that Nietzsche very much wanted to be read and therefore practiced the right kind of alchemy, not "inverse alchemy." 7 The rhetoric in general and the rhetoric of earth in particular have their most prominent expression in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, that work which, as Higgins aptly points out, has been labeled atrocious not only by English-language commentators such as Brinton and more recently J. P. Stern, but by the German philosopher Gadamer as well.8 Higgins sets about to demonstrate that Zarathustra has not received its critical due from mainstream Nietzsche scholarship; too often Nietzsche's writings are viewed narrowly as lacking standard philosophical arguments and propositions, while a second dismissive strategy is to regard Zarathustra as a mere fictional treatment of ideas set out later and better in the "mature" works. 9 Staten, too, remarks on the weakness of the approach represented in Gadamer by asserting that we must exercise the same kind of "literary" attention in reading Nietzsche's "philosophical" texts as we appropriately expend in reading Zarathustra. This careful reading would include, for example, focus on the "dramatic content, tonal shifts, ambiguities, conflicts between what is said and the motivational forces inscribed within what is said, and the system of entrances,

6 7 8 5

Ken Gemes, "Nietzsche's Critique of Truth," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52:1 (1992), 60. Daniel W. Conway, Nietzsche and the Political (London: Routledge, 1997), 119. See G S 292 and my discussion of same throughout the course of my book. Kathleen Higgins, Nietzsche's Zarathustra (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), xii. Higgins, Nietzsche's Zarathmtra. xii- xiii, xiv-xv.

4

I. On Grounding

exits, and interactions of personae."10 There is much to be said in favor of approaching Nietzsche's oeuvre in the manner suggested by Staten, if for no other reason than Staten acknowledges that a rhetoric is at work in Nietzsche which is not limited to Zarathustra and which harbors subtleties that often go unnoticed. Furthermore, if we agree with Staten that "the authority of any writer depends in a profound way on the quality of self-assurance in his or her prose," then we have to dignify the authority of Nietzsche's voice all the more since he does not ground his claims on outside authorities, only his own authority.11 What Higgins and Staten refer to respectively as the non-traditional or literary character of Zarathustra and the Nietzsche-based authority of Nietzsche's voice are reflections of what I regard as grounding the Nietzsche rhetoric. It is not sufficient for purposes of scholarship in the humanities to advocate a dismissive strategy toward Nietzsche's rhetoric simply or mainly because one has recognized a non-traditional or even egocentric tendency in it — on the contrary, one might expect that, in view of the undeniable factualness of the rhetoric, its firm existence, one would instead approach it with caution and a degree of respect as a rhetoric. One aspect of Nietzsche's rhetoric that has, unfortunately, gained all too strong a following is his motif-like insistence that in most matters concerning human beings, sooner or later a thing becomes a matter of interpretation. Accepted at face value, i.e., accepted in an ungrounded and unconsidered manner, this Nietzschean commonplace gives rise to an erosion of respect for the Nietzschean text and project not unlike the cruder, but more honest erosion that relies on charges of pathology, madness, and posturing. Bernard Williams raises the example of Nietzsche's claim, or what appears to be a claim, that there are no moral phenomena, only moral interpretations; this should be construed as an invitation to ponder morality, not necessarily to champion infinite interpretations. And, adds Williams, perhaps "claim" is not the best word to use in connection with Nietzsche's many assertions; "It is not only too weak for some things he says and too strong for others; we can usefully remember, too (or perhaps pretend) that even when he sounds insistendy or shrilly expository, he is not necessarily telling us something, but urging us to ask something."12 For purposes of picking up on one's own and inscribing oneself into or atop the Nietzschean discourse, nothing serves quite as well as nodding one's head in recognition and approbation, kidding oneself that "all has been told here" and now it is simply a matter of taking Nietzsche's claims into "new" ventures and "theoretical" applications and celebrations of the loss of meaning. In fact, however, the Nietzschean rhetoric functions more or less as Williams suggests, and if time were taken to let the questioning, asking, sometimes beseeching property of the rhetoric sink in, the effect of that sinking in upon us would be — grounding. 10 11 12

Henry Staten Nietzsche's Voice (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), 5. Staten, Nietzsche's Voice, 32-33. Bernard Williams, "Nietzsche's Minimalist Moral Psychology" in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality ed. Richard Schacht (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 240.

1. The Topography of Nietzsche's Rhetoric

5

Danto wrote already in 1965 that Nietzsche's reputation as an irrationalist was undeserved, inasmuch as his writing "exhibits attitudes toward main problems of philosophy which are almost wholly in the spirit of Logical Positivism."13 It may come as a shock to later generations of Nietzsche commentators that a philosopher would dare to "ground" Nietzsche with such a stone as Logical Positivism (writ large), but Danto has a keen understanding of both Nietzsche's interest in language and his rhetoric, and what is more, Danto has a more forgiving nature than most when it comes to judging this rhetoric. In making what appear to be "bald faced apologies" for lust, cruelty, violence etc Nietzsche made his own bed, to be sure, but Danto urges us to make a distinction between the rhetoric, which is often inflammatory, and the underlying belief.14 For example, it cannot be said that Nietzsche stood for a natural discharge of emotional energy and a ruthless rejection of emotional restraint, but the language that Nietzsche uses to make his point "is so in excess of the point he wishes to make that it drives him past his message into bordering conceptual territory." Indeed, if one were to expand on this metaphor of territory, we would incline toward the notion that Nietzsche's rhetoric has a way of dominating every conceptual landscape it approaches, of digging into the surrounding terrain and topography where one is scarcely prepared to walk, let alone run. Danto ponders what led Nietzsche to believe that unless he used excessive language he would not be heard at all. "He is urging a qualification on our attitudes toward the emotional and passionate side of men. He is attacking what he takes to be a tendency to extirpate rather than to spiritualize or discipline the passions."15 This will have to serve for the time being to explain why Nietzsche's rhetoric is duly or unduly impassioned, why it is in excess of the point to be made, but we will have frequent occasion in the course of this book to return to the issue of the passions and their extirpation, as this modern phenomenon did indeed cause Nietzsche consternation and anxiety as one of the most injurious, insidious undermining strategies of the ungrounded, of the earth haters. The topography of the Nietzschean rhetoric is one of ups and downs, of peaks and valleys as Zarathustra would say of his own soul,16 and perhaps this befits a rhetoric whose appeal must aim simultaneously at the many and the few, as suggested by Zarathustra's subtitle "A Book For All and None." Rosen refers to this as a double rhetoric "that juxtaposes the registers of despair and exaltation" and is otherwise present in the discussions of esoteric and exoteric in Beyond Good and Evil. Without denying that 13 14 15 16

Arthur Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York: McMillan, 1965), 83. Danto, Nietzsche, 145-46. Danto, Nietzsche, 147-48. "From silent mountains and thunderheads of pain my soul roars down into the valleys." Z II/l, KSA4:106. See also Graham Parkes, "Staying Loyal to the Earth: Nietzsche as an Ecological Thinker," Nietzsche's Futures, ed. John Lippit (New York: St Martin's Press, 1999): "As Zarathustra elaborates his teaching of the Ubermensch and himself develops as a teacher, the natural environment of mountain and sea, lake and forest, is the indispensable context for this self-unfolding" (171).

6

I. O n Grounding

for Nietzsche there are many things reserved for the rare and the few, Rosen regards him as the "first major thinker to employ what others have preserved for the rare in a teaching directed to the many or, perhaps more accurately, to the spokesmen for the many. Nietzsche is the first to transform esotericism into an exoteric doctrine." 17 Such a "double rhetoric" would of course explain some of the tension, some of the intensity of the rhetoric, and certainly Rosens understanding of the opposing demands of the esoteric and exoteric helps to explain as well why Nietzsche employs a rhetoric in the first place, viz., his task requires nothing less, only a rhetoric could meet the demands of appealing to two audiences whose needs and interests are mutually exclusive.18 When Staten maintains that contrary to appearances Nietzsche "is in some very deep sense incapable of irony" and "almost always tries to preserve certain forms of purity," 19 I take this to mean that Nietzsche's rhetoric is rarely shut down, rarely switched off, and runs like an undercurrent beneath his writings. By "preserving certain forms of purity" Nietzsche is minimizing the rhetorical distance between himself and his readers, preferring to reveal himself directly as opposed to through the lens of irony. In order to remain direct (or unmitigated, immediate) and close to the purity or source of his concerns, in the absence generally speaking of irony Nietzsche will instead engage in exaggeration and intensification. Another way to look at this phenomenon of sticking closely to the pure, 20 to the source, is by tracking Nietzsche as he wanders. For all his nomadic inclinations and his sometimes tortured landscapes, Nietzsche remains highly trackable, highly capable of being followed and traced because he returns again and again to his favorite haunts and themes, which function for him as a home and a ground. 21 17

18

15

20

21

Stanley Rosen, The Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzsche's Zarathustra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 247-48. Earlier commentators have approached the problem of a "crowded "or "packed' Nietzschean rhetoric from the standpoint of style. Fritz Martini in Das Wagnis der Sprache: Interpretationen deutscher Prosa von Nietzsche bis Benn (Stuttgart: Klett, 1954) sees rhythmic vitality, didacticism, aesthetics, and the mimetic-rhetorical in the unity of N . s language, with a combination of the lyrical, dramatic, and epic. No prose in 19th-century German, he argues, was burdened by such a complex achievement, 19. Siegfried Vitens in Die Sprachkunst Friedrich Nietzsches in Also sprach Zarathustra (Bremen-Horn: Walter Dorn Verlag, 1951), writes that as a creative user of language N. was to the early decades of the 20th-century what Luther had been to his century and Goethe to his, 152. Staten, Nietzsche's Voice, 45. Having said this, Staten only a few pages later remarks that N. speaks "at his coyest" and "keeps a certain ironic distance" in connection with remarks on Schopenhauer (p. 61). We must observe caution in using "pure" because, as Gemes points out, N . s "model of health is not that of a pure being free of all external contamination. Rather, his model of health is of one who has been thoroughly contaminated by a myriad of influences . . . ." Gemes, "Postmodernism's Use and Abuse of Nietzsche," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62:2 (2001), 355. This by way of distinguishing N. s views from fascism, where "pure" in racial terms is the desiderata. Babich gives a plausible account of "returning" to N.'s tracks or footsteps: "[W]hether one reviews a textual locus, context, phrase, or term, the reader finds Nietzsche's texts renewedly new. I have described this phenomenon as an effect of Nietzsche's self-deconstruction. ...To read Nietzsche, as to play or to perform a musical piece, is to interpret Nietzsche: and each time that interpretation as an interpretation must differ," 30. See Babich, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Sciencebelow and my discussion of Salaquarda's and Ansell-Pearson's views.

1. The Topography of Nietzsche's Rhetoric

7

We would err however in ascribing to Nietzsche's rhetoric only the symptoms of strength and what he would call ascending vitality. Anyone who has had occasion to ponder Nietzsche's sense of urgency and his uncanny ability to feel in his own skin the corrosive effects of millennia of ascetism, of nihilism might be inclined to agree with Staten that "Nietzsche's text is pervaded by a fear of the power of the weak, a power against which he must fortify and rigidify the boundaries of strength."22 This defensive operation would have Nietzsche turning up the volume of his rhetoric and in particular his power discourse whenever he feels weak, whenever his energy ebbs and he senses, in himself, the disadvantageous position in which, according to his own words, the strong constantly find themselves in relation to the more numerous and inexorably more successful multitudes of the weak. But Nietzsche needs tension, needs to feel the threat, as it were, and his fear, though no doubt real, is also attributable to his recognition of his enemy and his respect for his enemy. If Nietzsche does not always take to the agon with a warrior's heart, at least he does not practice the virtues that make small by speaking in a soft voice. Gemes describes how others use a discourse that is self-effacing, measured, and scholarly, "theirs is the voice of a universal reason, Nietzsche uses loud, bombastic self-advertising tropes."23 An important consideration for Nietzsche's rhetoric is the site of communication with his readers, where a delicate and risky exchange takes place. Salaquarda describes how Nietzsche's words, and especially his basic words (Grundwörter•) are only as capable of speaking to someone as that person himself is "experienced" or constituted to experience Nietzsche's words according to his degree of strength or weakness. Or let us say: Nietzsche's words speak to those who have the stomach for them, or in the spirit of another favorite Nietzschean phrase, the ears. Salaquarda continues by reminding us that Nietzsche privileges the auditors or audience of Zarathustra and elevates them to the status of chosen ones, by which he does not mean that only a few human beings can read Zarathustra and understand it in a philological sense. Instead, what is meant by this privileging is that a comprehension of Zarathustra is not the decisive experience. Essential understanding for Nietzsche, according to Salaquarda, means overcoming, which requires that one's stronger and more encompassing perspective is used to comprehend what is stored in the basic words of other thinkers in a new and better manner, and to then put it in turn into language.24 So, too, according to Gemes Nietzsche's various metaphors "serve a number of interconnected purposes. They help emphasize that Nietzsche is not interested in the scholarly world of measured reasoning aimed at eternal truths. Rather he wishes to affect and promote earthly life."25 There is every indication that

22 23 24 25

Staten, Nietzsche's Voice, 108. Gemes, "Nietzsche's Critique ofTruth," 60. Jörg Salaquarda, "Der Antichrist," Nietzsche-Studien Gemes, "Nietzsche's Critique ofTruth," 61.

2 (1973), 136.

8

I. On Grounding

Nietzsche approached his sources and influences in this spirit and expected it of his readers as well.26 What Salaquarda describes as an exchange premised on degrees of strength and affinity and transforming into an act of overcoming which ultimately yields "value added" is precisely what Nietzsche means when he insists that the value of a philosophy lies not in the structure, not in the edifice constructed by the philosopher but in the individual bricks and stones used in the construction, which another person may recycle for a better structure (HH II/1 201, KSA 2:466). Here once again we touch the issue of whether Nietzsche's rhetoric is designed to tell or to ask, whether it is an invitation to simply join him and concur or to use him in an act of overcoming. For the latter purpose a relatively intense and robust rhetoric may be more effective. Conway details how the "logic of self-overcoming . . . diverts our attention from the external targets of Nietzsche's polemics to their internal manifestations," such that statements critical of moralists, priests, and others "are best understood as occasions for galvanizing an internal resistance to the moralists, priests, dogmatists, and decadents who inhabit his own polycentric soul."27 Or for that matter, one may wish to regard the rhetoric more closely in connection with esotericism and what Babich calls a rhetorical musical style. For Babich Nietzsche's style is "not at all a matter of rhetorical excess," instead, since his writing so much resembles music, we cannot separate from it the question of style "and that is true in Nietzsche's case more than it is true of any other author just where Nietzsche writes to or for the reader's spiritual ear and not the reader's intellectual eye."28 It is possible, and indeed Nietzsche himself has championed this notion, that in matters of communication taste is a deciding factor — one must have the ability, for example, to "hear" Nietzsche's rhetoric as a music in order to appreciate it as a rhetoric, or at least to not blithely dismiss it as noise. If music or a particular kind of music is an acquired taste, so are Nietzsche's writings. Some readers will be able to comprehend Nietzsche without necessarily hearing him, without necessarily encountering him. In these cases, one develops a sense of having unmasked him or of having caught him in an inconsistency or a lie — which may indeed be the case, but which changes little if the overall task and context of Nietzsche's rhetoric are not foregrounded.

26

This important understanding of how N. used sources and expected his readers to use him appears to be missing in Moore, who on numerous occasions faults N . for adopting the insights of scientific writers and putting his own words in the place of theirs. Moore (2002) is quite correct, and astute, in pointing out this phenomenon (e.g. 14-15, 43, 48, 50, 52-3, 55), but in using it to cast N. as a merely derivative thinker in matters of biology, he overlooks the fact that N. was not a biologist and his philosophical task simply makes use of biology —whether or not that particular use of biology squares with nineteenth-century biological science.

27

Conway, Nietzsche and the Political, 76. Babette E. Babich, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science: Reflecting Science on the Ground of Art and Life (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1994), 18.

28

1. The Topography of Nietzsche's Rhetoric

9

Yet another way to tune into the Nietzschean rhetoric is to develop a sense for the silence that is a more subtle feature, in other words, to make note of when and where Nietzsche stops short of uttering something in order to heighten his effect or in order to abandon his effect to the inference of the reader. Babich refers to a process of aposematic aposiopesis, "that is, a kind of incomplete suggestion, deliberately left incomplete (that is, aposiopetic) in order to suggest a certain danger (and thus aposematic)."29 The process is notably at work, according to Babich, in the manner in which the eternal recurrence of the same is introduced in The Gay Science # 341. 3 0 Here Nietzsche poses many questions to his readers, and he uses the subjunctive mood for setting up the encounter with the "demon" as a hypothetical. What is not spoken in this context is nonetheless present in the form of suggestion, of warning, and yet, in having presented the thought of the eternal recurrence of the same in the first place, Nietzsche clearly wants it to have an effect on his readers. Similarly, when Nietzsche denies the existence of truth an extreme rhetoric is often at work, according to Gemes, because to "admit that one seeks influence not through truth but through seduction is to invite dismissal as a mere rhetorician." Nietzsche accounts for this rhetorical denial of truth having to coexist with his desire to persuade by avoiding "a philosophical account of the notion of truth," allowing us instead to focus on "his expressly rhetorical intent of using his audiences received notions of truth in order to subvert their wider Weltanschauung."31 Babich is not the only commentator to draw attention to the rhetorical device of aposiopesis. Allison traces the gradual rise of this device in Nietzsche's writing and demonstrates how it served Nietzsche's purpose of undermining metaphysics. But before I analyze Allison's nuanced views on this matter, let me rephrase the topic of this sub-chapter by reiterating that inasmuch as Nietzsche considered metaphysics to have undermined the grounding of human being on earth, we should regard his undermining of metaphysics as a conservational, restorative act — as an act of grounding. Nietzsche according to Allison borrowed aposiopesis from Luther, another great rhetorician, but in typical Nietzschean fashion he directed his own use of the rhetorical device against Luther. The process whereby something is suggested in order to allow the reader to fill in, or "proffered silence," in The Genealogy of Morals "constitute [s] a rhetorically informed agency — ironically so, by drawing upon Luther's own rhetoric — to bring about the demise of the traditional order (of thought and of morality), with its attendant metaphysics."32 In addition to the notion of "proffered silence" as an opportunity for the reader/auditor to "fill in," we also have at 29 30

31 32

Babich, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science, 290. Babich, ibid. She adds that of course the completion of this thought takes place in elaborate unpublished notes and in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but she is correct in pointing out how differently this first published mention of the eternal recurrence affects the reader than subsequent published versions. I will address this difference later in my chapter on gravity. Gemes, "Nietzsche's Critique of Truth," 48-9. David B. Allison, '"Have I Been Understood?'" in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality, 463.

10

I. On Grounding

work in Nietzsche's rhetoric a related motive, as seen in his own lectures on rhetoric: "Sometimes one cites things without going into any further details, because one despairs of being able to do it in a suitable manner, amplification is very effective at this point."33 Related to the device of aposiopesis, but broader in scope and application in the Nietzschean oeuvre is what Allison calls "retrospective inference," basing his phrase on Nietzsche's designations of Riickschluss and Ruckbeziehung. Retrospective inference, in Allison's view, lends coherence to Nietzsche's works beginning with Beyond Good and Evil. Moreover, because it perpetually works and reworks upon the past, "recreating it and us with it," retrospective inference is the posture of re-garding or recasting the world that has turned "world" into a metaphysical indictment, "a place of opprobrium." Nietzsche comes along and ties retrospective inference to the teaching of the eternal recurrence in order to overturn the tradition of earth-denial and bad conscience, in other words, he uses retrospective inference in his own works in a manner parallel with his use of aposiopesis to restore, to regroundwhat millennia of Platonism and Christianity have ungrounded.34 Thus the decibel level of Nietzsche's rhetoric is not the only thing we should be marking, we should also note the falling silent and the shifts in rhetorical strategy. That Nietzsche was himself keenly aware of these shifts and his need of them is dramatically enacted in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Part Two of that book opens with a chapter entitled "The Child With the Mirror," and illustrates how Zarathustra's words and rhetoric have been received by the people. Upon gazing into the mirror presented to him by the innocent child, Zarathustra sees not his own reflection, but the face of a devil. If he is to counter this false reception, if he is to rid his message of the onus that it is merely traditional evil, he will have to invent a new speech to correspond and keep up with his new ways.35 Allison reasons, properly, that Nietzsche realized in the face of Zarathustra's lack of positive reception that "he could no longer freely express his teaching of the Eternal Return in such grandiose and poetic terms." Henceforth Nietzsche would recast his teachings and parse them out in smaller units, with the result that Nietzsche's writings after Zarathustra appear more conventional and are also marked by silence about the grand teachings. In fact, as Allison details, the term "eternal return" is not mentioned once in either Beyond Good and Evil or The Genealogy ofMorab, but it continues to live an active and detailed life in the unpublished notes of the same period and even into 1888.36 Clearly the survival of the doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same 33 34

35

36

Gilman et al, Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, 83. Allison, pp. 464-66. For the record I point out that Allison does not speak of "grounding" nor of an "earth rhetoric" in the manner I do — very few commentators indeed have addressed this aspect of Nietzsche's thought. However, where Allison and a significant core of other critics approach my topic or suggest it, I do indeed make use of their work, and gratefully. Z II/1, KSA 4:106-07: "New ways I walk, a new speech comes to me; Like all creators I became tired of old tongues." Allison, '"Have I Been Understood?'" 467.

1. The Topography of Nietzsche's Rhetoric

11

in Nietzsche's mind, his plans, and his unpublished notes points to the importance of the doctrine for his overall task of regrounding human being and for promulgating a meaning for the earth. Where more audible and visible rhetoric did not serve to get his point across, Nietzsche opted to use more subtle means, and yet, these later manifestations of his rhetoric are still features of the earth-rhetoric, still designed to counter the nihilistic, ungrounding strategies of metaphysics as they have tended over the course of Western history to cast aspersions on the earth. In a manner reminiscent of Salaquarda and Babich, Ansell-Pearson offers that Nietzsche's texts "provide the reader with the space to interpret their pretensions, and to do so in a way that challenges notions of coherence, intelligibility, fixed meaning, and identity, and also with the space to deconstruct the authority which they speak."37 Again let us imagine this encounter between Nietzsche and his readers as one taking place in a topography, in a site. The reader is lured there by Nietzsche's rhetoric, and that rhetoric often surprisingly leads one to an unfamiliar place — this is the effect described by Danto when he refers to Nietzsche's rhetoric as overshooting the mark and spilling over into adjacent conceptual territory. This may be the invitation to deconstruct Nietzsche's authority by temporarily losing, and then regaining one's bearings in this unfamiliar landscape. Nietzsche could not predict the outcome of this encounter in the sense that he could fix, or ascertain, the reader's precise whereabouts in relation to his own thought, claim, or idea. However, by virtue of having opened a space for another, and by virtue of calling to another's mind the existence of uncharted but real tracts of land, his rhetoric has served.

2. The Grounds of Philology and

Hermeneutics

"All science only achieved continuity and constancy when the art of correct reading, that is philology, reached its height." Human, All Too Human I 270

The science, or academic discipline/study that characterizes Nietzsche's grounding efforts throughout his career, whether he is discussing the concerns of the historian, geographer, physicist, psychologist, physiologist, musicologist, philosopher is philology. The essay On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Living-was written during the period in which Nietzsche was still teaching at the University of Basle, but that essay with its innovative and influential views on history is no more the product of a professional philologist, in a strict generic sense, than is the first book The Birth of Tragedy. This is not to suggest that Nietzsche did not remain a philologist during his entire productive life — quite the contrary, the point here is that despite his contributions 37

Keith Ansell-Pearson, "Who is the Übermensch? Time, Truth, and Woman in Nietzsche," Journal of the History of Ideas 53:2 (1992), 330.

12

I. On Grounding

to numerous fields and disciplines, Nietzsche consistently approached his work with the ethos, method and skill of a philologist. Or as Miiller-Lauter succinctly formulates it, Nietzsche uses the philological relation of textual interpretation for explaining fundamental relations to reality.38 Thus when he concludes his foreword to the essay on history he confesses that he is untimely ( unzeitgemdss) and has to be untimely, for such is the classical philologist's lot: "that is, to be effective against one's age and thereby to have an effect on one's age and hopefully on a coming age" (KSA 1:247). The Untimely Meditations of which the essay on history is the second book illustrate the issue of a thinker's position vis-à-vis his contemporaries. If one has an untimely relation to one's own period one has perspective, though admittedly one is also out of step with the times (for better or worse). As a classical philologist Nietzsche of course brought his perspective of antiquity into the modern age, but this perspective means more than the set of knowledge represented by the classics, it means in Nietzsche's case that he attempted to recapture the groundedness of the ancients and to present it to his contemporaries as an urgently needed alternative. In unpublished notes from the period spring-summer 1875 Nietzsche confessed even more candidly that philologists are persons who use the dull feelings of moderns about their own insufficiency in order to earn a living — this he knows, he is a philologist himself (KSA 8:76). Again we see the special relation in which the philologist stands to his time. Moderns feel inadequate, dull, they long for someone or something to bring clarity and direction to their lives, perhaps they are merely bored with themselves and look upon the ancients not only as a past time, but a pastime — in any case, the philologist earns a living by somehow representing the ancient past to jaded moderns. But before we enter too deeply into Nietzsche's implied criticism of the philologist as an uninspired professional who makes his living from the discomfort of the cultural elite, let us consider another note written in very close proximity to the above. Our philologists, he writes, stand in relation to real educators as savage medicine men stand in relation to real physicians. What amazement a distant future generation will have! (KSA 8:84-5) A couple of nuances emerge in this treatment of who and what the philologist is. First there is the idea of education, signaling that the philologist has a special responsibility for the education of the species. Second there is an implied linkage between the educating work of philologists and the healing work of physicians, such that the gap that requires filling is analogous to the difference between savage medicine man and a modern physician. And third, the distance to be traveled from current "medicine man" philologist to the actual educator, healer and physician of the future is great, so great that a future age will marvel at how primitive we are today with respect to education. The special role of philology, which obviously holds enormous, perhaps unimagined potential according to Nietzsche, can only rest 38

Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, Nietzsche-Interpretationen I: Über Werden und Wille zur Macht (Berlin/ New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999), 71.

2. The Grounds of Philology and Hermeneutics

13

on the nature of philology itself, and certainly not on the narrow shoulders o f philologists who do their work in order to earn a living — it is necessary to inquire why philology would be capable o f making a difference in the lives of human beings. A clue to this pivotal role of philology for living is found in The Antichrist, where Nietzsche makes his starkest juxtaposition of the values represented by antiquity and Christianity, the latter being more or less synonymous with modernity. Was antiquity for nothing? he asks. W h y did we have these Greeks, these Romans? They gave us learning and culture, scientific method, and the incomparable art of reading well — but to what end? (A 59; KSA 6:247). Nietzsche's tone in this context and in this entire work is one of near despair, and certainly deep regret, at the collapse of antiquity's foundation as it occurred in ancient times and continues to occur in the present. T h e loss and decline of the art of reading well is the loss of philology, and more is at stake here than literature. Much earlier than 1888, in notes from the end of 1880 and so long before Nietzsche entertained the idea of pitting antiquity against modernity or Dionysus against Christ, Nietzsche commented in praise of philology that it represented the study of honesty, and antiquity perished from the decline o f philology (KSA 9:261). We will have a better understanding of why Nietzsche ascribes supreme importance to the virtue of honesty once we examine in detail the relationship between honesty and affirmation, as we shall have occasion to do in connection with the eternal recurrence of the same and the Dionysian. The humble work o f philologists is described as laborious and unclean, but philologists are motivated by a noble belief that the few who will come in the future, for whom they toil, will be deserving of this effort (GS 102, KSA 3:459.) At this point the grounding role of philologists is evident, for they do not so much guide the counsels of the day or wield power in the present as they instead lay the groundwork for a future elite who has need of their preparations. Nietzsche is not thinking of widespread literacy campaigns or similar strategies reflecting democratic efforts to bring literacy and more generally education to the masses — such campaigns could conceivably benefit a select few of the future, but the philological spirit Nietzsche envisions appears destined for more. Over and beyond the mere skill of reading, of gaining access to newsprint, books and the like, there is urgent insistence upon "reading well" and upon what Nietzsche calls honest, correct interpretation. To illustrate this point Nietzsche takes theologians to task for their incapacity for philology, which he once again defines as the art of reading well, that is to say, reading facts without falsifying them through interpretation, without losing caution, and maintaining refinement in the desire to understand (A 52, KSA 6:233). The earth could have millions of theologians, theoretically, and never realize the manner of reading that Nietzsche ascribes to philology, yet one could well grant that the millions of theologians and their billions of followers would all be quite capable of reading, i.e., they would be literate. The grounding work or effect of philology is not measured by the number of people who read, but by the attention that is given to the text and the honesty with which the text is approached.

14

I. On Grounding Nietzsche comes closer to linking the philological sense with living per se in an aph-

orism entitled "As interpreters o f our experience." O n e kind o f honesty is lacking in all religious founders and their like, viz., they do not make their experiences a matter o f conscience for their knowledge. B u t "we others" he continues, we who are thirsty for reason want our experiences like a scientific experiment, with constant monitoring and observation, we even want to be our own experiments and guinea pigs (GS 3 1 9 , K S A 3 : 5 5 0 - 1 ) . T h e failure to subject one's experiences to the test o f knowledge, to the standards o f conscience that prevail for knowing versus say faith, results in wrong or false interpretation. I f a person cannot accurately or adequately interpret her own experiences, that is, cannot apply herself properly, soberly to analyzing the substance and concerns closest to her, there is little chance that such a person would be a skilled interpreter o f things further away from the s e l f — things like texts, phenomena, events etc. O n matters o f interpretation it has long been acknowledged in Nietzsche scholarship that, as Jaspers claims, Nietzsche does not reject all interpretation but "instead a quite specific principle o f interpretation. Interpretations are not equally valid, rather one takes primacy over the other." 3 9 As flawed and vacillating as we humans are in matters o f judging, evaluating, interpreting, still Nietzsche insists on a ground, o f sorts, which can serve as the basis for skilled reading, for correct interpretation (by which is not meant "infallible" or "absolute" interpretation). Interpretation is not so much a matter o f choice as c o m m o n notions would suggest, and in the following discussion o f approaches by Müller-Lauter and Günther Abel, I will attempt to establish what constitutes the groundedness o f interpretation. Müller-Lauter elevates interpretation to the highest activity when he ascribes it to the philosopher as "ruler o f the world" ("Herr der "Welt"), who must continue to engage in interpretation without succumbing to the blindness, or paralysis, that everything is "merely" interpretation — the philosopher in Nietzsche's ecumenical, elevated sense must always see literally through interpretation, but also seefiguratively through interpretation, i.e., not be deceived by it. 4 0 T h i s difficulty, or apparent contradiction, Müller-Lauter likens to the problem o f the eternal recurrence o f the same, whose cosmological validity is premised on the finiteness o f energy overall, but the infiniteness o f combinations o f energy. There can be infinite interpretations, according to Nietzsche, and Müller-Lauter draws a comparison between them and the infinite combinations o f energy called for by eternal recurrence. 41 In both cases, a finite set

40

Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche: Einfuhrung in das Verständnis seines Philosophirens, 3rd. ed. (Berlin: Walter deGruyter, 1950), 319. Müller-Lauter, Nietzsche-Interpretationen I, 76. He does not use the "see through" word play, but I emphasize this usage because it seems to apdy illustrate what is stake. When we say in English "I see through you" or "I see through your actions," we indicate that the person has not deceived us, we have "seen through" her as though she were transparent. When we say "I wish you could see this through my eyes," on the other hand, we are transferring our capacity to see clearly to someone else, in the hope that another person would be able to see as we see.

2. The Grounds of Philology and Hermeneutics

15

(matter, energy, reality) is the ground, but the combinations arising from this ground, whether combinations of energy across vast stretches of time, or interpretations of reality across human history or for that matter in the course of the entire universe and its contents/inhabitants, are infinite. The human's place or position within the metabolism of interpretation is determined by the will to power, ultimately, because the will to power is at its ground the activity of interpretation. This notion becomes clearer when we bring in Abel's nuanced views on interpretation. For Nietzsche interpretation becomes completely integrated into the "fundamental event of overpowering and self-overcoming" (Grundvorgang der Ubermachtigung und Selbst-Uberwindung), thus interpretation "belongs inseparably and analytically to the character and execution of every occurrence." It is not as though there were a something that acts and also interprets, but instead, "each interpreting is an overpowering" in itself, premised not on the realm of human consciousness but instead upon a "continuous interpreting that characterizes the organic process.42 What Abel refers to as the "interpretation-scheme" is so basic that no thinking takes places without it, nor does it represent a step in the direction of the objective truth we consider possible; instead, the interpretation-scheme is merely a step into "interpretivity as such. That is the point." 43 Anticipating the criticism that this view smacks of relativism, Abel reminds us that relativism loses its meaning due to the fact that "the positive achievement of interpreting operates from the outset on a ground beyond the dualism of scheme and reality."44 Again, we must know what we see through, literally, when we focus our gaze or interpretive ability upon something: we see through (with, by means of) our eyes, and to see through the eyes is to see through the eyes of interpretation. We figuratively "see through" insofar as we remain cognizant of the interpreted character of the object under scrutiny, be it a landscape or a text, i.e., we are not deceived into thinking that what we see is anything more than our fundamental and ineluctable drive, as an organism, to master or overpower. The consequences of this grounding function of interpretation are wide ranging, and cannot be limited to academic or theoretical status. For as Abel persuasively argues, once interpretation is conceived of as the basic occurrence (Grundgeschehen), traditional Western concepts lose their central position — subject, thing, substance, number, objectivity, certainty, cause, effect, goal, purpose, regularity (laws of nature), self-preservation, self-reflection as well as the epistemologically and behaviorally driven 41 42

43 44

Müller-Lauter, Nietzsche-Interpretationen I, 56. Günter Abel, Die Dynamik der Willen zur Macht und die ewige Wiederkehr (Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1984), 141. Abel, Die Dynamik, 145. Abel, Die Dynamik, 152. He is discussing the aphorism "Our new 'infinity'" (Gay Science # 374) as does Müller-Lauter, who links infinite interpretations with infinite energy combinations; I see both these efforts as focusing on the finite, the grounded, and thereby imparting to Nietzsche scholarship a much needed measure and proportion.

16

I. On Grounding

motives of pleasure/displeasure, happiness, free will — these all cease to be dominant. But this shift does not imply the falseness or incorrectness of the decentralized concepts, which after all held sway at different times and in different degrees. Instead, what is at stake is "events of demagnification [Depotenzierung]. The old contents, strongly believed to be true previously, lose their position as ruling ideas, they sacrifice their interpretational capacity and are replaced by other interpretations, re-interpreted, re-valuated." 45 What matters in this process is not what is "right' or "true," but what works at any given time, what rules at any given time, or as Abel characterizes it, what has "interpretational capacity." Now when we return to the role of philology in human history, we are in a better position to appreciate why Nietzsche elevates this science. What philology has given us over the centuries can scarcely be appreciated in our time, for the modern period bristles with readers and interpreters and yet, Nietzsche is inspired to ask "all for naught?" in connection with the legacy of antiquity. Establishing and preserving the integrity of a text, along with the explanation of the text, was practiced for centuries in a guild and finally enabled us to find correct methods. The entire Middle Ages was profoundly incapable of a strict philological explanation, i.e., of a simply wanting to understand what the author says: "it was something, finding these methods, let no one underestimate it! All science only achieved continuity and constancy when the art of correct reading, that is philology, reached its height" (HH 1/270, KSA 2:223). 46 The unmistakable linkage of philology with correct method and with the rise of the scientific spirit marks Nietzsche as a thinker grounded in history and concerned with maintaining a grounding. Science is a fertile and transforming concept in Nietzsche's writing, and it is one for which the philosopher kept a profound respect right up to the final year of his productivity, when even science began to be questioned as a ground. 47 Nietzsche's readings in science began early and not surprisingly his philological training allowed him "to see the metaphorical, interpretive,

46

47

Abel, Die Dynamik, 153- Of interest to me is the terminology Abel uses in naming his chapter and sub-chapter: chapter VI is called "Interpretation als Fundamentalvorgang" (Interpretation as Fundamental Event) and a sub-chapter therein is called "Um-Interpretation als Grundgeschehen" (ReInterpretation as Fundamental [grounding] Occurrence." N. would have agreed with his predecessor Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) that philology is disruptive of religion and has the effect of undermining faith. Where N. would clearly disagree with Novalis is in his overall assessment of philology and the spirit of philology in modern times. Novalis shows nostalgia for the pre-philological era of the Middle Ages, true to his Romantic inclinations, and he justifiably points to Luther as a pivotal figure for supplanting the priest with the philologist. N. would argue that Luther contributed to a wholesale decline and perhaps even the ruin of philology, inasmuch as Luther introduced his "bad philology" to a broad audience and spawned an entire movement of bad philology. See Adrian Del Caro, "Notes concerning Nietzsche and Novalis," Germanic Notes 12/2 (1981), 22-4. By 1888, when there are signs of mental stress in the writings, N. began to cut himself off from virtually everyone and everything that had been previously solid to him, including science and of all persons, Goethe, whom he admired above most others. This should not detract from the reality that N. conducted his inquiries in a scientific manner, though of course he expanded the borders of science.

2. The Grounds of Philology and Hermeneutics

17

constructive character of the language of the sciences,48 which resulted in the fortuitous lifelong combination of interest in the sciences themselves and in enhancing scientific interpretation through philological principles. Lampert addresses the relevance of science to Nietzsche's grounding project when he writes that "Nietzschean science, joyous science, attempts to train the heart to delight in the earth as illuminated by intellect, to be loyal to the earth as a haven of life that has appeared and will perish with the deep and mysterious immensities of space and time." 49 Captured in Lampert's formulation is the grounding in history, to which Nietzsche frequently alludes in his discussions of the ancients, and the attending fleeting nature of our species and its achievements, also called to mind whenever Nietzsche makes comparisons between moderns and ancients (usually at the expense of moderns). What Lampert also succeeds in articulating here is that the earth is the ground for Nietzsche, a ground that should be dwelled upon joyously, delightfully, faithfully, in the spirit of Nietzschean science. In order to better understand where and how Nietzschean science differs from traditional models of science, Lampert describes the displacement of physics as the scientific paradigm: "And this is not arbitrary, a result of some accident of Nietzsche's aptitudes or the classes he liked as a boy: philology supplants physics because the mechanistic world view inadequately accounts for the richness of the phenomena."50 Though I agree with Lampert that philology displaces physics as the paradigm science for Nietzsche, I hasten to add that Nietzsche continued to approach his favorite problems of philosophy with a physicist's eye, as befits a thinker who is extraordinary in his ability to champion life- and earth-affirmation by endeavoring to help us see what is there, help us to avoid the errors of beyond-looking and double-looking that plague us as a species. The Gay Science earns a great deal of exegesis in Lampert's book, and not without grounds. It is here that Nietzsche more methodically and successfully than anywhere in his writings criticizes scientists for creating and sustaining a science of modern technological comfort, of comfortable self-preservation.51 Book five of The Gay 48

49

50 51

George J. Stack, "Nietzsche and Boscovich's Natural Philosophy," Pacific Philosophical QuarterlyGl (1981), 77. See also Miiller-Lauter for good discussions of N.s readings in physics, medicine, the natural sciences, and his special debt to the anatomist Wilhelm Roux (Nietzsche-Interpretationen I, 97, 100-02, 105-40). Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche and Modern Times: A Study of Bacon, Descartes, and Nietzsche (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 6-7. Lampert, Nietzsche, 302. The co-editor of the Kritische Gesamtausgabe and Kritische Studienausgabe of N.s works, Giorgio Colli, calls The Gay Science N.s "most successful attempt at philosophical communication," though he regards the fifth book appended to the second edition as failing to capture the expressive highpoint of harmony and balance of the first edition. See Colli's "Nachwort" (Afterword) in KSA 3: 660, 63. See also, especially for insightful considerations on the meaning of "science" in relation to N.s writings the introduction by Bernard Williams to Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science. With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, edited by Bernard Williams, translated by Josefine Nauckhoff, poems translated by Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. x-xii, xiv.

18

I. O n Grounding

Science, added to the original 1882 text in 1887, according to Lampert revisits the problem of self-preservation that Nietzsche had critiqued earlier in the essay The Use and Disadvantage of History for Living: "it sets out, if still only fragmentarily, a new ideal as the ground of a new social order, a new ideal of loyalty to the earth that aims to ground the human community on the affirmation of nature." 52 It was not the case that Nietzsche turned against science and the methods of science, however, like his contemporary and powerful influence Emerson, Nietzsche sought "to develop an aesthetically imbued philosophical interpretation of reality that would acknowledge the value and power of scientific knowledge, but not surrender to its domination of culture."53 What science could be according to Nietzsche begins to resemble what philology could be, namely, a new manner of dwelling on the earth in groundedness and affirmation, something that has eluded the grasp of technology thus far. The shift in Nietzsche from physics to philology is also treated by George Stack, whose study of Nietzsche and Boscovich reveals how closely Nietzsche studied the works of physicists and in particular Boscovich. Physicists do not see the implications of their conception of dynamic forces, according to Nietzsche, for they leave unspoken that human beings are not an exception to their general theory and that their interpretation of the "internal" structure of "reality" entails a universal perspectivalism.54 In other words, Nietzsche faults physicists for not taking into account the philological dimension of science. Stack asks, properly, why Nietzsche did not simply stop when he had a monistic metaphysics, why he did not accept that a denatured force, power or energy is the ultimate reality, claiming instead that there is a pervasive will to power. Once again philology is the reason Nietzsche takes his next step, because philology as interpretation is a basic, ineluctable human drive. Though fallible and ultimately resulting in a kind of fiction if we forego the possibility of Truth, Nietzsche errs in the direction of finding the fiction that best corresponds to our human drives.55 An analogy can be drawn between Nietzsche's enhancement of physics through philology and his critique of dialecticians, who, as Deleuze asserts, do not advance further than conceptions of universal and particular. " [T]hey were prisoners of symptoms and did not reach the forces or the will which give to these sense and value. They moved within the limits of the question 'What is...?', the contradictory question par excellence. Nietzsche creates his own method: dramatic, typological and differential. He turns philosophy into an art, the art of interpreting and evaluating."56 52 53

54 55 5(5

Lampert, Nietzsche, 302. George J. Stack, Nietzsche and Emerson: An Elective Affinity (Athens, O H : Ohio State University Press, 1992), 15. Stack, "Nietzsche and Boscovich's Natural Philosophy," 74. Stack, "Nietzsche and Boscovich," 75. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, translated by Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 197.

2. The Grounds of Philology and Hermeneutics

19

Deleuze has given us a useful and cogent definition of philology as Nietzsche applied it, and Deleuze also sees the hermeneutic/evaluative aspect of philology at work in the will to power, which at first glance appears to be unattached or ungrounded from Nietzsche's otherwise clearly grounded, i.e., antimetaphysical thought. Commentators are not in perfect agreement on whether Nietzsche's will to power constitutes a metaphysics, and the question is beyond the scope of my immediate context; however, inasmuch as I am arguing in this book that Nietzschean grounding has metaphysics as its biggest obstacle, my own view on the matter is that any doctrine, notion or view that successfully challenges and thwarts metaphysics can be properly regarded as a grounding force, and as such deserves attention whether or not it is a metaphysics. 57 In an early aphorism entitled "Origin of faith" Nietzsche concluded with the sentence: "Habituation of spiritual principles ( Grundsätze ) without grounds (Gründe) is called faith" ( H H 1/226, KSA 2:190). I provide the German in order to demonstrate that whenever possible, Nietzsche drew on the Germanic Grund in his discussions of grounding, even though he was keenly aware of Greek and Latin alternatives and could have used them. So for example Nietzsche's translator (say Hollingdale) could have chosen to use English "grounds" for German "Gründe," but chose instead to use "reasons," which is also correct though not exactly in the spirit of Nietzsche's etymological nuance. 58 Grundsätze, literally "grounding propositions" but idiomatically "principles," unfortunately has no comparable etymology in English. W h a t one becomes accustomed to or adopts as a habit based on faith versus grounds, cannot by definition be grounded, whether or not it is a principle. Based on this example, living with grounds or reasons is living with foundation, with something that provides a base and support. Living without grounds is simply acquiring habits, living by faith, living groundlessly. A similar usage is involved in English "grounds for dismissal," whereby "grounds" equals "reasons" and moreover good, solid reasons. Even the words "founded" and "unfounded" preserve some of the strength of grounded and ungrounded as I use them. In German "unfounded" is

57

58

Gemes (1992) argues that N. did not desire "to be permanently rid of ¿//metaphysics," since he ackowledges deception, lying, and approves of metaphysics for certain people (57); Clark (1990) claims that the will to power "belongs to psychology rather than to metaphysics or cosmology" (15-16); Moore asserts confidendy that the will to power is "conspicuously metaphysical in character" and his "anthropomorphic vision of a world permeated by spirit and will" is "strikingly reminiscent" of pan-animism in Leibniz and "its derivatives in German Naturphilosophie" (43). The 1986 Cambridge University Press edition of Human, all Too Human translated by R. J. Hollingdale is the best English-language edition of that work, and my rare corrections or criticism of Hollingdale's work merely attest to the fact that translating is notoriously difficult, controversial, and thankless work. And though I use my own translations from German, I find the Hollingdale translation generally reliable and highly useful. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Introduction by Erich Heller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 108-9.

20

I. O n Grounding

unbegründet 01 grundlos, participle and adjective respectively, and Nietzsche availed himself whenever possible of German expressions based on ground. T h e aphorism immediately following the above bears a title and a context even more deeply entrenched in the noun Grund, and its translation into English deserves close attention. "Aus den Folgen auf Grund und Ungrund zurückgeschlossen" becomes "Reasons judged a posteriori on the basis of consequences," 5 9 which I would render as roughly "grounds and ungrounds retroactively concluded (traced back to?) from consequences." Nietzsche uses Grund twice already in the title, and in the body of this "aphorism" of 30 lines a variation of Grund occurs six more times (Gründe, Gründen, Gründen, Begründetheit, Grundsätze, Grundsätze). Because the previous discussion in number 226 had set up the analysis of Grund in the context of grounds versus no grounds in the formation of principles, readers have to attempt to maintain this tone and context despite the difficulties of translation. The passage is worth the extra effort because it reveals firsthand not only what Nietzsche is capable of achieving in terms of philological grounding, but also how he goes about it. T h e states and social institutions such as marriage, education, law have their strength and duration according to Nietzsche by the faith that fettered spirits have in them, "hence in the absence of grounds, or at least in fending off questioning about grounds." This is the first stage of his argument; customs, institutions etc assert themselves and their right to exist based on absence of and avoidance of grounds. Christianity, for example, tells us we will reap the rewards of faith, and it passionately repulses the desire for grounds, for reasons, and so too speaks the state, and even a father when we are told to simply do something, we will later on see that it is good. "But this means that out of the personal utility borne by an opinion its truth is supposed to be demonstrated; the conduciveness of a teaching is supposed to guarantee its intellectual certainty and groundedness." This second stage of the argument embodies the retroactive concluding based on ground or unground, reason or lack of reason {Grund und Ungrund). Fettered spirits, as opposed to free spirits, have their principles out of utility, for and to their own advantage, and so they suspect that free spirits too seek their own advantage with their views, and likewise regard as true whatever suits them ( H H 1/227, K S A 2:191). The fettered spirits therefore introduce the charge of relativity, of unfounded or ungrounded, whereas in actuality Nietzsche wants principles to be grounded, to be concluded from grounds, not from faith or from consequences or utility. All of which amounts to saying that the opposite of faith is not ungroundedness, unfoundedness, but groundedness, grounding, and foundedness. We must not underestimate this kind of analysis in Nietzsche's texts, which in this case is found in the early work Human, All Too Human and therefore too often

59

See the Hollingdale translation p. 109.

2. The Grounds of Philology and Hermeneutics

21

dismissed as unimportant. Often his philological groundings are ignored in favor of the rhetorically more pleasing, sexier, and higher flying Nietzsche — such is the problem of reading Nietzsche. One can ignore at one's own risk passages such as those analyzed immediately above, with their detailed philological assertions and insights, and one cannot ignore (nor help but notice) the rhetorical passages where he seizes his readers by the scruff and fascinates with a rhetoric of striking difference, sharp points and quick style. In the latter case one has to ground Nietzsche's rhetoric, because he does have a point and the point must not be lost in the style; in the former case, one has to bear down and sort out the etymologies, the semantics, and patiently pace oneself with him, lest one underestimate and overlook the gravity of the grounding labor. Misunderstanding and false interpretation, moreover "over-interpretation" are powerful forces within human beings. Nietzsche claimed that one of the greatest effects of those we call geniuses and saints is the skill to compel interpreters who misunderstand them for the welfare of humanity (HH 1/122, KSA 2:140). The mediators of genius are thus poor interpreters, poor philologists but their imperfect efforts still serve as a boon. Less benevolent are those who provide profound explanations were profundity is not present. Whoever explains an author's passage "more deeply" than it was intended has not explained the author, but instead has obscured him. And so it is with metaphysicians vis-à-vis nature, even worse, for they rig the text and ruin it (HH II/2 37, KSA 2: 551-2). Based on this example the tendency of metaphysicians is to make nature more profound, more complicated than it is for the purpose of spinning off profound interpretations, which in turn will prove compelling to followers, it is assumed. Metaphysicians are the bad philologists who falsify nature by falsifying the text of nature, by veering into poetry when they should be doing philosophy.60 Several years later in Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche formulates the task of new philosophers, Dionysian philosophers, and free spirits in philological terms. There is a commanding something that the people call "the spirit," and this something wants to be ruler in and around itself and it wants to feel like a ruler. Free spirits, meanwhile, should be praised for their "extravagant honesty" instead of being called cruel, but modern language is used to lie, to devise glittering ideals, to spread gold dust over unconscious humanity. But beneath this flattering color and make-up is "the terrible basic text ( Grundtexi) homo natural The task of philosophers is to translate human back into nature, master the interpretations and connotations that have been scribbled over the eternal Grundtext homo natura, make it so that humans stand before their own nature as they stand before the rest of nature, intrepidly, not seduced by the flattery of metaphysics. This may be an insane task, but it remains a task (BGE

60

Gregory Schufreider, "The Metaphysician as Poet-Magician," Metaphilosophy 10 (1979), 265-88.

22

I. O n Grounding

230, KSA 5:167-69).61 The spirit rules, it wants to rule according to Nietzsche, but in the absence of careful philology applied to humans and the rest of nature, such "ruling" will be overlooked in favor of idealistic sentimentalities. Nietzsche refers in this passage to the basic text of homo natura as being terrible (schrecklich), and I find it interesting that Walter Kaufmann omits precisely this qualifier "terrible" in his translation.62 Nietzsche's term for the grounded human being is homo natura, and the grounding text, the basic text of this human is terrible. Does Nietzsche intend to frighten off any possible philologists of the human condition by using such a qualifier? Is he truly convinced that, because at bottom human nature is not the idealistic gold dust we use to appease our species' vanity, it must therefore be "terrible" instead? And in drawing an analogy between standing intrepidly before nature and learning to stand intrepidly before human nature, is he not ultimately suggesting that as we have learned, or are learning, to live with nature, which must be "terrible" at least as often as it is perceived to be mild, peaceful, forgiving etc, could we not get about the task of learning to live with ourselves in nature? And what about honesty in the pursuit of interpreting the basic text of homo natura? Honesty and philology go hand in hand, according to Nietzsche; with honesty our species can hope to establish its text.

3. The Dionysian Used as a Ground " . . . perhaps nothing has ever been done o u t of an equal abundance of strength. M y concept 'Dionysian' here became supreme deed. . . ." Ecce Homo 916

In his first book The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche was not yet a grounding thinker, but he had most of the ingredients necessary for the kind of grounding work he would begin almost immediately after. I say he was not a grounding thinker because The Birth of Tragedy is a Romantic celebration of metaphysics, and metaphysics have the effect generally of undermining ground and groundedness. Still, Nietzsche had 61

Often N.'s word "task" [Aufgabe] applies to several related facets of his late thought, and one wonders at times what this task or work could be. For a detailed and persuasive treatment of the "task" problem, one that intends to render irrelevant the question "is Thus Spoke Zarathustra philosophy or literature?", Magnus et al are helpful. Their treatment has Nietzsche "finding his way back to the world" after Zarathustra, thereby externalizing his concluding stance from Zarathustra and helping "to explain Nietzsche's importance for his critical heirs." See Bernd Magnus, Jean-Pierre Mileur, Stanley Stewart, "Reading Ascetic Reading: Toward the Genealogy of Morals and the Path Back to the World" in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality, 377.

62

Walter Kaufmann, editor and translator, The Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), 351. See also Adrian Del Caro, "The Hermeneutics of Idealism: Nietzsche Versus the French Revolution," Nietzsche-Studien 22 (1993), 162 and my Nietzsche Contra Nietzsche: Creativity and the Anti-Romantic (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 218-22.

3. The Dionysian Used as a Ground

23

grounding tendencies in his elaboration of the two opposing but mutually enhancing art deities Apollo and Dionysus. These deities elevated and hypostatized into basic principles of human nature, with their attending qualities of suffering, transfiguration, and will (borrowed from Schopenhauer) would later resurface in Nietzsche to serve as the bedrock for his critique of metaphysics. For the time being I will focus only on the grounding tendencies of the Dionysian, saving for later a more detailed treatment of the Dionysian as it became associated with new philosophizing. The brother Titans Prometheus and Atlas are both carriers, bearers of sorts, according to Nietzsche: "This Titanic impulse to become as it were the Atlas of all individuals and to bear them higher and higher, further and further on one's broad back is something in common between the Promethean and the Dionysian" (BT 9, KSA 1: 70-1). Atlas who bears the earth on his shoulders can be interpreted as a ground, as an extension of the earth, and Dionysus who dissolves individuality and represents the primal unity (nature) can be said to be carrying individuals in and on himself. In the Dionysian state individuals do not carry their own weight, indeed they are unaware of themselves as individuals, and instead they are borne along. But Nietzsche is also speaking symbolically of Prometheus as the uplifter and hero of humans, as the creator whose transgression against the gods in behalf of humans (sharing fire with them) caused him to be punished by the gods. In 1872 while he was still very much under the influence of Richard Wagner and that man's anti-Semitic views, Nietzsche made a point of juxtaposing the Promethean, masculine, aryan (sic) concept of sacrilege with the feminine, Semitic concept of sin; Prometheus knowingly, actively and courageously broke with the other gods to become the benefactor of humans, and so his crime deserves the designation "sacrilege." Adam and Eve, meanwhile, are representative of a passive incurring of guilt, their deed is out of ignorance and is no great boon for humankind (BT 9, KSA 6970). Nietzsche would soon cease to use Wagnerian rhetoric and innuendo, but he would never lose sight of the concept of sin, nor would be recant on the passive, utterly negative properties of sin as a manifestation of unhealthy metaphysics. According to Kreis Nietzsche was still concerned with these dueling notions of origin right up to the end of his career, as can be seen in the words that conclude Ecce Homo: "Have I been understood? Dionysus versus the Crucified" (EH 14/9, KSA 6:374). 6 3 Dionysus, in Nietzsche's latest writings, represents the alternative to metaphysics, indeed the alternative to Christ. At the conclusion of Birth of Tragedy the foundation (Fundament) of all existence, the Dionysian basic ground (Untergrund) of the world is said to enter an individual's consciousness only to the degree that the individual has Apollinian power of transfiguration sufficient to overcome the Dionysian (BT 25, KSA 1:155). In his late thought the Dionysian once again becomes the foundation, the ground, but without 63

Rudolf Kreis, Nietzsche, Wagner und die Juden (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1995), 36.

24

I. On Grounding

the artistic metaphysics of the early Romantic Nietzsche. Yet another way in which the Dionysian grounds Nietzsche is suggested by Colli, who argues that behind the doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same, and behind the Greek god of tragedy, Dionysus, stand the ancient Greeks themselves, real human beings from whom Nietzsche learned to say yes, real human beings who gave meaning and fullness to life (KSA 4:416). It must not be overlooked that however differently Nietzsche regarded Dionysus, that god was indeed a major factor in the lives of the ancients and these ancients inhabited this earth. Greece preoccupies Nietzsche again toward the end of his career because, according to Colli, there the highest wisdom ever manifested on earth was dependent neither on writing nor on words, but on the Dionysian; Nietzsche deepens the concept beyond its initial orgiastic and exalted elements, but the Dionysian is not his invention (KSA 11:721). Indeed Colli goes a step further in maintaining that Nietzsche represents a successful recapturing and recommunication of Dionysian wisdom. The immediacy ( U n m i t telbarkeit) of the Dionysian need not be inaccessible mystical experience, for Thus Spoke Zarathustra shows a crowded multiplicity of moments of immediacy, whereas mystical philosophers normally experience a single indescribable moment. All human beings have access to Dionysian immediacy, and in all human beings there are nascent expressive forms and direct reflections of the Dionysian "primal ground" ( U r g r u n d ) . What most frequently transpires, however, is that the original capacity for immediacy and its forms of expression are forgotten, wiped out, abandoned in favor of abstract forms of expression. In Colli's appraisal of the esoteric/exoteric problem of Zarathustra being "a book for all and none," Nietzsche succeeded in creating an upheaval of philosophical representation. He was bent upon elevating philosophy to an exoteric plane, freeing it of technicality, elitism without resonance, and ridicule (KSA 4:414). For Colli Zarathustra is an extraordinary work directly reflecting and communicating the Dionysian essence, and it remains harmoniously bound within the whole of Nietzsche's writing as seen in the "underground coherence" with The Birth of Tragedy (KSA 4:413). Of course we must remember that the name "Dionysus" is barely mentioned by Nietzsche in any published writings after Birth of Tragedy, not at least until Beyond Good and Evil in 1886, and it is certainly not mentioned in Zarathustra. The point that Colli and other commentators make is that the Dionysian becomes Nietzsche's living and lived achievement, a sort of ground of fecund and powerful inspiration. Among the scholars who see a linkage between The Birth of Tragedy and the later concepts is Schacht. For him, the early unity of the Apollinian and Dionysian becomes overman and will to power,64 both of which are announced and elaborated in Zarathustra. It is not entirely clear, however, how much of the Dionysian presence of Zarathustra is deliberate, and how much is the Dionysian undercurrent interrupting 64

Richard Schacht, Nietzsche (London: Roudedge & Kegan Paul, 1985), 482.

3. The Dionysian Used as a Ground

25

Nietzsche at various moments, as implied in Colli's remarks. Clearly where Nietzsche introduced the dithyrambs of Part IV and other similar dithyrambic passages, such as those containing female personifications of life, the soul, the eternal recurrence etc, Nietzsche had Ariadne in mind as the Dionysian companion, so the presence of the Dionysian is signaled through her. But at other times one is simply not sure whether Nietzsche planned for the Dionysian. Conway speaks of the Apollinian "dominant text" deriving its authority solely from Zarathustra's own, while the subtext "comprises a Dionysian attack on Zarathustra's model of selfunderstanding." 65 Conway also refers to the Dionysian subtext as "erupting" in the sections entitled "Tomb Song" and "Night Song." 66 His view of a struggle between the Apollinian, individuated Nietzsche and Dionysus is supported by Lampert who refers to Part I of Zarathustra as Apollinian, while the later parts are Dionysian. 67 Lampert also points out that The Gay Science aphorism number 342 is the first published mention of Zarathustra, and at this point in his text Nietzsche writes: "incipit tragoedia," i.e., the tragedy begins. Inasmuch as Zarathustra concludes with the dithyrambs of Dionysus, these represent an anticipation of the return of the god of tragedy.68 This observation is also made by De Bleeckere, who goes one step further and claims that Nietzsche wants to indicate that Zarathustra and tragedy are identical; however, The Birth of Tragedy failed as "incipit tragoedia" because it remained in the realm of metaphysics.69 Ironically therefore, Nietzsche's first and concerted effort to revitalize modern culture on the basis of a Dionysian renaissance failed despite the prominence of the Dionysian, but it failed for at least two good reasons. First, The Birth of Tragedy is unmistakably a return to metaphysics in the tradition of Romanticism, while metaphysics cannot serve as a proper ground for the ills of modern culture and society, which suffer as Nietzsche well knew from a lack of groundedness. Secondly, The Birth of Tragedy is an aesthetic manifesto tied closely to the cause and person of Richard Wagner, i.e., it is a contrived, artificial book, though not without brilliance and in some dimensions truly Nietzsche's own. However, inasmuch as he tried too hard on behalf of his theory and his mentor, The Birth of Tragedy does not emanate from the Dionysian ground that characterizes the later Nietzsche. In his "autobiography" Ecce Homo Nietzsche made extravagant claims regarding the greatness of his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and most often these claims are 65

Daniel W. Conway, "Nietzsche contra Nietzsche: The Deconstruction of Zarathustra" in Nietzsche as Postmodernist: Essays Pro and Contra, edited by Clayton Koelb (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 97. Conway, "Nietzsche contra Nietzsche," 100. 67 Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche's Teaching: An Interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 82. 68 Lampert, Nietzsche's Teaching, 231. ® Sylvain De Bleeckere, '"Also sprach Zarathustra': Die Neugestaltung der 'Geburt der Tragödie,'" Nietzsche-Studien 8 (1979), 270-71.

26

I. On Grounding

dismissed as signs of dementia or some other mental disorder. There is value in Ecce Homo however if we carefully sift through the assertions, the bravado, and the truths it undoubtedly contains. For instance, Nietzsche describes how difficult it must be for people in his day to comprehend the kind of inspiration that seized him during the writing of Zarathustra (EH 9/3, KSA 6:339); in this book, written out of a historically unprecedented superabundance of strength, his "concept 'Dionysian' became supreme deed"-, human being, he continued, "is overcome in each moment" as his concept '"superhuman (Ubermensch) became supreme reality" (KSA 6:343, 344). Krell summarizes these comments and concludes that Nietzsche made them "because Zarathustra was not only about Dionysus but, as Nietzsche's analysis of inspiration indicates, of Dionysus."70 If The Birth of Tragedy had been not only about Dionysus, but "of" Dionysus in the manner described by Krell, it too would have been a Dionysian, grounded work. We have already had occasion to consider the words of Carl Jung in connection with Nietzsche's rhetoric; Jung challenges Nietzsche's propensity for yea-saying and plays devil's advocate — let us see what kind of life this yea-sayer led, in order to draw our own conclusions — and Jung concluded that Nietzsche could barely hang on to his uplifted and uplifting spirit, that he was always a mere step away from collapse and ultimately a sick personality. Jung speaks a bit differently in regard to the Dionysian, however, and this may indicate that Jung takes the Dionysian seriously as an archetype, or it may simply indicate that he vacillated on whether Nietzsche was a pathological specimen. In any case, Jung informs us that Nietzsche had been aesthetically affected when he wrote The Birth of Tragedy and "became a Dionysian only at the time of writing Zarathustrar Aestheticism is a noble surrogate, he maintains, but it is merely a substitute image in place of the missing genuine; Nietzsche's later "conversion" to Dionysus shows better than anything else that the aesthetic surrogate did not last.71 Jung gives us something to ponder with these words. If the aesthetic Dionysus of the early Romantic Nietzsche had been affectation, as I and others have concluded, then a real or genuine Dionysus or Dionysian72 emerges for purposes of comparison only when Nietzsche emerges from his aesthetic affectation bearing visible traces of Dionysianism. The "Dionysian" in Nietzsche's day and in ours is nothing, means nothing unless we grant it "reality" in aesthetic form, or as a historical-cultural relic of Greek mythology. On the other hand, if we have evidence of a Dionysian that is neither aesthetics nor aesthetic affectation, as in the case 70

71 72

David Farrell Krell, Postponements: Woman, Sensuality, and Death in Nietzsche (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), ix. Carl Jung, Psychologische Typen, 9th ed. (Zürich: Rascher, 1960), 150-51. For a detailed treatment of what is meant by "the Dionysian" see Adrian Del Caro, "Nietzschean self-transformation and the transformation of the Dionysian" in Nietzsche, Philosophy and the Arts. Edited by Salim Kemal, Ivan Gaskell, and Daniel W. Conway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 70-91.

3. The Dionysian Used as a Ground

27

of Nietzsche's writing of Zarathustra and his subsequent elaboration of the Dionysian into a philosophy, then we can speak of a Dionysian grounding in Nietzsche's work, and a Dionysian grounding at large.

4. An Intellectual-Biographical Account of Nietzsche's Groundedness " . . . I climbed into the depths, I drilled into the ground, I began to investigate and dig at old trust. ..." The Dawn, preface, 2

In his 1886 preface to The Dawn, a book whose purpose is summarized in the subtitle "Thoughts on Moral Prejudices" (1881) Nietzsche explains to his readers that here one finds at work an underground man, a driller, a miner and an underminer. In this book he had descended into the depths, bored into the ground, digging away at the old trust upon which philosophers had accustomed themselves to building as if upon the firmest ground (D P 2, KSA 3:11-12). This explicit reference to ground and false ground helps us to see how Nietzsche perceived of his life's work. The false ground of previous philosophers was without foundation because it was a matter of trust, a matter of faith; in order to get to the bottom of this problem, Nietzsche felt he had to go to the hidden roots of morals in order to expose them as groundless. According to Mittasch, whose 1952 book on Nietzsche as a philosopher of nature is still today a useful and extensive study on Nietzsche and the sciences, Nietzsche found himself in a period of fermenting uncertainty concerning views of nature. Though at first he was insufficiently versed in the natural sciences, he made up for this with a rare ability to see through the surface to the ground or bottom of things, to their background. 73 It was Nietzsche's philological grounding then that enabled him to see through the anthropomorphisms of scientific writing and to root out what lies at the ground of inquiry. Inasmuch as Nietzsche was well versed in the classics and was reading philosophical and scientific texts beginning in the early 1860s and throughout his career, few writers of his time could match his perspective or his experience in deciphering texts. 73

Alwin Mittasch, Friedrich Nietzsche als Naturphilosoph (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag, 1952), 30. Mittasch finished his book in 1944 and originally planned to publish it with the Nietzsche Archive, which had been compromised during the Nationalist Socialist period by Elisabeth FörsterNietzsches currying of Nazi favor. Though Mittasch occasionally uses Förster-Nietzsche work, he generally steers clear of her and he is unsympathetic to the political appropriation of N. by National Socialists (he also updates the book for publication in the new Federal Republic of Germany). Mittasch assembles copious brief statements by N. on a long list of topics, and for the most part he lets N. do the talking. A weakness of the book is its failure to identify N.'s texts by tide and to distinguish between published and unpublished writings. For those readers who might regard this source as dated, I point out that Müller-Lauter has observed that Mittasch's book has not yet received its due from commentators (I, 120), and I too find Mittasch to be a useful source.

28

I. O n Grounding

Coming to philosophical and scientific issues from a background in classical philology, Nietzsche obviously did not feel constrained by the rules of the former disciplines — indeed, his early and abiding interest in Emerson can be traced to Emerson's "assertoric and rhetorical" discourse, "its grand manner, its lack of technicalities," which "suited Nietzsche perfectly in the earliest stages of his philosophical development." 74 In not playing by the rules, which by the way suited Nietzsche even as a classical philologist who produced a first book that was severely criticized by professionals in the field, he did not have to accept the boundaries, agendas, or tabus of a given discipline. He was free to see problems where others did not, as for example in his insistence "that a problem . . . to be regarded as a problem first must be recognized as such and that such a recognition is not possible from the basis or ground of the problem itself. This insight into the traditional problem of ground constitutes Nietzsche's Copernican revolution." 75 The digging work that Nietzsche ascribes to himself in the foreword to The Dawn has long been acknowledged as his genealogical method, with which he explores the underpinnings of problems by questioning all givens and assumptions. So for instance in Beyond Good and Evilhe makes a point of rearranging the priorities of Kant's notion of synthetic a priori judgments. For Kant, who believed in the existence of such judgments, the question was "How are synthetic judgments possible a priori?" Nietzsche shifted the question to "Why is the belief in such judgments necessary?" In formulating the question and answer as he did, Kant failed to go to the ground of the problem, failed to acknowledge that for purposes of human self-preservation, and from the particular perspectiva! optics of our species, such judgments are absolutely necessary whether or not they are "true" or "possible" (BGE 11, KSA:24-6). Nietzsche though a great admirer of Goethe was not an admirer of Faust and the type of modern man represented by him, though of course Nietzsche quoted extensively from the work Faust whenever it suited his purposes. Despite his aversion to Faust's undisciplined and voracious sampling, there is in Nietzsche a certain Faustian quality arising, in Mittasch's view, from his search for a philosophy of nature that overcomes the opposition of nature and spirit and produces a harmony of human and world. Mittasch speaks of Nietzsche's "innate Faustian research impulse" (Forschungsdran$ which seeks to penetrate nature's secrets and gain understanding of the place humans have in nature and of their task in nature. 76 In addition to attempting to reconcile mechanism, dynamism, biologism and idealism, Nietzsche pursued an anthropology that did not have its point of departure in his own consciousness, his own mind. Instead, according to Mittasch, Nietzsche uses a "realistic detour" to reach his goal. His point of departure is the natural sciences, but in doing so Nietzsche 74 75 76

George J. Stack, Nietzsche and Emerson, 4. Babich, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science, 80. Mittasch, Nietzsche als Naturphilosoph, 282.

4. An Intellectual-Biographical Account of Nietzsche's Groundedness

29

ignored the fact that the natural sciences are primarily a creation of the human mind. 77 In other words, in the absence of any absolute ground, Nietzsche conducted himself in matters of research and study as if he were capable of fathoming the next best thing to an absolute ground. 78 The limits of science are not a deterrent for Nietzsche, indeed, the very concept "limit" was embraced by him more warmly and fruitfully than in most thinkers, and this affirmation of the limited, the finite, the inherent as a dignity in all things present and finished, is why he could not see eye to eye with Faust. Human, All Too Human (1878-1880) is often regarded as an immature work, lacking coherence, rambling on a wide range of topics, aimed at rectifying Nietzsche's earlier Romantic sojourn and honeymoon with Wagnerism — and it many respects it is all that. But from the standpoint of grounding and what grounding means to Nietzsche's biography and his work, there is no single Nietzschean title more important, more enduring, and more misjudged than Human, All Too Human. While I concur with contemporary scholarship that seeks to rehabilitate the image of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I for one have never had a problem in recognizing the value of that work — Zarathustra's speaking speaks for itself (and everyone else). For me the question is not "Does Zarathustra represent Nietzsche's groundedness?", because clearly it does, rather, I ask "When more precisely does the grounding begin in Nietzsche?" If current scholarship can assert that Zarathustra contains all of the substance of the later works, and does not serve merely to "preview" them in rhetorical form, perhaps the time has come to look for Nietzsche's grounding in Human, All Too Human, where the rhetoric is low, very low, and the tone is one of humility and quiet appreciation, traits that many scholars seem to dislike in their Nietzsche. The first clue that Nietzsche has found his ground in Human, All Too Human is the title of the first chapter, "Of First and Last Things." Without going into detail here, for there will be plenty of opportunity for that in the course of my book, Human treats the things closest to human beings, the first things, with a new respect, a reverence bordering on awe, while the furthest things, the last things, are interrogated as to their worthiness, "sounded out" like hollow idols, to borrow a phrase from the "mature" Nietzsche of Twlilight of the Idols (1888). In the idiomatic expression "first things first" we insist on a proper order of things, on performing the common sense tasks that will help ensure a successful and fulfilling outcome to things we undertake. There is a growing sense of affirmation and accommodation of the little things in Human, All Too Human, with its often impressionistic descriptions of the immanence we experience daily. The "here and now" or what in German might be called Dies-

77 78

Mittasch, Nietzsche als Naturphilosoph, 282, 293. Moore (2002) sees a "fundamental contradictoriness" in N. because on the one hand he harbors "a nineteenth-century faith in the institutional authority of the biological sciences," but on the other this faith "co-exists uneasily with a belief that these same disciplines are infected with false values" (210-11).

30

I. On Grounding

seitigkeit, literally "this-sidedness" versus Jenseitigkeit, literally "beyond-sidedness," is acknowledged with a patient and practiced eye. Nietzsche reveals himself in Human not only as a critic of the "all too human," but as a champion of the all too human which is often overlooked when the human gaze wanders beyond, wanders so far afield of the first and closest things that humans, by comparison with their distant ideals, seem worthless and insignificant. If Human can be regarded as the physics of Nietzsche's anthropology, as opposed to the metaphysics of his earlier aesthetics, we can begin to see in this very honest and unpretentious book the key elements of his philosophical groundedness: an eye for the present, a heightened sense of immediacy with life, renewed interest in and respect for the small things, and generally speaking an elevation of the quotidian as the proper realm of dwelling. Again, these dimensions of Nietzsche's thought do not resonate well with readers and commentators who want their Nietzsche heroic, Faustian, and snarling with contempt — but these are the same elements from which Nietzsche in the second and final part of the second volume of Human will construct his notion of great health, his new hygiene. And dwelling groundedly on the earth is what Nietzsche's new hygiene is all about. So instead of regarding Human, All Too Human as a passing or surpassed phase in Nietzsche's development, I argue that the Nietzsche we find in these aphoristic writings of the late 1870s is in fact the grounded Nietzsche, the thinker who has found himself and his task. He appears more modest in this work than elsewhere, either before or after, because of his concern for the present reality of the every day. His sensitive, considerate criticism of human arrogance in the form of anthropocentrism, his criticism of metaphysics as an insidious, draining illness that tends to complicate, obfuscate, and otherwise multiply or add to the world while the present reality gets short shrift — all of this is hard work, all of this is practical and aimed at making a difference for humans where differences can be made. Nietzsche's own groundedness is characteristically elevated to a groundedness he sees as possible, or at least desirable, for other human beings. As egocentric as this may sound, however, the opposite may well be the case, for Nietzsche constantly used himself as a guinea pig, as the material for experimentation, and he was not prone to recommend to others anything he himself had not experienced. According to Conway, "Nietzsche's advocacy of self-experimentation, though deliberately outrageous, is neither purely rhetorical nor merely idle. In his own attempt to achieve the 'timelessness' that he believed would expand the horizon of human perfectability, he subjected himself to dangerous forms of self-experimentation." 79 Commenting on the consistency of Nietzsche's thought from the 1860s into the 1880s, Lowith seizes on Nietzsche's "suprahistorical viewpoint" as a grounding feature. According to the suprahistorical view, which Nietzsche already espoused in the essay On the

79

Conway, Nietzsche and the Political, 117.

4. An Intellectual-Biographical Account of Nietzsche's Groundedness

31

Use and Disadvantage of History for Living, the historical process does not lead to better insights and cannot lead to a goal for the world; the suprahistorical viewpoint acknowledges that the world is complete in every moment, that an individual of the nineteenth century has no better explanation of the meaning of life than an individual from the first century. Thus according to Lowith the suprahistorical anticipates what Nietzsche later teaches as the doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same, in which "the opposition between 'formerly' and someday is canceled in the omnipresence' of nontransitory types of'eternally same meaning.'" 80 1 quite agree with Lowith that the suprahistorical perspective espoused by Nietzsche in his essay of 1874 bears the kernel of the doctrine of eternal recurrence of the same, and to this observation I add: Human, All Too Human is the working out of the suprahistorical implications applied to everyday living. If Nietzsche had actually practiced what he preached in 1874, a strong case could be made, with Lowith's help, that On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Living is Nietzsche's first real grounded work. However, inasmuch as this second of the Untimely Meditations remains suspended at the level of theory and cosmology, I reserve that distinction for Human, which is the first Nietzsche book to elaborate a concept of "the same" as the content of the finite which is later said to recur eternally. In other words, I am concerned in my book with demonstrating how "the same" as the dimension of the finite contributes to earthly groundedness on the practical level, and how it serves to inspire or motivate earthly groundedness when it is "repeated eternally." The cosmological speculations inspired by "eternal recurrence" for me become secondary when "the same" is kept in focus, in tandem with Nietzsche's understanding that humans tend to disregard the first and closest things in favor of dreaming themselves, dissipating themselves into a nirvana of the infinite (the beyond). 81 The eternal recurrence of the same is not grounded on the first and closest things unless "the same" is moved into the conceptual foreground; "eternal recurrence" by itself or "infinite time" is one of those metaphysical "last things" that serves to undermine our ground. For Nietzsche the body, and because of the body the senses exert a grounding effect. He is less concerned about the senses being "deceived" relative to some absolute standard or ideal, than he is with the senses being denied, maligned, or inhibited in their relation to the closest things. It is for this reason that Zarathustra waxes rhetorical about the virtues of the body as opposed to any purported virtues of the soul.

80

81

Karl Lowith, Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same. Translated by J. Harvey Lomax, foreword by Bernd Magnus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 133. I think Lowith is himself more grounded in his approach to N. when he recognizes in the concept of Diesseitigkeit, i.e., in the here and now, not only one basic thought (Grundgedanke) among others, but instead the dominating impulse which is served by all of N.'s grounding thoughts — Diesseitigkeit ergo as the "grounding thought of his grounding thoughts" ("den Grundgedanken der Grundgedanken"), Nietzsche's Philosophy, 426.

32

I. On Grounding

The body is the first thing, the closest incarnate, and yet due to the long tradition of denial of the senses sponsored by Platonism and Christianity, the body is unfortunately the least known, the least respected aspect of human being. This helps to explain why Nietzsche was immediately attracted to the Dionysian and never lost his fascination for it: the Dionysian is a cult based on the senses, and later Nietzsche is unabashedly in favor of any drives in human beings that serve to embody, as opposed to disembody. Having said that, another interpretation has surfaced recently which purports to explain why Nietzsche is fascinated with the body. Köhler believes he has located the secret key to all of Nietzsche's enciphered rhetoric: quite simply, Nietzsche was a homosexual, and "when he speaks of the body, then not as a materialist but rather as a lover. He basically does not even speak of the body, he wants it." 82 Even Nietzsche's superhuman (Übermensch) according to Köhler is the healthy, beautiful human being in the form of those who romped on Mediterranean beaches in the days of Plato when gods were incarnated in bronze bodies of young men." 83 Köhlers book is fashionable and readable in a voyeuristic sort of way, but ultimately it leaves me asking: so what? Even if we accepted his premise hook, line and sinker that Nietzsche was gay, and his entire philosophical project is nothing more than an encoded appeal to gays or an encoded panegyric on homoeroticism (what a stretch!) — what does this mean for the texts we study as Nietzsche's legacy? Is Nietzsche's alleged homosexuality supposed to cheapen or diminish the importance of his thought? If so, then Koehler is nothing more than a bigot who aims to defrock Nietzsche, to diminish his authority by revealing that his real love for the body can be reduced to homoerotic desire. But let us return to the body, and stay focused on the body in the twofold sense that Nietzsche's texts are the body of his work, and the body is a grounding feature of Nietzsche's work. Nietzsche knew that the maligning of the body reinforced by two millennia of Platonism was not without consequences. The heightened capacities of the body express themselves in greater immediacy for living, as Colli has argued, and the Dionysian forms of expression are also expressions of the body. But the potential to stand in the closest possible relation to life, to the life force, and the expressive potential of the Dionysian are largely lost to moderns who live disembodied lives. Perhaps Nietzsche's own body, and in any cases his senses, were not as downtrodden and beset with infirmities as his physical suffering from migraines, insomnia, constipation etc suggest, for, if the body serves as a more faithful conduit of life and a more affirmative barometer of the closest things, Nietzsche actually appears to have been highly sensitive, highly capable of embodying what most would scarcely notice. Jung

82

83

Joachim Köhler, Zarathustras Geheimnis: Friedrich Nietzsche und seine verschlüsselte Botschaft: Eine Biographie (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1992), 439. The title in English: "Zarathustras Secret: Friedrich Nietzsche and his Encoded Message: A Biography." Köhler, Zarathustras Geheimnis, 463-4.

4. An Intellectual-Biographical Account of Nietzsche's Groundedness

33

implied as much when he claimed that what appears to be poetic figure of speech in Nietzsche is actually ancient myth; it is as if the poet were given the intuition or capacity to sense and to make real again, through contemporary speech and images, the immortal shadows of spiritual beings long past.84 It is crucial to bear in mind that when Nietzsche speaks of the body, and in particular of the Dionysian properties of life affirmation, he is referring to a state of groundedness whereby our bodies are not heavy to us, not a mere burden to us, not "prisons of the soul" but are instead in close partnership with the earth. "When one takes a grounded approach to Nietzsche's life and work, the surface manifestations do not tell the whole story. Nietzsche who speaks so much and so visibly of the body in overwhelmingly laudatory fashion also speaks frequently about women, and most often in a derogatory fashion. But what is surface and what is ground here? The editors of Feminist Interpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche, Kelly Oliver and Marilyn Pearsall, remind us that "the body and irrational passions have been associated with women," so why should we not expect a revaluation of women from the philosopher who asks us to revaluate the bodily passions? They ask whether "all of the bodies that he brings back into the focus of philosophers [are] the bodies of men," as Kohler obviously believes.85 If only men's bodies are to become the new focus of Nietzsche's new philosophers, I fear we are in for a rather disembodied conception, another "immaculate conception" in reverse order of the notion of body. In fact, however, Oliver and Pearsall assert that, Nietzsche's woman-hating aphorisms notwithstanding, "far from evading and ignoring femininity and maternity, as other canonical philosophers do, Nietzsche seems compelled to speak of them." 86 As I have stated elsewhere, if we are to regard Nietzsche's Dionysianism as an authentic, worthwhile philosophical conception the Dionysian must be seen to entail that vital, indispensable component that is the feminine.87 Nietzsche cannot on the one hand condemn Christianity for reviling the body and the senses, then turn around and heap scorn upon women, who represent half the body human. How seriously can we take his misogynist rhetoric? I find a clue to Nietzsche's problem of communication on the issue of women in an analysis by Staten. He perceptively asks why it should be inappropriate for Wagner and Wagnerians to speak in hysterical tones when he himself, Nietzsche, occasionally engages in much the same with his diatribes. For Staten the answer lies in Nietzsche's conception of the Dionysian as a state in which 84

Paul Bishop, "Jung's Annotations of Nietzsche's Works: An Analysis," Nietzsche-Studien 24 (1995), 282. In his excellent treatment of Jung's readings on N., Bishop points out that Jung quoted extensively from N.'s Dionysus Dithyrambs in Wandlungen undSymbole der Libido, from which the above Jung quote was taken. Kelly Oliver and Marilyn Pearsall, editors. Feminist Interpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche (University Park, PA: the Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 4. 8 ® Oliver and Pearsall, Feminist Interpretations, 5. 87 Adrian Del Caro, "Andreas-Salome and Nietzsche: New Perspectives," Seminar 36/1 (2000), 88.

34

I. On Grounding

the individual is dissolved, in which simultaneity and instant adoption of roles is second nature due to the condition of Rausch, i.e., frenzy. The reason it is so hard to say who is speaking when Nietzsche uses "I" or "we" and "they" is because he has thrown himself into the moment: "His experimentalism involves his whole self, which is entirely dissolved in the perspective of the moment, and thus ranges freely from the largest and most generous utterances to the meanest and most reactive, as though one voice knew nothing of the other." Staten adds that Nietzsche had always conceived of the Dionysian in this manner, and in section 8 of The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche refers to the poet as one who feels "the urge to transform himself and to speak out of other bodies and souls."88 This explanation may wear thin if applied to all instances of Nietzschean lapses in taste, but on the whole it makes sense.89 Of course if Nietzsche had been able to avoid any such lapses in his otherwise fastidious narrative we would suspect at once that a lack of authenticity, and a preponderance of aesthetic design were at work. The Dionysian ground is stronger than the aesthetic impulse stemming from the individuated personality. For this reason Thus Spoke Zarathustra reveals extraordinary highs and lows, insofar as the presence of the Dionysian is greater in this book than in any other written by Nietzsche. Jung describes the "help" Nietzsche received in writing Zarathustra. The figure of Zarathustra is that of the wise old man, "a typical figure and therefore we call it an archetype; one meets it in legends and folklore and in innumerable texts and works of art, which shows that it is a generally human idea."90 The archetype represented by Zarathustra appears according to Jung in times of trouble, when there is great need among human beings, "when an old orientation has been lost and a new one is needed." Zarathustra's first item of business is to announce the death of God and proclaim the superhuman. "It would be quite wrong to assume that Nietzsche invented such a particular artifice in order to make an impression, for the sake of aesthetic effect or anything like that; it was an event which overcame him — he was overcome by the archetypal situation."91 Whether one calls it the Dionysian ground, an archetype, or with less fanfare simply Nietzsche's personality and creative drive, Nietzsche possessed a physical capacity for drawing on the Urmensch or primordial human, and a spiritual capacity for harnessing that energy in the service of grounding human being on earth. 88 89

Staten, Nietzsche's Voice, 152. John Richardson, Nietzsche's System (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), argues that even though N. proposes certain male values, "these values themselves demand that one cultivate and incorporate female viewpoints and values as well. . . . We might then hear his most dismissive remarks against women as masking (to us and perhaps to himself) his share in what he attacks" (200).

90

91

C. G. Jung, Nietzsche's "Zarathustra": Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939 by C. G. Jung, edited James L.Jarrett, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), vol. 1,21. Jung, Nietzsche's "Zarathustra", 24.

4. An Intellectual-Biographical Account of Nietzsche's Groundedness

35

Regulating or controlling what I call the Dionysian ground must have been difficult in the extreme for Nietzsche, since he was a disciplined thinker accustomed to scientific method, philological method (where it may diverge in matters of hermeneutics from scientific method), and generally at pains to rein in the fictionalizing, poetizing impulse. Add to this internal struggle the tensions created by the esotericexoteric problem, and soon one derives a sense of how many factors are at work in producing the Nietzschean text. Colli remarks on the central role of The Gay Science in Nietzsche's life, not only because that title represents a chronological midpoint of production, but more importantly because it reflects a precious moment of balance, Nietzsche's "sole experience of complete health." 92 Extremes are present in this book but they are united in a relaxed manner, held under control, and free of fanaticism. Colli explains that Nietzsche's irresistible urge to intensify personal standpoints to the extreme, and to use thoughts plucked from the stars as murderous weapons, are avoided, and these are signs of illness.93 Another commentator might prefer to see in these "intensified personal standpoints" eruptions and interruptions of the Dionysian, or lapses in taste, or even the occasional self-parody in which Nietzsche engaged, but whatever the case, The Gay Science represents balance. Colli's perspective is helpful because he also edited the complete Nachlass, i.e., the unpublished writings of Nietzsche, consisting of texts from 1869 to 1889, and comprising roughly half of the entire critical edition. These unpublished writings are far more copious, and revealing, than the arbitrary selection and arrangement from them which has been circulating in the world of Nietzsche studies as The Will to Power. Without getting into the complex and controversial editorial history of these unpublished writings, let me say for the present that Colli's knowledge of them gives him a unique perspective, such that he observes precisely what Nietzsche chooses to publish, and what he leaves aside. "What Nietzsche leaves aside" meanwhile is considerable and revealing. So for instance Colli remarks on the unpublished notes from the years 1885 to 1889 (only ten pages of notes can be ascribed to late December 1888 and early January 1889) that Nietzsche harks back to the ancient differentiation between universally comprehensible communication and mystical expression, while at the same time he lowers the thesis of the will to power to the popular level. By virtue of this act Nietzsche gives us a means for deciphering his contradictory statements without having to resort to hermeneutical tricks. In other words, Colli sees in Nietzsche's exotericizing of the concept of the will to power, at least insofar as this occurs in the notes, a partial explanation for perceived inconsistencies concerning the will to power. Colli

92

93

Collis editorial notes and comments for the Kritische Studienausgabe are quite brief and laudably to the point. If I appear to rely on him for running commentary it is because he was in the best possible position, as a reader of Nietzsche, to observe the subde changes in N.'s writings. And for the sake of those who do not read German, some exposure to Colli's views might prove interesting. Colli, KSA 3:660.

36

I. O n Grounding

believes that Nietzsche wanted to give an exoteric or "popular" version of the will to power, and yet, Nietzsche was highly aware of the weaknesses of this strategy from the standpoint of esotericism. What we find more prominently in the unpublished notes is a side by side existence of the exoteric, universally understood discourse and the esoteric, secretive and personal deepening of Nietzsche's own thinking (Colli, KSA 13: 651-52). I regard Nietzsche's efforts to make his most difficult and esoteric doctrines accessible to the average reader, the non-specialist reader, as an indication of how seriously he regarded his task of providing a ground for groundless moderns. In making this statement, whose confessional character will be seized upon and possibly reviled by esoteric readers of my book, I knowingly incur the wrath of Nietzsche scholars and Nietzsche followers who insist that we perform a disservice to Nietzsche if we try to make his thought accessible to, and applicable to, everyday people and situations. There is a point at which Nietzsche becomes ungrounded, at which he loses his own contact with the good ground of earth, and of course it is well known that Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown from which he never recovered, the date of which Colli gives as January 3, 1889. 94 Some of the writings of 1888 reveal clear signs of mental stress, in Colli's view, and I find it difficult to disagree. Two opposing drives which Nietzsche earlier held in check are beyond his control, namely the "contemporary" and "uncontemporary or untimely" which had characterized Nietzsche from the beginning. 95 I regard these two drives as reflections of the more basic dichotomy of exoteric/esoteric, but in any case, Colli sees the drives forcing each other apart into opposing poles. The "demon of untimeliness rages" and expresses itself absolutely, personally, aggressively and violently; the will to power no longer satisfies Nietzsche and proves to be too objective, too detached from the present; in Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist even the foundation of the will to power, namely will, collapses, and every theoretical construct appears to be abandoned, including the ideal of sovereign scepticism (KSA 6:451). If Conway is correct in claiming that Nietzsche "overcomes his decadence not by eliminating or

95

Claudia Crawford in To Nietzsche: Dionysus, I love you! Ariadne (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995) assumes the role of Ariadne and argues that N. feigned his madness. Since scholars are not likely to accept her thesis (a very old one), she posits the existence of "resentment criticism" which privileges rational discourse (pp. 10, 18). See my review article in which Nietzsche books by Crawford, Staten, Hoover, Jang, and Kreis are reviewed: "A Nietzsche in Your Corner, or To Each a Nietzsche," Monatshefie^\-.\ (1999), 132-41. Moore (2002) of course claims that N's thought "is still ensnared in his century's values and prejudices. But whether critical or uncritical, the very fact of Nietzsche's biologism undermines the self-created myth of his 'untimeliness'" (10, 193). While Moore is to be lauded for his skillful reconstruction and presentation of the biological discourse to which N . undoubtedly owes a great deal and in relation to which he is, in fact, not "untimely," Moore errs in regarding this particular aspect of N.'s thought to be the alpha and omega of the question of timeliness: N.'s untimeliness is most clearly in evidence in his anti-democratic, anti-modernist spirit, which includes a consistent and unequivocal critique of science/scholarship as the last stages of the ascetic ideal.

4. An Intellectual-Biographical Account of Nietzsche's Groundedness

37

reversing it, but by resisting it, by opposing it even as it constitutes his identity,"96 then we might say that ultimately Nietzsche's resistance fails. As I pointed out earlier in connection with Nietzsche's deep admiration for Goethe, even Goethe is ultimately rejected as being "un-Dionysian." And so Nietzsche, one of the most grounded individuals of his age and a deserving spiritual heir of the legacy of Goethe, was left with Dionysian frenzy.

5. Modernity's Groundlessness ". . . what from now on will no longer be built, no longer can be built is — a society in the old sense of the word; everything is lacking to build this structure, above all, the material." The Gay Science 356

In his preface to Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche announces that he will give no quarter to dogmatism, and he voices disappointment at how little had sufficed, in the course of history, to serve as the corner stone (Grundstein) of the philosophers' sublime and unconditional edifices (BGE P, KSA 5:11). By "how little" Nietzsche means how little substance, how little method, how little verifiability or empirical observation contributed to philosophical work, based as it was on indefensible premises. Around the same time, in his 1886 preface to The Dawn, he poses these rhetorical questions: Why is it that from Plato to the present all philosophical architects in Europe had built in vain? Why does everything they honestly and earnesdy regarded as eternal threaten to cave in, or already lie in rubble? The answer that is given today is false, namely that the prerequisite, the critique of all reason was missing — Kant's answer to this problem of ungrounded philosophy did not succeed in leading us to firmer ground. And was it not strange to demand that a tool should criticize its own excellence and usefulness? The correct answer to these questions would more probably be that all philosophers have built under the seduction of morality, even Kant (D P 3, KSA 3:13). And so far from having solved the problem of ground, Kant too, insofar as he built upon the shaky foundation of morals and even compounded the problem by refusing to recognize reason's critique of itself as a problem, put up another shaky philosophical edifice. Returning to a theme he had sounded ten years earlier, Nietzsche writes that philosophers confuse first and last, they posit at the beginning what comes at the end, namely their "highest concepts," which are also their emptiest concepts. In this manner they show their reverence by indicating that the higher must not grow out of the lower, must not even have been allowed to grow, since morality and the highest things should be causa sui (TI 3/4, KSA 6:76). The fundamentally organic thought process 96

Conway, Nietzsche and the Political, 75.

38

I. On Grounding

of Nietzsche, its genealogical method bent on tracing obscure origins, suspects any claim or institution that cannot trace its genealogy. Based on his observations the "higher"concepts generally derive from the day to day activities of human beings, but for any number of reasons — including low esteem for the entire species — these lowly origins are denied. By frequently using architectural metaphors to convey his insights and warnings concerning the lack of ground that accompanies humanity's most cherished spiritual building projects, it is as if Nietzsche were trying to convince us that our defiance of gravity will have consequences, that indeed, unless we change our ways, much that now stands will ultimately fall. As a species we are so steeped in the process of constructing a second false world that we are hardly capable of remembering anymore the manner of conceptual shortcut that characterizes our building. The unpublished essay "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense" (1873), while making the case that humans are distinguished from animals by their ability to schematize graphic metaphors and to dissolve an image into a concept, relies heavily on architectural metaphors. In the realm of schematics something becomes possible that could never succeed among the graphic first impressions, namely, the construction of a pyramidal order according to castes and degrees, the creation of a "new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, defined borders that now stands opposed to the other graphic world of first impressions, and is the more firm, universal, known, human and therefore the regulating and imperative world" (KSA 1:881-2). Humans are inclined to build a false, second world because it offers a base of operations, a secure place not subject to the frantic pace of first impressions. In the second false world we call the shots and make the arrangements, dictating the pace that is most suited to our human needs. "As architectural genius the human being is elevated far above the bee: the latter builds from wax gathered from nature, the former builds from the far more delicate stuff of concepts which he must first fabricate out of himself" (KSA 1:822). Anticipating views that he would publish in the late 1880s, Nietzsche claimed already in 1873 that scientific research was the metamorphosis of the world into a human, using a procedure that regards the human being as the measure of all things; the regularity (Gesetzmässigkeit) that impresses us in the constellations and in chemical process merely corresponds with those qualities we ourselves attach to things, so that we are in effect impressing ourselves (KSA 1: 883, 886). At first language works on the construction of concepts, but in later times science as well. Again comparing humans to bees, Nietzsche describes how science works unceasingly on the great columbarium of concepts, "the burial site of perception," building newer and higher stories, filling cells, making sure to fill the monstrously towering framework and to organize the entire empirical, i.e., anthropomorphic world into it (KSA 1:886). The forming of metaphors being the "fundamental drive of human beings" (KSA 1:887) we can scarcely do otherwise than to construct a second, manipulatable world out of concepts, all the while drifting further from the

5. Modernity's Groundlessness

39

ground of the real world or, as Nietzsche would finally come to characterize it, the much maligned world of appearance, the world that concerns us. The grim tone of the essay of 1873, with its tendency to reduce human activity to the formation of metaphors and concepts, is made even more grim by Nietzsche's own use of metaphors to make his point — this has the effect of underscoring the circularity, the hollowness of the human stance in relation to the earth. But at least Nietzsche's use of architectural metaphors points to his awareness of the problem of groundlessness. At this early stage he is clearly aware of the creative, if not entirely fictionalizing propensities of language, and he is equally aware of the anthropocentric nature of our relationship to the world. What is striking about the position Nietzsche takes in this essay is that he ascribes these linguistic and epistemological weaknesses to humanity as a whole, without concern for a particular historical or cultural marker. The essay opens with a cosmic perspective and employs the ironic fairy tale device of "once upon a time" ("es gab einmal"): "Once upon a time in a remote corner of the universe poured out and glittering in countless solar systems there was a planet on which clever animals invented knowledge" (KSA 1:875). At very near the same time Nietzsche was honing his thought concerning groundlessness, focusing specifically on history as an undermining influence. While the problem in "Truth and Lie" was couched in the grand terms of knowledge, truth, language, and science, the historical lens allowed him to address the problem of groundlessness with an eye toward allowing for an alternative, for a way out of the conceptual prison. The essay on history details three basic types or approaches to history, the monumental, the antiquarian, and the critical (UMII/2, KSA 1:258). Each of these types of history, Nietzsche emphasizes, has only one soil and one climate, "on any other it grows into a ravaging weed." The critic without need, the antiquarian without piety, the knower of the great without the ability of the great are just such degenerated plants, sprung forth as weeds and alienated from their natural mother soil (UM II/2, KSA 1:264-5). Our position in history, and toward history, must be properly grounded; it does no good, for instance, to exercise criticism for the sake of criticism — at the base of this criticism there must be a need. For this argument Nietzsche prefers to use soil and plant metaphors, and these he will continue to use alongside the architectural metaphors whenever he applies his rhetoric of earth. The plant metaphor succeeds as a grounding device because everyone is familiar with the model of life represented by a plant. In order to live a plant needs soil, which serves it as a ground, and the taller and more robust the plant becomes, the more it has grounded itself with a network of roots in the soil. The wonderfully instructive thing about a plant is that one can see the relation between its groundedness, its underground life and its above-ground flourishing, while in humans this is hardly the case. In order to illustrate the difficulty of conceiving of a grounded human being, Nietzsche raises the issue of "innerness" (Innerlichkeit), a uniquely modern artifice. One can say that a person has the content but is simply lacking the

40

I. On Grounding

form "but in all living things this is an entirely inappropriate opposition." Modern education is a case in point; it is not alive, or vital, because it cannot be comprehended without this opposition of form and content, and so it is not education but instead merely a kind of knowledge about education. This modern dichotomy of inner/outer, of content versus form was unknown to the ancients (UM II/4, KSA 1: 273, 272). The particular point Nietzsche appears to be making about the modern propensity to judge according to the values of an invisible, purported "content" in relation to a manifest, apparent "form" is that moderns forgive themselves too readily, and do not hold themselves accountable. Too much that is lacking, or amiss, or unbalanced in the modern psyche can be ascribed to this dichotomy, as if at any given time a preponderance of "content" could compensate for a lack of "form" or vice versa. If we could imagine a human being without the inner/outer, content/ form dichotomy we would have before us a human being as a whole, one who does not add a fictional dimension to him or herself because the groundedness of this individual is decisive. As stated by Gemes, "[f]or Nietzsche the strength to achieve a natural unity, an organizing force within the competing drives, is a precondition for the appearance of genuine subjects, genuine cultures." 97 To illustrate that he is not speaking in the abstract Nietzsche invites a comparison between ancients and moderns. "Would it even be possible, he asks, to bring forth and display todays literary personalities, officials, politicians as ancient Romans? It simply does not work, he claims, because they are not human beings, only incarnate compendia and concrete abstracts. Moderns are moreover a "species of eunuchs," neither man nor woman, more appropriately characterized as neutra or the "eternally objective" ones (UM II/5, KSA 1:283-4). Groundless, sexless and indifferent, or "objective" as moderns prefer to say, moderns enjoy a security and contentedness made possible by their very lack of ground. To live groundedly would require an ontological wholeness that does not tolerate the "inner/outer" dichotomy, and it would also require a gender, which is Nietzsche's not so subtle way of reminding us that naturally constituted roles, such as gender, require their fair share of representation. The objectivity with which moderns cloak themselves serves to justify every manner of reserve, every manner of deceasing or refraining from action, but in fact, a grounded person would act and such a person would act in accordance with the motivating ground. To an extent Nietzsche is romanticizing the ancients when he implies that they seem almost to be another species in comparison with moderns, but even so he is probably correct in his diagnosis that the modern virtue of objectivity is a defining characteristic, one that insidiously undermines and one that did not exist, at least not in its current highly developed and ubiquitous state, in antiquity.

97

Gemes, "Postmodernism's Use and Abuse of Nietzsche," 347.

5. Modernity's Groundlessness

41

Moderns are distinguished by their playing out of adopted roles as opposed to their playing out of intrinsic roles. The scorn Nietzsche heaps upon gutless neuters in 1874 is reformulated in 1887, this time in the fifth book of The Gay Science., where the actor and the builder are juxtaposed at the former's expense. Human beings Nietzsche observes are becoming more dramatic, and with the rise of the actor we are witnessing the fall of the architect and builder, because the strength required for building is lacking. Who dares anymore, Nietzsche asks, to undertake works whose completion will require millennia? A human being has value only insofar as he is a stone in a great building, for which he must first be firm and stone of quality, not a mere actor. Society in the ancient sense of the word can no longer be built, he laments, everything is missing, and above all the material (GS 356, KSA:595-97). At first one is puzzled by this lack of regard for the actor, after all, Nietzsche's patron god is Dionysus, god of tragedy, but one soon adjusts to the values of Nietzsche's critique. Modern acting is not a symptom of strength, of solidity, of groundedness, but of the opposite, namely, of hollowness, masking, feigning, and playing any role except the one demanded by the continuity of ground and action. Moderns are skilled in pretending, in exercising distancing techniques such as objectivity, political correctness, and a host of other refinements which, in addition to requiring strength and firmness of character, also require a capacity to ride along, to adapt chameleon-like to one's neighbors and surroundings. Ultimately this alluring but shallow modernity is what Nietzsche condemns in Richard Wagner, whom Nietzsche regarded as one of the great histrionics of all time. 98 The builder on the other hand is not concerned with the instantaneous clever effect. The builder understands his work in terms of great stretches of time. Since the immediate context of Nietzsche's remarks is the impossibility of building a great society, we are urged to focus on the most conspicuously missing element, viz. the building material proper. Whatever the virtues of actors and acting may be, construed in the most favorable modern terms, actors will simply not serve as material for building because they cannot support additional weight. A construction of actors, or of those whose mores and behavior were as shifting as those of actors, might actually resemble an edifice from the outside, but it would not be three dimensional. At some point moderns lost their ability to weigh the merits of a solid, enduring, real structure against the seeming merits of a simulated structure. I see in this late observation on the decline of builders and building material a return to ideas Nietzsche had already surfaced in 1873 and 1874, when the primary culprits for false building were

98

Gemes comments on this strain of criticism in N.: "Nietzsche's architectural metaphoric of modern man as a mere building carted together, in fact as a kind of ruin, his vision of the architect of the future as one who constructs a unifying goal, as one puts the various pieces into a highly structured whole under a singular vision, runs counter to the whole postmodern appropriation of Nietzsche as celebrating a fragmentary decentered world" ("Postmodernism's Use," 348-9).

42

I. On Grounding

language and science, i.e., of linguo-epistemic origin. The added nuance in 1887 is that moderns also exhibit an undermining effect in their adoption of role playing, which leads to a collapse of the difference between nature/natural on the one hand, and art/artificial on the other. Yet another undermining practice attributable to moderns can be laid at the doorstep of the enlightened. As Enlightenment-minded as Nietzsche ultimately is in his effect and his method, he generally finds room to fault certain features of smugness and contentedness in the modern psyche. So for instance even in his most visibly proEnlightenment book, Human, All Too Human, which was originally dedicated to the spirit of Voltaire," he exposes the weakness of the most enlightened individuals who liberate themselves from metaphysics and look back at it with an air of superiority. Instead, they need to turn the corner at the end of the track, as one would in the hippodrome (HH1/21, KSA 2:42). The modern enlightened individual too often feels in command of a situation by virtue of holding knowledge. Knowledge is indeed power, but it should also be empowering according to Nietzsche, and what good in practical terms is accomplished by liberating oneself from metaphysics if one does not take the next step? Turning the corner in the hippodrome would signify that one has not only recognized the undermining properties of metaphysics, but that one has resolved to do something demonstrative of one's liberation. That Human, All Too Human represents just such a turning the corner from having liberated oneself from metaphysics to having taken a next step has long been symbolized by the break between Nietzsche and his mentor Wagner. The writing that Nietzsche does in Human as well as the unifying message of this long, unwieldy collection of aphorisms both serve as a next step. That unifying message, as I have indicated earlier and as will become abundantly clear in the course of my book, is Nietzsche's new respect for the first and closest things, and his growing understanding that the "higher" or more exalted things subsumed under metaphysics, be it morality, God, the afterlife, or the soul, actually diminish in importance proportionate to their distance from the day to day. Even the aphoristic style is a next step, for the earlier works beginning with The Birth of Tragedy had all been essayistic in nature. But Nietzsche also shows his practical resolve in attempting to practice what he preaches. Intelligent people can learn much from the discoveries of science, he cautions, but one notices from their conversations and their hypotheses that they are lacking in scientific spirit. The instinctive mistrust of the detours of thought, of the thought process, never takes root in them. And so Nietzsche recommends that each person should learn at least one science "from the ground up" ("von Grund aus"), in order to know what method is and how necessary is this extreme form of prudence {Besonnenheit). Of course the

99

See Erich Heller's introduction to Human, All Too Human (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), x-xi. Heller maintains that N. used Voltaire "as the stick with which to chastise Wagner."

5. Modernity's Groundlessness

43

science Nietzsche knew from the ground up is philology, and in the Germanic tradition it is considered a science today as well, although in the Anglosaxon tradition philology enjoys less "standing" and is generally subsumed under literature and language — a clear sign of the decline of the philological spirit in modern times. Some of Nietzsche's sharpest philology applied to the problem of exposing the unfounded or ungrounded nature of modern Western culture is seen in On the Genealogy of Morals (1887). In the first of Genealogy's three essays Nietzsche elaborates a philosophy of life, or vitalism, and he takes great pains to describe the abundance and variety of life that is represented by the human being and the human spirit (Geist). The abundance of life we call human, if viewed nonjudgmentally and dispassionately, reveals a complex economy whose balance is upset, and historically has been upset, by centuries and sometimes millennia of disruptive forces such as idealizing, the corrosive effects of ressentiment, and other related distortions of and deviations from earthgrounded being. But Nietzsche had already made genealogically-derived commentaries on good and evil as early as Human, All Too Human, or earlier still in The Birth of Tragedy if one bears in mind the frequent comparisons there of moderns and ancients. Nietzsche does not hold that all moralities are bad, or nihilistic to use a more precise and safe term, nor does he hold that all moralities are equal. Instead, it may help to view a particular morality from its ground, or from its ground zero, in order to help establish the whereabouts of modernist moralities in relation to a ground. Just such as exercise can be found in Beyond Good and Evil where Nietzsche first uses the terms master and slave morality. He explains that in his wanderings through the numerous finer and coarser moralities which have heretofore ruled or yet rule on earth, there emerged two basic types ( G r u n d t y p e n ) , and there is a basic difference ( G r u n d u n t e r s c h i e d ) between them. Without giving each detail of the argument here, noble human beings extend themselves into society and morals, such that whatever harms them is regarded as harmful in itself. The noble person helps the unfortunate but not or almost not out of pity, rather, out of the urge begotten of power. Faith in self, pride in self, irony toward "selflessness" describes noble morality, with its deep respect for age and tradition, and for ancestors. Moderns on the other hand with their inclination toward progress, the future, and with their lack of respect for age reveal that their ideas are not of noble origin, but are closer to slave morality. Nietzsche invites this scrutiny: if the violated, oppressed, suffering, unfree (enslaved), uncertain of themselves and the weary construct their own morality, what will be the commonality (das Gleichartige) of their moral valuations? (BGE 260, KSA 208-11). Note that in each case Nietzsche assigns a ground to the moralities, and the ground determines the mood or aspect of the morality. The ground of the noble type of human being is their sense of self, they serve as the ground of their moral valuations, which are nothing more than extensions of themselves into their surroundings. But the ground of the noble consists of much more than the given generation in history — it is grounded further upon the reverence toward age and

44

I. On Grounding

ancestry, which has been accumulated over untold generations under the affirmative auspices of respect, faith, and pride in self — these ingredients sustained and maintained over many years by the conservationist mentality of reverence ensure a solid foundation. 1 0 0 T h e noble types are preservers and recyclers of the spiritual economy of their collective, appreciative of what they are and have in the present based on deep respect for ancestors. T h e ignoble, on the other hand, display tendencies that appear not only modern but downright consumerist. Moderns are so wedded to the ideas of "progress" and "the future" that they increasingly lack respect for age. Let us extrapolate just a bit from the above proposition. While the noble do everything in their power to honor themselves as "old" manifestations of their honored ancestry, and thereby serve to conserve and lend dignity to the things that are and the things that were, the ignoble are always ready to make a clean slate and start afresh. In the mentality of the ignoble, it is always better to turn another page, to make another start, to abandon the old, to conceive of new ways to assert the current generation's needs and values. This manner of thinking appears to contribute to the modern prevalence of throwaway thinking, and it feeds the dangerous illusion that resources both natural and spiritual are infinite. In any case, the impulse for newness as a value in itself does not stem from the powerful noble types. Those who would be inclined to act like marauding conquerors in the landscape, and to spend themselves as though there were no tomorrow or, as though a new start were possible on any given day, are the "slaves." At this stage it is important to consider what enslaves the slaves of the slave morality. T h e matter is not nearly as simple as the symbols of slavery, chains and bondage, suggest. Obviously Nietzsche chooses to highlight these two moralities because they represent broad segments of humanity and are basic in that sense. T h e behavior of the noble is premised on the noble ground, such that actions are not undertaken out of sentimentality or idealism. Let us consider the question of pity, for instance. Nietzsche is careful to note that the noble help others but not out of p i t y — acting merely out of pity would be a violation of their ground, inasmuch as pity is not a value of the noble and does not belong or fit into the economy of the noble morality. Thus Nietzsche uses the strange-sounding phrase that a noble individual helps "not or almost not out of pity, rather out of an impulse that is produced by the superabundance of power" (BGE 260, KSA 209-10). These words are chosen to convey the grounded necessity of the noble person's actions; "pity" is out of character for the noble, it is not on their list of possible responses, not reflected in their spiritual economy. Indeed, Nietzsche is here referring to what Zarathustra lyrically christens the "gift giving" or bestowing virtue. In an example of "proffered silence" or the rhetorical device of aposiope100

Gemes understands that N. "respects the past for the individuals it has achieved and for providing the materials from which his new subjectivity has been fashioned" ("Postmodernism's Use," 358).

5- Modernity's Groundlessness

45

sis Nietzsche lists the day to day experiences of the ignoble, the slaves, implies that this is their ground, grimly and utterly, and then asks: what now will the common features be of their morality? T h e message here, and throughout Nietzsche's writings where he engages in the grounding rhetoric, is that the strong cannot do otherwise than to behave strongly, while the weak cannot do otherwise than to behave weakly. This axiom of Nietzsche's of course does not change the fact that moderns are humans who do just what they want and do so in the name of freedom. Richardson's formulation of the actual effects of slave morality on the h u m a n (spiritual) environment is helpful. T h e original aristocratic phase of society degenerates, he explains, because of the tension arising from the "logic of wills" of both master and slave. As the slave morality "diffuses itself into the society, replacing or engulfing the active values," society's practices become infused with the spirit of the resentful sufferer, until "envious hatred of the stronger produces a gradual 'leveling' of society." By the time we arrive at the modern condition over and against which Nietzsche asserts his untimeliness, "[i]t becomes more and more accepted by all, as a basic background truth, that no way of living or thinking is better than any other and that an aspiration to distinction is the root of evil." 101 Such relativism is fought tooth and nail by Nietzsche, not because he underestimates the extent to which our values are relativistic, but because modernism's drift into relativism is a function of weakness, of skepticism, of having given up the pursuit of excellence and meaning. In attacking what Richardson calls "the aspiration to distinction," moderns and postmodernists alike reject all standards because no absolute, no infallible standard is forthcoming, as if humans could not flourish using standards that are less than absolute and infallible. In stating his underestimated tautology that the strong are strong and therefore "do" strong, while the weak are weak and therefore "do" weak, Nietzsche is also trying to help us escape the clutches of the blame game. Blame after all is what the weak resort to in the absence of any alternative; they cannot beat up on the strong, at least not politically or physically, but they can use their wits, tapping into their ressentiment, and thus create an onus, a punishment, an appropriately phrased blame for their enemies — they can label their oppressors evil, and themselves good ( H H 1/45, KSA 2:67-8). Before this invention of "evil" there were only the good, who are strong, and the bad, who are weak. T h e bad become the good by virtue of stigmatizing the strong as evil, which really amounts to plucking a weapon from the sky, from thin air, for there is no basis or ground for such aspersions upon the strong. To the extent that the bad (weak) invent, circulate and enforce their moral valuations condemning the good (strong) by using every manner of pejorative associated with "evil," they engage in an undermining of ground, in degrounding the formerly grounded human beings. 101

Richardson, Nietzsche's System, 64-5.

46

I. On Grounding

We have another illustration of this modern propensity for degrounding in Nietzsche's explanation of what he means by "return to nature."102 Though he clearly does not favor the word, Nietzsche himself has a notion of "progress" that would reveal itself in a kind of return to nature that is a rising up to nature, not some vague modernist nostalgia about going back to something. And so he juxtaposes the persons and values of Napoleon with Rousseau. Napoleon represents for Nietzsche a successful return to nature — Napoleon earned his return to nature as an ascent to the natural. Rousseau, on the other hand, with his doctrine of equality represents the most poisonous poison, the end of justice. Because Nietzsche associates the slogan "return to nature" with Rousseau, and sees in him the father of the modern movement for equal rights, he objects most passionately to egalitarianism as anything remotely resembling nature. "Equal to the equal, unequal to the unequal" would be a grounded way of looking at things, according to Nietzsche, while the drive to make all equal, and by association, everything equal, would be a crime against nature (TI 9/48, KSA 6: 150). Nothing is being grounded by pursuing the goal of making all equal, instead, a process of ressentiment and "seeing evil" is at work very much like the evil-positing of the weak. Nietzsche's sense of ground, and his philological honesty and consistency require him to maintain an open. This open, about which more will be said in the course of my book, is posited as an alternative to the closed; the closed meanwhile attests to the effects of the equalization impulse in moderns. The ground of human being is an open, and it requires the diversity and ¿¿&ersity of nature, including humans, with the order of rank that exists everywhere in nature. Much is at stake when the ground of values is denied or otherwise lost, such that a given people, culture, or age becomes untethered and disembodied. And nowhere is this loss more evident and eventful for our species than in the evolution, Nietzsche would say devolution of the Judaic God into the Christian God. The Antichrist 16 begins with the thesis that a people who still believe in themselves also still have their own god. While the early God was representative of the strength of a people, of everything aggressive and power hungry in the soul of the people, now God is merely good, antinatural, and castrated. Either gods are the will to power and therefore gods of the people (Volksgotter), or they are the impotence to power, in which case they necessarily become good{K 16, KSA 6:182-3). Like the argument that the morality of the noble is an extension of the noble human beings into their social setting, the positing of a "God" on the part of a people who have faith and confidence in themselves first, resembles again an intensified act of self affirmation. The natural, grounded conception of God reflects the affirmation of the human in a people, the best and worst of the human, to be sure, but the whole economy of what that particular people (Volk) stand for. Gods that are not of the people, not reflective nor representative of the people, are simply 102

See Adrian Del Caro, Nietzsche Contra Nietzsche, pp. 211-222 entided "Nietzsche's homo Text of Nature versus Interpretation" and pp. 40, 78, 85, 88, 102-03, 113.

naturtr.

5. Modernity's Groundlessness

47

"good," that is, ungrounded, chimera, another invention of the weak. It would be fair to say that the first instance represents a bodied God, i.e., the God of the early Jews has a body in the people. In the second instance we are dealing with a disembodied God, a God who can well live without the people because he has no body in them. Nietzsche revisited his argument on the relative groundedness of gods just a few pages later in Antichrist 25. Israel's Jahweh was the expression of their power consciousness, joy of self, and hope. The Israelites expected victory and welfare, and they trusted nature to give the people what they needed. The shift occurs when the concept changes, becomes denaturalized into Jahweh as God of justice first, such that the unity between God and Israel is lost. Now God becomes a tool in the hands of priests and is used for punishing disobedience. The new God demands instead of provides, and in the new role is "no longer the expression of the life and growth conditions of a people, no longer the most basic instinct of life, instead something which has become abstract" (A 25, KSA 6:193-4). With the denaturalization of God, and simultaneously with the detachment of God from the people, the concept God becomes ungrounded, mere metaphysics, without any of the invigorating, anchoring qualities vested in the physiology of the people. "Good God" replaces "people's G o d " is a transference of ground, ultimately, but Nietzsche would argue that such a transfer has had profound nihilistic effects. In fact, the shifting ground of Christianity is so false in its foundations that according to Nietzsche Christianity denies its own ground in reality, namely Judaism (A 27, KSA 6:197), even though Christianity is the conclusion of Judaism (A 24, KSA 6: 191). Before we abandon the issue of the relative groundedness of gods and the relations between peoples and their gods, we must not forget that modernity has been living with the consequences of the shift to a disembodied moral God, and that one of modernity's most insidious forces has been the looming presence of a disembodied God. In other words, the lack of groundedness of the Christian concept of God has in turn led to the erosion of faith in the Christian God — but as Nietzsche has his Madman say — the people do not yet know that G o d is dead (not even the ones who think they are atheists). Clark has a cogent formulation of what is at stake, based on her reading of the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals. Once God is understood as pure spirit or the opposite of human beings who are sunk in nature, that is, once the transformation takes places from pagan gods who are basically super humans into purely spiritual God, humans then had a weapon which could be used against the self, "a standard of good we could never live up to, and in relation to which we could enjoy judging, condemning, and chastising ourselves and others." 1 0 3 Here we have insight not only into how peoples' gods became "good G o d " and therefore groundless, but we also have a glimpse into the power of the 103

Maudemarie Clark, "Nietzsche's Immoralism and the Concept of Morality" in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality, 30.

48

I. On Grounding

perversion that systematically corrodes human self esteem and engineers a groundless, disenchanted dwelling of humans on the earth. Nihilism is a terrifying concept, so terrifying in fact that many who should be able and willing to deal with it, to address it squarely and to give it its proper place in Nietzsche's writings simply refuse to dignify it. Nihilism means too many things and yet too little, it makes academics uncomfortable, especially those for whom "meaning" is a game. But Nietzsche does not always say "der Nihilismus" when he means nihilism, sometimes he will say instead "metaphysics" or "God" or "morals." Nietzsche is the one, after all, who points out that we do not yet have language to speak of things that we have suppressed as human beings, and the language we have is hopelessly biased and pejorative against the real, the close, while it is hopelessly laudatory and starryeyed in favor of the most distant things. In a nutshell the modern lack of ground and the inability or incapacity to sense the groundlessness of modernity are both symptoms of nihilism. Nihilism, meanwhile, is not an academic trend or a particularly academic creature — in fact, it is even much larger than the Western currents of Christianity, humanism, and the Enlightenment according to Heidegger, and "thought in its essence nihilism is instead the ground movement (Grundbewegung) of the history of the West."104 As Conway summarizes, "Nietzsche proffers no assurance (and certainly no hope) that he will respect the liberal ideas of modernity, for he views the advent of the 'will to nothingness' as a greater danger than the demise of liberalism."105 The will to nothingness is the groundlessness of modernity, and if Nietzsche hastens the passing of nihilism by occasionally exposing liberalisms complicity in nihilism, he does so in the hope that a grounded humanity will be stronger, and better, than the self-congratulatory but ultimately floundering humanity of modern times.

6. The Reclamation of Ground "Verily, the earth shall yet become a site of recovery!" Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "On the Gift-Giving Virtue," 2

In this foundational or grounding chapter of my book I have thus far commented extensively on the nature of Nietzsche's rhetoric, and I have demonstrated that he was in a perfect position both personally and professionally to bring a new philological spirit to the task of philosophy. In order to leave no doubt concerning the seriousness of Nietzsche's task, I have devoted an entire (rather lengthy) subchapter to the nature of the ungrounded predicament we find ourselves in, as moderns, and so the next step 104

105

Martin Heidegger, "Nietzsches Wort 'Gott ist tot'" in Holzwege 3rd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1957), 201. Conway, Nietzsche and the PoliticaU 5.

6. The Reclamation of Ground

49

is to provide salient examples, within the modest space remaining for this particular chapter, of precisely how Nietzsche attacks the problem of groundlessness. At this juncture a brief prefatory note concerning Nietzsche and modern causes is in order. Nietzsche makes himself notoriously difficult to recruit for modern causes generally, since he is unreservedly and unabashedly antimodernist whenever an opportunity presents itself. Any number of modern causes have, however, attempted to recruit him and his philosophical authority, with varying degrees of success. Aschheim recounts in great detail and perspective how Nietzsche was appropriated by such causes as religion, antireligion, the Volkish movement, socialism, National Socialism and so on, while Sokel has dealt with Nietzsche's profound influence on Expressionism.106 Nietzsche's own aversion to causes and especially modern, democratic or populist causes notwithstanding, many wish to claim him because he appears to speak with an urgency and sincerity not common among philosophers. I want to suggest, indeed, more than suggest that Nietzsche's attraction to a broad spectrum of causes, movements, and currents is due first and foremost to the grounding nature of his thought — everyone needs a base, especially a well-thoughtout base, from which to launch their own platforms and agendas. This has proven particularly true in the case of literary theory but can be expanded to include any disciplines that place a heavy emphasis on theory. But as Williams cautions, Nietzsche's text is "booby-trapped, not only against recovering theory from it, but, in many cases, against any systematic exegesis that assimilates it to theory." Despite the problem, then, of foisting an exegesis upon Nietzsche or incorporating him into the history of philosophy "as a source of theories," Williams maintains that Nietzsche's writings are important for philosophy in a way that transcends the odd terms "analytic" and "continental" philosophy, and he agrees with Foucault "that there is no single Nietzscheism, and that the right question to ask is 'what serious use can Nietzsche be put to?'"107 I submit that the most serious use to which Nietzsche can be put, and the one that least violates his own preference to remain free of causes, is the reclamation and preservation of the earth — he made this his task, he set the standard at the threshold of the ecological age for humanity's first attempt to dwell affirmatively, intelligently, and in partnership with the earth. What I refer to as a partnership between humans and earth is expressed in the phrase "the superhuman is the meaning of the earth," found in the prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Schacht uses these words in his discussion of Nietzsche's "rarest and best constituted men" who experience the highest human joys "in which existence celebrates its own transfiguration" and "where man feels himself to be 106

107

Aschheim, "After the Death of God," 219-20, 229, 236, 245; Sokel, The Writer in Extremis, 19, 65, 155-6. Williams, "Nietzsche's Minimalist Moral Psychology," 238.

50

I. On Grounding

altogether a deified form and self-justification of nature." 108 Schacht then invites us to compare the above language from the notes of 1885 with the language of The Birth of Tragedy section 24, where Nietzsche claims that existence and the world are eternally justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon, making the point that humans actually attain this elevated status.109 This is an excellent way to demonstrate the larger, overall consistency of Nietzsche's thought, despite the break with Schopenhauer and metaphysics, when the constant factor is the earth. The elevated status of human beings and their closest possible connection to the earth is what The Birth of Tragedy is all about, and the same can be said of the superhuman, the free spirits, or other higher types. The phrase from Tragedy which includes "existence...world... justified" is another formulation of "the superhuman is the meaning of the earth" — the components are the same: existence = superhuman, world = earth, justified = meaning. Stripped of its rhetoric, the Zarathustra phrase offers a nonmetaphysical version of the Tragedy phrase. Because Nietzsche works with a rhetoric in Zarathustra and because the Übermensch (superhuman) is a touchstone of that rhetoric, often readers forget the human dimension and dwell instead on the super. I see a similar tendency in the reception of the doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same — commentators exhaust themselves with speculation on infinite time, eternity, cosmology, and rarely if ever deal with the fact that the same means here, now, on earth, and earth is the venue of the same. Among recent commentators who are working to bring the Mensch back into Ubermensch are Conway, who insightfully states that the Ubermensch is the embodiment of human perfection "rather than the transcendence, of humankind. The Übermensch is any human being who actually advances the frontier of human perfectability,"110 and Richardson, who breaks with previous Nietzsche-translators and renders Mensch as human being instead of as "man," though he continues to use "overman" where I use superhuman. 111 If Nietzsche is true to form, he would not posit the existence or call for the creation of a superhuman unless something were seriously amiss in the current human condition, and it should also be noted that for Nietzsche "superhuman" never means cutting out the human or somehow circumventing human — superhuman is over or above, surpassing the ordinary human, but grounded utterly and gratefully in the human.

108

Schacht, Nietzsche, 393. Schacht is quoting from The Will to Power, # 1051, in the translation provided by Hollingdale and Kaufmann. N. does not use the masculine noun "man" in this passage, but instead the generic Mensch, i.e., human, human being, which actually makes much more sense. For all their acumen in other respects, N.'s translators over the years have stubbornly clung to rendering Mensch as man, thereby contributing to the notion that N. was more sexist than he was. For the German see KSA 11: 680-81, notes from August-September 1885.

109

Schacht, Nietzsche, 393. Conway, Nietzsche and the Political, 20. Richardson, Nietzsche's System, viii.

110 111

6. The Reclamation of Ground

51

Bergmann has grasped the issue of Nietzsche's urgency and his tone, remarking that "it is not a philosopher's detached wondering" that drives him. If we accompany Bergmann in considering the "horrifyingly dangerous incompleteness with which we are born, if our physical unfinishedness at birth is a metaphor for how raw and embryonic the rest of our being is through much of life," then one can regard the task of shaping and transforming our human "raw material" as both necessary and appropriate.112 Few would argue against the proposition that as a species we have our work cut out for us when it comes to working with raw material, the question arises when one ponders how to shape and transform the human potential. What we do not need, according to Bergmann, is a new law sanctified by metaphysics. "What is needed instead is the very opposite: newly imagined devices of individual encouragement, enticement, and inspiration — conceivably images like that of Nietzsche's 'overman,' designed to give people the heart and stamina, but also the irreverence and the sheer truculence needed to persist in the awesome task of peeling themselves out of their pulp."113 This is a compelling and grounded interpretation of the problem of enhancing human beings. The concept of the superhuman is not put forth in the spirit of eugenics, that shallow pseudoscience so prevalent in Nietzsche's day and throughout the first half of the twentieth century.114 The superhuman, unlikely as it sounds, is a practical step toward shoring up what is dangerously weak and constantly beset by corrosive forces that make it even weaker; in other words, the current weak, confused, fragmented nature of human being is actually encouraged, actually perpetuated by the forces of metaphysics, such that something must be provided as a counter. And here enter Nietzsche, for his task as a philosopher is to provide that counter, that "antidote" in the face of a host of obstacles stemming direcdy from humanity's inertia. The reconstructive or reconstitutive doctrines of Nietzsche's philosophy do not occur by chance in Zarathustra, because Zarathustra is the conceptual ecosystem in which a superhuman could emerge. Or to use a favorite Nietzschean metaphor: Zarathustra as a work is the uterus in which the superhuman can be brought to term. Gooding-Williams calls Zarathustra "a productive act of the imagination . . . [which] creates vocabulary, questions, and concerns that stand at a distance from the mainstream of western philosophy." In the aggregate the doctrines espoused by Zarathustra "constitute a set of anxieties, hopes, questions, and possibilities," and it is against this backdrop that the unifying theme of Zarathustra, namely "the possibility of creating new values, is intelligible."115 Here we must note that the possibility of creating 112 113 114

115

Frithjof Bergmann, "Nietzsche and Analytic Ethics" in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality, 77, 94. Bergmann, "Nietzsche and Analytic Ethics," 94. Moore (2002) has provided the best study to date of N.'s debt to the scientific writing of his age, in the wake of Darwin's The Evolution of Species, and he comments specifically on eugenics as arising in this context of heightened interest in degeneration (134-7). Robert Gooding-Williams, "Literary Fiction as Philosophy: The Case of Nietzsche's Zarathustra.," The Journal of Philosophy 83/11 (1986), 674.

52

I. On Grounding

new values is not, contrary to decades of postmodernist head scratching, to be undertaken as a cure for academic ennui — the possibility for creating new values, which entails the physical, manifest conditions on earth for a grounded relationship between humans and earth, is nothing less than the reclamation of ground. One should therefore give a close and careful ear to Nietzsche's earth rhetoric, especially since this rhetoric tends to speak strangely, with unfamiliar metaphors and urgency, as do the numerous dialogue partners of Zarathustra. One of these dialogue partners is the earth. But as Kreis has aptly stated, Nietzsche's earth is not a living space to which we readily relate, "but instead a forbearing and irreducibly vulnerable communication partner of human beings." As such the earth is not simply the object of our speech, but conversely it constantly calls us to account, only in a language that humans have yet to learn.116 Kreis is right: humans do not have original sin, according to Nietzsche, nor are we morally insufficient or morally flawed, but we do have accountability. Ultimately human accountability will learn or will have to learn the language of the earth, and the energy we expend in learning to be a partner with the earth, if it represents even a tithe of the human energy we have thus far expended in maintaining a dialogue with heaven, will suffice to make life better on earth. Humans may be wretched in some respects but of course Nietzsche is attuned to certain strengths in the human condition. A philosopher believes the value of his philosophy to lie in the whole, in the structure, whereas posterity finds value in the stone with which he built and with which improvements can be made, even when the structure is destroyed ( H H II/1 201, KSA 2:466). The materials of the human spirit are finite, and humans remain inventive in the recycling of these materials, although we still have much to learn in the matter of privileging the structure at the expense of the building blocks. Coming around to the limitations of the grounded human being in the sense that we learn to live economically within these limitations is an art not yet long practiced, but Nietzsche sees hopeful signs. In a Dawn aphorism entitled "The new grounded feeling: our definitive mortality" the case is made that earlier one tried to demonstrate human glory by finding a divine genesis, but this is forbidden now since an ape stands at the door and gnashes his teeth knowingly. The next phase that is supposed to reveal human divinity is in where humanity is heading, but this too leads to nothing. There is no transition to a higher order, no more so for us humans than for an ant or an earwig. "Becoming drags behind it what has been: why should there be an exception from this eternal spectacle for some little planet and then for some little species upon it! Away with such sentimentalities!" (D 49, KSA 3: 53-4). Far from wanting to be grim in this passage, Nietzsche is asking us to think the possibilities once we have definitively ruled out a divine genesis or a divine goal, as this would effectively leave us on solid ground. At this stage there is no mention of a superhuman, and in any case the 16

Kreis, Nietzsche, Wagner, und die Juden, 29.

6. T h e Reclamation of G r o u n d

53

superhuman is not, I repeat, an idealistic or divine projection but another human grounded in the current human. In the economy of the human spirit one of our better powers has been knowledge, and though knowledge has been around as a pursuit for a long time, Nietzsche insists that it has been squandered, or compromised in the service of virtue, as far back as antiquity. Now, however, for the first time in history knowledge wants to be more than just a means (GS 123, KSA:3:479-80). It is difficult at first to imagine what knowledge, as an extension of human being, would want with greater force than to serve as a means, but Nietzsche speaks this way about knowledge in other passages of The Gay Science, most notably in the famous aphorism # 283 with its exhortation to "live dangerously." There he concludes: "Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and owners, you knowing ones! . . . Finally knowledge will reach out for its due: — it will want to rule and possess, and you with it!" (GS 283, KSA 3:526-7). We will have much more to say about the semantics of ruling and possessing ("herrschen und besitzen") as they come to define the reclamatory spirits, but for the moment let us recall that knowledge is no longer supposed to serve as a means, especially not as a means to metaphysics or virtue as defined by metaphysics. The manner of expression of human beings whose knowledge is an extension of themselves will somewhat resemble a ruling and possessing, only not in the political-material sense suggested by the common application of those words. The rule of knowledge is part of Nietzsche's ecumenical vision, to be dealt with in a later chapter. The layout of the human spirit is of close interest to Nietzsche, as seen earlier in my section devoted to the topography of his rhetoric. Nietzsche strives constantly, and with notable success, to concretize and present for visualization those aspects of conceptualization that have tended to drift into silent abstraction. In other words, if Nietzsche can somehow provide a body where hitherto no one had thought to present a body, his evidence is grounded or at least tends toward a ground. Individual philosophical concepts, he writes, are not arbitrary, but instead part of a system and network just like the fauna of a continent. Philosophers' thinking is not discovery, in the main, but recovery, re-membering, a homecoming to our ancient soul, and therefore an atavism of the highest order. Grammar meanwhile holds an unconscious sway and guidance, preparing the way for similar philosophical systems, and the spell or sway of certain grammar functions is the spell of physiological valuations and racial conditions (BGE 20, KSA 5:34-5). This economical, holistic way of saying that concepts are like fauna native to a particular region is sensitive to the organic, finite nature of the human spirit, and to its reliance on a physical or physiological ground. The implication is clear enough: if we heed this relationship between our embodied selves and the soil from which we spring, we stand to gain much, or better, regain much that is currently squandered in the human condition. Humans after all gleefully "discover" proportionate to their drive to "create new things," these are modern values, but Nietzsche is urging a more cautious, more conservative and conserving approach, such

54

I. O n Grounding

that we do not overlook, as a species, how much there is to us already, and how like it or not, consciously or not, we are constantly recycling our mental energy. What Nietzsche means by the physiological is closely tied to the evolution of the psyche, or let us say, to the means by which the body trains the psyche. In Genealogy he shows a deep interest in cruelty and torture not because of any morbid fixation, but because these phenomena speak directly to what humans have done with and to the body since prehistory. In the prehistorical era burning and branding were used to force humans to remember via pain, and Nietzsche goes so far as to claim that generally speaking the forms of cruelty and torture all have their origin in pain as the most powerful mnemonic aid. What we treasure today as reason, seriousness, mastery over the affects and reflection are the privileges and trophies of humanity, all bought dearly, all resting on a ground of blood and cruelty ("wie viel Blut und Grausen ist auf dem Grunde aller 'guten Dinge!') (GM II/3, KSA 5:295-6). The ground of humanity is therefore not ideal — and I mean not ideal in every sense of the phrase — but instead physiological, need based, primitive in its resistance to sublimation. As a species we have earned our refinements, we have moreover been the sole architects of our evolutionary progress, and it is high time that we acknowledge both the nature of our ground and the ground to be reclaimed, as well as acknowledge with a modicum of human pride that our refinements are indeed ours — not those conferred upon us by a disembodied divinity. Nietzsche is similarly concerned about the economy of the individual. Thus a selfcentered individual's value is commensurate with whatever physiological value obtains in that person. She can be very worthy, or unworthy, despicable, depending upon whether life is ascending or descending in her. The mistake made by common people and philosophers alike, writes Nietzsche, is to conceive of the individual as just one. In fact, the individual is not an atom, not a ring in a chain, but the whole single line ofhumanity ("die ganze Eine Linie") up to herself (TI 9/33, KSA 6:131-2). A worthwhile, physiologically robust individual has "natural value" for the entire species and is the entire species, representing all ofhumanity up to that point. The species progresses through such an individual and everything must be done, Nietzsche cautions, to nurture and enhance this person, while the types illustrative of life's descending line (decay, chronic degeneration, illness) should be regarded as parasites (ibid). In the urgent matter of reclaiming ground, it is imperative to be able to recognize precisely what it is that we need to, and wish to, reclaim. Nietzsche's numerous meditations upon cruelty and torture, as well as his genealogical probings more generally, remind us of the prehistorical human in each of us, who occupies much more space, physiologically speaking, than the civilized person. We cannot reclaim ground if we misjudge our own ground or refuse to acknowledge its presence. In the same spirit, if the species does not or cannot care for and promote the interests of its highest exemplars, as if they somehow did not exist or as if their existence were merely a matter of indifference, then we are fundamentally incapable of living according to the impulse of ascending life — and Nietzsche

6. The Reclamation of Ground

55

does not believe this to be the case. Even the ascetic ideal, arising from the protective and healing instinct of degenerating life, though in its effect life denying is an artifice for the preservation of life (GM 111/13, KSA 5:366). Nietzsche's prophet Zarathustra is the perfect mask through whom he can speak. Well aware of his untimeliness in the role of rediscoverer of human ground, Nietzsche creates an Areopagus for himself in the unique fusion of prophecy, philosophy, and literary fiction that is Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Adding to the oracular nature of that work is the undercurrent of the Dionysian, which simultaneously grounds Nietzsche and sweeps him away from the present. He is able to use this forum to express without inhibition, though certainly with a healthy dose of lucid moments, most of the concerns and dreams he has for the species, and in such a way that for the most part he will not be branded an egomaniac or a madman — after all, Zarathustra is a "book for all and none," and what are books if not arcane packages of entertainment? Perhaps humanity's greatest wisdom can only be contained within the innocence of a seeming work of fiction. The foundational prologue of Zarathustra addresses the problem of reclaiming ground both in its rhetoric and its substance. Zarathustra declaims, after having lived among humans and then for ten years in isolation, as if to demonstrate that he has found a new bedrock and will serve as a new beginning. The declamatory speeches do not invite comment, do not elicit comment, and so we are forced to deal with their substance. The human is something that must be overcome, we are told, and now that the superhuman is the meaning of the earth, our will should say: the superhuman shall be the meaning of the earth. The imperative now is to remain faithful to the earth; earlier the greatest sin was sacrilege against god, now sacrilege against the earth is most terrible, and esteeming the bowels of the inscrutable higher than the meaning of the earth. The human being is a polluted stream, and it needs a sea to take it in and cleanse it without itself becoming unclean, and the superhuman is this sea (Z P/3, KSA 4:14-15). Nietzsche makes sure from the start that his readers understand the finite nature of their ecosystem. The center of gravity for living has been shifted entirely to the earth, which has endured "without meaning" for as long as humans have not fulfilled the covenant of partnership with the earth, their true home, their only home. A closer look at humans reveals them to be as mighty as a stream but polluted, flowing but without goal. The only power on earth large enough to filter such a polluted stream is the sea called superhuman, but observe how the power is here, on earth, as opposed to beyond, emphasizing that the problems of human making in the form of injustice to the earth will only be solved by restoring the values of the earth — there is no extraterrestrial intervention. Underscoring the natural and earthy ground of Zarathustra are his two main companions, the eagle and the snake. The most grounded animal is borne aloft by the least grounded, the clever is carried great distances by the proud, such that Zarathustra remarks on seeing them approach: "That I were clever from the ground up, like my

56

I. On Grounding

snake!" ("von Grund aus") (Z P/10, KSA 5:27). As high as the eagle may soar, its habitat is still the sky which is the dome of the earth, and of course Zarathustra's wisdom and pride remain companions as long as these two, eagle and snake, travel together. Another expression of the tension between body and spirit, if the snake and the eagle may be seen as symbols in some sense of these basic human properties, is found in "On the Despisers of the Body," where we learn new respect for the body and its primacy. To those who despise the body Zarathustra says it was the creative body that created spirit, such that contempt is made possible in the first place by the body. The despisers of the body cannot create beyond themselves, cannot escape their bodies, and so they scorn life and earth (Z 1/4, KSA:4:40-1). Ground is equated with body, body is primary and gives rise to spirit, just as in the dim past of humanity earth was primary and gave rise to heaven and hell and the metaphysical world in general. What the despisers of the body, and of the earth, do not comprehend is that even their aversion to body and earth is an expression of the body, there is simply no escaping it. A force whose impulse or message can be obscured or obfuscated, but not shut down, is a force to be reckoned with. Conversely, a force that impotently rages against the body and the earth, when the intelligent measure would be to ally oneself with them instead, is a force that no longer needs to be reckoned with. Nietzsche intersperses his speeches with variations of the grounding theme. In his discussion of the passions, which are expressions of the body, he confesses love for earthly virtue which is one's own good and does not come from divine law and will not become a human statute (Z 1/5, KSA 4:42). Earthly virtue is grounded in the reality of the person whose virtue it is. Or consider the tree growing on the mountainside: the higher it wills itself, the deeper its roots strive earthward, into the dark and into the deep and into evil. The tree grew in isolation above everything in its surroundings, and now it awaits the lightning, its ruin or "going under" ( Untergang) (Z 1/8, KSA4: 51-2). Like his other plant metaphors the tree vividly captures the grounding effect, for it is anchored in the earth more deeply than any living thing, and therefore is also tapping into the darkest most "evil" elements, all the while the tree's above-ground life boldly grows beyond all other growing things, as if inviting the lightning to strike it dead. The tree which drinks in everything, good and evil, thrives in the economy of the earth, and it is not shy or fearful. The most detailed treatise in Part I of Zarathustra as it pertains to the reclamation of ground is in the speech entitled "On the Bestowing Virtue," which gives the first part of the book a dramatic and lyrical conclusion. As a parting gift Zarathustra's disciples give him a staff upon whose golden handle a snake encircles the sun. What Zarathustra and his disciples consider bad and worst of all, he tells them, is degeneration, which is present wherever the bestowing soul is absent. The disciples are told to watch for the hour in which their spirit speaks in parables, for there is the source of their virtue and the elevation of their body. This new virtue is power, a ruling thought and encircling it a clever soul: a golden sun and around it the serpent of knowledge.

6. The Reclamation of Ground

57

The disciples are admonished to remain faithful to the earth, to not let their virtue fly against eternal walls, to guide their virtue back to earth, to the body and to life, for the meaning of the earth and the meaning of human. There are a thousand paths not yet walked, he tells them, and a thousand healths and hidden islands of life. Human being and human earth are still unexhausted and undiscovered, now the earth shall become the site of recovery, now that all gods are dead and we want the superhuman to live (Z 1/22, KSA 4:97-102). 117 The reclamation of the earth is timed to coincide with the death of all gods, who have stood in the way of a proper human habitation of the earth. The gift-giving or bestowing virtue is power, symbolized by the sun (Zarathustra's first dialogue partner), but with a snake coiled around it, symbolizing that the power is contained by wisdom (another body/spirit metaphor). The superabundance of the sun cannot do otherwise than give, than bestow, and Zarathustra explains to the sun in the opening words of the prologue that he must now do exactly as the sun, namely, bestow, "go down" to the people. The implication is that if mortals would cherish their virtue as the virtue that speaks in parables, as the virtue than speaks the language of the body, and then channel this virtue back into the body and the earth, this virtue would grow to a superabundance of power that must give of itself. It should be recalled that degeneration is present where the bestowing virtue is absent. The earth becomes a site of convalescence and the reclamation project has begun. Humans have not yet begun to weigh the merits or the possible boon that accrues to humanity once the best energies of our species are directed back onto the species, instead of being radiated into outer space or into the Nothing. For this reason, Nietzsche concludes the speeches on the bestowing virtue with a stark juxtaposition: all gods are now dead, and so it is time for the superhuman to live. This leaves little doubt that "superhuman" is to a large extent a potential left open by the absence of gods, who otherwise drain off human energy. Seen in this light, "superhuman" is once again based on the current human, and the status of superhuman could be reached, theoretically, at any given time in an individual's lifetime depending on his or her ability to reclaim ground and return human- and earth-virtue to their proper home. We should also add that henceforth in Zarathustra the bestowing virtue will be referred to as ruling, or even the lust to rule by Zarathustra, representing Nietzsche's effort to elevate the semantics of earthly, grounded values by liberating them from the pejorative tone cast upon them by the earth haters (see in particular "On the Three Evils" in Part III). Earth and sky form a constructive field of tension in Zarathustra, sometimes acting as opposites, for rhetorical purposes, but generally functioning as partners, as differently situated boundaries of an ecosystem. In the last section of Part II, when 117

See Daniel Conway for the significance of the staff as a parting gift — the disciples reveal their immaturity in treating Zarathustra as if he were a (the) the good shepherd ("Nietzsche contra Nietzsche," 92).

58

I. O n Grounding

Zarathustra is experiencing his "stillest hour" reminiscent of the scenario of the loneliest hour in which the demon comes to you in Gay Science 341 ("The greatest weight"), he falls into a kind of trance or swoon that symbolizes his momentary loss of ground, his entering of the abyss: "This I say to you as a parable. Yesterday, in the stillest hour, the ground gave way: the dream began." Zarathustra is visited by the voice of his angry, "awesome mistress" ("furchtbare Herrin" could also be lord or ruler) during this period of groundlessness. He knows or intuits the eternal recurrence of the same but he is not ready to declaim it, i.e. he has the power but lacks "the lion's voice for commanding." His mistress tells him that what is least forgivable is that he has the power and does not want to rule (Z11/22, KSA 4:187-9). During this groundless experience the dream state is used to mitigate the knowledge of the eternal recurrence of the same, which will function as a new ground and a new gravity once it can be affirmed. Meanwhile, it is significant that Zarathustra's state of unreadiness, his immaturity for the heaviest weight and the heaviest thought, is symbolized by a loss of ground or a suspension of ground: without the proper resolve to accompany it, the thought of the eternal recurrence of the same is an abyss. Part III of Zarathustra enacts Zarathustra's affirmation of the eternal recurrence of the same, and ground and abyss (GrundznA Abgrund) continue to be played against each other. The seminal chapter for this Part is "On the Vision and the Riddle," where the doctrine of eternal recurrence is formulated and Zarathustra also has a vision of himself as the superhuman. Zarathustra finds himself arduously climbing a steep mountain path, surmounted by his old enemy and devil the spirit of gravity, who is half dwarf and half mole. As Zarathustra struggles to climb, the gravity dwarf poisons him with "leaden words" designed to weigh him down, to ground him in the negative sense of paralysis. When it finally becomes a matter of life or death for Zarathustra, he resolves to confront the dwarf with courage, saying "The human being is the most courageous animal: therewith he overcame every animal," and "Courage slays even dizziness at the abyss: and where would humans not stand at the abyss! Is seeing not itself — seeing the abyss?" (Z III/2, KSA 4: 198-9). After his loss of ground in "The Stillest Hour" Zarathustra is working through the heaviest moment to reclaim his ground; he not only has the spirit of gravity to deal with, symbolizing all that is heavy, inert, and grave in the human condition, but his labor is further intensified by the fact that courage reveals that everywhere humans step they are confronted by an abyss. Though the dwarf speaks to Zarathustra in words that sound much like his own, they are empty rhetoric because the dwarf did not bear himself up the mountain, but rode instead on Zarathustra's back. The dwarf personifies the old gravity insofar as he is capable only of pulling down, of demoralizing, of thwarting the climb of human beings. He cannot represent the ground proper, only the false ground that afflicts human beings. In the second part of the encounter Zarathustra has a vision of a shepherd into whose throat a thick, black snake has crawled. Helpless to dislodge the snake from the

6. The Reclamation of Ground

59

shepherd using force, Zarathustra receives a voiceless command, reminiscent perhaps of the voice of his awesome mistress, such that he cries out to the shepherd to bite down and to bite off the snake's head. The shepherd succeeds in freeing himself of the snake, and he immediately transforms from the dying, writhing and horror-stricken human being of a moment ago into a transfigured, radiant, laughing being, laughing in fact as no human being on earth had ever laughed. Zarathustra poses this question to his auditors: " Who is the shepherd into whose throat the snake thus crawled? Who is the human being into whose throat all that is heaviest and blackest will thus crawl?" (p. 202). Zarathustra is given the experience of shedding the old gravity and acquiring the new in two painful but highly cathartic forms. We have already discussed the significance of the dwarf as old gravity, and now we see that a similar operation has been conducted with the young shepherd. Nietzsche writes that "all that is heaviest" ("alles Schwerste") had lodged itself in the throat of the shepherd, meaning that the black snake can be regarded as another formulation of everything that the earth deniers have dished up over centuries and millennia to poison life on earth. This unsavory snake has no business lodging itself in a human, but observe how the vulnerable position of the shepherd, his lying down asleep on the ground, made it possible for the snake to invade him. The old gravity is not a friend to human, nor is it a friend to animal and earth. Something is seriously amiss in the relationship between human and earth when such a spectacle as the shepherd and the snake can take place. In the spirit of the new gravity, Zarathustras snake does not represent "all that is heaviest" ("das Schwerste" can also be "all that is hardest" or "most difficult"), and the snake thrives in partnership with earth, human, and sky. There is an implication here for the work of reclamation. As humans we may live on this planet is a state of wretchedness and horror if we allow it to be, if we allow ourselves to sleep, open mouthed and naive, upon a ground infested with monsters of our own making — we have the option to choke on our own bile. But we can also wake up, face the nature of ground with courage, reclaim the ground that harbors no such monsters. Other indications of reclaimed ground occur when Zarathustra experiences his innermost, and his outermost passions as dimensions of the same gamut. "On Involuntary Bliss" makes the case that one loves from the depths ("von Grund aus") only one's own child, while the love of self makes one pregnant. Zarathustra sees his children budding and blooming like the trees of his best garden and best soil. He had been deaf to these new children and to the arrival of "his time" until his abyss stirred and his thought bit him, his abysmal thought. He knows he requires extraordinary strength to hear the digging of this thought, namely the eternal recurrence of the same, and though the weight of this thought has always been terrible enough for him, he promises to find the strength and the lion voice to summon it and bring it forth (Z III/3, KSA 4:204-05). Zarathustras abysmal thought is referred to as such because it comes from his utmost ground, the abyss of his self, as though he were pregnant and capable of giving birth to it as he would to the children of his own siring and bearing.

60

I. O n Grounding

Meanwhile, in "Before Sunrise" Zarathustra refers to the sky above as an abyss of light; they are friends with common grief and ground, and Zarathustra's manner of blessing is "to stand over each and every thing as its own sky, as it round roof, its azure bell and eternal security" (ZIII/4, KSA 4:207-09). Now Zarathustra's gaze is directed outward, to the highest heights, but even here he remains grounded because his manner of blessing is to provide a roof and haven to every thing under the sun, the supreme gesture of affirmation. He can refer to the sky as an "abyss of light" because its ground, or depth, is comparable to that of earth's. Moreover, what is telling in these metaphors applied to the sky is that they are all metaphors of containment, metaphors of the finite and the need of the finite to have its day and its proper measure of security. Even when Zarathustra speaks in rhapsodic and lyrical parables, his rhetoric can be traced to the ground. It may make no decisive difference that Kaufmann translates Himmel as heaven in this passage and others, but most would agree that if we are to become attuned to Nietzsche's unique discourse of grounding, the word "sky" is a far more accurate translation for indicating that earth and sky belong together as an ecosystem. The sky is our dome, earth's dome, earth's atmosphere, without which earth and all of us on the planet will perish. Many other examples that tend to reclaim the earth as the proper and only site of human habitation could be offered, and certainly Zarathustra will be cited throughout the course of my book, but for the present let us consider a passage or two from Part IV and then move on. The fourth and final part of Zarathustra reverses and sometimes parodies much of the earlier material, and yet, inasmuch as it was written later and after the earlier parts had met with bewilderment and derision on the part of all too few readers, it is the most grounded of all the parts. It opens with "The Honey Sacrifice," which Zarathustra ostensibly conducts in order to offer up a sacrifice, but on second thought, he suspects that his rhetoric is deceiving him, and so he reveals that he is actually setting out honey as bait. It is noteworthy that for this operation Zarathustra is back in his mountain home, and that for the time being, tiring of their chatter and their empathy, Zarathustra sends his animal companions away, in order to be alone. Now he can speak freely about his need to squander that which has been bestowed upon him. The strange human world and human sea is where he now casts his fishing rod. H e calls to the human abyss to open up. Though Zarathustra's kingdom of a thousand years is still quite distant, he stands on this ground, his mountain, as upon an eternal ground of hard primeval rock, upon the highest and hardest primeval mountain range ("mit beiden Füssen stehe ich sicher auf diesem Grunde, / — auf einem ewigen Grunde, auf hartem Urgesteine, auf diesem höchsten härtesten Urgebirge . . . " ) (Z IV/1, KSA 4:295-9). Clearly in his final scenes Zarathustra is not only symbolically at home, he is also situated where he should be, must be, according to the grounding virtues he himself has espoused to the lowlanders. Now he will "fish" for humans rather than go to them, which is to say, they must leave their human abyss to rise up to his ground, for he stands upon the summa of ground.

6. The Reclamation of Ground

61

Not without humor and self parody, Zarathustra realizes in Part IV that he has made something of a spectacle of himself in the matter of grounding. One of the "higher humans" he lures to his mountain top is the Leech, who represents a parody of ground and gravity. As he is walking about in woods and swampy valleys ( Griinde) trying to locate the source of the distress cry, Zarathustra is thinking about "weighty things" and so he accidentally steps on a human. The human leech had been lying on the ground, his arm extended into a swamp, in order to attract leeches. He tells Zarathustra that he is the "conscientious in spirit," and that his business requires only a bit of ground upon which to stand. When Zarathustra asks if the leech man is an expert in leeches, if he pursues the leech to its ultimate grounds, the latter modestly replies: not an expert of the entire leech, merely the leech brain (ZIV/4, KSA 4: 309-11). For Zarathustra to literally stumble over this specimen of groundedness while he himself is pondering "weighty matters," is a moment of self parody for the often pompous and gloomy prophet. The Leech, meanwhile, who is one of the "higher humans" but like the rest not nearly high enough for Zarathustra's ground, has obviously managed to imbibe some of Zarathustra's grounding spirit, only to have halted in his extreme conscientiousness at the point of occupying as little ground as possible (as long as it is firm) and in expending his energies in the most focused, grounded pursuit. Again, this is a "higher human," and we are left to ponder just what the "not so high humans" are able to make of Zarathustra's teachings concerning ground. Lampert directs our attention to the importance of taste and gratitude to Nietzsche's thought. Gratitude is a virtuous word for amor fati, he explains, and taste manifests itself as "refined sensibility both inborn and acquired." These Nietzschean virtues of gratitude and taste "rebel at modern man's extreme lack of loyalty," which Lampert sees perfectly illustrated in a passage from Genealogy. Nietzsche discusses the character of modern being, wherever it expresses power, as pure hubris and godlessness: "Hubris is today our entire position on nature, our violation of nature with the help of machines and the ever so thoughtless ingenuity of technicians and engineers; hubris is our position on God, that is to say, on some alleged spider of purpose and morality behind the great sticky spider web of causality." Not only have we modern humans displayed hubris vis-à-vis the earth and the concept of god, we also display hubris toward ourselves, "for we experiment with ourselves as we would not permit ourselves to do with any animal, and we slice gleefully and curiously into our souls even while we live" (GM III/9, KSA 5:356-7). To which Lampert responds: "Here is a Nietzsche yet to be heard, the advocate of love who traces the modern rage to alter and possess nature to the natural propensity of male eros." For it is a lack of loyalty in males for what nurtured them, according to Lampert, that accounts for their "spiritualized and organized aggression ... goaded into vengeance against humankind and the earth by the long and now ignoble Platonic lie of their defective or fallen character."118 118

Lampert, Nietzsche and Modern Times, 385.

62

I. On Grounding

Paramount in the reclamation of ground, of earth is the spirit with which humans will see themselves as they set about the work of reclamation. Few would argue, it is hoped, that Nietzsche elevates the virtues of gratitude and taste — there can be no appreciation for the things of this earth, the closest things, and for ourselves as human beings, without a refined sense of gratitude and a discerning taste — a taste that is not dictated by hubris. On the question of love, and I do agree with Lampert and Staten that Nietzsche is generally ignored on this point, 119 it is perhaps harder to see where Nietzsche weighs in, given that his remarks on women are frequently misogynist and his prophet Zarathustra does not have a mate. But if both Nietzsche and Zarathustra lack real life women and the experience of sexuality, such that their children are the offspring of self pregnancy, let us not forget that the love for and loyalty to the earth is symbolized by Zarathustra's wedding with eternity, whose vows are repeated seven times at the conclusion of Part III: Never yet did I find the woman with w h o m I wanted children, unless it were this woman w h o m I love: for I love you, oh eternity! For I love you, oh eternity! (Z 111/16, KSA 4:291)

In the matter of reclaiming the earth, the act of marriage to the eternal recurrence of the same symbolizes the closest possible union between human and earth. One is tempted to regard this love as Platonic, save for the very important fact that Platonism and Christianity are the two cardinal forces of Western culture responsible for shaping negative views of humans, nature and the earth. The love Nietzsche displays for the earth is appropriately human love, just as his Zarathustra teaches that virtues ought to be human virtues and earth virtues. This love for the earth will translate into love of humans for each other, as living, breathing, physical bodies dependent on a bodied earth for their survival and welfare. The words "remain faithful to the earth" assume foundational importance in the task of reclaiming lost ground.

119

Lampert, Nietzsche, 363f., 404; Staten, Nietzsche's Voice, 155.

Chapter II: Immanence 1. On Heightening Human Presence through Reorientation "What counts however is eternal liveliness-, what do 'eternal life' and life in general matter!" Human, All Too Human II/1 408 As a working definition of immanence I start with the view whereby all value resides or inheres in the physical reality of nature, to include humans and their experience, knowledge, and values, as opposed to any value ascribed to a transcendental power. Immanence therefore privileges the physical, the present, and the real, as opposed to the metaphysical, the absent, and the ideal. What is immanent is manifest and present, but in the case of life immanence, it is not always apparent or in a state of immediate presence — life manifests itself in humans in varying degrees at various times. What Nietzsche refers to as "ascending life" is the process whereby life strives for immanence, strives for and succeeds in manifesting itself. "Descending life" in Nietzsche's estimation is the dwindling away or diminishing of life as force and presence, such that descending life typically projects its values beyond the physical, beyond earth in particular. Immanence is a state or mood according to which humans try to make the best and most of conditions on earth, not fatalistically but in a spirit of affirmation, with the goal of living groundedly and fully in the here and now. Historically the major movements, religions, and philosophies of the West, if not of the earth more generally, have tended to stress metaphysical doctrines and transcendental solutions, with the effect of effacing the human presence from our planet on the one hand, and effacing the planet on the other. Immanence in the sense I ascribe this mood to Nietzsche is a corrective gesture aimed at reclaiming and remanifesting what is inherent in human beings. When I speak of immanence as a mood whereby humans would assert or reclaim their presence on the planet, I do not mean this in a hegemonist, anthropocentric sense, i.e., heightening human presence at the expense of the immanence of animals and plants and balanced ecosystem. In fact, the very notion of establishing immanence on our planet is of historical consequence for the survival and flourishing of our planet, inasmuch as immanence is so closely tied to nature that we first need a sense of immanence on our planet before we can truly appreciate what is at stake when we abuse our planet and ourselves as human beings. In other words, Nietzsche's sense of immanence is of partnership with the earth, as will emerge in the course of this chapter and later ones in which I deal with the concepts of dwelling, the open, and post-humanism.

64

II. Immanence

In notes from spring 1884 Nietzsche wrote that "the highest human being is to be conceived as a copy of nature: tremendous superabundance, tremendous reason in the individual, squandering itself as a whole and indifferent to the squandering" (KSA 11:51). It is clear from these scant three lines of text that a different notion of human presence is at stake, one based firmly on the model of nature but with the human property of reason. Superabundance linked with reason appears to tie together two incompatible properties, after all, what is reasonable about squandering and doing so indifferently? We can well understand that nature indifferently squanders its superabundance, as long as we accept Nietzsche's view of nature, but to then imagine a human with "tremendous reason" engaging in such behavior seems counterintuitive. And it is precisely this cognitive aversion to reason "squandering indifferently" that is Nietzsche's point: if tremendous superabundance and tremendous reason were wedded in a human being, there would not be this bifurcation or split or conflict between the faculty of reason and the state of superabundance — as a "copy" of nature the highest human being is not so dependent on cognition, is not so aware of the dualism represented in the body versus mind dichotomy. Less than a page later in his notes Nietzsche writes: "Return of the human being to nature naturelle, in which the ancient cultures refresh themselves. — Break with the historical landscape" (KSA 11:52). Introduced here is the notion that even ancient cultures, mindful of their drift away from nature, would refresh or invigorate themselves by temporarily severing their ties with history (consciousness, temporality) and rejoining nature. "Nature naturelle" is not a tautology but a description of nature as the ground, nature not anthropomorphized, nature not viewed through the lens of history and consciousness. Nietzsche also indicates that our place in history, insofar as we maintain a constant awareness thereof, serves to block or obstruct the heightened life, as if we remove ourselves artificially from the flow or chaos of nature in order to isolate and encapsulate ourselves instead in a place called "history." Abel suggests this break with the historical landscape when he emphasizes as Nietzsche's ultimate task the construction of individuals through immanent overcoming and self-overcoming of universal structures determined by our species, e.g. grammar, socialization, institutionality. 120 Detractors of life on earth are the detractors of life as earth. Immanence seeks to define and discover life on earth. Fundamental to Nietzsche's understanding of life on earth is a recognition of the gulf separating our human conception of nature from nature naturelle. Time and time again Nietzsche argues against the prevailing view of nature as scarcity, as distress {Not, Notlage). Superabundance rules in nature, he maintains, and squandering to the point of senselessness, whereas the struggle for existence 120

Abel, Die Dynamik, 134-5. I certainly agree with Abel that the challenge of becoming an individual is of primary importance to N.'s philosophizing, and I would add that the dramatization of this challenge is seen in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

1. O n Heightening Human Presence through Reorientation

65

is merely an exception, a temporary restriction of the life will. All struggle big and small revolves around preponderance, growth and proliferation of power, according to the will to power which is the will of life (GS 349, KSA 3:585-6). Knowingly or not, when moderns ascribe to nature the state of scarcity, paucity, or distress, such that nature is seen as a field of struggle for existence, struggle for survival, a skewed version of nature and a mere exception within nature are elevated to the "norm" of nature. Since humans are a part of "this" nature, this paltry, stressed and distressed lack of vitality, it stands to reason that humans, too, knowingly or not regard themselves and their lives in like manner. Now compound the problem of curtailing life's presence by knowingly subscribing to the notion that nature is distress. It has not been without consequences for the regard or lack of regard in which humans hold themselves, and the clear lack of regard in which humans hold the earth, that we have served as willing accomplices in the equation life = distress. Nietzsche has a different formula for capturing the essence of vitality, and it includes the instincts. "Having to fight the instincts — that is the formula for decadence: as long as life ascends, happiness equals instinct — " (TI 2/11, KSA 6: 73). This observation made in connection with the critique of Socrates in Twilight of the Idols (1888) is strongly reminiscent of the position Nietzsche takes much earlier in Tragedy, where Socrates is portrayed as a decadent who wields an "instinct disintegrating influence" (BT 13, KSA 1:91). The need to fight one's instincts in the manner of Socrates is a clear obstruction to immanence, since life speaks through the instincts. Whatever Socrates may have represented in other respects, for instance as a wise man and dialectician and martyr to knowledge, in his person and his influence he represents the kind of decadent transcendence that has contributed to the loosening of human ties to the earth, to nature, and ultimately to humanity. The tragic philosophy of the authentic Dionysian Nietzsche parallels the tragic culture of the ancient Greeks insofar as it attempts to affirm life, earth, world by using "the creative forces of sex (Wollust), lust to rule, and selfishness (Zarathustra's "three evils") as representatives of life's profundity, which remains concealed to metaphysics, religion, and morality." 121 These manifestations of instinct can only be inhibited at the expense of manifesting a human presence, and for this reason Nietzsche attempts in Zarathustra to give these much maligned human drives new names and new dignity, for instance he changes "lust to rule" (Herrschsucht) to "the bestowing virtue" (Z 111/10, KSA 4:238). The human aversion to transience runs deep, so deep in fact that it represents a general "flight from experience . . . [that] characterizes and inseminates" our dominant tradition. Magnus refers to this powerful aversion to transience as "kronophobia." In positing the eternal recurrence of the same as a counter-hypothesis to the concept of an afterlife, Nietzsche is fighting dualism, metaphysics, Christianity, nihilism "all with 121

De Bleeckere, '"Also sprach Zarathustra,'" 282.

66

II. Immanence

a single formulation" that has the effect of abolishing "all bifurcations of apparent and real, temporal and timeless, contingent and necessary."122 Indeed, Nietzsche cannot conceal high hopes for his doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same as a concept that is capable of seriously changing the way we regard earthly life, our own lives most importantly. Humans who are capable of abolishing or suspending the bifurcating "second nature," by which I mean "doubled nature" are closer to the "copy of nature" ("Abbild der Natur"). We have already seen that living in keeping with one's instincts promotes immanence, and overcoming what Magnus calls "kronophobia" by means of the eternal recurrence of the same is just such a strategy of not allowing the traditional, metaphysically sponsored bifurcations to disparage the instincts. Nor must the passions be allowed to be extirpated ad infinitum. While the "ascetic ideal demands the destruction of the passions of the earth,' — Zarathustra's metaphor for the kinds of desire that commonly claim human bodies — the creation of the overman requires the inspiration of passional chaos. In creating the overman, one prizes the passions of the body in order to embody the 'meaning of the earth.'" 123 Passional chaos can serve as the ground or substratum from which to find inspiration for the superhuman, and observe that in the above formulation, too, the linkage between body, passions, and superhuman is without interruption. A state of immanence whereby earth achieves new meaning, or perhaps as Nietzsche suggests, a meaning for the first time in history, is one in which the passions of the body are far more likely to thrive than in modernity's current state of nihilistic denial. There is no mystery or arbitrariness to Nietzsche's method when it comes to immanence: those aspects of human being labeled "evil" or flawed by the institutions of metaphysics, or otherwise inhibited in terms of their growth or practice, are in fact values and virtues of the earth, and as such they will he elevated by Nietzsche, though he also reserves the right to channel, sublimate, and refine them. Yet another strategy for achieving immanence is to give proper credit to humans for the creative work that actually attempts to ground humans. That which is of human making and does not tend to undermine life on earth, such as the creation of new values to serve as a counter to the values of declining life, as well as the creation of a higher humanity in the form of the superhuman — all of this is created value of which humans should be proud, according to Schacht. Nietzsche certainly considered the value imparted to humanity and earth by the emergence of a higher humanity to be "as real as this higher humanity itself is (or may come to be)," and so worthy of affirmation that he used both amorfati and eternal recurrence to express his affirmation. 124 By focusing on the activity that is highest, most wanting and most

122 123

124

Bernd Magnus, '"Eternal Recurrence,'" Nietzsche-Studien 8 (1979), 370, 377. Gooding-Williams, Zarathustra's Dionysian Modernism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 65. Schacht, Nietzsche, 415-16.

1. On Heightening Human Presence through Reorientation

67

lacking in the human condition, namely the creation of life affirming values, humans will have a different relationship with the earth, an enhanced relationship such that dwelling here on earth will be fuller, and there will be more of the human presence. By "more" of the human presence I mean: humans who learn pride in their humanbuilding work, in their earth-building work will look upon themselves and earth as part of the same, they will see more of the human reflected in nature, and vice versa. Seeing more of themselves on earth (by which I patently do not mean greater numbers of humans), humans will be in a better position to appreciate how earth is neither a hostile environment that rejects them as alien, nor a hostile environment of the kind that requires technological subjugation. In other words, Nietzsche is right to point out that humans behave like paranoid strangers on this planet, and the serious disconnect between humans and earth will not begin to be bridged until humans begin to feel more comfortable, more at home here on earth. In notes not used for Zarathustra Nietzsche rehearsed a Zarathustra speech: '"The earthly' — you must learn to perceive it differently. Set aside the false value standards which are taken from an unknown world. The human being stands high perhaps suddenly a higher being will succeed!" (KSA 10:182). As fragmentary as this observation remains, still it contains important tips for enhancing the human presence in the only site, on the only planet we know of where humans exist. "The earthly" ("das Irdische") is that which is of the earth, earth's property, earth's essence, its life forms, but for some reason Nietzsche uses quotation marks around it — perhaps because we do not reflect often enough on what is earthly. The first way to perceive the earthly differently would be to abandon the false value standards created in honor of "another world" or the "real world" or the "eternal world." If we then return our gaze, properly, to the earth, we find that the human being has grown tall, with the implication that it has grown taller or higher than the other species. Who is to say, asks Nietzsche, that the next development of the human being might not take place quite suddenly? What if this were actually possible? What would be required of current human beings to achieve such a spurt in growth? Why has the current state of human being taken as long as it has? All of these and doubtless many more are fair questions when we try to perceive the earthly differently. A heightened state of immanence for humans will include a variety of reorientation strategies — and reorientation strategies are the nucleus of Nietzsche's grounding work — not unlike the one Nietzsche suggested when he observed that humans must break with the historical landscape. The human being is a rhythm-forming creature, he observes, and this rhythm forming is part of the greater multiplicity of forces united in a common process of nourishment that we call "life." This life process not only opposes all other forces, it also fictionalizes or adapts ( Z u r e c h t m a c h e n ) other forces into forms and rhythms, and appraises things with respect to incorporation or separation (KSA 10:650-1). Just a few pages later in his notes Nietzsche reveals the source for his latest thoughts concerning the nature of organisms, and

68

II. Immanence

he pens this fragment: "We have to presuppose a lively rhythm, not came, and effect! (KSA 10:664).125 Inasmuch as Nietzsche rejected cause and effect as an anthropocentric ruse, he appears to have favored the ruse whereby instead humans posit a lively rhythm. By "lively rhythm" ("einen lebendigen Rhythmus") Nietzsche means the vitalistic, life-induced pattern with which we parse the world of events. "Pattern" or "rhythm" may not be the best words for this phenomenon, but one begins to see his point: cause and effect contribute to the bifurcating activity of the intellect, and have the effect of separating humans out of nature. Something more akin to a living rhythm might be a more immanent way of regarding the activity whereby humans take in impressions from the senses. Still another strategy for grounding the human presence and bringing it into tighter focus on earth is the ubiquitous Nietzschean emphasis of the moment, whose most famous expression occurs in the doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same. This doctrine will be analyzed in detail somewhat later in my book, but for now let us approach the moment somewhat more obliquely. Both Colli and Staten comment on the success Nietzsche has in living in and for the moment, and both these commentators remark that Nietzsche appears to have had particular stylistic success in expressing such moments through the Dionysian.126 If an individual is successful in shutting down, momentarily, the historical narrative of one's individual place in time, the bifurcating and dualistic mechanisms that force us into a relation of subject and object, for instance, then the individual can be said to be momentarily unindividuated — a radical reorientation takes place whereby the individual fails for a moment to be individual and takes part, completely and uninhibitedly, in the chaos of becoming. Clearly Nietzsche ascribed such moments to the ancient Greeks during their Dionysian festivals. What appears to be crucial for such moments to occur is a falling off of the activity of the mind, similar to what Bataille describes in this passage: "In the state of immanence — or the theopathic state — falling into nothingness isn't required. The mind itself is wholly steeped in nothingness, it identifies with nothingness (meaning is identified with nonmeaning). The object meanwhile is dissolved into identification with the mind. Time absorbs everything. Transcendence no longer grows as the expense of, or above, nothingness while hating it."127 The state Bataille describes is one of reconciliation and a suspension of conflict between being and nothingness, meaning and nonmeaning, with even a temporary reconciliation between the jealous enemies transcendence and nothingness. Bataille seems fairly certain that Nietzsche had such 125

127

Beginning in 1881 N. was reading J. G. Vogt Die Kraft. Eine real-monistische Weltanschauung. Leipzig, 1878. This book N. consulted again in winter 1883/84, for the above quote. Vogt's title in English: "Force: A Realistic-Monistic World View." See chapter one above, "The Dionysian Ground." Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche. Translated by Bruce Boone. Introduction by Sylvere Lotringer (New York: Paragon House, 1994), 141.

1. On Heightening Human Presence through Reorientation

69

temporary states, for he claims that "moments of simplicity connect Nietzsche's 'states' with immanence. True, these states participate in excessiveness. However, simple, playful times cannot be separated from them."128 Like Staten and Colli, and to some extent Jung, Bataille understands Nietzsche's states, by which I think he means, for instance, the inspiration for the writing of Zarathustra as described in Ecce Homo, as momentary connectedness to something deeper, something primal. What interests me in Bataille's description is the designation "simplicity," for this word captures something of the essence of Nietzschean notions of dwelling in the here and now. If one could actually experience moments of simplicity, which are harder and harder to come by, such moments could foster a reorientation toward living and could conceivably be practiced like meditation techniques. There are strong indications in Nietzsche's respect for the quotidian and the closest things that he values simplicity far more than has been documented in the critical literature. At other times when Bataille speaks of immanence in his highly personal journal on Nietzsche it is as though immanence is not a loss of identity and absorption by time, but almost the opposite. At one point he discusses the masses, particularly the working masses, and observes that he does not want to transcend them: "I'm deeply different from the workers. But the feelings of immanence I have when talking to them, that is, when we're together in our sympathies, are an indicator of my place in the world — a sign of the wave in the midst of ocean."129 The kind of kinship that Bataille feels for workers is a moment of simplicity, perhaps, for he intuits during his encounters with workers that they share something fundamental, something undeniable despite the differences in class, education, and any other differences that Bataille may ascribe to himself and to them. He knows or better he intuits his place in the world as a result of this sympathetic encounter, such that he does not exist in a markerless ocean, in complete separation from his fellow human beings. What Bataille describes in connection with the workers might be perceived by a more cynical observer as condescending behavior, a kind of patronizing gesture on the part of an intellectual who thinks he has struck up some special relationship with the rugged unwashed — but I think not. What is striking about Bataille's talk of immanence is the absence of the ego: he appears to experience immanence when his ego is relaxed, as though the letting go of ego plays an important part in moments of connectedness. The force of life is such that humans require error in order to sustain life, this according to the penultimate aphorism of the first section of Human. At this time in his thinking Nietzsche is still working on the problem of revealing the negative consequences of what I call the old gravity, and so he has not quite turned the corner to formulating positive, creative strategies for dwelling in the new gravity. The 128 129

Bataille, On Nietzsche, 142. Bataille, On Nietzsche, 157.

70

II. Immanence

belief in the value and dignity of life rests upon "impure thinking," he charges, for such a belief is only possible because "our empathy for universal life and for the suffering of humanity is very weakly developed in the individual." For the ordinary person, then, the only value to living is found in regarding oneself as more important than the rest of the world. This person's lack o f imagination does not allow her to feel her way into other beings, and so she participates as little as possible in their lot and suffering. " Whoever, on the other hand, actually could participate in them would have to despair of the value of life; if he succeeded in comprehending and perceiving the overall consciousness of humanity in himself, he would break down with a curse against existence" ( H H 1/33, KSA 2:52-3). Because humans are not capable, generally speaking, of any great empathy with other forms o f life, their reading of life is seriously flawed — at least from an epistemological perspective. Sheltered as we are by our obtuseness from one another and from other living beings, we blithely pronounce that life is beautiful and have no inkling of the suffering around us. It is for this reason that Nietzsche gives his aphorism the title "Error concerning life necessary for life." But once Nietzsche liberates himself from the old gravity, he no longer speaks in negative terms regarding the protective or prophylactic measures that life uses to insulate itself against even greater life. Once he takes the step, or the plunge, into unconditional affirmation of life, he is no longer in a position to lament the terrible forces of life, and he affirms error and adversity in the same spirit. It is also somewhat disingenuous for Nietzsche to be using terms such as "impure thinking," especially in the context of vital force, universal life, suffering, and perceptions, inasmuch as these have little to do with "thinking" let alone "pure thinking," which he later strongly disavows. Once he establishes his own equilibrium with respect to the new gravity, Nietzsche speaks more favorably of empathy and more convincingly of the value or worthiness of life. In his essay on history Nietzsche distances himself from a religion and culture that dignifies the moment of death above the moment of living ( U M II/8, KSA 1:304). There can be little opportunity to practice immanent living if the hour of one's death is regarded with anticipation and reverence while one's entire life is lived in the shadow of this moment. Jaspers applies the term "Transzendenzlosigkeit" (transcendencelessness) to this dimension o f Nietzsche's thought; the dead are not present in Nietzsche, at least not in the form of a "penetrating metaphysical remembrance," and for immortality Nietzsche substitutes the "memory-less" eternal recurrence. 130 It stands to reason that if life and earth are ever to coalesce in such a way as to anchor meaning in the immanent, a reorientation toward death and dying is called for. Death is not the threshold to a higher life or immortality, in fact, given the eternal recurrence "of the same" death in not even finality — Nietzsche robs the concept of death of any dignity, of any power, and he so diminishes its 130

Jaspers, Nietzsche, 326-7.

1. On Heightening Human Presence through Reorientation

71

capacity to intimidate and haunt humans that one could even say death is not a factor anymore, or, not the factor anymore. Understanding that transcendence is virtually meaningless without death as a catalyst or trigger for the alleged experience of the afterlife, Nietzsche conceptually attacks death in order to channel the human gaze back to living. Underscoring the reorientation toward death is the final aphorism of the first part of volume II of Human, which Nietzsche humorously titles "Journey to Hades." There are times, he explains, when the living seem like shadows to him, pale, restless, lusting for life, while the dead appear lively to him, as if they could never become weary of life after their deaths. What matters, he concludes, is eternal liveliness, not "eternal life" and even life in general (HH II/1 408, KSA 2:533-4). The reorientation here is evident in the implied redefinition of life, which tends to render what matters in life less abstract than the word "life." Liveliness can more easily be conceived as a state, such as immanence, while any who live in the biological sense partake of life by definition. But if the dead manifest liveliness sometimes more so than the living, this is because immanent life is not dependent on biological life, at least not on "eternal" biological life — the lesson is that reorientation toward both death and abstract Life are helpful in heightening the human presence. The manner in which moderns regard life and death has not prevailed at all times in human history, thus speaks the classical philologist in Nietzsche who regards the ancient Greeks to be the most life affirming humans of all time. If reorientation is crucial for dwelling in a state of immanence, then learning from the ancient Greeks is a solid approach. The decisive factor in Nietzsche's elevation of the Greeks and in his holding them up for scrutiny is not whether he is academically correct or academically justified in depicting them as he does, instead, the deciding issue is the simple and obvious one — there was such a people as the ancient Greeks, and their liveliness is irresistible to moderns. In Tragedy Nietzsche describes how the Dionysian festival brings about the union of human and human. Even alienated, hostile or subjugated nature celebrates a reconciliation with its lost son, the human being: "Voluntarily the earth offers up its gifts, and peacefully the beasts of prey approach from the rocks and the desert" (BT 1, KSA 1:29). The Dionysian revelers feel such empathy that all contrasts, dangers, differences are suspended, and moreover even the beasts of prey join in the temporary reunion. Humans meanwhile become animals, no longer speaking and walking, and animals speak. The earth gives forth milk and honey, humans feel like gods and are no longer artists but have become artwork: "The artistic power of all nature reveals itself here amidst shudders of frenzy to the highest blissful gratification of the primal unity" (BT 1, KSA 1:30). Stripped of its artistic metaphysical semantics, the experience of the Dionysian festivals describes an at-oneness with the earth. No effort is required here to manifest a human presence as an act of reclaiming, because the distinction between human and animal is suspended, powerless — all

72

II. Immanence

life is sucked into the vortex of primal unity, all life forms participate uninhibitedly in expressions of their vitality. The Greeks of the Dionysian, tragic age were also able to sustain their contact with the earth for longer periods, more reflectively, through the symbol and figure of the satyr. The ancient chorus rested on a foundation of "a fictitious natural state" upon which stood "fictitious natural beings," namely satyrs. Tragedy grew upon this foundation according to Nietzsche and never had to deal with the limitation of reality. And yet, "this is no arbitrarily phantasized world placed between sky and earth; rather it is a world of the same reality and credibility as Olympus with all its inhabitants possessed for the devout Hellene" (BT 7, KSA 1:55). The oxymoronic expressions "fictitious natural state" and "fictitious natural beings" (Nietzsche's emphasis) aim to convey that although the Greeks were conscious of the fictitious constitution of their satyrs, they tried to bridge creative-human with nature by casting the satyrs as "natural beings," that is, beings belonging to nature as opposed to beings belonging to the imagination of humans. The satyrs therefore are powerful beings who relate to the cultural human as Dionysian music relates to civilization. The cultured Greek felt "nullified at the sight of the satyr chorus," such that state, society, even the gulf between human and human yielded to a profound sense of unity. The satyr chorus is the incarnate representation of tragedy's metaphysical solace, for these natural beings "live as it were indelibly behind all civilization and remain eternally the same despite all change of generations and of the history of nations" (BT 7, KSA 1:55-6). The satyrs are fictitious but they are said to represent the earth, nature, the ground of life, and the cultured Greek would experience immanence through the satyr by virtue of the satyr's ability to nullify or suspend the "cultured" persona of the Greek. One could draw an analogy between the satyr and early-modern Europe's idyllic shepherd, but Nietzsche cautions: "How firmly and unafraid the Greek was in taking hold of his forest human, how coyly and effetely the modern person dawdled with the flattering image of a tenderly flauting, sissified shepherd!" (BT 8, KSA 1:58). The satyr is a powerful being, immutable, goat below the waist and human above, while the rococo shepherd is merely a reflection of the rococo human being projected vainly, stupidly upon nature, ribbons blowing in the wind. The Greeks looked up to their satyr, for this being represented "nature upon which no knowledge had yet worked, in which the bolts of culture are still unbroken — that is what the Greek saw in his satyr, and still he was not reduced to a mere ape for him. On the contrary, he was the primeval image of the human being, the expression of his highest and strongest impulses" (BT 8, KSA 1:58). And yet another formulation regarding the universal nature of the satyr is found in the unpublished essay "The Dionysian World View" (1870), where Nietzsche writes that in the primitive springtime dithyramb humans did not want to express themselves as individuals but as the human species. The cessation of individual human being is expressed in gestures, the language of the satyr

1. O n Heightening Human Presence through Reorientation

73

who as a natural being among natural beings speaks in gestures and moreover in an intensified language of gestures, namely in the gesture of dance (KSA 1:575). Whenever Nietzsche describes the ancient Dionysian state of immanence the normal, cognitive channels are switched off, humans no longer speak but animals do, and speech as the quintessential "human" faculty is so civilized, so superficial in relation to the ground of life that the actual form of expression becomes dance. Immanence is not achieved by talking heads but by dancing bodies. The ancient Greeks were a mythically aroused people whose waking life was more similar to dream than it was to the regular day of modernity's scientifically minded, sober thinker (KSA 1:887). But what intrigues Nietzsche not only in the beginning but throughout his writing career is the notion that the Greeks did not use their mythology to escape earthly life, but quite to the contrary, they used it to embrace the earth. To say that the ancients led day to day lives closely resembling the dream state does not mean they were dreamers, it simply means they were open, far more open and receptive to the Dionysian undercurrent of life, to the force of greater life than any modern could understand. A necessary ingredient of immanence is the ability to feel the greater life, by which is meant: the life which is greater and more encompassing than one's own, and which we routinely block out. In unpublished notes from summer 1883 Nietzsche remarks on how the Greeks' feeling for nature is more related to the religious ("dem religiösen viel verwandter") than is ours. "With us the main thing is always that we are redeemed from the human — we search for feelings that we do not have among humans" (KSA 10:339-40). So while moderns are trying to escape from their humanity, to be redeemed of their humanity, to feel otherwise than humans feel, the ancients practiced a more religious feeling for nature, which is to say, their feeling for nature was likewise a feeling for humanity. Now let us return our gaze to modernity in order to reestablish the orientation that speaks for the status quo. In the fragment " T h e Greek State," one of five forewords to five unwritten books, as Nietzsche referred to them (1872), he wryly comments on two advantages that moderns have over the ancients, namely the concepts "dignity of the human being" and "dignity of labor." This "dignity" is of course thoroughly modern in an idealized, democratic, and hypocritical sort of way, and it leads Nietzsche to ask: "What else may we find in the working distress of all the millions than the impulse to exist at any cost, the same all powerful impulse through which stunted plants extend their roots into earthless rock!" (KSA 1:764). T h e metaphor is revealing and in keeping with Nietzsche's concern for the human condition in a time of increasing groundlessness, decreasing immanence. I do not think he is "lording it over" the working class here, but he is definitely making a point and making a pointed juxtaposition. Whatever he may have had to say in the unwritten book on the Greek state, we can bet that the Greeks would have come out looking far more human than Nietzsche's contemporaries of 1872. It is a far cry from "existing at any cost" in the form of "stunted plants" straining their roots

74

II. Immanence

into "earthless rock" to the superabundant immanence, the flowing presence of humanity as it flowered in the age of Dionysian Greece. Modernity's great thinkers coin phrases such as "dignity of the human being" and "dignity of labor," meanwhile millions toil, and millions starve to death upon an earth that gives more than any ancient human could have imagined.

2. How the Earth Becomes a Place of

Opprobrium

"Yes, what an appalling place Christianity has managed already to make of the earth, with its erecting of the crucifix everywhere in order to designate the earth in this manner, 'where the just one is tortured to death !" The Dawn 77 Throughout the course of human history there have been those whose weariness of the world, whose discontent with their own lives and with life on earth more generally has contributed insidiously and profoundly to the spiritual pollution of planet earth. In an aphorism called "The darkening of the sky" (D 323) Nietzsche discusses the revenge of timid and humble Christians, of the judgmental, of drunks and those with hangovers, of the sick and the oppressed who do not want health: "The number of these little vengeful ones and even the number of their little acts of revenge is monstrous; the whole air buzzes continuously with their fired arrows and the darts of their malice, so that the sun and sky of life are darkened by them" (KSA 3:230). So numerous are the acts of spite and vengeance against the earth that it is as if they manifest themselves as smog. At the time of its rise Christianity learned to leverage the tremendous demand for suicide into power, leaving only two forms of suicide available, but cloaking them in the highest dignity and highest hopes and banning all other forms of suicide most strictly — only martyrdom and the slow disembodiment of asceticism were permitted (GS 131, KSA 3:485). In themselves the phenomena of martyrdom and asceticism might be tolerable, but one must consider that these practices of denial both spring from suicidal tendencies, according to Nietzsche, and by virtue of the dignity they carry as acts of religion, they testify strongly against life, the body, and earth. In Genealogy essay III religion is described as an epidemic of obstructed or inhibited human physiology. One of the more frequent methods of treating epidemic human depression is mechanical activity, and so work is used as a pain killer ( G M III/ 18, KSA 5:383-3). W h e n it comes to the priestly remedies we find they are numerous, with prescriptions as follows: overall numbing of the feeling for life, mechanical activity, small pleasures such as love of one's neighbor, organization into herds, awakening of the communal sense of power. These priestly remedies are innocent compared to the conscious and guilty measure applied to mass depression, namely the creation of

2. How the Earth Becomes a Place of Opprobrium

75

an orgy of feelings to dull the pain ( G M 111/19, KSA 5:384-5). Most potent and sinister among the priestly cures or remedies for large scale human malaise is guilt, whose effects are manifest throughout European society. The ascetic ideal, Nietzsche claims, is unprecedented in its destruction of health and racial strength, it is the "true calamity in the history of European health," comparable to the notorious German influence, namely alcohol, with syphilis as a distant third ( G M 111/21, KSA 5:392). From the foregoing we should not fail to draw our conclusions. Religion, first of all, is a type of hygiene for the depressed, the world weary as they exist in large numbers on our planet at various times and in various places. Only the "remedies" of religion do not cure, they make matters worse. The priestly, i.e., religious-institutional responses in the form of remedies all have in common a deadening of the sense for life on earth, and while they may temporarily kill the pain, they merely deal with symptoms and likewise do not cure. The hygiene for the collectively ill, otherwise known as religion, is a real response, albeit an unsuccessful cure, to real conditions on earth and to real conditions in human beings — this is what makes religion and the priestly remedies such lethal forces. Finally, the ascetic ideal is not mere fantasy, but actual effect and influence on entire peoples across entire ages, comparable to the impact of powerful narcotic agents such as alcohol, and even more ravaging of the human condition than syphilis. The legacy of the world weary is spiritual pollution of the highest order, at work in the present as a poisonous smog and at work across the ages of humanity in the form of religion and its crippling remedies. 131 Life on earth has been slandered, cast in the most negative light imaginable. To listen to the world weary, for whom earth is a torturous experience, one would have to conclude that life is sick, flawed, inferior, and sinful. Take the passions for example — they are given a "terrible character" by "gloomy philosophical worms," but through our neglect of the closest and the smallest things, through our lack of self observation and observation of those whom we are supposed to educate, we ourselves have allowed the passions to grow into monsters, such that the mere word "passion" now strikes fear. Humans have always had the opportunity and indeed the responsibility to "take the terrible character from the passions" so that they do not become raging torrents of white water ( H H II/2 37, K S A 2:569). This discussion of humanity's failure to regulate the passions and the instincts emerges in rhetorical form in Zarathustra, where the passions are recast as one's proper, ownmost (unique) virtues, but observe here an early and practical response, in measured discourse, to the problem of living in peace with our passions. Nothing is helped by promoting fear of the passions, indeed, all that is accomplished is a slandering of one of humanity's greatest assets.

131

Richardson's (1996) words come to mind here; the worst consequence ofthe slave morality's diffusion into society is "that no way of living or thinking is better than any other and that an aspiration to distinction is the root of evil" (64-5).

76

II. Immanence

When Christianity painted devils on the walls of the world it brought sin into the world. Today the belief in remedies against the devil and sin has finally been shaken to its roots, but something remains: the belief in the illness which Christianity taught and propagated ( H H II/2 78, KSA 2:587). As scientifically "modern" humans we are learning to abandon our superstitions regarding the devil and perhaps even sin, they may seem outdated, even a bit quaint, but we still believe in the illness of evil, we sustain the virulence of this illness called evil by our own faith. This is an example of detracting from the earth or more precisely, from the attractiveness of the earth by adding to the world something that is not in it, something injurious, dangerous, harmful, and of course our collective health suffers, and of course we require the appropriate priestly remedies etc. We have succeeded only in throwing off the more frivolous manifestations of the illness of evil, its incarnate avatars, its melodramatic leading men and ladies. In the final aphorism of Human, Nietzsche explains that humans have had to bear many chains in order to learn how to be milder, more spiritual, joyful, more clever than the animals. But we still suffer from having borne chains for so long. The chains, Nietzsche repeats at the conclusion of his first antimetaphysical book, are those ponderous, meaningful errors committed in the name of moral, religious, and metaphysical ideas. Only when the "chain disease" too has been overcome will we reach our first great goal: true separation of human from animal ( H H II/2 350, KSA 2:702). 132 The lethargic presence of evil long after we have ceased to believe in devils is analogous to the lethargic presence of chained animality in the human, long after we have unchained ourselves from primitive metaphysics. Suffering and infirmity or incapacity are strong forces in life denial, and Nietzsche describes a peculiar dynamic that creates "after worlds" and "after life." When the body despairs of the body, it probes with the fingers of its deceived spirit on eternal walls. When the body despairs of earth, crying out in its sickness or weariness, it hears the speaking of "the belly of being," and wants to break head first through the earthly walls to the "other world." But the ego teaches a new pride, a pride in not sticking one's head into heavenly sand but bearing it proudly, "an earthly head that creates meaning for the earth" (Z 1/3, KSA 4:36-7). Body and earth are the ground and "reason" of all pain and suffering, just as they are the ground and reason for all joy. Those who malign the earth and create (or wish for) the "real world" or the "eternal life" without pain are basically wishing for a disembodied existence, but even this wishing is an act of the body — what is missing is the gratitude for the body and the earth. And unless we attribute this longing for the other world, the after world and its after life only to the run of the mill sickly and weary, Nietzsche does not let us forget than none other than Socrates said as he died: "'Life — that means being sick for a long time" (TI 2/1, KSA6:67). 132

Later N. argues for a brand of post-humanism based on a closer relationship with the animal human. See my VI: 1 below.

2. How the Earth Becomes a Place of Opprobrium

77

The notion that life on earth, whether human or otherwise, is inferior and flawed has been around ever since humans were able to conceive of eternity, for humans are mortal after all, and the "test" of whether something is truly worthy lies in whether it is eternal or transient — this is simply part and parcel of humanity's lack of self esteem, an unfortunate side effect of taking too seriously those beings we "intuit" and whose existence we posit as real,133 while we masochistically wallow in our own alleged inferiority. Nietzsche understands that humans constantly have revenge on their minds, revenge not only on their enemies and rivals, but on their own bodies, their own earth, their own world. Revenge is caught up in time and is a function of time, one could say, revenge is a function of the lack of time and the passing of time. Heidegger's formulation of the revenge problem as it appears in Zarathustra is helpful: "Revenge is the will's ill will (Widerwille, reluctance) toward time and this means: toward transience and what is transient. . . The ill will toward time disparages the transient. The earthly, the earth, what belongs to it is that which actually should not be and basically also has no true being." 134 There are many "reasons" for disparaging the earth, especially when idealism, Platonism, metaphysics are enlisted as powerful allies. The role of language in disparaging the earth and making it a place of opprobrium is both structural and semantic. That is, we tend to use language in a particular way when referring to things of the earth, and generally speaking we use a more positive semantics when speaking of the beyond. The word "passion" has already been discussed in this regard. On the structural level, language is an undermining function and Nietzsche is aware of this very early in his career, at the time of the essay "On Truth and Lie." In subsequent years he deepens his expose of the self defeating, metaphysical properties of language. In its origins, he writes, language stems from the most rudimentary form of psychology, it is a crude fetish. Reason ascribes doer and deed to everything, believes in the ego as being and as substance, and projects this belief onto all things. This phenomenon is not limited to Europe but also applies to India and Greece, where it is also believed that "we must have been at home in a higher world before," instead of a lower one; "we must be divine because we have reason." Nietzsche concludes "I fear we will not be rid of God because we still believe in grammar" (TI 3/5, KSA 6:77-8). These false conclusions based on "reason" achieve certain very real and damaging effects. First, they pollute by putting into the spiritual ecosystem debilitating figments of the imagination, unnecessarily adding virus-like time bombs. The other apparent danger is in ascribing the origins of what we deem "high" or exalted to something higher and less physical than the human, when the opposite is the case according

133

134

I have in mind a poem by Goethe called "Das Göttliche" (The Divine), in which we humans are encouraged to be a model "for those intuited beings." Heidegger, "Wer ist Nietzsches Zarathustra?" in Vorträge undAufiätze, 2nd ed. (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954), 116. Note that Heidegger attributes this view to Plato.

78

II. Immanence

to Nietzsche — we were never "at home" in a higher world, but in a much lower one, and "reason" is not of divine origin but quite to the contrary, is a crude device rooted in human physiology. If one wants to study the difference between creativity as slander and myth, and creativity as immanence, the very next section of Twilight is revealing. Fables and myths about another world are only expressions of the instinct of slander, humiliation, suspicion of life. T h e so-called true world of Christianity or of Kant is a symptom of decadence and descending vitality. T h e artist, on the other hand, values appearance more highly than reality, which should not be seen as an objection to the above proposition. "Appearance" in the hands of the artist, especially the tragic artist, is reality once more, only in selection, intensification, correction, because the tragic artist is Dionysian and "says yes to precisely everything questionable and terrible" ( T I 3 / 6 , KSA 6:789). T h e artist who presents through appearance certain versions or segments of reality is contributing to a greater presence of life by virtue of amplifying reality, amplifying and highlighting the here and now, and not merely when it comes to life's pleasant Romantic landscapes but precisely when life's questionable and terrible manifestations are at stake — this is affirmation at its best. Contrast this earth affirming, world affirming behavior of the artist with the "reasoned" behavior of language, whose effect is to weaken, not fortify our position on earth as sentient beings. If language puts us humans at odds with our human selves, our own ancient myths of origin suggest that humans have been aware of language's power, if not its precise workings, for a very long time. In Nietzsche's account of the Old Testament God separates humans and splinters them, imposing multiple languages as a sort of emergency measure or martial law. God apparently finds it easier to deal with individual peoples when they war against each other and destroy one another. H e creates animals, then woman, in order to have companionship and entertainment, he drives humans away from the tree of life and oppresses them with need, death, and work. "Real life is represented as God's self defense, as an unnatural condition ... Culture, i.e., the work of knowledge strives nonetheless for God-likeness: it towers itself toward heaven. Now war is found to be necessary (language as the cause of a "people") and humans are supposed to destroy themselves" (notes from 1887, KSA 12:373-4). Nietzsche's vision of a paranoid, punishing God who uses language in the first instance to control and manipulate human beings gives us insight into the degree to which we use language against ourselves as a club. The question Nietzsche rightly implies here is: how do we have even the barest chance to live immanently on our own planet when our highest ideal, our "divinity" after whom we strive to model ourselves, imposes multiple languages in order to sow confusion and dissension? In the aggregate humanity's efforts at God-likeness have contributed to a vast store of pent up, negative traits for which the earth is a warehouse, something like a toxic waste dump. T h e political shrewdness of early Christianity, Nietzsche writes, shows in its appropriation of the ancient Roman idea of hell as punishment, which

2. How the Earth Becomes a Place of Opprobrium

79

helped Christianity triumph over the cults of Mithras and Isis by bringing the fearful over to its side as the strongest devotees. T h e Jews like the Greeks were a people who clung to life, and they had not developed this hell concept; for them the fitting punishment of a sinner was ultimate death with no chance for resurrection. But the Christian teaching of eternal damnation became stronger than the belief in definitive death, and only much later in the scientific age do humans restore the finality of death. Today, Nietzsche offers, we are no longer interested in the "after life" and this is an indescribable boon that is still too young to be appreciated far and wide (D 72, KSA 3:70-1). Contained in this somewhat wishful reflection on the status ofhell is the notion that hell itself, as a fearful concept, is powerful and compelling. I f Nietzsche is to be consistent in his reasoning, we humans have not nearly rid ourselves of hell, whether or not we have lost interest in an after life, because "hell" remains here on earth with us and is still quite an ingredient of the invisible chains that bind us, the "chain disease" as Nietzsche calls it. On closer reflection Nietzsche recognizes how hell still thrives on earth. He draws a linkage between physical torture of humans and animals, which is appalling and visible, and spiritual torture as practiced by Christianity, which is neither. Today's humanity, he observes, still behaves with the same fearful forbearance and indecision before spiritual death by fire and spiritual torture by instruments as previously humanity responded to actual torture of the body of humans and animals. "Yes, what an appalling place Christianity has managed already to make of the earth, with its erecting of the crucifix everywhere in order to designate the earth in this manner, 'where the just one is tortured to death'!" (D 77, KSA 3:74-5). Not only does Christianity surround us with symbolic reminders of Christ's physical torture, thereby constantly upgrading and updating the spiritual torture that manifests itself as guilt, moreover the earth becomes a mere place of shame, the scene of the crime. O f course it could be argued that the crucifix merely symbolizes how Christ died for the sins of humans, but this does not substantially change Nietzsche's meaning, insofar as a reminder of sinfulness is yet another spiritual torture. In a reversal of Luke 6:25 and Matthew 8:12 Zarathustra states that the greatest sin on earth to date was the word of the one who spoke: "Woe to those who laugh here!" 135 Zarathustra asks: "Did he himself find no grounds for laughter on the earth? Then he sought poorly. A child still finds grounds here" (Z I V / 1 3 , KSA 4 : 3 6 5 ) . I f earth is to be a site where laughter is forbidden, and where wailing and gnashing of teeth are our eternal punishment for living immanently, clearly the old gravity represented by God and Christianity is simply too grave, too burdensome, too beyond-oriented. What do we have left on earth if laughing is prohibited? In the shadow of the "true world"and the "valuable world" our maligned earth-world

135

In the Berkeley Version of the Holy Bible the words are "Alas for you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep."

80

II. Immanence

has to come up short. And though we have discovered out of what material the "true world" was constructed, this does not immediately restore justice because we now have only the maligned world remaining, and this "highest disappointment is reckoned into the sum of its reprehensibility" (KSA 12:397). And so the litany of charges against the earth continues to spiral. Emotionally and psychologically humans have been made to pay for any allegiance to the earth, and it is a wonder we can even breathe on a planet whose spiritual atmosphere contains so much filth. In On the Use and Disadvantage of History Nietzsche claims that a religion that prophesies the end of earthly life and "condemns all the living to live in the fifth act of the tragedy certainly stirs the deepest and most noble powers, but it is hostile to all new-planting, bold-attempting, free-desiring" (UM II/8, KSA 1:304). In other words, the negative starting point of Christianity, and therewith of Western culture, is a dead end for the earth and for humanity's ability to apply itself immanently. It is time, cautions Nietzsche, that we withdraw from constructions such as "world process" and focus instead on individuals, for "the goal of humanity cannot lie in its end but only in its highest exemplars" (UM II/9, KSA 1:317). At least by keeping our eyes on the highest exemplars, who live in all times and places, we do not make the mistake of deferring human value and earth value to some purported final stage of an inscrutable process. Deleuze writes that "man inhabits only the dark side of the Earth, of which he only understands the becoming-reactive which permeates and constitutes it." 136 Indeed, the negative mood characterized by our habitation of the earth's "dark side" can be conceptualized even further in the same direction: humans are extraterrestrials. Our fascination with the possibility of an after life, and life on other planets is an expression of the same earth-hating that has made us strangers to the earth. The question then is not when humans will come into proof of the existence of life on other planets, but when will humans cease behaving as extraterrestrials and embrace their own planet? Nietzsche respects the philosophy of Epicurus because it pays attention to the closest things, the things that matter to humans. In order to quiet the mind we do not need answers to questions regarding the most distant and the last things — it sufficed for Epicurus to tell those tortured by fear of the gods that if there are gods, they do not concern themselves with us (HH II/2 7, KSA 2:543). What rightfully concerns us is the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, and it does matter how the earth is regarded in this equation because the earth provides all these things for us. As Hallman maintains "Nietzsche's attempt to re-immerse humanity into nature . . . is much more radical than earlier attempts . . . for Nietzsche is one of the first Western thinkers to recognize the extent to which the concept of nature has been transformed and degraded by traditional philosophical and religious thinking." 137 On 136 137

Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 198. Max O. Hallman, "Nietzsche's Environmental Ethics," Environmental Ethics 13/1 (1991), 113.

2. How the Earth Becomes a Place of Opprobrium

81

this issue Zimmerman's balanced perspective is also useful. He acknowledges that to some extent patriarchal biblical religions are "otherworldly in orientation, and to the extent that they invite domineering attitudes toward non-believers and nature, those religions are problematic." At the same time however he cautions that "an acceptable alternative is not to be found in a wholly immanent, nature-worshiping religion that regards all talk of the transcendent dimension as a sign of life-hating, patriarchal decadence." 138 More will be said on the dangers of immanence at the conclusion of this chapter. What we do to the earth and to our fellow human beings has always been, and always will be influenced by the quality of life we manifest as human beings in relation to our earthly ecosystem. It is unsustainable in emotional-psychological and ecological terms for humans to spiritually and physically pollute the earth. The less respect we have for life on earth, in all its forms, the less inclined we will be as a species to intervene swiftly and effectively to prevent crimes against humanity and crimes against the earth.

3• Efforts Toward Immanence: First Steps "Therefore I myself want to die so that you friends love the earth more for m y sake; and I want to return to the earth so that I have rest in her who bore me." Thus Spoke Zarathustra, " O n Free Death"

The site of creativity is the earth, and like it or not, trust it or not, this transient, temporal world of appearances is the proper venue for the creation of new values. Gooding-Williams understands that "[s]ince neither the Platonist nor the Christian believes that new values can be created from within that world, Nietzsche is compelled to reinterpret it in terms of a post-Christian-Platonic philosophical vocabulary and conceptual apparatus." 139 Nietzsche's project of what I refer to as immanent reorientation does indeed require just such a new vocabulary and conception, and owing in part to the scope of this task he is compelled to use his trademark earth rhetoric. Nietzsche's discourse especially as it is filtered through Zarathustra has an enormous challenge to meet, namely to be heard above the words of both Socrates and Christ. As Lampert explains the latter "are the teachers with the greatest influence on how we in the West confront questions regarding the basic meaning of human life" and Zarathustra's role as a philosophical teacher "is underscored by the fact that he is a parodic counterpart of Socrates and Christ." 140 138

139 140

Michael E. Zimmerman, "The Death of God at Auschwitz?" in Martin Heidegger and the Holocaust. Edited Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg (Adantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), 257. Gooding-Williams, Zarathustra's Dionysian Modernism, 83. Lampert, Nietzsche's Teaching, 101.

82

II. Immanence

Of course Socrates and Christ were historical human beings, while Nietzsche's Zarathustra — whatever else might be said of the original, historical Zoroaster — is a fictional being. Nietzsche has many reasons for resurrecting the figure of Zoroaster/ Zarathustra to serve as humanity's spokesman, not the least of which is Nietzsche's own sense of propriety in not wanting to push himself to the fore as a direct counterpart of Christ and Socrates. Nietzsche's quarrel is with Platonism and its values, and if the earth is to be a site of immanent dwelling steps must be taken to counter the influence of Platonism. Not all are as supportive as Gooding-Williams and Lampert in their assessment of Nietzsche's position against Platonism. Rosen sees Zarathustra as "an example of Nietzsche's grosse Politik, and in that sense his Platonism. Whereas Plato as it were establishes Western European history on a basis of philosophy by writing the Republic, Nietzsche publishes Zarathustra in order to destroy a Western Europe that has been enervated by a deteriorated, historically exhausted Christianity, or Platonism for the masses." Rosen adds that Zarathustra cannot be "merely destructive," it also has its own "noble lie, or invocation to create."141 For all his contention that Nietzsche's Zarathustra represents a destructive counter to Platonism, the point in which Rosen agrees with others is most telling, namely, that Nietzsche clearly targets Platonism. As Nietzsche would be the first to admit, the work of creation, especially in the realm of values, requires destruction, and Rosen is justified in mentioning the enervated and deteriorating character of Western values: left to their own devices, these decadent values do more harm than good, according to Nietzsche, and we cannot pretend indefinitely that these corrupt values are without environmental impact. A solid first step toward opposing or reversing the effects of Platonism is a reorientation toward time, such that time in its transient dimension is not used to cast aspersions on the passing nature of earthly life. We have already heard Heidegger on this point, to which I add that at the precise point in his essay on Zarathustra where he writes that from the standpoint of vengeance the earthly is that which should not be and which has no true being, because of its transient nature, he adds: "Already Plato called it the (tf) ov, the not-being (Nicht-Seiende)." 142 Nietzsche is determined to deal with time without revenge, without resentment toward the transient, and so Zarathustra's teaching emerges as "a comprehensive teaching on being and time, one that judges all previous teachings on being and time to have been marked by revenge or by a poisoned refusal of temporal beings as they are."143 Central to Nietzsche's revengeless conception of time is the doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same, which Magnus refers to as a "counter-myth, one which attempts to impress the quality of being upon becoming." I take this to mean that the eternal recurrence is a myth 141 142 143

Rosen, The Mask of Enlightenment, xiv. Heidegger, "Wer ist Nietzsches Zarathustra?" 116. See also footnote 134. Lampert, Nietzsche's Teaching, 148.

3. Efforts Toward Immanence: First Steps

83

counter to the myth o f the after life, or the eternal soul, and that Nietzsche strives to give his myth roughly the same attraction as the eternal soul by granting "eternal being" to transient becoming. Magnus continues: "In that sense, the counter-myth's eternalism is the logical contrary of dualism. It is to be understood as the antidote to hierarchical dualism, which is what it attempts to counter." 1 4 4 I think Magnus' emphasis on being from becoming is a fair formulation, and certainly he concurs with Heidegger on this point, 1 4 5 and it is useful in demonstrating that Nietzsche uses the eternal recurrence o f the same to attack the myth o f the eternal soul head on. However, I am also concerned that we do not make too much o f the notion of conceptually transforming becoming into being, as if by this ruse we are actually achieving something substantial toward the nullification o f revenge — it seems more important in my view to affirm and embrace the transient character o f becoming as becoming, even if as an after thought or side effect we gain a kind o f "eternal being" through the eternal recurrence o f the same. T h e concept o f sin as an error o f reason, as one of Nietzsche's "early chains" which still leave marks on us today in the form o f the chain disease, has made humans "much blacker and more evil" than we are in fact. I f we were to let go o f this belief in sin, our entire faculty of perception would be greatly relieved and humans and world would appear in a glory o f harmlessness such that "it does a person good through and through ("dass es einem von Grund aus wohl dabei wird")" ( H H 1/124, KSA 2: 121). O f course humans are not as wicked as morality teaches, but the concept o f sin is virulent, unrelenting, and does not admit of any innocence — it is categorical in condemning humans as flawed beings. In order to allow us to imagine life without sin, Nietzsche presents us with the person of Jesus Christ, just a few pages later, to make the point that the founder o f Christianity felt himself to be without sin as the son o f God. Christ achieved the feeling o f complete sinlessness, complete unaccountability "which today anyone can acquire through science" ( H H 1/144, KSA 2 : 1 4 0 ) . Which is not to say, of course, that anyone can go forth and perform miracles. But if we admire the person o f Christ, Nietzsche seems to be implying, would it not make sense for all humans to be without sin and therefore capable o f emulating Christ? There are strong indications that Nietzsche believes we are poised to achieve breakthroughs in inhabiting the earth on earthly and human terms. So for example in Genealogy where much o f his work is devoted to diagnosing the illness represented by religion and made worse by its remedies, Nietzsche also entertains ideas "concerning the possibility o f a new and greater 'health' beyond it (as well as beyond mere animal vitality)," and these ideas "help elucidate a conception o f the sort of nature we have that now presents both possibilities." 146 So there is health beyond the prevailing illness

144 145 146

Magnus, '"Eternal Recurrence,'" 371. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 1 (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961), 656. Schacht, Nietzsche, 439.

84

II. Immanence

of humanity, and the form this new health will take has to be more than mere animality. Clearly the task of putting humanity on the track of health will require new conceptualizations of venerable traditions, for instance, our approach to hygiene will have to expand, and perhaps the very question of what constitutes health will have to become a project engaging humanity's best minds for generations to come — we are currently barely at the stage where we are capable of defining what ails us as a species, but we at least see that our work is cut out for us in making the earth a "site of recovery" as Zarathustra says (Z 1/22, K S A 4:101). Most of the time when Nietzsche presents strategies for countering the detrimental effects of transcendentalist earth-denial he advocates some form of channeling, refinement, or sublimation of the bodily passions which prove offensive to the disembodied and which do indeed take on a life of their own. His point on this matter is that we ourselves must govern our physicality in such a way that it does not become disruptive or burdensome, because the alternative of simply shutting ourselves down as bodied creatures, of extirpating the passions and stifling the instincts, does too much harm. There are times, however, when Nietzsche speaks as though wishfully that the maligners of the world would simply go way — leave the world. In an aphorism entitled " O n improving the world," for example, he muses about the possibility of proscribing sexual reproduction to the dissatisfied, bilious, and sullen, which would have the effect of transforming the earth into a garden of happiness. "This proposition" he concludes, "belongs in a practical philosophy for the female gender" ( H H II/1 278, K S A 2:496). I do not regard this particular statement as entirely sincere, inasmuch as Nietzsche is not applying his usual long-term perspective to a problem that has been long in the making, and his suggestion goes only to the symptoms of humanity's reluctance to live immanently, not to the root causes. Still, quite often Nietzsche makes remarks on marriage in just such a manner as this, stating first that marriages should result in better offspring and second that women should be more selective in their choice of a mate. O n e sees at a glance that Nietzsche's concern is for the quality of the human environment, which he does not want to see crowded by negative spirits. In

Zarathustra

the so-called "preachers of death" are analyzed in their composition: "There are the terrible ones who bear a beast of prey within themselves and have no choice save for lusting or self laceration. And even their lusting is still self laceration. / They have not even become humans, these terrible ones: may they preach renunciation of life and pass away themselves!" (Z 1/9, K S A 4:55-7). T h e instincts of the "terrible ones" are turned inward upon and against themselves, such that the preachers of death are at odds with the rest of humanity and with themselves. Observe, too, how Nietzsche remarks that they have not yet become human, meaning they have not learned to govern or conduct themselves as human beings who subscribe to living, not dying. Beginning with Zarathustra

this less patient tone becomes noticeable in Nietzsche's

writings, whereas earlier, especially in Human he feels confident enough and strong

3. Efforts Toward Immanence: First Steps

85

enough to patiently work on and with the small things, the closest things, trusting as it were that with good will and enlightenment humanity will turn the corner toward greater health. In other words, Nietzsche's patience for negative manifestations o f life appears to grow thin almost at the same time that his call for unconditional life affirmation grows louder, and this is a puzzling, indeed, disturbing feature o f his rhetoric. Tfall that is questionable and terrible in life is to be affirmed with Dionysian strength and courage, and this is precisely what is symbolized in Zarathustras eventual affirmation and marriage to the eternal recurrence o f the same, then Nietzsche's wishful thinking regarding the spiritual polluters of humanity should not be necessary— after all, Dionysian affirmation is not needed in a "garden of happiness." " O n the Virtue that Makes Small" is another Zarathustra meditation on those human beings who do not measure up in terms o f life affirmation. T h e smaller keep getting smaller until they break up, like stones into gravel, and they perish. T h e "contented" are a soil that is too yielding, and tall trees need hard rock for hard roots. Their hour is coming, says Zarathustra, from hour to hour they grow smaller and less fruitful, like poor weeds in poor soil (Z III/5, KSA 4 : 2 1 6 - 1 7 ) . In this passage Zarathustras quarrel is not with the malcontents, but more precisely with those who are too content by virtue o f practicing the virtues that make humans small. Either way, by manifesting a life that can only complain about life and earth, or by manifesting a shallow, rootless life that reduces humans in size, Zarathustra does not want them around and he looks forward to their disappearance. In this latter example the inference is that those who practice the virtues that make small will die out o f their own failure to embrace life, for the process has already started and little is left o f them already. Yet another meditation on the world weary is found in the third part o f Zarathustra, appropriately under the heading " O n Old and New Tablets," where Nietzsche focuses some o f his thinking regarding possible efforts toward immanence. Zarathustra begins # 17 o f this lengthy collection of speeches by pointing out that the skiff lies waiting to travel to the great Nothing, yet no one seems ready to climb aboard the death-skiff. They are world weary, to be sure, and yet they are not detached from the earth because their lust still clings to earth and they remain in love with their own earth weariness. T h e world weary are not only hypocritical in this manner, they are also characterized as "earth lazy" ("Ihr Erden-Faulen") types who should be lashed with switches. They should pass away, Zarathustra suggests: " O n e should not want to be a physician to the incurable: thus teaches Zarathustra: — and so you should pass away! / But it takes more courage to make an end than a new verse: that all physicians and poets know. — " (Z 111/12, KSA 4 : 2 5 9 ) . In this context the earth-lazy are diagnosed as "terminal" and faulted for not making an end to themselves, with the obvious implication that the earth would be better off without them. T h e coinage "earth-lazy" is an intriguing one; it implies that living on earth as anything more than simply coasting along, simply taking up space is an act that requires effort, requires work, and that some apparently are too lazy, in fact "incurably lazy" and therefore not

86

II. Immanence

earth-worthy. This does not change the fact that the earth-weary and earth-lazy prefer to remain on earth, i.e., prefer to remain alive. It is extremely difficult to establish precisely how Nietzsche intends these messages indicating that the earth-weary have overstayed their welcome. At one point Zarathustra parodies the Bible to say "Blessed are these sleepy ones, for they shall soon nod o f f " (Z 1/2, KSA 4:34), which we can also interpret as a "good riddance" to those who have difficulty embracing life on earth. At the negative end of the hermeneutical spectrum such comments, when studied in the context of similar remarks alleging "superfluous" human beings and touting eternal recurrence as a "cultivating thought" to test who can survive its rigor — such comments played right into the hands of National Socialist hate mongers who prided themselves in "exterminating vermin" in the form of millions of Jews. On the other end of the spectrum one could conclude that Nietzsche is merely voicing his frustration with fellow human beings who take no joy in living and who tend to darken the sky for everyone else — but this would be as unjust and naive as the opposite interpretation. For one thing, Nietzsche does not show much regard for the millions on our planet who have no choice but to find life difficult and unworthy of affirmation, e.g., the millions of toiling workers (whom he does mention in other contexts), of starving and diseased human beings, of oppressed humans beings living under regimes of terror — clearly he does not intend that such people should simply "pass away." The refrain in many of Nietzsche's efforts to help humans foster a sense of immanence is: live in your own time! Only fools, he claims, used such phrases as "if only I had lived back then," when in truth they should be saying: I am glad I did not live back then. "The spirit of that age would press on you with the weight of a hundred atmospheres, you would not enjoy its good and its beauty, you would not digest its bad." And yet each person manages to withstand his own age, because the spirit of one's own age lies not only upon him but also in him — the spirit of the age resists itself and carries itself ( H H II/1 382, KSA 2:527). There is solid and practical advice here; we must devote ourselves to living in our time, to living in real time as opposed to attempting to live in something else or wishing to live in another time. At some point, Nietzsche is warning, these longings for a different time and a different scenario begin to erode our capacity for living in the present. A related phenomenon of wishful other-dwelling is described in an aphorism entitled "The heavenly kingdom of the children." When we speak of the happiness of children it as much a myth as the Greek myth of the Hyperboreans. Their reasoning appears to have been: if happiness resides on earth, then as far as possible from us, out there somewhere on the edge of the earth. Older people think in a similar way: if humans can be happy at all, then certainly only as far as possible from our age, at the beginning of life. Nietzsche sees this myth-making at work everywhere in the modern world where sentimentality is present ( H H II/2 265, KSA 2:666-7). What is manifesting itself in such wishful, misguided other-dwelling is low self esteem and disrespect

3. Efforts Toward Immanence: First Steps

87

for the present. Even Nietzsche's cherished Greeks were guilty on this count. In alerting us to the fact that we have it within our power as human beings to love the here and now, and to supervise our sentimentality and wishful projections, Nietzsche is paving the way for us to change our behavior. But there is no changing human behavior on such essential issues as embracing who we are, where we are, when we are unless we first recognize the symptoms of life denial. If Christ had remained in the desert, if he had avoided the so-called good and the just he might have learned to love life and earth and even laughter, this according to Zarathustra as he speaks with his friends. For his part Zarathustra wants to die so that his friends love the earth even more, and he wants to return to earth, which bore him (Z 1/21, KSA 4:95). What is noteworthy in this formulation of life affirmation is the juxtaposition of Christ and Zarathustra on the point where Christianity appears most vulnerable, namely, in its positing of an unearthly beginning and an unearthly fate for human life. What Nietzsche allows us to infer in this passage is that Christ's manner of living in earth denial continues to be symbolized in Christianity's emphasis on the beyond. This problem can be approached in an analysis of the concept of the cenotaph, from Greek kenotaphion meaning empty tomb. A cenotaph is a monument or other symbol erected to honor persons whose physical remains are elsewhere. In the case of Christ, one might say the entire religion is a cenotaph, for in the literal sense, Christ is without a grave on earth — there are no earthly remains of Christ, his tomb became empty when he ascended to heaven. For Nietzsche this is symbolic of abandoning the earth, and so Zarathustra offers instead that in order to engender earth-love in his friends, he wants to return to the earthwomb that bore him. There is no divine genesis for Zarathustra, and no divine exit. The writings of Nietzsche contain many such reminders and explorations of the otherworldly dimensions of Christianity, inviting us to ponder the symbolism of Christ's actions, words, and his death. 147 In what appears to be a major lapse of judgment Nietzsche appended to The Antichrist a so-called "Law Against Christianity" ("Gesetz wider das Christenthum"), proclaiming in one page signed "The Antichrist" that the date 30 September 1888 ("according to the false calculation of time") shall henceforth be used as the first day of the first year of salvation. There are seven propositions to this new law, of which the third is as follows: "The cursed site upon which Christianity hatched its basilisk eggs shall be leveled to the earth and shall be an infamous site of the earth to the horror of 147

I am indebted to the poetry of Paul Celan for the implications of the cenotaph. See Adrian Del Caro, The Early Poetry of Paul Celan: In the beginning was the word (Baton Rouge and London: LSU Press, 1997), 172-74, 178. Celan (1920-1970) was a Holocaust survivor and poet whose awarding winning poetry of the 1950s and 1960s bears witness and remembrance to the victims of the Holocaust, most of whom are without earthly remains. Celan offers in his difficult but worthwhile poetry some of the most insightful probings of Western culture's appropriation and abuse of time and earthly dwelling.

88

II. Immanence

all posterity. Poisonous snakes shall be bred upon it" (A, KSA 6:254). Regardless of the state of mind Nietzsche was in when he wrote this strange text and appended it to The Antichrist, it contains a consistency with respect to the violations against the earth which Nietzsche attributes to Christianity. In a reversal of roles, he declares not the entire earth, only the birth place of Christianity, apparently, to be labeled a place of opprobrium, and the site will be visited by people of the future who will then see with their own eyes how horrible is this religion. By using the site to breed snakes, Nietzsche underscores the repulsive character of this plot of ground, in the same spirit with which Christianity condemns the snake as the symbol of sin and body. In short, Nietzsche regards this appalling gesture as payment in kind for what Christians have done to the earth. Extreme as it is, and as lacking in taste as it is (even giving consideration to Nietzsche's well developed sense of humor), the "law" represents yet another measure Nietzsche prescribes in his task of making the earth more liveable. There is a fighting spirit to this so-called law, and certainly a spirit of fighting back.

4. Knowledge as an Impediment to Living "The only critique of a philosophy that is possible and also proves something, namely to attempt whether one can live according to it, has never been taught at universities Schopenhauer as Educator, 8

It will surprise no one who has read The Birth of Tragedy that Nietzsche considered certain dimensions and applications of knowledge to be impediments to the manifesting of earthly living. The case in Tragedy is very strong that knowledge as introduced by the Socratic spirit did much to shipwreck tragic culture, and because it was pursued as a panacea associated with virtue, knowledge began to exert hegemony over other values and to crowd alternatives out of the field. Nietzsche regards Socrates influence as "the one turning point and vortex of so-called world history" and Socrates as one who believed that "thinking can not only know being but is even in a position to correct being." Socrates is referred to as a form of existence never seen before, namely "the theoretical human being" (BT 15, KSA: 100, 99, 98). With this in mind we can better understand that Nietzsche remains critical of certain features and functions of knowledge even in his most positivistic and pro-science writings, and we can also bear in mind that the rivalry between art and philosophy, or creativity and knowledge as it may also be stated, begins in Tragedy for Nietzsche and it is maintained throughout his career. Normally when Nietzsche invites scrutiny of the scholar he uses the philosopher as a point of comparison, in order to reveal how limited is scholarship. In Schopenhauer as Educator the scholar is compared with the genius instead, in keeping with Nietzsche's early interest in genius-types such as Schopenhauer and Wagner and their

4. Knowledge as an Impediment to Living

89

romantic views on genius. Scholars are unfruitful and moreover they have a natural hate for fruitful human beings. Throughout history, he continues, scholars and geniuses have been enemies; scholars want to kill nature by dissecting and understanding it, geniuses meanwhile want to increase nature through their own natural vitality. "The truly fortunate ages did not need the scholar and did not know him, but the sickly and morose ages treasured him as the highest and most dignified human and ranked him number one" (UM III/6, KSA 1:399-400). Knowledge as a tool of scholars is like the dialectician's scalpel that Nietzsche attributes to Socrates; it is used to lay bare, to cut, and ultimately to kill for purposes of inspection, research, gaining knowledge and so on. T h e scholar therefore cuts through and cuts up nature, and in the process or, in processing nature merely succeeds in eviscerating and violating it — though of course the triumph of knowing remains as a byproduct. The genius, on the other hand, since she already stands in complete unity with nature and is really nothing more than an expression of nature's power and creativity has the opposite effect of "increasing nature" ("die Natur durch neue lebendige Natur vermehren"), which for Nietzsche means that genius is the highest illustration of immanence. In Tragedy Nietzsche attributes the death of tragedy and the tragic, Dionysian, lifeaffirming culture of the early Greeks to Socrates and his influence, and he remains consistent in History where he applies the same idea to Christianity. In the example of Christianity, he writes, we observe how under historical treatment the religion becomes pale and unnatural, becomes a "pure knowing about" Christianity and so is destroyed. Nietzsche raises this phenomenon to an axiom and asserts "one can study this in everything that has life" (UM II/7, KSA 1:297). Apparently Nietzsche is convinced of the power of knowledge to enervate, to penetrate, and to dismember a living thing, and he is clearly frustrated by modernity's blindness to both the power of knowledge and the indifferent manner with which it is wielded. Those who should know better (or know differently) are the philosophers, but Nietzsche does not see them measuring up to the standard of vitality either. H e confidently asserts that the only critique of a philosophy that is possible and that proves anything is whether one can live according to it, but this has never been taught at universities, only the critique of words about words ( U M III/8 KSA 1:417). And what adds insult to injury, he continues, is that people regard philosophers as harmless when in fact bad philosophers are not harmless: they make philosophy into a ridiculous affair and give it a bad name. If we were to withdraw state subvention of philosophers they would slip away to become teachers, pastors, journalists, and textbook authors for girls' schools — their existence as philosophers depends on state subvention ( U M III/8, KSA 1:421-2). If philosophers are to be taken seriously they must effect a direct connection to living, such that their philosophy contributes to vitality, and the proof of this vitality would be that actual human beings live according to philosophy. Anything less, Nietzsche maintains, is merely the Western state's subvention of the philosophical profession or something

90

II. Immanence

like philosophy by academic decree/degree; knowledge in the hands of such philosophers does little for living. The tone softens somewhat by the time of Human, when Nietzsche is exploring the notion of grounding knowledge in a human way. In an aphorism that reads like an observation on today's academic scene, entitled "The science professionals and the others," scholars and scientists are described as professionals (Angestellte, i.e., salaried employees). Their talents are recognized by older scholarly mentors and they are assigned to "a place in science where their qualities can be of use," later on when they learn the ropes they place themselves where they can do the most good for research. "These natures are all there for the sake of science: but there are rarer, more rarely succeeding and completely maturing natures 'for whose sake science is there.'" At this point Nietzsche is making the turn from science and knowledge in the abstract, as institutions, to the vitalistic, humanizing meaning of science, which must reside in the human first. These "other" types possess the same scholarly qualities but display certain telling differences; they are often unpleasant, arrogant, aloof, and they utilize the professional scholar's achievements with princely indifference; they cannot serve in a particular post, they are loners, and they are impelled toward areas of knowledge where their own fruits will flourish: "They lack any impersonal interest in a problem of knowledge, for just as they are a person through and through, so all their insights and learning grow together into a person, into a lively multiplicity whose individual parts depend on one another, are intertwined, and are nourished in common, yielding a whole that has its own air and its own scent." These natures who bring their personal qualities to science are usually called philosophers (HH II/2 171, KSA 2:624-6). What Nietzsche describes here is a process whereby humans inseminate science in order to give it life. The person in whom science is a living thing is constitutionally incapable of an impersonal interest in science, and she is capable of using the institutional trappings of science to become a philosopher, as distinguished from the science professional or scholar whose objectivity makes her work abstract and unfruitful. Though Nietzsche is to be praised for demanding an organic groundedness of knowledge in living, one wonders about his strict layering of the vitalistic philosopher atop an academic ground, in other words, what is one to make of Nietzsche's claim that the philosopher springs from a soil of scholarship or science? It would seem that if nature, vitality, and immanence of person are the decisive characteristics of the philosopher, there should be a broader, less specialized ground for the emergence of philosophers than the academic institution. Does Nietzsche's formula for growing philosophers preclude the emergence of a philosopher who does not have roots in the scholarly establishment? Is Nietzsche himself so modern on this point that he unwillingly harbors an academic bias even when he knowingly attacks the academic bias? The position or rank of the philosopher in relation to the scholar is superior, but ultimately Nietzsche does not side with the philosopher and her medium, namely knowledge, but with the artist when it comes to representing life with a maximum of

4. Knowledge as an Impediment to Living

91

immanence. His late formulation for the most affirmative human being is "Dionysian philosopher," and though he retains the designation "philosopher" we understand that by this time philosophizing has been characterized as the supreme creative activity. Meyer summarizes the basic properties of this Nietzschean reorientation of knowledge to creativity when he explains that Nietzsche resolutely stresses the primacy of creativity over knowledge, of shaping over learning, and of producing over knowing. "Not without reason does he bring the artistic metaphor of the sculptor into play, for he is concerned with bringing forth a new form." 148 T h e manner in which life can be dissected and killed by knowledge, as well as the merely tentative and limited status of knowledge in relation to Nietzsche's privileging of creativity, make knowledge and its chief representatives into unreliable partners in the venture of maximizing vitality. As if to dramatize the withering effects of knowledge Nietzsche writes that moderns are able to say cogito, ergo sum but not vivo, ergo cogito\ "I am guaranteed empty 'being' but not full and green 'life'" (UM 11/10, KSA 1:329). T h e reversal of the Cartesian, modernist ontology exposes the primacy of knowing over living, revealing how when knowledge is taken to be the ground, being remains empty, hollow. O u r reliance on knowing is doubtlessly easier than other strategies for living, since we can manage knowledge much more readily than we can manage say the passions, but we are constantly being deceived by and about knowledge, and we know far less about the world of the living than we think. In "On the Pathos of Truth," one of his forewords to unwritten books, Nietzsche claims that if humans were only knowing animals, or entirely knowing animals the truth would drive us to despair and destruction, for the truth is that we are eternally damned to untruth. Nature for example conceals from us what is most important and closest to us, namely our own bodies, of which we have only a deceptive "consciousness." Nature has thrown away the key, but sometimes humans are offered a glimpse of themselves through a crack in the "room of consciousness" and we "perhaps intuit then how the human being rests upon the greedy, the insatiable, the disgusting, the merciless, and the murderous, in the indifference of his ignorance and as it were clinging in dreams to the back of a tiger" (KSA 1:760). Knowledge and consciousness are our lesser parts, so runs the Nietzschean refrain, and we actually know very little about the human condition which is concealed from us. In fact, it's a good thing we know as little as we do, he adds, because knowing the "truth" about ourselves, about human being, would destroy us. I do not think Nietzsche is erecting a false either/or between ignorance on one side and animality on the other; instead, he appears to be making a plea for toning down the reliance on knowledge as if it were a panacea, in favor of coming to terms more honestly with the beast within in order to integrate it into our civilized lives. This, it is hoped, would have the effect of manifesting life as being instead of mere knowledge as being. 148 -p^eo Vleyer, Nietzsche unddie Kunst (Tubingen: Francke, 1993), 44. Meyer's nouns rendered by me as knowledge, learning, knowing are: Erkenntnis, Wissen, Erkennen.

92

II. Immanence

Humans can hardly be faulted for having over developed the cognitive faculties, since as Nietzsche claims early on the intellect is a means for the preservation of the individual, and it functions best in deceiving. Weaker individuals use the intellect to survive because unlike animals they have no horns or predator jaws; deception is so prevalent among humans that "almost nothing is more incomprehensible than how an honest and pure impulse to truth could emerge among humans" (KSA 1:876). 149 The body has most of our substance and strength, and when we compensate as humans must by developing the intellect, we have to develop the skill of deception at the expense of the skill of accuracy, knowledge, truth — what we call consciousness is really not much at all. In fact, since Nietzsche insists that consciousness always contains a double mirroring, there being nothing that is direct, one may have the right to deny consciousness, but hardly the right to deny the putting forth of affects, e.g. in a rain forest (KSA 12:23-4). Finally, consciousness can pose a danger to the organism, as Danto reads Nietzsche, for when mind and body operate mechanically there is efficiency, whereas when consciousness supervenes there can be error and clumsiness. Danto adds that Nietzsche is not anticipating the horrendous Nazi injunctions to "think with blood" however, as Nietzsche opposes atavism. 150 The point to be made here is that in the economy of the body and the intellect, or body and mind, body holds most of the cards and to the extent that consciousness exerts influence on life, it does so through filtering and blunting the instincts and through deception. Since error is a condition of living it is to our advantage as a species to factor in error as constructively and creatively as we can. It is error, Nietzsche maintains, and not pure knowing that allowed the blossoming of religions and the arts, of which pure knowing is incapable, for it can only reveal aspects of the world and so disappoint us. W h a t is meaningful then is not the world as thing in itself, but as representation, as error: "This consequence leads to a philosophy of logical world negation-. which by the way can be united with a practical world affirmation just as well as with its opposite" ( H H 1/29, KSA:2:50). In partial agreement with Schopenhauer Nietzsche regards the necessity of error as dictating a represented world, but then breaking with Schopenhauer he construes the logical world denial of this equation as an opportunity for "practical" world affirmation, which is precisely what he sets about to do and precisely why he achieves a significant break with Schopenhauer. In other words, Nietzsche does not rest with or upon the knowledge that error is intrinsic to living, at least not in a pessimistic and resigned sense, instead, he tries to harness this as a source of immanent energy. In order to affirm earth we need to

150

From the essay "On Truth and Lie." The human clinging to the back of a tiger is used verbatim in this essay too, p. 877. Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, 118. See also Gemes (2001): whereas Mussolini and Hitler looked backward for glory and purity, resp., "Nietzsche posits unity as a possible future achievement" (355).

4 . Knowledge as an Impediment to Living

93

affirm error, acknowledge our imperfection and accept a standard that is less than "pure" but more than life denying. In the same vein are observations in The Gay Science

to the effect that arts

sustains us and protects us from madness, rendering us spiritually flexible, and that we created a world in which we can live, but it is not a verifiable world: life is no argument because the condition o f life could be based on error (GS 107, 121, KSA 3 : 4 6 5 , 4 7 7 - 8 ) . In an unpublished note he states the case even more strongly, asserting that it is not enough that one sees in what kind o f unknowing (Unwissenheit) human and animal live, one must also have "the will to unknowing" and learn this unknowing, without which life would be impossible. Unknowing is a condition under which everything living survives and thrives, "a big, firm bell o f unknowing must stand about you" (KSA 11:228). 1 5 1 A concept such as a "will to unknowing," in which unknowing is a substantive and not a gerund, would have to be a highly developed skill, since unknowing as a state o f ignorance triggered and powered by a will implies selective unknowing. According to Nietzsche there is much that we do not know about living, about human nature, and it is good that we do not know because life would otherwise be obstructed; now imagine that instead o f merely letting this unknowing happen, without our knowing, we instead develop a sense for shutting down knowing where it does the most good for affirming our lives — it is almost as if Nietzsche were experimenting with an economy o f consciousness whereby different states or levels o f consciousness would be appropriate for different situations. 152 We are o f course quite selective in what we choose to know but we have a speciesbased tendency to know what flatters us and what appeals to our vanity. A fresh reorientation in knowing would acknowledge the fact that the beauty o f knowing also extends to knowing the ugly, to knowing the reality that is considered ugly. " T h e happiness of the knowing ones increases the beauty o f the world and makes everything in it sunnier; knowledge posits its beauty not only around things, but also, for the duration, into things" (D 550, KSA 3 : 3 2 0 ) . To be read in tandem with this aphorism is # 4 6 8 , which makes a plea for expanding the size of the kingdom o f beauty. We wander through nature with appreciation for its variety and nuance, and so too we should traffic among humans, exploring and observing them in their sunny and cloudy moods,

151

At this point in his notes N . draws up a list o f "will to..." which includes: will to unknowing, will to uncertainty, will to untruth, will to power, will to suffering, will to cruelty, will to annihilation, will to injustice, will to the ugly, will to the immoderate, will to frenzy, and will to paralysis. Judging from the context o f the "will to unknowing," N . was experimenting with where willing might be applied to affirmation and possibly where willing might be misjudged or even under-represented, KSA 11:228-9.

152

O n e sees, perhaps, why N . kept this in his notes and did not choose to publish it. O n the other hand, when someone uses the expression "pay close attention," is this a tautology or is some form o f attention closer than another?

94

II. Immanence

perhaps even enjoying the evil person as one would a wild landscape (as long as she behaves legally). But this manner of living among and perceiving humans is forbidden: "Just as surely as there are a hundred kinds of happiness among the evil, of which the virtuous have no inkling, so too there are in them a hundred kinds o f beauty: and many are as yet undiscovered" (D 4 6 8 , KSA 3:280-1). I f humans could expand their knowing into regions of the spiritual ecosystem traditionally proscribed as ugly or evil, our knowing would be working more affirmatively, more realistically, more in keeping with the greater economy of nature. Nietzsche speaks, some might say naively, like an explorer in the realm of the ugly and the evil, but we would be even more naive to deny that these dimensions exist. His plea is to open these regions for exploration, for knowing, and he would not be advocating such a position unless he were convinced that these are areas humans should know about. We seem willing as humans to venture into and even to violate any physical space on the planet or for that matter in the solar system, yet we are timid beyond reckoning when it comes to exploring the space of our own spiritual ecosystem. Humans have successfully deployed satellites and orbiters for purposes of mapping earth and other planets, meanwhile the spiritual space of human being remains terra incognita. In a play on words Nietzsche entitles one of Zarathustra's speeches "Von der unbefleckten Erkenntnis," literally " O n Immaculate Knowledge" but translated by Kaufmann as " O n Immaculate Perception." T h e German for immaculate conception is "die unbefleckte Empfängnis." In ecclesiastical terms the immaculate conception refers to Mary, the mother of Christ, becoming pregnant by the Holy Spirit as opposed to conceiving by normal human means, hence the purity of this conception. Nietzsche's quarrel is with those who insist on any kind of immaculate knowledge, knowledge so pure that it circumvents, miraculously, the needs and ground of the body. T h e so-called pure knowers (Rein-Erkennenden) are hypocritical because they are actually lustful. Zarathustra alleges that they too love the earth and the earthly, but there is shame in their love and bad conscience. T h e spirits of the pure-knowing ones have been persuaded to despise the earth, but their bowels have not been persuaded. And while the pure-knowing say they would be happiest to regard earth's beauty from afar and superficially, like the moon, Zarathustra understands that the pure knowers only slander desire because their own desire lacks innocence: "Where is innocence? Where the will to procreate is. And whoever wants to create over and beyond himself has the purest will" (Z 11/15, KSA 4:156-8). Using the parable of the immaculate conception shifted to immaculate knowing, Nietzsche interrogates myths of purity and tries to ground the sentiments that construct such myths. In natural, earthly terms, if one lives with one's bodily passions the urge to procreate is innocent and beautiful, and it will result in an innocent and beautiful child. In the realm of knowing, there is no such thing as knowing without desire, for to live is to manifest desire, to esteem and to interpret, to ultimately get "over" oneself in the Nietzschean act of self-overcoming.

4. Knowledge as an Impediment to Living

95

The pure knowers are the prudes of knowledge who are sterile and can see no living connection for knowledge. They are disembodied, but Nietzsche frequently describes them as leering and lecherous, in keeping with their hypocrisy — they want more than simply "to know," but they are ashamed, confused, inhibited. These immaculate knowers are the Platonic lovers whose love will never be consummated, and they are compared to the moon because the moon is a mere satellite of the earth, a silent companion, a weak and impotent lover. When the day begins to break Zarathustra exclaims: "For already it is coming, the glowing one, — its love for the earth is coming! All solar love is innocence and creator's craving" (Z 11/15, KSA 4:158). The relationship between sun and earth, unlike moon and earth, is creative, consequential, living and life-providing. In matters of knowing it merely obstructs life to be coy and Platonic. The Nietzschean ambivalence toward knowledge is one of the major reasons for the hermeneutical difficulty of reading Nietzsche. This ambivalence manifests itself in the esoteric/exoteric problem, as well as in the philosopher/poet problem. As Colli observes knowledge is a value in itself in the works before Zarathustra (at least in the aphoristic works), but by the time of the third and last essay of Genealogy (1887), Nietzsche presents arguments and theses attacking science and knowledge (KSA 5: 420). In Beyond Good and Evil (1886) Nietzsche announces that Dionysus is a philosopher and that he, Nietzsche, is the last disciple and initiate of the god Dionysus (BGE 295, KSA 5:238). If nothing else this signals that traditional philosophizing as a matter of knowledge and truth is no longer a viable way of philosophizing, for the intrusion of "gods" into the sphere of "knowing" is a serious shift in values. Moreover, it is in Beyond that Nietzsche begins to make allusions to the mask and to deliberate deception, at one point claiming "everything that is deep loves the mask " (BGE 40, KSA 5:57). The mask as a feature of Dionysus, who was a disguised, masked god, becomes a property of Nietzsche's philosophizing, such that he invokes the mask by warning readers not to practice psychology and curiosity in the wrong place (BGE 270, KSA 5:226), and again by warning readers that "every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hiding place, every word also a mask" (BGE 289, KSA 5:234). The protracted discussions of esoteric/exoteric in the final pages of Beyond underscore the shift in epistemological values, occurring as they do in the same space as the reintroduction of Dionysus into Nietzsche's writings. One of the earliest influences of Nietzsche's writings on his contemporaries was the critique of knowledge that emerges in On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Living, which as Sokel explains gave voice to a second Sturm und Drang in the form of the irrational Youth Movement founded in the 1890s. This movement embraced youth, vitality, and instinct and was an important segment of German intellectual life from the Wilhelminian period to Hitler. The book's appeal, according to Sokel, lay in its charge of too much history encumbering the psyche, too many undigested "knowledge stones" filling the bellies of moderns, too much emphasis on the intellect

96

II. Immanence

and not enough emphasis on vitality and wholeness.153 This is a skillful formulation of Nietzsche's resonance as a critic of knowledge and of his impact on contemporaries who thirsted for vitality and creativity in an age of utilitarian and nationalistic values. Unfortunately the new Sturm und Drang coincided with the rise of völkisch ideology and contributed to the abuse of Nietzsche's writings by German nationalists. From the standpoint of immanence, however, there is no mistaking Nietzsche's insights concerning the workings of knowledge in relation to both inhibiting and enhancing life.

5. On Regulating the Instincts to Create Human Being "It was not a limited, priestly caste-like moral law that decided the constitution of the state and the state cult, but instead the most encompassing regard for the reality of everything human." Human, All Too Human II/l 220

At the time of his deepest immersion in the culture of the ancient Greeks Nietzsche wrote "Homer's Contest" as yet another juxtaposition of modern and pagan sensitivities. We speak of "humanity," he writes, and imagine thereby something that is separate from nature, but this is an illusory distinction. The human being even in his highest and most noble powers is "wholly nature and bears within its uncanny double character," perhaps it is even the case that the capacities regarded as terrible and inhumane are the fertile soil "from which alone all humanity can arise in emotions, deeds and works." After all, Nietzsche continues, "the Greeks who were the most humane human beings of ancient times" also have a tendency toward cruelty and tiger-like lust for annihilation" (KSA 1:783). The Greeks recognized that they had to let their hatred vent fully, as a necessity, and we moderns would shudder to perceive how the Greeks jubilated at the battle images of the Iliad, we are not sufficiently "Greek" to understand this (KSA 1:784). If this was true of the Homeric Greeks, Nietzsche asks, into what do we gaze in the world of the pre-Homerics? "Only into night and horror, into the products of an imagination accustomed to the ghastly. What manner of earthly existence these repugnantly terrible theogonistic sagas reflect: a life ruled over only by the children of night, strife, amorous greed, deception, old age and death" (KSA 1:785). The Homeric Greeks were cruel, but they were not hopelessly stunted and doomed human beings — something must have developed among them to produce the redeeming qualities we admire so much today. Battle and the lust of victory were acknowledged, Nietzsche claims, and nothing distinguishes the Greek world from our own more than the coloration of individual 153

Walter Sokel, The Writer in Extremis: Expressionism in Twentieth Century German Literature (Stanford University Press, 1959), 95.

4. Knowledge as an Impediment to Living

97

ethical concepts such as Eris and envy. Though both goddesses are called Eris (Greek "strife"), one supports bad war and enmity while the other encourages humans to work, compete, and strive for prosperity. The good Eris is regarded as jealousy and envy but inspires to action, to contest, not annihilation, while the negative Eris or envy causes wars of annihilation. "The Greek is envious and does not perceive this trait as a flaw" (KSA 1:786-7). The contest was a means to vent aggressive, jealous, otherwise only negative impulses by moving them to a higher plane. The necessity of the contest is demonstrated by its alternative, ostracism, a custom whereby no one person could be allowed to be the best "because therewith the contest would dry up and the eternal ground of life of the Hellenic state would be endangered." The contest ethos shows that several geniuses are needed who mutually inspire one another to action, but modern educators fear nothing more than the unleashing of ambition. Nietzsche hastens to point out that the Greeks did not have unbounded, unbridled ambition, as we understand it in modernity, but were focused instead of the welfare of their mother city. "For that reason individuals of antiquity were more free, because their goals were closer and more graspable. The modern human being on the other hand is crossed all over by infinity ("überall von der Unendlichkeit [gekreuzt]") (KSA 1:788-90). 154 Among the important and thematically resonant ideas from this seminal essay, of which I have given only the briefest of samples, perhaps the most important is the notion of sublimating the passions and aggressive urges into a communally acceptable and constructive custom. Another concept that Nietzsche holds onto and develops further is the regulating or curbing of ambition, accomplished under the auspices of Greek moderation. Nietzsche is extremely insightful about the modernist, Romantic compulsion to throw off all restraint as if this were a form of freedom. Finally, I regard as basic to the Nietzschean notion of grounding that he recognizes freedom in the defined, circumscribed realm of attainable and graspable goals — the Greeks achieved what they did based on respect for the closest things, one another, and visible, palpable achievements. A Faust would have been inconceivable to the ancient Greeks, or he would have been ostracized, banished. Without a notion of the finite and what can be achieved for humanity within the finite, there is no ground to human being. Moderns might imagine that the ancient peoples cowered before nature, but this was not the case with the Greeks. The intent of pagan religious cults was to constrain nature and give it regularity, which it does not have, except by virtue of what moderns

154

See Jordan Dieterich and Janet Lungstrum's translation of "Homer's Contest," and Lungstrum and Sauer's introduction, in the volume Agonistics: Arenas of Creative Contest, ed. Janet Lungstrum and Elizabeth Sauer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 1-32, 35-45. See also Richardson (1996) pp. 163-3, and throughout, for insightful commentary on the importance of the agon to N.'s thought.

98

II. Immanence

falsely attribute to it in this regard. Even humans of the lower cultural stages were not impotent slaves in the face of nature, as seen in the example of the Greeks in relation to their gods. Here one can speak of a living together of two castes, one noble and the other less noble, but both belonging together in their origin and both of a kind, neither ashamed of the other. "That is what is noble in Greek religiosity" ( H H 1/111, KSA2: 115-6). The Greeks devised a way to see themselves reflected gloriously in nature, without self-loathing and without the placing of blame. Humans neither need to fear nature nor subdue it, and the example of the Greeks teaches us that there is room enough for humans in nature. W h a t is interesting about this observation is that Nietzsche also indicates that there is room in enough in nature for religiosity, which he holds to be beneficial for the state of immanence, only it must be a religiosity that affirms life. In an even more detailed exploration of what is "actual paganism" Nietzsche describes how nothing alienates the modern observer of the Greek culture more than discovering that they from time to time held festivals for all their passions and wicked natural inclinations, and they had constructed a state hierarchy of festivals for their all too humanness — this, he claims, is the actual paganism of their world, never understood by Christianity. The Greeks took their all too humanness as unavoidable and preferred to relegate it to justice second class instead of reviling it; they integrated it into customs of society and into their cults. "Yes, everything in the human being that has power they named divine and wrote it on the walls of their heaven." They did not deny the natural drive that expressed itself in bad qualities, instead they regulated it and restricted it to certain cults and days after rendering it manageable with appropriate precautions. T h e barbaric and animalistic-atavistic was allowed a moderate discharging, instead of being completely destroyed. T h e Greek state "in its construction shows that wonderful sense for the typical-factual that later enabled them to become natural scientists, historians, geographers and philosophers. It was not a limited, priestly caste-like moral law that decided the constitution of the state and the state cult, but instead the most encompassing regard for the reality of everything human ( H H 11/220, KSA 2:473-4). Nietzsche takes extraordinary efforts to convey how the Greeks were appreciative of everything within the economy of human being, conserving everything, ranking everything, and careful to give a modicum of respect and celebration even to the questionable aspects of being. By contrast with moderns, the Greeks were capable of living within their spiritual region and ecosystem without altering the landscape, without clear cutting, without wasting anything. To be sure, the work of regulation, governing, channeling the base impulses and instincts is time consuming and onerous, but castration, extirpation, and condemnation are the modern human's laziness masquerading as progress. W h a t Nietzsche describes as "actual paganism" could be rewritten as affirmation, restraint, intelligence, sensitivity, regulating, a wide field of vision, humility, and conserving. Pagans may wish to add even more reformulations of their much maligned wisdom.

4. Knowledge as an Impediment to Living

99

It is helpful in rendering the concept of the superhuman less abstract and less idealistic to bear in mind that Nietzsche already has a notion of superior human beings, namely the Greeks, and he also implies that rare individuals throughout history attained virtual super h u m a n status. T h e will to power at work in humans is capable of producing super humans, not by endowing them with superior strength or the ability to fly, rather by putting an artistic touch to what is in place and latent, and by sublimating what is vital but crude. Schacht for example writes that "the Übermensch may be construed as a symbol of human life raised to the level of art, in which crude self-assertive struggle is sublimated into creativity that is no longer in thrall to the demands and limitations associated with the 'human-alltoo-human.'" 1 5 5 This formulation is fair, but I think Schacht underestimates the importance of precisely the "all-too-human" as part of the superhuman constitution — after all, the Greeks achieved their greatness, their "superiority" by dignifying and sublimating the all too human, the quotidian, that which was closest to them and manifest in the everyday. In order to explain himself on the will to power Nietzsche draws analogies to nature, and particularly to places and phenomena of nature that appear most robust. He invites us to consider that when life spreads out, incorporates, grows, it is striving against opposition. W h y do the trees of the rain forest struggle with each other, he asks, certainly not for "happiness" but for power. Humans have become rulers over the forces of nature and over their own wildness and unrestraint, and this means the desires have consequences, they have learned to be useful. Today's human compared to a pre-human, he concludes, represents a "tremendous quantum of power — not a plus of'happiness': how can one maintain that he has strivedfor happiness?" (KSA 13: 52-3). T h e same force at work in a rain forest is at work in humans, namely the will to power, though scientists will of course dispute Nietzsche's interpretation and offer one of their own, couched in the anthropocentric language of pure knowing. Nietzsche speaks against attributing teleology to nature and for this reason he objects strenuously to philosophical accounts explaining human nature as a striving for happiness; happiness may perhaps be a byproduct of the will to power's striving against obstacles, but the pursuit of happiness could not explain the advances in power accumulation as they manifest themselves in today's human. And when Nietzsche writes that trees of the rain forest struggle against each other "for power," it is not as if we could take our politically charged, anthropocentric notions of "power" and simply ascribe them to trees — this would be ludicrous. "Will to power" is itself a metaphor, the actual force and phenomenon are observable in the rain forest and, he would have us think, in humans as well — just look at what we have managed to become as humans. Drenthen reminds us that the concept of the will to power is introduced in order to provide the physical concept of force with an inner side, i.e., 155

Schacht, Nietzsche, 482.

100

II. Immanence

"Nietzsche argues that our passions and instincts have to be understood both as physical forces and as interpretive entities." When passions within human nature struggle with each other, we have a struggle between different interpretations: "Because Nietzsche's vantage point is that human nature is not different from nature as a whole, nature as a whole can be seen as a struggle between several instances of 'will to power.'" 156 Humans possess the capacity to govern, regulate, sublimate the will to power because we are the will's "inner side," its human form of expression, its "thinking man's" version. The task is not to de-world ourselves ("nicht uns entweltigen") but instead to overcome the world and us in it. "We must prepare the earth for the superhuman and the animal and the plants" he writes in notes not used for Zarathustra, and he presents a strategy for creating the superhuman that draws on existing drives of human nature. "To create the superhuman after we have thought all of nature in accordance with ourselves, have made it thinkable" ("nachdem wir die ganze Natur auf uns hin gedacht, denkbar gemacht haben") (KSA 10:136-7). Our natural inclination as humans has always been anthropocentric, namely, to think of nature on our terms, in accordance with ourselves, and by so doing we have made it possible to think of nature in the first place. This is not mere arrogance and humanistic excess, as idealists might maintain, it is instead the result of thinking, a human process, and the result of being human in nature; Nietzsche would argue that we cannot do otherwise than to regard nature in relation to ourselves. Now that he has established that human in nature will serve as the ground for the superhuman, he completes his draft of a plan by writing; "We can only love something that is entirely related to us: we love best a being created by thought ("ein erdachtes Wesen"). Love need not be commanded toward one's work and one's child. Advantage of the superhuman" (KSA 10:137). Thus the superhuman becomes a possibility because humans have a natural inclination to love what is related to them, to love their own works, especially works of thought — Nietzsche expects these factors to naturally, organically posit and nurture the superhuman. Humans must of course take requisite pride in themselves as expressions of nature, harnessing what is natural toward the creation of this human. I find a cogent explanation of the will to power and the larger issue of will in Nietzsche in Breazeale, who describes what transpires when we speak of "self control." He begins by stating that Nietzsche "frequently ridiculed the idea that 'freedom' or 'free will' is a sort of metaphysical property," instead it is a state achieved by self-discipline and self-overcoming. However, "the experience upon which the idea of freedom is ultimately based is the experience of self-control, the experience one has when one part of one's self succeeds in dominating and subordinating the other aspects, so that one is, in consequence, able to will in a single direction rather than be torn between 156

Martin Drenthen, "The Paradox of Environmental Ethics: Nietzsche's View of Nature and the Wild," Environmental Ethics 21/2 (1999), 167.

4. Knowledge as an Impediment to Living

101

competing natural impulses." Therefore the process of establishing control over one's passions amounts to "one strong instinct succeeding in establishing its sway over the rest, for which achievement the self as a whole, or rather the small part of the self called the conscious intellect, impudently (and ignorandy) claims the credit." 157 This "inside look" at the concept and process of self control is helpful in demonstrating that humans do in fact regulate their passions, as Nietzsche has long claimed on the basis of his study of the ancient Greeks, and that such regulating is not a metaphysical property or idealistic desiderata but something firmly grounded in the hierarchy or order of rank (Rangordnung) of the passions. A soul-based, metaphysical view in hindsight would construe self-control as an achievement of the intellect, but a bodybased, physiological approach to self-control ascribes its possibility to the instincts. Not to be forgotten in any of these investigations into the character of the will and regulating the passions is that one must first have a quantum of passion, a certain force of body before one can speak of regulating and harnessing for the purpose of creating a superhuman or, more modestly and more likely, for manifesting a stronger human presence. This is what is at stake according to Danto when Nietzsche gives us the impression that he blindly admired Cesare Borgia, who served as the prototype of Macchiavelli's Prince, and whose ruthlessness, cunning, and cruelty are easily held out as an example of where "will to power" is capable of taking humans. Danto explains that Nietzsche is not in favor of abolishing decency, but is unsure whether humans have become more moral: "Perhaps we have just become emasculated, and our failure to do evil is to be ascribed merely to our inability to do evil. Perhaps we are just too weak. To be moral is to overcome one's impulse; if one does not have any impulses, one is not therefore moral." 158 Theoretically, a person of Cesare Borgia's passions, instincts, physical and mental durability, intelligence could have used his powers for "good," in which case he might have been lauded as a kind of saint or ascetic — in any case, he used his powers and he was human. Nietzsche is obviously not the shy retiring type when it comes to facing up to what is human — the historical example of Cesare Borgia looms large in the human landscape. The importance of art or perhaps more basically of creativity for living is emphasized by Schacht, who writes that art is a special schooling of the spirit "in which capacities of expression other than those characteristic of merely vital existence have been cultivated, and a form of self-mastery contrasting with that taught in the obedience-school of society has been learned." 159 The tendency of society to reinforce 157

158

159

Daniel Breazeale, "The Meaning of the Earth" in The Great Year of Zarathustra (1881-1981), edited with introduction by David Goichoechea (Lanham, M D : University Press of America, 1983), 124-5. Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, 224. The passage in N. where he addresses his critics and defends his mention of Borgia is Twilight, chapter 9, # 37, entitled "Whether we have become more moral" (KSA6:136-9). Schacht, Nietzsche, 524.

102

II. Immanence

obedience as a self-serving virtue results in a kind of rote learning, while artistic or creative application on the part of individuals would draw upon less frequently used and exercised passions, the ones that need cultivating for any self-overcoming on the part of humans. It is necessary to concentrate our efforts in this manner because, as Drenthen observes, for Nietzsche humans are the as "yet undetermined animals" who, "unlike other animals, can shape their lives in many ways. Moreover, moral interpretations of reality differ throughout history and within different cultures. Nietzsche emphasizes that there are numerous possible articulations of moral meaning in reality."160 Nietzsche's urgent and timely concern for providing a meaning for the earth is underscored by such considerations, for a focus on earth will help to define human being, which has remained largely undefined and unexplored owing to the anti-physical (anti-body and anti-earth) tendencies of metaphysics. It is not sufficient to merely discover the passions, moreover, because this brings us back to what Schacht calls "merely vital existence." The creative impetus and direction for transforming the passions is provided by the framework of superhuman as meaning of the earth — this is the task which is both big enough and noble enough for the mobilization of the instincts and passions under self-control. This discipline to which one subjects oneself is described by Richardson as a three-fold process; first an individual's self-interest is diffused "against a background of obedience and conformity," then the individual works against this background but "tempered 'agonistically'," such that one's enemy is willed to be stronger, and finally, society is opposed most effectively "by diagnosing and attacking its sickness or reactivity, thereby reforming and redeeming it." Here Richardson refers to the three-fold as "the three main allegiances Nietzsche gives to our society," and concludes: ". . . they rebut, I think, the common suspicion that his egoistic values must make us indifferent to our society or else set us to prey upon it." 161 The creative aspect of asserting one's self and one's self-interest enters the picture in steps two and three of Richardson's cogent scenario, where passional energy is devoted to both agonistically opposing society's strictures and to reforming its reactivity. The figure of Zarathustra is striking in his interaction with others and very conspicuously in his lack of interaction in a communal setting. As a loner who finds little in common with other human beings and whose best efforts to communicate are rewarded by a shabby crew of "higher human beings" who are in fact mere fragments of humans, Zarathustra does not point to any real community. In fact, at the conclusion of the book Zarathustra discards happiness, embraces his "work" and basically goes about waiting for his "children" (the superhumans) by himself, alone, in his own good time. Zarathustra's "work" is picked up by Nietzsche beginning 160

161

Drenthen, "The Paradox of Environmental Ethics," 167. The passage in N. is BGE # 62, KSA 5: 81. Richardson (1996), 163.

4. Knowledge as an Impediment to Living

103

with Beyond Good and Evil, and we have had occasion to consider Magnus' observations on how Nietzsche's writings after Zarathustra "externalize" Zarathustra's task and work. 162 Clark also addresses this issue and in such a way that we recognize another manner in which the regulating and self-controlling activities factor into Nietzsche's plans. In Genealogy Nietzsche "claims that debt is moralized into guilt, and duty into moral duty, through the development of the bad conscience and of the idea of having a debt to God. But neither of these notions plays any part in or is presupposed by his account of judgments of fairness. Nietzsche evidently believes, therefore, that we can regard obedience to the rules necessary for communal existence as a matter of fairness without the help of moral duty or guilt, and therefore without regarding them as moral rules." 163 This is an extremely important point and one which does not receive enough attention in Nietzsche scholarship. Earlier in this subchapter I detailed how the ancient Greeks achieved a community of superior quality, building on Nietzsche's remark that the Greeks were the most humane of ancient peoples and simultaneously cruel etc, in order to demonstrate that Nietzsche does indeed have a concept of community, just not one based on Western morals as they are propagated by Platonism and the Judeo-Christian traditions. These traditions extirpate the passions, while the Greeks affirmed and regulated theirs — that is the telling difference, and I believe Clark's appraisal underscores this. Clark continues to write that "Nietzsche's objection is not to justice or the common good (contrary to Foot), nor to social norms that apply to all (contrary to Nehamas), but rather to the moralization of these ideas and norms." 164 Justice and common good should prevail, according to Nietzsche, but they should do so in a grounded, physiologically determined sense deriving from the regulation of the instincts and passions, as opposed to existing in a metaphysical and idealistic twilight zone. We encountered a similar Nietzschean nuance in his admiration of Cesare Borgia — it is not at all a matter of making humans into Borgias — it is, however, a matter of working with strong human types who possess the requisite strength for creating and for self-overcoming, using sublimation and regulation of the baser instincts.

162 163 164

See note 61 above. Clark, "Nietzsche's Immoralism," 28. Clark, "Nietzsche's Immoralism," 29.

104

II. Immanence

6. Environment, or What Really Surrounds Us "To be unknowing of the smallest and most day to day things and not having sharp eyes — this is what makes the earth a Vale of tears' for so many." Human, All Too Human II/1 6

Environment is not a simple notion for Nietzsche, and this is to be expected from a thinker who expended much energy in explaining to contemporaries and to posterity that humans are absentee dwellers on the earth. In presenting some coherent picture of what the environment meant to Nietzsche, from the personal level to the broadest conception of environmental factors as they contribute to the formation of a people and their values, I am not attempting a comprehensive analysis of Nietzsche on environment — let my entire book represent that attempt, and only modestly. Instead, the immediate task is to sketch features of the environmental consciousness as they contribute to or detract from immanence. The entire human species inhabits the earth, but no human being inhabits the entire earth — each of us has an environment and the way we navigate this environment, regard it or disregard it, determines the kind of life we have. We suffer pangs of conscience after social functions according to Nietzsche, because afterwards we realize that we behaved badly, were insensitive, were perhaps not completely honest or loyal, in short, because we behaved in society as though we belonged to it ( H H 1/351, KSA 2:252). In a social gathering there is a danger of temporarily losing one's equilibrium, indeed one's identity due to the party's flow or animated socializing; the momentum of socializing can carry a person away and beyond her better self. Nietzsche explains that we suffer the bad conscience afterwards because we realize that we do not belong to that society, to that group, to that social crowd, and yet we behaved as though we did. Under normal circumstances, within our own environment say, we would not socialize with that particular group or in that particular way, but we allowed ourselves to enter another environment, a simulated or pseudo environment, perhaps for the sake of companionship, perhaps out of a sense of duty to attend, and we emerge feeling ontologically compromised — we had no business being there. Where we are on one evening and where we are in fact at home, in balance with our surroundings is less likely to be taken for granted if we are capable of experiencing such feelings as Nietzsche describes. Nietzsche's sensitivity to the social environment was perhaps outdone by his sensitivity to the physical environment. For this reason Mittasch, who gives us a detailed account of Nietzsche as a natural philosopher interacting with the scientific literature of his day, tells us at the beginning of his book that Nietzsche's visual faculty was overworked, inefficient, and steadily declining, but a corresponding increase of his tactile senses made his moods increasingly and extraordinarily dependent on not only the landscape environment but also climate and weather. 165

6. Environment, or What Really Surrounds Us

105

In other words, despite his lack of visual acuity due to myopia and occasional migraine related blindness, or perhaps even in compensation thereof, Nietzsche was a human barometer. His sense or feeling for what we so loosely and thoughtlessly call "nature" was physiologically based, and so when he comments in an aphorism entitled "The outdoors" that we enjoy being in the outdoors ("in der freien Natur") because it has no opinion of us ( H H 1/508, KSA 2: 322), he is expressing a kind of gratitude for nature insofar as it allows him to "be there" without judging him. T h e German expression "im Freien" literally means in the open air, while "die freie Natur" as a space refers to open nature, the outdoors, both because one feels less constrained and therefore "free" in nature and because it is, relatively, the open as opposed to the hemmed in, sheltered dwelling of the cities and the indoors more generally. Nietzsche does not neglect the indoors, I hasten to add, for to do so would be to discount vital and immanent dimensions of life, perhaps in the manner of an escapist Romantic. But he clearly has a preference for the outdoors and some of his best thinking and inspiration occurs there. Witness the last aphorism of the first volume of Human appropriately entitled "The wanderer" as the second and final section of volume two of Human is called "The Wanderer and His Shadow." This impressionistic meditation on the interior and exterior landscape begins with an understanding: whoever has achieved any measure of freedom of reason cannot feel otherwise on earth than as a wanderer, though not as a traveler toward an ultimate goal, which does not exist. O n e must keep an eye open for everything that transpires in the world, and so not cling too firmly to individual things but rather attend to that in oneself that wanders and has pleasure in change and transience. There will be bad times, Nietzsche warns, evil nights when the wanderer is weary and finds the city gate closed against him, only to find after sunrise when the gate opens that the faces of the city dwellers bear more desert, filth, deception and insecurity than does the desert in which the wanderer was forced to sleep. This may well happen to the wanderer, he continues, but as compensation there will be blissful mornings of other regions and days on which the wanderer will experience "the gifts of all those free spirits who are at home in mountain, wood and solitude and who, like him, in their now cheerful now pensive manner are wanderers and philosophers. Born of the secrets of dawn, they reflect upon how the day between the tenth and twelfth toll of the bell could have such a pure, irradiated, transfigured-cheerful countenance: — they seek the philosophy of the forenoon ( H H 1/638, KSA 2:362-3). This style foreshadows the impressionistic, lyrical descriptions we find in Zarathustra, and observe the substance or stuff of this "philosophy of the forenoon" — gratitude, joy in being alive, a wanderer's and hermit's eye for the nuances of nature, alternating cheerfulness and pensiveness. T h e special two hours before noon present a world of experience and insight that 165

Mittasch, Nietzsche ab Naturphilosoph, 12.

106

II. Immanence

N i e t z s c h e w o u l d n o t trade for the world, a n d this is w h a t it m e a n s to be present in one's w o r l d , this is his w a y o f relating to the e n v i r o n m e n t . A n o t h e r impressionistic s o n g o f affirmation is called " H a p p i n e s s o f the historian" in order to underscore that for Nietzsche the historical reality o f the d a y to day, o f the here a n d now, o f the transient is capable o f b r i n g i n g happiness. O n a m o r n i n g w a l k in the sunshine he reflects u p o n the w o r d s o f the metaphysicians o f the "afterworld" ( H i n t e r -

weltler) a n d the after life, a n d he feels that w e others are the " p o o r in spirit," t h o u g h we have o u r own k i n g d o m o f heaven with its transformations, spring a n d fall, winter a n d s u m m e r , while their a f t e r w o r l d has grey, frosty, never e n d i n g f o g a n d shadow. For h i m history transforms not only the spirit b u t the heart, a n d he is happy, contrary to the metaphysicians, in having not o n e " i m m o r t a l s o u l " b u t " m a n y mortal souls to shelter in h i m s e l f " ( H H I I / 1 17, K S A 2 : 3 8 6 ) . T h e state o f i m m a n e n c e Nietzsche feels on his s u n n y m o r n i n g walk is strong e n o u g h to question the metaphysicians w h o insist o n another world, a better world, a n d w h o s e e m capable o f overlooking the joys o f livi n g o n earth. T h i s earth, after all, has the c h a n g i n g o f the seasons, ever t r a n s f o r m i n g spirit a n d heart, in short it has a multiplicity o f m o r t a l , h u m a n souls, all to be sheltered in oneself — w h y w o u l d a n y o n e trade this for the after world, for any world? T h e state o f i m m a n e n c e gives more, in real terms, than the far fetched p r o m i s e o f any other world, b u t in order to perceive a n d sense this, o n e m u s t be at h o m e in one's envir o n m e n t . T h i s m a n n e r o f b e i n g requires a k n o w l e d g e o f the e c o n o m y o f the spirit, a calmness, respect for a n d savoring o f the finite just as this special m o m e n t o f m o r n i n g is an experience o f the finite, o f history. W h e n Nietzsche speaks in this m a n n e r already in Human,

w e begin to u n d e r s t a n d that the "experience" o f the eternal recur-

rence o f the same, the highest f o r m u l a o f affirmation, does not descend u p o n h i m as an epiphany, even t h o u g h for d r a m a t i c p u r p o s e s he claims it does — these very passages f r o m Human,

a n d a host o f others very similar to them, are expressions o f increasing

gratitude a n d a f f i r m a t i o n that later inexorably a n d logically b e c o m e the eternal recurrence o f the s a m e . O n e o f the earliest in-depth c o m m e n t a t o r s o n Nietzsche, G u s t a v N a u m a n n , observes that Zarathustra's landscape is a synthesis o f A l p i n e a n d southern coastal, reflecting Nietzsche's actual experience a n d taste. In the evolution o f the idea o f the s u p e r h u m a n , first c o m e s the free spirit (cf. " T h e wanderer" above), then Zarathustra, then finally the s u p e r h u m a n ; because Nietzsche is b o t h thinker a n d artist, he needs this synthesis in himself a n d it is also reflected externally, in Zarathustra's landscape. 1 6 6

166

Gustav Naumann, Zarathustra-Commentar. Erster Theil (Leipzig: H. Haessel, 1899), 62-3. This is the first commentary on Thus Spoke Zarathustra, still quite useful today, and compare GoodingWilliams' Zarathustra's Dionysian Modernism (2001) as the most recent Zarathustra commentary to date. Compare also Kreis' evaluation of the Zarathustra landscape: "What Zarathustra perceives in his land in his dialogue with his land is, spoken concretely, the biblical interweaving of desert and promised land transferred into the vertical and inscribed into the mountainous environment." Kreis, Nietzsche, Wagner unddie Juden, 148.

6 . Environment, or W h a t Really Surrounds Us

107

Naumann sees the cross pollination that occurs between Nietzsche's inner nature and his environmental preferences, which is a deeper insight than is immediately apparent. Zarathustra's landscape can readily be understood as a version of the landscapes in which Nietzsche dwelled once he retired from the University of Basle in 1878, mostly Alpine but also coastal Italian. What is less obvious is that Nietzsche's interior landscape is that of the wanderer through many landscapes who develops into the Zarathustra of primarily two landscapes. The superhuman, meanwhile, who according to Naumann is the third version of Nietzsche himself, is not something Nietzsche actually achieves, but instead a human whom he envisions and proclaims as a future human. The superhuman has to be created, just as Nietzsche's Zarathustra was created from the synthesis of philosopher and artist. In discussing Nietzsche's feel for nature and his environment, as well as how the physical surroundings influence him and manifest themselves in his work, it becomes ever more apparent that he was gifted with a capacity for dignifying the closest things, and therefore, in his estimation, the things which should be of chief concern to humans and which represent the only reality to which we have access. I f one were to speculate on this issue one might offer that Nietzsche's serious bouts of migraine and his other ailments, all of which led after all to his early retirement due to medical reasons, simply did not allow him to take his health, his body, and the closest things for granted — in other words, Nietzsche was more appreciative than most of what we would call the simple pleasures, and he had to work harder than most to maintain his health. His own health and any biographical factors aside, however, it is also clear that the grounding Nietzsche works at gives him a heightened awareness of the closest things, and a heightened awareness of how moderns increasingly distance themselves from the closest things. He claims for example that there is a hypocritical disrespect of all those things which in fact humans take most seriously, all closest things, while conversely the high estimation of "the most important things" is almost never genuine. Priests and metaphysicians have accustomed us to their hypocritical and exaggerated use of language. "Still an unfortunate consequence of this double hypocrisy is that we do not make the closest things, for instance eating, dwelling, getting dressed, social intercourse into the object of constant impartial and general reflection and reform." Instead, because these things are regarding as demeaning "one turns one's intellectual and artistic earnest away from them." Meanwhile, "our continuous violations of the simplest rules of the body and spirit bring us all, younger and older, into a shameful dependency and bondage, — I mean that basically superfluous dependency on physicians, teachers and religious advisors whose pressure even now lies upon the whole of society" ( H H II/2 5, KSA 2:541). Here is a Nietzsche who goes largely unheard in contemporary debate but whom we must hear if the alluring doctrines of will to power and the superhuman are to make sense. The above passage is vintage Nietzsche. We speak ill, deliberately and also unconsciously, after rote learning, of the closest things, while we speak highly of the most

108

II. Immanence

distant and allegedly most important things, and in so doing we waste opportunities to improve ourselves, strengthen ourselves, manifest a human presence. The whole time we are engaged in this self-effacing behavior we "shamelessly" increase our dependence on others, thereby perpetuating our negative behavior and even worse. By ignoring our daily maintenance and by not heeding and dignifying our daily actions but merely going through their motions, we are in effect polluting and complicating our immediate physical and spiritual environment. We incur bondage, we are not free on our own earth and within our own environment. Language plays a key role in this, and when Nietzsche entitles this aphorism "Linguistic misuse and reality," he is not being all-too-intellectual in criticizing language for not apprehending reality, quite the contrary: he is criticizing the earth-slandering properties of metaphysical bias set to language, and presenting us with the fact that reality, which consists of the closest things, is systematically undermined by such language. Let us continue to hear Nietzsche on this and related issues, because much misuse of Nietzsche's writings has accumulated over the last two decades due to the linguistic practices of those who refuse to acknowledge that Nietzsche even has a concept of reality — too often observations such as the above are turned or twisted to reflect that all language is hopelessly unreliable and that relativism therefore supersedes reality. The position of aphorism # 5 so close to the beginning of Human volume II part two is by no means incidental. The two immediately following aphorisms also strike the theme of immanence through observation of the closest things, and as I have argued already, this is the recurring motif of Human and what makes it a formidable, grounding achievement in Nietzsche's oeuvre. Aphorism # 6 is called "Earthly frailty and its chief cause," and it can be regarded as a continuation of # 5. Most people do not notice the little things related to eating and to the taste of food, to how for example the workings of the bowels is improved during a thunderstorm, and how the sense of taste differs in certain places in the mouth, and that listening and speaking during meals is harmful to the stomach. 167 These closest things, Nietzsche maintains, are poorly seen by most humans and this is not without consequence because almost all physical and spiritual frailty of the individual derives from these activities. "To be unknowing of the smallest and most day to day things and not having sharp eyes — this is what makes the earth a 'vale of tears' for so many." The fault is not with reason, he adds, for reason exists in abundance, but it is falsely directed and artificially diverted from the smallest and closest things by priests, teachers and the sublime rule of idealists of every kind who impress upon children that something else is important, e.g. salvation of the immortal soul, service to the state, promotion of science, reputation, possessions etc ( H H II/2 6, KSA 2:542). Those who have a selfish and 167

Hollingdale here translates "Stellen des Mundes," i.e., places in the mouth, as "phases of the moon," an understandable error since Mund (mouth) and Mond(mooa) look similar and N. does, after all, sound rather superstitious in parts of this passage.

6. Environment, or What Really Surrounds Us

109

vested interest in deflecting the human gaze away from the human, away from the day to day and do so in the name of improving life are actually helping to make life miserable one person at a time. Neglecting the earth or worse, slandering it and letting its daily "blessings" go unnoticed results in neglect of the body, the individual's health, and ultimately one's spiritual environment. Too many influential and trusted representatives of society are involved in institutionalizing earth's "frailty," by which Nietzsche does not mean earth's frailty as an endangered and finite ecosystem, but instead, earth's reputation as a place of opprobrium. The earth has long been relegated to an inferior position as a physical site of living, and it stands to reason that just as metaphysics has made an art of casting the earth in a negative light for spiritual purposes or for purposes of the spiritual life, very few humans will be willing to come to the earth's defense when the physical earth is violated — this is the ecological upshot of Nietzsche's pleadings in favor of the quotidian. What makes matters worse for wresting control of the earth away from the extraterrestrially inclined metaphysicians is that these same persons are society's trusted leaders and have the authority to instill and nurture their values in our children. Nietzsche's refrain on this point is that we shamelessly delegate individual responsibility for well being, for health, for joy in living to others who "make their living" by doing for us what we should learn to do for ourselves. Another dimension of the problem of casting the earth in a negative light and thereby contributing to indifference to or rejection of one's immediate environment is seen in Nietzsche's criticism o f individuals who use intoxication to sow dissatisfaction. Individuals who experience sublime and intoxicated moments, he cautions, regard these special moments as their actual self and so learn to hate their environment, their time, the whole world with a feeling of vengeance. These are the insatiable sowers of weeds and discontent with themselves and the closest things, the sowers of contempt for time and for the world as it is. At this point Nietzsche draws an interesting analogy. Just as today savages are ruined by so-called "fire water," so too humanity on the whole has been slowly and thoroughly ruined by the spiritual fire-water distilled by those who want to keep alive the addiction to fire-water — it is possible that humanity will perish by this (D 50, KSA 3:54-5). It should be noted that Nietzsche is a great believer in the powers of Rausch (frenzy, intoxication), but he clearly does not favor using the human capacity for becoming intoxicated as a stick with which to beat the quotidian experience of sobriety. Ostensibly there have always been those who were capable of experiencing sublime moments or moments of ecstatic release, as for instance in the experience of the Dionysian union with nature, but it is quite another matter when individuals use such states to disparage the relative dullness of day to day living. Historically speaking the Europeans in their contact with "savages" did introduce so-called fire water, or alcoholic drink, and the indigenous peoples were sorely affected by it — it did not belong to their environment and they were unable to maintain their health and equilibrium. Those

110

II. Immanence

who peddle spiritual narcotics, Nietzsche appears to be saying, are engaging in an even larger scale effort to corrupt humanity as a whole. Foltz quotes Heidegger on what constitutes an environment. '"The environment' then, is that sector of the world that is closest to us from day to day because it concerns us every day." Moreover, "that which genuinely surrounds, a true environment, is disclosed, established, and conserved only by the poetic comportment that concerns itself in an attuned manner with entities — concerns itself that they be conserved within what is essential to them —and thereby allows them to be what they are, to matter and be significant, to be near."168 If the above passage is stripped of a few Heideggerian usages such as "genuine," "disclosed," and "poetic comportment" there is nothing in it that Nietzsche does not say more clearly, and with less fanfare, in Human. Nietzsche of course does not possess the twentieth century's consciousness of the Holocaust, which represented the basest application to date of human technology to the goal of genocide, nor does he possess that century's overall capacity to judge how the earth is being altered for the worse by technological mastery, and yet, he does indeed go to the heart of the environmentalist dilemma by speaking for the closest things, and by urging us to avoid misjudging the closest things. One of the problems associated with dwelling constructively within one's environment is that what one calls "nature" is different each time it is perceived. We speak of nature but forget ourselves in the process, though we are nature. "Consequently nature is something completely different than what we perceive when we say its name" ( H H II/2 327, KSA 2:696). In forgetting ourselves as part of nature, as the keystone of the environment which we blithely call nature, it can never be the same thing when we invoke it or face it. He reformulates the notion by claiming we perceive the external world ever differently because it stands out against each dominating drive in us; because our drive meanwhile is growing and changing like any living thing, our perception of the external world is always becoming and passing away, always changing (KSA 9:209). The ultimate expression of this idea of the ever changing nature of the external world is found in Beyond, where Nietzsche concludes that no life could exist without perspectival judgments. He asks: Why shouldn't the world that concerns us not be a fiction? (BGE 34, KSA 5:54). The world that concerns us is the immediate environment, the sum total of all the closest things ranging from the food we eat to the paths we walk and the highways we drive. This environment is not an ideal, not an absolute truth, not an unchanging given — it is different in each moment of our perception, but insofar at it concerns us, it does not matter whether it is a fiction according to some absolute standard, for it is still "our reality."

168

Foltz, Inhabiting the Earth: Heidegger, Environmental Ethics, andthe Metaphysics ofNature (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995), 172-3. Foltz is quoting from Heidegger's Being and Time but also draws on several other Heidegger works.

6. Environment, or What Really Surrounds Us

111

There are times when Nietzsche speaks quite critically of those whose mores, habits and life style have the effect of polluting the environment for the rest of humanity. In exercising pity, for example, we neither help nor invigorate the suffering but only become gloomy ourselves (D 144, KSA 3:146). If we accept the logic that only those deeds are moral which are done for others, he claims, there are no moral deeds at all. What is more important is to give humans back the courage for egoistic deeds, since these are the most frequent and will be for all time, and so we should remove the evil appearance from the whole picture of deeds and life: "This is a very high outcome! When humans no longer regard themselves as evil they will cease to be evil!" (D148, KSA 3:139-40). Restoring the good conscience to deeds otherwise deemed selfish or evil even though such deeds are preponderant would have a tremendous effect on the environment, and not in the negative sense that traditional morals would dictate. Nietzsche claims that such "evil" or selfish deeds already dominate in our daily lives, so why stigmatize them and ourselves? Why drag ourselves into the mud of our own making, when a reorientation toward the ego would brighten the world for so many? I do not think Nietzsche is calling for a mass migration toward evil deeds, but perhaps more modestly, a reappraisal of the utility of "evil appearance." We seem to want to surround ourselves with evil — what would it take to learn to want to surround ourselves with good instead? Of punishment Nietzsche observes that it does not cleanse the criminal, does not serve as atonement, but instead it pollutes worse than the criminal does (D 236, KSA 3:199). Or consider the person who curses her surroundings ten times a day, not realizing that after a few years she has established a law of habit around herself which now requires her to be annoyed with her environment ten times a day (D 462, KSA 3: 278). Gloom and darkness enter the sky of humanity not during the primitive times of human cruelty, he writes, for life on earth was more cheerful then, instead, the gloom descends in later times when humans learn shame before other humans, when the "animal" human learns to be ashamed of its instincts (GMII/7, KSA 5:302). Borrowing words from Freud, it is as if civilization were intent upon creating its own discontent, so attuned are we and so prone to spreading discomfort and gloom. But of course for Nietzsche civilization is at its worst as a moralizing agent. Humans were thought "free" in order to condemn and punish them, in order to have a ready supply of guilty humans. Immoralists, he points out, constitute a counter movement of ridding the world of punishment, cleaning up psychology, history, nature, social institutions. Theologians form the radical opposition, they pollute the innocence of becoming with their concept of a "moral world order," while Christianity is a metaphysics of the executioner (TI 6/7, KSA 6:95-6). Nietzsche and his fellow immoralists assume the task of cleaning up the human house, as counter intuitive as this may sound, for the "moral" and the "good" have polluted it from top to bottom with their executioner's morality. If humans are thought to be "free" in order that they might be punished, does this not make the entire earth a prison?

112

II. Immanence

Nietzsche claims we have a choice when it comes to our environment. One should beware of living in an environment before which one can neither be silent with dignity, nor communicate one's highest, such that our complaints and needs remain uncommunicated. There one becomes dissatisfied with oneself, with one's environment, and becomes a complainer who ends up complaining even about having to complain. Instead, one should live where one is ashamed to speak of oneself and does not need to. "But who thinks of such things, of a choice in such matters! One speaks of one's 'fate,' stands there with broad shoulders and sighs 'I unfortunate Atlas!"' (D 364, KSA 3:242). More attention to where one dwells, and how one dwells, would surely have a positive environmental impact. Humans are too fatalistic about where they stand in relation to their environment, as seen in the analogy of the negative, self-pitying Atlas who is constrained to remain in place because the weight of the world is literally on his shoulders. Though one might object that Nietzsche reasons as though all and any human beings could actually pick up and move to a more appropriate environment, when in fact most simply do not have the means to do this, he is at least consistent in his observation that one must make every attempt to be free of one's immediate environment if it is not conducive to one's needs.169 The notion that we are doomed or fated to flourish or perish on one spot of the earth is merely an extension of spiritual environmental pollution. Whatever one chooses to call the distinguishing feature of the European, "civilization" or "humanization" or "progress," Nietzsche maintains that the democratic movement conceals a stealthy but tremendous physiological process. Europeans are becoming more similar, and their increasing detachment from conditions such as climate and class, and any specific milieu, is producing an essentially supra-national and nomadic type of human being "which, physiologically speaking, possesses a maximum of the art and power of adaptation as its typical distinguishing feature" (BGE 242, KSA 5: 182). However, he cautions, these same conditions that contribute to similarization and mediocritization, to the herd animal, also contribute to producing the occasional exceptional human being of dangerous and attractive qualities. The overall drift of Europe is toward slavery and people who thirst for someone and something to obey, but thanks to more open schooling and to the tremendous variety of practice, art, and mask, the strong individual will have to turn out stronger and richer than perhaps ever before: "I meant to say: the democratization of Europe is at the same an involuntary staging for the cultivation of tyrants, — this word understood in every sense, the spiritual too" (BGE 242, KSA 5:183). What Nietzsche is describing here is a transfor-

See The Dawn # 206, "The impossible class," wherein N. advises the workers of Europe to leave Europe, rather than to stay and endure the conditions that lead only to inadequate pay, impersonal toil, and further exploitation by socialists. If the workers cannot be "masters" in Europe, let them emigrate to another country where they will not have to be slaves. This would serve their needs and Europe's, because Europe is over-populated and spoiled (KSA 3:183-5).

6. Environment, or What Really Surrounds Us

113

mation of the European spiritual landscape, such that physical and social conditions, notably climate and class, are no longer decisive in the character of a people. Instead, having loosened their ties to these historically prevailing conditions, Europeans are becoming more similar to one another, nomadic, and have an increased adaptability as their crowning virtue. This is going on, Nietzsche insists, in a physiological manner while the greater democratic movement manifests itself more politically in the environment. But yet another unseen and unforeseen consequence of this process of becoming uprooted and independent of climate, geography, and class, which results in a surmounting of nationalism, is the physiological process whereby increased polarization of the masses takes place. Conditions of slavery will ensue because adaptability is not conducive to growing power, and the exceptional individuals who arise at the opposite end of the spectrum, the commanders as opposed to the obeyers, will have optimal conditions and opportunity for practicing and testing their skills, resulting in the rise of tyrants as never seen before. Whether or not Nietzsche is accurate or correct in his forecasting of the changes Europe will undergo (or has undergone), what is more relevant is his notion of the economy of forces ranging from climate, geography, social class to the bifurcation of spiritual strength once the earlier conditions are overcome. The process and the outcome are both environmentally determined; a people or a grouping of peoples such as Europe's do not cease to be influenced by their environment once they achieve nomadic adaptability, they simply move to a less physical, more spiritual plane of environmental dependency, one of their own making. Stack has found important links between Emerson and Nietzsche on the idea "which has long since become a cliché, that physiology determines culture." Emerson refers to the importance of overcoming resistances, and to the value of difficult circumstances for increases in organic strength: "This notion that harsh environments or obstacles are contributory to growth and augment power is one that is frequently repeated by Nietzsche."170 Most would agree that this notion is indeed prevalent in Nietzsche, and whether or not one can trace the ownership of this idea, what matters is what Nietzsche does with it and how it relates to the overall task he sets for himself. I believe Nietzsche is the first thinker to attempt a consequential experiment involving humans and their ability to grow in relation to the obstacles of their environment. Specifically, Nietzsche poses the question: What would life on earth look like, human life in particular, if the earth were treated like the only environment, the only world, the real world? This is the ground of his task, namely, to provide a mentality whereby earth is accepted as the environment per se of humans. Next, given that Nietzsche wants obstacles and a harsh environment, and given that he does indeed believe that nature is harsh and unsentimental, if not downright inhospitable, his challenge is to persuade human beings that the earth is the environment which should 170

Stack, Nietzsche and Emerson, 170.

114

II. Immanence

define human being and shape it, should promote human growth — the reciprocity of superhuman is the meaning of the earth, and earth is the venue of superhuman, should become apparent. Nietzsche cannot sanction control of or technological domination over nature. Like an environmentalist, he needs nature to remain intact, to keep its obstacles (at least from the human perspective), to keep its naturalness — Nietzsche is a conservationist in this sense. Control over nature would have the effect of taming nature, rendering it innocuous, and Nietzsche decries this process in humans, who are becoming "tamed" instead of regulating their passions creatively. A controlled nature is no longer a human natural habitat, indeed, "controlled nature" is an oxymoron. W h e n humans can no longer develop and grow over and against the obstacles of nature, which may well be their own obstacles as well, humans regress, or degenerate. If we begin to understand that as humans we need the earth to remain as natural and uncontrolled as possible for our own good, for our own growth and development, then, it is hoped, a stronger appreciation for the earth will emerge, and along with it, a stronger affirmation of the earth. T h e earlier stages of the above argument from Beyond are found in Beyond# 268, where Nietzsche discusses how the concept of commonality and the common (also vulgar) arises in a people. It does not suffice for purposes of communication, he explains, for people to simply use the same words, because one must also use the same words for the same species of inner experiences, which can only be based on experiences in common. "This is why humans of a single people understand each other better than those who belong to different peoples, even when they use the same language; or rather when humans have lived together for a long time under similar conditions (of climate, soil, danger, needs, work), there arises from this experience something that 'understands' one another, a people." (BGE 268, KSA 5:221). H e goes on to claim that language is a process of abbreviation aimed at the fastest possible communication as a response to danger: "The greater the danger, the greater is the need to agree quickly and easily on what must be done" (ibid). Giinzel explains what is at stake here for a peoples' values: "From these common sensory expressions traceable to climatic phenomena there result for Nietzsche in turn groups of preferred perceptions, which finally determine the 'values' of a given people or also other groupings, its 'goods.'" 171 In earlier times, then, the now nomadic and supra-national Europeans formed their respective identities as peoples based on environmental conditions, with climate playing a crucial role. Nietzsche resumes his investigation into the role of environment in the formation of a peoples' values in Genealogy. The added nuance, as Giinzel points out, is that Nietzsche distinguishes now between values that enhance the power of adaptability to a specific climate, thereby contributing to the strengthening of a specific climati171

Stephan Günzel, "Nietzsches Schreiben als kritische Geographie," Nietzscheforschung!jl(> (2000), 242.

6. Environment, or What Really Surrounds Us

115

cally determined morality, and those values that effect a tearing away from the symbiosis of morality-climate. The latter values evoke the formation of a strong type, the former manifest the identity and permanence of "a race." Of the two, "Nietzsche's 'ruler' (Herr) is the one who has emancipated himself most extensively from climatic determinism or from the local climatic prerequisites that determine his cultural and moral context."172 In addition to illustrating how tension and obstacles in the environment are necessary for building strength, what also emerges here is that overcoming one's climatic determinism is what leads to the creation of the ruler. It is also significant, especially in the negative light in which Nietzsche's writings have generally been viewed since their exploitation by the Nazis, that race is the lesser of conditions according to Nietzsche, as race is still bound to the symbiosis of morals and climate, while the stronger type, who is Nietzsche's free and free ranging spirit, has transcended race — just as the modern Europeans are transcending nationalism. No analysis of Nietzsche's thoughts concerning the environment, however small in scope, would be complete without a word concerning the city. In Zarathustra the city takes on its most negative image, for Zarathustra is after all a kind of hermit, a prophet who descends to the valley and the populated regions only to retreat to his mountain solitude when all is said and done. Kreis observes that while Nietzsche's contemporaries were drawn to the metropolis, Nietzsche himself was attracted "to the counter reality of the woods and the wilderness."173 A plausible expression of this aversion to the city occurs in the prologue of Zarathustra, according to Kreis, when Zarathustra emerging from his woods and desert (solitude) encounters the hermit, whom he must pass in order to get down the mountain to the city. The hermit warns Zarathustra to stay away from humans, to do as he himself does by living in the woods: the people will merely suspect him for a thief, regardless of what Zarathustra may wish to bestow upon them. But according to Kreis Zarathustras impulse to go to the city is strong: "They [the people] allow God to die for them. What is supposed to prevent the earth from dying for them as well? Murder of God and murder of earth are for Zarathustra the complex of a single 'sacrilege.'"174 I believe Kreis is justified in using this juxtaposition because for Nietzsche, if not for most Europeans accustomed for centuries to finding the highest meaning in their God, the death of God is the death of meaning, the advent of nihilism, and if a similar "death" should befall the earth, there would simply be no alternative to God, there would be only — nihilism. Zarathustra is the one who knows, contrary to the hermit-saint of the woods, that God is dead: if it is not the city proper that killed God, at least Zarathustra understands that those who inhabit the cities are least likely to know, and least likely to care that God is dead. All the more reason to start his "ministry" there. 172 173 174

Günzel, "Nietzsches Schreiben," 243. Kreis, Nietzsche, Wagner unddieJuden, 81. Kreis, Nietzsche, Wagner und die Juden, 83.

116

II. Immanence

What the cities lack is an "architecture of the knowing" as opposed to the architecture of the pious. Nietzsche envisions cities with quiet and spacious places for reflection, places where people can shelter from inclement or all too sunny weather, where the noise of wagons and cries from the street are not heard, and where decorum prohibits even the loud praying of a priest. The time of the monopoly of the church as the only place for contemplation is through, he claims, and the churches themselves, even if they were stripped of their ecclesiastical mission, would not suffice: "these buildings speak a much too pathetic and biased language, as houses of God and ostentatious sites of an other-worldly intercourse, for we godless ones to be able to think our thoughts here. We want to have ourselves translated into stone and plant, we want to take walks in ourselves when we stroll in these halls and gardens" (GS 280, KSA 3:524-5). This "new space" for the cities sounds familiar, because the implication is that such space, henceforth dedicated to the here and now for the benefit of the "godless," is a reclaiming of space traditionally given over to the beyond. The external space should reflect the internal needs of the city dwellers, that is, the environment without should be conducive to the reflection within. Nietzsche is proposing, in his mildly blasphemous way, that we construct "human houses" in the city to take the place of "God houses" — such architecture of the city- and landscape would restore a lost element to the environment.

7. A New Hygiene on the Basis of Life "We modern human beings, we are the heirs of the conscience vivisection and self-animal cruelty of millennia On the Genealogy of Morals II, 24

Nietzsche's elevation of the concept of health stems directly from his vitalistic or philosophy of life efforts in the domain of immanence. Health (Gesundheit) is a leading concern in the young Nietzsche and if anything only increases in importance for the late writings. We can speak of health as a singular state of being, and we can also, indeed must also speak of hygiene as a more encompassing term dealing with views, doctrines, and practices of health in Nietzsche, as they apply to not only individuals but to entire ages and cultures. So for example in the essay on history he maintains that when history is in the service of life, it is serving an unhistorical force and in this relationship it can never be a pure science such as mathematics. The question of to what degree life needs the service of history is in turn one of the highest questions and concerns affecting the health of a human being, a people, and a culture, "for with a certain preponderance of [history] life crumbles and degenerates and ultimately as well, through this degeneration, history itself" (UM II/1, KSA 1:257). Toward the conclusion of his essay he stresses that science needs a higher oversight and guardian, a hygiene of life ("eine Gesundheitslehre des Lebens") whose propositions would include

7. A New Hygiene on the Basis of Life

117

the understanding that the unhistorical and the superhistorical are natural remedies for the overgrowing of life by history, or for the historical disease. "It is probable that we, the historically diseased, also have to suffer from the remedies. But that we suffer from them is no proof against the correctness of this chosen hygienic procedure" (UM 11/10, KSA 1:331). It is unclear in what sense Nietzsche means that the historically diseased, i.e., moderns, will probably suffer from the remedies, but what is clear is that history must be subordinate to life, and science must also be subordinate to life insofar as science must stand in the service of life's hygiene. T h e "unhistorical" as a remedy would draw on the "art and strength to be able to forget, and to enclose oneself in a limited horizon," while the "superhistorical" as a remedy includes those powers that divert our focus from becoming to that which gives existence "the character of the eternal and the same meaning, to art and religion" (UM 11/10, KSA 1:330). Using these criteria as remedies against the historical disease, we can extrapolate that some humans will have to suffer simply because the operations of forgetting and working within a limited horizon are not well practiced and readily available to moderns — by forgetting Nietzsche means not allowing consciousness, especially consciousness of history as a kind of spiritual baggage, to stand in the way of living. T h e superhistorical, meanwhile, would cause us pain because we have given free rein to science and have lost our sensibility for both art and religion, which take a much larger, an "eternal" view compared to science, whose manner of observation can only admit of what has been, of the historical (ibid). T h e meaning of a hygiene on the basis of life is clearer in Nietzsche's later writings because he no longer crowds the field against life with both history and science, preferring instead to zero in on morals as the chief ill. Thus in Twilighfwc find the more concise formulation that every naturalism in morals, that is, every healthy morality is ruled by the instinct for life, such that some command of life is fulfilled by following a certain canon of shalt and shalt not, some hindrance and hostility on the path of life is cleared (TI 5/4, KSA 6:85). In arguing this way Nietzsche is inviting a comparison between the commandments of say God, which are metaphysically based shalt nots designed to service the ascetic ideal, and the commandments of life, which are not at all metaphysically based but are the instincts of life. "Life's commandments" so juxtaposed with "the Ten Commandments" sounds strange to us, but only the former is healthy, in Nietzsche's view, and whatever else might be said for life's commandments, in obeying them we are physiologically uninhibited, and life flows through our circulatory system without obstructions. Nietzsche clearly speaks frequently of experimentation and he experiments with himself. As I have pointed out on numerous occasions, he is confident in his discourse when he is able to draw on personal experience and is able to point to his own "overcomings," and we should not immediately interpret this drawing of attention to himself as an expression of egotism or mere egotism. The ultimate expression of this occurs in "ecce homo," behold the man, which Nietzsche humorously and self-

118

II. Immanence

parodistically makes into his autobiography, but humor and parody aside, he is serious about using his own experiences and maintains consistently that philosophers are in fact more concerned with and influenced by their own bodies than they are by the pursuit of such abstracts as "truth." So for example in his 1886 preface to the second edition of Human he refers to the second volume as a continuation of the antiromantic self treatment prescribed by his instinct, which has remained healthy, and he hopes that the two volumes of Humane iewed together will teach their doctrine "more strongly and clearly, — a doctrine of health" (HH II P 2, KSA 2:371). In retrospect he calls Human a "hygiene," i.e., eine Gesundheitslehre or doctrine of health, and a more appropriate designation he could not have invented. In this same foreword he calls upon his spiritual companions, who are also convalescing and seeking new health, the health of tomorrow and after tomorrow, addressing them thus: "you predestined, you triumphant, you overcomers of your age, you most healthy, you strongest ones, you good Europeans*. " (HH II P 6, KSA 2:376). Another 1886 preface makes the case for the philosopher's interest in hygiene: "with all philosophizing hitherto it was not at all a matter of truth,' rather a matter of something else, let us say health, future, growth, power, life . . ." (GS P 2, KSA 3:349). In keeping with his view beginning with Human that we neglect the closest things to the lasting detriment of ourselves and humanity, Nietzsche insists that the philosophers, too, have been tending their own gardens, seeing to their own closest things, whether or not they, in the exoteric manner of Nietzsche himself, choose to admit it, or whether they are even conscious of it. In Ecce Homo "Why I am So Wise"175 he claims, just weeks before his breakdown into insanity, that "I took myself in hand, I made myself healthy again: the condition for this — every physiologist will admit this — is that one is at bottom healthy ("dassmanimGrundegesundist") (EH 1 /2, KSA6:266). Nietzsche's health in the basic sense was always sufficiently strong, he pleads, to allow for his own intervention, hygiene, and cure. "For a typical healthy person on the contrary being ill can even be an energetic stimulus to living, to living more" (ibid). Couched as it is in the odd fusion of euphoria, bravado, and self parody that is Ecce Homo, one is inclined to disregard such passages, but that would be a serious mistake. Hygiene, as has already been shown, is a Nietzschean concern from the start, in philosophical terms, and it is a Nietzschean preoccupation from the start due to his ill health, his having suffered from the "illness" of Romanticism, and his keen interest in contemporary biologism.176 Using himself as a test case, Nietzsche experiments with diagnosing illness (is an indi175

176

Compare Isaiah 5:20-21: "Woe to those who call evil good and good evil; who place darkness as light and light as darkness; who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! / Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and shrewd in their own sight!" Moore (2002) writes: "All too often his predilection for the rhetoric of health and sickness has been portrayed as an idiosyncratic response to, and preoccupation with, his own well-documented medical crises" (1). Moore sees N.'s "timeliness" precisely in his biologism, therefore not as "expressions of the personal symbolism of a valetudinarian" (193), although he does grant that

7. A New Hygiene on the Basis of Life

119

vidual honest and perceptive enough to see his own illness?), with treating his illness (is the individual prepared to make sacrifices for the sake of regaining health?), and with turning his base experiences into gold (is the individual wise enough to turn all of this to his own advantage by manifesting a better life, a stronger constitution for physical and spiritual work?). Mittasch tells us that "Nietzsche's current ideal of health maintenance (HygieneIdeal) expresses itself in The Dawn #553, 'On detours.'"177 What we find in this aphorism is a candidly introspective and confessional account, rarely seen in philosophers, some of which is here quoted at length: Where does this entire philosophy want to go with all its detours? Does it do more than translate as it were a constant and strong drive into reason, a drive for mild sun, brighter and breezier air, southern plants, the breath of the sea, more ephemeral dishes of meat, eggs and fruit, hot water for drinks, day-long quiet hikes, little speaking, infrequent and cautious reading, dwelling in solitude, fastidious, simple and almost soldierly habits, in short, a drive for all things which taste best just to me and happen to be good just for me? A philosophy which at bottom is the instinct for a personal diet? An instinct that searches for my air, my elevation, my weather, my kind of health through the detour of my head? (D 553, KSA 3:323).

Nietzsche's wandering philosophy, he admits, may in the end be nothing more than the experience of the closest things and their immediate effect on him, given the proper doses and combinations of diet, exercise, weather conditions, and time for reflection — his entire philosophizing may be nothing more than the physiological (drive, instinct) manifesting itself in his thought (detour of the head). It is no wonder, given Nietzsche's finely attuned and painstakingly maintained equilibrium with his environment, that he elevates himself to the status of acting in his own behalf as his own physician. The general impression one gets from Nietzsche on matters of health is that humans have been far too trusting of traditional medicine and hygiene, insufficiently aware of the needs of the body in relation to optimal performance as human beings, and severely constrained from practicing intelligent, life affirming hygiene by the long-held Western bias against the senses. The role of the physician will have to change in the future, and we are given a glimpse of a possible new role in an aphorism entitled "The future of the physician." There is no other profession, he maintains, which has the same great potential for enhancement as that of the physician, but his

177

in contrast to N.'s successors Scheler, Spengler, Simmel, Lessing and Klages, "Nietzsche's biologism is more wide-ranging, more total. . . ." (210-11). It is in this latter point that Moore implies the direction of my book, insofar as I am concerned with the "more wide-ranging, more total" nature of not only N.'s medical metaphors but his entire earth rhetoric. The force, urgency, and "obsessive proliferation" (210-11) Moore refers to in N.'s metaphors in my view can be traced to his ecumenical vision, his "task," which separates him from derivative successors. Mittasch, Nietzsche als Naturphilosoph, 271.

120

II. Immanence

conception of this profession is an expanded one. A good physician, he insists, today needs the artifices and privileges of all the other professions, not merely the normal training limited to the medical curriculum. So for example the physician should also possess eloquence, serve as an example of virility, have the detective's and the lawyer's capacity for subtlety and discretion. Thus equipped, the physician is in a position to become a benefactor for all of society by increasing good works, spiritual joy and productivity; by preventing evil thoughts, intentions, and roguishness; by promoting a spiritual-corporal aristocracy through promoting and preventing marriages; by benevolently amputating all the so-called torments of the soul and pangs of conscience: "only thus will a 'medicine man' transform to a healer (Heiland) and not need at all to work miracles, nor need to have himself crucified" (HH 1/243, KSA 2:203-4). This litany of benefits to society is pointedly underscored by Nietzsche's use of the word "healer" which also translates as "savior." Clearly he is alluding to Christ, who was a healer and a savior, but Nietzsche would secularize the concept and of course limit it to healing, which is nonetheless a major step beyond being a "medicine man." His focus on maintaining health in a much broader and more preventive sense is revealing of his understanding of the importance of the quotidian and the need to clean up one's immediate environment. The new physician spreads mental and physical health by concentrating on the things she can control and regulate in the normal course of day to day human affairs. In serving as the model and promoter of a grounded, healthy existence, the new physician neither practices miracles nor magic, and significantly, the new physician will not suffer the fate of crucifixion, which after all is a symbolic capitulation in matters of the body — no healer, Nietzsche implies, inspires health in her patients by hanging on a cross. Related to this futuristic conception of the new physician is an equally utopic "vision" in which Nietzsche describes daily celebrations of thinking and learning, with churches converted to special gathering places for such activities. Teachers will encompass the duties of priest, artist, and physician, and each day a festival is held celebrating the achievements of reason: "This is my vision, which returns to me again and again and which, I believe, has lifted a corner of the veil of the future" (HH II/1 180, KSA 2:458). By converting places of worship to places of learning and intellectual discovery, Nietzsche underscores the need to reposition ourselves conceptually regarding matters of health — health occurs here, in the day to day, as a result of our own actions and it is more likely to manifest itself in humanity's highest achievements than through wishful prayer. Celebrations and festival-like atmospheres accompanying the achievements of reason, meanwhile, draw into the limelight all the positive, creative things humans do for themselves, but which routinely get taken for granted. New physicians and new attitudes concerning hygiene have at their core stronger efforts to render visible, palpable, and worthy of pride all that is regarded as mere subsistence, transience, day to day drudgery. Clearly Nietzsche sees inspiration and motivation as vital factors of a new hygiene, and current trends in modern Western

7. A New Hygiene on the Basis of Life

121

medicine as it becomes enriched by contact with alternative hygiene and healing techniques seem to suggest that he was ahead of his time. Empowering people to take their health into their own hands may be a more viable and attainable strategy, for the near term, than expecting humanity to revolutionize its concept of the physician. "We should learn to live without physicians if possible, Nietzsche writes, because it appears that a sick person lives more carefreely and stupidly if she has a physician than if she has to care for her own health (D 322, KSA 3: 230). Transferring the tendency to rely irresponsibly on one's physician to relying irresponsibly on an even "higher" authority, he asks where would humanity be if we had consequentially and honestly surrendered our collective health "to the will of God?" (ibid). What he is driving at in this immediate context is that morals and metaphysics are a hindrance to good health, and merely trusting in some higher power is not likely to encourage self empowerment through the forming of good habits. Higgins appreciates the scope of the problem as it is presented in Genealogy. Here Nietzsche attempts to "poison our thinking about ourselves" in order to make the point that we unconsciously poison ourselves with our moral habits, "[h]e forces us to recognize the poisonous character of our moral perspective by abruptly heightening it." What I would refer to as teleological poisoning or homeopathy is not all Nietzsche achieves in Genealogy, he also "hints that we would do well to become aware of temporality, of process in our thinking." 178 Higgins is perceptive in noting that the changing of one's moral habits will require close attention to temporality and to process, and this, in fact, is what Nietzsche has been advocating since Human, a good decade before Genealogy, inasmuch as learning to dignify the closest things is the very practice of temporal awareness. When he takes an ecumenical view on hygiene Nietzsche calls for a "medicinal geography" in an aphorism called "Spiritual and physical transplantation as remedy."179 We need knowledge about the various cultures and spiritual climates as they are harmful or healthful to a given organism, and herein history can serve as a therapeutics with its knowledge about different cultures, but we still need a hygiene and physicians in order to send individuals into their appropriate climate, temporarily or permanently. Nietzsche envisions this as a physical and spiritual or mental process: "Living in the present within a single culture does not suffice as a universal prescription, this would allow too many highly useful types of humans who cannot breathe healthily in it to die out." He recommends using history to provide them with the proper atmosphere, and in this venture "even the people of retarded cultures have their value." At the same time "humanity must strive in bodily respects to ascertain, by means of a medicinal geography, which degenerations and illnesses are caused by each 178 175

Higgins, "On the Genealogy of Morals— Nietzsche's Gift," 71-2. This aphorism immediately follows one called "War as remedy," in which he argues that weary, consumptive nations might benefit from a radical cure such as war ( H H II/2 187, KSA 2:634).

122

II. Immanence

region of the earth, and conversely which healing factors it offers." This will eventually allow peoples, families, and individuals to be transplanted as indicated, and "the whole earth will eventually be a sum of health resorts (Gesundheits-Stationen)" ( H H II/2 188, KSA 3:634-5). We should recall at this point that in Zarathustra the earth is referred to as a "site of recovery" (Z 1/22, KSA 4:101). A number of intriguing ideas emerge from this discussion of spiritual and physical transplantation. First of all, the otherwise academic discipline of history could be brought to bear on the problem of hygiene by assisting medicine in identifying and prescribing past cultures as a remedy. This makes history a practical pursuit, or at least "practical" in a sense not generally ascribed to it today, for it would have the responsibility of drawing up an entire inventory of cultures and their values, customs, etc with sufficient detail to allow physicians to know where their patients should be sent in a "virtual" sense. One person, say, might require a strong exposure to Reformation Germany while another would benefit from Mayan culture. Nietzsche also presupposes that many "highly useful" human beings are not thriving in the present within a single culture, and these types might be exposed to a contemporaneous culture somewhere else on earth, or even to a "retarded culture" of the present or past. I do not think Nietzsche is being entirely chauvinistic in his linguistic usage here; in recognizing that even so-called "retarded" cultures have characteristics of use to "advanced" cultures, he is in fact respecting the overall economy of the human spirit and attempting to dignify alternative lifestyles and practices. The discipline of geography, furthermore, could be enhanced by adding a specialization in medicinal geography, or by expanding this subfield to the extent that is already exists. Of course, this part of Nietzsche's vision is the most utopic and least likely to find implementation, even though it makes sense, because it requires the recognition of health as an ecumenical priority, such that for purposes of promoting health the nations and peoples of the world would set aside all other considerations, e.g. religion, territorial claims, borders, economics etc for the sake of turning the entire earth into a "sum of health resorts." Before we dismiss this vision out of hand, however, let us imagine for a moment what manner of spirit the earth would radiate, as a planet, if it were ever to become what Nietzsche dreams. It seems a far cry, though in a sense a logical step from Nietzsche's vision of a new physician to the questionable "Morality for physicians" he discusses in Twilight. The entire tone of his approach in this passage is harsh, even carping. The sick person, he begins, is a parasite on society, and in a certain condition it is "indecent to live any longer." Simply vegetating away in "cowardly dependence on physicians and practices" once the meaning of life, "the right to life has been lost" should bring about deep contempt. "Physicians meanwhile would be the mediators of this contempt . . . To create a new responsibility, that of the physician, for all cases where the highest interests of life, of ascending life, demands the ruthless putting down and putting aside of degenerating life — for example the right to procreation, the right

7. A New Hygiene on the Basis of Life

123

to be born, the right to live." When one does away with oneself "one does the most estimable thing that there is: one nearly earns thereby the right to live . . . Society, what am I saying! life itself has more advantage from suicide than from some 'life' in renunciation, anemia and other virtues — one has liberated others from one's sight, one has liberated life from an objection (TI 9/36, KSA 6:134-5). The point at which most readers would part company with Nietzsche is not where he proclaims the right to die, but the duty to die, and where he appoints physicians to serve as "mediators of contempt" and then assigns them responsibility for deciding who is to live and who is to die. It appears Nietzsche is not content to limit the expanded role of the physician to fostering greater health — the new physician will also be the one to intervene in cases of "degenerating" life and preventing its propagation. Nietzsche's quality of life argument gets swallowed and muted by his apparent enthusiasm for euthanasia, which alienates us all the more given that Nazi Germany and its collaborators were all too willing to engage in such "God-playing" and to do so claiming all the while to represent human decency.180 As Gemes has wisely observed, Nietzsche culpability is "best addressed in terms of his responsibility for fostering a set of metaphors, in particular, and most dangerously, the metaphor of degeneration. Nietzsche's complicity rests not in what he said but in his very language itself."181 Another such expression of the need for physicians to be pitiless is found in The Antichrist, also a work of Nietzsche's last year, indeed, his last three months of sanity. In our unhealthy modernity, he claims, there is nothing more unhealthy than Christian pity. Our kind of love for humanity, he writes, will require us to be physicians here, to be pitiless here, to wield the scalpel here, and with that we are philosophers, we Hyberboreans (A 7, KSA 6:174). This is "tough love," to be sure, and once again Nietzsche alludes to the hardness of the physician instead of to the physician's expanded role as healer. What is troubling about Nietzsche's use of this surgical metaphor is that he himself faults both Christianity and Socrates with going about their business as castrators, as wielders of the knife, yet he boastfully adopts this pose for himself.182 The new hygiene is called for because all around us are symptoms of illness, decadence, and degeneration. Our malaise has been long in building, moreover, and it is 180

181 182

I have in mind as a particular example the "Posen Speech" of Heinrich Himmler, in which he told his SS officers: "Most of you will know what it means when 100 corpses lie together, when 500 lie there or when 1000 lie there. To have withstood this and, with exceptions for human weakness, to have remained decent throughout, has made us hard. This is a never written and never to be written page of honor in our history." See Del Caro, The Early Poetry of Paul Celan, 18-19. Gemes (1992), 62. I discuss N.'s aversion for the practice of castration as a slackening of the life force in "The Pseudoman in Nietzsche, or The Threat of the Neuter," New German Critique 50 (1990), 154-6. In part N.'s adoption of the strategy of his rivals can be explained by the "table turning" he uses to counter their values (see the conclusion of this subchapter).

124

II. Immanence

insidious. Nietzsche points out that as a psychologist and a physician Christ was lacking, he was more like the dentist whose every response is to extract the tooth. But at least the dentist achieves his aim of removing the patient's pain, whereas the Christian who follows the teaching "if your eye offends you tear it out!" is only deceived if he thinks his sensuality is thus killed: "It continues to live in an uncanny and vampirelike way and tortures him in repulsive disguises" (HH II/2 83, KSA 2: 589-90). Anticipating Freud's theory of the return of the repressed, Nietzsche faults Christianity and its ascetic ideal with extirpating, excising, and castrating when all that is needed is regulation of the passions. The attempts to "kill" the offending urges, meanwhile, only drive the urges underground, making us neurotic and susceptible to problems, and ultimately making us dependent on outside help. It is significant that Nietzsche is fully aware of this problem and its manifold symptoms already in the 1870s, during the writing of Human, for most of the critical attention in Nietzsche scholarship on this and related issues is to be found in discussions of Genealogy. Everywhere on earth where we find the religious neurosis it is linked with a dangerous diet: solitude, fasting, sexual abstinence. Repressed sexuality could have caused the religious neurosis, he speculates, but it is not certain which comes first (BGE 47, KSA 5:67). Yet another form of repression occurs under the pressure of the ascetic ideal, namely, the cultivation of an animal that has the capacity to make promises, a paradoxical task which nature has given itself, especially given the power of forgetting. The human in whom this healthy apparatus of repression called forgetting is damaged and ceases to function becomes dyspeptic, cannot "have done" with anything (GM II/l, KSA 5:291-2). The obstruction of healthy forgetting violates the spiritual economy of forces, wherein unfinished actions or improperly regulated drives have a negative, though not necessarily immediate effect on the entire person. Nietzsche is reasoning that promising, guilt, and bad conscience amount to an unseen buildup of poison in the spiritual ecosystem, and have the effect of not allowing cleansing, flushing forces to alleviate strains and stresses. Perhaps the deepest illness and the one most detrimental to the spiritual environment is bad conscience, which humans contracted when they became civilized through socialization and peaceful dwelling. Nietzsche goes so far as to claim that bad conscience is comparable in its impacts on the human to the experience of sea animals that were forced to become land animals; they lost all their abilities and guiding instincts, had to rely on their weakest organ, consciousness, had to endure "an appalling gravity" and never before was there such misery on earth. But the drives and instincts did not cease, they instead became repressed. The case of humans is no different in this respect: all instincts that formerly discharged themselves outwardly into the environment now turned inward, "this is what I call the internalization of the human being: therewith for the first time something develops in the human being which we later call the 'soul'" (GM 11/16, KSA 5:321-2). The thwarted instincts whose natural expression is external discharging no longer

7. A New Hygiene on the Basis of Life

125

function efficiently, causing a state of confusion. Nietzsche reminds us what is at stake here: hostility, cruelty, lust to persecute, ambush, change, destruction — all of these turned in on and against the possessor. With the emergence of bad conscience humans also experienced the onset of the "greatest and most uncanny illness from which humanity has not recovered to this day, the suffering of the human being from the human being, from himself." As a result of this violent separation from our animal past, life on earth has been altered forever by what amounts to the animal soul turning against itself, taking sides against itself. But Nietzsche's hope remains that out of the ensuing tension the species which has no goal as such can build itself into "a bridge, a great promise" (ibid 323-4). What is remarkable about this diagnosis is that Nietzsche describes a process whereby animal and human tend to part ways, the civilizing and moralizing pressures being so strong that a new stage of humanity ensues, "animal acquires soul." Given Nietzsche's account of this powerful bifurcation and its effects, it would not be stretching matters to say that humans become their own natural enemy in this process, with the primitive animal human defending herself against the "internalizing" civilized human. When the instincts are not channeled naturally to the environment, their internalization amounts to an attack on the possessor, in a manner of speaking, and Nietzsche knows that this uncanny development is not yet over and there is still much to expect from the human condition, which proves resourceful in dealing with the internalization process. Having said that, Nietzsche obviously still feels justified in referring to bad conscience as an illness, indeed one of ecumenical scope and, he suggests, of cosmic interest (just in case the gods are watching). In focusing on the possibilities remaining for human beings, Nietzsche in typical fashion will practice his alchemist's craft and attempt to turn lead into gold — as a bridge humanity is still an open, still has a vista to the open. At this point a brief detour or footnote out loud on Freud's Civilization and its Discontents seems in order. Freud is also concerned about the effects of repression and understands that "civilization has to use its utmost efforts in order to set limits to man's aggressive instincts and to hold the manifestations of them in check by psychical reaction-formations." However, he adds, civilization's efforts in this regard have not achieved much, basically a curtailing of the most brutal violence by itself visiting violence upon criminals. The time comes, he continues, when each person has to "give up as illusions the expectations which, in his youth, he pinned upon his fellow-men, and when he may learn how much difficulty and pain has been added to his life by their ill-will."183 At this point Freud sounds like Nietzsche, for he is drawing conclusions and sketching out the implications of humanity's clumsy, thoughtless attempts to rein in the passions and the instincts. He again sounds like 183

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents. Translated and edited by James Strachey. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1962), 59.

126

II. Immanence

Nietzsche when he recognizes that strife and competition are indispensable, "but opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity" (ibid, 59). If we accept Freud's conclusion that humanity has not achieved much in curbing the aggressive instincts, and that quite to the contrary we harm ourselves by trying to enforce youthful ideals that add difficulty and pain to life, we are back in the vicinity of Nietzsche's efforts to promote immanence through a new hygiene. Let us recall that the moral-physiological phenomenon called "bad conscience" is otherwise subsumable under the notion of "soul" and Nietzsche's theory of internalization of the instincts. Freud asks which means civilization uses to inhibit aggressiveness in the individual: "His aggressiveness is introjected, internalized; it is, in point of fact, sent back to where it came from — that is, it is directed towards his own ego. There it is taken over by a portion of the ego, which sets itself over against the rest of the ego as super-ego, and which now, in the form of conscience', is ready to put into action against the ego the same harsh aggressiveness that the ego would have liked to satisfy upon other, extraneous individuals." So far Freud seems only to differ with Nietzsche in semantics, introducing the concept of "superego" where Nietzsche writes 'soul," and using "ego" where Nietzsche writes "animal," in all other matters their views correspond. In concluding the above passage Freud again mirrors Nietzsche: "The tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego that is subjected to it, is called by us the sense of guilt; it expresses itself as a need for punishment." 184 In Nietzschean terms, this punishment we visit upon ourselves and others has a detrimental environmental impact, spreading illness and what he calls physiological inhibition for the sake of maintaining the illusion that concepts such as "punishment" and "guilt" are capable of transforming humans from instinctdriven creatures to morality-driven, disembodied gods. 185 Christianity's conception of God as the maximal-god introduced a maximal guilt feeling on earth. However, as the belief in God lessens, the sense of guilt for being on earth should lessen in proportion. In fact, Nietzsche hopes that a complete triumph of atheism would give rise to a new innocence (GM 11/20, KSA 5:330). There is a suggestion here of a new history, a new earth, a new gravity in the form of a second innocence as a "second coming" of the human, the first innocence having been human prehistory. Atheism as Nietzsche describes it in this passage is still a long way off, that much he confesses in Gay Science through the mask of 184 185

Freud, Civilization, 70. Yet another uncanny similarity between N. and Freud lies in the super-ego's (soul's) lack of concern for the egos happiness and the difficulties of the external environment. The super-ego "issues a command and does not ask whether it is possible for people to obey it," behaving as though the "ego has unlimited mastery over [the] id." The ethics of religion, meanwhile "promises a better after-life. But so long as virtue is not rewarded here on earth, ethics will, I fancy, preach in vain." Civilization, 90.

7. A New Hygiene on the Basis of Life

127

the "madman" who finds that the people still do not know that God is dead, even though they regard themselves as atheists — such is the insidious nature of nihilism. The madman knows that it will take light years for the event of God's death to reach humans (GS 125, KSA 3:480-1). Still, atheism is a major part of the new hygiene inasmuch as it can help to establish humanity's innocence, even in the face of our conflicted and self-piercing humanity as it has worked under the harness of metaphysics for all these millennia to prove its own guilt. Nietzsche often chastises Germans for acting as major accomplices, if not outright leaders, in the movement to corrupt humanity's health. What the German spirit could be, he muses, if only this people had not voluntarily stupefied itself: nowhere else are the two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity, misused so viciously (TI 8/2, KSA 6:104). The German people represent a diseased culture, he claims, because they are addicted to these dangerous narcotics. In the Christian religion, meanwhile, the body is despised and hygiene is rejected as sensuality; the diet is maintained to favor morbid phenomena and overstimulation of the nerves. Also typically Christian, he adds, is the deadly hostility against "the rulers of the earth, the noble'" (A 21, KSA 6:188). Ostensibly those who are "rulers of the earth" are the ones who have made earth their true home, as opposed to the slaves of the earth, who would be Christians and others who look askance at the body and the earth. "Rulers of the earth" (much more on this later) need not be political masters as implied by a political interpretation, they may well be the type of "noble" human being whose hygiene is earth affirming. We should not ignore Nietzsche's linkage between the substance ingestion and substance abuse of a people and the spiritual form of narcotic that it uses in the form of Christianity — this connection speaks volumes about a people's hygiene, about its place in the earthly ecosystem and its purported place in the metaphysical realm. Diet translates into a manner and style of living, and just as Nietzsche applies this principle to his own habits and his own philosophizing, he applies it to peoples, ages, and cultures.186 Nietzsche suggests certain strategies for regaining health, sometimes on the macro level, by prescribing atheism, for instance, but sometimes also at the individual level. One thing he strives to make clear is that health means something different for each body and person, there is no normative health for all (D 120, KSA 3:477). His concept of "the great health" even requires that one not only acquire great health, one must reacquire it because one must repeatedly give it up, in other words, "the great health" is tied to the concept of self overcoming — it cannot be a static state. The pursuit of this ideal of human and superhuman well being will

186

In his notes N. writes (Nov. 1887-March 1888): "Through alcohol and hashish one brings oneself back to stages of culture which one has overcome (at least survived). All foods reveal something about the past from which we became" (KSA 13:41). The same theme is elaborated in KSA 13: 239.

128

II. Immanence

often seem inhumane when compared to what humanity has historically viewed as its task, and at this point Nietzsche writes: let the tragedy begin (GS 382, KSA 3: 635-6). He uses the phrase "let the tragedy begin" to conclude the fourth book of Science, just after announcing the eternal recurrence of the same in "The greatest weight," and now he follows suit by closing the fifth and final book of Science with the same injunction. The style of life that is tragedy, or I should say, that was tragedy and that Nietzsche wishes to resurrect in the person of the philosophizing Dionysus, entails complete affirmation of all of life's features, especially the unsavory ones, for this is the Dionysian affirmation that goes hand in hand with living according to the eternal recurrence of the same. In general terms, then, joining in the tragedy is Nietzsche's way of saying the new hygiene will require sacrifice, suffering, overcoming — it will not be a magic pill or any other kind of panacea, nor will it result in a kind of narcoticized nirvana. That it differs from paranoid, fascist notions of "purity" as something to be regained, protected and maintained by brutal force is clear from Gemes' characterization of Nietzsche's health model as "not that of a pure being free of all external contamination. Rather, his model of health is of one who has been thoroughly contaminated by a myriad of influences . . . ." 187 One thing we can do as a species to alleviate the negative effects of religiously inspired illness is to ensure that philosophers oversee religion for purposes of educating and cultivating. Nietzsche cautions that religions must not be allowed sovereignty, for their focus and concern are not consonant with greater hygiene. Indeed, he asserts, humanity like other species has a surplus of failures, of sick, degenerating, frail human beings, whereas the successful cases are the exception. The human being is the "as yet undetermined animal," there is much in store for humans but at the same time, "the accidental, the law of absurdity in the overall economy of humanity reveals itself most horribly in its destructive effect on higher human beings, whose conditions of life are fine, multifarious, and difficult to calculate." The great religions make matters worse by preserving on principle the lower forms of humanity, while attacking and endangering the rarely occurring higher forms of humanity (BGE 62, KSA 5:81-3). Given this scenario, one sees why Nietzsche wishes for philosophical oversight of religion, as in his estimation only philosophers are capable of appreciating and nurturing the exceptional humans who will otherwise surely fail. By rescuing and preserving the sick, and by killing or seeing to it that the healthy do not succeed, a religion like Christianity practices reverse conservation and in effect cultivates the ill and the weak. Turning the tables on traditional values is a favorite Nietzschean strategy, and so we find him speaking of the "transvaluation of all values" and using his genealogical method to unmask today's "evil" as the "good" of early humanity. A prime example

187

Gemes (2001), 355.

7. A New Hygiene on the Basis of Life

129

of this is found in Genealogy where he laments that for the longest time humans have been heirs of the vivisection of conscience, a self torture. Too long have we regarded our natural inclinations with an evil eye — but the reverse would be possible. Let us instead, he suggests, henceforth associate all unnatural inclinations, e.g. the beyond, the attack on the senses, on instincts, nature, the animalistic, all previous ideals, all world-slandering ideals — let us associate them with bad conscience. A new conception of health and a new hygiene are needed, a great health. The human of the future should be liberated from previous ideals and the disgust that clings to them, f r o m the will to nothingness, from nihilism. T h e future h u m a n being will "set the will free once again, and give back to the earth its goal and to humans their hope, this antichrist and antinihilist, this victor over God and nothingness — he must come someday . . ." ( G M 11/24, KSA 5: 335-6). It may appear simplistic but on closer examination Nietzsche is probably correct in faulting rote learning, dogma, and slander with contributing to the erosion of immanence through self immolation and self vivisection, and so perhaps it is not far fetched to expect that turning the tables on the earth-maligners will generate results. As if to underscore the counter effect of his new teaching, Nietzsche uses here a rhetoric of advent, for his Zarathustra is the "godless one" and the antichrist and the antinihilist, and he must rise to the challenge of saving both earth and humanity. Mittasch provides a formulation of Nietzsche's task and possibly his achievement. H e explains that what can be achieved practically is for a valuating moral and cultural philosophy on the ground of human experience to stand in harmony with knowledge of nature, i.e., that such a philosophy does not display gaping contradictions vis-à-vis the actually existing, objective expediencies of nature. "In this manner one can arrive at an ethical and cultural pragmatism, even at a 'biological heroism,' which for Nietzsche is attached in the first instance to the concept of strength, of 'health.'" 188 Mittasch is correct in stressing first of all that Nietzsche has a practical or applied side, and that it manifests itself in his moral and cultural philosophy from the standpoint or ground of experience. This, in turn, is consonant with his knowledge of nature and nature's "expediencies" or realities. Whether one calls it "biological heroism" or "the new hygiene" or "Dionysian affirmation," the Nietzschean project is indeed attached to the concepts of strength and health — of that there can be no doubt. In speaking of "strength" and "health" as if they were one concept, Mittasch is also implying a relationship and proximity to one another of these two concepts in Nietzsche — one does not exist without the other. Moderns merely reveal their inconsistency and confusion when they praise health and use "strong" as a pejorative.

188

Mittasch, Nietzsche als Naturphilosoph, 267.

130

II. Immanence

8. Immanence Manifested as Hubris, Exploitation, and Criminality "Being able to suffer is the least thing: even weak women and slaves often achieve mastery in it. But not to perish from inner distress and insecurity when one inflicts great suffering and hears the cry of this suffering — that is great, that belongs to greatness." The Gay Science 325

Nietzsche is aware during the course of his writing that his anti-traditional ideas, along with his call for a reorientation of human beings toward the values of body, earth, and life affirmation, will frequently be construed as inhumane, even criminal at times — he himself makes a point of bringing this up in several instances where his ideas make a radical departure from accepted norms. It would be disingenuous, therefore, to claim that Nietzsche had no inkling of how his thought might resonate in the real world, among real readers — he knew "damn well" as we say how his thought would be taken and he frequently lamented that he would in fact be misunderstood. But because he is so highly conscious of his own break with tradition, and his need to work with a new rhetoric of the earth in order to counter the effects of the rhetoric of the beyond, Nietzsche made the choice to not mince words, to not idealize unduly the conditions that obtain in humans and in nature at large, and this takes us to the negative features of immanence as they exist in his writings and as they are suggested by his writings. I have already given Nietzsche the podium in the sense that we are now quite familiar both with his views on the urgendy needed grounding of our species, as well as his views on how immanence can be achieved and how it is thwarted. In the present context I shall therefore limit myself to providing only a few samples of Nietzsche's texts as they tend to exhibit hubris and perhaps a glorification of exploitation, trusting that I have already given a sufficient textual base for my readers to judge for themselves where Nietzsche's remarks might contribute to a more negative picture of immanence. It should be stated at the outset that what we celebrate today in the form of political correctness and democratic sensibility was far less developed in Nietzsche's day, and even so, he spoke against it as a form of decadence, as a refusal to see things as they are, especially with regard to the human condition. It would be highly unjust, however, to cast Nietzsche as a dogmatic political troglodyte, or to suggest that because he refused to play along with political correctness he was therefore an insensitive bigot. Nietzsche's complicated and transforming views on modern issues such as newly emerging roles for men and women, bigotry in the form of religious, racial, and national prejudice, and his profound appreciation for the diversity of all forms of life on earth quite often leave today's morally and politically correct thinkers and commentators in the dust. Many factors make aspects of Nietzsche's thought appear reprehensible, and key among them are the twentieth century's devastating political

8. Immanence Manifested as Hubris, Exploitation, and Criminality

131

upheavals culminating in fascism, genocide, and totalitarianism, and secondly, our own propensity as moderns to do as little thinking on our own as possible, which in turn has led to blind following, conformism, inability to interpret words, texts, and events, and often self-righteous and sanctimonious scape goating. This is not the proper venue for writing a history of the white washing of Nietzsche's writings, but a word concerning the key figure in this process is in order. Walter Kaufmann, known since the 1950s throughout the English speaking academic world as the chief translator and editor of Nietzsche's works into English, performed an enormous service to Nietzsche scholarship with his generally reliable translations. However, given that Kaufmann was performing his labor of love soon after World War II, while Nietzsche's writings were very much stigmatized by the actions that National Socialists had taken to appropriate his thought for their cause, he felt compelled to "explain" Nietzsche's questionable passages with often patronizing footnotes, and he worked tirelessly to mainstream Nietzsche's thought by comparing him to Goethe and by downplaying the controversial doctrines of the superhuman, the will to power, and the eternal recurrence of the same. 189 That Nietzsche's writings have become as accessible and as critically acclaimed as they are today, internationally by the way, is largely due to Kaufmann's efforts in the decades immediately following the second world war. A commonplace interpretation of the will to power since Kaufmann makes it over into a process of "internal realization or of individual self-creation, not domination." However, as Peter Heller continues, "he clearly envisages domination of master races over enslaved masses, etc., as prerequisite for the unfolding of the supreme individual manifestations of will to power." In other words, Heller would have us devote more attention to those passages in Nietzsche, both published and unpublished, ostensibly, in which he speaks of the will to power and the rule over the earth in tandem, as opposed to merely speaking of will to power as something intended for self mastery. Another common ploy, according to Heller, is to claim "that Nietzsche's pronouncements are all to be read as metaphors. When he says 'war,' he — always — means an internal or mental conflict, etc." 190 We have already had occasion in this book to consider passages in Nietzsche where he quite clearly 189

190

See for example Alan Megill, "Historicizing Nietzsche? Paradoxes and Lessons of a Hard Case," Journal of Modem History 68 (March 1996); Kaufmann's notion of the will to power precludes violence against others: " . . . the definition of will to power as self-overcoming implied, on the level of intimate personal life, an effort of containment that fitted the cultural mood of America in the 1950s," 116. Peter Heller, "Concerning the Nietzsche Cult and Literary Cults Generally" in Nietzsche: Literature and Values. Edited Volker Diirr, Reinhold Grimm, Kathy Harms (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 203. For a detailed analysis of N.'s "rulers/rule of the earth" and further discussion of the will to power in the context of my investigation of the earth rhetoric see my chapter V below. See also Clark's (1990) refutation of Kaufmann's (in)famous claim that N.'s will to power intends only self-mastery and self-overcoming, not people and peoples (228-9).

132

II. Immanence

means "war" in the literal sense ("War as remedy," H H II/2 187 comes to mind) and recommends it as a radical cure for moribund peoples, so clearly Heller is correct when he disputes those who would reduce Nietzsche's talk of war to mere metaphor. In fact, the phenomenon of white washing that Heller alludes to in 1988 still happens to be taking place in 1988 in the work of theologian Georg Picht, who has written a serious book on Nietzsche. H e maintains that "Nietzsche used the vocabulary of war throughout his entire work and metaphorically transferred it to spiritual processes, in order to unmask the concealed will to power in the feigned harmlessness of the spirit. That one did not see through the metaphorical character of this vocabulary then led to the bloody farce of the abuse of Nietzsche by fascism." 191 This is too simply stated. Nietzsche did in fact use metaphors in the manner suggested by Picht, and National Socialists did in fact refuse to or fail to distinguish between Nietzsche's metaphorical and literal uses of "war," but this does not change the fact that Nietzsche did write in glorifying terms about the effects of war, real war. Moreover, Nietzsche expressed his views that exploitation is the basis of all culture; that destruction is required for the work of creation; that slavery has always existed and continues to exist — he does not transfer these terms to spiritual processes. Finally, if Nietzsche is speaking only metaphorically about the concepts of rule, ruling, and rulers (Herrschaft, Herrschen, Herren) for instance, why then does he make a point of coining a new expression, namely "the bestowing virtue," for these much maligned concepts? H e would not have sensed the need to coin a new expression for "lust to rule," nor to rehabilitate "selfishness," and "sex" (Zarathustra's "three evils") unless he himself knew and felt the full weight of their tarnished image. There is no grounding Nietzsche or his rhetoric if we emasculate him by crying "metaphor!" each time he utters something questionable or offensive — he was more honest as a philologist than are his readers, who want him harmless, politically correct, and at all times Enlightened. Another manner in which commentators attempt to protect Nietzsche from charges of irresponsible or dangerous discourse is by playing the esoteric/exoteric card. This strategy basically covers all of Nietzsche's controversial statements with one large blanket, that of esotericism, in order to rule that any attempt to question the statement or to suggest it is socially or morally reprehensible is a clumsy exoteric misreading of Nietzsche — just as the Nazis engaged in clumsy exoteric misreadings of Nietzsche (as if there were no educated Nazis). O n this basis, Nietzsche could have said absolutely anything, and no matter how outrageous, the reply would always be: Nietzsche was not writing for you, you have missed the point. I find something of this attitude in Babich, whose book reverberates with the assertion that Nietzsche's writings are only for those with special ears, only for "select readers," and in Crawford, who resorts to coining the term "resentment criticism" for any who would dare to 191

Georg Picht, Nietzsche (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1988), 128.

8. Immanence Manifested as Hubris, Exploitation, and Criminality

133

question the legitimacy of the discourse of insanity.192 Finally, I agree with Gemes that the postmodernist approach to Nietzsche, whereby his writings are reduced to play, metaphor, and a celebration of the destruction of meaning, are a deliberate strategy to neutralize Nietzsche and to avoid appearing sympathetic to his politically incorrect project of building "a unified self."193 In replying to Hallman's article claiming Nietzsche for deep ecology, Acampora charges him with "simplistically taming Nietzsche's feral philosophy" and remaining "blind to the harsher aspects of Nietzsche's much more ecologically ambiguous concept of what it means to be human." For one thing, Acampora reminds us, Nietzsche "repeatedly extols what he calls the 'pathos of distance — a feeling conducive to pride and hermitage, a sensibility that valorizes precisely isolation, separateness, and independence as the highest virtues!" So much for deep ecology's merging of the isolated individual into interconnectedness. But on this point Acampora may be stretching too far; to be sure, Nietzsche speaks of pathos of distance, but he does so based on his understanding of different ranks, of hierarchy as it exists in all of nature, humans included. Nor do I see why maintaining a pathos of distance would necessarily rule out greater connectedness with the environment — Acampora's conception of interconnectedness may be too simple, too much based on an egalitarian notion of human beings standing in a circle holding hands, when in fact, Nietzsche's concept of the pathos of distance may have the effect of bringing humans closer to their natural environment by virtue of cutting through idealism, wishful thinking, patronizing, anthropocentric and Romanticized conceptions of nature. In any case, "whatever eco-natural holism Nietzsche may embrace, it is a variety that does not preclude the possibility (nor exclude the actuality of) hierarchical visions or transcendentalist aspirations."194 To this I would add that perhaps the superhuman is a "hierarchical vision," but only a misunderstanding of the superhuman and a complete overlooking of Nietzsche's strident critique of transcendentalist values would hold open the possibility of "transcendentalist aspirations" in Nietzsche. Though Acampora is on the right track in tempering some of Hallman's more enthusiastic and idealistic claims regarding Nietzsche, he errs in moving too far to the opposite extreme when he writes that '"living fully in the natural world'[Hallman's 192

Babich, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science, 33, 102-03, 131, 277, 282,-3, 297; Crawford, To Nietzsche, 10, 18 (see my note 87). There is of course much to be said in N.'s defense from the standpoint of esotericism, but I think this practice has been so prevalent in Nietzsche scholarship that it rises to the status of abuse. Even Karl Lowith, with whom few would disagree, relies too strongly on the notion that N.'s ideas and doctrines are intended only for the few — this does nothing to illustrate the meaning of N.'s doctrines, does nothing to enhance them or rescue them (as if suspending them in esoteric academic debate were N.'s preference!), and it has the unwanted effect of dignifying the claims of those who charge N. with being a fascist progenitor.

193

Gemes (2001), 354. Ralph R. Acampora, "Using and Abusing Nietzsche for Environmental Ethics," Ethics 16/2 (1994), 189-90, 191-2.

194

Environmental

134

II. Immanence

phrase] may mean for Nietzsche that we accept ¿«//human impulses, including the technical, as thoroughly natural, maybe even that we can dare apocalyptically to affirm the will-to-powering drive of human artifice to the earthly extremity of techno-Armageddon." 1 9 5 1 find nothing in Nietzsche's writings concerning the earth that would even suggest such a scenario as put forth by Acampora, not even the conception of the will to power as a "monster of energy"196 which is more honest than previous anthropocentric conceptions of nature. In this matter one should consider Nietzsche's "big picture" of linking superhuman with the meaning of the earth — a philosopher does not work toward and work out an earth affirming, life affirming philosophy of immanence only to stupidly explode the earth allegedly because technology means that "he can" explode the earth. Even the earliest scholarship on Nietzsche, during his conscious lifetime, took issue with the "danger" of his thought, but more recently, as Staten points out, even established Nietzsche scholars appear to line up to condemn Nietzsche on moral grounds while praising him on other aspects of his thought. "Who are we?" Staten asks, "that we can recite our moral beliefs in unison? And what authority have these beliefs over certain views Nietzsche expresses which stick in the craw of our moral being?" Staten's point is that one can always critique Nietzsche according to one's particular morality or ideology, but "it makes no sense to give a discursive account of this critique, praising Nietzsche for his achievement, and then proceed to give another discursive account of Nietzsche's 'political thought' of the sort one would have given if Nietzsche's critique did not exist." What Staten attempts therefore is "a nonmoral investigation of Nietzsche's economy, instead of putting Nietzsche's Views' on display we want to describe the rhythms according to which they come into play and then disappear, and the patterns of libido, anxiety, and aggression that regulate these rhythms." 197 What Staten prescribes in his "hands off" approach is preferable to the double discourse of commentators who praise the "clever" Nietzsche with one voice and condemn the "evil" Nietzsche with their moral voice. But Staten's approach, though conscientious in spirit and quite scientific, tends to make a mere specimen of Nietzsche, and implies that Nietzsche's thought can somehow remain hermetically sealed, perhaps limited to a test tube. The Germans themselves are of two minds concerning Nietzsche, as Jang points out using the cover of Der Spiegel, a leading German news magazine. The 8 June 1981 issue of Der Spiegel reports on the growing interest in Nietzsche and provides the caption: "Recurrence of a Philosopher: Doer Hitler, Thinker Nietzsche," using likenesses

195 196

197

Acampora, "Using and Abusing Nietzsche," 193. See N.'s notes from June-July 1885, where he writes: "And do you know what 'the world' is for me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without e n d . . . This world is the will to power — and nothing besides!" (KSA 11:610-11). Staten, Nietzsche's Voice, 78-9, 80-1.

8. Immanence Manifested as Hubris, Exploitation, and Criminality

135

o f Hitler and Nietzsche. Jang also provides a useful summary o f Nietzsche's reception by the Nazis, communists, post-war Germany and contemporaries, demonstrating that people will never exhaust their fascination with Nazism nor ever abandon their efforts to link Nietzsche with Hitler and his political party. 198 I f serious journalism in democratic Germany can facilely depict the connection between Nietzsche and Hitler as a matter o f theory and praxis, we are obviously facing continued pressure to read Nietzsche in the shadow o f National Socialist atrocities. As mentioned above I have already provided scores o f samples from Nietzsche writings, published and unpublished, upon whose basis readers should be able to make their own judgments concerning the moral character o f his thought. Since Nietzsche prides himself on being an "immoralist" and in fact presents us with the most c o m prehensive critique o f morals in Western history, it should not surprise us to find that he speaks critically o f traditional morals and offers alternatives. I limit myself therefore in the present context to providing only the briefest overview o f instances in which his language appears to be particularly hubristic or potentially encouraging o f exploitation, whether o f other human beings or o f nature. T h e third "untimely meditation" called Schopenhauer

as Educator

is in many

respects still a Romantic work, as signaled by the title treating Schopenhauer, the most R o m a n t i c o f European philosophers and the favorite o f both Wagner and Nietzsche. At this time Nietzsche asserts that each human being should work toward the production o f the philosopher, the artist, and the saint and thereby work on the perfection o f nature, for all o f nature is striving to become human as redemption from itself ( U M III/5, K S A 1 : 3 8 2 ) . T h i s ultra-humanistic, radically R o m a n t i c conception o f nature, which would replace nature with what Nietzsche regards as humanity's highest representatives, is diametrically opposed to Nietzsche's views on humans and nature once he cures himself o f Romanticism (see Human).

T h e notion that

nature requires redemption, or could even be redeemed by human beings is preposterous to Nietzsche after this last fling and honeymoon with Romanticism, especially early German Romanticism, whose various representatives and influences (Novalis, Fichte, Schelling etal)

held that nature was unconscious spirit. I f Nietzsche's thought

had continued to develop in this vein, there is no telling how nature might have been transformed by "saints" bent on "redeeming" it — Nietzsche soon abandons this position and takes to the field against just such transcendentalist, hubristic conceptions o f nature. At around the time o f The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche pens " T h e Greek State," one o f five forewords to unwritten books, in which he claims that the cruel truth is that slavery belongs to the essence o f culture, and this truth is the vulture that eats from the liver o f the Promethean supporter o f culture. T h e misery o f those who toil must

198

Sung-Hyan Jang, Nietzsche-Rezeption im Liebte des Faschismus: Thomas Mann und Menno ter Braak (New York: Olms-Weidman, 1994), 74. See also chapter II.

136

II. Immanence

even be increased, he adds, in order to produce a small number of Olympian human beings (KSA 1:767).199 Well known for his pyramidal conception of culture, Nietzsche acknowledges the importance of the lower base of the pyramid but he argues consistently that it exists for the benefit of the few at the apex. And of those who insist that Nietzsche's ideas are not intended to have political application or political consequences, one must ask why then does he insist that his beloved Greeks "were the political people as such," second to none in history for their terrible unleashing of the political drive, unconditionally sacrificing all their interests to the service of the state? The closest comparison, he adds, would be Italy during the Renaissance (his second love after ancient Greece) (KSA 1:771). To be sure, by the time of Dawn he calls for "As little state as possible!" and argues against using society's best minds in the employ of the state (D 179, KSA 3:157-8) and in Zarathustra"Or\ the New Idol" he excoriates the state and claims that where the state ends the bridge to the superhuman begins (Z 1/11, KSA 4:64). But Nietzsche appears to be much more critical of modern manifestations of the state, in which herd values and utilitarianism prevail, and his preoccupation beginning with Zarathustra^u'vUsx "who shall rule the earth" strongly suggests that he does indeed embrace a politics, a "great politics" as he calls it ("die grosse Politik"), and this in turn is closely associated with the will to power. Nietzsche obviously prides himself on not being sentimental, and on looking life squarely in the eyes without flinching. An aphorism entitled "What belongs to greatness" is a strong illustration of his mental toughness, for here he insists that whoever would achieve something great must also feel in herself "the strength and the will to inflict great pain. Being able to suffer is the least thing: even weak women and slaves often achieve mastery in it. But not to perish from inner distress and insecurity when one inflicts great suffering and hears the cry of this suffering — that is great, that belongs to greatness" (GS 325, KSA 4:5 5 3). 200 Kaufmann's footnote to this aphorism proves revealing: "This aphorism is surely quite as much prompted by personal experience as the three that precede it: Nietzsche is thinking of the suffering that his ideas and books inflict on his mother, the Wagner circle, and those whose pieties he offends." 201 This is all well and good, of course, and there is no disputing the fact that Nietzsche actually has these worries and offends these parties. But the bigger picture that Kaufmann ignores, and exhorts his readers to ignore is that on the eve of writing Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche already had in mind his vision of the superhuman and his doctrine of the will to power. One can only limit one's interpretation of the above aphorism in the manner instructed by Kaufmann if one entirely ignores all of Nietzsche's writings in praise of hardness, 199

200

201

N. also claims that slavery is required by modern Alexandrian culture, but it disguises this fact with talk of "dignity of man" and "dignity of labor," BT 18, KSA 1:117 I am indebted to Robert Pois for pointing out the semantic similarity between this aphorism and Himmler s "Posen Speech," which may be entirely coincidental. See note 180 above. Walter Kaufmann, Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 175-6.

8. Immanence Manifested as Hubris, Exploitation, and Criminality

137

exploitation, commanding, obeying, the disease of bad conscience, appreciating the beauty of evil, and so on. 202 For those who are unable to find such passages in Nietzsche as I have just described, perhaps a sample from Beyond will serve. Nietzsche discusses mutual disarmament and the abstention from exploitation as something good if limited to individuals, but this must not be raised to a founding principle of society, for as soon as it is, it will be revealed for what it really is: "as will to denial of life, as a principle of disintegration and decline. Here one must think thoroughly and to the bottom ("gründlich auf den Grund denken") and resist all sentimental weakness: Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker, suppression, hardness, imposition of one's own forms, incorporation and at least, most mildly stated, exploitation, — but why should one always have to use just such words upon which a slanderous intent has been imprinted since time immemorial?" (BGE 259, KSA 5:207) Individuals may do well to settle their scores peacefully and to refrain from exploiting one another, but observe how the complexion changes radically if this manner of behavior and reasoning were transferred to society as a whole — Nietzsche immediately cries foul. His criticism of the slanderous tendencies of moralistic language usage is well taken, for there can be no doubt that morality invents and attaches pejorative status to most of the instinct-based, body-based expressions of human being — quite simply, life is not moral according to Nietzsche. But he himself invites criticism of his view regarding the exploitative character of life when he sets up the argument in terms of what is proper for individuals versus what is proper for society as a whole. O n e is left wondering why society must not refrain from exploitation, must not lay down its arms, and Nietzsche's answer that to do so would be a form of "life denial" and "decline" somehow does not seem adequate. Perhaps the most infamous expression of Nietzsche's admiration of the natural, uninhibited primitive human being is his "blond beast" passage from Genealogy. Here he discusses the opposing moralities of good (strong humans) and evil (weak humans' resentment against strong), and how the good behave quite civilly within their own people and customs, but when they come into contact with outsiders, with the strange and the foreign they are "not much better than beasts of prey set loose." Now they celebrate their release from their long period of restraint and enclosure by "stepping back into the innocence of the predatory conscience, as exultant monsters." Their hideous deeds include murder, arson, rape, torture, all done without the least remorse. "Not to be mistaken at the ground of all these noble races is the beast of prey, the blond beast magnificently and greedily roving after prey and victory; a

202

See also BGE 202, KSA 5:124-5, where N. pleads for "oar truths" and rails against socialists, anarchists, and others who represent modernity's herd values: "They are all of them at one in the cry and the impatience of pity, in their deadly hatred against suffering in general, in their almost feminine inability to remain spectators of suffering, to allow suffering."

138

II. Immanence

release is needed for this hidden ground from time to time, the animal must emerge again, must return again to the wilderness: — Roman, Arabian, Germanic, Japanese nobility, Homeric heroes, Scandinavian Vikings — they all resemble each other in this need" (GM 1/11, KSA 5: 274-5). Kaufmann points out that the "blond beast" is not a racial concept, and that "blondness" refers to the lion's appearance.203 1 tend to agree with Kaufmann on this point, a small one, but I hasten to add that the small point is not the point — unmistakably Nietzsche glorifies the unleashed instincts of the noble predatory peoples, and claims toward the conclusion of this section (#11) that modern Europeans are mere domestic animals, tamed predators who triumphed in time over the noble races using the instincts of resentment and reprisal, and who ultimately "represent the regression of humanity" (ibid, 276-7). This does not mean, of course, that Nietzsche wants a return to the roving beasts of prey who fall upon their perceived enemies with savagery and joy in cruelty, it is, instead, his way of pleading for less hypocrisy about the human condition, current and former, and for more understanding of what it means for the long term development of culture if humans become total herd animals, mere domestic animals. Colli describes how Nietzsche's enthusiasm for his method and his topic gets ahead of him at times. Referring to the "blond beast" passage he writes: "Here too Nietzsche is driven by his 'truthfulness' fanaticism, that is the impulse to show the suffering of the world to the utmost (even if one cannot overlook certain inconsistencies, shrill tones, in which the exposing of wounds which cause shame to civilized human beings switches over to uncontrolled glorification)." In Colli's view the violence of the blond beast means "human society is based on terrible crimes, and it will always be so. Dionysus commands that this truth be spoken openly and that it also be accepted and affirmed. It is the same view of reality as is represented by Thucydides in the conversation between the Melians and the messengers of Athens" (KSA 5:418). The challenge, then, if one does not simply rest upon one's laurels by morally condemning Nietzsche's language, and if one does not content oneself with offering apologies and explanations of the sort that seek to exonerate Nietzsche, is to ascertain what usefulness and value for a more grounded, immanent living can be extracted from Nietzsche's Dionysian truthfulness. If all Nietzsche has to offer is criticism of moderns and their descent into domestic animal living — and I certainly do not think he rests with mere criticism — then he need not become excited and intense about his work, and readers in turn need not, indeed, would not respond with any degree of passion. Nietzsche claims that the philosopher is distinguished from the critic, from the scholar, by being productive, fruitful, consequential in matters of living, that the philosopher is both a commander and a legislator, and that Dionysus is 203

Kaufmann, The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 476-7. Kaufmann also calls upon Danto, who reasons that if lions were black, and N. had written "black beast," this would be taken as support for "African instead of German nationalists" (ibid).

8. Immanence Manifested as Hubris, Exploitation, and Criminality

139

a philosopher. Grounding Nietzsche consists of demonstrating how the philosopher is all these things by trying to establish how they affect the interaction of people and environment in Nietzsche's major task of grounding life on earth. We have already considered what Nietzsche has to say about Cesare Borgia in the context of his aphorism "Whether we have become more moral"; the question he poses, using Borgia as a point of departure, is whether we have become more moral or simply softer. He asserts at this point that we moderns with our "thick wadding of humanity" would have been a laughing stock to Borgia's contemporaries. Nietzsche regards as his innovation the discovery that the softening of our customs is a consequence of decline: "hardness and terribleness of custom can conversely be the consequence of overabundance of life" (BGE 37, KSA 5:137). Moderns couch their ideals and values in language that appeals to them and highlights their humanity, their humane-ness, but it is clear that Nietzsche favors physical and biological qualifiers instead. We say "good, humane, civilized" and Nietzsche says "weak, soft, tamed" — at some point Nietzsche and modernity must stop speaking past each other, must find common ground as it were, and I believe Nietzsche seeks this common ground, though it may well turn out that this "common ground" (he would object mightily to my usage here) is by no means a "higher ground" as desired by idealism. There were many in Europe around the turn of the century and into the 1920s and 1930s who were susceptible to Nietzsche's call for a greater manifesting of life, and the Germans were among them. According to Aschheim, "Nietzsche permeated every aspect of the German Faith Movement's Nazi counter-religion. He was the central authority behind its attack on Enlightenment reason, liberalism and Socialism... The Germanic racial religion, in many ways, simply nationalized the by now familiar Nietzschean counter-faith of immanence, heroism and vitalism."204 Even an otherwise balanced early commentator like Naumann writes glowingly of Nietzsche's distinction between the soldier and the warrior, the latter representing what he calls "the character of primitive Germanic times, whose type Nietzsche chose as the model for his ideal of the master human being." And Naumann also waxes enthusiastic about the wars of the future which are supposed to take place at the behest of philosophers and in the interest of the universal higher development of humanity; these warriors will die just as surely as today's soldiers, but "dying early as a hero is valued more by the brave man than living out one's life without honor as an old man." 205 Nietzsche's appeal to commentators such as Naumann and to many others who followed can be explained, writes Aschheim, by what he opposed in the spirit of the age: he rejected bourgeois society, liberalism, socialism, democracy, egalitarianism, and the Christian ethos. The Nazis hammered these themes home, making Nietzsche a "crucial force 204

Steven Aschheim, "After the Death of God: Varieties of Nietzschean Religion," Nietzsche-Studien 17 (1988), 245. 20 ^ Naumann, Zarathustra-Commentar, vol. I, 160, 163.

140

II. Immanence

for regeneration" and helping them to campaign against the decadent and feminized nineteenth century. Another function that Nietzsche fulfilled, according to Aschheim, was to allow the German intelligentsia to make the conversion to Nazism, since they liked his elevated stature and his cultured writings, "and to employ him as inspiration and rationalization."206 Indeed, none other than writer-politician Alfred Rosenberg, speaking on Nietzsche's 100th birthday on 15 October 1944, insisted that Nietzsche's noble idea of life and his world view that acknowledged the laws of life helped Germany out of the darkness of the Versailles Treaty and anarchy. Moreover, National Socialist Germany was the only country that maintained Europe's concept of the old cultured citizen ( K u l t u r b ü r g e r ) , the only country that defended old Europe from Jewish-Western Marxism, and thus they, the Germans, were the "good Europeans" and had the right to claim this for themselves.207 This brazenly dishonest rhetoric, with its casting of Hitler-Germany in the role of "good Europeans," demonstrates with clarity that Nietzsche was a treasure chest of popular, sought after sentiments and ideas, which any cause could and did appropriate in its struggle against the status quo. Dan to admits that a Nazi propagandist, reading straightforwardly, could find justification for bigoted ideologies in some passages of Nietzsche. "Of course, the subsequent disaster of Nazism, and the semiofficial adoption of Nietzsche as the philosopher of that ghastly movement, have given to this negligible aspect of his thought an importance quite out of proportion to its systematic relevance." To illustrate his point Danto offers up a hypothetical: if an insane dictator had risen to power on a platform of misogyny, and had ordered the death of six million women, "we should be disinclined, supposing this man had read and been inspired by Schopenhauer, to regard that philosopher's antipathy toward women with the same indulgence we now assign it."208 As I said at the outset of this subchapter, the principle reason why Nietzsche's name is associated with 20th century atrocities is because these atrocities were committed by people who invoked Nietzsche's name, but who had their own cause and agenda. When immanence is regarded as a counter-religion (Aschheim) to say Christianity, or otherwise cast as a religion of nature, as in Pois' book, it takes on a religious fervor and connotation that Nietzsche may or may not have intended, since Nietzsche does not appear to regard immanence or the heightened state of vitality of Lebensphilosophie as any kind of religion. Pois writes that the "philosophical language of the religion of nature which provided the ideational background for the Nazi actions was German. In its frequent call for an embracing of life' strong, quasi-Nietzschean overtones are obvious, and in its emphasis on the supremacy of nature and in its expression in organic, völkisch forms, elements usually and correctly associated with German

206

207 208

Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany1890-1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 238, 247. Alfred Rosenberg, Friedrich Nietzsche (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1944), 20-1). Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, 167.

8. Immanence Manifested as Hubris, Exploitation, and Criminality

141

romanticism are evident." 209 Pois' observations are well taken, and I think they accurately reflect what nationalistic Germans in the early 20th century felt about nature, and so he is correct in demonstrating a link between religious feelings about nature and how these feelings were fed by both Nietzsche and Romanticism. But two things need to be clarified here. Firstly, unlike either Aschheim or Pois, Nietzsche does not necessarily envisage immanence as a religion or a counter-religion — if these two can be distinguished — immanence is the absence of religion, and in the absence of religion the authority of religion is lacking, i.e., people who are religious adherents conduct themselves with the authority of their religion and so feel empowered by their religion, whatever that religion might call itself. Secondly, Nietzsche himself was profoundly anti-Romantic in precisely those areas where the rest of Germany was proRomantic, though of course this did not stop Germans from appropriating him for their cause of nationalism. During the Second World War Bataille wrote On Nietzsche and had this to say concerning the positioning of Nazi Germany vis-à-vis immanence: "For the first time (regarded from a more or less dispassionate viewpoint, however) I've grasped the meaning of the war, that it is a transcendence against immanence. The defeat of National Socialism connects with the isolation of transcendence and the Hitlerite illusion — as the latter, in a movement of transcendence, is unleashed in force." 210 1 find this formulation extremely useful in trying to distinguish between immanence and religion. Opposite Pois' and Aschheim's view that the Nazis made a religion of immanence, Bataille claims the Nazis were bent on transcendence, based on his understanding that fascism is a form of national transcendence which cannot become universal (ibid, 159). Philosophically Pois and Aschheim are correct to argue that fascism was an orgy of immanence, based on what the Nazis themselves took to be immanence, but Bataille reveals the lie in the Nazi reasoning, and what is more, he does so during the war, in occupied France, when he perceives that immanence is the greater, the more authentic condition and that immanence is the rest of the world, the "what really is" as opposed to the transcendence dreams of the Nazis. 211 209

210 211

Robert A. Pois, National Socialism and the Religion of Nature (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), 29. Bataille, On Nietzsche, 158. I see a reflection of Bataille's insight playing itself out in Goethe's Faust. Faust wants control over nature, and he constantly, proudly claims that he wants what is of the earth and to learn to plumb the depths of human being, and yet, Faust's words do not match his actions. He is entirely otherworldly in his orientation, using the powers of the devil to achieve what no human could, and in the end, he is even saved by divine intervention — Faust talks immanence but represents transcendence. This is illustrated by Goethe in the scene in which Faust conjures, by accident, the earth spirit, which he does not understand and which he confuses for the devil. When Faust tries hubristically to claim kinship with the earth spirit, the earth spirit (admittedly "earth spirit" is an oxymoron) rebuffs him, saying; "You resemble the spirit which you yourself comprehend" (Faust, in Goethes Werke, vol. 3 p. 24).

142

II. Immanence

It is my view that immanence as desired by Nietzsche, whether one calls it Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of life), vitalism, or the Dionysian, works against not only nationalistic but also humanistic excesses of hubris. Lampert too sees promising signs in Human that Nietzsche is confident of an emerging new humanity. "The cocky faith of the age of the actor must be countered with 'true modesty': 'recognition that we are not our own work' ( H H 1/588). Philosophy's ignorance is consonant with the recognition that we owe our being to nature and history, that we are not our own but belong, like stones, to a great structure of being and time. A new gratitude loyal to the earth can be built on this recognition." 212 Stack sees Nietzsche learning a valuable lesson from Emerson: "Amplifying Emerson's occasional worries over the impact that man's power over nature through scientific knowledge might have on culture to the highest degree, Nietzsche predicted the coming of nihilism, a century of nihilism." 213 Emerson recognized that humanity's technological progress "has outrun his moral and spiritual development," such that applied science changes the earth, but "man is not improved." Nietzsche took inspiration from this when he conducted his critique of Darwin, pointing out that the weaker dominate the stronger. 214 Gtinzel points out how Nietzsche exposes the antiquarian view of history of Hegel, instead making history legitimate for living only as long as it remains subordinate to humans and their purposes. Whereas Hegel assigned territorial and national markings to various stages of the spirit, e.g. naturalness, alienation, self consciousness, and deleted entire territories from history, e.g. the polar regions, southern Africa, and North America, Nietzsche condemns this view of history as metaphysically truth-bound (Wahrheitsbediirftig), mythological, and reinforcing the central European status quo. 215 Far from contributing to a hubristic attitude toward nature and the earth, then, Nietzsche in significant ways countered the near sighted and chauvinistic tendencies of his age. Bataille expresses his perception of the gulf separating Nietzsche from nationalistic abusers of his thought in this manner: "Between the ideas of the Fascist reactionaries and Nietzsche's notions there is more than simple difference — there's radical incompatibility." But Bataille does not close his eyes to Nietzsche's radical critique of tradition, either, stating "he required of the new humankind that it possess a capacity to withstand adversity — while recognizing its right to trample on norms. Still, he distinguished this humanity on principle from men in possession of power. H e recognized no limits, and confined himself to describing as freely as he could the field of a possible." 216 Another serious voice of Nietzsche scholarship from the fascist era observes that there are countless brochures and speeches in which the Third Reich is

212 213 214 215 216

Lampert, Nietzsche and Modern Times, 354. Stack, Nietzsche and Emerson, 37. Stack, Nietzsche and Emerson, 94-5. Giinzel, "Nietzsches Schreiben," 234-5. Bataille, On Nietzsche, 170-1.

8. Immanence Manifested as Hubris, Exploitation, and Criminality

143

seen as the fulfillment of Nietzsche, but the truth is if one does not merely interpret Nietzsche but actually takes him seriously, he is alien to the nationalists and socialists. One should look closely, Lowith urges, at his writings against Wagner to see what Nietzsche thought of Jews, and this is an abyss of difference between Nietzsche and his new (1941) mouth pieces. Still, this does not change the fact that Nietzsche is a ferment in the movement of National Socialism and determines it ideologically in a decisive way. 217 Gooding-Williams interprets "On Great Events" from Zarathustra as Nietzsche's critique of revolutionary movements, and we should not forget that Europe was polarized by revolutionary movements, brutally and abruptly casting aside existing forms of government and establishing totalitarian regimes in their place. According to Gooding-Williams, "the Rousseauian revolutionary modernist is destined to effect a repetition, or 'return to life,' of the forms of life she intends to overcome, because, Zarathustra suggests, she is not radical enough: taking her nourishment from the surface of the earth, she does not, like the overman Zarathustra imagines, speak out of

the heart of the earth . . . the heart of the earth [that] is ofgold."mi

Nietzsche's outspo-

ken hatred for revolution, in particular the French Revolution whose only justification was the emergence of Napoleon, in his view, led him to formulate that Napoleon in turn made nationalism possible, and that is his limiting factor (KSA 12:471). W h a t Lowith, Bataille, and Gooding-Williams understand is that Nietzsche is not a revolutionary spirit, his groundedness in history and his insistence that great events take time mark him as a thinker to whom movements such as communism, fascism, National Socialism would have been anathema. W h e n one turns one's attention to questions of Nietzsche's possible role in a reorientation of human beings toward their environment, which is both logical and natural given that Nietzsche is the first Western thinker to truly address the problem of making earth the only place of human habitation — both spiritually and physically speaking — one tends to agree with Hallman that "very little has been written that exonerates Nietzsche's philosophizing from the accusation that it affirms the technological domination of the natural world," and this in spite of the fact that "one of the principal thrusts of Nietzsche's thinking is an attempt to overcome the kind of

217 218

Karl Lowith, Von Hegel bis Nietzsche (Zurich and New York: Europa Verlag, 1941), 267. Gooding-Williams, Zamthustm's Dionysian Modernism, 193. He offers this interpretation of the heart of the earth consisting of gold, namely it is "an allusion to the gift-giving virtue and to its role in resurrecting the body and earth" 359, n. 28.1 would offer a different interpretation, though Gooding-Williams's is plausible enough. The revolutionaries are superficial, fly-by-night types who have no regard for history, and their superficiality corresponds with their base metal status, i.e., they are bronze. The heart of the earth, on the other hand, is made of gold, indicating that those who are truly of the earth and take their nourishment from the earth are the philosophers, the highest caste of Plato's Republic, as seen in the myth of the three metals and their corresponding human types.

144

II. Immanence

philosophizing that has traditionally provided a theoretical framework for the technological control and exploitation of the natural world." 219 1 also agree with Hallman that Nietzsche's undeserved reputation in this area has in part been due to the influence of Heidegger, whose four-volume Nietzsche, published in 1961 but composed of lectures and writings from 1936-1946, had a profound effect on Nietzsche scholarship world wide. As perceptive as he is in many ways about Nietzsche's writings, Heidegger is also set in his ways about important, indeed, pivotal aspects of these writings and I shall offer a brief summary of his views as they tend to depict Nietzsche as one who affirms technological domination of nature. Heidegger first of all attaches too much importance to the very limited and arbitrarily selected set of notes that has been published under the title The Will to Power, and he favors this purported major "philosophical work" of Nietzsche's over the actual published writings — a serious mistake. In typical fashion he sets to work on interpreting these fragments, as seen in his analysis of Will to Power # 12 (KSA 13:46-9). Nietzsche is describing how the concepts of purpose, unity, and being with which we previously posited value to the world result in a worthless or valueless world once we pull them out. "Final result: all values with which we hitherto tried to make the world estimable for ourselves and ultimately devalued in so doing, when they proved inapplicable — all these values are, psychologically recalculated, results of certain perspectives of utility for the preservation and intensification of human structures of domination: and only falsely projected into the essence of things. It is still the hyperbolic naivete of the human being positing itself as the meaning and value standard of things" (KSA 13:48-9). Whereas I and most commentators in reading this passage understand Nietzsche to be criticizing and condemning the human propensity to construct its own dominance into the world, as an expression of cosmic "hyperbolic naivete," Heidegger says otherwise. There is an inconsistency between "naivete" on the one hand, and "positing oneself as the meaning of things" on the other, the latter being "anything but naivete. It is the supreme consciousness of self-reliant man, explicit will to power, and certainly not in any way impotence to power." If we try to understand both naivete and self-positing meaning as expressions of the same, he contends, "then Nietzsche would be saying that 'hyperbolic naivete' consists in being thoroughly not naive."220 In other words, Heidegger does not accept that humans in positing themselves as the meaning of the world are demonstrating naivete — for him the matter is solved by redirecting the naivete in Nietzsche's statement. "Naivete does not consist in the fact that man posits values and functions as their meaning and as the measure of value. Man remains naive to the extent that he posits values as an 'essence of things' that devolves upon him, without knowing that it is he 219 220

Hallman, "Nietzsche's Environmental Ethics," 100. Heidegger, Nietzsche. Volume IV. Translated by Frank A. Capuzzi, edited with Notes and an Analysis by David Ferrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982), 79-80.

8. Immanence Manifested as Hubris, Exploitation, and Criminality

145

who posits them and that the positing is a will to power" (ibid, 80). Heidegger is correct in asserting the existence of this particular brand of naivete, for Nietzsche clearly alludes to it as well, but Heidegger is not correct in substituting this brand of naivete for the one Nietzsche designates the "hyperbolic naivete." We can see why this transference becomes important to Heidegger as he continues to build his case. "A superficial reading of the statement seduces one to the opinion that Nietzsche — in opposition to the process of naive valuation, which often imposes human values on things and so humanizes all beings — is demanding an experience and definition of beings in which every anthropomorphism would be avoided. But precisely that interpretation of the statement would be erroneous . . ." (ibid, 80). Heidegger overstates here, first off, because Nietzsche is clearly aware that anthropocentric valuations cannot be avoided completely, at best we can minimize them by being aware of our need and propensity to construct them into the world. But Heidegger does not give Nietzsche such credit, insisting instead that the whole problem lies "in the fact that the humanization is not consciously carried out. . . . the positing of the world according to the image of man and through man is the only true mode of any interpretation of the world, and therefore something toward which metaphysics must finally, resolutely, and without reservation set its course" (ibid, 80). Here we have the most fundamental difference between Nietzsche's thinking and Heidegger's, and here Heidegger reveals what is really on his mind. Whereas I define Nietzsche's grounding work as a building upon a solid foundation of the actual, the physical and physiological-spiritual of humans interacting with and on earth, Heidegger sees Nietzsche's work as metaphysics. I am attempting to demonstrate that because he has a high consciousness of human unfounded and ungrounded construction, Nietzsche seeks to unmask and redirect, reorient human efforts to regard themselves as the meaning of the world, which at bottom after all is humanistic hubris. Heidegger, quite to the contrary, insists that Nietzsche's meaning is to consciously embrace the process of anthropocentric meaning, of positing humans as the standard of values, and to do so resolutely. Thus Heidegger construes the will to power, his favorite Nietzschean concept, metaphysically, and thereby opens a Pandora's box for Nietzsche studies. He is convinced that the will to power is aimless as it "pertains to the metaphysical essence of power. If one can speak of aim here at all, then the aim' is the aimlessness of man's absolute dominance over the earth." Current man, according to Heidegger, needs and seeks ideals, while "overman, on the contrary, no longer needs the above' and 'beyond,' because he alone wills man himself, and not just in some particular aspect, but as the master of absolute administration of power with the fully developed power resources of the earth" (ibid, 82). At the conclusion of his chapter on "Nietzsche's 'Moral' Interpretation of Metaphysics" Heidegger claims: "Metaphysics is anthropomorphism — the formation and apprehension of the world according to man's image. Therefore, in metaphysics as Nietzsche interprets it and above all demands it as future philosophy, the relationship of man to being as a whole is decisive" (ibid, 83-4). Finally,

146

II. Immanence

so that there is no doubt concerning Heidegger's agenda for metaphysics versus Nietzsche's life-long critique o f metaphysics, let us consider this rhetorical question posed in Heidegger's next chapter on "Metaphysics and Anthropomorphism": " W h y shouldn't metaphysics affirm once and for all, without reservation, man's unconditional role o f dominance, make h i m into the definitive principle o f every interpretation o f the world, and put an end to all relapses into naive views o f the world?" 221 Heidegger forces metaphysics upon Nietzsche, insisting quite stubbornly that despite Nietzsche's efforts to counter metaphysics, he remains mired in metaphysics precisely because he addresses metaphysical questions. Nietzsche does not dispute that humans regard themselves as having the "unconditional role o f dominance," but more importantly, he challenges this notion, based as it is on groundless metaphysics, on delusional thinking, and he seeks to undo it. Ultimately Nietzsche's project o f dismantling metaphysics may result in nothing more than another "naive view o f the world," as Heidegger calls it, but it will be a more honest view, a view more connected with the rest o f nature, a view more respectful o f life in all its forms, including human life, a view that does not stress man's "dominance over nature" at the expense o f either the earth or life on earth, including humans. Krell's "Analysis" at the conclusion o f volume I V o f Heidegger's Nietzsche attempts to explain the context in which Heidegger first gave the Nietzsche lectures. Krell maintains that Heidegger's confrontation with National Socialism occurs in the form o f resistance to "biologism" and his rejection o f the "official" Nietzsche "promulgated by Frau Forster [Nietzsche's sister] and embraced by the Nazi leadership." 222 I f one has a sense o f the extent to which Nietzsche's writings had been appropriated for Germany's political mission under National Socialism, Krell argues, without trying to minimize "Heidegger's own involvement in National Socialism," one would better understand that what Heidegger's students heard "was something different — it was in fact out of context" (ibid 2 7 0 - 2 ) . T h e fact that Alfred Baeumler is virtually unknown to Nietzsche scholarship today, unless as a propagandist for National Socialism, whereas Heidegger is still regarded as an authority on Nietzsche, would certainly underscore Krell's evaluation — after all, Baeumler was "one o f the most influential perpetrators o f the official' Nietzsche," and professor o f philosophy in Berlin from 1 9 3 3 to 1 9 4 5 (ibid, 2 6 9 ) . Still, Heidegger's Nietzsche as an improvement over Baeumler's Nietzsche is not the issue. Krell puts Heidegger's lectures in context but then goes on to explain that Heidegger's "later treatises on Nietzsche often turn their back on the richness o f Nietzsche's central thought, the eternal recurrence o f the same, and treat the will to power as a metaphysical construct or a will to rule and dominate rather than as an expression o f the life instinct.' Will to power there becomes indistinguishable from the 'essentially destructive' will-to-will and the accomplished subjectivism and nihil-

221 222

Heidegger, Nietzsche, IV, 87. Krell, "Analysis" in Heidegger, Nietzsche, IV, 269.

8. Immanence Manifested as Hubris, Exploitation, and Criminality

147

ism of planetary technology."223 We shall consider one more sample of Heidegger's very stubborn, very forced reading of Nietzsche on the will to power as it purportedly supports technological domination. 224 In his notes Nietzsche writes "To impress upon becoming the character of being — that is the highest will to power" (KSA 12:312). This fragment is known as the "Recapitulation" note and is numbered 617 in The Will to Power, but what interests us is what Heidegger does with it. He features it twice in volume I of Nietzsche, the first time writing: "This says: Becoming is only when it is grounded in being as being," the second time: "We ask: Why is this the highest Wi\\ to power? Answer: Because the will to power in its deepest essence is nothing other than the constancy of becoming into presence." 225 What concerns me is Heidegger's insistence that somehow Nietzsche actually prefers being to becoming, when in fact he went out of his way to characterize nature, the world, the will to power as clearly as possible in terms of becoming, "being" being for him another illusion of metaphysics, another anthropocentric halting of time or making of time into human form. Aside from the fact that Heidegger insists on a metaphysical interpretation of the will to power, what other motive could he have in wanting to isolate this relatively innocuous statement, intended as it is to argue for becoming by offering an analogy with being, i.e., an analogy with something that is exoterically more understandable? I find a plausible explanation in Babich, though she may disagree with my characterization of Nietzsche's analogy as an attempt to render the esoteric will to power more comprehensible. Babich writes: "A seal on shifting, everbecoming appearance fastens and marks it with the character of being. This fascination with static being characterizes the dominant, reactive Will to Power of Western culture. Thus Nietzsche writes... 'To seal Becoming with the character of Being — that is the supreme Will to Power.' Heidegger employs this declaration to draw a line between Nietzsche's doctrine of the Eternal Return as an expression of Will to Power and the possibility of an illumination of the Eternal Return through the essence of technology."226 Babich, like Krell and Arendt, understands that Heidegger is reading his own

223

224

225 226

Krell, "Analysis," 275. He is quoting Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977-1978), II, 177. See Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, who claims that Heidegger emphasized the superhuman as a legislator positing conditions for domination over the earth, hence his "acute description of the Nietzschean project must have had an immediate resonance . . . . " (268). And for a view opposing that of Krell's, namely that Heidegger took pains to present an image of Nietzsche liberated from Nazi ideology, see Miiller-Lauter, whose writings on Nietzsche and Heidegger are among the most detailed available. Miiller-Lauters volume III of Nietzsche-Interpretationen is subtitled Heidegger und Nietzsche (de Gruyter, 2000), but already in volume I he makes the point that Heidegger followed Baumlers lead in stressing the "will to power" as a finished book, and Heidegger did not actually refute Baumler except on the issue of the eternal recurrence, which Baumler trivializes {Nietzsche-Interpretationen I, 339-41, 342). Heidegger, Nietzsche. Vol. I (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961), 27, 656. Babich, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science, 264.

148

II. Immanence

values into Nietzsche's will to power, recasting both it and becoming as a metaphysical being. "Heidegger does not expressly advert to the difference between the W i l l to Power as it is the reactive expression o f impotence and need, and as it is an active expression o f overflowing abundance" (ibid, 2 6 4 ) . In the latter form, the form that Nietzsche generally has in mind when he speaks o f the will to power in connection with the superabundance, as opposed to the paucity and scarceness o f nature, the will to power does not "want" to be fixed or to imprint itself on becoming as a static being — that is entirely inconsistent with the character o f superabundant power and life. Foltz deals with this issue in Heidegger from a slightly different perspective, crediting Heidegger for his insight into the dangers o f technology. " T o the extent that technology becomes the exclusive manner in which entities can be revealed, 'to be' is 'to be a resource,' that is, to be 'in stock,' in supply, ready for delivery. It is through the constant

availability

o f entities that are revealed solely as an ordered, regulated

inventory firmly installed within the technological framework that the metaphysical quest for constant presence finds its final and perfect culmination." 2 2 7 I f Heidegger is the one who informs us about how technology in our time is monopolizing ontology, i.e., warping our otherwise human sense o f being into a mere "being in stock," and thereby pursuing a mania o f metaphysical "presencing," then Heidegger should not be insisting on reading the will to power as the agent o f imprinting the stamp o f being on becoming — this is only compounding the problem. It is but a small step from Foltz's observation concerning the danger o f succumbing to technology's tendency to regard being as Bestandot

stock, reserve, to the actual

treatment o f human beings as mere reserve, as mere inventory to be dealt with as one pleases. Anderson explains that French deconstruction follows Heidegger's lead in associating rationalism, democratic liberalism, technology and mass society as functions o f techne (knowledge): "In this view the metaphysical 'essence o f the West' is the will to further and further technological control o f the world, which results finally in the 'scientific' genocide o f the Jews. T h i s is what Lacoue-Labarthe means when he states that Celan was the victim o f Germany's 'Hellenic' Utopia, o f the age when 'that which since the Greeks has been called knowledge, that is techne,' comes to its terrible and inevitable 'fulfillment.'" 2 2 8 T h e association o f Heidegger with techne and technology, as well as with metaphysics, can be laid at his own doorstep, since he insists on reading Nietzsche in this manner, especially in connection with the will to power. O r as Milchman and Rosenberg write: " T h e Cartesian conception o f humans as the 'masters and possessors o f nature' is a fertile source for the unfolding o f planetary technics, the culminating point o f which is embodied in Nietzsche's Wille zur Macht,

which

constitutes for Heidegger the completion o f Western metaphysics." 2 2 9

227

Foltz, Inhabiting the Earth, 103.

228

Mark M. Anderson, "The 'Impossibility of Poetry': Celan and Heidegger in France," New Critique 53 (spring/summer 1991), 16.

German

8. Immanence Manifested as Hubris, Exploitation, and Criminality

149

One gets the impression reading Heidegger on technology that he is a most insightful, a most perceptive thinker on the important issue of how human being is being crowded off of our planet by forces which we could control if we better understood their nature. One also gets the impression, given his intractable silence concerning the Holocaust, that he would just as soon blame the Holocaust on technology, or nihilism, or a failure to properly embrace metaphysics. In any case, his defense of Nietzsche as a defense of metaphysics is not helpful, it purports to ground being when in fact it takes the ground out from under human beings, in effect reversing much of what Nietzsche actually strived for and attained in his struggle to liberate us from metaphysics. Compared to Nietzsche, when Heidegger addresses matters of immanence he does so with a detached, philosophical air, as a metaphysician, as a "pure thinker," and one does not feel any closer to the earth, though I dare say one thinks oneself closer to the earth. Miiller-Lauter offers a sobering reading of Heidegger's attempt to make Nietzsche into a metaphysician, but there is even more at stake, since in foisting a metaphysical frame onto Nietzsche, Heidegger also remained free to extrapolate from metaphysics to political speculations reflective of his National Socialist time and place. For example, according to Miiller-Lauter, Heidegger did not fully hear or accept Nietzsche's qualification that the superhuman can just as well exist in solitary if he cannot lead; not until the 1950s, in any case, did Heidegger soften his rigid interpretation of the superhuman from the writings of the 1930s and 1940s. 230 A brief return to the reasons why immanence is called for in the first place is in order. Passmore observes that ecological critics of the West "are justified in arguing that Christianity has encouraged man to think of himself as metaphysically unique, as supernaturally above, rather than naturally immersed in, the ebb and flow of processes." Christianity encourages the belief that men are "'sons of God' and therefore secure, their continued existence on earth guaranteed by God." 231 As Nietzsche is quite careful to add, the metaphysical superstructure erected by Christianity continues to sponsor such hubris long after "God is dead," that is, long after modern humans have stopped feeling for their God and their religion — this is the condition of nihilism otherwise stated as "life without meaning" which Nietzsche transforms into a parable of life and earth affirmation by claiming "life without meaning

229

Alan Milchman, Alan Rosenberg, "Heidegger, Planetary Technics, and the Holocaust" in Martin Heidegger and the Holocaust, edited by Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), 221. For the opposing view, or let us say, for a discussion of Heidegger's views on the polis as not commensurate with National Socialism, see Gregory Schufreider, "Heidegger's Contribution to a Phenomenology of Culture," Journal ofthe British Society for Phenomenology 17:2 (1986), 166-85.

230

Miiller-Lauter, Nietzsche-Interpretationen III: Heidegger undNietzsche (Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2000), 159-65, 110-11. Passmore, Man's Responsibility for Nature: Ecological Problems and Western Traditions, 2nd ed. (London: Duckworth, 1980), 184.

231

150

II. Immanence

eternally" — eternal recurrence of the same. It should be more difficult, or let us say, less inviting to ravage and exploit the earth, and all life on it, once one realizes that there is no place to go after life on earth, not even death, because one returns eternally to the same life. In The Domination of Nature Leiss focuses on the figure of the alchemist as one who embodies Western notions of seizure, control, and exploitation of nature. '"The alchemist,' wrote Paracelsus, the great practitioner of this trade, 'is he who helps to develop to the extreme limits intended by nature that which nature produces for the benefit of mankind.'" A seemingly innocent statement, and perhaps one that would resonate with modern sensitivities though written in the early 1500s, until one examines its premises. Nature intends the development of its products for human consumption, and nature produces everything for mankind's benefit. But the Faust legend that begins circulating late in the sixteenth century, based in part on the example of Paracelsus, is dominated according to Leiss by "a fundamental ambiguity . . . for the notion of an irresistible lust to command nature's secret energies arouses the terrifying, complementary fear and guilt represented in the diabolical pact." Now the words of Paracelsus can be seen more clearly as hubris, for in order to unlock and unleash nature's secret energies, Faust must make a pact with the devil, God's adversary, and Faust raises himself above mere mortals to take on god-like powers. T h e alchemists, our early scientists, "were convinced that they had only to discover a few operational tricks in order to gain the long-sought prize: complete mastery of nature, that is, the ability to duplicate the work of creation." 232 After all, if God is the Creator, and the earth his Creation, should mortals not at least attempt to emulate this absolute goodness? Is this not "human nature?" And if the answer, governed by tradition and religion, is a profound N o — humans should not aspire to be god-like — then should humans not treat Creation with great reverence, with great deference, as something divine? 233 Christianity engenders on the one hand the perception that everything is here for human benefit, but on the other hand that everything is here by divine generosity, as Creation, with humans a part of Creation. As early masters of nature, the alchemists make a political attempt to be smaller creators in the manner of lesser gods. Instead of conceiving "mastery" as growing into and assuming a proper place in nature, they want to create nature again, i.e., they begin to perpetrate the creatio ex nihilo instead of doing the heavy lifting required of drawing exclusively on human powers of creativity. As science and learning and technology grow, as alchemists become chemists

232 233

Leiss, The Domination of Nature (New York: George Braziller, 1972), 40-2. Roszak, The Voice of the Earth, contends that alchemists were quite different creatures than those depicted by Leiss: "Macrocosm spoke to microcosm; microcosm reflected macrocosm. The two were in living dialogue. Understanding the universe was a matter of listening, having ears to hear the music of the spheres, the voice of the Earth. Wisdom meant connecting" (15-16).

8. Immanence Manifested as Hubris, Exploitation, and Criminality

151

and physicists and engineers, the same impulse to master nature and to duplicate creation is at work and will continue to be at work, in Nietzsche's view, until we human beings fashion our own values of creation, our own earthly values of creation, which in turn makes earth a partner in creation and not a mere product. It deserves repeating that hubris, excessive pride in the human being's capacities and wisdom, such that humans regard themselves as gods and dispense with human decency and limitations, leads to a mind set that believes itself liberated of the divine but capable of acting with divine impunity, as though a "human religion" or "human worship" were imposed in place of divine worship. This is seen in the example of National Socialism, with its emphasis on what Pois calls "the sanctity of nature," in its "discomfiture with the Judeo-Christian tradition." Generic to modern nationalism in the West, he maintains, are "(1) what can be called a 'flight from history,' or 'flight from transcendence'; (2) a sanctification of national life; and (3) the acceptance, and virtual sanctification, of a presumed 'natural order of things.'" 234 So while the "God" may be absent from the picture of such negative immanence, the motions and passions and actions formerly devoted to that God remain and are channeled into political projects. That the Nazi idealogues were concerned that men should live in harmony with the environment does not make this a bad idea: "In their own version of the natural religion however, i.e., their Lebensphilosophie, the National Socialists exemplified a pernicious tendency that must be of special concern for anyone who chooses to see man as a product of some deified nature, and nothing more than that," and Pois concludes by stating that Himmler's "reduction of men to being simple products of nature . . . pieces of earth" carried over into his views and policy regarding Judaism. 2 3 5 As Pois sees things, the N S movement was rooted in nature and "there could be no appeal to any sort of higher authority for justification, and those individuals, who, with unbounded arrogance, has deprecated humanity in order that a mystery-grounded naturally-determined racial elite rule on earth for one thousand years, found themselves condemned by their own naturalism." 236 W h a t Pois is describing is, I believe, a condition of nihilism such that the sense of meaning is completely lost, completely absent, despite the propaganda of "kingdom of a thousand years" and related motivational apparatus. Having no purpose or meaning beyond their own installation to power and totalitarian rule, the Nazis quickly resorted to genocide, regarding nature as their prison and closed circuit, in which the only course of action was to kill before being killed. Indeed, the Nazi form of immanence is a mind set of no escape, no egress, for which the death camp serves as a fitting metaphor: while the Germans carried out their annihilation of millions of Jews, they were themselves inmates of the camps by virtue of having

234 235 236

Pois, National Socialism and the Religion of Nature, 3. Pois, National Socialism, 58-9. Pois, National Socialism, 120-1.

152

II. Immanence

to perpetrate the atrocities and live, each day, in the presence of their atrocity — this is not immanence, this is not joy and affirmation of life, this is not the meaning of the earth — this is perversion. 237 That humanity still needs above all to learn to deal effectively with its own powers and limitations, in order to achieve a sense of well being that does not lash out at itself, nature, or others, is suggested by Freud's comment that man has become a kind of prosthetic God: "When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give much trouble at times." 238 Freud's suggestion that at our best we are not organic in our relations to ourselves and our environment, but instead equipped with artificial organs and limbs, betrays our lack of confidence vis-à-vis nature. Passmore would have us "admit the independence of nature" as a first step in learning to admire, sensuously enjoy, and study nature as opposed to "looking for simple methods of manipulating" its complex ways. To suggest that we cannot, as Hegel thought, "take any interest in it or feel any concern for it underestimates the degree to which we can overcome egoism and achieve disinterestedness. The emergence of new moral attitudes to nature is bound up, then, with the emergence of a more realistic philosophy of nature. That is the only adequate foundation for effective ecological concern." 239 Nietzsche might object to the expressions "overcoming egoism" and "achieving disinterestedness," as they are indicative of humanity's lack of self esteem in his view, but he would agree with Passmore emphatically on the need to admit nature's independence and to coexist within and with it. Nietzsche is an alchemist, by his own admission, but not because he tries to transform the lead of immanence into a golden transcendence — Nietzschean alchemy regards everything on earth, pain and pleasure, as worthy of affirmation, as worthy of love — in short, as gold.

237

Müller-Lauter addresses the problem of a "second innocence" unleashed by the death of the "maximal God" who engendered maximal feelings of guilt in humans; the "second innocence" envisioned by Nietzsche, as a state of immanent earth affirmation, degenerated in the 20th century into a "brutal spiritual vacuum" which N. could not foresee (Nietzsche-Interpretationen II: Über Freiheit und Chaos, Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999, 321).

238

Freud, Civilization, 38-9. Passmore, Man's Responsibility for Nature, 217-8.

239

Chapter III: Nietzschean Religiosity 1. Grounding versus Religion Founding "I am no human being, I am dynamite. — And with all that there is nothing of the religion founder in me — religions are affairs of the rabble, I need to wash my hands after contact with religious people." Ecce Homo 14, 1

In the concluding chapter of Ecce Homo, immodestly but also playfully entitled "Why I am a Destiny," Nietzsche offers explicit disavowals of the role of religious founder while leaving the door open for this interpretation on the part of others by pointing to his world-historical achievements. One day his name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous, "with a crisis like none other on earth, with the deepest collision of conscience, with a decision summoned forth against everything that had previously been believed, demanded, hallowed." After stating his credentials in this way, indicating that he is the precipitator of a crisis dividing or rupturing human history, he continues: "I am no human being, I am dynamite. — And with all that there is nothing of the religion founder in me — religions are affairs of the rabble, I need to wash my hands after contact with religious people." He states furthermore that he does not want "believers," that he fears he will one day be pronounced holy and therefore writes Ecce Homo as a preemptive act, that he does not want to be a saint ("sooner a f o o l . . . perhaps I am a fool"), that he is the discoverer of truth by virtue of having exposed the lies of millennia, that he contradicts as no one before him and yet is the opposite of a nay-saying spirit, that he is a " bearer of glad tidings" ("ein froher Botschafter"). Not by accident does Nietzsche use the expression "bearer of glad tidings," for this is the original meaning of evangelist, i.e., one who brings good news or gospel. At the same time, he adds, he is also "the human being of calamity" inasmuch as the ensuing clash between truth and lie will unleash "a convulsion of earth quakes," and politics as usual will dissolve into a spiritual war, old power structures will be blown to bits: "there will be wars such as have never existed before on earth. Only beginning with me does the earth know great politics" (EH 14/1, KSA 6:365-6). Clearly, then, Nietzsche makes a sporting attempt to explain why he is "a destiny." Even at this late stage where he is focused on his legacy, and even in this enigmatic, euphoric text, too often dismissed as completely irrational, his thinking is devoted to the earth as a whole and to earthly concerns at large, such that there will be convulsive earth quakes — his metaphor for changing the spiritual landscape — and a new era of spiritual warfare designated as "great politics." Whether this is megalomania, feigned martyrdom, self

154

III. Nietzschean Religiosity

parody, or mischievous (masking, masked) fun, or even a combination of these traits, there is no overlooking the unmistakably Nietzschean task behind the mask, namely, the ecumenical task of inhabiting the earth in both body and spirit. In a sense Nietzsche's self-juxtapositioning with Christ as a religion founder is called for by the nature of his task, and therefore cannot be avoided, neither by Nietzsche nor by readers. In addition to the example given above, consider this one from the notes of the Zarathustra period. "Zarathustra teaches redemption from redeemers. / Being magnanimous toward the earth? No, just" (KSA 10:356). Much is at stake in this seemingly simple juxtaposition. T h e redeemer Christ in effect redeems or liberates humans from the earth (body, pain, suffering, mortality, sin etc), and this manner of redemption results in "eternal" disembodied life in a beyond called heaven. Humans need "redeeming" from this kind of redemption, according to Nietzsche, i.e., they need to be liberated from this particular Christian notion of redemption in order to establish proper habitation of the earth. As if anticipating the question and its implied criticism: does Zarathustra (Nietzsche) teach redemption from redeemers out of magnanimity for the earth? Nietzsche preemptively explains: no, Zarathustra is being just to the earth. This sets up an important difference in the relationship between human and earth. If Zarathustra were to redeem from redeemers as an act of magnanimity, that alone would be fine, and helpful, but does Zarathustra have the right to such a gesture? That is, does Zarathustra redeem humans from redeemers only to function himself as another magnanimous redeemer of earth? Does the earth need magnanimity (redemption) or does the earth instead warrant and deserve justice? Justice, Nietzsche is saying, is the more grounded, more basic and organic relationship that should obtain between humans and earth — magnanimity sides with and resides in the anthropocentric, the hubristically humanistic perspective. The earth should be given its due, plainly and simply, and this is why Zarathustra's redeeming from redeemers is an anti-redemption, an act of restoring earth to its proper place by virtue of putting humankind in its place. Another note from the same period makes it clear that Nietzsche is thinking in counter terms, forging an alternative to prevailing doctrines as they pertain to ecumenical issues. T h e highest expression of Jesuitism and socialism, he claims, is the rule of humanity for the purpose of making it happy ("zum Zweck ihrer Beglückung"), while making humanity happy is done through the preservation of illusion, of faith. Then he writes: " To this my counter movement: — Rule of humanity for the purpose of its overcoming." This overcoming is to be achieved "by means of teachings from which it will perish, except those who withstand them" (KSA 10:315). 2 4 0

240

Emphasis is N . s. In some cases, especially when quoting from the notes, I do not attempt to reproduce the text as N.'s editors do, using both italics and bold face. In his notes N . uses both conventions much more so than in his published writings, which already bristle with emphasis.

1. Grounding versus Religion Founding

155

Here, too, we see how Nietzsche's strategy is to have the effect of a counter redeemer. Instead of promising or providing happiness through the propagation and sustaining of faith, and seeing the rule of humanity in this purpose, his purpose for the species is to foster overcoming, i.e., the status of humanity at any given point in history should be overcome. Whereas the redeeming movements (religion, socialism) achieve their goal of stasis by making people happy through illusion and faith, Nietzsche would achieve his goal of dynamism or self-overcoming by counter means, i.e., by using teachings or doctrines that have the effect of weeding out, or cultivating the humans who endure or withstand the teachings (e.g. eternal recurrence of the same). The definition of self-overcoming requires that the current stage be surpassed, so in order to facilitate this purpose, Nietzsche uses teachings which leave people behind or, if they are strong enough, push them into the next iteration of self overcoming. The talk of "zu Grunde gehen" (to perish) need not be taken literally. First of all, it is intended to counter the static conception of being in happiness that is promised by the redeemers, and secondly, there will be self overcoming on the part of the species whether or not those who cannot endure the hard teachings perish or merely continue to survive — the hard teachings are a stimulus for the ones who withstand them, not necessarily a death sentence for those who do not. 241 And of course, those who do not endure the new teachings are going to perish, in their own good time, just as are those who endure the teaching — the decisive point, and Nietzsche concludes his note with this, is that opposed to the current theory whereby the purpose of the human being is the preservation of the species and only to this extent also the preservation of the person, he proposes "so it stands too with very individualized human beings: we are concerned for our future needs\" (KSA 10:315). What must not become lost in all this is the fact that Nietzsche regards himself and his task as a counter redemption, promising more or less the opposite of what is promised by the redeeming movements, and he does so based on his notion that humanity is not fixed but dynamic. That he sees himself working against Christianity and socialism, the latter being a political form of Christianity, is clear from his identification of "Jesuits" at the beginning of his note. Around the time Nietzsche is writing The Dawn, published in 1881, he is putting together a draft under the heading "Religion nouvelle" which conspicuously contains ten propositions. As this provides an unusual glimpse into Nietzsche's pre-Zarathustra workshop and represents a kind of résumé of a "new religion," and inasmuch as it will not be found in The Will to Power, that arrangement of notes being limited to a selection of notes from 1883 and forward, I shall reproduce it here: 241

Gemes (1992) explains that N. "is happy that lesser mortals should remain with their unconditional truths" and that particular types of metaphysics such as Christian cosmology should "be abandoned by certain types of people" (56-7).

156

III. Nietzschean Religiosity

Religion nouvelle 1) 2) 3) 4) 5) 6) 7) 8)

saved for rare moments veneration of lust to sacrifice no God, no beyond, no reward and punishment no blaming anymore, no pangs of conscience, but pangs of reason the ego restored the beautiful perceived as the self sacrificing ego no universal h u m a n love, rather rule of drives the highest intelligence taken as a norm, as common and therefore not revered, because ordinary 9) the imprudence (Unklugheit) of magnanimity admired. Pitying a weakness and relaxation — conceded 10) not admired as sacrifice for others, rather as the full triumph of one affect over the others, so that we dedicate life, honor etc to it: ergo the fullness of passion is what is essential. (KSA 9:402)

This list of "new religion" commandments, as it were, should be compared with the Bible's Ten Commandments under the lens of affirming life on earth. These are not commandments, of course, only ideas or strategies of affirmation, and as number one indicates, only "for rare moments" anyway. But just to be on the safe side, I will also reproduce the note immediately preceding "Religion nouvelle": "The only thing missing still are the great persuasive human beings — otherwise everything is prepared for a complete change; principles, mistrust, dissolution of all contracts, the habit, yes even the need for shaking up (Erschütterung), dissatisfaction" (KSA 9:402). Now let this preface to the "ten propositions" be compared to section one of Ecce Homo, "Why I am a Destiny." Before he has even formulated the eternal recurrence of the same, Nietzsche is on the way to designing strategies for a "complete change" in the complexion ofWestern culture — only the "great persuasive persons" are lacking! Observe, too, that he calls for a plurality of such human beings, not a single leader. The semantic and conceptual correspondence between notes 8 [93] and 8 [94] (KSA 9:402) and the description of himself as a "destiny" in Ecce Homo is simply too close, too uncanny to be overlooked, even though these writings are separated by eight years.242 The idea of the eternal recurrence of the same begins to surface in Nietzsche's notes in early August 1881. In one set of notes (11[157]-11[161]) he describes eternal recurrence as a rotation (Kreislauf) without goal, as a circle without beginning or without "having become" ("nichts Gewordenes"). Colli points out that material from this note fragment was used in The Gay Science 109, but in that aphorism there is no

242

Werner Stegmaier, Nietzsches 'Genealogie der Moral' (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1994), claims N. was close to Feuerbach in wanting to make a new religion out of the critique of religion, but N. ultimately condemned Feuerbach for projecting the essence of humans into the perfection of the species, a view that N. compared with "the last human" or opposite of superhuman (164).

1. Grounding versus Religion Founding

157

mention of the rotation or circle in the context of the eternal recurrence of the same, which Nietzsche saves for # 3 4 1 "The heaviest weight." 243 What is of interest to our immediate discussion is that 11 [157] is followed by a paragraph which can only refer to eternal recurrence, though again it is not specifically referred to in this manner, and which draws a comparison with Christianity. Let us beware, Nietzsche writes, of teaching such a doctrine as if it were a sudden religion. "It must slowly soak in, entire generations must build on it and become fruitful, — so that it becomes a great tree overshadowing all of humanity to come. What are the couple of millennia in which Christianity has preserved itself! For the most powerful thought many millennia are needed — long longit must be small and powerless" (KSA 9:503). Once again we see that Nietzsche cannot help but speak of the eternal recurrence of the same in the context of Christianity. It is designed to serve as a counter doctrine to Christianity's teachings of the immortality of the soul and the afterlife, but Nietzsche cannot resist commenting on the doctrine as if it had the attraction of religion, and indeed, he warns against teaching it like religion, supposedly as some form of revelation or advent. Jaspers describes an exchange of letters between Nietzsche and Peter Gast. The latter had written to Nietzsche concerning Zarathustra: "This book deserves the circulation of the Bible, its canonical appearance, its sequence of commentaries . . . ," to which Nietzsche responds, apparently taking Gast seriously: "I shuddered at your words, if you are right, then my life would not be a waste . . . ,"244 Nietzsche's response to Gast, who could very well have been sincere in his praise of Zarathustra, reveals again that he knew he was on to something great, that he had struck gold with the eternal recurrence of the same, which after all is the central message of Zarathustra and the strongest doctrine for helping to give the earth its meaning. In his notes he worried about how to present the teaching, and the fact that the idea's first mention in Science is couched in hypothetical terms, with use of the familiar du pronoun in order to heighten the personal, communicative, exoteric effect — all this underscores how much Nietzsche agonizes over the presentation and reception of this admittedly strange, indeed, paradoxical doctrine. I agree with Conway that Nietzsche's sense of flattery notwithstanding, the philosopher in him made him wary indeed of a religious following. "In order to allay his greatest fear as a philosopher — that he might be involuntarily conscripted as the new redeemer — Nietzsche welcomes the deconstruction of his own textual authority, thus preemptively sabotaging his potential candidacy for the position of interim God." 245 The manner in which Conway uses the word "deconstruction" here is appropriate, and should not be confused with the run

243 244

245

See KSA 14, Kommentar zu den Bänden 1-13, 646. Jaspers, Nietzsche, 78. N.'s letter to Gast (Köselitz) from 6 April 1883 in Friedrich Nietzsche Briefwechsel: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, edited Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Vol. 3, part 2 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1985), 361. Conway, "Nietzsche contra Nietzsche," 105-6.

158

III. Nietzschean Religiosity

of the mill deconstructing that has been all-too-common in Nietzsche scholarship since Derrida. Just as Nietzsche claims in Ecce that he writes the work as a preemptive act against those who would become his believers, his faithful, so too Zarathustra has built in features to dissuade the redemption needy. I think Nietzsche is being as straight forward and good humored about his quasi-religious doctrine as he can be, knowing as a philosopher that he would immediately compromise his principles if he teaches redemption from redeemers on the one hand, and practices redemption or allows himself to be seen as a redeemer on the other. Despite his hyperbole to the effect that he has to wash his hands after contact with religious people, Nietzsche as can be seen in his writings on the Greeks and in his writings on moderns was a person of unusual religious sensitivity. Whatever else may be said of him in this regard, religion was for him not a matter of indifference, and when one sets aside the fact that he criticized major religions for expending precious, finite human energy on nihilistic, earth-undermining values, one sees that Nietzsche remained open to alternatives for the channeling of religious energy. Jung maintains that Nietzsche was actually a better Christian and more moral than Christians before and after him: "Zarathustra is a highly moral book. If anybody should try to live that teaching, he would have astonishing experiences. He would certainly feel himself to be a better Christian than all those before."246 Not that Nietzsche in writing Zarathustrawas trying to be a better Christian — we should accept his own testimony on this point and agree that Zarathustra represents a serious, or a seriously intended alternative to the exemplary moralizing Christian. But Jung understands that insofar as Zarathustra embodies a new morality, a morality of the earth and the body, he is still a moral teacher and therefore closer to the original religiosity of Christianity's founder than the institutionalized Christian of today. Jung invites us to consider what it means for Nietzsche to declare that God is dead. The moment this declaration is made, he ceases to be a Christian and becomes an atheist who is now caught up in the process "of that archetype of rebirth, because those vital powers in us which we call 'God' are powers of self-renewal, powers of eternal change."247 Indeed, if one examines closely the discourse of Zarathustra one finds that among Nietzsche's favorite metaphors are those of birth and rebirth, procreation, and love. The book's appeal can in part be explained by its strong atmosphere of renewal, and whether one subscribes to Jung's theory of archetypes or not, clearly his idea can be linked to a real phenomenon in Nietzsche and a real reception in the world of Nietzsche's readers. For the more agnostic and cynical Jung issues a disclaimer: people will object that it makes no difference whether one declares this or that. "But I tell you it does make a difference in reality, only you won't connect it with things. You see, the man Nietzsche himself did not realize, when he said God was 246 247

Jung, Nietzsche's "Zarathustra, "Ti. Jung, Nietzsche's "Zarathustra, "54.

1. Grounding versus Religion Founding

159

dead, that it meant that he would get into the mill, into the alchemical pot where it is cooked and transformed (ibid, 54). Though I agree with Jung that Nietzsche went into the "alchemical pot" once he declared the death o f God, I cannot agree that he did so unknowing of the consequences to himself. Nietzsche was not only well versed in matters o f Christianity, coming from generations o f pastors, he was also more perceptive than most about gods in general, having applied himself in creative ways within the field o f classical philology. I believe he was indeed aware that there would be consequences for his own health and well being, though I would concede to Jung that he did not know in what precise form. Jung's point is basically that it is dangerous to say and mean that God is dead. If Nietzsche knew "what a task he was confronted with, he would not teach it; he would keep it all to himself. You see, when one preaches such things, one practically says you ought to do it, but / am all right" (ibid, 55). This appears to correspond with Conway's notion of the self-deconstructing authority o f Zarathustra, and with Nietzsche's own remarks, insofar as it addresses the redeemer/redeeming problem. W h y declare that God is dead unless one has an alternative, a solution? A process has been set in motion whereby the messenger must account for the message by providing something in its stead. This process has been referred to as the archetype o f rebirth by Jung, but for Nietzsche there is no denying that his entire creative energy, his task, his work become providing the meaning o f the earth in the absence o f God. O n e who is creative in this way and to this great extent, Jung cautions, will have his energies sapped, his time stolen by the creative forces, they would like "to imagine that they are Shiva, in order to have the delight of being creative. But if you know you are creative and enjoy being creative, you will be crucified afterwards, because anyone identified with God will be dismembered" (ibid, 58). When one reflects on Nietzsche's assertion that as part o f his Dionysian dowry he knows women, and that women who engage in "tearing apart" are "charming maenads," he is referring to the punishment inflicted on the god Dionysus, who is torn apart by his maenad followers and regenerates as a symbol o f eternal life and resurrection. 248 And when in his madness Nietzsche signs his last postcards, postmarked Turin on 4 January 1889, as " T h e crucified one" and as "Dionysus," the two symbols o f resurrection, o f eternal life become conflated in him, such that he no longer appears to play one against the other ("Dionysus against the crucified" E H 14/9, K S A 6 : 3 7 4 ) . It cannot escape notice that the philosophical alternative to religion in general and to Christianity in particular is itself highly religious, namely the Dionysian, based as it is on Nietzsche's reworking o f the artistic deity o f the ancient Greeks into a "philosopher god." O n this reasoning, when Nietzsche looks for a medium or vehicle for his new doctrines of earth affirmation, he unabashedly revisits the sphere o f religion, as if to say that the type of earth affirmation he calls for is only possible if the religious impulse is tapped.

248

Staten, Nietzsche's Voice, 118.; Del Caro, "Andreas-Salomé and Nietzsche: New Perspectives," 84.

160

III. Nietzschean Religiosity

Rosen refers to Zarathustra as a "younger and stronger" representation of Nietzsche himself, a prophet of a new doctrine, "that of a philosophical lawgiver or revolutionary founder of a new order."249 While contemporary philosophers such as Rosen are able to comment on Zarathustra with scholarly detachment and rigor and to recognize at the same time that Zarathustra occupies a place of its own in the Western tradition, with very few peers as a work of art,250 the earliest decades of Nietzsche reception were much more inclined to exploit the religious aura of Zarathustra. Aschheim is therefore able to document extensively how alternative and often incompatible counter-religious concepts were a factor in the assimilation of Nietzscheanism "as a shaping factor in European, and especially German, culture." Those who wanted a religious Nietzsche found allusions to religion everywhere in his writings but especially in Zarathustra, and "Nietzschean religious impulses thus appeared in various left-wing guises while at the same time inspiring the outlook and imagery of countless neo-romantic and völkisch groupings as well as purportedly apolitical avant-garde literary and intellectual circles." The scope of this influence is striking enough, but even stranger is the reception epicenter: "This diffusion began in both a significant and startling way. For the escapades of Nietzschean religion in Germany began not as a revolt against the Church but as a force within it, as a means for the revitalization not the destruction of Christianity!"251 As if to confirm his worst fears, and as if in an eternal recurrence of Zarathustra's failed attempts to persuade his auditors that he is not a redeemer, Nietzsche was "co-opted as a crucial agent of Protestant regeneration."252 When he was not being appropriated by Protestants, the pagan and men's movements adopted Nietzsche, as in the example of August Horneffer, author of an essay entitled "Der heidnische Lebensweg" (The Pagan Way of Life), according to which "Nietzsche's invocation to remain true to the earth was possible only when anchored in community life." The alleged Nietzschean contours of this community, meanwhile, were not compassion for the poor and sick, not neighborly love, but instead "commonality of creation, brotherhood in arms, mutual elevation and fructification."253 This early effort to build a Nietzschean community, heedless to the fact that Zarathustra is without lasting companions (except for his animals) and is unable to establish a sense of community due to his profound differences with the existing community, is part of the broader Zeitgeist which "sought to transmute Nietzscheanism into a new configuration of faith in which the political and the religious realms became increas249 250

251 252

253

Rosen, The Mask of Enlightenment, 22. Rosen compares it to the Bible, Thousand and One Nights, to Oriental writings, to Montesquieu's Persian Letters insofar as it "approaches the West from the standpoint of detachment," 7. Aschheim, "After the Death of God," 218, 219-20. Aschheim, "After the Death of God," 231. See also pp. 226 and 228 for descriptions of early religious titles that drew on Nietzsche. Aschheim, "After the Death of God," 241.

1. Grounding versus Religion Founding

161

ingly intertwined." 254 We have already considered Pois' writing on the outcome of early twentieth century experiments with religion and politics as they blossomed into National Socialism as a "religion of nature." Interestingly, one of the features of Nietzsche's quasi-religious thinking not adopted by the Nazis was the Dionysian, according to Bataille, about which Hitler was supposed to have wryly remarked: "Youth needs stadiums, not sacred groves."255 Of course Nietzsche was not the only one in the nineteenth century to sense that a spiritual vacuum had emerged, and on this point Nietzsche was influenced by his much admired Emerson, who according to Stack abandoned transcendentalism and began to speak instead of an "immanent vital force." But whatever Emerson may have preserved by way of religious sentiment, Stack stretches matters in referring to Nietzsche as a "founder of Dionysian religion" and a proponent of "Dionysian faith." 256 1 say this not because Stack is wrong to emphasize the power with which Nietzsche embraced and recommended his modernized Dionysus, but only because we must attempt to find terms for Nietzsche's religiosity which do not themselves reinforce the operations of religiosity that he critiques in the figure of the redeemer and the believer. In a sense, "Dionysian faith" should be an oxymoron, for if we view the Dionysian as Nietzsche invites us to by regarding it as the highest standard and test of life and earth affirmation, "faith" is not an issue, inasmuch as religious faith by definition alleviates and mitigates the experience of life on earth, i.e., it is one of the strategies whereby life on earth is made tolerable as a mere temporal phenomenon, a transient "vale of tears." The Dionysian is an anti-faith, a statement to the effect that however miserable life may be on any given day, in the aggregate there is nothing more glorious, nothing more worthy of embrace than this moment.

2. Paganism's Special Powers of Affirmation "Here nothing reminds us of ascetism, spirituality and duty: here speaks only an exuberant and triumphant existence in which everything present is deified, whether it is good or evil." The Birth of Tragedy, 3

In Tragedy Nietzsche sets the tone for his later critique of morals by contrasting the pagan culture of the early Greeks with modern Western culture. Although his purpose at the time is merely to mentally prepare moderns for a better, closer appreciation of pagan culture for the sake of his argument in Tragedy, his statement will reverberate throughout his writings and serve as a grounding feature of his thought. 254 255 256

Aschheim, "After the Death of God," 247. Bataille, On Nietzsche, 171. Stack, Nietzsche and Emerson, 158, 335, 359.

162

III. Nietzschean Religiosity

Whoever might approach these Olympians with another religion at heart, he writes, perhaps seeking moral elevation, holiness, disembodied spirituality, merciful love looks "will be discouraged and disappointed and soon turn his back on them. Here nothing reminds us of ascetism, spirituality and duty: here speaks only an exuberant and triumphant existence in which everything present is deified, whether it is good or evil" (BT 3, KSA 1:34-5). This feature of the early Greek culture may serve as the very definition of affirmation, namely the deification, not mere acceptance, of everything that is present ("alles Vorhandene"), such that a people's existence is exuberant and triumphant. Nietzsche gives due notice to moderns that we will not find our own values reinforced here. Particularly difficult for moderns to fathom is the deification of everything, of all things whether good or evil, since this runs counter to everything we cherish in the civilized human's capacity for and exercise of moral judgment. We should also heed and bear in mind how Nietzsche already at this very early stage offers a sustained critique of asceticism in the form of Socratic optimism, for the ascetic impulse as he elaborates in his later writings, especially Genealogy, is one of the strongest undermining impulses to contribute to life and earth denial. This argument is strengthened in Science where Nietzsche raises the issue of the origin of sin, and once again finds himself comparing cultures. Sin is a Jewish invention, he maintains, later adopted by Christians. Owing to the strict separation, indeed opposition of God and humanity in Judaism, moreover, it is not even possible to sin against humans: "each deed is supposed to be seen only in the light of its supernatural consequences, not its natural ones: this is how Jewish feeling, to which everything natural is indignity per se, wants it. The Greeks on the other hand were closer to thinking that even sacrilege could have dignity, even theft, as with Prometheus, even the slaughtering of cattle as the expression of an insane envy, as with Ajax" (GS 135, KSA 4867). Nietzsche concludes his aphorism by underscoring how the Greek need to invent and incorporate dignity into sacrilege led to their invention of tragedy (ibid, 487), and here we have another splendid example of how inventive, indeed resourceful the Greeks were in regulating as opposed to merely extirpating their passions.257 The role of the body in pagan affirmation amounts to more than simply affirming the senses, though this in itself is healthy and desirable. This Nietzsche makes clear in "Beauty no accident" from Twilight. The beauty of a race or a family, he begins, is gained by hard work. One cannot simply cultivate feelings and thoughts, for this amounts to nearly nothing: "One must first persuade the body." What is decisive in the fate of a people and in humanity is that culture begins in the right place, not in the soul but in the body, gestures, diet, physiology, while everything else follows from these. The Greeks, he concludes, remain the first cultural event in history, for they

See above chapter II, section 5. In the current discussion of Science 135 N. is plainly suggesting that the ancient Jews put their resources into inventing sin, while the pagan Greeks put theirs into inventing tragedy, which by contrast is an earth affirmative expression.

2. Paganisms Special Powers of Affirmation

163

knew and did what they needed to do, while Christianity which despises the body "was the biggest misfortune of humanity to date" (TI9/47, KSA 6:148-9). This economy of the beautiful includes the body as its primary ingredient, and is based not so much on an ideal of beauty but on the finite, physical properties that are accumulated after generations of work. Culture along the same lines is not a matter of opinion but is also based on the body, radiating outward from the body to take on the manifestations we attribute, say, to the early Greeks of the tragic age. We can extrapolate from this that as long as the body is primary in notions of culture, a culture will be grounded, earth affirming, and dwelling constructively within the economy of the closest things. Conversely, as long as the soul is primary — and for Nietzsche this development is represented by a fusion of Judaic, Platonic, and Christian forces — a culture will be earth denying, dwelling at odds with the closest things, most conspicuously with the body and nature. Though the mention of Dionysus in Nietzsche's published writings disappears after Tragedy and does not resume until Beyond {1886), the Dionysian transformed from the artistic deity of tragedy resurfaces in the 1880s and has its most significant presence in Zarathustra, though again without specific mention of Dionysus. All the more interesting, therefore, to find Nietzsche redirecting his focus to Dionysus in 1885 in his notes, where he praises the Dionysian as "the highest world affirmation and transfiguration of existence achieved on earth to this day" (KSA 11:681). The standard was set so high by the Dionysian Greeks, Nietzsche maintains, that Dionysus is a judge before whom the West's greatest moments and figures, Goethe, Beethoven, Shakespeare, Raffael are condemned. But all hope is not lost, for Nietzsche recites a litany of Dionysian "imperatives" designed to help one overcome the Christian, recapture "a southern health and hidden power of the soul" in a process of becoming "more Greek" (griechischer) (ibid, 681-2). In relation to nature and the natural the pagan is "yes-saying to the natural, the feeling of innocence in the natural, 'naturalness'" while "the Christian (chrisdich) is no-saying to the natural, the feeling of unworthiness in the natural, antinaturalness" (KSA 12:571-2). When Nietzsche speaks of the "innocence of becoming" and restoring the innocence of becoming, he has in mind an essentially pagan way of dwelling in nature free of bad conscience and free of ascetic impulses. If one examines closely the historical success of Christianity, Nietzsche observes, one must deal with the fact that what is most noble and high does not affect the masses, ergo Christianity's success has nothing to do with the greatness of its founder: "Between him and its historical success lies a very earthly and dark layer of passion, error, greed for power and honor, for continuing forces of the imperium romanum, a layer from which Christianity obtained that taste of earth and earthly remainder that enabled its continuation in this world and also gave it sustainability" (UM II/ 9, KSA 1:320-1). Nietzsche appears to be indicating that although Christ's greatness as an individual was decisive in establishing Christianity, the longevity of this earth denying religion owes to rather pagan and mundane features of "worldliness" grafted

164

III. Nietzschean Religiosity

onto Christianity from the Roman empire. In addition to making the point that people "vote with their stomachs" when it comes to supporting religion, i.e., that even Christians whose dogma teaches them to deny the body in fact respond favorably to the body, Nietzsche is paving the way for his later thought regarding symptoms of life denial, and how these symptoms mask the more basic drive for life affirmation, for more life. But we should also give some consideration to the other major point that is implied in this context, namely, that the masses are not nearly as stupid as Nietzsche sometimes appears to indicate. If the masses of Christians are not affected by Christ's nobility and elevation, but are instead affected by the earthy residue and "dark layer of passion" as these were current in imperial Rome, then surely the masses are to be lauded according to Nietzsche's criteria of life affirmation, for their bodies cannot be fooled, at least not completely, by the transcendental doctrines of religion. Moreover, if the masses respond more or less consistently to these passionate impulses, let us call them pagan impulses, over the course of history, would the masses not be susceptible and responsive to other paganistic impulses? If the earth forces represented by imperial Rome have been able to survive over two millennia in the guise of Christianity, albeit in truncated and distorted form, perhaps a more straight forward harnessing of pagan energies would help everyday moderns toward earth affirmation. In geographical terms Nietzsche discusses where Christianity will disappear and where it will fade most slowly, and so provides a remarkable elaboration of the above argument. Protestants made the choice to rescue Christianity using the mind, their reforming of the religion being a thinking process as opposed to the heart and feeling of the southern peoples whose older Christianity coexists more readily with paganism. Once Christianity is uprooted by thought, as in the case of the Reformation, it becomes clear where the religion will begin to disappear, "ergo precisely where it will defend itself most harshly." A religion that establishes itself and defends itself on cognitive grounds cannot survive — Nietzsche claims already in Tragedy that mythology died in early Greece when the feeling for the myths died and was replaced by the demand to establish religion on a historical base (BT 10, KSA 1:74), and he remains consistent on this point. While in the southern regions of Europe the feeling for paganism allows for a transforming of Christianity, a bending but not breaking as Nietzsche calls it, in the northern Protestant regions it will predictably vanish soonest. T h e senses will have their due, according to Nietzsche, and thus he explains that the more flexible, pagan-infused Christianity agrees to put up with the demands of the church because this is preferable, in terms of energy cost, to doing all the work on one's own: "The senses raise against a dechristianized world the objection that one would have to work too much in it, and the yield of leisure would be too small; they side with magic, that is — they prefer to allow God to work for them {oremus nos, deus labored)" ( H H II/1 97, KSA 2:416). T h e famous "Protestant work ethic" accordingly will be responsible for the decline of Christianity, among Protestants in any case, because in their zeal to work they

2. Paganism's Special Powers of Affirmation

165

take upon themselves a form of asceticism, while in their taste for leisure the older Christians who let God do the work will have more time for themselves, and more time to enjoy life. Nietzsche's lesson is simple and powerful: the senses are life, and the senses do not want to die out. Polytheism and its psychological-physiological origins as a dimension of paganism are useful to the species. Nietzsche argues that "the most monstrous of all human aberrations," tantamount to idolatry itself, was the individual erecting his own ideal and acting according to it in matters of law, joy, and rights. Those who acted in this manner always had to be ready with an apology or a disclaimer to the effect that "a god worked through me," and it was only the "wonderful art and power to create gods — polytheism," in which this drive originally held to be crude, unsightly and related to stubbornness, disobedience and envy could experience sublimation. As opposed to the one permissible norm of "human being," polytheism allowed "a multiplicity of norms" in which one god was not the denial of or blasphemy toward the other: "Here for the first time one allowed oneself individuals, here for the first time one honored the rights of individuals. The invention of gods, heroes and super humans of all kinds, as well as minor humans and lower humans ("Neben- und Untermenschen"), of dwarves, fairies, centaurs, satyrs, demons and devils was inestimable early practice for the justification of selfishness and self glorification of the individual" (GS 143, KSA 3:490). W h a t Nietzsche describes here is the valuable, indeed priceless alternative to the ascetic impulse turning inward to attack the human being. W h e n the otherwise negative aspects of selfishness or the self as ideal are sublimated, or regulated as in the case of polytheism, a creativity ensues whereby human diversity is honored in lesser or greater incarnations of the human individual. We must not underestimate the significance of this polytheistic drive, Nietzsche cautions, for its counterpart of monotheism with its doctrine of one normative god and one normative human being encourages rigidity and stasis, while polytheism provided "the power to create for ourselves new eyes which are our own and ever newer eyes which are more our own, so that for humans alone among all animals there are no eternal horizons and perspectives" (ibid, 490-1). O u r ability to transform and create beyond ourselves depends on this pagan impulse to posit the existence of many gods and beings as otherwise forbidden personae of ourselves, for clearly the human potential for affirmation is strengthened by embracing this multiplicity of beings and giving each its due. In fact, Nietzsche adds, we no longer understand how the ancients perceived the closest and the most frequent things, we changed their color. Waking and dreaming were entirely different for the ancients, our life and our conception of death are also totally different: "All experiences shined differently, for a god gleamed from them. . . . We have recolored things, we are constantly painting away at them — but what are we able to achieve in the meantime compared to the magnificence of color of that ancient master! — I mean ancient humanity" (GS 152, KSA 3:495). For the ancients the closest things were alive and full of wonder, likely to be occupied or

166

III. Nietzschean Religiosity

caused by a deity. These closest things of which Nietzsche speaks with a new found reverence in Human and the subsequent books were very real, awe inspiring in fact, and today we paint in vain to recapture even a fraction of their colorful abundance. Moderns have a "conscience" for diversity but are in fact blunt and benumbed when it comes to seeing and affirming diversity, for the moral perspective from which we embrace diversity is itself a closed morality, a judging and condemning morality, while the ancients embraced diversity unconditionally, embraced it as the real and not as the ideal. Thus the church fights passion with castration, its cure for everything it finds offensive is castration, and it never asks how a need could be spiritualized or otherwise sublimated. "But attacking the passions at their root means attacking life at its root: the practice of the church is hostile to life" (TI 5/1, KSA 6:83). In the Christian vocabulary "world" is a pejorative, a curse, whereas in classical aesthetics the world is enriched by superabundance (CW Epilogue, KSA 6:51). The Romans had represented something noble and stronger, and there were no stronger people on earth; their kind was briefly invigorated during the Renaissance, but Jewish-Christian resentment triumphed again in the form of the Reformation (GM 1/16, KSA 6:287). And just so he does not lay the entire blame on Christianity and Judaism, Nietzsche points out that sexuality, rule, pleasure in appearance and cheating, gratitude for life and its typical conditions are all essential for pagan cults and are done in good conscience, but the "unnatural" was already at work among the Greeks to fight paganism with morality, with the dialectic (KSA 13:19-20). When Nietzsche elevates Dionysus to the highest expression of paganism, claiming he represents "the religious affirmation of life, of the whole and not denied and halved," he sets Dionysus against Christ and adds: "It is not a difference with respect to martyrdom — only martyrdom has a different meaning. Life itself, its eternal fruitfulness and recurrence determines the torture, the destruction, the will to annihilation. In the other case suffering, the crucified one as the innocent one' counts as an objection against this life, a formula of its condemnation" (KSA 13:266). In other words, while Dionysus is martyred because he affirms life and represents its highest fulfillment and fruitfulness, Christ is martyred because he is "innocent" and in order to demonstrate that the "true life" takes place after earthly life, after the natural life. Moral ideals, Nietzsche writes, have a tendency to exercise power over nature, as in the case of Parsifal the miracle worker (KSA 12:561), and of course as in the case of Christ himself. The pagan justification of life requires no exerting of power over nature, there is nothing superior to nature and nothing "beyond" it, such that the martyrdom of Dionysus points only back to nature and regeneration, to resurrection of nature eternally. Mosse asserts that Nietzsche's praise of primitivism and ancient Greek culture led to a new paganism which was rendered more appealing through the experience of World War I. An entire generation of European writers begins to praise brutality and bloodshed, and such thinking heavily influenced intellectuals such as Jiinger,

2. Paganism's Special Powers of Affirmation

167

who conceives of the warrior as a superior human being. 258 As we have seen in our earlier examination of Nietzsche as an unwilling religion founder, many causes laid claim to his writings, including neo-paganism in whatever forms it may have flourished around the turn of the century and into W W II. However, we have also seen that Nietzsche's notion of paganism does not call for new warriors and bloodshed, and that when he speaks of paganism it is with deep respect for its capacity to affirm life. The problem with the word "paganism" is that Western civilization has done a thorough, indeed, unparalleled job of making it a pejorative, of associating it with violence, lack of decency, blood lust etc. Nietzsche was much more an anthropologist in his interest in paganism, much more inclined to look for constructive aspects of a way of life that moderns, for the most part, simply condemn. T h e decline of the pagan, meanwhile, may not be as final as we wish — despite our physiological inhibitions, there is still a chance that our repressed paganism will emerge in inventive and creative ways.

3. The Loss of Religious Feeling "To sacrifice God for the nothing — this paradoxical mystery of the final cruelty was saved for the generation that is now arising: all of us already know something of this — " Beyond Good and Evil 55

We no longer understand architecture, if "understand" is the right word for our lost capacity to intuit and sense the atmosphere that architecture originally intended. Nietzsche explains that originally everything in a Greek or Christian building meant something in relation to a higher order, a mood of inexhaustible meaning lay over the building like a magic veil. Beauty only came into the system incidentally, without considerably detracting from the grounding perception of the uncannysublime, of consecration through the proximity of gods and magic. "Beauty at best mitigated the dread— but this dread was everywhere the prerequisite. — W h a t is the beauty of a building to us today? T h e same as the beautiful face of a witless woman: something mask-like" ( H H 1/218, KSA 2:178). T h e loss of the sublime can be measured in modern terms by our inability to react to our architecture. We are no longer capable of fear and trembling, of dread as it once spoke to us through our buildings in an earlier time when divine presence manifested itself on earth. If buildings formerly exuded an aura capable of inspiring awe and fear, they were alive with us, indeed, they were part of what made us alive, part of living nature even though they pointed to a "higher order." Hence the title of this aphorism, "Stone 258

George Mosse, Germans andJews: The Right, the Left, and the Search for a 'Third Force'in Pre-Nazi Germany (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987), 162.

168

III. Nietzschean Religiosity

is stonier than before," to indicate that stone today is mere stone, construction material, aesthetically pleasing perhaps but without life, whereas in the past when humans were still receptive to the sublime, stone was living tissue. At times Nietzsche speaks as though we have no choice but to be superficial in our viewing of the world, and he includes both piety and the artistic impulse among the superficializing aspects of being. So for example he maintains that whoever has looked deeply into the world understands the wisdom that lies in the superficiality of humans, "it is their preserving instinct." Referring to philosophers and artists who have caught an occasional glimpse of the world's profundity and emerge burned from the experience, he writes: "one could deduce the degree to which life has been spoiled for them by ascertaining how far they desire to see life's image falsified, diluted, beyonded (verjenseitigt), deified — one could count the homini religiosi among the artists as their highest rank." Nietzsche concludes his aphorism with the speculation that perhaps there has never been a stronger means of beautifying the human being than piety: "through it the human being can become art, surface, play of colors, goodness to such an extent that one no longer suffers from the sight of him" (BGE 59, KSA 5:78). Since Nietzsche speaks with profound appreciation for pagan religiosity and tragic artistry, we can see in this analysis of the superficial tendencies a rejection of traditional, institutionalized expressions of culture as they tend to reach for the beyond. 259 It is a failure of the religious impulse as well as of the artistic impulse if the surface is not penetrated, or, if in having lifted the veil and having gotten burned, we turn instead to embellishing life and falsifying its image. When Nietzsche is tempted to include the religious person among the artists as their highest ranking member, we recognize the close relationship between art and religion especially in their drive to fictionalize, to poetize existence in order to make it bearable. This is not the Dionysian way of life affirmation, in fact, it is reminiscent of the Apollinian drive to give form and appearance to the world, but absent the Dionysian ground. 260 One form in which the modern spirit appears to triumph over the religious feeling is in the arena of politics, though it is not always clear which triumphs in this equation. Just as historians such as Mosse, Pois, and Aschheim see Nietzsche's

260

Henry David Aiken argues that "the quality of Nietzsche's thought is incurably religious. And this is so whether God himself is dead or alive . . . unlike the lay or secular humanist, [N.] invests the spirit of creativity and the ideal of self-transcendence . . . with a dimension of holiness and even of awe . . . which I, at least, take to be hallmarks of the religious attitude." From "Introduction to Zarathustra in Nietzsche: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited Robert C. Solomon (New York: Anchor, 1973), 127. See Philip Grundlehner, The Poetry ofFriedrich Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), where he discusses the Dionysian dimension of Goethe's Earth Spirit as cited by N. in Tragedy, to indicate that the genuine poet sees himself surrounded by mythical figures, while the bad poet merely uses metaphors, devoid of life, as rhetorical figures, 50, 61-2. Grundlehner's book on N.'s poetry is the most comprehensive and successful study to date of this underestimated aspect of N.'s writings.

3. The Loss of Religious Feeling

169

attention to paganism exerting an influence on political expression early in the twentieth century, Voegelin draws our attention to the religious dimension of political collectivism, claiming that it is not just political and moral, but more importantly it is a religious element and until we recognize this we are only diverting ourselves from the evil. According to Voegelin the process of decay in which culture finds itself in the 1930s has the secularization of the spirit as it cause, the separation of a worldly spirit from its roots in religion, and only religious renewal will bring the spirit back to health. H e therefore calls for a religious renewal whether in the form of the historical religions or outside these boundaries, as long as it proceeds from religious persons and not from politicians. Politicizing intellectuals miss the point, he maintains, when they harp on National Socialism as a return to barbarism, to the dark ages, to times predating the ideal of human progress. They ignore how the secularization of life, carried by the idea of humanism, is precisely the soil from which antichristian movements such as National Socialism arise. 261 If political collectivism is, as Voegelin maintains, an element of religion, and if as well political collectivism is a distinguishing feature of the modern spiritual landscape, we would do well to study the conditions in which any kind of religion may survive without being corrupted by politics. Clearly history has shown that .Fairer-worship or nature worship under the auspices of a Fuhrer are the most negative manifestations of religion imaginable. The question arises whether Nietzsche, with his passionate will to redirect the religious impulse toward earth affirmation, necessarily contributes to the political appropriation of religion or, as his posthumanistic "great politics" suggests, provides instead an alternative expression of religion that is capable of binding us to the earth without political factionalism. Secularization is clearly dangerous if it is construed, collectively, as a license to exploit, rampage, and murder. But humanism in its extreme forms, or "high humanism" if you will, is not the only expression of secularization. W h a t is decisive, and Nietzsche never seems to tire of repeating this, is how humans understand their place in relation to the earth. This is not to say, however, that humans in their understanding of time have been more engaging in affirming the earth. As Abel points out, the forward course of time brings with it the illusion of progress, but Nietzsche maintains that the 19th century does not represent progress vis-à-vis the 16th century. 262 Nietzsche is one of few thinkers who actually writes and believes as though his century, his time, is not superior to previous times, and the appeal of his style, tone, tempo owes much to this consequential effort to break down the hegemony of time and not bow to it. Humans lacking a sense of religiosity in some ways also lack a sense of proportion, and they will dignify their moment in history as the justifying moment, the moment of meaning, at the expense of the earth and other humans. As strongly as 261 262

Erich Voegelin, Diepolitischen Religionen (Stockholm: Bermann-Fischer Verlag, 1939), 8-9. Abel, Die Dynamik, 136.

170

III. Nietzschean Religiosity

Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal recurrence foregrounds the moment, we must nonetheless remember that the moment recurrs eternally, and this realization is intended to burst the hubris bubble that might otherwise obtain in a generation of humans that sees itself as the goal of history. I find the views of Kreis useful for amplifying Nietzsche's thought because Kreis uses a history of ecology approach that grounds Western history in actual events and environmental circumstances, all the while arguing that Nietzsche and Wagner represent antipodes of earth affirmation and earth denial. Kreis recounts how Pope Gregory II desired to colonize northern Europe, which possessed everything Rome and southern Europe had already exhausted: forests, water, fish, berries, honey etc. However, trees were sacred to the Germanic tribes, and so Bonafatius (Boniface, d. 755) penetrated into a holy forest, felled a tree consecrated to Donar, and when nothing happened the Christian God was proven to be more powerful than the Germanic god: "The 'patron saint of the Germans' signals the start of the greatest clear cutting in the history of the West." The effects of this prodigious lifestyle change were seen in the migration from forest to city, the shift from self-sufficiency to feudalization, the actual physical shrinking of the Germanic tribes people, and the overall plundering of the European continent. 263 Kreis draws our attention to two basic events here and to their relation to one another: the Christian-Roman colonization on the one hand, with its supplanting of paganism, and the powerful hegemony of Christianity on the other, with its wide-ranging effects on both the physical and spiritual land known as Europe. The latter hegemony is still evident today in modern humanity's more than symbolic acceptance of the promise of the beyond at the expense of the protection of the earth — literally and figuratively the clear cutting has not ceased. Of course, St. Boniface and his encounter with the Germanic tribes were long ago, ancient history, and what is the death of one god, more or less, in the history of the death of God? Indeed, of what significance, Nietzsche asks, is the death of the God of the West, when the people of the West fail to see that God is dead and that they themselves are God's killers? The ladder of religious cruelty, Nietzsche writes, has many rungs, but there are three most important rungs. At first humans sacrificed other humans to their god, "perhaps even those whom one loved best." Later, in the moral epoch, humans sacrificed their strongest instincts, their "nature" to their God, much to the satisfaction of the anti-natural ascetic. With all hope and value remaining in this one God, "did one not have to sacrifice God himself and, out of cruelty toward oneself, worship the stone, stupidity, gravity, fate, the nothing? To sacrifice God for the nothing — this paradoxical mystery of the final cruelty was saved for the generation that is now arising: all of us already know something of this — " (BGE 55, KSA 5:74). In the loss of feeling for religion that characterizes modernity, we cannot forget that the "uncanniest of all guests," nihilism, is the result of the cruel sacrifice 263

Kreis, Nietzsche, Wagner und die Juden, 62.

171

3. The Loss of Religious Feeling

of the West's remaining value. No one would admit to worshiping the nothing anymore than she would admit to killing God, either singularly or as an accomplice, but this is what we are faced with. Religiosity continues, Nietzsche appears to be saying, though we no longer know what we worship. The last sentence of Genealogy states things most clearly: "And in order to say in conclusion what I said at the beginning: the human being would rather will the nothing, than not will ..." ( G M 111/28, KSA 5:412). Willing and worship are human operations; in the absence of something to will, or to worship, the earth can only be a place of opprobrium, a prison, a spinning rock to which we are attached only by gravity — unless of course the earth itself were to assume new meaning. Kreis explains how the Jewish people maintained the land in their consciousness, even from a distance, and thought of it as the body of its soul and of the people as the soul of this body. It is historically unprecedented to have remained loyal to the land for four thousand years. Christianity, by contrast, set in the place of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob the "God of the philosophers: With him the body of Jesus became separated from its land, the soul of Jesus from its people with the effect that the original cosmicity of the father paled behind the God-will-it-power of the son to such an extent that Wolfram as well as Wagner destructively played out their God against JHWH." 2 6 4 In Kreis and in Nietzsche what is decisive about religion is the union of body and spirit, the union of earth and sky and people that inspires loyalty to the land, loyalty to the earth. If the Jews could sustain their loyalty to the land for four thousand years without becoming a disembodied religion, is this not possible in principle for human beings in general, once the case is made that we need a new orientation toward the earth?

4. The Dionysian "And s u p p o s i n g that gods too philosophize . . . I d o not d o u b t that in d o i n g so they also laugh in a s u p e r h u m a n a n d new way — a n d at the expense o f all serious things!"

Beyond Good and Evil, 294 Our analysis of Nietzsche's earthly affirmation in religious or quasi religious expression would not be complete without a section on Dionysus and the Dionysian. What I mean by "the Dionysian" runs parallel to what the concept means to Nietzsche in various stages of his writing. In the earliest aesthetic stage, the Dionysian is closely tied to its manifestations in the tragic age of Greece, where it flourished as a cult and led to the public worship we know as tragedy. At this stage, given Nietzsche's "artistic metaphysics," the Dionysian is regarded as the essential counterpart of the Apollinian. Kreis, Nietzsche, Wagner und die Juden, 211.

172

III. Nietzschean Religiosity

Moreover, the Dionysian is seen as the immediate expression of nature or "primal unity" ("das Ur-Eine"); in the Dionysian state there is union with all living beings, a participation in the chaos of becoming without any sheltering by or filtering through consciousness. The Apollinian, by contrast, is the image creating, consciously commanded state of individuality which serves to translate the experience of the Dionysian into appearance, into art. The Apollinian represents calm, control, lucidity and all things civilized or cultured, whereas the early Dionysian represents lack of restraint, superabundance, intoxication. The Dionysian begins to transform in Nietzsche early in the 1880s. The Apollinian counterpart seems to disappear, or at least is not specifically mentioned at this stage, but neither is Dionysus. It would be wrong, however, to conclude that Nietzsche's transformed Dionysian does not somehow, in some way, benefit from the properties earlier embodied by the Apollinian — these properties can be seen in both the will to power and in the transformation of the art deity Dionysus into a "philosopher Dionysus." The Dionysian begins to be associated with the emerging major tenets of Nietzsche's thought as they are designed to counter metaphysics: the eternal recurrence of the same, the will to power, amorfati. This is the most general sense in which commentators speak of a "Dionysian" in Nietzsche, unless of course they are referring specifically to the Dionysus of Tragedy. In Nietzsche's usage "the Dionysian" ("das Dionysische") becomes synonymous with a view of nature as superabundant and innocent becoming, a capacity to affirm and embrace life in all its manifestations, and of course the highest expression of paganism both historically and insofar as paganism is able to teach moderns. Finally, there is a more limited sense in which the Dionysian is used to characterize one who follows Dionysus as a devotee of the god. We have seen Nietzsche referred to as a "Dionysian" by Jung, for example, and we have Nietzsche's own statement, upon his "coming out" as a Dionysian philosopher, that he is the last disciple and initiate of Dionysus. Others whose writings we have analyzed in this context are Colli, Staten, Gooding-Williams, Higgins, Crawford, Krell, Babich, Schacht — in short, to speak of Nietzsche as "a Dionysian" is to acknowledge that he is a serious innovator in matters concerning Dionysus, such that his own work on the concept and his own deliberate representation of himself as a Dionysian philosopher are seen as central to an understanding of his thought.265 During the earliest years of his interest in Dionysus Nietzsche is not keen on the wildly "barbaric" Dionysus as he was worshiped before his arrival in Greece, e.g. in Babylon, but the Greeks spiritualized the Dionysian festivals, he maintains, as seen in

265

My own writing on the Dionysian began to appear in 1981, with the publication of my dissertation Dionysian Aesthetics (Frankfurt and Berne: Peter Lang, 1981); see more recently "Nietzschean self-transformation and the transformation of the Dionysian" in Nietzsche, Philosophy and the Arts, 70-91.

4. The Dionysian

173

Euripides Bacchae (KSA 1:558-9). At this point in his essay "The Dionysian World View" Nietzsche goes on to give an almost full page transcription of a Dionysian scene from Bacchae, something he pointedly did not do in Tragedy probably because in that book he was too focused on stressing how Euripides neglected the Dionysian and contributed to its decline. In another essay from the period he claims "we admire here most highly the incredible idealism of the Hellenic nature; from a nature cult which signifies the wildest unleashing of all raw and base drives among the Asiatics, a panhetaeric animal life that for a certain time exceeded all the bounds of humanity, they created a festival of world redemption" (KSA 1:583-4). Here, too, Nietzsche quotes twenty lines of Bacchae, as opposed to its mere mention in Tragedy (KSA 1:587). What Nietzsche appreciates at this early stage he continues to explore throughout his lifelong preoccupation with the Dionysian, namely, the singular capacity of the early Greeks to regulate and sublimate the base drives, instincts, and passions. In addition to downplaying or neglecting the barbaric manifestations of the Dionysian, Nietzsche is also concerned to suppress the feminine characteristics of the god and his followers. According to Nietzsche's colleague at the University of Basle, J. J. Bachofen, the Dionysian cult "gave the life of the female sex an entirely new direction, and found among women its most loyal adherents, its most assiduous servants, basing all of its power on their enthusiasm. Dionysus is the god of women in the fullest sense of the word, the source of all their sensual and supersensual hopes, the nucleus of their entire existence. "2SS As a classical philologist Nietzsche would have been aware of this decisive role of the feminine in Dionysian worship, and yet he makes very little of it, if anything at all, in his writings until quite late. Kerenyi quotes a famous passage of Tragedy to the effect that the individual who comes under the power of the Dionysian "is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art," and concludes that this idea is borrowed from the literature, from Euripides' Bacchae: "he ignores the Dionysian woman, after the god the second person in the drama, in a manner that was almost as pathological as his later appalling preoccupation with Ariadne." 267 While I concur with Kerenyi that Nietzsche ignores the feminine component of the Dionysian and also deliberately snubs Euripides by not appropriately citing the Bacchae, I disagree with Kerenyi's conclusion that Nietzsche's interest in Ariadne, the female companion of Dionysus, was "pathological" and in anyway "appalling."268 In fact, the ignoring of woman that is perpetrated by the early Nietzsche is atoned for by the subtle 266

267

268

Johann Jakob Bachofen, Mutterrecht und Urreligion, edited RudolfMarx (Stuttgart: Kroner, 1954), 118-19. Karl Kerenyi, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, translated Ralph Mannheim (Princeton University Press, 1976), 135-6. Kerenyi and others make the mistake of interpreting Ariadne as Cosima Wagner, something that scholarship on N. has done since the beginning. See Del Caro, "Symbolizing Philosophy: Ariadne and the Labyrinth," Nietzsche-Studien 17 (1988), 125-57 or the same reprinted in Nietzsche: Critical Assessments, edited Daniel W. Conway, vol. 1 of 4 (London: Roudedge, 1998), 58-88.

174

III. Nietzschean Religiosity

introduction of Ariadne into Nietzsche's writings of the 1880s. The Dionysian transforms as Nietzsche himself transforms and grows, and on matters of the female presence in Nietzsche's Dionysian one does well to consult the later Nietzsche, just as one cannot base one's understanding of the Dionysian only on The Birth ofTragedy.m Another critic who has observed the turn in Nietzsche's late thinking toward affirmation of the feminine is Nolte. He first points out that in early letters to his friend Erwin Rohde, Nietzsche speaks of the "hideous" nature of the sex act and of the "repulsive secret" of child birth, but toward the end of his life he "juxtaposes Dionysus as the lord of the 'mysteries of sexuality' with the antinature of Christianity," which leads us to ask whether Nietzsche in fact adopted or felt compelled to adopt the barbaric Babylonian Dionysus.270 Consistent with his emphasis on affirmation and Dionysian affirmation in particular, which requires the philosopher to affirm without flinching even those aspects of life that are most difficult and distasteful to affirm, the later Nietzsche sheds his discomfort regarding sexuality and so opens up to the role of women in the affirmation of the body and the earth. As I demonstrated earlier in connection with the body, it is meaningless to speak of "the body" in Nietzsche as an exclusively male b o d y — this would be tantamount to speaking of "earth affirmation" but only in connection with the male population of the earth. Kerenyi explains that Nietzsche's occupation with antiquity was not, like Bachofen's, a scientific approach to the "origin," but instead a kind of strict, formal self discipline designed to help him manage his own inclination toward the abyss before he had developed his own manner of philosophizing. 271 In a rather crude way what Kerenyi is saying is that Nietzsche uses the science of philology to ground and construct his own philosophy, and I think this relationship between philology and philosophy persists — it is not something that Nietzsche abandons once he has a philosophy. Kerenyi also attempts to solve the riddle of Nietzsche's adoption of a god to counter God, observing that he is a radical atheist after all. In opposing Dionysus and Christ "he selected — whether correctly or incorrectly — the god who struck him as compatible with his radical atheism. How did he come to do so? Though strange, his idea cannot have been totally unfounded. And once the 'idea' made its appearance, it must be counted among the experiences that make up our culture." 272 We shall have a better understanding of why Nietzsche opts for a pagan god to serve as a

2

® See also Staten Nietzsche's Voice, where he regards N.'s banning of the maenads from Tragedy as outright repression, not mere omission as suggested by Silk and Stern in their Nietzsche on Tragedy (1981), p. 118. 270 Ernst Nolte, Nietzsche und der Nietzscheanismus (Frankfurt/Main: Propyläen, 1990), 110-11. 271 Karl Kerenyi, Bachofen und die Zukunft des Humanismus. Mit einem Intermezzo über Nietzsche und Ariadne (Zurich: Rascher, 1945), 26-7. See also M. S. Silk and J. P. Stern, Nietzsche on Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), for how N. typically personalizes his academic interests or otherwise adapts influences to his transforming needs, pp. 34, 18, 419. 272 Kerenyi, Dionysos, xxiii.

4. The Dionysian

175

counter to Christ if we briefly review some of the main features that were worshiped in the Dionysian cults and religion. At this point it is also helpful to bear in mind that both Christ and Dionysus are demigods, i.e., what makes them especially attractive to Nietzsche, each in their own way, is that they combine aspects of the divine and the human and inspire accordingly. Kerenyi explains that for the Greeks Dionysus was primarily a wine god, a bull god, and a god of women. Dionysus learned the use of grapes for wine making from a snake. T h e snake, in turn, was "a highly ambivalent" symbol associating life with coldness, slipperiness, mobility, and deadly peril. Snakes were also linked to grape-laden vine. 273 Otto meanwhile stresses that the presence of Dionysus brings chaos, madness, annihilation, and invasion of the individual to the core of being. H e is depicted as both a mighty hunter and murderer, and death is also in his domain. At other times his sudden appearance brings forth blissful as well as horrible intoxication, and he is "the actual masked god," the mask symbolizing what is at once present and absent, "most immediate presence and absolute absence in One." Among the transfigurations of Dionysus are lion, bull, panther, bear, snake, boar, fire and water.274 Of special interest to Nietzsche for transforming Dionysus into a philosopher god, Nietzsche himself serving as the model of the Dionysian philosopher, are the association with annihilation, which Nietzsche sees as the essential but repressed companion of creation; the presence/absence paradox, which plays out in Nietzsche in expressions of immanence and transcendence, as well as in the pain of the completely abandoned human symbolized by Ariadne; intoxication and bliss as expressions of the superabundance of nature; and the mask — which represents the esoteric as a feature of Nietzsche's style, serves as a symbol for the limits of reason, of understanding, and points to the need for human humility, acceptance of mystery and of a proper place in nature, and finally, the mask as it symbolizes Dionysus the tempter, the god who lures humans into the labyrinth. Indications that Nietzsche is himself tempting and experimenting with the Dionysian (he uses the word versuchen to mean both experiment, i.e., attempt, and tempt) are seen early in Beyond long before the final section in which Dionysus becomes explicit or unmasked. He claims that "everything profound loves the mask" and that every profound spirit needs the mask, indeed, around each such spirit a mask continually grows, thanks to our superficial interpretation of each word, each step, each sign of life the profound individual gives (BGE 40, KSA 5:58). Observe that in making this claim Nietzsche is also implying that profundity cannot do otherwise than to sport a mask, since the profound person attracts masking or disguising features as they are imposed on her from without. W h e n Nietzsche nonetheless claims that all 273 274

Kerenyi, Dionysos, 51, 57-8, 61. Walter F. Otto, Dionysos. Mythos und Kultus (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1933), 87-8, 100, 104-06, 1 7 1 , 7 4 , 8 1 , 8 4 , 101.

176

III. Nietzschean Religiosity

profundity "loves the mask," I see this as typical Dionysian affirmation of natural traits and their consequences. At about the same place in BeyondVt informs his readers that a new species of philosopher is arising, and he "baptizes" them with a dangerous name: they shall be tempters and attempters (Versucher) (BGE 42, KSA 5:59). In using the word "baptize" he deliberately invokes Christ and Christianity, but he does not ascribe Christian qualities to the new philosophers — on the contrary. "The Olympian vice" of laughter, contrary to philosophers who insist that laughter is an infirmity of human nature and to be overcome by thinkers, is what Nietzsche proposes to use for assigning an order of rank to philosophers. The highest philosopher will be the one whose laughter is golden, and supposing that gods philosophize, they do so in a superhuman way (BGE 294, KSA 5:236). The so-called Olympian vice, that is, the vice characterizing the gods, is levity, laughter, humor, defiance of the grave and gravity. Nietzsche uses this same idea in his writing of The Gay Science, and he also makes a point of defending humanity's right to laugh here on earth, in opposition to Matthew 8:12: "Alas for you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep." Laughter connects mortals who philosophize with gods (Dionysus), and gods who philosophize with mortals (Nietzsche et al), and laughter is also "superhuman" in the sense described by Zarathustra when he witnesses the shepherd transform from victim to superhuman: "No longer shepherd, no longer human — one transformed, radiant, one who laughed\ Never yet on earth has a human being laughed as he laughed!" (Z III/2, KSA 4:202). Finally in Beyond Nietzsche states unequivocally that Dionysus is a tempter god, and he Nietzsche is permitted to give a sample of his philosophy. The human being is an agreeable, courageous, inventive animal with no equal on earth, and she finds her way in any labyrinth. Dionysus meanwhile reflects on how to make humans stronger, more evil, deeper (BGE 295, KSA 5:238-9). The human is to be enhanced by the demigod Dionysus, who tempts humans and desires to make them stronger — supposedly by improving upon the already sound human ability to find one's way out of the labyrinth. The labyrinth is an allusion to the myth ofAriadne, Theseus, and Dionysus; Theseus is guided out of the labyrinth, in which the Minotaur is fed its ration of human sacrifices, by Ariadne's thread. In slaying the Minotaur Theseus is a human hero, but he abandons Ariadne and it is Dionysus who comes to her in her utter solitude. 275 Dionysus is therefore a more loyal and "superhuman" model for humans than is Theseus, who is vain and disloyal. As to why Dionysus would be a "tempter" god, consider that Christianity promises to alleviate, to remove obstacles, to make all things bearable while one suffers and languishes on the earth, now consider that if humans are to achieve spiritual autonomy they will have to be induced, tempted, motivated beyond their complacency and tendency to graze like herd animals. This is where Dionysus the tempter and at-tempter comes in, for he is able to lure humans into the human abyss, into the life 275

Del Caro, "Symbolizing Philosophy," 139-41.

4. The Dionysian

177

labyrinth, where they can test themselves and emerge into and on their own. Nietzsche is of course aware that "tempting" is the work of the devil, traditionally speaking, but this does not mean that tempting and at-tempting are intrinsically bad, though he might consent to have tempting characterized as "evil."276 And so Beyond Good and Evil concludes with a confession that Nietzsche is a follower of Dionysus, that gods philosophize, and that Dionysian philosophizing will partake of laughter, contrary to those who would proscribe laughter from philosophy or from our dwelling on earth. With his talk of the mask and the impossibility of ever getting to the essence of a profound individual, on the one hand, and his sharing of the secret of Dionysus on the other, Nietzsche's esoteric and exoteric drives are both in evidence, both working together, not unlike, if the analogy is not too stretched, the early Dionysus worked with Apollo to externalize the message of life affirmation the ancient Greeks called tragedy. In his notes for the time he was writing Beyond Nietzsche has a dialogue with Dionysus. When the god is asked if he has bad intentions and is driving human beings to destruction, he answers: "Perhaps . . . but in such a way that there is something in it for me." When asked "what" then might that something be, Dionysus replies " Who then, you should ask," and then he goes silent "in the manner that is his own, namely seductively" (KSA 12:76). The intentions of Dionysus will appear bad or questionable or dangerous for human beings, in the same way that Nietzsche frequently repeats how dangerous his writings and ideas will be, how their adoption or application cannot preserve the status quo with respect to morals, values, dwelling on the earth. Dionysus hints that he is concerned, selfishly, with a new kind of human, just as Nietzsche makes it clear through Zarathustra that he too is seeking a new human, a super human, who will be the meaning of the earth. What Zarathustra announces and proclaims in the most exoteric, sharing manner, albeit it with limited if any success in communication, Dionysus the masked presence in Nietzsche's writings, the mysterious god who uses tempting and seduction, merely offers up in riddles and hints — in keeping with his profundity and his inscrutable nature. Gooding-Williams draws the connection between Zarathustra and Dionysus as such: "By recalling men to the earth, or to the possibility of going-under to passional, Dionysian chaos, Zarathustra would persuade his auditors that they can restyle their bodies and remake European culture by compelling their passions to fulfill a purpose (effectiveness as a source of self-enjoyment) other than the purpose (destruction) they have hitherto served."277 The by now familiar message of the need to regulate and sublimate, as opposed to destroying or curtailing the passions, becomes the work of Dionysus who tempts humans into his philosophy of earth affirmation and body affirmation. The "going under" (untergehen, i.e., literally

276

277

See Reinhold Grimm, "Antiquity as Echo and Disguise," Nietzsche-Studien 14 (1985), 201-49. Grimm provides a very detailed analysis of what he calls "Dionysus-Diabolus." Gooding- Williams, Zarathustra's Dionysian Modernism, 130-31.

178

III. Nietzschean Religiosity

going under and perishing) is rendered more spatial by Gooding-Williams when he describes it as a quasi realm of "passional, Dionysian chaos." What we have analyzed so far in terms of immanence, regulating and harnessing the passions, and pagan affirmation are all dimensions of the Dionysian which is mediated both spiritually and physically through human being. Dionysus is not a redeemer, any more so than Nietzsche took to the field as a redeemer; however, Dionysus loves humans in his way and wishes to help in his way, which I have described elsewhere as follows: "Dionysus is the god who comes to those who suffer the labyrinth, the Nietzschean labyrinth of nihilism which requires us to embrace the eternal recurrence of the same."278 Dionysus is two things at once with respect to the passions. He is the embodiment of the passions and he is the deification of the passions, which his ontology as demigod expresses most perfectly. As embodiment of the passions Dionysus is present and manifest in all human beings, he is the pinnacle of immanence, and as deification of the passions, he represents the human being's fondest appreciation of and reverence for the passions, such that they should be eternalized, deified, honored with the highest status humans are capable of conferring, as though these passions could be present eternally. In Genealogy^iictzsche asserts that a counter, a match is needed to the powerful ascetic ideal. "Where is the counterpartior this closed system of will, goal and interpretation?" he asks. Science is not the match of the ascetic ideal, for science is itself the latest and most noble form of the ascetic ideal (GM111/23, KSA 5:395-6). Three things need to be borne in mind at this point. First, the ascetic ideal represents a closed system, a trap, in which human being is arrested and held in stasis; secondly, science cannot function as the "way out" of the closed system because science, noble as it is and representing the pinnacle of what can be achieved under the ascetic impulse, is nonetheless history's most recent form of asceticism; and thirdly, we still need the counter, we still need the match, the equal of this powerful ascetic ideal. Nietzsche does not state here what that counter is or could be — perhaps we have yet another example of his rhetorically motivated aposiopesis — but in my mind there is no doubt that this counter is the Dionysian, and the functional formulation of the Dionysian as the rival of the ascetic ideal is the doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same.279 At the very conclusion of Twilight,280 Nietzsche distinguishes his conception of tragedy from Aristotle's and from Schopenhauer's, maintaining that his key to the 278 279

280

Del Caro, "Symbolizing Philosophy," 156. Clark (1990) writes "I can find only two serious candidates for the counterideal Zarathustra teaches: the Ubermensch and the ideal of affirming recurrence" (253). In my broader view of the Dionysian, both of these "candidates" are subsumed under Dionysus and the Dionysian philosopher. We can observe in N.'s arrangement of his aphorisms, sections, "books" and parts both a conceptual organization, whereby material is presented according to conceptual unities in order to serve as a frame or to indicate a progression, and we can observe a dramatic organization, according to which pieces of certain effect are used to underscore. As examples of the latter see how Dionysus is not explicit in Beyond until the conclusion, and see how Twilight, in its dramatic conclusion, also returns to Dionysus, the inspiration and impetus for drama as we know it.

4. T h e Dionysian

179

concept of the tragic feeling lies in "the psychology of orgiasm as an overflowing feeling of life and power in which even pain still works as a stimulus." It is the capacity for yes-saying to life even in its strangest and hardest problems, he adds, the will to life rejoicing in its inexhaustibility even when sacrificing its highest types that he called the Dionysian, and this he discovered as the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet. Tragedy is not a matter of ridding oneself of fear and pity, not a matter of catharsis but instead the lust of becoming which includes the lust of annihilation: "And therewith I touch again the place from which I once started out — the "Birth of Tragedy" was my first transvaluation of all values: with it I reposition myself on the soil from which my intention, my ability grows — I the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus — I the teacher of the eternal recurrence ..." (TI 10/5, KSA 6: 160). T h e Dionysian is Nietzsche's "turf" in an organic sense, it is "his soil" because his willing and his ability grow out of it, which is to say, there is nothing "objective" or detached about his occupation with the Dionysian. For Nietzsche the challenge for humans has never been accepting life in general or loving life when it is pleasant and inspiring — these go without saying. T h e real measure of vitality and the presence of life will is seen when life presents its strangest and hardest problems, as it inevitably does, given that the nature of life is superabundance, inexhaustibility and amorality. T h e ability to face life and engage it precisely where it causes pain, and then to let that pain act as a stimulus, and the ability to rejoice in life's inexhaustibility precisely where it sacrifices its highest types, are measures of affirmation far exceeding mere acceptance of life, and to the modern sensitivity these operations seem like punishment, like torture. And in order to emphasize how Dionysian affirmation stands in relation to the human's ability to turn suffering not into an indictment of life, but instead a welcome partner of life's abundance, he restates his role as the disciple of the philosopher Dionysus in terms of the teacher of eternal recurrence. In practicing Dionysian affirmation one in effect embraces the doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same, because both are expressions of maximum affirmation, the former psychologically invested in participating in nature's superabundance rejoicingly, the latter philosophically and religiously invested in affirming each moment by giving it eternity, by deifying it, which is what humans do to confer their highest stamp of approval on something. Another nuance we should not overlook in this proximity of Dionysus and the eternal recurrence is the message expressed by Zarathustra when he dismisses his "followers": " O n e repays a teacher poorly if one always remains the pupil" (Z 1/22, KSA 4:101). As the disciple or pupil of Dionysus, Nietzsche does not remain entirely or only the pupil, for the eternal recurrence of the same is his teaching. Schacht elaborates on the significance of the Dionysian as a new ard. T h e Dionysian affirmation of the world as it is, "for which formula is 'amor fati,"' is a stance Nietzsche regards "[as] not merely of a particular type of psychosomatic constitution, but also superior

value stand[Nietzsche's] symptomatic to any other

180

III. Nietzschean Religiosity

philosophically," such that standing in a Dionysian relationship to existence is the highest philosophical state. Nor is the Dionysian value standard a rephrasing of what generally goes by the name of "laws of nature." "But it is intended to reflect what goes on in the world, as it goes on independently of any evaluative schemes which the likes or dislikes, wishes or desires, and reasonings or errors of particular human beings may lead them to hatch." Because the Dionysian value standard serves as a basis for evaluative judgments, it plays a key role in the transvaluation of values "in its double character as both a critique of former values and traditional modes of valuation, and also a development of a substantive alternative to them." In repeatedly referring to Dionysian affirmation after Zarathustra, Nietzsche "marks the point of his transcendence of nihilism." 281 The Dionysian is thus seen as a new kind of evaluative standard, one not married to "truth," which after all resides in the realm of metaphysics or ideals, and one not tied to infallibility of any kind, but rather to amorfati, the love of fate, as the supreme expression of unconditional affirmation. What is pivotal in the Dionysian affirmation is that one seeks out "the terrible and questionable sides of existence" as opposed to passively accepting whatever comes one's way (KSA 12:455). This is a reiteration of Nietzsche's view that pain serves as a stimulus and life rejoices in its exhaustibility at the same time as its highest types are sacrificed — the Dionysian value standard appears to be pinned entirely to self overcoming, not in any way to concern for or preservation or sparing of oneself. The measure for Dionysian affirmation appears to be designed not as a last stage or end in itself, but as process, much like the regulating of the passions that is ascribed to pagans. Thus Nietzsche enumerates several important steps involved in Dionysian affirmation. The first is to comprehend the previously denied sides of existence as not only essential, but as desirable; next the previously affirmed sides of existence need to be devalued and interrogated as to what they are affirming; and finally, there is to be a conception of a higher kind of being as "immoral" according to previous concepts, and he sees approaches to this in history in the example of the pagan gods and the ideals of the Renaissance (KSA 12:455). We see in this particular note ("My New Way to 'Yes'") that Nietzsche's genealogical method is at work, insofar as he sees vital substance wherever Western history pronounces negatively, from the standpoint of morals, on a given practice, people, or age. If something is condemned by morality or on moral grounds ("moral grounds" being an oxymoron), Nietzsche is immediately interested in it because it most likely represents a manifestation of life that is not physiologically inhibited. By the same token, if

281

Schacht, Nietzsche, 397, 347, 397. As he does throughout his book, Schacht relies on The Will to Power, in this case he is quoting from # 1041, which is attributed by Kaufmann to the year 1888. In KSA 12 the fragment is attributed to autumn 1887, p. 455, and is shorter than the version in Will to Power.

4. The Dionysian

181

something is affirmed on moral grounds, he suspects that the instincts of the herd are at work, or resentment. It is this kind of reasoning that leads to his critique of values as a "transvaluation of all values" ("Umwertung aller Werte"). We recall that the "Olympian vice" described in Beyond(# 294) will be used as a standard for ranking philosophers; the one whose laughter is golden shall be highest. Laughter, the comic, the absurd are all dimensions of the ancient Dionysian, as Nietzsche explains, with the sublime finding expression in tragedy and the absurd finding expression in comedy (BT 7, KSA 1:57). There is a role, and an important one, for this too often ignored dimension of the Dionysian in Nietzsche's proposed reorientation toward the earth. Higgins explains that a first step in weaning ourselves off of the poison of our moral perspectives is to become aware of temporality and process in our thinking, and a next step is related: "The antidote is one toward which Nietzsche hints at odd moments in the Genealogy, and again it involves a conscious awareness of temporality. This odd antidote is comedy." And while Nietzsche "might not be able to do this himself, as he still stares down abysses," we others should stop and step back, after ruminating and thereby opening our own abysses: "Our way out is not, as it might seem, thinking our way further into the labyrinth. We have to think in order to recognize the extent of the problem; but thinking is not the ultimate means of our escape. Instead, we must step back from the whole span of time over which we've developed our pernicious habits — laughing at their foolishness." 282 I regard this as an especially successful formulation of the Dionysian alternative, for it includes major features of the Dionysian which tend to become lost in the labyrinth of critical reasoning because they are suggestive, symbolic, inspirational as opposed to cognitive. For any human beings who are truly engaged in life and have liberated themselves from the herd, existence becomes painful, labyrinthine, fraught with danger and suffering. This after all is part of the heightened state of immanence in which one is alive, and this is the state into which Dionysus the tempter and at-tempter lures human beings. But once in the labyrinth, we cannot expect redemption or rescue, because Dionysus is not a redeemer in that sense. It is incumbent upon us, using the strength we have gained in affirming even what is most terrible, most grave, most dangerous, to surmount these obstacles using any means provided by the superabundant energy that each of us possesses. The goal of Dionysian living, if there is any goal beyond the simplest and deepest affirmation of each moment (eternal recurrence of the same) is not to be locked away in some gloomy labyrinth, but to transform the labyrinth, at will, into the experience of joy that is life's glorious character and that "wants deep, deep eternity," as Zarathustra says (Z III/15, KSA 4:286). If thinking in and of itself were the antidote to morality's earth-poisoning or to the loss of self in the labyrinth, then golden laughter would not be a proper 282

Higgins, "On the Genealogy of Morals— Nietzsche's Gift," 61.

182

III. Nietzschean Religiosity

measure of a philosopher's rank. We must acknowledge that for Nietzsche there is an ontological open, a space for creativity and affirmative dwelling, despite the obstacles and limitations he constantly points out. The Nietzschean open, however, is something that humans earn, not something that serendipity bestows. In fact, in the opposite spirit of Schopenhauer, whose pessimism uses human limitation as the justification for escape and denial, Nietzschean "Dionysian pessimism" uses human limitation, suffering, and the harshness of existence as a springboard into the open. 283 Now "laughing at our foolishness" may not, at first glance, seem sufficiently Nietzschean in an elevated and intellectual sense, but to reason thus would be a mistake. Laughter is elevation in Nietzsche, and he is singular in the history of philosophy for introducing levity, lightness, defiance of gravity into his writings. And to those who would smile at the injunction to laugh at our foolishness, perhaps ironically smile, there is still hope — "to smile" in German is lächeln, and "to laugh" is lachen. As a young scholar writing The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche gives short shrift to comedy, after all, he is purporting to explain the birth of tragedy, and the sublime strikes us with terror, not with laughter. But as he matures philosophically, and as he begins to establish a dialogue or dramatic roles for the esoteric and the exoteric Dionysus, humor and laughter come into their own. Laughter is something all humans can share, all humans can understand and benefit from it. Nietzsche's new Dionysian is lighter, less grim than the traditional guardian of artistic metaphysics, and he is also less grim than many critics make him out to be who are themselves keen on defending Nietzsche's esoteric Dionysus and their own esoteric authority. As I have said in connection with the feminine, there is no authentic Dionysian without the presence of women, and Nietzsche realizes this late in his career and makes appropriate amends. Similarly, there is no authentic Dionysian without the golden laughter, or without at least the smile, and if every human on earth is capable of laughter — so be it. There is a certain economy to relations between the sexes which Nietzsche has knowledge of through his "Dionysian dowry,"as he refers to it in Ecce, perhaps humorously, perhaps in masterful self parody. In claiming to know women and that the perfect woman tears to pieces when she loves, he adds "fortunately I am not inclined to allow myself to be torn to pieces." He claims to know "these lovely maenads," and he clearly has deep respect for them, observing that "woman is unspeakably more evil than man, more intelligent too; goodness in a female is already a form of degeneration." Thereupon he gives his definition of love as: "in its means war, in its ground the deadly hatred of the sexes" (EH 3/5, KSA 6:305-6). Though as a Dionysian Nietzsche claims that he is the first psychologist of the "eternal feminine" and women "all love him," except for those who are "emancipated" and lack the means to bear children 283

See Del Caro, Nietzsche Contra Nietzsche, 27, 54, 94-7, 123.

4. The Dionysian

183

(ibid, 305), he also wants to keep his distance, respecting the fact that Dionysus in one version of the myth is torn to pieces by his maenads. 284 Though a Dionysian, Nietzsche is not suicidal and he has work to do. Work of the nature of Zarathustra, which, leaving the poets aside as he suggests, is unprecedented as an expression of superabundance of power, a work in which his concept of the Dionysian became deed: "There is no wisdom, no research of the soul, no art of speaking before Zarathustra; the closest, the most everyday speaks here of things unheard of." As a figure of Dionysian affirmation, Zarathustra presents the psychological problem of "how one who says N o to an unheard of extent, does N o to everything to which one has hitherto said Yes, can nevertheless be the opposite of a no-saying spirit; how the spirit who bears the heaviest fate, a fatality of a task nevertheless can be the lightest and most transcendent — Zarathustra is a dancer" (EH 9/6, KSA 6:343-5). O n e sees that Zarathustra-Dionysus is a dancer, one who creatively defies gravity, yet he is affirmatively grounded by the new gravity of earth affirmation — Nietzsche refers to him as "light" and "transcendental" despite the fact that Zarathustras burden is the heaviest, and his task is "fatalistic." This is the paradox of the Dionysian value standard, this is the earned liberation that does not fall from heaven. Observe, too, that in distinguishing his Zarathustra from other models of humanity, Nietzsche wants him peerless, unique as a creation, and yet, it is "the closest, the most everyday [that] speaks here of things unheard of." Zarathustra's authority is not borrowed from heaven, or morality, but instead is based on the closest, the quotidian — on the life that is present to us each day of our lives. Deleuze has a good summary in connection with affirming and denying. There is a yes that "does not know how to say no (the yes of the ass)," and this is a mere caricature of affirmation. "This is precisely because it says yes to everything which is no, because it puts up with nihilism it continues to serve the power of denying — which is like a demon whose every burden it carries." By contrast the Dionysian yes "knows how to say no: it is pure affirmation, it has conquered nihilism and divested negation of all autonomous power. But it has done this because it has placed the negative at the service of the powers of affirming. To affirm is to create, not to bear, put up with or accept." 285 So the task of creating distinguishes the real affirmative spirit from the one who merely says yes and serves as beast of burden, reminding one of the three metamorphoses of the spirit, which include camel (the bearing one), lion (the destroyer) and child (the creator). O n e is also reminded of Nietzsche's fondness for distinguishing between scholars, scientists, researchers on the one hand and philosophers on the other, the latter having the task of creation, the former being more or less sterile. And

284

285

Nor can we overlook what N. suffered, in real terms, at the hands of Lou Salome, with whom he was in love. See Del Caro, "Andreas-Salomé and Nietzsche: New Perspectives," 85ff. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 185-6.

184

III. Nietzschean Religiosity

of course we should not overlook that whether we are referring to the three metamorphoses of the spirit, or to Nietzsche's conception of the philosopher, the earlier incarnations are essential stages — the superhuman no more than the Dionysian can leap from current human to the affirmative human — there is no circumventing or leaping over the current human, no shortcut to a grounded humanity, for that would leave us with a disembodied human and that, based on everything Nietzsche holds dear, would be a monstrosity. The challenge of resurrecting a figure of mythology and making it palatable for jaded moderns, who have little respect for pagan affirmation and even less awareness of what the earth means in relation to human being, would have stopped a lesser individual in his tracks. Before Nietzsche the Romantics had enthused about a "new mythology" and they made promising contributions to recognizing the importance of creativity, but unlike the Romantics Nietzsche is not interested in finding or inventing a new mythology. The task Nietzsche sets himself is more in keeping with the virtues of a "Dionysian classicism," as Behler uses the term, than with Romantic humanism, though Nietzsche ultimately cannot rest with "classicism" as a characterization of his task.286 The Dionysian requires work, but not asceticism; creativity, but not unbounded, transcendental creations; moderation and humility, but not subordination to higher powers — the Dionysian is ultimately anti-romantic in the sense that romanticism has historically been an accomplice of earth denial, but one could well say that the Dionysian has been present throughout cultural history, East and West, wherever creativity has flourished in connection with a vision of a glorious human being, including romanticism.

5. Of Apotheosis and Surrogacy " O h you humans, in the stone there lies sleeping an image, the image of m y images! O h that it m u s t sleep in the hardest, ugliest stone!" Thus Spoke Zarathustra, " O n the Blessed Isles"

Nietzsche's writings reveal how as a species humanity sees itself reflected everywhere in nature, but in such a manner that humanity's image is painted on to nature, plastered on top of nature, as opposed to sharing in the composite that is nature. Our unconscious species vanity is responsible for our seeing the world "our way," which is a human necessity and enables us to go about our business with a minimum of concern for reality. But the species vanity fails us when it comes to positing a strong, glorious,

286

Ernst Behler, "Nietzsche's Challenge to Romantic Humanism," Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 5 (1978), 30-52. See also Del Caro, Nietzsche Contra Nietzsche, 26-7, 54-5, 95-6, 27980; and Del Caro, "Dionysian Classicism, or Nietzsche's Appropriation of an Aesthetic Norm," Journal of the History of Ideas 50/4 (1989), 589-605.

5. O f Apotheosis and Surrogacy

185

elevated image of the human being in matters of religion. Latin religio as "reverence" perhaps precludes any notion of religion in which the human does not humble herself in order to elevate God, but Nietzsche frequently points to the early Greeks as a people who were capable of religion ¿«¿/capable of elevating their human status at the same time — this is the challenge of religion according to Nietzsche, and this he does in defiance of humanity's historically practiced, religiously practiced low self esteem. A pivotal discussion in this regard is found in the second volume of Human. "The poet as signpost to the future" begins with the thesis that there is much poetic energy present among humans which should be used for a goal, in order to point the way to the future, not through reason, as if the poet were a national economist, but instead using art. Just as earlier artists created their images of God, new artists should work toward creating a beautiful image of the human being, tracking down those cases "in the midst of our modern world and reality" in which the beautiful, great soul still exists, still embodies harmony. This is what the new artist should depict and establish as a model for the future, and this new art should supersede old art in which the coarsening of the human image is seen. Among the features of this new art Nietzsche would like to see strength, goodness, mildness, purity and involuntary, innate moderations in the characters and their actions; a level ground that gives repose and pleasure to the feet; a bright sky reflected in faces and events; knowledge and art blended to a new unity; the intellect dwelling together without pretension and envy with its sister, the soul, in order to achieve the grace of earnestness as opposed to the impatience of division. All of this, Nietzsche writes, would be "the comprehensive, universal, goldgroundedness" upon which for the first time the delicate distinctions of embodied ideals would constitute the actual painting: "that of the ever growing human majesty." Goethe is a point of departure for many such paths to the future, but what are needed are good path finders and above all "a much greater power than possessed by current poets, that is by the thoughtless depicters of the semi-animal and immaturity and immoderation mistaken for strength and nature" (HH II/1 99, KSA 2:420). There are several points to consider in this detailed, albeit utopic vision of future artists. Immediately apparent is Nietzsche's disregard for artistic realism or naturalism, very much flourishing in his time, as it tends to focus on society's poorest and most oppressed (victims), while in depicting so-called positive characters mistaking weakness for strength. As a classicist himself, Nietzsche is quite aware of the virtues of moderation, scale and proportion, and this is why he cites Goethe as an example of great and promising poetry, for Goethe avoided both the pitfalls of Romantic excess and the voyeuristic, modern inclination to obsess about the negative, the downtrodden and the pathological. On close examination the properties Nietzsche ascribes to the new poetry are classically restrained and designed to provide an image of humans as whole. Moreover, artists would take their material not from the divine, or the sublime, but from existing human beings from our own time and place — there is no need to hunt for inspiration in the divine when humanity itself offers abundant substance

186

III. Nietzschean Religiosity

for human modeling, once the criteria are defined as Nietzsche or future artists state them. We should keep in mind that these are real, actual measures Nietzsche proposes, in accordance with a Dionysian aesthetic focused on the task of consciously creating a glorious human image which, through the medium of art, would constantly surround and support us, constantly reinforce and empower us. In addition to the religious human tendency to demean or debase the human image in favor of a divine image, the intellect also works in undermining ways. The more we comprehend the world, Nietzsche maintains, the more we lose in terms of solemnity. If fear is the basic element of respect and we no longer stand in a fearful relation to the unknown, to the mysterious, and to the incomprehensible, has the world not lost its attraction for us and have we not lost our own terribleness as a consequence of losing our fearfulness? Our courage in thinking "could become so much a part of us that it feels itself above humans and things as the most extreme arrogance." Where are the poet-seers, he asks, who could be seers of the possibilities in store for human being? If only we were able to glimpse or intuit something of future virtues, or of virtues that will never be on earth although they could be somewhere in the universe (D 551, KSA 3:321-2). In this scenario the poets are not charged specifically with drafting a new image of humans, but they are invoked as a possible source of guidance in the event our species arrogance becomes so flagrant in disregarding the earth that it becomes detached, disembodied. Ironic as it appears, the more we know about ourselves and the world the more we disregard, as if self knowledge and knowledge of the world were ultimately not only a matter of indifference, but the cause of increased self deprecation. If knowledge only cheapens by virtue of its exposing function, or by dispelling the aura of things, then by all means, art will have to serve as the saving grace. This conclusion is similar to the one Nietzsche reaches in Tragedy, when he weighs the benefits of the modern optimistic and scientific spirit against the existential impact of the loss of tragedy. It is not as though Nietzsche were advocating a return to primitive times when humans stood in awe and in fear of everything, though one wonders along with Nietzsche what is to become of awe, which according to Goethe is "the finest portion of humankind." 287 Instead, Nietzsche is concerned with putting forth the best possible human effort to create an elevated image of the human, which is unlikely to transpire if human arrogance takes no heed of the environment and fails to feel at home in it. The world — as nature, environment, things, reality — whatever it is that contains and maintains us — must be seen as a finite possibility, not as a prison necessarily, but as the venue in which humans are able to project their highest image of themselves in order to one day embody that image. The first step is to project an 287

See Goethe, Faust, lines 6271-74. See also Silk and Stetn, Nietzsche on Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), for a discussion of how moderns create mythological figures to pursue "greater reality" and related signs of immanence, 354-5.

5. Of Apotheosis and Surrogacy

187

image that is actually attainable, for only in this manner does the human who weans herself away from metaphysics not commit a similar metaphysical error by positing an unattainable image. Zarathustra explains that once people said "God" when looking out upon distant seas, now they should say superhuman. "God is a conjecture; but I want that your conjecturing not extend further than your creative will. / Could you create a God? — Then speak no more to me of any gods! But you could well create the superhuman" (Z II/2, KSA 4:109). The conjecture of God is not harmless to our species: "but who could drink all the agony of this conjecture without dying? Should the creator's faith be taken from him and the eagle's soaring in eagle distances?" A conjecture of God or gods steals from humanity what is its prerogative, namely creativity, and it steals from nature its prerogative, namely its own majesty and virtue and awe-inspiring scope — as seen in both the "distant seas" and the distances of the eagle. Zarathustra's will tells him otherwise, and it does not speak to him of infinite things, of unattainable conjectures: "Away from God and gods this will lured me; what would there be to create if gods — existed! / But toward the human being my fervent creating will impels me ever anew; thus is the hammer impelled toward the stone. / O h you humans, in the stone there lies sleeping an image, the image of my images! O h that it must sleep in the hardest, ugliest stone!" (ibid, 110-11). This section entided " O n the Blessed Isles" is one of Nietzsche's most elaborate and successful meditations on the dignity of the finite as human capacity, potential, and nature. It was the sense of awe derived from standing on the shore and gazing at seemingly infinite seas that inspired early humanity to say "God," but we who know the seas to be finite can just as well say "superhuman." It was the sense of awe in regarding the eagle's majestic soaring, high above the earth, that inspired early humanity to say "Creation," but those who do not believe in God attribute the eagle's greatness to the eagle, and are in awe of the eagle nonetheless. And consider the block of ugly stone in which humanity's image remains imprisoned — that block, too, is finite, constructed by humans over millennia of neglect, fear, asceticism, conjecturing. It remains for the human creator, mindful of the finite nature of the materials at her disposal, to slowly chip away at this block of stone until the image of humanity emerges into its own, human open — an open which is not infinite, and which is its true home. Putting forth a glorious human image is a lost art, a skill obliterated by the presence of the one god who, in order to exist and subsist acts as a drain upon human energy. Nietzsche insists that there can be more noble conceptions of deities than the crucified and violated one that rules in Europe. T h e Greek gods, he tirelessly maintains, reflected more noble, self glorifying humans in w h o m the animal deifies itself, and in whom the animal does not rage against itself. T h e early Greeks used their gods to stave off the phenomenon of "bad conscience" and to rejoice in the freedom of their soul. A pivotal feature of this relationship between gods and mortals was typically that gods would be blamed for human errors, they would be

188

III. Nietzschean Religiosity

seen as causes of evil: "back then they did not take punishment upon themselves but instead, as is more noble, guilt" (GM 11/23, KSA 5:333-5). The concept of amor fati does not allow for the bifurcation of actions into good and evil in exactly the same sense as Christianity, because there is no specific "agent of evil" as there is in the Christian devil. One can well comprehend a Christian blaming her own action on the devil (or herself), but a more noble conception would be to blame the gods and allow the gods to live with the guilt. Humans are spared an insidious and powerful physiological inhibition if they are more or less automatically absolved of guilt by their gods. Thus the individual Greek person represented a whole, a totality, by virtue of not having to practice repression of the animal side (passions, instincts and the like). This spiritual hygiene has the overall effect of encouraging health, self respect, and affirmation which in turn accumulates in individuals and community and continues to be projected into images of deities, thus fueling and not draining the best human energies to posit a glorious image. 288 In Beyond # 44 Nietzsche is propounding his notion of the free spirit and distinguishing sharply between it and the so-called "free thinkers"of the democratic mold who would alleviate suffering and pursue the leveling of the species. The free spirits are real and present, though scattered and living in solitude, as is their lot, and they are paving the way for the new philosophers (implied are the Dionysian ones) who are coming (BGE 44, KSA 5: 61-3). In notes not used for this number of Beyond, and in which Nietzsche specifically mentions Dionysus and more, there is a different slant. He has discovered in his study of the various religions that Europe's morality is simply not useful for his task of making humans stronger and deeper, and likewise Europeans need to learn that their morality is not the only one. He needs the opposite of herd ideals and the herd instinct, for it is his view that humans must be cultivated, to which end he proposes the rediscovery of the ancient world and the way of thinking he calls the Dionysian. The Dionysian sees the highest joy of existence in creating and reshaping humans and things, and in morality it sees only a means "to give the ruling will such a power and flexibility that it can impress itself upon humanity. I observe religions and educational systems with respect to how far they accumulate and transmit power; and nothing seems more essential to me than to study the laws of cultivation in order to not lose again the greatest quantum of power through inexpedient obligations and styles of living" (KSA 11: 478-80). Central to this discussion of reshaping the human is the notion that a new morality is possible and in fact desirable; that religions and schools in particular should be scrutinized with respect to how they store and transmit power across

288

I believe this phenomenon as elaborated by N. was first discovered by Hölderlin, whom N. at first admired, then appeared to reject as too romantic. See Del Caro, Hölderlin: The Poetics of Being (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), chapter 9 "Nonmetaphysical Divinity? Being's Dispensational Aspect," 80-98.

5. Of Apotheosis and Surrogacy

189

generations ( vererben ); that the laws governing cultivation must be learned and finally, that the foregoing is necessary to avoid the squandering of human spirit that historically has characterized the West. The "new morality" that Nietzsche proposes is a Dionysian morality, of sorts, but inasmuch as he claims that the philosophy of Dionysus only uses morality as a means, the goal is not so much a new morality but a process of reshaping humanity according to Dionysian laws of cultivation, as opposed to ascetic-Christian laws of cultivation, for the overall (ecumenical) purpose of nurturing the ruling will ("den herrschenden Willen") and enabling it to shape humanity. More will be said later in my book in connection with "ruling" as it relates to the earth. It is more apparent in Zarathustra than in other texts that Nietzsche sees his challenge in facing and replacing the Christian notion of God. We have already analyzed the contexts in which Nietzsche sees himself as the redeemer from redeemers, or as an anti-redeemer, and in Zarathustra he offers a new definition of redemption: "To redeem the past in the human being and to recreate all 'It was' until the will speaks: 'But I wanted it so! I shall want it so —' / — This I called redemption, This alone I taught them to call redemption " (Z III/12, KSA 4:249). According to this new definition of redemption, the transient (which includes mortals of course) is dignified by having been willed, as opposed to being disregarded or shunned as that which is merely transient, that over which we exercise no volition and whose passing makes us want to condemn life. Similarly, when Zarathustra speaks of consecrating his brothers to a new nobility, there is no historical model of this type of nobility because it resides in the future in the "children's land" and not in any "father land," nor can it be found in "the promised land": "for where the worst of all trees grew, the cross, — there is nothing promising in that land! —" (Z 111/12, KSA 4:255). 289 Lampert describes Zarathustra's foundational role as one of bringing new values and ending the nightmare of revenge (as seen in affirming the past), and so he refers to Zarathustra's willing of the eternal recurrence as "the foundational act." He also points out that Part III of Zarathustra ends with "The Seven Seals," an allusion to the New Testament in which seven seals are undone in order to bring about the final battle between Christ and Satan for the earth: "Nietzsche borrows the image of a book of seven seals to close his own book and to intimate the political consequences of the new teaching brought by the founder of the thousand-and-first people."290 Indeed, nothing less than a "battle for earth" is at stake, in Nietzsche's estimation, when it comes to countering the earth-denying properties of Western metaphysics, though Nietzsche does 289

290

N.'s reference to the cross as "the worst of all possible trees" is brimming with symbolism, for as a "processed" tree the cross is of course no longer living, and its utterly negative purpose as a platform upon which to crucify humans, or even worse, Christ, merely underscores the criminality of despoiling nature for lethal, cruel purposes. Trees are not supposed to be harvested to service crucifixion, and humans are not supposed to live only to die by crucifixion. Lampert, Nietzsche's Teaching, 157.

III. Nietzschean Religiosity

190

not see himself in the role of Satan, but rather in the role of Dionysus.291 And when it is no longer a matter of a "kingdom of heaven" but instead a "kingdom of the earth," Zarathustra asserts, against Matthew 18:3, that humans are no longer children but men who want to enter their own kingdom (Z IV/18, KSA 4:393), signifying that Christianity is a religion for an immature people, for minors, basically holding out to them the promise of a fairy tale world. Contrary to Plato and Kant, who taught that humans have "intelligible freedom," Nietzsche insists that "KO one is responsible for his being here at all, that his make up is thus and such, that he is in these circumstances, in this environment. The fatality of his being cannot be separated from the fatality of everything that was and that will be." If one honors the whole, recognizes that humans belong to a whole, that there is nothing outside the whole, then no one can be held accountable and condemned without condemning the whole. This is necessary to restore what Nietzsche calls "the innocence of becoming." To this day "the concept 'God' was the great objection to existence. We deny God, we deny the responsibility in God: with that we first redeem the world" (TI 6/8, KSA 6:96-7). If God is the decisive indictment against existence, then removing God from the picture will have the effect of restoring innocence, and will in effect give us a new world. This is a forceful and straight forward expression of the linkage between wholeness and the open, the open conceived as the innocence of becoming versus the stasis of condemned or guilty being. Matters might be different and Nietzsche might not feel called upon to deny God in such strong terms but for the fact that this God, the God of the West, represents a significant decline from the original God of Judaism and its ascending vitality, down to a God of descending life, of the poor, the oppressed, a democratic God. "The Christian concept of God — God as a God of the sick, as a spider, God as spirit — is one of the most corrupt concepts of God ever attained on earth." As the nadir of descending conceptions of the god type, God represents "the formula for every slander of 'the here and now,' for every lie about the 'beyond'! In God the nothing is deified, the will to nothing is pronounced holy!" (A 18, KSA 6:185). And to clarify that he is not against gods or God on principle, providing that God serves the interests of ascending life, Nietzsche maintains that what distinguishes him and his kind is not that they do not find God in history, in nature, or behind nature, "instead, that we perceive what has been revered as God not as 'godly' but as pitiful, as absurd, as harmful, and not only as an error but as a crime against life" (A 47, 6:225). Nietzsche's consistency on the matter of deification extends all the way from Tragedy to Antichrist; if humans are impelled to deify what they hold to be most worthy, in order to give it the character of eternity, and if humans are motivated by a glorious image of themselves

291

For a comprehensive analysis o f how N . actually uses Bible text in Zarathustra

see Siegfried V i -

tens, Die Sprachkunst Friedrich Nietzsches in Also Sprach Zarathustra, chapter II "Nietzsche und die Bibel," 3 1 - 4 3 .

5. Of Apotheosis and Surrogacy

191

and strong capacity for life affirmation, then their gods should reflect these values of life and under no circumstances should their gods be inimical to the values of life. But let us bring this discussion of the worthy deity closer to home, closer to the individual, by means of the eternal recurrence of the same. In complete contrast to Schopenhauer and Buddha, two great teachers of life denial who stood under the spell of world denying morality, Nietzsche discovers the opposite ideal "of the most high spirited, lively and world affirming human being." This person has learned not only to accept and get along with what was and is, but instead, wants to have it11 as it was and is" again, for all eternity. Insatiably shouting "da capo not only to himself, but to the whole play and spectacle, and not only to a spectacle, but at bottom to him who needs precisely this spectacle — and makes it necessary because he needs himself again and again What? Would this not be — circulus vitiosus — and makes himself necessary deus?" (BGE 56, KA 5:74-5). Nietzsche does not have a moralist's prescription for the life that would deserve deification, deserve eternity, he has only the prescription of this life, his life, your life, my life. There is no magic formula for deciding whose life, which life, because life itself is deserving of deification, the whole spectacle, as he says, and in affirming one's life and the spectacle it represents, eternally, the individual needs the spectacle and makes it necessary at the same time because he needs himself, again and eternally, and makes himself necessary, again and eternally. One sees why Nietzsche describes this as "a vicious circle made god," because in effect one's life becomes deified, not, to be sure, as a distinct and separate entity "out there" to be worshiped, but as oneself and one's life spectacle to be lived eternally. O n e is one's own private god, in a sense, not necessarily worshiping oneself, but nonetheless deifying one's life out of love for life and making the supreme gesture of life affirmation. The apotheosis of the human being does not intend to rival idealized conceptions of deities. It should be quite clear that Nietzsche conceives of human energy, human spirit and ingenuity as finite and in need of cultivation, which is to say, as finite and requiring wise management. 292 To try as humans to "out do" or out perform the gods, or God, would be to engage in the same manner of wasting spirit and denying life that has characterized Western culture since Plato. T h e so-called lowly human being, warts and all, and her little spectacle of life are the substance to which apotheosis is applied. It must be remembered, however, that in saying da capo to her life and the. spectacle in which her life is caught up, the individual also affirms everything by association and extension, i.e., there is more at stake than egotism, for essentially she affirms the whole. Respecting the religious impulse as he does, and having studied where the human spirit ebbs and flows historically according to the Dionysian value standard, Nietzsche wants religion and morals to serve as a means for cultivating the human. All this energy

252

See Bishop, "Jung's Annotations of Nietzsche's Works," where he acknowledges that both thinkers saw "it was possible to use religion for the purposes of psychological development, rather than merely submitting to it," 304.

192

III. Nietzschean Religiosity

should be harnessed, he maintains, for the good of humans and their home, the earth, for the alternatives have proven disastrous. It is not the case that Western metaphysics is harmless to the human condition, and even if it were, great potential for change, enhancement, development has been squandered. It is the case, in fact, that metaphysics culminating in the Western conception of God has spawned a nihilistic crisis, such that Nietzsche feels compelled to offer a counter that triumphs over nihilism while grounding existence in a partnership with the earth, effectively elevating both humanity and earth in the equation: the superhuman is the meaning of the earth. Nietzsche does not deny that humans benefit from some aspects of Western religion in important ways, and as we have noted already, he is open to the possibility of life affirming religion, gods, and morality. Every morality, he maintains in Beyond, as opposed to laisser aller or "letting go" is a piece of tyranny against nature and reason, but morality is not objectionable in itself. In order to condemn morality on the whole one would have to do so from the standpoint of another morality. What is "essential and inestimable in every morality is that it is a long compulsion." This goes to the heart of what Nietzsche means when he uses the word Zuchtto indicate cultivation, for under the pressure and long term effects of compulsion, virtually everything we value as human beings has been shaped and has found expression in us. To those in his day who blithely enthuse about so-called "freedom" and complain of being subject to arbitrary laws, Nietzsche responds: "The odd fact of the matter is, however, that everything there is or has been on earth in terms of freedom, refinement, boldness, dance and masterful certainty, whether in thinking itself or in governing or in speaking or in persuading, in the arts as well as in ethics, only developed by virtue of the 'tyranny of such arbitrary laws.' And in all seriousness, the probability is not small that precisely this is nature' and natural' — and woithat laisser aller? (BGE 188, KSA 5:108). This observation positions Nietzsche in stark contrast to modernity and Romanticism, which are very similar after all and spring from the same sources, and once again we see him applying the standard of classical restraint, which he not only borrows from antiquity for his own uses but wishes as well to invigorate for broader cultivating purposes. As he had claimed earlier in his preface to Beyond (BGE P, KSA 5:12-13), the struggle of Europe's spirit against the pressure of Christianity as a "Platonism of the people" has created a "magnificent tension of the spirit" as never seen before on earth, and one can actually accomplish something with this tension, with this accumulated energy. Here in Beyond # 188 he elaborates, explaining that European refinement is the result of compulsion, having been trained or bred (angezuchtet) by compulsion. The tyranny and "grandiose stupidity" of such concepts as "for the glory of God" and "for the salvation of the soul" have educated the spirit: "it seems that slavery in the cruder and finer sense is the indispensable means also for spiritual discipline and cultivation." Consequently, if one examines each morality one will see that its "nature" teaches us to hate letting go, to hate excessive freedom and instead "plants the need for limited horizons, for the closest tasks." Finally, the imperative of nature in matters

5. Of Apotheosis and Surrogacy

193

o f morals is "thou shalt obey, someone, and for a long time: or else you will perish and lose your last respect for yourself." Nietzsche offers this as an alternative to Kant's categorical imperative, and observe that Nietzsche's is neither categorical nor aimed at the individual, but at "peoples, races, ages, classes, but primarily at the entire animal 'human being,' at the human being" (ibid, 1 0 9 - 1 0 ) . W h a t characterizes Nietzsche's respect for Western morality, then, is the manner in which its compulsion and pressure on the collective psyche has precipitated into a physiological state manifesting all those advancements and properties in which we can justifiably take pride. T h e problem is, however, that these advancements have developed unintentionally and at the expense o f much squandered and ruined spirit. For the purpose o f building up the image o f the human being, Nietzsche appears to be saying two things: first, we have already been engaged in a cultivating o f the spirit, and undeniably this cultivation has produced some excellent results; secondly, if we are capable o f producing such results unintentionally, and despite our ascetic and life denying precepts, does it not make sense to pursue this course consciously, given what we know today about ourselves and our planet? In some sense what Nietzsche is addressing is humanity's failure to take credit for its accomplishments, a recurring theme in his writings. After all, G o d did not impose this compulsion upon us, we did, in the name o f G o d . T h e fear o f expressions o f hubris is strong in us, such that we shy away from claiming too much for ourselves, for the glory o f the human being, as though this would bring down on us some form o f reprisal. A n d it could be that this "fear o f reprisal" is no longer legitimate in the different sense that we merely do it reflexively, out o f habit, as a kind o f ill-timed and outmoded gesture o f humility, as a hollow protocol. In any case, the transference o f credit back to humans for their own achievements begins, according to Lampert, in the writings o f Bacon: "In the face o f a religion that promised the other world, the religion o f science promised this world — new bodies and a new earth — the Baconian form o f useful dreaming and the agency is man's not God's." 2 9 3 N o w that we know what the West's morality has given us despite itself on the positive, life affirming side, we must turn our attention to what has become o f it, and us, on the negative side, returning to Nietzsche's assertion that the European morality is no longer useful for the purpose o f cultivating a life affirming human being, and that we must rediscover the values o f antiquity (KSA 1 1 : 4 7 8 - 8 0 ) . According to Clark, Nietzsche concludes that what we call morality is not something that has always been with humans, it "developed in the course o f human history through the multiple coupling o f originally separate strands that we can no longer see as independent." In shedding light on this process and going about an inventory o f values, with the example o f the Dionysian as a constant guide, Nietzsche would have us revisit the space o f our moral creativity and possibly rearrange it. As Clark concludes with respect to the separate strands that

293

Lampert, Nietzsche and Modem Times, 247.

194

III. Nietzschean Religiosity

are woven together to create morality, "by separating them, I think Nietzsche tries to show us the possibility of tying these strands together differently, and thus the possibility of gaining much of what morality gives us, indeed what we cannot do without, in alternative ways, and specifically without the tie to the ascetic ideal." 294 This observation shows insight into the Nietzschean project or task by pointing to the open that Nietzsche desires to reveal for our species, without prematurely tarring him as an advocate of the devil or a wanton destroyer of human decency. When the myopic, closed system of Western morals believes itself to be the only morality it is behaving at its worst, and when commentators refuse to acknowledge that Nietzsche is a serious thinker in matters of morality, one often senses that their condemnation is a more or less faithful defense of their respective morality. But the same morality that spawns righteous indignation and moral condemnation is also capable, albeit less frequently, of practicing its flexibility, its intelligence as it were, by entertaining notions of alternative moralities. Aware of the difficulties connected with breaking moral habits that are long in the making, often imprinted by branding and the threat of fire, and have long been reinforced through centuries if not millennia of practice, Nietzsche is quite capable of regarding art as a religious surrogate, especially as a bridge or transition until, physiologically speaking, humans can stand on their own. To those who would prescribe a philosophy as a popular substitute for religion he cautions that "in the spiritual economy occasionally transitional thought processes are needed; hence the transition from religion into scientific reflection is a violent, dangerous leap, something that is to be advised against." Art, on the other hand, could play a role in weaning a person off of negative religious anxieties, which should not be allowed to persist in any case, and "from art one can then more easily make the transition to a truly liberating philosophical science" (HH1/27, KSA 2:48). One sees in this passage the stirrings of Nietzsche's interest in art for its creative potential, since after all we are talking here about removing emotional supports upon which people have leaned and relied — Nietzsche makes several related expressions of concern for humanity's welfare in the absence of the "old gravity" based on God. In part this sensitivity for providing a transition stems from his understanding of ancient tragedy as both a religion and a culture, as a system in which art and religion were not separated, but we could also infer that he is making tentative steps in the direction of his new Dionysian philosophizing, which becomes the major alternative to religion. In a not entirely humorous aphorism called "Homo poeta," Nietzsche delivers a monologue in the role of the human as poet. Now that he has killed all gods in the fourth act, and done so out of morality, what is next? Where is the tragic solution supposed to come from now? "Must I begin to reflect upon a comic solution?" (GS 153, KSA 3:496). Here he again voices his concern for not leaving humanity in the lurch, in a state of grief and mourning, without some proper 254

Clark, "Nietzsche's Immoralism," 31.

5. Of Apotheosis and Surrogacy

195

alternative. Humans are inventive beings, as the designation homo poeta suggests, and if it turns out that the spectacle we call humanity is not destined to be a tragedy, because we kill off all the gods and leave ourselves no tragic fate, then why not write the final act as a comedy? The philosopher of the golden laughter, after all, will be Nietzsche's highest conception of the new philosopher, and standing in a Dionysian relationship to existence does not mean tragedy in the ancient sense, nor is it limited to tragedy in any new sense propounded by Nietzsche. Of course when referring to art we cannot dismiss the elevated view of art that is common to both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Schopenhauer would use art to escape the suffering of the will by taking refuge in the special kind of knowledge he designates as "art," because art, unlike other forms of knowledge that rely on the principle of sufficient reason, "repeats the eternal Ideas apprehended through pure contemplation, the essential and abiding element of all phenomena of the world." In other words, art draws only on the Ideas and "its sole aim is communication of this knowledge."295 Humans are redeemed, in Schopenhauer's view, by their art, and one can recognize Schopenhauer's influence everywhere in Tragedy where Nietzsche follows a course parallel to Schopenhauer and argues for the saving grace of art and in particular music and tragedy, the two most closely related art forms according to Nietzsche and also highest in Schopenhauer's scale. I agree with Young that Nietzsche did in fact subscribe to Schopenhauer's brand of cultural pessimism in Tragedy, though he later "started to represent his own philosophy as antipodal to Schopenhauer's in a way that centrally involves the issue of pessimism: in opposition to Schopenhauer's 'denial' of life, the later Nietzsche represents 'life-affirmation' as the pervasive character and fundamental point of his own philosophy."296 Young goes on to criticize Nietzsche commentators since Kaufmann for accepting Nietzsche's claims at face value, and what is more, for purporting to see in Tragedy already an overcoming of Schopenhauer's pessimism, such that Tragedy can then be seen "as fundamentally continuous with Nietzsche's later works."297 While I quite agree with Young that Tragedy is a thoroughly Schopenhauerian work, and perfectly consistent with the elevation of Platonism and artistic metaphysics as propounded by Schopenhauer — for which reason I do not regard it as a grounded or grounding work (see my chapter I) — I disagree with the view that Nietzsche did not surpass Schopenhauer's brand of pessimism, and I believe I addressed the problem of Nietzsche's reworking of Romantic pessimism in Nietzsche Contra Nietzsche, where I explored the sources and influences of Romantic pessimism and how Nietzsche stands in relation to them. 295

296

297

Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. 1 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1961), 265. Julian Young, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 26-7. Young argues throughout that N. never truly surpassed Schopenhauer's pessimism, despite claims to the contrary, and that he returns to it in the late works (p. 3). Young, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art, 27.

196

III. Nietzschean Religiosity

For Nietzsche art cannot possibly represent an Ideal in the Platonic sense, or a thing in itself, because it is a basic expression of human life and as such it reflects the relative strength of a given age or people, it is grounded in the physiology of human beings. Every age, he argues in The Case of Wagner, has its own measure of strength and its own measure of the virtues it is permitted and denied. Either it possesses the virtues of ascending life, or it is itself a declining life: "Aesthetics is indissolubly bound to these biological prerequisites: there is a decadence aesthetics, there is a classical aesthetics — a 'beautiful in itself is a hallucination, like all of idealism" (CW E, KSA 6:50). This idea also shows up in Twilight where Nietzsche discusses frenzy (Rausch) as the physiological prerequisite for art and aesthetic viewing: "What is essential in frenzy is the feeling of intensified strength and fullness. One imparts to things from this feeling, one compels them to take from us, one violates them — one calls this process idealizing. Let us rid ourselves here of a prejudice: idealizing does not consist as commonly believed in a subtracting or discounting of the small, the incidental. A tremendous forcing out of the main features is instead what is decisive, so that the others thereby disappear" (TI 9/8, KSA 6:116). Transferred to the realm of biology, Nietzsche's theory of frenzy closely resembles his view, often stated in refuting Darwin (e.g. TI 9/14), that the condition of life is not scarcity but superabundance, not barely hanging on in order to survive, but proliferation according to the will to power. There is no doubt that the discussion of frenzy, like the will to power, rests on a Dionysian vision of the world. So when Nietzsche prescribes art as a bridge and does so in the context of a "popular" ("fur das Volk") alternative to religion, one has to decide whether this is only an "interim" Nietzsche speaking, a pre-Dionysian who may actually be concerned about the people at large, or whether this is Nietzsche's final statement, intended to apply to people in general regardless of any real or purported esoteric conditions on the Dionysian.298 The modern, Romantic conception of "art for art's sake" or I'artpour I'art is taken to task by Nietzsche. Insofar as one pursues an art without morals, he is in favor of characterizing it as art for its own sake, but he stops here. There can be no indifference or lack of purpose in art, for the artist's deepest instinct does not go into art but into the meaning of art, which is life. Art Nietzsche claims is the great stimulus to living — how can it be without purpose, without goals, art for art's sake? (TI 9/25, KSA 6:127) Those who would suppose that by characterizing art as something justified in and of itself they are elevating art are in fact debasing it, for they are removing it from the environment and agency of its greatest effectiveness in living to a plane of pure perception, to a Platonic plane. If Platonism is unacceptable to Nietzsche in matters of religion it remains unacceptable in matters of art. He leaves no doubt as 298

Young, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art, 118. Young claims the Dionysian appears to become more accessible by 1888 and more achievable, at least for the artist, but N. himself has not noticed that "the concept of what constitutes it has altered."

5. Of Apotheosis and Surrogacy

197

to his anti-romantic position in Twilight, and for an even earlier expression one can turn to his notes from 1885/86 where he writes: "Ultimately it is a question of power: this whole romantic art could be refashioned into the anti-romantic by a super rich (iiberreich) and powerfully willed artist — to use my formula — into the Dionysian, just as each kind of pessimism and nihilism in the hands of the strongest individual becomes just one more hammer and tool with which to build oneself a new pair of wings" (KSA 12:111). In seeking to demonstrate that humans have the requisite strength and qualities to project a glorious image of themselves, Nietzsche is constrained by the fact that the modern image of God includes omnipotence, omniscience, the ability to work miracles, to condemn to hell etc. In other words, the capacities of the divine are anything but human, leaving humans feeling crushed and feeble should any dare to make a comparison. This is why Dionysus becomes pivotal for Nietzsche's project of the apotheosis of the human being, that is, Dionysus occupies a special place among conceptions of gods both by virtue of being half human and by virtue of being life affirming even on his divine side. Dionysus is thus capable of symbolizing the fullest possible range of experiences to which the human being is entitled. Moles is justifiably struck by Nietzsche's image of the cosmos and how it appears to coincide with his perception of Dionysus, remarking that "Nietzsche's image of the cosmos is that of a god undergoing eternal self-destruction and self-creation. This fatality is an attribute of the god the ancient Greeks called Dionysus." Basing his finding on Nietzsche's readings in physics and astronomy, and his writings on the Dionysian and the eternal recurrence of the same, Moles observes that "Dionysus is a god of incredible power, but not infinite. His nature is to be eternally self-contradictory, or inwardly divided. Yet Dionysus eternally heals himself, trying to create himself as whole again. But he can only create out of himself; so every accomplished unity shares in his fatality, and destroys itself. The creative activity of Dionysus is inexhaustible; through every created unity, he seeks a path back to himself, eternally. Yet he cannot re-create himself finally; he is eternally recurrent." 299 What is valuable both in this timely linkage of Dionysus with Nietzschean cosmology and the detailed analysis of the god's nature is the notion of the inescapableness and fruitfulness of the finite, which Nietzsche takes as his philosophical dowry or inheritance and elaborates into a project of grounding existence. Dionysus is finite but "inexhaustibly" creative, which could well be said of humans. His self-contradictory nature or his "flaw" does not obtain by any moral authority, i.e., Dionysus is not flawed because of original sin or because of the paltriness of the idol in relation to the Platonic Ideal — the flaw of Dionysus is the character of nature itself, for Dionysus is nature itself, and nature can no more be "perfect" or ideal than humans can be perfect or ideal. So the Dionysian activity of seeking wholeness or 299

Alistair Moles, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Nature and Cosmology (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), 301.

198

III. Nietzschean Religiosity

healing (re-membering that Dionysus as Zagreus is torn to pieces!), is not a seeking of redemption beyond natural wholeness, it is instead a restitution to the state of wholeness in which Dionysus naturally exists. And once achieved, Dionysian wholeness is fleeting, transient, as is human life, all life, such that the wholeness must be worked at again and again, eternally. Finite powers and finite nature, paired with inexhaustible or infinite creative activity, are the formula of the eternal recurrence of the same. Dionysus is a geocentric and biocentric metaphor for living under eternity in the moment, he is the recurring eternity and yet he is life on earth to the utmost extent that anything or anyone can be said to represent earth in its essence. But I am arguing here only for regarding Dionysus as a more appropriate model for a glorious human than the model provided by the Judeo-Christian God, I am not suggesting that Dionysus is human or that humans are capable of achieving the divine status of Dionysus. For as Moles adds: "Dionysus has none of the limitations of a human being. Whatever his consciousness, he knows no weariness, satiety, or disgust. Recurrence is an inner necessity of things which has nothing to do with reasons; it is simply Dionysus' nature, or fate."300 In referring to Nietzsche's Dionysian as a bridge to the "psychology of the tragic poet," as this is discussed at the conclusion of Twilight (TI 10/5, KSA 6:160), Babich reiterates her strong position that "this kind of affirmation is not available to the ordinary individual. This critical restriction must never be discounted in Nietzsche's doctrine of amor fati, or tragic, Dionysian life-affirmation." 301 In defending a view of Nietzsche as esoteric, Babich would have us ignore the exoteric dimensions of the Dionysian, which I believe manifest themselves as the communication of the formerly esoteric mysteries of the Dionysian in a manner similar to the Apollinian serving as the expression, the apotheosis of the Dionysian. And even if we grant that Nietzsche's communication of the Dionysian is intended only for small ears, the ears he prefers, the ears of the like-minded (Nietzsche actually did have small ears, as opposed to what he called ass ears), does this necessarily mean that concepts such as amor fati cannot be used by ordinary people for their own greater affirmation of the earth? If we close this possibility, what are we to make of the fact that Nietzsche's new Dionysian is based on an old one, on the actual worship of Dionysus by actual, historical Greeks? Were these people, that is, the ancient Greeks, not ordinary by the standards of ordinary as they obtain in any given age? And, whether or not ordinary folk can engage in what Nietzsche calls Dionysian amorfati, can their dwelling on and sharing of the earth with "the few" Dionysians not be positively influenced by them? Must they be regarded by the real Dionysians (the few) as mere chaff? Or might not the few, real Dionysians feel compelled, by virtue of their Dionysian affirmation, to affirm even the little people who have only a small capacity for loving fate, but would like to do 300 301

Moles, Nietzsche's Philosophy, 301. Babich, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science, 111.

5. Of Apotheosis and Surrogacy

199

so anyway? Other questions could be posed as well — there is no slamming the door of the Dionysian in the faces of the people, any more so than Nietzsche or anyone else can speak of a real Dionysian without including women. I do not wish to make of Nietzsche some kind of Dionysian Pied Piper, but due consideration must be given to the fact that he does communicate the Dionysian, i.e., he renders it exoteric both in Zarathustra and in the writings which follow, in the latter case explicitly; furthermore, the portrayal of Dionysus as a tempter suggests that his views will be attractive to the unitiated, inasmuch as the initiates of Dionysus don't need tempting, and the little people, after all, want tempting too; finally, what are we to make of Nietzsche's deliberate positioning of the Dionysian, amor fati, the eternal recurrence of the same next to Christianity, as a counter? On whom is the Dionysian counter supposed to be effective? In real terms we can expect that Nietzsche's doctrines will have a limited and esoteric appeal — that I do not wish to dispute; however, to categorically deny access to his teachings to the people at large based on their alleged unsuitability strikes me as a more draconian position than the one adopted by Nietzsche.302 The position defended by Babich has been around since the earliest years of Nietzsche scholarship and as I discussed earlier (see the section on "Negative Immanence" above) has only assumed greater importance to commentators in the light of the devastations of W W II. One wants to protect Nietzsche's legacy, and the integrity of his writings, by making the best possible case than any past attempts to invoke his thought for political purposes were misguided and criminal, based on a completely mistaken notion that Nietzsche could have popular appeal. It was wrong during the Hitler period to appropriate Nietzsche for National Socialism, and so it is wrong henceforth and evermore to try to appropriate Nietzsche for anything but arcane academic discourse, so more or less goes the argument. Already in the 1890s Lou Salomé, who knew Nietzsche better than most commentators, had this to say about the esoteric Nietzsche: "Zarathustra has remained, at best, the most misunderstood of all his books, and all the more so since it has been commonly assumed that this poetic work contains in popularized form that which had been previously rendered in stricter philosophical form. In truth, however, of all his works it is the least intended for popularization. If ever there was an esoteric philosophy which would not be accessible completely to anyone, this was it." 303 This statement is quite understandable coming from one who accepts the rhetorical Nietzsche at face 302

303

See Babich pp. 282-3. She has reasons for her views, which must be respected, but I believe the case is just as strong, if not stronger, that N. envisions that at some point in the future his views will have ecumenical and culture shaping influence. Lou Salomé, Nietzsche. Edited, translated and with an introduction by Siegfried Mandel (Redding Ridge, CT: Black Swan Books, 1988), 123. First published in 1894, Salome's book contains many valuable insights concerning Nietzsche and his writings, of which this particular observation is a more questionable one.

200

III. Nietzschean Religiosity

value. But when he subtitles Zarathustra "A Book for All and None," we must situate Nietzsche's readership between all and none, not at either end of the spectrum. The minute the book is read by one human being, with or without understanding, Dionysian empathy or whatever, it is no longer "a book for none," and the last time anyone checked, all human beings had not read Zarathustra, thereby eliminating it as a book "for all." To claim that Zarathustra and the ideas represented therein are not intended for popular appeal is to overlook virtually everything Nietzsche himself says concerning the greatness of Zarathustra, especially in Ecce Homo, and it is also to overlook the language and communicative intensity of the work itself, which is difficult to do. Nietzsche attracts his readers as Dionysus attracts his followers, by tempting and seduction, and Nietzsche knows better than most that in order to make something attractive on a grand scale, one must not profess to give it away in the streets, like religious pamphlets, and one must make a point of hammering home the exclusivity and elite nature of the teaching — he reveals this strategy to any who have eyes to read in Science 292 "To the preachers of morals." Having said this, we do not forget what Nietzsche himself says about Zarathustra, namely, that he is not a redeemer but a redeemer from redeemers.

Chapter IV: Logic and Limit in the Eternal Recurrence of the Same 1. The Finite in Relation to Potential "How rich is this earth in small good perfect things, in things that turned out well!"

Thus Spoke Zarathustra,

"On the Higher Human Being," 15

The misleading thing about the semantics of the doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same is the suggestion that "eternal" somehow equates to "infinite" as if time were perceived in a linear mode. In fact, however, because the eternal recurrence of the same is supposed to represent a circular view of time, time as a great ring, its eternity does not stretch from an origin in point A in linear fashion into infinity — such a view of time would not allow for recurrence, as each moment in time would be different from the next ad infinitum. In Nietzsche's preferred circular view of time, the character of eternity is changed because there is no starting point and time progresses in a circle, always contained and containing itself, always retracing its steps, eternally intersecting and passing "point A." Such a view of time does of course allow for recurrence, but it does not allow for a conclusion or finale, nor does it allow for the permanent passing of any point in time. The eternal recurrence of the same forces a revaluation of the concept of past, as well as a revaluation of the concept of end, both of which it renders impossible or at least, irrelevant. This brings us to the word "same" as Nietzsche uses it when he does not himself abbreviate the doctrine as "eternal recurrence" or "eternal return." Under normal circumstances it would suffice to say "eternal recurrence" to indicate that all things recur eternally, but he insists on adding "the same" in order to emphasize that the eternal recurrence does not leave open the possibility of any transcendental, any detour, any escape from the ring. As a doctrine purporting to represent both the highest affirmation of life achievable, and the most nihilistic thought, the eternal recurrence of the same invites us to imagine a scenario in which there is not only nothing after life, but instead, there is not even nothing after life — after life there is the eternal recurrence of the same life. This is why our conception of "the end" must change with the eternal recurrence of the same, and this is also why our relation to the past must change. With the removal of the possibility of "the end" or at the very least, of the possibility of any "beyond" in relation to the end, and with the certain prospect of the past recurring eternally, one is "motivated" (choose your verb) to make the very most of one's life. In other words, whether or not it is logical, scientifically verifiable, or reasonable in any sense, the eternal recurrence of

202

IV. Logic and Limit in the Eternal Recurrence of the Same

the same compels us to reflect on the finite nature of our lives by focusing on the same life as if it will recur eternally. I think Nietzsche chooses this wording and this doctrine to foster a deeper capacity for affirming the finite. As long as humans can conceive or imagine an eternal life in some form of beyond, they will do so, it is human nature to do so, and religion encourages this indulgence and thrives off of it. And for those who manage to break away from dreams of an eternal "better life" or "worse life" after life, perhaps consoling themselves that they are headed only for oblivion, Nietzsche spoils their outlook by claiming there is no oblivion for it, too, is a form of beyond, and it too is specious infinity. By building up humanity's capacity to acknowledge, recognize, celebrate and embrace the finite, Nietzsche believes he can ground human being as never before. By all indications humans do not do well with their time, they are inefficient, wasteful, indifferent, confused, fearful with time, and time's passing has the effect of making humans angry, resentful, vengeful, vulnerable — transience is depressing. Living in a state of depression and fear is not sufficient for Nietzsche, no matter how successful we become in suppressing our fear or in masking our resentment toward everything that passes, including ourselves. In order to not have to deal with our discomfort, our deep discontent, we keep as busy as possible and try to glide through life, and we do not pay too much attention to how much time is left, or to what comes next, or last. I think Nietzsche prescribes a new orientation to the finite in two basic forms: the temporal finite as the moment, with "moment" symbolizing an individual life; and the spatial finite as body and environment, both subsumed by "earth." Dwelling on these two notions could have the effect of breaking us out of the state of depression into which we are thrown by fear of transience, by resentment toward the past, by the horror of the unknown. The deep joy that Nietzsche attributes to living has to mean more than simply substituting his kind of hell for the one currently preferred by people. The finite liberates, counterintuitive as it may seem, and Nietzsche teaches that the finite is our proper environment, just as earth is our proper physical and spiritual home. In this spirit, when we consider the masterful one-page "chapter" of Twilight zntided "How the 'True World' Finally Became a Fable" (Wie die 'wahre Welt' endlich zur Fabel wurde), appropriately called a "reverse genealogy" by Stegmaier,304 because as he states it proceeds from extreme metaphysics to the fundamental character of the only world, I wish to draw attention to the adverb endlich as more than the temporal designation "finally." The German endlich can also mean, as an adverb, "in a limiting way" or "in a finite way." Endlichkeit (finitude) is therefore the opposite of Unendlichkeit (infinity). Of course Nietzsche was aware of this nuance when he wrote the reverse genealogy, but because he has covered so much time since the inception of metaphysics until the present day, the day of his Zarathustra, readers naturally focus on the most common usage of endlich as finally — f i n a l l y the "true 304

Stegmaier, Nietzsches

'Genealogie,

336.

1. The Finite in Relation to Potential

203

world" is exposed as a hoax etc. But in my reading of Nietzsche's earth rhetoric it is impossible to ignore the adverb endlich in its instrumentality, i.e., the means by which the "true world" became a fable are finite means, finitude itself played a role in making the "true world" disappear, which is to say, in effect, reality had a hand in this reverse genealogy or, extrapolating once more, the course of events was natural. The problem is, since humans are so prone to hurl themselves at the least glimmer of transcendence, we recoil from embracing anything around us, close to us. Humans abhor limitation. Moles explains how our special fascination with temporality is related to the limitation complex: "Nietzsche apparendy ascribes this tendency to a feeling of limitation, found in people everywhere and even in organic nature as a whole. The sense of being limited leads to a defensive attitude, to the need not to lose, to the need to gain and to accumulate, to seeing the future as offering something more than the present, to seeing what is gone as lost and irredeemable."305 In Zarathustra Nietzsche refers to this unhealthy condemnation and resentment of the transient as the spirit of revenge, and the eternal recurrence of the same is intended to cure it. In Nietzsche's view of the "the great health" as it is elaborated by his new hygiene, the human suffering from temporality must be dealt with. To use an analogy from the body: it is as if humans were endowed with their senses for the purpose of living a joyous life surrounded by everything they need, only to have their senses inhibited at every turn, at every moment, by a mental condition that refuses to allow the senses to work within their physical environment. While this condition might contribute in certain ways to the positive tension of the spirit that Nietzsche sees in the Western psyche as a result of living under the compulsion of the God-concept, it is also clear that living in this state of postponed living, of inhibited living, of stressful living acts as a drain on finite human energies and as a negative stimulus to abuse our environment, which is the chief reminder of transience. The feeling of limitation existentially is the feeling that contributes to the desire to accumulate, expand, grow large, hold on to things. One might see in this feeling an expression of the will to power, which also appropriates and expands, but the feeling of limitation wants to compensate by holding on, by accumulating for the purpose of arresting time in its place, of asserting a material bulwark against the passing of time, as if somehow enclosing oneself in a fortress of possessions could stave off the advance of time. This becomes a processing will, a will that treats nature with contempt as a means to an end, as a momentary dwelling whose "resources" are there for the taking, especially since according to the processing will humans are supposed to transcend nature and become disembodied eternal souls. The will to power, on the other hand, when it is not diverted or distorted by the inhibited senses such that it appears in the guise of the processing will, while behaving as an appropriating will 305

Moles, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Nature and Cosmology,

242-43.

204

IV. Logic and Limit in the Eternal Recurrence of the Same

does not aim for accumulation and stasis and is not acting out of compensation for a feeling of limitation. As the expression of superabundance, and as the expression of what life cherishes more than its own life, the will to power deals with the environment in terms of management and shaping, in terms of creativity, expending itself not for some goal (e.g. accumulation, bulwarking against time) but at all times, constantly, for the moment, in the moment, engaging the finite with uninhibited senses. Humans living according to the postulates of the eternal recurrence of the same and the will to power would have a substantially different sense of time than others, such that their actions in time would allow them to harvest the greatest yield from each moment in time, without constantly having to worry about time's passing. And this reorientation is not only, and in my view, not even principally a function of time, but instead, it is a function of embracing the finite and becoming occupied with it. As usual much depends on how we view nature, namely, whether we see in nature superabundance and potential, or whether we regard it as the condition of life that merely clings to life, that merely survives and struggles to do so. Obviously Nietzsche understands that our positions on nature are dictated by our anthropocentric perspective, but he does believe we have to carry our view of human flawed character and limitation into nature, i.e., we cannot judge nature to be what we think we are, nor can we judge it to be what we want it to be. Moles' formulation of the cosmos in Nietzsche can stand well as a summary of his view of nature: "To the extent that there is joyful identification with the creative pathos of the cosmos, there is also participation in its eternity, and the experience of living as if beyond time. Nietzsche describes such a state as living one's life sub specie aeterni, under the aspect of eternity." At this point Moles also directs our attention to Antichrist numbers 33 and 3 5.306 What Moles draws our attention to in the notion of living under the aspect of eternity will be more familiar to readers in the guise of the eternal recurrence of the same, which would constitute a practice of living under the aspect of eternity if adopted by an individual. "Living as if beyond time" is precisely what I mean by the intervening, changing force of the will to power as opposed to the processing will; of course one continues to live within time, and "beyond' is something Nietzsche would just as soon proscribe from the human vocabulary, and yet, what is needed according to Nietzsche is an affirmative stance toward existence such that one is no longer plagued by time, troubled by time, beholden to time. Now we can analyze Antichrist # 33 to see why Moles would have it classified as an example of living under the aspect of eternity. Nietzsche asserts that in the entire psychology of the gospel the concepts of guilt, punishment, and reward are lacking, and "sin" as well as any kind of distance ratio between God and humans are also dispensed with: "precisely that is the 'glad tidings' Blessedness is not promised, it is not tied to conditions: it is the single reality — the rest is sign, in order to speak of it." The 306

Moles, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Nature and Cosmology, 243-44.

1. The Finite in Relation to Potential

205

evangelical practice, therefore, was to act without vengeance, prejudice, anger, disrespect, to abstain from oaths, to suspend judgment. "The life of the redeemer was nothing other than this practice. "Thus Christ did not need prayer, dispensed with the Jewish doctrine of penance and reconciliation, and he knows "how it is only the practice of life with which one can feel 'divine,' 'blessed,' evangelical,' at all times a 'child of God.'" Ways to God are not found in penance or prayer for forgiveness, but instead "the evangelical practice alone leads to God, it itself is 'God.'" After making clear that Christ represents a denial ofJewish religious doctrine, Nietzsche concludes: "The deep instinct for how one must live, in order to feel oneself'in heaven,' in order to feel oneself as eternal' while one with every other behavior decidedly does woifeel oneself'in heaven': this alone is the psychological reality of'redemption.' A new way of living, not a new faith" (A 33, KSA 6:205-6). Nietzsche reiterates his position in Antichrist# 35, and adds that the "bearer of glad tidings" died as he lived and taught, "not in order 'to redeem human beings' but instead to show how one must live" (KSA 6:207). Obviously Nietzsche's evaluation of Christ differs profoundly from what has been handed down, since Christians do in fact regard Christ as the redeemer, and the concepts of penance, punishment, sin, etc are all very much in evidence in Western culture. Christ's ability to live under the aspect of eternity or in any case to feel as though he is eternal rests on his practice, i.e., on his actions, day to day, on his behavior in his environment, day to day, on his interaction with the finite, not with the infinite. If a human being were able to live as Christ lived, feeling herself eternal and in heaven and without sin, there would be tremendous power of life affirmation in her, a power of affirmation which Nietzsche removes from the metaphysical and religious sphere and transfers to the sphere of the physical, of the environmental, by virtue of the eternal recurrence of the same. Just as Christ's being tolerates no division between teaching and practice, in essence, tolerates no intervention from the beyond, living under the eternal recurrence of the same tolerates no division between living and one's environment, all meaning, all joy stem from what one does, day to day, in one's environment, but not as "the son of god," only as a finite, humble mortal whose living falls under the aspect of eternity because her life recurs eternally in every detail. Using the metaphor of the gardener and gardening, Nietzsche insists that we are essentially free to cultivate ourselves. Among the options he enumerates as possibilities are growing our anger, pity, brooding, and vanity until they blossom like fruits; or one could tend to cultivating oneself in the manner of French, English, Dutch, or Chinese gardeners; or one could let nature take its course and intervene minimally, simply allowing "the plants to grow within their natural favorable conditions and obstacles and letting them wage their struggle among themselves."All of this, he claims, is free to us, available to us ("steht uns frei"), but how many people are aware of this? "Do not most people believe m themselves as if in completedfully grown facts7. Have not great philosophers impressed their seal upon this prejudice with the doctrine of the unchangeableness of character?" (D 560, KSA 3:326). A gardener works with the finite toward

206

IV. Logic and Limit in the Eternal Recurrence of the Same

bringing forth things of beauty and utility, using materials that are quite common, quite ordinary, but doing so with love, forethought, planning, cultivation and above all, the knowledge that the plot of soil does not have to remain as she found it. And if Nietzsche's nature metaphors are too earthy for some, consider his praise of Goethe, in whom posterity has recognized a great human being, perhaps even a genius and Renaissance man. Nietzsche characterizes him as a piece of coming up to nature, a piece of the Renaissance and a kind of self-overcoming on the part of the nineteenth century. "He helped himself with history, the natural sciences, antiquity, as well as Spinoza, above all with practical activity; he surrounded himself with nothing but limited horizons; he did not detach himself from life but placed himself into it." What Goethe wanted was totality, and in fighting against the separation of reason, sensuality, feeling and will ( — preached in the most repulsive scholasticism by Kant, Goethe's antipode), he disciplined himself to wholeness, he created himself." Such a spirit who has become free, Nietzsche continues, stands in the midst of the universe "with a joyous and trusting fatalism," in the faith that only the particular is objectionable, "that in the whole everything is redeemed and affirmed." Such faith Nietzsche has baptized with the name Dionysus (TI 9/49, KSA 151). If one can pardon the comparison (though Nietzsche would have appreciated the humor in it), what Christ and Goethe had in common was that they were practitioners of living, not observers, not sideline preachers. These were individuals who commanded each moment and were incapable of negation, denial, resentment toward life. Moreover, they took their help and their substance from the everyday, from the closest things, from what Nietzsche calls "limited horizons." In "Christening" his affirmative faith as the Dionysian, and in unifying the Dionysian and the eternal recurrence of the same, Nietzsche is pointedly offering his way as an alternative to Christ's way, since he does not believe humans capable of Christ's example and sees no basis in Christianity for believing that Christ's example is of the slightest interest. Goethe was of course a far cry from living a "Christ-like" existence, but as a modern he was unique in his capacity for living and creating, and for making the most of his finite powers, and Nietzsche may well have had in mind a poem by Goethe in which he writes: "only in limitation does the master reveal himself" ("nur in der Beschränkung zeigt sich der Meister"). 307 In organizing and cultivating one's attributes for the purpose of maximizing one's interaction with the environment, Nietzsche prescribes self mastery, and whether or not self mastery is synonymous with the will to power in humans, it is undeniably of prime importance to Nietzsche's conception of great individuals. One should become master of oneself and master over one's virtues. Earlier these virtues had been master over the individual, now they need to be relegated to their appropriate position as tools among other tools. It is also imperative that one gain power over one's pros and 307

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Natur und Kunst" in Goethes Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe in 14 Bänden, ed. ErichTrunz (Hamburg: 1969), I, 245.

1. The Finite in Relation to Potential

207

contras, learning to use them according to one's higher needs ( H H I P 6, KSA 2:20). These and numerous other "commandments" will be known to free spirits, who after all only become free spirits by virtue of imposing upon themselves just such a strict regimen of inventory and cultivation. If one cannot take the measure of oneself and one's needs, as well as the effect of one's perspectives and dealings with the outside world, one is doomed to frittering away life. After all, the phenomenon life is overwhelming and Nietzsche understands that the human being has no goal in relation to life. Moreover, it is only our lack of imagination that shelters us from perceiving the great suffering of other beings, and if we were capable "of comprehending and perceiving the total consciousness of humanity" in ourselves, we would break down "with a curse against existence" ( H H 1/33, KSA 2:53). This observation occupies the penultimate position of the first section of Human, entitled "Of First and Last Things." But Nietzsche does not advocate pessimism, withdrawal, denial or retreat to a plane of Platonic idealism, as does Schopenhauer — Nietzsche characteristically falls back upon the most grounded position he can establish, upon "first things." Thus he concludes the first section of Human with a rejoinder to the despair that might be inferred from aphorism # 33. Knowing that one is doomed to living with untruth, in untruth as a condition of life need not devastate or intimidate us. "I believe the decision about the after effect of knowledge is provided by the temperament of a human being." As knowledge makes its advances in a person's life, one begins to cultivate oneself through regulation of the passions and affects that earlier ruled over a person. "One would live in the end among humans and with oneself as if in nature, without praise, blame, without becoming excited, calmly regarding as if a spectacle much that previously only caused fear. O n e would be rid of emphasis and would no longer feel goaded to think that one is not only nature or more than nature." Establishing one's equilibrium in nature is key, and is a form of coming to terms with the finite. All this would depend on one's temperament, he reminds us, and what is needed in a temperament is "a firm, mild and at bottom cheerful soul, a mood which does not need to be on its guard against malicious tricks and sudden outbursts." T h e individual who in this manner "only continues to live in order to know better and better" will eventually find the most desirable condition in soaring above others, their morals and laws and traditional valuations ( H H 1/34, KSA 2: 53-5). We should not overlook the ingredients which lead to the finished product here; it is the even temperament, not the unrestrained, flaring, rampaging ego that determines how one responds to the growth of knowledge, and knowledge itself is used to regulate the affects and quiet the otherwise fearful individual in the light of knowledge gained. These are long-term, practical steps to living in the "abundance of limitation" or in the potential of limitation, which humans have heretofore not consciously attempted. T h e modesty of the approach is important to consider, as if the length of the race were the important factor, because after all one must bear up to the adversity of lost comfort, lost solace, lost illusion and prepare to settle in

208

IV. Logic and Limit in the Eternal Recurrence of the Same

for the long run. Knowledge clears a space for the open, but the open can be horrifying to us, at one extreme, or dangerous, or even useless. The open can only be appreciated as a liberating space once it is creatively, and gainfully occupied by the contours of individual human energies applied to the limitations of one's space. The best way to begin each day would be to reflect upon waking whether one could do a favor, or provide a pleasure to at least one person on this day: "If this were allowed to stand as a substitute for the religious habit of praying, then our fellow human beings would have an advantage from this change" ( H H 1/589, KSA 2:338). The engaging of the finite in this aphorism stems from an awareness of finite time, measured in the unit of a day, and the resolve to do a good deed, versus make a good wish, for one person. Nietzsche underscores that even a small deed, as long as it is a deed, has the power to work, to be effective, and multiplied over time this action or behavior translates into harvesting the finite. All the good wishes and prayers, meanwhile, inasmuch as they are not effective on the environment, would likely result in the squandering of opportunities. Once again the focus is on action and practice, and the outcome should be manifested in measurable change, in a difference representing enhancement. If Goethe is considered to be a great human being it is because he made a difference, because he effected changes, because his society and our earth are better for his having been here. There is also a late expression of the embrace of the finite in Nietzsche's notes from 1888, a good ten years after the published Human aphorisms which make up the majority of his observations on the need to engage the closest and the finite.308 Modernity has certain features which do us honor, he writes, and insofar as Nietzsche is generally speaking harsh in his appraisal of modernity's softness and lack of character, we should analyze closely any praise he musters for it. If anything does us honor it is that we have placed seriousness elsewhere: "we take as important the lowly things despised by all ages and left aside — while by contrast we regard 'beautiful feelings' as cheap." Establishing his thesis in this way, he goes on to criticize as dangerous the despising of the body (see Zarathustra 1/4, KSA 4:39) and the tendency of both Christianity and idealism to ignore the "smallest world" which is after all "everywhere decisive" and has been discovered by modernity. "Paved streets, good air in our room, the apartment not poisoned, foods understood in accordance with their value, we have taken seriously all necessities of existence and despise all 'beautiful soulism as a kind of'superficiality and frivolity.' What was hitherto most despised has been placed first in line" (KSA 13:236).309 1 regard this as a strong reiteration of the ideas in Human

308

309

Note 14[37] KSA 13:236 is found as # 106 in Will to Power, but in slightly different form. The Nachlass note has the heading "On Modernity" and includes a final sentence listing "immorality" ( Unmoralitäf) as yet another modernist trait that does us honor. See Will to Power pp. 524-5. Hallman, "Nietzsche's Environmental Ethics," reads this note (in its Will to Power version) as N. being ahead of his time in terms of appreciating a clean environment, p. 123.

1. The Finite in Relation to Potential

209

as they express a need to discover and affirm the closest things, and to let the "last things" fade in importance, fade back into their purported infinity. Harking back to his thesis in "The actual pagan" that the early Greeks were singularly successful in regulating and celebrating all of their passions and forming a life affirming community ( H H II/1 220, KSA 473), Nietzsche provides an abbreviated version of this idea in "The good field," an aphorism of five lines. All rejecting and negating, he asserts, shows a lack of fruitfulness. If at bottom we were good soil we would let nothing perish without using it and we would see in each thing, event and human being welcome fertilizer, rain or sunshine ( H H II/1 332, KSA 2:515). This is sound advice on how to dwell economically and intelligendy within a finite conceived as one's proper element, and it suggests the kind of positive alchemy that Nietzsche characteristically brings into his affirmative stance. What is regarded as base, or as cheap as the rain and the sunshine is in fact precious, the stuff of life, but only if one is not a denying and rejecting spirit. In his affirming philosophy we also have the philosophy of conservation, of recycling, of reorientation versus throwing away, rejecting the old on principle, starting ever anew as though our world were not finite. This same attitude is reflected in higher cultures, he claims, where small and unpretentious truths arrived at through strict method are valued more highly than flashy and flattering errors which fuel the metaphysical and artistic ages. In sticking to these humble truths one demonstrates virility, courage, simplicity and abstinence: "Eventually not only the individual but all of humanity will be elevated to this virility when it finally accustoms itself to the higher valuation of tenable, lasting knowledge and has lost all faith in inspiration and the miraculous communication of truths" ( H H 1/3, KSA 2: 25-6). This is one of Nietzsche's earliest expressions of the significance of the quotidian, and it contains not only the appreciation of the small and close, but two other features which transform into the project of providing meaning for the earth. Here we see the formulation of classical and mundane values as they are later adopted by the classical Dionysus for purposes of creativity, and here as well we see the first stirrings of an ecumenical consciousness in Nietzsche, indicating that his concern is for the species as a whole, for the earth as whole. When everything is seen as useful the value of one's environment is increased in unimagined and manifold ways, such that despite any limitations in size or scope, one's environment becomes a realm of opportunity as opposed to a realm of opprobrium. By opportunity I do not mean resources for the taking, or exploitation of nonrenewable resources, as these have always been regarded as useful, indeed, as all too useful. I think Nietzsche increases the value of the finite by opening our eyes to the little things that otherwise get tossed aside, overlooked, dismissed but which, in the aggregate and from day to day, amount to quite a lot in both spiritual and material terms. Witness how often he refers to the adventurous quality of the life of the free spirit, of "soaring" where others tread heavily, of flying westward to the point of exhaustion as in the upbeat final aphorism of Dawn, entitled "We airship explorers

210

IV. Logic and Limit in the Eternal Recurrence of the Same

of the spirit!", which concludes: "Will they perhaps say of us, someday, that we too in steering westward hoped to reach an India — but that it was our lot to shipwreck on infinity? Or, my brothers? Or? — (D 575, KSA 3:331). The reorientation toward the earth brings with it a rediscovery of the earth, and in alluding to the fears of the earliest sailors and navigators Nietzsche strives to communicate how open, how frightening this new earth must appear, but at the same time, it too will prove to be finite and navigable, and the more knowledge we gain, the greater is the adventure of inhabiting this misjudged and neglected planet. Nietzsche poses a parable of the finite in relation to the infinite in Science, called "Excelsior!" He enumerates a series of renunciations that a hypothetical individual will take upon herself, beginning with never again praying and concluding with desiring the eternal recurrence of war and peace. But no one has ever possessed the strength for such renunciations, and at this point Nietzsche relates the parable of the lake that refuses to flow off and builds itself a dam where its waters used to escape. Since then the lake rises ever higher, and perhaps the secret is that renunciation will provide the strength for renunciation: "perhaps the human being will rise ever higher from that point when he no longer flows into a god" (GS 285, KSA 3:527-8). The actions that call for renunciation are all identifiable as strategies for securing contentment and peace, comfort and repose. In renouncing these comforting measures one condemns oneself to a life of renunciation that seems to harbor only punishment, and is virtually impossible for human strength. As the parable of the lake suggests, however, the strength is there in the human condition, if humans would cease to squander their essence by letting it flow into another being, the draining being par excellence, namely a god or God. Living the finite life will require renunciation, but it need not require asceticism. And in proportion to the strength garnered from the foundational act of renunciation, that of no longer flowing out into a god, the finite and strong human being takes shape, rises higher, and at some point will never again need to pray or look for solace from beyond. Nietzsche admires the condition of pregnancy for the state of mind that is simultaneously the state of body. In referring to pregnancy as "the ideal selfishness" ("die idealische Selbstsucht"), he is elevating both the ideal and the physical, the selfless and the selfish as they unite for a higher purpose. Aphorism 552 of Dawn is written from a shared perspective, as the outside observer of pregnancy and also from the standpoint of one whose empathy allows him to conjecture on how it might feel to be pregnant. What Nietzsche describes is a condition of tremendous devotion, expectation, hope, reconciliation, heightened senses. Everything is veiled and full of portent, one does not know yet one waits and tries to be prepared, while at the same time "a pure and purifying feeling of deep irresponsibility reigns in us," for we have nothing to do with determining the child's value or its hour. He claims "in this devotion one should live! One can live! And whether what is expected is a thought, a deed — we have no other relationship to all essential accomplishment than that of pregnancy and we should throw

1. The Finite in Relation to Potential

211

to the wind our presumptuous talk of'willing' and creating'! This is the proper ideal selfishness: to always care and to wake and to keep the soul quiet, so that our fruitfulness ends beautifully!" (D 552, KSA 3:322-3). To live in such devotion to life, specifically, to the life that is emerging but with deference to all life as the environment that the new life will soon be joining, draws on the best powers and instincts of the mother and those around her, and clearly Nietzsche is enthused about this condition of living because it allows no compromise, no letting up, and suggests an area of human activity that is so much stronger than the individual that we cannot bungle it. As the philosopher of life affirmation Nietzsche is attuned to physiological states in which humans are actually receptive to life without physiological inhibitions, and obviously pregnancy in his estimation is a condition whose powerful devotion to life should be emulated whenever possible for living on the whole. Still, for one so keen about physiology, Nietzsche does not appear to credit the transformation of the mother's body with this new capacity for devotional living, preferring instead to remark on the psychological and emotional aspects of pregnancy, as if they alone were capable of bringing a baby to term. He takes up the theme of pregnancy in Science were he observes that other animals see females differently than we do. The males are beautiful, the females are productive. The mothers' love for children can be compared with the artist's love for her work. "Pregnancy has made women milder, more patient, more fearful, more eager to submit; and just so does spiritual pregnancy produce the character of the contemplative type, which is related to the female character — these are the male mothers" (GS 72, KSA 3: 430). If this aphorism is thought in connection with Dawn 552, Nietzsche appears to be saying that the devotional physiology of the pregnant mother is the condition par excellence for both art and contemplation, that is, he values pregnancy so highly that he wishes to universalize pregnancy and thus resorts to the locution "male (or masculine) mothers." For those who see only the gendered antagonism of Nietzsche's image of woman, this kind of reasoning should be striking for its elevation of woman to the supreme act of life affirmation, such that male philosophers like Nietzsche can only speculate on what is must be like to be pregnant. Lungstrum sees "a new dialectical art of palingenesis" underlying Nietzsche's notion of woman, and insightfully draws on Salome for investigating the question of spiritual pregnancy.310 The idea of "ideal selfishness" also finds reiteration in Zarathustra, not once but several times, for that book after all is a parable of birth for the new human being, the super human being, and it is also a handbook for giving birth to one's self. And so Zarathustra tires of hearing that virtue resides in deeds that are selfless, claiming instead that one's self should be in one's deed as the mother is in her child (Z II/5,

310

See Del Caro, "The Pseudoman in Nietzsche," 151-2; and Janet Lungstrum, "Nietzsche Writing Woman / Woman Writing Nietzsche: The Sexual Dialectic of Palingenesis" in Nietzsche and the Feminine, ed. with introduction by Peter J. Burgard (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 137, 144, 151.

212

IV. Logic and Limit in the Eternal Recurrence of the Same

KSA 4:123). The self is the closest thing, and one's deeds should be extensions of the closest things, as in the model of the mother whose body produces the child — this is virtue according to Nietzsche, this is embodied virtue arising from the real, the tangible, from one's self. One could no more deny the power of this virtue than one could deny that the baby issues from the mother's womb, and if the uterus is taken as a metaphor of the environment and as a metaphor of what manner of glorious promise is available within the finite, given the proper devotion and love — then one has no higher example of life affirmation emanating from the embrace of the finite than is demonstrated every day in pregnancy. Ansell-Pearson's formulation steers us toward a more grounded appreciation of the feminine in Nietzsche, one not charged with sexual politics: "It cannot be without significance that Zarathustra's quest for meaning and truth culminates in the recognition of'eternity' understood as a woman. Nietzsche uses the idea of'woman' as a metaphor for life understood as eternal pregnancy and fecundity. It is woman who thus embodies, who bears and carries, the overman as life's perpetual desire for self-overcoming."311 The finite in relation to human potential is rendered visible, observable, and actively life affirming in the condition of pregnancy. When Nietzsche characterizes women as "milder, more patient, more fearful, more eager to submit" (GS 72), from the perspective of political correctness he is merely imposing his "phallocentric" view of women, and of course he brings down on himself the requisite response. But judged by a higher standard, in describing woman this way Nietzsche is pointing to the virtues (strengths) of woman as they alone are responsible for the supreme condition of pregnancy, and if these traits seem to us, in our modernist sensitivities, to be overtly limiting, then the problem lies not in some gendered antagonism, but in our species' reflexive aversion to limitation.

2. The Quotidian Nietzsche ". . .these little things — nutrition, place, climate, recreation, the entire casuistry of selfishness — are inconceivably more important than everything previously regarded as important."

EcceHomol, 10 If everyone who comments on Nietzsche has a tendency to build him or herself a Nietzsche to order, the finite Nietzscheans are a small minority and the quotidian Nietzscheans are an endangered species. Nietzsche is supposed to be dynamite, the wild man of European philosophy, the rampaging blond beast or at least the progenitor of same, but at bottom he is one of the more modest, honest, and least presumptuous thinkers in the history of philosophy, though one would not know this by his 311

Keith Ansell-Pearson, "Who is the Übermensch?" 327.

2. The Quotidian Nietzsche

213

rhetoric or by the literature on Nietzsche (which takes its cues from Nietzsche). That the quotidian Nietzsche is not generally known to readers is partly his own fault for loving a well turned phrase, especially when it makes the reader wince, laugh, or raise an eyebrow; partly due to the disastrous publication history of Nietzsche's texts in the English speaking world, according to which 2^arathustra came first, in bad translations, and established Nietzsche's entire reputation; and partly the quotidian Nietzsche remains unknown because commentators want it that way, want "their" Nietzsche to be as distant as a motley bastard on a cloud. Especially the wave of postmodernist criticism as it engulfed North America in the last decades of the twentieth century contributed to an esoteric, barely human Nietzsche whose texts were raided for their theoretical blood and spewed out in turgid, linguistically clever but mostly autobiographical or fictional accounts of Nietzsche. Meanwhile, philological readings of Nietzsche which do in fact engage the text with an eye toward hermeneutics were precisely the ones capable of writing on the quotidian Nietzsche, but such writing was not in vogue. Finally, the unknown Nietzsche who is the friend of the closest things, the friend of the practical, the practiced, and the everyday, was not sufficiendy appreciated by professional philosophers, who are only now beginning to give Nietzsche his due. This circumstance was not helped by the bifurcation of professional philosophy into "analytical" and "Continental." "Able to be small" pleads for adults to be as close, physically and emotionally, to flowers, grass, and butterflies as are children, who do not tower above these simple things. But we older people have grown beyond them and must condescend to them: "I think the grass hates us when we profess our love for it. — Whoever wants to participate in all good things must also understand how to be small at times" ( H H II/2 51, KSA 2:575-6). Condescending to the grass and the flowers is clearly not being small in the innocent and humble sense, and we are reminded that just because someone professes a love for nature and perhaps even has a sense for nature, this does not make the individual somehow noble — the same person with her "idyllic sensibility. . . could be rather loveless, niggardly and conceited" ( H H II/1 49, KSA 2:401). Just as a child learns to leave behind the grass and the flowers and the butterflies in adopting the mannerisms and preferences of adults, the ability to be small could be learned, for Nietzsche is talking here about an ability. The problem for those of us who have lost the ability to be small is that we have in the meantime adopted much that is "big," much that is "distant" and extraneous, such that when we do bend down to sit in the grass, it is an unseemly and unnatural gesture — it is a gesture, not a mere action, and if a gesture is supposed to mean something, therein lies the condescension. This ability to be small which humans lack, unless they are children, should not be confused with the fear of being big, which Nietzsche treats mercilessly in Zarathustra. Seven pages are devoted to the speech entitled "On the Virtue that Makes Small," which is practiced by shrinking humans who occupy tiny doll houses. "I walk among these people and keep my eyes open: they have become smaller and become

214

IV. Logic and Limit in the Eternal Recurrence of the Same

ever smaller: — but that is because of their doctrine of happiness and virtue. / For they are modest even in their virtue — because they want contentment. But only the modest virtue gets along with contentment." Those who practice the virtues that makes small are ashamed of themselves, of being human, of occupying space, of standing up and standing out — they are the "last human being" Zarathustra warned of in his Prologue (Z P 5, KSA 4:18), the human being who is the antipode of the super human and who is a present danger to the species. "And this hypocrisy I found worst among them: that even those who command pretend to the virtues of those who obey. / 'I serve, you serve, we serve' — thus even the hypocrisy of the rulers prays here — and woe if the first lord is only the first servant!" (ZIII/5, KSA 211,213-14). This is smallness of character, of spirit, of the human being whose stature diminishes in proportion to the rise of "last human being" and the leveling tide of contentment that threatens humanity. The ability to be small presupposes a stature such that one would have to be skilled at occasionally being small. Therefore, when Zarathustra rails against the small people and their virtues that make small, this should not be construed as a contradiction of his teaching of respect for the things that are small and therefore closest to us. For a sample of how Zarathustra speaks of the closest and smallest things, we turn to Part IV and the section "On the Higher Human Being." "You creators, you high humans! One is pregnant only with one's own child. / Do not let yourselves be talked at and talked into! Who after all is your neighbor? And even if you act 'for your neighbor' — you still do not create for him!" As we have seen in other expressions, the self is the closest and the self is the finite out which one's virtues and creativity arise. Once again, too, Nietzsche appropriates the condition of pregnancy to indicate the highest affirmation, the highest devotion to the life that is higher than one's own life (Z IV/13, KSA 4:362). In consoling the higher humans that the more rare the type, the more seldom it succeeds, Zarathustra focuses on the positive and says: "And verily, how much has already succeeded! How rich is this earth in small good perfect things, in things that turned out well! / Place small good perfect things around yourselves, you higher humans! Their golden ripeness heals the heart. The perfect teaches hope" (Z IV/13, KSA 4:364). Except for the heightened rhetoric, and of course embedded as these comments are within Zarathustra's landscape and mindscape, this praise of the small and its benevolent effects on living are virtually the same as those expressions found in Human. The Nietzsche who speaks here shows gratitude and wisdom, an eye for the earth's simplest things and the presence of mind to put his experience in words. And so I return to the distinction between Nietzsche's aversion to the virtues that make small and his disgust with the smallest, "last" human, on the one hand, and his frequent, profound elaboration upon, indeed discovery of the world of the small and the close as it encourages joyous dwelling in the finite. But in having drawn this distinction I do not yet consider the matter closed. Nussbaum is correct to point out that "we encounter a rather large surprise" in Nietzsche, because after all "he charges

2. The Quotidian Nietzsche

215

Christian and Platonist moralities with making a false separation between our spiritual and our physical nature," insisting against them "that we are physical through and through." What is surprising, then, is that "he really is very loathe to draw the conclusion that is naturally suggested by his position: that human beings need worldly goods in order to function. In all of Nietzsche's rather abstract and romantic praise of solitude and asceticism, we find no grasp of the simple truth that a hungry person cannot think well; that a person who lacks shelter, basic health care, and the basic necessities of life, is not likely to become a great philosopher or artist, no matter what her innate equipment." 312 Nussbaum is right, of course, in pointing out that Nietzsche shows little, if any concern for the downtrodden who lack the basic physical comforts and needs. But I hope to have shown by now that Nietzsche's reputation for ignoring the little things and the little people has been blown far out of proportion, and that efforts to ground Nietzsche and his writings will reveal this even more as the finite and quotidian Nietzsches get their day in court. We should also make note of the fact that when Nietzsche speaks of the quotidian and the finite, it is not necessarily in connection with solitude and certainly it is not in the context of asceticism, which he justifiably regards as life denying. Nussbaum is right to emphasize that Nietzsche's vision of the solitary, struggling individual is bourgeois and does not address the plight of the poor, who are present everywhere on the earth and deserve a share in defining any purported "meaning of the earth." Still, I regard Nietzsche's choice to not speak as a champion of the poor as another expression of his view of nature as superabundance — he is the prophet of abundance, of a world (nature) rich in things great and small, of nature as it encourages us to honor and value the finite — poverty in the natural sphere does not exist as far as he is concerned, or if it does only as an exception. Of course he admits of poverty in the social sphere where, it could be argued, humans who are out of touch with the finite and intent on hoarding, on bulwarking against the transient are spreading their disease of consumption and life denial across the planet, dragging both the planet and its life forms down with them. And before anyone, socialist or otherwise, slams the door on the potential of Nietzsche's philosophy of nature to effect changes in the gross imbalances that cover our planet in social and economic terms, perhaps greater attention should be paid to the quotidian Nietzsche, the one who teaches gratitude and modesty and love for earth — the last time I looked these were not bourgeois values. In other words, I believe Nietzsche does in fact draw the conclusion that Nussbaum finds lacking in him, and that his formulation of the conclusion and his suggestions for change are miles apart from those of Marx and other socialist and democratic thinkers, and because they are so different both from Marxian ideology and the image of Nietzsche which is lodged in people's minds, his alternatives have only begun to percolate to 312

Martha Nussbaum, "Piety and Mercy: Nietzsche's Stoicism" in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality, 158.

216

IV. Logic and Limit in the Eternal Recurrence of the Same

the surface of Western cultural consciousness. The Marxian strategy to redistribute wealth is one ecumenical vision, Nietzsche's is quite another, but make no mistake: Nietzsche has an ecumenical vision, a vision for the earth and for humanity, and it is neither religious nor revolutionary. There is no reason to expect that one as antidemocratic as Nietzsche would have anything resembling a platform for egalitarian social reform. And by the same token, there is no reason to expect that one as adamant about working creatively within the finite, about affirming the earth with gratitude and humility, would not be interested in empowering human beings to whatever extent possible to begin dwelling affirmatively and intelligently on the earth — there are other moralities. Müller-Lauter wants to ensure that Nietzsche's protective, conservationist attitude toward the earth is visible despite what readers may have been led to believe by Heidegger. In Zarathustra but also in earlier and later writings "the earth is supposed to maintain its own within the whole process of human creation of meaning." While for Heidegger the earth becomes "the errant star" (der Irrstern, also wandering star), Müller-Lauter focuses instead on Nietzsche's steady insistence that "humans must remain conscious of their own earthiness as well as their rule of the earth, in order to appropriately exercise any such rule."313 Our earthiness (Erdhaftigkeit) is precisely the feature of human being that Nietzsche foregrounds when he alerts us to the presence of the closest things and the quotidian. Earthiness cannot be demonstrated by simply professing a view of the earth and installing oneself as earth ruler — by definition earthiness requires a closeness and bonding~wii\i the earth, as suggested by the German haften, to bond or to stick, as it forms the compound erdhaftig, "earthy" or "of the earth." On this accounting the poorest, least refined human who is bonded to the earth, who displays earthiness in her living, is as capable of earth affirmation as a professor or a philosopher. Nietzsche proposes two principles (Grundsätze) for "the new life," the first being that one should establish (einrichten) life on the most certain, most verifiable, not as hitherto on the most distant, most uncertain, most horizon-like and cloud-like. The second principle requires that one determine the sequence of the closest and the close, the certain and the less certain before one establishes one's life and gives it a definitive direction (HH II/2 310, KSA 2:691). The common sense with which the closest things are affirmed speaks for itself. What is real is what is close, verifiable, and an individual should be able to make her own determinations on the degree of closeness of all things. Modesty, scale, personal initiative and a plea to build one's life on something, as opposed to not building one's life at all — by the end of Human Nietzsche is able to express this in an aphorism of seven lines. Where did we stumble off the path of common sense? Ancient thinkers harbored the illusion that if they were on the trail of the origin of things, they would find something of inestimable value; insight 313

Müller-Lauter, Nietzsche-Interpretationen III, 129-30.

2. The Quotidian Nietzsche

217

into the origin would bring human salvation. However, with insight into the origin the meaninglessness of the origin increases, while the closest, the around-us and in-us eventually begins to reveal its colors and beauty and riddles and riches of meaning (D 45, KSA 3:51-2). What is here, what was here is the treasure, and mythical Romantic notions of origin only sour the taste of life, though the sobering up process shows promise for using knowledge more affirmatively. 314 Nietzsche even sees us beginning to develop an affinity for and tendency toward the real, which almost everyone possesses; this is only to be understood because we for so long had our joy in the unreal to the point of disgust (D 244, KSA 3:203). For all his criticism of realism as an art form, which has been extrapolated upon by commentators to present a Nietzsche who is if not anti-realistic then at least unrealistic, is there another thinker in Nietzsche's century who is capable of speaking for the real as he does? What, he asks, is the history of each day? Do one's habits consist of innumerable little cowardices and lazinesses or are they the result of courage and inventive reason? As different as these two scenarios are, one might end up receiving the same praise and doing the same good by either route. But when praise and utility and the good conscience are not the standards, it is because one is a scrupulous tester who has knowledge about conscience (GS 308, KSA 3:545). The quotidian is an opportunity to make history, this is why Geschichte in this aphorism is translated as "history" and not "story," though one's day is also a story by any definition. So little attention is given to one's day, both by the person who lives the day and the people around her, that very probably it does not matter if a person is lazy or inventive, cowardly or brave — at the end of the day one has the good conscience in either case. This lack of attention to the closest things, to one's very habits in fact, is so widely practiced that those around us remain unaware and we ourselves can fritter away the days with impunity, in good conscience. But by linking knowing with conscience ("ein Wissen um das Gewissen"), the knowing person does not settle for this lowest of all standards, for the "good conscience" which is virtually meaningless and as easy as breathing, preferring instead to fight the good fight each and every day — even in the absence of recognition and reward. The good conscience derives basically from doing what everyone else is doing, while one makes history of one's day by knowing that one is not damned to the indifference or behavior of others, one has one's own day and one's own time. In his retrospective Ecce Homo Nietzsche claims that even as a child he was not concerned with the "last things," with God, immortality of the soul, redemption, the beyond, and he knows atheism not as a result or an event in his life, but instead from instinct. The question he is concerned with instead, and upon which the salvation of humanity depends, is one of nutrition, which he formulates as follows: "How do 314

John Pizer, Toward a Theory of Radical Origin: Essays on Modem German Thought (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), writes that Foucault "almost completely inverts Nietzsche's priorities" (18) on the matter of origin.

218

IV. Logic and Limit in the Eternal Recurrence of the Same

precisely you have to nourish yourself in order to come to your maximum of strength, of virtu in the Renaissance style, of moral-free virtue?" (EH 2/1, KSA 6:278-9). The concept of transcendental "salvation" is transvalued in this perspective. First it is rendered personal and made to seem selfish, ego-centered, next it is based entirely on the body and what the body takes in, as opposed to the soul, and finally, nutrition determines the outcome for the body in terms of "moral-free" virtue, in terms of strength. Except for the intensified rhetoric in which this and other passages of Ecce are written, the message does not differ from the glorification of the quotidian in Human. What is closest decides humanity, and insofar as the body is what is closest for each of us, we would do well to pay attention to what we eat and drink, and then focus on the place and climate of our dwelling (ibid, KSA 6:281-2). At the conclusion of this section of Ecce entitled "Why I am So Clever," he anticipates the questions and criticism of readers who will be baffled by his discussion of "all these little and according to traditional judgment indifferent things," and so he offers an explanation: "these little things — nutrition, place, climate, recreation, the entire casuistry of selfishness — are inconceivably more important than everything previously regarded as important. Precisely here one must begin to relearn. That which humanity hitherto considered seriously are not even realities, mere figments of the imagination, more strongly put, lies..." (EH 2/10, KSA 6:295-6). The tendency in Nietzsche scholarship has been to read these comments straightforwardly as expressions of egomania, quite in the manner Nietzsche anticipates when he observes that his recounting of the "little things" is out of step with tradition. In a certain ironic sense, the recounting of the little things is egocentric, but stopping there would be to miss the point. It is not so much a matter of ego as of body, and again, it is not so much a matter of "Nietzsche's body" as it is a matter of relearning to appreciate the closest things as the things most real. Nietzsche suggests that the erosion of the real begins already among ancient thinkers who seek a mythical origin, but he has more to say on the subject. How individuals digest and parse life is extremely important, it is tantamount to knowing what to do with one's "insignificant quotidian experiences" such that the latter "can become soil that bears fruit three times a year." Humanity he observes is divided into a minority who make much of little, and a majority who make little of much, "indeed one encounters those inverse sorcerers who make a nothing out of the world instead of the world out of nothing" (HH 1/627, KSA 2:353). Whether one becomes a producer or a waster depends on the ability to grasp and collect the everyday experiences, perhaps in the manner of the good farmer who does the little things each day to ensure that the crops are maintained — observe how frequently Nietzsche praises the condition of waiting and positive anticipation as the proper relation toward the transient. Is he not talking about regulating one's time, so as not to allow it to pass without incident, in much the same manner as he talks about the regulating of the passions and the instincts, such that their strength, their energy is neither lost to the individual nor turned inward upon her?

2. The Quotidian Nietzsche

219

Since ancient times generations have handed down their fantasies as seriousness and truth, in the absence of being able to determine anything with certainty, until the general sense emerged that faith is more valuable than knowledge. But now Nietzsche cautions what is needed with respect to these last things is not knowledge versus faith, but "indifference toward faith and alleged knowledge in these areas! — Everything else must stand closer to us than that which was previously preached to us as the most important." Instead of questions such as what is the human being, why are we here, what is our fate after death, how do we reconcile with God etc, "we must again become good neighbors of the closest things and no longer gaze contemptuously beyond them toward clouds and nocturnal monsters" ( H H I I / 2 16, KSA 2:550-1). Here, too, there is a recommendation for breaking out of the time stupor that stuns us and does not allow us to manage, regulate, live our time; we must set aside the debate concerning faith versus knowledge, which after all carries its own momentum and will in all probability never be concluded, in order to render irrelevant and indifferent all teachings from the past which purported to address what is most important. It might surprise some to find such a strong, intact formulation of the transvaluation of all values already in Human, but by this time Nietzsche understands full well that the closest things are the ones from which humans receive their proper nourishment and instruction, while only the farthest things, the last things are touted as important and real. In an aphorism entitled "Why the closest things become ever more distant," he explains that the more we think about everything that was and will be, the more pale becomes that which is right now, in the moment. If we live with our dead and die along with them, he asks, what becomes of those closest to us who are living? "We become lonelier — and to be sure because the whole flood of humanity roars around us. The smoldering in us, which is for everything human, constantly increases — and this is why we. look upon that which surrounds us as if it had become more indifferent and more shadowy. — But our cold gaze is offensive!" (D 441, KSA 3:269). It takes only a little imagination to rearrange the semantics of this passage in order to formulate the eternal recurrence of the same — and observe that Nietzsche has numerous such passages and entire aphorisms in Human and Dawn. In ignoring the moment we ignore the closest, living not in affirmation of the finite but in denial of the finite, which is the one life, the current life, the only life. The most radical way to stave off this "dying in life" or "flowing off" of life is to declare the eternal recurrence of the same, by virtue of which this life and this finitude become eternal as the same. Since humans are generally speaking heedless and even negligent in their spending of time, even suicidal in their indifference to the severest loss of time, the eternal recurrence of the same is the remedy with which to staunch the wound, with which to apply sufficient pressure to stop the hemorrhaging of time. Among the many positive expressions attributed to the dignifying of the quotidian is what Nietzsche calls the "The ultimate noble mindedness." Formerly it was rareness and the unawareness of this rareness that made things noble: "But consider in

220

IV. Logic and Limit in the Eternal Recurrence of the Same

this case that by means of this standard everything usual, closest and indispensable, in brief, that which preserves the species most and is after all the rule in humanity heretofore, has been unfairly condemned and maligned as a whole, in favor of exceptions. To be the advocate of the rule — that could perhaps be the ultimate form and refinement in which noble mindedness manifests itself on earth" (GS 5 5, KSA 3:418). "The rule" here is not elevated because it derives from a higher authority, but quite simply because the rule represents the real as the closest, and as such represents what is most valuable and instrumental in preserving the species. Thus to honor and observe the rule is an expression of Nietzschean conservation, which in turn is an expression of Nietzschean affirmation. Here the question arises: is such "noble mindedness" conceived as the ability to honor the rule before the exception an elitist perspective, or does it instead point to species preservation and affirmation of the quotidian, the finite, precisely on the part of those who are not rare and have no interest in the rare? Nietzsche has Zarathustra proclaim a new nobility based not on gold (rareness) nor where one comes from, but where one is heading, on love for the "children's land" (.Kinderland) (Z 111/12, KSA 4:254-5). The ultimate noble mindedness would be a great help in surpassing earlier conceptions of nobility and ensuring that such a children's land will be available on earth. The Fourth Book of Science is called "St. Januarius" and in its first aphorism Nietzsche allows himself a kind of new year's wish or resolution. "I want to learn more and more to see the necessity of things as the beautiful: — thus I will be one of those who makes things beautiful. Amor fati: let that from now on be my love! I want to wage no war against the ugly. I do not want to accuse, I do not even want to accuse the accusers. Let looking away be my only negation! And, all in all and on the whole: some day I just want to be a Yes-sayer!" (GS 276, KSA 3:521). The embrace of the finite here assumes the nuance of love, although it could be argued that love was already present when Nietzsche began extolling the condition of pregnancy as supreme devotion to life. Nothing will be ugly enough to prompt him to condemn, the necessity of all things will be their beauty and in this perspective he will practice the art of making all things beautiful, all things worthy of embrace. Amor fati as one of the late tenets of Nietzsche's thought reveals itself to be inextricably bound to his early praise of the quotidian, the closest, and the finite. There is every reason to believe that Nietzsche regarded his discovery and advocacy of the closest things as one of his principal philosophical teachings. The lyrical dialogue that concludes Human, featuring the wanderer and his shadow and thus bringing together in dramatic arrangement the title of his final instalment of Human, namely "The Wanderer and His Shadow," underscores the importance of the "first things" when the shadow says: "Of all that you have presented I liked nothing more than one promise: you want to again become good neighbor to the closest things. This will also benefit us poor shadows. For, you must admit, up till now you have slandered us all too eagerly" (HH II/2 E, KSA 2:703). The shadow speaks as the personifica-

2. The Quotidian Nietzsche

221

tion of that which is closest to the wanderer, so close in fact that one can not be rid of one's shadow, a fact that has become the stuff of legend. New meaning accrues to the shadow in this sense, for it is not only that which is dark and regarded as unsavory, but first and foremost, that which is closest, truest to and of oneself. And as ordinary, as quotidian and lacking in recognition as the shadow is — after all, everyone, everything has one — Nietzsche deserves praise for restoring its dignity.

3. Features and Failings of the Old Gravity "When one places life's center of gravity not into life but instead into 'the beyond' — into nothingness — then one has taken life's center of gravity altogether." The Antichrist 43

Earth and world are not synonymous and as long as they are used interchangeably, no progress will be made in providing a meaning for the earth or in encouraging immanence. "World" is simply too big, too encompassing and lacking in capacity for conceptualizing the finite to serve as an adequate stand in for earth, and one could argue that Platonic conceptions of the earth as a shadowy inferior version of the "real world" have done much to harm the case of earth. "World" simply allows us to envision a "phenomenal receptacle" as seen in Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea, according to which "world" may consist of various versions of one's imagination. I agree with Giinzel that Nietzsche makes great strides in differentiating between loose conceptions of the world and the earth, whose presence, immanence, reality and "radical this-sidedness (Diesseitigkeit), which has no alternative" he brings to his readers' attention "by writing and by wandering in a philosophical geography with maritime, mountainous, tropical, and desert landscapes of thought."315 Nor should we make the mistake of regarding "world" in Nietzsche as "the meaningless and borderless mass of fixed stars and Milky Way galaxies" in which the earth takes up its lonely residence, for according to Picht "Nietzsche means by 'world' the world as cosmos. Opposed to it is infinite nothingness and empty space in which there is neither up nor down, the so-called universe that physics and astronomy of the modern age have revealed. When Nietzsche asks: 'Are we not straying as though through an infinite nothing?' he is thinking, as a classical philologist, about the original meaning of the word planet,' namely wandering star (Irrstern)." Picht attributes the death of the God of philosophers to discoveries in physics that make it impossible to interpret the world "as cosmos in the sense of Greek ontology."316 315

316

Günzel, "Erde: Treue zur Erde" in Nietzsche-Handbuch. Leben — Werk — Wirkung. Edited Henning Ottmann (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2000), 219. Picht, Nietzsche, 333.

222

IV. Logic and Limit in the Eternal Recurrence of the Same

One can appreciate Picht's efforts to distinguish between cosmos and astronomy in defining world, without having to accept his view that the universe is infinite and contains empty space, and that Nietzsche ultimately regards the earth as an errant star — views which technically Nietzsche rejects, but for rhetorical purposes uses in the aphorism "The madman" in Science, from which Picht quotes above. Both Nietzsche and Picht appear to be stressing the loss of gravity as a parallel expression of the loss of meaning when "cosmos" is no longer sustainable, and for this purpose it is helpful to strike the strongest possible contrast by juxtaposing order, meaning, purpose on the cosmos end of the spectrum with randomness, infinity, nothingness on the other end. What makes the loss of the old gravity all the more painful, according to Nietzsche is that fact that we profoundly loved "this world of our creation," and "how deeply foreign to us is the world discovered by science!" (KSA 9:580). The old gravity signified meaning with the force of gravity, or as Lowith puts it, "as long as the Christian gravity prevailed, man was held firmly in existence. One thought one knew why one is there at all, for the sake of what goals."317 The loss of both the "philosophical gravity" propounded by the Greek philosophers, for whom the world was cosmos, and the Christian gravity which derives from and is related to cosmos, are "the specific historical context — the death of God and devaluation of Western humanity's highest values — in which the vision [of the eternal recurrence of the same] is promulgated by Nietzsche."318 The Nietzschean alternative to cosmic order and Christian meaning, human inventions of such force and magnitude that they were capable of holding humanity in place despite the threat of chaos and nihilism (and evil) and thereby acting as the glue that holds everything together for humans, is represented by the most finite conception of the world that is humanly possible, humanly conceivable, namely, the eternal recurrence of the same. Absent any form of beyond with which to threaten, beat or reward human beings, the retreat from the horror of the perceived vacuum to the earth as the sole venue for humanity takes on a forced embrace of the finite. The eternal recurrence of the same carries a deliberate hyperbole, a teleological intensification because Nietzsche wants it to counter previous notions of "world" as they undermined and continue to undermine earthly life. For all the speculation in cosmological terms about eternal recurrence, ultimately it is an anti-cosmology designed to shift "world-meaning" to earth not as a statement of fact, or of science, but in effect. The eternal recurrence of the same invites us to regard the earth as if a. were the world, because in effect the earth is the only world that concerns us. At the same time, the earth cannot be compared with "world" because earth always comes up short, its finitude standing in relation to world as the human's finitude stands in relation to God. As stated at the beginning of this section, we should be more concerned with placing earth in the conceptual space 317 318

Lowith, Nietzsche's Philosophy, 52. Ansell-Pearson, "Who is the Ubermensch?" 321.

3. Features and Failings of the Old Gravity

223

formerly occupied by world, than in allowing "world" to usurp the space that properly belongs only to "earth." This does not mean that humans are unaware of the universe, incapable of space travel, or otherwise "stranded" on or "locked inside"earth as a prison — Nietzsche holds in fact that the cosmological and Christian world views are responsible for making the earth a prison — his view of eternal recurrence actually liberates humanity to inhabit the earth. Nietzsche regards himself as the one who takes consequential measures to expose Christian morality. "The uncoveringoiChristian morality is an event without parallel, an actual catastrophe. Whoever enlightens about it is a force majeure, a destiny — he breaks the history of humanity in two" (EH 14/8, KSA 6:373). By exposing everything previously held to be "truth" as nothing more than the most damaging, devious, and subterranean form of lie (ibid, 373), he reveals the shaky foundation of the old gravity, which is a catastrophic revelation because humanity is not prepared to deal with a let down of this magnitude. T h e old gravity leaves behind a long list of conceptual shortcuts and crutches on which humanity has relied, and Nietzsche enumerates some of them in Science under the heading "Let us beware!" The world is not a living being; the world is not a machine; we should not assume cyclical movements everywhere among neighboring stars; there are no laws in nature, only necessities; death is not opposed to life, the living is merely a kind of the dead ("eine Art des Todten") and an infrequent one at that; the world does not eternally create anew, there are no eternally enduring substances. At this point he writes: "When will all these shadows of God no longer darken us? When will we have de-deified nature entirely! W h e n will we be permitted to begin to naturalize us human beings with pure, newly found, newly redeemed nature!" (GS 109, KSA 3:467-69). The beliefs we have concerning the old gravity and the old world we created and loved are now obstacles in the way of living according to the new gravity and the newly (re)discovered nature. O u r knowledge tells us that the old beliefs are no longer tenable, and collectively our species "feels" and intuits the crisis of the loss of the old gravity, which manifests itself as growing secularization, perhaps even as the more insidious nihilism. But in clinging to the old beliefs and in harboring illusions about the world, we believe in the old gravity that no longer functions as gravity, that is, it no longer holds us upon the earth and it no longer holds the earth in place in relation to the rest of the universe. The old gravity is quite capable of holding us down, in a negative sense, and that much Nietzsche makes clear by personifying the old gravity. Gravity is a word rich in meaning and Nietzsche plays with its ambiguity. In the most general sense applicable to his writings, gravity as a mood, as the aspect of the grave, the somber, he opposes with lightness and gravity-defying movement such as dance — The Gay Science is a book in which Nietzsche argues for lightness and levity, as opposed to gravity in philosophizing. Gravity is also that which is ponderous and heavy and tends to hold us down as humans, tends to keep us in the bearing stage of the camel, which is the first metamorphosis of the spirit and is succeeded by the destroying, clearing lion — the

224

IV. Logic and Limit in the Eternal Recurrence of the Same

opposite of the beast of burden. Yet gravity is also the physical force that keeps us grounded on the earth, without which we would be disembodied and free floating, and it is the loss of this "good" gravity that Nietzsche seeks to repair when he makes his urgent plea for naturalizing humans with the newly found, newly liberated nature. If the species had had a truly grounding gravity in the first place, as opposed to the cosmological and religious metaphysics of the old gravity, we would not find ourselves facing a catastrophe. On this point Miiller-Lauter observes that there is a limit to Nietzsche's attacks upon the old; "destruction should not be directed against that which has provided longevity [Dauer] to humanity." 319 In "The Dancing Song" Zarathustra and his disciples come upon a group of girls dancing in a grassy clearing in the woods. They stop dancing when they recognize Zarathustra, but he approaches them cordially and says: "Do not stop dancing, you lovely girls! No spoil sport has come to you with his evil eye, no enemy of girls. / 1 am the advocate of God before the devil: he however is the spirit of gravity. How could I be hostile to divine dances, you light ones? Or to girls' feet with pretty ankles?" After reassuring the girls that he basically sides with them, against the devil, and that he is himself not the devil (Zarathustra is often confused for him), he promises to conjure up Cupid for them as a dancing partner and he even sings them a dancing song: "A dancing and mocking song to the spirit of gravity, my supreme and most powerful devil, of whom they say that he is 'the ruler of the world'" (Z 11/10, KSA 4: 13940). In dancing maidens Zarathustra will have sympathetic ears for his dancing and mocking song aimed at the spirit of gravity.320 What is striking about this passage is that Zarathustra defines himself as "God's advocate before the devil," as opposed to the devil's advocate before God, as if to underscore that the devil qua spirit of gravity is indeed "ruler of the world," and not God. Moreover, Zarathustra personalizes his quarrel with this spirit of gravity, such that he refers to him as "my supreme and most powerful devil," implying that whatever qualities of evil and burdening she might have in the world at large, the spirit of gravity is Zarathustra's supreme threat and challenge.321 This he elaborates in "On the Spirit of Gravity," where he speaks of himself as the deadly enemy, arch enemy, and primordial enemy of the spirit of gravity. "Whoever will some day teach humans to fly will have moved all boundary stones; all boundary stones themselves will fly into the air with him, he will rebaptize the earth — as 'the 315 320

321

Müller-Lauter, Nietzsche-Interpretationen I, 231. For excellent and detailed analysis of "The Dancing Song" see Gooding-Williams, Zarathustra's Dionysian Modernism, 168-70, 176. See Gooding-Williams, Zarathustra's Dionysian Modernism. "A figure for the endless perpetuation of Christian-Platonic man and his values, Zarathustra's spirit of gravity, like the Christian God the great dragon symbolizes, is a representation of repetition who denies the possibility of creating new values. This, again, is why he echoes the Christian God's crooked' vision of human possibility, and why as a lion-spirit Zarathustra must oppose him," 222.

3. Features and Failings of the Old Gravity

225

light one.'" Dwelling on the earth should be a matter of lightness but the spirit of gravity wants earth and life heavy: "But only the human being is too heavy to carry himself. This is because he lugs too much that is foreign on his shoulders. Like a camel he kneels down and lets himself be well laden. / Especially the strong, enduring human being who is characterized by reverence: too many foreign heavy words and values he loads upon himself — now life seems a desert to him!" What Zarathustra refers to as "the foreign" is the extra weight that humans should not be carrying, but which weighs them down so much that earth's gravity is too much for them, and life becomes a desert. The spirit of gravity imposes this foreign burden, be it in the form of asceticism, love of the neighbor, bad conscience, guilt, or any other manifestation of bodily and earthly denial, but Zarathustra offers a remedy in asserting one's own good and evil: "I honor the recalcitrant and discriminating tongues and stomachs, which learned to say 'I' and 'Yes' and 'No'" (Z III/l 1, KSA4:241-3). In order to lessen the negative gravity that makes one's body only burdensome, and makes the earth only a desert, one cannot say yes to everything, in other words, one cannot allow oneself and one's spirit to remain in the camel stage. This should not be confused with Nietzsche's amorfati, the love of fate that is capable of saying yes to everything, for the love of fate is immanence in which even the burden does not burden the spirit; the inference is that before one can practice amorfati one has learned to discriminate, one has divested oneself of all extraneous baggage, all foreign material imposed by the spirit of gravity. Affirmation is not accidental but by design, and the training or cultivation of the spirit that might be said to lead to affirmation consists of making decisions, exercising judgment, exerting one's creativity— all within the context of the finite. Another vision of the old gravity is provided in "On Old and New Tablets," where Zarathustra discusses the great conceit that still exists among humans, namely, that they know "what is good and evil for humanity." Zarathustra disrupts this sleepy conceit by asserting that the only ones who know what is good and evil are the creators. "And I bade them overthrow their old academic chairs, and wherever that old conceit had sat; I bade them laugh about their great masters of virtue and saints and poets and world redeemers." Those whose exemplary status made them leaders of humanity, models of humanity and educators are considered part of the problem. With his "wise longing" Zarathustra soars above this world and gains a special perspective, for he is able to observe simultaneously the distant past and the present, and he surveys many different landscapes of the spirit, at one point arriving: "Where I also found again my old devil and arch enemy the spirit of gravity and everything he created: constraint, statute, need and consequence and purpose and will and good and evil: — / For must there not be something over which, away from which one can dance? Must there not be, for the sake of the light, the lightest ones — moles and heavy dwarves? " (Z III/12, KSA 4: 246-8). Now the old gravity is described as a floor, not as a ground necessarily, upon which lighter spirits can dance. This floor, moreover, is a point of departure, a point of comparison, for the light spirits use it only in order to

226

IV. Logic and Limit in the Eternal Recurrence of the Same

immediately dance over it and away from it, thus avoiding it to the extent that they do not rest on it. The existence of moles and dwarves, two creatures who symbolize heaviness and gravity and who plague Zarathustra in " O n the Vision and the Riddle," appears to be mandatory in the scheme of things, that is, their existence is both historical and recurring. N o matter what heights Zarathustra attains, no matter how far or how long he soars, in short, no matter how much new value he creates in relation to the old gravity and its old drag-me-down values, there will always be a floor beneath him composed of "old gravity," of the spirit of gravity, because human being can never transcend that floor. In time even the new values will lose their creative flexibility, in time there is no plateau on which Zarathustra or any other human can rest, for the doctrine of self overcoming, or of Dionysian transformation and affirmation, does not allow for stasis. Indeed, one might conclude that a chief negative feature of the old gravity is the will to preserve at all costs, even when it means that humans cling to rotting and decomposing values. Even when it means clinging to death. I believe Zarathustra's first encounters with the spirit of gravity occur already in the Prologue, where death comes in two forms, each one symbolizing the dead weight of old gravity that humanity unknowingly drags around, or that unduly bears down upon humanity. The first encounter is on the mountainside as Zarathustra descends to the people; he meets an old saint who lives in the woods, they exchange words on the relative merit of bringing anything to humans, who are ingrates, and how to best worship God. On parting company Zarathustra has to remark to himself that apparently the old saint has not yet heard that G o d is dead — this is the first instance of the spirit of gravity as it tends to hound and cloud Zarathustra. His message of the death of all gods linked to the prophecy of the superhuman works best when humans understand that G o d is dead, but in not knowing this piece of vital information, humanity continues to plod along, laboring under a twofold burden: first in thinking that the cosmos and meaning are intact, and conducting themselves accordingly, as if nothing were amiss; second in lugging the dead weight of God, which is so oppressive as to be unsensible, unmeasurable — humanity in a spiritual sense carries on its own back the dead weight of god, or, the weight of dead God — this defies conceptualization and is every bit as monstrous as countenancing the "death" of God. The next Prologue encounter with the spirit of gravity occurs when Zarathustra becomes saddled, literally, or packed like a beast of burden, by the corpse of the tightrope walker who plunges to his death when the jester leaps over him. Zarathustra in his naivete and largess would like to do the rope dancer honor by burying him, as he says, with his own hands: his life should not have been meaningless for at least he lived his life, having made danger his profession. Zarathustra explains to the dying tightrope walker that "your soul will die more quickly than your body: now fear nothing anymore!" (Z P 6, KSA 4:22), indicating that death, the "end" of life, the loss of life cause the rope dancer his last pain. Ultimately Zarathustra does not bury the rope dancer, but he carries him on his back until on the next day he has a realization: "A

3. Features and Failings of the Old Gravity

227

light went on in me: Companions I need and living ones — not dead companions and corpses whom I carry with me, whither I will. / Rather living companions I need, who follow me because they want to follow themselves — to where I want" (Z P 9, KSA 4: 25). His pseudo-redeeming or quasi-redeeming of the rope walker teaches Zarathustra a graphic lesson: humans constantly put themselves in a position of bearing unfair burdens, especially when they are well intentioned and want to help others. Just as humanity is lugging its invisible burden of the unimaginable corpse of God, Zarathustra is carrying his visible burden of a dead human being — in this context there could be a no more fitting metaphor of the spirit of gravity, of its deceptive and omnipresent nature, of its oppressive character both as a physical weight andzs a promise, as a pledge that is hard, heavy to redeem and therefore spawns a burden of guilt. Moles contends that Zarathustra gradually comes to realize that the fear of the "end" of life is itself illusory, itself a dimension if you will of the spirit of the gravity. "Life and death are not alternatives of choice, as the survival instinct imagines. Survival does not have to be achieved; it is eternally guaranteed. There is no requirement to accumulate weight, to hold on and resist. There is nothing to lose. This revelation is accompanied by enormous relief and joy."322 This view of the lightness of being once the spirit of gravity has been identified and overcome is given its appropriate voice in "The Seven Seals (Or: The Yes and Amen Song)" which concludes the original Zarathustra in Part III. Immediately following "The Other Dancing Song," i.e., linked directly to the gravity defying, loving, and life affirming dance songs, the conclusion of part III represents a marriage between Zarathustra and eternity whose wedding ring is the "ring of rings — the ring of recurrence" (Z 111/16, KSA 4:291). In Antichrist Nietzsche voices one of his strongest concerns for the center of gravity ( S c h w e r g e w i c h t ) , not as dramatically as in "The greatest weight" of Science, which contains the first published formulation of the eternal recurrence of the same, but nonetheless in powerful language that attacks the concept of the eternal soul and thus invites comparison with "The greatest weight."323 "When one places life's center of gravity not into life but instead into 'the beyond' — into nothingness — then one has taken life's center of gravity altogether." The great lie about personal immortality, he continues, destroys any reason and any nature in instinct, amounting to an indictment of life. "To live in such a way that there is no meaning any longer to living, that now

322 323

Moles, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Nature, 302. Aphorism 341 of Science, "The greatest weight," also translated as "The greatest stress" (Kaufmann) and "The heaviest weight" (Nauckhoff) is "Das grosste Schwergewicht" in German. One sees why Kaufmann first used "stress" then switched to "weight," and one sees as well why Nauckhoff in the authoritative translation keeps "weight." However, given that Antichrist43 speaks of Schwergewicht in terms of center of gravity, and treats the counter-concept to the eternal recurrence of the same, namely the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, one might bear in mind that "The greatest center of gravity," though awkward, may in fact be closer to N.'s meaning, or at the very least, it may enhance one's understanding of the ERS.

228

IV. Logic and Limit in the Eternal Recurrence of the Same

becomes the 'meaning' of life. Why then the sense of community, why then gratitude any longer for descent and ancestors, why then working together, trusting, promoting and keeping an eye on any kind of overall well being?" (A 43, KSA 6:217). Note how the closest things, the tangible things in which humans are and should be inventive, creative, well intentioned etc are rendered moot. What follows is a scathing condemnation of the doctrine of the eternal soul as a selfish, absurd, and poisonous teaching, one that obsequiously elevates every human being to the status of eternity, to the center of the universe, as if every human being deserved such status, and ultimately, one that translates into the realm of politics and unleashes devastation in the form of revolution. All of this must be considered when Nietzsche warns against placing life's center of gravity into the beyond, for this is not without consequences for humanity and for earth. "'Immortality' conceded to every Peter and Paul has been the biggest, the most malicious assassination attempt to date on noble humanity," he maintains, for in its effect, the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, available as it is to anyone, constitutes a denial of difference, of rank, of distance, and encourages precisely the kind of hollow yes-saying that only says yes because it cannot say no, it cannot discern, distinguish, evaluate — in short, it can only let itself be laden with burden, to which it says "yes" indiscriminately (ibid). Those who indiscriminately say yes to everything, allowing themselves to be burdened by everyone, anyone, everything — those who submit in such a fashion to the spirit of gravity always have something to fall back upon, namely their belief in the immortality of the soul, and their knowledge that in the eyes of G o d all human beings are equal. O f course Nietzsche opposes this view with his own view that G o d is dead, that all bets are off, and that the old gravity will be exposed for what it is. At this juncture, it would seem, people have nothing more to fall back upon. But the spirit of gravity has a way of convincing people that they are well taken care of by means of a pseudo-gravity that Nietzsche describes in Genealogy. The slave revolt within morality begins, he asserts, when resentment itself becomes creative and bears its own values. Beings who are denied the capacity for action now engage in a reactionary "imaginary revenge." While all noble morality grows out of "a triumphant Yes-saying to itself," the slave morality from the beginning says N o to any "outside," to any "other," to any "not-itself," and "this N o is its creative deed. This reversal of the value positing gaze — this necessary direction toward the outside instead of back onto i t s e l f — properly belongs to resentment. In order to develop slave morality always needs first a counter and outer world, it needs, physiologically speaking, outer stimuli in order to act at all — its action is at bottom reaction" ( G M 1/10, K S A 5:270-1). While noble types affirm themselves and extend themselves into their environment, letting their selves serve as their morality and placing value into the world, the slave types affirm nothing but instead base their morality on a negation which they create for the purpose of having a negation, a negative position against which they carry out their imaginary revenge. In other words, the slave types have no gravity or center of gravity, unless one

3. Features and Failings of the Old Gravity

229

were to regard their negating stance as a center of gravity, while the noble types serve as their own greatest center of gravity. In his notes Nietzsche writes a detailed appraisal of how "we will have to pay for having been Christians for two thousand years: we are losing the center of gravity that allowed us to live." The loss of our center of gravity leaves us helpless; we now plunge blindly into opposite valuations with the same measure of energy with which we were Christians. He lists four major problems connected with the collapse of the old gravity: the immortal soul; the solution occurring in the beyond; moral value as highest value with the salvation of the soul as cardinal interest; and the concepts sin, earthly, flesh, lust stigmatized as "world." Meanwhile, he continues, the ongoing solutions are not working. T h e attempted earthly solution merely repeats the triumph of idealism and metaphysics through socialism and equality of the person; one attempts to maintain the moral ideal with its negation of the ego, self, and will; one attempts to maintain the beyond, even if only as an antilogical X; one seeks to prove divine governance in events; one believes as before in good and evil and in the triumph of good as one's mission; one continues to despise naturalness, desire, ego, striving instead for supreme spirituality and art as a consequence of depersonalization and disinterestedness; and finally, one allows the church to infringe on all aspects of individual life (KSA 13: 69-70). 324 The old gravity is alive and well, though in living according to it we grow less alive and well with each passing day. O f particular interest to me is Nietzsche's claim that the "earthly solution" in the form of socialism, an ecumenical vision calling for the redistribution of wealth and the equality of all persons, merely repeats the mistakes of "truth, love, justice." In other words, Nietzsche's quarrel is not with an earthly solution, only with socialism as a particularly bad model of an earthly solution to the loss of the center of gravity. The doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same, according to Kreis, deprives the concept of God of any anthropocentric conceit. W h e n there is neither beginning nor end to the world, then the ground is taken away from the goal oriented spirit of gravity and from vengeance in any form, then there is no great finale, no judgement day of the condemning and redeeming God, "not even as humanistic eschatology of the final battle of the final avenging class (Marx) or race (Wagner), then it will be the earth that will come to judge the living and in them the errors of the dead." 325 Kreis updates Nietzsche's list of failed and failing "earthly solutions" when he mentions the class warfare of Marxism in the same breath as the race warfare of Wagner and Hitler — these are both unworthy of humanity and unworthy of earth. W h e n the earth's gravity is restored and life's center of gravity is restored to the earth, possibilities for dwelling in partnership with the earth will open up, revealing an earthly open far surpassing the crude designs of vengeance and hatred. 324

This entry is longer and more detailed than the one given in Will to Power, # 30. Kreis, Nietzsche, Wagner unddie Judeti, 161.

230

IV. Logic and Limit in the Eternal Recurrence of the Same

4. The New Gravity "There has never been a greater deed — and whoever is born after us belongs by virtue of this deed to a higher history than all history up to now." The Gay Science 125

Bearing in mind what the death of God means in the Western tradition of cosmological order buttressed by Platonic-Christian meaning, Nietzsche's messenger of the death of God is appropriately a madman. Lighting his lantern in the morning light and rushing into the market place shouting "I seek God!" the madman only succeeds in bringing laughter down upon himself from those in the crowd who do not believe in God. The madman now delivers a lengthy speech explaining first that we have killed God, then unfolding the implications of this deed for the future of life on earth. Nietzsche here uses a series of spatial and physical metaphors in an attempt to render the event imaginable. How were we able to drink up the sea? he asks. W h o gave us the sponge with which to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do in unchaining this earth from its sun? Now our planet drifts without direction in the icy darkness of space, in "infinite nothingness," and only night and more night is coming, such that lanterns have to be lit in the morning. "Do we not yet hear anything of the noise of the grave diggers who are burying God? Do we not yet smell anything of the divine rotting? — even gods rot!" And since we are all God's killers, "how do we console ourselves, we murderers of all murderers? The holiest and most powerful thing the world possessed till now, it has bled to death beneath our knives — who will wash this blood from us?" Perhaps, the madman asks, the greatness of this deed is too great for us: "There has never been a greater deed — and whoever is born after us belongs by virtue of this deed to a higher history than all history up to now." His listeners are silent now, they can only gawk at him, but the madman realizes that the event is still on its way, comparing it to the time it takes for thunder and lightning to reach us, for the light of the stars to reach us: "This deed is still more distant to them than the furthest stars — and yet they have committed it\ (GS 125, KSA 3: 480-2). The character of the earth has changed, must change, in the wake of this event, and so Nietzsche speaks of the disappearance of the seas and the horizon — there can be no navigating, no embarking from terra firma to discover new lands, as there is nothing more to navigate and no point of orientation with which to steer. Unchained from its sun, the earth becomes a mere asteroid hurtling through space, doomed to perpetual winter and night. While the madman in his clairvoyant state can already see the darkness, hear the grave digging and smell the decomposition of God's corpse, 326 things will go on as before for most of humanity, despite the fact 326

Observe how his senses register these changes, i.e., his body as opposed to his head or his reason.

4. The New Gravity

231

that all who are born after this event belong to a higher history, a new history, one in which humans will have to become gods themselves to appear worthy of the deed ("um nur ihrer wtirdig zu erscheinen"). This new history is the new gravity, and the madman's rhetorical questions notwithstanding, there is a future without God. Nietzsche dramatizes this point by beginning the fifth and final book of Science (added in 1887) where # 125 leaves off. "The greatest new event — that 'God is dead,' that faith in the Christian God has become unworthy of faith — begins already to cast its first shadows across Europe." A few will have suspected as much, he adds, and a few will have their trust turned into doubt. In the main, however, the event itself is "much too great, too distant, too remote from the comprehensive faculty of the many" for this news to have even reached them, let alone that the many would already know what actually transpired and how everything must collapse now that this faith has been undermined, "because it was built upon it, propped up by it, grown into it: for example our entire European morality." Nietzsche predicts a "darkening and eclipse of the sun whose like has probably not existed before on earth." But there are those for whom this event is an occasion for cheerfulness: "we philosophers and 'free spirits' feel ourselves illuminated by a new dawn with the news that the 'old God is dead'; our hearts overflow with gratitude, amazement, foreboding, expectation — finally the horizon seems open to us again, supposing even that it is not bright, finally our ships may sail again, sail out into any danger, while every dare of the knowing one is again permitted and the sea, our sea lies open again, perhaps there has never been such an 'open sea'" (GS 343, KSA 3:573-4). In "The madman" the sea was the first to disappear with the death of God, but here it is back, symbolizing the enterprising and adventurous spirit that once again ships out into open waters. It is not obtuseness, false bravado, or recklessness that enables the free spirits to respond in this manner to their greatest challenge, indeed, to the greatest challenge ever to have faced humanity, instead, it is the relief and gratitude of knowing and creating types who now have before them a historically unprecedented open, a "new world" of possibilities denied them by the old gravity. As is typical of free spirits, their explorations and findings will not resonate among the many, just as the free spirits themselves according to Nietzsche live scattered in anonymity, but while the old gravity continues to fade, and the shadows of the death of God continue to spread across Europe, another diametrically opposed existence is unfolding on the earth, an existence grounded for the first time on the earth — a liberated and elevated earth — with a new gravity and center of gravity in life. Lowith draws on the unpublished note which is the first written formulation of the eternal recurrence of the same, in which Nietzsche refers to the doctrine specifically as "the new gravity" ("das neue Schwergewicht"), to make the point that "because the new 'gravity' in existence (which has now become transitory) is the idea of the eternal recurrence, a clear connection arises between the death of God,

232

IV. Logic and Limit in the Eternal Recurrence of the Same

nihilism, and the eternal recurrence of the same." 327 It is as if Nietzsche had planned the sequence of events to bolster his doctrine of recurrence, for as Lowith points out, now that existence has become transitory, that is, existence no longer stands under the auspices or offices of God, reverting to the same transient character as any thing without a soul, the meaninglessness of existence must begin to be felt, must begin to cause pain and alarm. It is also in his notes concerning European nihilism that Nietzsche refers to the eternal recurrence of the same as "the most nihilistic thought," writing there: "Let us think this thought in its most terrible form: existence as it is, without meaning and goal, but unavoidably recurring, without a finale in nothingness: 'the eternal recurrence.' This is the most extreme form of nihilism: nothingness (the 'meaningless') eternally!" (KSA 12:213). Death of God, ensuing loss of meaning, enter the eternal recurrence of the same — not, Nietzsche insists, as savior and redeemer, but as a new gravity, a worthy gravity and, it must be added, a gravity that cannot falter or collapse because it already envisions the most nihilistic scenario. We have seen enough of Nietzsche's architectural metaphors, and enough of his critique of failed metaphysics, to perceive how he builds for the long term: the eternal recurrence of the same is built to last not because its ontology pretends to the absolute, to eternity as in the Western God or some other transcendental monument — the longevity and force of the eternal recurrence of the same, as new gravity, derive from its finite character, its reconstitutive, Dionysian nature, its earthiness. Miiller-Lauter repeatedly claims that ERS has to be incorporated, in order to act as a new gravity (einverleiben, sich einverleiben), and to incorporate something means for Nietzsche "to internalize an idea and 'make it so firm' as internalization that it is already shaped in advance by future experiences." 328 Lowith addresses the eternal recurrence of the same as the most extreme form of nihilism and as the crisis of nihilism, which causes nihilism to veer "into the reverse teaching of the eternal recurrence. T h e 'reverse men' teach the eternal recurrence. T h e belief in it gives man's new existence 'the new gravity' after man has lost the old gravity that he had in the Christian faith." 329 I think Lowith's focus on the interconnectedness of nihilism and the eternal recurrence as they contribute to the new gravity is valuable in helping to ground Nietzsche's writings on both topics, but I am concerned when Lowith appears to equate the doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same with a new faith, as in the above juxtaposition. It is not a matter of "belief" in eternal recurrence in the same sense as it is a matter of belief and faith in Christianity — Nietzsche disavowed the role of redeemer and religion founder

327 328

329

Löwith, Nietzsche's Philosophy, 42. Miiller-Lauter, vol. II, 232-33 and vol. I, 298. The quote needs to be provided in German as well: " [Eine Vorstellung] auf eine Weise verinnerlichen und als verinnerlichte so 'fest machen, daß sie die künftigen Erfahrungen vorgängig immer schon prägen" (I, 298). Löwith, Nietzsche's Philosophy, 56.

4. The New Gravity

233

and he did so "preemptively," knowing his doctrine would be regarded as another form of faith. Moreover, Nietzsche cannot build on the same hollow foundation as Christianity by proposing another teaching that requires faith — God requires faith, Christianity requires faith, whereas I think Nietzsche wants us to approach the eternal recurrence from the standpoint of knowledge and what he regards as necessity. He calls it a doctrine (Lehre) and a thought (Gedanke) and presents it not as an article of faith but as both metaphor and fact, in order that the dimensions and characteristics of his idea be ponderable and comprehensible. Christian faith, one could argue, is truly a matter of faith, is accepted and nourished on faith. Are we really dealing with two faiths opposing each other, as Lowith suggests, or as I argue, is the eternal recurrence of the same not a counter-faith, a constant test, a constant disavowal of faith and faiths, a teaching that dissolves all faiths? If Nietzsche teaches redemption from redeemers, and if eternal recurrence is his major teaching in this regard, the counter-faith dimension of the eternal recurrence cannot be seen as just another faith, as a substitute that more or less restores humanity to the status quo in the absence of God. Abel helps us to distinguish between ERS as an article of faith and ERS as the antidote to faith-based practices. He refers to it as a complete overcoming of gnosis, rendering impossible any metaphysical and any world-denying dualism, self-sacrifice, or need to sacrifice the world for the sake of some redemption, ideal, or metaphysical-moral imperative: "Therein it proves to be simultaneously the quintessence of the interpretation circle, the interpretation of interpretations." 330 In other words, as far as faith is concerned and insofar as faith is concerned with subscription to a privileged set of beliefs promising salvation and redemption from this world (the only world), ERS functions on the contrary as a ground, a center of gravity, rendering moot any considerations that are not specific to this (the only) world. For this reason I cannot agree, at least not entirely, with Clark's otherwise compelling effort to put to rest the cosmological "justification" of ERS. She "share[s] the aspirations" of interpreters who regard ERS as a practical, versus a cosmological doctrine, but does not believe "they have established the irrelevance of cosmological considerations." It is not enough, she continues, to "focus on the putative transformational effects of the eternal recurrence cosmology. . . . If we are rational, we will ask what reason exists for accepting the cosmology. Focus on the consequences of the cosmology as a possibility or a myth leads straight to the proofs for recurrence in Nietzsche's notebooks." 331 Clark understands that on rational grounds one would have to consult Nietzsche's numerous unpublished notes concerning ERS, and this she uses as a response to interpreters who see ERS's practical dimension in the transformation it is supposed to effect in individuals. And precisely this is my point: even when a person is 330

Abel, Die Dynamik, 184.

331

Clark (1990), 247, 251.

234

IV. Logic and Limit in the Eternal Recurrence of the Same

supposed to be, and possibly is transformed by the doctrine of ERS, she will still ponder the cosmological "meaning" or justification of ERS whether or not she consults the "proof" notes which Nietzsche did not publish. There is enough information in the published contexts of ERS to suggest a cosmological justification, absent the detailed notes, and Nietzsche wants and needs this "justification" on "rational" grounds because he does not want, or need, ERS as an article of faith. So contrary to Clark I argue that there is indeed a cosmological dimension to ERS, at least to the extent that Nietzsche offers the doctrine with proofs cum grano salis, in order to appeal to both the hearts (practical, transformational, psychological) and intellects of his readers. Supposing that I am merely misreading Lowith and not sufficiently attuned to the nuances of his discourse, let me offer additional samples of his reasoning. "The metaphor of the eternal recurrence is therefore equatable with something twofold: on the one hand, with an 'ethical gravity' by means of which human existence that has become goalless obtains a goal again, beyond itself; and on the other hand, with a natural-scientific 'fact' in the goalless self-contained existence of the world of forces."332 Again, Lowith is quite right to approach ERS as a "twofold" proposition, for it is both metaphor and purported fact, i.e., it is couched in terms of both the poetic imagination and the scientific intellect. However, Lowith is making a leap to his next point, namely, that ERS is an "ethical gravity." Nietzsche uses ERS to replace and displace the moribund ethical gravity, the old gravity, so why then would he impose another "ethical" gravity in its place? Lowith apparently reasons that the only possible replacement for the old ethical gravity is another ethical gravity, when in fact, all he needs to say is that ERS is a new gravity. The second leap involves the wording "existence . . . obtains a goal again, beyond itself." True, existence had a goal in the old gravity, as long as it was tied to the immortality of the soul and to redemption, but ERS pointedly breaks with any goal for existence, let alone one "beyond itself," insofar as ERS is supposed to be the most radical teaching of the anti-beyond. Lowith himself uses the unpublished note in which Nietzsche describes ERS as "the most nihilistic thought," the thought that disallows any finale, "existence as it is, without meaning and goal, but unavoidably recurring" (KSA 12:213), indicating that he is quite aware of what Nietzsche has to say on this point. But let us return to the paragraph in Lowith where he discusses ERS's twofold nature. "This double explicableness as an atheistic religion and as a physical metaphysics shows that in its totality the teaching is the unity of a conflict between the nihilistic existence of the man who has rid himself of God and the positivistic existence of physical energy. Qua natural scientist, however, Nietzsche is a philosophizing dilettante, and as the founder of a religion, he is 'hermaphrodite of sickness and will to power.'" (ibid, 83). This is a skillful formulation of the dual character, especially the part about ERS as a totality capable of unifying the conflict between nihilism and positivism, but again, 332

Lowith, Nietzsche's Philosophy,

83.

4. The New Gravity

235

it stretches by insisting that there is a religious dimension, albeit an "atheistic" one to ERS. And what are we to make of the dismissive comment with which Lowith concludes his paragraph? At the time Lowith is writing his book, very little had been done by way of investigating Nietzsche's sources and use of sources in the natural sciences, so that, for instance, Mittasch's highly reliable book was unavailable to him. On balance it may turn out that Nietzsche was nothing more than a philosophizing dilettante in matters of natural science, though recent studies suggest otherwise,333 and supposing he is precisely that, the merits of ERS as a new philosophical teaching do not depend on endorsement of ERS by professional scientists. On the matter of Nietzsche being a "hermaphrodite of sickness and will to power," observe how Lowith attributes these words to Nietzsche himself, and how this is based on an incorrect reading. In the preface to Ecce Homo where Nietzsche takes pains to preemptively disavow the role of religion founder, he has this to say: "Within my writings Zarathustra stands by itself.... Here speaks no prophet,' none of those gruesome hermaphrodites of sickness and will to power whom one calls founders of religion" (EH P 4, KSA 6: 259). Lowith's use of these words out of context, in order to indicate that Nietzsche referred to himself as a gruesome hermaphrodite, when in fact he is distancing himself from same in the strongest possible terms, reveals the depth of Lowith's conviction that ERS is some sort of religious substitute, some sort of effort on Nietzsche's part to found a new religion. As slippery as Nietzsche's rhetoric is, especially in Ecce Homo where Lowith might have read Nietzsche's words as self-parody, one is at least able to discern what he opposes and how his language in this regard is typical of his style.334 When Lowith refers to ERS as an "atheistic gospel" and as a "Thou shalt" converted to an "I will" and thus "a self-made legislation and religion," he is paraphrasing Nietzsche's words and linking them directly to the concept of the new gravity, which is laudable.335 Where I believe he is not practical enough, however, is in taking the next step of exploring the finite, earthly nature of this new gravity, which requires us to foreground the spatial implications of ERS and to stop dwelling on the eternity aspect. After all, new "gravity" is not merely a metaphor but a deliberate invoking of earth's pull, earth's mass, earth's force as a physical reality. One can deny Nietzsche all legitimacy in matters of science and yet not deny the existence of gravity. 333

I have in mind Lampert, Nietzsche and Modern Times, Moles, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Nature and Cosmology, Stack, "Nietzsche and Boscovich's Natural Philosophy," Mittasch's Friedrich Nietzsche als Naturphilosoph (1952), and Moore's Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor, all of which are cited in this study. Lowith tones down, slightly, his criticism of N. as scientist a bit later in his book when he refers to N.'s scientific justification of ERS, p. 94.

334

I do not want to create the impression that Lowith's scholarship is lacking overall, or that I do not like his book. See my review of the Lomax translation in Monatshefte 9114 (1999), 562-3. His study on the eternal recurrence of the same remains a milestone in Nietzsche scholarship, and my own study, not devoted exclusively to ERS, expands on some of Lowith's points with an eye toward drawing out implications for the earthly finite. Lowith, Nietzsche's Philosophy, 86-7.

335

236

IV. Logic and Limit in the Eternal Recurrence of the Same

Even before he formulates the eternal recurrence Nietzsche concerns himself with a new era opening up for humanity as a result of existential prioritizing of the closest things. In his discussion of Schopenhauer's definition of genius as coherent and lively recollection of the experienced self, he extrapolates to the striving for knowledge on the part of all historical consciousness, "which ever more powerfully distinguishes the modern era from all earlier eras and for the first time has broken down the old walls between nature and spirit, human and animal, morality and physics," remarking that such striving for universal knowledge reveals a striving for "genius of humanity on the whole" ( H H II/1 185, KSA 2:460-1). In addition to indicating that humanity is poised to move into a new era, he underscores the role of knowledge applied to the finite as a catalyst for this new mode of dwelling. Moreover in pointing to precisely these three ancient dualities, he anticipates what is achieved by the doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same. The definition of genius that Nietzsche finds appealing in Schopenhauer has a distinctive feature above or beyond the definition of genius that one would find in Romanticism, namely, "coherent and lively recollection" of what the individual has experienced, as opposed to spontaneous, innate, "natural" or "naive" ability. Nietzsche is working with a finite conception of genius based on the individual's capacity to organize, render coherent, and recollect experience, a rather practical elevation and intensification of the quotidian as it manifested itself, for example, in the life of Goethe. We have examples of the unification of nature and spirit in the effort to de-deify nature and naturalize humanity, of the unification of human and animal in the effort to eschew lazy living by regulating the passions, and finally morality and physics become closer when we consider Nietzsche's alternative to ascetic morality, which drives at a physiologically uninhibited morality practiced within the environment of the finite. Another early expression of the new gravity or of conditions illustrative of a new gravity is found in "Mortal souls!" from Dawn, where the highest achievement of knowledge is characterized as the letting go of the belief in an immortal soul. Now for the first time humanity is free to envision tasks that earlier would have been seen as madness and blasphemy: "We are allowed to experiment with ourselves! Yes even humanity is allowed this! The greatest sacrifices to knowledge have not yet been made" (D 501, KSA 3:294). In experimenting with ourselves, we are exploring the newly opened and finite realm of human agency, of defining human being without guardianship and divine guidance. Experimenting with ourselves implies self-ownership and empowerment, which was denied us as long as our souls were purported to belong to God or the devil. As usual Nietzsche is concerned about method in pursuing the new opportunities for grounded existence, and so in "Principle" (Grundsatz) he writes that one unavoidable hypothesis to which humanity must return again and again is in the long run more powerful that the best-believed faith in something untrue, "in the long run here means a hundred thousand years" (GS 133, KSA 3:485). Here we have the stress on groundedness as a value, seen in what is known to us and unavoidable,

4. The New Gravity

237

and we also have a glimpse into the span of time in which the new gravity will help shape a more affirmative humanity, namely a hundred thousand years — as opposed to the mere couple of millennia in which Christianity ("faith in something untrue") has exerted its influence. Echoes of scientific rigor applied to living with a new gravity are also present in "Our air," where Nietzsche speaks collectively of free spirits who dwell in their own atmosphere, quietly and anonymously, practicing the "rigor of science": "In this rigorous and clear element he has his entire strength: here he can fly!" Scientific rigor is equated here with courage in seeing reality without escaping into the clouds, into the fog of the ungrounded, reminiscent of the classical values of imparting style to one's character rather than letting oneself go, unbridled, heedless, into the "infinite." What such spirits do best according to Nietzsche is bring light, they can be the "light of the earth," he claims somewhat blasphemously (GS 293, KSA 3: 533-4), drawing a distinction between the work of enlightening individuals and the redeemer Christ who is sometimes referred to as "light of the world." Though it is true that Nietzsche's trust in science and knowledge loses some of its buoyancy in the works following Zarathustra, it must still be remembered that knowledge remains a key ingredient of the new gravity in the sense that it continuously, progressively dispels shadows of the old gravity, and science is conducted in a new, passionate and "gay" manner appropriate to life affirmation. The Gay Science # 3 4 1 "The greatest weight" ("Das grosste Schwergewicht") is Nietzsche's first published formulation of the eternal recurrence of the same and differs in many respects from subsequent elaborations of the idea. Whether his use of Schwergewicht is taken to mean weight, stress, gravity, or center of gravity, all of which could serve as translations, the common element is physicality, force, mass, presence — there can be no discussion of gravity without due consideration of gravity as a manifestation of bodily presence. I contend therefore that the title of this aphorism is already a signal to the reader that humans are not adept in navigating time, in arranging and harvesting the finite, and in dealing with the bias against transience as it causes anxiety and life denial. By referring to his formulation of the eternal recurrence of the same as "the greatest weight," only to follow with a hypothetical scenario designed to shock, without any real discussion of "time," Nietzsche is trying to force a reorientation toward life such that life is felt in its weight, felt in its substance, such that it becomes embodied, and in order to effect this feeling of the new gravity, "time" is deliberately left small, unobtrusive. I also believe that given the numerous detailed and inventive explorations of the quotidian, the finite, and the closest things in the writings beginning with Human, it would require a leap of faith to regard the idea of the eternal recurrence of the same as something that suddenly dawned on Nietzsche or came to him as an epiphany — his own words to this effect notwithstanding. The doctrine is plainly a radical formulation of earlier statements designed to help us affirm the close and the quotidian, and as such it is not new in Nietzsche's thinking

238

IV. Logic and Limit in the Eternal Recurrence of the Same

but organic in its growth and flowering. What's more, when the idea is next elaborated upon in Zarathustra, the emphasis on gravity as body is overt, and unlike the formulation in Science, it is rendered in the most spatial terms imaginable. A person who is experiencing her loneliest moment of solitude is posed with a grim hypothetical and addressed in the familiar second person as du, you: What if some day or night a demon were to sneak 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 again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, rather each pain and each joy and each thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small and large of your life must recur to you — and everything in the same order and sequence — and just so this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and just so this moment and I myself. The eternal hour glass of existence will be turned over again and again — and you with it, speck of dust!* (GS 341, KSA 3:570)

The timing of the hypothetical visit is significant because it represents a low point in the person's life; there is no great skill or strength required to embrace life at its most joyful. One's life recurs eternally in every detail, big and small, so there is no escaping any particular moment or editing any aspect of it. The finite nature of one's life is symbolized by the hourglass containing a finite number of grains of sand, and as if to underscore how there is no escaping the eternal recurrence regardless of one's stature, place, reputation or lack of it, the demon addresses you as "speck of dust," smaller even than a grain of sand. What the demon describes is on one level not unusual at all, in fact it is the facticity of the quotidian and therefore not at all frightening, more likely to be overlooked and blinked away than to give a person pause in any form. On the other hand, with the intensification of the quotidian through eternalization, one's daily life suddenly becomes more ominous than anything imaginable; what is "normally" unacknowledged, unnoticed, unappreciated in the normal stream of transience suddenly assumes tremendous gravity, becomes the very center of gravity of one's existence. At this point the omniscient narrator returns, dispelling the hypothetical vision spun by the demon. The question now put to you is whether you would despair and curse the demon who brings you this news, or, recollecting a single "tremendous moment" you experienced, welcome him as a god bearing divine news. "If this thought were to assume power over you, it would change you as you are and perhaps crush you; the question with each and every thing, 'do you want this once again and innumerable times again?' would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to long for nothing more than for this final eternal confirmation and seal?" (ibid, 570). If gravity and one's center of gravity consist in the embodied, physical, finite, closest things that comprise our lives day in and day out, the "heaviest" weight would be the multiplication, or recurrence, of this life eternally, in very much the same way that Nietzsche insists the eternal recurrence of the same is the most nihilistic thought because life without meaning eternalized is the most extreme multiplication,

4. The New Gravity

239

or recurrence, of nihilism imaginable. In other words, Nietzsche means "heaviest weight" and "most nihilistic thought" literally, not merely as metaphors. The fourth book of Science contains sixty six aphorisms, of which approximately nineteen, by my reckoning, are clearly related to earth affirmation and grounding. Book Four which originally concluded Science reaches a crescendo with "The greatest weight," its penultimate aphorism, and "Incipit tragoedia" its final aphorism which reproduces almost verbatim the first page of Zarathustra. By placing it where he does in Science, Nietzsche saves his best for last. But just as importantly, he summarizes and distills his thoughts on the finite and makes this the bridge to Zarathustra's open. To indicate in the strongest possible terms that "The greatest weight" is supposed to serve as a threshold, not as a brick wall, he adds a preview of Zarathustra, whose message of the superhuman as the meaning of the earth is a first protracted experiment with the new gravity that Nietzsche sometimes refers to as the "new infinity." Humanity is not yet in a position to describe what will take the place of moral feelings and judgments, though it is capable of perceiving that they are "erroneously laid out and their building is incapable of repair." The influence of the old judgments will wane as long as the influence of reason does not wane; however, the sciences of physiology, medicine, sociology and psychology ("Gesellschafts- und Einsamkeitslehre") are not yet certain enough of themselves to reconstruct the laws of life and behavior: "And so we live a provisional existence or a catch-up existence, depending on taste and talent, and do best in this interregnum to be as aware of ourselves as possible and to found {gründen) small experimental states. We are experiments: let us also want to be!" (D 453, KSA 3:274). What Nietzsche calls the "moral interregnum" will assist in transitioning from the old to the new gravity, and again the theme is sounded that individuals will have to step up, provide their own center of gravity by experimenting with themselves as they now have a right to — individuals are now their own property and empower themselves after all. There is an unmistakable reliance on science and method in this modest and honest proposal to learn new existential strategies by experimenting; no one should expect that living in a new gravity will be painless and automatic, but with the strengthening or even retooling of the sciences a new foundation, "new corner stones" as he writes can be achieved over time. 336 Experimentation and exploration are proper responses for individuals liberated to engage the open of the new gravity. Nietzsche places hope in the possibility of "a philosophical overall justification" of an individual's way of life, comparing such a supportive 336

Additional discussions of the problems to be expected in coping with the new gravity are found in H H 1/21, where N. speculates on how human society would form if it accepted that all metaphysical explanations are useless (KSA 2:42); and H H 1/22 where a disadvantage of the cessation of metaphysical beliefs would be that individuals countenance the single lifespan too squarely and no longer perceive the need to build upon lasting, centuries-old institutions (KSA 2:43-4). He sheds his misgivings once he has a clear sense of the requirements of the new gravity.

240

IV. Logic and Limit in the Eternal Recurrence of the Same

and reinforcing atmosphere to a sustaining sun that shines on every aspect of a person's life, and he wishes that "many such new suns would yet be created! Even the evil, the unhappy, the exceptional person should have his philosophy, his good right, his sunshine!" Pity is not prescribed in these cases, and Nietzsche wishes we would rid ourselves of this "arrogant notion." Nor are confessors, exorcists, or forgivers of sin necessary, as these too are accouterments of the old gravity. What is needed, he insists, is a new justice: "And a new chance! And a new password! And new philosophers! Even the moral earth is round! Even the moral earth has its antipodes! Even the antipodes have their right to existence! There is yet another world to discover — and more than one! To the ships, you philosophers!" (GS 289, KSA 3:529-60). Nietzsche's sense of the economy of life manifesting itself in a spectrum of diverse traits accompanies this exhortation to sail forth into the new world. It would make no sense to speak of a "new world" or "round moral earth" unless one were prepared to explore (countenance, study, affirm) the whole of this finite space; the "bad specimens" as well as the "bad regions" of this new, round moral earth cannot be relegated to extraterrestrial zones or be deprived of their right to sunlight, as was the case with the old gravity whose superstition taught that the earth was flat and that certain places had to be avoided. One of the strongest formulations of the open is found in an aphorism titled "Our new 'infinite,'" where "infinite" is placed in quotation marks to indicate that Nietzsche does not literally mean infinite. The perspectival character of existence does allow us to analyze whether existence could have a different character, whether a meaningless existence without interpretation becomes nonsense, whether all existence is essentially "an interpreting existence." We cannot see around the corner of our perspectivalism. We will never be able to satisfy our curiosity about whether other kinds of intellect and perspective are possible. There could be beings whose perception of time differs considerably from our own. "But I think that today we are at least far away from the ridiculous immodesty of decreeing from our angle that one is permitted perspectives only from this angle. Instead the world for us has become 'infinite' once more: insofar as we cannot reject the possibility that it includes in itself infinite interpretations." He cautions here that we must not revert to deifying " this monster of an unknown world" in the old manner, thereby worshiping again "the unknown" in the form of "the unknown one" (GS 374). Thus the "infinite" character of the world inheres now in the human potential to advance infinite interpretations, not in any cosmological or metaphysical view regarding the world proper. And issuing an explicit warning Nietzsche anticipates the human propensity for deifying; we must not waste this opportunity in history by sliding back upon the old gravity. Of course Nietzsche remains cognizant of the new infinity as a "monster of an unknown world" ("dieses Ungeheure von unbekannter Welt"), suggesting we will have our fair share of difficulties navigating it and adjusting to the new gravity. The values of creativity figure prominently in the reorientation, and we must remember

4. The New Gravity

241

that creativity now requires working with the finite and remaining within the scope of what humans can actually create. Meyer regards the propositions "God is dead" and "I teach you the superhuman" as complementary: "Only from this background does Nietzsche's provocative votum 'God is dead' become fully comprehensible. The death of God is not only a loss, not only the expression of nihilism, the loss of the metaphysical center of meaning, rather it is also a gain for it opens a new freedom and a new infinity for the human being." 337 Because Nietzsche conceptualizes "freedom" differently than most moderns, namely as something that has to be earned and constantly overcome in relation to the real obstacles and dimensions of one's environment, as opposed to something granted in exchange for faith, adherence to dogma, or as reward for denying this world (freedom as redemption), his freedom cannot be enjoyed as a passive state. In the new gravity freedom depends entirely on what one manages to accomplish for oneself as a creator using the opportunity of a value-less environment. In Zarathustra he poses the problem of creativity: "Are you a new force and a new right? A first movement? A wheel rolling out of itself? Can you compel even the stars to revolve around you?" (Z 1/17, KSA 4:80). These physical expressions are designed to convey the message that one must become one's own center of gravity. The use of the wheel metaphor is telling here because the third metamorphosis of the spirit, that of the child, is described as a wheel rolling out of itself and is only achieved in spiritual terms after one has endured the burden of the old gravity (camel in the desert), and after one has defeated the dragon Thou Shalt (the destroying lion). At such time one is sufficiently practiced in the ways of overcoming the old gravity that one can stand on one's own, as one's own center of gravity, requiring no more direction from external forces. The roundness of the moral world expresses the idea that in spiritual terms humanity needs to progress along with its science. We do not truly inhabit the earth if we are still in the thrall of medieval superstitions regarding the human condition, such that acting in a certain manner in relation to self, body, earth will bring damnation. In "On Old and New Tablets" from Zarathustra he uses his favorite metaphor of sea exploration to describe what lies in store for humanity. O h my brothers, when I bade you break the good and the tablets of the good: then only did I ship human beings onto their high sea. And only now the great fear comes to them, the great looking-around, the great sickness, the great disgust, the great seasickness. False coasts and false securities the good taught you; in the lies of the good you were born and sheltered. Everything has been falsified and twisted in the extreme by the good. But whoever discovered the land 'human being' discovered also the land 'human future.' Now you shall be seafarers, brave and patient (Z 111/12, KSA 4:267). 337

Theo Meyer, Nietzsche unddie Kunst (Tubingen: Francke, 1993), 43.

242

IV. Logic and Limit in the Eternal Recurrence of the Same

Two gravities are at work in the above passage, the old gravity according to which everything is false and twisted, providing a false sense of security and sheltering within the herd of the good, and the new gravity which obtains when humans are out to sea, in their real environment, encountering the nausea of being at sea in the open. Human being is described as a new land because this is how strange and unfamiliar humans will seem in the new gravity. In temporal terms there is nothing but future associated with the new humanity of the moral round earth — that is how much room is open for creativity and for the new image of the human. Speaking in philosophical terms Nietzsche encourages a reorientation toward judgments, taking issue with Kant's approach to the question of how synthetic judgments are possible a priori. "The falseness of a judgment is for us no objection to a judgment; therein our new language perhaps sounds strangest. The question is, to what extent is it life promoting, life preserving, species preserving, perhaps even species cultivating. And we are fundamentally inclined to assert that the most false judgments (to which the synthetic judgments a priori belong) are among the most indispensable . . . . " In a de-deified and nonmetaphysical world, where the value "truth" or Truth does not hold sway, the new center of gravity has to emanate from something solid, something grounded, something more reliable than reason elevated to divine status. "False" therefore becomes a moot point, and the new standard is whether a judgment promotes vitality and helps in cultivating the species — a very high standard, it should be added, and not an invitation to engage in an orgy of nihilistic "deconstruction" of meaning. "To admit untruth as a condition of life: this means to be sure resisting the usual value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that dares this places itself on this basis alone beyond good and evil" (BGE 4, KSA 5:18). In his more numerous metaphorical expressions of the new gravity we are constantly warned of dangers, shipwreck, fear, nausea etc, while in this precise philosophical language Nietzsche tones down the rhetoric and addresses a central problem of Western metaphysics. There are still indications of danger, strangeness, and daring associated with the new gravity, but more basically, the tools for helping to navigate in the new gravity are suggested in positive terms. What Nietzsche refers to as false judgments, logical fictions, constant falsification of the world are, in fact, the tools we have used and will continue to use, only henceforth we shall do so deliberately, with a grounding standard of life affirmation and species cultivation as a guide. The strangeness of the new language resides in the fact that our reorientation in the new gravity must have the ontological flexibility to allow for a teleological rehabilitation of slandered values and concepts, since there is no longer an absolute according to which the traditionally slandered values, concepts and judgments can or should be condemned. But the absence of absolute standards such as God and Truth should not be construed as the absence of meaning — the new gravity is too often, too clearly portrayed as a new opportunity to allow for such a negative interpretation. Simi-

4. The New Gravity

243

larly, in Nietzsche's intensive and consequential critique of teleology the concept of teleology should not be, as Abel cautions, confused with the concept of necessity — Nietzsche disavows the former but embraces the latter. 338 T h e center of gravity of meaning has to shift to human being and earth, and this all important shift must be carried out as a new form of labor previously rendered impossible. Even in his most sustained and refined critique of morals, namely Genealogy, Nietzsche enlists the aid of metaphor to present the challenge offered by the round moral world. "What is at stake is traversing with entirely new questions and as it were with new eyes the enormous, distant and so well concealed land of morals — morals that actually existed and were actually lived — and is this not tantamount to first discovering this land?" ( G M F 7, KSA 5:254). There has never been an inventory of morals, let alone a comprehensive study of the effects of morals — those that actually exist and existed — conducted for the purpose of evaluating their effect on the h u m a n species. While Nietzsche avails himself of creative language on the one hand in order to present the task in its novelty and scope, he implies immediately on the other hand that the values of knowledge and science can be redirected toward this journey of discovery. 339 The new gravity therefore is rarely elaborated upon by Nietzsche in the context of time, or I should say, of temporality, since its historical nature as a new place in time and a new history are quite evident. T h e eternal recurrence of the same is effective in emotional, psychological, and epistemological terms when these are applied to the affirmation of the finite, but ERS is blunted in its effect, and meaning, if regarded primarily under the influence of a linear view of time. Indeed, the linear view of time is itself a property of the old gravity, which no longer sustains life and whose power wanes in direct proportion to the sinking in or dawning of the idea of the death of God. T h e element of time in ERS is in my view chiefly rhetorical, designed to intensify the motivation for exploring earthly space. Earthly space, in turn, consists of the finite in the form of the closest things and the quotidian, raised to the nth power by eternal recurrence, and it consists of the finite in moral-spiritual terms as the property, past, present and future, of a humanity that acknowledges no ownership, no empowerment except to itself.

338 339

Abel, Die Dynamik, 138-39. In H H 1/292 he stresses, with optimism, that in order to make something of one's experiences and overcomings, the old and flawed in the form of religion and art must be used to transition to the new gravity resting on philosophy and science — the trick is not to become mired in religion and art (KSA 2:235-7).

244

IV. Logic and Limit in the Eternal Recurrence of the Same

5. The Sameness of Eternal

Recurrence

"It appears that the total state reshapes qualities into the smallest details, such that two different total states could have nothing identical." Unpublished notes, 1881

In "The Vision and the Riddle" Zarathustra relates his experience of the eternal recurrence of the same to the sailors of the ship on which he travels, speaking to them exclusively for reasons we can now associate with their receptivity to exploration of the new moral world and humanity's new gravity. "But Zarathustra was a friend of all who make distant journeys and do not like to live without danger. And behold! finally in listening his own tongue was loosened and the ice of his heart broke: — then he began to speak thus." The "vision of the loneliest one" is what he relates first, and unlike the first formulation of ERS in Science, this one is presented in the form of a spectacle with characters and scene. In the corpse-pale twilight he is walking laboriously up a steep, barren mountain path, the whole time the spirit of gravity, his "devil and arch enemy," is crouched upon his shoulders as half dwarf, half mole, "lame, laming," dripping leaden thoughts into his brain. In this most intensified and symbolized depiction of humanity laboring under the burden of the old gravity, we recognize yet another iteration of Zarathustra's encounter with the saint who does not yet know that God is dead, and with the burden of death (transience, poisoned time) symbolized in Zarathustra's early, naive attempt to bury the rope dancer, which left him lugging the corpse around the countryside. The spirit of gravity is not only a dead weight bearing down on Zarathustra, he is also actively bearing down by filling Zarathustra's head with discouraging, defeatist thoughts. The dwarf-mole creature invokes the law of gravity to intimidate Zarathustra on his climb; referring to him sarcastically as "philosopher's stone" and "sling stone," the creature reminds him that "every hurled stone must —fall!" and ultimately, the creature claims, Zarathustra will end up stoning himself and having the stone he throws fall back upon him. Even the creature's silence is oppressive, such that Zarathustra compares his experience to the tortures of a sick person who wakes from falling asleep only to enter a worse dream. Summoning his courage Zarathustra stops in his tracks and cries: "Dwarf, You! Or I!" In summoning the courage "that kills even death," Zarathustra confronts the creature: "I am the stronger of us two: you do not know my abysmal thought! It — you could not bear!" At this point the creature leaps down and crouches on a stone, and Zarathustra notices a gateway: "Behold this gateway, dwarf!" I continued. "It has two faces. Two paths come together here: no one has walked them to their end. This long lane back: it lasts an eternity. And that lane outward — that is another eternity.

5. The Sameness of Eternal Recurrence

245

They contradict each other, these paths; they fly in each others face — and here, at this gateway they come together. The name of the gateway is written on top: 'Moment.'" (Z III/ 2, KSA 4: 197-200)

One pictures Zarathustra's arduous climb and labors with him, mentally, in empathy. One pictures the grave creature and the resolve that Zarathustra finally summons, until the mountainous path dissolves and a new space appears, that of the gateway with both Zarathustra and the creature before it, regarding it. Gooding-Williams observes that the coherence of this vision of time depends "on the representation of time as space." What he calls the "spatializing" of time allows us to envision it as the two paths "intersecting at a gateway that marks the place and the present moment in which he stands. For Zarathustra, all places present on the paths of the past and the future are present simultaneously. Thus, each of these places is present at the same time as the place he himself occupies. By spatializing time, Zarathustra represents all times and moments as concurrent with the present moment." We now envision the inscription at the top of the gateway, and realize that Moment is the only perspective, or the only relevant one, and it becomes the center of gravity. Or as GoodingWilliams writes: "From this perspective, the experience of the present moment is that of a perpetual, or eternal, now,' relative to which neither earlier nor later moments exist."340 This spatial representation of the eternal recurrence of the same, presented as a dramatic parable, allows Nietzsche to put a physical face on the concept of the old gravity (Zarathustra struggling uphill beneath the dwarf), and on the greatest weight or greatest center of gravity (the Moment as the knot of all time) as the alternative. Thus while I agree with Hatab that Nietzsche objected to "representing this totality of Time 'spatially,' i.e., as a circle," in keeping with Gooding-Williams I would offer that Nietzsche deliberately spatializes the presentation of ERS with means other than the circle in order to allow the physical, gravity-related properties of bodies to be adequately represented. And Hatab himself seems inclined to this view when he writes that "perhaps Nietzsche's experience of time is a 'synthesis' of linear and cyclic time, or more properly, a going-beyond the two."341 After all, what is pivotal to the new center of gravity is the focus on the moment, which if experienced as Nietzsche intends under the eternal recurrence of the same effectively neutralizes "old gravity" with its condemning of life because of transience and its suspending or postponing of life (its depriving life of its center of gravity) because of a purported future life.342 We recall from our earlier discussion of philological grounding (see chapter I) that although Nietzsche does not believe in a metaphysical or absolute ground, he does 340 341 342

Gooding-Williams, Zarathustra's Dionysian Modernism, 219. Lawrence J. Hatab, Nietzsche and Eternal Recurrence (Wash. DC: UP of America, 1978), 95-6. Or as Hatab formulates it: . . past, present and future are not 'points' on a line mutually excluding each other; they regenerate each other; in others words past and future constitute the moment and vice versa and are not the no-longer and not-yet," 95.

246

IV. Logic and Limit in the Eternal Recurrence of the Same

indeed believe that by enhancing traditional science with philology humans are capable of establishing the text of nature and of engaging in a proper, honest interpretation of it. On this reasoning, as Hatab suggests, the factuality or provability of ERS "is not really an issue for us (a statement which may be precarious because Nietzsche himself dabbled in 'scientific justifications' for eternal recurrence)." At the same time, Hatab cautions against the other extreme "of assuming it to be some sort of cryptic metaphor for a world-view that 'really' has nothing to do with eternal repetition," preferring that we "take eternal recurrence literally, but not factually."343 Plausibility and probability may be the best we have in the absence of absolute truth, and Nietzsche certainly elaborates upon ERS in his unpublished notes far more than he does in his published writings. Stack argues, I think correctly, that "there is no reason to assume that the notes comprising the Nachlaß represent hypotheses that Nietzsche abandoned, as claimed by some; he was fascinated by physical theories as early as 1866 and his reading of Lange was incorporated into his published works and alluded to or seriously reconsidered in his unpublished notes."344 Another way of approaching Nietzsche's elaborations on ERS is suggested by Moles, who observes that "Nietzsche's principle of finitude is not based on a scientific estimate, but on an assumption regarding what should be the appropriate point of view for scientific thinking."345 In other words, the eternal recurrence of the same, as a doctrine whose constituent parts include finite matter and infinite time, need not be scientifically factual in order to serve as Nietzsche's proposed ground, and by the same token, neither Nietzsche nor anyone else believes that his new center of gravity or his "greatest weight" in the eternal recurrence of the same is suddenly going to compete with or supplant the understanding of gravity as it is represented in physics and astronomy — nor is such a substitution intended by Nietzsche. Earlier I took issue with commentators who see a faith to faith substitution of the belief in immortality and the eternal recurrence of the same, because I think there is more to ERS than there is to dogma, or to accepting a teaching on faith, as one does with Christianity. The role of knowledge in revealing and creatively engaging the new gravity has been dealt with already, but revisiting the issue will not hurt. Whatever earlier notions of the idea of recurrence may have stipulated, and Nietzsche was certainly familiar with versions from antiquity,346 he enhances the doctrine and makes it uniquely his by infusing it with dimensions of the finite in the form of the closest things and with his understanding of physics. 343

344 345 346

Hatab, Nietzsche and Eternal Recurrence, 93-4. I believe Hatab is perceptive also in regarding the union of eternity and time "as a ground; it signifies the self-sufficiency, non-createdness and nonotherness of the world-process," 99. Stack, "Nietzsche and Boscovich," 73. Moles, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Nature, 277. Bernd Magnus, Nietzsche's Existential Imperative (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1978), see chapter two for N.'s possible sources in Heraclitus and the Stoics.

5. The Sameness of Eternal Recurrence

247

What I mean by plausibility as Nietzsche's scientifically informed ground, but a ground not based technically on either truth or verifiability, is well reflected in a detailed note in which he emphatically denies that the world has a goal, a final state, or being. "That is still the old religious way of thinking and wishing, a kind of longing to believe that somewhere the world does indeed resemble the old beloved, infinite, boundlessly creative God — that somewhere 'the old God still lives' — that longing of Spinoza's which expresses itself in the words ' deus sive natura' (he actually perceived 'natura sive deus —)." Such wishful thinking and sliding back nostalgically to a view that God and nature are interchangeable are illusory because both are thought to be infinite, and there is no grounding in the sense pursued by Nietzsche as long as the biggest psychological hurdle to grounding is not removed. "But what is the proposition and belief with which the decisive turning point, the now-achieved preponderance of the scientific spirit over the religious god-creating spirit is most certainly expressed? Is it not: the world, as force, must not be thought of as unlimited, because it cannot be thought this way — we forbid ourselves the concept of an infinite force as incompatible with the concept 'force'. Hence — even the world is lacking the capacity for eternal newness" (KSA 11:557). Not only does this "note" (the text of forty-four lines is actually as polished as many of Nietzsche's published writings) express Nietzsche's reasoning for viewing the world as becoming as opposed to being, but it also contains the rationale for the eternal recurrence of the same and does so by denying the possibility of infinite new creation on the part of the world, as if the world were endowed with divine creative power (ibid, 556). Moreover, by invoking the proposition of the world as finite force, Nietzsche is elevating the acknowledgment of the finite to the highest standard, indeed the "decisive turning point" (Wendung) with which scientific spirit prevails over religious spirit. Though Nietzsche ultimately does not accept a mechanistic view of the world, he appreciates certain psychological effects such a view would have on people and he recommends it as a "regulative principle of method" requiring rigor, discipline, and avoidance of sentimentality (KSA 11:443). Still, the mechanistic explanation of the world is an ideal, he claims, with which one would explain as much as possible with as little as possible. "Still needed: the denial of empty space; space thought of as fixed and limited; just so the world as eternally recurring" (KSA 11: 438). Space is an abstraction, "in itself there is no space, there is especially no empty space. Much nonsense stems from the belief in empty space'" (KSA 11:252). Moles unpacks some implications of this view of limited space: "What Nietzsche means when he calls the universe finite is simply that he rejects the idea that it extends indefinitely far. He gives an argument for the finitude of space. If space was infinite, force would gradually become dissipated throughout it, and an equilibrium would result. By Nietzsche's principles, such an equilibrium of force is the same as the attenuation of force itself, incompatible with the law of conservation

248

IV. Logic and Limit in the Eternal Recurrence of the Same

of energy." 347 Now let us think what the conservation of energy and the finitude of the universe have to do with Nietzsche's real concerns, his "smaller" concerns if you will, because after all, if we become bogged down in Nietzsche's physics, are we not diverting our own gaze from the closest things to the last things? I agree with Moles' interpretation of Nietzsche's comments on the finite, and I appreciate the attention he gives these comments in his book — scholars who attempt to unpack the implications of the finite for Nietzsche's thought are all too few. Why does Nietzsche bother with these scientific justifications, albeit more so in his unpublished notes than in his actual writings? Is it because he wants to provide a scientific basis for his thought, such that it would rival someone else's scientific theories, or replace en masse those views accepted by the scientific establishment? I think this is highly unlikely. Instead, I propose that what really motivates Nietzsche in this endeavor is his own sense of urgency, his own sense of the need for a profound comprehension and affirmation of the finite in the light of the damage to the human psyche and physiology, and to the earth, perpetrated by millennia of belief in infinity and in the God of infinity. Nietzsche frequently rails against the democratic spirit as a force actually capable of leveling humanity into a species of herd animals, as if this degeneration to "the last human," the opposite of "the superhuman" were just around the corner, when in fact we know that such a devastating change could not take place — (unless of course it already has taken place). In a similar manner he feels called upon to lash out at Platonism and Christianity in order to make up for the lost ground of immanence, sometimes countering these movements with doctrines that appear unduly radical or confrontational. If this is all part of Nietzsche's psychological economy, perhaps his constant back-filling by way of providing "scientific" elaboration upon the finite is traceable to his genuine fear of our capacity to destroy the earth and ourselves. The finite does not sink in, it does not pique the imagination, it is too real, too manifest to draw interest, and to champion it is to preach to the sparrows. There are times when Nietzsche is monumentally patient and steadfast, urging his readers to steer clear of revolution, to comprehend the length and depth of humanity's prehistory, to think in terms of a hundred thousand years as opposed to the two millennia of Christianity; there are other times when he appears strident and anxious in his will to change the course of history. Human actions are inconsequential and infinitesimal in relation to the principle of the conservation of energy and the finitude of force, but when these views are presented in magnified form and distilled into the teaching of the eternal recurrence of the same, human actions achieve supreme importance and the site of their unfolding, the earth, comes into focus in an entirely new manner. The cluster of notes quoted immediately above are from 1885, but earlier such expressions from the period of Nietzsche's formulation of ERS are also available. 347

Moles, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Nature, 277.

5. The Sameness of Eternal Recurrence

249

Thus in 1881 he writes: "The measure of total force is fixed, nothing 'infinite': let us beware of such conceptual excesses. Consequently the number of states, changes, combinations and developments of this force is to be sure tremendously large and practically 'immeasurable,' but nonetheless also fixed and not infinite. Certainly time, however, in which the universe exerts its force, is infinite, i.e., force is eternally the same and eternally active." This leads Nietzsche to conclude that everything has already been innumerable times "insofar as the total state of all forces recurs eternally," however, having said that, he adds that it is entirely unverifiable "whether there has ever been anything identical. It appears that the total state reshapes ("neu bildet") qualities into the smallest details ("bis ins Kleinste"), such that two different total states could have nothing identical" (KSA 9:523). The paradox of the eternal recurrence of the same, then, is that nothing recurs twice. No two leaves could ever be identical, Nietzsche maintains, because this would presuppose that two leaves had "an absolutely identical development, and with that we would have to assume that back into all eternity something identical has existed, despite all changes in the total states and creation of new qualities — an impossible assumption!" (ibid, 523). The crux of the eternity problem for Nietzsche is that nothing is identical to anything else, each version of a thing is an original and therefore unique, and yet, given infinite time, each thing will recur eternally, not necessarily come forth as eternally new creation. Once again let us shuttle between the macro and the micro to register the effect of such a teaching on humans and their environment. The note that immediately follows the above invites us to draw such comparisons, because obviously Nietzsche is experimenting with perspectives of the closest and the farthest. Let us test, he begins, how the thought of something repeating itself has affected us so far, e.g. the year, or periodic illness, waking and sleeping etc. "If cyclical repetition is even only a probability or possibility, the thought of a possibility can also shake and reshape us, not only perceptions and definite expectations! How the possibility of eternal damnation has affected us ("gewirkt...hat")!" (KSA 9:524). Since he is clearly concerned about the negative impact of the mere possibility of eternal damnation, not to mention the actual threat and ritualized carrying out of eternal damnation, which reinforce this negative impact, Nietzsche feels called upon to reverse these effects with a teaching of roughly equal strength or efficacy, knowing that even thinking the possibility of the eternal recurrence of the same, absent any belief in or embrace of it, will have effect. The more we are inoculated with this idea, the more likely it is that first our thinking and next our actions will be influenced. One more analysis of a note denying the possibility of eternal novelty will help us to contextualize Nietzsche's notes regarding the "farthest" as experiments for presenting, or presencing, the closest. Also in 188 1 348 Nietzsche writes that looking 348

The reader is reminded that the notes found as The Will to Power begin with 1883.

250

IV. Logic and Limit in the Eternal Recurrence of the Same

backwards, if the world had a goal it would already have to have been achieved; if it had an unintended final state, that too would already have to have been achieved. If the world were capable at all of "a persisting and becoming rigid, if there were in its course only a single moment of 'being' in the strict sense, then there could be no more becoming, hence also no thinking, no observing of becoming. If it were eternally new becoming (¿'swig neu werdend") then it would therewith be posited as something inherently wondrous and freely and self creatively divine" (KSA 9:553). He warns that we must not fall back to the old creator concept which entails increase from nothing, decrease from nothing, "absolute arbitrariness and freedom in growth and in qualities" (ibid, 554). In other words, setting out the finite and the limits of creativity as he does, Nietzsche hopes to rid us of notions inherent in the Western conception of God as they spill over into the quotidian and render the quotidian and the closest things irrelevant. In the above example he tackles the problem of the infinite from two positions; there can be no persisting or rigidity or stasis, for these are incompatible with both the nature of becoming and with the possibility of thinking, which requires becoming; secondly, there can be no eternal new creation because this presupposes a god-like volition and a fantastic or magical state of affairs, creation from nothing, ex nihilo, which in historical terms accounts for the nihilistic crisis we find ourselves in today. The "small" lessons to be extracted from this note are: the persistence of being is an illusion — nothing endures without changing, not your house, not your life, not your soul; and, creativity has meaning only in an applied and circumscribed sense, which sense is indicated by the closest things — which may be your house, your life, your soul.349 Given how adamant Nietzsche is in elevating becoming at the expense of being, and in exposing the fallacy of identical things, it does cause one to wonder why he insists on calling his doctrine the eternal recurrence of the same. Two reasons immediately come to mind. First, as a rhetorical device designed to leave no option or alternative for a beyond of any kind, in direct contradistinction to the teaching of the immortal soul and life after death, "the same" recurring eternally ensures that the entire center of gravity of life must be in this life, as it is, without exception, without the slightest change, multiplied to the nth power. This radical, indeed, forced affirmation of the here and now, of the moment to be precise, leaves nothing to look forward to beyond or after life, not even death as oblivion or unconsciousness. This "sameness" of recurrence also represents the most nihilistic thought, because as Nietzsche argues, if one's life in the absence of God is meaningless, and therefore nihilistic, one's meaningless life recurring eternally is the superlative expression of nihilism. Secondly,

Miiller-Lauter on this point: We assume the existence of things, when in fact everything is occurrence: "By making things the same life forms preserve themselves" (vol. I, 4-5). Abel also gives a persuasive account of the dynamic nature of ERS, and like him I see the origins of ERS in Human (Die Dynamik, 432-34, 436-38).

5. The Sameness of Eternal Recurrence

251

Nietzsche associates his doctrine of recurrence with the same because his vision of the universe does not allow otherwise. Finite force exerted throughout infinite time formulaically yields the eternal recurrence of the same. Of these two possibilities (there are doubtless others as well), the first is the compelling reason and the motivation for teaching the doctrine in the first place, since Nietzsche expects us to affirm the closest things (body, passions, the finite, earth, the quotidian) by means of ERS. I think most, if not all, objections to the "same" clause of ERS are based on cognitive grounds, on logic, on the sheer impossibility of accepting the eternal recurrence "of the same." Vattimo admits of a bit of frustration in this regard when he writes that it is difficult or even impossible to combine the idea of eternal recurrence and decision. This "is based on the circumstance that, very summarily expressed, the idea of eternal recurrence (and not only the doctrine, rather the experience that human beings in the epoch of nihilism have with it) has such a destructive effect on the subject that in itself it becomes literally unthinkable.' It becomes incomprehensible and can no longer be 'held together' in its different aspects. This however leads to thought becoming dizzy ("Das aber fuhrt dazu, daß dem Denken schwindelig wird")." 350 This is a telling observation on the part of a philosopher, for if the eternal recurrence of the same is "thought out" in the manner apparently experienced by Vattimo, it is indeed a harsh doctrine, even more a harsh experience, severe to the point that lesser spirits could perish from "the cultivating thought," as Nietzsche repeatedly alleges in his notes. But somehow the point is being missed here; Nietzsche is not trying to "stump" the average citizen or the average philosopher, he is not playing cruel mind games or engaging in premeditated brinkmanship, and humanity in the epoch of nihilism is still free to ignore ERS (as it has thus far) and to go about its business as usual. The doctrine fails, by Nietzsche's standards, if one thinks it to the point of dizziness, for his emphasis is not on thinking ERS but on living, which should be enhanced by the presence of ERS somewhere in one's consciousness, but certainly not by the constant hammering of ERS on one's brain. Furthermore, though it may be only second nature after all for a "philosopher" to think ERS to the point of dizziness, do Nietzsche's other entreaties to embrace life and affirm it with all our strength fall completely by the wayside? Does anyone who has seriously devoted him- or herself to exploring Nietzsche's writings believe that ERS is the only expression of life affirmation to be found in Nietzsche? One stands Nietzsche on his head if one insists that the thought that is intended to give lightness to being (in the form of becoming and the innocence of becoming), and a new gravity and meaning to the earth, is somehow "grasped" in its essence by describing it as staggering, destructive, lethal. The burden that ERS alleviates, namely the indictment of earthly life and its punishment by eternal damnation, might properly be described as staggering, destructive, lethal. When Nietzsche writes 350

Gianni Vattimo, Nietzsche. Eine Einfuhrung. Trans. Klaus Laermann (Stuttgart: Verlag J . B . Metzler, 1992), 79.

252

IV. Logic and Limit in the Eternal Recurrence of the Same

that "all joy wants eternity," to my mind he is being rather cheerful. If ERS is truly the bitter pill that Vattimo contends, then a smaller dosage is indicated. And as for the destruction of the subject that purportedly accompanies ERS — one can argue to the contrary that there is not much to the modern subject, not much by way of self and substance, and that ERS, far from destroying the subject, is a practical remedy for fortifying the subject — albeit it in proper doses.351 Lowith's formulation of the doctrine on the point of sameness might prove helpful. He explains that the time of ERS is not the eternal present "of a goalless revolving in which past still becomes and future already was; it is rather the future time of a goal that liberates from the burden of the past and arises from the will to the future. 'Eternity,' then, does not have the meaning of an eternal recurrence of the same, but it is the willed goal of a will to eternal-ization." 352 The qualifier that Lowith attaches to "same" is that there is no determinism, no being imprisoned within a circle that is not of our making. There is a liberating will, a will to eternalize, and a future that can and will be affected by our actions. Mittasch is more dismissive of the "same," claiming that next to Einstein's formula E = mc2 Nietzsche's doctrine can only be regarded as "thought fiction in the high style" ("Gedankendichtung hohen Stils"). He adds that there is some evidence of periodicity in the overall course of the universe, "a certain cosmic rhythm of creation and unfolding," but he asks "who wants to prescribe to the universe that it must be a matter of recurrence of the same when it comes to 'recurrence,' instead of ever new formations and 'evolutions'!"353 Indeed, and who would want to prescribe to Nietzsche that his doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same, which is offered in the spirit of philosophizing about life, has to conform to the theories of modern physics before it can have any meaning? Where in Mittasch, who is dismissive of ERS as a scientific concept, is the effort to associate the "same" of ERS with Nietzsche's broader philosophy of earth affirmation and the role of the finite? Common to both Mittasch and Vattimo is the pursuit of ERS into the stratosphere of the "last things," the furthest things, an approach that puts ERS "out there" in the form of a thing in itself. This tendency to over-philosophize Nietzsche's thought, to force it to resemble rather than oppose metaphysics even when it can be demonstrated that ERS stands in the closest proximity to the finite, the quotidian, and the closest things is yet another dimension of the esoteric/exoteric debate that lives its furtive life in Nietzsche studies. Deleuze describes ERS as "an answer to the problem of passage," and insists that "we misinterpret the expression 'eternal return' if we understand it as 'return of the 351

352 353

Vattimo disagrees with Lowith on the meaning of Zarathustra's "going under" once the great noon is reached. While Lowith maintains Zarathustra is now heading for his death, Vattimo maintains he is heading "instead to the unavoidable dissolution of subjectivity, which the idea of the eternal recurrence, thought radically enough, must necessarily bring with it," 65. Lowith, Nietzsche's Philosophy, 87. Mittasch, Nietzsche als Naturphilosoph, 258.

5. The Sameness of Eternal Recurrence

253

same.'" For Deleuze the emphasis must be on becoming as it applies to the human experience of being, and he gives some indication of the relative wealth of becoming, explaining "identity in the eternal return does not describe the nature of that which returns but, on the contrary, the fact of returning for that which differs. This is why the eternal return must be thought of as a synthesis; a synthesis of time and its dimensions, a synthesis of diversity and its reproduction, a synthesis of becoming and the being which is affirmed in becoming, a synthesis of double affirmation."354 1 would like to apply Deleuze's "double affirmation" in a slightly different manner, namely, by stressing the finite where he places time's dimensions, diversity's reproduction, and becoming's being. Time's dimensions, whatever they may be construed to mean, are not nearly as practical as one's finite environment, and I would argue that to the extent that "time's dimensions" have any relevance for Nietzsche, then primarily when they are construed as the dimension of the human life span viewed under ERS. Diversity's reproduction, meanwhile, assumes greater meaning for me when the reproduction is attributed to the agency of the human; reproducing the diversity of the finite is the work of the human will when it is an affirming will, not in the sense that humans "create" the external world, but instead in the sense that opening oneself to the diversity of the finite allows for a meaningful, if selective, reproduction of diversity in the individual's life. Amor fati is an expression of such opening up to diversity.355 One does not and cannot literally affirm everything, since the contents of the world are too manifold and numerous for any one person to affirm, but one does live one's life as affirmatively as possible and attempts to say Yes to everything on which one has the opportunity for a yes or a no. The concern in lending too much dignity to "same" in the eternal recurrence is that one might construe "same" as stasis or permanence, as a snapshot of frozen being that occurs eternally, and of course this view is to be discouraged.356 The finite and becoming must be thought at the same time, or as Babich writes: "So far from the idea of a system or structure of permanence, the dynamic nature of existence reveals nothing but finitude. Such a dynamic does not express life in a perpetual round but articulates its essential timeliness, the time for mortal existence instead."357 This is a useful formulation because it places time where Nietzsche insists it must reside, namely as time for mortal existence, and it expresses as well the

354 355

356

357

Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 48. See also Deleuze's arguments concerning the impossibility of the return of the small man and of reactive forces; of the Overman as affirmation and the driving out of the negative; and the eternal return as the lesson that there is no return of the negative, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 71, 72, 176-7, 189-90. And this is why Heidegger errs seriously in elevating N.'s "recapitulation" note to the highest or supreme expression of the will to power, insisting that N. literally wants to impress being upon becoming. See my section on "Negative Immanence" in chapter II above. Babich, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science, 270.

254

IV. Logic and Limit in the Eternal Recurrence of the Same

dynamic of the finite, the open of the finite, so that one cannot confuse ERS with mechanistic determinism or the loss of freedom — contrary to Vattimo the eternal recurrence of the same is a liberation from the old gravity. Moles also has a helpful formulation of how "same" applies to ERS, approaching the problem from the standpoint of memory and intellect. Nietzsche "recognizes that if life were to survive throughout an entire cycle, then its accumulation of memories would make the 'recurrent' cycle different; it would no longer be recurrence of the same. . . . But Nietzsche denies that there is any 'second time' for an event. A recurrent event is not that event again; compared with any event, the recurrence of that event is not a 'gain.' Recurrence is not an additive, cumulative process. Recurrence is always of the same; a recurrent event is not distinct from the event itself." 358 Thus according to Moles the "same" of the eternal recurrence of the same inheres in the fact that there is no second time, no repetition of a given event, a position Nietzsche stakes out early in his writings when he denies the possibility of identical things ( H H 1/19, KSA 2:40). Taken together Nietzsche's principle of difference, or diversity, and his discovery of the new world of the finite and everything associated with its new gravity, constitute an exciting opportunity for humans, regardless of the mental anguish that appears to accompany an all too close examination of the doctrine of ERS on logical grounds. Eternal recurrence is earthly occurrence, first and foremost, because the unfolding of our lives is earth bound, geocentric in every way imaginable. O n e might speculate until one's dying day about how ERS violates this or that "law of physics," or how it plays out in the universe, but essentially these are not Nietzsche's major concerns because they are the last things in the world that concerns us, and they rightfully should be the last thing in the world to concern us. That Nietzsche deserves some of the blame for causing ERS migraines in philosophers cannot be disputed, since he refuses to leave his doctrine as metaphor and seeks to provide some modest level of cognitivescientific basis for it. I have argued that this supplementary desire in Nietzsche stems from his not wanting to see ERS as a "mere" article of faith, as the virtual equivalent of dogma. W h a t is undeniable about the eternal recurrence of the same is its new positioning of the finite in the horizon of human endeavor. T h e element of time in the eternal recurrence of the same is rhetorical and designed to intensify our exploration of space, earthly space, in order to perhaps make contact with the as yet undetermined and apparently very promising extraterrestrial known as "human being."

358

Moles, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Nature, 295.

Chapter V: The Ecumenical Nietzsche 1. The Right Time and the Only Place "The administration of the earth by humanity must be taken in hand by humans themselves, their omniscience' must watch over the destiny of culture with a sharp eye." Human, All Too Human 1/245

Much of the rationale behind Nietzsche's ecumenical perspective, which in the simplest terms is the perspective that speaks for the entire human species and the entire earth, can be found in Zarathustm in "On the Thousand and One Goals." This is not where Nietzsche first discusses the ecumenical, that topic having been aired in great detail in Human, which we shall revisit in due course, but it is a good place to start an examination of the ecumenical because it presents a compact assessment of the energy embodied by the various peoples of the earth and a vision of what might be accomplished if this energy were intelligently, ecumenically managed. A step by step analysis of "Goals" will be worth the extra attention. 359 Zarathustra's first observation in this regard is a statement on what has been observed to date: "Many lands Zarathustra saw and many peoples: thus he discovered the good and evil of many peoples. No greater power on earth did Zarathustra find than good and evil." Geographical diversity of lands (Lander means lands or countries), plurality, as many versions of good and evil, and the constituting of good and evil as the highest power on earth are all compressed into this first verse, making it clear that the entire planet and its inhabitants are described according to their essence. "Never did one neighbor understand the other: constantly his soul was amazed by the madness and malice of the neighbor. / A tablet of goods hangs over each people. Behold, it is the tablet of its overcomings; behold, it is the voice of its will to power." The plurality expressing itself in the different peoples and their respective versions of good and evil leads to misunderstanding, and we can take "misunderstanding" here both literally and figuratively; because each people has its own version of good and evil, that version does not translate well into the language (customs, morals) of the

I do not agree with Clark (1990) that "Zarathustra's conception of life as will to power is too metaphorical and anthropomorphic to take seriously as a literal account of the essence of life . . ." (212-3), though of course one has to unpack the rhetoric and Beyond does in fact present a more philosophical arugment. Indeed, she herself uses Zarathustra's speech only a few pages later to make her point concerning the will to power as ruling over real peoples etc (228-9).

256

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

neighbor, such that cognitive misunderstanding arises. Meanwhile, because the neighbor operates with a different tablet of good and evil, this misunderstanding escalates into perceived malice, into alienation between the peoples causing "constant amazement," a heightened state of tension and a further indication of the distance dividing the peoples. What makes each people's perspective or point of view so entrenched, so inflexible is the fact that its tablet is the consequence of its overcomings, i.e., it has been created, forged over time by its toughest battles and challenges — in other words, a people's tablet of good and evil is a record of a people's historical, earthly experiences as a people, as a particular group bound together by a particular set of environmental (external) factors. The relationship between a people and its tablet of good and evil is so close, so inviolate that the one can be said to be the other. We recall that Nietzsche uses similar reasoning when discussing how the early conception of the Judaic God stemmed from the people, while the later "moral" God stemmed from the priests and is therefore less authentic, less a "living" God. The tablet of each people is "the voice of its will to power," which is to say, to the extent that the will to power expresses itself in ways perceptible to the human eye, this is the most visible expression, in keeping with Zarathustra's initial assertion that there is no greater power on earth than good and evil. Zarathustra continues to elaborate upon the force and binding power of a people's overcomings, as well as the direction or distinctiveness inherent in precisely these overcomings: "Verily my brother, if you have once recognized a people's need and land and sky and neighbor, then you certainly guess the law of its overcomings and why it climbs on this ladder to its highest hope. / 'Always you shall be the first and outstanding among others: Your jealous soul shall love no one unless it be the friend' — this made the soul of a Greek tremble: with this he walked his path of greatness." In order to know a people one must study, map out, ascertain their environment as the factors that contribute to its overcomings, and Nietzsche is quite specific in delineating a people's needs, their natural environment, and of course the neighbor, which is also a decisive factor as a rich source of overcomings. If one possesses knowledge about how a people deals with its closest things (need, earth, sky, neighbor are all closest things!), one has a key to this people's "law" or rule applying to its overcomings, which is to say, one learns how a given people regulates and applies its overcomings to become the unique people, one discovers why it achieves its highest by these means, on this ladder and no other. Not to be overlooked here is that Nietzsche uses the metaphor of the ladder — overcomings (Überwindungen) are literally jwrniounting, superseding in accordance with the will to power and Nietzsche's insistence that all life exhibits an order of rank. Only rarely in Zarathustra does Nietzsche make overt references to history, inasmuch as the elevated style of the work suggests timelessness, and here we have one of them, strategically positioned to indicate that humans have in fact achieved a certain standard of glorious existence and implying that this standard can be achieved in

1. The Right Time and the Only Place

257

the future as well. What impresses him about the jealous soul of the Greek, "jealous" taken in the sense of good Eris and the spirit of the agon, is that it strives upward to be outstanding ("den Andern vorragen") and bestows its love jealously, sparingly, and only on "the friend." In so doing, the Greek soul establishes itself first on self love, on love of one's highest, striving self, and next limits and delimits its love to those who are closest — this process knits together and grounds community, such that excellence in the individual translates into a broader based community of excellence — behold a great people. In this manner Nietzsche gives a historical example of what is meant by the "ladder to [a people's] highest hope." He urges a closer scrutiny of the content or make-up of good and evil in order to underscore the geographical and physiological bases:360 Verily, humans gave themselves all their good and evil. Verily, they did not take it, they did not find it, it did not fall to them as a voice from heaven. The human being first placed values into things in order to preserve himself — he first created a meaning for things, a human meaning! Therefore he calls himself 'human,' that is: the esteeming one. Esteeming is creating: hear this, you creators! Esteeming itself is the treasure and gem of all things esteemed. Only through esteeming is there value: and without esteeming the nut of existence would be hollow. Hear this, you creators! (Z 1/15, KSA 4:75)

The unique work of creating good and evil, and values more generally, is what defines humanity according to Nietzsche, and this work arises from the species' need for preservation. It is not arbitrary, it is not an external given, but it is in fact the most valuable thing that humans do. For "human" to be synonymous with "esteemer" and "creator" is to define humans in terms of their needs, which leads to the creation of their (a people's) particular values, which in turn gives meaning to the lives of a particular people. Zarathustra goes on to explain that in the beginning only peoples were creators because "the individual himself is still the most recent creation." The tablets of good and evil created by the peoples are composed of "love that wants to rule and love that wants to obey," but since the joy in the herd is stronger than the joy in the ego, good conscience resides in and with the herd, while the individual has only bad conscience: "Verily, the clever ego, the loveless one that wants it advantage in the advantage of the many: that is not the herd's origin but instead its ruin {Untergangf (ibid, 75-6). Zarathustra makes this observation on conscience in relation to the collective and the individual because the time has come for individuals to have a free and clear conscience; the old values connected with the old gravity no longer bind, no longer create and esteem in the manner described by Zarathustra, and these old values will be the unmaking of the collective. 360

At this point I should explain that I am moving selectively through this section of roughly three pages, and in the process doubtlessly omitting much.

258

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

Decisive in this reorientation is the role of love: where esteeming and creating no longer reflect love, they are the tablets of ruin, of dead end. This is why the "clever, loveless" ego as the one that presses its own advantage will supplant the old herd. It is "loveless" not because it does not have the capacity to love — Zarathustra makes this clear in the ensuing verses — instead, it is characterized as "loveless" because the herd, the collective does not love it, even though the herd at some point created the individual. Lovers and creators were always the ones who created good and evil. T h e fire of love glows in the names of all virtues, and the fire of anger. Many lands and many peoples Zarathustra saw: no greater power did Zarathustra find on earth than the works of the lovers: 'good' and 'evil' are their names. Verily, a monster is the power of this praising and blaming. Tell me, who will subdue it, my brothers? Tell me, who will throw a yoke over the thousand necks of this beast? A thousand goals there have been until now, for there have been a thousand peoples. Only the yoke for the thousand necks is still lacking, only the One goal is still lacking. Humanity still has no goal. But tell me, my brothers: if humanity still has no goal, is there not also lacking still — humanity itself? (ibid, 76)

The power and ardor of love that is poured into the creation of values and virtues is still the same will to power Zarathustra alludes to early on in this section, but Nietzsche gradually transforms the rawness of "will to power" into the loving power as he begins to differentiate between herds and individuals. If the misunderstanding between peoples is fueled by their respective tablets of good and evil, theoretically the monstrous energy, creativity, esteeming inhering in these disparate peoples could be harnessed — the lovers and creators could contribute to an overcoming, a new age of individuals, in which the tablets of the peoples would be surmounted for the sake of ecumenical goals. If one reads "lovers" ("die Liebenden") not in a general sense but literally, as Nietzsche apparently suggests, good and evil have transformed from the values created by esteeming peoples and therefore defining, circumscribing and also separating peoples, into two lovers, one called good, the other evil — their child might represent a surpassing of themselves, a synthesis and higher version of the two — a humanity for the first time. In notes from the Zarathustra period, in this case winter 1883/84, we find what is possibly a draft of the section analyzed above, whose various nuances may shed light on the thousand and "one" goals. H e begins by writing that in analyzing the individual tablets of good, their formation is revealed as the formation of conditions of existence for limited groups, often erroneous conditions, for the purpose of preservation. In analyzing current humanity, what emerges is that we are skilled in very diverse ("sehr verschiedene") value judgments and that there is no more creative power in them; the basis and "condition of existence" are now lacking in moral judgments. Things are now more superfluous, not nearly as painful, merely arbitrary and chaotic. "Who

1. The Right Time and the Only Place

259

will create the goal that remains standing over humanity and also over the individual? Formerly one wanted to preserve with morals. But no one wants to preserve anymore, there is nothing to be preserved. Hence an experimental morality, give oneself a goal. Species preserving" (KSA 10:653). What Nietzsche describes here in his notes is the transformation in "Thousand and One Goals" from the values of the peoples, which ceased to be creative and sustaining and preserving and must be phased out by the values of the ego, of the newly formed individuals who are not loved by their respective peoples. These individuals, ostensibly, form their own ecumenical community, their own moral experiment beyond the good and evil of their fatherlands, once more preserving because there is something now and henceforth to preserve — namely species values, humanity's values, the tablet of good and evil to which all of humanity could subscribe. If existence has no basis in the current scheme of morals, that is to say, if current morals lack the ability to ground and serve as a new gravity, the experimental morality may be relevant enough to serve as a condition of existence. In notes written in autumn 1887 and revised in summer 1888 Nietzsche reveals again how the idea of an ecumenical goal remained of interest to him even in the final year of sanity. Here it should be pointed out that the arrangement of the notes in Will to Power proves lacking once again, because in the critical edition note # 866, as it is rendered in Will to Power, is preceded by two notes dealing with economy in nature, both of them including quotations from Emanuel Hermann's Cultur und Natur (1887) (KSA 14:744). A brief recounting of the quote from Hermann which immediately precedes Nietzsche's "economic" discussion of ecumenical goals is therefore in order. According to Hermann distinguishing between lower and higher existence is technically untenable, "for each animal, each plant corresponds to its task in the most perfect manner possible. The flight of the clumsy beetle is no less perfect than the soaring of the butterfly for butterfly tasks. The distinction is an economical one, for more complicated organisms are capable of performing more work and more complete work, and the advantages from these achievements are so great that through them the considerably elevated costs in terms of preservation and creation are exceeded" (KSA 12:461-2; Hermann 86). Nietzsche copied this excerpt into his own notes and drafts, in his typical scholarly manner, because he was struck by something here. One thinks immediately of his concern for higher human beings, those who fail in life because they are more complicated and require more elaborate infrastructure, not to mention that as higher types they are ignored, if not scorned and eradicated, by religions that see their mission in preserving the lowest specimens of humanity. In any case, it is with the above excerpt from Hermann that Nietzsche launched into his two-page note on ecumenical economizing, of which I will present only a few salient points. He is concerned with the necessity of demonstrating that a counter-movement accompanies "an ever more economical consumption (Verbrauch) of the human being and humanity, an ever more firmly integrated 'machinery' of interests and

260

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

achievements." He characterizes such a counter-movement as a secretion of a luxury surplus of humanity in which a stronger type will emerge, "who has different conditions for arising and for preserving itself than the average human being," and the metaphor for this type is the superhuman. Next he explains why the new type is needed and in so doing how the word "economical" is used in connection with "consumption." The current direction of humanity is that of economical consumption, and its predictable outcome is adaptation, flattening, a higher Chinadom, modesty of instinct, contentedness in the making small of humanity, "a kind of stand still in the level of humanity." However, this current trend can be countered: "If we once have that unavoidably impending economical overall management of the earth ("jene unvermeidlich bevorstehende Wirthschafts-Gesammtverwaltung der Erde"), then humanity can find its best meaning as machinery in its service." Nietzsche envisions two humanities existing simultaneously. The majority of people would be tiny cogs in the great machinery, and a new type of synthetic, summarizing, and justifying human would arise as the higher type for whom "this machining of humanity is a precondition of existence." Frankly Nietzsche explains that in moral terms the overall machinery with its solidarity of gears represents "a maximum in the exploitation of humans: but it presupposes those individuals for whose benefit this exploitation has meaning." Left to its own devices, that is, without the intervention of an overall economical management (Verwaltung) of the earth, namely Nietzsche's counter-movement, we may infer that the exploitation will continue in the manner described but without meaning, without any redeeming spin off. Nietzsche's fear appears to be that humanity might degenerate to some kind of hive or ant hill, perfectly "economical" in the sense that it can perform work, but lacking intelligence, lacking the spirit that defines human being. Let us now study his conclusion in order to read this note in the context of the beast with a thousand necks. "One sees that what I am fighting is economic optimism, as if with the growing expense of all people the advantage of all people must necessarily grow too. The opposite seems to me to be the case: the expense of all people adds up to an overall loss-. the human being becomes diminished, so that one no longer knows to what aim this tremendous process has served. An aim? A new aim?' — this is what humanity needs" (KSA 12:462-3). The key to escaping what Nietzsche regards as an already surveyable ("jetzt überschaubar") descent into the transformation of human beings into consumer products resembling parts of an elaborate and efficient, but mindless machine, is the identification and cultivation of a new human being who gives meaning to the virtual enslavement and actual exploitation of the masses — this "key" in Zarathustra is formulated as the superhuman as the meaning of the earth, and as the "one goal" that will successfully yoke the thousand necks of humanity's creative (esteeming) energy. Here the key lies in the inevitable "economic overall administration of the earth," not as a Marxian solution, to be sure, for Nietzsche decries social and economic optimism as vain, hypocritical attempts to dignify conditions which are

1. The Right Time and the Only Place

261

essentially undignifiable, tantamount to slavery, — instead, Nietzsche would have us admit that ever finer and more subtle expressions of human exploitation are evolving in economic terms, visible to some eyes but obviously denied by most, and if humanity as a species is ever to salvage something noble, something worthwhile from this inevitable commodification of human beings, it is high time an overall aim, an overall objective were established.361 The timing of Nietzsche's call for an ecumenical strategy regarding humanity adds urgency to his task. As Picht explains, "in the strictest sense of the word history first begins to be the history of humanity with the death of God." We have seen this formulation many times in Nietzsche's writings, and it is present wherever he insists that humans are their own property and now must experiment with themselves to establish knowledge of their cultural preconditions in the new gravity. Picht continues: "The death of God is the greatest event of history, because this event grants humans the freedom to countenance their entire history, as it is and as it will be, and in Nietzsche that means: to produce it and to will it."362 Missing in this otherwise astute formulation of the relevance of history for Nietzsche is the fact that where this history unfolds is of practical concern to Nietzsche, i.e., the earth for the first time in history becomes humanity's real home, humanity's only home, but the question is: are humans prepared? From Nietzsche's perspective as a classical philologist who has forsworn contact with people who embrace the belief in progress, the old culture is a thing of the past. "But human beings can consciously resolve to develop further into a new culture, whereas earlier they developed unconsciously and fortuitously. They can now create better conditions for the emergence of human beings, their nutrition, education, instruction, they can manage the earth economically as a whole and weigh and employ the relative strengths of human beings" ( H H 1/24, KSA 2:45). In calling for an inventory of human assets and a plan for culture that spans the entire earth, the ecumenical Nietzsche is thinking like an administrator, like a manager who is charged with maximizing conditions for an enterprise, in this case "total earth culture," in the absence of any strategic plan. The elitists among Nietzsche's readers will wince to see him characterized in such terms, but the words are Nietzsche's not my own — verwalten (to manage, administer) is a frequent term used by Nietzsche from 1878 to 1888. The political apologist will perhaps envision Himmler shuffling papers and convening bureaucrats for the Wannsee Conference formalizing the Final Solution, while others may take issue with a Nietzsche who could concern himself with mundane issues of management. What remains, however, is that according to Nietzsche's

361

362

See also Babich, who addresses the dead end represented by technology as what she calls "the promise of fixity," which also achieves the leveling effect of standardized happiness, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science, 264. Picht, Nietzsche, 328.

262

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

thinking there is an urgent need to inhabit our planet in a thoughtful and intelligent manner, and unless we set about this with some kind of strategy, the alternative is a continued slide into the state of "last human being," which will not be without dire consequences for the earth. If it is the prevailing opinion of Nietzsche commentators that Nietzsche should not be taken seriously where he discusses education, nutrition, instruction in direct connection to improving conditions for humans, then we should admit from the outset that only certain topics are open for discussion in Nietzsche scholarship, in which case — the entire notion of Nietzsche scholarship is a travesty. Working with and working on the closest things requires practical strategies, not ludic theories, and commentators who fault Nietzsche for his elitism, his lack of sophistication in cultural and political matters, and his inattention to the plight of the earth's poorest should look again at the ecumenical Nietzsche. In the matter of Nietzsche's credibility as a political thinker I agree with Conway, who points out that Nietzsche "is rarely considered, on the strength of his teachings, an important political thinker in his own right," even though he is lauded in several other areas: as a critic of liberalism and modernity; as an expert on ancient Greek political thought; as a champion of autonomy; as an opponent of German nationalism; as a diagnostician of cultural malaise; "as a vigilant sentry posted on the advancing frontier of postmodernity; and so on." 363 Given the many "related" areas in which Nietzsche enjoys widespread critical support, it is surprising that his political views are not taken more seriously by the "objective" liberal establishment, but are, unfortunately, taken seriously and mis-taken by right-wing personalities at every turn. In an aphorism called "Private and public morality" ("Privat- und Welt-Moral") 364 it is immediately apparent that with the waning of belief in a God-centered and God-guided world, there can be no more business as usual, now "humans themselves will have to posit ecumenical goals which span the entire earth." Kant's old morality demanding actions from individuals which one would wish from all people "was a beautiful naive thing," as if each person knew what would benefit humanity at large. "Perhaps a future survey of the needs of humanity will reveal that it is definitely not desirable that all people act the same way, instead, that in the interest of ecumenical goals special, in some cases even evil tasks should be posited for entire stretches of humanity. — In any case, if humanity is not to destroy itself by such a conscious overall administration, it must first acquire hitherto unprecedented knowledge of the conditions of culture as a scientific standard for ecumenical goals. Herein lies the tremendous task of the great spirits of the next century" ( H H 1/25, KSA 2:46). Years 363

Conway, Nietzsche and the Political, 120. 364 •pj Je c o n t e x t suggests N. is talking about "world morality," not necessarily the exercise of public morality as it is found in Kant's "What is Enlightenment?" or in the famous categorical imperative. In his notes from the period N. writes: "Kant's proposition yields a petite bourgeois private respectability of customs and stands in opposition to ecumenical purposes, of whose existence he did not have the slightest notion" (KSA 8:460).

1. The Right Time and the Only Place

263

before Nietzsche has Zarathustra descend from his mountain cave to proclaim that God is dead and now the superhuman shall live, he occupies himself with the problem of conditions of culture as a prerequisite for an earth-wide administration (Gesammtregie-rung), knowing that to embark on ecumenical goals without a proper foundation could destroy humanity. Once again the implication is that a kind of inventory is needed, a taking stock now that God's agency is finally out of the equation. The message is that in the light of human-posited ecumenical goals the old morality, including Kant's categorical imperative, will not serve — it demands too much and too little, and Nietzsche honestly observes that we have a long way to go before establishing a "scientific standard" for ecumenical goals. The task falls upon the thinkers of the twentieth century, in Nietzsche's view, because he regards the crisis of nihilism symbolized by the death of God to be imminent, such that the twentieth century will already be a proving ground and laboratory for the new gravity. In carrying their own burdens and positing their own ecumenical goals humans will be assisted by two factors made possible by the death of God, namely unaccountability and innocence as they are discussed in the final aphorism of the second section of Human entitled "On the History of Moral Perceptions." For persons accustomed to seeing their "patent of humanity" ("den Adelsbrief seines Menschthums") in accountability and duty it is a bitter pill to learn that humans are completely unaccountable for their actions and their nature. There will have to be major adjustments now that humans stand before their own actions as they stand before the rest of nature, without condemning, without praising, but the pain and sadness will be followed by comfort, for these are the pangs of birth. "The butterfly wants to break through its cocoon, it pulls and tears at it: now the unfamiliar light blinds and confuses it, the realm of freedom. In such persons as are capable of this sadness — how few they will be! — the first attempt is made to determine whether humanity can transform from a moral into a wise humanity." The sun of a new gospel is beginning to reach the souls of such individuals, he maintains: "Everything is necessity — so speaks the new knowledge: and this knowledge itself is necessity. Everything is innocence: and new knowledge is the way of insight into this innocence." And though everything is in flux it is also flowing "to One goal." The inherited habit of erroneous valuation, of loving and hating will continue, but under the influence of growing knowledge this habit will weaken and gradually "a new habit, that of comprehending, not-loving, not-hating, surveying plants itself in us in the same soil." In thousands of years, he concludes, perhaps this new habit will be powerful enough "to give humanity the strength to produce the wise, innocent (innocence-conscious) human being just as regularly as it now produces the unwise, unfair, guilt-conscious human being — that is the necessaryprestage, not the opposite of the new person' (HH 1/107, KSA 2:103-06). The current stage of humanity is not the opposite of the new human being, as that would have humans leaping to their goal and disconnecting from the closest things that constitute humanity today. As a precursor of a distant tomorrow's humanity,

264

V. T h e Ecumenical Nietzsche

current humankind will have to break old habits and grow new ones, creating and at the same time adjusting to a new gravity, a far lighter gravity in which accountability and guilt no longer weigh down on us. There is a strong sense o f economy to this aphorism as well (two and one half pages is hardly an aphorism, strictly speaking), suggested by the thousands o f years required to transform from a moral to a wise species. T h e plant metaphor is also used for he is referring to a long process o f cultivation using soil that already exists. There is no doubt as to the nature o f the loss o f the old morals and metaphysics — only certain individuals even have the capacity to feel the sadness of the transition — but the new innocence, though by no means a paradise, provides an atmosphere in which wise and guiltless human beings will be the rule, and these are Nietzsche's super humans. Culture is formed like a bell, he claims, within a coating o f coarser, more common material. Untruth, violence, unbounded expansion of individual egos, o f individual nations comprise the coating. He asks whether we are ready to abandon our crutches o f metaphysics and the errors o f religion, and severe and violent measures as the most powerful glue between individuals and nations: "In answering this question no sign from a God can help us anymore: our own insight must decide here. T h e administration o f the earth by humanity must be taken in hand by humans themselves, their omniscience' must watch over the destiny o f culture with a sharp eye" ( H H 1/245, KSA 2:204-5). 3 6 5 O f course humans do not possess omniscience, but with the growth o f knowledge and the planting and cultivating of the proper cultural conditions, humans are capable o f managing their own affairs — I think this is why Nietzsche favors the use o f verbs such as verwalten and regieren at this stage, for they mean "to manage" and "to administer" respectively, and it is this skill, this kind of surveying perspective that is sorely needed before humanity plunges headlong into another episode o f love and hate. Nor was the presence of God in Western culture a "rule" or ruling over the earth: humans ruled over various pieces o f the earth in various ways, most frequently with violence and brutality — this they often did in the name o f their God, to be sure, but such ruling is a far cry from the ecumenical administration o f the earth. W h e n Nietzsche later adopts the verb herrschen, to rule, in connection with the ecumenical task, this reflects a post-will to power perspective in which "ruling" transforms to "bestowing virtue." Humanity's past is a tremendous source o f instruction and inspiration, at least according to the conservationist Nietzsche, and we now have the fortune o f enjoying all cultures and their achievements, while earlier cultures were able to enjoy only themselves and could not see beyond themselves. Meanwhile, "[w]ith respect to the future

365

Hollingdale translates "Die Erdregierung des Menschen" as "the rule o f man over the earth," but I think "Regierung" is more accurately rendered as "administration" or perhaps "governing" here, especially since in his later works N . consistently uses "Herrschaft" in connection with earth, and Herrschaji does indeed mean rule.

1. The Right Time and the Only Place

265

we have opening up for us for the first time in history the tremendous vista of humanecumenical goals spanning the entire inhabited earth. At the same time we feel aware of our strength to take this task into our own hands without presumption, without requiring supernatural assistance; yes, may our enterprise result as it will, even if we have overestimated our strength, in any case there is no one to whom we are accountable but ourselves: from now on humanity can do with itself whatever it wants" ( H H I I / 1 179, KSA 2:457). In these clear and resolute terms Nietzsche announces that humanity's time has arrived, and that its greatest challenge lies in making intelligent use of its surveying perspective, made possible by its special place in history, for the purpose of gazing into the ecumenical horizon informed by the conditions of all earlier cultures. Nietzsche is not only a conservationist with respect to what is closest in the present, but also with respect to what is redeemable from the past — human energy is finite, what is noble in past cultures should be recycled, indeed, the "strength" that he refers to has been accumulating for centuries and only our liberated ingenuity can determine now what to make of that strength. I believe what enables Nietzsche to think in ecumenical terms is his geographical conception of the species, i.e., his emphasis on establishing and illuminating the properties of the earth and its life forms. He is impelled in this direction early on through his study of the ancients, and his fascination with humans as they interact with their environment only picks up momentum throughout his career. For someone of Nietzsche's philosophical predilections the death of God is, ironically, a godsend, a defining moment, and this translates for him into a unique historical overview that does not become bogged down in history. Giinzel distinguishes sharply between Hegel's use of history and Nietzsche's. While Hegel from his particular European perspective condemns past stations of history as inferior {minderwertig), Nietzsche proposes a reversal of this assumption. "Instead of the historical observation of geographical conditions, whose existence Nietzsche does not dispute, one could introduce a geographical observation of history that assesses this kind of historical observation or historical observation in general as inferiority or at least as an idiosyncracy of the respective human beings." This stance in Nietzsche is already evident in the essay On the Use and Disadvantage of History according to Giinzel. Later on in Genealogy, Nietzsche works on "drafting a cultural model characterized by an active liberation from inherited (angenommenen) geographical determinants. Rising above climatic conditions is here characteristic of the critical reshaping of historically given conditions."366 Giinzel comprehends and appreciates the extent to which Nietzsche values the closest things in their finite, earthly manifestations both in the present, where life affirmation makes greatest sense, and in the past, where the dwelling of human beings in different places and times is a real phenomenon, a real expenditure of human energy, and a valuable source of instruction for more immanent living in the present. 366

Giinzel, "Nietzsches Schreiben als kritische Geographie," 244.

266

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

I take Giinzel's reference to liberating ourselves from geographical and climatic determinants to mean that the ecumenical Nietzsche, who is present long before Genealogy, as I have shown, views humans as engaged or about to become engaged in the task of inhabiting the earth according to a plan, a strategy, or a "goal" if you wish, according to which geographical and climatic determinants are no longer perceived as unalterable, not because humans will engineer changes in their geography and climate (though we do, constantly), but because a survey of cultural conditions for the entire earth will make appropriate use of different locations and climates, just as Nietzsche suggests in his predictions concerning the new hygiene.367 Nietzsche's frequent allusions to the mobility of peoples in the modern age underscores his tendency to view humanity in the age of the new gravity from an ecumenical perspective. A grounded approach to envisioning ecumenical goals requires a basis in history and in past and existing models of culture — Nietzsche does not envision a u-topia, and it would make a mockery of his earth affirmation if he were to attempt to make of the place per se, namely the earth, some sort of non-place, namely a Utopia — Nietzsche's energies are devoted to letting the earth be a place, the place, for human habitation. It is only fitting, then, that Nietzsche's model or starting point is Europe, for he is after all a European, and this is the perspective from which he observes the earth. Moreover, as nihilism spawned by the death of God is intimately, if not inextricably linked with Europe and the European heritage, the peoples best suited to entertain ecumenical goals and to benefit from them in a timely manner are Europeans. Richardson explains that Nietzsche's "overmen become most feasible in a society that has passed through nihilism, this last phase of the slave morality's rule constitutes a great opportunity — thus Nietzsche looks mostly favorably on it." 368 What holds true for the "overmen" holds true as well for Europeans in general, if we follow Nietzsche's reasoning that nihilism is a particularly European, Christianity-oriented affliction. Finally, in Europe Nietzsche finds a model of the beast with a thousand necks, a region supposedly united by a common religion but riven with politics, ethnic rivalries, and age old misunderstandings; if Europe can make advances toward ecumenical goals, perhaps there is hope for the rest of the planet. In "The European human being and the abolition of nations" the dissolution or annihilation (Vernichtung) of nations derives from advances in commerce, industry, printing, shared higher culture, rapid changing of address and geographical region ("Ort und Landschafi:"), and the nomadic lifestyle of those who do not own land. All of this brings a weakening and ultimately an abolishing of European nations. Only the interests of elite dynasties and classes of commerce are served by nationalism; one should aspire forthrightly to be a good European and work on the amalgamation of nations, whereby the Germans would be useful as interpreters and mediators between 367 368

See my section 7, chapter II, above and HH II/2 188, KSA 2:634-5. Richardson, Nietzsche's System, 67.

1. The Right Time and the Only Place

267

the nations. Surveying the cultural history o f Europe Nietzsche observes that Jewish free thinkers helped Europe ward o f f Asiatic tendencies; their efforts are largely responsible for a more natural, more reason-based and nonmythical explanation o f the world. "As soon as it is no longer a matter o f conserving nations, but instead o f producing the strongest possible mixed European race, the J e w is just as useful and desirable an ingredient as any other national remnant." T h e Jewish intervention in modern European history has enabled a continuation o f the Enlightenment stemming from Graeco-Roman antiquity: " I f Christianity has done everything to orientalize the Occident, then Judaism has considerably helped again and again to occidentalize it, which in a certain sense amounts to making Europe's task and history into a continuation of the Greek" ( H H 1/475, K S A 2: 3 0 9 - 1 1 ) . T h e persistence o f nationalism is far more dangerous, and stupid in cultural-economic terms, than Nietzsche's contemporaries understand, otherwise history would not have recorded a rapid rise in nationalism throughout Europe in the nineteenth century and culminating in the Holocaust just a few generations later. Ecumenical goals directed for the m o m e n t only toward Europe would allow each people, as a "national remnant," to play an appropriate role toward building a supernational community, a European community. Nietzsche begins by calling for the abolition o f nations and soon finds himself defending and highlighting the role o f Jews in European history, arguing that their influence has been decisive in setting Europe's feet on the path toward unification and westernization. 369 In this aphorism we have an example o f how ecumenical goals bring out the best o f humanity's diversity, while the preferred modernist model o f nationalism only succeeds in preserving the worst. Species preservings

Nietzsche's highest criterion o f life

affirmation and o f cultural value is a difficult concept even for moderns, who flaunt their capacity for open mindedness, because it threatens essentialist notions o f identity. Whereas Nietzsche would have humans be proud o f their status as earthlings, as limited, diverse and inventive creatures who manage their planet with love and gratitude, for moderns it appears that one is still far more eager to die for one's country or religion, as if diversity were defined not by what the individual peoples bring to the table for earth, but by what they bring to the table only for themselves. Let us examine another sample o f Nietzsche's critique o f nationalism as petty politics, this time from Beyond. " T h a n k s to the pathological alienation that the madness o f nationality has laid and continues to lay between the peoples o f Europe, thanks likewise to politicians o f the short sight and the quick hand who today are on top 369 -phis jpjjQj-jsjjj should be compared with # 237, also in volume I of Human, entitled "Renaissance and Reformation." See also Yirmiyahu Yovel, "Nietzsche, the Jews, and Ressentimenf in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality. "To fulfill their new role, the Jews must give up their uniqueness and seclusion and mix with the other races in creating a Dionysian Europe, freed of Christian culture . . . . Nietzsche thus made himself an advocate of Jewish emancipation and assimilation, for reasons that have nothing to do with liberalism or the Enlightenment, but rather derive from his own 'Dionysian' philosophy of power," 231.

268

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

with the help of this madness and who have no inkling of the extent to which the disintegrating politics they are practicing can of necessity only be an interim politics — thanks to all of this and to much that today is still inexpressible the most unequivocal signs are now being overlooked or arbitrarily and mendaciously misconstrued in which it is expressed that Europe wants to become one" (BGE 256, KSA 5:201). Having thus attributed this complete breakdown of philology, of the skill of proper interpretation to the madness of nationalism, which historically proved stronger than any application of reason, Nietzsche goes on to cite individual examples of great Europeans in whom, and in whose works, this unifying wish can be read: Napoleon, Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, Heine, Schopenhauer, and Wagner. However they may have ended up, Nietzsche claims, these Europeans only degenerated into "patriots" once their actual work was done, once they needed a holiday from themselves (ibid, 202). More important than any individual whom Nietzsche might cite in connection with the broader idea of the European 370 is the strongly worded and insightful observation that nationalism is pathological, that it erects barriers between peoples, that it exerts a disintegrating effect on politics, and that it is doomed to extinction. Nietzsche's heart would have sunk at the sight of Nazi Germany and its ravaging of Europe and the Jews, and his heart would have swelled at the sight of Germany's authentic role in helping to unify Europe later on in the twentieth century. So strong is Nietzsche's faith in reason and human ingenuity that he regards the threat of overpopulation as a challenge and a stimulus toward ecumenical measures. Humanity is being senile and shortsighted in its fearfulness of overpopulation, he claims, while hopeful individuals see in this problem a great task: "humanity should one day become a tree overshadowing the entire earth, with many billions of blossoms which should all become fruits next to each other, and the earth itself should be prepared for the nourishment of this tree." Whether a person of today is useful or useless shall be decided according to how she contributes to the still modest supply of sap and energy, and helps to deliver these to the various limbs of the tree through countless canals, for the nourishment of individuals and the whole. This is an unspeakably great and bold task, Nietzsche reiterates, and we must not trust to some notion of instinct to prepare us, as if we were ants. "On closer examination we perceive how entire peoples, entire centuries exert themselves to discover new means and to test how one can benefit a great human collective and finally the great collective fruit tree of humanity." Through trial and error, and often through suffering as a result of this "testing" humanity learns from its mistakes, such that successful practices are adopted by entire peoples and ages. Once more he stresses that we possess no guiding instinct for this manner of work: "Instead we must look into the face of this great task of preparing the earth for the growth of the greatest and most joyful fruit370

I think he should have included Germaine de Staël here, but his visceral hatred of her prevented that.

1. The Right Time and the Only Place

269

fulness — a task of reason for reason!" ( H H II/2 189, KSA 2:635-6). T h e ecumenical, optimistic vision presented here as an organic metaphor seems clumsy and overly elaborated as a metaphor, at first, but it makes increasing sense and stands up beside Nietzsche's other ecumenical formulations. Obviously feeding the planet's population is already a concern in Nietzsche's day, and this prompts him to envision the earth's population collectively, in the aggregate, as one big tree overshadowing the entire earth. T h e first step to solving the problem of overpopulation, or as Nietzsche would have it, the first step in greeting the opportunity of a growing population is to establish an organic and conceptual relationship between earth (soil, provider) and humans (planners, managers, farmers). O u r current means of nourishing this single tree, whose fruitfulness is sufficient to nourish all of humanity, are only the prelude to far greater means, for the new standard or the ecumenical standard of an individual's usefulness shall consist in how she meets the needs of nourishing and strengthening the tree. T h e tree itself becomes the "goal" that Nietzsche calls for in other formulations of the ecumenical, and given the size of this tree and the potential it bears for feeding the entire earth's h u m a n population, there are literally countless ways in which individuals might contribute, taking full advantage of their labor and ingenuity in dealing with the closest things. While the tree's fruits are the visible product of humanity's labor, humanity must never swerve from the understanding that it has no automatic mechanism for species preservation, no instinct, and so the earth, the soil and ground that enable the tree to root, grow, and stand, will have to be treated with the solicitude afforded by the farmer to her orchard. Overpopulation looms as a threat because humans have not consciously pursued ecumenical goals, we are still in the phase of the beast with a thousand necks, charging off in different directions, at odds with one another. Looking the task in the face is an exhortation to take conscious, resolute command of the human situation in relation to the earth. In this vision there appears to be place for everyone, empowerment for each human being, and all stand to benefit. H o w different in tone is this expression of wise and planned habitation for all of humanity from the rhetorical, impatient tone one occasionally finds in Zarathustra, as for instance in " O n the Preachers of Death," where we read: "The earth is full of the superfluous, life is spoiled by the all too many. May they be lured away from this life with the eternal life'!" (Z 1/9, KSA 4:55). In condemning what he calls Vaterlanderei or devotion to the fatherland, Nietzsche calls for a human being who feels values above himself that are "a hundred times higher than the welfare of the 'fatherland,' society, blood and racial relations — values that stand beyond the fatherlands and the races, ergo international values." Such an individual would have to be a hypocrite to play the 'patriot,' and just such a person is the one Nietzsche has in mind when he speaks of ecumenical tasks and species preserving behaviors. Tolerating national hatred is a "debasing of the h u m a n being and soul," and unfortunately there are still too many such types in

270

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

existence, willing to allow themselves to be exploited by the dynastic families (KSA 12:310). This is not merely a political statement on Nietzsche's part, as if he were exercising his rights as an "untimely" free spirit who happens to differ with the nationalistic policies of the new Germany united behind Prussia and Bismarck as of 1871, though clearly Nietzsche was at odds with the prevailing political climate. But more importantly, Nietzsche has philosophical and cultural reasons for despising nationalism, namely, the expense of nationalism in terms of human energy, its disintegrating and divisive force, which perpetuates violence and exploitation without preserving or enhancing the species — in short, nationalism is stupid and uneconomical in ecumenical, cultural terms. We have already seen that when it comes to exploitation, Nietzsche does not wear rose colored glasses — he acknowledges that exploitation is part of the human experience. At the same time, he is the one who demands of his fellow human beings that if there is to be exploitation in any event, let it be conducted in the spirit and name of ecumenical goals that elevate all of humanity, not just some dynasty, dictator, or class. Nietzsche is not enamored of the idea of learning many languages for their own sake because he sees a downside to filling an individual's memory with words instead of with deeds and thoughts, and he is suspicious of the false sense of ease that multilingualism confers. Moreover, such play-acting through several languages also detracts from thorough knowledge and from the purpose of honestly earning the respect of others, multilingualism even attacks the root of one's native language. "Both peoples who produced the greatest stylists, the Greeks and the French, did not learn foreign languages." But Nietzsche understands full well that with commerce becoming ever more cosmopolitan the learning of many languages is a necessary evil that, pressed to its extreme, will compel humans to find a remedy: "and in some distant future there will be a new language for everyone, at first as a language of commerce, then as a language of intellectual intercourse generally, as certainly as there will one day be air travel. For what other purpose has linguistics {Sprachwissenscha.fi) spent a century studying the laws of language and appraising what is necessary, worthwhile, successful in each individual language!" ( H H 1/267, KSA 2:221-2). The international is a dimension of Nietzsche's ecumenical thought and at least his prediction concerning air travel proved accurate. One recognizes in his criticism of multilingualism for its own sake the characteristic Nietzschean arguments of economy and conservation of energy; it is costly in every sense of the word to have as many languages as we have, and who could even dream in this day and age of the benefits that could accrue to humanity if it spoke only "earth"?

2. Cultivating the Ecumenical Disposition

2. Cultivating the Ecumenical

271

Disposition

"In the spirits who are most free and far sighted self-determination and self-education could one day become universal determination with respect to all future humanity."

Human, All Too Human II/1 223 Europe lags behind in religious terms compared to India, Nietzsche maintains, because Europeans still have not reached the level of thinking attained by the ancient Brahmans who believed that the priests were more powerful than the gods and that the priests' power resides in the rituals. Another step further in this direction and the gods themselves were dispensed with, still one more step and the priests and mediators were no longer necessary and the teacher of self redemption, Buddha, appeared. What will become of Europe when the customs and morals are destroyed upon which the power of gods, priests and redeemers is based? Instead of playing a guessing game, Europe should work on catching up to what transpired in India a few thousand years ago under the aegis of thinking. There are perhaps ten to twenty million people among the different European nations who no longer believe in God, he observes, and it is time they give one another a sign. As soon as they acknowledge each other, they will also have to be acknowledged and reckoned with as a power in Europe and fortunately, "as a power between the peoples! Between the classes! Between poor and rich! Between commanders and subjects! Between the most restless and the calm, most calming human beings" (D 96, KSA 3:87-8). This aphorism called "In hoc signo vinces" (by this sign I conquer) closes the first book of Dawn, which immediately follows Human and continues the ecumenical exploration opened in Human. It is not a matter of converting Europe to Buddhism — Schopenhauer after all had come as close to that as any European — but instead following India's example in "thinking through religion" until the human being comes into her own. Once more we see Nietzsche's conservationist values at work; the model of liberating a people from their gods has already been provided, humanity does not need to reinvent the wheel in order to make progress toward ecumenical goals. And let us not overlook that the anonymous "anticommunity" of atheists could constitute a political power if constituted as a community — and a unique power at that, one that could be free to serve as a positive, mediating force between all of Europe's rival factions. These atheists are the thinkers, free spirits Nietzsche would rely on to help Europe achieve a "godless" state of affairs, and their very existence is a unifying and stabilizing force. This concept is elaborated upon in a post-will to power manner in Beyond. The philosopher as " we understand him, we free spirits — as the human of the most comprehensive responsibility, who has the conscience for the overall development of the human being: this philosopher will avail himself of religions for his cultivating and educating work, just as he will avail himself of the respective political and economic

272

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

conditions" (BGE 61, KSA 5:79). By this time Nietzsche is already speaking in terms of "ruling the earth" or Erdherrschaft, a concept he surfaced in Zarathustra and which becomes a refrain of that work in the phrase "who shall become ruler of the earth?"371 The tools of the new philosopher assume the form of existing cultural institutions and movements whose momentum and accumulated spiritual inventory can be diverted into ecumenical projects. For the purpose of cultivating humanity according to ecumenical values, as opposed to those of the status quo, which includes nationalism, religion and religious denominationalism, class antagonism etc, the new philosopher or Dionysian philosopher, as he is finally announced late in Beyond, will find in religion, politics, and economics worthy materials for resculpting humanity. It is crucial to understanding Nietzsche's ecumenical vision that the new philosopher is not some rampaging "blond beast" exercising tyrannical power over cowering masses — the philosopher as understood by thefree spirits possesses "the most comprehensive responsibility" precisely because that responsibility is for humanity as a whole, and he has "the conscience for the overall development of the human being" as opposed to the development of any single strand, class, type, or religion of human being. This responsibility and this conscience has never before existed on the earth, and yet, Nietzsche insists that the ingredients are present in the present and the past to construct such a model of earthly habitation. I believe Richardson's nuanced understanding of the nature of Nietzschean power will help to clarify the "greater responsibility" described above. First of all, "Nietzschean power lies chiefly not in those intra-episodic satisfactions but in developing the first-order project itself: it lies in enriching the effort at those ends, and so also those ends themselves." So far Richardson has established that Nietzschean power does not exhaust itself in vanquishing, as if vanquishing were the noble activity or purpose per se. "For this," he continues, "incorporation must work a different way than by marshaling efficient servants' — transparent functionaries to its ends. To help to the more important sort of power or growth, the forces subjected must keep their own characters and not be utterly made over into mere facilitating tools; they must add their own telic patterns and viewpoints to its fabric." At this stage of the argument it is clear than subjugation, domination are words too crude to describe the incorporating activity undertaken by Nietzschean power: the relationship between rulers and ruled is reciprocal, there is agency on the part of ruled to an extent that the ruler is affected. Richardson concludes his thought: "It's only by coming to rule persistingly different forces that a will expands not just quantitatively, reproducing its own pattern in others, but qualitatively: to include those still-foreign behaviors as phases or elements in its own thus fuller effort." 372 What Richardson refers to as the "first-order project" is, I want to offer, the will to 371 372

See sections 3 and 4 for a detailed analysis of ruling. Richardson (1996), 34.

2. Cultivating the Ecumenical Disposition

273

power in the service of ecumenical goals, the will to power reflected in Nietzsche's politics. Observe that in this context it makes perfect sense for Richardson to speak of "ruling" and this is in fact the notion of ruling that I think Nietzsche subscribes to with his refrain of "who shall rule the earth." Nothing of Nietzsche's vision for the future of humanity can come to pass if Europeans continue to insist that their morality is the last word in morality: " M o r a l i t y today in Europe is herd animal morality, ergo as we understand things only One kind of human morality next to which, before which, after which many other, above all higher moralities are possible or should be possible" (BGE 202, KSA 5:124). Inasmuch as democracy is the direct descendent of Christianity and colors the entire political picture of Europe, democracy and its offspring in the form of anarchists and socialists merely repeat and radicalize Christianity, thereby contributing to a further entrenchment of the herd animal morality (ibid, 125). Secularism apparently remains bound to herd values according to Nietzsche if it merely disposes of religious trappings while continuing to operate according to religious precepts. At this point one has to ask: what might a truly secularized community look like, if the democratic model is thought to be so woefully lacking? We already have an answer to this question in the free spirit and the new philosopher. What characterizes the free spirit above all is her atheism and her autonomy in relation to existing centers of power, whether they be political, religious, or economical. The new philosopher, meanwhile, who can only come to pass on the shoulders of free spirits, has an ecumenical responsibility for humanity's welfare that rules out democratic strategies for cultivating the new humanity, primarily because democratic strategies are not of the "cultivating" but of the leveling variety. "Conscience" on the part of the new philosopher is more difficult to define and pin down than conscience in the Christian sense, because the new philosopher works under a different set of morals, under ecumenical values which have still to be created, as opposed to the thousand tablets of good and evil that characterize and occupy the current, Christian-democratic conscience. Still, Nietzsche is thinking about such individuals and communities early in his career, before he ever gets around to positing the existence of free spirits, super humans, and new philosophers. It might surprise some readers of Nietzsche to find this draft among his notes of 1875, which he underlines in his handwriting and which appears in print in italics: I dream of a cooperative (Genossenscha.fi) of human beings who are unconditional, who know no sparing and want to be called 'annihilators': they hold the standard of their criticism to everything and sacrifice themselves for truth. What is bad and false should be exposed! We do not want to build prematurely, we do not know whether we will ever be able to build and whether it is not best not to build. There are lazy pessimists, resigned types — we do not want to belong to them (KSA 8:48).

This note is situated among those Nietzsche uses for his Untimely Meditations, and it is immediately followed by a note in which he argues for the extraordinarily pivotal

274

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

position of the philologist as one who possesses knowledge about the supreme value of antiquity and how, on account of this special insight and knowledge, the philologist contains and restricts himself to a merely professional conception of philology, avoiding the risk of "depicting antiquity purely" for fear of seeming untimely and possibly endangering his class interests (ibid, 48-9). I believe these are revealing glimpses into Nietzsche's early workshop and I present them in tandem in order to demonstrate that he is entertaining ideas about an ecumenical collective already in the mid-1870s, and that these ideas stem directly from his studies of antiquity and from his vision of what philology brings to modernity. 373 O f course Nietzsche reverses his field on the matter of "unconditional" persons, and though he retains the sacrifice of the individual for a higher calling, namely as self-overcoming, he does not later advocate sacrifice for truth, which becomes part of the ungrounded metaphysical edifice. What remains striking about this note is the fact that it bears a Dionysian intensity in its affirmation of life's harshest features, even to the point of seeking fellow "annihilators" as Nietzsche later speaks of them in connection with the role of destruction in creation. He is tentative at this stage as to whether he and his envisioned "associates" or "comrades" could ever build, sensing that their influence may have to remain muted and anonymous, like the early free spirits who have not yet given one another a sign, but this reticence gradually disappears. In a series of notes from late 1880 and winter 1881 we are given additional indications of the kind of individuals who might comprise a truly secularized community. Discussing the signs of the next century (the twentieth), he mentions the entrance of the Russians into culture as a grandiose goal, the proximity of barbarism and the awakening of the arts; the socialists will likewise constitute actual drives and strength of will, and bring about "an age of wildness and rejuvenation of strength"; humanity's religious powers could still be strong enough to create "an atheistic religion a la Buddha, "but it will not be a universal love of humanity! A new human being will have to show himself — I myself am far removed from this and do not wish it at all\ But it is probable" (KSA 9:340-1). Within a few pages of the above note one finds another glorifying the image of the Greeks as the age which brought forth the most individuals, bearing in mind that individuals are rare even in modern times, and whose closest analogy was the Renaissance. While Nietzsche sees socialist bodies forming in his day, he warns that these bodies will also need to sprout heads; socialism will spawn the future slave class over which, perhaps, an aristocracy of "hermits" could form. Meanwhile, he continues, Russia is the only "conquering power in the great style" and as a result Europe will have to unite: "We are heading for wilder times!" (KSA 369-60).

373

Philology as a special science of hermeneutics was already discussed in chapter I above, where I demonstrated that the values of philology, e.g. honest reading and correct interpretation, are prerequisites for grounding culture.

2. Cultivating the Ecumenical Disposition

275

These sentiments are brought together in a third note which begins: "NB: An age of barbarism is beginning, the sciences will serve it! Let us see to it that the higher things, the extract of our current knowledge, are indeed preserved: through a community of free individuals who say . . . ." At this point he enumerates, and numbers, three features of the community: 1) There is no God; 2) no reward and punishment for good and evil; and 3) good and evil depend on the ideal and direction under which we live, are mostly inherited, and their judgments could be false. H e concludes the note: "in order to preserve oneself in this barbarism the community will have to be raw and courageous — ascetic preparation" (KSA 9:395-6). Let us review the main qualities of the loosely knit community of free spirits who could preside over an ecumenical shift in values. A certain quality of hardness and steadfastness will be required, such that individuals are not sentimental, not "sparing," and acknowledge their role in destroying as well as creating values. The free spirits will also preside over a powerful and fermenting collective, with the masses quite possibly fueled by socialism. Meanwhile the Russian people will contribute an invigorating, stimulating effect to the European mixture, such that they will represent new, vital cultural impulses and a political threat to the European collective. All in all these new cultural infusions will bring about an age of barbarism, a "wilder age," in which individuals who subscribe to atheist notions and are not bound to the tablets of good and evil of any people or interest will use their knowledge and daring to preserve their own community. If the new barbarism represents an interim phase of political and cultural ferment — and by "wildness" and "barbarism" Nietzsche appears to mean periodic disruptions or inoculations of the otherwise stable, civilized collective — throughout this period of growth and fermentation the sciences, culture, knowledge must continue apace, there can be no sacrificing of spiritual progress during this age of uncertainty, and therein lies the role of the free spirit community whose values diverge from those of Christianity and democracy. Those who are predisposed to keep their wits in the age of mass movements and possibly even social confusion or anarchy are individuals whose own powers of selfcultivation and independence of spirit allow them to impart ecumenical direction to what appears to be brute, vital force, at least according to the scenarios in which Nietzsche prophesies wilder times in store for humanity. As Picht describes the philosophy of the future it will be "the historical attempt to lead humanity to that stage of consciousness wherein it can found a new culture spanning the world; hence it is 'discipline' {Zucht) not only in the sense of cultivation {Züchtung), but at the same time 'discipline' in the sense of disciplina, the higher school of historical consciousness."374 We can indeed refer to the cultivation Nietzsche envisions as a "higher school of historical consciousness," because Nietzsche refers again and again to the opportunity and timing of the conscious habitation of the earth, and how this orientation 374

Picht, Nietzsche, 69.

276

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

will require a higher, surveying perspective and engagement on the part of free spirits and their kind. In connection with Nietzsche's frequently repeated phrase "administration of the earth as whole" Picht concludes that "philosophy after the death of God must transform itself into great politics with the unavoidability of a world historical process; the concept 'great politics' is Nietzsche's essential definition for his own philosophy."375 This is another way of saying what Zarathustra says when he announces the death of all gods and calls for the superhuman, a foundational act that points to a new open for humanity because politics, from Greek polis meaning city state and designating community, must now operate on an ecumenical plane. Accompanying the death of God is the dissolution and nullification of the existing tablets of good and evil, which belong to the era of small politics because each people has its own laws, customs, values. If Nietzsche does not establish with any precision the nature of the future community of the earth, at least he devotes much effort to underscoring the ecumenical scope of such a community and how its construction must be undertaken by a certain type of individual. And though Zarathustra concludes with the retreat of the protagonist to his mountain cave, after his last attempt to establish a sense of community with the "higher humans" fails, this cannot be interpreted as Nietzsche's last word on community — throughout Zarathustra the leitmotif of "who shall rule the earth?" resonates clearly, and after Zarathustra Nietzsche devotes himself to "great politics" by returning to the exploration of the ecumenical. Zarathustra is neither the initiation nor culmination of the ecumenical thread of Nietzsche's thought, it is a powerful, rhetorical interlude. In the Renaissance Europe witnessed positive forces which in our modern culture have not yet come to power, "it was the golden age of this millennium, despite all blemishes and vices." But retarding spirits of the Reformation "delayed by two to three centuries the complete awakening and mastery (Herrschen) of the sciences, when they rendered impossible perhaps forever the complete merging of the antique and modern spirits." The great task of the Renaissance thus could not be concluded (HH 1/237, KSA 2:199). We recognize in this statement on the potential to learn ecumenical goals from the ancient Greeks Nietzsche's later formulation of the role of Europe's Jews in helping to make modern, denationalized Europe's goal a continuation of the Greek ( H H 1/475). For a time, at least, antiquity and modernity flowed together in the Renaissance, and if humanity will never again benefit from such a union, owing to the intervention of the spirit of the Reformation and the movements it spawned, at least humanity can keep open a channel to antiquity and preserve its culture as a model and incentive for moderns. Early in his career Nietzsche ascribed this role exclusively to philologists (KSA 8:38) but later expanded it to include free spirits and new philosophers, especially Dionysian philosophers. After all, since Nietzsche's ecumenical vision depends on forming a community of free spirits, of extraordinary individuals 375

Picht, Nietzsche, 328.

2. Cultivating the Ecumenical Disposition

277

in a time of democratic leveling and other pressures against individualism, his harking back to ancient Greece is more than Romantic nostalgia; the age of the Greeks produced the greatest number of individuals (KSA 9:359), there must be something in the Greek model that is inherently species preserving, inherently cultivating in the sense explored by Nietzsche. Nietzsche would draw on the past to strengthen and inform individuals in the present, bridging distances in time as if they were geographical distances. His premise for this view is that direct self observation is insufficient to learn to know oneself, one must supplement it with history "because the past continues to flow in us in a hundred waves; indeed we ourselves are nothing but that which we perceive of this flowing forth in each moment." He advocates a "finer art and purpose to travel" whereby one is not required to physically move from location to location over thousands of miles: "Very probably the last three centuries in all their cultural nuances and radiance are still living in our proximity: they only need to be discovered." A practiced individual will encounter and rediscover her own transforming and wandering ego everywhere in history from Byzantium to the Reformation, "in the homeland and abroad, yes in the sea, forests, plants and mountains." This enhanced, holistic manner of self-knowledge has the potential to become "universal knowledge with respect to everything in the past," just as in the spirits who are most free and far sighted self-determination and self-education "could one day become universal determination with respect to all future humanity" ( H H II/1 223, KSA 2:477-8). In thus arguing for making history part of the environment of the closest, Nietzsche is practicing a conservationism that acknowledges the multifarious and bountiful tributaries flowing into the modern individual. Moderns are not detached from their past, or their earthly, physical landscape, in physiological and psychological terms, though apparently they have become sufficiently alienated from their past to persist in the illusion that they represent some higher stage of consciousness no longer dependent on the past — as if the modern ego had somehow descended from the heavens. In ecumenical terms where humanity is heading should rely consciously on where humanity has been, not as a repetition of diverse historical developments and their respective peoples, but as an extract relived or re-experienced by individuals whose enhanced "self-knowledge," which is actually knowledge of the interconnectedness and wandering of the ego, might serve as a model for the species. Nietzsche's efforts to rediscover the terrain of the human spirit is nowhere more evident as a consequence of his own "travels" as a classical philologist than in the aphorism "Learning to write well," which could stand as a metaphor for Nietzsche's ecumenical thought. T h e age of speaking well is over he claims because the age of the city culture is over as it contributed to Aristotle's dictum that the herald's voice had to be heard by the entire assembled community. Such a limit concerns us as little as the city community concerns us, since we moderns have to make ourselves understood across the peoples. Anyone who is inclined to be a good European must

278

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

therefore learn to write well and ever better. Being German does not help, for bad writing is considered the birth right of Germans. "Better writing however means at the same time better thinking; always inventing something more worthy of communication and actually being able to communicate it; becoming translatable for the languages of one's neighbors; making oneself accessible to the understanding of those foreigners who learn our language; working toward making everything good into common property and freely available to free individuals; finally, preparing that still so distant state of affairs whereby the good Europeans come into possession of their great task: the direction and supervision of overall earth culture ( H H II/2 87, KSA 592). Whoever does not concern herself with good writing and good reading, interdependent virtues, shows the nations a way in which they can become even more nationalistic and thereby "increases the illness of this century and is a enemy of good Europeans, an enemy of free spirits" (ibid, 593). T h e skills inherent in good speaking, reading, writing are those of rhetoric as it is handed down to us by the Greeks. In the first chapter of my book I laid the foundation for Nietzsche's writings as an earth rhetoric by exploring the virtues of philology as they contribute to groundedness, and here, in the context of the ecumenical Nietzsche it becomes apparent that rhetoric is the defining spirit of the ecumenical. T h e modern sensitivity inclines toward reading this aphorism as an expression of Eurocentrism — in other words, Nietzsche's message threatens to become lost here because one is able to fault him on moral grounds for placing something "European" at the forefront of human experience. Such a reading would not be wrong from the standpoint of political correctness, but it would be stupid from an ecumenical standpoint, a classic example of failing to see the forest for the trees. First of all, Nietzsche is not advocating a superimposition of European totality upon humanity as a whole, such that the current content of European culture should become the content of earth culture. He is on record as having condemned European qualities and practices that contribute to essentialist and chauvinist views, e.g. nationalism, class warfare, racism. In fact, by elevating rhetoric or the ability to communicate effectively to the highest standard for "good Europeans," Nietzsche provides a means for transcending nationalism and ultimately Europeanism itself. Moreover, since the free spirits of Europe are "free" by virtue of not being what everyone in Europe is, the free spirited European as the "good European" is only a European in name, not in practice, and could just as well be referred to as an earthling, a citizen of the world, a cosmopolitan. W h e n one examines the inventory of qualities that Nietzsche enumerates as stemming from conscious efforts to promote values of communication, one sees that the tendency is toward ecumenical openness, toward sharing and exchanging. Those who fear or are made nervous by Nietzsche's call for "supervision of overall earth culture" under the auspices of "good Europeans" are not responding to European cultural hegemony so much as they are responding to the potential loss of their own nationalism, religion, class standing, in short, the loss of the status quo or what Nietzsche calls small politics.

2. Cultivating the Ecumenical Disposition

279

It is the ecumenical idea itself that humanity finds disturbing, despite all posturing to the contrary, because humanity is not comfortable with the idea of inhabiting the earth as a species, with an overall culture, and will continue to find many ways to resist this movement; too many idiosyncratic interests are at stake and the teachings of the beast with a thousand necks have been effective for many centuries. The "European" is of course not so uniquely European as one might think, and Nietzsche underscores the composite nature of culture, and individuals, when he encourages our active exploration of the diverse sources and tributaries that flow in and through us. What clearly impresses Nietzsche about Greek culture is its capacity to assimilate Eastern influences, most notable among them Dionysus, and to thrive as an engine of dynamic cultural forces. Nietzsche's ecumenical thought demonstrates that when one fears the loss of one's individuality, identity, culture, values etc one fears by rote, one fears as a function of having been taught to fear the other, the foreign, the unknown, the new — not because there is actually something terrible in store. His view is that small politics and small, dynastic interests encourage small thinking and insular cultural standards. It is not a given that an ecumenical governing of the earth would result in the loss of what we call diversity. Nietzsche is not the proponent of obliteration of difference, on the contrary, he is the strongest voice for maintaining variety, difference, multiplicity, abundance of types and views as the nature of what is, of what is closest to us and deserving of our watchful appreciation. If the energies that today esteem and create in a thousand voices are harnessed by the single ecumenical goal, speaking of course metaphorically, for there is no need to speak literally of "one goal," does this necessarily entail the silencing of the thousand voices? What Nietzsche calls cultivating (Züchtung) as he would have it consciously applied to our species is not something new in itself, as cultivating has been practiced, whether one agrees with the term or not, by dynasties, religions, peoples from the beginning. Thus in Nietzsche's reasoning the European of today is a result of cultivating forces exerted over the centuries by Christianity, whether or not Christianity sought to "cultivate" such a human being. Once it becomes a matter of the soil of the earth per se, and no longer a matter of allowing each plant to grow when and where it wills, doing what it wills to its ground and the ground of its neighbors as well, without a guiding and surveying intelligence, — once it becomes a matter of the species liberating itself both from the thrall of divine purpose and the ensuing chaos of relativism, cultivating becomes the operative term for Nietzsche. Cultivating is not, however, an exercise or operation of master gardeners who rule by brute force, or puppeteers who merely pull the strings of the masses; instead, cultivating takes place, over time, as a guiding or channeling of spiritual forces in response to stimulus or resistance. Christianity's cultivating, for example, consists primarily in taming or domesticating the animal in humans, in subduing the passions, extirpating the passions, implanting guilt and conscience, growing a "soul" in humans, as Nietzsche argues in Genealogy.

280

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

The frequently quoted aphorism "Ennoblement through degeneration" suggests the cultivating process that leads or can lead to ecumenical goals. History teaches that within a given people that tribe will preserve itself best in which the greatest number of persons have a lively sense of community based on shared principles and faith. The danger of any such strong community founded on similarly constituted individuals displaying the same strong character is "gradual stupidity intensified by heredity, which simply follows all stability like its shadow." The spiritual progress in such communities depends on the less bound, much more uncertain and morally weaker individuals who because of their weakness perish in countless numbers without having had an effect. But over time these weaker types, especially if they have descendants, exert a loosening effect and inflict a wound on the stable community. It is precisely on this spot, Nietzsche claims, that something new is inoculated into the community, whose overall strength must be such that it can sustain the inoculation and assimilate it. "The degenerating natures are of the highest significance wherever progress is to take place. Every progress in the whole must be preceded by a partial weakening. The strongest natures hold firmly to the type, the weaker help it to develop." Nietzsche would apply this principle to individuals as well, citing the ability of ill or physically impaired individuals to compensate by developing stronger skills elsewhere. He also uses the opportunity to take issue with the concept of struggle for existence, pointing out that the strengthening of humans and races depends on two things. First, there must be an increase in stable power through spiritual bonding (Bindung) in faith and sense of community; second, there must be the possibility for achieving higher goals through degenerating natures who would cause partial weakening and wounding of the stabile collective, "precisely the weaker nature as the more delicate and more free makes all progress possible in the first place." Nietzsche sees this process at work in peoples, and he would apply it to education too; teachers should ensure that children are given a solid foundation then inoculated. Finally, Nietzsche quotes Machiavelli to the effect that the great goal of statesmanship should be duration, which outweighs everything else because it is more valuable than freedom. "Only with the greatest possible guarantee and firm grounding of duration is continuous development and ennobling inoculation at all possible. Of course the dangerous companion of all duration, authority, will usually resist this" (HH 1/224, KSA 2:187-89). The term "ennoblement" ( Veredelung) is preferred by Nietzsche because it does not correspond directly with the notion of progress, which is beholden to the values of democratic modernity and does not illustrate the kind of change he would effect in humans. Ennoblement is a qualitative change brought about by a redistribution of energy within a finite, stable collective, as a response to an inoculation that challenges the collective and causes it to rally. The biological metaphor leaves no room for moral judgments; ennoblement through inoculation occurs regardless of a community's moral position vis-à-vis its deviants and outsiders, its weak, free, and creative types. In fact, the inoculating effect is nature's remedy against the inevitable stupidity that

2. Cultivating the Ecumenical Disposition

281

plagues a community precisely because its stability is based on moral uniformity and spiritual conformity. As we have seen in numerous instances, Nietzsche's metaphor of ennoblement is based on observable, measurable events as if they were unfolding in a laboratory-like environment, not because the events are controlled, but because the environment is finite as opposed to idealized or projected as a mere desiderata. Contrary to modern idealists who enthuse about progress defined primarily in technological terms, Nietzsche's notion of ennoblement can be applied to any community. Extrapolated to the overall administration of the earth, it becomes clear that if such a level of ecumenical governance were ever achieved, the continuing need for inoculation would ensure the presence of different types whose actions challenge, and develop, the basic type. It should also be remembered that in this particular equation Nietzsche's emphasis is on the stability and strength of the community, whose duration is of primary importance. While nature appears to be the guarantor of a particular mode of cultivation Nietzsche calls ennoblement, humans can bring about their own improvements and historically are poised to do so. Europe has entered a warlike age, Nietzsche contends, which he would use to develop a stronger kind of skepticism characterized by audacious manliness related to the genius for war and conquest. This virile skepticism, and by skepticism here Nietzsche means pathos of distance and the ability to affirm things as they are as opposed to optimistically fictionalizing them, will possess an intrepid eye, courage and hardness of analysis, and a tough will for dangerous voyages of discovery undertaken as spiritual polar expeditions (BGE 209, KSA 5:140-41). He is not entertaining the prospect of a new skepticism under the auspices of male, warrior values because he happens to prefer these values generally, but because it is his view that Europeans have "evidently" entered a new warlike age in which such values will be indispensable, just as historically speaking the warrior values of the aristocracy yielded to the more feminine values of the middle class.376 Nietzsche is writing in the wake of the Franco-Prussian war and Germany's unification under militarized Prussia, and one may regard the warlike age as extending into the twentieth century, with two world wars emanating from German soil. More important than any war in this context are the qualities of manly skepticism which contribute to the will to undertake dangerous voyages of discovery; this enterprising and adventurous spirit is a development capable of fostering the ecumenical disposition that regards the entire earth as its home. We will return to the detailed ecumenical discussion found in Beyond in a later analysis of the concept of ruling. For the moment, however, our understanding of the cultivating dimensions of the ecumenical idea can be enhanced by a closer look at certain unpublished notes. In 1875 Nietzsche speculates that "the production of better human beings is the task of the future," and this task could be aided by the creation 376

See Del Caro, "Ethical Aesthetics: Schiller and Nietzsche as Critics of the 18th Century," Germanic Review 55.2 (1980), 55-63.

282

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

of a "great center" ("ein grosses Centrum") of humans. The individual would have to become accustomed to the fact that in affirming himself he affirms the will of the center with respect to choosing a woman and the manner in which his child is raised. "Until now no individual or only the rarest was free, they were also determined by such ideas but by bad and contradictory ones. Organization of individual purposes" (KSA 8:36). Humanity has attempted to cultivate a certain kind of individual using marriage, but according to Nietzsche these efforts have been misguided, ostensibly because the ecumenical vision has been lacking. This notion is revisited in 1881 in such away that one immediately detects how Nietzsche's thinking has matured around the idea. The transformation of the human being requires millennia for the formation of the type, he begins, then generations, until finally one human being "in the course of his life runs through several individuals." Why, he asks, should we not bring forth humans in the manner by which the Chinese create trees that bear roses on one side and pears on the other? Those natural processes at work on the cultivation of humans, up till now practiced in an infinitely slow and clumsy manner, "could be taken in hand by human beings: and the old clumsiness of races, racial struggles, nationalistic fever and personal jealousies could be compressed into smaller ages, at least in experiments. — Entire parts of the earth could be devoted to conscious experimentation!" (KSA 9: 5478). Here the premise is that nature is already at work on cultivating human beings, at least insofar as it effective in this regard on any other species, and humans can accelerate the process by intervening on their own behalf. The crude and clumsy expressions of cultivation still visible today, in descending order, in the form of races and racial tensions, nationalism, and individual enmity could theoretically lead a shorter life if humanity took its future into its own hands. In order to achieve this objective conscious experimentation would be required, and it is here of course that the specter of eugenics arises and one thinks of such Hitlerian projects as the Lebensborn or "well of life" program whereby selected Germans engaged in procreation for the sake of cultivating the so-called master race. But there is nothing in Nietzsche's ecumenical vision of cultivation that is not already included in his concept of the great hygiene and in his basic desire to see humanity emerge from the primitive state of warfare and hostility based on racial hatred, nationalism, religious differences, dynastic interests, class struggle, and other existing forms of human self destructiveness. The doctrine of eternal recurrence of the same is itself referred to as a selecting principle, situated at the midpoint of history and useful for founding an oligarchy "over the peoples and their interests" (KSA 10: 646, 645). It is furthermore referred to specifically as "the great cultivating thought" (KSA 11:250), because supposedly not all peoples and individuals will be able to tolerate it. In yet another note Nietzsche poses the question as follows: "whether the higher type. (Art) cannot be better achieved and more quickly than through the terrible game of national wars and revolutions? — whether not through nutrition, cultivation, separation (Ausscheidung) of certain experimental groups" (KSA 10:286). And for those who would see a politically

2. Cultivating the Ecumenical Disposition

283

exploitative, perhaps fascist tendency in Nietzsche's understanding of cultivation, this note sets the record straight: "My demand: to bring forth beings who stand sublimely above the entire species 'human,' and to sacrifice oneself and 'the closest ones' for this goal." Two movements are now in force, humanity having achieved a sufficient degree of stability through existing moralities; one movement is the leveling of humanity and turning it into ant hills, the other movement is Nietzsche's counter, "the sharpening of all oppositions and cleavages, elimination of equality, the creation of super-powerful humans. The former produce the last human being. My movement produces the superhuman. It is definitely not the goal to comprehend the latter as the rulers of the former, instead: two types should exist side by side — as separate as possible; the one like the Epicurean gods, not concerning itself with the other" (KSA 10:244). Nietzsche's nonintervention in the affairs of the masses, as formulated in the above note, may be only an extreme consequence of his ecumenical vision, for at other times he speaks as though conditions for humanity as a whole would improve through the cessation of nationalism and other divisive ills. Having said that, Nietzsche must also consistently maintain his position against leveling, which would result in a standing still of spiritual and social forces, a stasis on the part of humanity such that there is stability only, to be followed by stupidity and eventual ruin. When he describes the state of masses and superhumans existing parallel to one another, therefore, we should regard this to some extent as hyperbole; the "sharpening of all oppositions" has to take place in humanity at large, and on this point alone there can be no true nonintervention, inasmuch as "sharpening oppositions" is a cultivating act. I think Nietzsche intends to underscore, quite simply, that his superhumans have no interest in lording it over the masses, although they will need the masses as a field of cultivation from which the preferred taller plants will arise. After all, "ruling" or imposing one's will on the masses, on the part of beings who ostensibly "stand sublimely above the entire species 'human'" is a contradiction in terms. The ecumenical stance of the higher human beings removes them from the small, lower level politics of the masses, however they are organizationally constituted. Though Nietzsche claims as one of the goals of his counter movement that equality would be eliminated (Beseitigung), this striving must always remain a striving, it can not and must not become complete, for the sake of continuous cultivation. We recall that "playing the patriot" represents for Nietzsche's higher human being nothing but hypocrisy, and that it is a debasing of human being and soul to tolerate national hatred, let alone admire or glorify it (KSA 12:310). Of course patriotism and national hatred are not synonymous, and the former can exist without the latter, theoretically, but we will grant that Nietzsche is correct in linking blind patriotism or patriotism as the highest standard with the tendencies of nationalism as they contribute to hatred between peoples. He suggests an interim state of affairs in another note from the year 1886: "As many international powers as possible — in order to practice the worldperspective" (KSA 12:222). The implication here is that even within the

284

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

existing dynamic of small politics, with its nationalism and associated divisive influences, there is potential for peoples to rise to the status of international powers — as they exist today — and these powers should take advantage of their position by practicing the ecumenical perspective. Above even the international powers is Nietzsche's great politics, die grosse Politik, which is on his mind as late as the period December 1888 to January 1889, the final days of sanity. In his final note entitled "The Great Politics" Nietzsche asserts that he brings war, but not between the peoples: "I have no words for my contempt for the execrable politics of the interests of the European dynasties." Instead, Nietzsche's war observes no boundaries: "I bring war straight through all the absurd accidents of people, class, race, profession, upbringing, education: a war as between rise and fall, between will to life and lust for vengeance against life, between honesty and malicious mendacity." The existing powers side with the lie, they cannot do otherwise and exercise no free will in the matter, Christians have the numerical advantage and so the Christian influence of two thousand years, with its "physiological nonsense" (Widersinn) has brought about a preponderance of degeneration and inconsistency among instincts. It causes one to shudder, furthermore, that only in the last twenty years have the closest most important questions of nutrition, clothing, food, health, procreation been treated with rigor and honesty. And this prompts him to list three propositions. 377 First, the great politics wants to make physiology master over all other questions: "it wants to create a power strong enough to cultivate humanity as a whole and as something higher, with pitiless hardness toward what is degenerate and parasitical in life, toward that which ruins, poisons, slanders, destroys and sees in the annihilation of life the badge of a higher kind of soul." The second proposition is deadly war against vice, with vice defined as any kind of antinature: "The Christian priest is the most depraved kind of human, for he teaches antinature." The next proposition, which Nietzsche also introduces with "Second proposition," calls for the creation of a party of life that is strong enough for great politics: "the great politics makes physiology master over all other questions, it wants to cultivate humanity as a whole, it measures the rank of races, peoples, individuals according to their future, their guarantee for life, which it bears within itself— it inexorably makes an end to all that is degenerate and parasitical." Finally, the third proposition reads: "The rest follows from the above." Notwithstanding the confused numbering and the repetition that occurs between propositions one and the second version (or continuation) of number two, there is a remarkable consistency between this note from the period of alternating madness and lucidity and the earlier expressions of the ecumenical.

377

Actually N. proceeds to list four propositions, each of which is introduced as follows: "First proposition," "Second proposition," "Second [sic] proposition," "Third proposition." His mental state at this time could have been a factor in this incorrect numbering, or he could have intended the second "Second proposition" merely as a continuation of number two.

2. Cultivating the Ecumenical Disposition

285

W h a t differs in this late formulation is the intrusion of the antinature and antiChristian themes which preoccupy Nietzsche in his final days of sanity, such that he takes the opportunity to attack Christianity, and its priests, with an obvious degree of satisfaction. These features are of course richly in evidence in Antichrist, completed in autumn 1888. T h o u g h he is consistent in his elevation of physiology to the highest standard, especially in the light of the closest and most important things as he had already formulated this in Human, his strident lashing out at the "degenerate and the parasitical" is not characteristic of the earlier writings, though the idea of cultivating clearly is. Finally, Nietzsche's euphoria or megalomania already shows through in this note where he proclaims "I bring war." We know from passages in Ecce Homo that Nietzsche regards himself as a "destiny" and a watershed figure of history, yet his talk of "bringing war" in this ecumenical context sounds strange, and is an unfortunate choice of words, because in earlier expressions he emphasizes that the ecumenical should eliminate war, should put a stop to hatred between peoples and individuals. Here, instead of setting up the opposites as ecumenical versus nationalistic, they seem to become ecumenical versus degenerate and parasitical. We must not overlook that Nietzsche is speaking metaphorically about the cross-cutting war, he will bring a war "as between rise and fall" etc, suggesting that his "war" is actually his continuing critique of small politics and his plea for great politics in the ecumenical style. W h e n the ecumenical is viewed in the aggregate or with what Nietzsche likes to call the "surveying perspective," I agree with Lampert's assessment of Nietzsche's politics: "Nietzsche's thought grounds a postnationalist politics that loves the earth as humanity's home, a politics that could no more side with modern humanism and the now appalling rights it has granted humans over the community of life that sustains it, than it could side with dead theisms that single out the human as the one thing worth saving from an earth worth damning." 378 His ecumenical vision is clearly postnationalist in the sense described by Lampert, and consistendy so from the earliest to the latest writings. It is posthumanist as well insofar as it envisions a humanity whose groundedness on the earth would establish, for the first time, a partnership between humans and earth based on fairness, not on any humanistic "magnanimity" displayed by our often ingrate and arrogant humanism. In its economical and conservationist essence Nietzsche's ecumenical vision embraces the past, it is as Lampert writes a "local politics of a 'good European' who affirms his European home as heir to Christianity and Greece, to hardness and intellect. But that politics broadens out as this particular past makes possible the recovery of the human and natural past. Local loyalty expands into loyalty to the earth." Both the past and one's groundedness in the local are reflections of what is grateful and loyal in humanity, its embrace of the finite, the closest things, which in turn leads to recovering what we have been taught to deny. If the negative 378

Lampen, Nietzsche and Modern Times, 279.

286

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

features of humanism have evolved under the aegis of earth denial, which in turn has rested upon denial of the closest and the local, Nietzsche's new humanity would reverse this course. From its source in Europe, Lampert observes, Nietzsche's global politics "spreads out as a future global politics of loyalty to the earth, ecological or 'green' politics that has only begun to formulate its agenda but that finds in Nietzsche's thought a comprehensive means of affirming the earth."379 Affirming the earth would be the easiest, most natural thing in the world for humans if we were capable of appreciating, of valuing the closest things in the manner called for by Nietzsche. In a perverse twist of reasoning whose origins grow dimmer each day, humanity chose to abjure the closest, to disavow that upon which it stands and that from which it draws life, until in the twentieth century an ecumenical movement of 'greens' sprouted across the planet. This tiny but growing minority of human beings is largely unaware of Nietzsche's writings. But the color of life symbolized by the color of this movement of human beings is appropriately ecumenical, transcending the colors of the existing political spectrum, and green appears to suit Nietzsche well.

3. The Lust to Rule, Or the Bestowing Virtue Goes World Wide "Lust to rule: but who would call it lust when what is high longs downward for power?" Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "On the Three Evils"

The three evils Zarathustra would redeem from their imprisonment in pejorative and historically slandered connotation are sex, lust to rule, and selfishness, but these translations of the German do not nearly tell the story. Wollust also means voluptuousness and sexual lust, and refers to the feeling of pleasure inherent in sexual gratification; Herrschsucht derives from herrschen "to rule" and the suffix -sucht connoting an addiction to something, and Selbstsucht too implies inordinate attention to the self. Nietzsche refers to this trinity as "the three best cursed things" in the world, but instead of writing their obituary he christens them all with new names in order to surround them with a positive, life affirming aura. The lust to rule therefore transforms to "bestowing virtue": Lust to rule: but who would call it /wifwhen what is high longs downward for power? Verily, there is nothing sickly and lustful in such longing and descending! That the lonely height does not isolate and suffice itself eternally: that the mountains come to the valley and the winds of the heights to the lowlands: — Oh where would one find the right christening and glistening name for such longing! 'Bestowing virtue' — thus Zarathustra once named the unnameable. (Z III/10, KSA4:237-8)380 375

Lampert, Nietzsche and Modem Times, 432.

3. The Lust to Rule, Or the Bestowing Virtue Goes World Wide

287

The bestowing virtue is first described in Zarathustra in the concluding chapter of Part I, called "On the Bestowing Virtue" ("Von der schenkenden Tugend"), in which schenken, "to bestow" or to give as a present, is identified as the highest virtue, and degeneration, described as the worst thing, is revealed by the absence of the bestowing soul (Z 1/22, KSA 4:97-8). Thus ruling, which has had a bad name throughout history and remains stigmatized to this day, is re-presented by Nietzsche as an act or behavior of bestowing, of giving of oneself and what one is — with the stipulation that an individual of superabundance has no choice but to bestow, to give of herself, and in so doing, to rule. In repackaging and presenting the bestowing virtue as he does, Nietzsche makes it clear that ruling is not an arbitrary act, indeed, it is in a strict sense involuntary, since one who is predisposed to rule cannot do otherwise. This is the same scenario Nietzsche uses to begin and conclude Zarathustra, namely, Zarathustra follows the example of the superabundant, radiating, bestowing sun, whom he addresses as a faithful companion: "'You great star! What would your happiness be if you did not have those for whom you shine!'" (Z P 1, KSA 4:12, 405). A significant reorientation is required to conceive of rule and rulers as benefactors, since throughout history rulers, and especially absolute rulers, have engaged in tyrannical behavior, as witnessed by the phrase "rule with an iron fist." Thus Nietzsche takes a risk in emerging as an advocate for a ruling spirit in a time of justified hatred for rulers: "Taking advantage of the palpable degeneration of modern political institutions, he dares to raise a calamitous, and previously unapproachable, question of political legislation: what ought humankind to become ?"381 Conway's formulation alerts us to both the risk and the question of timing that motivates Nietzsche to take the risk. Rules after all are restraints, and rulers enforce restraints, at least in the traditional sense of ruling, but Nietzsche rightfully challenges these limited, albeit powerful conceptions of rule and asks: why can the highest that any human has to give not be designated in more appropriate terms? If bestowing and giving, of oneself and of what one has, constitute the highest virtue, ruler and ruled would enter into a new and promising relationship whereby each gets what she needs — the ruler needing to give, the ruled needing the gift of rule with its implied direction, solicitude, welfare, nurturing. What is lacking in human terms in the ruled is abundantly present in the ruler — ruler and ruled complement and complete each other. It is obvious that Nietzsche does not have in mind current models of rule whereby one "comes" to power by any means, as an act of greed, violence, vanity, egomania etc: "And I turned my back on the rulers when I saw what they now call ruling: haggling and dickering for power 380

381

Kaufmann renders "Oh wer fände den rechten Tauf- und Tugendnamen" as "oh, who were to find the right name," omitting entirely the word play and the qualifiers "Tauf- und Tugendnamen," which mean literally: christening name and virtue name. To preserve the alliterative word play and to convey that N. seeks a virtuous, shining name for the besmirched lust to rule, I offer "christening and glistening." Conway (1997), 3.

288

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

— with the rabble!" (ZII16, KSA 4:125). Nietzsche's ruler does not haggle for power, power is the ruler and power should be, indeed must be used for ruling. Nietzsche's rejection of ruling as practiced in his day is also evident in Science where he includes one of his longest critiques of the Reformation and catalogues the ills with which this movement impacted not only Christianity, but Europe on the whole. The "plebeianism of the spirit" that is the Reformation's legacy has occurred, apparently, because the boundaries and differences between church and state have not been properly observed: "A church is above all a ruling structure that ensures the more spiritual persons the highest rank and believes in the power of spirituality to the extent that it denies itself all cruder means of force — therewith alone is the church a more noble institution under any circumstances than the state" (GS 358, KSA 3:60205). In what is rare praise for religion, but consistent with his views regarding the redeeming, cultivating dimensions of religion as long as religion is not left to its own devices but is properly used by philosophical spirits, Nietzsche praises its ability to devote itself to spirituality, to cultivating humans of superior spirituality and giving them rank accordingly, at the expense of practicing violence or force (Gewaltmittel). By the same token, given that he here juxtaposes noble-spiritual non-violence with the practices of the state, he obviously prefers the model of rule found in the church — this must not be forgotten when one considers the meaning of "rule" and "ruler" in Nietzsche. In other words, when Nietzsche himself clouds this issue by engaging in rhetorical panegyrics on Napoleon and other military men, we should not conclude that such types represent the highest conception of rulers, on the contrary, to the extent that they must resort to violence or force they and the state apparatus they command are less noble than even lowly religion. In "The triumph over power" ("Der Sieg über die Kraft") Nietzsche proposes that when one considers what has been venerated to date as "superhuman spirit" and "genius" one comes to the sad conclusion that "on the whole the intellectuality of humanity must have been something very lowly and paltry indeed." Of the genius he writes "[h]ow quickly his throne is erected, his worship become custom! One still kneels before power— out of old slave habit — and yet, if the degree of venerability (Verehrungswürdigkeit) is to be established, only the degree of reason in power is decisive: one must measure to what extent precisely power has been overcome by something higher and now serves as its tool and instrument!" This subordination of power to "something higher" is entirely in keeping with the sublimating, regulating activity called for in the case of the passions. Meanwhile, what is truly beautiful in a genius goes unseen and unsung, namely the "spectacle of that power which a genius expends not on works, but on himself as a work." We still do not possess the refined gaze for the manner in which a genius uses power for restraining himself, for purifying his imagination, for ordering and selecting in the flood of tasks and insights. "We remain blind to the genius' "triumph over power" (D 548, KSA 3:318-9). To be sure, power in the sense Nietzsche uses it here is not synonymous with "force" as he uses that word in the

3. The Lust to Rule, Or the Bestowing Virtue Goes World Wide

289

context of church versus state, but the two are sufficiently similar to allow us to conclude that ruling has a spiritualizing and self-cultivating dimension, as well as a direct impact on subjugated peoples, but in the former case this is barely or rarely visible to the eye, whereas outer manifestations of power as they are reflected for instance in the works of a genius or the exerting of force by the state are indeed highly visible, even spectacular, but by no means noble. The "old slave habit" of kneeling before power still influences our perceptions of who or what is superior; moreover, since we obviously relish displays of power whether in the form of a genius' works or the forceful displays of a mighty state, our notions concerning ruling and rulers continue to be clouded by confusion, if not outright hypocrisy.382 Perhaps the way to see power through a clearer lens is to distinguish between ruler and master, as I have argued in connection with the verb herrschen, and to bring into the picture so-called slaves. Richardson asserts that "[t]he overman combines the assets of master and slave: he has the latter's richness of drives but the former's ability to organize them toward an active overall practice." Observe that Richardson uses the word "assets" in connection with both master and slave, and that he directs our attention to "overall practice" as the particular strength of the master. The master is enriched by the "far richer, spiritualized social context accomplished by the slaves" in such a way that he can replenish his own activeness from the reactive, but formidably resourceful impulses characterizing slave existence: "this new context makes his activeness rather unlike the master's. Nietzsche may be marking this other way that his ideal is a synthesis, in his famous phrase 'the Roman Caesar with Christ's soul.'" 383 In other words, if one considers the superhuman and not the "master" to be Nietzsche's model of the new human being in the new gravity, one has a more realistic and realizeable goal. Using the overcoming of passions as his starting point, Nietzsche illustrates again how overcoming is not practiced in order to become the master or to lord it over others. The person who has overcome his passions, he claims, is now in possession of the most fertile soil, like the colonist who has mastered forests and swamps. But now it is imperative that the seed of good spiritual works be sown in this soil: "The overcoming itself is only a means, not a goal; if it is not regarded this way, then quickly all manner of weeds and devilish nonsense will sprout on this vacant rich soil, and soon things will be even wilder and woolier than ever before" ( H H II/2 53, KSA 2: 576). In this true aphorism of only ten lines Nietzsche gives us much to ponder. The earthly metaphor is revealing because it gives us an opportunity to examine his views regarding clearing and developing a piece of land. Having previously existed only in a wild state, the now vacant but fertile soil is capable of sprouting virtually anything, and the growth there will be more tangled, weed ridden, and chaotic than anything that stood on this land in its natural, undisturbed state. In reasoning thus Nietzsche 382

Other aphorisms from Dawn in which power is discussed are 348, 356, 360. Richardson (1996), 68-9. The "Roman Ceasar" phrase is in Will to Power # 983 or KSA 11:289.

290

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

may have nothing more in mind than the potential danger to fertile soil if it is not properly managed — managing here ascribed to nature or to humans beings. Or, he may actually be expressing his concern for the deleterious effects of clear cutting as they destroy an ecosystem by removing or upsetting the conditions of its long standing, natural state. In either case, thought must be given to caring for this new fertile plot now that its natural state has been disrupted. The seeds of "good spiritual works" need to be sown once an individual has overcome her passions. We have seen how regulating and governing the passions is imperative for spiritual cultivation, and we recall that Nietzsche ascribes this skill to the ancient Greeks as both individuals and as a community. If one were to stop at the point of overcoming the passions, difficult as this might be, the exercise is uneconomical, wasteful, and a mere extirpation or castrating of fertility. The goal instead is to plant something spiritually redeeming in this unusually fertile soil. If one were to accept overcoming as the final stage, moreover, one would have achieved mastery for the sake of exerting mastery, of lording it over one's passions (stifling them). Applied to the land, mastering or subduing it simply to change it and repress it makes no sense — the fertility and potential of the land need to be managed, not repressed, such that having undertaken the task in the first place is justifiable. After all, nature manages the land without human intervention. If one extrapolates from the individual to the collective, it follows that overcoming the "passions" of the collective, i.e., imposing rule upon the diverse and conflicting drives as they arise for instance from the tension between individual and collective interests, is not undertaken for the purpose of subduing, repressing, or otherwise stifling the potential of the collective, in other words, ruling is not done for the sake of controlling, though controlling is one consequence of ruling. Instead, ruling is done for the sake of planting good spiritual works, for the sake of helping the collective, which is now fertile soil, to achieve its best state of growth and flourishing. At this point one might well ask, using Nietzsche's analogy of clearing and sowing, why any intervention at all is justified or needed, since after all in the case of land nature has already provided a "use" and management for a given plot, and in the case of peoples, they too exist already under some form of governance — why are overcoming and a ruler needed in either case? Nietzsche's response would appear to be implied by his view regarding nature as will to power or, more specifically, by his view regarding exploitation, which is an unavoidable function of the will to power and is the driving force of culture. Whether we admit it or not, exploitation takes place in nature and of course among humans, and Nietzsche would have us regard it amorally if possible, as something given, but as something whose efficacy and energy we are capable of regulating and directing. The argument could be made that Nietzsche's vision of ecumenical rule is a violation of existing forms of rule as they are reflected in the manifold governments and administrations of the thousand peoples. To this Nietzsche would respond: all of these lesser governments or forms of rule, which

3. The Lust to Rule, Or the Bestowing Virtue Goes World Wide

291

constitute small politics, are themselves a violation, an imposition of rule on or over a people who may or may not be "united" by virtue of language, customs, religion, ethnicity etc. Moreover, since each of these peoples has its own tablet of good and evil, their respective models of ruling cause strife and violence when the neighbors are regarded as evil and obtuse. Since a certain degree of exploitation will remain in any case, despite idealistic dreaming and political engineering, Nietzsche would prefer the model of exploitation that results in the greatest good for the species. Moreover, given the accidental nature of humanity's ungrounded existence, symbolized by the jester becoming humanity's fatality (Z P 7, KSA 4:23), Nietzsche has to fight what Conway calls "a certain indiscriminacy of the will." Conway explains that "[w]hile it has become popular in late modernity to entrust to each will the task of determining its own goal, thereby obviating the legislative role of the lawgiver, this trust is egregiously misplaced. . . . Lawgivers must consequently legislate against the indiscriminacy of the human will, subjecting to their own design that which naturally' falls to chance."384 The basis for this argument against "chance" as the prevailing shaping force of humanity also shows up, I think, in Nietzsche's rejection of the categorical imperative, where in addition to arguing that one size does not fit all in moral terms, he also questions how an individual could possibly elevate his actions to the status of a law for all people (GS 335) and how an individual could possibly know what is "best" or what is needful for all humanity, such that one's actions should have universal validity. The same could be said in connection with the land. An environmentalist might decry any justification for clearing the woods and swamps from a piece of land — this is violation, pure and simple, and no "higher purpose" justifies such a means. Nietzsche would weigh the act of clearing against the next step of planting, i.e., the value of clearing or "overcoming" the natural state of the land is determined by the use to which it is then put by humans. Judging on this basis, one cannot justify any arbitrary use of the land, i.e., putting in a strip mall may be hundreds of times less intelligent and "spiritually" redeeming, than putting in a medical facility for the indigent or for that matter leaving the land in its natural state entirely. To insist, however, that humankind should desist from developing the land entirely, on principle, is to disavow the needs of humans in relation to other forms of life, and to accord all life forms equal standing — something that Nietzsche's order of rank does not allow. He makes it abundantly clear that of all the animals, humans have risen to the highest rank and should therefore act accordingly. By the same token, humans should know better than to lord it over nature and over one another, and precisely this knowledge is what Nietzsche would promote using ecumenical goals and strategies. Now that we have investigated some of the key issues associated with the nature of rule according to Nietzsche, we can pursue the question of the relative merit of existing 384

Conway (1997), 17.

292

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

models of rule and why, for example, Nietzsche feels compelled to revise notions of ruling. As Nietzsche takes issue with the values and practices of Christianity on a scale greater than any thinker before him, it stands to reason that he would reject what Leiss refers to as "a consistent image of man as lord of the earth based on the Biblical creation story." Bearing in mind that Nietzsche eschews political dimensions of ruling as they tend to manifest themselves in ostentatious displays of power and exercise of force, as happens throughout history in the case of the state, Leiss's continuation of this thought is particularly interesting. " T h e most significant aspect of this imagery is the degree to which the religious setting has always been interpreted in political terms. T h e God of Genesis is pictured as the absolute ruler of the universe who has delegated subordinate authority to man for the management of affairs on earth." 385 Since the model provided by God is that of absolute ruler, humans follow suit in imposing themselves as absolute rulers, with divine mandate, but this environmentally dangerous stance is intensified and illustrated in the mentality of the medieval alchemist who would achieve such mastery over nature as to "duplicate the work of creation" (ibid, 42). These two strivings, then, the absolute political rule over earth with its attending impunity by divine mandate, and the desire to wheel and deal with nature as if humans were the authors of creation, contribute to the most negative model possible for the earth. Surely when Nietzsche envisions the superhuman as the meaning of the earth, and humanity's task as cultivating itself for ecumenical goals, he does not have this Judeo-Christian conception of rule in mind — after all, the current situation regarding humanity and earth has been brought about by this conception of rule, and Nietzsche insists that the spiritual goals and aspirations are not political ones — religion erred in pursuing political objectives, and religion is more noble than statehood or politics insofar as it assigns rank according to spirituality and disavows the use of force. Nietzsche criticizes the concept of reformation as well as the historical Reformation, by pointing out that higher culture does not respond favorably to the reformationist spirit because it is already diversified, inhabited by different individuals with different needs who cannot be accommodated by a movement advocating one size fits all. Thus he concludes that the more a culture is able to resist the will o f powerful and domineering (herrschsüchtige) natures, the higher is the culture in question, and only sects will result from the reforming efforts, not a reformation per se. Ruling in this sense of dominating is therefore a sign of cultural backwardness, as it had existed in Europe's northern lands during the Reformation, and Nietzsche clearly favors the higher culture capable of resisting domineering rulers: "Where there is ruling, there are masses: where there are masses there is a need for slavery. Where there is slavery, there individuals are few and they have herd instincts and conscience against them" (GS 149, KSA 3:493-4). Nowhere in this equation is there a hint of glorification of tyrannical ruling, on the contrary, culture is defined by 385

Leiss, The Domination ofNature, 33.

3. The Lust to Rule, Or the Bestowing Virtue Goes World Wide

293

how effectively it rebuffs the overtures of domineering types, as these would tend to quash the diversity and individuality of a culture. Now let us study the outcome when Napoleon is added to the equation, bearing in mind, as Danto has succinctly maintained, that Nietzsche was "an inveterate worshiper of heroes" who usually favored military types.386 We have Napoleon to thank, according to Nietzsche, that we are entering a "classical age of war" that should last a couple of centuries (the twentieth and twenty-first). The nationalistic movement is the counter-shock to Napoleon and would not be possible without him. Napoleon is therefore to be praised for enabling a manly spirit to ascend in Europe, and for representing a continuation of the Renaissance in his aversion to modern ideas and to the concept of civilization. It is Nietzsche's wish that the "piece of antiquity" somehow preserved in Napoleon will ultimately triumph over the nationalist movement, becoming the heir and continuator of Napoleon "in the affirming sense," for Napoleon after all wanted One Europe "and as one knows, this as ruler of earth" (GS 362, KSA 3:609-10). 387 The classical age of war has been spawned by nationalism, by the conflicting interests of the nations left in the wake of the Napoleonic wars. This age of war, however, is useful only insofar as it helps to cultivate humanity along manly as opposed to feminine lines; nationalism should be vanquished "in the affirming" sense in order to first unite Europe and behind it, to unite the earth. What Nietzsche appreciates in the example of Napoleon then is his cultivating and catalyzing effect, demonstrated in propelling Europe into an age of war whose sublimated result will be ecumenical in nature. Before we leave the vicinity of this "classical age of war" we should point out that only a few pages earlier, in an aphorism entitled "To what extent things will become ever more artistic' in Europe," Nietzsche bemoans the lack of character in Europe, claiming that actors are sprouting as a new kind of flora and fauna. These actors are inappropriate material for building, and as a result humanity is no longer capable of building a society in the old sense of the word (GS 356, KSA 3: 595-7). The guiding metaphor of this aphorism differs from # 362, but more importantly, so does the message: # 356 gives the gloomiest possible scenario for ecumenical advancement, while # 362 appears to reverse the ill effects "thanks to Napoleon." If the two are read in tandem, they could be interpreted as Nietzsche's warning against the rise of pseudo-spirits, of mere actors without substance, as they might be revealed and defrocked by the presence of individuals such as Napoleon. Ruling as a form of tyranny is also rejected in Nietzsche's discussion of the Greeks in their transformation from a mythology-based to a political culture. The life of the Greeks shines under the ray of myth but is otherwise gloomy, for the Greek thinkers

386 387

Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, 198, 154. "Ruler of the earth" here is "Herrin der Erde," literally female ruler of the earth, because Europa is feminine in natural gender, neuter in grammatical gender. It makes no sense therefore to render this phrase "mistress of the earth," since it is entirely consistent with N. s frequent use of "Herr der Erde."

294

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

took knowledge too seriously and became tyrannical. "Plato was the incarnate wish to become the supreme philosophical legislator and founder of a state," but all such ventures to tyrannize with the spirit failed. "What transpired among the Greeks, namely that each great thinker became a tyrant in the belief that he possessed absolute truth, so that even the history of the spirit in the Greeks acquired that violent, hurried and dangerous character that is demonstrated in their political history," has also occurred to a lesser extent and with less intensity in modern times. However, Nietzsche concludes, the period of the tyrants of the spirit is past. "There will always have to be ruling in the spheres of higher culture, to be sure — but this ruling from now on lies in the hands of the oligarchs of the spirit. They form a solidarity-based society despite all spatial and political separation, whose members recognize and acknowledge one another." This oligarchy of free spirits would remain inscrutable to the popular press, and their spiritual superiority would work as a unifying force in the fight against ochlocratic character and attempts to erect a tyranny with the help of the masses (HH 1/ 261, KSA 2:214-18). Nietzsche's oligarchy of the spirits closely resembles his description of the free spirits and atheists of Europe, with the added feature of ruling by oligarchy ("Herrschaft. . . der Oligarchen des Geistes"). If tyrannical ruling practiced a divisive effect ("these many petty tyrants would have liked to have devoured each other raw," ibid, 216), oligarchical ruling would be unified against a common enemy characterized as the mob and attempts by tyrants to tyrannize with the mob's support. The practical refrain of Nietzsche's philosophy, namely "who shall be ruler of the earth?" ("wer soil der Erde Herr sein?" KSA 11:76), is therefore to be read not in the context of "which individual" but "which group of individuals" shall be ruler(s) of the earth. In notes from 1884-85 the idea of rulers of the earth takes many shapes, and even shows up in a draft for an unwritten book called "Noon and Eternity," whose second part would have been called "On the rulers of earth" (KSA 11:528). Yet another draft title suggesting Nietzsche's close attention to this topic is "The Rulers of Earth: Thoughts about Today and Tomorrow," which appears at the same time as the title "Beyond Good and Evil," which of course Nietzsche did indeed write (KSA 11:489). Among his drafts for Zarathustra we find additional evidence for an oligarchy of rulers: "NB: There must be many superhumans: everything good develops only among its own kind ("unter seines Gleichen"). One god would always be a devil. A ruling race. For 'the rulers of the earth.'" In these notes intended for a chapter of Zarathustra it is further pointed out that Zarathustra can only bring happiness after the order of rank has been established, and he must first teach this. The order of rank is to be executed "in a system of earth administration: the rulers of earth finally, a new ruling caste." Once again Nietzsche raises the issue of "the dangerous midpoint" indicating humanity can regress to "last human being" or cultivate itself toward superhuman. After enumerating several qualities and types of human beings, Nietzsche finishes his note with the following observation: "the earth now a marble workshop lying there: a ruling race is needed, with absolute power" (KSA 11:541-2).

3. The Lust to Rule, Or the Bestowing Virtue Goes World Wide

295

Nietzsche uses "ruling race" and "ruling caste" interchangeably, even within the same note, and these rulers are to be brought about through cultivation which can only having meaning when the concept of the order of rank is understood. By referring to Zarathustra specifically as the "teacher of the order of rank" ("der Lehrer von der Rangordnung") we can deduce that this teaching accompanies the better-known doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same. Like most of Zarathustra's teaching, the order of rank has its counterpart in an existing teaching that needs to be refuted, in this case, the doctrine of the equality of human beings. There can be no cultivation in Nietzsche's sense by following the modernist egalitarian doctrine, only degeneration and diminution of the human being. Thus the concept of a ruling caste makes sense in the context of an order of rank among human beings, i.e., the best and the highest shall rule. Nietzsche uses the metaphor of the sculptor working on the imprisoned image of humanity, using all her skill and power to liberate the image of humanity from a block of the ugliest stone (ZII/2, KSA 4:111), but in this note he attributes the sculpting to a ruling race with absolute power, and the material to be sculpted is the earth. These may be regarded as slightly different formulations of the basic idea that sculpting (cultivating) needs to be done by a ruling, creating caste, whose goal is to assert meaning for the earth in tandem with liberating the image of humanity, all of which is to be achieved through ecumenical strategies. Nietzsche's proposed ruling caste or oligarchy would differ from any before it by means of its attention to the earth in two important ways. First, "earth" as conceived by the Nietzschean rulers means humanity as a whole, the entire inhabited earth, the ecumenical potential and promise of the highest species once small politics are overcome — this we may regard as the manner of dwelling of the ecumenical. Second, "earth" refers to our planetary home, the space and geography of the embodied, finite living that humans can only enjoy once we have divested ourselves of metaphysical notions of a "true" world or "eternal" world to which our earth is merely a prelude or a dim shadow — this we may regard as the space in which the ecumenical dwells. Nietzsche's talk of earthly rule is alienating and frightening, especially in the wake of twentieth century carnage resulting from two world wars, and yet, his discourse on this matter should be less strange, less alienating than what actually transpires, unknown to us, but with the effect of ruling the earth nonetheless. Kreis gives us a compelling case in point. The Enlightenment brought with it the triumph of the light of reason over all darkness of the past, such that politically speaking we achieved the abolition of torture, freedom of opinion, the liberation of peasants from feudalism, sharing of power, universal education. "Everything in the Enlightenment revolves around the bondage of human being in relation to human beings. Nowhere is there a word about the self-imposed detachment of human beings in relation to God's creation. The spirit of the philosophers stands out in progress. It leaves behind the long reliance on the soil." This triumph of the philosophical spirit allows the luxury of forgetting, which in turn has been made possible by the "the last

296

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

great energy bifurcation point," namely the revolutionary transition from wood as the primordial source of energy to the fossil fuels coal, oil, and natural gas, "an event without which there would be no world civilization of modernity."388 Kreis's point is that the Enlightenment spirit estranged humanity from its earlier, grounded relationship with the earth, which had relied on a pact between the Old Testament God and humanity. As long as humanity regarded itself as the steward of creation, its bond to the earth and the soil remained intact. By the time of the energy bifurcation in the eighteenth century, however, this bond was severed by a combination of Enlightenment notions of freedom and the new sources of energy that liberated Europe from its seventeenth-century energy crisis, when the lack of wood became "the central problem of economic and juristic policies of feudalism" (ibid, 72). Enlightenment and technology have been a lethal combination of forces against the earth, and to the extent that anything resembling a world-wide or ecumenical "ruling" exists on earth today, then very probably one could attribute this rule to the Enlightenment's notion of progress in tandem with the achievements of technology — this manner of ruling is not in the hands of any particular nation, to be sure, but its influence is felt world wide, and its power is such that it is out of control. Nietzsche acknowledges that humans have changed their environment and will continue to do so, but it makes a difference to him how we do this. Humans experience the production of the most useful and practicable qualities when they change milieu, "or they perish. It shows itself as power to assimilate even in unfavorable situations, but simultaneously as tension, caution, the loss of physical beauty." Europeans are just such a super race (Uber-Rasse), and so are the Jews: "it is ultimately a ruling type, although very different from the simple old ruling races who did not change their environment." According to Nietzsche the ability to assimilate and adapt, to transplant as a people from one milieu to another, is a surpassing, an overcoming of racial as well as geographical determinants, and ruling types are found in such transcending races or peoples (KSA 11:136). If the "new" ruling peoples who have transcended nationalism and race are also distinguished by their capacity for adapting to new environments and changing them, an ecumenical purpose behind and beneath these ruling types would of necessity bode well for the earth as the environment per se. Humans united behind an ecumenical vision of humanity and regarding the entire earth as their environment would not be capable of the environmentally destructive practices and policies displayed by the individual peoples under the sway of the old gravity. We recall that the pivotal factor in the timing of humanity's ecumenical movement is the emergence of human beings into an era of self-knowledge and self-possession, such that they are historically free to decide their own fate and must adjust to a new gravity in the absence of God. While Kreis points out the negative side of this development in the context of the Enlightenment, namely humanity's abandonment of 388

Kreis, Nietzsche, Wagner und die Juden, 71-2.

3. The Lust to Rule, Or the Bestowing Virtue Goes World Wide

297

its original pact with the Creator, I think Nietzsche's approach is far more comprehensive and includes a critique of the Enlightenment itself. Among Europe's thinkers Nietzsche is the one to truly problematize the death of God and to argue for the earth now that the old gravity has failed. His concern for the planet and its future is inextricable from his concern for the future of humanity, and far from affording himself "the luxury of forgetting" humanity's ties to the earth and its soil, Nietzsche plays the role of constant reminder and tempter-experimenter, using every device at his disposal to open our eyes to the dignity of the closest things. A brief review of the earliest model of world-wide ruling should refresh our memory concerning what is at stake. Dominion over the earth is granted according to the Old Testament, but as Passmore observes, "it is far from suggesting that God has left the fate of all animals entirely in man's hands, whether before or after the Fall." Beasts and humans are both provided for, and "after the Flood, he instructed every type of living creature, not man alone, to 'breed abundantly on the earth.'" There are according to Passmore therefore two possible interpretations of man's dominion: "the first, that he is an absolute, or Thrasymachean, ruler who cares for the world God made subject to him only insofar as he profits from doing so; the second, that like the Platonic shepherd he takes care of the living things over which he rules for their own sake, governing them not 'with force and with cruelty' but in the manner of a good shepherd, anxious to preserve them in the best possible condition for his master, in whose hands alone their final fate will rest."389 We have not yet examined in detail Nietzsche's thoughts concerning animals and humanity's relation to them, but we have indeed seen enough of the ecumenical dimension in Nietzsche to know that he is neither a Thrasymachus nor a shepherd (Christ), in strict terms, but perhaps a combination of the two, as suggested by Richardson's quoting of Nietzsche's "the Roman Ceasar with Christ's soul."390 Nietzsche's rulers do not rule by right of might, instead, as an oligarchy of free and ruling spirits, they are at odds with tyranny and transcend the small, power politics of nations, focusing on ecumenical goals which are best served when humanity's energies and spiritual exemplars are not squandered in the service, and the sacrifice, of the state. Having said that, Nietzsche's rulers are not exactly shepherds, either, since they are aware of their rank and use it to rule. When he speaks of the masses and the rulers simultaneously, they appear to dwell in a parallel manner without really interacting, and this is less than the solicitude shown by a shepherd. Nor do the Nietzschean rulers tend their flock in anticipation of giving it over to the ultimate care of God, though in a sense, as we shall discuss below, the rulers are themselves a "return of the master." There is no denying that Nietzsche sympathizes with the positions of the Sophists and that he castigates Socrates for using his dialectic as a castrating tool, but to hear the ecumenical Nietzsche is to hear a voice far more reasoned and refined than the 389 390

Passmore, Man's Responsibility for Nature, 8-9. Richardson (1996), 68-9.

298

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

voice of Thrasymachus, a voice that decries the use of force while acknowledging the undercurrent of exploitation that runs beneath all culture and cultivating. Leiss explains the rationale behind "mastery of nature" as the concept is processed by modern Utopian thought. It is shorthand for "the guarantee of an adequate material provision for human wants," but these "wants" are burgeoning in such a manner that they "can only be met by a highly developed productive apparatus which continually locates new resources in nature and transforms them into desired commodities." The optimistic long term view is that given current technology and forecasts, humanity will always be able to satisfy its demands, even on a world-wide scale. "If the material desires of men and women are expected to expand infinitely, then mastery of nature in this sense means an ongoing search for adequate sources of satisfaction, and under certain conditions every level of attainment might meet an escalating discontent arising out of appetites accustomed to regular stimulation." 391 Thus the optimistic or to use Leiss's words the view of "the more sanguine authorities" appears to ride the wave of optimism and forgetting spawned by the Enlightenment's overly strong reliance on reason, which in Nietzsche's thinking is a continuation of the disembodied metaphysics of old. An embodied view, such as Nietzsche's, recognizes that value resides in the closest things as they are, not in the exponential manufacture of things for the sake of things, such that the finite dimensions of the closest things are raided, harvested, processed again and again for the sake of consumerism. There is nothing in Nietzsche's writings to suggest that he agrees with the sanguine voice of reason described by Leiss, just as there is no indication of favor in Nietzsche for a humanity whose goal is as shallow and demeaning as the fulfillment of material wants — Nietzsche is appalled by such a prospect for humanity, and he expresses his horror of the same whenever he condemns socialism on the one hand and the diminution of human beings to "last human being" on the other, which is the direst consequence of modernity's despiritualized, hive-like existence. The idea of mastery over nature was given wings early in the seventeenth century according to Leiss by "a radically new method to guide scientific investigation." Bacon and Descartes became proponents of this new method according to which "men would achieve 'mastery over nature,'" and the two basic components of the innovation are as follows. First, "the new method would permit an explanation of natural phenomena far superior to what obtained in their day with respect to such criteria as generality, consistency, and conceptual rigor," and secondly, "the fruits of the method also would consist in social benefits — notably an increased supply of goods and a general liberation of the intellect from superstition and irrationality — that would enable men to control their desires and to pursue their mutual concerns more justly and humanely." 392 W h o could fail to see the enormous promise of this 391 392

Leiss, The Domination Leiss, The Domination

of Nature, 16. of Nature, 21.

3. The Lust to Rule, Or the Bestowing Virtue Goes World Wide

299

new grounding of the scientific spirit, stated in these positive terms of enhanced scientific rigor and social benefits! The problem of course arises when humanity begins to perceive the earth, or nature, as an infinite resource upon which it may draw for the sake of increasing the supply of goods for humans. Now humanity has a compelling motive for its reorientation toward nature, for moving from a position in which it regards itself as a part of Creation to one from which it regards itself as lord of the earth, as master over nature and as keeper of the keys to nature. For Europeans already facing the exhaustion of supplies of wood as their chief energy source, and feudalistic social conditions that cried out for reform, the scientific method of Bacon and Descartes must have seemed a second godsend, and in retrospect, it precipitated a second Fall. In the absence of God it is not the case that humans can henceforth do no wrong; Nietzsche makes it abundantly clear that working on removing the concept of guilt by dismantling its institutional and psychological infrastructure is not synonymous with absolving humanity of stupidity, greed, violence, leveling etc. Loyalty to the earth requires justice in the relations that govern between humans and the earth, and this means that the earth becomes the new moral authority, the new gravity. Humans are of course famously loathe to regard the earth, and its staggering array of life forms, as anything resembling an authority, although we are perfectly content with prostrating ourselves before far flung notions of the farthest, the last things, whose legitimacy is self-referential species vanity. Nietzsche's call to remain faithful to the earth flies in the face of the Baconian call to conquer nature as humans conquer any other realm. "Bacon decries the unwillingness of men to study diligently the mundane phenomena of nature, for 'the most certain it is that he who will not attend to things like these, as being too paltry and minute, can neither win the kingdom of nature nor govern it.'"393 For the briefest of moments one imagines, on reading this passage, that Nietzsche is speaking to rally humans to observe what is closest and to throw off the lure of the last things, but then it quickly becomes a matter of "winning" and "governing" the kingdom of nature, and this is not the spirit in which Nietzsche wisely invites our familiarity with the closest things. "Loyalty to the earth" entails far different thought processes and behavior than violation of the earth, which is really at stake in the Baconian-alchemist's dream. Leiss observes the "psychological dynamic of mastery over nature" in Bacon's language, in which the "vital legacy of magic and alchemy is revealed in his terminology, which displays strong overtones of aggression (including the sexual aggression connected with the feminine gender of the noun and the use of'her' as the pronoun): 'hounding,' 'vexing,' and 'subduing' nature."394 If Nietzsche were even a fraction of the woman-hating and power-mongering brute he is made out to be by commentators who remain largely unaware of his writings 393 394

Leiss, The Domination ofNature, 55. Leiss, The Domination of Nature, 60.

300

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

on the Dionysian, the quotidian, the closest things, and the ecumenical, surely we would have ample evidence of such a "psychological dynamic of mastery over nature" in his writings too. But ruling is not construed by Nietzsche as a license to rape, any more than the will to power is construed as a license to violate nature or other human beings. 395 The difference between Bacon and Nietzsche is perhaps the difference between an early but avowed modernist and one in whom modernism learns to overcome itself, learns to regard itself with a critical eye. Lampert observes that Nietzsche fully embraces the new Baconian science of nature "which gradually uncovers what can be known of the natural history of our cosmos and our species," but he rejects the technological dominance of nature "as hubristic excess by the animal who knows no assignable limits to the conquest of nature." Nietzsche's biggest objection to Bacon, however, lies in his role as a prototype modernist: "Bacon's work is dangerous and must be opposed by the German philosopher of the future because Bacon set in motion the 'modern ideas' that capture Europe and threaten the ideal of human nobility, most particularly the nobility of wisdom or of genuine philosophy." 396 The nobility that Nietzsche would cultivate in humanity through its rulers is not the modern spirit pushing forward at all costs, at any expense to the earth and its life forms, using technology to master nature and extract materials to produce more and more goods. Neither the conquest nor the goods, neither the means nor the end of this modernist science have anything to do with the wisdom of ecumenical thinking. The rewriting of "lust to rule" as bestowing virtue attempts to rescue humanity from a tailspin. The ecumenical project of reclaiming the earth after millennia of efforts to make the earth a place of opprobrium includes weaning humans off the narcotic of mastery of nature, which has been in our veins since the old narcotic, God, lost its potency. Whatever has passed for "ruling" or leadership in human terms since the Enlightenment has failed to place earth in the forefront, in the focus of humans at the level of the quotidian and the closest, engaging instead in petty, destructive and divisive politics whose predominance has left ruling with a bad name. Indeed, judging by the modern spirit's aversion to rulers and ruling, it appears that humanity would rather wipe itself out, and the earth along with it, than face up to the prospect of governing itself ecumenically in partnership with the earth. Christianity has been at odds, if not at war with ruling types since its beginning: "In Christianity the instincts of the subjugated and oppressed come to fore: it is the lower classes that seek their salvation in it." Among the features of Christianity which Nietzsche now enumerates are: 395

396

Leiss shows an understanding of N.'s will to power when he writes that N.'s "basic intention was to show the primacy of valuation in all forms of human experience . . . The forms of reason enable us 'to misunderstand reality in a shrewd manner,' that is, to create a stable basis for experience and action in order to assure the preservation and enhancement of life" (ibid, 106-7). Leiss is quoting from Will to Power # 480. Laurence Lampert, "Nietzsche and Bacon," International Studies in Philosophy 33:3 (2002), 124-5.

3. The Lust to Rule, Or the Bestowing Virtue Goes World Wide

301

lack of openness (Öffentlichkeit) in favor of the hiding place and dark room; hatred of the body with even hygiene rejected as sensuality; cruelty against oneself and others; hatred toward those who think differently; the will to persecute; diet maintained so as to favor morbid symptoms and overstimulate the nerves. "Christian is the deadly hostility toward the rulers of the earth, toward the noble' . . . Christian is the hatred of the spirit, of pride, courage, freedom, liberty of the spirit; Christian is the hatred of the senses, of the joys of the senses, of joy itself" (A 21, KSA 6:187-8). As he claims elsewhere explicitly, the democratic spirit of modernity merely continues the spirit of Christianity in its hatred of rulers and noble types. Whereas Nietzsche would conserve and protect the types he refers to as "predators," Christianity wants to rule over them and achieves this by making them sick: "weakening is the Christian recipe for taming, for civilizing'" (A 22, KSA 6:189). In detailed notes from June 1887 Nietzsche gives one of his most persuasive accounts of why people hate to be ruled. Whenever humans were violated and oppressed by other humans, it was morality that entered as a saving grace and protected the oppressed from despair and suicide: "for the impotence against humans, not the impotence against nature produces the most desperate embitterment against existence." Without morality the violated and oppressed would have nothing, be nothing, for as Nietzsche implies, humans are capable of putting up with anything nature can throw at them, but not with the unpunished cruelty of other human beings. Thus morality treated power holders, violent types, and '"rulers' in general" ("die 'Herren' überhaupt") as enemies against whom the common man had to be protected by means of encouragement and strengthening. Consequently, morality taught people to hate and despise most profoundly the basic character trait of the ruling types, namely their will to power. If this morality could be abolished or denied, then the profoundly hated will to power would be greeted with a reversed perception: "If the suffering, oppressed were to lose faith that they have a right to despise the will to power, then they would enter the phase of hopeless desperation." What the oppressed feel and express toward the oppressor, in the guise of morality, is itself an expression of will to power, only unfortunately for the oppressed, it is not as strong as the will of the oppressive ruler. "The oppressed would recognize that he stands on the same ground as the oppressor and that he has no prerogative, no higher rank before him" (KSA 12:214-5). To reiterate the thought with which Nietzsche begins this note: morality is the only buffer between oppressed humans and their oppressors — remove this morality and, in Nietzsche's world of the will to power, any redemptive aspect to one's suffering is lost — one simply suffers, without even the solace of believing that the oppressor is evil and one's suffering is morally unjustified. What does Nietzsche intend with such a seemingly grim note, followed as it is by two more pages of elaborations of the idea? In its conclusion the note closely resembles numerous descriptions of the eternal recurrence of the same in which Nietzsche argues that life without meaning, recurring eternally, is the most nihilistic

302

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

thought possible.397 Just as ERS is not intended to make a hell of one's life and of the earth, but on the contrary, is intended to motivate the greatest possible life affirmation and seizing of the moment, Nietzsche's proposed suspension of morality in order to force people to regard their lives under the will to power is a cultivating mechanism, a cultivating thought useful for living in the new gravity. There will always be a morality and we should not err in thinking that the current morality of Christianity, which favors the oppressed, is the only possible morality. What is needed in order to further the goals of the species? What is species preserving and species cultivating? These are Nietzsche's primary concerns in the matter of ruling, and a major obstacle to rewriting ruling as bestowing virtue is the virulence with which morality attacks ruling in its essence: the will to power. Note # 12 in the above cluster of notes on European nihilism provides a scenario in practice in keeping with the loss of meaning in theory. The underprivileged no longer have solace and "destroy in order to be destroyed." Cut loose from morality they no longer have a reason to resign themselves to anything, to put up with abuse, and so they adopt the position of their oppressors and rekindle their own will to power, they "fight back" as it were "in that they^r«' the powerful to be their executioners. This is the European form of Buddhism, doing No after all existence has lost its 'meaning'" (KSA 12:216). Once again Nietzsche is speculating on the most extreme consequences of his twin doctrines of eternal recurrence and will to power, attempting to ascertain how they might function as cultivating mechanisms. The "active nihilism" of "doing No" is a highly unlikely scenario — in order to take Nietzsche literally on this point we would have to presuppose that the oppressed are actually prepared to give up their morality, give up their only buffer and protection against the oppressors, then, we would have to presuppose that once having given up their only protection, the oppressed become would-be oppressors themselves, exercising their weaker, less developed will to power by "forcing" the only way they can, namely by forcing oppressors to kill them. Let us agree for the moment at least that this scenario is a thought experiment, not a serious proposition. The "doing No" scenario depends on weaker types taking a step that is entirely contrary to their needs and survival, namely dropping their only weapon, their morality. Nietzsche has a similar problem when he insists that the ERS must work as a cultivating mechanism, supposedly because some individuals and entire peoples will be able to tolerate it, while others who cannot tolerate it will not survive; the problem here is with getting a given individual or a people to accept the ERS in the first place — after all, it is not a lethal virus, such that once exposed, one either develops a resistance or succumbs (the inoculation theory comes 397

In fact, of the 16 different notes that comprise this collection entitled "European nihilism,"# 6 is the one that reads: "Let us think this thought in its most terrible form: existence, as it is, without meaning and goal, but unavoidably recurring, without a finale in nothingness: 'the eternal recurrence.' This is the most extreme form of nihilism: the nothing (the 'meaningless') eternally!" (KSA 12:213).

3. The Lust to Rule, Or the Bestowing Virtue Goes World Wide

303

to mind). Nietzsche may wish for ERS to have the effect of an inoculation, but in fact it is just a thought, capable of being ignored as easily as other thoughts. Nietzsche underscores in # 14 of this cluster that the crisis of nihilism "purifies," it organizes and arranges, it sifts through humanity with a consequence, giving impetus to "an order of rank of strengths from the standpoint of health." When all is said and done, commanders will be recognized as commanders and obeyers as obeyers, "naturally outside all existing social orders" (KSA 12:216-7). The disclaimer regarding how this process of cultivation transpires "outside" (abseits) the social orders suggests that the process is already in motion, and has been since nihilism in its passive and active forms has been around, imperceptible to most or disguised as Nietzsche claims by symptoms of self-destruction such as self-vivisection, poisoning, intoxication, Romanticism, reliance on deeds that make mortal enemies of the powerful. These symptoms, furthermore, are the result of "an instinctive selection" of what must destroy: when the underprivileged drop their guard, their perishing by self-destruction becomes for Nietzsche a matter of instinct (KSA 12:215). This is his way of underscoring that the will to power is with the instincts, whether or not the instincts express themselves in life affirmation of life denial, i.e., the instincts are free to choose selfdestruction because the will to power overrides even the will to remain alive. In any case, morality is the physiological inhibitor of the will to power and comes between instinct and will to power. If this process is already underway, in an insidious and unacknowledged manner, Nietzsche's cultivating doctrines would have an accelerating effect, they would somehow manifest the crisis whose outcome would be a more consistent, instinctively more certain humanity, also a healthier humanity no longer conflicted about ruling and being ruled. Let us now examine what remains after all this cultivating and separating in the great centrifuge of Nietzsche's twin doctrines. "Who will prove to be the strongest in this? The most moderate, those who have no need of extreme articles of faith, those who not only concede a good portion of accident and nonsense but love it, those who are capable of thinking of human beings with a considerable reduction of their value without thereby becoming small and weak: the richest in health who are equal to the most misfortunes and therefore do not fear misfortunes so much — humans who are certain of their power and represent the achieved strength of humans with conscious pride" (KSA 12:217). After all the Sturm undDrangoidespair, perishing, selfdestruction, and purifying, the desired outcome for Nietzsche is a rather unthreatening, quotidian, and reasonable human being — not an extremist by any means, but definitely a well-tuned individual. There is the by now familiar virtue of moderation, so essential in an animal of extreme passions; flexibility of the spirit in the form of being able to love accident and nonsense (Unsinn is literally nonsense but also connotes un-(non)meaning, as Sinn is meaning); the ability to face a reduction in the relative value of human beings without being diminished by this reality (modesty, gratitude, loyalty, less hubris); a state of health tested by many misfortunes (experience of

304

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

life as opposed to mere observance) and finally, pride in the genuine human achievement of strength and a bearing commensurate with this strength. Clearly Nietzsche's notion of ruling has a place in this vision of the strong and moderate, stable human being at the top of her powers. When he asks the question: "How would such a human being think of the eternal recurrence?" (KSA 12:217), the rhetorical nature of the question should be obvious: such a human being would desire nothing more than the recurrence of her life eternally. Ruling need not be violent or oppressive, though Nietzsche understands the motivations that have solidified, indeed petrified over the years as a reaction against ruling. The message in part is that instead of hating rulers for their will to power, they should be hated for being poor examples of human beings, for whereas humans will come and go and can be cultivated in one direction or another, the will to power stays. Should we be swimming against the stream of the will to power or more efficiently using our energies to put ruling on the right track? What are the possibilities for ruling in an ecumenical sense? Do Nietzsche's trials of cultivation represent any improvement over the status quo in which the earth is inhabited by dictatorships, democracies, closed societies, the well fed and the starving, the open-minded and the violently paranoid? Are the behaviors and movements that Nietzsche deems self-destructive (essentially suicidal) really manifestations of active nihilism, of "doing No," and if they are, is any reasonable intervention possible? Is humanity currently under any rule at all, or are we deceiving ourselves by merely closing our eyes to slow-motion anarchy? In Genealogy Nietzsche refers to the redemption of human beings from rulers, or masters,398 as a particular kind of poison flowing through the veins of all humanity. "The people have won — or 'the slaves' or 'the mob' or 'the herd' — whatever you prefer to call them — if this has happened through the Jews, so be it! in that case no people ever had a more world historical mission. 'The masters' have been done away with; the morality of the common man has triumphed" (GM 1/9, KSA 5:269-70). A few pages later Nietzsche conducts an exercise, using the form of the dialogue, to demonstrate the reasoning of those who fabricate ideals in the absence of power. In one example, the weak argue that they are not only better than the powerful, "the rulers of the earth" (die Herren der Erde")399 whose spittle they have to lick, they also have it better and are better off (GM 1/14, KSA 5:281-2). This reverse logic or perverse rationalizing seems absurd on the face of it, but Nietzsche must attribute substantial power to this time-honored device of denial, of fighting the masters by denying 398

It is not always clear when N. uses Herr to mean master and when he uses it to mean ruler; generally speaking, if N. uses Herr in connection with Sklaven, i.e., slaves, as he does throughout Genealogy, I will conform by using "master" instead of ruler as appropriate, in order to indicate that he is speaking in terms of the master-slave polarity. For the rest, it would be useful for Nietzsche scholarship if commentators refrained from translating Herr, Herren as "master" in those instances where N. might be referring to rulers instead.

399

Kaufmann renders this phrase "lords of the earth."

3. The Lust to Rule, Or the Bestowing Virtue Goes World Wide

305

the instrumentality and effects of the masters, because after all he concludes that the morality of the weak, the common man has triumphed — the masters have been done away with not by force but by morality's stubborn refusal to acknowledge force. If the "slave" who has to serve as a lick spittle by day returns to her own kind each evening and maintains her dignity by denying her servitude, indeed by arbitrarily reversing roles and maintaining that she is the superior one, over time this manufactured ideal has the effect of destroying the masters. It is unclear whether Nietzsche objects to the slaves' refusal to abide by the rules of the ruling game, according to which there would be genuine rulers and genuine subjects, such that ruling actually means something and has the potential for nobility, or, whether he is merely venting his frustration about the ungroundedness of the slaves' notions of justice, power, dignity etc — inasmuch as the slaves' notions are not based on and do not emanate from active (real) power. One thing is clear, however, and that is that the "slave revolt" precipitated by ressentiment is spiritually refined and formidable, perhaps even a kind of "de-cultivating" or "anti-cultivating" regarded by Nietzsche as a serious threat to humanity. White argues that in disposing of the master, and condemning him to silence, the "very possibility of'mastery' has been forgotten. Thus, everything now hides the exclusion of the master: art, religion, morality, even science, which comprehends the world with entirely 'slavish' categories like 'reaction' and 'adaptation,' 'struggle' and 'universal law.'" White sets about therefore to "show how in describing the victory of the slave, Nietzsche's strategy in the Genealogy is to force us to undertake a recollection of the master." What White calls the "return of the master" will provide "an alternative ideal which can overcome the historical dominion of nihilism." 400 One might quibble over using the word "ideal" to describe Nietzsche's alternative, since after all he gives us a revealing glimpse into the manufacturing of ideals in Genealogy 1:14, but White is indeed on to something and I heartily agree with his overall position. "Return of the master" has a nice ring to it, but I would prefer to use "ruler" in this context because in my reading of the ecumenical Nietzsche — the Nietzsche who asks "who shall rule the earth?" — it is not a matter of mastering or being master so much as ruling, or bestowing. Again, Richardson's differentiation of master behavior from superhuman behavior is helpful here.401 Others might argue that only semantics are at stake here. For his argument White construes nihilism as "nothing other than the triumph of the slave and the continued destruction of the individual as such. And, as the artist of such a history the priest is finally revealed as the world-historical agent of nihilism itself." Indeed, the priest is a particularly formidable opponent of the ruling spirits, and as we observed in the context of Nietzsche's great hygiene, the priests are capable of applying "remedies" that severely impair and inhibit one's physiology. Other factors 400

401

Richard White, "The Return of the Master: An Interpretation of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals" in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality, 64-5. Richardson (1996), 68-9, 72.

306

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

also work against the rulers, e.g. scholars where they would detract from the work of new philosophers, and "modern ideas" generally as they tend to undermine the concept of ruling and the notion of rank or hierarchy. White goes on to quote from both Beyond Good and Evil and Genealogy to show their organic relationship. Return of the master is restoration of humanity's ability to will; willing is the opposite of nihilism and the last man; the priest and the scholar feed nihilism and create slaves; but slaves can free themselves and become the master, i.e., they can become "new philosophers" as announced in Beyond. White regards Genealogy as "performative critique," by which he means a prescription for healing. 402 Like Danto, Higgins, Lampert, Schacht, Williams, Magnus and others, White sees a practical dimension to Nietzsche's talk of "masters" or rulers, and I argue that this practical dimension is at the heart of the ecumenical Nietzsche. Most of Nietzsche's language devoted to a new ruling caste, or race, is found in the unpublished notes, but by no means all of it. Before we examine some of this language it will help to speculate briefly on the question of why he relegates most of his "ruling" commentary to the desk drawer rather than publish it. I think a couple of possibilities should be entertained. First, Nietzsche is well aware that he is writing in a century of mass movements, and as one who decries mass movements and revolution in particular, he does not want to come across as a nationalist, a social reformer, a Utopian, or anyone remotely resembling a socialist or anarchist. The published works therefore present the image Nietzsche wants to present: for those who read him carefully, the ecumenical vision is clearly present and ties his thought together even more coherently than do the major doctrines, which are all tributaries of the ecumenical. We should also remember that Nietzsche's unique brand of philosophizing "as Dionysus" relies on the virtue of tempting and attempting, which in practical terms means that we are supposed to be lured deeper into his thought labyrinth not only by the surface calls and exoteric, welcoming gestures — not exclusively by the discourse in which Nietzsche proffers the pronoun "we"— but also by the silence of his aposiopesis and his profound conviction that one does not speak openly of the best things, does not "advertise" them if one truly wants them to be accepted as valuable. As he appears to have held ruling as the highest expression of the will to power, in other words, as the greatest treasure for a humanity very much in need of such "bestowing," it follows that he limits his direct communications on the issue of ruling, preferring to persuade by suggestion, tempting, inoculation. He shows significant restraint in this regard judging by the numerous instances in which he writes about the ruling caste in his notes. Zarathustras final speech or lesson is delivered to the higher men who begin to realize, led by the ugliest human being, that their time spent with Zarathustra has been a therapeutic experience. As they express their gratitude, close to midnight, and begin to celebrate, Zarathustra goes into a kind of trance and says: " The hour has come: let us 402

White, "The Return of the Master," 71.

3. The Lust to Rule, Or the Bestowing Virtue Goes World Wide

307

wander into the night\" In this chapter entitled "The Sleep Walker Song" presented in twelve movements or hours, Zarathustra re-presents his roundelay from Part III, thus closing again the circle that leads to the expression and affirmation of the eternal recurrence of the same. This time, however, the time is midnight, illustrative of Zarathustra's closing and in a sense the completion o f w h a t he is able to do "by day." H e tells the higher humans: "Still! Still! T h e n you can hear something of what must not become loud by day; but now, in the cool air, when all the noise of your hearts grew still — / — now it speaks, now it is heard, now is creeps into nocturnal, overwaking souls: oh! oh! how it sighs! how it laughs in dream!" ( Z I V 19, KSA 4:395-8). The sleep walker song is essentially a reprise of the song of joy, the spirit of joy that seals the eternal recurrence of the same, with its recurring theme of "all joy wants eternity." Interspersed in this otherwise "drunken song," as it was referred to in earlier editions of Nietzsche's works, is the final message of Zarathustra regarding his ecumenical vision. Section 4 expresses a mood of trepidation, once again the hour is approaching: — the hour in which I shiver and freeze, which asks and asks and asks: who has enough heart for it? — who shall be the ruler of the earth? W h o wants to say: thus you shall flow, you great and small streams!' — the hour nears: oh human being, you higher human being, beware! This speech is for fine ears, for your ears — (KSA 4:398-9)

T h e great problem in this final speech of Zarathustra is that of who shall rule the earth. This requires heart and the will to tell all streams, big and small, how they should run their course ("so sollt ihr laufen"). T h e hour approaches when this question must be answered, when the rulers of the earth must step forward. T h e higher human beings are Zarathustra's audience because they accompany him up to the end and they possess "fine ears," i.e., the message should not be lost on them, although this remains questionable. And we recall that this message is reserved for the night, suggesting that Nietzsche regards the question of ruling as too important, too special to be trumpeted by day, when all are awake but few have ears for him. Section 5 continues the revelation: "I am carried away, my soul dances. Day's work! Day's work! W h o shall be ruler of the earth?" The expression "day's work" (Tagewerk) means literally one day's work, but figuratively it refers to one's work or one's task. This'is an important point because Zarathustra's concluding philosophical statement is "Am I concerned with happiness? I am concerned with my workT (Z IV 20, KSA 4:408). Thus the linking of his day's work with the question of who shall rule the earth is the great task and problem with which Zarathustra is left: this task causes him trepidation but also great joy, "it carries him away" and his soul dances. But in attributing this great task to Zarathustra, we are not implying that Zarathustra himself shall be ruler of the earth, or of anyone — this is revealed in his critique of the day now that Zarathustra is "sleep walking" and speaking from his vantage point of night.

308

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

Section 7 is addressed to the day and begins: "Leave me! Leave me! I am too pure for you. Do not touch me! Did my world not become perfect just now?" On the surface Zarathustra is playing coy here, and certainly his words suggest a tone of elitism, but more is at stake. Zarathustra has earned his night, he has earned his sojourn in the night as a sleep walker, one whose step is certain even without seeing, even without consciousness. This statement on his part is an assertion of his rights as an individual, for now that his day is behind him, "the day" in general is behind him, and this he claims by announcing that "his world" just became perfect. Not "the world" only "his world" reveals how Zarathustra's instrumentality is limited, finite, that of a teacher, not a miracle worker or redeemer. He continues: "The purest shall be the rulers of the earth, the most unknown, the strongest, the midnight souls who are brighter and deeper than any day." Zarathustra now tells the day, and the world, to find someone else — he literally tells them both "reach for some god, do not reach for me." There is defiance and resignation in this disavowal of the specific task of ruling the earth; by this time, having concluded his day's work, Zarathustra knows what is to be done and he also knows he is not the one to do it. As for Zarathustra flippantly telling the day and the world to go out and find a god for their task, there is irony here, since Zarathustra began his work with the proclamation that all gods are dead, and yet, the task of ruling the earth, formerly God's work, seems so daunting to humans that Zarathustra suggestively "wishes" a god were available for this task. A proper god, to speak blasphemously for the moment, might make a good go of it, might actually have the requisite qualifications for ruling the earth. Section 8 picks up this theme: "God's woe is deeper, you odd world! Reach for God's woe, not for me. What am I? A drunken sweet lyre — / a midnight lyre, a bell-toad whom no one understands, but who must speak before the deaf, you higher human beings! For you do not understand me! (Z IV 19, 398-401). Now the disavowal of ruling on his own becomes even more ironic, because the higher types to whom he speaks are in fact not high enough, not capable of hearing his message concerning who shall rule the earth. This is vintage Nietzsche, however, because just when the reader wants to conclude that everything has been in vain, that there will never be rulers of the earth or super humans or a meaning for the earth, as Zarathustra had called for them in the Prologue, one realizes instead the limitations or borders of Zarathustra as a work, and turns one's gaze to the ecumenical as it exists in Nietzsche's writings before and after Zarathustra. In this sense Thus Spoke Zarathustra is itself a stunning example of aposiopesis — Zarathustra goes silent, his speaking goes silent, but his work is continued by his auditors (readers) in the real world. Difficult as it is to step from the atmosphere of Zarathustra back into the mundane, back into the day, this is precisely what Nietzsche calls for and his own next step is Beyond Good and Evil, whose preface he concludes by writing: "But we who are neither Jesuits, nor democrats, nor even Germans enough, we good Europeans and free, very free spirits — we still have it, the whole need of the spirit and the whole tension of its bow!

3. The Lust to Rule, Or the Bestowing Virtue Goes World Wide

309

And perhaps also the arrow, the task, who knows? the goal" (BGE P, KSA 5:13). More is revealed of the nature of the task that good Europeans set for themselves in the eighth chapter of Beyond, entitled "Peoples and Fatherlands," of which number 251 may serve as a particularly relevant example of ruling in connection with the ecumenical. One has to accept that a people suffering from nationalistic nerve fever and political ambition will display clouds and disturbances, "little attacks of stupefaction," as for example with the Germans and their various stupidities: now anti-French, now anti-Jewish, anti-Polish, now Christian-romantic, now Wagnerian, Teutonic, Prussian and whatever else these "small befoggings" of the German spirit might be called. Nietzsche confesses that he himself had been briefly infected and began entertaining thoughts about things that do not concern him, "the first sign of political infection." As an example, he cites German opinion regarding Jews. He has never met a German, he asserts, who is well disposed toward the Jews. Claiming that even those who for political purposes reject the most radical anti-Semitism are themselves fundamentally antiSemitic and respond only to the "dangerous immoderation" of this form of hatred, he next ventures an explanation for why Germans are anti-Semitic. Comparing Germany as a community to a stomach (one of his favorite biological metaphors), Nietzsche observes that the German stomach and blood cannot cope with this "quantity of'Jew,'" unlike the Italians, the French, and the English who have coped "as a consequence of a stronger digestion." In crying out against allowing additional Jews to enter Germany and Austria, especially those Jews to the east,403 the Germans are obeying an instinct, for the German people as a type are "still weak and undefined, so that it blurs easily and could be easily extinguished by a stronger race." Meanwhile, the Jews according to Nietzsche are the strongest, toughest and purest race living in Europe, and as a force in European politics will have to be reckoned with along with Russia. "That the Jews, if they wanted — or if one were to force them as the anti-Semites appear to want — could even now have preponderance, yes even literally rule over Europe, is certain; likewise that they are not working and making plans for this" (BGE 251, KSA 192-4). Meanwhile, Nietzsche continues, the Jews want to be assimilated and Germans should oblige, especially where the German type is already defined enough to not feel threatened. It would be interesting to see whether the inherited art of commanding and obeying, as found in Prussians of the Brandenburg region, could be enhanced and culti-

403

The Ostjuden or eastern Jews were regarded as most threatening because unlike the Jews of central and western Europe who had chosen to assimilate over long periods of time and were therefore often indistinguishable, in appearance, from other Europeans, the eastern Jews maintained their "Jewish" appearance, customs, identity, and were moving into Germany during the period of Germany's "nationalistic fever," as N. calls it, namely the 19th and early 20th centuries. The eastern Jews were therefore "exposed" as a particularly dangerous, looming presence in the National Socialist propaganda film The EternalJew (Der ewige Jude), which uses unflattering footage of eastern Jews from Germany's conquest of Poland to make the point that this is what the "real Jews," the "undisguised Jews" are like.

310

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

vated by the genius of finance, patience, and spirit, especially since spirit and spirituality are lacking in the former. "But here it is proper to break off my cheerful Germanomania and festival speech, for I am already touching on what is serious to me, on the 'European problem' as I understand it, on the cultivation of a new caste ruling over Europe" (ibid, 194-5). By referring ironically to his speculations about intermarriage between Prussians and Jews as "Germanomania" (Kaufmanns translation of Deutschtümelei) and his festival speech, Nietzsche backs off because he is now entering the space about which he is serious, and about which, for the moment at least, he is no longer prepared to speak. But he has already made it clear in the preceding lines of this three-page section that the way toward cultivating a European ruling caste is to disavow notions of nationality and race, as they cause nothing but anxiety and politically exploitable fear in a people such as the Germans. The more mature and stable communities of Europe are able to cope with their Jewish minorities and they should be regarded as models in this regard. When Nietzsche prophetically writes in Dawn that the next century (the twentieth) invites us to view the spectacle of the "decision on the fate of the European Jews" he does not envision the Holocaust, but instead the prospect of Jews becoming rulers of Europe or losing Europe ("es bleibt ihnen nur noch übrig, entweder die Herren Europas zu werden oder Europa zu verlieren . . . " ) (D 205, KSA 3:180-1). When this statement from Dawn is compared with the later statement from Beyond and other similar published comments, we observe that Nietzsche regards the Jews as a unifying, super-national force in European culture, such that they will be decisive in moving Europe toward unity by means of their significant role in cultivating a ruling caste. Nietzsche's discussions of ruling (Herrschen) do indeed include specific roles for the various peoples of Europe, and specific mention of the relative strengths and weaknesses of the peoples in relation to ecumenical goals. Clearly Nietzsche is prophetic when he speaks about the insecurity of Germans in relation to the Jews, for as history has demonstrated, politicians and other leaders were able to exploit such fears in their engineering of state-sponsored anti-Semitism leading to the so-called Final Solution. It is all too easy to become bogged down in the status quo of racial and ethnic politics if one does not maintain a focus on Nietzsche's objective, or task, whenever he engages the issue of ruling. The task is ecumenical, that is, first Europe will transcend the rivalries and divisions of nationalism by cultivating a ruling European caste, then this model could be used to achieve a truly ecumenical administration of the entire earth. This is also Stegmaier's understanding of the process, especially since, as he points out, the Europeans will not be able to count on the unity of reason to solve completely new problems of political organization. "To be sure, into the Europeans' hands, Nietzsche expects, will fall 'the administration and oversight of all earthly culture,' but that does not mean that the culture of earth will be a European one." 404 404

Stegmaier, Philosophie der Fluktuanz:Dilthey und Nietzsche (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992), 62. Stegmaier is quoting Human II, 2, # 87.

3. The Lust to Rule, Or the Bestowing Virtue Goes World Wide

311

O f the numerous notes pertaining to the cultivation of a ruling caste I shall select a few as they help to illustrate what Nietzsche had in mind and merely summarize them. In spring 1884 he claims he is writing for a "species of human being which is not yet present: for the 'rulers of the earth,'" and in connection with Plato's statement to the effect that each of us would like to be ruler of all human beings, most preferably God, he a d d s " This attitude must be present again. The English, Americans, Russians" (KSA 11:50). At the same time he pens a note describing the need for a teaching "strong enough to have a cultivating effect: strengthening for the strong, paralyzing and breaking for the world weary." The "rule over the earth" meanwhile will be used "as a means for producing a higher type" (KSA 11:69). The task is to form a ruling caste "with the most comprehensive souls, capable of the most diverse tasks of ruling the earth," and the Jews should have a role in this due to their great practice in adapting. "The rule of earth is a near problem. The radical question is: must there be slavery? Or instead: it is no question at all, rather a fact" (KSA 11:72-3). Just over a year later, in summer 1885 he writes: "It approaches, unavoidable, hesitating, terrible like fate, the great task and question: how shall the earth as a whole be governed (verwaltet)? And to what purpose shall 'the human being' as a whole — and no longer a people, a race — be bred and cultivated ("gezogen und gezüchtet")?" To assist in the task of cultivating ruler types he proposes a morality that has opposite purposes from the current one and would cultivate humans "upward instead of into comfort and mediocrity" (KSA 11:580-82). Addressing the issue of new philosophers, a major concern of Beyond insofar as that work is subtitled "Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future," he writes in early summer 1885 that the new philosopher can only arise in connection with a ruling caste, as its highest spiritualization. "Great politics, administration of the earth are near; complete lack of principles for this" (KSA 11:533-4). At the same time that he pens the title "Beyond Good and Evil" (autumn 1885-autumn 1886) he writes this note attesting to the importance of timing for the ecumenical task: "From now on there will be favorable preconditions for more comprehensive ruling structures, whose like has not yet existed. And this is not even the most important thing; the origin of international race federations (Geschlechts- Verbänden) has been made possible, which pose themselves the task of cultivating a ruler-race, the future 'rulers of the earth.'" In this newly constructed aristocracy the will of "philosophical dynamos and artist-tyrants" will be given millennia of duration. 405 These new types will make use of democratic Europe as "their most willing and flexible tool for taking in hand the fate of the earth, for shaping 'human being' itself as would an artist" (KSA 12:87-8). Müller-Lauter observes in connection with these "artist-tyrants" that Nietzsche here reveals his mixed 405

N.'s words are "philosophischer Gewaltmenschen und Künsder-Tyrannen," literally "philosophical brutes," although this is oxymoronic. Gewalt is force, power, or violence, hence in anyone else's discourse such a person is a brute. However, since N . redeems will to power and lust to rule from their pejorative status, and connects Gewalt both with "philosophical" and "cultural," I have chosen to use the translation provided by Kaufmann for B G E #207, e.g. "dynamo."

312

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

conception of biological and artistic formations. He adds, however, that the task is not to be construed as a belief in a new humanity as a whole; such ruling types will not lead to one organism, but their presence will bring peoples and states closer.406 What emerges from even this glimpse into Nietzsche's unpublished notes concerning the ruling caste is that he gave the idea much thought, and the notes are relatively uninhibited compared to the published formulations. Frequently interspersed with these allusions to the rulers of the earth are discussions of Napoleon, whom Nietzsche regarded as the prototype of a ruler, a grand and unifying figure towering above the little individuals and the little politics of Europe. On the whole I would have to agree with Schlechta's conclusion that the unpublished notes have the effect of coarsening (vergröbern) Nietzsche's published statements, at least with respect to the topic of ruling, and for this reason they are most appealing to Nietzsche enthusiasts.407 Having said that, I see no reason to ignore the unpublished notes on ruling, as long as one does not limit oneself to only those notes arbitrarily selected for The Will to Power, since they obviously indicate the degree to which Nietzsche was serious about the issue. However, insofar as discussions of both the ecumenical and the notion of ruling are elaborated in the published works beginning as early as Human (1878), we would do well to look to these for both the scope and coherence of ruling in connection with the ecumenical. Beyond Good and Evil as the book immediately following Zarathustra has long been regarded as an elaboration of the ideas in Zarathustra, and Nietzsche himself states that the book is intended to be read as a different form of the highly lyrical, rhetorical discourse of Zarathustra and to serve as clarification.408 In Zarathustra the problem of ruling the earth constitutes a kind of frame around the entire work, insofar as the superhuman as the meaning of the earth is established already in the Prologue, and as we have seen, the question "who shall be ruler of the earth?" is found in Zarathustra's last speech to the higher humans ("The Sleep Walker Song"). Although Nietzsche discusses in Zarathustra some of the obstacles to ecumenical rule and to the cultivation of ruling types, notably in "On the Thousand and One Goals" and "On the Three Evils," he cannot use this venue as effectively as Beyond because the nature of the problem requires an elaboration of the role of philosophy in ruling the earth, and Zarathustra's discourse, his speech and literally his "speeches" distinguish him not as a philosopher but as a wise man — though it is hoped that these terms are to some extent interchangeable. In other words, just as Nietzsche rarely uses historical references and allusions to historical figures in Zarathustra, in order to preserve the loftiness and timeless quality of his protagonist's speeches and observations, so too he avoids problematizing the issues of philosophy, direct criticism of issues in the

406 407

408

Müller-Lauter, Nietzsche-Interpretationen II, 172-73. Karl Schlechta, editor. Friedrich Nietzsche. Werke in drei Bänden, 7th ed. (Munich: Hanser, 1973), vol. III, 1433. See Collis notes on BGE in KSA 14:345.

3. The Lust to Rule, Or the Bestowing Virtue Goes World Wide

313

history of philosophy, and conditions of contemporary philosophy. He cannot avoid these matters completely, to be sure, but Zarathustra goes about his work in a manner quite differently than Nietzsche goes about his in Beyond. There we find in part six, disguised under the ironic and apparently unassuming heading "We Scholars" numbers 204 through 213, all related to the topic of scholars and the values of scholarship in one way or another, as the chapters or sections of Beyond function as coherent units versus unrelated aphorisms. But in addition to providing Nietzsche's most thoughtful, considered observations on the nature of scholarship, this section makes it clear that the question of ruling comes down to a struggle between scholars and their spirit, which we might characterize as a slackening or castrating spirit illustrative of modernity, and philosophers and their spirit, which is supposed to be ruling and legislating. At stake is the disposition of our planet. T h e ecumenical task aired in "We Scholars" is, moreover, signaled in advance by the segue conclusion of part five, where Nietzsche decries the "overall degeneration of the human being," the "animalization of the human being to a dwarf animal of equal rights and claims." Whoever has thought this possibility to the end, he asserts, knows not only one more disgust but also perhaps "a new taskl" (BGE 203, KSA 5:127-8). He begins by pointing out that the declaration of independence of the scientific person from philosophy constitutes one of the more refined effects of the democratic nature: "the self-glorification and self-elevation of the scholar stand everywhere in full bloom today, in their best spring." Now science would prescribe laws for philosophy and for its part play the role of ruler ("den 'Herrn' spielen") or even play the role of philosopher. The degeneration of philosophy can be attributed to the sad state of modern philosophers, who do not measure up to Heraclitus, Plato, Empedocles and "all these royal and magnificent hermits of the spirit." T h e hodge-podge philosophers of today who calls themselves philosophers of reality or positivists are "in the best case themselves scholars and specialists" brought under the sway of science, illustrative of the " unbelief In the ruler-task and the masterfulness of philosophy" ("die Herren-Aufgabe und Herrschaftlichkeit"). Science rides high and with a good conscience while philosophy has gradually sunk to the status of arousing mistrust and pity. "Philosophy reduced to 'epistemology,' in fact not more than a timid epochism and doctrine of abstinence: a philosophy that no longer gets beyond the threshold at all and scrupulously denies itself the right to enter — this is philosophy in its last throes, an end, an agony, something that inspires pity. H o w could such a philosophy — rulel" (BGE 204, KSA 5:129-32). In number 204 the lines are drawn in terms of ascending scientific or scholarly spirit with a simultaneously descending spirit of philosophy, such that scholars now not only declare their independence from philosophy but presume to be philosophers themselves, made all the easier because modern philosophers themselves are nothing more than scholars. Conspicuously Nietzsche juxtaposes the ancient philosophers characterized by their "lust to rule" with his contemporaries, whom he regards as

314

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

hodge-podge philosophers preoccupied with knowledge theory and a kind of paralyzing, prostrating absence of will and imagination, reminiscent of the leech-man from Zarathustra Part IV. Given this pitiful state of philosophy, Nietzsche asks how it could possibly assume the task of ruling. For many years the attitude in Nietzsche scholarship has prevailed that Nietzsche is talking about "dominating" or "dominance" when he uses the verb herrschen, and of course Kaufmann's translations have contributed to this view. But even Kaufmann agrees that "Herrschsucht" should be translated as "lust to rule," not lust to dominate, and given that Zarathustras refrain is "who shall be ruler of the earth," not who shall dominate or be lord, at this point I suggest we make the necessary associations between "task" and "ruling" and begin to speak of philosophy that would rule, not dominate. It makes far more sense, in my reading of the ecumenical Nietzsche, to speak of cultivating a caste of rulers than it does to speak of cultivating masters, lords, or dominators. What does it mean to state that philosophy should "dominate?" Is "being dominant" as a translation not itself a gesture of epochistic holding back and timid toeing of the threshold? After all, the modern philosophers characterized by their objectivity, preoccupation with knowledge theory, realism, positivism, and general abstinence can be said to "dominate" the field of philosophy, and yet, they are scarcely rulers in Nietzsche's sense. Dominating is not so much a task as a state of mind, whereas ruling is a transitive verb. In the next section Nietzsche states that conditions for the development of a philosopher are so unfavorable today that it is doubtful whether this fruit could ever ripen. The crowd has for a long time misjudged the philosopher and confused him for the scientific person, the ideal scholar, or the religiously elevated and desensualized enthusiast of God. Today when one hears that a person lives wisely or like a philosopher this amounts to nothing more than living prudently and apart, while "wisdom" appears to the rabble as a kind of escape. Judging by these terms, Nietzsche concludes that the real philosopher lives unphilosophically and unwisely, imprudently and "feels the burden and duty of a hundred attempts and temptations of life: he risks himselfco ns tan tly, he plays the wicked game" (BGE 205, KSA 132-3). Living as a philosopher beyond the threshold requires qualities not found in those types who are commonly regarded as philosophers on the basis of their appearance and extraordinary devotion to an ideal. The squandering, tempting, attempting of the philosopher cannot be without danger or consequence to himself and others. But the development and ripening of such a fruit, as Nietzsche cautioned earlier, is highly unlikely, since an individual of spiritual promise would either simply tire of learning, given the tremendous scope of the scientific edifice, or choose instead to specialize in something, thereby compromising his potential to develop the "surveying" perspective (ibid, 132). Compared to a genius, "that is to a being who either begets or gives birth," the scholar or the scientific average person always resembles an old maid. On close examination the scientific person fits in well with the democratic age: "Above all an ignoble type of human being, with the virtues of an ignoble, that is a non-ruling, non-author-

3. The Lust to Rule, Or the Bestowing Virtue Goes World Wide

315

itative and also non-self-sufficient type of human being." The scholarly qualities of industriousness, patient acceptance of one's place, evenness and moderation in abilities and needs, an instinct for one's equals and their needs, are attended by related qualities that Nietzsche calls "the illnesses and bad habits of the ignoble type." There is envy in the scholar toward those who are higher, and a sharp eye for their weakness. "The worst and most dangerous of which a scholar is capable comes from the instinct of mediocrity of his type: from that Jesuitism of mediocrity that instinctively works on the annihilation of the extraordinary human being and seeks to break — or even better! — to slacken each tense bow" (BGE 206, KSA 5:133-4). The danger of scholarly virtues can only properly emerge in a context such as Nietzsche's where the cultivation of species preserving, ecumenical ruling values are desired. For it is in relation to higher types that the scholar or scientific person is at her worst, working against the higher types with an array of formidable scholarly qualities and the instinct of mediocrity. Whereas one might conclude that in dealing with all others the scholar's work is constructive, or at least appears to be so, in dealing with higher types the scholar's work turns destructive, turns into "deconstruction" and "slackening" ( a b s p a n n e n ) . This slackening which is the scholarly specialization wherever extraordinary human beings are present should be linked to the "arrow, the task, the goal" found in the Preface of Beyond, where Nietzsche argues that the good Europeans know how to utilize the tension of the European spirit (tension = Spannung) as a bow capable of launching arrows (BGE P, KSA 5:13). 409 In the ecumenical struggle for the future of the species and the disposition of the earth, therefore, scholars and the scientific spirit represent a powerful, secular, and largely unrecognized threat to the cultivation of higher, ruling types, since scholars by definition, and mission, are the castrators of rulers. Nietzsche now turns his attention to the concept of objectivity and how it affects the modern spirit. With genuine gratitude to objectivity for its role in curtailing subjectivity's "damned look-at-me" (Ipsissimositat) vanity, he cautions that we must "put a halt to the exaggeration with which nowadays the deselving and depersonalization of the spirit are simultaneously celebrated as the goal in itself, as redemption and transfiguration." The objective person, he continues, "is certainly one of the most precious instruments there is: but it belongs in the hand of one more powerful." Again the point is made that scholars must be recognized as a specific type in contradistinction to higher types, so that for instance the scholarly virtue of objectivity does not become the highest standard — especially insofar as this standard leads to "deselving" and "depersonalization," i.e., to the transformation of humans into herd animals. The objective person should be reined in, regulated, directed, channeled and this higher operation should be conducted by the more powerful individual, not by objective persons themselves, who cannot see beyond their objectivity, i.e., who cannot see that their objectivity, itself a virtue in relation to the vice of subjectivity, ceases to be a virtue when it 409

See Del Caro, "The Pseudoman in Nietzsche," 154-5-

316

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

cannot overcome itself and remains at cross purposes with the cultivating spirit. What is at stake in properly utilizing objectivity, as opposed to letting it set the standard for humanity, is the ability to recognize the difference between humans who have real passions and those who are hollow, humans with personality and those who are mere composites, those who choose between yes and no and those who are no longer capable of choosing, those who are exemplary humans and those who are irrelevant. The objective figures have been confused with the philosopher, "with the Caesarian cultivator and dynamo of culture," but they remain "the most sublime type of slave." As a delicate and vulnerable instrument the objective person is to be protected and honored, "but he is no goal, no culmination and ascent, no complementary human being in whom the restoiexistence justifies itself, no conclusion" (BGE 207, KSA 134-6). Nietzsche thus regards what is arguably the finest tool in the inventory of science, namely objectivity, as a danger to humanity if it is not properly used as a tool by higher types. He is clearly not advocating the suspension of objectivity or the cessation of cultivating objective human beings, but he is saying that cultivating the objective person cannot be the goal of humanity, for such a person is essentially a non-person, "without substance and content, a 'selfless' human being" (ibid, 137). The "rest of humanity" is a great open promise, and objectivity can both help to discover this open and obliterate it. His next target is skepticism, and, he wryly observes, he hopes that a philosopher today may refuse to be a skeptic given the foregoing analysis of the objective spirit. For his own definition of skepticism is again at odds with the unconditional elevation of this concept as it has been embraced by modernity. "Skepticism namely is the most spiritual expression of a certain manifold physiological trait which in common language one calls nervous exhaustion and sickliness; it originates each time when races or classes long separated from each other are crossed in a decisive and sudden manner." It is the will that suffers most deeply as a result of this mixing, he claims: "Our Europe of today, the show place of a nonsensical sudden attempt at radical mixing of classes and consequently of races, is therefore skeptical from top to bottom, now with that flexible skepticism that leaps impatiently and lasciviously from one branch to the other, now gloomy like a cloud pregnant with question marks — and often sick of its will to the point of dying! Paralysis of the will: where today does one not find this cripple sitting?!" Whatever finery this illness may sport, Nietzsche adds, whether it dresses itself as "objectivity," "being scientific," 'Tart pour l'art," or "pure will-free knowing," he sees it as "dressed up skepticism and paralysis of the will" and asserts: "I vouch for this diagnosis of the European illness." The illness manifests itself in Europe variously, depending on whether culture has been in place for a long time, in which case the illness flourishes, or whether the barbarian spirit still asserts itself, in which cases the illness retreats. Russia poses the greatest potential and threat, as it has tremendous reserves of will, and though Nietzsche personally does not wish it, the threat of Russia directed at Europe would cause the latter to respond in kind and "to acquire One will by means of a new caste ruling over Europe,

3. The Lust to Rule, Or the Bestowing Virtue Goes World Wide

317

one long terrible will of its own, which could set itself goals across the millennia." With this development the long comedy of small states and dynastic as well as democratic multi-willing ( V i e l w o l l e r e i ) would come to an end: "The time for small politics is over: already the next century will bring the struggle for the rule of earth — the compulsion to great politics" (BGE 208, KSA 5:137-40). In this the fifth of ten small essays comprising part six of ¿^«¿/Nietzsche makes his strongest statement concerning the ecumenical and the notion of ruling. He addresses the cultivation of a ruling European caste in the context of need: Europe will unite, in this scenario, not because it wants to but because it is forced to in the face of a stronger will exerted by the outside threat of Russia. This geopolitical development will have the effect of "curing" Europe of its illness, namely paralysis of the will, which results from precipitous mixing among the "races" and classes but which is nurtured by the values of the modern scientific spirit, which promotes objectivity and skepticism. If the twentieth century did not bring the "struggle for the rule of earth" in a strict sense, it brought two world wars and virtually an entire century of mobilization against the "threat" of Russia. Some might see in this prophecy a reflection of Nietzsche's instinct for surveying the earth according to centers of power and drawing inferences accordingly. Others might see in this prophecy the skills of a diagnostician who is concerned with the human body as the physiology of humanity and the earth as an environment of great politics. Lest we lose sight of what the ecumenical vision promises, the age of warfare or struggle should result in the elimination of small politics as a breeding ground for warfare and divisive, selfdestructive behaviors that detract from the meaning of the earth by effectively holding humanity and earth hostage, captive. Humans come into their own and are no longer possessions of God, state, religion, ideology only after they succeed in yoking the beast with a thousand necks. It is not the scholarly individual per se who will help to bring about the ecumenical ruling caste, but the new philosophers who distinguish themselves from the scholarly types by virtue of their ability to will and by using the latter as instruments for achieving species preserving goals. As Nietzsche reaches the denouement of his critique of the scholarly or scientific spirit in number 208 of Beyond, I shall sketch the remaining relevant features of the ecumenical equation in the briefest manner possible, in order to suggest that the coherence of this section arises from the need to define and justify the existence of a type of human being who surpasses the scholar. In 209 he offers the possibility of "another and stronger kind of skepticism," that of manliness, which is closely related "to the genius of war and conquest." The new, manly skepticism is present in the " German form of skepticism" and takes the form of "a tough will to dangerous voyages of discovery and spiritualized North Pole expeditions" (BGE 209, KSA 149-1). Number 210 explains that the philosopher of the future may well be a skeptic in the manly sense, but even this would be only one trait, and not the decisive one. With the same right, he adds, they could also be called critics "and certainly they will be human beings of experiments." He explicitly underscores their attempting and their

318

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

joy in attempting by baptizing them as he does in the name of Dionysus. "Critical discipline and every habit that leads to purity and rigor in matters of the spirit these philosophers of the future will not only demand of themselves, they could even sport them as their kind of jewelry — nevertheless they still do not want to be called critics for all that." He summarizes by stating that the new philosophers regard critics as tools of the philosopher and not as philosophers themselves, and this applies to Kant as well (BGE 210, KSA 142-4). Number 211 reiterates in strong terms that one must finally cease to confuse philosophical workers and scientific persons with the philosopher. Previous philosophers such as Kant and Hegel are credited with having worked as researchers to make things surveyable, comprehensible, abbreviated, for "subduing the entire past," and he calls this a "tremendous and wonderful task." However, "the genuine philosophers are commanders and legislators: they say 'it shall be so!'" These philosophers "reach for the future with a creative hand, and everything that is and was becomes a means for them, a tool, a hammer. Their 'knowing' is creating, their creating is a legislation, their will to truth is — will to power" (BGE 211, KSA 144-5). He elaborates the difference between the Kants and Hegels of the world and those to come by emphasizing how the latter must always be at odds with their contemporaries and the spirit of their age. In today's world of "modern ideas," which would relegate each person to a corner and specialization, the philosopher, if such an individual were possible, would be forced "to posit the greatness of the human being, the concept 'greatness' precisely in his comprehensiveness and multiplicity, in his wholeness in many." This human being would have to emerge in the herd animal's atmosphere of "equality of rights" that could "all too easily transform into the equality of wrong" ("Gleichheit im Unrechte"), by which Nietzsche means the common war waged against everything rare, strange, privileged, the higher human being, higher soul, higher duty, higher responsibility, the creative fulness of power and masterfulness. Number 212 concludes with a question: "And to ask once more: today— is greatness possible?" (BGE 212, KSA 5:145-47). Where the ability to will is dying out greatness itself is threatened, and when greatness ceases to be a star in the sky of humanity, our species will have achieved its nadir, described in Zarathustra as the grim but contented "last human being" who is the superhuman's nemesis. The final number of part six reaffirms the notion of rank and argues esoterically for the natural dignity of philosophy. "What a philosopher is is difficult to learn because it cannot be taught: one must 'know' it from experience — or one should have the pride to not know it. But that nowadays the whole world speaks of things in relation to which it can have no experience is true mostly and in the worst way of the philosopher and of philosophical conditions — the fewest know them, may know them, and all popular opinions about them are wrong." Philosophers and their ways are unknown to most thinkers and scholars, he claims, who cling to a notion of thinking as "something slow, hesitating, almost as toil." Nietzsche's criticism of the grave

3. The Lust to Rule, Or the Bestowing Virtue Goes World Wide

319

and laborious science and his praise of the artist by comparison reminds one of his notion of "gay science" formulated some years earlier. "There is finally an order of rank in the conditions of the soul, which corresponds to the order of rank of problems; and the highest problems mercilessly repulse each person who dares to approach them without being predestined to solve them through the height and power of his spirituality." Apparently the cultivation of a ruling caste and ecumenical goals would constitute such problems. "For every high world one must be born, or more clearly, one must be cultivated for it: a right to philosophy — the word taken in its greatest sense — one has only thanks to one's descent, the ancestors, the 'blood' is decisive here too" (BGE 213, KSA 147-8). Nietzsche's ardor for science has cooled by now, as he is convinced that something requiring more than scientific values, namely the enterprising and dangerous spirit of ruling, stands higher than and is threatened in some respects by science if the latter is taken as the summa of the human spirit. Thus the almost unconditional praise of science from the original Gay Science, that is the first four "books," turns to criticism of science in Science Book Five (1887), and this is more understandable now that we have analyzed the intervening Beyond in connection with the critique of the scholar and the scientific person. It is not as though Nietzsche no longer has "use for" science, quite the contrary is true: he now "has use" of science precisely because he regards it as a tool in the hands of philosophers, and so he elevates the philosopher to the highest rank and enlists the scholarly individual as the assistant. This subordinate relationship of the scholar to the philosopher is of course preferable to having the scholar at cross purposes with the philosopher, or even worse, attempting to "slacken" him using the instinct of mediocrity. In a curious and sometimes conflicted way, because after all Nietzsche himself was both scholar and philosopher, these two "types" represent the finest in humanity and are capable of communicating effectively with one another if the conditions are right and the order of rank is observed. Decisive in this partnership between scholar and philosopher is the nature of the task that humanity sets for itself. If the task is to maintain the status quo of small or petty politics, which according to Nietzsche is leading us rapidly downhill to the fate of herd animality, then the scholar's values will serve, indeed have served nicely — and scholars and priests could see to it that between them, any higher types are castrated or driven into the wilderness of the spirit. If, on the other hand, the tasks are ecumenical in nature, such that they cannot be engaged using the leveling, deperson-alizing effects of the scholar, then it is a matter of urgency to identify human beings whose responsibilities and abilities surpass those of the scholar, individuals who are able to properly use the scholar's energies. Ruling has been the province of tyranny, of chance, of democracy, of anything but conscious cultivation and experimentation, and certainly it has not been, at least in modern times, the province of philosophers. Whether or not one greets this proposition with enthusiasm may ultimately depend on one's opinion of philosophers — it was no different in Nietzsche's day.

320

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

4. The Will to Power in its Empowering State "Only we created the world that concerns human beingsT The Gay Science 301 T h e will to power has inspired more critical commentary than any other Nietzschean doctrine, and ever since the publication of a selection of Nietzsche's unpublished notes under the title The Will to Power (1901) there has been spirited debate not only about the merits of this "book" but of the merits of the concept itself. Heidegger's preoccupation with the will to power during the 1930s and early 1940s, when he was lecturing on Nietzsche, gave a decidedly negative spin to the concept during a period in history when Germans were attempting to justify their war efforts using Nietzsche, among others, as a philosophical authority. These lectures and shorter writings were published early in the 1960s under the title Nietzsche, thereby breathing new life not only into Nietzsche's writings but more specifically into the will to power, to which Heidegger had given prominent standing. The next quantum leap of interest in "will to power" was provided by Kaufmann, who edited and along with Hollingdale translated the German "book" from 1901, thereby making it readily available in the English-speaking world. This broad distribution of The Will to / W e r served to fuel interest in the concept of will to power, not unlike Heidegger's multi-volume Nietzsche, by propagating an image of Nietzsche as the philosopher of the will to power. Moreover, since The Will to Power in its original iteration purports to be Nietzsche's most philosophical and systematic work, even though it consists of selected notes from 1883-1888 which Nietzsche partially used in his published writings, all too many commentators in the English-speaking world have relied on it as though it were a reasonable substitute for both the published works and the voluminous unpublished notes, the Nachlaß. T h e foregoing is offered only to stress that "the will to power" has a long and tortured history. My present concern for the will to power is strictly in terms of its relation to the ecumenical in Nietzsche. I shall attempt to show what the will to power is in nature, i.e., in its "natural" state, how it assumes nuances of meaning in connection with the super human, with the sublimation process (spiritualized will to power), in relation to struggle, ruling, and finally, how the will to power may serve as a model of species empowerment. " O n Self-Overcoming" in Zarathustra represents the first detailed published mention of the will to power, and it is presented as an alternative, one might add, a biologically and physiologically more honest alternative to the "will to truth." 410 While the wise men attribute their ardor to the will to truth, Zarathustra unmasks them, claiming: "Will to thinkability of all being: that is what / call your will!" T h e wise would simply dignify their need to render all things thinkable by claiming to embody the will to truth, but in fact Zarathustra claims they are engaged in attempting to 410

The first actual mention of will to power is in "On the Thousand and One Goals" of part one.

4. The Will to Power in its Empowering State

321

control, to subordinate everything to their spirit and thereby making it a reflection of themselves. "That is your entire will, you wisest ones, as a will to power; and even when you are speaking of good and evil and of valuations. / You still want to create the world before which you can kneel: such is your ultimate hope and intoxication." Meanwhile, the wise in relation to the masses are like a boat on a river, borne by the waters of the river, and though the common people accept the valuations of the wise, this relationship is determined by the will to power and cannot be considered whole, or final: "Not the river is your danger and the end of your good and evil, you wisest ones: rather that will itself, the will to power — the unexhausted procreating will of life." In order to make his point about the origins of good and evil in the procreating will of life, Zarathustra shares his secrets and learning about life, which he has pursued like a hunter in order to know its nature (Z 11/12, KSA 146-7). Life reveals itself to him as obeying, first of all, but secondly whoever cannot obey himself is commanded. The third point is that commanding is harder than obeying, "and not only because the commander bears the burden of all obeyers, and because this burden could easily crush him." Commanding is dangerous because it does not put itself first. Zarathustra has already explained that the burden of commanding consists in carrying those who obey, whose sheer weight and mass could crush the commander — commanding is already on this count not without consequences and responsibilities. Commanding is still more: "An experiment and a hazard appeared to me to be in all commanding; and always when it commands, the living ("das Lebendige") hazards itself. / Yes even when it commands itself: even there it has to pay for its commanding. It must become judge and avenger and victim of its own law." Zarathustra next puzzles over the question of why the commanding engages simultaneously in commanding and obeying, such that there is always something "above" or prior to commanding, i.e., he ponders how commanding cannot be an end in itself. "Where I found the living there I found the will to power; and even in the will of the serving I found the will to be master ("Herr zu sein")." This is Zarathustras way of saying that despite appearances as they are maintained by the wise in relation to the masses, despite any valuations and definitions of relationships as they obtain in the game of good and evil according to the rules of "truth," the bedrock or ground of life is the will to power, and no living thing escapes the effect of this will. The effects of the will to power may appear in various guises; the small may yield to the great, and thus the great has its pleasure and power; the great in turn may yield itself and hazard its life for the sake of power. Sacrifice, service, amorous glances — in all of these the will to be master is present as well. O n secret paths the weaker sneaks into the fortress and into the heart of the more powerful — and there steals power. And this secret life itself spoke to me. 'Behold, ' it said, 'I am that which must always overcome itself.

322

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

To be sure, you call it will to procreate or the drive to an end, to something higher, more distant, more manifold: but all this is O n e and One secret. I would rather perish than refuse this O n e thing; and verily, where there is perishing and the falling of leaves, behold, there life sacrifices itself— for power! That I must be struggle and becoming and end and the contradiction of ends: oh who guesses my will surely also guesses the crooked ways it must walk! (Z 11/12, KSA 147-8)

Zarathustra attempts to explain the paradoxical nature of the will to power, and how it contradicts the valuations and expectations of the old gravity. For one thing, the commanders are not immune to being commanded — only they take their commands from the will to power which demands that they yield (sacrifice) themselves to it. This sacrifice, meanwhile, is not for the sake of a power beyond, not for a transcendental ideal but as a service to life, as a form of recycling. And even where we are prone to see the absence of any "will to power," e.g. where we encounter loving and tenderness and sacrifice, we are witnessing the effects of the will to power, not the effects of a divine agency. Indeed, though we refer to the things that motivate and sustain us as human beings by exalted names such as "procreation" and "drive to something higher," these are interpretations of "the One secret" that life, the living, prefers to perish (untergehen) than to deny its own overcoming, for life's overcoming is the law of the will to power. Verily he did not strike the truth, he who shot at it with the word 'will to existence': this will — does not exist! For: what is not, that cannot want; but what is in existence, how could it still will to existence! But, where there is life, there too is will: but not will to life, rather — thus I teach you — will to power! Much is esteemed more highly by life than life itself; but from this esteeming itself speaks — the will to power! (Z 11/12, KSA 148-9)

The attempt to clarify the paradox is continued by means of juxtaposing "will to existence" with will to power. The possibility to will is present in life, but not in the form of a will to life, since life according to Nietzsche does not will itself — it already has itself, already has life, and the nature of will requires a willing of something greater than life, something that life does not already possess but is constantly striving to possess, namely power. Pivotal in this explanation is the fact that esteeming {schätzen = to esteem, value) as a function of life is the track, the trace of the will to power. Nietzsche regards esteeming or valuing as something more fundamental, more far-reaching than life's survival, though of course survival is one consequence of esteeming. As we observed in connection with the critique of the scholar and the scholar's values of objectivity and skepticism, these values, if elevated to the highest and pursued as humanity's goal, would signal the demise of humanity by reducing the species to herd animals, and by rendering the very concept and existence of greatness extinct. So, too, in the case of "will to existence" versus will to power: a purported will to existence allows no opportunity for growth, sublimation, egress into the open for a future humanity, i.e., there is no opportunity for self-overcoming in such a model of willing, indeed, there is no willing, and

4. The Will to Power in its Empowering State

323

Nietzsche diagnoses paralysis of the will as Europe's illness. Will to power thus stands in relation to will to existence, conceptually speaking, as the new philosopher stands in relation to the scholar. The ecumenical vision of the new philosopher, furthermore, expresses the agency of the will to power, while the small politics of the current scholarly establishment represent the conflicting, thwarted, and self-canceling expressions of a will to power arrested at any early stage, inhibited by ideals and values of mediocrity, of mere survival. We have taken this time to analyze the formulation of the will to power in " O n Self-Overcoming" because this pivotal chapter of Zarathustra provides a valuable summary of the nature of the will to power in relation to both living and self-overcoming. Whenever Nietzsche uses the verb herrschen, to rule, to master, to dominate, we should keep this chapter in mind, if only to remind us that herrschen, Herr are not

arbitrary terms. The interaction between commanding and obeying that is characteristic of life has its political analogy in the relationship between rulers and the rest of humanity, the ruled whereby it is important to note that "the ruled" are constantly exercising their own will to power and are not powerless. Physiologists, Nietzsche cautions, should think twice before positing the drive for self-preservation as "the cardinal instinct of an organic being." Above all, he claims, "a living thing wants to discharge its strength — life itself is will to power — self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent consequences thereof." Here as everywhere, he adds, we should avoid superfluous teleological principles, in keeping with method and its economy of principles ( B G E 13, KSA 27-8). More will be said concerning "discharging" later in this chapter, but for the moment, this number of Beyond reminds us that Nietzsche views nature as a state of abundance, even superabundance, and not generally speaking as distress. Thus in his view it is not a matter of various life forms clinging and scratching for their bare survival, but instead, it is a matter of all living things discharging, spreading out, making themselves larger, appropriating etc. 411 How we regard nature is highly relevant to understanding the nature of the will to power, and when we are not falsely ascribing teleological principles to nature, then perhaps we are viewing it romantically, idealistically, as in the case of the Stoics who profess to "live according to nature." What a deception of words! Nietzsche exclaims: "Imagine a being such as nature is, squandering without measure, indifferent without measure, without purposes and regards, without mercy and justice, fertile and barren and uncertain at the same time, imagine indifference itself as power — how could you live 411

Moore (2002) attributes N.'s notions of life abundance and surplus to N.'s reading of Rolph, Biologische Probleme, but what this ignores is the looming presence of the notion of abundance and surplus as it characterizes the Dionysian, which N . dwells on in Tragedy and never relinquishes. It belongs to the Dionysian world view of N . that nature is abundance and superabundance, and he does not need Rolph to teach him this — at best, Rolph is drawn in by N . as an expedient "scientific" authority to bolster N.'s own claims against Darwin. This is not to refute that N . read and notated Rolph's book — Moore has shown this connection without a doubt (47-48).

324

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

according to this indifference?" At the conclusion of this number Nietzsche writes that it is an old story; what the Stoics attempted then is being attempted today whenever "a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world according to its image, it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself, the spiritual will to power, to the creation of the world,' to the causa prima" (BGE 9, KSA 21-2). There is no imitating of nature once nature is stripped, to the extent possible, of anthropocentric features. This does not preclude the possibility of living a humble, minimalist life, or living primitively, as did Thoreau at Walden Pond, or for that matter living biomimetically or under the principles of sustainability. Even these gestures to live in harmony with the environment Nietzsche would ascribe to the will to power, but he would refrain from equating them with living in accordance with nature. 412 T h e depiction of indifference as power assumes a heightened formulation in a note from summer 1885, which Nietzsche used in Beyond36 and very possibly as well for Beyond'9. In Beyond 36 he argues for limiting our notion of "reality" to our world of desires and passions, so that in effect there is nothing but the reality of our drives, which includes thinking inasmuch as thinking "is only a relationship of these drives to one another." Then, he argues, the attempt should be made to ascertain whether this "given" does not suffice to provide an understanding of the mechanistic or material world as well, i.e., the material world would be regarded as "a more primitive form of the world of affects, in which everything that still lies locked in a powerful unity will then in organic process bifurcate and take shape (also, as is only fair, become tenderer and weaker) — as a kind of instinctive life in which all the organic functions are still synthetically bound together with self-regulation, assimilation, nourishment, excretion, metabolism — as a preform of life." This attempt is demanded by method, he underscores, because we should not assume several kinds of causality as long as we have not first exhausted all attempts to find one sufficient cause. He concludes this number by pleading for a definition of "all effective force as: will to power. T h e world seen from within, the world defined and characterized with respect to its 'intelligible character' — it would simply be 'will to power' and nothing besides" (BGE 36, KSA 54-5). Now that we have examined both numbers 9 and 36, which represent milder, stylistically more polished, and philosophically argued versions of the 1885 note on power as indifference, we can see why the note remained a note. T h e note's rhetorical tone is immediately apparent because Nietzsche presents himself to the reader: "And do you know what 'the world' is for me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end, a firm, iron magnitude of energy that does not become greater, does not become smaller, that 412

Moore (2002) in describing the will to power as reverting "to the same Romantic conception of the universe as organism," which as he duly points out was dismissed by N. in GS 109, seems to forget that nature and subsequendy will to power for N. are completely indifferent, and they are finite too. Both the finite aspect of the universe and nature's indifference make it highly unlikely that N. has a Romantic conception of the universe (50).

4. The Will to Power in its Empowering State

325

does not consume itself but instead transforms, as a whole unchangeably great, an economy without expenditures and losses but likewise without increase, without income, surrounded by 'the nothing' as if by its border . . . " This note of slightly more than one page continues in hypotactic syntax and is written as one meandering sentence, ostensibly in order to underscore the indifference and monstrous energy of the world using a cascading, cumulative effect. By the time Nietzsche inserts his first colon, he reveals how this vision of the world relates to both the Dionysian and the eternal recurrence of the same, neither of which are mentioned in the published versions of this note in Beyond: "this my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally selfdestroying, this secret world of the double sexual delights ("der doppelten Wollüste"), this my beyond good and evil, without goal, if a goal does not lie in the happiness of the circle, without will, if a ring does not have good will toward itself— do you want a name for this world? a solution for all these riddles? a light for yourselves too, you most concealed, strongest, most undaunted, most midnightly ones? — This world is the will to power— and nothing besides\ And you yourselves also are this will to power — and nothing besides!" (KSA 11:610-11).413 In Beyond Nietzsche saves this style for the closing numbers of the final chapter, once Dionysus has been proclaimed a philosopher, and here in the note the tempting, masking, concealing and revealing nature of Dionysus is richly in evidence. Nietzsche not only recapitulates the indifferent and powerful nature of the world as will to power, he also mitigates it by referring to the "double sexual delights" of Dionysian creation and annihilation as nature's model of procreation, and he draws in the possibility of a goal and a will in the context of eternal recurrence. In addressing himself to the types he considers "most midnightly," Nietzsche is reproducing the atmosphere of Zarathustra, final part, final speech to the higher humans, which is the midnight counterpart to the midday "work day" of Zarathustra's task. Yet another prominent feature of the will to power, and also manifested in nature according to Nietzsche's observsations, is the notion of discharging. Mittasch treats this topic in detail, pointing out that Nietzsche was familiar with Mayer's essay "Über Auflösung" ("On Discharging") of 1876 and adopted Mayer's term for his own uses. The word Auflösung used as Mayer does would closely resemble Entladung, discharge, as in the discharging of a firearm. Mayer refers specifically to the spark (der Funken) as something that causes discharging in countless cases, and he even quotes 413

Clark (1990) questions whether N . accepts the argument for will to power, and believes N. is merely giving us his own moral viewpoint (212-3, 223, 227). She also asserts that the doctrine is neither metaphysics, nor cosmology, but instead psychology (227), and I would agree that in the example just cited from N. s notes (KSA 11:610-11) he comes close to making a psychological effect. However, in my view there is too much apparatus related to will to power to accept it as reflecting only N.'s moral view of the world, or primarily a psychological mechanism. The compelling notions of indifference, discharging, and superbundance lead me to believe N. is more serious about will to power than Clark allows. See also Moore (2002) who regards will to power as an "amalgam of a number of competing Darwinian theories" (55), and holds that N.'s doctrine is both metaphysical and anthropomorphic, dressed up in the "language of modern evolutionary biology" (43, 55).

326

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

from Schiller's poem "Ode to Joy" in which joy is referred to as "divine spark" (Götterjunkeri).

"Humans are by nature constituted in such a way that they like to achieve the

greatest possible result with the application o f lesser means. T h e pleasure one feels in firing a firearm is telling proof o f this." Mayer goes so far as to claim that if our planet were constituted in such manner that anyone could blow it up like a keg filled with dynamite, there would always be people willing to explode "our beautiful earth" into the universe, even at the expense o f their own lives. 414 Beyond the intriguing psychological ramifications o f Mayer's view is the crucial idea o f a catalyst, or trigger, that sets off ernergy, because in Nietzsche's view, nature represents an abundance of energy, as do individual life forms. T h e manner in which discharging assumes a prominent position in Nietzsche's writings o f the 1880s is described by Mittasch as not only the emergence o f the term "discharge" in itself, but also in the many related expressions that Nietzsche uses as metaphors and applies "even to processes in the sphere o f the psycho-physical and ultimately 'purely spiritual.'" Thus where we find Nietzsche using words such as discharge, ignite, bring to explosion, released, express oneself, explode, react, imitate (entladen,

zünden, zur Explosion bringen, ausgelöst werden, sich auslassen, explodieren, reagieren, nachahmen)

we are frequently observing the influence o f Mayer's concept o f discharge.

From Mayer Nietzsche learned that energy is constantly being stored in organic and inorganic nature, and viewed anthropocentrically, this energy is just waiting to be set off. In political terms, even a mediocre human being can set off a great chain o f events, because energy for the explosion or discharging o f events has been storing up. Ultimately, according to Mittasch, Nietzsche takes this idea o f discharging into the will to power: everything, everyone is discharging at all times. 4 1 5 Mayer as noted above did not exclude discharging from the human experience and underscored the importance o f discharging to physiology and psychology by claiming that "our entire life is linked to an uninterrupted process o f discharging" ("daß unser ganzes Leben an einen ununterbrochenen Auslösungsprozess geknüpft ist"). Mittasch has an interesting way o f summarizing Mayer's views: "Whatever thoughts one might entertain about the 'nature of life,' this much is firm: that which the subject experiences as drive and stress, as suffering and doing, can be viewed from the outside in each case as a discharging, a firing ( E n t l a d u n g ) , a de-inhibiting ( E n t h e m m u n g ) o f certain directed free energies of an organism, indeed it can even be measured in favorable cases, if the organism, viewed from outside, represents a historically transforming, holistic bundling o f substantive natural forces bound to the environment." 4 1 6 Nature therefore appears to us as a historically transforming bundled or interconnected 414 415 416

Robert Mayer, quoted by Mittasch, Friedrich Nietzsche als Naturphilosoph, 117. Mittasch, Friedrich Nietzsche als Naturphilosoph, 122. Mittasch, Friedrich Nietzsche als Naturphilosoph, 138. "Welche Gedanken man sich auch über das 'Wesen des Lebens' machen möge, so viel steht fest: das was das Subjekt als Trieb und Drang, Erleiden und Tun erlebt, das läßt sich von außem jeweils als eine Auslösung, Endadung, Enthemmung

4. The Will to Power in its Empowering State

327

whole, but in essence it is a discharging. When Nietzsche in later years consistently uses the phrase "will to power," according to Mittasch, it is because he regards this term "as the most appropriate formula for characterizing organic self activity."417 I think it is important to emphasize Nietzsche's view of nature, and therefore his view of the will to power, as one characterized by both superabundance and discharging, if for no other reason than to make it clear that all living things are discharging, each in its manner and according to its quantum of power, and there can be no assigning of "equality" to life forms in a physical, ontological sense, only in a wishful or idealistic sense. Nietzsche disputes the concept of sameness or identity, as we have already seen, but on top of that he insists on the order of rank that characterizes nature at every turn. Thus when Acampora, in tossing a (naked) bone to environmentalists who would enlist Nietzsche for their cause, suggests that an "egalitarian" approach might be possible, we should pause and desist. "One egalitarian argument that might be mobilized by neo-Nietzschean environmentalists could start out with an attempt to bifurcate the question of hierarchy, admitting that Nietzsche is a politico-social elitist (great specimens on top), while simultaneously contending that he is an eco-naturalist holist (all species on equal terms)." 418 Acampora does not himself believe in this bifurcation, apparently, but he suggests it in the spirit of giving environmentalists something, anything, with which to harness Nietzsche to their plow. The very notion that all species could be on equal terms would stagger Nietzsche as a demonstration of anti-scientific perversion. Nietzsche speaks quite critically of humanistic hubris toward animals and nature in general, as we shall see in a later section on Nietzsche and post-humanism, but this does not come close to avowing equality among species. One of his standard arguments against such wishful thinking, such "anti-natural" thinking is that a predator cannot do otherwise than to prey upon its sources of food, and this reasoning he carries over into the human sphere when he insists that the weak are weak by virtue of their weakness, not their superior "moral character," and the strong are strong by virtue of their strength, and it is impossible for the strong to be otherwise than strong — weak and strong have no choice in the matter. A relevant question for Nietzsche studies in the context of the will to power is: what appropriate uses can be made of both weak and strong when the entire species and the entire planet are at stake? Obviously this question does not get answered by insisting that Nietzsche's strong are mere predators (hence they will only prey), and his weak mere slaves (hence they will only slave), nor does it get answered by claiming equality in nature or humanity. If humans are half as resourceful as they make themselves out to be, and if Nietzsche

417 418

bestimmt gerichteter freier Energien des Organismus beobachten, ja günstigen falls sogar messen; stellt dieser doch, äußerlich gesehen, eine sich geschichtlich wandelnde und an die Umwelt gefesselete ganzheitliche Bündelung stoffgebundene Naturkräfte dar." Mittasch, Friedrich Nietzsche, 141. Acampora, "Using and Abusing Nietzsche for Environmental Ethics," 188-9.

328

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

is on to something in regarding nature as will to power, then it is up to us to decide how we will be empowered by this knowledge. Drenthen's attempt to formulate a response to both Hallman and Acampora comes closer to the mark. "We could be aware that each moral valuation of nature is necessarily contingent and can be regarded as a seizure of power: as a restriction of nature's expressiveness." This awareness is helpful, and it is in fact prescribed by Nietzsche, who after all views morality as "anti-nature," but it is not necessary to push Nietzsche in the direction of pure biomimetics, on the contrary, Nietzsche's contributions to partnering with nature, as opposed to obliterating it or "mastering" it, will most likely lie in the identification and implementation of intelligent, species-preserving, ecumenical goals whose "restriction" of nature are undertaken in the spirit ofsustainability that should arise once humans put themselves in their place. Drenthen continues: "This paradoxical knowledge, however, can be mobilized in an 'ecological' way, and can help as a therapy for environmental ethics. The awareness of the radical otherness of nature can lead to a new attitude of listening and respect for nature and awareness of human finitude." 419 To be sure, a new attitude is called for, and Nietzsche provides us with the means to develop this new, grounded attitude more rigorously and systematically than any other thinker precisely by deromanticizing nature (nature = will to power) and teaching humans to dignify themselves and their planet by embracing the finite. That nature is not the bucolic playground longed for by nostalgic moderns is expressed with clarity by Nietzsche already in Tragedy, where he contrasts the vitality and trust-inspiring nature of the satyr with early modern Europe's beribboned shepherd, and elaborates the importance of the satyr as a "fictional natural being" ("das fingirte Naturwesen") representing the primordial image of human being (BT 7, 8, KSA 1:55, 58). Perhaps equally as dangerous as modernity's romantic humanizing of nature is the latest attempt by thinkers to "deconstruct" nature, that is, to maintain that as with all things, with nature too we can only have multiple interpretations. "The problem with this approach (which strongly resembles postmodern environmentalism) is that the notion of 'nature' seems to have lost all meaning. However, the notion of nature as something beyond my interpretations — as an (albeit unknowable) underground of conscious life — is essential if we try to understand Nietzsche's critique of morality. Morality can be criticized as tyranny over nature, only if nature is something other than interpretation." 420 Drenthen is correct to stress that nature is not a construct of humans, not a matter of mere interpretation, though in taking a stand on nature we are, in effect, selecting what best suits us as human beings. Nietzsche would not deny that we are constantly, unavoidably interpreting ourselves into nature, but this is a far cry from claiming that there is no essential nature working on and through us. Even in tyrannizing 415 420

Drenthen, "The Paradox of Environmental Ethics," 172. Drenthen, "The Paradox of Environmental Ethics," 170.

4. The Will to Power in its Empowering State

329

nature by imposing an interpretation or a morality on it, we are living according to nature's will to power. T h e goal for Nietzsche is for humanity to work consciously and honestly on reading the text of nature without writing itself into the text as author. As Drenthen points out, "nature functions as a counterpoint to any moral interpretation of nature," and Nietzsche would have us make better interpretations "of what nature really is," inasmuch as "the world is not of our making. We find ourselves already 'in context,' we live in a world that is already there" (ibid, 174). W h a t lies beyond interpretation then, the being "in context" that Drenthen refers to, is precisely what we have to build, for humanity's sake and for the earth's. We are "in context" only in the sense that there is no denying nature, no immunity from it, but we are not in context to the extent that we are locked into our status quo of being. Now that we possess certain knowledge of belonging only to earth, not to any beyond, and thus belonging only to ourselves, and not to any higher beings, we must determine the context of humanity's habitation of the earth, its empowerment vis-à-vis the earth. This context is not a given which only needs to be discovered, on the contrary, putting ourselves in context with nature, which I refer to as putting humanity in its place, will require humanity's best efforts of creativity. Naturalizing human beings after millennia of anti-natural behavior directed not only at the natural environment but at humanity's nature as well, is serious work, the work Nietzsche attributes to new philosophers whose teachings stand counter to those of priests and scholars. By working with the will to power, i.e., with a deromanticized, "demodernized" view of nature as that to which humans must ascend, Nietzsche's ecumenically inclined free spirits will not attempt to control or dominate the uncontrollable, but they will direct their sublimating and regulating efforts upon what is controllable, namely their passions, their nature, and their own behavior will be a self-overcoming guaranteeing the openness and renewal of nature as will to power, as opposed to a behavior that merely imposes itself upon nature and other human beings. Of vital importance to naturalizing human beings is the notion that the will to power functions as self-overcoming, meaning that a given individual cannot rule or dominate nature because she is expendable, she also "yields" as the commander and is commanded by the will to power. In practical terms, the will to power puts certain brakes and restrictions upon the individual, whereby the individual can never come to absolute power because she is recycled. This is a direct consequence of the finite nature of force or energy, not a moral dictate, and as such, it is reliable to the point of being ineluctable. The superhuman ( Ubermensch) is the type of person in whom the will to power functions best. Nietzsche claims that such a person is "above" or "over" the rank and file of humanity because he envisions a natural human being, one who not only survives in the new gravity but who thrives in it and prepares the way for all of humanity to embark on its ecumenical habitation of the earth. I have deliberately used the translation "superhuman" or "super human" in my arguing of Nietzsche's grounding

330

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

because Kaufmanns "overman" sounds seriously dated and limiting in the context of ecumenical thinking. Both overman and superman are misrepresentations of German Mensch, human being, which is the noun in question in Übermensch. When translators insist on rendering Mensch as "man," they are seriously limiting Nietzsche's scope and framing him with a sexist connotation that derives principally from grammatical gender, i.e., der Mensch. It is easier and stylistically more pleasing to the eye to use "overman," after roughly half a century of Kaufmann translations, and there are to be sure a host of semantic reasons why the prefix "over" should be maintained, all of which Kaufmann has elaborated in connection with overmans "going under" (untergehen). But there is nothing to prevent the commentator on Nietzsche from making any necessary philological notations along the way, ad hoc so to speak, in order to allow for the use of the more accurate and encompassing term superhuman. We cannot appropriately suggest the scope of the ecumenical by using "overman," for this genderizes the concept so strongly as to imply that only males are capable of superhuman being, which would lead us to the rather absurd conclusion that at some far off point in time, a perfectly ordinary woman (incapable of being a superhuman herself) will give birth to an "over man" — unless of course she were to give birth to a girl, also fathered by a so-called overman, in which case — ? Superhuman encompasses female and male alike, there can be no ascending to nature without both, there can be no natural representation of humanity without both. It is high time Nietzsche scholars got over overman — this would constitute a good first step toward empowering humanity as a whole. 421 Ansell-Pearson argues based on the unpublished notes that Nietzsche first conceived of the eternal recurrence, then he conceived of the superhuman as the type of human who can withstand eternal recurrence.422 This is plausible enough, especially in terms of chronology, but it forces eternal recurrence and superhuman together in a way that is unnecessary. For one thing, though Nietzsche does indeed attribute a higher capacity for affirmation and immanence to those who embrace the eternal recurrence, he does not, categorically, claim that only superhumans are capable of embracing the eternal recurrence. When he refers to ERS as a cultivating thought, for instance, he sometimes speaks in terms of entire peoples who could withstand ERS, while others might not, and this does not imply that an entire given people would be superhuman. The linkage between the two is obvious because both are announced in Zarathustra, but I have argued that wherever Nietzsche speaks of the new gravity, the finite, the closest things, he is already pointing to a "new" human being who is selfempowering, and this begins as early as Human. 421

422

I think too that we do well to reflect on Müller-Lauter's critique of Heidegger's conception of the superhuman and the ruler-race. These are anything but rulers in the techno-social sense employed by Heidegger, for he overlooks that for N. the superhuman represents spirituality, refinement, affirmation, variety, differences among higher types, etc; N.'s superhuman transcends homo faber (Nietzsche-Interpretationen III, 111-21). Ansell-Pearson, "Who is the Übermensch?" 322.

4. The Will to Power in its Empowering State

331

Löwith maintains that the eternal recurrence "is supposed to remodel our image of man through a new stipulation of man in his passions," and Zarathustra is the model because he is self-commanding, well-disciplined and well bred, representing the "already mapped-out image of an 'exaltation of man.'" Thus according to Löwith Zarathustra would represent a fictional version of the human being who existed in antiquity, the Renaissance, and in modern terms in Napoleon and Goethe. 423 Löwith subscribes to the view that there have been superhumans or "more-than-human beings" and that Zarathustra is a model of the superhuman. This is entirely consistent with Nietzsche's view that humanity is not "evolving" in a linear sense, such that each generation represents an improvement in the species as the modern notion of progress would dictate. Instead, since Nietzsche allows for the elevation of individuals above their contemporaries, their times, their place, superhumans can exist at any given time and indeed have existed at various times throughout history. This differs of course from the view expressed by Zarathustra himself that "there has never been a superhuman" (Z II/4, KSA 4:119), even as it differs from his view that the superhuman stands in relation to the current human as the human stands in relation to the worm (Z P 3, KSA 4:14). In each case, if one takes Nietzsche literally, there has never been a superhuman, and much seems to hinge on whether we take "superhuman" as a metaphor or a reality. For example, in " O n Poets" Zarathustra, speaking lucidly with the consciousness of his own tendency to poetize, and in direct defiance of Goethe's "eternal feminine" from Faust, says: "Verily, always it lifts us up — namely to the kingdom of the clouds: upon these we set our motley bastards and then call them gods and superhumans" (Z 11/17, KSA 4:164). Navigating according to such ambivalent comments by Nietzsche in the same book which purports to teach the coming of the superhuman, we are inclined to regard the superhuman as anything but an ideal, since an ideal is a transcendental beyond the human powers of creativity, i.e., Zarathustra claims humans cannot create gods, but can in fact create the superhuman. T h e superhuman, then, could well have existed in the past, could well exist today, and need not be thought of as lying in the remote future. Conway has shown that passages from The Antichrist are useful in separating Zarathustra's "gnomic claim " from less rhetorical descriptions of the superhuman: "Having separated Nietzsche's teaching from Zarathustra's, we may confidently interpret the Ubermensch in concrete terms, as the historically instantiated, fully attainable, concrete embodiment of human perfectability — an empirical rather than a theoretical ideal — around whom the ethical life of any thriving culture revolves."424 However, if one extrapolates from the existence of a few historical superhumans who have perhaps displayed the traits of ecumenical rule, in keeping with Zarathustra's question "who shall rule the earth?", one could infer that at the species level humanity is as far from superhuman as the

423 424

Löwith, Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence, 85Conway (1997), 25.

332

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

species worm is from humanity. In any case, if one works with Nietzsche's lesser definition of the superhuman, according to which individuals such as Goethe and Napoleon achieved superhuman status, and according to which Zarathustra is Nietzsche's didactic model of a superhuman, then we are working with a definition of superhuman that is far more inclusive, and potentially far more empowering, than the "ideal" version which Nietzsche rejects, but which many commentators appear to champion because it reflects their esoteric Nietzsche. I think Schacht is wise in differentiating between Nietzsche's goals as they are evaluative versus metaphysical,425 for in the latter case, the superhuman is mere ideal, while in the case of the former, the superhuman is as diversified and "human" (creative, manifold, different, undefined etc) as are currents humans, only stronger and healthier on the evaluative scale. I do not believe I am engaging in the same argument as Palma, Kaufmann, and Danto when they claim that "overman is the man who fulfills the essential or true self that man is and has been all along," as Gooding-Williams reminds us in his defense of a major difference between superhuman and last human.426 There is indeed a major difference, a gulf if you will between last human being, who is a mere herd animal, and superhuman, who is human to a degree rarely achieved in history— on this score I quite agree with Gooding-Williams. The decisive factor, for me at least, is whether humanity is dwelling in the old or the new gravity, for dwelling in the new gravity gives a quantum leap to the cultivation of human beings. Thus in my reasoning the "overman" as Kaufmann et al refer to it cannot be simply a matter of "fulfilling" an "essential" or "true" self because these formulations are themselves ideals, indifferent to the work that needs to be done in the new gravity, such as creating and living according to new values. Individuals such as Napoleon and Goethe had their own gravity, they were centers of gravity strong enough to counter the effects of old gravity. Nietzsche believes humanity as a species has finally reached the point where the new gravity has become a necessity, where humanity comes into its own for the first time, which implies empowerment of humanity on a scale unimagined. Schacht also notes that eternal recurrence is "inseparable from two of his most basic concerns: with the idea and possibility of a total 'affirmation of life' and of the world (as they are, rather than merely as one might wish them to be), and with the emergence of an enhanced form of life strong and rich enough to stand as a 'justification of life' (so that, in the language of Zarathustra, 'the earth shall have a meaning,' and may warrant affirmation)."427 Of course the affirming will cultivated by eternal recurrence works with and through an individual, such that she would become "enhanced" in any case, whether or not one were to posit the existence of separate individuals designated as superhumans. And we must also bear in mind that affirming 425 426 427

Schacht, Nietzsche, 381. Gooding-Williams, Zarathustra's Dionysian Modernism, 326. Schacht, Nietzsche, 261.

4. The Will to Power in its Empowering State

333

eternal recurrence is the "supreme" or highest act of affirmation, but by no means the only act of affirmation that might result in more immanent living. We must entertain the possibility that superhumans, however and whenever they exist, are quite affirmative and resourceful individuals without even the slightest knowledge of the eternal recurrence of the same — as would be the case with superhumans of the past such as Goethe and Napoleon. One could always claim, as Nietzsche tends to do in such cases, that such an individual would want his life to recur eternally, or that such an individual's life is exemplary to the point that one would want such a life to recur eternally, but this does nothing to change the fact that superhuman and eternal recurrence are not in all cases connected. In human beings power should become creative, and it has the potential to become ruling — this is what Nietzsche means by the bestowing virtue. In Gooding-Williams' assessment, " [f] unctioning in the role of the gift-giving virtue, the will to power serves the purpose of creating a being beyond man, which purpose is 'the meaning of the earth.'" 428 Briefly for purposes of review, let us detail why a "meaning" is necessary for the earth. Historically speaking there has been earth denial to such a degree that little, if anything, is known of the earth and humanity's place in it. The religious and philosophical positions on the earth have been variously demeaning and exploitative, treating the earth as a provisional prison, a place of opprobrium, and historically speaking, next treating the earth as an object for rape and plunder — a prize for the taking. Throughout this history humanity has led a disembodied, i.e., un-earthly existence, and remains retarded, as a species, for having failed to integrate spirit and body, for having failed to dwell "on earth." When Nietzsche claims that the superhuman shall be the meaning of the earth, he is simultaneously admitting the errors committed by humans in the old gravity, and announcing that the new human beings shall be worthy of habitation of the whole earth, the real earth, the earth that remains unexplored, unknown, and still vastly promising. The earth shall have meaning, for the first time in history, because humanity embarks on its first affirmative habitation of earth — there is no other "meaning" in Nietzsche's universe. That Nietzsche is talking about real human beings in relation to a real earth and functioning in real time is revealed in this passage by Gooding-Williams: "A refashioning of the self would 'purify' the body of the repression that the practice of asceticism has perpetuated, for it would resurrect the passions as features of a newly integrated body. Virtue that had 'flown away from the earth, by becoming indistinguishable from the privation of earthly and bodily passions, would be 'led back' to the earth and flourish there as states of elevation in which instinct and desires claimed and moved human existence" (ibid, 126). What is described here is the spiritual-physiological ecosystem in which the human body acknowledges and celebrates its physicality by means of actions that acknowledge and celebrate the physicality of the earth body. 428

Gooding-Williams, Zamthustra's Dionysian Modernism, 126.

334

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

The finite virtue of humanity will be conserved, reclaimed, redirected and reinstated in the form of "earthly meaning," and earthly meaning should become synonymous with meaning itself. This earthly meaning is not a mere substitution of earth for God, however, because the worship of God took the form of asceticism, of earth denial and denial of the human body, while earthly meaning is composed of the interactive and mutually enhancing partnership of humans and earth. Whereas worshiping God formerly provided meaning at the expense of denying body and earth, partnering with the earth has the opposite effect, namely the effect of completing human being by means of embodying and empowering. Under the old gravity nihilism created an atmosphere of the negative, of the nothing, such that humans were held to be nothing on two counts. First, in relation to the divine, the afterlife, and the immortal soul, the human being in her wholeness of being is regarded as nothing, as one brief life span whose meaning and purpose is to quit body and earth in order to ascend to a purported higher life. In the second instance, once the understanding begins to dawn on humanity that God is dead, nihilism becomes the vacuum of meaning, the vacuum of values, and once again the human is nothing and has nothing. This is why Nietzsche elevates the "bestowing virtue" as the primary symptom of health, the very opposite of degeneration, and associates the gift-giving virtue with the will to power. Humans have been taught for time out of mind that they are nothing unless they have value as creations in the image of God, and of course under such stress humans have nothing to give — those who are nothing have nothing. Once empowered by virtue of coming into their own, as humans, human beings are something and have something, such that they are able to practice bestowing. Now there is no motivation to the heedless, mechanical taking that characterizes humans under the old gravity. Now giving itself becomes an investment in humanity and its habitat, earth. What Gemes ascribes to "real philosophers," namely the task of taking responsibility of authorship in matters of "truth" so as to "explicitly take up the task of creation," 429 I construe more broadly as Nietzsche's empowerment of humans more generally, albeit via the agency of new philosophers. Commentators are aware of the difficulties involved in envisioning or identifying superhumans, and such difficulties are understandable as long as superhuman is disconnected from "meaning of the earth" and regarded as a metaphysical goal, an ideal. Vattimo contends that the superhuman can appear in the form of an artist because the artist has qualities that enable her to function in a meaningless world full of contradiction and cruelty. Drawing on Nietzsche's statements concerning the need for humans to be able to live without truth, and to be able to lie, Vattimo concludes that the artist is currently the most visible manifestation of the superhuman, because art is a normative model of the will to power and it can appear in a healthy 429

Gemes (1992), 52.

4. The Will to Power in its Empowering State

335

form. 430 This reading of Nietzsche's physiological aesthetic is accurate, but Vattimo is focused too much on the artist and her works of art, as if individuals such as Goethe and Napoleon were not themselves the primary work of art, as Nietzsche repeatedly maintains. It would be more useful, and certainly more ecumenical, to maintain that the superhuman tends to cultivate creativity, and to leave open where and how that creativity is expended in the creation of a new gravity consisting of new values. Meyer observes that the term superhuman can be subjected to quite different interpretations depending on the spirit of the age and the perspective of the critic. Biologism, evolutionary theory, psychology and ideology can avail themselves of the term just as utopism, romanticism, and cults. The superhuman can be construed "as a product of biologic cultivation, as the Dionysian individual, as the political power-wielder, as elite spiritual existence, romantic ideal, and religious redeemer."431 Which is not to say, of course, that any of these accord with Nietzsche's intentions, though one may well speculate that both a politician and a religious redeemer could be superhumans. Careful to stress that Nietzsche's will to power is intended partially as a counter to the concept of "struggle for existence," Meyer adds that Nietzsche "negates evolutionary adaptation in favor of the spontaneous will" (ibid, 52), which means that the superhuman can emerge at any time. We have already analyzed several passages in Nietzsche's writings where he expresses his distaste for violence and force and ascribes these behaviors to the conflicted, "thousand-and-one-goals" state of humanity which is to be superseded by ecumenical thinking. In keeping with this dimension of Nietzsche's insistence on regulation and sublimation toward ever more refined spirituality, Danto states explicitly that the superhuman is not the blond beast dominating his lesser fellows, he "is merely a joyous, guiltless, free human being, in possession of instinctual drives which do not overpower him. He is the master and not the slave of his drives, and so he is in a position to make something of himself rather than being a product of instinctual discharge and external circumstance." 432 If it is true that Nietzsche decries the degeneration of human beings to herd animals, while on the other hand he encourages the naturalization of human beings and in this operation privileges the predatory nature of animals as they tend to reflect the will to power, then in both cases he is arguing for more than a mere animalization or brutalization of the human condition. Humans "ascend to nature" by occupying their rightful place in the hierarchy of nature, not by denying the will to power. In affirming will to power, meanwhile, humans are not degenerating to mere predatory animality — Nietzsche does not hold lions and humans to be equals — the affirmation of the will to power merely provides for the spiritual sublimation characteristic of human being to proceed without physiological inhibitions.

430 431 432

Vattimo, Nietzsche, 89. Mesyer, Nietzsche und die Kunst, 49. Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, 199-200.

336

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

The will to power as reflected in humans is by definition a sublimating process, not a regression to animality or total reliance on instinct over reason — as if humans could ever rely totally on their blunted and confused instincts. When Nietzsche speaks in defense of "our insights" in Beyond, frankly admitting that they will sound foolish and under certain conditions even appear criminal to those who are not cut out for them, he is explaining the practical results of higher types living among average human beings. The esoteric and exoteric distinction used to be observed by philosophers, he reminds us, and by the Greeks, Persians, and Muslims "in short wherever one believed in an order of rank and not in equality and equal rights." The difference between these two views is not only that the exoteric individual stands outside and makes judgments from outside, rather, the more telling difference is that he looks up at things from below, while the esoteric person looks down from above (BGE 30, KSA 5:48). Missing then in the exoteric person is the perspective that surveys, which Nietzsche counts among the finest virtues of the spirit. The difference in rank between the higher types of human and lesser types is so great, Nietzsche claims, that what is nourishment or refreshment for the former must be nearly poison to the latter. Shifting his focus to books as a case in point, he maintains that there are certain books whose value depends on who is reading them; if it is a lowly soul with lower vitality then such a book would be dangerous, crumbling and disintegrating in its effects on the reader, but if the reader is of the higher and more powerful type, then the book serves as a herald's cry to the bravest, bringing forth their bravery. "Books for all the world are always foul smelling books: the odor of little people clings to them. Where the people eat and drink, even where they worship, there it usually stinks. One should not go into churches if one wants to breathe pure air" (ibid, 48-9). Of course the reference to books in the context of esoteric and exoteric, order of rank, and higher human beings is self-reflective and designed to signal Nietzsche's message to his readers — his books are at stake, among others, ostensibly, when he alludes to the opposite character of certain books in their effect on readers. The message moreover appears clear and unequivocal: caution, for here there is poison if you are not constituted to take this strong medicine! But is the message truly unequivocal? Nietzsche is speaking as the Dionysian philosopher in Beyond, which means, among other things, that he experimenting, attempting and tempting, sporting a mask. In Science he has good advice for the preachers of morals when he writes: I do not want to make a morality, but to those who do so I give this advice: if you want to deprive the best things and conditions ultimately of all their honor and value, then continue to speak of them as you have up until now! Place them at the pinnacle of your morality and speak from dawn to dusk about the happiness of virtue, about the calm of the soul, about righteousness and immanent retribution: the way you go about it, all these good things in this manner will finally acquire a popularity and a clamor of the streets for themselves, but then all the gold on them will be worn away and even worse: all the gold in them will have transformed to lead (GS 292, KSA 3:532-3).

337

4. The Will to Power in its Empowering State

Nietzsche's message to the "inverse alchemists" bears something o f the revelation o f a trade secret. He tells them "disavow those good things, deny them the approbation o f the mob and easy circulation, make them again into the hidden modesties o f solitary souls, tell them morality is something forbidden?

(ibid, 5 3 3 ) I f this advice

is good enough for the preachers o f morals, who are losing their subscribers by preaching openly and publicly and offering their wares for free, for nothing, and who therefore should not wonder why they cannot give it away — if this counsel goes to the heart o f human nature by appealing to one's sense o f pride, difference, privilege, specialness, by tempting

humans who want to have a higher opinion o f

themselves, then surely it is advice Nietzsche will not deny himself when he is in need. 4 3 3 T h e will to power is not a morality, but it is a "good thing," the knowledge o f which Nietzsche wants to share, the benefit o f which he wants to share. Quite clearly he will not trumpet the will to power in the streets, for those who might hear him there would likely make it into a street slogan and use it to justify their street ways. T h e screening is already at work in the publishing o f Nietzsche's books and in the rhetoric he uses to share his secrets, his insights. I f he wants to get his message out and across, he must tell "them" (his readers, whoever is listening) that the good thing he has is forbidden, dangerous, not for their eyes and ears but only for "ours." T h e will to power is not a moral teaching but a fact o f nature and simultaneously a reading o f nature according to which nature is not equality but order o f rank. I f this insight were a matter o f indifference to Nietzsche, he would have no motive to take special pains to defend its "esoteric" nature and to bar the doors against its widest possible dissemination. Inasmuch as Nietzsche simultaneously publicizes and protects, heralds and privatizes his insights concerning the will to power, he is counting on informing and eventually empowering others. W h e n Nietzsche approached the ancient Greeks from the standpoint of the Dionysian he did so knowing that he was challenging a long-standing conception o f Greek art and writing as "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur," a formula that Winckelmann had made famous in his milestone book Thoughts

on the Imitation

of Greek

Works (Gedanken iiber die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke, 1755). 4 3 4 In

Twi-

light Nietzsche explains that the psychologist in him suspected the "beautiful souls," "golden means" and "other perfections" o f the Greeks, such as their alleged calm in greatness, idealistic disposition, and high simplicity. "I saw their strongest instinct, the will to power, I saw them tremble before the tremendous power of this drive — I saw all their institutions grow out of protective measures designed to safeguard 433

434

At the beginning of Zamthustra Part IV the protagonist is engaged in "The Honey Sacrifice," which he himself more properly refers to as a baiting and tempting and luring of higher human beings to his height — i.e., Zarathustra is fishing in the mountains, not in the sea, though he too is a "fisher of men" in the sense that Christ, upon recruiting Peter and Andrew, says "Follow me and I will make you fishers of men!" Matthew 4:19. Del Caro, "Dionysian Classicism," 592.

338

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

one another from their own internal explosives" (TI 10/3, KSA 6:157). The ancient Greeks seen from within were not noble simplicity and quiet grandeur, but explosives brought under control by sublimation and governing of the passions, just as Nietzsche argues in Tragedy that the Dionysian is brought under the control of individuation, the Apollinian, by means of artistic, image-creating impulses. The primal unity ("das Ur-Eine") of Tragedy represents Nietzsche's earliest version of the will to power, though he did not in 1872 refer to it as such, and was at that early date still committed to artistic metaphysics. By 1880, however, in what may be the first mention of the phrase "will to power," Nietzsche writes in a note that no one dares anymore to speak of the will to power, but it was otherwise in Athens ("Vom Willen zur Macht wird kaum mehr gewagt zu sprechen: anders zu Athen!" (KSA 9:360). The greatness of the Greeks rested on their particular style of living dangerously, which required them to devise "protective measures," i.e., their entire tragic culture, for the purpose of artistically, meaningfully, constructively discharging their will to power. In a note from the period in which he is indeed elaborating the doctrine of the will to power he stresses its interpretive nature, explaining that in the formation of an organ interpretation is at stake when the will to power demarcates, and determines degrees and differences of power. "Mere differences in power could not perceive themselves as such: there must be present a something that wants to grow ("es muß ein wachsen-wollendes Etwas da sein"), that interprets each other something that wants to grow with respect to its own value." Interpretation itself, he continues, is a means of becoming master over something ("um Herr über etwas zu werden"), and the organic process presupposes "continuous interpreting" (KSA 12:139-40). This note basically confirms the description of the will to power found in "On Self-Overcoming," whose analysis stands at the beginning of the current section, but with the added dimension of interpretation. Mastery and interpretation go hand in hand in the manner described by Gooding-Williams: "To constitute a passion as 'good' is, in his view, to use it, to adapt it to and literally make it 'good for' the realization of some function. By representing the will to power as a purpose-imbuing will to be master, Zarathustra prefigures Nietzsche's general claim in Genealogy that 'all events in the organic world are a subduing, a becoming master [Herrwerden], and all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh interpretation, an adaptation [Zurechtmachen] through which any previous 'meaning' and 'purpose' are necessarily obscured or obliterated.'" 435 This "purpose-imbuing will to be master" is the lust to rule, the bestowing or gift-giving virtue, and interpretation is its chief tool. Interpretation moreover is taking place constantly, continuously ("fortwährendes Interpretiren") even at the level of organ formation, and it is of course most readily apparent in humans, who are the esteeming and interpreting beings par excellence. 435

Gooding-Williams, Zarathustra's Dionysian Modernism, 121. GM 11/12, KSA313-4.

4. The Will to Power in its Empowering State

339

T h e foregoing discussions of the nature of the will to power enable us to read Nietzsche's aphorism on giving style to one's character in an empowering light. This "one needful thing" he refers to as a great and rare art: "It is practiced by the one who surveys everything that his nature offers in terms of strengths and weaknesses and then works it into an artistic plan until each detail appears as art and reason and even the weakness delights the eye." T h e strong and domineering (herrschsüchtig) natures will enjoy "their finest delight" in sculpting and mastering themselves, while the weak will rebel against this constraint of style: "they feel that if this bitter-wicked compulsion were imposed on them they would have to become vulgar under it: they become slaves as soon as they serve, they hate serving. Such spirits — and they can be spirits o f the first rank — are always out to shape or interpret themselves and their environments as free nature — wild, arbitrary, fantastic, disorderly, surprising, and they do well to do so because only thus do they do themselves good!" (GS 2 9 0 , KSA 3:531). T h e art of giving style to one's character depends on the frequently invoked Nietzschean virtue of surveying, of being able to oversee (übersehen) one's situation, personality, environment etc — surveying is the seeing that sees more honestly because it sees more and sees from a height. With a proper inventory of one's strengths and weaknesses, one can proceed to work the aggregate of traits into an artistic plan in the sense that one becomes one's own work of art, and in this sculpting process taste plays a role, although whether good or bad taste is not so important: "enough that it is One taste!" (ibid, 530). Strong and domineering types will be in their best element during such work; stylizing provides them with an outlet for the "the passion of their powerful willing," which is alleviated (erleichtert) "at the sight of all stylized nature." T h e classical virtues are now juxtaposed with the romantic or modern virtues. T h e weaker types, or those in whom the will to power does not drive to ruling, mastering, stylizing behaviors, cannot serve without becoming slaves, which is to say, they have no reserves of power, such that if they were to serve, their serving would be their everything. 436 In such types the attitude of laisser aller is prevalent and in the absence of law, rule, order, style, character, they will resort to the modern default of interpreting themselves, and nature, as "free." Science 2 9 0 is an early version of the concept of will to power manifesting itself in humans. T h e ruling or mastering virtue is present, along with the surveying capacity, the overall drive to make a "one" of oneself and thereby dignify, and sublimate, the quantum of energy that is one's passions. T h e economy of the whole human being is already signaled in this aphorism, and as Nietzsche writes in Dawn, we have a choice when it comes to environment, we are not "doomed" to playing the role of an unfortunate Atlas who bears another's person's world upon his shoulders (D 364,

436

Zarathustra takes this up in "On the Way of the Creator": "Are you such a person as is allowedto escape the yoke? There are many who threw away their last value when they threw away their servitude" (Z 1/17, KSA 4:81).

340

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

KSA 3:242). Giving style to one's character is the first act of the gift giving virtue, defining one's self in relation to one's environment, working on how to dwell in the context of where to dwell, and from this giving to one's self arises the possibility of dwelling ecumenically, conscious of the earth and all humanity, affirming the finite, practicing the art of giving style, serving without becoming a slave, empowered by the will to power. Higher human beings are distinguished from lower ones insofar as they "see and hear unspeakably more" and do so thoughtfully, and this distinguishes humans from animals and higher animals from lower ones. "The world becomes ever fuller for one who grows into the heights of humanity," he maintains, but a delusion accompanies this enhanced and enriched life of the thinking person, namely "he thinks of himself as placed as a spectator and auditor before the great drama and concert which is life: he calls his nature contemplative and overlooks the fact that he himself is also the actual poet and continuing author of life." This delusion (Wahn) on the part of humanity's most refined, thinking types is perhaps understandable as a result of the gap, or should one say putative gap between a life of thought and a life of action, but Nietzsche quickly points out that the contemplative person possesses not only the power of contemplation but also the power of creativity ( vis creativd) "which is lacking in the man of action, whatever appearances and the belief of all the world may say." Once again we see that Nietzsche ascribes superior spirituality to higher humans, in this case creativity associated with contemplation, and he explicitly denies creativity to the active types, reminding one of his preference for the spiritualized rank order of religion, which eschews force and violence, over the political expressions of force seen in the modern state. T h e conclusion of this aphorism from Science clearly indicates Nietzsche's concern for reclaiming and re-cognizing human agency in relation to the environment: Whatever has value in the world today has it not in itself, according to its nature — nature is always valueless —instead it has been given a value, bestowed, and we were these givers and bestowers! Only we created the world that concerns human beings\ But precisely this knowledge is lacking in us, and if we catch it for a moment then we have forgotten it again in the next: we misjudge our best power and underestimate ourselves, we contemplative ones, just a bit — we are neither as proud nor as happy as we could be (GS 301, KSA 3:539-40).

It seems to me that a strong argument is being made here for debunking the dichotomy between the active and the contemplative life. T h e latter is a profusely rich life, such that "the world becomes ever fuller" for one who grows into the heights of humanity, and in this I recognize Nietzsche's reverence for the closest things, the quotidian, as they are appreciated especially by thinking persons. But the flaw of our spiritualized and spiritualizing refinement is the spectator delusion, the false sense of merely viewing the world as if it were a finished play in whose presence we mysteriously "find ourselves." I regard this as a disembodied perspective, a delusion made possible by false separation of mind and body, contemplative and active, human and

4. The Will to Power in its Empowering State

341

nature. If we were able to acknowledge our own authorship in creating the world that concerns us — not necessarily in creating nature, for we do not do that — we could bridge this gap and rid ourselves of a major source of human inhibition and low selfesteem. The contemplative life is not, and should not be regarded as a relinquishing of the creative life; it is creativity, not activity, that Nietzsche consistently holds out as humanity's greatest hope. What is at stake in this argument is pride of ownership, pride of accomplishment, pride in humanity's artistry, all of which presently goes unnoted, is underestimated, remains unrecognized: "we misjudge our best power" ("wir verkennen unsere beste Kraft"). Thus before Nietzsche formulates his doctrine of the will to power, he takes an economical, ecumenical survey of the human condition and concludes that we sell ourselves short, that we misjudge our own creative agency and settle for a view of ourselves as spectators when in fact, we are builders and authors. This flaw or delusion is difficult to overcome, it haunts humanity and clings to us like a shadow, so pervasive that it currendy defines humanity in relation to nature. We should emphasize that the flaw is not "tragic" in the sense of hubris, because humans do not know the scope and scale of their own agency in creating "their world," and it is not excessive pride but a lack of pride that characterizes the thinking members of our species. The empowerment that awaits when humans discover and affirm themselves as thinkers and creators will reflect back upon the earth, upon the closest things, the every day things, such that eventually the value of all things surrounding and concerning humans will be recognized, guaranteeing or at least arguing for the continued existence of these things. It is not hubris that leads Nietzsche to claim that nature is valueless but for the value we humans bestow upon it — it is instead a proposition expressing a balance of pride and humility: nature takes no special notice of us and exists without morals, value, or values, but we will never live up to nature as a species unless we confer upon it the highest value of which we are capable, namely our creativity. When humans give to nature, and give not out of a feeling of superiority, generosity, or magnanimity, they are simultaneously investing in and giving to themselves, they are giving themselves in accordance with the virtue that gives, namely the will to power. Empowering means ascending to nature, reciprocrity between humans and nature, openness in the channel between humans and nature — there is no empowerment in exerting power over nature unless "nature" is limited to mean human nature subjected to the will to power — all other efforts to control, master, dominate, rule, exploit nature are measures of taking, and as such, they betray the absence of the gift giving virtue and are expressions of degeneration. Deleuze raises an interesting question in regard to struggle and will to power. By asking how established values are attributed, and concluding that this transpires "as the result of a combat, a struggle, whatever form this takes — whether secret or open, honest or underhand," he maintains that from Hobbes to Hegel "the will to power is engaged in combat, precisely because the combat determines those who will

342

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

profit from current values." In Nietzsche's case, however, matters are considerably, essentially different: "One cannot over emphasize the extent to which the notions of struggle, war, rivalry or even comparison are foreign to Nietzsche and to his conception of the will to power? Nietzsche does not deny struggle "but he does not see it as in any way creative of values. . . . This is why Nietzsche is opposed to Darwin: Darwin confused struggle and selection. He failed to see that the result of struggle was the opposite of what he thought; that it does select, but it selects only the weak and assures their triumph." 437 According to this scenario, a rereading of Science 301 would put the Hobbesian and Hegelian "doers" or "actors," the so-called men of action, in the camp of the will to power harnessed to a combat whose purpose is to determine "who will profit from current values." Meanwhile, the contemplative ones who sell themselves short by not acknowledging the extent to which they are themselves instrumental in the creation of the world that concerns human beings, would represent or at least imply the proximity of humans beings whose will to power is not diverted by petty politics, but is instead channeled ecumenically. I do not agree with Deleuze that struggle and competition are alien to Nietzsche's notion of will to power, for there is far too much evidence in Nietzsche's writing that he regards tension, which is a positive, dynamic state resulting from the conservation of energy, to be the opposition of forces agonistically engaging one another. The point that Deleuze appears to be making is that the will to power is not the imposition of authority or force, or the struggle against a competing power, whether higher or lower, but instead an affirming action that transcends struggle. Those whose actions are a reflection of the will to power do not need to exert force or violence, inasmuch as they are not engaged in the vicious game of who will profit from existing values, but instead, are engaged in the creation of new values by virtue of their giving. The manner in which the will to power transcends the power politics so evident in the pejorative sense of "ruling" is nicely described by Gooding-Williams, using the example of the self. Recalling that Zarathustra claims that the creator is also the annihilator, one who is prepared to "go under" (untergehen, i.e., perish) for the sake of creation, he explains that this act "permits the will to power to reassert power and mastery through the creation of new values (that is, through the revaluation of the passions) and hence through the creation of a new self. In surrendering power, the will to power squanders an established form of life and embraces the body's capacity to be affected by passional chaos; in reasserting its power, the will to power produces a new form of life and perpetuates life's self-augmenting economy."438 Of particular interest to me is the phrase "life's self-augmenting economy," because Nietzsche does indeed think in terms of an overall economy of spiritual energy, call it consciousness, intelligence, or even humanity, just as he conceives of the world 437 438

Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 82. Gooding-Williams, Zarathustra's Dionysian Modernism, 174.

4. The Will to Power in its Empowering State

343

as a finite economy of energy subjected to infinite time. The object of living, if one can use such a term for the moment, is not to be "on top" and to die for the sake of remaining on top, as is typical in the case of conquerors, mass murderers, and large-scale criminals against humanity as they appear to dominate the twentieth century: this behavior is patently, openly, and self-evidently abhorrent, and it has nothing to do with creativity. It seems to me that we ought to be able to distinguish the positive, constructive, competitive and creative expressions of the will to power from those far more onerous, and more common expressions resulting in the imposition of brute force, for if we fail to undertake this distinction, we give the mistaken impression that Nietzsche is a pacifist — neither he, nor nature, is by any means pacifist in the sense of nonresistance. 439 Vattimo remarks that the strong individual is distinguished less by traits illustrative of the world of struggle than by a kind of "'hermeneutic' character that is very reminiscent of the 'philosophy of the forenoon.'" 440 Interpretation is indeed a major manifestation of the will to power in humans, and though according to Nietzsche it is so pervasive in organisms that it is present even in the formation of a creature's organs, it is less visible than struggle, whose exterior manifestations are apparent and often spectacular. Breazeale writes that "there does not seem to be anything especially mysterious" about the will to power, which Nietzsche "plainly employed to indicate [his] conviction that there is more to life than the mere struggle for existence," which is not to deny that self-preservation "may indeed be the chief concern of some peoples and individuals." However, as Breazeale continues, it is growth that is more essential to life, growth in the form of struggle for dominion, self-assertion, expansion, and thus life as will to power "necessarily involves preference, aggression, domination, inequality, and the assertion of differences."441 While providing this cogent description of the will to power and its essential association with the notions of rank and ascendancy, Breazeale is critical of Nietzsche's unproven claim that certain types of culture, individuals, and value systems are unhealthy or decadent "whereas others express healthy, ascending life and represent the future direction of the life's self-overcoming." For him, at least, Nietzsche's categories such as "ascending" and "descending" forms of life are facile and unexplained (ibid, 129). 439

Gooding-Williams pp. 172-3 attributes the phrase "self-augmenting economy" to Henry Staten, Nietzsche's Voice, 8-15. For the record Staten's account of "economy" in Nietzsche is most compelling, and pertains not only to life and will to power but to N . himself and is responsible for the particular voice that is N. See Staten p. 12, where he discusses various examples of economy in N., and this statement: "On the one hand, there is an overall economy that includes both health and decay; on the other hand, Nietzsche cannot deny himself the satisfaction of sounding the note of strong ascendancy over the forces of decay. And the question of the relation between these forces is also the question of Nietzsche's identity," 30.

440

Vattimo, Nietzsche, 81. See my discussion of the philosophy of the forenoon in section 6 of chapter II above (HHI/638 is at issue here). Breazeale, "The Meaning of the Earth," 118.

441

344

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

I shall return the discussion to empowerment as a specific feature of the will to power now that the concept has been analyzed from the standpoint of nature, the superhuman, sublimation in humans, and struggle. There is a role for the will to power in ruling, that is, unless one subscribes to the view that wherever Nietzsche uses the word herrschen and the phrase Herr der Erde he means only "to dominate" and "lord of the earth." Bataille directs the notion of gift giving virtue back to Nietzsche himself and emphasizes its role in helping him to create Thus Spoke Zarathustra. "The mystical state, elsewhere identified with power, is more properly seen as the desire to give."442 Nietzsche would of course deny that the state he describes as the gift giving virtue is mystical, although in fairness to Bataille there are times and moments in Nietzsche, especially connected with the writing of Zarathustra, in which his inspiration quite closely resembles the elevated, Dionysian state of discharging superabundance. The bigger issue here is Nietzsche's claim that giving is an expression of power and of healthy life, and what this implies in the socio-political setting. For if giving is the ultimate expression of power and a direct consequence of self-overcoming, an individual must have something to give and it must be something that she has to give: Nietzsche does not favor charity or other forms of altruism as they tend to alleviate for the sake of ensuring the survival of the weakest. The giver must have something to give, not merely want to give something, and ultimately this something is one's self. In bestowing herself, the power-fill individual is engaging in self-overcoming, heedless of her self, which of necessity transforms to become another self but not heedless of her species. Meanwhile, those to whom or upon whom she bestows herself are the beneficiaries of a particular kind of giving, perhaps the only kind of giving that Nietzsche considers appropriate in the ecumenical context, namely, the giving that it not motivated by charity but by the instincts of ascending life, and this "pure" motive of giving in turn ensures a "pure" or innocent reception in the ones upon whom the gift is bestowed. Those who are the recipients of the gift giving virtue are not receiving alms, morals, or any other goods generally associated with altruism, instead, they are receiving their due, that for which there neither need be nor can be a proper expression of gratitude. In other words, ruling is a fact of life and a relationship between ruling types and ruled, characterized by an order of rank. Those who would deny that Nietzsche has or intends any influence in the real, day to day affairs of human beings appear to want to protect his legacy from the ravages of Hider Germany, which is understandable enough, or to isolate him for ownership by a few "kindred" free spirits who feel themselves personally addressed whenever Nietzsche uses the "us and them" rhetoric, little realizing that Nietzsche casts his net wider, far wider than they are willing to admit. Sokel properly credits Kaufmann with demonstrating "a direct correlation between the degree of power held by an individual or a group and the liberality and tolerance displayed by him or them," which is to say, Kaufmann did a service to Nietzsche studies by arguing that the will to power was neither an inspiration nor a justification for

4. The Will to Power in its Empowering State

345

Germans of the Third Reich who regarded themselves as a master race. While great power "feels secure, exuberant, and bountiful, and can consequently afford to indulge in, and indeed to invent, the ideas of justice, fairness, and forgiveness," by contrast "those with relatively little power at their disposal — Bismarck's Reich for example — are compelled to engage in shrill assertiveness and aggressive gestures." 443 It is quite a different matter however to proceed from such an understanding to a view that Nietzsche was apolitical or somehow unconcerned about power in geopolitical terms: "Any world view that makes power its central issue must be political," writes Sokel, "at least in that deepest sense." He compares the will to power to the Apollinian will transferred to masses of people as the artist's medium, even referring to Hitler as someone who saw himself as such an Apollinian artist sculpting the masses. Whether or not one agrees with Sokel's reference to Hitler — after all there is nothing creative or constructively inventive in coming to power on a platform of anti-Semitism, paranoia, and raw hatred, using the most brutal means in the history of humanity — one still respects Sokel's conclusion about the space in which the will to power unfolds: "The state to be born, or the continent of Europe to be unified, or mankind to be refashioned — those are top priorities among Nietzsche's desiderata." This needs to be borne in mind when commentators fall back upon Zarathustra's contempt for the state as a defense of his putative aversion to politics, for according to Sokel Nietzsche had the state of Bismarck's Germany in mind, not "state" per se (ibid, 438, 440-1). N o t only did Nietzsche have Bismarck's Germany in mind when he criticized the state of his day, but more important all small politics-AS they tend to splinter humanity and perpetuate division, squandering of spirit, disrespect for the earth and for humanity itself. W h e n Sokel reminds us that Nietzsche's notion of power must be instrumental in the world of politics, he is merely being honest about the embodied, the grounded Nietzsche for whom power is not an ideal but a physiological reality. The embodied Nietzsche gives due consideration to the effects of will to power on individual human bodies, collective human bodies whether in the form of individual states or unified, supernational political bodies, loosely knit groups of free spirits, or ruling castes, and on the earth, the body which is second to none, the body as terrestrial home. Of course as Danto points out Nietzsche's "idiosyncratic" preference for military types and heroes contributed to the current notion that the will to power is military, 444 and Heidegger's insistent favoring during the period of Germany's conquest of Europe of both the concept of will to power and the text The Will to Power, which he used to argue that the will to power is directed toward mastery of the earth, 445 go a long

442 443

444 445

Bataille, On Nietzsche, 176. Walter H . Sokel, "Political Uses and Abuses of Nietzsche in Walter Kaufmanns Image of Nietzsche," Nietzsche-Studien 12 (1983), 437. Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, 154. Babich, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science, 6-7.

346

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

way toward convincing most commentators that the will to power is a philosophical apology or justification for brute force. And even when a scholar clearly recognizes that "dominion as such cannotbc the proper expression of the overman," because the "desire for dominion springs from the reactive desire born of a need for power," 446 that same scholar will venture no comment on who Nietzsche's "rulers of earth" might in actuality be, preferring instead to maintain that they are not overmen, in any case. Where does this leave us? W h a t good is achieved for Nietzsche studies by refusing to open the door to the ecumenical Nietzsche who speaks with enthusiasm of both will to power and humanity's first empowered habitation of the earth? We recall that Rosen refers to Nietzsche as the first major thinker to transform esotericism into an exoteric doctrine, 447 and the will to power is a good case in point, in my view. O n the one hand by ensuring that the will to power is thought of in connection with rank or hierarchy, but on the other hand defining it as a manifestation of the bestowing virtue, Nietzsche draws an arc that spans humanity's highest and lowest, according to which even the lowest have their will to power and are in any case recipients of a gift. For Rosen this is suspiciously reminiscent of Plato's "noble lie," not accidentally formulated in The Republic, and so he concludes: "The noble cannot be reduced to power. The attempt so to reduce it is a sufficient explanation for the failure of Nietzsche's revolution" (ibid, 248-9). But for the sake or argument, let us say that the noble can be reduced to power if power is raised to the infinite power, if power itself ««powers as Nietzsche suggests it does when he calls it "bestowing," schenkend. Nietzsche's view of nature as will to power is an attempt to cut through sentimentality, idealism, asceticism, transcendentalism, metaphysics as they have distorted the image of human being, there can be no empowerment of our species as long as "what is noble" 448 is defined as the disembodied, as what is anti-human, anti-earth, anti-nature. Nietzsche's honest approach to nature puts him at odds with the modern spirit of egalitarianism, to be sure, because he is strident in his view that nothing resembling "equality" can be honestly read in the text of nature, only read into it as a typical gesture of humanistic hubris. If the discharging of power or "growth" is the underlying reality, versus survival, and if the strong and noble types of human beings are constantly overcome by the weak who acquire spirit while they, the strong, lose it, it appears that the economy of the will to power ensures a balance, a recycling and redistribution of forces. Even the successful "rulers of the earth" are subject to selfovercoming, such that they sacrifice themselves to the interests of the species. And once more in the spirit of argumentation, if power is not noble, what is noble? Is clinging to survival noble? Is acting out the role of slave noble? Is nobility to be found in

446

447 448

Babich, "A Musical Retrieve of Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Technology: Cadence, Concinnity, and Playing the Brass," Man and World26:3 (1993), 252-3. Rosen, The Mask ofEnlightenment, 248. "What is Noble" (Was ist vornehm?) is the title of Beyond's final chapter, nine.

4. The Will to Power in its Empowering State

347

claiming freedom when in fact the human species lives for the most part in a state of abject slavery? Is nobility to be found in refusing to serve, as suggested by the spirit of democracy which decrees simultaneously that none shall serve but all shall serve, including the political leaders, the servants of the people? Power is a meaningless term unless power is used, but using power is not limited to the exercise of power for purposes of subjugation, conquest, enslaving, and annihilating human beings. Babich emphasizes that readers must not ignore Nietzsche's rank-order in considering the notion of Dionysian affirmation and the doctrine of Eternal Return: "Once again one may not apply Nietzsche's categories or possibilities to Everyman. For if one does, one easily concludes that Everyman could well 'go under,' or, more commonly and understandably one concludes that anyone might be capable of becoming an Übermensch."449 Let us examine this horrific prospect of our entire planet inhabited by Ubermenschen. First, I am in total agreement with Babich when she maintains that we must not ignore the order of rank as it applies to all of Nietzsche's important teachings. This understanding or reading of the superhuman already precludes the absurd consequence, apparently raised as a scare tactic, that "Everyman" might be capable of becoming a superhuman. The all-too-humans will always be in the majority, of this we can be assured, and whatever number of superhumans there might be at any given time, each of them will be distinguished by an individuality, not a sameness, not equality. Unless, of course, one were to conclude that everyone inhabiting our planet today is in fact equal, and that there are only appearances of inequality among human beings, such that Everyman might be capable (dare we say it!) of becoming an equal. W h y do humans strive for equality if they already have it? What makes the democratic ideal more noble than Nietzsche's vision of the superhuman? W h a t makes it in any way more real, more fair, more attainable? Babich clarifies her position by explaining that she goes beyond "this gnomic denial to say why Nietzsche may not be read in this way. The principle obstacle is the unpleasantness, the difficulty of Nietzsche's esotericism, not because the doctrine [Eternal Return] may not be communicated (a difficulty intrinsic to the doctrine), but precisely because the general reader cannot be expected to have ears for what is said (a difficulty intrinsic to the possibility of reception)" (ibid, 282-3). Thus by her reasoning the rigor of Nietzsche's major teachings is such that it prohibits entry to the common person, to Everyman, and this despite the fact that Nietzsche claims the weak are in possession of greater spirit, of evergrowing spirit because they need to acquire it: "[T]he weak again and again prevail ("werden . . . über die Starken Herr") over the strong — this is because they are the greater number, they are also smarter. Darwin forgot the spirit (— that is English!), the weaker have more spirit. O n e must need spirit in order to acquire spirit — one loses it when one no longer needs it" (TI 9/14, KSA 120-1). And supposedly the weak, the 449

Babich, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science, 282.

348

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

common people, are incapable of hearing Nietzsche's message even though he bends over backwards to make esotericism into an exoteric teaching, as Rosen correctly maintains. And we are supposed to ignore as well Nietzsche's advice to the preachers of morals when he instructs them on how to make their message appealing? One begins to see that the reasons given for preserving the immaculate perception of the will to power and other Nietzschean doctrines do not stand. Yes, Nietzsche is esoteric, and his esotericism resides principally in the notion that life is precious, that human beings are precious, that the earth is precious — who wants to experience these goods? Who has the capacity, the right, the motivation to participate in this exclusive community of human beings? W h o would rather be left out in the cold? The weak do have power, according to Nietzsche, and the weak are constantly empowering themselves even as the strong are ruling and giving according to the gift giving virtue. To insist that the notion of the esoteric somehow obviates the need of the weak to acquire power through acquiring spirit is to close one eyes to the ecumenical, practical implications of Nietzsche's notion of power. If only those with Nietzsche's ears are allowed or are able to hear his message, then only a relatively small number of "Nietzsche scholars" (and by no means "all Nietzsche scholars") will live affirmative, immanent, Dionysian, will-to-powered and eternally recurring lives, and the rest of humanity will simply have to go to heaven or hell. Conway writes in an edifying way about the opposing teachers and teachings of Socrates and Zarathustra as they are represented in The Republic and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Socrates says "I went down yesterday to the Piraeus," while Zarathustra addresses the sun and announces his intention to "go under" to the people, thus "both works begin as the central character announces his intention to descend xa his audience." What both teachers share is a "guiding imperative," namely that the "philosopher is obliged to renounce his solitude and attend to the political education of his fellow men. As I will show, however, their common ground extends no further; Nietzsche intends Zarathustra ultimately to articulate an alternative to the Socratic katabasis as a model of political agency."450 The katabasis or going down/descending of Socrates represents a "descent" in Platonic terms both figuratively and literally because Socrates will reside in the world of appearances, not the true Platonic world of the Ideas, which imposes upon him the social obligation of returning to the cave, while in Zarathustra's case, since the apparent world is the real world and there is no other world, the social responsibility is to leave the cave: "Nietzsche reverses the imagery to reinforce his point that the genuine cave' is the philosopher's solitude" (ibid, footnote 16). Conway quotes Nietzsche's statement that Socrates replaced instinctual decadence with a rational one: "Nietzsche thus takes advantage of the 'demise' of the Socratic improvement-morality to submit an alternative strategy: 450

Conway, "Solving the Problem of Socrates: Nietzsche's Zarathustra as Political Irony, " Political Theory 16:2 (1988), 261,264.

4. The Will to Power in its Empowering State

349

W h y not predicate a program of political education on the assumption that human nature is not inherently deficient? Hence the central doctrine of Zarathustra is the sufficiency of human nature; as the executor-elect of Nietzsche's program of political education, Zarathustra attempts to convey this doctrine through his twin teachings of the death of God and the Übermensch'" (ibid, 264). Reading the vital difference between Plato and Nietzsche as the opposing teachings of human deficiency and sufficiency, the former representing what I call the old gravity and the latter representing the new gravity, it becomes apparent that Nietzsche's Zarathustra is first and foremost a teacher of human empowerment. Humans who are subservient and subordinate under God and Platonistic conceptions of human deficiency become empowered to serve themselves in the model of the superhuman who symbolizes and embodies human sufficiency. I argued in an earlier book that the example of Zarathustra serves as an epic version of man's attempt to establish a meaningful society. The lesson imparted by Zarathustra is that ultimately man must trust his creative potential to create himself in his own image and bear himself as his own child.451 Conway reached a similar conclusion around the same time, but he more narrowly circumscribes Nietzsche's agency by claiming that "Zarathustra's program of political education thus involves nothing over and above his agency itself; to be a virtuous exemplar is to promote the virtue of others. Zarathustra therefore solves the aforementioned problem of authority by dissolving it altogether. The authority of his political ideal is established by virtue of the power, integrity, coherence and happiness evident in his own life."452 This holds up well if we consider Zarathustra to be the last word on the role of authority, or ruling, or power in Nietzsche, because Zarathustra does appear to relinquish any claims to authority beyond his own self. However, inasmuch as I pursue the issue of the ecumenical Nietzsche based on Zarathustra's question "who shall rule the earth?", and inasmuch as Zarathustra does not answer this question himself but Nietzsche clearly elaborates upon it in Beyond and the later works, I think we have to conclude that the problem of authority is not solved by dissolving it entirely, i.e., the dissolution of Zarathustra's authority is a symbolic representation of Zarathustra's self-overcoming, his own sacrificing of himself to the will to power after serving as a virtuous "new" human being in the conditions of the new gravity. "Authority" may not be the most appropriate term for what remains of Nietzsche's ecumenical vision post -Zarathustra, but by holding open the prospect of a renaissance of the gift giving virtue in the person of individuals who rule, whether or not they are superhumans, the authority of Nietzsche's ecumenical teachings rests on the meaning of the earth. Another reading of Nietzsche's superhuman that I find particularly relevant to the notion of empowerment is Ansell-Pearson's. He maintains that "[t]he overman 451

Del Caro, Nietzsche Contra Nietzsche, 241. Conway, "Solving the Problem of Socrates," 273.

350

V. The Ecumenical Nietzsche

is within us, it is not 'out there.' Rather, it is a question of giving birth to it by freely undergoing the experience of self-overcoming (from Mensch to Ubermensch) .The reason why there has not been an overman so far is because human beings have yet to learn how to go under and over or across to that which lies 'beyond' themselves. To 'men' the Übermensch thus has the appearance of a 'super' man." 453 Apparently taking literally Zarathustra's claim that there has never been a superhuman, Ansell-Pearson offers a view whereby humans can learn to "cross over" or can learn to supersede their current humanity, and I believe this is indeed what Nietzsche calls for and why he offers his teachings. But he contradicts himself and backs down from this didactic view a moment later when he writes: "Zarathustra is a teacher who deconstructs the ground of his own authority and must do so if he is to teach autonomy. Strictly speaking, the overman cannot be taught but only undergone'' (ibid, 323). Here Ansell-Pearson agrees with Conway on Zarathustra's need to suspend his own authority in order to teach autonomy, but he also appears to agree with Conway that the problem of authority is solved because the superhuman cannot be taught, only experienced. This places Nietzsche's post-Zarathustra writings in limbo, as I maintained earlier, and it fails to recognize the efficacy of teaching, which is a form of interpretation, of ruling, of the will to power, of esteeming — perhaps what is meant by "teaching" requires clarification at this point. If by writing "strictly speaking, the overman cannot be taught but only undergone," Ansell-Pearson means that a person cannot be transformed into a superhuman by means of teaching, whatever form that teaching may take, say lessons, exhortations, practice in certain behaviors etc, then certainly — you can't teach a dog to be a human, and you can't teach a human to be a superhuman. But Nietzsche does not say, through his protagonist Zarathustra, "I teach you to be the superhuman," he in fact says: "I teach you the superhuman," and follows up by emphasizing that the human being is something that must be overcome, and "what have you done to overcome him?" (Z P 3, KSA 4:14). If we interpret the word "teach" so rigidly that the process of human beings "learning to become superhumans" is equated with the acquisition of a set of skills, then of course, no such teaching and no such learning is possible. But I do not believe this is what Nietzsche has in mind, and neither does Ansell-Pearson, appearances to the contrary, since he states that the lack of specific mention of the term superhuman in Nietzsche's later writings does not indicate that Nietzsche abandoned the idea. In other words, Nietzsche continues to teach the superhuman after Zarathustra, though he obviously never makes the claim that he or anyone else can teach an individual to become a superhuman. I may love to sing and may even be a good singer, judging by low standards, but I cannot be taught to sing like Paul McCartney or Pavarotti — another person could very well "be taught" to sing in a manner surpassing them both, though it would depend on that person's abilities. 453

Ansell-Pearson, "Who is the Übermensch?" 323.

4. The Will to Power in its Empowering State

351

Ansell-Pearson wisely relents and ceases to speak "strictly" when he writes: "The overman is 'we,' that is, the readers of [Nietzsche's] texts, who must decipher their meaning by learning the art of interpretation,' gaining from it the insight that, just as there is no 'way,' so there is no truth" (ibid, 323). The art of interpretation is directly linked to the will to power, and here it is plainly visible than interpretation is empowering. Both the model provided by Zarathustra and the teachings of Nietzsche, whether pre or post Zarathustra, constitute a process: "Nietzsche's authorship therefore, lies 'beyond' (über) himself in this 'future' of the Ubermensch. Nietzsche's future readers will be those who have undergone the test of eternal return and emerged changed and 'over' man" (ibid, 326). Ansell-Pearson thus describes a state of dwelling which I refer to as the new gravity, and he implies a manner of dwelling that draws on the embodied virtues and their enhanced capacity for immanence, virtues emanating from the philological and hermeneutic creation of the world that concerns human beings. T h o u g h it may appear that the superhuman is imminent, by his account, I argue that the will to power is species empowering in the present and can only function in this manner if the superhuman is seen as a real dimension of the current human, not as an unattainable transcendental ideal. Moreover, though Ansell-Pearson does not specify a direction for the overcoming of human that results in superhuman, suggesting instead that the transition is desirable in itself and inevitable, I have provided a means for reading the will to power as empowerment by focusing on the meaning of the earth and the ecumenical vision that arises from the construction of meaning of the earth. This approach has addressed two important and neglected questions of Nietzsche studies: first, w h o m does the will to power empower, and second, how does it empower? It is fashionable but facile to write about the will to power as if it were a curious, mysterious epiphany of the instincts on the part of a few human beings scattered throughout history, or as if it were an innocuous, futuristic vision of a human being that will never be, a mere metaphor and ideal, a stick with which to beat the current human being. W h e n the will to power is grounded on the earth, and the superhuman is regarded as the meaning of the earth, we are not postponing the meaning of the earth or suspending such a meaning until more auspicious times — that would constitute a perpetuation of the nihilistic behavior engendered by the old gravity. Instead, as Nietzsche maintains, we are already in the era of the new gravity, we have already embarked upon our exploration and affirmation of the closest things, we are currently engaged in constructing meaning of the earth, we are now in the process of crossing over from human to superhuman, and all of this activity, thinking, reclamation, affirmation has the effect of empowering humans as a species, helping us to realize the meaning of being earthlings. Earthlings in the dignifying and elevating sense in which Nietzsche envisions earthlings, partnering with the earth for the first time in history instead of treating it like an inscrutable, inexhaustible monster, such earthlings would be superhumans.

Chapter VI: Dwelling Creatively Within the Finite 1. Conservation Measures for the Spirit "Our age, as much as it talks of economy, is a squanderer: it squanders what is most precious, the spirit." Dawn 179

For Nietzsche to use the word "economy" and to think in terms of economy during the years of Human, All Too Human is a natural extension of his growing interest in the administration of the finite, in the spiritual management of the closest things. But Müller-Lauter observes that a later influence on Nietzsche became indispensable for his understanding of economy and economics, namely Emanuel Hermann, whose 1887 book Cultur und Natur Nietzsche not only read but excerpted in his notes. Thus according to Müller-Lauter critics err in seeing only Stuart Mill as Nietzsche's major dialogue partner in matters of economy.454 Already in his "Enlightenment phase," Müller-Lauter contends, Nietzsche demanded that economics work to reveal original relationships; later on however, after discovering Hermann's book, he attributed even greater significance to economic interpretations of phenomena, adopting and following closely Hermann's view of "pure economics" whereby, for example, the differences between higher and lower life forms is an economic difference.455 Not economics as we understand it today, as an academic discipline, but economics as a principle therefore had a shaping influence on Nietzsche's famous genealogical method. It is revealing to analyze his economical thinking as it applies to the finite and renders more visible the interrelations of the finite, bearing in mind that the finite obtains wherever and whenever humans are implicated, in "the world that concerns us." Despite his occasional talk of war and its invigorating, revitalizing effects on a moribund people, or its heralding of a new "manly" age leading to the dissolution of small politics, in the final analysis, when he thinks ecumenically and reflects on the finite nature of spirit, Nietzsche recognizes that warfare is the single most wasteful behavior in which humans engage. The highest human beings are sacrificed for the sake of "country and honor" ("patria und honor") at a time when this "crude Roman patriotism" should yield to "quite different and higher tasks," and such behavior Nietzsche characterizes as "either something dishonest or a sign of retardation" (HH 454 455

Müller-Lauter, Nietzsche-Interpretationen II, vii-viii, 181. Müller-Lauter, Nietzsche-Interpretationen II, 174, 175, 176-85, 192-94.

1. Conservation Measures for the Spirit

353

1/442, KSA 2:288). 456 Thus he is against conscript armies and the ready availability of fighting forces that they make possible because they squander the most highly civilized humans whose development is achieved under difficult circumstances and over great stretches of time. But instead of treating our most highly civilized types with the thrift and solicitousness they deserve, Europeans are imitating the ancient Greeks who slaughtered one another. In relative terms those who are sacrificed are the most highly developed, precisely the ones who guarantee "a plentiful and good posterity," because they are at the forefront of battle as commanders and moreover expose themselves to the greatest dangers on acount of their superior ambition (ibid, 288). Therefore in the overall economy of the spirit, modern society is responsible for large-scale wasting of its rarest and most promising exemplars. An attending consequence of the waste of humanity's finest is the loss of individualism resulting from mobilization. "Great politics and its costs" is likewise from the first volume of Human and therefore several years before Nietzsche starts to use the term "great politics" consistently to refer to a transcending politics linked to his ecumenical vision, hence at this early date the term would correspond roughly with "geopolitics." In addition to losing humanity's highest exemplars when a people expends its energies on standing armies, war and conquest, individuals become consumed by the nation's greed and are no longer able to pursue their own interests. The new issues and concerns of the public welfare devour a daily ration of the mental and emotional capital of each citizen; the sum of all these losses and costs in terms of individual energy and work is so tremendous that the political blossoming of a people brings with it a spiritual impoverishment and exhaustion, a weaker capacity to perform works which demand concentration and focus. The fear generated in other nations by the implementation of force, along with the commercial and travel advantages extorted by such means are a "crude and gaudy flower of the nation" unworthy of the sacrifice of "the more noble, delicate, spiritual plants and growths" that previously characterized this people's soil ( H H 1/481, KSA 2:314-16). Nietzsche approaches the squandering of finite spirit both from the standpoint of the loss of individual human beings for the present and the future, as well as from the perspective of the ongoing, continuing loss of individualized energy in the shadow of a mobilized people whose goal is military and commercial conquest. At stake therefore are spiritual refinement and diversity, which Nietzsche counts among the highest values of culture, and all this is squandered for the "gaudy flower" of nationalistic power politics. In matters of the spirit as well as in matters of the environment, apparently, modern humanity practices clear-cutting where economizing and conservation are called for.

^

See e.g H H 1/444, "War," on the very next page of Human where N. lists two disadvantages of war as the making stupid of the victor and the making malicious of the vanquished, which lead to overall barbarism and naturalization, a kind of "sleep or winter time" for cultures.

354

VI. Dwelling Creatively Within the Finite

Humanity's cynicism, or possibly its indifference toward both the precious and finite nature of spirit is illustrated in yet another aphorism from Human in which humanity's propensity to ignore the closest things is juxtaposed with its preference for the ease and automation of an inscrutable end, in this case technology. Nietzsche compares humans with the charcoal kilns of the forest, proposing that young human beings are "useful" only once they have burned out and carbonized. To be sure, they may be more interesting when they still steam and smoke, but they are also useless and often troublesome (unbequem). "Humanity mercilessly uses each individual as material for stoking its great machines: but why have these machines if all individuals (that is humanity) are only good for maintaining them? Machines that are an end in themselves — is this the umana commedidt" (HH 1/585, KSA 2:336-7). In proposing this grim scenario of worship of the machine over cultivation of human individuality and spirit, Nietzsche recognizes that technology becomes an end in itself, stoking the machines becomes the "meaning" of humanity and therefore the meaning of the earth. A precious substance (one hates to equate humans with "resources" but precisely this is at stake in the current discussion) such as human youth, vitality, potential, promise is transformed, deliberately, into a second order "precious substance," a "resource," but solely for the purpose of stoking machines — here we have the transformation of humans into matter, into fuel, back into objectified nature — here we have dehumanization in the extreme. Long before Heidegger decries the equation of human beings with natural resources, Nietzsche uncovers this cynical trend of modernity's squandering of spirit and does so in the context of conserving human spirit and preserving human dignity.457 A similar argument against engaging and harnessing the spirit for ignoble purposes is made in Dawn where Nietzsche famously uses his surveying perspective to draw up an inventory of what the modern state provides and what price we pay in terms of spirit. Political and economic circumstances do not merit the energies of the most talented spirits, he maintains, and "such a waste of spirit is basically ( i m Grunde) worse than a state of emergency (Nothstand)." There are lesser spirits for such work and no others should be made available, even if the machine falls to pieces, but unfortunately everyone today believes they must be informed about politics and economics and must be engaged in them, even if it means dropping one's own work. "The general security is purchased at much too high a price, and what is most insane is that we 457

Heidegger presents his views on technology in "The Question Concerning Technology," Vortrdge und Aufidtze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959), where he concludes: "The threat to humans does not come first from the possible lethal effects of the machines and instruments of technology. The actual threat concerns humans already in their essence. The dominion of the enframing ["das Gestell"] threatens with the possibility that humans could be denied the return to a more original unconcealment through which they could experience the consolation of a more original truth" (p. 36). But for the metaphysical discourse and typical Heideggerian spin, these are N.'s thoughts. See also Bruce Foltz, Inhabiting the Earth, 92.

1. Conservation Measures for the Spirit

355

actually achieve the opposite of general security by these means, as our dear century is undertaking to prove, as if it had never been proven before!" Making society safe against thieves and fire, comfortable for trade, and transforming the state into providence in the good and bad sense — "these are lowly, mediocre and by no means indispensable goals" for which the highest means and instruments available to humanity should not be used, "the means that one should conserve (aufzusparen) for the highest and rarest goals! Our age, as much as it talks of economy, is a squanderer: it squanders what is most precious, the spirit" (D 179, KSA 3:157-8). Primary in this argument is not the critique of the modern state as such, since the goals of security and providing are hallmarks of the modern and will remain, but instead the notion that humanity must learn to conserve its spirit and noble spirits for higher goals, and not resort to a long-term "state of emergency" by squandering and mindlessly consuming its best spirits. The title of this aphorism is "As little state as possible!", not "let us abolish the state," by which two points are made: first, the political and economic benefits provided by the state are incommensurate with the value of the spirits (individuals, talents, potential etc) who are enlisted to serve the state, and are furthermore a drain on the energies of individuals who should not be abandoning their own work in order to serve the state; second, there is entirely too much "state" in the sense that it has become self-perpetuating, drawing on energies to which it has no right and therefore growing disproportionately in relation to spiritual goals and objectives, in other words, the state threatens to become the "machine" of the "human comedy" (HH 1/585). The message is clear: moderns think themselves wise because in some matters they have learned to economize, but in fact they are only penny wise and pound foolish because their whole notion of economy disregards the value of the most precious asset — spirit. Conserving the spirit requires planning and a sense of proportion, skills conspicuously lacking in moderns who do not cultivate the surveying perspective, as a direct consequence of denying order of rank, but choose instead to assign value laterally, as a kind of proliferation fueled by the notion that all humans are equal and therefore equally expendable or consumable. A case in point is the scholar, as we have seen in our analysis of chapter six of Beyond, because scholars and scholarship should tell us a lot about humanity's efforts to manage spirit. When Nietzsche claims very early in Beyond that what a scholar chooses to study is entirely arbitrary and absent of any personal investment, whereas everything is personal to the philosopher and reveals how his innermost drives are ranked in relation to one another (BGE 6, KSA 5:20), he draws the distinction between spirit that is used for modern institutional purposes, not unlike the draining of spirit by the state, and spirit that is species preserving, and therefore capable of creatively shaping the ecumenical vision. The concern for a proper use and allocation of spirit surfaces quite early in Nietzsche, as seen in Schopenhauer as Educator (1874) where those human beings who are "no longer animals" are the philosophers, artists, and saints (UM III/5, KSA 1:380-2). In a note from 1875

356

VI. Dwelling Creatively Within the Finite

he writes that countless humans live only as preparation for one actual human being, for example, philologists as preparation for the philosopher "who knows how to use their ant labor to make a statement on the value of life. To be sure, if there is no direction:, the greatest portion of that ant labor is simply nonsense and superfluous" (KSA 8: 32). According to Nietzsche's sense for conserving spirit, the "ant labor" performed by humanity's high, but not highest spirits would be a complete waste without the direction imparted by its highest spirits, the philosophers, and this is the basic argument he presents in Beyond chapter six, ten years later, only by 1885 Nietzsche has an ecumenical vision and is able to articulate the direction that is capable of redeeming the ant labor of the spirit. In Genealogy Nietzsche takes up the issue of wasted spirit in the person and figure of the priest, another spiritual specimen and one occupying a rank and agency roughly similar to the scholar's. At the conclusion of that book Nietzsche claims that if one discounts the ascetic ideal, then the particular animalh\ima.n ("das Thier Mensch") had no meaning, "its existence on earth contained no goal." The will for both human and earth has been lacking, and this is the meaning of the ascetic ideal, namely, that something was missing, that humanity was not able to justify itself. The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse of humanity; while asceticism offered a meaning, its meaning was only capable of staving off suicidal nihilism, rescuing the will but turning the will into hatred for humanity, for the animal, for the material, for the senses, for reason; into fear of happiness and beauty, longing to escape from appearance, change, becoming, death, desire, longing itself: "all this means a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rejection of the most fundamental presuppositions of life, but it is and remains a willT Humans, he concludes would rather will nothingness than not will at all (GM 111/28, KSA 5:411-12). Analyzed in terms of conservation of spirit, this long period of nihilistic willing, of negative channeling persisted according to the old gravity as long as life-denial, the ascetic ideal, was the only meaning. The spirit was "at work" but in a manner unbecoming of our species, indeed in a manner that physiologically inhibited and retarded our growth as a species. Only when human and earth acquire meaning, as they do in Nietzsche's ecumenical vision of the superhuman as the meaning of the earth, is the willing spirit diverted into creative, constructive, species-useful pursuits. Conserving spirit must not take place at the expense of life. Nietzsche describes a condition, more properly, an "epidemic" of weariness and depletion that arises in all great religions, such that when religion itself becomes dominant, the feeling for life is reduced to a minimum: no more willing, no desiring, instead avoidance of everything that produces blood (voluntary anemia), in short: hypnosis. This condition achieves for humans what hibernation achieves for some animals. "An amazing amount of human energy has been expended on this goal — has it been in vain?" (GM 111/17, KSA 5:377-79). Reducing life to its bare minimum, suspending animation as it were, is not living but its opposite, dying, and Nietzsche justifiably asks if this

1. Conservation Measures for the Spirit

357

expenditure of energy paradoxically aimed at not-living has been in vain. The implication is that this form of collective hypnosis, as well as the numbing or anesthetizing of life that assumes the form of mechanical activity (GM III/18), will be superseded by healing behaviors in the new gravity. Meanwhile, what humanity has "learned" or been "trained" to withstand during this long period of hibernation has resulted in a certain disposition and reserve of spirit that now needs to be placed in the service of life. This is the process of which Nietzsche speaks with such hope and optimism in the preface of Beyond. There, if I may review for the moment, he observes that all great things first wander the earth in the form of monstrous and frightening masks, e.g. Plato's greatest dogmatic error, "the invention of pure spirit and good in itself." Now that this monster has been conquered Europe can breathe freely, the nightmare is over, and we whose task it is to remain vigilant ("deren Aufgabe das Wachsein selbst ist") are the heirs of all the energy which the struggle against this error has cultivated. A magnificent tension has been created by the European spirit in its struggle against the "Christian-ecclesiastical pressure of millenia,"458 and this tension could be used by good Europeans like a bow to launch an arrow (BGE P, KSA 5:12-13). An aphorism of six lines in Human called "Economy of goodness" skillfully captures Nietzsche's concern for conserving what is best in the human condition. "Goodness and love as the most healing herbs and forces in traffic among humans are such precious finds that one wishes that the application of these balsamic means were as economical as possible: but this is impossible. Economy of goodness is the dream of the most audacious utopists" ( H H 1/48, KSA 2:69). The tone of this aphorism resembles "To the preachers of morals" in Science, and expresses the same common sense attitude that what is valuable should not be lavished high and low, should not be peddled in the streets where it loses all its lustre and appeals only to the base, if to any at all. Once again the modern spirit reveals itself as a wasteful spirit because it would dilute or otherwise dissipate the essence of the noble, the dear, by indiscriminately spreading it around, heedless of the fact that in so doing the value of the good is diminished, obliterated, and only the trace of the good or its empty promise remains. If moderns instead had a sense for the finite, and were truly convinced of the rareness and preciousness of their goodness and love, these features of the human spirit would be conserved, protected, cultivated, cherished, would exist in deed and not merely in word, and would escape the modernist trap of value inflation. In Beyond where Nietzsche lists a catechism for the highest types, detailing what they should do and what they should avoid, the message concludes: "One must know how to conserve oneself: hardest test of independence" (BGE 41, KSA 5:59). These higher types adhere to a regimen and hygiene for building strength, endurance in the spirit as an athlete does with the body.

458

Here, pace Deleuze, is one major example of how struggle does retain prominence in N. and does indeed result in creativity, contrary to Deleuze's blanket statement in Nietzsche and Philosophy, 82.

358

VI. Dwelling Creatively Within the Finite

Modems of course enthuse and rhapsodize about freedom, but Nietzsche contends this is mere storm and stress, inasmuch as freedom is far less prevalent in modern times than we wish to admit. "The value of a thing lies sometimes not in what one achieves by it, but instead in what one pays for it — what it costs us." He goes on to cite the example of liberal institutions which cease to be liberal as soon as they are achieved. For him, freedom means "that the manly, the warlike instincts that triumph joyfully have dominance over other instincts, for instance over those of 'happiness.' The human being who has become free, and even more so the spirit who has become free, tramples on the despicable kind of well-being dreamed of by grocers, Christians, cows, females, Englishmen and other democrats." Thus "the highest type of free human being would have to be sought where the highest resistance is constantly overcome: five steps removed from tyranny, close to the threshold of the danger of servitude." The "first principle" that governs here is one of economy: "one must need to be strong, or else one never will be" (TI 9, 38, KSA 6:139-40). 459 Freedom is a precious thing, Nietzsche maintains, but not because we decree that it is precious, out of a modernist sense of idealism, rather it is precious because it is finite, not a given, because it bears a price tag in terms of spirit, because one must first need it and its existence is by no means guaranteed. In the economy of spirit, struggle and war can liberate, the "warrior" or the one who fights can be free in the process of becoming free. The above argument entitled "My conception of freedom" may serve as an example of Nietzschean conservation of the spirit, and he quickly follows with an example of wasted spirit in "Freedom which I do not mean." In our age the instincts cannot be trusted, they contradict and destroy each other; he defines modernity as a physiological contradiction. The individual must first be made possible by means of pruning, and by "possible" Nietzsche means making the individual whole. However, he maintains, the opposite is happening: "the demand for independence, for free development, for laisser aller is made most feverishly by precisely those for whom no reins would be too strict— this is true in politics and in art" (TI 9/41, KSA 6:143). Thus freedom, one of humanity's highest goods and according to Nietzsche so rare that it really only exists as a process "five steps removed from tyranny," serves as a revealing example of humanity's squandering of spirit. Everywhere freedom "rings," everywhere freedom is on the lips of the people and it is celebrated or practiced as a kind of laisser aller, a letting oneself go, when the most needful thing for moderns is to construct a self (a whole) and conserve it. This modernist philosophy of dropping the reins and letting oneself go should not be confused with the discharging Nietzsche contributes to all organisms as an expression of the will to power — it is not abundance, power,

Miiller-Lauters second phase of economical reasoning in N., namely the later one characterized by N.'s reading of Emanuel Hermann, seems to be in force here. N. closely adhered to Hermann's view that the difference between higher and lower life forms is an economic one (Nietzsche-Inter-

pretationen II, 181).

1. Conservation Measures for the Spirit

359

wholeness of spirit that characterizes the modern person's notion of freedom, but instead, an ungrounded emptiness, a mistaken impression that all things and all persons are "equal" anyway, of no consequence, nothing matters — "it's all the same" to me. There can be no creativity without a profound understanding and appreciation of the finite, and what might appear creative, even liberated is an unbridled dissipation of spirit.

2. The Conservation of Negative Traits "Hatred, pleasure in the misfortune of others, the lust to rob and rule and whatever else is called evil belong to the amazing economy of species preservation . . ."

The Gay Science 1 What I refer to as "negative traits" are those aspects of the spirit that appear to have no place, no right to exist, and without which generally speaking humanity would be better off. When Nietzsche surveys the entire economy of life there are no such "negative traits," to be sure, because his doctrine of affirmation calls for the affirmation of every thing — love of fate or amorfati does not choose but affirms whatever life presents to it, and especially the things most difficult to bear. However, inasmuch as all peoples and individuals have their tablets of good and evil, we can gain valuable insight into Nietzsche's conservation of spirit precisely when it comes to exploring the utility of even negative traits. One way to approach this problem is through aesthetics, but by no means is the nature of the problem exhausted by aesthetics. Nietzsche argues in Dawn that the kingdom of beauty is actually much larger than we think. He first asks us to consider how we move around in nature, seeking to discover beauty everywhere whether by sunshine, stormy sky or in the pale twilight as we are trying to take in a landscape: "so too we should move around (umhergehen) among human beings, as their discoverers and look outs, showing them good and evil so that their own beauty reveals itself as it unfolds in one person by sunshine, in another by thunder storm and in a third only by half night and rainy sky." Why is it forbidden, he asks, to enjoy an evil human being as one would a wild landscape, supposing the same person behaves himself ("solange er sich gut und gesetzlich stellt")? "Yes, it is forbidden: up to now we have been allowed to seek beauty only in the morally-good— reason enough that one has found so little and has had to make do to such a great extent with boneless imaginary beauties! As certainly as there are a hundred kinds of happiness among the evil, of which the virtuous have no inkling, so too there is in them a hundred kinds of beauty: and many have not yet been discovered" (D 468, KSA 3:280-1). We can regard Nietzsche's advocacy of the wicked or evil ("den bosen Menschen") person as a dimension of his affirmation of the closest, for in effect what he is maintaining is that good and evil surround us, as does nature in all its scope — we have

360

VI. Dwelling Creatively Within the Finite

cultivated our vision to appreciate many aspects of nature while we have failed to cultivate our vision for what is beautiful in the unsavory, wicked, or evil among human beings. T h e equation of beauty with virtue is at least as ancient as Platonism, and though Nietzsche does not mention Plato in this aphorism, his presence is implied when Nietzsche claims that the restricting of beauty to the realm of the moral-good has left humanity impoverished, needful of imaginary "boneless" beauty in the form of idealism, aestheticism, embellir la natur and related phenomena. W h y settle for imaginary beauties, he argues, when next door to us in the guise of the forbidden is an undiscovered world of happiness and beauty which happens to be invisible to the virtuous eye. In this case naturalizing human beings would enable them to stand in the presence of all human beings, not only the "good" and the virtuous, as today one stands in the presence of nature — namely without condemning, without demanding for example that a certain species of tree be removed from the landscape because it does not please the eye as does the rustling and swaying aspen. In what Nietzsche refers to as the "amazing economy of species preservation" traits such as hatred, delight in the misfortune of others, the lust to rob and to rule "and whatever else is called evil" are an undeniable element. This species preserving economy is costly, wasteful "and on the whole quite foolish," but "demonstrably i^'bewiesener Massen ) it has preserved our race so far" (GS 1, KSA 3:369-70). This is the spirit of realism and honesty with which Science opens, namely with a plea to suspend judgment, to resist the temptation to divide one's fellow human beings into useful and harmful, good and evil, and to listen instead to the instinct of species preservation that speaks in each of us. It is this instinct, however it might be disguised and diverted in the anthropocentric search for the "purposes" of existence, that characterizes the economy of species preservation. Thus if one were to examine the life of the best and most fruitful human beings and peoples one would do well to consider the analogy of a tree which is supposed to grow to a proud height and ask whether this would be possible without bad weather and storms. O n e has to ask, in the case of great growth in the realm of virtues, whether this is possible without varieties of hatred, envy, stubbornness, mistrust, hardness, greed and violence. "The poison from which the weaker nature perishes is a tonic for the strong — and he does not call it poison" (GS 19, KSA 3:390). The view urged by Nietzsche is the surveying gaze, the gaze that does not satisfy itself with the most obvious, superficial appearances without tracing their genealogy, without exploring the flora, fauna and meteorological conditions under which a thing grows. If height or elevation of virtues is desired, he maintains, it is in our own self-interest to acknowledge and include the negative traits, the vices, in the promotion and creation of our virtues. Conserving these negative traits runs counter to everything we are taught by morality, of course, but the economy of species preservation supersedes morality and it is now incumbent upon humans to manage this economy more intelligently, more courageously than was possible under the old gravity. Nietzsche returns to this problem in

2. The Conservation of Negative Traits

361

Beyondwheic he argues for the liberation of psychology from moral prejudice and fears. Psychology is the branch of science designated by Nietzsche as his "morphology and doctrine of development of the will to power," and so he places new demands upon it. He claims that "an authentic physio-psychology has to struggle with unconscious resistance in the heart of the researcher, it has 'the heart' against it," by which he means that moral sentiments still govern in psychological deliberations and therefore compromise method. A doctrine of the mutual dependency of "good" and "bad" drives, as well as a doctrine of the derivation of all good drives from bad ones are still obstructed by moral inhibitions. "If, however, a person were to take even the affects hatred, envy, greed, lust to rule as life-conditioning affects, as something that must be fundamentally and essentially ("grundsätzlich und grundwesendich") present in the overall economy of life and consequently must even be enhanced if life is to be enhanced — he will suffer from such an orientation in his judgment as if from seasickness" (BGE 23, KSA 5:38). Here one sees immediately the effects of the new gravity on those searchers and researchers, those explorers of the human condition who would use a new psychology to navigate the "overall economy" of life, meaning life as will to power. The sickness, Nietzsche continues, would not even be the worst thing — there is danger in such exploration and we could end up crushing what remains of our own morality: "but what do we matter!" The sacrifice will be worth it if psychology "is acknowledged once again as the ruler (Herrin) of the sciences, at whose service and preparation the remaining sciences exist. For psychology is now once more the way to the fundamental problems" (ibid, 38-9). The plea for a bolder, more confident psychology leading the way for the other sciences should not obscure the basic fact that Nietzsche's motivation is the conservation of negative traits, not for their own benefit, but for the sake of the spiritual environment which cannot flourish without the negative traits. The species preserving economy with its intertwined and mutually dependent virtues and vices is rarely taken into account when Nietzsche's statements on the necessity of evil are discussed, even though the existence of this economy in his own writings precedes the formulation of the will to the power and grows out of his affirmation of the closest things. Stack observes that Emerson influenced Nietzsche's image "of man as analogous to a plant," needing "crude fertilizers in order to grow." Noting that Nietzsche in Beyond # 44 contends that "the 'plant' man" has grown vigorously not because of tender care but under harsh conditions, Stack writes: "Nietzsche's variations of this theme — the depiction of the tree as the most healthy form of life because as its branches reach up to the heavens its roots shoot more deeply into the earth (a notion later reiterated by James Joyce) — are all related to Emerson's reflections."460 None would dispute the presence of such metaphors in Emerson, or for that matter in earlier thinkers like Kleist and Goethe, but it would be a mistake to attribute to Emerson's influence, exclusively or in any major way, what is so patently and organically 460

Stack, Nietzsche and Emerson, 31.

362

VI. Dwelling Creatively Within the Finite

Nietzschean. The conservation of negative traits is a notion Nietzsche formed from his study of the Greeks, whose ability to govern, regulate, sublimate the passions influenced his thought at every stage of his writing. The very notion of amor fati requires such a conservation of negative traits, and as I have shown in previous chapters of this study, Nietzsche's respect for the finite things of this world in the form of the closest things, and the quotidian, form the basis of his major teachings whether we are talking about the Dionysian, the superhuman, eternal recurrence of the same, or will to power. T h e question in the old gravity was usually, upon encountering anything negative or perceived as negative: how can we quickly remove and destroy it? In the new gravity, the thing's right to exist is not questioned, and the question is instead: what use does our species make of it? In Nietzsche's broad, genealogical, and surveying view it is anathema to exclude anything, to fail to see a particular thing whether by choice or by default. As Miiller-Lauter explains, for Nietzsche humans are heirs of the entire organic past, constituted not only by what "we" remember, but by everything, because we do not in fact forget anything — we digest everything. 461 Being able to survey affords one the opportunity to view the whole, or as much of the whole as possible, in any case, and this manner of seeing is considered vital by Nietzsche. When he attempts to survey the whole, the whole in this case being humanity with its current inventory of good and evil and its past, present, and future, he looks for signs and avenues of species enhancement. "On H u m a n Prudence" in Zarathustra explores the status of evil with Zarathustra claiming: "But my third human prudence is that I will not let your fearfulness spoil my view of evil ones." Zarathustra enthuses about the wonders hatched by a hot sun, e.g. tigers, palm trees, and rattle snakes, and observes rhetorically that human evil does not live up to its name. "Verily, there is a future too for evil! And the hottest south has not yet been discovered for humans." If humans are to be enhanced, their obstacles and challenges will have to be great enough to contribute to enhancement, and no such enhancement is possible in humans whose striving is for happiness, contentment, and herd-like serenity. Therefore Zarathustra uses the superhuman and the requisite super-challenge in a metaphor: "For in order that the superhuman is not lacking his dragon, the super-dragon that is worthy of him, much hot sun must yet glow upon your damp rain forest! / Your wild cats must first have turned to tigers and your poisonous toads to crocodiles, for the good hunter shall have his good hunt!" (Z11/21, KSA4:185). W h e n one considers the economy of species preservation, Zarathustra's "tough talk" is not so puzzling, not so alienating, and one understands his apparent glorification of evil for its own sake as an attempt to instruct us about the necessary ingredients for enhancement of the type human. Building on Nietzsche's own metaphor, in her current state the human being has nothing to be overly concerned about in terms of physical danger, for the nature of her "wild" is characterized by wild cats and poisonous toads. However, the 461

Müller-Lauter, Nietzsche-Interpretationen I, 215.

2. The Conservation of Negative Traits

363

current human would be challenged exponentially if her dangers transformed from these cats and toads to human-threatening, life-threatening predators whose existence requires humans to assert their place in nature's order of rank. Though he is speaking metaphorically here Nietzsche is indeed implying that a naturalization of human beings will contribute to human enhancement, and more particularly, such a naturalization must in his view proceed along the lines of reclaiming the predatory instincts and sublimating them, as opposed to degenerating into a herd animal by closing our eyes to and attempting to cut off negative traits. This long-term view of the whole is evident as well in Nietzsche's aphoristic definition of a people: " A people is nature's detour to arrive at six or seven great men — yes, and then to get around them" (BGE 126, KSA 5:95). W h e n everything is thrown into the mix, so to speak, an entire people with its history, customs, culture exists as the spin-off of nature's attempt to produce a few choice specimens of human being, but then in a pointed reversal of the romantic notion that nature strives for consciousness, i.e., that nature aspires to becoming human, Nietzsche suddenly maintains that once these few specimens have been achieved, nature "gets around them" ("um dann u m sie herum zu kommen"). There are no goals in nature, only will to power and its constant self-overcoming, nor is there an evolutionary goal, since the choice specimens of humanity are achieved at any given time, not as the result or goal of a people's "ripening" toward perfection. This may appear wasteful from the standpoint of a people and its collective worth, its collective value, and perhaps it is part of the "foolishness" of the economy of life, but such in any case is the species preserving undercurrent flowing through humanity. A similar point is made in Genealogy where atrophy, decline, even death can sometimes be indicators of enhancement. The will and way to greater power always appear according to Nietzsche at the expense of numerous smaller powers: "The magnitude of a 'progress' ("eines 'Fortschrittes'") is measured in fact according to the mass of that which must be sacrificed for it; humanity as a mass sacrificed for the flourishing of a single stronger species of human — that would be a progress" (GM 11/12, KSA 5:315). Much has been written about Nietzsche's view of the criminal given that Zarathustra Part I has an enigmatic chapter entitled " O n the Pale Criminal," and Nietzsche scholarship has for a long time acknowledged Nietzsche's deep interest in Dostoevsky owing to the latter's skill in portraying the criminal in his fiction.462 In the context of affirmation, economy, and conservation of negative traits, the criminal type for Nietzsche offers the opportunity to test humanity's capacity for enhancement. Beyond the obvious and long-practiced strategies of moral and physical condemnation, what particular behaviors does humanity display when confronted with the worst exemplars of humanity? If enhancement only takes place in the context of struggle, overcoming, being challenged and responding to the entire economy of life, especially the negative 462

See Rosen's treatment of this chapter, or speech, in The Mask of Enlightenment, pp. 89, 97.

364

VI. Dwelling Creatively Within the Finite

traits, then what does our treatment of criminals tell us about ourselves? In Dawn he explores such questions in an aphorism (three pages!) called " O n promoting health." Scarcely have we begun to reflect on the physiology of the criminal and already we are faced with the insight that there is no essential difference between the criminal and the mentally ill person, provided one accepts the usual moral way of thinking as the healthy way of thinking. Thus Nietzsche recommends that the criminal be returned to humanity's good graces by restoring his sense of self-worth, by removing pangs of conscience as one would an impurity of the soul. Humanity still lacks compulsory education in matters of hygiene and diet, still has no societies (Vereine) of individuals who volunteer to dispense with the agency of the courts and the penal institutions as they exact revenge upon criminal perpetrators, "to date no thinker has had the courage to measure the health of a society and of individuals according to how many parasites they can bear . . . " (D 202, KSA 3:176-8). In Nietzsche's holistic conception of health, or in his "great hygiene" the strength and health of a given community stands in direct proportion to its capacity to withstand or to bear parasites, i.e., not punishment but correction and healing are gestures of a healthy people, though these measures are more costly in terms of time and spirit, and by this reasoning moderating, regulating, sublimating base drives is called for, not punishment by incarceration or even death. 463 In a late note he writes that the harmfiilness of a human being should not be an objection to him, "as if among the great promoters of life the great criminal too did not have a place! We leave the animals untouched by our wishes, nature too; but humans we want absolutely otherwise" ("schlechterdings anders") (KSA 13:109-10). Again, what appears on the surface to be something resembling a liberal, democratic and modernist person's sympathy for criminals and deviants is in fact a conservationist argument for acknowledging that in the big picture criminals too have contributed to the enhancement of humanity, not by being model citizens, to be sure, but instead by helping to shape the human spirit by providing much needed challenges and obstacles for overcoming. It is quite a different matter to "reward" or show "gratitude" for criminals, which Nietzsche does not advocate, inasmuch as he would have criminals healed, where this is possible, and returned to society as functioning peers. Humanity moves forward according to Nietzsche on the backs of the strong and the evil, who represent the new. Those who are good plant using the seed of old thoughts and they are fruitful in this endeavor. "But every soil eventually is used up and again and again the plow of evil must come" (GS 4, KSA 3:376). Reflecting his consistent view that in matters of the spirit maintenance, survival, and stability are not the end, not the goal, but are inert states upon and within which creativity is embodied by dissenting, deviating types, Nietzsche questions the absolute adherence to the good and exposes the enormous price humanity pays for refusing to acknowledge "the equally expedient, species-preserving and indispensable" nature of evil drives (ibid, 463

See H H I I / 1 220 "What is actually pagan" for a discussion of such sublimation.

2. The Conservation of Negative Traits

365

376-7). This insight into the economy of life accompanies his thinking throughout the 1880s and is recapitulated as late as Ecce Homo, where he invites us to examine the psychology of the good person. In order to evaluate what a particular type of human being is worth, one should know his conditions of existence and calculate the price of his maintenance. The condition of existence of the good person is untenable, a lie; it consists of not wanting to see, at any price, how reality is structured, it is the stupidity par excellence of wanting to eliminate conditions of need and distress, "almost as stupid as would be the will to eliminate bad weather — perhaps out of pity for poor people." This embellishing and alleviating tendency of the modern spirit ignores the whole: "In the great economy of the whole the terrible aspects of reality (in the affects, the desires, the will to power) are to an incalculable degree more necessary than that form of petty happiness, so-called 'goodness'" (EH 14/4, KSA 6:368). Without a sense for the economy of the whole, Nietzsche maintains, we arbitrarily select traits, or at least, we make our selection based on very limited information and on appearances, heedless of the cost of maintaining this spiritual lifestyle. An analogy could be drawn between this failure to see the whole in spiritual terms and the failure to survey nature. W h e n Nietzsche argues in Dawn for navigating the human spirit as we do nature, appreciating the variety of the spiritual landscape as we do the variety of the natural, he is pointing to the need to put humans in their place in nature. A healthy stance in relation to nature is one that does not wish to change the contours and features of the natural to please oneself, and time and time again humans have experienced, after the fact, how damaging it is to the environment to implement changes without knowledge of the impacts on other forms of life and even on climate. Just as our heedless, anthropocentric manipulations and violations of the natural setting result in imbalances, irreparable harm and even extinction of species, so too in the spiritual context, where humanity's "humanity" is at stake, our failure to survey the whole and to acknowledge the economy of the whole has damaging effects — these too remain largely unseen, like the damage to the environment, unless one looks for them and tries to prevent them. In any case, given that our species is stubbornly capable of denial in matters of environmental transgressions, preferring to regard the earth and its "resources" as infinite and renewable, we can expect that denial of damages to the spirit, to the future of humanity, will be even more deeply entrenched. Part of the problem lies with the anesthetizing or narcotic effects of happiness as conceived by moderns. W h e n Zarathustra describes the "last human being" as a flea beetle and claims he "lives longest," he is referring to a being who has lost the capacity for love, creativity, longing, and giving birth to a dancing star: '"We have invented happiness' — say the last human beings, and they blink" (Z P 5, KSA 4:19). And while no one should claim that a doctrine is true simply because it makes a person happy or virtuous, this is precisely what idealists do when they enthuse about the good, the true, the beautiful "and allow all manner of motley, clumsy and benevolent desiderata to chaotically swim around in their pond." Happiness and virtue are

366

VI. Dwelling Creatively Within the Finite

not arguments, Nietzsche asserts, but: "One likes to forget, even among sensible spirits, that making-unhappy and making-evil are not counter arguments either" (BGE 39, KSA 5:56). If an individual is really interested in "truth," accordingly, that person's strength would be measured by how much truth she is able to stand, to endure, without diluting and falsifying it. "Perhaps hardness and trickery {List) provide more favorable conditions for the development of the strong, independent spirit and philosopher than that gentle, refined, yielding good naturedness and art of taking things easily that one values and justifiably values in a scholar" (ibid, 57). If the standard is low and deliberately kept low, such that the happiness and contentment of the masses are humanity's goal, then there is no need to countenance or affirm the negative traits because nothing more is expected of the human spirit. However, as Nietzsche makes clear using the example of the scholar and the philosopher, spirit that embraces creativity must also embrace the negative traits. Returning now to the first aphorism of Science in which Nietzsche takes issue with the teachers of purposes for existence, we find that he is deeply concerned about another form of denial that violates the principle of economy. When someone insists on discovering or teaching a purpose for existence ("Zweck des Daseins") the following reasoning is at work: "Life shouldbt loved, because\The human being should advance himself and his neighbor, because!" In so arguing, however, we lose sight of the whole and simultaneously detract from and add to existence in a wasteful manner. "In order for that which happens necessarily and always of itself and without any purpose to seem from now on to be done for a purpose and to dawn upon humans as reason and ultimate commandment — this is why the ethical teacher appears as the teacher of the purpose of existence; for this he invents a second and different existence and by means of his new mechanics removes this old common existence from its old common hinges" (GS 1, KSA 3:371). This operation of opposing the real world, with all its faults, evils, accidents etc with a "true" or "ideal" world is deeply ingrained in the ascetic legacy of Platonism and Christianity. In the first instance this false doubling ignores or seeks to deny the existence of negative traits by remaking life, and one's fellow human beings, in the image of the good, by inventing purposes ("because" etc). We recognize in this behavior a denial of the closest things in favor of the last things, in favor of metaphysics. The second violation of the principle of economy takes places when the second, or double, world is posited in place of the real, the only world. This is done ultimately because humans do not easily embrace the notion that life has no meaning, that there are aspects to life about which we can only laugh. "Yes, he [the ethical teacher] in no way wants us to laugh at existence, or ourselves — or at him; for him One is always One, something first and last and tremendous, for him there are no species, no sums, no zeroes" (ibid, 371). The transgression against nature is two-fold because not only are the closest things denied because they do not conform to idealistic notions of the good, but further wasteful conduct manifests itself as inflationary doubling.

2. The Conservation of Negative Traits

367

It is certainly not news that lambs dislike birds of prey, Nietzsche observes in Genealogy, but this is no reason to reproach birds of prey for feeding on lambs. It is senseless to demand of strength that it not express strength, that it not engage in mastering, dominating, overpowering, every bit as senseless as demanding of weakness that it express itself as strength. "A quantum of force is a like quantum of drive, will, effect — even more, it is nothing but precisely this driving, willing, effecting itself, and only under the seduction of language (and the fundamental errors of reason petrified in it), which understands and misunderstands all effects as conditioned by an effecting agent, by a subject,' can it appear otherwise" (GM1/13, KSA 5:279). "What Nietzsche objects to is the morally motivated attribution of conscious agency, or conscience, intelligence, subjectivity to what is a mere quantum of force, as if the force were endowed with the capacity to do otherwise, e.g. as if the eagle were endowed with the capacity to refrain on moral grounds from devouring lambs. He also objects to the tendency of language to engage in doubling by ascribing a subject or agent-doer to deeds, as if the eagle's feasting on lambs could be separated from the eagle itself, as if the eagle were not, essentially, what the eagle does. Nietzsche insists that "there is no 'being' behind doing, effecting, becoming; 'the doer' is merely a fiction added to the deed — the doing is everything." Science is no better off in this regard than are common people, since scientists too speak in terms of moving forces and causing forces (ibid, 279), but what really galls Nietzsche is the reverse logic or anti-natural asceticism that the doubling mentality engenders. The doubling mentality when combined with hatred and resentment results in the mistaken notion that the strong individual is free to be weak, and the bird of prey is free to be a lamb (ibid, 280). Using such reasoning, the creatively resentful weak, the inventors of evil where formerly there were only strong and weak, i.e., good and bad, begin to regard their inability to use force, their very weakness, not as something unavoidable, not as the reality of their situation but instead as "a voluntary achievement, something willed, chosen, a deed, a merit." In other words, while the weak and oppressed are lacking all physical means of opposing their powerful oppressors, they have need of and avail themselves of a spiritual means of fighting back, albeit one that turns reality on its head: the weak reason that they are the strong, they are the good, that their incapacity to fight back is instead a matter of their own choosing. "The subject (or, to speak more popularly, the soul) has perhaps been the best article of faith on earth to this day because it enabled the majority of mortals, the weak and the oppressed of all kinds, that sublime self-deception of interpreting weakness itself as freedom, their so-and-so being ("ihr So-und So-sein") as merit" (ibid, 2801). We should try not to lose sight of the implications of such doubling and reversing for how humans conduct themselves in nature and in society. What is close, abundant, and diverse is overlooked, virtually wasted and untapped, or, in the event that it is allowed to be a factor in our lives, it is recast as an ideal, made over into something "good." Nietzsche is not talking about sublimation here but about denial and

368

VI. Dwelling Creatively Within the Finite

falsification, since sublimation arises from an abundance of "negative" traits (passion, drives, instinct etc) and their conscious redirection into virtues, not from a condition of weakness. Meanwhile, the weak parade as the strong, the bound spirits pretend to be free spirits, with the overall effect that "soul," the ultimate among last things, endures and grows at the expense of body, the ultimate among first things. The sheer quantity of falseness and error injected into the human habitat by doubling is what Nietzsche might be objecting to with such stridency, for surely he understands that the weak are only using their own will to power in thus surmounting their challenges in relation to the strong. Since the weak have no other means, their resentment becomes inventive, creative, they acquire spirit because they need it. Nietzsche appears to fault the weak, however, for not playing according to the rules of honesty — a peevish objection at best given their circumstances — and for draining the world of embodied passions while polluting it in the next instant with their particularly reprehensible brand of "virtue." The doubling, and in this case reversing or standing on its head of logic, are not limited to the resentful weak, and Nietzsche picks up this thread again in Twilight. Reason he states is the cause of our falsifying the testimony of the senses; insofar as the senses show becoming, passing away, change, they do not lie. Heraclitus was right to regard being as an empty fiction; the "apparent world" is the only world, while the "true world" is a lie tacked on (TI 3/2, KSA 6:75).464 It is not without consequences for the conservation of spirit and body that humans disavow or misinterpret the senses while simultaneously creating a "true world" parallel to the real world. In the most basic sense, the habitat that is earth and all things that are part of it, subsumable under the categories of the closest things and the quotidian, are treated disrespectfully and as if they were not "real," as if they can be used and tossed aside with the "real" world eternally out there to take us in. Meanwhile, for those who are trying to make a go of it in the new gravity, the "true" world represents so much spiritual noise, pollution, obstruction standing in the way of grounded dwelling. Williams provides a cogent discussion of the implications of living within the economy of life as Nietzsche understands it. He first establishes that for Nietzsche "[t]he demand for moral psychological minimalism is not, however, just an application of an Occamist desire for economy," and that we must give an account of "what materials we should use in giving our economical explanations." Thus when Nietzsche identifies "an excess of moral content in psychology" he does so "by appealing first to what an experienced, honest, subtle and unoptimistic interpretor might make of human behavior elsewhere. Such an interpretor might be said to be . . . 'realistic' . . . ,"465 I recog464

465

This argument is presented as section 4 of Twilight under the heading "How the 'True World' Finally Became a Fable. The History of an Error," KSA 6:80-1. Here N. gives a step by step account of the rise and fall of Platonism and the emergxence of the history of earth with the appearance of Zarathustra. Williams, "Nietzsche's Minimalist Moral Psychology," 240.

2. The Conservation of Negative Traits

369

nize in Williams' description of Nietzsche's minimalism the coming together of several strands; first, there is an excess of "moral content" in Western conceptions of the world, or what Nietzsche refers to as a preoccupation with the last things; secondly, the criterion for judging on matters of economy should be vested in an individual whose philological and hermeneutical skills are up to the task, as opposed to say true believers in the faith and philosophers with metaphysical axes to grind; and finally, the qualities Williams ascribes to the realistic observer and the environment or setting in which the observation takes places are highly reminiscent of the quotidian neighborhood inhabited by the closest things. Williams analyzes Genealogy 1/13 where Nietzsche discusses lambs in relation to birds of prey and isolates "two helpful ideas in this account. One is that the picture under attack involves a kind of double counting. The self or I that is the cause is ingenuously introduced as the cause of an action' (ibid 243). As we have seen, Nietzsche insists that '"the doer' is merely a fiction added to the deed — the doing is everything" (GM 1/13, KSA 5:279). Meanwhile, according to Williams, "[t]he second helpful thought to be recovered from Nietzsche is that such a peculiar account must have a purpose, and that purpose is a moral one" (ibid 243). In other words, our motivation for double counting or adding a doer to the doing is a moral one, stemming from our need to exercise moral judgment even, one might say, especially in cases where morals should not be at issue, e.g. in nature. The strong human being, like the bird of prey, can only be condemned for doing what the strong and the predatory must do by nature if we insert the morally motivated fiction that each of them, as subjects, is capable of doing otherwise, is in other words the subject-agent-doer of a separate deed. The mental-moral acrobatics therefore have the effect of doubling, that is, of inflating, and insofar as this doubling is channeled into inventing and placing blame, it has the effect of polluting the spiritual ecosystem, crowding it with negative fictions as weeds crowd and drain nutrients from more useful plants. In attempting to "achieve a reduced and more realistic moral psychology" and "in diagnosing the psychology of willing as a demand of the morality system itself," Williams proposes that we can "see the integrity of action, the agent's genuine presence in it" without construing the will in the doubling sense that has characterized our thinking. "The process by which we can come to see this may be complex and painful enough for us to feel, not just that we have learned a truth, but that we have been relieved of a burden" (ibid 241, 246). The presence of an individual in an action or in relation to it cannot emerge unless we stop doubling, stop ascribing wilful intent, and therefore blame, where Nietzsche maintains there should be the innocence of becoming. A kind of ontological presencing would be provided by this reorientation, in the sense that one would truly be in one's environment, as opposed to projecting one's presence into a fictionalized environment characterized by blame. Williams does a valuable service to Nietzsche studies by pointing out that what is at stake in rethinking our notions of the will, and in granting that Nietzsche is correct to insist on the

370

VI. Dwelling Creatively Within the Finite

complexity of willing, is not merely a "lesson" or a point of knowledge but moreover has the capacity to relieve us of a burden. This suggests strongly that there is a practical dimension to Nietzsche's teachings on the economy of life and the conservation of negative traits, one that corresponds to Goethe's statement, quoted by Nietzsche in the preface to On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Living, and according to which Nietzsche lived and wrote: "Furthermore I despise everything that merely teaches me without increasing or directly animating my activity."466 The complexity of Nietzsche's conception of life's economy is apparent in and of itself, but is further complicated by the position Nietzsche adopts within this play of forces. I think analytical philosophers, or at least those professional philosophers who have a tendency to dismiss Nietzsche as a Romantic or an aesthete, as does Bertrand Russell, frequently overlook his contributions because they fail to ask questions where others, such as Williams, accept Nietzsche's invitation to formulate a question and to launch an investigation. It is not always the case that Nietzsche prefers to avoid argumentation according to the rules of philosophy, it is also the case that professional philosophers refuse to engage Nietzsche's ideas even they do constitute a substantial basis for argumentation. Another reason Nietzsche's ideas do not receive their due in terms of analysis is because of his voice, whose often egotistical presence obscures the merits of the argument. On this issue Staten has some interesting observations. "Nietzsche's text reacts against the slave and the ascetic (who are not identical, but whom Nietzsche at times runs together and never definitively distinguishes), condemns them, tries to throw them outside of the boundary that it draws around nature and health. And it swells with praise when the aggressive, noble barbarians pull into sight; all positive value tends to migrate toward them and cluster around them." As a result of Nietzsche's being pulled back and forth between the polarities he identifies in nature, Staten maintains that" [t]he logic of the argument becomes ambiguous and contradictory as a consequence of the pull exerted by these positive and negative valuations." In other words, Nietzsche takes a position on the phenomena he describes, and we have analyzed numerous passages in which he questions the merit of scholarly objectivity. "Nietzsche is implicated within the field he analyzes, the history he narrates is a history to which he belongs, and the economic typology he invents is one that must characterize him, he must belong to one or more of the types that play the roles in the history he tells."467 By not exempting himself from the give and play that characterizes life's economy and the conservation of negative traits, Nietzsche would argue that he is being more honest, more philologically forthcoming than philosophers who, though basically writing their "memoirs" and their interpretation of things based on their embodied selves, do so as if philosophizing were a matter of writing as does the third person omniscient narrator.

466

467

Goethe to Schiller, 19 Dec. 1798, see Del Caro, Nietzsche Contra Nietzsche, 82. These words of Goethe introduce the preface of the second Untimely Meditation, KSA 1:245. Staten, Nietzsche's Voice, 20-1.

3. Creating with Forces and States

371

3. Creating with Forces and States "The cultivation of suffering, of great suffering — do you not know that only this cultivation has created all enhancements of the h u m a n being thus far?" Beyond Good and Evil 225

In Nietzsche's conception of nature as a physical environment as well as in his understanding of the spirit the key ingredient is dynamism, by which I mean everything is in a state of tension, activity, animation, movement — in the Nietzschean universe everything is on the move, not teleologically, of course, but simply because there can be no stasis, no subsidence in a context characterized by the finite. There must always be recombinations of energy and states, redistributions and transformations of energy to account for the fact that nothing new enters the economy of nature and nothing ever exits. The consequences of this view can be seen in his cultural philosophy when he assesses the presence and absence of spirit in relation to politics and culture. He claims that on the political sickbed a people rejuvenates and rediscovers its spirit, after losing it in seeking and asserting political power. Culture therefore owes the most to politically weak times ( H H 1/465, KSA 1:300). Here a cycle is described in which the energies of a people are monopolized for political purposes, bringing about atrophy in cultural terms, while a cultural blossoming occurs and the spirit reappears when politics are in decline. This point is made again in 1888 in the Twilight chapter entitled "What the Germans Lack," making it clear that Nietzsche has Germany in mind as a case in point. Culture and the state are antagonistic, he maintains, and if one spends on politics, the economy, parliamentary government, the military etc that quantum of thought, earnestness, will and self-overcoming will not be available for other purposes (TI 8/4 KSA 6:106). Related to this economy of where a people invests its energies is the discussion called "War as remedy" in Human-, weary and pitiful peoples might benefit from war as a remedy in case they are consumptive and require a radical cure. Wanting to live eternally and not being able to die is already a sign of senility: "the more fully and ably one lives, the faster one is prepared to give life away for a single good sensation. A people who lives and perceives thus does not need wars" ( H H II/2 187, KSA 2:634). In a healthy organism the economy of life does not strive above all to extend life, to increase an organism's longevity, but instead, analogous to the role of the will to power, there is something that life esteems more highly than life itself. In applying this principle to entire peoples, Nietzsche appears to recommend a "radical cure" with its risk of sudden death and its possibility of healing, over the slow consumptive wasting away that characterizes a moribund people who will die, slowly, in any case. The "single sensation" brings to mind the issue of choice, of affirmation and willful control of one's destiny, as it is called for by the eternal recurrence of the same; not longevity and life in the abstract as "immortal soul," but

372

VI. Dwelling Creatively Within the Finite

life in the fullest sense and dedicated to the moment is the meaning of the eternal recurrence. A healthy people, interestingly enough, does not require wars because it stands to gain nothing, only to lose, in making war; this healthy people "living fully and ably" ("je voller und tiichtiger") is making the best possible creative use of its energies in cultivating the spirit, not in merely maintaining itself or in investing its energies in activities of the state. As a last resort, even a moribund people, having accumulated illness for generations, has the opportunity to make creative use of its remaining energies. The modernist notion that nature conforms to laws is simply bad philology according to Nietzsche, a wrong interpretation and by no means the actual text of nature. Someone else could come along and claim that all laws are lacking in nature, and every power at every moment draws its ultimate consequence, thus making it seem that laws are at work. And, he adds, if this explanation too is criticized as mere interpretation, "so much the better" (BGE 22, KSA 5:37). The enigmatic conclusion of this discussion leaves an open field without lapsing into deconstructive non-sense. There is nothing wrong with interpretation per se, Nietzsche claims, as long as it is informed and based on sound philology. Humans cannot do otherwise than be creative in their perception of nature, but being creative here does not require us to impose humanistic and modernist values on nature — one can be equally creative in asserting that nature lacks all laws or regularity, and what is more, one can be creative and economical at the same time by refraining from assigning teleologies to nature. In the well-known "Anti-Darwin" aphorism from Twilight the so-called struggle for existence is more assertion than fact. It is the exception, according to Nietzsche, while the overall aspect of life is not crisis and starvation but wealth, profusion, absurd squandering, and where struggle exists it is for power. The species do not grow in perfection, the weak prevail over the strong all the time, and the weak have more spirit because they need it. "One should not confuse Malthus with nature" (TI 9/14, KSA 6:120-1). Here Nietzsche argues against survival as the fundamental aspect of life, and against Malthus' notion that nature has installed starvation and disease as thinning mechanisms to prevent over-population, because these views of nature appear anthropocentrically contrived. The state of nature and of life is superabundance, in his view, and in Science he claims that "as a natural scientist one should emerge from one's human corner" (GS 349, KSA 3:585), by which he means that scientists should not superimpose human ideals and behaviors upon nature. The state of superabundance ( U b e r f l u s s ) that characterizes life also influences Nietzsche's view on over-population, which he references in both Twilight 9/14 and Science 349, and in fact predates both these references, made in 1887 and 1887 respectively by several years. In Human he criticizes the "senile myopia" of contemporaries who fear the over-population of the earth, claiming that more hopeful individuals see this problem as their great ecumenical task (HH II/2 189, KSA

3. Creating with Forces and States

373

2:635). 468 This does not mean, as some might be quick to object, that Nietzsche regards nature as an infinite reserve of resources there for human plundering — on the contrary, it means that humans working creatively within the limitations of the finite earth are in a position, for the first time in history, to make ecumenical (read: wise, environmentally friendly, ecological, species and earth preserving) use of nature's abundance — which remains finite, exhaustible, and is increasingly threatened by the current «»-ecumenical dwelling of human beings. Nietzsche views the state of all living things as abundance, as opposed to distress and poverty, owing to his interpretation of nature as will to power and the attending sublimation thereof in human creativity, but this should not be construed as humanistic naivete or hubris regarding nature. Elaborating upon his notion of genius, Nietzsche argues that great men, like great ages, are explosives in which a tremendous force is stored. Great human beings are a necessity, while the age in which they appear is accidental, and the reason they almost always prevail over their age is because they are stronger, older, and for a longer time things have been stored for them ("dass länger auf sie hin gesammelt worden ist"). This view he contrasts with the theory of milieu current in France and sweeping the rest of Europe in his day, "truly a neurotic's theory," which has become "sacrosanct and nearly scientific" (TI 9/44, KSA 6:145). The great human being is an end, as the great age, such as the Renaissance, is an end: "Genius — in works, in deed — is necessarily a squanderer: that it spends itself is its greatness." People misinterpret the actions of a genius as self-sacrifice and heroism, but something else is at stake. "He flows out, he flows over, he consumes himself, he does not spare himself — with fatality, disastrously, involuntarily, as a river's breaking out beyond its banks is involuntary. But because one owes much to such explosives one has also given them much in return, for example a kind of higher morality. That is the nature of human gratitude: it misunderstands its benefactors" (ibid 145-6). Nietzsche's argument here resembles the argument against Darwin, and Malthus, who view nature as a state of poverty, distress, and weakness, in which survival is the cardinal instinct and measures or laws exist for thinning populations. T h e theory of milieu approaches nature in the same fearful and "neurotic" manner, contending that one's environment, one's surroundings are the decisive factor in one's development, while Nietzsche makes milieu subordinate to the great individual, the genius, who usually prevails over milieu. In the genius forces have been at work over long periods of time, the genius himself is the "end" ("das Ende") or goal, as the great age is its own end. Abundance in these cases is concentrated and continually refined in great individuals until it expresses itself individually or collectively, rendering milieu at best secondary. Meanwhile, because humans have a poor eye for such "natural phenomena" 468

See my discussion of the "tree of humanity" metaphor and its ecumenical context toward the conclusion of chap. V sec. 1 above.

374

VI. Dwelling Creatively Within the Finite

as the genius and need to come to grips with such rare exemplars, they engage in the moral doubling characteristic of humans and attribute moral superiority, moral motivations to the genius, even though the genius in his actions has as little choice as the river that must flood. Struggle for existence, scarceness of nourishment, milieu: what all of these have in common is a view of nature as a force that makes small, as a draining, debilitating, curtailing force. Nietzsche counters this lack of human self-esteem extrapolated into nature with his view of nature as bestowing abundance: humans therefore do not need to strategize so much about how to protect and ensure themselves against nature's insufficiency, instead, we should be educating ourselves as to the signs of nature's abundance and cultivating our species "with the grain" of nature, not against the grain. One example of this cultivation would be to learn gratitude to nature for the benefits humanity derives from it, instead of attributing this goodness to morality and thereby, in a roundabout way, thanking oneself. Yet another way to live more creatively within the abundance and diversity of nature is to suspend or withhold moral judgment in relation to humanity's immoral exemplars, in particular its criminals. Without revisiting at any length Nietzsche's views regarding criminals and deviants, we should at least point out that natural abundance does not conform to any human ideal of virtue or utility, so that nature abounds in examples of strong types and forces whether they be animals, humans, or phenomena capable of harming humans. Thus Nietzsche argues in the discussion immediately following the one on genius that the criminal is a type of strong human living under unfavorable circumstances, essentially a strong human made sick by civilization. Lacking suitable wilderness and a more free, more dangerous form of existence, the criminal's "virtues" are restrained by society and so he suffers physiological degeneration and repression. Our society of tamed and mediocre types is one in which the "naturally primitive {naturwüchsig) human being who comes from the mountains or from adventures at sea" necessarily degenerates into a criminal (TI 9/45, KSA 6:146-7). And providing a followup to "The Pale Criminal" chapter of Zarathustra, Nietzsche explains that the criminal nature bears the colors of the subterranean in his thoughts and deeds, "on him everything becomes paler than on those whose existence lies open to the sun. But nearly all forms of existence which we today regard as distinguished previously lived under this half air of the grave: the scientific character, the artist, the genius, the free spirit, the actor, the merchant, the great discoverer" (ibid 147). His point is that long periods of gestation and sublimation, working on a quantum of primitive, wild, and less differentiated spirit, have resulted in the highly civilized and spiritualized humans whom we most cherish and wish to cultivate. In chastising criminals we are merely chastising our progenitors, we are in effect lashing out at nature when we should be able to deal more constructively, more creatively with these stranded exemplars. Ultimately of course Nietzsche does not wish to elevate the criminal, the primitive to a position of honor in society, and if we take him at his word these raw types will, in their good time, be the moral leaders of some future society. He is concerned, how-

3. Creating with Forces and States

375

ever, with making proper use of the stores of energy, goods, and spirit that characterize humanity. In a note from autumn 1881 he writes: "My task: to demand the return of all the beauty and sublimeness that we have conferred upon things and fantasies, as the property and production of the human being and as his most beautiful jewelry, his most beautiful apology. The human being as poet, as thinker, as god, as power, as pity" (KSA 9:582). Humanity is in possession of a vast treasure, or let us say instead, we could be owners of such if we learn to empower ourselves and reclaim our heritage. The property and production of humans begins with gratitude for the closest things, but over time these possessions of our own making are mistaken for gifts from beyond, such that the beyond earns our gratitude. Meanwhile, humanity lies fallow, without power, without direction, unaware of its legacy of abundance and dwelling in relative penury. If humanity could tike, its proper place in nature, as a force among forces, it would be far closer to achieving this partnership if it had the full backing of its own properly-begotten wealth. Channeling or directing energy is a prime Nietzschean tenet because the conditions that obtain for life, including human life, are abundance that cries out for shaping, potential that cries out for a creative hand. Expressing his doubts about the "purity" of any given race, and suggesting instead that races can "become pure," in a manner of speaking, Nietzsche observes that progress in purifying a race occurs when its existing energy {Kraft) is increasingly limited to "individual selected functions, while previously it had to take care of too much and often contradictory things." When the purification process is complete all the energy that was earlier expended on the struggle of disharmonious traits is now available to the whole organism, "which is why races that have become pure are always also stronger and more beautiful. — The Greeks provide us with the model of a race and culture become pure: and hopefully one day too a pure European race and culture will succeed" (D 272, KSA 3:213-4). Early stages of the ecumenical vision are apparent in this discussion, as Nietzsche conceives of a "super" race drawn from the various European "races," as peoples and nations were spoken of in the 1880s. But more relevant to the current discussion is the manner in which this cultivation takes places, namely through the channeling of a people's energies into an ever narrower range of functions. Abundance is therefore not squandered in lateral, peripheral, and meaningless (unplanned) activities, but is instead given direction. Nietzsche may well be mistaken that any kind of "purity" results from this process, but if by "purity" he means a desiderata, a condition allowing a given people or group of peoples to achieve optimal use of their energies, then his reasoning is understandable. The Greeks of the tragic age were highly creative, affirmative, and whole human beings — these traits can serve as examples of what Nietzsche means by "individual selected functions." The very idea that a people is thus capable of organizing and deploying its energies implies a ruling ethos along with the presence of administrative and surveying skill.

376

VI. Dwelling Creatively Within the Finite

T h e unconscious and its life of instinct is seriously underestimated by moderns, but Nietzsche cautions that there is no escaping the unconscious, no extirpating of the prehistoric human being without dire consequences for humanity's health. Science contains a cogent analysis of the relative immaturity of consciousness and its unreliability compared to instinct. If it were not for instincts, he maintains, humans would have perished from the errors committed by their immature and as yet under-developed consciousness. Ironically, however, humans regard consciousness as the kernel of what is human, as the enduring, eternal, ultimate, and original: "One regards consciousness as a firm, given magnitude!" This overestimating of consciousness and the attending inability to see it as nascent, probing, vulnerable, inconsistent has a great usefulness as a consequence, namely, "it has prevented an all too rapid development" of consciousness because humans have believed themselves to be in possession of consciousness all along, and have therefore refrained from making efforts to acquire it. Thus he concludes that the task of embodying knowledge ("das wissen einzuverleiben") and making it instinctive is still quite new and only now dawning on human beings, at least, on those who are able to see that up till now "only errors have been embodied in us and that all our consciousness relates to errors" (GS 11, KSA 3:382-3). Once our species recognizes that instinct is the ground and reliable "regulator" of humanity, as it is in all life, we can set about the task of embodying (grounding) knowledge and thereby building upon the instinct foundation. There is enormous potential here for creatively channeling our cognitive energies back into, or onto, instinct, which would have the effect of naturalizing human beings at the same time that spiritualizing continues apace. T h e goal is not to "replace" instinct with consciousness, according to Nietzsche, but to enhance instinct by making knowledge embodied, by in-corporating knowledge such that consciousness develops the ability to navigate with fewer errors. 469 Nietzsche's interest in maintaining distance between human beings highlights difference and order of rank, and his so-called pathos of distance can be regarded as a state conducive to creativity. O n e way to approach the creative potential inherent in the tension field that characterizes distance is to examine his view of pity. Whereas the modern spirit is inclined to exercise pity for the socially downtrodden and deprived, he claims "owrpity is a higher, more farsighted pity: we see how the human being is made smaller, how you make him smaller!" Nietzsche and his sympathizers look on in anxiety as their contemporaries attempt to alleviate and even to abolish suffering, while from their perspective humans need to have things still higher and worse. "The cultivation of suffering, of great suffering — do you not know that only this cultivation has created all enhancements of the human being thus far? That tension

469 -phis does not mean that all errors can or should be eliminated, or that some errors are not useful. For example, logic derives from the vast realm of unlogic when beings who do not see things precisely, as they really are, derive advantage over beings who see everything in flux (GS 111, KSA 471-2).

3. Creating with Forces and States

377

of the soul in misfortune, which cultivates strength in it; its shuddering in the face of great ruin; its inventiveness and courage in bearing, enduring, interpreting, exploiting misfortune, and whatever it has been given in terms of depth, secret, mask, spirit, cunning, greatness: has this not been given to it under the cultivation of suffering, under the cultivation of great suifering?" At this point he uses one of his favorite metaphors, that of the human being as both potter and clay, both creator and creation; humans contain substance, fragment, abundance, clay, mud, nonsense and chaos, but humans also are creator, sculptor, hammer-hardness, spectator-divinity and seventh day, to which he adds: "do you understand this contrast?" The modern spirit pities only the creation, which Nietzsche regards as raw material, whereas this material must be subjected to the formative influences, the creative influences of its opposite, for which suffering is necessity ("was nothwendig leiden muss and leiden soll") (BGE 225, KSA 5:160-1). In focusing its alleviating and pitying tendencies on the raw material of human being, moderns are practicing a reverse conservation, of sorts, whereby the material that must exist "hands off" in a raw and unformed state is artificially altered, one might say is conserved, even though it is supposed to serve as the grist of the creator. Nietzsche's "indescribable anxiety" ("unbeschreibliche Beängstigung") in the face of this modernist threat stems from a sense that the natural contrast inherent in humans as both creation and creator is being undermined by pity, by egalitarian and alleviating principles that threaten to usurp the function of the creator-human. I believe this fear of Nietzsche's can emerge more clearly if we address the question he asks in connection with this discussion, namely: "do you understand this contrast?" To be human is essentially to embody distance and contrast in one person, to be putty and creator, potter and clay, victim and aggressor, solver of riddles and problems — human being is living contradiction, and we cannot neutralize this creative tension without neutralizing/ neuterizing human being in its essence. Of all the animals only the human works consciously on its own creation, and Nietzsche would have us give serious thought to what this means. At the same time that being human is "natural" in the sense that one cannot be otherwise, being human is also being aware that humans can be and have been otherwise, and that human agency is part of the plan for human being. T h e suffering of humans is compared to raw material because without it, humans would not have the means to change, transform, and grow. Abolishing suffering, while noble as an ideal and civilized as a cultural principle, in biological terms would vacate the tension field required for self-overcoming. Thus Nietzsche in calling out for the preservation of higher types is making the strongest possible plea for maintaining difference and distance, for not abolishing the "creation" human because that would mean abolishing the "creator" human as well. Suffering will never be abolished — let us not deceive ourselves on this count and succumb to Nietzsche's rhetorical intensity— the problem lies in modernity's ignorance of the importance of sufferingcreation human in relation to the shaping, cultivating, creating human. Collectively, as a species, we only diminish ourselves by obliterating the pathos of distance.

378

VI. Dwelling Creatively Within the Finite

Difference as a creative state is also visible in Nietzsche's otherwise essentialist view of gender. 470 By ascribing certain traits to women and others to men, as he does in Beyond# 239, Nietzsche shows "the weaker sex" in a different light, despite modernist notions that women are "weaker" and are in need of intervention on the road to parity with men. His basic argument is one of economy: woman's instincts are sacrificed when she learns to no longer fear man, i.e., she unlearns her female instincts, which are by no means passive and subservient, in favor of acquiring "cultured" male (read: denatured, neutered, passive and subservient) rights and privileges, whose overall effect is the loss of instinct first among males, then among females. To cultivate woman in the same direction as the cultivated, modernist, democratic male is to repeat the stupidity of denaturing males. Men are becoming effeminate as a result of the modernist movement, one of whose tenets is the "elevation" of woman to equal status with males, with the result that first virility, then femininity tend to vanish (BGE 239, KSA 5: 175-8). T h e tension field that naturally obtains between males and females is obliterated for the sake of a "modern idea." That matters have not always taken this course is underscored in the opening paragraph of the final chapter of Beyond, where Nietzsche asserts that every enhancement of the type human has been the work of aristocratic society, and it will always be so. Humanity needs pathos of distance, he maintains, along with its class differences. Spoken without sentimentality "every higher culture on earth" has begun in the following way: Humans with a still natural nature, "barbarians in every terrible sense of the word," threw themselves upon and exploited weaker, more ethical, peaceful, and spent cultures. "The noble caste in the beginning was always the barbarian caste: their preponderance did not lie primarily in physical strength, but instead in strength of the soul — they were the more whole human beings (which also means on every level the equivalent o f ' m o r e whole beasts') — " (BGE 257, KSA 205-6). In this discussion the words "natural" and "barbarian" are equated with nobility, with "what is noble," ("was ist vornehm"), and according to Nietzsche all higher culture has its origins in aristocratic, noble types who force their will upon others. A major feature of their nobility, it should be pointed out, is that they are "more whole," i.e., they make use of the entire economy of their "more natural" nature, by implication the economy of negative traits in particular. Also of interest in this discussion is the notion that pathos of distance is a desiderata for the individual as well, meaning that observation of the principle of distance in social and cultural terms brings about, in the individual, "that demand for an ever newer expansion of distance within the soul itself," which Nietzsche equates with the self-overcoming of the human being (ibid, p. 205), and which corresponds with his discussion in Beyond# 225 where contrast is

470

See my article "The Pseudoman in Nietzsche," in which I argue that N. s greatest fear is not the rise of women and the attending decline of men, but instead the rise of the neuter. In this article I take issue with Derrida's aestheticizing of the gender issue.

3. Creating with Forces and States

379

the defining characteristic of the human who embodies both creator and creation. In other words, Nietzsche is not out to reconcile or bridge contradictions so much as he is intent upon exploiting them for creative purposes; in the case of an individual, the more distance her soul "spans" or covers, the greater she is in terms of humanity. 471 The creativity that arises from forces and states such as polarity, tension, distance, and difference is constantly thwarted by the modern person's inclination to intervene in nature with the effect of neutralizing or leveling. The hubris of this particular modern brand of humanism lies in the notion that humans are capable of improving nature, of making "it" better, wherever and whenever they apply themselves to changing something in the natural world — as if nature were there merely to receive instruction and improvement from us, from nature's ambivalent creature-creator. Where humans see contrast, difference, elevations and depressions, the tendency is to make everything the same, to hold the natural world to egalitarian standards. Underlying this misguided sense of "improving nature," by which is not meant living in constructive partnership with nature, is the mistaken but deep-seated notion that the world is infinite and therefore invulnerable, impervious to our probings and machinations. Nietzsche argues against this transcendentalist notion of the infinite in virtually everything he writes, and his view of the world as eternal recurrence of the same, as well as the importance he attaches to this doctrine, is the clearest possible evidence of his conservationist mentality. In notes from spring 1888 under the heading "The New World Conception" he introduces his first of five paragraphs with this thesis: "1) The world exists; it is not something that becomes, that passes away. Or rather: it becomes, but it has never begun to become and has never ceased to pass away — it maintains itself in both. It lives off of itself: its excrements are its nourishment" (KSA 13:374). Hallman uses this definition of the world to claim a similarity between Nietzsche and modern ecologists because Nietzsche's view shows nature "as a system in which energy is recycled again and again."472 In practical terms Nietzsche's new world conception demands a reappraisal of forces and states from the standpoint of creativity, because the obliteration of the tension inherent in these forces and states represents not only a squandering of energy but a suppression, if not outright denial of the raw material of creation. And again in practical terms, since destruction or annihilation is part of nature's economy and certainly not to be disregarded, we must investigate the consequences of our untimely, arbitrary and interventionist destruction of nature and attempt to ascertain where and how human-imposed destruction upsets the naturally occurring cycles of destruction and creation. I agree with Graham Parkes who draws attention

471

472

I treated the issue of N.'s reluctance to synthesize in Nietzsche Contra Nietzsche, pp. 172-84, in order to demonstrate that the Romantic (modern) temperament is one of reconciling and slackening, whereas N.'s remains adversarial. Hallman, "Nietzsche's Environmental Ethics," 121.

380

VI. Dwelling Creatively Within the Finite

to the human capacity and need for realizing "our implication in the utter momentariness of natural processes." Science and technology have delivered a certain degree of mastery over nature, to be sure, "but it is a Faustian delusion to believe that we are no longer subject to non-human powers — to the natural forces on which human life depends."473 Finally, since Nietzsche's world conception is that of a closed, finite system, within which all things are recombined eternally, we need to give thought to our modernist leveling reflex — the forces which we abort and distort today, instead of cultivating with an eye toward enhancement of the species, will resurface later, perhaps even with the power of the repressed.

4. Dwelling on the Quality of Life "I want to teach them what so few today understand and those preachers of pity least understand: to share joy, not pain! The Gay Science 338

All indications are that Nietzsche regards quality of life as a major issue, if not the major issue, facing moderns. If the eternal recurrence of the same is regarded as a parable, the lesson is not only carpe diem, wise enough in itself, but seize the moment and make something of it because it will recur, eternally, and there is no escaping the return. Living in a state of immanence and living the here and now without distraction should enable humans to not merely live on our planet but to dwell, to live thoughtfully, creatively, abundantly — dwelling is the mode of being that makes the most of time and place. For my notion of dwelling as I attempt to establish its Nietzschean dimensions, I am indebted to the usage of Hölderlin, whose poem "In Lovely Blueness" (In lieblicher Bläue) contains the lines: "Full of merit, yet poetically dwells / The human being on this earth" ("Voll Verdienst, doch dichterisch wohnet / Der Mensch auf dieser Erde").474 Poetic dwelling is furthermore suggested in a variety of Hölderlin poems treating the human being in relation to the sublime, and it is now a commonplace in Nietzsche studies that Hölderlin had a profound effect on Nietzsche and was for a time his favorite poet, though I do not wish to confine Nietzsche's notions on dwelling (German wohnen) to Hölderlins influence alone. Let me say, in summary, that Hölderlin provides a model of a thoughtful, inspired indi-

473 474

Parkes, "Staying Loyal to the Earth," 174-75. Michael Hamburger, editor and translator, Hölderlin: His Poems translated by Michael Hamburger with a Critical Study, 2nd ed. (London: The Harvill Press, 1952), 260-5. As Hamburger explains, the poem cannot be attributed to Hölderlin with certainty, but it has acquired fame through Heidegger's interpretation of it and other Hölderlin poems, even to the point where "dwelling" has become a philosophical concept connected with Heidegger. For an enlightening discussion of Heidegger's appropriation of Hölderlin (they were both Swabian), see Michael E. Zimmerman, "The Death of God at Auschwitz?" in Martin Heidegger and the Holocaust, 254.

4. Dwelling on the Quality of Life

381

vidual whose love for life and insight into the nature of the sublime render the phrase "poetic dwelling" of special interest to moderns. In Science Nietzsche scrutinizes his contemporaries in the United States and claims that a curious conflation ofAmerican Indian savagery and European work ethic are evident in the American striving for gold. This vice, meanwhile, is returning to Europe, to the old world via the new world, infecting it and spreading mindlessness. Joy is therefore becoming scarce and untenable while work assumes value and importance far beyond its merit (GS 329, KSA 3:556-7). Although it may be unfair for Nietzsche to attribute the work-frenzy to Americans and native Americans without first underscoring that the work ethic made its way to the new world via the old world, at least he is consistent in exposing the "mindlessness" that has setded over Europe and the industrializing world. Without time for leisure or idleness, humans merely toil and moreover do so in pursuit of base interests such as wealth. He condemns the hunt for profit as exhausting to the spirit, bringing about a weariness whereby the individual in rare moments of leisure not only lets himself go but must lie down, stretched out (ibid, p. 557). This imbalance results in a spiritual bankruptcy, a loss of self to the mechanical momentum of conformism, commerce, and industry, and of course an inevitable attending loss of individual time. An alternative to the mindless, mechanical life is suggested only a few pages later in a lengthy aphorism (5 pp.) praising the science of physics. He begins by pointing out that few people possess the power of observation, and among these few, still fewer possess the means to observe themselves. In this criticism we recognize Nietzsche's familiar entreaties to respect the closest things and to practice good philology. Ultimately, he claims, we should " restrict ourselves to the purification of our opinions and valuations and to the creation of our own new tablets of values." This will have the effect of allowing individuals to become who they are, to create themselves authentically. "And for this we must become the best learners and discoverers of all that is lawful and necessary in the world: we must be physicists in order to be able to be creators in every sense — while hitherto all valuations and ideals were constructed upon ignorance of physics or in contradiction to it" (BGE 335, 560-4). Thus in praising the mental discipline required for physics, Nietzsche is describing a person entirely different from the emerging corporate slave he attributes to American culture, an individual cognizant of and responsible for her own ontology, her own set of values. Of special significance is the fact that the values and lessons of physics, specifically those of precise and honest observation, offer the opportunity for creativity — this I regard as yet another example of how Nietzsche argues for creating within the realm of the finite and the real. To dwell as a physicist and to dwell as a poet need not be, and in Nietzsche's case certainly are not, contradictory strategies of life affirmation, and this new ideal is embodied in his notion of "gay science." Yet another life-affirming lesson on dwelling is found in the cluster of aphorisms that concludes Book IV of Science, this time in the context of morals. Here Nietzsche launches a critique of pity, or compassion, reminiscent of the critique of pity found at

382

VI. Dwelling Creatively Within the Finite

the conclusion of Zarathustra, where pity is described as Zarathustra's last temptation and trial. Pity is an ontological distraction, and drain, of the highest magnitude, and though Nietzsche specifies a time and place for altruism, he is critical of the effects of pity on the part of both pitier and pitied. Those who bestow pity do so without the slightest knowledge or understanding of the nature of an individual's suffering, and respond superficially to profound problems: "it belongs to the nature of the compassionate affection that it strips the personal from another's suffering: our 'benefactors' are the diminishers of our value and will more than our enemies are." Meanwhile, he describes how the "entire economy of my soul and its equilibrium through 'misfortune'" are of no concern to the bestower of pity: "he wants to help" and does not consider that "the path to one's own heaven always passes through the voluptuousness of one's own hell." In the reflex to pity Nietzsche sees a powerful mechanism for escaping one's self, for abandoning one's own way which is "a matter too hard and demanding and too distant from the love and gratitude of others." H e raises an extreme example and describes how an individual runs to the banner of his country whenever war breaks out, eager to commit suicide by detour ("der Krieg ist fur sie ein Umweg zum Selbstmord"). His advice to any who would avoid the distractions of the omnipresent compulsion to pity: "Live unknowing of that which your age deems most important! Lay between yourself and today at least the skin of three centuries!" And when you help, you will help those "whose distress you completely understand," namely friends, and in this manner you will help yourself as well: "I want to teach them what so few today understand and those preachers of pity least understand: to sharejoy, notpainl (dieMitfreude) (GS 338, KSA 3:565-8). 475 N o t surprisingly the notion of economy enters Nietzsche's critique of pity in at least two important ways. First, pity as a crude and clumsy emotion fails to consider the complex economy of an individual's soul or psyche, and to employ a medical analogy, pity goes after a tumor with an axe instead of a scalpel. Nietzsche is on record against alleviation and abolishing of suffering on principle, as a modernist reflex, so his reasoning here does not surprise us. Perhaps more importantly, the economy of the spirit can tolerate only so much negative output, namely pity, and has to suffer when a preponderance of pitying displaces joy and the sharing of joy. W h e n considering the spiritual household of humanity's dwelling, pity and other negative emotions cast a pall over the landscape, if not literally then figuratively choking life-giving oxygen from our air. Thoughtful activity with adequate and appropriate leisure, close observation and honest realism in relation to self and world, and a reorientation to joy-sharing instead of pity — these Nietzschean prescriptions would bring about a state of dwelling as opposed to mere surviving. And to those who would immediately

German Mitleid, meaning pity or compassion, is formed from mit, with, and Leid, pain or suffering. To pity is to show com-passion, to share suffering or pain. N.'s preference for sharing joy is therefore appropriately expressed in his coinage of Mitfreude.

4. Dwelling on the Quality of Life

383

counter that Nietzsche's prescriptions are attainable for the privileged only, I would say that unless and until they actually become the property of the privileged, or of free spirits, or of empowered individuals, these desiderata will never enjoy the widespread circulation implied by Nietzsche's ecumenical vision. Sometimes Nietzsche's suggestions for dwelling are as simple as the notation: " N B : Live outside the cities!" (KSA 11:179), a seemingly random one-liner from the notes of summer 1884 which, it is hoped, will not be transformed into another deconstructive ramble such as the one on "I have forgotten my umbrella." More often, however, Nietzsche's practical advice on achieving a state of dwelling is couched in terms of a struggle for meaning, a struggle against nihilism, as this circumstance is featured in Zarathustra. Deleuze describes how Zarathustra is hounded throughout his journeys by various personifications of nihilism, e.g. ape, buffoon, dwarf, demon: "[Nietzsche] is opposed to all thought which moves in the element of the negative, which makes use of negation as a motor, a power and quality. Just as other ways of thinking are maudlin, such a way of thinking is tearfully destructive, tearfully tragic: it is and remains the thought of ressentiment."476 As the philosopher of affirmation Nietzsche would reduce to a minimum all thinking and emoting of a purely or predominantly negative nature, such as pitying, moral condemnation, hating etc. He would also encourage empowerment in the direction of liberating ourselves from self-imposed burdens, foreign bodies whose weight imposes a false, but deadly gravity upon us. It is for this reason that Nietzsche features the ass in Part I V of Zarathustra and otherwise speaks of people with ass ears. As Deleuze insightfully remarks, "[t]he ass knows how to affirm because it takes things upon itself, but it only takes on the products of the negative. For the demon, Zarathustras ape, it is sufficient to jump on our shoulders; those who carry are always tempted to think that by carrying they affirm and that the positive is assessed by weight. T h e ass in a lion's skin — this is what Nietzsche calls the 'man of the present.'" 477 Appearances aside, the modern person is merely posing as a free human being, merely posing as a lion when in fact she is a nay-saying beast o f burden. Dwelling is achieved by the person who is discerning, who chooses her own battles and burdens, whose will is affirmative to the degree that she desires all things to recur eternally, exactly as they are. T h e privileged and the educated o f Nietzsche's day, no less than in our own, squander their spirit on materialism and displays of ostentatious bad taste. Ever the critic of revolution, Nietzsche cautions that if we wish to ward off socialism we should refrain from challenging and inciting it by living moderately, thriftily, and avoiding displays of arrogance. We should assist the state when it imposes taxes on luxuries, or else we are deserving of the triumph of socialism. Spectacular indulgences in pleasures, houses, clothing, carriages, shop windows, cuisine, opera 476

Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 179-80.

477

Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 196.

384

VI. Dwelling Creatively Within the Finite

etc, "finally your wives, shapely and molded, but of base metal; gilded, but without the sound of gold, chosen by you as show pieces and giving themselves as show pieces: these are the poisonous disseminators," Nietzsche warns, "of that popular disease which is spreading ever faster to the masses as socialist scabies of the heart but has its first seat and breeding ground in you ( H H II/1 303, KSA 2:503). This is scathing criticism of the mindless, arrogant life style of the privileged, who have no possible excuse for such base and antagonistic behavior. In this aphorism entitled "Revolutionary spirits and possessing spirits," which could just as easily be called "have-nots and haves," Nietzsche makes it clear that the quality of life on earth is everyone's responsibility, and that the have-nots will not, and should not tolerate the arrogance and stupidity of the haves. T h e message applies as well to today's "haves" and "have-nots" and need not be limited to resentment on the part of socialists, insofar as the gap between those who live in comfort and those who struggle to survive continues to be a blight on humanity. Gratitude and love are attributes Nietzsche frequently invokes in Zarathustra, but before we examine their relevance to dwelling as it is illustrated by Zarathustra's alternative lifestyle, an earlier discussion from Human helps to set the stage. "In the mirror of nature" investigates the character of a person who has a special, profound relationship with nature, who loves the outdoors and animals and appears to be "at one" with nature. Nietzsche asks whether such a description of a person tells us anything significant about her, and concludes: "Yes, something about this person is therewith described, to be sure: but the mirror of nature says nothing about how the same person, with all his idyllic sensitivity (and not even 'despite it'), could be rather loveless, niggardly and conceited" ( H H II 1/49, KSA 2:401). An individual's sense for nature, and appreciation of it, obviously says something about how the person interacts outside the social sphere, but this does not indicate an enhanced dwelling because that same person could be a miserable human being among human beings. In other words, a predisposition to nature does not guarantee good character or an ability to love where it counts. Nietzsche is making a statement here about the disconnect between humans and nature. Moderns want to be "close" to nature, like Goethe's highly sensitive but ultimately suicidal hero Werther, but they must first attend to their own human environment. Nature is not a mirror in which humans can see themselves, and nature cannot be used as a frame or mirror for judging other human beings. O n e of the more strident and off-putting features of some environmentalists, for instance, is their professed "love" of nature and their sacrifice in protecting it, while at the same time they engage in violent, even terrorist actions, appear to hold human beings in contempt in relation to animals, and generally speaking behave as though bonding with nature required breaking with humanity. To such individuals Zarathustra's word is "pass by." Zarathustra encounters a "foaming fool" at the gate of a great city, the same fool w h o m the people have christened "Zarathustra's ape" because he has learned to speak like Zarathustra and

4. Dwelling on the Quality of Life

385

has drawn on his wisdom. T h e fool confronts Zarathustra and delivers a lengthy harangue brimming with harsh criticism for the people and ways of the city, and concluding with the words: "spit on the great city and turn around!" T h e fool's harangue is forcibly interrupted by Zarathustra, who holds the fool's m o u t h shut. To the fool Zarathustra replies: "I despise your contempt; and if you warned me, — why did you not warn yourself? / From love alone shall my contempt and my warning bird fly up: but not from the swamp!" Zarathustra tells the fool that his criticism is motivated by wounded vanity and lust for revenge: "But your fool's word does me damage, even where you are right! And if Zarathustra's word were right a hundred times: you would always do wrong — with my word!" T h e inauthenticity of the fool's position is what Zarathustra exposes in this encounter, since the fool merely mimics Zarathustra and practices his criticism of the city dwellers as a function of his own personal failings. Though Zarathustra confesses his own contempt for the city and eventually passes by, his motivations are different: "This teaching I give you, you fool, as a parting gift: where one can no longer love, there one should — pass by\" (Z III/7, KSA 4:222-5). This is a central parable in the story of Zarathustra's relation to the human environment and one that clearly points to an alternative mode of dwelling. T h e big city is itself a metaphor of the modern human being and everything that ails her, so that in taking this position on the city Nietzsche is facing one of his greatest challenges, namely how to teach enhancement of the human type without becoming bogged down in contempt for humans. Further complicating this problem is the modernist inclination to criticize and condemn, often practiced at the expense of actually doing something constructive. 478 T h e foaming fool exemplifies what is negative, destructive, and strictly "old gravity" in the human condition, and he would be a snarling misfit regardless of his environment. T h e state of dwelling Nietzsche envisions is one characterized by love, and this dwelling is nomadic not only because Nietzsche regards urbanization as a blight and therefore refuses to embrace the ways of the city, but also because one must keep love alive at all costs, even when it means passing by and thereby adopting the ways of a wanderer. A similar sentiment is expressed in the chapter " O n Old and New Tablets," where Zarathustra's alternative lifestyle is expressed in the form of possible overcomings. Thus is the manner of all noble souls: they wants nothing for nothing, and life least of all. Whoever is of the m o b wants to live for nothing; we others however, to w h o m life gave itself — we always reflect on what we best give in returnl And verily, this is a noble speech which speaks: 'what life promises us, that we want — to keep for life!'" (Z III/12, KSA 4:250)

478

See Hermann Hesse, "The European," a fairy-tale/parable very cleverly juxtaposing "the last European" and numerous "third world" individuals who are stranded on a new Noah's Ark. Der Europäerin Gesammelte Erzählungen Band 3.

386

VI. Dwelling Creatively Within the Finite

Related conceptually to the bestowing or gift-giving virtue, the thoughtful ontology of not living for nothing, meaning here not living without cost or living at someone else's expense, reveals a nobility grounded on gratitude, fairness, and sharing. W h a t ever is precious, according to Nietzsche, is neither easy to come by nor without cost, and so life, the most precious thing, should be regarded as a gift as opposed to an entitlement. Those who feel gratitude for life, to life, constantly strive to repay life, to keep or hold life's promise, as Nietzsche says, and in so doing they literally personify life and fulfill its promise. While for others life is a given whose presence goes unnoticed and unappreciated, like the air we breathe, for the noble soul dwelling entails a living consciousness of a nourishing indebtedness to life. Individuals motivated in this manner to feel responsibility to keep life's promise in themselves and by their actions are changed individuals, their actions reveal that they do not take life for granted, and this in turn raises the quality of life for all. W h e n he contemplates future humanity Nietzsche realizes that there is nothing more wondrous than the historical sense, which he calls humanity's "unique virtue and illness." T h e historical sense provides an opportunity "for something entirely new and strange in history," and given time in the form of a few centuries, it could become "a wonderful growth with an equally wonderful fragrance, for whose sake our old earth would be more pleasant to inhabit than before." The development we are engaged in, scarcely knowing what we do, Nietzsche describes as the forming of a chain "of a future very powerful feeling" that he summarizes as the capacity of an individual to sense the history of humanity as her own history, thereby universalizing all the pain, glory, and triumph represented in history's vast inventory of human experience. "To have all this compressed into One soul and O n e feeling: — this would result in a happiness hitherto unknown to humans — a god's happiness full of power and love, full of tears and laughter . . . This divine feeling would then be called — humanity!" (GS 337, KSA 3:564-5). T h e capacity to feel all human history as one's own history clearly points to a superhuman being in which the extract of humanity is not merely genetically encoded in a person but is felt, is sensed as one's own history. This is another dimension of the empowering factor accompanying the superhuman who learns to live according to the will to power, and quite conspicuously, this factor depends on empathy. W h e n Nietzsche describes the feeling as "a god's happiness full of power and love, full of tears and laughter," he is foreshadowing the Dionysian conception of life that emerges later in Zarathustra and Beyond. N o t power over other human beings, but power and love as the extract of what it has meant and will mean to be human — these are the "divine" features which shall define "humanity" in the not too distant future. Dwelling is open to the creative, the poetic, and the contradictory, especially as these aspects of life tend to encourage affirmation. W h e n Nietzsche draws up a list of five things he is not interestedin (notes from summer 1884), the list reveals where he places his energy for dwelling. First, he is not interested in the national state inasmuch

4. Dwelling on the Quality of Life

387

as it is ephemeral in relation to the overall democratic movement; the worker question does not interest him because the worker himself is merely an interlude (Zwischenakt); the differences between religion and philosophy, meanwhile, do not amount to much because they are basically the same in matters of good and evil, where he has his doubts; the ways of thinking "which do not hold fast to the body and the senses and the earth" do not interest him, and finally, he has no interest in I'artpour I'art and objective people (KSA 11:242-3). What remains? The fourth point differs from the others in the manner of its formulation, and restated in the positive it would read: I am interested in the ways of thinking that hold fast to the body and the senses and the earth. Body, senses, and earth are the determinants then of Nietzsche's grounded dwelling, and he passes by the riveting, compelling events of the modernist psyche: state, social issues, metaphysics, disinterested observation. The closest things have their own merit and hold their own fascination, but their value goes unseen by the eyes of the old gravity. Dwelling affirmatively requires the surveying form of seeing, not the judgmental posture of refusing to see what lies before a person. Babich has a cogent formulation of Nietzsche's attitude in this regard: "Nietzsche does not advocate the 'lie' in the place of 'truth.' Instead, what he advocates is that the usual attitude toward the lie, toward illusion, the attitude of suspicion, anger, or disbelief, be suspended."479 If the strictures of modernity's institutions can be avoided, one has room to move with relative freedom by not viewing all things through the lens of prescribed ways of thinking, one dwells, in short, poetically, creatively, inventively, as does a free spirit. What Foltz ascribes to the writings of Heidegger, not entirely without foundation, I ascribe more properly, more authentically to Nietzsche, namely, "a sophisticated basis for showing the primacy of the poetic in the task of learning to inhabit the earth rightly."480 Heidegger's notions on dwelling are elaborations, often linguistically very formidable and subtle, of metaphors culled from Hölderlin, ideas and metaphors culled from Nietzsche, and in my view, one demonstrates poetic dwelling far more effectively in poetry than Heidegger does in his unique prose, though his prose is capable of enhancing our appreciation of poetry. Foltz is correct in explaining that it is not a matter of "giving up technological devices or of not paying heed to scientific ultimacy," and he is also correct when he states that it is "poetic discourse and modes of sensibility — not as something rarefied but as they infuse the everyday," that will help human beings to develop a new relationship with the earth.481 He may also be correct in ascribing insightful notions of dwelling to Heidegger, but he shows profound unfairness by ignoring Nietzsche as the true author of the first philosophy in Western history designed to influence the way humans inhabit the earth.

475 480 481

Babich, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science, 78. Foltz, Inhabiting the Earth, 175. Foltz, Inhabiting the Earth, 176.

388

VI. Dwelling Creatively Within the Finite

5. The Open "We others, we immoralists, on the contrary have widened our hearts for every manner of understanding, comprehending,

approving."

Twilight of the Idols 5/6

W h a t I mean by "the open" in Nietzsche is both a property of being, i.e., an ontology of dwelling openly, and a natural state characterized by open space and room to wander freely. T h e open has been sought, gained, and lost by humans throughout history, and moderns in particular have a keen interest in and need for the open, though judging by our actions we do everything possible to close ourselves off from the open. I have aired my views on Hölderlins ontology of the open 482 and regard his insights, coming as they do on the threshold of the nineteenth century and in close proximity to the French Revolution, as trend-setting for all discussions of the open, especially since Heidegger made a point of commenting on Hölderlins poetry and philosophizing in the poet's name. In the most basic sense, humans have an intuitive understanding of the open based on their need for freedom and mobility, values as well as properties which define us as human beings, while on the other hand, as Nietzsche more skillfully and persistently than any other maintains, we close ourselves off from the open, from our natural environment, by means of anti-natural, life-negating strategies and behaviors. At first it appears counterintuitive to speak of the open in connection with Nietzsche, since Nietzsche after all is firm in his insistence that humans need to learn the value of the finite before they can come into their own as humans. But overcoming such false dichotomies as "open" and "finite" is exactly what Nietzsche is about, and I argue that only when humans have developed a healthy respect for the finite, both as it describes humans and the natural world, will we be able to experience the open. Paradoxical as it may sound, humans will enjoy and celebrate their sense of the open only when they have ceased to perceive the world as vague, infinite and materially inexhaustible. For a better understanding of Nietzsche's open one might also turn to his conception of freedom, which differs from modernist, idealist notions of letting oneself go, of complete lack of restraint and direction, and involves instead a thoughtful, creative styling of one's character. Modern sensitivities appear to require the notion of the infinite in conceptualizing the open, but "infinite" is damaging to humanity and nature per se — it is an entirely negative concept, transcendental, useless and even worse, dangerous because it is not species-preserving or species-enhancing. Whatever it is in humans that hates restraint, borders, moderation, valuation, definition, economy, meaning, in short, whatever is nihilistic in the human condition aspires to the infinite and slanders the finite, yet it does so in the name of freedom. T h e "freedom" gained by those who invoke the infi482

Del Caro, "Hölderlins Ontology of the Open," Philosophy Today 34:7 (1993), 383-91.

5. The Open

389

nite is false, it merely purports, idealistically, to represent a state of sovereignly when it fact it represents only an absence of laws and an arbitrary adoption of someone else's perspective. Nietzsche is careful to point out that the instincts of moderns have become unreliable on this point, that our tendency is to let ourselves go when in fact our greatest need is to practice restraint and to prune the plant that otherwise grows misshapen. T h e open, like freedom, is therefore not to be attained within a context of borderless and empty space, which exists nowhere in any case and is literally a utopia, i.e., a non-place, devoid of obstacles and opportunities against which one may test oneself; to experience the open one must have a sense for the finite without succumbing to the defeatist mood of the closed. For a time humans feel good in and enjoy the neutrality of grand, open nature, as in mountains, sea, woods and desert, but after a while we grow impatient according to Nietzsche and ask whether these things do not want to speak to us, whether we are not there for them. As a result there arises a feeling of the offended majesty of humans ("eines crimen laesae majestatis humanae") ( H H II 2/205, KSA 2:642). T h e individual and perhaps universal human tendency to perceive oneself as the locus of meaning, and the object of attention, is so strong in us that our sense of "majesty" is violated by nature's neutrality, its silence, its inability to acknowledge us. This state of discomfort within grand or open nature ("Neutralität der grossen Natur") could very well form the basis of our constant fictionalizing of nature and our falsification of the text of nature, for in refusing (from the human point of view) to acknowledge humans as a presence, open nature wounds our vanity and reminds us of our relative insignificance in relation to nature. One would think that the discomfort of unresponsive nature would have a humbling effect on humanity, but in fact our hubris as a species rests in large measure upon nature's inability to respond to our presence "on our terms." While we can be assured of the fact that nature is affected by the human presence and altered by it, as a silent partner nature is not regarded as a partner at all and is therefore subjected to the tyranny of our wounded vanity and our thoughtlessness. O n e might add that only in particularly honest moments does nature offend our vanity, for most of the time humans flatter themselves by thinking they are "at one" with nature when in fact they have merely enjoyed a good meal or have some other reason to be in a good mood. The open that is nature is seen in instinct, while its opposite, the closed, in seen in morals. Thus according to Nietzsche a human being who has turned out well must take certain actions and instinctively avoids others, carrying the order he represents physiologically into his relations with others. "In a formula: his virtue is the result of his happiness" (TI 6/2, KSA 6:89). Error on the other hand is "in every sense the result of degeneration of instinct, of disintegration of will: one nearly defines in this manner what is bad. Everything good'v*. instinct — and, consequently, easy, necessary, free" (ibid, p. 90). Though we might regard instinct as a reflex and therefore as a matter of necessity, something that guides inexorably without allowing choice, Nietzsche

390

VI. Dwelling Creatively Within the Finite

sees in instinct a state of freedom and openness such that one cannot err, one cannot do otherwise than do good, one is moving freely and effortlessly within a natural gravity. This open state should be contrasted with the obstruction of instinct by morals. "The morality of breeding and the morality of taming are perfectly worthy of one another in their means of execution ("in den Mitteln, sich durchzusetzen"): we may posit as the highest proposition that in order to make moral, one must have the unconditional will to the opposite" (TI 7/5, KSA 6:102). Morality is seen as such a noble desiderata, according to Nietzsche, that none of the great moral teachers and religions of the world "have ever doubted their right to lie," and once again summarizing his argument into a formula, he maintains: "all means whereby humanity was supposed to have been made moral were fundamentally immoral" (ibid, p. 102). This is one paradox that Nietzsche does not allow to stand, for in casting morality in the role of antinature, he would restore virtue to the natural, to the instinctive, and thereby restore the open of nature. Only morality, and not any properties of nature itself, imposes a closed, dead-end, negating aspect upon nature, such that one's senses, passions, instincts are deemed unreliable and are attacked. When we read Twilight 612 and 7/5 in tandem, what emerges is that one of the greatest dangers of morality as anti-nature lies in its closed and closing psychology, the manner in which it stifles, condemns, terminates, extirpates, reduces and so on. Nietzsche of course allows that other moralities could and should exist, and whatever else one might say of alternative moralities, they would have to foster a sense of the open by embracing nature's proclivities for the open, by which is meant: nature does not pass judgment, and nature is not an executioner. Nietzsche argues that it is naive, to put it mildly, to demand that humans should be thus and such while reality reveals a captivating wealth and variety of types of human beings. "The individual is a piece of fatum, from front to back, one more law, one more necessity for everything that is coming and will be. To say to him change yourself means to demand that everything change itself, even retroactively." In demanding such change on the part of fellow humans, we engage in immodesty of the worst sort. "Morality, insofar as it condemns, for its own sake, not for life's regards, considerations, purposes ("aus Hinsichten, Rücksichten, Absichten des Lebens"), is a specific error for which one should have no pity, an idiosyncracy of degenerates which has caused unspeakable harm!" Upsetting the balance of nature, even of history, is a negative consequence of the demand for humans to change from what they are to what they "should be," and in this sense Nietzsche is concerned about the environmental impact of forced, arbitrary change on a natural ecosystem to which the human must return both in body and soul. That morality imposes a closing and terminating effect upon natural growth becomes clear when he poses his alternative: "We others, we immoralists, on the contrary have widened our hearts for every manner of understanding, comprehending, approving." In opening and expanding their hearts to practice positive esteeming, in seeking to understand instead of resorting to condemnation, the immoralists (free spirits, new philosophers,

5. The Open

391

empowered individuals) acknowledge and celebrate an open world full of variety, diversity, and individuality. Their eyes increasingly open to "that economy which still needs and knows how to use all that the holy foolishness of the priest, the diseased reason in the priest rejects . . ." (TI 5/6, KSA 6:86-7). Again, the economy of life contains negative traits, when viewed in human (moral) terms, but nonjudgmental individuals dwelling affirmatively can make appropriate use of everything. Dwelling in affirmation means saying yes to abundance and fullness and doing so unconditionally, with gratitude and in a sense with trust, or faith, that humans are part of something more complex and abundant than human reason is able to establish. Dwelling affirmatively, instead of morally when "moral" is taken to mean in a closed and condemning manner, is the mode of dwelling of humility that is lacking in humanistic hubris, which obstinately believes it can improve upon nature in both the natural and social spheres. T h e hallmark of Nietzsche's views on nature is the state of abundance, but we must also bear in mind that this abundance is defined by what he calls hierarchy or order of rank, in other words, whereas Nietzsche banishes all "laws" from nature as anthropocentric inventions, the one "law" he does observe in the natural world is the direct consequence of the will to power, which precipitates into a hierarchy whereby some beings are higher or stronger than others. In Zarathustra those who preach equality are referred to as tarantulas, poisonous spiders, for they would avenge themselves against any and all who are not their "equals." Humans should be redeemed of revenge, according to Nietzsche, and a step toward doing so is to grant that humans are not equal and should not be equal. Equalizing as an expression of revenge closes down the open of possibilities and promises that characterizes humans. Zarathustra says that justice tells him that humans are not equal: "And nor should they become equal! W h a t then would my love for the superhuman be, if I spoke otherwise? / O n a thousand bridges and paths they shall throng to the future, and ever more war and inequality shall be placed between them: thus my great love makes me speak!" Contrasted here are the superhuman and the equal human, or in Nietzsche's parlance, superhuman and last human. This passage reveals that the superhuman is not an ideal, uniform state of being somehow captured and arrested and persisting in a future stasis — quite to the contrary the superhuman is the notion Nietzsche uses to preserve and conserve the variety, the powerful diversity of the h u m a n type. Rank plays a role in this conception of the h u m a n because life, according to the will to power, engages in self-overcoming, i.e., it gives itself instead of cardinally seeking to preserve itself. "Life itself wants to build itself into the heights with pillars and steps: into broad distances it wants to gaze and out upon blissful beauties — therefore it needs height!" (Z II/7, KSA 4:128-30). To extend Nietzsche's metaphor for the sake of sharpening this point, let us say that humans cannot have a sense of the open if they are unable to survey their environment, just as people in a thick crowd have no idea of what goes on around them. In the

392

VI. Dwelling Creatively Within the Finite

crowd all are equal in the sense that all are unable to see, but this blindness is not a desirable condition for individuals or the species.483 In Beyond Nietzsche elaborates on his notion of free spirits and as sharply as possible draws a distinction between them and fashionable upstarts in Europe and America who are abusing this designation. The modernist free thinkers, as Nietzsche refers to them, or the Freidenker, libres-penseurs and liberi pensatori as he refers to them in their native tongue, actually seek the opposite of what genuine free spirits want. Compared to the new philosophers who are coming up, these bound and chained spirits "must now truly be closed windows and bolted doors." The reason they are described as agents of closure is because they are levelers. While the free thinkers would abolish suffering, Nietzsche's kind ("wir Umgekehrten," i.e., we opposite or we reverse ones) regard the negative, predatory traits that characterize humans as just as valuable for the enhancement of the species "human" as their opposite (BGE 44, KSA 5:60-3). When the open is at stake, the entire economy of life must be preserved and utilized, and only an open temperament such as that of authentic free (open) spirits is capable of affirming and sublimating or "turning" the negative. A similar criticism of the closing tendencies of objectivity if it is pursued as a goal in itself,484 without regard for the notion of enhancement of the human type, is found in Beyond# 207. By expanding one's panoramic and surveying vision, which is to say, by growing into the heights as opposed to remaining blinded by the human crowd and the leveling symbolized by it, Nietzsche recognizes that humans are on the path to discovering an ever greater open. "With the strength of his spiritual gaze and insight the distance and, as it were, the space around the human being is growing: his world is becoming deeper, ever new stars, ever new riddles and images are coming into view." At some future time, Nietzsche speculates, "the most solemn concepts over which there has been the most fighting and suffering, the concepts 'God' and 'sin'" will appear no more important to us "than a child's toy and child's pain to an old man." But if any would regard Nietzsche's "old man" as a state of closure or exhaustion, his conclusion indicates otherwise: the old man will remain "child enough, an eternal child!" by discovering new toys (BGE 57, KSA 4:75). Here we have a reminder of the three metamorphoses of the spirit as presented in Zarathustra's first speeches to the people. 483

Miiller-Lauter explains that N. parts company with Emanuel Hermann's vision of the future of humanity. For Hermann, competition will eventually cease and harmony will ensue, such that mutual love obtains among humans. N. sees this as decline and capitulation to the machine age, indeed as the triumph of the last human, though he keeps Hermanns concept of "pure economics" for natural and social processes (Nietzsche-Interpretationen II, 192-4, 204). The absence of competition, diversity, obstacles is inconsistent with N.'s conception of the superhuman.

484

I have already discussed objectivity in detail, but here add the following: while objectivity, as a tool and a subordinate value does contribute to openness by entertaining rival viewpoints, it must not be allowed to do so "infinitely," i.e., as a goal in itself, in which case it becomes paralysis and inability to decide and to take sides. This is what makes objectivity an insidious agent of nihilism and why N. makes the scholar subordinate to the philosopher.

5. The Open

393

The bearing, lumbering camel transforms into a lion, symbolizing the liberation of the spirit from unauthentic, externally and internally imposed burdens. As lion the spirit is capable of destroying what burdens and hems the spirit, but it is not capable of creativity, and hence the third metamorphosis of the spirit as child. The innocence and receptivity of the child united with the surveying vision of the continuously expanding human spirit — these are the defining moments of Nietzsche's open. In addition to morals the modern state poses a serious threat to the open. The state proclaims itself to be paramount in "On the New Idol," and Zarathustra draws our attention to how it lures the all-too-many, swallows, chews and ruminates them: '"On earth there is nothing greater than I: the ordering finger of God am I' — thus roars the monster. And not only the long-eared and short-sighted sink to their knees!" (Z 1/11, KSA 4:62). After delivering a scathing critique of the state, in its vitriol very much reminiscent of the "foaming fool's" tirade against the great city and very probably the fool's source for his copying of Zarathustra, the prophet gives his followers this advice: "My brothers, do you want to choke in the stench of their snouts and cravings? Rather break the windows and leap into the open!. . . The earth today still stands open to great souls. Vacant still are many seats for the lonesome and twosome, about which wafts the fragrance of silent seas" (ibid, p. 63). Finally the open is symbolized as the superhuman in this speech when Zarathustra concludes: "There, where the state ends— just look there, my brothers! Do you not see it, the rainbow and the bridge of the superhuman?" (ibid, p. 64) .485 There is a difference between the heady rhetoric of Zarathustra and the sobering commentaries of Genealogy, which like Beyond is written by Nietzsche to ground and elaborate upon his earlier more poetic work. Nietzsche's most radical expression of the open is found here embedded in his argument against the ascetic ideal. The deniers and fringe dwellers of today, he maintains, these hard, rigorous, abstinent, heroic spirits "who comprise the honor of our age, all these pale atheists, anti-Christians, immoralists, nihilists, these skeptics, ephectics, hectics of the spirit" — they all believe themselves "in fact to be as liberated as possible from the ascetic ideal," but in Nietzsche's eyes they are the actual front-line troops of the ascetic ideal, they are not free spirits "because they still believe in truth." Here Nietzsche distances himself, and his notion of the free and the open, from his nearest cousins, and in so doing, the best he can find by way of a model for his thinking is the secret, invincible order of Assassins encountered by Christian crusaders in the 11 th century. These he refers to as "that order of free spirits par excellence" for they adhered to the secret doctrine: "Nothing is true, everything is allowed." At this point he juxtaposes the mentality of the Western Christian with the 485

The open is also indicated by Zarathustra in "On the Land of Education," where he states his love for the undiscovered Kinder Land lying in the furthest sea; Z. says he wants to atone for being the child of his fathers, emphasizing the open nature of dwelling in the new gravity. "On Great Events" also breaks with kings, churches, states and revolutionaries, invoking instead "the heart of the earth which is of gold" (KSA 4: 155, 166-70).

394

VI. Dwelling Creatively Within the Finite

anti-credo of the Islamic sect: "Has a European, a Christian free thinker ever strayed into this proposition and its labyrinthine consequences? Does he know the Minotaur of this cave from experience? I doubt it, and even more, I know otherwise." What draws Nietzsche's interest to the Assassin watchword is its apparent setting aside, once and for all, any notion of truth and therefore any notion of the forbidden in the absence of truth. "It is still a metaphysicalfaith upon which our faith in science rests — even we knowers of today, we who are godless and antimetaphysicians, even we still take our fire from that conflagration ignited by a millennia-old faith, that Christian faith which was also Plato's faith, that God is truth, that truth is divine." In this section of Genealogy, at least, science and knowledge do not partner with creativity to establish and maintain the open, they only aid the closing mentality of the ascetic ideal, morality's most lethal weapon. Nietzsche concludes by calling for a comprehensive critique of the value of truth and by drawing his readers' attention to the critique of science found in the fifth book (1887) of Science (GM 111/24, KSA 5:398-401). Genealogy is an appropriate source for Nietzsche's elaborations upon the open because it is a critique of what Europeans value most highly, namely their morality, their moral sense, their sense of justice, goodness, truth. If these values cannot guarantee the open for humanity per se, then the Western ethos is exposed. Or in Nietzsche's way of thinking: the Western ethos, any ethos, needs to be exposed in order to coexist with the open. Stegmaier makes the point that ever since we triumphed over the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, we have become certain in our beliefs about what is good. Even the peaceful, moralistic movements of recent decades engage in this belief, "chiefly the series of emancipatory movements, then the great ecological movement." But we must also remain vigilant about the means used by these movements. Despite their rejection of violence and war, they too appear "combative and impatient and discriminate against those who do not unconditionally join them. We cannot rule out that they too are blind to their morality and all the more so, the more strongly they engage morally." Thus while "Europe's adventure" of rationalization, economization, and science as the justification of life has become the world's adventure, Nietzsche urges us to recall that the origin of this adventure is European morality.486 Clearly, seizing upon a movement "because it is good" does not create a culture of the open. If the pursuit of "the good" inspires stridency, absolutism, intolerance, discrimination and the host of qualities we normally attribute to zealots, then "this" good is incompatible with the open. But as Nietzsche was fond of pointing out, there are other moralities. The radicalization of the concept of free spirit to the point that Nietzsche feels compelled to invoke the extremism of an early Islamic sect represents an imbalance in his otherwise sound, and persuasive view that science and knowledge more generally are the surest vehicles for liberating the human condition. Though one can 486

Stegmaier, Nietzsches 'Genealogie', 5, 157-58.

5. The Open

395

sympathize with his impatience with metaphysics and the underlying faith in truth that binds otherwise "almost-free" spirits, one is put off by the implication that Western culture represents a dead-end in matters of the open because allegedly it cannot do away with the value of truth. After all, in most other contexts where Nietzsche speaks as a cultural critic he understands, on the basis of economy and facing up to current and past realities, that the Western culture and psyche constitute a state of promise, an enormous potential or tension of the spirit which cries out for shaping, direction, creative management (cultivation). One is again confronted by two Nietzsches; the first writes Science books one through four, delivering a masterfully persuasive account of the benefits to be gained for dwelling in the new gravity by unifying science and creativity, while the "other" Nietzsche, the one who is always tempted to overflow his banks, to see himself as an isolated and peerless phenomenon, and to spew vitriol — this other Nietzsche turns around in 1887 and attaches a fifth book to Science, which effectively overturns and disrupts the balance of the original edition by arguing against science as hopelessly tainted by the ascetic ideal. He still maintains a notion of the open in 1887, but he appears to put it out of reach, when in fact all his writings up to 1887, with their increasingly ecumenical tone, suggest that the open is an achievable reality for human beings as long as we continue to ground ourselves in the reality of the closest things. The state represents the exemplary mode of dwelling of the West, and in Nietzsche's eyes it elevates itself to "the new idol" and looms so large in its demands that it becomes a prison from which one must escape — where the state ends the bridge to the superhuman begins. Regarded as the primary guarantor and violator of individual freedom, as the compatible, expedient vehicle of democratic values, the state provides a framework in which individualism could unfold but, according to Nietzsche, it ends up instead merely grinding and spreading the human spirit. Part of the problem lies with what has happened to instincts in our modern, democratic age. Nietzsche contends that the instincts can no longer be trusted, they contradict and destroy each other: "I already defined modernity as the physiological contradiction." The challenge today, then, would be to make the "individual possible in the first place, in that one prunes him: possible here means whole." But the opposite is happening according to Nietzsche, and the demand for independence and free development, for laisser aller is made most stridently by those for whom "no reins would be too strict" leading him to conclude: "our modern concept of 'freedom is one more proof of the degeneration of instinct" (TI 9/41, KSA 6:143). Inasmuch as the state is the space in which modern notions of freedom are played out, Nietzsche regards it as an incubator for decadence, for degeneration, because, apparendy, it fosters fragmentation by allowing derailed, confused instincts to shoot off in all directions. What results is at best a political and ideological definition of the open, but ontologically speaking, those who dwell in the bosom of the state are not free — Nietzsche would say they have merely been given up, humanity has merely given up on them.

396

VI. Dwelling Creatively Within the Finite

I disagree with Nietzsche's grim account of the state and part company with him on this important issue, or perhaps I should say instead: I maintain that the ecumenical Nietzsche is most persuasive when he takes into account his own teachings. In order to achieve the state of intelligent, creative dwelling that is attainable in the new gravity, we have to set our sights on the here and now, on the earth as it is presently constituted and inhabited, for every moment that is spent waiting without dwelling in the present is a wasted moment. In other words, just as Nietzsche argues compellingly against the transcendentalists and beyonders who disavow the closest things, we cannot afford to disavow the earth today just because the state fails to live up to our vision of how community should be constituted. The state is the closest thing, in a manner of speaking, since we can be assured that it will not go away and that future efforts to dwell in the open will only be safeguarded and provided by the state — whether or not individuals choose to "buy into" the state. The open is threatened to some extent by the state and by morality, to be sure, but this negative end of the spectrum should not obscure the fact that the modern state, and modern society as it is constituted in the West, are at the same time the actual space in which notions of the open, of freedom, are explorable in the first place. In this sense I favor the view of Passmore that the modern West "leaves more options open than most other societies; its traditions, intellectual, political, moral, are complex, diversified and fruitfully discordant." 487 So far Passmore sounds very much like a Nietzschean. The West's capacity to grow and change, its inventiveness in technology, politics, administration, and intellect, combine for a flexibility that "gives it a better, not a lesser, chance of solving its problems." Again consistent with Nietzsche's ecumenical views, if the West can solve "its problems," then perhaps we have a model for an ecumenical dwelling that would make "the West's problems" those of the earth — "its problems" need to include partnering with the earth. Passmore is not starryeyed about the challenges involved in providing and maintaining an open future. "Admittedly, its central Stoic-Christian traditions are not favourable to the solution of its ecological problems — those traditions which deny that man's relationships with nature are governed by any moral principles and assign to nature the very minimum of independent life. But they, I have sought to show, are not the only Western traditions and their influence is steadily declining" (ibid, p. 195). Morality that excludes the earth, the body, the senses, the closest things that comprise "ecology" is, as Nietzsche cogently states, immoral, and he would concur with Passmore that the morality of the old gravity is in decline and we must attempt our changes now, with the means at hand, working on and with the finite. It makes no sense to condemn the modern state, and the culture of the modern West, to the point where it is sidelined in the task of creating an ecumenical habitation of the earth. On the contrary, while the Christian influences of the West may be declining, due, one might add, to 487

Passmore, Man's Responsibility for Nature, 195.

5. The Open

397

the openness ofWestern society, earth-hostile and earth-indifferent forces still abound in the West and are rising in other parts of the earth where the values of the modern West are not exactly authoritative and are even under direct attack. T h e open cannot be an open if it is idealized out of attainability by being elevated beyond the reach of humans — this is Nietzsche's message concerning the superhuman and it is, ultimately, his message concerning open dwelling. T h e superhuman is a mere ideal, and an unattainable one, if it is not grounded in the human, and the open is a mere ideal if it is not grounded in the openness and opening tendencies of today's societies. 488 In "The Seven Seals," that chapter which originally concluded Zarathustra before Nietzsche added a fourth part, seven affirmative, forward-looking "songs" are underlined with the same phrase: "For I love you, oh eternity !"489 Marrying the woman "eternity" with w h o m Zarathustra will have children symbolizes the union of body and time, of now and forever, and this personifying designation for the eternal recurrence of the same also symbolizes the celebration of the open within the finite. Zarathustra refers to the earth as a table for gods, at which he sits with gods and throws dice: "If ever I played dice with gods at the table for the gods, the earth, that the earth quaked and broke and snorted up rivers of fire — / — for the earth is a table for gods, and trembling with creative new words and gods' throws" (Z III/16, KSA 4:288-9). T h e openness of the earth is described in terms of creativity and destruction; when the gods, who play dice and are themselves the best of man's creations, throw their dice, the earth convulses, reconstitutes itself, and reverberates with creative words, open to ever new possibilities. Zarathustra affirms and mixes everything: If ever m y h a n d poured the furthest to the nearest a n d fire to spirit a n d joy to pain and the worst to the kindliest: If I myself am a grain of that redeeming salt, which causes all things in the mixing m u g to be well mixed: — — for there is a salt that binds good with evil; a n d even what is most evil is worthy of being used as spice a n d for the last foaming over: — (ibid p. 289).

Life tastes good to Zarathustra because it includes everything, near and far, joy and pain, good and evil, and life's entirety is added to his mug in the form of a special salt,

488

See Stegmaier, Philosophie der Fluktuanz, for a helpful discussion of how N. uses the prefix über in a wide variety of contexts, tending toward the Greek "anti" as it used to intensify but also supersede. According to Stegmaier, when N. uses Ubermensch, he is attacking the "concept" of human that has been allowed to ossify, encouraging with his use of über the notion that all concepts must continuously shift, whereby "human" especially should not acquire a fixed meaning (371-72). I see this as a step in the direction of the open, since all too often the superhuman is regarded as a fixed and finished type, a uniform state of humanity implying exclusivity and closure.

485

See Lampert's discussion of the meaning of the "seven seals," and how they symbolize, in their opening, the beginning of "the final batde between Christ and Satan for the earth." Lampert, Nietzsche's Teaching, 157.

398

VI. Dwelling Creatively Within the Finite

a special spice blend, composed of good and evil. This is the bracing and intoxicating draught of the open, the cup that Zarathustra does not wish to pass by him. Finally the openness of Zarathustra^ new dwelling in the spirit of triumphant affirmation results in a new gravity, indeed, a weightlessness: If ever I spread silent skies above me and flew with my own wings into my own sky: If I swam playfully in deep expanses of light, and the bird wisdom of my freedom came: — — but bird wisdom speaks thus: 'Behold, there is no up, no down! Hurl yourself about, out, back, you light one! Sing! speak no more! — are all words not made for the heavy? Do all words not lie to the light? Sing! Speak no more!' — (ibid, p. 291).

Singing is to speaking what flying is to inertia. In one's own gravity, under one's own sky, dimensions of space no longer apply. Kreis describes how Abraham makes a bargain with God and causes a turning point in history. He leaves Ur, the Babylonian city, and so begins the history of the Jews. W h y and how he leaves with his people is world historical because he abandons the city, its comfort, security, and its values, for a promise made by God: "to a land that I will show you." In this gamble Abraham adopts the ethos of the land; he and his people take up the dare and look for the promised land. 490 We should reflect on the meaning of "promised land" and not allow it to fade back into cliché. Land is earth, place, a site of dwelling that is of the earth and designated for the people. Land in this context is also directly under the aegis of God, it is to be provided and bestowed by God but Abraham has to trust that it actually exists and that he can find it. Kreis calls this "the action of the unheard o f " ("das Tun eines Unerhörten"): "A paradox — and as distant from Western thinking as it is foreign. To the West any action not preceded by knowing is regarded as stupid and negligent, or in the best case naive" (ibid, p. 52). Abraham gave up an established, and apparendy successful and bountiful dwelling in the city, in favor of moving out into the open, into the desert or wilderness. Kreis sees a similar mentality at work in Nietzsche's writings. By putting the deed and the venture ahead of listening, and with his talk of free spirits, wandering and traversing the desert, homelessness, and children of the future, Nietzsche's entire conception of the open can be regarded as the wilderness (ibid, p. 54). Two implications of Kreis's analysis are of special interest. First, the notion that there has always been a choice on earth between the earth as the promise of the open, and the earth as a fixed space, usually the city, where dwelling means to be closed off from nature. T h e widely differing mentalities represented by these two modes of dwelling are deeply symbolic of the human's relation to earth. Human and earth are partners in the context of the promised land, and land remains foremost — it is believed in, trusted in, and one's own material comfort is deferred while the land remains unaltered, unexploited. Meanwhile, those who dwell in the city must cut, 450

Kreis, Nietzsche, Wagner und die Juden, 51.

5. The Open

399

mine, and harvest in order to sustain their way of life. While in a sense they are living in the moment by not deferring to a promised land, their relationship with the land is one-sided, exploitative, and characterized by taking. Believing that the land is their entitlement and theirs to exploit for the enhancement of material comfort, city dwellers take the land for granted and become thoughtless, empty of gratitude for the earth. The wanderers and seekers of the promised land live frugally off the land by moving from place to place, allowing the earth to regenerate, leaving no scar, no traces on the land, while the city dwellers suck nature's "resources" into their cities, and thus increase the amount of fuel available for their follies. The other item of interest to me in Kreis's interpretation is the "unheard of" dimension of Abraham's venture. Without knowing, prior to having knowledge Abraham leads his people in search of a "promised land," betokening his great faith not only in God but in the land. A land that is promised is worth the sacrifice of leaving the city behind. The Western mind is more cynical toward promise generally, and in particular about the value of the land. Why, a Westerner might reason, should I mobilize my people to search for a "promised land" when everywhere around me there is land for the taking? The land is cheap, infinite, free as the wind, she reasons, and only a fool would hallow the promise of land and thereby hallow the land itself. To the extent that knowledge helps us to process and alter nature for human consumption, knowledge has characterized humanistic hubris and excess. Nietzsche would not have us disavow knowledge, but he does encourage its redirection and augmentation by means of a new dwelling on the earth, a dwelling more closely resembling the faith in a "promised land" than the current state of Western dwelling whereby the land is there for the taking. In Human the final words are spoken by the wanderer who is conversing with his shadow, and we recall that the final volume of Human is entitled "The Wanderer and His Shadow." As discussed earlier in the context of the closest things, the shadow expresses gratitude to the wanderer and tells him that nothing pleased him more than "one promise: you want once more to become good neighbors of the closest things" ( H H II/2 350, KSA 2:703). In his role as shadow the wanderer's shadow is the closest thing to the wanderer, the thing that no one or thing under the sun can be without. We can follow the wanderer/shadow motif into Zarathustra, where one of the "higher humans" of Part IV is Zarathustra's shadow, also referred to as the wanderer. Here are the shadow's words to Zarathustra, once the latter gives up in his foolish attempt to flee from his shadow: 'Forgive me, answered the shadow, that it is I; and if you do not like me, well then, oh Zarathustra, I praise you and your good taste! I am a wanderer who has already walked much at your heels: always on my way but without goal, even without home: hence very little is lacking and I would be the Eternal Jew, except that I am not eternal and am also not a Jew. What? Must I always be on my way? Whirled by every wind, restless, driven? O h earth, you became too round for me!' (Z IV/9, KSA 4:338-9).

400

VI. Dwelling Creatively Within the Finite

O f all the "higher humans" who cry out to Zarathustra the shadow occupies a singular space because he is the last "higher human" to whose cry for help Zarathustra responds, and he is a dimension of Zarathustra, his (and Nietzsche's) past, his double, his dark side, but in every sense his shadow. It is not by accident that the shadow bemoans his wandering, nomadic, rootless existence and compares himself to the Eternal Jew — Nietzsche is aware that in making this analogy he is comparing himself, and his way of thinking, to the culture and legacy of the Jewish people. 491 But Zarathustra's shadow also reveals that he has lived according to the Assassin's code: '"Nothing is true, everything is allowed': thus I spoke to myself. I plunged myself into the coldest water with head and heart. Oh how often then I stood there naked as a red crab!" (ibid, p. 340). Zarathustra's shadow laments that the earth has become too round for him, meaning that the open represented by the earth and the wanderer's lifestyle is wearing on him. Sensing the danger confronting his shadow, and therefore himself, Zarathustra listens to his shadow's justifiable desire for a home and says: "Beware that in the end a narrow faith does not capture you, a hard, severe illusion! For you will henceforth be seduced and tempted by anything that is narrow and solid" (ibid, p. 341). Zarathustra is describing the travails of living the open life, but at the same time he is encouraging his shadow, the shadow in him and in all humans, to stay the course, to resist the temptation of a cozy setdement in both physical and spiritual terms. Paradoxically, dwelling in the open in relation to the earth and being "at home" on the earth requires us to remain wanderers, if not literally then at least at heart, because traditional notions of being at home tend to render the earth unsuitable as a home. We must look upon the land as the open promise, as the promise of the land and of the open, as opposed to carving out a space for ourselves, laying claim to it and becoming indifferent to the land as earth. If humans cannot learn to practice freedom within the realm of the finite, as wanderers on the earth whose entire life's journey takes place on the earth, then our species is doomed to premature extinction. Freedom is the attitude of humans who dwell in the open.

491

Compare also the Dionysus dithyramb entitled "Among Daughters of the Desert" and found in Zarathustra as "The Desert Grows!", Part IV, and sung by the wanderer/shadow, for its Middle Eastern themes and atmosphere as they are contrasted with specific Western traits. Grundlehner's translation and analysis of this poem are helpful. Grundlehner, The Poetry of Friedrich Nietzsche, pp. 230-51. Even with the apparendy nihilistic coda attached by N. in January 1889 (the Dionysus Dithyrambs vtas the last manuscript N. submitted to his publisher), Grundlehner demonstrates how this poem's depiction of the desert symbolizes the Nietzschean disavowal of asceticism and represents "a harsh but real affirmation of Dionysian tenets" (250).

Chapter VII: Nietzsche and the Environmental Ethos 1. Animals and Human

Animals

"Sacrificial animals think quite differently about sacrifice than do human spectators, but from the beginning they have not been allowed to comment."

The Gay Science 220 The conviction that humans are becoming increasingly denatured and need to naturalize themselves as opposed to humanizing nature is a hallmark of Nietzsche's grounded, geocentric ethos. By examining his views regarding the creatures with whom we inhabit our planet, as those views appear in his published works and are also generously represented in his notes, we are able to construct an image of the current human in relation to nature as well as a vision of the more naturalized human being whom Nietzsche sees emerging as a result of humanity's new orientation toward the earth. In presenting Nietzsche's views on animals I shall attempt to deal first with his considerations on the animal proper, and then move on to the least animalistic aspects of humans, in order to depict how Nietzsche basically regards humans as wayward beasts, wayward animals, and this for better and for worse. A number of discussions concerning animals follow the formula "humans are animals who . . . ." One such discussion occurs in the fifth book of Science where we learn that the long process of falsely and mendaciously interpreting the world according to the desire and will of our veneration has transpired as a human necessity ("nach einem Bediirfnisse')-. "For the human being is a venerating animal! But he is also a mistrustful one: and that the world is not worth what we have believed, this is just about the most certain thing that our mistrust has finally come to possess." By designating humans as the "venerating animal," Nietzsche is putting us in our place relative to not only animals but to the entire world which we prefer to falsify and humanize. Nietzsche would find it ridiculous if humans in his day were to attempt "to invent values which are supposed to surpass the value of the actual world," meaning that humans have nothing capable of trumping or improving upon nature. Modern pessimists, the teachings of Buddha and Christianity all contain "human vanity and unreason" that contributes to a perception of humans as the "'world-denying' principle, the human as value measure of all things, as world-judge." Such a position Nietzsche regards as a "monstrous insipidity," just as he finds the juxtaposition of "human and world" to be laughable, as if the human did not belong all along to the world, the only world (GS 346, KSA 3:579-81). Our venerations are fading, Nietzsche claims, and though they

402

VII. Nietzsche and the Environmental Ethos

have made life tolerable for us in the past, it is high time we develop a level of comfort and affirmation with what we are — and I believe this human reality that is so difficult for us to face without falsifications, so difficult for us to reconcile with our need to be venerating beings, is quite simply that we are animals. Humans are described as "a multifarious, mendacious, artificial and opaque animal, uncanny to other animals less by strength than by cunning and cleverness." Thus it is not our superior strength or physicality that distinguishes us from other animals but our inventiveness, particularly in the area of morals, where humans invented good conscience "in order to enjoy his soul for once as simple." The artificiality of human existence is plainly visible in our morality, which lies upon existence like a salve, making the sight of the complex and tortured soul bearable: "Under this point of view perhaps there is much more to the term 'art' than one has commonly believed" (BGE 291, KSA 5:235).492 On the one hand, he seems to be saying, humans want and need the "simplicity" of the state of being we call good conscience, a state enjoyed by other animals but without artificiality because they are without conscience, while on the other hand, we have no other means of acquiring this simplicity than by duplicity, deceit, fraud, invention — our creaturely need can only be fulfilled by increasing the distance between the human as animal and the human as moral being. This is a consistent message in Nietzsche's writings on the conflicted, contradictory nature of the human, found in his notion of contrast (BGE 225)493 as essential to human growth because humans are both creator and creation. In notes from 1884 he writes that in contrast to the animal, humans have cultivated within themselves the fullness of opposing drives and impulses, and this synthesis has made humans rulers of the earth (KSA 11:238). In other words, by living out, acting out the tension between simplicity and complexity, body and spirit, instinct and moral, health and illness humans have "added on" to themselves beyond the mere animal state and in the process have achieved mastery over other animals. The condition of "adding on" to the animal is not in all cases favorable for the species, though apparently the ability rests on a particular human strength. The danger to humans lies in their strength, according to Nietzsche, which is their unbelievable talent for self-preservation "even in the most unfortunate circumstances," which includes the religions catering to the poor, the unfortunate. " Thus the failed ("das MiSrathene") preserves itself longer and worsens the race-, which is why the human, compared to animals, is the sickliest animal" (KSA 11:111-12). By preserving itself unnaturally, as Nietzsche would say, humanity shows its strength, but at the same time he regards this as a danger to humanity because this manner of preserving across the board is detrimental to the species ("race" in the above note). Once more, humans are animals,

493

In a note used for this number of BGE N. had added that humans behave superficially as soon as they moralize (KSA 11:194). Cf. my chap. VI sec. 3, p. 377.

1. Animals and Human Animals

403

but in this case, we are animals who have taken sick and have a remarkable tendency for thriving in the midst of our illness.494 When Nietzsche stretches to imagine how humans might appear in the perspective of other animals, he clearly reveals that humans have no basis for regarding themselves as the crown of creation. Sacrificial animals, he maintains, think quite differently about sacrifice than do human spectators "but from the beginning they have not been allowed to comment" (GS 220, KSA 3:509). The arrogance and audacity of humans who sacrifice animals in the name of their gods, cults, rituals etc is brought home when one attempts to put oneself in the animals place; this is another example of humanity's "improvement" of nature and our tendency as venerating animals to change all things to our favor, to cast ourselves as the value measure of all things as a function of our arrogance in thinking we can create values surpassing those of the world. Of course sacrificial animals can voice no complaint about their treatment, and precisely this is Nietzsche's point: "advanced" and "superior" animals living according to their own moral dictates would be sensitive enough to consider the animal's point of view in the absence of the animal's ability to express itself in "human" terms. Nietzsche's three-line aphorism entitled "Sacrifice" is poignant in demonstrating how colossal human stupidity and arrogance truly are. Just one page further and Nietzsche is discussing the kind of criticism that animals might have of humans: "I fear animals regard the human being as a being like them, but who in the most dangerous manner has lost his healthy animal sense ("den gesunden Thierverstand") — as the insane animal, as the laughing animal, as the weeping animal, as the miserable animal" (GS 224, KSA 3:510). From the animals' perspective we could be mere failures, a degenerate species, and this notion surfaces even earlier in a note from 1880 where Nietzsche asserts that we must learn from animals and plants what blossoming is, and then relearn accordingly with respect to humans. "Those pale, emaciated, impotent humans who suffer from their thoughts can no longer be ideals" (KSA 9:327). What animals and plants achieve by blossoming (Blühen) is a state of completion, of wholeness and regeneration, and this is lacking in humans who are impeded or "physiologically obstructed" by their cognitive apparatus, inwardly-turned instincts, and other traits that fail to cultivate and preserve the species. If the human animal were allowed to blossom, so reasons Nietzsche, not in the metaphorical or idealistic sense of the word ("she blossomed into a fine athlete") but literally, with the full force of nature behind and within her, but without shutting off the spiritual enhancements characteristic of humanity, our

454

Schacht uses GS 354 and A 14, where N. also speaks of humans as sickly and endangered, to make the point that the superhuman, rather than the beast of prey, is the meaning of the earth, i.e., N. does not want a relapse of human to mere animal, he wants to retain the cultivating mechanisms involved in our "sickly" nature, but not necessarily those diverted into morality etc. Schacht, Nietzsche., 273-4.

404

VII. Nietzsche and the Environmental Ethos

species would have an abundance of exemplars worthy of serving as models. That this is not the case but is nonetheless a possible scenario is underscored by the call for a superhuman or a human surpassing the human of today. The animal's blossoming wholeness is seen in Nietzsche's favorite example of the predator. One misunderstands both the nature of the predator and of predatory humans like Cesare Borgia, he writes, and thus one misunderstands nature as long as one insists on viewing "these healthiest of all tropical monsters and growths" as having a pathological basis. It appears, he continues, that moralists have a hatred for the primeval forest and the tropics ("gegen den Urwald und gegen die Tropen") and are bent on discrediting the "tropical humans" at any cost, denouncing them as sick, degenerating, and living in a hell of self-torture. "But why? For the sake of the 'temperate zones'? For the sake of the temperate humans? The 'moral' humans? The mediocre humans? — This for the chapter 'Morality as Timidity'" (BGE 197, KSA 5:117). Humans who are predators are referred to here as "tropical" humans because they represent an abundance of life analogous to the ecosystem of the primeval forest; just as nature blossoms by manifesting its greatest variety of life forms in the primeval forest, the tropical human embodies the greatest possible natural component and appears extreme, inscrutable, dangerous among ordinary "temperate" human beings. While humans of today are capable of acknowledging the importance of maintaining the rain forests for their role in the global climate and their abundance of rare plants used in medicine, it appears that in other respects we adhere to the "morality of timidity" by favoring and living the temperate life without properly understanding how our favored mode of existence is not possible without the tropics and by extension everything living in the tropics. Nietzsche's ecumenical vision, cognizant as it is of the economy of life and the need to conserve even negative traits, affirms all zones and regions of the earth, not only those corresponding to Europe's "temperate" morals and ideals. His plea is for less hypocrisy in the matter of protecting nature and for greater boldness in the matter of blossoming as human beings. Greater boldness as humans would not necessarily translate to living the ruthless life of a Borgia, which is an extreme, but neither should humans be living the life of a cow or a sheep. Ultimately when Nietzsche highlights Borgia and the "morality of the tropics" he is making a statement on what today is known as biodiversity. Parkes offers a cogent explanation of both the language Nietzsche uses and the message he sends by observing that "no psychical or cultural development can take place in the absence of imagery drawn from natural phenomena: thus the more we accelerate the extinction of species in the natural world, the more impoverished our psychical life will gradually become." From the traditional standpoint of ecological awareness, then, human life will be diminished when the diversity of life around us diminishes. But Nietzsche's concern is for the animal human first, i.e., he does not take to the field as a philosopher of nature in an effort to maintain biodiversity — although biodiversity would be one outcome of his plan. We recall that in Nietzsche's thinking the great human

1. Animals and Human Animals

405

is a rare plant, a rare specimen, an endangered species, even now humans are degenerating into a "dwarf species" that Zarathustra characterizes as the flea beetle "last human." Parkes continues: "But the larger stakes are higher: the future of the human is in doubt, in part because the future of the earth is imperilled. Nietzsche's philosophy of nature, his understanding of the natural world and human existence as interdependent processes and dynamic configurations of the will to power, can contribute to grounding a realistic, global ecology that in its loyalty to the earth may be capable of saving it."495 As usual there is self-interest at stake in the position Nietzsche maps out for humans, but "self-interest" of a kind that ensures coexistence of humans, animals, earth, not self-interest in the sense of disloyalty to the earth. Humans are the only species intelligent enough to alter the conditions of life on earth, and so we are the only species dangerous enough to destroy ourselves and the earth, in whole or in part, precipitously or across vast stretches of time. The "primeval forest vegetation 'human being' always appears where the struggle for power has been waged for the longest time. The great humans" (KSA 11:573). This note can be read at two levels. In the first instance, the human being proper is a product of the primeval forest where, for the longest time, there has been struggle for power according to the will to power. On this reading human beings owe their distinctiveness as animals to their ability to prevail under the conditions of the primeval forest. On another level, Nietzsche may be referring specifically to the "tropical humans" who make their environment into one of rivalry and struggle for power, thereby cultivating themselves into tropical specimens of an otherwise temperate human species. That Nietzsche prefers the flourishing taller plants and sees himself as the advocate of a higher human being is evident in his stand against the levelers of humanity: he and his kind are reverse or opposite men who have "an eye and a conscience" for the question of "where and how the plant 'human being' has so far grown most heartily into the heights" (BGE 44, KSA 5:61). Sharpening Nietzsche's sense of urgency in behalf of the tallest "human plants" is his view that Christian morality practices reverse conservation by conserving the weak and failed specimens while waging war against the rare successful types; inasmuch as "the human being is the not yet determined animal," much is at stake if humans are deprived of the opportunity to complete themselves through conscious cultivation, as their own creators (BGE 62, KSA 5:81). The animal is a creature that persists and must continue to live in the human, it is not simply an early stage of human with which we are finished as a matter of volition. Thus Nietzsche writes: "One must also be perfect as an animal if one wants to become perfect as a human being" (KSA 10:143). This note from the period of Zarathustra (1882-3) strongly implies that the spiritualized aspects of the human animal do not necessarily compensate or adequately substitute for lost animality — when the animal in the human is lost, humanity is lost at the same time. If humans were capable 495

Parkes, "Staying Loyal to the Earth," 185.

406

VII. Nietzsche and the Environmental Ethos

of "blossoming" like animals first, then enhancing the animal state with sublimated human traits, or let us say, if humans were capable of simultaneously cultivating their animal and human natures, then humans would be approaching the superhuman status Nietzsche envisions. "We err in thinking that our spiritual refinement represents an undisputed improvement over animals: "The human being is not heir to all sympathetic sensations of the animal world" (KSA 9:132). The goal therefore is not to draw a heavy line between animal and human, putting as much idealistic distance between ourselves and our fellow animal beings, instead, we should be working on embodying the distance, the contrast between animal and human, in ourselves and individually, in order to create that "great soul" who is truly creator and creation. Unkind as it sounds, Nietzsche writes that most humans are without a right to existence and are simply a misfortune for higher humans: "Silly 'humanity!' Compared to animals the human being as human being may feel himself to be among his kind.' But as human being before human beings — " (KSA 11:102). In making this distinction Nietzsche wants to deflate the arrogance of humans who feel their "humanity" and their sense of belonging, appropriately and properly, to the human community only by virtue of their perceived superiority over animals. In other words, even the lowliest human being feels "human" among her human peers, regardless of how high her peers stand in relation to her, as long as she can look down on animals. But this basis of "humanity" is unworthy of the name human, according to Nietzsche, and he seems to be asking: which other animal in the animal world could or would set up such a spurious definition of itself? Moreover, by making this assertion regarding the superfluous human beings, the "all too many" as they are referred to in Zarathustra, he is also implying that only humans have superfluous members as a species, all other animals have their place and time. As for the all too many, contrary to what some wish to believe, Nietzsche does not advocate their eradication or forcible removal, as for instance by genocide — he simply relegates them to the modern state, whose existence is guaranteed and justified by the all too many. Those animal qualities that Nietzsche wants preserved in the human animal are generally speaking those of the predator, and all animals and plants surpass the human in their capacity to blossom. Passmore has an interesting word for any who might be offended by the suggestion that the human being should affirm the predator in herself. "Even the fruits a plant does not need, however, may be needed by a variety of micro-organisms; men cannot survive, as I have already suggested, except by being in some degree a predator. As Hume said, it is one thing to maintain than men ought to act humanely towards animals, quite another to maintain that they ought to act justly towards them." 496 We are no more able to act justly toward animals than we are able to act justly toward fellow human beings, but by 496

Passmore, Man's Responsibility for Nature, 216.

1. Animals and Human Animals

407

all accounts we are indeed capable of acting humanely toward animals, and that is the problem, according to Nietzsche, inasmuch as this "humanity" is often silly, hypocritical, arrogant and dangerous to humans and animals alike. Another approach taken by Nietzsche to clarify his position on the animal in relation to the human is found in his discussion of taming. In Genealogy he raises the issue of the now-famous "blond beast" residing at the ground (Grund) of all noble races, of whom he writes: "this concealed ground needs a release from time to time, the animal must emerge again, must return again to the wilderness." Culture is at odds with such types, however, and Nietzsche maintains that the very meaning of all culture today lies in making a "tame and civilized animal, a domestic animal" of the predator human. The reactionary and resentful instincts by means of which the noble races have been conquered are therefore "tools of culture," but those who wield these instruments do not necessarily represent culture, in fact, he maintains, they are quite to the contrary the opposite of culture and they represent a regression of humanity" (GM1/11, KSA 5:275-6). Taming the animal-predator in humans is the work of culture, to be sure, for in so doing the predator-humans ("das Raubthier 'Mensch'") are civilized, denatured, pacified etc. But Nietzsche refuses to dignify the animal tamers by granting them cultured status; in his eyes they are enemies of culture and once again he raises the specter of a "morality of timidity" versus a bold humanity that does not cower in fear, of a "dwarf" humanity versus the human who is allowed to grow to full height (ibid, p. 277). Both the taming of the beast human being ("die Zdhmung der Bestie Mensch") and the breeding (Ziichtung) of a specific kind of human being have been called "improvement," and only these zoological terms do justice to the reality of what transpires in the name of improvement. One has to doubt, he argues, whether a beast can be "improved." "It is weakened, it is made less harmful, it is made into a sickly beast through the depressive affect of fear, through pain, through wounds, through hunger. — It is not otherwise with the tamed human being whom the priest has 'improved'" (TI 7/2, KSA 6:99). Taming is without doubt a real and effective procedure, one carried out on animals and humans, but no one should begin to think that taming represents an improvement, that is, unless one were to sanction the use of torture for "improving" animals and humans. Once again Nietzsche exposes the arrogance of our species at the point where we claim to improve upon nature, where we attempt to create values surpassing those of the world. But note the context in which he abhors taming: it is the higher, noble, predator human for whom Nietzsche takes to the field, the so-called "blond beast" whom he again invokes in Twilight (ibid, p. 99). Hallman emphasizes Nietzsche's sensitivity to the values and perspectives of nonhuman life forms, and is sharply criticized for doing so by Acampora. Such claims "may lead one to infer that Nietzsche shares, if not the theories, at least the concerns of contemporary animal advocates. Such an inference, however, would be erroneous, for Nietzsche values wild over domestic animality, whereas today's animal liberationists

408

VII. Nietzsche and the Environmental Ethos

and rightists are mostly concerning with the plight of domesticated animals . . . he prefers predatorial brutality to homey, herd-like traits."497 Acampora is right to set the record straight in this manner, since Nietzsche's concerns do indeed differ from those of animal liberationists and more generally, from humans who hypocritically "domesticate" or keep domestic animals when in fact they feel contempt for them. But one would be justified in questioning whether "predatorial brutality" is the right phrase for getting Nietzsche's point across, after all, the eagle who carries off and devours the lamb is not being brutal so much as it is being eagle, and the little lamb is not being victim so much as it is being a lamb, i.e., eagle food. And most importantly, where Nietzsche shows sympathy for the animal predator and the predatory animal human, he is serving as the advocate of misunderstood, misjudged, maligned, and endangered species — on this point there should be no equivocating. Since taming and domestication represent degeneration of animals and humans, the less we humans are domesticated the better off we will be as a species. This is the meaning behind the will to power as will to empowerment, which makes us beings of our own making responsible for and to ourselves, our fellow human beings, fellow animals, and all life forms of the earth, but not responsible in the sense of guilt, bad conscience. With a sense of wonder Nietzsche asks "what are the deep transformations which must derive from the teachings that no God cares for us and that there is no eternal moral code (atheistic, unmoral humanity)? that we are animals'i that our life passes? that we are unresponsible? The wise person and the animal will approach one another and yield a new type\" (KSA 9:461). In this note from 1881, predating the concept of the superhuman, we find already the key ingredient of Nietzsche's vision of the super human being of the new gravity, namely, the natural, the animal combining with the spiritualized human being now that God no longer keeps us as pets and domestic animals. One could regard this event in the history of life on earth as a liberating event for animals and humans. How the human rises above the animal is of great interest to Nietzsche not only because he sees the dawn of human history in this process, but also because this ongoing process has resulted in untold obstacles and inhibitions for our species, and as a solution Nietzsche is motivated to rediscover the animal human by naturalizing humanity. In an early aphorism entitled "The Super-Animal" ("Das Ueber-Thier") he claims that the beast ("die Bestie") in us craves lies, and morality is a type of noble lie that protects us from becoming torn to bits by the beast. Without the errors we have committed based on our morals, humans would have remained animals, but we regard ourselves as something higher and imposed strict laws upon ourselves. Thus humans have "a hatred for the stages which have remained closer to animality, which explains the former contempt for the slave as a non-human, as a thing" (HH 1/40, KSA 2:64). Nietzsche's use of the expression "super-animal" is fascinating because it 497

Acampora, "Using and Abusing Nietzsche for Environmental Ethics," 192-3.

1. Animals and Human Animals

409

foreshadows his concept of the superhuman, which is likewise based on an operation of superseding and supervening. The superhuman adds on to the human a capacity to recapture and complete the animal, combining the highest spiritual refinement with the "lowest" animality in one person, while the super animal (the basic human being), desiring peace and a measure of security, invents morality and thus embarks on the path to humanity, that path leading further and further from animality. As this moral distance between the human and the animal increases, so too do the resentment and hatred for the animal and anyone/thing resembling it, such as the slave. What is ironic in this arrangement is that the beast tames itself by means of morality, and imposes strictures upon itself whose result is the enslavement of the beast-human into the "desired" human, the moral human. Thus self-enslaving humanity, by imposing enslaving measures upon the animal world and showing contempt for animalistic stages of life, effectively enacts its own self-contempt. The limitation of mere animality then, characterized as the beast in us, is its destructiveness — we would be torn to bits if we persisted as beasts. And even if we shifted perspective to focus instead on the peaceful animals, the situation still remains one of frustrated or obstructed volition. I see this problem in the nature of Zarathustra's three metamorphoses of the spirit, which include camel, lion, and child. The lion is needed, according to Zarathustra, because the loadable camel is characterized by renunciation and veneration ("Was geniigt nicht das lastbare Thier, das entsagt und ehrfiirchtig ist?"), and while these qualities are suitable for the first metamorphosis of the spirit, bearing burdens and asking to be loaded down is not the alpha and omega of human being. "To create new values — that not even the lion is capable of: but to create freedom for itself for new creation — that the lion's power is capable of" (Z 1/1, KSA 4:30). But in the lion stage of the spirit we are still beasts capable of destroying one another, even if we clear the way for the creation of new values. In his more grounded speech Nietzsche explains, beginning in Human and culminating in Genealogy, that the beast-human imposes morality upon himself and thereby grows both a "soul" in the religious sense and expands in spirit, while in Zarathustra, where metaphorical speech is Nietzsche's preferred vehicle, the point at which beast (lion) becomes human is symbolized by the metamorphosis of lion into child. The child represents innocence and forgetting, "a new beginning, a game, a wheel rolling out of itself, a first movement, a holy yes-saying," (ibid, p. 31). But observe how in Human (above) the transition from beast to human involves the noble lie of morality, taming, enslavement of the beast, in other words, an environment strikingly different from the child's openness. In Nietzsche's grounded version of the history of the spirit, humans will have to revisit the beast, specifically the lion, in order to achieve the open of the child, child being superhuman here, because in its current state, the human spirit remains enslaved. Although it bears within itself the potential for achieving the open, on balance one would have to conclude that the human spirit is overwhelmingly camel, and that the camel comes about when the

410

VII. Nietzsche and the Environmental Ethos

beast begins to crave lies and invents morality. In other words, there is a beast that predates or precedes the camel, and the way to freedom or to the open is through renunciation (camel), through destruction (lion), and on into the creativity of the child and her sacred affirmation. Thus while the three metamorphoses of the spirit apply strictly to the human, they are couched in terms of a progression from animal to human. In other discussions of spirit Nietzsche makes it clear that we are never far from the animal and we in fact do injustice to ourselves and to animals when we accentuate the distance between animal and human. Nietzsche refers to the priest as an "essentially dangerous form of existence of the human being" and adds that in the priest for the first time humans became "an interesting animal," producing depth in the soul and evil as well: "and these indeed are the two basic forms of the human being s superiority heretofore over other animals ("liber sonstiges Gethier")!" (GM1/6, KSA 5:266). In serving as the model and enforcer of morality, the priest's "dangerous" lifestyle consisting of radical cures in the form of abstinence in dietary matters, flight into the wilderness, hostility toward the senses, self-hypnotization, longing for nothingness {unto mystica) all combine to produce that remarkable tension and contrast in the soul which, as Nietzsche never tires of maintaining, is both a pathological state and the engine of human ingenuity, in this case responsible for propelling humans beyond animals (who are healthy but far less interesting, apparently). Schacht quotes Genealogy 11/16 where Nietzsche discusses the internalization of instincts, their being turned inward against the human, as the fundamental change from semi-animal to human: "This for Nietzsche was the crucial step in what might be called 'the birth of man.'" 498 And, we might add, if humans of today were to ever become motivated to assist in the birth of the superhuman, the prescription is readily visible in reversing the steps taken by the priestly innovators. Instead of internalizing instinct, externalizing it; instead of denying and mortifying the senses, using them to affirm the external (real!) world; instead of positing humans in opposition to nature and world, attuning ourselves to being in nature. Nietzsche challenges humans to be bold in the face of nature, not timid — humans should not be afraid of degenerating into mere beasts once we engage in strategies of naturalizing ourselves — we are big enough, flexible enough to accommodate both the animal and the human. The notion that engaging in a dangerous style of living contributes to the expansion of the soul and thereby elevates us above other animals is dealt with metaphorically in Zarathustra, in the Prologue where the crowd has gathered to watch the tightrope walker. The rope walker is literally a super-human insofar as his business is conducted above the heads of ordinary mortals — they must look up at him, gaze at him from below and of course they are thrilled by his deeds. When Zarathustra finishes his long speech about the superhuman, someone from the crowd cries out: '"We have heard enough about the rope dancer; now let us see him too!' And all the 498

Schacht, Nietzsche, 437.

1. Animals and Human Animals

411

people laughed at Zarathustra. But the rope dancer, who believed that this comment was addressed to him, began his work" (Z P 3, KSA 4:16). This confusion is deliberately planted by Nietzsche because he is embarking on a parable of how living dangerously is the mode of existence conducive to the superhuman. The cry from someone in the crowd to bring on the tightrope walker may or may not have been uttered in a spirit of sarcasm, because for all intents and purposes, Zarathustra in holding forth about a "higher human being" prepares and primes the crowd of spectators on hand to enjoy the spectacle of just such a person. The crowd's inability to discern the difference between a metaphorical superhuman and a practicing tightrope walker merely reflects the naivete, the state of unawareness of the masses, for whom extraordinary human beings are, at best, a form of entertainment. Once the rope walker has plunged to the ground, leaped over by the jester who symbolizes how human existence is still without meaning, accident prone, uncanny and capable of becoming a jester's fatality ("ein Possenreisser kann ihm zum Verhangniss werden" Z P 7), Zarathustra attempts to console the dying tightrope artist by assuring him that his soul will not be carried off by the devil, but "will be dead even faster than your body: fear nothing more!" The mistrustful rope walker replies that if Zarathustra speaks the truth, then he, the dying man loses nothing when he loses his life: "I am not much more than an animal that has been taught to dance through blows and little treats." Whereupon Zarathustra now attempts a more creative, humanistic rejoinder to the effect that the rope walker made danger his profession and there is nothing contemptible in this, and so Zarathustra will bury him with his own hands (Z P 6, KSA 4:22). The elevated status of the rope walker may be merely literal for the masses, to whom he is mere spectacle and entertainment, a curiosity who thrills by taking chances with his life; but to Zarathustra the rope artist represents crossing over from human to superhuman because the state of living dangerously gives rise to the expansive, great soul that lives up to the promise of being both creator and creation. But for the fact that the dying man had made danger his profession, he would have lived and died no differently, and no better, than a trained animal. Both the rope artist and the crowd, moreover, appear to have the same low regard for the animal, as seen in the jester's warning to Zarathustra to leave the town: "It was your good fortune that you took up with the dead dog; when you lowered yourself that way, you saved your own life for today" (Z P 8, KSA 4:23), and moments later the grave diggers whom he encounters at the city gate ridicule Zarathustra: "Zarathustra is carrying away the dead dog . . ." (ibid, p. 24). Why these pointed references to the dead tightrope artist as a dead dog, especially in the light of the artist's own observation that absent heaven and hell, he is no different than a trained animal? Whereas Zarathustra's wisdom enables him to see the dignity of the tightrope artist in the choice of profession, namely living dangerously, to the crowd the same individual is useful only as entertainment, from a distance, as a form of vicarious living, and in order to be useful in this way he quite simply has to be performing — anything less

412

VII. Nietzsche and the Environmental Ethos

and he is a "dead dog." Lying broken on the ground, the tightrope artist is an affront to the cowardly onlookers who are now staring at their own mortality and experiencing the uncanny sense of alienation and accidental being that characterizes all human being. While skillfully negotiating the distance between buildings, suspended high in the air on a thin rope, the artist thrills his gaping onlookers with his courage, his physical prowess, and inwardly they can remark: There's a man! But there is no middle ground, no ground at all to the crowd's sense of what constitutes a human being and a proper human life, so that as soon as the rope artist fails in his task he not only falls to his death but also sinks to the level of a mere dog in their eyes. Zarathustra promised them a superhuman and a life surpassing anything that humans had lived heretofore, but what the people actually get, from their perspective, is a terrifying letdown in the form of a less-than-human, a dog, and a dead dog at that. 499 How we traffic with animals reveals much about the origins of morals. Nietzsche explains that where utility and harm are not factors, humans feel completely unaccountable toward animals, as seen in how we kill or injure insects without a second thought. If animals harm us, we are ruthless in destroying them, and often cruel out of sheer thoughtlessness. If animals are useful, however, we exploit them; in this case we avoid torturing or harming domestic animals and regard as immoral those who mistreat their cattle, for instance, and extrapolate from such behavior that the same person might be capable of injuring vulnerable humans as well. Meanwhile some animals intrigue us because of their appearance, sound or behavior, such that we "fictionalize" ourselves into them, and some religions teach that the souls of humans and gods reside in animals, which encourages respectful diffidence in dealing with them. "Christianity as is known has proven itself to be a poor and underdeveloped religion in this respect" ( H H I I / 2 57, KSA 2:577-8). In addition to the direct reference to Christianity, and by association to all Western culture as particularly unsympathetic to animals, Nietzsche exposes the self-interest of individuals and communities who actually treat animals with any measure of thoughtfulness at all. By and large, however, humans remain indifferent to animals and the only positive examples he can cite are those found in religions that hold animals to be sacred, and it is questionable whether religiously prescribed views of animals can qualify as genuine human sensitivity for their fellow animals, especially if there are sanctions for violating the religious precepts.

499

N. again plays with the distinction between animal and human, dead and living, when he has Zarathustra knock on the hermit's door as night falls. The hermit tells him: "Animal and human come to me, to the hermit. But tell your companion to eat, he is more tired than you." When Zarathustra explains that his companion is dead, the hermit refuses to acknowledge this difference: '"That doesn't concern me,' said the old man sullenly; 'whoever knocks at my house must also take what I offer him. Eat, you two, and farewell!'" (ibid, 2-5). Though part of this ontological confusion is caused because Zarathustra is accompanied and one has every reason to expect that a companion be alive, the hermit's reluctance to distinguish between human and animal, living and dead reveals that something is seriously flawed, seriously lacking in the human condition as Zarathustra finds it.

1. Animals and Human Animals

413

The origin and development (Entstehung) of morals as observed in our traffic with animals demonstrates that humans feel morally obligated only to those which are nearest, namely domesticated animals, and in this case the "moral" behavior is based on what is expedient. This may serve as a metaphor for humanity's relation to nature on the whole. If humans do not feel a moral obligation to respect and protect nature, this may rest on the perception of nature as something distant, indeed something both distant and infinite. And when humans demonstrate thoughtfulness vis-à-vis nature, but do so because a particular use or advantage accrues to us in the process, this is little more than hypocrisy, a skewed relationship with nature mirroring our compromised concern for domestic animals. The solution to such indifference, by implication, lies in changing our view of nature and of ourselves. Humans need to adopt Nature as the closest thing, making Nature into nature; and in naturalizing themselves, humans can assist this process of discovering nature and dwelling on it. What passes for sensitivity to nature is often quite disappointing. There is nothing more disgusting, Nietzsche claims, than the sentimentality toward plants and animals on the part of a creature that has from time immemorial dwelled among plants and animals as their most raging enemy, and now lays claim to tender feelings in the presence of weakened and truncated victims (D 286, KSA 3:217-18). "Demigod. Hero. Man. Child. I am still a companion of fellow-animals ("ein Genosse der Mit-Thiere")" (KSA 10:111) he writes in notes from the Zarathustra period, indicating that even the highest conceptions of humanity cannot afford to stray beyond the principle of solidarity with animals. Nietzsche's sympathy for animals and more generally his empathy are visible from the start in Tragedy, where he attempts to persuade moderns that the particular style of nature worship practiced by the ancient Greeks and culminating in the Dionysian myth and cult is a model of culture worthy of a second look. More overtly however it is Zarathustra that suggests Nietzsche's love of animals to most readers, since the prophet's companions are the eagle and snake who, in the tradition of the fable, speak with Zarathustra. At the point where Zarathustra summons his most abysmal thought, namely the eternal recurrence of the same, and falls into unconsciousness, "his" animals do not leave his side and indeed use his own words to entice him back to the world of the living. Commentators of course have long seized on this as evidence of Nietzsche's elevation of the animal, without pointing out that the animals who encourage Zarathustra to affirm the eternal recurrence of the same, using his words, are essentially no different than the negative Zarathustra imitators (dwarf, foaming fool) — at best innocent by virtue of being animals. For in parroting Zarathustra's words the eagle and the snake are engaging in human behavior, which is not proper for them in the first instance, and what is more, in a particularly nebulous and inscrutable human behavior. Zarathustra is amused by their words, he tells them to continue chattering: "How lovely it is that there are words and sounds: are not words and sounds rainbows and illusory bridges between things eternally apart? / To every soul another

414

VII. Nietzsche and the Environmental Ethos

world belongs; for each soul every other soul is an afterworld" (Z III/13, KSA 4:272). Words are the magic, the illusion by which problems are solved, by which gaps that cannot be filled appear to be filled, by which one human's anguish can, allegedly, be felt by another. Inasmuch as Zarathustra questions the capacity of one human being to truly understand another, comparing each soul to a separate world, it is doubtful whether his animals can sympathize with him, bridging the even larger gap between animal and human. And so he calls them "buffoons and barrel organs" (ibid, p. 275) and slowly silence falls upon them all. As similar as they are in many respects, Zarathustra maintains his humanity and is unable to share it with the animals, just as they are unable to share their animality with him. One lesson to be drawn from this episode in Zarathustra is that humans are singular animals, incapable of stepping "back to nature" in the manner of Romantic longing, but singular as well in the individual sense, such that no human being ever really connects with another. Though Hallman is justified in pointing to Zarathustra's animal companions and the above episode in particular as evidence of Nietzsche's sensitivity, he appears to miss the larger point that distances cannot be bridged, words notwithstanding, and distances are defining characteristics of being human, at least if Nietzsche's concept of the "pathos of distance" has any meaning. Hallman also appears to overstate the case when he writes that "Nietzsche not only attempts to re-immerse humanity into nature, but he also suggests that the values and perspectives of nonhuman life forms must be taken into consideration, while denying separateness and individuality and affirming wholeness and totality."500 One wonders how, in the event Nietzsche truly represents this position, the values, perspectives etc of nonhuman life forms could ever penetrate to the obtuse, insensitive human being, though as we have seen, Nietzsche is in fact highly critical of human insensitivity toward animals. Separateness and individuality, meanwhile, which are naturally occurring states and affirmed by Nietzsche when he argues for the cultivation and pruning of the individual as well as for affirming nature's order of rank, are not opposed by him on principle. Wholeness and totality are Nietzschean desiderata, but they do not necessarily obviate the need for and existence of separateness and individuality. Here Acampora's criticisms come to mind, as they address the order of rank that Nietzsche finds in nature. 501 Staten has a more refined approach to this problem of distance and empathy. He points out that Nietzsche does indeed believe humans should learn to sympathize with animals, and that "such remarks are continuous with the later remarks we have already canvased concerning Nietzsche's desire to sum up the experience of mankind in himself, his sense that 'the isolation of the individual ought not to deceive us: something flows on underneath individuals.'" 502 Well aware that the notion of individual is illu500 501 502

Hallman, "Nietzsche's Environmental Ethics", 115, 117. See footnote 418 above. Staten, Nietzsche's Voice, 154. See also Staten p. 214 for a discussion of the universal scope of N.'s pity.

415

1. Animals and Human Animals

sory in the sense that Nietzsche believes the entire species is represented in individual human beings, Staten distinguishes between two phenomena "that look very much alike: on the one hand Mitleid

and, on the other, something called Phantasie,

mental operation called hineinfuhlen

or hineindichten,

or a

which would be the true coin

o f which the other is the counterfeit" (ibid). Since Nietzsche opposes pity

{Mitleid)

for its effectiveness in preserving the "wrong" human beings, the weak types who are humanity's overwhelming majority, and advocates instead the sharing o f joy

{Mit-

freude), his particular brand o f empathy must somehow circumvent the negative while still manifesting a capacity to feel with and for other living things. W e should not forget that in dwelling as he does on joy, Nietzsche is quite serious about expanding the human range for positive emotions — for h i m being able to feel what other beings feel is not simply a matter o f feeling their pain. W e know, for instance, that he has such sympathy and empathy for the endangered higher specimens o f humanity, and we can now safely assume that he has such regard for animals as well. T h e challenge o f a "Dionysian philosopher" lies, on the Dionysian side, in affirming everything, in living without judgmentalism, in expanding one's sense o f life and one's sensitivity for the living beyond the current status o f European consciousness. However, on the philosopher side o f this Nietzschean oxymoron sits the cognitive human being, the individual whose spiritual advancement has been made possible by tension and cultivation, the "tall plant" human being who is indeed distinguishable from the masses and represents all that is noble, discerning, value-creating, and species preserving. As a thinker attuned to the need to restore human beings to a grounded, embodied, sense-affirming existence Nietzsche is clearly capable o f advocating the expansion o f humanity's capacity to feel, and such expansion would have to include greater respect for all life forms and by extension for the earth proper. Nietzsche's last days o f consciousness are often romanticized, and it is not difficult to be filled with pity for this brilliant, lonely man who lived modestly on a pension, doing his best to avoid G e r m a n y and Germans, including his sister and mother, while quiedy and for the most part anonymously churning out tide after title which, only a few years later, would stand the philosophical world on its head. His mental breakdown in Turin in D e c e m b e r 1 8 8 8 and January, 1 8 8 9 , very near to where he rented a room, was a dramatic affair in one particular instance. According to accounts varying in accuracy but agreeing that a horse was involved, 5 0 3 Nietzsche

503

Colli dates the mental breakdown as January 3, 1889 (KSA 15:210), but this is disputed by Anacleto Verrechia, "Nietzsche's Breakdown in Turin" in Stanford Italian Review (>\ 1-2 (1986), 105-112, special issue Nietzsche in Italy ed. Thomas Harrison. Verrechia proposes the thesis that N.'s collapse was not sudden and final, but a serious of lapses culminating in his being taken across the border to Switzerland by his friend Overbeck on January 9. The notion that N. collapsed once and for all was supposedly perpetrated by Overbeck and later N.'s sister, who sought to minimize the lingering onset of madness and thus preserve N.'s dignity. See Verrechia, above, pp. 106-08, and in the same volume David L. Miller, "Nietzsche's Horse and Other Tracings of the Gods," 159-70.

416

VII. Nietzsche and the Environmental Ethos

could not tolerate the sight of a tired old nag standing before its cart, was overcome by pity at this spectacle, and threw his arms around the horse's neck, weeping. 504 In other accounts Nietzsche was supposedly protecting the horse from a whipping by its owner. What are we to make of this public collapse of Nietzsche's personality? We might have a clue in a note Nietzsche penned in spring 1888, given here in its entirety: "Motif for a picture. A coachman. Winter landscape. The coachman with an expression of the most scornful cynicism relieves himself on the back of his own horse. The poor tortured creature turns its head and looks — grateful, very grateful ..." (KSA 13:350). A possible scene from everyday life, but definitely not Norman Rockwell. One could easily lose oneself in the writing of a text to this image, and in a psychogram of its author. Inasmuch as Nietzsche was no painter and held naturalists/ realists in the highest contempt, one has to wonder why this particularly depressing and tawdry image comes to his mind. It is antiromantic in the extreme, with its winter landscape dominated by the mundane and serving only to frame and intensify the figure of the urinating man. If this image is allowed to stand as a metaphor, there is commentary here on the distance between animal and human, which turns out to be very little distance after all. The exploitative coachman who makes a living from his animal ("Die arme geschundene Creatur") yet derives perverse pleasure in abusing it exceeds any "normal" abuse of the animal by demonstrating his boundless contempt for it. He is not pictured as whipping or beating the horse — that would call to mind cruelty and that is apparently not Nietzsche's direction here. Standing on his coach above the horse, the coachman urinates down onto the horse's back, symbolizing his superiority, indeed, his tyranny over the animal. Such an act would intend profound humiliation if committed against a human being, but the horse, apparently responding to the warmth of the urine, turns around to face the coachman with an expression of gratitude in its eyes. Unaware of any intended insult, the creature-horse responds, in creaturely fashion, to a stimulus, and for a moment it senses something that makes it feel good. Unaware of his own relatedness to the horse as a fellow-animal (N.'s term is "MitTier"), and caught up in the creaturely pleasure of exercising his absolute power and contempt for the animal, the creature-human experiences his little moment of pleasure, not only by relieving himself but by doing so in a manner that adds emotional pleasure to an otherwise purely physical one. Viewed together horse and man are both creatures, but the useful and helpful horse which is in a position of helpless exploitation manifests gratitude, while the man, who is capable of doing as he pleases, manifests behavior unbecoming of a creature, to say nothing of a human being. As viewers or readers of Nietzsche's motif, what exactly is supposed to evoke our pity?

504

Sander Gilman, ed. Begegnungen mit Nietzsche, 2nd ed. (Bonn: Bouvier, 1985), 615.

2. Post-Humanism Grounded in the Body

2. Post-Humanism

417

Grounded in the Body

"What they have bought themselves is, all in all, a feeling as if they were in principle too good and too significant for the earth and dwelling on it only provisionally."

Dawn 425

The first, and last problem one encounters in speaking of Nietzschean post-humanism is his remarkable focus on the human simpliciter, which makes one reluctant to pursue his thought into those regions where it is indeed post-humanistic. But insofar as Nietzsche's call for the superhuman is made simultaneously with his call for the meaning of the earth, his values are not merely those of humanism or high humanism, as these rest on a Judeo-Platonic-Christian ascetic foundation whether or not one speaks of "secular" humanism, but new values of an enhanced human being who makes her home solidly, and permanendy, upon the earth. Nietzsche's post-humanism is geocentric in the sense that his ecumenical vision requires humans to discover and inhabit the earth, and it is biocentric in the sense that it places the highest values on vitality per se, not just human vitality. In these two major ways Nietzsche diverges from the humanism characterizing Western culture, whereby humans, and predominantly male humans at that, regard themselves as gods in miniature, lording it over the earth and all other forms of life, flattering themselves that they are the measure of all things and the very purpose or goal of the world. In what follows I will demonstrate that Nietzsche is vividly critical of human invocations to uniqueness, privilege and superiority; that he exposes human vanity both conscious and unconscious and urges us to find our place among animals and life forms more generally; that he understands why humans are driven to dominate and why they deliberately blind themselves; that there is something higher and simultaneously deeper than humanity to which humans must defer but without engaging in metaphysics; and finally, I shall summarize the ground of Nietzsche's post-humanism. Nietzsche does not denounce human propensity for error so much as he denounces our hypocrisy vis-à-vis error and the serious misconceptions arising from our erroneous judgments, especially as they impel humans toward life negation. Without the errors that are at work whenever we experience psychical pleasure or displeasure, he maintains, a humanity would never have arisen "whose basic sense ( Grundempfindung) is and remains that the human being is the free one in the world of unfreedom, the eternal miracle worker, whether in matters of good or evil, the amazing exception, the super-animal, the almost-god, the meaning of creation, the one whose existence cannot be thought away ("der Nichthinwegzudenkende"), the solution to the cosmic riddle, the great ruler over nature and despiser of the same, the being that calls his history world history\ — Vanitas vanitatum homo" (HH II/2 12, KSA 2:547-8). By enumerating the many ways in which humans

418

VII. Nietzsche and the Environmental Ethos

are, as the Latin states, the vanity of vanities, Nietzsche is defining the essence, the singularity of what is human and in so doing tracing this quality to our rather faulty, if not outright dishonest psychic life. Error is present in humans to a greater extent than in other animals who rely on and are genuinely served by their instincts, but Nietzsche questions what we make of our errors, what they achieve (vanity, a sense of entitlement, superiority, meaning = human, etc), and by implication he suggests we can do better with our errors. As Miiller-Lauter writes, humans must build on the old for their new values, without seeking to escape our animal history, which is every bit as ineluctable as the basic errors of judgment that have gotten us to this point in our development. Thus the task of future great humans, according to Nietzsche, will be to experiment. 505 While our errors regarding our origins, uniqueness, determination and the accompanying demands we impose upon ourselves have allowed humanity to rise above itself, these same errors according to Nietzsche have caused unspeakable suffering, persecution, suspicion, misjudging, and misery to be brought into the world. "Humans have become suffering beings as a result of their moralities: what they have bought themselves is, all in all, a feeling as if they were in principle too good and too significant for the earth and were dwelling on it only provisionally. 'The suffering arrogant one' is for the present still the highest type of human being" (D 425, KSA 3:261). Here the downside to humanity's errors, its failure to ground itself, is expressed in terms of self-imposed suffering. Our errors are not only inventive in the sense that they give us delusions of grandeur, they are equally inventive in cruelty and arrogance. For Nietzsche this is "too much humanity" in the world, too much, in any case, of the suffering that only humans appear to be able to cause, and so there is great irony in juxtaposing "humanity" with arrogance and the inflicting of suffering. Our moralities have undermined us, have taken the ground out from beneath us, by allowing us to think the most arrogant and anti-human of thoughts: that humans are too good for the earth. When Nietzsche gives his aphorism the title "We gods in exile!", he is playing up the irony of our inflated perceptions of ourselves and suggesting a healthier scenario. Would we rather be gods, albeit paltry and mean-spirited gods in exile, or would we rather be sound humans at home on the earth? There is an alternative to exhausting ourselves in pain and arrogance — perhaps humans as we are presently constituted could dwell instead on more earthly matters. This would require a serious shift from a morals-based ontology to an embodying strategy of cultivation, as Miiller-Lauter suggests, because cultivation (Ziichtung) unlike morality would act upon human character by constructing a new body capable of creating a new soul, i.e., we must work directly on the organism so that "physiology is placed in the service of a basic change in the human being." 506 505 506

Müller-Lauter, Nietzsche-Interpretationen I, 176. Miiller-Lauter, Nietzsche-Interpretationen I, 116.

2. Post-Humanism Grounded in the Body

419

When he ponders the scope of human errors Nietzsche settles on four basic errors that have educated humanity. Humans have always seen themselves incompletely; we have attributed fictional attributes to ourselves; we have felt ourselves in a false order of rank regarding animals and nature, and finally, we have always invented new value tablets and then regarded them, for a time, as eternal, thereby haphazardly ennobling our "primary" drives and conditions. "If one subtracts the effect of these four errors, then one has also subtracted humanity, humaneness and 'human dignity'" (GS 115, KSA 3:474). Seen in this light humanity is thin. Of course the four basic errors cannot be subtracted and after all they are responsible for the current human condition, which is not entirely bad and does not consist exclusively of pain and arrogance. But the point Nietzsche is making is an appeal to common sense. Let us choose our errors more wisely, now that we have grown to the point where we are empowered enough to do so, and in the process let us fill in and fill out our perceptions of ourselves; let us find our ground and dispense with vanity and arrogance by finding our place in nature, and let us work on ecumenical values worthy of the error that wishes them to be eternal. While giving due thought to how thin our "humanity" is based on these four errors, we should keep in mind that the animal human, the one who has existed for hundreds of thousands of years prior to the emergence of the human we are today, is the bedrock and ground of humanity. In other words, we must have something to build upon for future notions of humanity, and it is not the case that if the four errors are stripped away, the human is without foundation. When Nietzsche asserts that nothing is more conditional or restricted than our feeling of the beautiful, he is criticizing our tendency to use the human as an overall standard. "Whoever were to think of it as detached from the pleasure of the human being in the human being would immediately lose the ground beneath his feet." Humans believe the world is filled with beauty but forget themselves as the cause, forget about the vanity of the species. His alternative to the human as the model of beauty: "Who knows how he looks in the eyes of a higher judge of taste? Perhaps audacious? perhaps even amusing? perhaps a bit arbitrary?" The "higher judge" is Dionysus, and Nietzsche inserts a brief dialogue here between Dionysus and Ariadne, with references by the "philosophical lover" Dionysus to Ariadne's ears (TI 9/19, KSA 6: 123-4).507 The post-human mode of dwelling encourages us to judge by standards surpassing those of the vanity of our species, which prompts us to see the beautiful wherever we see the reflection of the human and wherever we feel ourselves flattered. Dionysus is an appropriate alternative because of his proximity to human beings, symbolized both by his demigod status and his amorous relationship with Ariadne, who symbolizes the desperate, abandoned human soul. As the supreme personification of affirmation, Dionysus sees beauty differently, in all things and without moralistic 507

For the significance of these enigmatic snippets of conversation between Dionysus and Ariadne see Del Caro, "Symbolizing Philosophy," and Krell, Postponements.

420

VII. Nietzsche and the Environmental Ethos

judgment, but most importantly, he is immune to the species vanity characterizing our humanistically conditioned notions of beauty. A prominent feature of the post-human is humor, and once again the presence of Dionysus is indispensable for the blossoming of this trait. Without humor as a function of proportion, modesty, and humility, humans take themselves too seriously and consequently do not deserve to be taken seriously. Humor connects Nietzsche's later Dionysian philosophizing with his earliest observations on humanity's basic errors, and in a way, though he does not sufficiently address the importance of humor in Tragedy, his criticisms there of cognitive and theoretical arrogance point directly to the aphoristic writings which dwell richly upon the absurdity of error-inspired humanism. Thus in Human he advances immediately from the human's basic errors to the human as comedian of the universe. There must be more intelligent creatures than humans, he observes, if only to savor the humor that lies in humans regarding themselves as the purpose of the world's existence and as creatures settling for nothing less than a "world-mission." Astronomers tell us that the drop of life in the universe is without significance for the total character "of the tremendous ocean of becoming and passing away," that countless planets have similar conditions for the production of life as does earth. "Perhaps the ant in the forest imagines itself just as strongly to be the goal and purpose of the forest's existence, as we do when in our imagination we almost involuntarily equate the destruction of humanity with the destruction of the earth" ( H H II/2 14, KSA 548-9). If humor exists elsewhere in the universe, and Nietzsche hopes it does, he sees a role for human beings as involuntary comedians if they cannot get over themselves, if they fail to develop a sense of proportion that might allow them to develop a sense of humor. Humans of today would appear to other beings as comedians by default, and there is little dignity in being the butt of such laughter. "If a god created the world, then he created the human being as god's ape, as a constant occasion for amusement in his all too long eternities" (ibid, p. 548). In order to impart some notion of scale to human vanity, Nietzsche invites us to imagine the most vain human being, then to juxtapose him with the most modest human being contemplating his "humanity" in relation to nature and world (HH II/ 2 304). The least significant human emoting about himself over and against nature and world, feeling his humanity in the difference he perceives between himself and nature, is vain beyond our ability to comprehend, much more vain than the vainest human being we could imagine in relation to other human beings.508 Nietzsche makes a parable of humanity's need to defy nature when he writes that the human alone struggles against gravity and wants to fall upward (KSA 10:95). In obeying gravity as a natural force other animals are at ease in falling down, but the human apparently 508 - p j ^ apjjorjsjjj should be compared with the fragment from 1884 in which "silly humans" feel comfortable as human among animals, where they can manifest their superiority, but not as humans before humans (KSA 11:102).

2. Post-Humanism Grounded in the Body

421

feels undignified in this position and invents the ruse of falling upward, which is tantamount to claiming immunity to gravity and is the clearest illustration of all that humanism lacks groundedness. While humans are "a small eccentric animal species," life on earth is a mere moment according to Nietzsche, "an interlude, an exception without consequence, something that remains without relevance for the overall character of the earth." Expanding his perspective even wider, he maintains that the earth itself like any planet is "a hiatus between two Nothings, an event without plan, reason, will, consciousness, the worst kind of necessity, stupid necessity..." This observation causes the snake vanity to rear up in us, to declare that all this must be false because after all it incenses us, all this must be mere appearance (KSA 13:488-9). And so human vanity has elevated humans to the paragon of animals, the paragon of all life everywhere, and by extension humans have "dignified" the earth by simultaneously declaring it the seat of all life and projecting eternal life beyond life on earth. Meanwhile the stupid necessity governing the existence of earth and all other planets is redeemed and recast as divine intelligence, as divine plan whose features are suspiciously those of human being. Without a notion of the post-human Nietzsche's philosophizing would stop here, at the point where human vanity forces us to ignore everything we know and feel about humans in favor of half-heartedly living the lie that humans cannot be surpassed, that everything exists for our benefit. This is the state of nihilistic dwelling that characterizes today's groundless humanity, according to which we hover far above the animals and just below our dead God. Europeans cloak themselves in their morality like a disguise, Nietzsche claims, because the European, the humanist par excellence, has become sick, a crippled animal, tame. But a predator does not need a moral disguise, only the herd animal does "with its deep mediocrity, fear and boredom with itself" (GS 352, KSA588-9). It could be that humans have become vulnerable to the point where they require a disguise, as do certain animals who blend in with their surroundings to escape predators; or perhaps humans need their disguise for their own pride and vanity, unwilling and unable to face themselves in their true form; or perhaps there is also an aesthetic dimension to this disguising of the human in moral trappings — " morality spruces up the European — let us admit it!" (ibid, p. 589). The post-human will rediscover the predatory animal in humanity, and stray further away from the pretty, but herd-like diminution of humanity. The unembellished human being will have much to unlearn with respect to "human" and much to learn with respect to "animal." Teaching human sufficiency as opposed to teaching the Platonic doctrine of human deficiency requires something more than mere love of the human, at the same time that it demands love for the human as a minimum. We have "relearned" ("wir haben umgelernt") and grown more modest: "We no longer derive the human being from 'spirit,' from the 'deity,' we have placed him back among the animals. We regard him as the strongest animal because he is the most cunning: a result of this is his spirituality." Humans are not the crown of creation for every creature is on the

422

VII. Nietzsche and the Environmental Ethos

same level of perfection as the human, and more accurately, humans are less perfect than other creatures because they are the sickliest animal. Consciousness was seen as proof of our divine genesis, and so the human began to resemble a tortoise and cease to traffic with earthly things, tending toward pure spirit instead. But for Nietzsche the development of consciousness and spirit is a symptom of a relatively incomplete organism engaged in attempting, probing, blundering, and exertion that unnecessarily squanders much nervous energy (A 14, KSA 6:180-1). Once again we find Nietzsche insisting on a higher level of animal efficiency for humans, a completion and execution of what we are as animals before we attempt to obliterate the animal in us and end up completely disembodied, completely without instincts for the earth. Consciousness alone is not the way to the open, the pure spiritual life "is a pure stupidity" (ibid, p. 181) and it is time to adjust course. In fact, consciousness is immature and underdeveloped to the extent that it is dangerous and capable of setting off precipitous events, such as the French Revolution, consistently regarded by Nietzsche as a low point in history. Stegmaier explains that the process of internalization critiqued in Genealogy has indeed been a considerable change for the earth, one whose consequences are still unknown. Therefore Nietzsche could write about the French Revolution as a rationalistic event whose origins can be traced back to consciousness as illness, decrying this particular mode of experimentation because it is based on "conclusions," not on instincts.509 In matters of the earth and humanity, Nietzsche cannot condone revolution, nor can he condone the desperate kind of experimentation that fails to be guided by instinct. The internalization of the human being brought with it a decline of instinct and even more, an attack on instinct whose exterior manifestations can be studied and observed in our relationship with the external world, which we regard with great ambivalence and sometimes outright hostility. To modernist eyes revolution may be mistaken for a sign of the open, but in Nietzsche's eyes it represents the potential destruction of both humans and earth once the human, earth's most powerful, enterprising, and dangerous life form, is unhinged from the reliability of instinct. When Nietzsche refers to our species as "gods in exile" and arrogant "almost-gods" he is imagining how we appear in the eyes of the higher judge Dionysus, but also in the eyes of animals. '"There is no human being because there was no first human being': thus conclude the animals" (KSA 10:94). Animals would have a hard time believing in us, using the analogy of humans believing in gods, because the ontological line between animal and human is blurred. According to the animals humans do not exist because this particular species denies its genesis, preferring to have no beginning than to allow an all too close association with the animal, which after all is what is revealed in trying to identify the first human being. If we were more animal the animals could "believe in us," they would have no reason to doubt our existence. 509

Stegmaier, Nietzsches 'Genealogie', 157.

2. Post-Humanism Grounded in the Body

423

This reversing of perspectives underscores that humans are the only species that effaces itself as a species, the only life form that denies that it is a life form, while seeking always to characterize itself as something higher, something finer. "The judgment over the human being from the standpoint of the animal\ Are we not parasites to it?" Here animals do indeed acknowledge our existence, but only as parasites. The gift-giving virtue comes to mind here, but now Nietzsche invites us to scrutinize our taking nature from the animals' point of view. The very next note reads: "The parasitic is the kernel of the base attitude. The feeling of receiving nothing without giving in return or therewith receiving something in return is the noble attitude" (KSA 10:294). Of course parasites occur in nature and Nietzsche is not claiming otherwise, but the parasite is the lowest form of life, living off of other life forms in the sense that it does not have the capacity to live as an independent animal. Whatever distance we succeed in imposing between ourselves and animals, between ourselves and nature by means of our moral disguise and posturing, on closer examination (or on animal examination) we are as rudimentary, as base as the leech. Here we must ask ourselves the question: are we leeches in the eyes of our fellow animals because they fail to see all that we give back to nature, or, are we leeches in their eyes because we take without giving? Leiss draws on the Hegelian discussion of "master and slave" to make the point that domination entails "the struggle for recognition of the master's authority," and thus requires acknowledgment on the part of the subjugated that they are indeed subjects: "Thus properly speaking only other men can be the objects of domination." When we analyze the concept of "domination of nature," therefore, in order for the phrase to have any meaning, it has to refer to the application of "superior technological capabilities" to "dominate and control other men. The notion of a common domination of the human race over external nature is nonsensical. This point can be understood best by examining what is signified by the word nature' in relation to the mastery of nature through science."510 Leiss is not merely splitting hairs in making this distinction, nor is he denying that humans attempt to control and dominate nature. He does draw the line, however, on the question of whether humans actually can dominate nature, since technically speaking nature does not acknowledge our dominance. And for this reason Leiss quotes Nietzsche where the latter asserts that humans have always revolted most strenuously to the cruelty and oppression of other humans; human impotence in the face of other humans inspires us to create morality, not the feeling of impotence before nature (KSA 12:214). This, in turn, is a nuance of the larger Nietzschean view that humans cannot improve nature, that they delude themselves into thinking human values are superior to the world as it is. Leiss follows the thread of domination of nature into Horkheimer, who "follows Nietzsche's path breaking thought and argues that the domination of nature or the 510

Leiss, The Domination ofNature, 122-3.

424

VII. Nietzsche and the Environmental Ethos

expansion of human power in the world is a universal characteristic of human reason rather than a distinctive mark of the modern period." 511 This view emerges early indeed in Nietzsche and is already decisive in the unpublished 1873 essay " O n Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense", where he uses architectural metaphors to describe humans as builders of "conceptual cathedrals" without ground. Humans feel a need to dominate in nature on the basis of their drive to create metaphors, a fundamental human drive "which one cannot dispense with for a moment," and which ultimately results in the construction of a "second world" that is controllable and lasting in comparison to the fleeting world of images which are not processed into concepts by animals (KSA 1:881-2, 886-7). T h e basis of our humanism is language, and out of language reason as it is applied to science (KSA 1:886). If we cannot dominate nature because nature does not acknowledge us as masters, we can still alter, transform, use, and destroy nature, or at least those parts of it to which we have direct access and upon which we depend for our day to day lives, and in recognition of this danger to both ourselves and to other life on earth, Nietzsche calls for a superhuman who will cease the hubris-laden humanistic behaviors of the past and present, redirecting humanity from "the human is the meaning of the universe" to "the superhuman is the meaning of the earth." Kreis offers a reading of Goethe's Faust that is relevant to our discussion. He compares Faust's pact with Mephisto to Eve's venture with the serpent, referring to it as a "pact with the cleverness and sensuality of his body." In no time at all, Faust is transformed from a "scholastically dried up scholar" to a sexualized and rejuvenated man. 512 So far Faust has "mastered" nature by turning back the clock and refreshing his sexuality, which will allow him to engage in sexual conquest, first with simple, innocent Gretchen, but later with the fabled Helen of Troy. But Faust needs more to become whole. As the "reasoning animal" possessed by the devil at the threshold of modern industrialism, Faust gets to play lover, politician, absolute ruler, and world economist. However, he experiences himself as paradoxical double nature in his being as reason (spirit) and earth spirit (life), which contradict one another. Kreis explains: "It is the earth spirit that shatters the knowing arrogance of the Faustian Western man who believes he is the 'image of the deity,' with the statement: 'You resemble the spirit which you comprehend, not me!'" Faust learns this humbling lesson not from books, but from the fire of the earth spirit, symbolizing life, "as it showed itself to the children of Israel in the wilderness." W h a t Faust comes to know is that it is not a matter of reconciling soul with heaven, but instead that the earth wants to be reconciled with itself and 511

512

Leiss, The Domination of Nature, 148-9. Leiss quotes from Horkheimer, The Eclipse ofReason (Columbia UP, 1947), 176; and Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1969), 20, 27-9, to the effect that thought in itself, as logic, is a domination in the realm of concepts arising on the basis of domination in reality, including the subjection of individual to the whole in society. Kreis, Nietzsche, Wagner und die Juden, 79.

2. Post-Humanism Grounded in the Body

425

long as this is not the case, "Faust is the 'houseless' person, the exile, far away from the land for which he strives. His building is destroying. The human being itself is his hell, his devil..." (ibid, p. 80). In a moment of humanistic arrogance, Faust looks upon the earth spirit, not knowing what it is but feeling an affinity for it, and tells it that they are two of a kind. But inasmuch as Faust is thinking and acting out of humanistic myopia, he needs to be put in his place and the earth spirit does so by rubbing Faust's nose in the limitation of spirit when standing in the presence of life. The manner of the spirit that drains life and is decisively not earth spirit is found in Christianity, the religion that is "only inventive in life poisoning and heart poisoning errors," and which would serve as a spectacle for gods, especially philosophical gods, who would give the "pitiful small planet called earth" a glance for the sake of this curious religion alone (A 39, KSA 212-3). While it appears that Nietzsche is putting down Christianity and earth at the same time by conflating them as he does, he is actually criticizing Christianity's tendency to undermine the earth as it is, to make the earth a place of opprobrium as the home planet of Christianity, and ultimately its tendency to elevate earthlings beyond their actual, and worthy status of earthlings to the false status of almost-gods. Christianity, in other words, has contributed mightily to the humanistic notion that humans are the center of the universe, the executors and heirs of God's will — earth is too big in an inflated, relative sense when it is regarded as Christian earth, which is why Nietzsche intersperses such comments with allusions to Dionysus, the demigod who simultaneously grounds human life in the earthly and surpasses the humanism of the past. Writing about his reception or lack thereof in the reading public in Ecce Homo Nietzsche complains that the word "superhuman" as used by him has been misunderstood. While he intends it to characterize "a type illustrative of the highest success ("eines typus höchster Wohlgerathenheit")," as opposed to the "modern" and "good" human being, "to Christians and other nihilists," it has almost everywhere been naively construed as the opposite of the figure represented by Zarathustra, namely as "the 'idealistic' type of a higher kind of human, half'saint,' half'genius'" (EH 3/1, KSA 6:300). Wohlgerathenheit literally is a noun characterizing something that has turned out well, so on this reading the superhuman is the human who has turned out well, superlatively well, in fact, which means she has avoided the pitfalls of idealism, asceticism, genius worship, nihilism etc as they plague the humanistic condition. Nietzsche's disappointment shows through that his conception of the superhuman has not been recognized as a great step beyond the humanistically perceived exemplary human, that it has, in fact, been misconstrued as the validation of the humanistic type. This is no small misinterpretation, but it is a common one, and just as the misunderstanding existed in Nietzsche's day, it continued throughout the twentieth century and still troubles Nietzsche scholarship today. Part of the problem is traceable to Nietzsche himself, for he needs to clarify what appear to be contradictory positions. O n the one hand, as I have tried to show in this

426

VII. Nietzsche and the Environmental Ethos

book, the superhuman is the human, must remain grounded in the human, or it drifts off into a stratosphere of idealistic wishful thinking. On this reasoning, unless one follows very closely Nietzsche's entire argument concerning the human in relation to the earth, it would appear that his superhuman is simply a beefed up version of the "best" (morally spoken) qualities we now ascribe to humans. On the other hand, he is keen to make the point that humanism fails to take into account the animal nature of humanity and of the earth proper, as the rightful dwelling of earthly life forms. In making this important point he dwells, some would say excessively, on negative qualities of the human condition, on qualities of the so-called "last human being," which has the effect of making a humanistically conceived individual look quite good, even "super" by comparison. The tossing back and forth within Nietzsche's rhetoric sometimes has the superhuman looking unattainable, "beyond" human entirely, and other times it looks as though superhuman as the meaning of the earth is proximate, and inevitable, if one takes certain steps recommended by Nietzsche's ecumenical vision and his general reorientation of dwelling to accommodate the closest things. A similar dynamic is visible regarding the will to power. Some commentators reserve the will to power as a function of a superhuman, heedless of the fact that even a flea has will to power according to Nietzsche's conception of the organic, and even the resentment of the slave morality is an expression of will to power, and so they thereby exclude everyday humans from the will to power — as if any life forms could be immune to such a force in nature! I have argued, however, that the will to power is most meaningful as a force for dwelling groundedly on the earth when it is conceived as the will to empowerment. Before I abandon the topic of why humans have a tendency to want domination over nature, and the related problem of how humanistic thinking impels us into strategies of dominance, a brief discussion of a famous twentieth century case will be helpful. Thomas Mann's indebtedness to Nietzsche for inspiration both aesthetic and political is well documented. Mann was of the generation coming up in the 1890s, the first generation to have a truly good look at Nietzsche, and like many others around the world, Mann was smitten. But as I and more recently others have argued, Mann had a strong, almost irrational tendency to ascribe his own humanistic and romantically derivedwiews to Nietzsche, as if the latter were the actual humanistic and romantic influence on him. Thus when it came time to finally and definitively break with Germans in political terms, and only in the aftermath of World War II, Mann felt that he had to break with Nietzsche as well, and in doing so he branded Nietzsche a hopeless Romantic, and a hopeless aesthete, and laid partial blame for Germany's fascist excess at Nietzsche's feet. 513 In my view this is a classic case of the myopia

Del Caro, "The Political Apprentice: Thomas Manns Reception of Nietzsche," Studies in the Humanities 12:1 (1985), 21-8; Del Caro and Bialy, "Rückblick nach dem Exilerlebnis: Thomas Mann und Nietzsche" in Exil: Wirkung und Wertung, ed. Donald G. Daviau and Ludwig M. Fischer (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1984), 149-59.

2. Post-Humanism Grounded in the Body

427

of humanism coming face to face with the ugliest reality and caving in upon itself. Nietzsche who earlier and more ardently than most thinkers of his time condemned the petty politics of nationalism, championed a united Europe free of small politics, and argued for an ecumenical habitation of the earth suddenly emerges as a protofascist and is denounced as such by one of the twentieth century's greatest humanist aesthetes — small wonder the second half of the twentieth century was preoccupied with the name-calling characteristic of the Cold War. In fact, however, as Kreis persuasively explains, "Thomas Mann placed Nietzsche into the roster of his own psychological-humanistic perceptions. He saw him correspondingly — and overlooked that Nietzsche's thought did not organize itself anthropocentrically but instead — biocentrically!" O n balance one has to marvel at how different these two men were, and Kreis makes a strong case for this difference when he adds that Mann's condemnation of Zarathustra as the portrait of an abomination ("einer Unfigur") and a monster rings hollow. The criticism is directed at a Zarathustra who celebrates his wild wisdom by climbing over glacial wilderness and dwelling in woods and caves where he speaks with animals instead of humans beings, by a great literary man of the metropolis and its diseases.514 The point is not simply that Mann was mistaken about Nietzsche and tried, toward the end of his life, to shift his own guilt to Nietzsche's shoulders — that would be sad enough, to be sure; but inasmuch as Mann was no fool, was indeed one of the truly brilliant Europeans of his time, his ability to humanistically deceive himself about Nietzsche, and to finish his life in denial about what he, Mann had represented and what Nietzsche represents — this is the failure of humanism itself, this is the failure of Dr. Faustus as he appears throughout history. When Nietzsche critiques the shallowness of consciousness, as he frequently does, he is attempting to show both the relative immaturity of consciousness and its fallibility, especially since Western humanity places such great store in consciousness at the expense of the animal. Because humans were the most endangered animal, we developed communication as a means of helping ourselves, and consciousness was necessary in order to communicate. "For to say it again: the human being, like any living creature, constandy thinks but does not know it; the thinking that becomes conscious is only the smallest part of it, let us say: the most superficial, the worst part." Consciousness does not actually belong therefore to the individual existence of humans, "rather to that which is community and herd nature" in them. Consciousness is most refined with respect to community and herd utility, and however much we apply ourselves toward understanding ourselves as individual, what inevitably surfaces is "precisely the non-individual in itself," the average. "Our actions are at bottom all personal, singular, infinitely individual in an incomparable way, there is no doubt; but as soon as we translate them into consciousness, they no longer appear so." At this 514

Kreis, Nietzsche, Wagner und die Juden, 158.

428

VII. Nietzsche and the Environmental Ethos

point Nietzsche offers an explanation of his notion of phenomenalism and perspectivism: "the nature of animal consciousness brings with it that the world of which we can become conscious is only a surface and sign world, a generalized, a debased world — that everything that becomes conscious likewise becomes shallow, thin, relatively stupid, general, sign, a sign of the herd; that great and thorough corruption, falsification, superficialization and generalization are tied to becoming conscious." Indeed, voicing his concern in even stronger terms, Nietzsche maintains that "ultimately, growing consciousness is a danger; and whoever lives among the most conscious Europeans even knows that it is a disease" (GS 354, KSA 3:591-3). This grim view of consciousness deserves closer analysis. In the first instance, Nietzsche is hardly inclined to sing the praises of consciousness since he regards it as an expression of the herd instinct much more so than as a state of the individual. While our actions have individuality, the moment we make them conscious they lose their individuality. This he attributes to "animal consciousness," which of course subsumes humans as well, but not for the purpose of disparaging the animal, on the contrary — it is in moving from unconscious to becoming conscious that the animal loses out, that the world is falsified by the herd filter. When he claims that growing consciousness is a danger and even a disease, judging by today's "most conscious" Europeans, he is underscoring how the humanistic world view obliterates the individual, represses the animal, and in so doing sets up ever greater deterrents to living embodied, earth affirming lives. Consciousness is something that the herd agrees upon, it is a spiritual pact of sorts, to live in a certain way relative to the world. If there is nothing higher, better, superior to consciousness as we know it, Nietzsche sees a dim future for humanity. The solution to the problem of growing consciousness does not lie in unconsciousness, and already the theoretical Romantics were aware that in calling for a "new mythology" they would have to join modern and ancient, knowledge and intuition, science and faith. Nietzsche believes that humans are capable of more, that as valuable as consciousness, morality, objectivity etc are, still there is a need to make better, wiser, more economical use of these spiritual qualities, especially when they can be focused more sympathetically upon the animal. In a note from 1884 Nietzsche writes that the human up till now is basically the embryo of the future human, "all formative powers that strive for the latter are in the former." These are tremendous powers, he adds, and so the individual of today suffers "the more he is determinative of the future." Now as encouragement Nietzsche observes that we must not be deceived by the isolation of the individual: "in truth something flows on beneath individuals" (KSA 11:210). This "something" flowing beneath individuals, cited by Staten as an indication of Nietzsche's special empathy, is the alternative to the human of today, for the very next note reads: "Not 'humanity' but instead superhuman is the goal! A misunderstanding in Comtek (ibid). Those individuals who suffer today and suffer from today, from the atmosphere, climate, pressure, gravity that is today, are the truest

2. Post-Humanism Grounded in the Body

429

evidence of the superhuman gestating in the current human. "Humanity" may serve only to reinforce humanity, to preserve and perhaps even worsen the condition that we know today as humanism. In a cluster of notes from winter 1883/84 Nietzsche explores the role of knowledge in those behaviors that are species preserving, crossing back and forth from discussions of knowledge to discussions of evaluations, creativity, and consciousness. His summary of one particularly long discussion strikes me as especially relevant to the issue of post-humanism and so I will quote it at length: Briefly put: in the entire development of the spirit perhaps it is a matter of the body, it is the history, becoming sensible, of the fact that a higher body isforming. The organic is rising to still higher stages. Our lust for knowledge of nature is a means whereby the body wants to perfect itself. Or rather: hundreds of thousands of experiments are made to change the nourishment, manner of dwelling, and way of living of the body. Consciousness and its evaluations, all kinds of pleasure and displeasure are signs of these changes and experiments. Ultimately it is not at alia matter of the human being: he shall be overcome (KSA 10:655-6).

Restoring the primacy of the body at this juncture in human history will have the effect of overcoming the human. O u r thirst for knowledge about nature has an underlying dimension, namely, providing the body with the means to perfect or complete itself ("sich vervollkommnen"), which in Nietzschean parlance amounts to the human turning out well. We recognize in this discussion of the body's primacy the language of Zarathustra from " O n the Afterworldly": "More honestly and purely speaks the healthy body, the perfect and perpendicular one: and it speaks of the meaning of the earth" (Z 1/3, KSA 4:38); and from "On the Despisers of the Body": "There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom. And who knows why your body needs precisely your best wisdom?" (Z 1/4, KSA 4:40). T h e changes we make in what and how we eat, how and where we dwell, how we live are all evidence of the body's need to surpass itself, to engage in constant self-overcoming, and what we value more than our bodies, whether we call it "eternal soul" or "humanity," this is not steering the body but is instead the body's latest vehicle to its own perfection. Miiller-Lauter displays a keen understanding of Nietzschean notions of embodiment, and he consistently views the major doctrines in relation to embodiment (Einverleibung, also incorporation). The eternal recurrence of the same, as an idea, as a thought, for example, is supposed to become embodied to roughly the degree that the basic errors of human consciousness have been embodied — these errors have shaped us as humans. 515 In his analysis of Zarathustra's discourse on the body as "great reason," Miiller-Lauter contends that the unconscious, namely body, would come to embody new truths, so that over time the development of the body may contribute to a new form of humanity. 516 This reading is compatible with Nietzsche's insistence 515 516

Miiller-Lauter, Nietzsche-Interpretationen I, 180, 298-99. Müller-Lauter, Nietzsche-Interpretationen II, 61.

430

VII. Nietzsche and the Environmental Ethos

that the instincts be reinstated, in some measure, as a ground for humanity's future development. Similarly, Abel foregrounds the body when he writes that the human body represents a point of origin and a guide for reflection not only in a heuristic sense, but moreover as the actual basis of original interpretation and as the mutally supporting relationship of our efforts to interpret world, self, others, in short, the body is the interpreting act.517 When the body functions not merely as the carrier or container of the mind, but as the ground itself of what it means to be human, the body, its senses, instincts, and its unique physicality in relation to the environment assumes new authority, new empowerment. The homeless, wandering good Europeans to whom and for whom Nietzsche speaks in Science are united in their concern for strengthening and elevating the type "human." Their particular challenge, however, lies in having to live "in an age which loves to lay claim to the honor of being the most humane, mildest, most righteous age" ever achieved under the sun. Nietzsche and his homeless companions are not humanitarians and do not love "humanity" as do the French, nor do they advocate nationalism, racism, and related forms of "petty politics" (GS 377, KSA 3:629-30). While Nietzsche embraces the notion of good Europeanism as a surpassing of the era of nationalistic politics, being a good European is not reducible to exporting "humanitarianism" and "humanity" and humanism from the European epicenter. In his ecumenical thinking the good European is simply the proximate and inevitable enhancement of a particular grouping of humans, namely Europeans, beyond their state of tribalistic confusion and toward an earth affirming, body affirming dwelling such as it is called for on the way to humanity's first habitation of the earth. Zarathustra expresses his love for those who do not seek behind the stars for reasons to die, to "go under" or "go down" (perish) but who sacrifice themselves to the earth, so that the earth can become the dwelling of the superhuman. He loves those who work and invent to build a house for the superhuman, preparing earth, animal and plant for him (Z P 4, KSA 4:17). In this formulation humans continue to die for what they believe in, but what they believe in is now tied to their own advancement, and their future has become their own property. The time has come, Zarathustra claims, for the human being to set a goal and to plant the seed of his highest hope: "His soil is still rich enough for this. But one day this soil will grow poor and tame, and no tall tree will ever be able to grow from it" (Z P 5, KSA 4:19). When the human soil is exhausted the "last human being" will occupy the earth: "His race is ineradicable, like the flea beetle; the last human being lives longest" (ibid, p. 19). The German for flea beetle is Erdfloh, literally earth or soil flea, designating its habitat. It offends our propriety to have our venerable humanistic sentiments dragged through the mud, but Nietzsche is warning us that if we continue to follow the course of arrogant humanism, our species will merely envelope the earth as an infestation. 517

Abel, Die Dynamik 157-58.

2. Post-Humanism Grounded in the Body

431

Perhaps Nietzsche overstates, and he certainly rhetoricizes the threat to humanity of diminishing into a herd animal, which is how he speaks of the "flea beetle" in Beyond. Perhaps his urgency for a higher human being is motivated as much by hatred for the egalitarian spirit as it is by love for human beings — it often appears so, in any case. But Nietzsche cannot declare his love for humanity, he must always search for language indicative of his love for what the human being can become, and at best he can say, as Zarathustra does at the outset of his journey: "Ich liebe die Menschen" (I love humans) (Z P 2, KSA 4:13). Love is a powerful motivation and does not always allow for linear and logical communication, its paths are often elliptical and its force overpowering. But whoever would doubt that Nietzsche's philosophizing is motivated by love should look for the recurring message in all of his apparent tirades and panic attacks, the message that recapitulates "how the human being is still unexhausted for the greatest possibilities" (BGE 203, KSA 5:127).

Works Cited

Nietzsches Works Friedrich Nietzsche: Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Einzelbänden. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. 2nd ed. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1988. Friedrich Nietzsche: Briefwechsel. Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. 18 vols. Berlin, 1975-85. Friedrich Nietzsche: Werke in drei Bänden, 7th ed. Edited by Karl Schlechta. Munich: Hanser, 1973. Basic Writings of Nietzsche. Translated and edited, with commentaries by Walter Kaufmann. New York: The Modern Library, 1968 The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Edited with introduction by Bernard Williams. Translated by Josefine Nauckhoff. Poems Translated by Adrian Del Caro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Translated, with commentary by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974. Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Introduction by Erich Heller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. The Portable Nietzsche. Selected and translated, with an introduction, preface, and notes by Walter Kaufmann. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982. The Will to Power. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1968.

Works Cited Abel, Günter. Die Dynamik der Willen zur Macht und die ewige Wiederkehr. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1984. Acampora, Ralph R. "Using and Abusing Nietzsche for Environmental Ethics." Environmental Ethics 16:2 (1994), 187-94. Aiken, David Henry. Introduction. Nietzsche: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Robert C. Solomon. New York: Anchor, 1973 Allison, David B. '"Have I Been Understood?'" In Nietzsche, Genealogy Morality: Essays on Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. Ed. Richard Schacht. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994, 460-68. Anderson, Mark M. "The 'Impossibility of Poetry': Celan and Heidegger in France." New German Critique 53 (1991), 3-18. Ansell-Pearson, Keith. "Who is the Übermensch''. Time, Truth, and Woman in Nietzsche." journal of the History of ideas 53:2 (1992), 309-31. Aschheim, Steven E. "After the Death of God: Varieties of Nietzschean Religion." NietzscheStudien 17 (1988), 218-49.

Works Cited

433

—, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Babich, Babette. A Musical Retrieve of Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Technology: Cadence, Concinnity, and Playing the Brass," Man and World26-3 (1993), 239-60. —, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science: Reflecting Science on the Ground of Art and Life. Albany: State University of Press New York, 1994. Bachofen, Mutterrecht und Urreligion. Ed. Rudolf Marx. Stuttgart: Kröner, 1954. Bataille, Georges. On Nietzsche. Trans, by Bruce Boone. Introduction by Sylvere Lotringer. New York: Paragon House, 1994. Behler, Ernst. "Nietzsche's Challenge to Romantic Humanism." Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 5 (1978), 30-52. Bergmann, Frithjof. "Nietzsche and Analytic Ethics." In Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality, 7694. Bishop, Paul. "Jung's Annotations of Nietzsche's Works: An Analysis." Nietzsche-Studien 24 (1995), 271-314. Breazeale, Daniel. "The Meaning of the Earth." In The Great Year ofZarathustra (1881-1981). Ed. with introduction by David Goichoechea. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983, 113-41. Clark, Maudemarie. "Nietzsche's Immoralism and the Concept of Morality." In Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality, 15-34. —, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Colli, Giorgio, ed. Friedrich Nietzsche: Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Einzelbänden. Vol. 3 of 15 vols. Conway, Daniel W. Nietzsche and the Political. London: Routledge, 1997. —, "Nietzsche contra Nietzsche: The Deconstruction of Zarathustra." In Nietzsche as Postmodernist: Essays Pro and Contra. Ed. Clayton Koelb. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990. —, "Solving the Problem of Socrates: Nietzsches Zarathustra as Political Irony." Political Theory 16:2 (1988), 257-80. —, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Crawford, Claudia. To Nietzsche: Dionysus, I love you! Ariadne. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. Danto, Arthur. Nietzsche as Philosopher. New York: McMillan, 1965. De Bleeckere, Sylvain. '"Also sprach Zarathustra': Die Neugestaltung der 'Geburt der Tragödie.'" Nietzsche-Studien 8 (1979), 270-90. Del Caro, Adrian. "Andreas-Salome and Nietzsche: New Perspectives." Seminar 36:1 (2000), 79-96. —,"A Nietzsche in Your Corner, or To Each a Nietzsche." Monatshefte 91:1 (1991), 132-41. —, Dionysian Aesthetics: The Role of Destruction in Creation as Reflected in the Life and Works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1981. —, "Dionysian Classicism, or Nietzsche's Appropriation of an Aesthetic Norm." Journal of the History ofLdeas 50:4 (1989), 589-605. —, "Ethical Aesthetics: Schiller and Nietzsche as Critics of the 18th Century." Germanic Review 55:2 (1980), 55-63. —, "Hölderlins Ontology of the Open." Philosophy Today 34:7 (1993), 383-91. —, Hölderlin: The Poetics of Being. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991.

434

Works Cited

—, Nietzsche Contra Nietzsche: Creativity and the Anti-Romantic. Baton Rouge: Lousiana State University Press, 1989. — , "Nietzschean Self-Transformation and the Transformation of the Dionysian." In Nietzsche, Philosophy and the Arts. Ed. Salim Kemal, Ivan Gaskell, and Daniel W. Conway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 70-91. — , "Notes Concerning Nietzsche and Novalis." Germanic Notes 12:2 (1981), 22-24. — , "Symbolizing Philosophy: Ariadne and the Labyrinth." Nietzsche-Studien 17(1988),125-57. —, The Early Poetry of Paul Celan: In the beginning was the word. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. — , "The Hermeneutics of Idealism: Nietzsche Versus the French Revolution." Nietzsche-Studien 22 (1993), 158-64. — , "The Political Apprentice:Thomas Mann's Reception of Nietzsche." Studies in the Humanities 12:1 (1985), 21-8 — , "The Pseudoman in Nietzsche, or The Threat of the Neuter." New German Critique 50 (1990), 135-56. Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans, by Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Drenthen, Martin. "The Paradox of Environmental Ethics. Nietzsche's View of Nature and the Wild." Environmental Ethics 21:2 (1999), 163-75. Foltz, Bruce. Inhabiting the Earth: Heidegger, Environmental Ethics, and the Metaphysics of Nature. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and its Discontents. Trans, and ed. by James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1962. Gemes, Ken. "Nietzsche's Critique of Truth," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52:1 (1992), 47-65. — , "Postmodernism's Use and Abuse of Nietzsche," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62:2 (2001), 337-60. Gilman, Sander, Carole Blair, and David J. Parent. Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and language. Edited, translated and with a critical introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. —, Begegnungen mit Nietzsche, 2nd ed. Bonn: Bouvier, 1985. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Goethes Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe in 14 Bänden. Edited Erich Trunz. Hamburg, 1969. Gooding-Williams, Robert. "Literary Fiction as Philosophy: The Case of Nietzsche's Zarathustra." The Journal of Philosophy 83:11 (1986), 667-75. —, Zarathustra's Dionysian Modernism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. Grimm, Reinhold. "Antiquity as Echo and Disguise." Nietzsche-Studien 14 (1985), 201-49. Grundlehner, Philip. The Poetry of Friedrich Nietzsche. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Günzel, Stephan. Nietzsches Schreiben als kritische Geographie." Nietzscheforschung 5:6 (2000), 227-44. —, "Treue zur Erde." In Nietzsche-Handbuch: Leben — Werk — Wirkung. Ed. Henning Ottmann. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2000. Hallman, Max O. "Nietzsches Environmental Ethics." Environmental Ethics 13:1 (1991), 99125. Hamburger, Michael, editor and translator. Hölderlin: His Poems translated by Michael Hamburger with a Critical Study, 2nd ed. London: The Harvill Press, 1952.

Works Cited

435

Hatab, Lawrence J. Nietzsche and Eternal Recurrence. The Redemption of Time and Becoming. Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1978. Heidegger, Martin. "Die Frage nach der Technik." In Vorträge und Aufsätze. Pfullingen: Neske, 1959. —, Nietzsche. Vol. 1 of 2. Pfullingen: Neske, 1961. —, Nietzsche. Vol. 4 of 4. Trans. Frank A. Capuzzi, ed. with notes and analysis by David Ferrell Krell. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982. —, "Nietzsches Wort 'Gott ist tot.'" In Holzwege, 3rd ed. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1957. —, "Wer ist Nietzsches Zarathustra?" In Vorträge und Aufsätze, 2nd ed. Pfullingen: Neske, 1954. Heller, Erich. Introduction to Human, All Too Human by Friedrich Nietzsche. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Heller, Peter. "Concerning the Nietzsche Cult and Literary Cults Generally." In Nietzsche, Literature and Values. Ed. Volker Dürr, Reinhold Grimm, Kathy Harms. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988, 199-218. Hesse, Hermann. Der Europäer. Gesammelte Erzählungen Band 3, 1909-1918. Edited Volker Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 315-22. Higgins, Kathleen Marie. Nietzsche's Zarathustra. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987. —," On the Genealogy of Morals— Nietzsche's Gift" In Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality, 49-62. Hollingdale, R. J., trans. Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits by Friedrich Nietzsche, Introduction by Erich Heller. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, 1986. Jang, Sung-Hyan. Nietzsche-Rezeption im Lichte des Faschismus: Thomas Mann und Menno ter Braak. New York: Olms-Weidman, 1994. Jaspers, Karl. Nietzsche: Einführung in das Verständnis seines Philosophirens. 3rd ed. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1950. Jung, C.G. Nietzsche's "Zarathustra": Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939 by C. G. Jung. Edited James L. Jarrett. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. —, Psychologische Typen, 9th ed. Zürich: Rascher, 1960. Kaufmann, Walter, ed. and trans. The Basic Writings of Nietzsche. New York: The Modern Library, 1968. Kerenyi, Karl. Bachofen und die Zukunft des Humanismus: Mit einem Intermezzo über Nietzsche und Ariadne. Zürich: Rascher, 1945. —, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Lndestructable Life. Trans, by Ralph Mannheim. Princeton: Prinecton University Press, 1976. Köhler, Joachim. Zarathustras Geheimnis: Friedrich Nietzsche und seine verschlüsselte Botschaft: Eine Biographie. Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1992. Kreis, Rudolph. Nietzsche, Wagner und die Juden. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1995. Krell, David Farrell, ed. Nietzsche by Martin Heidegger. Vol. 1 of 4. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982. —, Postponements: Woman, Sensuality, and Death in Nietzsche. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Lampert, Laurence. "Nietzsche and Bacon." International Studies in Philosophy 33:3 (2002), 117-25.

436

Works Cited

—, Nietzsche and Modern Times: A Study of Bacon, Descartes, and Nietzsche. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. —, Nietzsche's Teaching: An Interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. Leiss, William. The Domination of Nature. New York: George Braziller, 1972. Löwith, Karl. Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same. Trans, by J. Harvey Lomax, foreword by Bernd Magnus. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. —, Von Hegel bis Nietzsche. Zurich: Europa Verlag, 1941. Lungstrum, Janet and Elizabeth Sauer, eds. Agonistics: Arenas of Creative Contest. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Lungstrum, Janet. "Nietzsche Writing Woman / Woman Writing Nietzsche: The Sexual Dialectic of Palingenesis." In Nietzsche and the Feminine, edited and with an introduction by Peter J. Burgard. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994, 135-57. Magnus, Bernd. "Eternal Recurrence." Nietzsche-Studien 8 (1979), 362-77. —, Nietzsche's Existential Imperative. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1978. Magnus, Bernd, and Jean-Pierre Mileur and Stanley Stewart, "Reading Ascetic Reading: Toward the Genealogy of Morals and the Path Back to the World." In Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality, 376-426. Martini, Fritz. Das Wagnis der Sprache: Interpretationen deutscher Prosa von Nietzsche bis Benn. Stuttgart: Klett, 1954. Megill, Alan. "Historicizing Nietzsche? Paradoxes and Lessons of a Hard Case." Journal of Modern History 68 (March 1996), 114-52. Meyer, Theo. Nietzsche und die Kunst. Tübingen: Francke, 1993. Milchman, Alan and Alan Rosenberg. "Heidegger, Planetary Technics, and the Holocaust." In Martin Heidegger and the Holocaust. Ed. Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1996, 215-35. Miller, David L. "Nietzsche's Horse and other Tracing of the Gods." Stanford Italian Review 6: 1-2 (1986), 159-70 Mittasch, Alwin. Friedrich Nietzsche als Naturphilosoph. Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag, 1952. Moles, Alistair. Nietzsche's Philosophy of Nature and Cosmology. New York: Peter Lang, 1990. Moore, Gregory. Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Mosse, George. Germans and Jews: The Right, the Left, and the Search for a 'Third Force' in PreNazi Germany. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987. Müller-Lauter, Wolfgang. Nietzsche-Interpretationen. 3 vols. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999-2000. Naumann, Gustav. Zarathustra-Commentar. Erster Theil. Vol. 1 of 4 vols. Leipzig: H. Haessel, 1899. Nolte, Ernst. Nietzsche und der Nietzscheanismus. Frankfurt/Main: Propyläen, 1990. Nussbaum, Martha. "Piety and Mercy: Nietzsches Stoicism." In Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality, 139-67. Oliver, Kelly and Marilyn Perasall, eds. Feminist Interpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. Otto, Walter F. Dionysos: Mythos und Kultus. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1933. Parkes, Graham. "Staying Loyal to the Earth: Nietzsche as an Ecological Thinker." Nietzsche's Futures. Ed. John Lippit. New York: St. Martins Press, 1999-

Works Cited

437

Passmore, John. Man's Responsibility for Nature: Ecological Problems and Western Traditions. 2nd ed. London: Duckworth, 1980. Picart, Caroline Joan S. "Nietzsche as Masked Romantic." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55:3 (1997), 273-91. Picht, Georg. Nietzsche. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1988. Pizer, John. Toward a Theory of Radical Origin: Essays on Modern German Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Pois, Robert A. National Socialism and the Religion of Nature. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986. Richardson, John. Nietzsche's System. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Rosen, Stanley. The Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzsche's Zarathustra. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Rosenberg, Alfred. Friedrich Nietzsche. Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1944. Roszak, Theodore. The Voice of the Earth. New York: Touchstone, 1993. Salaquarda, Jörg. "Der Antichrist." Nietzsche-Studien 2 (1973), 91-136. Salomé, Lou. Nietzsche. Edited, translated and with an introduction by Siegfried Mandel. Redding Ridge, CT: Black Swan Books, 1988. Schacht, Richard. Nietzsche. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985. Schlechta, Karl, ed. Friedrich Nietzsche: Werke in drei Bänden, 7th ed. Vol. 3 of 3. Munich: Hanser, 1973. Schopenhauer, Arthur. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Vol. 1 of 4. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1960. Schufreider, Gregory. "Heideggers Contribution to a Phenomenology of Culture." Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 17:2 (1986), 166-85. —, "The Metaphysician as Poet-Magician." Metaphilosophy 10 (1979), 265-88. Silk, M. S. and Stern, J. P. Nietzsche on Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Sokel, Walter. "Political Uses and Abuses of Nietzsche in Walter Kaufmanns Image of Nietzsche." Nietzsche-Studien 12 (1983), 436-42. —, The Writer in Extremis: Expressionism in Twentieth Century German Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959. Stack, George J. Nietzsche and Emerson: An Elective Affinity. Athens, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1992. —, "Nietzsche and Boscovich's Natural Philosophy." Pacific Philosophical Quarterly Gl (1981), 69-87. Staten, Henry. Nietzsche's Voice. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. Stegmaier, Werner. Nietzsches 'Genealogie der Moral'. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1994. —, Philosophie der Fluktuanz: Dilthey und Nietzsche. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992. Vattimo, Gianni. Nietzsche: Eine Einfuhrung. Trans, by Klaus Laermann. Stuttgart: Verlag J. B. Metzler, 1992. Verrechia, Anacleto. "Nietzsche's Breakdown in Turin." StanfordLtalian Review 6:1-2 (1986), 105-12. Special issue Nietzsche in Italy, ed. Thomas Harrison. Vitens, Siegfried. Die Sprachkunst Friedrich Nietzsches in Also sprach Zarathustra. Bremen-Horn: Walter Dorn Verlag, 1951. Voegelin, Erich. Die politischen Religionen. Stockholm: Bermann-Fischer, Verlag, 1939.

438

Works Cited

White, Richard. "The Return of the Master: An Interpretation of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals." In Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality, 63-75. Williams, Bernard. "Nietzsche's Minimalist Moral Psychology." In Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality, 237-47. — , ed. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs by Friedrich Nietzsche. Trans, by Josefine Nauckhoff, Poems trans, by Adrian Del Caro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Young, Julian. Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Yovel, Yirmiyahu. "Nietzsche, the Jews, and Ressentiment." In Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality, 214-36. Zimmerman, Michael E. "The Death of God at Auschwitz?" In Martin Heidegger and the Holocaust. Edited Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996, 246-60.

Index Abel, G., 14 ff., 64, 169, 233, 243, 250, 430 Abraham, 171, 398 f. absolute, 36, 242, 246, 287, 292, 294, 297, 329, 364, 394, 416, 424 absurd, 181, 190, 228, 284, 304, 372, 420 abundance, 148, 166, 215, 279, 323, 326, 368, 372, 374, 375, 377, 391, 404 abyss, 58 ff., 174, 176, 181, 244, 413 academic, 90, 199 Acampora, R„ 133 f., 327 f., 407 f., 414 accident, accidental, 128, 153, 162, 225, 284, 291, 303, 366, 372, 400, 410 ff. acting, action, actor, 41, 205, 213, 228, 238, 249, 262 £, 333, 340 ff., 369, 374, 384, 386, 389, 398, 402, 406, 416, 425, 427 £, 430 activity, 270 f. adaptation, 112 ff, 296, 305, 311, 335, 338 Adorno, T., 424 adversity, 46, 70, 142, aesthetic, aesthetically, 18, 25 f., 30, 34, 50, 166, 168, 186, 196, 335, 359, 370, 421, 426 f. affirmation, affirmative, 2, 13, 18, 29, 33, 44, 46, 58, 60, 63, 65 f., 70 £, 78, 83, 85, 89, 91-94, 98, 106, 114, 127-130, 138, 149, 152, 156, 161, 163 £, 166169, 172, 174,176 £, 177, 180-183, 188, 191 ff, 197 f., 201 f„ 204, 206, 209, 211-221, 226 ff, 237, 239, 242, 248, 250 f., 253, 274, 281 f„ 286, 293, 302 f., 307, 330, 332 f„ 340, 342, 348, 351,359, 361,363, 366, 371,375, 383, 391 f., 397 f., 400, 402, 404, 410, 413 ff, 419, 428, 430 Africa, African, 138, 142 afterlife, 42, 71, 76, 79, 80, 83, 106, 157, 334 afterworld, 76, 414, 429 agon, 97, 102, 257, 342 Aiken, H. D., 168

air, 80, 90, 105, 119, 208, 237, 270, 307, 336, 374, 382, 386, 412 Ajax, 162 alchemical, alchemy, 3, 125, 150, 152, 159, 209, 292, 299, 337 alcohol, 75, 109, 127 Allison, D. B„ 9 f. Alpine, 106 f. America,X, 131,311,381,392 amorfati, 61, 66, 172, 179, 180, 188, 198 £, 220, 225, 253, 359, 362 anarchy, 140, 273, 275, 304, 306 ancient, ancients, 12 £, 17, 24, 40, 43, 64, 68, 71, 96, 103, 165 £, 188, 216, 218 f„ 236, 265,313, 338, 260, 428 Anderson, M„ 148 Andreas-Salomé, L., 33, 159, 183, 199, 211 Andrew, 337 animal, VIII, 38, 55, 58- 61, 71, 73, 76, 78 f„ 83 f., 91 ff, 98, 100, 102, 112, 116, 124 ff, 128 f„ 138, 160, 165, 173, 176, 185, 187 f., 193, 211, 236, 248, 259, 273, 279, 291, 297, 300, 303, 313, 315, 318 £, 322, 327, 332, 335 £, 340, 355 £, 363 £, 374, 377, 384, 401- 409, 411-416, 418 £, 421, 423 £, 426 ff, 430 £ Ansell-Pearson, K., 6, 212, 330, 349, 350 f. anthropocentric, anthropocentrism, 30, 39, 63, 68, 99 £, 133 £, 145, 147, 154, 204, 229, 324, 326, 360, 365, 372, 391, 427 anthropology, 28, 30, 167 anthropomorphic, anthropomorphism, 27, 38, 64, 145 £, 255, 325 Antichrist, The, VIII, 13, 36, 46 £, 87 £, 123, 127, 190, 204 £, 221, 227 £, 285, 301,331,422, 425 antidote, 181, 233 antiquity, 12 £, 16, 40, 53, 97, 174, 192 £, 206, 246, 267, 274, 276, 292 £, 331 anti-Semitism, 22, 309 £, 345

440

Index

Apollo, Apollinian, 23 ff., 168, 171 f., 177, 338, 345 aposiopesis, 9 £, 44, 178, 306, 308 Arabian, 138 archetype, 26, 34, 158 f. architect, architectural, architecture, 37 ff., 4 1 , 5 4 , 1 1 6 , 167, 2 3 2 , 4 2 4 Arendt, H „ 147 Areopagus, 55 Ariadne, VII, 25, 36, 173-176, 419 aristocracy, 311, 378 Aristode, 178, 277 art, artist, 71, 78, 88, 90, 93, 99, 102, 107, 117, 120, 135, 159 f., 163, 165, 168, 171, 182 f„ 185 £, 192, 194, 196 f„ 209, 211, 215, 217, 220, 243, 274, 293, 305, 309, 311 f., 319, 334 f„ 338 f., 4 4 1 , 3 5 1 , 3 5 5 , 3 5 8 , 374, 4 0 2 , 4 1 1 f. ascetic, asceticism, 7, 36, 55, 66, 74 f., 101, 117, 124, 161 ff., 165, 170, 178, 184, 187, 189, 193 f., 210, 215, 225, 236, 275, 333 £, 346, 356, 366 £, 370, 393 ff., 400, 417, 425 Aschheim, S. 4 9 , 1 3 9 ff, 147, 160 £, 168 Asia, Asiatic, 173, 267 Assassins, 393 £, 400 astronomy, 197, 221 £, 246, 420 atheism, atheist, 47, 126 £, 158, 174, 234 £, 271, 273 £, 294, 393, 408 Athens, 138, 338 Adas, 23, 112, 339 atmosphere, 60, 80, 86, 121, 167, 237, 240, 264,318,325,334, 400,428 atom, 54 Auschwitz, 380 Austria, 309 awe, 29, 58 £, 166 ff, 186 £ Babich, B., 6, 8 £, 11, 28, 132, 147, 172, 198 £, 253, 261, 345, 347, 387 baby, 211 Babylon, 172, 174, 398 Bachofen, J. J., 173 Bacon, F„ 17, 193, 298 ff. Baeumler, A., 146 £ baptize, baptism, 176, 206, 224, 318

barbarian, barbarism, 172, 174, 274 £, 316, 353, 370, 378 Basle, 1, 11, 107, 173 Bataille, G., 68 £, 141 ff, 161, 344 £ beauty, 86, 93, £, 137, 156, 162 £, 167 £, 185, 196, 206, 208, 211, 217, 220, 288, 296, 337, 356, 359 £, 365, 375, 391, 419 £ becoming, 52, 68, 83, 111, 147 £, 163, 172, 179, 190, 247 £, 251, 253, 322, 356, 367 ff, 379 Beethoven, L„ 163, 268 Behler, E., 184 Bergmann, F., 51 Berlin, 146 bestow, bestowing, 44, 57, 60, 65, 115, 143, 182, 257, 264, 286 £, 300, 302, 305 £, 333 £, 338, 340 £, 343, 346, 348, 374, 386, 398, 423 Beyond Good and Evil, 5, 10, 21, 24, 28, 37, 95, 103, 110, 112, 114, 124, 128, 130, 137, 163, 167 £, 170 £, 175 ff, 181, 188, 191 £, 242, 255, 267 £, 271 ff, 306, 309-319, 323 ff, 336, 349 £, 355 £, 361, 366, 371 £, 377 £, 386, 392, 402, 404 £, 431 beyond, the, 30, 156, 168, 170, 190, 201 £, 204 £, 217, 221 £, 227 ff, 234, 250, 281, 308, 322, 329, 357, 374, 396, 426 Bialy, R., 426 Bible, biblical, 79, 81, 86, 106, 156 £, 160, 190, 292 biocentric, 198, 417, 427 biodiversity, 404 biological, biologism, biologistic, biology, I f . , 8, 28 £, 36, 71, 118, 129, 139, 146, 196, 280, 309, 312, 320, 325, 335, 377 biomimetic, 324, 328 birth, 51, 59, 87 £, 158, 174, 182, 263, 314, 330,350, 3 6 5 , 4 1 0 Birth of Tragedy, The, VIII, 11, 22-26, 34, 42 £, 50, 65, 71 £, 88 £, 135,161-164, 173 £, 179,181 £, 186, 190, 195, 323, 3 3 8 , 4 1 3 , 420 Bishop, P., 33, 191 Bismarck, O., 270, 345 Blair, C „ 1

Index blond beast, 137 £, 213, 272, 335, 407 blossoming, 92, 268, 353, 371, 403 £, 406 body, bodied (embodied), 31-34, 47, 53 £, 56 £ 62, 64, 66, 73, 76 f., 79, 84, 88, 91 f., 94, 101, 107 ff., 118-121, 127, 130, 137, 143, 154, 158, 162 ff., 171, 174, 177, 193, 202 £, 208, 210 ff., 218, 225 f., 230,237 f., 2 4 1 , 2 4 5 , 2 5 1 , 2 7 4 , 301, 317, 333 f., 342, 345, 357, 368, 383, 387, 390, 396 f„ 402, 411, 417 f., 424, 429 f. Bonafatius (St. Boniface), 170 boredom (ennui), 52, 421 Borgia, C„ 101, 103, 139,404 Boscovich, R. G„ 18, 246 bound spirits, 20, 368, 392 Brahmans, 271 Brandenburg, 309 Breazeale, D„ 100 £, 343 Brinton, C. 3 Buddha, 191, 271, 274, 302, 401 build, builder, building, 28, 37 £, 41, 52, 67, 133, 145, 167, 216, 232, 239, 273 f., 293, 329, 341, 357, 376, 391, 412,418, 424 f„ 430 Burgard, P., 211 Byzantium, 277 Caesar, 289, 297, 316 Camus, A., X Case of Wagner, The, 2, 166, 196 castration, 46, 98, 123 f., 166, 290, 297, 313,315,319 catharsis, 179 causality, cause, 61, 324, 367, 369 Celan, P., 87, 148 cenotaph, 87 chaos, 64, 66, 68, 172, 175, 177 f., 222, 258, 279, 289, 342, 365, 377 charcoal, 354 chemical, chemistry, 38, 150 child, children, 10, 94, 102, 108 £, 174, 182, 189, 190, 205, 210, 212 ff., 217, 220, 241, 282, 349, 392 £, 397 £, 409 £, 413, 424 Chinese, 205, 260, 282

441

Christ, Christian, Christianity, 10, 13, 20, 23, 32 £, 46 ff, 62, 65, 74 £, 78-83, 87 ff, 94, 98, 103, 120, 123 £, 127 £, 139 £, 149 £, 154 £, 157, 159, 163-167, 171, 174 ff, 188 £, 192, 198 £, 205, 208, 215, 222 £, 229-233, 237, 246, 248, 267, 273, 279, 284 £, 288 £, 292, 297, 300 ff., 309, 337, 357 £, 366, 393 £, 396 £, 401, 405, 412, 417, 425 church, 116, 288 £, 336, 393 city, 105, 115 f., 170, 277, 383 ff, 393, 398 £ Clark, M„ 19, 47, 103 £, 131, 178, 193 £, 233 £, 255, 325 classical, classics, 1, 12, 27, 71, 159, 166, 173, 184 £, 192, 196, 209, 221, 237, 261, 293, 339 clear-cutting, 98, 170, 290, 353 climate, 2, 39, 104, 112-115, 1 2 1 , 2 1 3 , 2 1 8 , 265 £, 365, 404, 428 closed, 46, 178, 194, 304, 388-392, 394, 398 closest things, 29-32, 42, 48, 62, 69, 75, 80, 85, 97, 107-110, 119, 121, 163, 206, 165 £, 183, 192, 209, 211, 213 £, 216-221, 228, 236 £, 243, 246 £, 249, 251 £, 256, 262 £, 265, 269, 277, 279, 285 £, 297 £, 300, 330, 340 £, 351 £, 354, 359, 361 £, 366, 369, 374, 381, 387, 395 £, 399, 413, 426 clothing, 284, 383 cloud, 93 coal, 296 coastal, 106 £ Cold War, 427 Colli, G., 17, 24 £, 32, 35 £, 68 f., 95, 138, 156, 1 6 2 , 3 1 2 , 4 1 5 comedy, comic, 181 £, 194 £, 317, 354 £, 420 commander, commanding, 58 £, 113, 137 £, 150, 207, 214, 271, 303, 309, 318,321 ff, 329, 331,352, 366 commerce, 270, 381 common sense, 216, 357, 419 communism, 143 competition, 126, 342, 392 Comte, A., 428

442

Index

conformism, 381 conscience, 14, 94, 103, 111, 120, 124 ff., 128,137, 153, 156, 163, 166, 187, 217, 225, 257, 261, 271 f., 279, 292, 313, 364, 367, 402, 405, 408 conscious, consciousness, 15, 64, 70, 91 ff., 101,104, 110,117, 142, 144 f„ 171 f., 207, 209, 216,236,251,262,275 £, 308, 328, 331, 340, 342, 363, 367 £, 377, 386, 415, 417, 422, 427 ff. conservation, conservational, conservationist, 9, 44, 53, 98, 110, 114, 128, 209, 216, 220, 247 f., 264 f., 267, 270, 277, 285, 334, 352, 353-359, 362 ff., 368, 370 £, 377, 379, 391, 404 £ consumerist, consumption, 44, 259 £, 298, 355 contemplative, 340 ff. contest, 97 contradiction, 129, 283, 322, 334, 370, 377, 381,395,402, 425 contrast, 377 ff., 402, 406, 410 Conway, D. W„ 2 £, 8, 25 £, 30, 36 £, 48, 50, 57, 157, 159, 173, 262, 287, 291, 331,348, 350 corporate, 381 cosmic, cosmological, cosmology, 14, 31, 39, 50, 125, 144, 155, 171, 204, 221224, 226, 230, 233 £, 240, 252, 300, 325,417 cosmopolitan, 270, 278 courage, 58, 85, 217, 244, 275, 281, 301, 360, 364, 377, 412 Crawford, C„ 36, 132, 172 create, creation, creative, creator, 6, 10, 34, 39, 50, 56, 65 ff, 69, 72, 74, 76, 78, 81 £, 88 £, 91,95 £, 99-103, 111, 114, 120, 132, 150 f , 159 £, 165, 167, 175, 182 £, 187, 193 £, 197 £, 204, 206, 208 £, 211, 214, 216, 222 £, 225 £, 228, 231, 240- 243, 246-250, 252 £, 257 ff, 264, 273 ff, 279, 295 ff, 299, 318, 320 £, 324 £, 329, 331, 333 ff, 338, 340-343, 351 £, 355-358, 360, 364 ff, 368, 372 £, 375 ff, 379 ff, 387, 393, 396 £, 402 £, 405 ff, 409 ff, 415, 417, 420 £, 423 £, 429

crime, criminal, 23, 79, 81, 111, 125, 130, 138, 189, 199, 336, 343, 363 £, 374 criticism, 138,184,213,317£, 385,403,427 crucifix, crucify, 74, 79, 120, 159, 166, 187, 189 cruel, cruelty, 5, 54, 93, 103, 111, 116, 125, 138, 167, 170, 189, 297, 301, 334, 412, 416,418,423 crusaders, 393 cultivate, cultivating, 86, 102, 124, 128, 155, 162, 188 £, 191 ff, 205 ff, 225, 242, 251, 260, 264, 272 £, 277, 279285, 288 ff, 292 £, 295, 298, 300, 302-305, 309-316, 319, 330, 332, 335, 354 £, 357, 360, 371 £, 374 £, 377, 380, 395, 402 £, 405 £, 414 £, 418 Cupid, 224 custom, 291, 276, 288, 309, 363 dance, 73,183,223-226,244,307,365,410 £ danger, dangerously, 53, 112, 114, 124, 127, 132, 134, 159, 176 £, 181, 194, 208, 214, 226, 231, 242, 244, 267, 280, 290, 292, 294, 300, 309, 314 ff, 319, 321, 328, 336, 337, 358, 361 ff, 374, 388, 390, 400, 402 £, 405, 410 £, 422, 424, 427 Danto, A., 5, 11, 92, 101, 138, 140, 293, 306, 332, 335, 345, 352 darkness, 80, 111, 230 £, 295, 301, 400 Darwin, C„ 2, 51, 142, 196, 323, 342, 347, 372 £ Daviau, D., 426 Dawn, The, 27 £, 37, 52, 74, 94, 109, 111 £, 119, 121, 127, 136, 155, 186, 205, 209 ff, 217, 219, 236, 239, 271, 288 £, 310, 339, 352, 354 £, 359, 364 £, 375, 413, 417 £ day, 307 £ death, 57 £, 70 £, 79, 84 £, 87, 96, 115, 127,150 ff, 155,159, 165, 170,175, 219, 221 ff, 226 £, 230, 241, 243 £, 250, 252, 261, 275, 297, 308, 334, 349, 356, 363 £, 371,411 £, 421 De Bleeckere, S., 25, 65 decadence, decadent, 65, 78, 81 £, 123, 130, 140,196, 343, 348, 395

Index

deconstruction, 148, 157, 159, 242, 315, 328, 350, 372, 383 degeneration, 2, 39, 45, 54-57, 114, 116, 121, 123, 128, 182, 248, 260, 268, 280, 284 f„ 287, 295, 313, 334 £, 341, 363, 374, 389 £, 395, 403 ff., 408, 410 deify, deity, 23, 50, 151, 161 ff., 166, 168, 178 £, 187 £, 190 f., 223, 236, 240, 242, 421,424 Deleuze, G., 18 £, 80, 252 f„ 341 £, 357, 383 demigod, 175 £, 178, 413, 419, 425 democratic, 130, 135, 190, 248, 273, 277, 301, 304, 308, 311, 313 £, 317, 319, 347, 358, 364, 378, 387, 395 Derrida, J., 158 Descartes, Cartesian, 17, 91, 148, 298 £ desert, 71, 87, 105 £, 115, 221, 225, 241, 389, 398, 400 desire, 94, 180, 229, 324, 333, 356, 365, 401 destruction, 82, 91, 125, 128, 132 £, 146, 160, 166, 177, 197, 223 £, 251 £, 274 £, 290, 296, 300, 302 £, 305, 315, 317, 325, 362, 379, 383, 385, 393, 397, 409 £, 412, 420, 422, 424 f. devil, 10, 75, 141, 150, 165, 177, 188, 194, 224 £, 236, 244, 294, 411, 424 £ diagnosis, 40, 262, 316 £, 323 dialectic, 18, 89, 166, 297 dictatorship, 270, 304 Diesseitigkeit, 29 £, 221 diet, 2, 119, 124, 127, 162, 364, 410 Dieterich, J., 97 difference, 254, 279, 343, 378, 411, 420, 427 digestion, 309, 362 Dionysian, Dionysus, VII, VIII, 2, 13, 2124, 26 £ 32-35, 41, 55, 65, 68, 71-74, 78, 85, 89, 91, 95, 109, 128 £, 138, 142, 159, 161,163, 166, 168, 171-84, 186, 188-191, 193 £, 196-200, 206, 232, 267, 274, 276, 279, 300, 306, 318, 323, 325, 335 ff, 344, 347 £, 362, 386, 400, 413, 415, 419 £, 422, 425 "Dionysian World View, The," 72, 173 discharge, discharging, 5, 98, 124, 323, 325 ff, 335, 338, 344, 346, 358 discontent, 74, 111, 298

443

discovery, 243, 254, 277, 281, 316, 374, 381,392,413,417 disease, 79, 83, 86, 117, 137, 215, 372, 384, 391,427,428 disembodied, disembody, 32 £, 46 £, 54, 74, 76, 84, 95, 126, 154,162, 171, 184, 186, 203, 224, 298, 333, 340, 346, 422 distance, 133, 183, 204, 228, 256, 277, 281, 376, 378 £, 391,406,409-414, 416, 423 distress, 64 £, 73, 323, 365, 372 dithyramb, 25, 72, diversity, 46, 130, 165, 240, 253 f£, 258, 267, 277, 279, 292 £, 311, 353, 367, 374, 391 £, 396, 404 divine, 185, 224, 229 £, 236, 238, 242, 247 £, 250, 279, 292, 322, 326, 334, 377, 386, 394, 421 £ dogma, dogmatism, 8, 37, 130, 241, 246, 254, 357 domestic, 138, 407 £, 412 £ Donar, 170 Dostoevsky, F., 363 double, doubling, 17, 66, 92, 96, 366-369, 374, 424 dream, 73, 165, 244, 307 Drenthen, M„ 99 £, 102, 328 £ drink, 119, 218 dualism, 64 £ 68, 83, 233, 236 duration, 20, 280, 311 Diirr, V., 131 Dutch, 205 dwell, dwelling, 17 £, 30, 63, 67, 69, 82, 86 £, 104,107, 112, 116, 163, 177, 182, 198, 203, 209, 214, 216, 218, 225, 229, 236, 295, 297, 332 £, 340, 351, 368, 372, 380, 382-388, 391, 395-398, 400, 413, 417 £, 421, 426 £, 429 £ dynamism, 155, 279, 371 dynamite, 153, 326 earth, earthly, VII £, IX, 1 £, 5, 7, 9 ff, 13, 17 £, 24, 30-33, 36, 39, 48 ff, 52, 55 ff, 59-62, 65 £, 70, 72-75, 77, 80, 83, 8588, 94, 100, 102, 104, 106, 109, 111, 114, 122, 126 £, 130 f., 139, 141, 143, 145, 149, 150-154, 156-161, 163 £, 167, 171, 174, 177, 181, 187, 190 £,

444

Index

198, 201 f., 208 fF, 214 fF., 220-225, 228-231, 239-243, 248, 251, 254 fF., 260, 262, 265, 269, 272 f„ 275 F, 278 F, 281, 286, 289, 292, 295 F, 299, 301 f„ 304 f„ 307 f., 310 fF, 317, 326, 329, 332 fF, 340 F, 345 F, 348 f., 351, 356 F, 361, 365, 373, 378, 384, 3 8 7 , 3 9 6 f., 3 9 9 - 4 0 2 , 4 0 5 , 4 1 5 , 4 1 7 f., 420 fF., 424-430 eating, 107 f. 110, 218, 412, 429 EcceHomo, 22 F, 25 F„ 69, 118, 153, 156, 158 £., 182 F., 200, 213, 217 F, 223, 235, 285, 365, 425 ecological, IX, X, 5, 49, 81, 109, 133, 149, 152, 170, 286, 328, 373, 379, 394, 396, 404 F. economical, economy, 43 F, 46, 52 fF, 56, 92 fF, 98, 106, 113, 122, 124, 128, 134, 163, 182, 185, 194, 209, 215, 240, 248, 259 fF, 264, 267, 271, 285, 296, 323, 325, 339, 341 fF, 352-355, 357 F, 360363, 365 F, 368 fF, 372, 378 F, 382, 388, 391 F, 394 F, 404, 424, 428 ecosystem, 51, 55, 57, 60, 63, 77, 81, 94, 98, 109, 124, 127, 290, 333, 369, 390, 404 ecumenical, VII, IX, 14, 53, 121 F, 125, 154, 189, 199, 209, 216, 229, 255, 258, 259, 261, 263, 265-269, 271-86, 290, 292 F, 295, 297, 300, 305-17, 319 F, 323, 328 F, 330 F, 334, 340 fF, 344, 346, 348, 351 fF, 356, 372 F, 375, 383, 395 F, 404, 417, 419, 426, 430 education, 12, 13, 40, 69, 75, 88, 97, 128, 188, 192, 225, 261 F, 271, 277, 280, 284, 295, 348, 349, 364, 383, 393, 419 egalitarian, egalitarianism, 46, 133, 139, 216, 295, 327, 346, 377, 379, 431 ego, egocentric, egoist, egotistical, 4, 30, 69, 7 6 , 7 7 , 102, 111, 1 1 7 , 1 2 6 , 152, 156, 191, 207 F, 229, 257 fF., 264, 277, 287, 370 Einstein, A., 252 embody, 32, 53, 158, 172, 178, 186, 211, 213, 237, 255, 295, 298, 320, 331, 334, 345, 351, 364, 368, 376 F, 381, 404, 406, 415, 418, 428 F

embryo, 428 Emerson, R.W.,X, 1 8 , 2 8 , 1 1 3 , 1 4 2 , 1 6 1 , 3 6 1 empathy, 60, 70, 200, 386, 4 1 3 fF, 428 Empedocles, 313 empower, empowerment, 42, 121, 141, 186, 216, 236, 239, 241, 243, 269, 320, 328 fF, 332, 334, 337, 339 fF, 343, 346, 348 £, 3 5 1 , 3 7 5 , 3 8 3 , 3 8 6 , 3 9 1 , 4 0 8 , 419, 426, 430 endangered, 408, 415, 427 energy, 5, 7, 14 F, 18, 34, 52, 54, 57, 92, 102, 134, 150, 158 F, 164, 181, 185, 187, 203, 208, 218, 229, 248, 255, 258, 265, 268, 270, 280, 296, 299, 304, 324 fF, 329, 339, 342 F, 353-357, 371, 375, 379, 422 engineer, 61, 151, 266, 291, 310 English, 205, 214, 309, 311, 347, 358 Enlightenment, 42, 48, 85, 132, 139, 262, 267, 295-298, 300, 352 ennoblement, 280 F. environment, environmental, environmentalist, VII, 45, 67, 82, 84, 104, 106 F, 110-114, 116, 120, 124 fF, 133, 138, 143, 151 F, 170, 186, 190, 196, 202, 204 fF, 208 F, 211 F, 228, 236, 241 F, 249, 253, 256, 265, 277, 281, 291 F, 296, 317, 324, 326-329, 339 F, 353, 361, 365, 369, 371 fF, 384, 388, 390 F, 4 0 1 , 4 0 5 , 4 0 9 , 430 envy, 97, 315 Epicureans, Epicurus, x, 80, 283 epidemic, 74, 356 epistemology, 313 Eris, 97, 257 error, 69 F, 76, 83, 92 F, 180, 187, 190, 209, 229, 258, 263 F, 268, 333, 357, 367 F, 376, 389 F, 408, 417-420, 425, 429 Eschenbach, WolFram von, 171 esoteric, esotericism, 5 F, 8, 24, 35 F, 95, 132 F, 1 4 7 , 1 7 5 , 1 7 7 , 182, 1 9 6 , 1 9 8 F, 213, 252, 318, 332, 336 F, 346, 348 esteeming, 257 F, 279, 322, 338, 350 eternal, eternity, 57, 60, 62, 71 F, 77, 79, 83, 117, 154, 158 F, 165 F, 170, 178 F, 181, 190 F, 195, 197 F, 201 F, 205, 212, 223, 227 F, 235, 238, 245, 249,

Index

252, 269, 294, 325, 371, 376, 380, 397, 408,413, 419 f. eternal recurrence, 9 f., 13 f., 24 f., 31, 50, 58 f„ 62, 65 f., 68, 70, 82 £, 85 £, 106, 128, 131, 146, 150, 155 ff., 160, 166, 170, 172, 178 f„ 181,189, 191, 198 £, 201, 203 £, 206, 210, 219, 222 f„ 227 £, 232-237, 243 f., 246 £, 249, 251 f., 254, 282, 294, 301-304, 307, 325, 331 ff., 347, 351, 362, 371 £, 379 f., 413, 417, 429 ethics, 328, 366, 378 ethos, 398, 401 eugenics, 51, 282 Euripides, 173 Europe, European, 37, 72, 75, 82, 109, 112115, 118, 127, 135, 138 ff., 142 f„ 160, 164, 166, 170, 177, 187 f., 192 f„ 213, 231 f., 265, 267 £, 271, 273, 275-279, 281, 284 ff, 288, 292 ff, 296 £, 299, 302, 308-312, 316 £, 323, 328, 345, 352, 357, 373, 375, 381, 392, 394, 404, 415,421,427, 428 euthanasia, 123 Eve, 23, 424 evil, 10, 45 £, 56, 65 £, 75, 83, 94,101, 111, 120, 128,134, 137, 161,169, 176 £, 188, 222, 225, 229, 240, 255 £, 258, 262, 275 £, 286, 291, 301, 321, 325, 359 £, 362, 364, 366 £, 387, 397 £, 410, 417 evolution, evolutionary, 2, 46, 54, 325, 331, 335, 363 excrement, 379 excretion, 324 executioner, 111, 302, 390 experiment, experimental, experimentalism, 3, 14, 30, 34,61, 93, 113,117, 161, 175, 236, 239, 249, 259, 261, 282, 297, 302, 317, 319, 321, 336, 418, 422, 429 exoteric, exotericism, 3, 6, 24, 35 £, 95, 118, 132, 147, 157, 177, 182, 198 £, 252, 306, 336, 346, 348 expedition, 317 exploitation, 132, 135,137,144,150, 260 £, 270, 283, 290 £, 298, 310, 333, 341, 377 ff, 399, 412, 416

445

exploration, 231, 239, 244, 254, 271, 279, 351,361,396 explosives, 338, 373 Expressionism, 49 extinction, 365, 400, 404 extirpate, extirpation, 5, 66, 103, 124, 162, 279, 290, 376, 390 extraterrestrial, 55, 80, 108, 240, 254 faith, 154 £, 160 £, 205 £, 209, 219, 231234, 237, 241, 246, 268, 280, 301, 303, 367, 369, 391, 394 £, 399 £, 428 falseness, 368 family, 162 farmer, 218, 269 fascism, 6, 128, 131 £, 141 £, 143, 283, 426 f. fatalistic, fatality, 112, 183, 197, 206, 291, 373,411 fatum, 390 fauna, 53, 293, 360 Faust, Faust, Faustian, 28 ff, 97, 141, 150, 186, 380, 424 £, 427 fear, 150, 167, 179, 186 £, 193, 202, 207, 210-213, 226 £, 241 £, 248, 260, 303, 310, 353, 356, 361, 373, 378, 407, 411, 421 female, feminine, femininity, 23, 25, 33, 84, 137, 140, 173 £, 182, 211£, 281,293, 299, 331, 358 fertile, 148, 289 £, 323 feudalism, 296, 299 Feuerbach, L., 156 Fichte, J. G., 135 finance, 310 finite, finiteness, 14 £, 29, 52 £, 55, 60, 97, 106, 109, 159, 163, 186 £, 191, 197 f., 201-204, 207- 210, 212, 214 ff, 219 ff, 225, 232, 235 £, 238-241, 243, 246, 248, 250, 251-254, 265, 280, 281, 285, 295, 308, 324, 328 ff, 334, 340, 343, 352, 354, 357, 359, 362, 371 £, 380 £, 388 £, 396 f. fire, 79, 109, 175, 194, 394, 397, 424 first things, 37, 207 Fischer, L„ 426 flora, 293, 360

446

Index

flowering, 238 Forster-Nietzsche, E., 27, 146 Foltz, B„ 110, 148, 354, 387 food, 80, 108, 110, 127, 208, 284, 327 Foot, P., 103 force, 18, 53, 56, 59, 63, 67, 69, 73, 75, 99 ff„ 113, 123 f., 128, 149, 161, 163 f., 204, 222 fF., 232, 234 f„ 237, 241, 247, 249, 251, 253, 256, 272, 275 f., 279, 288 ff„ 292, 296, 309 if., 324, 326, 329, 335, 340, 342, 346, 353, 357, 367, 371 f., 374 f„ 379 f., 397, 420, 426, 431 foreign, 137, 222, 225, 270, 272, 278 f., 342, 383, 398 forest, 72, 170, 277, 289, 354, 404, 405, 420 Foucault, M „ 49, 217 France, 141, 373 free, freedom, 45, 97, 100, 105, 111, 187, 190, 192, 206, 241, 250, 254, 261, 263, 271, 295 f., 301, 308, 339, 347, 358 f„ 367, 374, 388 ff„ 390, 395 f., 399 f„ 409 f., 417 free spirit, 50, 115, 188, 207, 209, 231, 237, 270-276, 278, 294, 329, 345, 368, 374, 383, 387, 390, 392, 398 free thinkers, 392, 394 French, 148, 205, 270, 309, 430 French Revolution, 143, 388, 422 frenzy, 34, 3 7 , 7 1 , 9 3 , 109 Freud, S., I l l , 125, 126, 152 fuel, 399 fullness, 24, 156, 196, 318, 340, 391, 402 gas, 296 Gaskell, I., 26 Gast, Peter (Heinrich Koselitz), 157 Gay Science, The, 9, 17, 25, 35, 37, 41, 53, 57, 93, 116, 118, 126, 128, 130, 156, 1 5 7 , 1 6 2 , 1 6 5 , 1 7 6 , 1 7 8 , 1 9 4 , 2 0 0 , 2 1 0 f„ 217, 220, 222 f„ 230 f„ 236, 238, 240, 288, 291 if., 319 f., 336, 340, 342, 357, 359, 360, 366 f., 372, 376, 380 if., 386, 395, 401, 403, 419, 421, 428, 430 geocentric, 417 Gemes, K„ 3, 6 f. 9, 19, 40 f„ 44, 92, 123, 128,133, 155,334

gender, 40, 2 1 1 , 3 3 0 , 378 genealogical, genealogy, 28, 38, 128, 180, 202 f„ 352, 360, 362 genesis, Genesis, 52, 87, 292, 422 genetic, 386 genius, 21, 88 f., 206, 236, 281, 288 £, 310, 3 1 4 , 3 1 7 , 373, 374, 425 genocide, 110, 131, 148, 151, 406 geocentric, 198, 254, 401, 417 geographer, geography, 11, 98, 113, 121 £, 164, 221, 255, 257, 265 £, 276, 295 geopolitical, 317, 345, 353 German, Germanic, Germany, 27, 75, 122, 127, 134, 138 f., 140 f„ 148, 1 5 1 , 1 6 0 , 170, 262, 266, 270, 278, 281, 300, 308 fF., 317, 320, 344 f„ 415, 426, 430 gestating, 429 gesture, 73, 162, 213, 345, 364 gift-giving see bestowing Gilman, S„ 1 , 4 1 6 glacial, 427 global, 286, 404 f. gnosis, 233 God, 34, 42, 46 ff„ 61, 77 if., 81, 83, 103, 115 fF., 121, 126 f., 129, 149 £, 151, 157 fF., 162, 165, 167 £, 170 £, 174, 185, 187, 189 fF., 193 £, 197, 230 fF, 236, 238, 241-244, 248, 256, 261-265, 271, 275 f , 294 £, 296 f., 299 £, 308, 311, 314, 317, 334, 349, 392, 394, 397 £, 408, 420 £, 425 gods, 1 5 0 , 1 5 9 , 1 6 5 , 1 6 7 , 1 7 0 £, 1 7 4 , 1 7 6 £, 180, 187, 191 F, 197, 203, 210, 217, 219, 221, 223, 226 fF, 230 F, 271, 283, 308, 331, 375, 397, 403, 412, 417, 422, 425 Goethe, J. W. von, X, 6, 16, 28, 37, 77, 131, 141, 163, 168, 185 F, 206, 208, 236, 268, 331, 332 F, 335, 361, 370, 384, 424 good, 45 fF, 56, 86, 101, 103, 111, 128, 137, 139, 161, 188, 191, 201, 213, 225, 229, 241 F, 255 F, 258, 275 F, 278, 291, 321, 325, 337 f., 348, 357 fF., 362, 367, 374 f„ 387, 394, 397 F, 417, 425, 430

Index Gooding-Williams, R„ 51, 66, 81 £, 106, 143, 172, 177 f., 224, 245, 332 £, 338, 342 f. grammar, 53, 64, 77 gratitude, 61 f„ 76, 105 f., 142, 166, 214 ff„ 228, 231, 267, 303, 306, 315, 364, 373 ff., 382, 384, 386, 399, 416 gravity, 9, 38, 55, 58 f„ 61, 69 f., 79, 124, 126, 170 £, 176, 182 £, 194, 221 ff., 225 ff., 229 ff., 234 f„ 237 f., 241-246, 250 £, 254, 257, 259, 261, 263 f., 266, 289, 296 £, 299, 302, 322, 329 £, 332335, 344, 348, 351, 356, 360 ff, 368, 383, 385, 387, 390 f„ 393, 395, 398, 408, 420 f„ 428 greatness, 130, 136, 163, 208, 230, 256, 318,322, 337 f., 373,377 Greece, Greeks, 13, 24, 65, 68, 72, 77, 79, 86 £, 89, 96, 98 £, 101, 103, 136, 148, 158, 161-164, 166 £, 171, 173, 175, 185, 187, 197 f., 209, 221, 256 f„ 262, 267, 270, 274, 276 ff., 285, 290, 293, 336, 338, 353, 362, 375, 397, 413 "Greek State, The," 73 Gregory II, Pope, 170 Grimm, R., 131, 177 Gmndlehner, P., 168, 400 Gunzel, S., 114 £, 142, 221, 265 f. guilt, 75, 79, 103, 111, 124, 126 £, 150, 152, 188, 190, 204, 225, 227, 263 £, 279, 299, 408, 427, habit, 194,217, 264,315,318 Hades, 71 Hallman, M. O., 80, 133, 143 £, 208, 328, 379, 407, 414 Hamburger, M„ 380 hard, hardness, 136 £, 139, 179, 184, 187, 275, 281, 284 £, 360, 366, 377 Harms, K„ 131 Harrison, T., 415 Hatab, L„ 245 £ hatred, 137, 213, 229, 263, 269, 283, 285, 301, 309, 345, 356, 359, 361, 367, 383, 408 £, 431 healing, 357, 364, 371

447

health, 2, 6, 30, 35, 57, 75, 83 ff, 107, 109, 116, 118 f., 122 £, 128 £, 159,162 £, 169, 188, 203, 215, 284, 303, 332, 334, 343, 364 £, 370, 372, 376, 402 ff, 410, 418, 429 heaven, 52, 56, 60, 78, 86 £, 98, 106, 154, 183, 190, 205, 257, 277, 348, 361, 382, 411,424, Hegel, G. W. F„ 152, 265, 318, 341 £, 423 Heidegger, M„ 48, 77, 82 f„ 110, 144149, 216, 253, 320, 330, 345, 354, 380, 387 £ Heine, H., 268 Helen, 424 hell, 56, 78 £, 197, 202, 302, 348, 382, 404,411,424 Hellene, Hellenic, 72, 97, 148, 173 Heller, E., 19, 42 Heller, P., 131 £ Heraclitus, 313, 368 herd, 181, 188, 242, 248, 258, 273, 292, 304, 315, 318 £, 322, 332, 335, 362 £, 408, 421, 427 £,431 Hermann, E„ 259, 352, 358, 392 hermeneutic, hermeneutical, 19, 35, 86, 95, 213, 274, 343, 351,369 hermit, 412 Hesse, H„ 385 hibernation, 356 £ hierarchy, 98, 101, 133, 327, 335, 346, 391 Higgins, K., 3 f.,121, 181, 306 Himmler, H„ 123, 136, 151, 261 historian, historical, history, 11 £, 15 ff, 31, 37, 39, 43, 53, 63 £, 66 ff, 70 £, 74, 82, 88 £, 102, 104, 111 £, 116£, 121 £, 126, 131, 135 £, 142 £, 151, 153, 155, 162 £, 168, 170, 178, 180, 189, 191, 198, 206, 212 £, 217, 222 £, 226, 231, 236, 243, 248, 256, 261, 265, 267 £, 275, 277, 280, 282, 285, 287, 294, 304 £, 310, 312, 320, 326, 331 ff, 363, 370, 373, 376, 386 ff, 390, 398, 408 £, 417, 422, 427, 429 Hitler, A., 92, 95, 134 £, 140 £, 161, 199, 229, 282, 344, 345 Hobbes, T., 341 £ Hòlderlin, F„ 188, 380, 387 £

448

Index

holistic, 53, 133, 277, 326, 364 Hollingdale, R. J., 19 f., 50, 108, 264, 320 Holocaust, 87, 110, 149, 267, 310, 380 homeless, 430 Homeric, 96, 138 "Homer's Contest," 96 homo faber, 330 homo natura, 21 f., 46 homosexual, 32 honest, honesty, 13 £, 21 £, 46, 91 £, 119, 146, 213, 239, 246, 274, 320, 329, 341, 346, 360, 368, 381,389, 429 Horkheimer, M., 423 £ Horneffer, A., 160 house, housing, 116, 383, 412, 425, 430 hubris, 61 £, 130, 135, 141 ff„ 149 ff., 154 f., 170,193, 300, 303, 327, 341, 346, 373, 379, 389, 391, 399, 424 Human, All Too Human, 1, 8, 11, 16, 19 ff., 29 ff, 42 £, 45, 52, 63, 69 ff, 75 £, 80, 83 £, 86, 90, 92, 98, 104 f., 107, 110, 118, 120, 122, 124, 142, 164, 185, 194, 207 f., 213 £, 216, 218, 219, 237, 243, 250, 254 £, 261-267, 271, 276 ff, 280, 285, 289, 294, 312, 330, 343, 352- 357, 364, 371 £, 384, 389, 399, 408 £, 412, 417, 420 humanism, humanistic, 48, 135, 142, 145, 154, 168 £, 184, 229, 285 £, 327, 346, 372 f„ 379, 391, 399, 411, 417, 420 £, 424-430 Hume, E„ 406 humor, 117, 158, 194, 420 hygiene, 30, 75, 84, 116 ff, 121, 127 ff, 188, 203, 266, 282, 301, 305 £, 357 Hyperboreans, 86, 123 hypnosis, 356, 357, 410 idealistic, ideals, idealism, VIII, 21 £, 28, 30 £, 36, 44, 52, 54, 63, 73, 75, 77 £, 99 ff, 103, 108, 110, 126 £, 129, 133, 145, 163, 166,172, 178, 180, 185, 191, 196, 207 £, 210 £, 229, 233, 247, 275, 281, 304 £, 314, 323, 327, 331, 334, 345 £, 348, 351, 360, 366 £, 372, 377, 388 £, 397, 403 £, 406,425 £ identical, identity, 37, 69, 249 £, 254, 279

ideology, 134, 139, 215, 317, 335, 395 illness, 30, 35, 54, 76, 83, 85, 119, 121, 123, 125, 128, 249, 278, 315, 323, 364, 372, 386, 402 £, 422 immanence, 29, 63-74, 78-89, 91 £, 96, 98, 104 ff, 116, 126, 129 £, 134, 138142, 149, 151 £, 161, 175, 178, 181, 186, 221, 225, 248, 265, 330, 333, 348, 351,380 immortal, immortality, 157, 217, 228, 234, 246, 250, 334, 371 incorporation, 67, 99, 137, 232, 272, 376, 429 independence, 313, 357, 366, 395, 396, 423 India, 77, 210, 271 Indian (American), 381 indifference, 64, 91, 196, 202, 323 ff, 400, 412 £ indigenous, 109 individual, individuality, 23 £, 51, 54, 64, 68, 70, 72, 80, 92, 99, 102, 108 £, 112 f., 116, 122, 126 £, 133, 137, 163, 165, 172, 175, 188, 191, 193, 197, 204, 206, 209, 210 £, 215, 218, 229, 233, 236, 239, 257-260, 262, 268, 273-280, 282, 285, 287, 292, 294, 302, 305, 308, 312, 314 £, 329, 331, 343, 349, 353 ff., 358 £, 364, 367, 369, 373, 379, 381, 383 £, 390, 392, 395, 414 £, 424, 427 £ indoors, 105 industrial, industry, 381, 424 infection, 309 infinite, infinity, 4, 15, 31, 44, 50, 97, 187, 197, 201 £, 209 £, 222, 230, 237, 239 ff, 246 £, 249, 251, 299, 365, 379, 388, 399,413 innocence, 55, 83, 94, 111, 126 £, 137, 152, 163, 166, 172, 190, 213, 263, 369, 393, 409, 413, 424 inoculation, 249, 275, 280, 302 £, 306 inorganic, 326 insect, 412 inseminate, 90 instinct, 2, 47, 55, 65 £, 75, 78, 84, 92, 95 £, 98, 100-103, 111, 1 1 7 f f , 125 f., 129, 137 £, 146, 168, 170, 173, 181, 188, 196, 205, 211, 217 £, 227, 260,

449

Index 2 6 8 £ , 3 0 0 , 3 0 9 , 3 1 5 , 3 1 7 , 3 1 9 , 3 2 3 f.,

Jünger, E., 166

336 £, 344, 348, 351, 358, 363, 368,

Jun g, C . G . , 2, 2 6 , 3 2 f., 6 9 , 158 £ , 172

3 7 3 , 3 7 6 , 3 7 8 , 3 8 9 f., 3 9 5 , 4 0 2 f., 4 0 7 ,

justice, 98, 3 0 5 , 3 9 4 , 4 0 6

410, 418, 422, 428, 430 intellect, intellectual, 2 0 , 2 8 , 68 £ , 92, 9 5 , 101, 107, 1 2 0 , 1 2 4 , 160, 166, 169, 182, 185 £ , 2 3 4 , 2 4 0 , 2 5 4 , 2 7 0 , 2 8 4 , 2 8 5 , 288,298,396 internalization, 3 9 £ , 124 ff„ 2 3 2 , 4 2 2

Kant, I., 2 8 , 3 8 , 7 8 , 190, 193, 2 0 6 , 2 4 2 , 2 6 2 f., 3 1 8 K a u f m a n n , W., 2 2 , 50, 6 0 , 9 4 , 131, 136, 1 3 8 , 1 8 0 , 1 9 5 , 2 2 7 , 2 8 7 , 3 0 4 , 3 1 0 f., 314, 320, 330, 332, 344

international, 2 6 9 f., 2 8 3 f., 3 1 1 , 4 1 0

Kemal, S., 2 6

interpret, interpretation, 4, 6, 11-18, 2 1 ,

Kerenyi, K., 173, 175

8 6 , 9 4 , 100, 102, 127, 131, 136, 145 f.,

Kleist, H . von, 3 6 1

149, 153, 175, 178, 2 2 1 , 2 3 3 , 2 4 0 , 2 4 6 ,

knowledge, 12, 14, 18, 39 f., 4 2 , 53, 57 f.,

268, 274, 322, 328, 329, 335, 338, 343,

6 3 , 6 5 , 7 2 , 7 8 , 8 8 , 9 0 £, 9 4 f £ , 129,

3 5 0 £ , 3 6 7 f., 3 7 0 , 3 7 2 f „ 3 7 7 , 3 9 9 ,

142, 148, 185 £ , 195, 2 0 6 - 2 1 0 , 2 1 7 ,

401, 430

2 1 9 , 2 3 3 , 2 3 6 , 2 4 3 , 2 4 6 , 2 5 6 , 2 6 1 f.,

intoxication, 109, 172, 175, 3 0 3 , 3 2 1 , 3 9 8

2 7 0 , 2 7 4 f., 2 9 4 , 2 9 6 , 3 1 4 , 3 2 8 , 3 2 9 ,

intuition, 4 2 8

333, 337, 340, 365, 370, 376, 382, 394,

inventive, 176, 3 6 8 , 3 7 7 , 3 8 7 , 4 0 1 £ , 4 0 9 £ , 419, 4 2 1 , 4 2 5 , 430

3 9 9 , 4 2 8 f. Köhler, J . 3 2 f.

Isaac, 171

Koelb, C „ 2 5

Isaiah, 118

Kreis, R., 2 3 , 52, 106, 170 f., 2 2 9 , 2 9 5 f.,

Isis, 79 Islamic, 3 9 4

398 £, 424, 427 Krell, D . F., 2 6 , 147, 172, 4 1 9

Israel, 4 7 , 4 2 4 Italian, Italy, 107, 136, 3 0 9

l'artpour

l'art, 196, 3 1 6 , 3 8 7

labor, 7 3 , 7 4 , 136 Jacob, 171

labyrinth, vii, 175-178, 181, 3 0 6 , 3 9 4

Jahweh, 4 7

Lacoue-Labarthe, P., 148

Jang, S - H . , 134 £

lake, 2 1 0

Japanese, 138

Lampert, L „ 17 f., 2 5 , 61 f., 81 f., 142, 189,

Jarrett, J . L., 2 Jaspers, K „ 14, 157 jester, 2 6 6 , 2 9 1 , 4 1 1 Jesuit, 154 f., 3 0 8 , 3 1 5 Jewish, Jews, 4 7 , 7 9 , 86, 148, 151, 162, 166, 171, 2 0 5 , 2 6 7 £ , 2 7 6 , 2 9 6 , 3 0 4 , 309 f£, 398 f£ J H W H , 171 joy, joyous, 17, 4 9 , 7 6 , 106, 109, 1 2 0 , 1 3 8 ,

193, 2 3 5 , 2 8 5 £ , 3 0 0 , 3 0 6 , 3 9 7 land, 11, 171, 2 2 0 , 2 3 0 , 2 4 1 ff., 2 5 5 f., 2 5 8 , 2 6 6 , 2 8 9 , 2 9 0 f., 3 9 8 ff., 4 2 5 landscape, 5 f., 15, 4 4 , 64, 6 7 , 94, 98, 101, 104-107, 112, 153, 169, 2 1 4 , 2 2 1 , 2 7 7 , 3 5 9 f., 3 6 5 , 3 8 2 , 4 1 6 Lange, F. A „ 2 4 6 language, 1, 5, 7 , 17, 38 f., 4 2 , 4 8 , 52, 57, 7 2 f., 7 7 f., 107 £ , 114, 116, 123, 135,

152, 165, 181, 188, 2 0 2 £ , 2 0 5 £ , 2 1 4 ,

137-140, 2 0 0 , 2 2 7 , 2 3 5 , 2 4 2 f., 2 5 5 ,

217, 227, 238, 252, 257, 268, 301, 307,

270, 278, 291, 299, 306, 316, 325, 332,

318, 326, 335, 358, 380, 381, 382, 397, 415 Joyce, J . , 3 6 1 Judaic, J u d a i s m , Judeo- , 4 6 £ , 103, 151, 162 £ , 190, 198, 2 5 6 , 2 6 7 , 2 9 2 , 4 1 7

367,404,424,

429,431

last human, 156, 2 1 4 , 2 4 8 , 2 6 2 , 2 8 3 , 2 9 4 , 298, 306, 318, 391 £, 405, 425, 430 last things, 2 9 , 3 1 , 3 7 , 8 0 , 2 0 9 , 2 1 7 , 2 1 9 , 2 4 8 , 2 5 2 , 2 5 4 , 2 9 9 , 3 6 6 , 3 6 8 f.

450

Index

laughter, 59, 79, 87, 176, 181 £, 213, 230, 366, 401, 403, 420 law, lawgiver, 15, 38, 51, 56, 87 f., 96, 111, 160, 165, 180, 188 f„ 192, 207, 223, 239, 247, 254, 256, 270, 276, 291, 305, 321 f., 372 £, 389 ff„ 408 legislator, 138, 147, 235, 287, 291, 294, 313,318 Leibniz, G.W., 19 Leiss, W„ 150, 292, 298 ff„ 423 leveling, 45, 273, 277, 283, 299, 319, 379 f., 392, 405 liberal, liberation, liberationist, 358, 364, 393, 407 f. libido, 134 lie, 8, 61, 223, 227, 241, 284, 334, 346, 365, 368, 387, 390, 408 ff., 421 light, 237, 263, 295, 325 lightness, 182 f„ 223, 225, 227, 251, 398 lightning, 56, 230 limit, limitation, 29, 152, 182, 198, 203 £, 207 f., 212, 267, 308, 375, 425 linguistics, 39, 108, 270 logic, logical, 201, 254, 304, 367 f., 370, 376, 431 love, VIII, 56, 59, 61 £, 74, 81, 87, 94 £, 100, 123, 136, 152, 156, 158, 160, 162, 176, 178 f., 206, 211 ff., 215, 220, 222, 225, 227, 229, 256 ff., 263, 267, 274, 285, 303, 322, 365, 382, 384 £, 391 £, 411,419, 421,424, 430 f. Lowith, K., 30 f„ 133, 143, 222, 231 f., 234 f„ 252 lowlands, 286 loyalty, 61, 299, 303, 405 Luke, 79 Lungstrum, J. 97, 211 Luther, M. 6, 9, 16 Macchiavelli, N „ 101, 280 machines, 61, 223, 259 f., 354 f„ 392 madness, 175 Maenads, 159, 174, 182 £ magnitude, 222, 324, 376 Magnus, B., 22, 3 1 , 6 5 £, 82 £, 103,246,306 male, manliness, IX, 34, 61, 211, 281, 317, 358, 378, 417

Malthus, T. R., 372 Mandel, S., 199 Mann, T„ 426 £ Marcel, G „ X maritime, 221 Martini, F., 6 Marx, K., 215 £ , 2 2 9 , 260 Mary, 94 marriage, 62, 84 £, 120, 227, 282, 397 masculine, 23 masking, masks, 3, 41, 55, 95, 154, 167, 175 ff, 202, 320, 325, 336, 357, 377, masses, 69, 74, 82, 113, 163, 260, 272, 275, 279, 283, 292, 294, 321, 366, 384, 411, 415 master, mastery, 43, 45, 112, 127, 131, 139, 145, 148, 150 £, 206, 225, 276, 279, 282, 289, 297-300, 305 £, 313, 318, 321, 323, 328, 335, 338 £, 341, 345, 367, 380, 402, 423 £ material, 41, 52, 80, 168, 203, 209, 264, 293, 298, 300, 324, 354, 356, 368, 377, 379, 383, 388, 398 £ mathematics, 116 Matthew, 79, 176,190, 337 Mayer, R„ 325 £ McCartney, P., 350 meaning, VII. 1, 11, 49, 55, 57, 66, 70, 76, 102,114, 133, 144,149, 151 £, 157, 169, 171, 177, 191, 196, 205, 209, 212, 215 ff., 221 £, 226 ff., 230, 232, 234, 239, 241 £, 251 £, 257, 260, 292, 295, 301 £, 308, 312, 317, 320, 332 ff, 349, 351, 354, 356, 366, 372, 383, 388 £, 397, 407, 411, 414, 417 £, 423 £, 426, 429 mechanical, mechanistic, 74, 92, 247, 254, 324, 357, 381 £ medical, medicine, x, 1, 120 ff, 239, 336, 382, 404 medieval, 241, 292 Mediterranean, 32 Megill, A., 131 Melians, 138 Mephisto, 424 metabolism, 324 metamorphosis, 409 £

Index metaphysical, metaphysician, metaphysics, 9 ff„ 19, 21, 23 ff„ 30 £, 47 f., 50 £, 53, 56, 63, 65 f., 70 ff., 76,100, 102 £, 106 f„ 111, 117, 121, 142,145, 147, 149, 155, 172, 180, 187, 191, 195, 202, 205, 209, 224, 229, 232 f„ 240 £, 252, 264, 274, 295, 298, 325, 332, 334, 338, 346, 366, 369, 387, 394 f., 417 method, 18, 35, 38, 180, 247, 298, 323 f., 352, 361 metropolis, 115, 427 Meyer, T., 91,241,335 Middle Ages, 16 Middle Eastern, 400 Milchman, A., 148 milieu, 112, 296, 373 f. Mileur, J-R, 22 Milky Way, 221 Mill, J. S„ 352 Miller, D., 415 mind,29,64,68,88,92,164,210,214,219 £, 251, 290, 314, 334, 340, 416, 430 Minotaur, 176, 394 miracle, 197, 209, 308, 417 misogyny, 62 Mithras, 79 Mittasch, A., 27 ff., 104 f„ 119, 129, 235, 252, 325 ff. mobility, 266, 388 moderation, 303 modern, modernist, modernity, moderns, IX, X, 5, 12, 16 f„ 25, 28, 32, 36 f„ 3949, 53, 61, 65 f., 71 f., 76, 86, 89 ff, 95, 97 f., 107, 115 ff, 120, 123, 129 ff, 135, 137 f., 143, 149 ff, 158,164, 166, 170, 172, 179,184 £, 191 f., 196, 206, 212, 221, 236, 241, 252, 262, 266 £, 274, 276, 278, 281, 285, 287, 292-296, 300 £, 306, 313 £, 316 ff, 325, 328, 331, 339 £, 352-355, 358 ff, 364 £, 372, 376 ff, 380, 383 ff, 387 ff, 392 £, 395 ff, 401, 406, 413, 422, 424 £, 428 Moles, A., 197 £, 203 £, 227, 235, 246 ff, 254 moment, 31, 34, 58, 68, 70, 110, 161, 181, 202, 204, 206, 219, 238, 245, 248, 250, 277, 302, 372, 380, 399, 421

451

Montesquieu, C., 160 moon, 94 £, 108 Moore, G., 1 £, 8, 19, 29, 36, 51, 118, 235, 323 ff moral, moralism, moralist, morality, 4, 8, 38, 42 £, 45 £, 48, 52, 65, 83, 96, 101 ff, 111, 115, 117, 121 f., 125 f., 129, 135,137, 139, 152, 158, 161 f., 166, 177, 180 f., 183, 188 f., 192 ff, 196, 200, 207, 215 £, 223, 228, 231, 233, 236, 240, 242, 244, 255, 258 ff, 262, 264, 273, 280 ff, 299, 301, 303, 305, 311, 325, 327, 329, 336 £, 341, 344, 348, 359, 361, 363 f., 367, 369, 373 £, 381, 383, 389 £, 394, 396, 402 ff, 407, 409 £, 412 f., 417, 419, 421, 423, 426 morning, 230 morphology, 361 mortality, 412 Mosse, G., 166 ff. mother, 136, 211 f. mountain, 56, 58, 60 f., 105 f., 115, 221, 226, 244 f., 263, 276 f., 286, 337, 374, 389 Müller-Lauter, W„ IX, 12, 14, 27, 147, 149, 152, 216, 224, 232, 250, 311 f., 330, 352, 358, 362, 392, 418 mundane, 209, 299, 308, 416 murder, 137, 175, 230 music, musical, musicologist, 6, 8, 11 Muslim, 336 Mussolini, B., 92 mystical, mystics, mysticism, X, 24, 35 myth, mythology, 26, 33, 73, 78, 82, 86, 94, 142 £, 164, 168, 184, 186, 217 £, 233, 267, 413, 428, Nachlass (N.'s unpublished notes), IX-13, 35 £, 50, 64, 67, 73, 78, 93, 99 £, 127, 134, 144, 147,154-57, 163,166,177, 180, 193, 197, 208, 229, 231, 232 £, 244, 246, 248, 251, 258 £, 273 £, 281 ff, 289, 294, 296, 301-304, 306, 311, 320, 324 £, 330, 338, 355 £, 364, 375, 383, 386, 401, 405 £, 408, 413, 416, 420-423, 428 £

452

Index

Napoleon, 46, 143, 268, 288, 292, 312, 331 ff., 335 narcotic, 75, 110, 127 f., 300, 365 national, nationalism, 113, 115, 130, 262, 266 ff, 270, 272, 278, 282 ff, 292, 306, 309 £, 353, 386, 427, 430 National Socialism, Nazi, 27, 49, 86, 123, 131 f., 135,139 ff, 143,146,151,161, 169, 199, 268, 309 natural, nature, X, 5, 15, 18, 21 ff, 28, 42, 44, 46 f., 50, 59, 61-65, 67 f., 71, 73, 80 f., 89, 91, 94, 96-99, 105, 107, 110, 114, 129 f., 133 ff, 140 ff, 144, 146152, 161, 163, 166, 172, 175, 180, 184, 187, 190, 192, 197, 203, 206 f., 213, 215, 223 f., 236, 243, 246 f., 263, 280 f., 290-301, 320 f., 323, 326-329, 335, 337, 339, 341, 344, 346, 354, 359, 363, 369-375, 384, 389 f., 399, 401, 404 f., 410, 413 f., 417,423, 426, 429 naturalism, 185, 416 Naturphilosophie, X, 19, 129, 404 Nauckhoff, J., 17 Naumann, G„ 106 f., 139 necessity, 220, 233, 243, 263, 361, 373, 377, 389 f., 401, 421 need, 365 Nehamas, A„ 3, 103 neighbor, 214, 219 f., 225, 255 f., 278 f., 291, 366, 399 neutra, neuters, 40 f., 123, 377 ff neutrality, 377, 379, 389 newness, 44, 53, 205, 247 f., 252, 364, 386, 409, 418 f., 428 f. New Testament, 189 Nietzsche, E. see Förster-Nietzsche night, 96, 230, 307 f., 359 nihilism, nihilistic, 3, 7, 11, 43, 47 f., 65 f., 127, 129, 142, 146, 149, 151, 159, 170, 178, 180, 197, 201, 222-234, 238 f., 241 f., 250 f., 263, 266, 301-306, 334, 351, 356, 383, 388, 392, 400, 421, 425 noble, nobility, 43 f., 46, 96, 98, 102, 127, 137 f., 163, 166,189, 213, 219 f., 228 f., 261, 265, 272, 288 f., 292, 300, 305, 346, 353, 355, 357, 377 f., 385 f., 390, 407 ff, 415, 423

Nolte, E., 174 nomadic, 113 f., 266, 385, 400 nonsense, 303, 316, 372, 423 noon, 252, 294 North America, 142, 213 northern, 170, 292 North Pole, 317 nothing, nothingness, 48, 57, 68, 85, 129, 167, 170 £, 190, 201, 218, 221 £, 227, 230, 232, 250, 302, 325, 334, 356, 385 f., 410 £, 421 nourishment, 219, 268 f., 324, 336, 374, 379, 386, 429 Novalis, 16, 135 Nussbaum, M., 214 f. nutrients, 269 nutrition, 213, 217 f., 261 f., 282, 284, obedience, 102, 112 f„ 137, 193, 214, 257, 303, 309, 321, 323 objectivity, 40, 314-317, 322, 370, 387, 392, 428 Occam, W„ 368 ocean, 69, 420 offspring, 84 oil, 296 Old Testament, 78, 296 f. oligarch, 294 £, 297 Oliver, K„ 33 Olympian, Olympus, 72, 136, 162, 176, 181 On the Genealogy of Morals, 9 £, 43, 47, 54 f„ 61, 74, 83, 95, 103, 114, 116, 121, 124, 129, 162, 166, 178, 181, 228, 243, 265 £, 304, 306, 356 £, 363, 367, 369, 393 £, 407, 409, 422 On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Living, 18, 30 £, 80, 95, 265, 370 "On the Pathos of Truth," 91 "On Truth and Lie in An Extra-Moral Sense," 38, 77, 92, 424 open, 46, 63, 73, 105, 125, 182, 187, 190, 194, 208, 210, 229, 231, 239, 242, 253 £, 278, 301, 316, 322, 329, 341, 372, 374, 389 £, 391-398, 400, 409 £, 422 organ, organic, organism, 3, 15, 37, 67, 90, 92, 113, 121, 140, 152, 154, 179, 203,

Index

238, 259, 269, 306, 312, 323 f., 326 f., 338, 358, 361 f., 371, 375, 406, 418, 422, 426, 429 origin, 23, 38, 77 £, 162, 165, 174, 197, 216 ff., 257, 321, 354, 376, 378, 394, 413, 417, 422, 430 ostracism, 97 otherwordly, 81 Otto, W. F., 175 outdoors, 105, 384 overabundance see superabundance Overbeck, F., 415 overcoming, 8, 113, 115, 117, 154 f., 256, 258, 289 f., 321 f., 350 f., 363 f., 385, 429 overman, IX, 51 f., 143, 212, 253, 266, 289, 330, 332, 346, 349, 350 f. oxygen, 382 pacifist, pacify, 343, 407 pagan, 47, 96 f., 160, 163 ff., 167, 169, 174, 178, 180, 209, 364 pain, 54, 74, 117, 125, 136, 152, 154, 179 f., 226, 232, 263, 380, 382, 386, 392, 397, 407, 415, 418 f. Palma, N„ 332 Paracelsus, P. A., 150 paralysis, 3, 14, 58, 93, 311, 314, 316 f., 323, 392 parasitical, 54, 284 f., 364, 423 Parent, D. J., 1 Parkes, G„ X, 5, 379 f., 404 f. Parsifal, 166 passion, passionate, 5, 33, 56, 66, 75, 77, 84,91,94, 97 f., 100-103, 114, 124 f., 138, 151, 156,162 ff, 166, 173, 177, 180, 188, 207, 218, 236, 251, 279, 288, 290, 303, 316, 324, 329, 331, 338 f., 342, 368, 390 Passmore, J., 149, 152, 297, 396, 406 pathological, pathology, 2, 4, 26, 410 pathos, 133, 204, 281, 376 f., 378, 414 patriotism, 269, 283, 352 Pavarotti, L., 350 Pearsall, M„ 33 people (a), 46 f., 78 £, 104, 109, 113 f., 116, 122, 127, 131 f., 136, 138, 162,

453

164, 166, 170 £, 180, 185, 189, 192 £, 196, 199, 255-259, 266 ff, 271, 277, 280, 282, 284 £, 289 £, 296, 302, 304, 309-312, 330, 343, 352 £, 359 f., 363, 365,371 £, 375, 398 £, 411 Persian, 336 perspectival, perspectivalism, 18, 28, 110, 240, 389, 403, 407, 409, 412, 414, 421, 423, 428 pessimism, 92, 195, 197, 207, 401 Peter, 337 philological, philologist, philology, 1,7, 1114,16-22, 27 £, 35, 43, 46, 48, 71, 159, 173 £, 213, 245 £, 261, 274, 276, 330, 351,356, 369, 372, 381 philosophers, philosophical, philosophy, X, 3, 5, 8, 11, 21, 27 £, 49,51-55,65, 80, 88-91, 95, 98, 104 £, 107, 116, 118 £, 123, 127, 129, 133 ff., 138 £, 142 £, 152, 157-160, 168, 171 £, 174, 176, 179-184,188, 194 £, 205, 211, 213, 216, 220, 222 £, 231, 239 £, 242, 244, 251 £, 254, 267, 271 f , 276, 288, 294 £, 300, 306, 311-314, 316, 318 £, 320, 323 ff, 329, 333 £, 336, 346, 348, 355 £, 366, 369 £, 387, 390, 392, 404 £, 415, 419 ff, 425, 431 physical, 34, 45, 51, 53, 63, 77, 79, 81, 84, 87, 94, 100 £, 104, 107 £, 112, 121, 122, 139, 143, 145, 163, 170, 178, 202 £, 215, 224, 227, 230, 234 £, 237, 241, 245 £, 280, 296, 327, 333, 362 £, 367, 371,400, 402,412,430 physician, 2, 12, 85, 107, 119 ff, 123 £ physicist, physics, 11, 17 £, 30, 151, 221, 236, 248, 252,254, 381,416 physiology, 47, 53 £, 74, 78, 101, 103 £, 113, 118 f., 126, 145, 162, 165, 167, 180, 188, 193 £, 196, 211, 228, 236, 239, 257, 277, 284, 303, 305, 316 £, 320, 326, 333, 335, 345, 356, 361, 364, 374, 389, 395, 403, 418 Picht, G„ 132, 221 £, 261, 275 Piraeus, 348 pity, 43 £, 111, 137, 156, 179, 205, 240, 313, 365, 375 ff, 380 ff, 390, 414 ff. Pizer, J., 217

454

Index

planet, planetary, 52, 59, 63, 86, 94, 147 ff., 193, 210, 215, 221, 230, 255, 262, 266 £, 269, 286, 295, 313, 326 £, 347, 380, 401, 420 f., 425 plant, 39, 56, 63, 73, 100, 116, 119, 205, 259, 264, 277, 279, 283, 290 f., 353, 361, 369, 389, 403, 405 f., 411, 415, 430 Plato, Platonic, Platonism, 10, 32, 37, 61 £, 77, 81 f„ 95,103, 163, 190 ff., 195, 207, 215, 221, 224, 230, 248, 294, 297, 311, 313, 346, 348, 357, 360, 366, 368, 394, 417, 421 pleasure, 16, 152, 166, 208, 326, 359, 383, 416 f., 419, 429 poet, poetic, 85, 95, 185, 194 f„ 198, 225, 234, 340, 386, 393 Pois, R„ 136, 140 £, 151, 161, 168 poison, poisonous, 46, 75, 88, 121, 124, 181, 208, 228, 244, 284, 303 f., 336, 360, 362, 384, 391 polar, 142, 281 Polish, 309 political, politicians, politics, VII, 27, 40 f., 45, 53, 82, 113, 127, 130, 132 f„ 135 f., 149 ff, 153, 160, 168 £, 189, 199, 212, 228, 261 f., 267 f„ 272 £, 275 £, 282, 284, 286 £, 291 £, 300, 309-312, 319, 323, 335, 340, 342, 347, 349, 352, 354, 358, 371, 395 £, 424, 426 £, 430 pollution, 55, 74 £, 77, 85, 108, 111 £, 368 £ polytheism, 165 Posen, 136 positivist, 5, 88, 234, 313 £ post-humanism, 63, 76, 285, 420, 429 postmodernism, postmodernist, 45, 52, 133, 213, 262 power, 7, 13,18, 43 £, 46 £, 55-58, 61, 63, 65, 70, 74, 78, 87 £, 98 £, 112 ff, 118, 142, 144 £, 148, 150, 152 £, 158, 163, 165 £, 173, 179, 183, 185, 188, 196 £, 198, 204 £, 208, 243, 255, 258, 267, 271 ff, 287 ff., 292, 294 £, 300 £, 304 £, 311, 318 £, 322-325, 328, 333, 338, 341 £, 344-347, 363, 372, 375, 383, 405, 409, 416, 424, 428

predator, 71, 84, 92, 137 £, 301, 327, 335, 392, 404, 406, 408, 421 pregnancy, 59, 62, 94, 210 £, 220, 316 prehistory, 54, 248, 376, preservation, 49, 220, 242, 250, 257-260, 267, 269 £, 275 £, 297, 300, 302, 315, 323, 328, 343, 354, 360, 363, 373, 377, 388, 391, 402 £, 415, 429 prey, 367, 369, 403 priest, priestly, 8, 16, 47, 74 ff, 107 £, 116, 120, 256, 271, 285, 305, 319, 329, 356, 391,407,410 primal unity, 72, 172, 338 primitive, 374 procreate, 94, 122 £, 158, 282, 284, 321 £, 325 progress, 43 £, 46, 54, 98, 112, 142, 169, 221, 261, 271, 275, 280 £, 295, 331, 363, 375 Prometheus, 23, 135, 162 proportion, 420 Protestant, 160, 164 Prussia, 270, 281,309,310 psyche, 40, 42, 54, 95, 125, 193, 203, 387, 395, 417 £ psychologist, psychology, 11, 77, 80, 95, 111, 124, 144, 165, 179, 182 £, 191, 198, 205, 211, 234, 239, 243, 247 £, 277, 299 £, 325 £, 335, 337, 361, 365, 368 £, 390, 427 punishment, 47 £, 79, 111, 126, 156, 159, 179, 205,251,364 quotidian, 30, 69, 99, 109, 120, 183, 209, 213, 215-221, 236, 238, 243, 250 £, 300, 303, 340, 362, 368 £ race, racial, 115, 130, 151, 162, 193, 229, 267, 269, 278, 280, 282, 284, 294 £, 306, 310 £, 316 £, 345, 360, 375, 402, 407, 430 Raffael, 163 rain, 209, 359 rain forest, 92, 99, 362, 404 random, 222 rank, 101, 133, 176, 181, 228, 256, 291, 294 £, 297, 301, 303, 306, 318 £, 327,

Index 329, 336 £, 340, 343 f., 346 £, 355 £, 376, 391,414 reader, reading, 3, 6-9, 11, 13, 16, 21, 35 £, 55, 60, 95, 158, 200, 213, 234 f„ 274, 308, 329, 336, 347, 351,413 real, realism, reality, 30, 48, 56, 63, 129, 185 f., 212, 216-219, 221, 235, 248, 313 f., 324, 333, 347 £, 360, 365 f., 381 £, 390, 402, 405, 410, 416, 424, 427 reason, 7, 37 £, 54, 64, 76 ff., 83, 108, 119 £, 139, 156,175, 185, 192, 195, 206, 217, 230, 239, 242, 267 ff., 288, 295, 298, 303, 310, 336 £, 339, 356, 367 £, 373, 391,421,424 rebirth, 159 reclamation, 49, 52-57, 59 £, 62, 351 recovery, 53, 57, 84, 122 recycle, recycling, 8, 44, 52, 54, 209, 265, 322, 346, 379 redeem, redemption, 73, 135, 154, 158, 160, 173, 177, 181, 189 £, 198, 200, 205 £, 217, 223, 225, 227, 232 f£, 241, 271, 288, 301, 308, 315, 335, 356, 421 Reformation, 164,166, 267,276 £, 288, 292 regeneration, 245, 403 regulate, regulating, 35, 38, 75, 96-101, 103, 114, 124, 162, 173, 177, 180, 207, 218 £, 256, 288, 290, 315, 324, 329, 335, 362, 364, 376 relativism, relativity, 15, 20, 45, 108, 279 religion, religious, religiosity, 16, 49, 63, 65, 70, 73, 75, 80 £, 87, 92, 98, 117, 124, 128, 140 £, 149, 153 f£, 157,159 ff, 164, 169, 171, 175, 185, 191-194, 216, 224, 232, 235, 243, 246, 259, 264, 266 £, 272, 288, 291, 305, 317, 333, 340, 356, 387, 390, 402, 412, 425 remedy, 75 £, 122, 252, 305, 371 Renaissance, X, 136, 166, 180, 206, 218, 267, 274, 276, 292 £, 331, 373 renunciation, 210 research, 89 £, 183, 318, 361 resentment, ressentiment, 43, 45 £, 82, 132, 137, 166, 202, 206, 228, 267, 305, 367 £, 383 £, 407, 409, 426 resources, 44

455

resurrection, 79, 159, 166 revenge, 74, 77, 83, 189, 203, 228, 364, 385,391 reverence, 43 £, 70, 225 revolution, 28, 248, 282, 383 £, 393, 422 rhythm, 67 £, 134, 252 Richardson, J., 34, 45, 50, 75, 97, 102, 266, 272 £, 289,297, 305 right, rights, 165, 301, 313, 317 ff., 336, 348, 355, 362, 378, 408 ripening, 214, 314, 363 river, 321, 373 £, 397 Rockwell, N., 416 Rohde, E„ 174 Rolph, W„ 323 Roman, Romans, Rome, 13, 40, 78, 138, 164, 166, 170, 267, 289, 297, 352 Romantic, romanticism, romanticize, 22, 24 f£, 40, 78, 89, 97, 105, 118, 133, 135, 160, 184 £, 188, 192, 195, 197, 217, 236, 276, 303, 309, 323 £, 335, 339, 363, 370, 379, 414 £, 426, 428 Rosen, S„ 5 £, 82, 160, 346, 348, 363 Rosenberg, Alfred, 140 Rosenberg, Alan, 148 Roszak, T., IX, X, 150 Rousseau, J. J., 46, 143 Roux, W„ 17 rule, ruler, ruling, 14,16, 21 £, 53, 56 ff., 65, 99, 108, 115, 127, 131 £, 136, 146, 151, 154, 156, 166, 187 ff, 207, 214, 216, 220, 224 £, 257, 264, 266, 281, 283, 286 ff, 290 ff., 294-297, 300- 309, 311-317, 320, 323, 330, 333, 338 £, 342, 344, 346, 348, 359 ff, 402, 417, 424 Russel, B„ 370 Russia, Russian, 274 £, 309, 311, 316 £ sacrifice, 167, 273 £, 361, 373, 401, 403 saint, 21, 135, 225 £, 244, 355, 425 Salaquarda, J., 6 £, 8,11 Salome, L. see Andreas-Salome same, sameness, 31, 50, 201 ff., 250 ff, 327, 347 Sartre, J-P., X Satan, 189 £, 397

456

Index

satyr, 72, 165, 328 Sauer, E., 97 savagery, 381 Scandinavian, 138 scarceness, scarcity, 64 £ 148, 196 Schacht, R., 4, 24, 49 £, 66, 99, 101, 172, 179 £, 306, 332, 403, 410 Schelling, F. W. G., 135 Schiller, F„ 370 Schlechta, K„ 312 scholar, 88, 90, 138, 183, 306, 314 f., 322 £, 329, 355 £, 370, 392, 424 Schopenhauer, A., 23, 50, 88, 92, 135, 140, 178, 182, 191, 195, 207, 221, 268, 271 Schopenhauer as Educator, 135, 221, 355 Schufreider, G„ 21, 149 science, scientific, 8, 11, 13 f., 16 fE, 27 if., 35 £, 38 £, 42 £, 51, 73, 76, 79, 83, 88, 90, 95, 98 f„ 104, 108, 116 £, 142, 148, 174, 183, 186, 193, 201, 206, 211, 217, 2 2 2 , 2 2 7 , 2 3 4 f„ 237 £, 241,243, 246 f£, 252, 262 £, 274 ff., 299 £, 305, 313318, 361, 372 ff., 380, 387, 394, 423 sea, 55, 60, 119, 187, 230 £, 241 £, 277, 337, 361, 374, 389, 393 seasons, 106 secular, 168 £, 223, 273 £, 315 security, 354 £, 409 seduction, 200, 367 self, 43, 59, 133, 211, 214, 229, 252, 257, 333, 342, 430 self-contempt, 409 selfish, 210 £, 213, 218, 228, 286 selfless, 43, 316 self-overcoming, 8,15, 94, 102, 127 £, 131, 155, 180, 212, 226, 274, 320, 322 £, 329, 338, 343 £, 350, 371, 377 £, 391, 429 senses, 32 £, 68, 104, 129, 164, 203, 210, 301,368, 387, 3 9 6 , 4 1 0 , 4 1 5 sex, sexuality, 62, 65, 84, 124, 132, 166, 174, 212 £, 286, 299, 325 shadow, 71, 220 £, 223, 231, 237, 280, 295, 341, 399 £ Shakespeare, W., 163 shepherd, 72, 176, 297, 328 Shiva, 159

sick, sickness, 89, 128, 190, 234 £, 241, 301, 316, 361, 402 f£, 407, 421 £ sign, 428 £ Silk, M. S., 174, 186 simplicity, 69, 214 simulation, 41, 104 sin, sinful, 23, 52, 55, 75 £, 79, 83, 88, 162, 197, 204 £, 229, 240, 392 skepticism, 3, 36, 45, 316 £, 322, 393 sky, 56 £, 59 £, 72, 74, 86, 111, 171, 185, 2 5 6 , 3 1 8 , 3 5 9 , 398 slackening, 313, 315, 319, 379 slave, slavery, 43 f£, 75, 98, 112, 127, 130, 132, 136, 192, 228, 260 £, 266, 274, 288 £, 292, 304 f„ 311, 316, 327, 335, 339 £, 346 £, 370, 381, 408 f. sleep, 2 , 2 4 9 , 3 5 3 social, 299, 303, 306, 348, 376, 387, 392 socialism, 49, 112, 137, 139, 143, 154, 155, 215, 229, 273 ff., 298, 306, 383 £, 391 society, 41, 101 £, 104, 107, 109, 120, 122 £, 137 £, 185, 304, 349, 353, 355, 364, 374, 396, 424 Socrates, Socratic, X, 65, 76, 81 £, 88, 123, 162, 297 soil, 39, 53, 59, 85, 90, 96, 114, 179, 206, 209, 264, 269, 279, 289 £, 295, 297, 353, 364, 430 Sokel, W„ 49, 95 £, 344 £ solar system, 94 Sophists, 297 soul, 8, 25, 31, 33 £, 42, 46, 56 £, 61, 83, 1 0 1 , 1 0 6 , 1 0 8 , 124 ff., 157, 162 £, 185, 187, 192, 203, 207 £, 211, 217, 226229, 232, 234, 250, 255, 263, 269, 283 £, 287, 289, 307 £, 311, 318 £, 334, 336 £, 367 £, 371, 377 £, 382, 385, 390, 402, 409- 414, 418 £, 424, 429 south, southern, 119, 163 £, 170, 362 space, spatial, 52, 54, 57, 94, 116, 193, 202, 208, 214, 222, 230, 235, 238, 240, 243, 245, 247, 254, 294, 388, 392, 395 £, 398, 400 species, 213 £, 220, 223, 242 £, 257, 259, 261, 265, 267, 269 £, 277, 279, 291, 299, 302, 311, 315, 317 £, 320, 327 £, 331-344, 346 £, 351, 355 £, 359 £, 362,

Index

364,366, 372 ff, 376 £, 380,388,389 f., 402- 408, 415, 419 ff„ 4 2 3 , 4 2 9 f. specimen, 26, 61, 327, 356, 363, 405, 415 Spinoza, B., 206, 246 spirit, spiritual, spirit, spiritual, 20, 22, 28, 33 f., 42, 44 £, 47, 52 £, 55, 57, 61 £, 75 f., 79 ff„ 85 £, 93 f., 1 0 1 , 1 0 6 f., 109 f., 112, 121 £, 124, 127, 132, 135, 142 £, 152 ff„ 1 5 4 , 1 6 1 £, 166, 168171, 175 ff., 183 £, 186, 188-193, 202 £, 209-215, 223 f., 226, 229, 234, 241, 247, 257, 260, 271, 275, 277, 279 £, 288, 290, 299, 301, 303, 308, 311, 313 £, 316-320, 324, 333, 335 £, 339 £, 345, 347, 352, 355 ff., 361, 364 £, 367, 371 £, 376 £, 381, 383 £, 392 £, 395, 398, 400, 402 £, 405 £, 408 £, 410, 415, 421 £, 425, 428 £, 431 spring, 313 Stack, G„ 17 £, 28, 142, 161, 235, 246, 361 Stael, G. de, 268 stars, 230, 241, 287, 318, 392, 430 stasis, 155, 178, 190, 204, 226, 250, 253, 283, 3 7 1 , 3 9 1 state, 89, 98, 108, 136, 288 £, 292, 294, 297, 312, 317, 340, 345, 354 £, 371 £, 383, 386 £, 393, 395, 396, 406 Staten, H., 3 ff., 7, 33 £, 62, 68 £, 134, 159, 172, 343, 370, 414 £, 428 Stegmaier, W„ 156, 202, 310, 394, 397, 422 sterile, 183 Stern, J. P., 3, 174, 186 Stewart, S., 22 stimulus, 180, 228 Stoics, X, 323 £, 396 stomach, 7, 164, 309 storm, 359 £ strength, strong, 7 £, 41, 45, 48, 52, 75, 84 £, 92, 101 ff, 1 1 3 , 1 1 5 , 129, 137, 142, 155, 166, 176, 181, 184 £, 191, 196, 210, 212 £, 218, 237, 244, 248, 260, 265, 274, 301, 303 £, 309 ff., 317, 323, 339, 357 £, 363 £, 366 ff, 372, 375, 377, 402, 421, 430 struggle, 64 £, 280, 282, 305, 313, 317, 320, 322, 335, 341 £, 344, 357 £, 363, 372 £, 405, 423

457

stupidity, 164, 192, 280, 283, 299, 365, 378, 384, 398, 4 0 3 , 4 2 1 , 4 2 8 Sturm undDrang, 95 £, 303, 358 style, 339 subject, 251 £, 326, 367, 369, 423 subjectivity, 367 sublimation, 54, 66, 84, 97,100, 103,165 £, 173, 177, 288, 320, 322, 329, 335 £, 338, 399, 344, 362, 364, 367 £, 372, 374, 406 sublime, sublimity, 2, 108 £, 167 £, 181 £, 185,316, 367, 375, 380 £ subterranean, 223, 374 suffering, 70, 76, 93, 111, 117, 125, 128, 130, 136 ff, 166, 176, 178 £, 181 £, 195, 203, 207, 268, 301, 326, 356, 371, 376 £, 382, 392,418, 428 suicide, 74, 123, 183, 188, 219, 301, 304, 382, 384 sun, sunshine, 56 £, 60, 74, 93, 106, 116, 119, 209, 230 £, 240, 287, 348, 359, 362, 374, 399, 430 superabundance, 57, 64, 74, 139, 148, 166, 172, 175, 179, 181, 183, 196, 204, 215, 287, 323, 325, 327, 344, 372 superhuman (ÜbermenscH),'V\\\, DC, 5, 11, 26, 32, 34, 49-53, 55, 57 £, 66, 99-102, 106 £, 114,127, 1 3 1 , 1 3 3 f., 136, 147, 149, 156, 1 6 5 , 1 7 6 £, 184, 211, 214, 226, 239, 248, 260, 263 £, 273, 276, 283, 288 £, 292, 294, 305, 308, 312, 318, 320, 329-332, 335, 347, 349 £, 356, 362, 386, 391 ff, 395, 403 £, 406, 408-412, 417, 424 £, 428 ff. supernatural, 265 superstition, 76, 241, 298 surveying, VII, 260, 264-267, 276, 279, 285, 314, 317 £, 336, 339, 354 £, 359, 365, 375, 387, 391, 392 £ survival, 62 £, 227, 322 £, 329, 346, 362, 364, 372, 382, 406 sustainability, 324, 328 Swabian, 380 swamp, 61, 289, 2 9 1 , 3 8 5 Switzerland, 415 syphilis, 75

458

Index

taking, 333f., 341, 399, 423 taming, 114, 301, 374, 390, 407 ff„ 421, 430 task, VIII, 1 , 8 , 2 2 , 30, 4 8 , 5 1 , 8 1 , 8 8 , 113, 119, 128, 154, 159, 186, 188, 194, 236, 243, 259, 262, 2 6 6 ff„ 278, 309, 311, 313 ff., 319, 325, 352, 357, 369, 372, 396,412,418 taste, 8, 34 £, 62, 88, 339, 383, 399 technological, technology, 17, 61, 67, 110, 134, 142 ff., 148 ff, 261, 281, 296, 298, 300, 330, 380, 387, 396, 423 teleology, 99, 121, 222, 242 f„ 323, 371 f. temperate, 4 0 4 f. tempter, 175 ff, 181, 199 f., 297, 306, 314, 325, 336 f„ 382, 400 tension, 5, 7, 45 f., 57, 115, 192, 203, 256, 290, 308, 315, 357, 371, 376 ff., 395, 402, 410, 415 terrain, 277 terrestrials, IX, 345 terrorist, 384 Teutonic, 309 theogonistic, 96 theologians, theology, 13, 111, 132 theoretical, theory, 15, 36, 49, 88, 135, 213, 302, 314, 331, 335, 373, 420, 428 therapy, 328 Theseus, 176 thinking, thought, 37, 42, 58 f., 70, 88, 100, 149, 221, 232, 249 ff, 271, 278, 302 £, 306, 312, 318, 320, 324, 340 f„ 371, 383, 387, 403, 412 £, 4 2 3 f., 427, 429 f. Third Reich, 142, 345 Thoreau, H. D „ X, 324 Thrasymachus, 298 throw-away, 44 Thucydides, 138 Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 2-5, 7, 9 f., 22, 24, 26 f., 29, 3 4 , 4 8 , 49 ff, 55-58, 61, 64 £, 67, 6 9 , 7 5 , 77 £, 82, 84-87, 9 5 , 1 0 0 , 105, 136, 143, 1 5 4 , 1 5 7 f., 163, 176, 179, 181, 183, 189 f., 199 ff, 2 0 3 , 2 1 1 , 213, 216, 226 £, 238 £, 241, 244 f„ 258, 269, 272, 276, 287, 291, 294, 306 f., 312 ff, 321 ff, 325, 331, 339, 344, 348-351, 362, 365, 374, 383, 386,

391, 393, 397, 400, 405 f., 409, 411, 413, 429 ff Tillich, P. J., X time, 15, 17, 41, 50, 66, 68 £, 71, 77, 82, 86 f„ 109, 137, 143, 149, 169, 185, 201 £, 204, 208, 218 £, 226, 237, 240, 243-246, 251 ff, 277, 333, 343, 352, 364, 380, 397, 405, 429 Titans, 23 torture, 54, 74, 79 f., 124, 129, 137, 179, 244, 404, 407, 412, 416 totality, 414 tragedy, tragic, 72, 128, 162 ff, 168, 171 £, 177 ff, 181, 186, 194 £, 239, 338, 341, 375 transcendence, transcendental, transcendentalism 84, 133, 135, 141, 151 £, 161,164, 168, 175, 180, 183, 201, 203, 218, 226, 296, 322, 331, 346, 3 5 1 , 3 7 9 , 388, 396 transfiguration, 23, 49, 59, 163, 315 transience, 65, 77, 81 ff, 105 £, 120, 161, 189, 202 £, 215, 218, 232, 237 £, 244 £ transvaluation, 128, 179 ff, 218 £ tree, 56, 59, 78, 85, 157, 189, 268 £, 282, 360 ff,373, 430 tropical, tropics, 221, 404 £ Troy, 424 trust, 27, 358, 391 truth, 9, 15, 18, 20, 91 £, 95, 110, 118, 135, 137 £, 142 £, 180, 209, 212, 215, 219, 223, 229, 242, 246 £, 273 £, 294, 318, 320 £, 334, 351, 354, 366, 368 £, 387, 393 ff, 4 1 1 , 4 2 9 Turin, 1 5 9 , 4 1 5 Twilight of the Idols, 29, 36, 46, 54, 65, 78, 101, 117, 122, 162, 166, 178 £, 196 ff, 202, 206, 337, 347, 358, 368, 371 £, 388-391,395,407 tyranny, tyrant, 113, 192, 272, 287, 292, 294, 297, 319, 324, 328, 358, 389, 416 ugly, 93 £, 220, 295, 306, 427 Umwelt, X uncanny, 167, 170, 402, 411 £ unconscious, 135, 184, 250, 261, 361, 413, 417, 428

Index United States see America universalize, 386 universal, universe, 15, 156, 186, 221 ff., 228, 236, 247 ff., 251 £, 254, 274, 277, 291, 324, 326, 333, 371, 414, 420, 424 universities, 88 f. Ur, 398 Untimely Meditations, 12, 31, 39, 40, 70, 80, 89,91, 135,273,355 urban, urbanized, urbanization, X, 385 uterus, 212 utilitarian, 136 Utopian, Utopist, 185, 2 6 6 , 3 0 6 , 3 3 5 , 3 5 7 ,

389 valley, 5, 61, 115,286 values, 29, 34, 40, 52, 63, 67, 81 f., 88, 96, 102, 109, 114 f., 122 f., 128, 130, 133, 136, 139, 144 f., 148, 151, 158, 162, 171, 177,179 f., 189, 191, 193, 209, 215 f., 222, 228 f., 236, 240, 242 f., 257, 269, 276, 292, 298, 303, 315, 317, 319, 322 f., 334, 340, 342, 353, 356, 381, 387 f., 397 f., 401, 403, 407, 409, 414, 419, 423 vanity, 93, 385, 389, 401, 417 ff. Vattimo, G., 251 f., 334 f., 343 veneration, 288, 401 ff, 409 vengeance, 82, 205, 229, 284 Verrechia, A., 415 Versailles, 140 violence, 125, 131, 138, 167, 194, 264, 270, 288, 294, 299, 301, 304, 311, 335, 340, 342, 360, 384, 394 virtue, 7, 31, 41, 53, 56 f., 62, 65, 75, 85, 88, 102, 123, 133, 186, 211 f., 214, 258, 278, 286 f., 300, 314 f., 333 f., 336, 339, 349, 360, 368, 374, 386, 389 virus, 302 vital, vitalism, vitality, 7, 40, 43, 65, 68, 70, 78, 83, 89 ff, 95 f., 99,101, 105, 139 f., 142, 158, 161, 179, 328, 336, 354, 362, 417 Vitens, S. 6, 190 Voegelin, E„ 169 Vogt, J. G., 68 völkisch, 49, 96, 140, 160

459

Voltaire, F. M. A„ 42 Wagner, C„ 173, 268 Wagner, R„ 23, 25, 33, 41 f., 88, 135 f., 142, 171,229 Waiden Pond, 324 wanderer, 220 f., 277, 385, 388, 399 f., 430 Wannsee, 261 war, warrior, 78, 121, 131, 139, 141, 153, 210, 220, 281 f., 284 f., 292, 317 f., 320, 342, 352 f., 371,394 water, 75, 80, 109, 175, 210, 231 weak, weakness, 7, 45, 47, 51, 92, 95, 101, 137, 139, 156, 185, 280, 301 f., 305, 309 f., 315, 321, 324, 327, 339, 342, 344, 346, 348, 360, 367 f., 372, 378, 405, 407,413,415 weather, 104, 119, 360, 365 White, R„ 305 f. wholeness, 40, 90, 96, 145, 185, 188, 190 f., 197, 206, 209, 240, 261, 295, 311, 318, 327, 334, 339, 358 f., 362, 365 f., 375, 378, 395, 403 f., 414, 424 wild, wilderness, 115, 274 f., 289, 319, 361, 374, 398, 407, 410, 424, 427 will, 3, 16, 65, 77, 94, 100 f., 121, 166, 171, 179, 187 ff, 195 f., 203, 211, 225, 229, 252, 261, 282, 291, 306, 311, 314, 316, 318, 321, 323 ff, 332, 335, 339, 356, 367, 369 ff, 378, 401, 421, Williams, B„ 4, 17, 49, 306, 368 will to power, 15, 18 f., 24, 35 f., 46, 65, 93, 99 ff, 107, 131 f., 134,136,144-148, 203 f., 206, 208, 234, 253, 258, 264, 290, 300, 302 ff, 306, 318, 320 f., 324, 326-329, 334 f., 337 f., 340 f., 342, 348, 350 f., 358, 361 f., 365, 368, 371 f., 386, 391,405, 408,426 Will to Power, The, 35, 50, 144, 155, 180, 229, 249, 259, 289, 300, 312, 320, 345 Winckelmann, J. J., 337 wind, 286, 399 winter, 230, 353, 416 wisdom, wise, 157, 168, 214, 300, 312, 314, 321,385, 408, 411, 427 ff. women, 33 f., 62, 78, 84, 130, 140, 173, 182, 199,212, 282, 378, 397

460 wood, woods, 61, 105, 115, 224, 226, 291, 296, 299, 389, 427 work, worker, working class, 13, 73 f., 78, 86, 184, 259 f., 268, 306 f., 315, 318, 325, 339, 353 ff., 387 world, 10,38,39,41, 50, 56, 60,65, 67, 70, 74-77, 79 ff., 84 f„ 87, 92 f„ 105 f., 110, 112 f., 116, 129, 134, 138, 143 f., 146 f„ 163,166, 168 f„ 173, 180, 184, 186, 190 £, 193, 195, 202 f„ 214, 218, 221 ff, 225, 228 £, 233, 237, 240, 243 f., 247, 253 f., 262, 283, 308, 324 f„ 329, 339, 341, 348, 360, 362,

Index

366, 368, 380, 394, 401, 407, 410, 414, 417, 420, 423 f., 428, 430 World War I, 166 World War II, 131, 141, 167, 199, 426 Young, J., 195 f. Yovel, Y„ 267 Zagreus, 198 Zarathustra see Thus Spoke Zarathustra Zimmerman, Michael E., 81, 380 zoological, 407 Zoroaster, 82