Nietzsche's Futures

NIETZSCHE'S FUTURES
Nietzsche's Futures
Edited by
John Lippitt
Senior Lecturer in Philosophy
University of Hertfordshire
First published in Great Britain 1999 by
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ISBN 978-0-312-21559-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nietzsche's futures / edited by John Lippitt.
p. cm.
''Most of the essays ... arose from papers presented at the Fifth
Aunual Conference of Britain's Friedrich Nietzsche Society, held at
the University of Hertfordshire during September 1995"-lntrod.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-312-21559-0 (cloth)
1. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900. I. Friedrich
Nietzsche Society. Conference (5th: 1995 : University of
Hertfordshire)
B3317.N4976 1998
193--dc21 98-21080
CIP
Selection, editorial matter and Chapter 6 © John Lippitt 1999
Chapters 1-5 and 7-10 © Macmillan Press Ltd 1999
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1999
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99
To my wife, Jo, and my parents, Pat and Ken - for love,
support and laughter
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Notes on the Contributors x
Reference Key to Nietzsche's Texts xii
Introduction xiii
Part One: Nobles and Exemplars 1
1 Nietzsche, Enlightenment and the Problem of

Noble Ethics
David Owen 3
2 Annunciation and Rebirth: The Prefaces of 1886
Daniel W. Conway 30
3 Stendhal's Ecstatic Embrace of History as the
Antidote for Decadence
Brian Domino 48
Part Two: Laughter and Comedy 63

4 Nietzsche's Best Jokes
Laurence Lampert 65
5 Waves of Uncountable Laughter
Kathleen Marie Higgins 82
6 Laughter: A Tool in Moral Perfectionism?
John Lippitt 99
Part Three: Art, Nature and the Transhuman 127

7 A 'Pessimism of Strength': Nietzsche and the
Tragic Sublime
Jim Urpeth 129
8 Creating the Future: Legislation and Aesthetics
Gary Banham 149
vii
viii Contents
9 Staying Loyal to the Earth: Nietzsche as an
Ecological Thinker
Graham Parkes 167
10 Loving the Poison: On the 'Meaning' of the
Transhuman Condition
Keith Ansell Pearson 189
Index '2fJ7
Acknowledgements
As is always the case with such ventures, more people have con-
tributed to this project than can be named here. In particular
though, I should like to thank the following: the officers of the
Friedrich Nietzsche Society for help in the organisation of the con-
ference (especially Keith Ansell Pearson, who provided the idea for
its original theme, and Duncan Large); other conference contribu-
tors whose papers I have been unable to include in this volume; the
University of Hertfordshire for making its facilities available; and
Margaret Mitchell-Jubb for her invaluable, highly efficient secretar-
ial support during the organisation of the event. I should also like to
thank Athlone and Cambridge University Press for their financial
support for the conference, and Rebecca Jiggens for help with
proof-reading.
The publishers and editor also acknowledge with thanks permis-
sion from Routledge to reproduce Essay 10, from Keith Ansell
Pearson, Viroid Life (1997).
JOHNuppm
ix
Notes on the Contributors
Keith Ansell Pearson is Director of Graduate Research in the
Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. His most
recent books include Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the
Transhuman Condition (1997) and the edited Deleuze and Philosophy
(1997). His next book, Deleuze and Germinal Life: Essays on Evolution,
Ethology, Ethics, and Literature, is forthcoming in 1998.
Gary Banham is a member of Hertford College, Oxford, which is
where he wrote his doctoral thesis on Nietzsche's The Birth of
Tragedy. He has published articles on Nietzsche, Kant, Derrida,
Joyce and Wyndham Lewis, and is currently writing a book on
Kant's aesthetics.
Daniel W. Conway is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director
of the Center for Ethics and Value Inquiry at the Pennsylvania State
University. He has published widely in the fields of political theory,
ethics, and contemporary continental philosophy. His most recent
publications include Nietzsche and the Political (1997) and Nietzsche's
Dangerous Game: Philosophy in the Twilight of the Idols (1997).
Brian Domino is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Eastern
Michigan University. He is the author of articles on Nietzsche's
medico-political thought.
Kathleen Marie Higgins is Professor of Philosophy at the University
of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Nietzsche's Zarathustra (1987),
The Music of Our Lives (1991), and co-editor (with Robert C. Solomon)
of Reading Nietzsche (1988), The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love (1991), From
Africa to Zen (1993) and (with Bernd Magnus) The Cambridge Companion
to Nietzsche (1996), among other books and articles. She has recently
completed a book-length study of Nietzsche's The Gay Science.
Laurence Lampert is Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University,
Indianapolis. He is the author of Nietzsche's Teaching: An
Interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1986), Nietzsche and Modern
Times: A Study of Bacon, Descartes, and Nietzsche (1993), Leo Strauss
and Nietzsche (1996), and articles on William Butler Yeats and the
Canadian philosopher George Grant.
x
Notes on the Contributors xi
John LippiH is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of
Hertfordshire. He has published numerous articles on Nietzsche,
Kierkegaard and theories of humour and laughter; and is currently
working on two books on Kierkegaard: one entitled Kierkegaard and
the comic, the other a commentary on Fear and Trembling.
David Owen is Lecturer in Politics and Assistant Director of
the Centre for Post-Analytic Philosophy at the University of
Southampton. He is the author of Maturity and Modernity (1994) and
Nietzsche, Politics and Modernity (1995), editor of Sociology after
Postmodernism (1997) and co-editor of The Politics of Critique (1998) as
well as numerous articles on contemporary continental philosophy
and political theory. He was until recently editor of the Journal of
Nietzsche Studies.
Graham Parkes is Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Hawaii. He is the editor of Heidegger and Asian Thought (1987) and
Nietzsche and Asian Thought (1991), translator of Nishitani Keiji's The
Self-Overcoming of Nihilism (1990) and Reinhard May's Heidegger's
Hidden Sources: East-Asian Influences on His Thought (1996), and
author of Composing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche's Psychology (1994).
His current work on Nietzsche is more biographically and filmically
oriented.
Jim Urpetb is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of
Greenwich. He has written on Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bataille,
Deleuze and Foucault, and is an editor of a forthcoming collection
of essays on the relationship between philosophy and theology in
contemporary thought. Other research interests include the philo-
sophy of art and contemporary critiques of 'humanism'.
Reference Key to
Nietzsche's Texts
Several different editions and translations of Nietzsche's works
have been used by the various contributors to this volume. Titles
have been abbreviated according to the following key. (See the end-
notes to each chapter for publication information.)
AC The Anti-Christ (or The Anti-Christian)

ADM 'Assorted Opinions and Maxims' (incorporated into HH IT)
ASC 'Attempt at a Self-Criticism'
BGE Beyond Good and Evil
BT The Birth of Tragedy
CW The Case of Wagner
D Daybreak (or Dawn of Morning)
EH Ecce Homo
GM On the Genealogy of Morals (or On the Genealogy of Morality)
GS The Gay Science (or The Joyful (or Joyous) Science)
HC 'Homer on Competition' (or 'Homer's Contest')
HH Human, All Too Human (two volumes, I and II)
KGW Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe
KSA Siimtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe
RWB 'Richard Wagner in Bayreuth'
SE 'Schopenhauer as Educator'
TI Twilight of the Idols
UD 'On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life'
UM Untimely Meditations (or Unfashionable Observations)
WP The Will to Power
WS 'The Wanderer and his Shadow' (incorporated into HH II)
Z Thus Spoke Zarathustra
xii
Introduction
Most of the essays in this volume arose from papers presented at
the fifth annual conference of Britain's Friedrich Nietzsche Society,
held at the University of Hertfordshire during September 1995. The
conference had the dramatic - even apocalyptic - title 'Nietzsche
and the Future of the Human'. ('That's right', Richard Schacht felt
obliged to add when advertising the conference in the North
American Nietzsche Society newsletter. 1) In this volume, as at the
conference, contributors address the 'future of the human' theme
from a variety of perspectives. These range from various concerns
about 'self-overcoming' in a person's own future - raising issues
about 'noble ethics', exemplarity and moral perfectionism - through
a consideration of a Nietzschean vision of the future characterised
by laughter and 'joyous science', to contemporary issues concerning
humanism and anti-humanism, humanity's relation - in an age of
ecological crisis - to the natural world of which we are a part, and
the ramifications of contemporary views of evolution on questions
about the 'transhuman condition'.
The essays are grouped under three broad themes. The following
brief outlines may also suggest alternative lines of development that
can be traced through the collection.
I NOBLES AND EXEMPLARS
Major features of any future commended by Nietzsche, surely,

would be some sort of 'noble morality', the ability to learn from
exemplars, and a proper orientation towards 'health' and'sickness'.
In 'Nietzsche, Enlightenment and the Problem of Noble Ethics',
David Owen addresses the 'problem of the noble ideal' raised in On
the Genealogy of Morality (GM I 16); and of the way that Nietzsche
manages to seduce us with this ideal. He relates Nietzsche to Kant's
concern about 'the great unthinking mass' being so 'immature' as to
allow others to do their thinking for them. Owen shows that
whereas Kant's world-view allows him to legislate for maturity via
an ideal dependent upon the transcendental status, absolute author-
ity, and unconditional value of reason, Nietzsche would find such a
xiii
xiv Introduction
solution repellent due both to his perspectivism and his objections to
Kant's conception of morality. Nietzsche can recommend - but not
legislate - the 'noble ideal' as a goal. But what is Nietzschean 'nobil-
ity'? Owen focuses upon the discussion of conscience in the second
essay of the Genealogy, with the aim of explaining Nietzsche's desire
to exempt the noble from 'bad conscience'. He points to a crucial
ambiguity in Nietzsche's use of this term: between bad conscience in
its 'raw', 'formless' state; and that which has been turned in a partic-
ular direction by the 'ascetic priest'. Owen reconsiders the difference
between the 'mature' Ubermensch and the 'immature' last man,
arguing that the main features of the former are 'self-affirmation dis-
closed as the disposition of amor fati', and an Enlightenment ideal of
self-government. Nietzsche's commitment to this latter ideal, Owen
suggests, means that a particular kind of morality will emerge from
such a view. Against common images found both inside and outside
Nietzsche scholarship, Owen argues for a noble ethics which
includes such features as 'mutual recognition, honesty, loyalty, mag-
nanimity and, even, courtesy'.
The themes of sickness, convalescence and health are central
concerns of the next two contributors. Daniel W. Conway's
'Annunciation and Rebirth' considers the prefaces Nietzsche wrote,
in 1886, to earlier works. What do they tell us about the develop-
ment of his thought; and what intended reading do they signal?
Conway aims to show how, through these prefaces, the story is
told of Nietzsche's own development from sickness to convales-
cence, and from convalescence to health. This latter transformation
is marked by a capacity for a Dionysian' squandering'. The prefaces
also show the strategy Nietzsche would himself commend for
reading him: one of 'symptomatology'. Conway argues that
Nietzsche aims to tum himself into a 'sign'; into that of which he
could only previously speak: the kind of exemplar upon which the
future of humanity is dependent.
Brian Domino continues the thought of images of 'health' being
presented through particular exemplars in his 'Stendhal's Ecstatic
Embrace of History as the Antidote for Decadence'. Domino argues
that for Nietzsche, whether the future of humanity is one of health or
sickness depends upon how we relate ourselves to history. He con-
trasts two flawed relations - decadents' 'grave-robbing' ideas that are
likely merely to have the effect of increasing decadence (Wagner) and
attempting to isolate oneself (the Nietzsche presented in Ecce Homo) -
with the antidote exemplified by Stendhal. Stendhal's 'embrace' has
Introduction xv
two crucial features: an aesthetics which is erotic, as opposed to disin-

terested; and placing oneself in what is foreign - in somehow inhabit-
ing a period such as the Italian Renaissance. While accepting that
Nietzsche offers no definite prescription or recipe for achieving this,
Domino warns that the deconstruction of history found in certain
strains of postmodernism may be a calamity, since the only remedy
for decadence lies in relating ourselves to history in a way more
appropriate than this.
n LAUGHTER AND COMEDY
Laughter is another feature which Nietzsche regularly hints would

be an important part of any 'Nietzschean' future. Someone to whom
I once mentioned my interest in Nietzsche and laughter expressed
amazement at my connecting the two. He suggested that a
Nietzschean laughter would be somewhat manic - perhaps prompt-
ing its panicked hearers to ensure that the steak-knives were safely
locked away. Yet in contrast to this caricature, the next three contrib-
utors all consider aspects of the role of laughter and comedy in
Nietzsche's thought. In 'Nietzsche's Best Jokes', Laurence Lampert
presents what he takes to be some of Nietzsche's wittiest aphorisms,
on the themes of both God and humanity. But he also assesses what
he considers to be the real ground of joking in Nietzsche. Lampert
argues that Nietzsche came to see that doctrines such as 'the sover-
eignty of becoming, the fluidity of all concepts, types and kinds, the
lack of any cardinal distinction between human and animal', which
he had once viewed as 'true but deadly' (UD 9), can in fact be
the ground of, and spur to, gaiety, carnival and festival: a comedy of
existence the eternal recurrence of which we could happily affirm.
The relationship between tragedy and comedy - especially between
the tragic and comic world-views mentioned at the start of The Gay
Science - is a leitmotif of Kathleen Higgins's 'Waves of Uncountable
Laughter'. By comparing Nietzsche's Zarathustra with the historical
figure who inspired him, Higgins aims to explain Zarathustra's
appearance at the end of The Gay Science. She aims to show how
Zarathustra plays there the role of a tragic hero, and the rest of the
book that of the tragic chorus, whipping up its readers to such a
Dionysian frenzy that they see Zarathustra as a visionary, rather than
a flawed human being. But in the preface to the second edition of The
Gay Science, Nietzsche suggests that when, at the end of the book, it is
xvi Introduction
announced that 'the tragedy begins', we should consider that what is
really being announced is that 'the parody begins' (GS Preface 2nd
ed 1). Higgins argues that this is intended to make us recall the claim
of the first section of the book; that the 'waves of uncountable laugh-
ter' of the comic perspective will always overwhelm the tragic
outlook. Hence we are to recognise two things: that the tragic era in
which we are ourselves situated will end, and that - if our experience
of the book is such that we are already engaged in 'gay science' - we
have ourselves embarked on the project of bringing it to an end.
In my own essay, I am rather more sceptical about the festive or
joyful laughter most commonly labelled as Nietzschean. In the cold
light of day, just how useful could a recommendation to laugh such
laughter be, given the 'all too human' position from which any 'self-
overcoming' must start? In my 'Laughter: A Tool in Moral
Perfectionism?', I consider some of the different roles of laughter at
work in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, focusing upon two. There is indeed
the ecstatic, Dionysian laughter associated with the embrace of
eternal recurrence. But in Part IV, after Zarathustra's embrace of
eternal recurrence, his laughter frequently remains akin to what
Mikhail Bakhtin describes as 'reduced' laughter. Containing no
obvious elements of festive joy, it is sometimes mocking, sarcastic,
and even angry. Yet a more 'reduced', 'all too human', more
reflective laughter, I suggest, can play an important role in the moral
perfectionist project which Stanley Cavell and others have seen at
work in Nietzsche. I develop two ideas in particular. First, I aim to
show how, when 'agonistic', publicly contested discourse reaches
immovable bedrock, such laughter can occasion a 'non-discursive
dismissal' of the competing views of others, which can fortify one in
the pursuit of one's own path to 'self-overcoming'. Second, though,
such reflective laughter can also help in situations in which we need
to stand back from and judge our current selves. The ability to culti-
vate 'comic distance' here can help prevent the ossification of the
self and resist the internalisation of potentially corrupting values,
such as dangerous forms of 'bad conscience'. These are two ways in
which even a 'reduced' laughter can kill the 'spirit of gravity'.
ill ART, NATURE AND THE TRANSHUMAN
Our third section deals with perhaps the widest diversity of topics.
Both Jim Urpeth and Gary Banham are concerned with aspects of
Introduction xvii
Nietzsche's aesthetics in relation to humanism. In 'A "Pessimism of
Strength": Nietzsche and the Tragic Sublime', Urpeth argues that the
limits of the 'human' are disclosed by a Nietzschean conception of the
'tragic' sublime which can be opposed to 'moral' conceptions thereof,
such as Kant's. The central theme here is different ways of overcom-
ing pessimism through art. To a 'slave' approach, such as that of
Schopenhauer - in which our only hope is to obtain transcendence of
'this world' via redemption from the will, the body, and so on -
Urpeth opposes Nietzsche's 'noble' overcoming of pessimism, which
denies the evaluation of life on which the 'slave' world-view hinges.
The 'slave' world-view derives from the unnecessary adoption of the
man-nature distinction of 'Platonic-Chrlstian' metaphysics. Urpeth
aims to develop a notion of 'immanent transcendence'. He argues
that, in The Birth of Tragedy as well as in later texts, Nietzsche provides
us with an account of such a notion which allows a conception of the
sublime that is thoroughly 'this-worldly', and which resists the critic-
isms he later - mistakenly - makes in the 'Attempt at a Self-Criticism'.
In 'Creating the Future: Legislation and Aesthetics', Gary Banham
derives from Thus Spoke Zarathustra an account of legislation and cre-
ation and their relation to questions about futurity. He considers this
alongside a reading of Nietzsche's early and later critiques of Wagner,
and what these reveal about the different views of art and aesthetics
held by the two men. Then, via a reading of the threefold nature of
the term' aesthetic' found in Kant's three critiques, Banham aims to
show how Nietzsche's 'selective inheritance of the Kantian legacy'
enables him to conceive the future of the human as an aesthetic
problem. He concludes with some suggestions as to what implications
this has for questions about the iibermensch and the human body.
The final two essays address, in very different ways, particularly
timely themes. In what is increasingly perceived as an age of
ecological crisis, Graham Parkes draws attention to aspects of
Nietzsche's thought which locate him in a tradition of thinking
which demands a reverence for the 'natural' world. In 'Staying
Loyal to the Earth: Nietzsche as an Ecological Thinker', Parkes
draws on a variety of texts, published and unpublished, to show
how Nietzsche develops a philosophy of nature which both stresses
the continuity between humanity and the natural world and shows
his tendency to construe nature as divine. Along the way, Parkes
draws brief but suggestive parallels between Nietzsche and aspects
of East Asian thought. Taking Nietzsche's view of nature seriously
forces us to consider the implications for our relation to the natural
xviii Introduction
world. Parkes wants to impress upon us the urgency of doing so
because (but not only because) the 'future of the human' is depend-
ent upon the 'future of the earth'.
The final contribution is Keith Ansell Pearson's 'Loving the Poison:
On the "Meaning" of the Transhuman Condition'. Ansell Pearson, it
seems, would wish to challenge aspects of the continuity between
man and nature in Nietzsche sketched by Parkes. The status of 'man'
in relation to 'the animals' is one of Ansell Pearson's concerns; yet he
argues that to say that man 'belongs' amongst them (or, by implica-
tion, is part of 'nature') is to overlook man's peculiar status as the
'sick', 'strange' animal. Against readings of Nietzsche which present
the Ubermensch or 'overhuman' as something radically discontinuous
with the human, Ansell Pearson insists on the importance of recognis-
ing the overhuman's human origins. Moreover, man's promise is to be
found in his 'becoming sick', through the triumph of the 'slave' over
the 'noble'. Prima facie 'reactive' values conceal a hidden' activity'; and
can be re-evaluated if we consider them as tools through which the
'human animal' can be further cultivated. One of the main claims of
Nietzsche's genealogy, therefore, is that morality is not merely the
'danger of dangers', it is also the 'breeding ground' for an extra-moral
self-overcoming. This enables us to read the invention of 'bad con-
science' as a decisive stage in evolution. With this thought in mind, and
with reference to such thinkers as Bergson, Deleuze and Guattari,
Ansell Pearson examines different pictures of evolution and 'recent
reports on the transhuman condition', aiming to explain why, from a
Nietzschean point of view, so many of them are fundamentally
wrong-headed.
Taken together, these essays provide a range of perspectives on
the thought of futurity in Nietzsche's work. It is hoped that this col-
lection will contribute to the continued debate about Nietzsche, one
of the most engaging thinkers of the past, who has much to say
about - and to - both the present and the future.
JOHN LIPPITT
University of Hertfordshire
Mily 1997
Note
1. Nietzsche News, no. 16 (Spring 1995), p. 3.

Part One
Nobles and Exemplars
1
Nietzsche, Enlightenment
and the Problem of Noble
Ethics1
David Owen
This essay focuses on two questions in relation to Nietzsche's work.

First, what is 'the problem of the noble ideal' that Nietzsche
identifies in section 16 of the first essay of On the Genealogy of
Morality? Second, how does Nietzsche seek to seduce us with the
noble ideal which he recommends? However, I will begin by
placing these questions in context by raising the issue of Nietzsche's
relationship to the question of enlightenment in German philoso-
phy. The rationale for this strategy is to illustrate both that
Nietzsche is committed to the enlightenment ideal of maturity as
self-government and that his critique of the enlightenment commit-
ment to transcendental standards of rationality entails that his com-
mitment to maturity can only disclose itself as a recommendation.
KANT, NIETZSCHE AND THE PARADOX OF ENLIGHTENMENT
In the Preface to Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche comments that the
struggle against Plato and Christianity (as Platonism 'for the
people') 'has created in Europe a magnificent tension of the spirit
such as has never existed on earth before: with so tense a bow one
can now shoot for the most distant targets' (BGE Preface).2
Nietzsche continues his remarks as follows:
European man feels this tension as a state of distress, to be sure;

and there have been two grand attempts to relax the bow, once
by means of Jesuitism, the second time by means of democratic
enlightenment - this latter may in fact, with the aid of the
3
4 Enlightenment and the Problem of Noble Ethics
freedom of the press and the reading of newspapers, achieve a
state of affairs in which the spirit would no longer so easily feel
itself to be a 'need'!
(BGE Preface)
What is of interest for this essay is that this passage seems more or
less straightforwardly directed against those eighteenth-century
writings on the theme of enlightenment of which Kant's text
'Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?' is the best-
known example. In that text Kant articulates a concern with demo-
cratic enlightenment through an appeal to the free public use of
reason which is manifest in 'freedom of the press and the reading of
newspapers'. Consequently, in order to get clear about Nietzsche's
relationship to the question of enlightenment, it is appropriate to
begin by asking why Nietzsche regards Kant's account of enlighten-
ment as an attempt' to relax the bow'. 3
In the above-mentioned essay, Kant seeks to identify, diagnose
and prescribe a cure for a cultural dilemma in terms of reflection on
a specific problematic, namely, the achievement of maturity (that is,
reliance on one's own rational understanding). The dilemma is this:
why do the mass of humanity fail to seek maturity, given that they
possess the requisite powers and opportunity? Kant's diagnosis is as
follows:
Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large propor-
tion of men, even when nature has long emancipated them from
alien guidance, nevertheless gladly remain immature for life. For
the same reasons, it is all too easy for others to set themselves up
as their guardians. It is so convenient to be immature! H I have a
book to have my understanding in place of me, a spiritual adviser
to have a conscience for me, a doctor to judge my diet for me,
and so on, I need not make any efforts at all. I need not think, so
long as I can paYi others will soon enough take the tiresome job
over for me.
(Kant, 1991, p. 54)
What is significant about these remarks? On the one hand, Kant is not
primarily concerned with whether the understanding, the conscience
and the diet disclosed by the book, the spiritual adviser and the doctor
are true, right and healthy but simply with whether or not the indi-
vidual exercises their own powers of understanding. On the other
David Owen 5
hand, Kant expresses a disdain for 'the great unthinking mass' (p. 55)
which suggests a certain pessimism concerning the chances of any but
a few exhibiting the courage and resolution required to exercise one's
own powers of understanding. This disdain is partially qualified by
the development of Kant's argument:
The guardians who have kindly taken upon themselves the work
of supervision will soon see to it that by far the largest part of
mankind (including the entire fair sex) should consider the step
forward to maturity not only as difficult but also as highly dan-
gerous. Having first infatuated their domesticated animals, and
carefully prevented the docile creatures from daring to take a step
without the leading strings to which they are tied, they next
show them the danger which threatens them if they try to walk
unaided ...
Thus it is difficult for each separate individual to work his way
out of the immaturity which has become almost second nature to
him. He has even grown fond of it and is really incapable for the
time being of using his own understanding, because he was
never allowed to make the attempt. Dogmas and formulas, those
mechanical instruments for rational use (or rather misuse) of his
natural endowments, are the ball and chain of his persistent
immaturity ... Thus only a few, by cultivating their own minds,
have succeeded in freeing themselves from immaturity and in
continuing boldly on their way.
(p.54)
Immaturity, then, is the product of an originary laziness and cow-

ardice which provides the conditions for the rule of the guardians
and is, at the same time, reinforced by the ideological production of
surplus fear which characterises this rule. Thus, from an original
position in which we recognise ourselves as able to act on our own
understanding but are too lazy or cowardly to do so, we move to a
position in which we cannot act on our own understanding since
we do not recognise such action as a choice available to us. How is
this dilemma to be resolved?
Kant argues that we have good reasons to be optimistic with
respect to public enlightenment given that all this requires is the
example and teaching of those few who do achieve maturity under
their own power together with the further condition of freedom of
speech:
For there will always be a few who think for themselves, even
among those appointed as guardians of the common mass. Such
guardians, once they have themselves thrown off the yoke of
immaturity, will disseminate the spirit of rational respect for per-
sonal value and for the duty of all men to think for themselves ...
For enlightenment of this kind, all - that is needed is freedom.
And the freedom in question is the most innocuous form of all -
freedom to make public use of one's reason in all matters.
(p.55)
However, it is by no means clear that this is anything like sufficient

- for the following reasons. Let us suppose, for the sake of sim-
plicity, that the example of those enlightened guardians and others
who have achieved maturity successfully acts to undermine the
surplus fears created by guardians of dogmas and formulas' such
I
that we recognise ourselves as capable of acting on our own under-

standing - this only leaves us in the position that Kant starts from in
which laziness and cowardice still act to ensure that the mass of
humanity are happy to be immature.
Of course, this need not be the case if the role of the enlightened
guardians is to disseminate the spirit of rational respect for per-
I
sonal value and for the duty of all men to think for themselves' as
legislators, that is, to command the duty to think for oneself as a
categorical imperative. In other words, Kant's argument is cogent
in so far as enlightened guardians still act as guardians and,
however temporarily, legislate for the mass in order to bring them
to maturity. However, such a procedure threatens to import a
paradox into Kant's position which is related to the paradox of the
legislator encountered by Rousseau: on the one hand, if the masses
are lazy and cowardly, they are unlikely to enlighten themselves;
on the other hand, if the enlightened guardians legislate the duty to
think for oneself, then maturity is predicated on immaturity, auton-
omy is rooted in heteronomy. I say that the idea of enlightened
guardians as legislators 'threatens to import a paradox' because this
also need not be the case if what is legislated is itself the rational
will (rather than the empirical will) of those subject to this legisla-
tion, that is, in so far as Kant can appeal to a transcendental ground
of authority which is immanent within the subject. This is, of
course, precisely how Kant does avoid Rousseau's recourse to a
noble lie in confronting the paradox of emancipation. In appealing
to the rational will of the noumenal self against the empirical will of
David Owen 7
the phenomenal self, Kant legitimates the legislation of maturity
and, concomitantly, the legislation of the moral law which reliance
on one's own rational understanding necessarily discloses.
For our purposes, the following points are notable about Kant's
activity as cultural physician. First, it involves an ideal - man as a
rational, self-legislating being - which is articulated through an
appeal to the transcendental status of reason, its absolute author-
ity and unconditional value. Second, this appeal acts to legitimate
its legislation of maturity (that is, the moral law) while securing its
avoidance of paradox. It is, however, precisely these features of
Kant's activity which lead Nietzsche to comment that democratic
enlightenment is not a resolution of our cultural crisis but a
further, and particularly damaging, manifestation of it (BGE
Preface). There are, I think, two features of this claim which can be
distinguished in making sense of Nietzsche's critical remarks con-
cerning democratic enlightenment as 'relaxing the bow'. The first
is Kant's denial of perspective and the second is Kant's conception
of morality.
The critique of the denial of perspective is most famously stated
in the course of the third essay of On the Genealogy of Morality, in
which Nietzsche presents an account of the ascetic ideal as involv-
ing the metaphysical presupposition of the value and authority of
truth. In this essay, Nietzsche's critique of the ascetic ideal is inter-
woven with his advocacy of perspectivism and this doctrine pro-
vides an appropriate starting point for understanding his rejection
of Kant's conception of enlightenment and maturity:
From now on, my philosophical colleagues, let us be more wary of

the dangerous old conceptual fairy-tale which has set up a 'pure,
will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge', let us be wary of
the tentacles of such contradictory concepts as 'pure reason,'
'absolute spirituality,' 'knowledge as such' - here we are asked to
think an eye which cannot be thought at all, an eye turned in no
direction at all, an eye where the active and interpretative powers
are to be suppressed, absent, but through which seeing still
becomes a seeing-something, so it is an absurdity and a non-
concept of eye that is demanded. There is only a perspective
seeing, only a perspective 'knowing'; the more affects we allow to
speak about a thing, the more eyes, various eyes we are able to use
for the same thing, the more complete will be our' concept' of the
thing, our 'objectivity'. But to eliminate the will completely and
tum off all the emotions without exception, assuming we could:
well? would that not mean to castrate the intellect?
(GM III 12)
Maudemarie Clark (1990) has convincingly argued that

Nietzsche's target in this passage is metaphysical realism, that is,
the idea that truth is independent of our cognitive constitution. This
is the point of Nietzsche's use of the ocular metaphor to subvert the
idea of a view from nowhere. According to Clark, Nietzsche's cri-
tique of metaphysical realism involves two stages. The first step is to
recognise that the metaphysical realist account of truth as indepen-
dent of all possible activities of knowing is incoherent:
we can have no conception, or only a contradictory one, of some-

thing that would be independent of all knowers, and therefore of
all conceptualization, because to conceive of something is to con-
ceive of it as satisfying some description or other, which is to
think of it as conceptualizable in some way or other.
(Clark, 1990, pp. 46-7)
This is Nietzsche's point when he remarks that the idea of the thing-
in-itself contains a contradictio in adjecto' (BGE 16). The second step
I
involves the recognition that the idea of truth as independent of

human knowledge entails the idea of truth as independent of all pos-
sible knowledge. This is so since while we may admit the possibility
that beings with greater cognitive capacities than our own may dis-
cover our best theory to be false, we can only intelligibly conceive of
this cognitive superiority in terms of our cognitive interests, that is,
the fact that the theory provided by these beings gives us more of
what we want than our own theory (Clark, 1990, p. SO). Consequently,
the metaphysical realist claim that truth is independent of both our
cognitive capacities and our cognitive interests entails the contradic-
tory notion of the thing-in-itself and, thus, is incoherent.
In this context, Nietzsche's claim that all perspectives are situated,
that is, views from somewhere, and interested, that is, bound up in
systems of purposes, is simply a recognition of the fact that
knowing is an activity which attends the embedded and embodied
character of human subjectivity. What implications does this posi-
tion have for truth? First, in so far as different perspectives are
rooted in different practical interests or systems of purposes, it
entails that there can be plural true descriptions of the world (for
David Owen 9
example, the description of the world offered by physics and that
offered by sociology) which are not necessarily reducible to a single
true description. Second, it specifies truth within a given system of
purposes as that which best satisfies our standards of rational
acceptability, that is, our cognitive interests within this system of
purposes. This second point entails the rejection of relativism in so
far as a clash of beliefs within a system of purposes is resolvable by
recourse to our standards of rational acceptability.
If we juxtapose Nietzsche's argument with Kant's account of matu-
rity, it becomes apparent that maturity requires not only the public
freedom to use and exercise one's own powers of understanding to
determine truth, but also the public freedom to use and exercise one's
own powers of judgement to evaluate perspectives tied to different
systems of purposes in terms of the value of the truths such perspec-
tives disclose. In this respect, self-government involves the following:
to see differently, and to want to see differently to that degree,

is no small discipline and preparation of the intellect for its
future 'objectivity' - the latter understood not as 'contemplation
without interest' (which is, as such, a non-concept and an absurd-
ity), but as having in our power our 'pros' and 'cons': so as to be
able to engage and disengage them so that we can use the differ-
ence in perspectives and affective interpretations for knowledge.
(GM III 12)
It is a necessary condition of such maturity or self-government that

we recognise that truth is not characterised by finality and that the
value of truth is not inestimable. This is the first purpose of genealogy.
Closely related to this critique of Kant's denial of perspective is
Nietzsche's attack on Kant's conception of morality. This critique
has two distinct aspects. On the one hand, Nietzsche is concerned
to point out that Kant adopts the typical expedient of the meta-
physician in that Kant presupposes that our moral commitments
are broadly right and simply attempts to anchor these commitments
in a domain secure from the vagaries of time and place (BGE 2, 186).
Nietzsche's point is that this presupposition prematurely forecloses
the question of the value of our moral commitments in so far as it
pre-empts the historical-comparative perspectives which disclose
this question to us. This is the second purpose of genealogy. On the
other hand, Nietzsche also seeks to advocate an alternative style of
moral reasoning oriented to a noble ideal which affirms our fragile
and painful existence in this world, the only world - if we are being
honest with ourselves - that we have. It is worth stressing this point
that Nietzsche's question concerning the value of values refers to
the styles of moral reasoning within which our moral commitments
to values are articulated; thus, it is plausible - if not necessary - that
precisely the same values may be articulated and affirmed in two or
more distinct styles of moral reasoning, yet that these styles of
moral reasoning be oriented to incommensurable ideals and express
radically distinct attitudes to self, others and the world. 4 I take this
to be Nietzsche's point in Daybreak when he comments:
It goes without saying that I do not deny - unless I am a fool -

that many actions called immoral ought to be avoided and
resisted, or that many called moral ought to be done and encour-
aged - but I think that the one should be encouraged and the
other avoided for other reasons than hitherto.
(D 103)
At this juncture though we should recall that Nietzsche's critique of

Kant's appeal to a transcendent source of authority entails that
Nietzsche cannot legislate his preferred form of moral reasoning
without falling into the Rousseauian paradox which Kant's tran-
scendental argument acts to avoid. As Nietzsche recognised in
Daybreak, he can only recommend:
Only if mankind possessed a universally recognised goal would it

be possible to propose 'thus and thus is the right course of
action': for the present there exists no such goal. It is thus irra-
tional and trivial to impose the demands of morality upon
mankind. - To recommend a goal to mankind is something quite
different: the goal is then thought of as something which lies in
our own discretion; supposing the recommendation appealed to
mankind, it could in pursuit of it also impose upon itself a moral
law, likewise at its own discretion.
(D 108)
This is the third purpose of genealogy - to recommend a goal.

If this sketch of the purposes of genealogy is plausible - and no
doubt much remains to be demonstrated - we can grasp genealogy
as Nietzsche's response to what he takes to be the cultural crisis of
which Kant's answer to the question of enlightenment is precisely a
David Owen 11
symptom. For Nietzsche as a cultural physician, recognising the
impure (that is, interested) character of reason requires us to cut
deeper in order to diagnose and open the possibility of a cure for
our modern malaise. More enlightenment, not less, is required:
genealogy as enlightenment, in fact. This suspicion is supported by
Nietzsche's reflections on this topic in Daybreak in which he both
notes how various counter-enlightenment currents in German
philosophy have deepened the process of enlightenment and
affirms this development:
And strange: it is precisely the spirits the Germans so eloquently

conjured up which have in the long run most thwarted the inten-
tions of their conjurors - after appearing for a time as ancillaries
of the spirit of obscurantism and reaction, the study of history,
understanding of origins and evolutions, empathy for the past,
newly aroused passion for feeling and knowledge one day
assumed a new nature and now fly on the broadest wings above
and beyond their former conjurors as new and stronger genii of
that very Enlightenment against which they were first conjured up.
This Enlightenment we must now carry further forward: let us
not worry about the great revolution' and the great reaction'
I I
against it which have taken place - they are no more than the
sporting of waves in comparison with the truly great flood which
bears us along!
(D 197)5
Against the Kantian project of replacing one transcendent source of

authority with another, Nietzsche locates the movement of enlight-
enment as the rejection of any transcendent source of authority and
the critical interrogation of our values that this death of God'
I
makes possible. Enlightenment, for Nietzsche, is a heightening of

tension that brings distant targets in range and develops our capac-
ity to make judgements concerning which targets are worthy of our
arrows - and while he cannot legislate an ideal for us, he can seek
to recommend, to persuade, to cajole, to seduce.
GENEALOGY AND THE PROBLEM OF THE NOBLE IDEAL
The ideal which Nietzsche seeks to recommend to us is that of nobil-

ity (GM I 17). But what is the character of this ideal? And how does
Nietzsche seek to persuade us of the value of this value? Throughout
the three essays in On the Genealogy of Morality he provides hints as
to the character of nobility which are developed through a series of
contrasts oriented to persuading us of the value of this ideal, albeit
contrasts which are not always made explicit. To explicate the charac-
ter of this ideal and to draw out these contrasts I will focus on what
Nietzsche refers to as the 'problem of the noble ideal'.
This problem is stated in the penultimate section of the first essay,
where Nietzsche remarks apropos the French Revolution:
True, the most dreadful and unexpected thing happened in the

middle: the ancient ideal itself appeared bodily and with unheard-of
splendour before the eye and conscience of mankind, and once
again, stronger, simpler and more penetrating than ever, in answer
to the old, mendacious ressentiment slogan of priority for the majority,
of man's will to baseness, abasement, levelling, decline and decay,
there rang out the terrible and enchanting counter-slogan: priority of
the few! like a last signpost to the other path, Napoleon appeared as
a man more unique and late-born for his times than ever a man had
been before, and in him, the problem of the noble ideal itself was
made flesh - just think what a problem that is: Napoleon, this syn-
thesis of the inhuman (Unmensch) and the ouerhuman (iibermensch).
(GM I 16, translation adjusted)
It is notable that Nietzsche locates Napoleon as 'late-born', as the

highest exemplar of 'the ancient ideal' in whom the problem of this
ideal is made manifest most clearly. But what is the nature of this
problem? What is the sense of 'inhuman' and 'overhuman' at work
in this passage?
Five sections prior to his portrayal of Napoleon as the highest
exemplar of the ancient ideal, Nietzsche provides us with an account
of the ancient nobles which highlights the issue of the inhuman:
Here there is one point which we would be the last to deny:

anyone who came to know these' good men' as enemies came to
know nothing but 'evil enemies', the same people who are so
strongly held in check by custom, respect, habit, gratitude
and even more through spying on one another and through
peer-group jealousy, who, on the other hand, behave towards
one another by showing such resourcefulness in consideration,
self-control, delicacy, loyalty, pride and friendship - they are not
David Owen 13
much better than uncaged beasts of prey in the world outside
where the strange, the foreign, begin. There they enjoy freedom
from every social constraint, in the wilderness they compensate
for the tension which is caused by being closed in and fenced in
by the peace of the community for so long, they return to the
innocent conscience of the wild beast, as exultant monsters, who
perhaps go away having committed a hideous succession of
murder, arson, rape and torture, in a mood of bravado and spiri-
tual equilibrium as though they had simply played a student's
prank, convinced that the poets will now have something to sing
about and celebrate for quite some time. At the centre of all these
noble races we cannot fail to see the blond beast of prey, the
magnificent blond beast avidly prowling for spoil and victory; this
hidden centre needs release from time to time, the beast must out
again, must return to the wild.
(GM I 11)
No doubt, as Ridley remarks, Nietzsche's reference to 'the innocent

conscience of the wild beast' is disengenuous since, on Nietzsche's
own account, a conscience is precisely what a beast cannot have
(Ridley, 1996, pp. 3-4). However, this passage does indicate that, for
Nietzsche, the inhuman traits of the ancient noble which are given
expression outside of the walls of society and peace are integrally
related to the maintenance of their ethical conscience within the
walls of society and peace (which I take to be the referent of 'over-
human' on the grounds that Nietzsche tends to reserve the phrase
'all-too-human' for the practitioners of slave morality). To try to
clarify the nature of these aspects of Nietzsche's argument, we can
tum to the account of conscience which Nietzsche provides in the
second essay of the Genealogy.
Nietzsche's central concern in the second essay is to provide a
naturalistic account of how human beings characterised by the
capacity to make promises, beings with a conscience, have emerged
from the animal state. He argues that a capacity for promising
entails the cultivation of memory
so that a world of strange new things, circumstances and even

acts of will may be placed quite safely in between the original 'I
will', 'I shall do' and the actual discharge of the will, its act,
without breaking this long chain of the will.
(GM II 1)
The preconditions of this development of a memory of the will
include the following:
In order to have that degree of control over the future, man must
first have learnt to distinguish between what happens by accident
and what happens by design, to think causally, to view the future
as the present and anticipate it, to grasp with certainty what is the
end and what is the means, in all, to be able to calculate, compute -
and before he can do this, man himself will really have to become
reliable, regular, calculable, even in his own self-image, so that he,
as someone making a promise is answerable for his own future!
(GM IT 1, translation adjusted)
How do these preconditions come about? There are two aspects to

this question. First, how does man become a being characterised by
reliance on consciousness? Second, how does man become regular
and calculable?
Nietzsche offers the following initial hypothesis:
I look on bad conscience as a serious illness to which man was

forced to succumb by the pressure of the most fundamental of
all changes which he experienced - that change whereby he finally
found himself imprisoned within the walls of society and peace.
(GM IT 16)
On the one hand, unable to act on the basis of instincts attuned to

pre-social existence, this enclosure entails that
these poor things were reduced to relying on thing, inference,

calculation, and the connecting of cause with effect, that is, to rely
on their consciousness', that most impoverished and error-prone
I
organ!
(GM IT 16)
On the other hand, the means by which the expression of instincts

are blocked (and the fallibility of consciousness is compensated for) is
the imposition of custom. As Nietzsche had remarked in Daybreak:
First proposition of dvilisation. - Among barbarous peoples there

exists a species of customs whose purpose appears to be custom in
general: minute and fundamentally superfluous stipulations ...
David Owen 15
which, however, keep continually in the consciousness the constant
proximity of custom, the perpetual compulsion to practise customs:
so as to strengthen the mighty proposition with which civilisation
begins: any custom is better than no custom.
(DI6)
The product of this enclosure within society and peace, and the
concomitant regulation of behaviour in minute detail through
customs backed by sanctions - a mnemonics of pain (GM IT 3) -
has the following effects:
All instincts which are not discharged outwardly turn inwards -

this is what I call the internalization of man: with it there now
evolves in man what will later be called his 'soul'. The whole
inner world, originally stretched thinly as though between two
layers of skin, was expanded and extended itself and gained
depth, breadth and height in proportion to the degree that the
external discharge of man's instincts was obstructed. Those terri-
ble bulwarks with which the state organizations protected them-
selves against the old instincts of freedom - punishments are a
primary instance of this kind of bulwark - had the result that all
those instincts of the wild, free, roving man were turned back-
wards, against man himself. Animosity, cruelty, the pleasure of
pursuing, raiding, changing and destroying - all this was pitted
against the person who had such instincts: that is the origin of
'bad conscience'. Lacking external enemies and obstacles, and
forced into the oppressive narrowness and conformity of
custom, man impatiently ripped himself apart, persecuted
himself, gnawed at himself, gave himself no peace and abused
himself, this animal who battered himself on the bars of his cage
and who is supposed to be 'tamed' ... this fool, this prisoner con-
sumed with longing and despair, became the inventor of 'bad
conscience' .
(GM IT 16)
Bad conscience is, thus, the necessary cost of social existence6 - but
how does this enclosure within the walls of society and peace come
about? Nietzsche's hypothesis is that states are formed by 'some
pack of blond beasts of prey, a conqueror and master race, which
organized on a war footing and with the power to organize,
unscrupulously lays its dreadful paws on a populace which ... is
still shapeless and shifting' (GM II 17). He continues by claiming
that these 'involuntary, unconscious artists'
are not the ones in whom 'bad conscience' grew; that is obvious -
but it would not have grown without them, this ugly growth would
not be there if a huge amount of freedom had not been driven from
the world ... made latent by the pressure of their hammer blows
and artists' violence. This instinct for freedom, forcibly made latent ...
that, and that alone, is bad conscience in its beginnings.
(GM II 17)
At this juncture, we encounter certain difficulties in Nietzsche's

account which require clarification.7Thus, the description in section
11 of the first essay of the ancient nobles as 'uncaged beasts of prey'
enjoying release from 'social constraints', as 'blond beasts' compen-
sating themselves for the 'tension' engendered by enclosure within
'the peace of community', both refers us to Nietzsche's hypothesis
of state-formation in the second essay and entails that these 'uncon-
scious artists' are already themselves subject to bad conscience.
Indeed this is required by the very possibility of such state-forming
activity; as Ridley notes:
What capacities must someone have if he is to impose a custom

on others? Power, obviously enough - the power to back up the
imposition. But also, evidently, the capacity to make promises:
the basic form of imposing a custom, after all, must be 'Do this, or
else ... ' (a threat, a promise). And this means that the imposer of
customs must himself have a memory of the will and have
become calculable, which means in tum that he must have been
subjected to custom and punishment.
(1996, p. 3)
What is of interest here is not the almost inevitable circularity which

attends any account of the origins of society - but rather why
Nietzsche seeks paradoxically to exempt the noble from bad con-
science in the second essay just as he seeks to offer the paradoxical
notion of' the innocent conscience of the wild beast' in the first essay.
A convincing explanation of this account is provided by Ridley in
terms of Nietzsche's use of the notion of 'bad conscience' in two
senses. On the one hand, bad conscience in its raw state as 'the inte-
riorized self engendered by repression' (Ridley, 1996, p. 8) is formless
David Owen 17
and not tied to any ethical system, be it noble or slave. Thus Ridley
(p. 6) notes that Nietzsche distinguishes between bad conscience
and the moralisation of bad conscience (GM IT 21) and, relatedly,
between guilt 'as a piece of animal psychology, no more' in its 'raw
state' and the moralised concept of guilt developed by the priest
(GM III 20). Indeed, Nietzsche refers to bad conscience in this
formless state as being the 'true womb of all ideal and imaginative
events' (GM IT 18). While bad conscience involves the repression of
instincts to some degree, Nietzsche comments:
Let us immediately add that ... the prospect of an animal soul

turning against itself ... was something so new, profound, unheard-
of, puzzling, contradictory and momentous on earth that the whole
character of the world changed in an essential way. Indeed, a
divine audience was needed to appreciate the spectacle which
began then ... Since that time, man has been included among the
most unexpected and exciting throws of dice played by Heraclitus'
'great child', call him Zeus or fate ... as though man were not an
end but just a path, an episode, a bridge, a great promise.
(GM I 16)
On the other hand, bad conscience in its slave-moralised state -

bad-(bad) conscience can be contrasted with good-(bad) conscience
in its noble-moralised state. Although this contrast is not drawn
explicitly in the Genealogy, the cogency of Ridley's claim that there is
such a distinction is supported by contrasting the passage cited
above with Nietzsche's reference to
the Greek gods, these reflections of noble and proud men in

whom the animal in man felt deified, did not tear itself apart and
did not rage against itself! These Greeks, for most of the time,
used their gods expressly to keep 'bad conscience' at bay so that
they could carry on enjoying their freedom of soul.
(GM IT 23)
Setting aside, for the moment, Nietzsche's repetition of the bestial

motif, what is significant about this passage is that if, as Nietzsche
argues, bad conscience is the womb of ideal and imaginative pheno-
mena such as the gods, the 'divine audience', it makes no sense to
refer to the Greeks using their gods to ward off bad conscience unless
we invoke Ridley's distinction between formless bad conscience on
one hand, and good and bad forms of bad conscience on the other
hand. This point is further supported by the fact that Nietzsche explic-
itly introduces the idea of good conscience in his work after the
Genealogy; thus, for example, in The Anti-Christ he writes of the Jewish
state in the period of the Kingdom:
Their Yaweh was the expression of their consciousness of power, of

delight in themselves, their hopes of themselves: in him they anti-
cipated victory and salvation, with him they trusted that nature
would provide what the people needed - above all rain. Yaweh is
the God of Israel and consequently the God of justice: the logic of
every nation which is in power and has a good conscience about it.
(AC25)
Apart from providing support for Ridley's argument, this passage

also offers some significant hints, consonant with the Genealogy,
concerning the way in which raw bad conscience is moralised into
good and bad·forms by highlighting the issue of 'consciousness of
power'. Thus Nietzsche specifies the transformation of Jewish con-
science from good(-bad) conscience to bad(-bad) conscience in
terms of the loss of their consciousness of power which attends the
failure of the Kingdom in the face of 'anarchy within, the Assyrian
from without' (AC 25). In the Genealogy, Nietzsche deploys a closely
related argument with respect to noble and slave classes within a
society by construing the noble moralisation of bad conscience -
good(-bad) conscience - in terms of the consciousness of power
(pathos of distance) expressed as self-affirmation and the slave moral-
isation of bad conscience - bad(-bad) conscience - in terms of the
consciousness of the lack of power expressed as ressentiment.
The initial point which I want to draw out of this discussion is that
Nietzsche's desire to exempt the noble from bad conscience -
through appeals to paradoxical juxtapositions such as that of con-
science and beast - can be understood in terms of an oscillation
between the two senses of bad conscience in his argument. However
we can understand the reasons for this oscillation by noticing that
although the formless bad conscience and formed bad conscience
(whether good or bad) are logically and psychologically distinct con-
cepts, they are intimately related practically. To clarify this claim, let
us recall two points. First, Nietzsche argues that the depth and
breadth of the interiorised self is a matter of the degree to which
instincts are repressed and, thereby, tum inwards. In other words,
David Owen 19
the degree to which bad conscience in its raw state is produced is a
function of the degree to which the expression of 'the old instincts of
freedom' is repressed. Second, Nietzsche directly relates the degree
of instinctual repression to the degree of subjection to enclosure
within the walls of society and peace which is, for the most part,S a
product of positioning within a social hierarchy and thus related to
the degree of subjection to social oppression (consciousness of
power or its lack). In this context, that the raw bad conscience of the
nobility is moralised in terms of a form of (noble) morality which
expresses itself as good(-bad) conscience is integrally related not
only to the pathos of distance that attends their position within the
walls of society and peace but also to the fact that they can compen-
sate for such enclosure by expressing 'the old instincts of freedom'
outside society. Thus, the way in which raw bad conscience
is moralised is interwoven practically with the degree of raw bad
conscience to which human beings are subject.
The significance of this point for Nietzsche's project emerges when
we note the following fact. On Nietzsche's account, the conditions of
emergence and maintenance of noble morality are predicated on both
intra-social relations of domination (over the slave) expressed through
a social order of rank, and extra-social expressions of 'the old instincts
for freedom' as a will to domination (with respect to the stranger).
Thus, Nietzsche describes noble morality in terms of an affirmation of
the relationship between self and world predicated on the pathos of
distance which attends the social order of rank in which the word
'good' simply refers to the capacities and traits exhibited by the
nobles. This pathos of social distance is the condition of possibility of the
pathos of inner distance whereby human beings are driven to engage
in the activity of self-overcoming oriented to the noble ideal (BGE
257). However, this pathos of distance requires both intra-social relations
of domination (a social order of rank) and extra-social expressions of a
will to domination (the establishment and security of the polity) if it is
to be produced and maintained. This point has considerable implica-
tions for the nature of this style of ethical reasoning in that, on
Nietzsche's account, the capacities and traits which are exhibited and
valued by the nobles are those which produce and sustain their con-
sciousness of power. Consequently, alongside, and non-contingently
tied to, the self-affirmation and self-overcoming of the noble qua the
overhuman, that is, 'resourcefulness in consideration, self-control, del-
icacy, loyalty, pride and friendship' (GM I 11), is the self-affirmation
and self-overcoming of the noble qua the inhuman, that is, cruelty
(GM II 6) and barbarity (GM I 11). Thus, the problem of the noble
ideal: the synthesis of the overhuman - honesty, courage, magna-
nimity, politeness (D 556) - and the inhuman - murder, arson, rape
and torture (GM I 11).
Now what is notable about readings of Nietzsche's politics as an
aristocratic politics of domination - for example, Ansell Pearson (1991)
and, more subtly, Warren (1988) - is that while they can certainly
adduce evidence to support the claim that Nietzsche did, on occasion,
argue for such a politics (for example, BGE 257-9), they cannot
account for why, this being the case, he should identify the noble
ideal as a problem. Rather this characterisation of the noble ideal
seems to intimate a different politics in which the overhuman is no
longer tied to the inhuman, that is, a politics in which the conscious-
ness of power and pathos of distance requisite to nobility does not
require domination - a reading intimated by Thus Spoke Zarathustra as
well as other scattered passages, such as section 337 of The Gay Science.
It is this more generous reading which the remainder of this essay will
seek to pursue, by focusing on how it is possible for Nietzsche to
envisage the diremption of the overhuman and the inhuman. In
order to take up this task, it is appropriate to begin by returning to the
issue of bad conscience, morality and the pathos of distance.
The different degrees of repression to which nobles and slaves
are subject have two consequences to which Nietzsche draws our
attention. The first feature to which Nietzsche directs us is that pre-
cisely because the slave is more deeply repressed, '[a] race of such
men of ressentiment will inevitably end up cleverer than any noble
race, and will respect cleverness to a quite different degree as well:
namely, as a condition of existence of the first rank' (GM I 10). It is
in this respect that Nietzsche comments that 'The history of
mankind would be far too stupid a thing if it had not had the intel-
lect [Geist] of the powerless injected into it' (GM I 7). The initial
significance of this cleverness emerges with respect to the second
issue of importance, namely, the slave revolt in morality. In contrast
to the noble's consciousness of power which emerges from the
pathos of distance which attends the social order of rank, the slave
is characterised by a consciousness of lack of power which is
expressed as ressentiment. The need to make sense of their suffering
as a class, on Nietzsche's account, drives the slaves both to reject
the noble style of valuation in which the slave is figured as lacking
value (GM I 10) and to identify the nobles as the evil agents of
their suffering (GM I 13) - a move which requires the radical
David Owen 21
separation of agent and act which raw bad conscience makes poss-
ible. The cleverness of the slave is given expression in the creative
moment of ressentiment which says 'no' to the hostile, external
world and fabricates the idea of the freely choosing subject to allow
the slave to engage in self-affirmation, albeit of a reactive type
(GM I 10). It is precisely through the fiction of the freely choosing
subject that the impotence of the slave can generate 'that sublime
self-deception' which construes 'weakness itself as freedom, and
their particular mode of existence as an accomplishmenf (GM I 13)
and which simultaneously allows the construal of the noble as evil
(the claim that Nietzsche mocks in the parable of the lamb and
beasts of prey). The point I want to stress here is that the 'imagi-
nary revenge' through which the slave compensates for 'being
denied the proper response of action' (GM I 10) involves a pathos
of imaginary distance, a reactive consciousness of power predicated
on an imaginary inversion of the social order of rank in which the
highest virtues are those of 'choosing' weakness (that is, humility,
patience, pity, obedience, and so on - the attributes which charac-
terise the slave) and the lowest virtues are those of 'choosing'
strength (that is, cruelty, murder, and so on - the attributes which
characterise the noble, particularly from the slave's perspective).
The importance of this point for the purposes of this chapter
becomes clear with the movement from the slave revolt in morals to
the construction of the ascetic ideal in Nietzsche's account. 9
The relevant feature of this movement is the development of a
transcendental notion of the freely choosing subject in which the
slave's devaluation of the hostile external world is heightened and
secured through the construction of the distinction between real
and apparent worlds. The imaginary inversion of the social order of
rank is constituted as revealed metaphysical truth - 'the first shall
be last and the last shall be first'. However, while this priestly move
secures the reactive self-affirmation of the slave, it makes possible a
further development which resolves a problem raised by the slave
revolt in morals. The problem is that a mass characterised by ressen-
timent is unstable, facing 'the ever-present threat of the disintegra-
tion of the herd' (GM III 15). This instability is the result of
ressentiment itself in the context of the slave's experience of life as
suffering:
For every sufferer instinctively looks for a cause of his distress;

more exactly, for a culprit, even more precisely for a guilty culprit
who is receptive to distress - in short, for a living being upon
whom he can release his emotions, actually or in effigy, on some
pretext or other: because the release of emotions is the greatest
attempt at relief, or should I say, at anaesthetizing on the part of
the sufferer, his longed-for narcotic against pain of any kind. In
my judgement, we find here the actual physiological causation of
ressentiment, revenge and their ilk, in a yearning, then, to anaes-
thetize pain through emotion ... The sufferers, one and all, are
frighteningly willing and inventive in their pretexts for painful
emotions ... they make evil-doers out of friend, wife, child and
anyone else near to them.
(GM III 15)
Ressentiment threatens sociality as such. It is to this problem that the

priest's transcendental move provides a solution. The separation of
soul and flesh, mind and body, rational will and empirical desires,
allows the priest to redirect ressentiment:
'I suffer, someone or other must be guilty' and every sick sheep
thinks the same. But his shepherd, the ascetic priest, says to him,
'Quite right, my sheep! Somebody must be to blame: but you
yourself are this somebody, you yourself alone are to blame for it,
you yourself alone are to blame for yourself ... That is bold enough,
wrong enough: but at least one thing has been achieved by it, the
direction of ressentiment is, as I said - changed.
(GM III 15)
The priest exploits 'the bad instincts of all sufferers for the
purpose of self-discipline, self-surveillance and self-overcoming'
(GM III 16). Why is this important? The cost is clear - a more
thorough-going and radical devaluation of this-worldly existence.
But this redirecting of ressentiment has two fundamental implica-
tions for the possibility of a nobility in which the overhuman is not
tied to the inhuman.
The first implication is that the redirecting of ressentiment divorces
the pathos of distance from any necessary relation to the social order
of rank. Thus, while the original creative thrust of ressentiment is
expressed through an imaginary inversion of the social order of
rank, the consciousness of power which is manifest as 'self-
discipline, self-surveillance and self-overcoming' is articulated
through a pathos of metaphysical distance in which the opposition of
David Owen 23
spirit to flesh, mind to body, rational will to empirical desires is
given hierarchical and imperative form. What is crucial about this
development is that it involves an ethical relationship of the self to
itself which is not mediated through forms of social domination.
The significance of this development is twofold. On the one hand, it
raises the logical possibility of a form of noble morality in which the
consciousness of power is similarly not predicated on relations of
social domination. On the other hand, it cultivates the capacities - if
not the disposition - requisite to this possibility.
The second implication is that the valuing of cleverness as 'a con-
dition of existence of the first rank' (GM I 10) is given specific
focus and direction as a will to truth oriented to the ascetic ideal. In
other words, the Socratic maxim that man sins only through ignor-
ance drives the production of truth through which one governs
how one acts on oneself, others and the world: the will to truth as
unconditioned existential imperative. Unsurprisingly, this has the
effect of cultivating truthfulness and it is this truthfulness which
acts as the dynamic for the overcoming of the ascetic ideal:
In this way, Christianity as a dogma was destroyed by its own

morality, in the same way Christianity as a morality must also be
destroyed - we stand on the threshold of this occurrence. Mter
Christian truthfulness has drawn one conclusion after another, it
will finally draw the strongest conclusion, that against itself; this
will, however, happen when it asks itself, 'What does all will to
truth mean?'
(GM ill 27)
Nietzsche's relationship to this question in the first four books of

The Gay Science (for example, GS 107-11) and at least some sections
of Beyond Good and Evil (for example, BGE 4, 24, 34) is illustrated by
the fifth stage in his account of the history of metaphysical
realism:
The 'real world' - an idea no longer of any use, not even a duty
any longer - an idea grown useless, superfluous, consequently a
refuted idea: let us abolish it.
(TI 'How the "Real World" at last became a myth' 5)
The conclusion which Nietzsche draws, at this juncture, is not per-

spectivism but rather epistemic relativism, that is, the claim that all
truths are illusions. The argument may be taken as running like
this:
1. There are no transcendental standards of rationality.

2. Truth is only possible on the basis of transcendental standards
of rationality.
3. There is no truth.
Although there is a logical problem with the minor premise of this

argument, Nietzsche's position is - as he comes to recognise - an
exemplary instance of the psychological effects of overcoming the
ascetic ideal, of feeling unheimlich as it were. However, the same
commitment to truthfulness drives Nietzsche to overcome the inco-
herence of this position in the sixth and final stage of his genealogy
of the real world':
I
We have abolished the real world: what world is left? The apparent
world perhaps? ... But no! with the real world we have also abolished the
apparent world!
(TJ 'How the "Real World" at last became a myth' 6)
With the recognition that the critique of the idea of truth as meta-
physical reality also involves the critique of the idea of illusion as
metaphysical non-reality, Nietzsche moves from epistemic relativism
to perspectivism (as sketched in the opening section of this essay).
Now what is vital about this development for Nietzsche's account is
that the process described here can be grasped as the transformation
of bad(-bad) intellectual conscience in its epistemic aspect into good
(-bad) intellectual conscience through the agency of truthfulness.
However, just as this process entails the overcoming of the claim that
either there is a metaphysical realm of truth or all is illusion, so too
this transformation of intellectual conscience in its ethical aspect
involves overcoming the opposition that either there is a metaphysical
order of moral values or everything is permitted. The epistemic doc-
trine of perspectivism has its ethical correlate in the idea of value-plu-
ralism and both manifest an immanent commitment to Nietzsche's
conception of maturity as self-government in terms of the
autonomous use and development of our capacities for judgement.
We are now in a position to see both how Nietzsche seeks to over-
come the problem of the noble ideal and what kind of ideal he is
recommending to us. The first of these issues can be grasped in
David Owen 25
terms of Nietzsche's deployment of an opposition between the
figures of the Overman (as maturity) and the Last Man (as immatur-
ity). In the same way that the opposition between the purity of the
soul and the corruption of the flesh constructs inner distance - 'that
other, more mysterious pathos ... that longing for an ever-increasing
widening of distance within the soul itself' (BGE 257) - on the basis
of a pathos of metaphysical distance, so too the opposition between
the Overman and the Last Man - as potentialities within the modem
individual - constructs inner distance on the basis of a pathos of
enlightened distance. We can grasp the character of this pathos of
enlightened distance and take up the second issue with which we
are concerned - the character of the ideal Nietzsche recommends -
by fleshing out the figures of the Overman and the Last Man.
The Overman is characterised by two main features: self-
affirmation disclosed as the disposition of amor fati (GS 276; EH
'Why I am so clever' 10) and self-government which manifests as
'having in our power our "pros" and "cons'" (GM ill 12). The features
are interwoven in that the degree to which one governs oneself is
the degree to which one has that consciousness of power requisite
to the disposition of amor fati. This connection is exhibited in
Nietzsche's description of the sovereign individual:
a man with his own, independent, durable will, who has the right
[Macht] to make a promise - and has a proud consciousness quivering
in every muscle of what he has finally achieved and incorporated,
an actual awareness of power and freedom, a feeling that man in
general has reached completion ... who gives his word as some-
thing which can be relied on, because he is strong enough to
remain upright in the face of mishap or even 'in the face of fate' ...
The proud realization of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility,
the awareness of this rare freedom and power over himself and his
destiny, has penetrated him to the depths and become an instinct,
his dominant instinct ... this sovereign man calls it his conscience.
(GM II 2)
What, then, of the contrasting figure - the Last Man? In Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, Nietzsche describes the Last Man in terms of the com-
fortable pleasures of living without ideals (Z Prologue 5). A neat
characterisation of this figure is provided by Mommsen's descrip-
tion of Max Weber's specification of the Last Man in terms of an
ethic of adaptability as human beings 'who no longer strive for
goals which lie beyond their intellectual horizon, which is in any
case likely to be exclusively defined by their most immediate mater-
ial needs' (1974, p. 20). Although the Last Man represents a coherent
response to the overcoming of the ascetic ideal, Nietzsche's claim is
that this figure inspires contempt and provokes nausea and pity
(that is, nihilism - the will to the self-annihiliation of humanity) if,
and only if we are committed to ideals - or, more specifically, to the
ideal of self-government - because the Last Man expresses an
absolute negation of self-overcoming:
You want if possible - and there is no madder 'if possible' - to

abolish suffering ... Well-being as you understand it - that is no goal,
that seems to us an end! A state which renders man ludicrous and
contemptible - which makes it desirable that he should perish!
(BGE 225)10
Thus Nietzsche's portrayal of the contrast between the Overman

and the Last Man can be seen as a portrayal of figures which, given a
commitment to the enlightenment ideal of self-government, inspire rever-
ence and contempt respectively - and, thus, constructs a pathos of
enlightened distance.
The kind of morality which emerges from this pathos of distance is
specifiable in terms of four axes. First, a commitment to those values
which are integral to self-government such as honesty and courage.
Second, a commitment to those values which cultivate affirmative
self-overcoming such as agonism. Third, a valuing of those values
which express self-affirmation such as the bestowing virtue (which
Nietzsche also refers to as 'squandering').ll Fourth, a commitment to
those values which secure the condition of this ethical form of life
such as publicity, loyalty, friendship and equal respect (which does
not mean equal regard, but rather the mutual recognition of all
modem persons as possessing the potential for self-government and
as possessing dignity simply in this respect - note that since it is logic-
ally the case that this potential can be taken up at any point in the
course of a life, such dignity is inherent in all persons).
However, as has been pointed out in this discussion, to get off the
ground this noble ethics requires a commitment to the ideal of self-
government and the recognition of this point returns us to the
second question posed at the start of this essay, namely, given that
Nietzsche's critique of metaphysical realism entails that he cannot
legislate this ideal for us, how does he recommend it to us? Recall
David Owen 27
the comments from the preface to Beyond Good and Evil cited at the
beginning of the first section of this essay in which Nietzsche -
speaking to fellow free spirits (the seduction of feeling oneself to be
an equal, a colleague - even a friend) - characterises the overcoming
of metaphysical realism in terms of 'the struggle against Plato'; no
doubt for such free spirits, this active characterisation is appropriate.
However, in the third essay of On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche
offers a different description:
All great things bring about their own demise through an act of
self-sublimation: that is the law of life, the law of necessary 'self-
overcoming' in the essence of life - the lawgiver himself is always
ultimately exposed to the cry: 'patere tegem, quam ipse tulisti'
[,Submit to the law you have yourself made'].
(GM ill 27)
In this presentation of the overcoming of metaphysical realism as the

self-overcoming of the ascetic ideal, Nietzsche situates the reader
within a process in which they are necessarily implicated by the
defining feature of modem persons, of persons whose lineage is char-
acterised by the rule of the ascetic ideal: truthfulness (d. BGE 227). In
so far as Nietzsche can persuade us of our commitment to this ideal-
and who is likely to resist this appeal to our vanity, even if it requires
a certain amount of self-deception - then he has a basis, the perspec-
tive of an idealist, from which to seduce us into the experience of
nausea and pity at the sight of the figure of the Last Man and, con-
comitantly, to relieve us from this experience through the disclosure
of the figure of the Overman. In this respect, it does not matter that
our commitment to self-government may emerge from vain self-
deception; all that matters is that we are impelled by our horror at
the figure of the Last Man (a horror whose depth may disclose a
secret and fearful recognition of significant features of ourselves) to
engage in ethical activity oriented to the telos of the Overman.12
CONCLUSION
In this essay I have tried to show both that Nietzsche can be under-
stood as a thinker committed to the enlightenment ideal of maturity
as self-government and that, interpreted fairly, we can grasp him
as articulating the possibility of a noble ethics in which mutual
28 Enlightenment and the Problem o/Noble Ethics
recognition, honesty, loyalty, magnanimity and, even, courtesy are
freed from the connection to domination characteristic of the earlier
forms of such an ethics. Approached in this way, I think, Nietzsche
offers us a generous vision of human relations in which his own
frequent explosions of ressentiment are redeemed.
Notes
1. This essay is both a continuation and critique of arguments devel-

oped in Owen (1995). Unquestionably the spur to the latter has been
a series of pub conversations with Aaron Ridley with respect to his
own current work on Nietzsche (see his Nietzsche's Conscience (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, forthcoming», and I am grateful to
Aaron for his provocation. I would also like to thank John Lippitt for
his helpful suggestions. For sigla used in my citations, see the Refer-
ence Key to Nietzsche's Texts on p. xii.
2. What is presented in these comments as a struggle against metaphys-
ical realism and its expression in the ascetic ideal, as a struggle
against 'standing truth on her head and denying perspective itself
(BGE Preface), is presented in the third essay of On the Genealogy of
Morality as the self-overcoming of the ascetic ideal in which a less
active register of engagement is manifest. In that essay, Nietzsche
situates modern individuals as subject to a logical unfolding of
events which appears to have the character of necessity. I will return
to the significance of this issue towards the end of this essay.
3. I have addressed Nietzsche's relationship to the question of enlighten-
ment as fonnulated by Kant in a slightly different way in Owen (1994).
4. This is a point often missed by uncharitable commentators who fail to
take note of Nietzsche's comments on mercy (GM II to), loving one's
enemies (GM I to) and respect and gratitude (GM I 11), to mention
but a few examples brought to my attention by Aaron Ridley.
5. Incidentally, an indispensable aid to reflecting on the debates around
the question of enlightenment in Gennan philosophy is provided by
Schmidt (19%).
6. See Conway (1992) for an illuminating discussion of this point.
7. It should be noted that my own previous discussion of this issue in
Owen (1995) remained somewhat confused. I am grateful to Aaron
Ridley for clarifying this issue to me.
8. The relevant exception is the figure of the priest.
9. I do not have the space to sketch the character of this move here, but
suffice to say that it seems a psychologically necessary one for the
slave in order to account for the general, and not just noble-specific,
experience of life as suffering.
10. I am grateful to Aaron Ridley for making this point clear to me.
11. For an excellent discussion of this topic, see Coker (1994).
David Owen 29
12. What is the relationship of these seductive stategies in On the
Genealogy oj Morality and Beyond Good and Evil? It seems that the per-
suasive technique deployed in the Genealogy is both more general
and prior to that utilised in Beyond Good and Evil, in that the latter
relies on readers already recognising themselves - however self-
deceptively - as satisfying the condition of the commitment to ideals
of the free spirits and appeals to them as equals, as co-workers in a
project - overcoming the ascetic ideal as soon as possible - which
they actively seek to accomplish.
Bibliography
Ansell Pearson, K. (1991) Nietzsche contra Rnusseau (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press).
Clark, M. (1990) Nietzsche on Truth and Philosaphy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press).
Coker, J. (1994) 'On the Bestowing Virtue', Journal oj Nietzsche Studies, vol. 8,
pp.5-32.
Conway, D. (1992) 'Nietzsche, Heidegger and the Origins of Nihilism',
Journal oJNietzsche Studies, vol. 3, pp. 11-44.
Kant, I. (1991) Political Writings (2nd enlarged edition), ed. Hans Reiss,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.)
Mommsen, W. (1974) The Age oj Bureaucracy (London: Routledge).
Nietzsche, F. (1961) Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale
(Harmondsworth: Penguin).
Nietzsche, F. (1968a) The Anti-Christ in Twilight oj the IdolsfThe Anti-Christ,
trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
Nietzsche, F. (1968b) Twilight oj the Idols in Twilight oj the IdolsfThe Anti-
Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
Nietzsche, F. (1973) Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale
Nietzsche, F. (1982) Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press).
Nietzsche, F. (1994a) On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson,
trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Nietzsche, F. (1994b) 'Homer on Competition' in On the Genealogy oj
Morality, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press).
Owen, D. (1994) Maturity and Modernity (London: Routledge).
Owen, D. (1995) Nietzsche, Politics and Modernity (London: Sage).
Ridley, A. (1996) 'Nietzsche's Conscience', Journal of Nietzsche Studies, vol. 11,
pp.1-12.
Schmidt, J. (ed.) (1996) What is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth Century Answers
and Twentieth Century Questions (Berkeley: University of California Press).
Warren, M. (1988) Nietzsche and Political Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press).
2
Annunciation and Rebirth:
The Prefaces of 1886
Daniel W Conway
So that I might neglect nothing on my part to ease your access to

my cave - that is, to my philosophy - I will ask my Leipzig pub-
lisher to forward to you my earlier writings en bloc. I recommend
especially that you read their new prefaces (they are almost all
newly collected). Read one after the other, these prefaces may
perhaps shed light on me, assuming that I, obscurissimus obscuro-
rum virorum [most obscure of obscure men], am not obscure an
sich (obscure in and for myself) ... This may certainly be pOSSible.
(Letter to Georg Brandes, 2 December 18871)
Even in a wound there is the power to heal. A maxim, the origin

of which I withhold from scholarly curiosity, has long been my
motto: Increscunt animi, virescit volnere virtus [the spirit grows,
strength is restored by wounding.]
(TI Preface2)
In August 1886, Nietzsche turned to the task of drafting a new

preface for a forthcoming new edition of The Birth of Tragedy. In the
final section of this preface, he pauses to take issue with a book that
has recently caused him significant distress. He judges the book in
question to be 'badly written, ponderous, embarrassing, image-mad
and image-confused, sentimental, in places saccharine to the point
of effeminacy' (ASC 3), and he rebukes its author for' conceal[ing]
himself ... under the scholar's hood, under the gravity and dialect-
ical ill humor of the German, even under the bad manners of the
Wagnerian' (ASC 3). Concluding his review of this 'arrogant and
rhapsodic book' (ASC 3), Nietzsche directly addresses himself to its
confused author:
30
Daniel W. Conway 31
But my dear sir, what in the world is romantic if your book is not?
Can deep hatred against 'the Now,' against 'reality' and 'modem
ideas' be pushed further than you pushed it in your artists' meta-
physics? ... Isn't this the typical creed of the romantic of 1830,
masked by the pessimism of 1850? Even the usual romantic finale
is sounded - break, breakdown, return and collapse before an old
faith, before the old God.
(ASC 7)
The offending author of this romantic screed is neither Wagner,

nor Wilamowitz-Mollendorff, nor Ree, nor any of the other usual
suspects. The target of Nietzsche's vitriolic 'review' is one Herr
Nietzsche, and the book in question is none other than his beloved
'first-born', The Birth of Tragedy (1872). His 1886 preface to this book
bears the title' Attempt at a Self-Criticism'.
What are we to make of this extraordinary exercise in self-
criticism? Ostensibly intended to attract a new audience for a new
edition of The Birth of Tragedy, this preface would seem more likely
to have the opposite effect on unsuspecting readers. Especially in
light of Nietzsche's stinging criticism of The Birth of Tragedy, why
should anyone now want to read this 'flawed' and' dated' book?
Why might he expect prospective readers to be attracted, rather
than repulsed, by this seemingly perverse exercise in self-criticism?
Does this 'Attempt at a Self-Criticism' not simply confirm the
popular reception of his book as an oleaginous, anti-philological
paean to Wagner?
But perhaps we should ask instead after those readers who are
not deterred by Nietzsche's bizarre attempt at self-criticism, those
who are in fact attracted by the wit and severity that he dispenses at
his own expense. To such readers, the appearance of this retrospec-
tive preface announces an important development in his thought.
His newly reconceived philosophical project now involves, and
indeed requires, a re-evaluation of his extant books, and he cannot
rely on lesser critics to deliver the sort of unflinching appraisal he
can now withstand. He has outgrown the petty proprietary skir-
mishes that followed the publication of The Birth of Tragedy, as well
as the loyal- if uncritical- readership he has enjoyed thus far. That
he can now criticise his earlier works is at least as important as why
he does so, for the self-inflicted violence of this preface attests both
to the health of its author and to his expanded ambitions.
32 The Prefaces of 1886
The new preface to The Birth of Tragedy is not an isolated instance
of intellectual probity on Nietzsche's part. In 1886 alone, he penned
new prefaces for The Birth of Tragedy, Daybreak, Parts I and II of
Human, All Too Human, and The Gay Science, to which he also added
a fifth book and an appendix of songs.3 This flurry of creative activ-
ity signals the commencement of a carefully designed reclamation
project: by means of these new prefaces, Nietzsche publicly
attempts to appropriate his pre-Zarathustran books for his recon-
ceived philosophical project.4
This reclamation project serves an undeniably political agenda.
Having reconceived and expanded his philosophical project, he
would like to have a second chance to mould an informed reader-
ship, a task to which he now lends a heavy editorial hand.
Dissatisfied with his reception thus far, he deploys the 1886 pref-
aces to school prospective readers in the obscure art of reading his
books - not as isolated events, but as moments within a gathering,
unified, world-historical project. No longer content to rely solely on
accidents of chance to produce an informed readership, he crafts
the 1886 prefaces for a reader who not only appreciates these
books individually, but also aspires to take the measure of their
polytropaic author.
Nietzsche's ultimate goal in cultivating this new readership is to
present himself as a sign of one possible future for humankind as a
whole.s In order to convey this vision of the future, however, he must
supplement his familiar 'sayings' with an array of unfamiliar 'show-
ings', or performances. He must therefore demonstrate, and not
merely promise, that a squandering of our residual vitality might con-
tribute to an alternative future for humankind. Towards this end, he
recommends his regimen of reclamation and self-criticism as a
neglected, unexplored means of unleashing the generative faculties
of the human soul. He consequently 'invites' his readers to witness
the greatest proof of his procreative powers: his own, self-orchestrated
rebirth. The retrospective prefaces of 1886 thus announce Nietzsche's
'daybreak' (D Preface 1), which he submits as a model- writ small-
for the possible regeneration of humankind as a whole.
THE RECLAMATION PROJECT OF 1886
One obvious aim of Nietzsche's reclamation project is to encourage

his readers to chart the development of his thought. The reclamation
Daniel W. Conway 33
project announced in the 1886 prefaces is possible, that is, only
because he has matured as a philosopher. These prefaces conse-
quently afford the reader a glimpse not only of the 'old' Nietzsche
through 'new' lenses, but of a 'new' Nietzsche as well.
In addition to the (limited) exegesis the 1886 prefaces provide of
the pre-Zarathustran works they reclaim, they also contribute a
significant amount of eisegesis. For example, they introduce novel
insights, vocabularies, and strategems, which expand the scope of
Nietzsche's philosophical project. Having disarmed his readers with
the intimacy and severity of his self-directed criticisms, he regularly
deploys these prefaces both to revise the guiding themes of the
books they introduce and to massage his readers' lasting impres-
sions of them. In an important sense, then, his retrospective pref-
aces actually produce new versions of the pre-Zarathustran books
they reclaim. It is virtually impossible, for example, to approach the
original Birth of Tragedy on its own terms once one has read the
preface to the 1886 edition. By 'neglecting' to acknowledge the posi-
tive contributions made by these prefaces, Nietzsche shrewdly
creates a demand for a new approach to his writings, which now
comprise recursive elements of self-reference and self-criticism.
Having cultivated this need, he promptly proceeds to satisfy it.
He consequently furnishes his readers with a new strategy for
approaching his oeuvre. This recommended strategy for reading
Nietzsche is not so much described in the 1886 prefaces as
exemplified by them. Inaugurating a practice that informs all of his
post-Zarathustran writings, he supplements his familiar sayings'
I
with a novel dimension of 'showing'. Unlike the one-dimensional

books they reclaim, that is, these prefaces also 'do' something to
prepare the reader for the books they introduce. They embolden
and seduce (HH I Preface 8), tempt and prove (HH II Preface 7),
demonstrate (HH II Preface 2), teach, and in general exemplify the
readerly approach that Nietzsche now recommends.
After discussing his 'novel perspective' of tragic pessimism, for
example, he (rhetorically) asks, 'Do you want me to prove [my
pessimism] to you? But what else does this long preface - prove?'
(HH II Preface 7). In a similar vein, he not only recommends the
'serpent's prudent art of changing his skin', but also, in the body of
these prefaces, 'demonstrates' how it is done (HH II Preface 2;
GS Preface 4). When he bids his 'patient friends' to 'learn to read
[him] well' (D Preface 5), he does not advise them idly, for his pref-
aces exemplify a philologically sound interpretive practice that he
was obliged to develop in order to read himself. Indeed, the publi-
cation of the prefaces itself proves that he is 'a philologist still, that
is to say, a teacher of slow reading' (D Preface 5). He nevertheless
realises, however, that even this added dimension of' showing' may
not be sufficient to convey the Singular conditions under which
these prefaces were written:
This book may need more than one preface, and in the end there
would still remain room for doubt whether anyone who had
never lived through similar experiences could be brought closer
to the experience of this book by means of prefaces.
(GS Preface 1)
The 1886 prefaces collectively introduce, via exemplification,

Nietzsche's preferred strategy for reading Nietzsche: symptomato-
logy. Reckoning the provenance of his symptomatological turn
away from metaphysics, he explains,
All those bold insanities of metaphysics, especially answers to the

question about the value of existence ... lack any grain of
significance when measured scientifically, [but] they are the more
valuable for the historian and psychologist as hints or symptoms
of the body, of its success or failure, its plenitude, power, and
autocracy in history, or of its frustrations, weariness, impoverish-
ment, its premonitions of the end, its will to the end.
(GS Preface 2)
The 1886 prefaces not only evince additional symptoms to be inter-

preted, but also provide a self-referential example of this readerly
art in practice. Indeed, his unique means of introducing his sympto-
matology makes it nearly impossible for his readers not to apply it
to him as well. He introduces his symptomatology simply by deliv-
ering - with no formal introduction whatsoever - an interpretation
of himself. The 1886 prefaces interpret his books (as well as his other
creative productions) as symptoms of an underlying physiological
condition, thus encouraging his readers to attempt a similar engage-
ment with their author.
By summoning himself as the subject of this introductory symp-
tomatological analYSis, Nietzsche not only provides us with a richly
detailed example of his revised critical method, but also indicates
that the 'philology' he recommends was one in which he too was
Daniel W. Conway 35
initially inexpert. We thus learn from the 1886 prefaces that despite
his rigorous philological training, he only very recently became an
accomplished and careful reader of signs.6 In the new preface to
The Birth of Tragedy, for example, he confesses that he had mis-
understood the culture of the tragic Greeks as well as of nineteenth-
century Germany, between which he had fatuously proposed a
more permanent alliance (BT 20). He consequently speaks (and
shows) from experience; he has travelled the way in which he now
instructs his readers.
The 1886 prefaces thus school Nietzsche's new' readers in both
I
word and deed. To become the audience for whom he recalibrates the
economy of his philosophical corpus, we must follow in his footsteps
and become improved readers of Nietzsche. It is no longer sufficient
to ruminate over what he says. We must also learn to read what he
does not say, what he conveys only through the performances that
incorporate into his writings an additional dimension of texture and
body. If we can learn to read both dimensions of his books - his
'showing' as well as his 'saying' - then we can become 'philologists' in
our own right and participate in this strange reclamation project.
NIETZSCHE'S SANCTUS JANUARIUS
Lest we become overly grateful for the reading lessons Nietzsche pro-
vides, we should remember that they serve his ends and not necessar-
ily our own. The 1886 prefaces may provide us with a new, improved
method of reading Nietzsche, but they also create this need in the first
place, by announcing the emergence of a new Nietzsche.
By virtue of the tell-tale symptoms they shelter, the 1886 prefaces
suggest four distinct stages in the development of Nietzsche's
philosophical career: a period of youthful enthusiasm and nai"vete,
which was marked by such unripe fruits as The Birth of Tragedy and
the Untimely Meditations;7 a period of 'sickness' and decline, of
which DaybrealcB and the original components of Human, All Too
Human are symptomatic; a period of 'convalescence', as signified by
The Gay Science; and a period of 'health', of which Zarathustra and
the post-Zarathustran writings are exemplary. Within the twin
economies of Nietzsche's physiological and literary corpora,
these four periods are governed, respectively, by principles of
stasis, contraction, expansion, and expenditure/explosion. 9 As the
1886 prefaces make clear, all of his books point either forwards or
backwards to Zarathustra. He would have us believe, in fact, that his
pre-Zarathustran works signify necessary stages in the attainment
of the 'great health' that his Zarathustra expresses (EH 'z' 2), and
that his post-Zarathustran works cultivate an informed readership
by supplying the philosophical context that Zarathustra presupposes
(EH'BGE'1).1O
The 1886 prefaces collectively describe, and enable us to plot, a
descensional trajectory that reaches its nadir in the winter of 1879--80,
just before Nietzsche began work on Daybreak.ll They also describe an
ascensional (or convalescent') trajectory that begins in 1881 and
I
reaches its apex with the 'great health' that informs the inspired pro-
duction of Zarathustra. 12 His various attempts at self-periodisation may
differ in their specific details, but they all rehearse this common, cycli-
cal theme of sickness, convalescence and health. They all furthermore
point to some crisis' 13 that transpires and passes shortly before his
I
initial inspiration with the 'basic idea' of Zarathustra. These exercises in

self-periodisation thus illuminate the two most critical junctures in his
development as a philosopher: his respective transitions from sickness
to convalescence and from convalescence to health.
Nietzsche's transition from sickness to convalescence marks the
occasion upon which he begins to husband his vital resources. We
might describe this first critical juncture in his life and career as his
own personal Sanctus ]anuarius, for it occurs in and around January
of 1882. The miracle of St January, whose desiccated, receptacled
blood supposedly liquefies on the feast day named for him, serves
as an apt metaphor for the commencement of Nietzsche's convales-
cence. In fact, he bestows upon Book N of The Gay Science the title
Sanctus ]anuarius, dedicating the book in January of 1882 with a
poetic epigraph that he approvingly reproduces in his 'review' of
The Gay Science in Ecce Homo. The Gay Science, he tells us in the 1886
preface, is emblematic of this 'miracle', and in Ecce Homo he fondly
recalls 'the most beautiful month of January [he] ever experienced,'
a month that engendered this welcome symptom of convalescence,
of which' this whole book was its present' (EH' GS').14
Unbeknownst to Nietzsche at the time, this 'holy January' - spent,
not incidentally, in the thawing climes of Italy - marked the occasion
on which his own blood, heretofore coagulant and thus resistant to
philosophical incorporation, miraculously began to disagulate and
permeate his writings. The 1886 prefaces, several of which boast
southern originS,lS thus reclaim his pre-Zarathustran books by trans-
fusing them with 'blood', by rendering explicit the deeply personal
Daniel W. Conway 37
conditions under which these original investigations were under-
taken. The 1886 prefaces not only employ blood as a metaphor for
health and vitality, but also attest to the suffusion of his post-
Zarathustran writings with blood. He consequently cautions his
'new' readers to steel themselves for the sight of spilt blood:
Is it any wonder if, with such sharp-pointed and ticklish work, a

certain amount of blood occasionally flows, if the psychologist
engaged on it has blood on his fingers and not always only - on
his fingers?
(HH II Preface 1)
Because the author of these prefaces can afford to squander his

'blood' on the continent, (relatively) dispassionate 'travel books' they
reclaim, he 'ventures to send [them] off again' (HH II Preface 6). To
do so both costs him less and promises his readers more than did
their original issue.
Nietzsche's Sanctus ]anuarius thus consecrates the marriage of
creator and creature, of autobiography and philosophy. In this holy
month in 1882, he involuntarily transformed his greatest perceived
liability as a scholar - his perilous physiological destiny - into his
singular gift and signature genius. Immobilised by hereditary illness
and enforced solitude, denied access to an empirical database that
might corroborate his speculations about moral psychology, he had
no choice but to experiment on himself, to direct inwards the
unflinching gaze of the Leipzig-trained philologist:
As physician and patient in one, I compelled myself to an opposite

and unexplored clime of the soul, and especially to a curative journey
into strange parts, into strangeness itself.
(HH II Preface 5)
In this holy month, that is, Nietzsche embraced himself as the fitting
and inevitable subject of his own philosophical investigations. 16
Subsequent to his Sanctus ]anuarius, he undertook the painful task
of extending the self-examination that he had unwittingly initiated.
His abiding concerns with the origins of morality, the economy
of prejudice, the spirit of music, the conditions of aesthetic
justification, the problem of knowledge - all were miraculously
transfigured into (and justified as) self-directed and self-referential
concerns. The 1886 prefaces thus demonstrate, once again via
exemplification, that the project of critique is still viable: they
contain criticisms of pessimism, morality, romanticism, music, art,
metaphysics, gravity, demagoguery, youthful naivete and hurried
argument. But the targets of this revised method of critique are
evaluated only (or at least primarily) in their Nietzschean manifes-
tations and incarnations.
In the prefaces of 1886, Nietzsche alone is subjected to criticism:
he objects to his romanticism, his weakness for redemption, and so
on. The critique of modernity that dominated his early writings is
now transformed into a critique of Nietzsche himself:
My writings speak only of my overcomings: 'I' am in them,

together with everything that was inimical to me, ego ipsissimus.
(HH II Preface 1)
In order to complete his critique of modernity, that is, he enlists

himself to stand for humanity as a whole (or at any rate its pecu-
liarly modem incarnation). He consequently endures the onslaught
of his own probing psychological investigations. 17
Nietzsche's Sanctus Januarius thus marks the birth of the science
of psychology, the unwitting and accidental inwardisation of
science itself:
Even that filigree art of grasping and comprehending in general,

those fingers for nuances, that psychology of 'looking around the
comer,' and whatever else is characteristic of me, was learned
only then [Le., in his convalescence], and is the true gift of those
days in which everything in me became subtler - observation
itself as well as organs of observation.
(EH 'Wise' 1)
The 1886 prefaces belatedly celebrate Nietzsche's Sanctus Januarius

by publicly designating him as the 'natural' subject of his philo-
sophy, and by announcing him as a philosopher versed in the' art
of transfiguration' (GS Preface 3).
REBIRTH AND PARTHENOGENESIS
It may seem ludicrous or self-serving to speak of the pivotal devel-

opment in Nietzsche's thought, for his philosophical career is
Daniel W. Conway 39
fraught with erratic digressions and circuitous dead-ends. His life
similarly comprises a dizzying series of reversals and apostasies:
he embraces and spurns Wagner, Schopenhauerian pessimism,
Germany, philology, academia, wonder diets and miracle cures,
friends and family, his proposed Hauptwerke (The Will to Power: The
Revaluation of All Values) and, ultimately, sanity itself.
Despite the fits and starts of Nietzsche's career as a philosopher,
his 1886 prefaces nevertheless announce the single most important
development in the maturation of his thinking:
Lest what is most essential remain unsaid: from such abysses,

from such severe sickness, also from the sickness of severe sus-
picion, one returns newborn.
(GS Preface 4)
The reclamation project of 1886 is not restricted in its compass to

his pre-Zarathustran books, for it rehabilitates their author as well:
In this book you will discover a 'subterranean man' at work, one

who tunnels, mines, and undermines ... He will return, that is
certain ... as soon as he has 'become a man' again.
(D Preface 1)
These prefaces also trade heavily on Orphic images of death and

rebirth, which collectively imply that in 1886 Nietzsche has figura-
tively, and almost literally, returned from the dead. The new
preface to Daybreak, for example, recounts his successful katabasis to
hell (D Preface 1-2). He describes himself as newly endowed with
'a dangerous second innocence in joy' (GS Preface 4), and he insists
that the title of Daybreak also refers to the renascence and 'dawn' of
its author (D Preface 1). Like Orpheus, moreover, Nietzsche dares
to look back as he ascends from the underworld - not for Eurydice,
but for himself.
The imagery of rebirth that pervades the 1886 prefaces recom-
mends an understanding of Nietzsche's bout with tragic pessimism
as the belated completion of his initiation into the mysteries of
Dionysus. According to the author of the 'Attempt at a Self-
Criticism', for example, the author of The Birth of Tragedy presumed
to speak as a disciple of Dionysus before actually completing his ini-
tiation into the Dionysian mysteries. As a consequence of this
impertinence, he unwittingly profaned the Dionysian mysteries he
had meant to celebrate, associating them with the romanticism
and decadence of Wagnerian opera. By way of contrast, the author
of the 'Attempt' speaks of the author of The Birth of Tragedy as a
master might speak of an apprentice - or, perhaps, continuing the
Dionysian theme, as an aged silenus might advise a young satyr. IS
It is no coincidence that so many of the 1886 prefaces invoke the
name of Dionysus, for it is their task to announce Nietzsche's
rebirth as a disciple of Dionysus. In order to hear this announce-
ment, we must attend not only to what the prefaces say, but also to
what they do, to the squandering and self-mutilation they enact. For
example, the 'Attempt at a Self-Criticism' answers the question it
poses -'Indeed, what is Dionysian?' - in both word and deed, for it
fully exemplifies the 'suffering from overfulness' that it associates
with Dionysus (ASC 1). This mutilation of the original Birth of
Tragedy, moreover, both expresses and stimulates
the craving for the ugly, the good, severe will of the older Greeks to
... the image of everything underlying existence that is frightful,
evil, a riddle, destructive, fatal.
(ASC 4)
The 1886 prefaces thus introduce us to a newborn Nietzsche, a

Dionysian squanderer whose great health affords him the luxuries
of self-mutilation and self-scarification.
Unique to the Athenian reception of the myth of Dionysus is the
belief that the god is 'thrice-born', but 'of two mothers'. While the
older, more familiar versions of the myth from Asia Minor associate
the birth of Dionysus with the castration of his father, the Athenian
version of the myth maintains that Zeus sewed the child Dionysus
into his thigh for safekeeping, until the Eiraphiotes was 'ripe' for
delivery to the goddess Hipta (or Rhea). Zeus thereby created for
himself a 'male womb' by inflicting upon himself a wound that is
simultaneously disfiguring and nurturing. Rather than commemo-
rate castration, the Athenian version of the myth celebrates the pain
of childbirth, even attributing this pain - and its attendant
affirmation of life - to male childbirth. The 'third birth' of Dionysus
thus afforded Zeus an experience analogous to 'the pangs of the
woman giving birth', which, according to Nietzsche, 'hallow all pain'
and justify human existence (TI' Ancients' 4).
This Athenian version of the 'third birth' of Dionysus sheds light
on Nietzsche's 'rebirth' in the 1886 prefaces. He was wounded by
Daniel W. Conway 41
his bout with tragic pessimism, but his endurance of this self-
inflicted wound, his very survival, revealed to him the indomitable
will to life that the 1886 prefaces celebrate. Rather than close the
wound or implement cosmetic procedures, he redeems the wound
by exploiting its (pro)creative powers. He thus gives birth to
himself, much as Zeus gave birth to Dionysus. Nietzsche himself is
therefore 'twice-born', but of one mother, and this second, self-
induced birth signals the completion of his initiation into the mys-
teries of Dionysus. His 'second birth' thus furnishes the key to his
own affirmation of life, for only the experience of childbirth (includ-
ing, apparently, the ersatz experience of male childbirth) grants him
access to 'the will to life rejoicing over its own inexhaustibility even
in the sacrifice of its highest types' (TI' Ancients' 5).19
Nietzsche's self-orchestrated rebirth furthermore accounts for the
provenance of the parthenogenic motif that runs throughout the
1886 prefaces, as well as in the otherwise cryptic beginning to his
'autobiography' :
The good fortune of my existence, its uniqueness perhaps, lies in its

fatality: I am, to express it in the form of a riddle, already dead as
my father, while as my mother I am still living and becoming old.
(EH 'Wise' 1)20
By giving birth to himself, Nietzsche becomes the silenian mentor -

the 'male mother' - he never had, and in the 1886 prefaces he belat-
edly conducts himself through the postponed rite of initiation.
The key to this initiation, as the 1886 prefaces indicate, is the
transformation of a debilitating wound into the precondition of
growth and procreation - hence his affirmation of the loneliness
and isolation of his pre-Zarathustran career as the conditions of his
present state of health. Invoking a bizarre, gynophobic image of his
own creativity, he thus discloses that
We philosophers ... have to give birth to our thoughts out of

our pain and, like mothers, endow them with all we have of
blood, heart, fire, pleasure, passion, agony, conscience, fate,
and catastrophe.
(GS Preface 3)
The 1886 prefaces thus announce Nietzsche's rebirth as 'the last dis-
ciple of the philosopher Dionysus' (TI' Ancients' 5). His wound has
become a 'womb', and he reproduces this transformation in a ritual
display of self-mutilation. He thereby reprises the nurturing wound
of Zeus as well as the eternally recurring dismemberment of
Dionysus. By commemorating the Sanctus Januarius of 1882, the
1886 prefaces thus anticipate his later claim that a 'well-turned-out
person ... exploits bad accidents to his advantage' (EH 'Wise' 2).
NIETZSCHE BECOMES A SIGN
Despite its unparalleled importance for Nietzsche's development as a

philosopher, the Sanctus Januarius of 1882 was neither strategic nor
intended. Only in retrospect can he discern his period of convales-
cence, and only in 1886 does he understand that his own blood has
become disagulated and liquefied. In commemorating the Sanctus
Januarius of 1882, the 1886 prefaces thus mark the completion of his
period of convalescence. As a belated celebration of this miracle,
Nietzsche transforms himself into a sign. This volitional gesture marks
the second critical juncture in the development of his philosophy, and
it points to an alternative future for humankind as a whole.
The reclamation project of 1886 thus marks Nietzsche's inaugural
celebration of his Sanctus Januarius, which he commemorates by
writing in blood. This second critical juncture in the development of
his philosophy, which marks his transition from' convalescence' to
'health', thus attests to his newly endowed capacity for squander-
ing. That he can afford to undertake this diScipline of self-criticism,
thereby transfusing some blood into his previously lifeless writings,
is of the utmost symptomatological importance. The 1886 prefaces
announce Nietzsche's restored health by means of a blood-letting
that involves an unprecedented festival of personal expenditure.
Only through self-mutilation and self-scarification does he become
what he is: a sign of health.
This sign is not so much described in the 1886 prefaces as embod-
ied by them. Although Nietzsche openly proclaims his renascent
health in each of the prefaces, the best evidence of it - especially for
the type of reader he now cultivates - is simply the reclamation
project itself. That he is now strong enough to criticise and derange
his extant works, that the expansionary economy of his corpus can
now accommodate these flawed pre-Zarathustran books, is itself
symptomatic of his renascent health. Simply by virtue of their
appearance in 1886, these prefaces announce that he can now afford
Daniel W. Conway 43
to indulge in this prodigal exercise of self-criticism. While any
philosopher can train his critical eye outwards and inveigh against
the reigning idols of his age, the author of the 1886 prefaces dares to
continue the project of critique even (and especially) at his own
expense. Unlike those philosophers who must hurriedly cover their
tracks behind a career-disrupting epiphany, he can afford to own
what might look to others like unsalvageable books.
We should therefore not confuse Nietzsche's reclamation project
with a cosmetic surgery designed to correct for the blemishes and
imperfections of his pre-Zarathustran books. To illuminate the flaws
of books that few readers have even bothered to scan constitutes an
act of self-inflicted violence, of self-directed trespass and violation.
Rather than heal or eliminate the unsightly abscesses that mar his
original books, on the contrary, these retrospective prefaces muti-
late the books to which they are appended, magnifying the excesses
and peccadilloes of the pre-Zarathustran Nietzsche. The webrous
scar tissue that results from this discipline of self-mutilation gradu-
ally envelopes his extant texts, lending depth, dimension, texture
and body to an otherwise shallow, continent, and eminently
Apollonian oeuvre.
Although staged to draw our attention to the author of the 1886
prefaces, this practice of self-scarification should not be dismissed as
vainglorious preening on Nietzsche's part. His reclamation project
is ultimately political in scope and design, for he believes that his
own self-transformation may prove useful to those 'good
Europeans' who similarly aspire to overcome their age. Towards
this end, his ritual blood-letting serves a dual selective function: to
repulse squeamish readers of a lesser rank and to announce his
rebirth to those readers of a comparable rank. 21 Alluding to the pos-
sible political consequences of his (newly transfused) personal
memoirs, he confides that' Again and again I feel sure that my
travel books were not written solely for myself, as sometimes seems
to be the case' (HH II Preface 6).
His 'travel books' may be of value to others because they illuminate
an alternative future for humankind as a whole. The imperative that
he would later borrow as the title of his 'autobiography' - Ecce Homo
(behold the man!) - functions here also as a revelation: Nietzsche
embodies a type of man - capable still of squandering himself - whom
others may have thought extinct.22 Like the ritual mutilation practised
by various native tribes, his self-scarification in 1886 serves as a distin-
guishing token, announcing the presence of an author of elevated
rank and nobility.13 In rebirth, that is, Nietzsche has become that of
which he could heretofore only speak: the exemplary human being,
in whose hands the future of humankind now restS.24 His capacity for
self-mutilation attests to the strength of will resident within him. That
the blood. still flows in late modernity, that its letting can still trans-
form a man into a sign - this is the miracle of his Sanctus /anuarius.
By enacting this miracle in the texts of the 1886 prefaces, Nietzsche
hopes to attract a select group of readers who share his sense of
purpose as well as his capacity for squandering and self-mutilation.
Such readers would be able to withstand the probing self-criticism
and self-experimentation that he believes will contribute to an alterna-
tive future for humankind. He thus says of his unknown 'friends',
Perhaps I shall do something to speed their coming if I describe

in advance under what vicissitudes, upon what paths, I see them
coming.
(HH I Preface I)
Simply put, he claims to see these 'new philosophers' coming

because he has invited them, by dint of his ritual self-mutilation.
Tempted by his squandering, they begin to assemble with him
as their focus, much as the 'higher men' converge upon Zarathustra's
cave in their own efforts to resist the decadence of the age.
Bleeding from a wound that will never heal, Nietzsche now pre-
sents himself to his readers as a potential master or initiator, as a
guardian of the Dionysian mysteries. This macabre invitation fur-
thermore indicates that he hopes to assemble an elite vanguard of
friends and fellow travellers. He advertises his post-Zarathustran
writings, after all, as 'fish hooks' rather than as bait (EH 'BGE' 1),
thereby confirming the violence his books will inflict on serious
readers.25 Having presided over his own 'rebirth', he now offers
guidance to those select readers who can afford to undertake a
similar rite of initiation. Those who dare to behold an alternative
future for humankind may now 'ripen' themselves within the shel-
tering womb of his self-inflicted wound.
In considering the sign that he has become, however, we should
also bear in mind that his ritual self-mutilation comprises a poten-
tially mortal strategy. Whereas Zarathustra confidently models
himself on the sun, whose squandered beams scarcely tax the
boundless solar economy, Nietzsche more closely resembles a
Daniel W. Conway 45
comet, streaking inexorably towards exhaustion as he illuminates
the twillt skies of late modernity.
Notes
1. Friedrich Nietzsche: Siimtliche Brie/e, Kritische Studienausgabe in 8 Biinden,

ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter/Deutscher
Taschenbuch Verlag, 1986), vol. 8, no. 960, s. 206. For my translations
of Nietzsche's correspondence, I occasionally consult and draw from
Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Christopher
Middleton (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1969). For sigla
used in my citations, see the Reference Key to Nietzsche's Texts on p.
xii.
2. With the exception of occasional emendations, I rely throughout this
essay on Walter Kaufmann's translations/editions of Nietzsche's
books for Viking PresslRandom House, and on R. J. Hollingdale's
translations for Cambridge University Press. Numbers refer to sec-
tions rather than to pages.
3. In a letter to Overbeck on 23 February 1887, Nietzsche suggests that
the appearance of the new prefaces not only brings to completion his
pre-Zarathustran project, but also secures for him the critical distance
he desires: 'In the past fifteen years I have set an entire literature on
its feet and finally 'completed' l1ertig gemacht'] it with prefaces and
additions, so completely that I consider it as quite detached from me,
and can laugh about it, as I laugh fundamentally at all literature-
making' (Siimtliche Briefe, vol. 8, no. 804, s. 29).
4. I undertake a more thorough examination of the reclamation project
announced in the 1886 prefaces in my essay, 'Nietzsche's Art of This-
Worldly Comfort: Self-Reference and Strategic Self-Parody', History
of Philosophy Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 3 (July 1992), pp. 343-57.
5. My attention to the ethical and political dimensions of the 1886 pre-
faces is indebted to Friedrich Nietzsche. Ecce Auctor: Die Vorreden von
1886, collected and introduced by Claus-Artur Scheier (Hamburg:
Felix Meiner Verlag, 1990). In his commentary on the prefaces of
1886, Scheier persuasively argues that the prefaces collectively con-
stitute an event of self-presentation and self-annunciation on
Nietzsche's part (s. vii-xxxii). On the importance of Nietzsche's ret-
rospective prefaces for his d~veloping political project, see Keith
Ansell Pearson, 'Toward the Ubermensch: Reflections on the Year of
Nietzsche's Daybreak', Nietzsche-Studien, vol. 23 (1995), pp. 124-45.
6. For an account of Nietzsche's ingenious adaptation of philology to
his new method of symptomatological analysis, see Eric Blondel,
Nietzsche: The Body and Culture. Philosophy as a Philological Genealogy,
trans. Sean Hand (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991),
Chapter 8.
7. In a letter to Georg Brandes on 19 February 1888, Nietzsche describes
his 'firstlings', referring explicitly to the Untimely Meditations, as 'the
Juvenilia and Juvenalia'. He proceeds to explain that 'between the
Untimely Meditations and Human, All Too Human lie a crisis and a
sloughing. Physically, too, I lived for years in the closest proximity to
death' (Siimtliche Briefe, vol. 8, no. 997, s. 260).
8. In a letter of 10 April 1888, Nietzsche recounts to Brandes that
his 'spirit [Geist] became ripe in the terrible time' of the writing
of Daybreak, even as his 'strength and health were at a minimum'.
He thus explains that Daybreak functions' for him as a kind of dynamo-
/I
meter'''. Daybreak could therefore be considered a convalescent work of

the soul, if not of the body (Siimtliche Briefe, vol. 8, no. 1014, s. 290).
9. Nietzsche thus describes Zarathustra as 'a squandering of good-
naturedness' that was 'made necessary' by his recuperation
(EH 'BGE' 2).
10. In a letter written to Fritzsch at the end of August 1886, Nietzsche
explains that 'The essential thing is that in order to have the pre-
suppositions for the understanding of Zarathustra ... all my earlier
writings must be understood deeply and seriously ... This'Versuch,'
together with the preface to Human, All Too Human, provides a true
Enlightenment about me - and the very best preparation for my bold
son Zarathustra' (Siimtliche Briefe, vol. 7, no. 740, s. 237).
11. In a curriculum vitae that he appends to a letter to Brandes on
10 April 1888, Nietzsche notes that he was 'nearest to death' at
'exactly the same age' as his father when the latter died (Siimtliche
Brieje, vol. 8, no. 1014, s. 290). Nietzsche later corroborates this
account of his decline, explaining that 'In the same year that [his
father's] life went downward, mine, too, went downward: in the
thirty-sixth year of my life [October, 1879 - October, 1880], I reached
the lowest point of my vitality - I still lived, but without being able to
see three steps ahead ... This was my minimum: the Wanderer and His
Shadow originated at this time' (EH 'Wise' 1).
12. While it is tempting to mark Nietzsche's convalescence from his
initial encounter with the thought of eternal recurrence in August of
1881, he himself suggests that he was 'reborn' (along with Gast) in
May of 1881, in Recoaro. At that time he experienced' as an omen a
sudden and profoundly decisive change in [his] taste, especially in
music' (EH'Z' 1).
13. Nietzsche himself uses the word Krisis in letters to Brandes on
19 February 1888 and 10 April 1888 (Siimtliche Briefe, vol. 8, no. 997,
s.260; no. 1014, s. 290). In the former letter he locates the 'crisis' between
the writing of the Untimely Meditations and that of Human, All Too
Human; in the latter letter he claims that 'the crisis had passed' by 1882.
14. In a letter to Hyppolyte Taine on 4 July 1887, Nietzsche corroborates
this account of the 'holy January' of 1882: 'For ... The Gay Science, I am
indebted to the dawning sunlight of returning health. It came into
being a year later [than Daybreak] (1882), also in Genoa, during a few
sublimely clear and sunny weeks in January' (Siimtliche Brieje, vol. 8,
no. 872, s. 107).
Daniel W. Conway 47
15. The 1886 prefaces were composed in the following locations: Daybreak,
Ruta (near Genoa); The Gay Science, Ruta; Human, All Too Human I, Nice;
Human, All Too Human II, SUs-Maria; The Birth of Tragedy, SUs-Maria.
16. On the birth of psychology from self-criticism, see Scheier (1990),
s. xviii-xxiii.
17. See Karl Kerenyi, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, trans.
Ralph Manheim (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976),
p. 358. Throughout the course of my discussion of Dionysus, I draw
extensively on Kerenyi's seminal study.
18. See Kerenyi (1976), pp. 273-90.
19. No critic has contributed more to our understanding of Nietzsche's
misogyny and gynophobia than Luce Irigaray, in Marine Lover of
Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1991), pp. 20-8. Turning the symptomatological
tables on Nietzsche, Irigaray interprets his masculinist fantasies as
expressions of his primal fear of the maternal body (pp. 77-94).
Although Irigaray's criticisms are directed specifically at Nietzsche's
teaching of eternal return, they are even more apposite to his obses-
sion with becoming a 'male mother' to his unknown 'children'.
20. In a later remark that perhaps alludes to Nietzsche's self-orchestrated
'rebirth', he explains, 'At another point as well, I am merely my father
once more and, as it were, his continued life after an all-too-early
death' (EH 'Wise' 5).
21. In a letter to Malwida von Meysenbug on 12 May 1887, Nietzsche inti-
mates, 'In the long "prefaces," which I have deemed necessary for the
new edition of my collected writings, there appear curious things of an
inconsiderate frankness with respect to myself. I do this to hold "the
many" once and for all at arm's length, for nothing annoys people so
much as expressing something of the strictness and severity with which
one treats, and has treated, oneself under the discipline of one's
ownmost ideals. For this reason I have cast my line for "the few," and I
have done so, finally, without impatience. Owing to the indescribable
strangeness and danger of my thoughts, receptive ears will open up to
them only much later - and certainly not before 1901' (Siimtliche Briefe,
vol. 8, no. 845, s. 70). Cf. Middleton (1969), p. 266.
22. See Scheier (1990), s. viii-xi.
23. Nietzsche's own biography furnishes an instructive, if mundane,
example of the significatory function of scars. If we can trust the
account of his friend Paul Deussen, Nietzsche apparently admired
his own modest duelling scar as a mark of distinction and nobility
(Paul Deussen, Erinnerungen an Friedrich Nietzsche (Leipzig: F. A.
Brockhaus, 1901), s. 22-3).
24. For a compelling defence of this political thesis, see Ansell Pearson
(1995), pp. 140-4. Ansell Pearson persuaSively interprets the 1886
prefaces in terms of Nietzsche's own 'day1?,reak', at which time he
presents himself as an example of a kind of Ubermensch.
25. Jacques Derrida documents Nietzsche's reliance on stylistic barbs and
spurs in Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, trans Barbara Harlow (Chicago, ill.:
University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 35-45.
3
Stendhal's Ecstatic Embrace
of History as the Antidote
for Decadencel
Brian Domino
For Nietzsche, the future of humankind depends on the psycholo-

gical and physical health of those alive in the present, in modernity.
Our health depends on our relationship to the past: on the prac-
tices, institutions and ideas we draw from history. As the millen-
nium nears, we stand at a crisis. We suffer from an epidemic of
decadence, a disease that leaves us enervated and fragmented.
Worse yet, decadence inverts our understanding of the healthful
and the harmful; it causes us to be attracted to that which further
fragments us, which further weakens us, and which will ultimately
rob humankind of a future. 2 Because of this inversion, decadents
seldom realise that they are decadent but believe themselves to be
healthy. By identifying decadence and tracing its contours through-
out history, Nietzsche has taken a crucial first step in preventing
humanity's degeneration into Zarathustra's apocalyptic last men. 3
Although nothing preoccupied him more profoundly than the
problem of decadence (CW Preface), Nietzsche never explicitly
offers a solution. In what follows, I reconstruct in outline what I
believe is the solution towards which he was working.
H humankind's future is uncertain, and the present riddled with
decadence, only the past, only history, can provide an antidote
against decadence and therefore hope for the future. Decadents can
stand in one of three relationships to history. First, there are the
grave-robbers, those who ransack history for practices, institutions
and ideas that appear useful. 4 Since the grave-robbers are decadent,
their projects only increase sickness, as the case of Wagner illustrates.
Second, there is the attempt to isolate oneself from history, and
thereby prevent oneself from choosing what hastens exhaustion. In
48
Brian Domino 49
Ecce Homo, Nietzsche claims to have followed this strategy. Lastly,
there is the ecstatic embrace of history. 'Ecstatic' here combines both
its erotic connotations and its Greek meaning of 'putting out of
place.'s The majority of my essay is spent showing, albeit specula-
tively, that Stendhal ecstatically embraces history, and that this
posture towards history is anti-decadent. In the process, I demon-
strate that much of what Nietzsche says accords with my discussion
of Stendhal. 6 I address each stance to history in tum, using Wagner,
Nietzsche, and Stendhal as paradigms of each relationship.
GRAVE-ROBBER HISTORY
Long before his discovery of decadence in the summer of 1886,7

Nietzsche saw the present as sick. Not surprisingly, the young
philologist claimed that the present needed an injection of the past,
particularly from Homeric Greece, to regain health. 8 Even in light of
the sophisticated symptomatology of his later works, this strategy is
not wholly without merit. There are two sources of decadence. The
one that occupies most of Nietzsche's thought is contagious dec-
adence: decadence that spreads from the infected to the healthy.
The other, which he rarely mentions, is biological decadence; deca-
dence that is necessary evolutionary detritus. 9 Prior to Socrates, this
was the main form of decadence. In such healthier times, the emer-
gence of biological decadents posed little threat to humankind's
health. Being attracted to what is life-denying, pre-Socratic dec-
adents formed decadent communities. 1o Healthy individuals
shunned such enclaves, effectively insulating themselves from
decadence and safeguarding the future. Moreover, decadent com-
munities eventually self-destruct because they concentrate the
lethal effects of decadence. Thus, drawing from the non-decadent
past seems a viable solution to the problems of modernity.
From The Birth of Tragedy to On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche's
manifold attempts to improve humankind's health rested on a
fundamental error. He assumed that humankind's failure to recover
from its sickness stemmed from an epistemic lacuna. As a physician
of culture, he believed that his patients knew they were sick, but
didn't know where to find a cure. Prior to 1888, Nietzsche's task was
to point the way towards a cure, primarily by displaying
humankind's original health. ll His discovery of decadence, however,
revealed that, because decadence inverts the toxic and the salubrious,
50 Stendhal as the Antidote for Decadence
his patients were unaware of their sickness, and would interpret any
cure, any increase in vitality, as a step in the wrong direction. The
problem with which Nietzsche had wrestled for years, namely 'How
did Socrates the buffoon get taken so seriously and for so long?' (TI
'Socrates' 5), could now be answered. Socrates' decadent teachings
provided a desperate means of self-preservation for decaying Athens
(TI 'Socrates' 9). His teachings infected his students, one of whom
later articulates the foundations of Western philosophy and
Christianity. Philosophers and theologians then spread decadence
throughout the West. Two millennia of gradual infection and infesta-
tion over multiple paths, as well as our own decadence, make it
difficult to see modernity's condition.12 Fortunately, Wagner, in
whom 'modernity speaks most intimately' (CWPreface), provides an
unparalleled view of our deleterious appropriation of history.
Wagner adopts from history only decadent ideas and motifs.
For example, he 'translated the Ring into Schopenhauer's terms'
(CW 4).13 More generally, Wagner infused his works with the
decadence of Christianity (CW 5, 6) and Hegelianism (CW 10).
Wagner borrows what is decadent, making his works a melange of
decadence. At the same time, he shuns what is healthy in the past.
Most notably, he spurns all musical laws, all previous definitions
of style (CW 6, 8, PS). Wagner shuns musical laws because they
are precisely what he needs most, what would help to control his
decadence (TI 'Expeditions' 41).
That Wagner takes from history the decadent while ignoring the
salubrious is not surprising, and I will not belabour the point. What I
have said should be sufficient to demonstrate that because decadents
are attracted to what further weakens them, pillaging history as a free
market-place of ideas can only worsen humankind's health.
ISOLATIONIST HISTORY
To those grave-robbers who wish 'to take humankind back, to

screw it back, to a former "measure of virtue"', Nietzsche warns:
Nothing avails: one must go forward, which is to say step by step

further into decadence ... One can hem-in [hemmen] this development
and, by hemming in [Hemmung], dam up degeneration, gather it
and make it more vehement and sudden: one can do no more.
(TI 'Expeditions' 43)
Brian Domino 51
Nietzsche here reiterates the political strategy he has suggested at
least since Zarathustra, namely, quarantine. Effective quarantine
requires a means of diagnosis, and a healthy population from
whom the sick are to be segregated. Although he presents exten-
sive lists of symptoms associated with decadence, Nietzsche never
locates any pathognomonic indications. I4 This lack of precise crite-
ria does not prevent him from diagnosing modernity as thor-
oughly decadent. Is Without a healthy population to protect, and a
precise means of determining who is healthy and who decadent,
socio-political quarantine is ineffective. This makes the problem of
decadence one of self-therapy, or of improving one's ethos. Since
decadents are attracted to what is decadent, the only ostensibly
safe route is to isolate oneself from others, both extant and histor-
ical. This is the route that Nietzsche advertises as having taken
himself.
A decade of 'looking from the perspective of the sick towards
healthier concepts and values and, conversely, looking again from
the fullness and self-assurance of a rich life down into the secret
work of the instinct of decadence' (EH 'Wise' 1) affords Nietzsche
an unparalleled view of the problems of modernity, particularly as
they inhabit him. According to Nietzsche's own self-diagnosis, he
'cured' himself to the extent that in 1888 he suffers only periodic
bouts of decadence (EH 'Wise' 6). Nietzsche had waged an internal
battle that, he thinks, he eventually won, if only partly, because he
quarantined himself from history; he became timeless:
What does a philosopher demand of himself first and last? To over-

come his time in himself, to become 'timeless'. With what must he
therefore engage in the hardest combat? With whatever marks him
as the child of his time. Well, then! I am, no less than Wagner, a
child of this time; that is, a decadent: but I comprehended this, I
resisted it. The philosopher in me resisted.
(CWPreface)
Nietzsche's claim that his philosophical spirit resisted decadence is

surprising given philosophers' near monopoly on decadence. I6 His
description of the philosophica11i£e as 'living voluntarily among ice
and high mountains' (EH Preface 3) does little to mitigate the Platonic
and ahistorical resonances of this passage. Neither of these observa-
tions allays fears that Nietzsche's immigration to the land of the
hyperboreans stems from decadent choices rather than healthy ones. I7
Given that decadence corrupts one's ability to make life-affirming
choices,18 what warrants Nietzsche's assumption that his choices are
healthy?
Nietzsche boasts that he has 'always instinctively chosen [instink-
tiv ... wilhite] the right means against wretched states; while the
decadent typically chooses [wahlt] means that are disadvantageous
for him' (EH 'Wise' 2). The oxymoron 'instinctively chosen' belies
the less than wholly volitional course of his recovery. Rather, it was
his inherited sickness that in 1878:
commanded me to forget; it bestowed on me the necessity of lying

still, of leisure, of waiting and being patient ... My eyes alone put
an end to all bookwormishness ... for years I did not read a thing
- the greatest benefit I ever conferred on myself - That nether-
most self which had, as it were, been buried and grown silent
under the continual pressure of having to listen to other selves
(and that is after all what reading means) awakened slowly,
shyly, dubiously - but eventually it spoke again.
(EHHH4)
Nietzsche details the causal events leading to his isolation, in which

his sickness and his eyes rather than his volitional self are the
agents, because that further ensures that he has not followed this
course beguiled by decadence. That is, while decadence attacks the
invisible body (the realm of the affects, mood, and so on), the visible
body retains its instinctual ability to flourish. 19 In an effort to
demonstrate that at this crucial juncture, his visible body took over,
Nietzsche performs his own psychological vivisection, publicly
recording his diet, the effect of alcohol on him, and a myriad of
other 'little things that are generally considered matters of complete
indifference' (EH 'Clever' 10). His self-examination reveals that
decadence has infected even his habits. His physical sickness forced
him to study these 'matters of complete indifference' and to adjust
his habits accordingly.
Nietzsche believed that he could prescribe the correct regimen for
himself, rather than merely alter the expression of his decadence,
because at bottom he was healthy (EH 'Wise' 2); his will to life, his
'nethermost self', could emerge once he was sufficiently sick that it
could overpower the decadent habits that had hitherto suppressed
it. This, however, shipwrecks his self-prescribed treatment. The sug-
gestion to 'hem-in' decadence, to isolate oneself, supposes that once
Brian Domino 53
decadence is forced inwards, it will eventually attack itself. By
making himself healthy enough that his decadence does not self-
destruct, he produces more volitional resources on which decad-
ence can parasitically feed and reinfect him. Thus, 1888 finds
Nietzsche stuck in a cyclical battle with decadence because isolation
from history is not the palliative he thought it was.20
ECSTATIC HISTORY
We have seen that the grave-robber of history, illustrated by the figure

of Wagner, only increases decadence because he is drawn towards
what is decadent in history. The isolationist, illustrated by the figure of
Nietzsche, fares slightly better in that he is not further infected by
decadence. Nonetheless, the internecine battle of the decadent and
the healthy within the isolated individual never ends; decadence
always recrudesces. The final, and healthier, relationship to history is
an ecstatic one, illustrated by the figure of Stendhal. As mentioned at
the outset, 'ecstatic' here connotes both the aesthetic-erotic and the
placing of oneself in what is foreign. I address these registers in turn.
The Aesthetic-Erotic
Much of Nietzsche's aesthetics comes from Stendhal. Wielding

Stendhal's Rome, Naples and Florence against Kantian asceticism,
Nietzsche writes:
'That is beautiful,' said Kant, 'which gives us pleasure without

interest.' ... Compare with this definition one framed by a
genuine 'spectator' and artist - Stendhal, who once called the
beautiful une promesse de bonheur. At any rate he rejected and repu-
diated the one point about the aesthetic condition that Kant had
stressed: Ie desinteressement.
(GMill 6)21
While Kant wants disinterested pleasure, Stendhal approaches beau-

tiful art-works as lovers holding out future happiness. Stendhalian
aesthetics dictates that the work of art must produce the effect that
would be produced by the object imitated were it to impinge on our
consciousness in those rare moments of sensibility and happiness
that form the prelude to a state of passionate exaltation. This
Stendhalian motif of art as lover runs through Nietzsche's works of
1888. For example, in Ecce Homo he confesses:
what I really want from music [is] ... [t]hat it be individual, frolic-
some, tender, a sweet small woman full of beastliness and charm.
(EH 'Clever' 7)
Music must be like a small woman because Nietzsche has 'the small-
est ears' (EH 'Books' 2). Similarly, he praises Bizet's Carmen as
one might have, admittedly misogynistically, praised a woman a
century ago: 'It approaches lightly, supplely, politely. It is pleasant,
it does not sweat' (CW 1). Heirs to Kantian and Schopenhauerian
disinterested aesthetics, some scholars find it difficult to accept
Nietzsche's praise of Bizet, much less Stendhal's judgement that
Mozart ranks 'far beneath Cimarosa'.22 Such traditionalists miss the
point. Nietzsche and Stendhal are recording their reactions to
lovers, not forwarding universal aesthetic judgements.
Erotic aesthetics combats decadence precisely because it relies on
love, a relationship that Nietzsche sees as incorruptible:
Woman gives herself away, man acquires more - I do not see

how one can get around this natural opposition by means of
social contracts or with the best will in the world to be just ... For
love ... is nature, and being nature it is in all eternity something
'immoral.' ... [A man's] love consists of wanting to have and not of
renunciation and giving away.
(GS 363)23
If we understand 'woman' to refer metaphorically to works of art, we

can see how love is salubrious for the decadent 'man'. Unlike anti-
natural decadent relationships that further fragment the decadent,
that cause him to 'give away' what little he has, love increases
and focuses volitional resources. While at bottom it exists beyond
good and evil, humankind has veneered love with moral meaning
(EH 'Books' 5). Thus, to be of service in the pursuit of health, the
artwork must fight, in some sense, the decadent's morality. More
specifically, what makes humans the interesting animal is that a par-
ticular empirical stimulation does not lead universally to a fixed
response. Rather, sense data must be interpreted. This allows us to
flourish in a myriad of ways. It also makes decadence possible, for
decadence manifests itself in interpretations that create responses, or
Brian Domino 55
a lack thereof, that are life-denying. While love may bypass much of
our interpretive schemata or morality, it still must function within an
intricate constellation of interpretations. Born from centuries of dec-
adence, centuries of moralities, customs and practices hostile to life,
modernity is thoroughly decadent. While one can neither analyse
one's interpretative schemata from an 'objective' vantage point nor
shed it like a snake-skin, it is possible to inhabit it parasitically, to do
an autogenealogy. Trapped in a decadent milieu, however, one is
unlikely to consider doing this, and this increases the chances that
if it is done, it will be done unhealthily. What is required, then, is a
shock: a situation that forces one to rethink one's morality. An ecstatic
embrace of history provides this.
Being Out of Place in History
The Italian Renaissance was the most recent - and Nietzsche

worries it will be the last - great epoch of human history. Its tempo-
ral proximity also makes the Renaissance psychologically closer to
modernity than, say, Homeric Greece. It stands to reason, then, that
the most practically salubrious era to embrace would be the
Renaissance; yet Nietzsche apparently claims this will not work:
we may not place ourselves in Renaissance conditions, not even

by an act of thought: our nerves would not endure that reality,
not to speak of our muscles ... Were we to think away our frailty
and lateness, our physiological senescence, then our morality of
'humanization' would immediately lose its value ... it would
even arouse disdain.
The first sentence claims that psychologically and physically it would

be impossible for modems to survive in the quattrocento. According
to Stendhal, 'danger has all too often stalked the streets of Florence.
Yet it is precisely the absence of danger in our own thoroughfares
that makes us so insignificant'.24 Like Stendhal, Nietzsche sees the
greater safety of contemporary public life not as progress but as
symptomatic of decreasing vitality because to decrease 'the instincts
that are hostile and arouse mistrust' (TI 'Expeditions' 37) requires an
overall decrease in vitality. Daily life severely taxes our volitional
resources. Not only are these survival instincts mobilised, but because
of our sympathetic morality, we must expend further resources
attempting to prevent their mobilisation. We, however, have become
habituated to interpreting our meagre vitality positively. Thus
to place ourselves in Renaissance conditions would strain us
immensely because those defensive instincts would be continuously
mobilised - and this time rightly so - yet we would habitually
attempt to suppress them. For these reasons, we cannot inhabit,
however vicariously, the world of the quattrocento.
It is curious, then, that Nietzsche describes, in the second sen-
tence, what would happen if we were 'to think away our frailty and
lateness'; if we were to succeed at the impossible. In The Case of
Wagner, written only months before Twilight, Nietzsche believes this
task to be possible, for he has done it:
For such a task I required a special self-discipline: to take sides

against everything sick in me, including Wagner, including
Schopenhauer, including all modem 'humaneness.' - A profound
estrangement, cold, sobering up against everything temporal,
everything timely [alles Zeitliche, Zeitgemasse].
(CWPreface)
Again we see Nietzsche's attempt to stand outside time, to isolate

himself from history. He rightly turns away from modernity, but
then only concentrates his own decadence within himself. That
Nietzsche changes his mind about the possibility of thinking away
our frailty and lateness through an ecstatic embrace of history may
be due to a repullulation of decadence.25 Thus we must tum to
Stendhal, who did what Nietzsche could not.
In his visit to Florence, Stendhal accomplished the impossible.
Deriding travel-guide writers as 'column-counting statisticians',
Stendhal asserts that 'I do not claim to portray things as they are; I
am concerned to describe the impression they made on me'. 26 He
recounts his ecstatic arrival in Florence as follows:
my heart was leaping wildly ... I found myself grown incapable of

rational thought, but rather surrendered to the sweet turbulence of
fancy, as in the presence of some beloved object ... I could gladly
have embraced the first inhabitants of Florence I encountered ...
[Inside Santa Croce, the] tide of emotion that overwhelmed me
flowed so deep that it scarce was to be distinguished from religious
awe ... I underwent, through the medium of Volterrano's Sybils,
the profoundest experience of ecstasy ... My soul, affected by the
Brian Domino 57
very notion of being in Florence, and by the proximity of those
great men whose tombs I had just beheld, was already in a trance.
Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty, I could perceive its
very essence close at hand; I could, as it were, feel the stuff of it
beneath my fingertips. I had attained that supreme degree of sensi-
bility where the divine intimations of art merge with the impassioned
emotions. As I emerged from ... Santa Croce, I was seized with a
fierce palpitation of the heart (that same symptom referred to as an
attack of nerves in Berlin); the well-spring of life was dried up within
me, and I walked in constant fear of falling ... Two days later, the
memory of this experience touched off a most impertinent idea:
is it not a surer guarantee of happiness ... to possess a heart so
fashioned, than a cordon bleu?27
The next day he adds:
Yesterday ... I roamed about in a sort of melancholy, historical

abstraction ... Emerging from San Lorenzo, I began to wander
aimlessly about the streets, contemplating, from the wordless
depths of my own emotion (with my eyes wide-staring, and the
power of speech utterly gone) ... I experienced a great joy for
knowing no one, for having no fear of being forced to converse.
The power of this mediaeval architecture took undisputed pos-
session of my faculties; I could believe that Dante was the com-
panion of my steps. Since waking, I doubt whether so many as a
dozen thoughts have crossed my mind for which I might not find
ready formulation in the lines of this great poet.
... Danger has all too often stalked the streets of Florence. Yet it
is precisely the absence of danger in our own thoroughfares that
makes us so insignificant ... [T]o preserve this somber illusion
that, throughout the day, has peopled my fancy with such figures
as Castruccio Castracani ... as though I might meet them face to
face at each street comer, I must resolutely avert my gaze, lest it
fall on the featureless, insignificant creatures who throng the
streets today.28
In his description of Florence's impact on him, Stendhal begins

enmeshed in everyday experience. He speaks to people on the
street and, in a paragraph omitted, even explains what he did with
his luggage. He soon becomes 'incapable of rational thought' and
then reaches the mountainous peaks of divine inspiration, but is
crushed once he leaves the church and is confronted with the
reality of who he is. His heart starts palpitating, he becomes dizzy,
and most significantly he reaches bottom when 'the well-spring of
life was dried up within me'. The realisation that he lacks the voli-
tional resources to create all he sees plunges him into nihilism,
which destroys the decadence in him. Stendhal can reconstitute
himself so that he is strong enough to think Dante's thoughts, to
walk with fourteenth-century rulers like Castracani.
Stendhal thereby demonstrates the truth of the first half of
Nietzsche's claim - that our muscles could not withstand being in the
Italian Renaissance. In his ascent to greater vitality, however, he also
shows the truth of Nietzsche's claim that 'we modems, with our
thickly padded humanity, which at all costs wants to avoid bumping
into a stone, would have provided Cesare Borgia's contemporaries
with a comedy at which they could have laughed themselves to
death' (TI 'Expeditions' 37). AF, Nietzsche anachronistically predicts,
Stendhal's morality arouses his disdain, for Stendhal must avert his
gaze from the people he sees in the streets, lest contemptuous laugh-
ter destroy the sombre illusion. All this points to his regained health.
An ecstatic embrace of history combats decadence by avoiding
the pitfalls of the other two anti-decadence strategies. Because it is
an erotic embrace, it takes in the whole, rather than risking acquir-
ing only the decadent, as the grave-robber of history does. The
physical and psychological stress of returning to an earlier, less
'humane' era compels the life-denying, decadent-ridden drives,
notably pity, to relinquish their stranglehold over the life-affirming
drives. An ecstatic embrace of history compels one to re-evaluate all
of one's values. Nietzsche's various attempts to browbeat humanity
into seeing the danger of its morality failed because no amount of
orotund prose can compel, can create an inner necessity, especially
in decadents who see nothing wrong with Christian morality.
CONCLUSION
If an ecstatic embrace of history is 'the way out of this dead-end

street' (EH CW 2) of decadence that Nietzsche smugly advertises as
knowing but never tells us, we still lack a definite prescription.
Obviously, merely strolling about Florence is no cure.29 While we
still do not know exactly what to do, if embracing history ecstati-
cally is the only way out of decadence, our engagement in
Brian Domino 59
the variety of thoughts and strategies gathered under the rubric
'postmodem' may leave humankind languishing only paces away
from Zarathustra's last men. 30 In 'On the Uses and Disadvantages of
History for Life', Nietzsche describes critical history in terms applic-
able to strands of postmodernism:
only he who is oppressed by a present need, and who wants to

throw off this burden at any cost, has need of critical history, that
is to say history that judges and condemns.
(UD2)
In its deconstruction of history, postmodernism prevents an ecstatic

embrace of history. Since decadents are attracted to toxins, this
comes as no surprise. Yet, if postmodernists succeed in critically dis-
missing history, or, what amounts to the same thing, rendering it
equal to the present, we risk destroying the only antidote to decad-
ence, thereby ending the future of the human.
Notes
1. This is a substantial revision of the paper I presented at the conference.

The improvements are due largely to the questions, suggestions, and
encouragement offered by Richard Beardsworth, Thomas Brohjer, Dan
Conway, R. J. Hollingdale, Laurence Lampert, Duncan Large, John
Lippitt, Alexander Nehamas, and David Owen. John Lippitt and
Rebecca A. Martusewicz offered many insightful questions and com-
ments on a draft of the revision. I would like to thank. the philosophy
department of Miami University for its generous support of my travel
to the conference. Throughout I quote from Walter Kaufmann's and
R. J. Hollingdale's translations with minor emendations. For sigla used
in my citations, see the Reference Key to Nietzsche's Texts on p. xii.
2. AC 6; TI 'Expeditions' 35, 'Socrates' 11; CW 5; WP 44. For the deleteri-
ous effects of decadence on the future, see AC 58; TI 'Expeditions' 35.
3. With typical modesty, Nietzsche claims 'seeing morality as a
symptom of decadence is an innovation and a singularity of the first
rank. in the history of knowledge' (EH BT 2).
4. If only the grave-robber were not decadent, this relationship would
be much like what Nietzsche lauds as 'monumental history' in 'On
the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life'.
5. Like Heidegger in Being and Time (trans J. Macquarrie and
E. Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962» I emphasise the original
meaning of 'ecstatic'; however, I do not mean to import all the
Heideggerian resonances of the term.
6. Although possible, it is beyond the scope of this chapter to demons-
trate Stendhal's influence, in the narrow, scholarly sense, on Nietzsche.
Even limited to KGW Vll, Nietzsche's notes indicate familiarity with a
substantial portion of Stendhal's works (see KGW Vll4/2 s. 703 for a list
of passages in KGW Vll concerning Stendhal, Nietzsche Werke: Kritische
Gesamtausgabe, Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, eds, Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter, 1967-). In addition to the passages quoted here, see
EH CW3, 'Clever' 3, 'Untimely' 2.
7. Nietzsche's letter to Carl Fuchs, dated mid-April 1886, is the earliest
use of the French decadence I have located. The first notebook entry
(KGW VIII1: 5 [89]) was written sometime between summer 1886
and autumn 1887. Kaufmann (Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist,
Antichrist, p. 73n.) claims that Nietzsche uses the term in a notebook
entry from 1876-77 (KGW IV2: 23 [140]); however, that instance is
both isolated, and not the French term he uses frequently in the note-
books of 1887-88 and the published works of 1888. The Case of Wagner
is the first published work in which Nietzsche uses decadence.
8. See, especially BT and UD. In the Foreword to UD, Nietzsche claims
that 'it is only to the extent that I am a pupil of earlier times, espe-
cially the Hellenic, that though a child of the present time I was able
to acquire such untimely experiences' .
9. WP 40, 339; also see KGW VIII3: 16 [52] where he is more explicit:
'The decadents regarded as excrement of society'. The distinction
between biological and epidemic decadence is crucial for understand-
ing why Nietzsche sometimes claims that decadence cannot be
fought, while at others he takes sides against decadence.
10. AC 43, 51; WP 153,282.
11. To quote only the most explicit passage: 'The third [Le. GM III]
inquiry offers the answer to the question whence the ascetic ideal,
the priests' ideal, derives its tremendous pawer although it is the
harmful ideal par excellence, a will to the end, an ideal of decadence.
Answer: not, as people may believe, because God is at work behind
the priests but faute de mieux - because it was the only ideal so far,
because it had no rival. "For man would rather will even nothingness
than not will." - Above all, a counterideal was lacking - until
Zarathustra' (EH GM). In contrast, in EH 'Destiny', Nietzsche takes
pains to prevent himself from becoming this counter-ideal.
12 'All protracted things are hard to see, hard to see whole' (GM I 8).
This seems correct here, too.
13. For Schopenhauer as the reformulator of Christian decadence, see
T1 'Anti-Nature' 5, 'Expeditions' 35 and 37.
14. KGWVIII3: 15 [32], 16 [77], 17 [1]; WP 42.
15. EH CW 2; T1 'Expeditions' 37, 39, 41; CW Preface, 5, Postscript. While
his list of decadents is extremely long, Nietzsche never mentions a
non-decadent contemporary.
16. While AC and CW single out Christianity and Wagner for diagnosis,
Nietzsche most frequently labels philosophers as decadents. For phi-
losophy in general see: T1' Ancients' 3; T1 'Socrates' 1-2; KGW VIII3:
14 [27], [87], [169]; KGW VIII3: 15 [5], [20]; WP 401, 428, 435, 444, 461,
Brian Domino 61
586, 794. Nietzsche also diagnoses the following specific philosophers
as decadents: Epicurus (AC 30, WP 437); Kant (AC 11); Plato
(TI 'Ancients' 2); Schopenhauer (TI 'Morality' 5, 'Expeditions' 35 and
37; CW 4); Socrates (EH BT 1-2, TI'Socrates' 4).
17. Also see EH 'Wise' 2: 'I turned my will to health, to life, into a
philosophy.'
18. AC 6; TI 'Expeditions' 35, 'Socrates' 11; WP 44.
19. Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989) p. 9 and Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic (London:
Routledge, 1993) Ch. 9, 'The Visible Invisible,' pp. 149-73.
20. See, for example, Nietzsche's letter to his sister dated 31 March 1888
in which he claims that he is 'a step further away from many years'
misery and emerging decadence' but attributes his inability to write
his masterwork to his decadence.
21. Also see KGW VII2: 25 [154]. According to Colli and Montinari,
Stendhal's De l'Amour contains the similar phrase 'Ie beaute n' est que
la promesse de bonheur' (KGW VII4/2 p. 108).
22. The Private Diaries of Stendhal. ed. and trans. Robert Sage (New York:
Doubleday, 1955). From letter to Pauline, dated 6 October 1807
(p.265).
23. Also see CW 2. Diotima's description of love as the child of Poros
(plenty) and Penia (lack) (Symposium 203e) is relevant here.
24. Rome, Naples and Florence. trans. Richard N. Coe (New York:
G. Braziller, 1959) 23 January 1817 (pp. 304£f). I have occasionally
emended Coe's translation, using Voyages en Italie (Paris: Gallimard,
1992).
25. This is most evident in UD where the three postures to history (that is,
monumental, antiquarian and critical) lack the self-other tension found
in the ecstatic embrace of history. It is not surprising that
the once lauded monumental history is discovered to be a great source
of danger in the works of 1888. In Ecce Homo, history becomes auto-
biography intended for the self: 'I tell my life to myself (EH motto).
26. Both quotations are from Rome, Naples, and Florence. The first is from
the entry of 30 October 1816 (p. 49); the second is a note added to the
3 December 1816 entry in 1826 (pp. 117f.).
27. Rome, Naples and Florence, 22 January 1817 (pp. 300f£.).
28. Rome, Naples and Florence, 23 January 1817 (pp. 304ff.).
29. A Florentine psychiatrist describes an eponymous syndrome, the
'Stendhal syndrome', which is an existential crisis brought about
by over-indulgence in Florence's vast beauty (Graziella Magherini,
La sindrome di Stendhal (Firenze: Ponte aile grazie, 1989».
30. Clearly I am painting ala Nietzsche, with broad strokes, as one must
perforce do with a term as nebulous as 'postmodern'. Not all post-
moderns prevent the ecstatic embrace of history. Among the strands
of postmodernism I have in mind are cultural relativism (whether
as an epistemological or ethical claim, or as the political project com-
monly labelled 'multiculturalism'), the decentring of the self, and
anti-foundationalism.
Part Two
Laughter and Comedy
4
Nietzsche's Best Jokes
Laurence Lampert
For the good are always the merry.

(William Butler Yeats)
I've been collecting Nietzsche's best jokes for a few years now and
I've got a couple of hundred so far. For this essay I've selected some
of Nietzsche's jokes on two topics: God and man. I'll report them
with a few comments and then I'll concentrate on one joking
moment, a high moment of comedy that seems especially fine to me
because it exhibits the true ground of comedy in Nietzsche's
thought. Insight, what Nietzsche came to see, made him fundamen-
tally, inexpungeably festive.
So these are my themes: God jokes, human jokes, and a single
instance displaying the ground of the jokes.
A preliminary word about the jokes: as much fun as they are,
they place a certain responsibility on the reader to take the jokes in
a Nietzschean way, for Nietzsche said:
A human being who neighs with laughter surpasses all other

animals in coarseness.
(HH553)
The wittiest of authors raise the very slightest of smiles.
(HH186)
So, God jokes and human jokes. Jokes on him, jokes on us. The God
jokes are all rooted in our spiritual history, part of Nietzsche's spirit-
ual warfare against our limited notion of the high, our 'monoto-
notheism' as he called it (TI'Reason' 1). And the human jokes are all
rooted in our ways, the ways of our kind, and have fun with us as
the laughable species.
I like to think of the two types as distinguished by their uses: the
God jokes are killing jokes and the human jokes are wounding jokes.
65
Killing and wounding - whenever I've felt offended I've had to
remember Nietzsche's command to interested readers: 'Toughen up!'
GOD JOKES, KILLING JOKES
'Nothing kills like laughter.' Thus joked Zarathustra. And he meant

it. In the opening aphorism of The Gay Science Nietzsche says, 'In
the long run, every one of the great teachers of a purpose [to exist-
ence] was vanquished by laughter, reason, and nature: the short
tragedy always gave way and surrended to the eternal comedy of
existence; "the waves of uncountable laughter" - to quote
Aeschylus - must in the end overwhelm even the greatest of these
tragedians' (GS 1). The greatest of these tragedians for us is God,
and Nietzsche jokes to kill him off:
God's only excuse is that he doesn't exist.

(EH 'Clever' 3)
Nietzsche called this his best atheistic joke and was mad at Stendhal
for telling it first.
If that's Nietzsche's best atheistic joke here's his best non-atheistic
God joke and maybe his best joke bar none:
One of the gods announced one day, 'There is only one God.
Thou shalt have no other gods before me.' ...
And all the other gods - died laughing.
Then there was only one God.
(Z ill 'On Apostates')
What makes this little joke so nice is its historic truth. The laughing
gods were Homeric gods of gaiety and festival and they in fact died
at the predatory tyranny of the God who spoke the ungodly word,
that there is only one God.
Another God joke on the same historic event:
It was subtle of God to learn Greek when he wanted to become

an author - and not to learn it better.
(BGE 121)
And it was subtle of Nietzsche to leave it at that, even though the

funny part depends upon knowing that God authored the New
Laurence Lampert 67
Testament in Koine or common Greek, not the high classical Greek
of Sophocles and Aristophanes, Thucydides and Plato. Nietzsche's
little joke suggests that by adopting common Greek for a non-Greek
message, a shrewd Asian god took up again the old contest between
Persians and Greeks, Asians and Europeans, a contest for the mind
of European humanity - and that the Asian god won because he
employed the common language, supplanting the high achieve-
ment of classical and post-classical Athens with a religion for the
mob.
Let me now just relate a few Nietzschean jokes about God and
our religion with less commentary.
'Is it true that God is everywhere?' a little girl asked her mother. 'I
think that's indecent.' - a hint for philosophers.
(GS Preface 4)
If there were gods, how could I bear not to be one? Therefore,

there are no gods.
(Z IT 'On the blessed isles')
Thus reasoned Zarathustra. (Remember though that in his note-

book, lamenting the fact of '2000 years and not a single new god',
Nietzsche himself said: 'Zarathustra is only an old atheist.')
God is dead: but given the way human beings are, there will be
caves in which men play with his shadow for centuries.
(GS 108)
'God cannot exist without the wise,' said Luther with good
reason.
'God can exist even less without the unwise' - that our good
Luther did not say.
(GS 129)
Here's a little dialogue between Luther and Melanchthon with

Pilate's question as its title:
What is truth?
Melanchthon: 'One often preaches one's faith precisely when one
has lost it and seeks it in every byway - and preaches it then
not the worst!'
Luther: 'Brother, thou speakest truth, like an angel.'
68 Nietzsche's Best lokes
Melanchthon: 'But that's the thought of thine enemies and they
apply it to thee!'
Luther: 'Then it's a lie from the devil's behind.'
(WS 66)
This one too bears a title:
When an ass is needed. - You'll never get the crowd to shout

'Hosanna!' 'til you ride into town on an ass.
(AOM313)
Christianity gave Eros poison to drink. He didn't die of it but

degenerated - into a vice.
(BGE 168)
Here's one with Nietzsche as Bible commentator:
Mark 9:47. 'And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.' It's not
exactly the eye that is meant.
(AC 45)
Nietzsche as theologian:
That countless numbers have from all eternity been condemned

to damnation and that this lovely little universal plan was
instituted so that the glory of God might be revealed in it - Paul
remained Saul to the end, persecutor of God.
(WS 85)
'Salvation of the soul' - in plain language, 'The world revolves

around me.'
(AC 43)
Here's Nietzsche as imaginative cosmologist:
Let's hope there really are more spiritual beings than human beings
so that the humour found in the fact that humans regard them-
selves as the goal of the whole universe will not go to waste. The
music of the spheres encompassing the earth - that would be the
sporting laughter of those more spiritual beings encompassing
humanity.
(WS 14)
Laurence Lampert 69
The limit of humility. - Many have no doubt attained the humility
which says, 'I believe because it is absurd,' and sacrificed their
reason to it.
But as far as I know, no one has yet attained the humility
which says, 'I believe because I am absurd' - it's only one step
further.
(D 417)
With jokes like this no wonder Nietzsche could say:
It's not their love of humanity but the powerlessness of their

love of humanity that keeps Christians these days from -
bumingus.
(BGE 104)
In former times we thought we could arrive at a feeling for the

grandeur of humanity by pointing to its divine origin. But now
that has become a forbidden way, for at its portal stands the ape,
grinning knowingly, as if to say, 'No further in this direction.'
(D49)
Even at the very end, when Nietzsche was getting most urgent
and least subtle, he could break out in a little smile from a pleasant
mockery of our God.
Has that famous story which stands at the beginning of the Bible
really been understood? The story of God's hellish fear of
science? Science is the first sin, the germ of all other sins, original
sin. Morality consists of this alone: 'Thou shalt not know' - the
rest follows.
How can one defend oneself against science? That was God's
big problem for a long time. Solution: 'Out of paradise with manl
Happiness, idleness, give rise to ideas - and all ideas are bad
ideas. Man shall not think.'
But despite God's best efforts - despite distress, death,
misery, age, toil, sickness, war - despite God's best efforts,
man's knowledge grew. And the old God makes a final deci-
sion: 'Man has become scientific - there is no other way: he
must be drowned.'
(AC 48)
With that, let's let God off the hook - for now - and tum to ourselves.
HUMAN JOKES, WOUNDING JOKES
Here the jokes play in the gap between the ideal and the human, all
too human. '1 don't refute ideals,' Nietzsche said, '1 just put on
gloves when I'm around them' (EH Preface 3). And one pair of
gloves are jokes. Because they're often biting or wounding some
have taken them to be poisoned by cynicism or contempt or per-
sonal bitterness. But it seems to me that they are still affinnative in a
manner caught in a little meditation from Dawn of Morning about
being laughed at:
Suppose we were at the market one day and noticed some-

one laughing at us as we went by - it will be a quite different
event according to the kind of person we are. One person will
absorb it like a drop of rain, another will brush it off like an
insect, another will try to pick a quarrel, another will examine
his clothes to see if there is anything about them that might
give rise to laughter, another will be led to reflect on the nature
of laughter, another will be glad to have involuntarily
augmented the amount of cheerfulness and sunshine in the
world.
(D 119)
That last one - to be glad at being laughed at because it adds

to the amount of cheerfulness in the world - that seems to me
to be the spirit aspired to in Nietzsche's joking about human
beings.
A section of The Gay Science makes this claim specifically about
himself.
When I hear the malice of others against me, isn't my first

response satisfaction? Here are my faults and failings, here's
my delusion, my bad taste, my bewilderment, my tears, my
vanity, my owl-seclusion, my contradictions. Here you can
laugh. Laugh and be merry. I'm not mad at that law of the
nature of things which dictates that faults and failings cause
merriment.
(GS 311)
Here's a small sampling of merriment at the faults and failings of

human beings:
Laurence Lampert 71
The thought of suicide is a powerful comfort: it can help you
through many a bad night.
(BGE 57)
Of all consolations none does as much good to those in need of

consolation as the claim that, in their case, there is no consolation.
There's such a degree of distinction in this claim that they can
hold their heads high again.
(D 380)
Somewhat related:
Whoever despises himself still respects himself as one who

despises.
(BGE 78)
And out of Nietzsche's direct experience:
Sickness can be a real stimulus to life; you just have to be healthy

enough for it.
(CW5)
And here's a word for those not healthy enough for it, the teachers
of despair or pessimism:
If life is such a tragedy for you, wouldn't now be a good time to

end it?
(Z I IOn the teachers of virtue')
And a comment on one of those teachers:
Pascal performed the experiment of seeing whether, with the aid

of the most incisive knowledge, everyone could not be brought to
despair. His experiment failed - and he despaired all over again.
(D64)
On modem times:
No one dies of deadly truths these days - there are too many
antidotes.
(HH516)
And further on modem times:
Because there's no time for thinking any more, and no repose in

thinking, we no longer weigh divergent views. We're content to
hate them.
(HH282)
We modems, with our thick padding of humaneness which dislikes

the slightest offense - we'd provide the men of the Renaissance
with such comedy they'd laugh themselves silly. We're involuntarily
funny, we with our modem virtues ... everyone an invalid, every-
one a nurse.
Nietzsche as a realistic philanthropist:
Sometimes, out of love of humanity, you hug a bystander at

random (after all, you can't hug everybody) - but you'd better
not tell him the reason.
(BGE 172)
These next ones don't deal with love of humanity:
His cynicism with others is a sign that when he's alone he treats
himselflike a dog.
(AOM256)
Pity, in La Rochefoucauld's and Plato's judgment, weakens the

soul. Of course, one should express pity, one should only guard
against having it.
(HHSO)
Here's a little dialogue:
'I don't like him.'

'Why not?'
'I'm not equal to him.'
Has any human being ever answered that way?
(BGE 185)
Another little dialogue:

Laurence Lampert 73
'I did that' says my memory.
'I can't have done that' says my pride and stands firm.
Eventually, memory yields.
(BGE 68)
Here's one of many little jokes on virtue:
When virtue has slept, it will rise refreshed.

(HH83)
One of many on punishment:
Every wrongdoer who has been pUnished deserves to feel like a

benefactor of humanity.
(WS 244)
You want to raise your esteem in his eyes? Pretend to be

embarrassed in his presence.
(BGE 113)
This fits very nicely with Nietzsche's definition of courtesy:
The impish and cheerful vice, courtesy, [consists in] successfully

appearing more stupid than you are.
(BGE 284, 288)
(I think our scholarship on Nietzsche would be greatly bene-

fited by recognising that Nietzsche could be a most courteous author.)
And now a few that deal with what Nietzsche knew best, the
thinker or philosopher.
Philosophers are not made to love one another. Eagles don't fly in
groups. Leave that to the partridges and starlings.
(WP 989, quoting Galiani)
He's a thinker: he knows how to make things more simple than

they are.
(GS 189)
The thorough. - Those who are slow to know suppose slowness is

the essence of knowledge.
(GS 231)
Yes, he considers the matter from all sides, and you think, here's
a true man of knowledge. But he only wants to lower the price.
He wants to buy it.
(D 342)
Error made humanity so deep and delicate and inventive

that humans brought forth such blossoms as religions and
arts.
Whoever revealed to us the essence of the world would disap-
point us all most unpleasantly.
(HH29)
A little dialogue on knowers entitled 'Final argument of the brave':
'There are snakes in those bushes.'

'Good. I'll go in and kill them.'
'But they may get you, not you them.'
'What do I matter?'
(D 494)
And a little later in Dawn of Morning:
'What do I matter!' - stands over the door of the thinker of the

future.
(D547)
And this one item on the thinker Nietzsche himself:
We forget too easily that in the eyes of people who see us for the
first time we're something quite different from what we take our-
selves to be - usually nothing more than a single trait which
strikes the eye and determines the whole impression. In this way,
the gentlest and most reasonable person, if he wears a big mous-
tache, can sit in its shade and feel safe - ordinary eyes will take
him to be the accessory of a big moustache, a military type, quick
to fly off the handle, sometimes even violent - they'll behave
themselves in his presence.
(D 381)
(This means of course, that Nietzsche also wrote with a big

moustache.)
Laurence Lampert 75
Let me end this section on human jokes with a little aphorism on
the opposite of humour, a lovely thought on gloom and vengeance,
and on surrender to them.
Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless

words directed our way, conclusions grow up, like mushrooms.
One morning: there they are, we don't know how, and they gaze
at us, grey and spiteful.
Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil to
his plants.
(D 382)
(I take this to be, in part, an invitation to ask how the gardener

Nietzsche tended his mushrooms.)
LEVITY IN GRAVITY
I turn now from jokes to the basis and genesis of Nietzschean

joking, that sense of things out of which the smile arises. I'm going
to look at a series of aphorisms which exhibit the tie between
gravity and levity and show why philosophy for Nietzsche is
rightly called gay science: two words - gaiety being the natural
accompaniment of insight. Science, as Nietzsche presents it, forces
assent to 'the doctrines of the sovereignty of becoming, the fluidity
of all concepts, types, and kinds, the lack of any cardinal distinction
between human and animal': doctrines Nietzsche once held to be
'true but deadly' (UD 9). But Nietzsche came to hold that these true
views - this gravity - could prove to be the foundation for gaiety,
for carnival and festival, for a new poetry celebrating the temporal
and mortal. In Nietzsche, truth is no longer felt to be humbling,
deflating our dignity and costing us our worth; instead, truth makes
festive. 1 think of this as Nietzsche's most significant contribution to
the human future, a possibly festive future based on science as
insight into the world in all its becoming and fluidity.
There's another, smaller reason for considering the humour in
this series of aphorisms: they illustrate the fact that most
Nietzschean jokes are so thoroughly embedded in their context that
they can not be lifted out without losing their humour. Any list of
Nietzsche's best jokes faces this limitation: most have to be left
behind, embedded in their context.
My focus is a tiny aphorism, a little dialogue that breaks out
between Nietzsche and those he calls 'my friends', aphorism 37 of
Beyond Good and Evil. To appreciate that little dialogue we have to
see its tie to aphorism 36, and see the parallel between this pair, 36
and 37, and the immediately preceding pair, 34 and 35, and,
finally, see the place of these four aphorisms in the whole
economy of the book. They occur in the centre of Part Two, the
part entitled 'The Free Spirit,' or 'The Free Mind'. As the second
part of Beyond Good and Evil, 'The Free Mind', depends on the
gains of the first part, 'On the Prejudices of Philosophers', for that
first part had cleared away dogmatic prejudices of two thousand
years of philosophy by raising the deepest suspicions about phi-
losophy and its three primary adjunct sciences, physics, the science
of nature as a whole, biology, the science of life, and psychology, the
science of the human soul. After that clearing away or liberation,
Nietzsche can address his proper audience in Part Two, the free
minds aware of their freedom from past dogmatisms, moderns
aware of their liberation into healthy scepticism.
At the centre of Part Two Nietzsche confronts those free, scepti-
cal, modern minds with what is most his own, the will to power
teaching, and it is something they can not welcome because it will
seem like a new form of the old dogmatisms.
Aphorism 34, the central aphorism of Part Two, deals with the
great epistemological problem of modern philosophy, recognition
of the erroneousness of the world in which we think we live.
Accompanying this now settled scepticism about the world of
objects there persists, Nietzsche maintains, a non-scepticism about
the subject or consciousness - a will to believe in subjectivity
as something immediately given and trustworthy. We suppose
that we are insurmountably deceived about the world, but
we are not deceived, we suppose, about our consciousness, our
subjectivity.
Presenting himself as an expert who has learned to think differ-
ently about deceiving and being deceived, Nietzsche says he
always keeps in reserve' ein paar Rippenstosse' - a few pokes to the
ribs - for 'the blind rage with which philosophers resist being
deceived'. Their very rage for truth has deceived philosophers
about the subtleties of truth and appearance, and made them
unable to appreciate 'perspective' or 'degrees of apparentness'.
Modem philosophers, Nietzsche suggests, have become dogmatic
sceptics about the world of objects and dogmatic believers in the
Laurence Lampert 77
truth of consciousness. But this is a nai'vete, Nietzsche says, a
stupidity, the innocent faith of our nannies,
and isn't it time for philosophy to renounce the faith of our

nannies?
Thus ends aphorism 34 and it is followed immediately by aphorism

35, a nice little Rippenstoss aimed at one of our nannies for his stupidity
about truth. Here is the whole aphorism:
o Voltaire! 0 humaneness! 0 nonsense! There is something

about 'truth,' about the search for truth; and when a human is
too human about it - 'He seeks the true only to do the good' - I
bet he finds nothing.
If that's the case about truth then to find something we will have to
become inhuman, and break the naive faith that the true and the
good are linked. By breaking that supposed connection we break
free of modern nonsense about the total erroneousness of the world
of objects and the total truthfulness of consciousness - but it will
hurt. This hurtful willingness to be inhuman - this 'Toughen up!'
demanded by the intellectual conscience - is taken up immediately
in aphorism 36.
Its theme is knowledge of the world arrived at through acquain-
tance with the self. It is a corrective to modern good-natured
scepticism about the world and modern good-natured dogmatism
about the self and it shows that Nietzsche shared neither the
scepticism nor the dogmatism. But 36 and 37 show as well how
acutely attuned Nietzsche was to the sensibilities of his audience,
particularly their scepticism. As Nietzsche said later in Beyond Good
and Evil: 'when a philosopher these days lets it be known that he is
not a sceptic, everyone is annoyed' (BGE 208). Aphorisms 36 and 37
show just how annoying Nietzsche is to modern sceptics - and just
how far he is willing to go to parry that annoyance in this, his only
possible sympathetic audience.
Aphorism 36 is the crucial aphorism of Beyond Good and Evil for
this under appreciated reason: it and it alone presents the reasoning
on behalf of the knowability of the world. Part One had suggested,
in the style of dogmatic announcement, that the will to power
teaching could explain what is deepest - in philosophy, in nature, in
life, and in the human soul, that philosophy, physics, biology and
psychology could advance to the deepest level of their subject
matters if they viewed their subject matters as modes of the will to
power. Those announcements of Part One are supplied with their
ground in the reasoning of aphorism 36. That reasoning is a dis-
course on method tracing the only possible route into the always
hidden heart of things. The reasoning depends upon a never
demonstrable inference that moves from the better-known to the
less well-known - from the self to the non-self, or the world as a
totality. The justification for that inference Nietzsche dares to call
the 'morality of method'; the morality of the intellectual conscience
requiring the supposition that the always inaccessible heart of the
world be like in kind to the barely accessible heart of the inquirer.
Aphorism 36 thus concludes:
the world seen from the inside, the world defined and deter-
mined according to its 'intelligible character' - it would be 'will to
power' and nothing besides. -
And here comes aphorism 37 as an immediate response. The first

voice we hear is the voice of Nietzsche's friends, that special audi-
ence of free minds. What they say betrays the fact that their minds
are unfree in the crucial respect, that they retain after all the preju-
dices of our philosophers, the faith of our nannies. For their re-
action to Nietzsche's reasoned conclusion shows annoyance and
more than annoyance: his conclusion appals them. But being good
modems they have no language of their own to express the extrem-
ity of their horror so they have to revert to the old language well
outfitted with extremes, a discredited language they no longer
believe in but one fit to express their repugnance at Nietzsche's rea-
soned conclusion. Here is their whole speech:
'What! Doesn't that mean, to speak in the common language,

God is refuted, but the Devil is not - 7'
'God' - they use the old word for everything high, refined, sacred,
good; every solace, everything sweet and beautiful. All that, they
say, is refuted in your conclusion about the intelligible character of
the world.
'Devil' - they use the old word for everything base, coarse,
profane, evil; every terror, everything bitter and ugly. All that,
they say, is not refuted in your conclusion. To their minds, if to be
Laurence Lampert 79
is to be will to power, God is refuted but the Devil is not. Put
another way, if there are only base origins, there is only the base.
And Nietzsche's response to this appalled outcry by his natural

friends and allies?
On the contrary! On the contrary, my friends!
This compact response is calculated to win over Nietzsche's friends

to the core of his teaching. Knowing that that core is bound to
annoy and appal, Nietzsche knows as well that even to begin to be
won over they will have to learn to think their way into that core by
themselves. And they can begin that process with the spare but
promising suggestion he has just made. For the exact contrary is
this: the Devil is refuted but God is not.
In pondering this exact contrary, Nietzsche's friends, we free-
minded atheists, will have the savoury pleasure of entertaining the
ultimate blasphemy to our tradition of divinity. For what is implied
in the contrary is this: God is refuted, you say? - that transcendent
immutable God who spoke the ungodly word 'there is only one
God'? Yes, the will to power conclusion refutes that God. But is that
God God? That God must be seen as the very contrary, as the Devil,
an all-powerful tyrant who put the earth under a curse and
assigned it to the Prince of Darkness; a tyrant who demanded of
cowed and single-minded followers that there be no science, that
they believe only what he said or face the prospect of being
drowned. Nietzsche's little 'on the contrary' reverses that God-
awful theology of the persecutor of God; his new, contrary view
refutes that Devil.
And the contrary reasoning would continue: The Devil is not
refuted, you say? Certainly the will to power conclusion does not
refute what the old theology called demonic: the world, the
worldly, the love of the world. But is that demonic demonic? On
the contrary. The will to power conclusion, so far from refuting
this Devil, vindicates it as divine. That wasteful, indifferent, throb-
bing abundance, the world as it is, must be seen as the not refuted,
vindicated divine.
Nietzsche has one more helpful and corrective word for
his shaken friends in this little dialogue on devilry and divinity.
It begins, 'Und, zum Teufel auch' which has to be translated
'And as to the devil', but it also means something like 'goddamn
it'. So:
And as to the Devil, goddamn it, who compels you to speak in the
common language!
Who but that old Devil himself, dead but not gone, lingering on
for centuries as a shadow on our cave wall, as the only language of
divinity possible for reduced modems, modems liberated into
poverty regarding the sacred by the welcome death of the tyran-
nical God of our tradition. The liberating death of the God with
the hellish fear of science leaves us speechless about gods - but
goddamn it, why permit that last tyrannical act by our dead
monotonotheism? Why not try to find a new language of divinity,
a new way of speaking about a natural order which is infinitely
greater than ourselves, and to which we owe our being and hence
our awe and gratitude? If the world is will to power and nothing
besides we must not only repudiate the common language of
divinity, we must invent a new one, a fitting language of festivity
and pandemonium that learns how to invite back the laughing
gods.
This whole complex of world affirmation based on insight into
the world is the root of comedy in Nietzsche. The basic comedy is
not the thousand and one jokes that give pleasure at the old God's
passing, for these jokes are merely timely, funny only for the next
few centuries as the comedy attendant on the greatest recent
tragedy.
The true ground of comedy in Nietzsche, its basis and genesis, is
neither God nor man, it is the new understanding of the whole. The
world viewed from the inside as will to power and nothing besides
is a world conducive to gaiety; glimpsing it transforms its viewer
into a lover and a celebrant and makes him festive. The ultimate
festive act of this viewer is also one whose logic Beyond Good and
Evil traces once and only once as the lover's act of shouting insa-
tiably to the whole interconnected totality of things: Let's have it
again, and again, an infinite number of times, this whole stupen-
dous comedy of existence.
Out of the deep comedy of existence well up the thousand
jokes Nietzsche employed on its behalf. Courteous to a fault,
Nietzsche masked the singularity of his own role in the monster
comedy, hiding the offence caused by his singular greatness
Laurence Lampert 81
and encouraging his friends to win through to his view on their
own aided by hints and jokes and fragments of the necessary
reasoning.
Let the last words be courteous words by Nietzsche himself, late
words that came after he had composed the great books that would
make him a destiny, words that express a kind of timid astonish-
ment at the gap between the revolutionary greatness of those books
and 'the absurd silence' with which they had been greeted during
Nietzsche's lifetime:
'Are there any German philosophers? Are there any German

poets? Are there any good German books?'
People ask me this abroad.
I blush.
(TI 'Germans' 1)
Note
For sigla used in my citations, see the Reference Key to Nietzsche's Texts on
p. xii.
5
Waves of Uncountable
Laughter
Kathleen Marie Higgins
We require that a man should be so large and columnar in the

landscape, that it should deserve to be recorded, that he arose
and girded up his loins, and departed to such a place. The pic-
tures most credible to us are those of majestic men who prevailed
at their entrance, and convinced the senses; as happened to the
eastern magian who was sent to test the merits of Zertusht or
Zoroaster [Zarathustra]. When a Yuani sage arrived at Balkh, the
Persians tell us, Gushtasp appointed a day on which the Mobeds
of every country should assemble, and a golden chair was placed
for the Yuani sage. Then the beloved Yezdam, the prophet of
Zertusht, advanced into the midst of the assembly. The Yuani
sage, on seeing the chief, said, 'This form and this gait cannot lie,
and nothing but truth can proceed from them.'1
According to George Stack, Nietzsche wrote' Das ist est' ('That is it!')
in the margin alongside this passage from Emerson's 'Character'.
Derrida notwithstanding, Zarathustra, for Nietzsche, is a myth of
such vital presence. As a type, Nietzsche contends, Zarathustra 'over-
took' him. Nietzsche characterises Zarathustra in this way early in
Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The saint who encounters Zarathustra in the
Prologue of that book remarks, 'Yes, I recognize Zarathustra. His eyes
are pure, and around his mouth there hides no disgust. Does he not
walk like a dancer?'2
From the standpoint of Nietzsche, living in the nineteenth
century, the historical Zarathustra would seem a ghostly apparition,
if present at all. But Nietzsche recognises a vital impulse, still active
in his own era, that he believes Zarathustra initiated. Nietzsche
announces that 'The tragedy begins' with Zarathustra in section 342
of The Gay Science. I will attempt to demonstrate that he considers it
82
to be a tragedy in which all of us, in the modern era, still find our-
selves implicated, yet one which may soon reach its finish.
Section 342 closes the first edition of The Gay Science. Its reference
to tragedy points us back to the book's opening. In section I,
Nietzsche describes human history as a sequence of eras, in which
tragic accounts that establish the meaning of human existence
are periodically necessary, but always overwhelmed by the comic
perspective, 'waves of uncountable laughter', in the phrase of
Aeschylus. Comedy always overwhelms tragedy. Nietzsche's
closing allusion to the beginning of our tragic age reminds us that
this era will end. Nietzsche hopes that the gay science, the light-
hearted approach to inquiry that he demonstrates throughout the
book, is itself an indication that our era of seriousness, too, will
soon itself be engulfed by the waves of comedy.
NIETZSCHE AND THE HISTORICAL ZARATHUSTRA
Kaufmann remarks, 'It seems to have gone unnoticed ... how close
Nietzsche had come to the real Zarathustra's view.'3 How histor-
ically accurate is Nietzsche's portrait of Zarathustra? Jacques
Duchesne-Guillemin, one of the most prominent current scholars of
Zoroastrianism, consid~rs Nietzsche to have been knowledgeable
but ironic in his depiction.
The Iranian prophet has never been a truly popular figure in

Europe, and it is significant that the only literary work that calls
him by his real name, Nietzsche's Also sprach Zarathustra,
1885-7, should present a picture of him which is the almost
exact opposite of truth. This was deliberate on the part of
Nietzsche, who was not at all ignorant of the real Zoroaster, but
wanted to use him as a mouthpiece for his own message. The
public, however, did not see the difference and Nietzsche's
enormous irony was 10st.4
The irony that Duchesne-Guillemin has in mind is presumably that

the real Zarathustra contended that good and evil were metaphysi-
cal principles, while Nietzsche's Zarathustra relativises these con-
cepts and contends that morality is a human, all-too-human
fabrication. The extent to which Nietzsche's portrait of Zarathustra
is deliberately ironic will concern us later.
Aside from Kaufmann, Nietzsche scholars have made little effort
to compare Nietzsche's character with his historical prototype.
Most scholarly treatments of Zarathustra give the impression that
Nietzsche called his character 'Zarathustra' just because he liked
the name. But this strikes me as extremely unlikely. In the first
place, Nietzsche explicitly described his work to Ida Overbeck as
an effort 'to revalue Zoroaster'.5 This suggests that his intention
was to reconsider the historical Zarathustra's achievement, not to
dismiss it or to construct a character only marginally related to the
original.
Second, Nietzsche's training as a classicist provided him with
ample knowledge of the ancient reports and legends about the
original Zarathustra - so he was not speculating in ignorance. 6
Nietzsche would surely have been acquainted with Pliny's
report that Zarathustra entered the world laughing instead of
crying. 7 Nietzsche was also aware of Herodotus' account of
the Magi, hereditary priests, who adopted Zoroastrianism but
retained certain old beliefs and deities. This account concurs with
the picture of the Magi presented by the Avesta (although he
does not explicitly mention Zarathustra).8 Herodotus also
reports of the Persians that 'Lying is regarded as the most dis-
credit-able thing by them.'9 That Nietzsche is drawing on this
account is evident from his assertion, in both Thus Spoke
Zarathustra and Ecce Homo, that the chief Persian virtue was to tell
the truth. 1o
Zarathustra is explicitly discussed by Diogenes Laertius, whom
Nietzsche knew well. Nietzsche had presented a lecture on the
sources of Diogenes Laertius to the Leipzig student philological
society and later written a prize-winning essay on Laertius. ll
Diogenes Laertius may be responsible for Nietzsche's decision to
use Zarathustra's actual name rather than Zoroaster, for Laertius
draws attention to the latter's status as a descriptive characterisa-
tion. 'Zoroaster', etymologically, means 'adorer of the stars'.12
Laertius also describes the Magi as opposing two powers, one that
of the good god and the other that of the devil, an opposition that
Nietzsche obviously had in mind when he set out to revalue the
prophet. 13
A third reason for thinking that Nietzsche aims to address the
philosophy of the original Zarathustra is that his style in Thus
Spoke Zarathustra appears to be modelled, at least in part, on the
Zend-Avesta, the scripture of the Zoroastrians. On the basis of
Zarathustra's verse-sermons, C. G. Jung thinks that Nietzsche must
have studied the Avesta in detail, a view with which Roger
Hollingrake concurs.14
The plot and depictions presented in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and
what is known about the life of the historical Zarathustra also con-
verge in many respects. This convergence is further evidence that
Nietzsche is considering the actual Zarathustra, not inventing a
completely new character. For example, the natural setting of
Nietzsche's work seems modelled on Zarathustra's Persia. In
section 342 of The Gay Science, Nietzsche explicitly mentions Lake
Urmi, where the historical Zarathustra allegedly lived. IS
A second significant similarity is Zarathustra's specific age of 30,
with which Nietzsche's account begins, both in The Gay Science,
section 342, and in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The age of 30 is tradition-
ally cited as the age at which the historical Zarathustra's mission
began. 16 The ten years that follow, also mentioned in Nietzsche's
opening, are also the span of time cited in the texts of Zoroastrian
religion. 17 Admittedly, the historical Zoroaster is actively involved
in proselytising between the ages of 30 and 40, while Nietzsche's
Zarathustra does not tire' of his mountain cave. Nevertheless,
I
Zarathustra was not successful in attracting any followers during

these first ten years; and the first years after 40, the age when
Nietzsche's character begins his mission, are also times of significant
challenge in the life and mission of the historical prophet. 18
Arguably such challenges of this order are precisely the subject
matter of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Other parallels between the plots of Zarathustra's story in the
Avesta and that told in Thus Spoke Zarathustra abound. Even
Nietzsche's reference to Zarathustra's residing in a city called 'the
Motley Cow' is firmly grounded in Zoroastrian history, although
the town's name is also, Freny Mistry observes, 'a literal translation
of the name of the town Kalmasadalmya (Pall: Kammasuddamam)
visited by the Buddha on his wanderings'.19 The reference to cattle
is appropriately Zoroastrian. Martin Haug observes that the practice
of agriculture, a religious duty for Zoroastrians, is expressed in
terms of 'the universal soul of the earth, the cause of all life and
growth'. The term for this 'soul of the earth' (Geush urva), however,
literally means 'soul of the cow'. This expression is a simile, accord-
ing to Haug, 'for the earth is compared to a cow'. The cow is thus an
image for the art of agriculture and, more broadly, for humanity's
activity on earth.
WHY ZARATHUSTRA?
Certain elements of Zoroastrian thought appear to run directly

counter to Nietzsche's views. In the first place, Nietzsche would be
unlikely to applaud the monotheistic tendencies of Zoroastrianism.
In The Gay Science, section 143, he praises polytheism for its valid-
ation of diverse types of individuals.20 Yet the original Zarathustra
is considered one of the earliest monotheists.
More straightforwardly, Zarathustra's analysis of good and evil
would seem to be precisely the type of moral dualism that
Nietzsche rejects in his account of the importance of moving
'beyond good and evil'. The Zoroastrian suggestion that a beatific
afterlife awaits those who ally themselves with good as opposed to
evil seems even further removed from Nietzsche's apparent posi-
tion, since Nietzsche frequently argues that the afterlife is com-
pletely 'imaginary' and a postulation that supported an 'anti-life'
point of view. Furthermore, Zoroastrianism is a predecessor of
Christianity - and in so far as the two faiths share common ground,
Zoroastrianism would seem to be a target for the same attacks that
Nietzsche aims against the latter.
Despite these evident grounds for opposing Zoroastrianism,
however, Nietzsche had many reasons for having at least an
ambivalent view of Zarathustra, and perhaps a favourable one. In
the first place, Zarathustra's accommodation of lesser deities makes
his monotheism a qualified matter. Zarathustra seems to have con-
sidered the angel Sraosha as a separate, quasi-divine personality.
'He is the angel who stands between God and man, the great
teacher of the good religion who instructed the prophet in it', Haug
tells US. 21
To the extent that Zarathustra is a monotheist, moreover, his
monotheism might be seen as the construction of an image in
which contrary powers are brought together and deified as
all aspects of a single divine reality. If so, Zarathustra's brand
of monotheism would not be vulnerable to Nietzsche's attack that
one type of person is elevated and all others denigrated by the
viewpoint.
This becomes even more evident when one considers a second
basis for Nietzsche's high opinion of Zarathustra - the latter's con-
viction that good and evil are interconnected. The popular image of
Zarathustra - indeed, one encouraged by the reports of Diogenes
Laertius and Plutarch - is that Zarathustra characterised good and
evil as separate, opposed principles. But this is not an accurate
picture. Haug, whose writing was known to Nietzsche and whose
scholarly work on Zarathustra was already in circulation by the
time Nietzsche wrote The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra,22
contends that 'a separate evil spirit of equal power with
Ahuramazda, and always opposed to him, is entirely foreign to
Zarathustra's theology'.23 According to Zarathustra's doctrine,
The two primeval causes ... though different, were united, and
produced the world of material things, as well as that of the spirit
... The one who procured the 'reality' ... is called ... 'the good
mind', the other, through whom the 'non-reality' ... originated,
bears the name ... 'the evil mind'. All good, true, perfect things,
which fall under the category of 'reality', are the productions of
the 'good mind'; while all that is bad and delusive, belongs to the
sphere of 'non-reality', and is traced to the 'evil mind'. They are
the two moving causes in the universe, united from the begin-
ning, and therefore, called 'twins' ... They are present every-
where; in Ahuramazda as well as in men.24
The two principles, when considered united within Ahuramazda

himself, are called spentO mainyush, 'the beneficent spirit', and angro
mainyush, 'the hurtful spirit'. As twins, the duality of holy and
destructive spirits emerges from a common divine unity. Haug
emphasises the importance of the interconnection between good
and evil, according to the original Zarathustra.
Both are as inseparable as day and night, and though opposed to

each other, are indispensable for the preservation of creation ...
Spento-mainyush has created the light of day, and Angro-
mainyush the darkness of night; the former awakens men to their
duties; the latter lulls them to sleep. Life is produced by Spento-
mainyush, but extinguished by Angro-mainyush, whose hands,
by releasing the soul from the fetters of the body, enables her to
rise into immortality and everlasting life.25
The two principles, as aspects of Ahuramazda, are considered as co-

relative and both essential to creation. They are complements, much
like the Chinese yin and yang.
In the original Zarathustra's doctrine, the hurtful spirit is not
Ahuramazda's opponent.
Angro is no separate being, opposed to Ahuramazda ... And,
indeed, we never find angro mainyush mentioned as a constant
opponent of Ahuramazda in the GAthas, as is the case in later
writings. The evil against which Ahuramazda and all good men
are fighting is called drukhsh, 'destruction, or lie', which is nothing
but a personification of the Devas.26
The actual Zarathustra's doctrine presents a subtle view of

the interdependence of good and evil, a view that resembles
Nietzsche's own view that 'the evil instincts are expedient, species-
preserving, and indispensable to as high a degree as the good ones;
their function is merely different'.27 In all probability, Nietzsche
would also have had some sympathy for the Zoroastrian doctrine
that God is the source of evil as well as good. In On the Genealogy
of Morals, Nietzsche describes his own youthful resolution of the
problem of the origin of evil: 'as for my "solution" of the problem ...
well, I gave the honor to God, as was only fair, and made him the
father of evil'.28 Strikingly, this is precisely the solution proposed by
Zarathustra.
A third reason for thinking that Nietzsche's view of Zarathustra
would have been more favourable than his view of Christianity is
that the ancient prophet was not nearly as absolutist as the later
religion. Duchesne-Guillemin observes
Though Zoroaster was never, even in the thinking of the founder,

as aggressively monotheistic as, for instance, Judaism or Islam, it
does represent an original attempt at unifying under the worship
of one supreme god a polytheistic religion comparable to those of
the ancient Greeks, Latins, Indians, and other early peoples.
Its other salient feature, namely dualism, was never under-
stood in an absolute, rigorous fashion. Good and Evil fight in an
unequal battle in which the former is assured of triumph. God's
omnipotence is thus only temporarily limited. In this struggle
man must enlist because of his capacity of free choice. He does so
with his soul and body, not against his body.29
As this point about the role of the body suggests, Nietzsche's advo-
cacy of naturalistic accounts over those that are transcendent and
metaphysical is yet another reason why he should be sympathetic
to Zoroastrianism. Duchesne-Guillemin reports that Zarathustra was
not particularly otherworld1y.30 Indeed, Zarathustra's advice to his
disciples is earthly and naturalistic. Much of his opening speech
refers to the importance of cattle-raising and agriculture. 'In Thee
was Armaiti [spirit of the earth], in Thee the very wise fertiliser of
the soil, 0 Ahuramazda, Thou spirit!'31
Some of the most pointed complaints that Nietzsche registers
against Christianity do not apply to Zoroastrianism. Nature is not
vilified; life on earth is treated as cosmically significant, suffering is
neither emphasised nor valued in its own right; sin is not consid-
ered a natural disposition; the needs inherent in human psychology
are not denied but are acknowledged and respected. Nietzsche's
Ecce Homo account explicitly casts Zarathustra as the opposite of the
contemporary moralist.
Zarathustra, who was the first to grasp that the optimist is just as
decadent as the pessimist, and perhaps more harmful, says: 'Good
men never speak the truth.'32 ... Zarathustra, the first psychologist of
the good, is - consequently - a friend of the evil .... When men-
daciousness at any price monopolizes the word 'truth' for its per-
spective, the really truthful man is bound to be branded with the
worst names. 33
Nietzsche is accurate in observing that the historical Zarathustra

developed a metaphysical account that, like his own, emphasised
the interactions and conflicts among powers. These had their own
economic principles which played themselves out over the course
of time. The emphasis on the conflict of tensions within time distin-
guishes Zarathustra's doctrine from Christianity, as Nietzsche
analyses it, with its emphasis on the goal of ultimate, tensionless
bliss. Zoroastrianism describes religion as a matter of commitment
in war, as opposed to 'the meek' whom Christianity deems blessed.
ZARATHUSTRA'S REVALUATION OF VALUES
Probably the most important reason why Nietzsche was interested

in Zarathustra is the fact that Zarathustra was a pioneer in the
revaluation of values. Although Zarathustra proposed a fundamen-
tal dichotomy of good and evil, Nietzsche suggests, the basis for
moving 'beyond good and evil' was already inherent in Zoroastrian
doctrine itself. The basis for this internal criticism, according to
Nietzsche, is Zarathustra's commitment to truthfulness.
In his autobiography Ecce Homo, Nietzsche directly describes
Zarathustra's commitment to truth as the ground for his own
identification with Zarathustra.
I have not been asked, as I should have been asked, what the
name of Zarathustra means in my mouth, the mouth of the first
immoralist: for what constitutes the tremendous historical
uniqueness of that Persian is just the opposite of this.
Zarathustra was the first to consider the fight of good and evil
the very wheel in the machinery of things: the transposition of
morality into the metaphysical realm, as a force, cause, and end
in itself, is his work. But this question itself is at bottom its own
answer. Zarathustra created this most calamitous error, morality;
consequently, he must also be the first to recognize it. Not only
has he more experience in this matter, for a longer time, than
any other thinker - after all, the whole of history is the refutation
by experiment of the principle of the so-called 'moral world
order' - what is more important is that Zarathustra is more
truthful than any other thinker. His doctrine and his alone,
posits truthfulness as the highest virtue; this means the opposite
of the cowardice of the 'idealist' who flees from reality;
Zarathustra has more intestinal fortitude than all other thinkers
taken together. To speak the truth and to shoot well with arrows,
that is Persian virtue. - Am I understood? - The self overcoming
of morality, out of truthfulness; the self-overcoming of the
moralist into his opposite - into me - that is what the name of
Zarathustra means in my mouth. 34
This statement is remarkable. Nietzsche claims that the historical

Zarathustra's project contained the seeds of its own destruction -
and that he himself is bringing the original Zarathustra's work to
fruition. Zarathustra initiated an interpretation of reality that was
mistaken, but Nietzsche considers him on a par with an avant-
garde scientist, whose overall framework may have been super-
seded, but whose significance lies in the experimental results that
his research achieved. Nietzsche reiterates the suggestion that
Zarathustra opened the way to the apparently opposite aspiration,
which Nietzsche himself defends. Zarathustra was, in this respect,
Nietzsche's own precursor.
Nietzsche himself endorsing the premier position that Zara-
thustra gives to truthfulness suggests that his own rejection of
conventional morality stems from his commitment to a value that
might itself be described as moral. In this respect, Nietzsche reveals
in Ecce Homo an aspect of his own philosophical character that
seems inconsistent and possibly even embarrassing. He identifies
with Zarathustra as one who takes moral values seriously and yet is
so committed to honesty as his fundamental value that he is willing
to accept the destruction of these values at his own hand. In this
self-portrait, Nietzsche positions himself as the madman who is
dizzied with grief at his own murderous deed but so honest that
he, like Luther, cannot do otherwise.
TRAGEDY VS. COMEDY
For all of Nietzsche's reasons to be interested in Zarathustra and

Zoroastrianism, we have yet to penetrate the meaning of the title of
The Gay Science section 342, 'Incipit tragoedia - The Tragedy Begins'.
Which tragedy does Nietzsche have in mind? What is tragic about
the story that the section relates?
The content of section 342 offers us one suggestion. It urges us to
see Zarathustra as a tragic hero, much in the fashion of the tragic
hero of the Greeks. In The Birth of Tragedy, the tragic hero's appear-
ance was, historically, a late development. The tragic chorus was
the original tragedy, and its function was to draw the spectators
into a mystical transformation of their sense of themselves. The
chorus retained this role in later tragedy, the tragic hero arriving on
stage only after the chorus had instigated a transformation of the
audience's experiential condition.
Now the dithyrambic chorus was assigned the task of exciting the
mood of the listeners to such a Dionysian degree that, when the
tragic hero appeared on the stage, they did not see the awk-
wardly masked human being but rather a visionary figure, born
as it were from their own rapture. 35
When Zarathustra appears as a tragic hero at the end of The Gay

Science, I think that Nietzsche is expecting the rest of the book to
serve something of the function of the tragic chorus for his readers.
The course of the book has, in a sense, initiated us by this point. It
has done so by making us aware from the beginning of the trans-
formative powers of assuming different perspectival visions, by
engaging us in the activity of perspectival alterations throughout,
and especially by attempting to make us try on the psychological
perspective of others and to discover for ourselves that they are dif-
ferent from what we imagined. By the book's end, Nietzsche hopes,
we are now capable of entertaining Zarathustra's perspective and
seeing his achievement in a transfigured light.
Section 342's title seems also to refer to the religious history that
followed Zarathustra. Zoroastrianism's influence on Judaism and
Christianity allow Nietzsche to address his own tradition by means
of his retelling of the Zarathustra story. 'The tragedy' that 'begins'
in The Gay Science, section 342, certainly includes the Judaeo-
Christian developments that follow Zarathustra. The tragedy
begins, historically, with Zarathustra initiating the possibility of
alternative perspectives on the traditional pantheon of devas. What
Zarathustra accomplished with his primal distinction, Nietzsche
suggests, is the initial move toward perspectivism.
This is not, however, the direction that the moral tradition
has gone with Zarathustra's insight. It has built upon his dis-
tinction between good and evil by elaborating it in finer detail.
But, in Nietzsche's view, to see Zarathustra as pronouncing a
principle for once and for all is a mistake. Nietzsche sees Zara-
thustra, instead, as one embarking on an on-going enterprise, the
enterprise of developing discernment, greater subtlety in making
distinctions.
In revaluing Zarathustra Nietzsche no longer represents him
as the beginning of the tradition's errors (although historically,
Nietzsche recognises, this is apt). Instead, Nietzsche presents
Zarathustra as the first to engage in the enterprise of identifying
errors, a process perfected by refining the ability to make distinc-
tions and revaluations. Zarathustra's project, so understood, is the
precursor of Nietzsche's. This is the sense of the irony of Nietzsche's
depiction, upon which Duchesne-Guillemin remarks.
Various notes that Nietzsche made about his picture of
Zarathustra support this reading. When Zarathustra says, 'I do not
accuse, I will not accuse the accuser himself', he identifies himself
as the antithesis of the moralists who present themselves as
Zarathustra's rightful heirs. Instead of pronouncing and enforcing
moral judgements on others, Nietzsche's Zarathustra's work is the
on-going attainment and revision of insights, which he does not
dishonestly force into easy consistency with one another. Another
of Nietzsche's notes makes this clear,
Du widersprichst heute dem, was du gestem gelehrt hast. - Aber
dafiir ist gestem nicht heute, sagte Zarathustra.36 [You contradict
today what you taught yesterday. - But that is why yesterday is
not today, said Zarathustra.]
Nietzsche's notes contrast Zarathustra with the moralist of the

later tradition, who registers moral objection to basic features of
the human being, particularly instinct. In Nietzsche's notes,
Zarathustra's wanderings lead him to recognise more and more to
admire as he becomes better acquainted with the human animal.
Wie vielen edlen and feinen Ziegen bin ich auf Reisen begegnet!
sagte Z[arathustra].37
[How many noble and fine goats do I meet while travelling! said
Zarathustra. ]
But if Zarathustra is associated with tragedy, how does the end of

The Gay Science, in its first version, fit with the opening? In section 1,
we recall, Nietzsche suggests that the dominance of tragic explana-
tions of the meaning of life will always eventually give way to
comic world-views, which no longer seek such explanations. Yet
the comic waves overwhelming the tragedy are less than evident in
section 342. Indeed, the section seems extremely serious. Nietzsche
confuses the matter further by remarking in his preface to the
second edition of The Gay Science, '"Incipit tragoedia" we read at the
end of this awesomely aweless book. Beware! Something down-
right wicked and malicious is announced here: incipit parodia, no
doubt.'38
This impish remark, I think, underscores Nietzsche's intention to
draw our attention back to section l's analysis of the relation of
tragedy and comedy. Zarathustra began a tragic era by initiating
philosophy in the West. Recalling this beginning of our philosophi-
cal era, Nietzsche also reminds us that the era will end. Even more -
by returning us to the beginning of the book, Nietzsche suggests
that we have already embarked on ending it, for we have already
experientially set about starting a new era to the extent that we are
already practising' the gay science'.
Nietzsche's notebook remarks about his characterisation of
Zarathustra offer further insight as to how the tragedy begun with
Zarathustra is linked to parody and comedy. The notes make it
obvious that Nietzsche considered casting a strongly comic light on
Zarathustra's role as innovator. In more than one passage,
Nietzsche makes reference to the German proverb, 'Miissiggang ist
aller Laster Anfang.' ['Idleness is the root of all evil.'] Nietzsche's
notes include the following:
Zarathustra's Miissiggang ist aller Laster Anfang [Zarathustra's

idleness is the beginning of all evil].39
Nietzsche considered actually titling his work about Zarathustra

with reference to the adage on idleness and evil.
'Zarathustra's Miissigang.
VonF.N.
fliissig feurig gliihend - aber hell:
das letzte Buch -
es soli majestatisch und selig einherrollen. - So sprach Z[arathus-
tra] 'ich klage nicht an, ich will selbst die Anklager nich
anklagen.'40
[Zarathustra's Idleness
by Friedrich Nietzsche
flowing, fiery, glowing - but bright:
the last book
it should roll along majestically and blissfully.
So spoke Zarathustra: I do not accuse, I will not accuse the

accuser himself. ]41
Nietzsche's joke is clear. Zarathustra, making for himself the kind

of leisure that Aristotle describes as necessary for the philosopher,
had time to speculate - and the result was his analysis of evil.
Playfully, Nietzsche reinterprets the German proverb 'Idleness is
the root of all evil' as apt for describing the origin of 'evil' as a
central term in Western thought. This significant moment, arguably
the dawn of metaphysical thought in the West, stems not from
sublime virtue, but from vice. (And isn't the leisure Aristotle advo-
cates itself vice from the standpoint of such common-sense adages?)
And yet, this isn't Nietzsche's entire point. The proverb he
incorporates is a manifestation of the petty brand of moralism
that Nietzsche rejects in his own upbringing. 'Idleness is the
beginning of all evil' is the kind of judgemental adage that one
uses to instil in children the proper concern for productive use of
time. In the modem era, Nietzsche contends, morality has come
to fuel a culture of frenetic industriousness, manifest even among
thinkers. This industriousness leaves little time for the sort of
insight that awakened Zarathustra when he first distinguished
good and evil.
The proverb, in Nietzsche's employment, exhibits the self-parody
that Zarathustra's achievement, in initiating moral history, has now
become. Zarathustra's cosmic distinction may not have been
intended as a basis for making judgemental accusations. But the
morality that is its most recent descendant has become so mechan-
ical and petty, so pedantically adamant in its application, that it
would point accusingly at Zarathustra himself. The space that
Zarathustra needed to discover his insight in the first place is a
space for which contemporary moralism allows no time.
Nietzsche's own tale of Zarathustra encourages the reader,
however, to judge differently. Although Zarathustra may be eccen-
tric and perverse from the standpoint of moral commonplaces,
Nietzsche presents him as a virtual superhero - powerful, blissful,
and majestic. We see again the figure that Emerson describes,
whose form and gait cannot lie.
By presenting Zarathustra, like the hero of Attic tragedy, as a
manifestation of humanity taken collectively (and not apart from
nature), Nietzsche fulfils a hint at the end of Plato's Symposium,
where Socrates is reported to have argued that the same person
might be a master of both tragedies and comedies. Although the
text does not report Socrates' rationale, his reasoning may well
resemble that which he uses in the Ion. In that dialogue Socrates
judged Ion wanting because he could not apply his art to all poetry,
but only to that of Homer. Socrates concluded that Ion did not
operate by means of knowledge, but by instinct alone.42 Full know-
ledge should provide the artist with the ability to apply their talents
to the whole spectrum of their art.
In revaluing Zarathustra, then, Nietzsche casts him as achieving
what Plato could only gesture towards. The culmination of the
Western philosophical enterprise derives from an impulse that is
neither Platonic nor Christian. And it is to this impulse and its ulti-
mate blossoming that Nietzsche jovially recalls us.
Notes
1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, 'Character', in Emerson's Essays (New York:

Dutton, 1906; reprinted 1980), pp. 263-4. For sigla used in my cita-
tions, see the Reference Key to Nietzsche's Texts on p. xii.
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche,
trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1968),
hereafter 'Z', pp. 122-3; Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe,
in 15 vols (KSA), Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, eds (Berlin/New
York: de Gruyter, 1%7-77 and 1988),4, p. 12.
3. Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 199n.
4. Jacques Duchesne-Guillemin, The Western Response to Zoroaster
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), p. 21.
5. Ida Overbeck, quoted by Albrecht Bernoulli, Franz Overbeck und
Friedrich Nietzsche: eine Freundschaft, 2 vols Gena, 1908). See Ronald
Hayman, Nietzsche: A Critical Life (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1980), pp. 245--6.
6. See G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical
History with a Selection of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1957), p. 65n.
7. See A. V. Williams Jackson, Zoroaster: The Prophet of Ancient Iran (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1926), p. 27.
8. See Wilhelm Geiger and Friedrich Heinrich Hugo Windishmann,
Zarathustra in the Gathas and in the Greek and Roman Classics, trans. Darab
Dastur Pshotan Sanjana, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz, 1899),
p. 83. See also Martin Haug, 'History of the Researches into the Sacred
Writings and Religion of the Parsis', in Martin Haug Essays on the Sacred
Language, Writings, and Religion of the Parsis, ed. E. W. West, 3rd ed.,
enlarged (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Triibner, & Co, 1883), pp. 5-7.
9. See Herodotus, History, Loeb Classical Library, Book I, chs cxxxi and
cxxxii, p. 138. See also Haug's citation in 'History of the Researches
into the Sacred Writings and Religion of the Parsis', p. 7.
10. See Z, p. 17 and Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. Walter
Kaufmann (together with On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter
Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale) (New York: Random House,
1967), p. 328; KSA 4, p. 75, and KSA 6, p. 367.
11. See Ronald Hayman, Nietzsche: A Critical Life (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1980), pp. 83-4 and p. 91.
12. Ibid., p. 87 and pp. 86-7n.
13. See Haug, 'History of the Researches into the Sacred Writings and
Religion of the Parsis', p. 8.
14. See C. G. Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in
1934-1939, ed. James L. Jarret, in two volumes, Bollingen Series XCIX
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), I, p. 4. Cf. Roger
Hollingrake, Nietzsche, Wagner and the Philosophy of Pessimism
(London: George Allen & Unwin, 1982), p. 144.
15. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, with a Prelude of Rhymes and an
Appendix of Songs, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random
House, 1974), 342, p. 274; KSA 3, p. 571. See Jackson, Zoroaster: The
Prophet of Ancient Iran, p. 30.
16. See Jackson, Zoroaster: The Prophet of Ancient Iran, p. 36.
17. Ibid., p. 37.
18. Ibid., p. 56.
19. Freny Mistry, Nietzsche and Buddhism: Prolegomenon to a Comparative
Study (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1981), p. 17.
20. GS 143, p. 192; KSA 3, pp. 490-1.
21. Martin Haug, 'The Zoroastrian Religion, as to Its Origin and
Development', in Martin Haug, Essays on the Sacred Language,
Writings, and Religion of the Pars is, ed. E. W. West, 3rd ed., enlarged
(London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Triibner, & Co., 1883), p. 309. The
later Zoroastrian doctrine also interpreted the Amesha Spentas, or
archangels, similarly, as mediators between Ahuramazda and the
rest of creation, although Zarathustra seems not to have considered
them personages himself. (See Haug, 'The Zoroastrian Religion, as
to Its Origin and Development', pp. 305--6. Haug cites Plutarch (in
'On Isis and Osiris', chs xlvi and xlvii) as describing the Amesha
Spentas as 'archangels'. See Haug, 'The Greeks and Romans', in
Haug, Essays on the Sacred Languages, p. 9.) In their later role, the
Amesha Spentas are in one sense aspects of Ahura Mazda, but they
have independent status as well. Each is also considered to stand in
union with a particular aspect of nature, a feature that would appeal
to Nietzsche's naturalistic bent.
22. See Mistry, Nietzsche and Buddhism, p. 17.
(Oxford: Oarendon Press, 1958), p. 20. Citation from Martin Haug,
Essays on the Sacred Language, Writings and Religion of the Parsis, ed.
E. W. West, 2nd ed. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Triibner, & Co.,
1878), p. 303.
24. Haug, 'The Zoroastrian Religion, as to Its Origin and Development',
p.303.
25. Ibid., p. 304.
26. Ibid., p. 304. Before the religious schism of which Zarathustra was a
part, the religion that was common to Persia and Indian involved the
worship of two sorts of deities, the devas and the ahuras. The
Persians eventually departed from the relative nomadism that pre-
dominated in the region and developed permanent agricultural set-
tlements. Their towns became targets for attack from the East, where
their previous religious compatriots had remained rather nomadic
herdsmen. The Persians construed these attacks, waged largely in the
hope of taking booty, as evidence of the effectiveness of the Indians'
sacrifices to their gods, who by now were mostly characterised as
'devas'. Zarathustra's opposition to deva-worship, therefore, had a
political focus, not solely a religious one. See Haug, 'The Zoroastrian
Religion, as to Its Origin and Development', pp. 292-3.
27. GS 4, p. 79; KSA 3, pp. 376-7.
28. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter
Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (together with Ecce Homo, trans.
Walter Kaufmann) (New York: Random House, 1967), Preface 3,
p. 17; KSA 5, p. 249.
29. Jacques Duchesne-Guillemin, 'Zoroastrianism and Parsiism', in The
New Encyclopaedia Brittanica, ed. Philip W. Goetz, 15 ed. (Chicago:
Encyclopedia Brittanica, 1987) vol. 29, p. 1078.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), p. 66.
31. Catha Ahunavaiti, Yas. xxxi, 9, in Haug, 'The Zend-Avesta; or The
Scripture of the Parsis', in Haug, Essays on the Sacred Language,
Writings, and Religion of the Parsis, ed. E. W. West, 3rd ed, enlarged
(London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Triibner & Co., 1883), pp. 151-2.
32. EH, p. 329; KSA 6, p. 368.
33. EH, p. 330; KSA 6, pp. 369-70.
34. EH, pp. 327-8; KSA 6, p. 367.
35. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (together with The Case of
Wagner), trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1%6),
p. 66; KSA 1, p. 63.
36. KSA 9, Herbst 1881, 12 [128], p. 598.
37. KSA 9, Herbst 1881, 12 [136], p. 599.
38. CS, p. 33; KSA 3, p. 346.
39. KSA 9, Herbst 1881, 12 [112], p. 5%.
40. KSA 9, Herbst 1881, 12 [225], p. 616.
41. Cf. CS 276, p. 223; KSA 3, p. 521, in which the same remark is made
by Nietzsche's own persona: 'I do not want to accuse; I do not even
want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only
negation.'
42. My thanks to Paul Woodruff for the suggestion that the Ion might
elucidate the meaning of this cryptic remark at the end of the
Symposium.
6
Laughter: A Tool in Moral
Perfectionism?
John Lippitt
He is more worthy of the human race who laughs at it rather

than sheds tears over it.
(Seneca)
INTRODUCTION
This essay considers two themes which have not, to my knowledge,

previously been connected: the role of laughter in Nietzsche's
thought (with particular reference to Thus Spoke Zarathustra); and
what several commentators have recently taken to calling
Nietzsche's 'moral perfectionism'. Though some writers have dis-
cussed laughter in Nietzsche, the attention it has been given
remains relatively minimal. When laughter is discussed, it is more
likely to be construed on a metaphorical level, and connected with
such themes as 'lightness' and 'dance' (for Zarathustra does indeed
make these associations);! or the focus put upon Part IV as some
kind of literary comedy.2 The former is keen to link laughter with
joy; the latter tends to focus upon the more obviously parodic ele-
ments of Part IV, such as the 'Ass Festival'. I have myself com-
mented elsewhere upon a Nietzschean laughter which is essentially
joyous, contrasting a Zarathustran 'laughter of the height' with a
'laughter of the herd'; a Bergsonian laughter of social correction. 3
But in this essay, I want to consider another kind - or use - of
laughter, of which there are also traces in Zarathustra. This laughter,
I shall suggest, can play an important role in a project of 'moral per-
fectionism'. So the essay is not primarily a piece of 'Nietzsche schol-
arship'. Rather, it stems from an interest I have in a potentially
99
important role that laughter can play, and to which certain
Nietzschean insights have provided an impetus.
The tendency in a recent strand of writing on Nietzsche to
describe him as a moral perfectionist owes primarily to Stanley
Cavell.4 Cavell sees Nietzsche as part of a long perfectionist tradi-
tion, which also includes such luminaries as Plato, Aristotle,
Emerson, Thoreau, Heidegger and Wittgenstein. What motivates
Cavell is a desire to show, against anti-perfectionist thinkers such as
John Rawls, not only that there are conceptions of perfectionism
which are compatible with the impulses of democracy; but, further,
that such perfectionism is essential to any democracy worth support-
ing. This overall enterprise is not our concern here. But we do need
to know what moral perfectionism is. Cavell is keen to dispel the
illusion that this is yet another moral theory. He is thus reluctant to
offer a definition, remarking instead that perfectionism is
not a competing theory of the moral life, but something like a

dimension or tradition of the moral life that spans the course of
Western thought and concerns what used to be called the state of
one's soul, a dimension that places tremendous burdens on per-
sonal relationships and the possibility or necessity of the trans-
forming of oneself and one's society.
(Cavell, 1990, p. 2)
The closest we get to a definition comes when Cavell suggests that

at the heart of Rawls's misreading of Nietzsche is his failure to see
that Nietzsche, like Emerson, is:
calling for the further or higher self of each, each consecrating

himself!herself to self-transformation, accepting one's own
genius, which is precisely not, it is the negation of, accepting
one's present state and its present consecrations to someone
fixed, as such, 'beyond' one.
(p.53)
Such a reading of Nietzsche is further explicated by Daniel

Conway, who deals with Nietzsche as both a political and a moral
perfectionist (Conway, 1997). The former need not concern us
here; and we should note Conway's claim that Nietzsche's political
perfectionism is merely in the service of his moral perfectionism
(p. 55). For Conway, the latter is to be construed 'in terms of the
John Lippitt 101
conviction that one's primary, overriding - and perhaps sole -
ethical" obligation" is to attend to the perfection of one's ownmost
self' (p. 54). A moral perfectionist project thus 'involves cultivating
one's native endowment of powers and faculties; eliciting from
within oneself the perfections that lie dormant, undiscovered, or
incomplete; and so fortifying one's soul with the virtues constitu-
tive of a sterling character' (p. 9).
Against this background, the present chapter proceeds on the
following assumptions. First, that Nietzsche can indeed plausibly
be read as a kind of moral perfectionist. Second, that Thus Spoke
Zarathustra is a text with important perfectionist overtones.
(Several commentators have claimed that what matters about the
book is not merely the content of Zarathustra's various speeches;
but the progress and transformations which he undergoes over the
course of the work. However, the term 'perfectionism' is poten-
tially misleading, as I agree with Conway that there is no reason to
assume that such an outlook aims at any final state of perfection,
either of the individual or the species (p. 9); and I certainly have no
desire - as will become clear in what follows - to claim that any
such final state of perfection is reached in the figure of Zarathustra
himself.) Third, I work on the assumption that laughter plays
an important, and still underinvestigated, role in the book.
Commentators do not always distinguish the different kinds of
laughter at work in Zarathustra, and their different roles. An
attempt to do this, I shall aim to show, can help us to see the poss-
ibility of a reading which neither dispenses with Part N as a stylist-
ically inferior disappointment, containing no new ideas;5 or as a
mere 'afterthought';6 nor leads us to conclude that the successes
Nietzsche claims for Zarathustra are a sham because the laughter it
portrays is 'reduced?
H we put these three factors together, we are faced with the fol-
lowing question. H Zarathustra is part of Nietzsche's perfectionist
project, and since laughter plays an important role in that text, is it
not reasonable to suggest that laughter can function as a tool in
moral perfectionism?8 I suggest that laughter could indeed function
in this way; and so the latter part of this chapter will begin to
unpack what its role might be.
My argument will tum in part upon the relationship between
Part N of Zarathustra and the culmination of the earlier parts of the
book in the finale of Part ill. Several commentators have observed
the relative importance of the comic in the fourth part.9 My own
focus will be upon the difference between the 'Dionysian', ecstatic
laughter associated with the embracing of eternal recurrence in
Part III, and some of the forms of laughter to be found elsewhere,
including in Part N. H - as I shall aim to show - some of the laugh-
ter of Part N is more 'reduced' or reflective than the laughter of
Part III, then we might well ask: why does Zarathustra revert to
such laughter, having been exposed to and finally, it seems, having
actually experienced the ecstatic laughter of joy and triumph laughed
by the shepherd in 'On the Vision and the Riddle'? In an attempt to
answer this, I shall draw upon a suggestion made in a recent article
by Richard Schacht (Schacht, 1995).
SCHACHT ON ZARATHUSTRA
Schacht argues that the text of Zarathustra functions as an 'edu-

cator' (Erzieher) to its potential readers in much the same way
as Schopenhauer acted as an educator to Nietzsche. 1O Against
this backdrop, Schacht advances a 'pedagogical' reading of
Zarathustra, in which Part IV plays a role important for our
current concerns.
Schacht views Part N as vital to the 'down to earth' Zarathustra
he considers significant to the overall message of the book. He
traces Zarathustra's progress from his beginning as 'a well-meaning
enlightened humanist' to the 'far wiser and more human' (p. 238)
figure we find at the end of Part N. The real message of Zarathustra,
according to Schacht, commends neither the iibermensch nor eternal
recurrence as the ultimate raison d'etre of the text. Rather, a truly
healthy future humanity would rather be 'concerned to get on with
one's life and work (in the spirit of Zarathustra's parting lines at the
end of Part N), as the only meaningful way of "becoming who one
is'" (ibid.).
Schacht spells out the implications of this reading in more detail:
The iibermensch, Eternal Recurrence and Zarathustra himself thus

all have their places within the educational process Nietzsche
crafts for us, rather than its end, as its results. They are among
the materials of a ladder that is to be dispensed with once it has
been climbed. H we become fixated upon them, we have made
mere means of this education into its end; for their role is not to
capture and hold our attention, but rather to aid us in reaching
John Lippitt 103
the developmental point at which we can go on without them -
as Zarathustra himself suggests often enough.
(pp.238-9)
So the overall role of Part IV, according to Schacht, is to make clear

that teachings such as the Ubermensch and eternal recurrence 'are
not intended to be embraced as gospel truth' (p. 240). Schacht sug-
gests that Nietzsche may have come to fear that the first three parts
did not make this clear enough; and that there is therefore a danger
that the 'new enthusiasm' which the text incites might 'congeal into
a new dogmatism' (p. 239). Part IV is the 'antidote' intended to
prevent this from happening. And Schacht immediately adds how
Part IV, read aright, prevents this rot setting in: 'Its irony, parodies,
grotesqueries and humor are more than sufficient for this purpose'
(p. 240). So the point of the comical aspects of Part IV is to question
(aspects of) the text's teachings. ll
Clearly, Schacht's reading can be challenged, being at odds
with reams of Nietzsche scholarship which has indeed viewed the
iibermensch and eternal recurrence as central Nietzschean 'doc-
trines' or themes. And what are we to make of Nietzsche's claim
in Ecce Homo that the 'fundamental conception' of Zarathustra
was, indeed, eternal recurrence (EH, 'Z', 1)?12 However, I neither
need nor want fully to support every detail of Schacht's reading.
What I do want to do is to take seriously the possibility that a
reading of Zarathustra which pays close attention to its laughter
will need to show the differences between the various kinds and
functions of laughter in the text; and in particular, the fact that
not all, at least, of the laughter of Part IV remains the ecstatic
laughter of Part III. Second, it will need to suggest why this is the
case. My claim is that Schacht's reading - together with the
thought of Nietzsche as moral perfectionist - gives a clue to why
this might be so.
The 'pedagogical' reading that Schacht goes on to advance aims
to justify his observations. Un surprisingly, he reads the main
purpose of Part ill as being to lead up to the affirmation of eternal
recurrence. He notes that the attitude to eternal recurrence shifts:
from its being Zarathustra's most 'abysmal thought' (Z ill 'On the
Vision and the Riddle' (hereafter 'OVR') 2, p. 269)13 - compare the
description of it in The Gay Science as 'the greatest weight' (GS 341)-
to its role at the end of Part ill, where it is joyously celebrated as an
affirmation of life.
But what of Part IV? Schacht's line here is to make the point that
one Simply cannot live perpetually at the height of an ecstatic
embracing of eternal recurrence. We may have experienced certain
sublime moments, certain 'ecstatic epiphanies', to borrow David
Owen's phrase (Owen, 1995, pp. 107f£.), which would enable us
to affirm eternal recurrence; but these are, by their very nature,
temporary states. What about when our full self-consciousness,
including an awareness of our 'all too human' aspects, returns?
Schacht's question needs to be faced:
where does this leave one who is acutely aware of the all-too-
human with the dawning of the cold clear light of day, when
the raptures evoked in the concluding songs of Part Three have
subsided?
(p.245)
In other words: what, after the ecstasies of eternal recurrence

affirmation, does one do next?
This question draws attention to the obvious but important fact
that the starting point for any perfectionist project must be where
we are; a point which is surely closely related to the idea of arnor
fati. 14 Schacht's own suggestion is that this is where Part IV's
'higher men' enter the picture. Observing that these are a fairly
motley, 'all too human' lot, Schacht claims that they provide
the material for a test analogous to the eternal recurrence test
posed by the thought of the demon in The Gay Science. IS That test
is as follows:
H 'higher humanity' were to amount to nothing more than the sort

of thing this strange and ludicrous crew represents, could one still
affirm it with open eyes, and adhere to the way of thinking that
ties 'the meaning of the earth' to the enhancement of life?
(p.245)
Schacht claims that Zarathustra passes this test; but the real ques-
tion is whether we - the text's readers - can. A crucial part of being
able to do so is to 'learn to laugh'. Just as Part ill is primarily con-
cerned, according to Schacht, with 'learning to love' and affirm, so
Part IV is based around 'learning to laugh' (and 'dance'). But on this
Schacht is frustratingly vague. He merely observes that 'not all
laughter is of the same kind' (p. 246). But as we have observed, we
John Lippitt 105
need to ask in more detail what kinds of laughter there are, and
why - and how - they are significant.
In an attempt to do this, let us consider in more detail the ecstatic
laughter mentioned, and contrast this with certain aspects of the
laughter of Part IV.
ETERNAL RECURRENCE, AFFIRMATION AND THE LAUGHTER

OF THE SHEPHERD
The former kind of laughter occurs most clearly in 'On the Vision and
the Riddle', the second section of Part III. Zarathustra's great enemy,
the 'half dwarf, half mole'. figure of the 'spirit of gravity' is 'dripping
... leaden thoughts' into Zarathustra's brain (Z ill 'OYR' I, p. 268).
Taking his courage into his hands, Zarathustra confronts the spirit of
gravity ('It is you or II'), claiming that he (Zarathustra) is the stronger
of the two, since the spirit'does not know my most abysmal thought'
(p. 269). This 'thought', it soon transpires, is that of eternal recurrence,
presented here for the first time in the text. As he expounds this
'thought', Zarathustra speaks 'more and more softly', ~escribing
himself as 'afraid of my own thoughts and the thoughts behind my
thoughts' (p. 270). It is against this background that he describes the
vision of which he needs an interpretation. It features a young shep-
herd, 'writhing, gagging, in spasms, his face distorted', a 'heavy black
snake' hanging out of his mouth (p. 271). The young man's face is a
picture of utter nausea and dread. But'all that is good and wicked' in
Zarathustra cries out to the shepherd to 'Bite! Bite its head off! Bite!'
(ibid.). Following Zarathustra's counsel, the young man
bit with a good bite. Far away he spewed the head of the snake -
and he jumped up. No longer shepherd, no longer human - one
changed, radiant, laughing! Never yet on earth has a human being
laughed as he laughed! 0 my brothers, I heard a laughter that
was no human laughter; and now a thirst gnaws at me, a longing
that never grows still. My longing for this laughter gnaws at me;
oh, how do I bear to go on living! And how could I bear to die
now!'
(p.272)
It is significant that this vision occurs so early in Part ill. It effect-

ively frames that part in an important way, since it is not until the
culmination of the third part that Zarathustra himself interprets the
riddle. The young shepherd, it turns out, represents Zarathustra
himself; and the snake on which he was choking was 'the great
disgust at man' (Z ill 'The Convalescent' 2, p. 331). What disgusted
and choked him was the eternal recurrence of 'the small man'. (For
this we might read the smallness in man, since the difference
between great and small is said to be minimal; they are 'all-too-
similar to each other, even the greatest all-too-human' (ibid.).)
Yet Zarathustra, at the very climax of Part ill, appears to triumph
over this nausea, and the third part culminates with his own ecsta-
tic affirmation of eternal recurrence. No longer his most 'abysmal
thought', eternal recurrence is now to be lusted after, affirmed
without reservation ('For I love you, 0 eternityl' (Z ill 'The Seven
Seals', passim». Moreover, this affirmation is one of joy, a joy that
'wants eternity' (Z ill 'The Other Dancing Song' 3, p. 339).
Given Zarathustra's interpretation of the riddle (Zarathustra =
shepherd), we are clearly supposed to associate the ecstatic laughter
of the shepherd with Zarathustra's own joyous ecstasies as he affirms
life and its eternal recurrence. But if it is anything more than mere
hyperbole to talk about a laughter that 'no human being' has laughed
before, then we must think about this laughter in relation to the more
mundane experiences which Zarathustra will undergo in Part IV.
With Schacht's reading in mind, the following question becomes
important: if moral perfectionism is about improving our characters
from the 'all too human' position from which we start, then would it
not be pretty empty and useless to commend laughing a laughter
such as the shepherd's, and nothing more? Hence the need to invest-
igate alternative kinds of laughter to suggest what other kinds - or
uses - of laughter may function as a moral perfectionist tool.
'LEARNING TO LAUGH' IN ZARATHUSTRA IV
We can see something of this by considering the most important

section praising laughter in Part IV, 'On the Higher Man' (hereafter
'OHM'). This passage has a strongly perfectionist air. Zarathustra
starts by confessing to the higher men his previous errors and fail-
ures, such as his committing 'the folly of hermits' (Z IV 'OHM' 1,
p. 398) by thinking he could speak in the market-place, where he
tried - and failed - to communicate with 'the mob' in the Prologue.
Many of the remaining sections have the air of Zarathustra - now
John Lippitt 107
with a more appropriate audience? - urging each of these 'higher
men' to form what we might call 'a higher self' (cf. SE 6). The
importance of laughter in such self-formation starts to become clear
in subsection 15. Here, Zarathustra offers encouragement to the
higher men, despite their previous failures. He says:
The higher its type, the more rarely a thing succeeds. You higher
men here, have you not all failed?
Be of good cheer, what does it matter? How much is still possi-
ble! Learn to laugh at yourselves as one must laugh!
Is it any wonder that you failed and only half succeeded, being
half broken? Is not something thronging and pushing in you-
man's future? Man's greatest distance and depth and what in him
is lofty to the stars, his tremendous strength - are not all these
frothing against each other in your pot? Is it any wonder that
many a pot breaks? Learn to laugh at yourselves as one must
laugh! You higher men, how much is still possible!
(Z IV 'OHM' 15, pp. 404-5)
The most important thing to notice about this, for our purposes, is
the attitude to laughter that is here being commended. Zarathustra
urges his companions to: 'Learn to laugh'. This idea, of learning to
laugh, is difficult to square with a kind of spontaneous, 'Dionysian'
laughter, akin to that of the shepherd. Rather, the idea of 'learning
to laugh' implies a more reflective appropriation of laughter. (And
this distinction is important, since, as suggested above, it is hard to
see what role the mere commendation of a spontaneous laughter of
pure joy could play in a project of moral perfectionism.) Moreover,
could it also be that this more reflective attitude to laughter stems
from a view which appreciates that the ecstatic Dionysian joy of the
shepherd is only temporarily available?
Perhaps a rider should be added here. It is true that, as
Zarathustra's speech progresses, his praise of laughter becomes
highly ecstatic; and this might lead us to associate that laughter
with that of the shepherd. 16 But observe the difference between this
and Zarathustra's own laughter, even in Part IV. It is frequently not
of this type. There are several passages where it is still described (as
it has been in earlier parts), as 'mocking' and concerned with
'sarcasm' .17 And in the very final section, Zarathustra's reaction to
the thought that he had succumbed to his 'final sin' of pity for the
higher men is that he 'laughed angrily' (Z IV 'The Sign', p. 439). So
the idea that the only laughter being commended is the ecstatic
laughter of the shepherd is dubious. To return to our earlier ques-
tion, then: what kinds or uses of laughter can help us deal with our
all too human existence?
In order to do tackle this question, it will be useful briefly to con-
sider a seminal work of Mikhail Bakhtin,18 and the distinctions he
makes between different views held of laughter during its 'history'.
The point of this is to give us just enough background to see how
one recent follower of Bakhtin, Hub Zwart, uses some of his ideas
to criticise the laughter of Zarathustra as 'reduced and negative'. We
shall then suggest that it is precisely laughters potential as a tool in
moral perfectionism that enables us to see that this judgement is
inadequate.
BAKHTIN: 'FULL' AND 'REDUCED' LAUGHTER
One of Bakhtin's main concerns in Rabelais and His World is to

reclaim for laughter a philosophical importance which, he reckons,
was recognised in the Renaissance, but which has become obscured
from the seventeenth century onwards. Bakhtin summarises the
Renaissance view of laughter, which he associates with Rabelais,
Cervantes and Shakespeare, as follows:
Laughter has a deep philosophical meaning, it is one of the essen-

tial forms of the truth concerning the world as a whole, concern-
ing history and man; it is a peculiar point of view relative to the
world; the world is seen anew, no less (and perhaps more) pro-
foundly than when seen from the serious standpoint. Therefore,
laughter is just as admissible in great literature, posing universal
problems, as seriousness. Certain essential aspects of the world
are accessible only to laughter.
(p.66)
He contrasts this with the attitude of the seventeenth century and

after:
Laughter is not a universal, philosophical form. It can refer only

to individual and individually typical phenomena of social life.
That which is important and essential cannot be comical ... The
sphere of the comic is narrow and specific (private and social
John Lippitt 109
vices); the essential truth about the world and about man cannot
be told in the language of laughter.
(p.67)
It is clear that one of the main points here is the relative importance
attached to laughter by these two viewpoints. Note that one of
Bakhtin's main concerns is that, from the latter point of view, laughter
'ceased to be a joyful and triumphant hilarity. Its positive regenerating
power was reduced to a minimum' (p. 38). Bakhtin repeatedly crit-
icises commentators who fail to recognise this 'positive regenerating
power' of laughter. Such phenomena as 'cold humor, irony, sarcasm'
(ibid.) and satire are dismissed as 'a laughter that does not laugh'
(p. 45). Note that this merely assumes that satirical laughter, say, has
no power to 'regenerate' and 'renew'. We shall have cause to question
this shortly, when we consider Zarathustra's 'mockery' and 'sarcasm'.
Bakhtin's key distinction, then, for our purposes, is between a
'festive' laughter of joy and carnival, which has a positive regener-
ating power (d. the laughter of the shepherd), and a 'reduced
laughter' that 'does not laugh', which lacks this power. However,
he also describes the new 'truth' or 'outlook on life' (p. 91) which
laughter affords as 'ephemeral; [since] it was followed by the fears
and oppressions of everyday life' (ibid.).
This is a very important concession. Bakhtin downplays the
significance of this ephemerality; but - bearing in mind Schacht's
reading of Zarathustra - we can see that it is vital. The kind of 'full'
laughter discussed by Bakhtin, or the ecstatic laughter of the shep-
herd, the embracer of eternal recurrence, can be seen as less than
the full story. This reinforces the idea that, as well as such a laughter
as this, we need a kind of laughter which can help Zarathustra face
the very different (and prima facie more mundane) challenges of
Part IV.
A failure to recognise this is likely to cause problems for a reading
of Zarathustra. Consider, for instance, Zwart's reasons for finding
fault with Zarathustra in his highly critical account of the book.
ZWART ON ZARATHUSTRA
Zwart complains that despite the presence of parodical elements in

Zarathustra, Nietzsche does not fully exploit the possibilities of 'parody
as a genre' (Zwart, 1996, p. 80). The text's 'laughter is sometimes
reduced to sarcasm, at other occasions silenced by seriousness.
In general, it suffers from Nietzsche's, or Zarathustra's, persistent
effort to preach the serious, cheerless, apparently even gloomy truth
of atheism' (ibid.). The laughter on display in Zarathustra is merely
'reduced and negative' (p. 79).
Consider this - essentially Bakhtinian - assumption: that laugh-
ter can be 'silenced by seriousness'. If this were true, then the
prospects for laughter as a tool in moral perfectionism would be
bleak indeed. For any project of moral perfectionism is surely
something the person concerned must, of necessity, take seriously.
But this is not a reason to conclude that laughter has no role to play
in moral perfectionism. I want to suggest a crucial distinction:
between seriousness and solemnity.19 The latter is incompatible
with laughter; the former is not. Solemnity, as I am using the
term here, is a mood fundamentally at odds with the mood appro-
priate to laughter. Seriousness is different. It represents an overall
attitude towards something - a set of values, perhaps, or one's
projects - which is perfectly compatible with moods of laughter.
These moods of laughter may even be needed to fortify oneself
in the attitude necessary to cultivate one's projects; to provide
temporary 'relief from the pressures resulting from the pursuit of a
life-long project such as moral perfectionism. Compare, in this
regard, the role of laughter in medieval religious festivals. Bakhtin
observes that 'nearly all the rituals of the feast of fools are a
grotesque degradation of various church rituals and symbols and
their transfer to the material bodily level: gluttony and drunken
orgies on the altar table, indecent gestures, disrobing' (Bakhtin,
1968, pp. 74-5). But he also quotes from an apology offered for
such behaviour by the Paris School of Theology in 1444. Such
diversions were held to be necessary
so that foolishness, which is our second nature and seems to be

inherent in man, might freely spend itself at least once a year.
Wine barrels burst if from time to time we do not open them and
let in some air. All of us men are barrels poorly put together,
which would burst from the wine of wisdom, if this wine remains
in a state of constant fermentation of piousness and fear of God.
We must give it air in order not to let it spoil. This is why we
permit folly on certain days so that we may later return with
greater zeal to the service of God.
(p.75)2O
John Lippitt 111
So it is not - and this is the crucial point - that, in these moments of
laughter, one abandons or even suspends one's commitment to
one's project, any more than the medieval celebrants of religious
festivals suspended their faith for the period of that festival. As the
Paris apology suggests, the 'relief fortifies, rather than suspends,
that commitment. So in this sense, laughter and seriousness are not
the uneasy bedfellows that Zwart assumes.
It should be noted, however, that there is one sense in which
Zwart is correct to view (some of) the laughter of Zarathustra as
'reduced'. If what I am saying is right, it is reduced in the sense that
laughter is a tool, rather than an end in its own right. The laughter
of the end of Part ill perhaps falls into the latter category; but at
least some of Zarathustra's laughter in Part IV fits the former. (And
on Schacht's reading of the significance of that part of the text, it
presumably must play some such role.) But this is not the objection
to Nietzsche that Zwart thinks. On the contrary, if, as Bakhtin
admits, the 'full' laughter of the medieval ages on which he concen-
trates is 'ephemeral', and imminently subject to the constraints of
authority, then it is no fault of Nietzsche's that he recognises that
more than such laughter is needed. Thus, the laughter which
Bakhtin and Zwart dismiss as 'reduced' may well be exactly the
kind of laughter we need to function as a tool in moral perfection-
ism after the ecstasies of embracing eternal recurrence subside. We
should not be misled by Bakhtin's loaded terminology: I am sug-
gesting that 'reduced' laughter may be more useful to us than 'full'
laughter in the continuing task of moral perfectionism to be faced
'the morning after the night before' the end of Part ill.
Let us review the argument so far. I have suggested that, if
Nietzsche is read as a perfectionist thinker, and Zarathustra as a per-
fectionist text, then it seems reasonable to consider that laughter,
given its importance within that text, might have some role to play in
that perfectionist project. But the kind of laughter most obviously
commended in Zarathustra is an ecstatic, 'Dionysian' laughter associ-
ated with the affirmative and joyous embrace of eternal recurrence.
Yet, I suggested, this laughter alone would be, at best, of highly
limited use in a project of moral perfectionism which takes seriously
the need for us to start from the 'all too human' position of where we
each find ourselves. I noted that a seminal writer on laughter,
Bakhtin, tends to distinguish between 'full' and 'reduced' laughter;
and that one of his followers, Zwart, specifically takes Zarathustra to
task for offering a merely 'reduced and negative' laughter. This (as
well as offering a one-sided account of the laughter at work in
Zarathustra) misconstrues the way in which that more reflective
laughter dismissed as 'reduced and negative' can function as a tool in
moral perfectionism. It is to this last point that we now finally tum.
HOW CAN LAUGHTER FUNCTION AS A TOOL IN MORAL

PERFECTIONISM?
How, then, can 'reduced' laughter, laughter that is less joyous and
ecstatic than that associated with the embrace of eternal recurrence,
be useful to us in a perfectionist project?
Non-Discursive Dismissals
The first point to be made here concerns laughter's ability to occa-

sion what one commentator has called a 'non-discursive dis-
missal'.21 To expand further upon this notion, we can draw on
Zwart's analysis in a manner more favourable to him than was our
earlier encounter. The striking overall thesis of Zwart's book is that
the logical and the chronological beginning, of moral philosophy

as well as of morality as such, is to be found in the subversive
experience of laughter. It is in the experience of laughter that the
vulnerability of established morality finds itself exposed, that
moral truth reveals itself to us, and that moral subjectivity is in
fact produced.
(Zwart, 1996, pp. 7-8)
While not wishing to defend this thesis in its entirety, I do want to

draw upon it in a certain way.
Zwart, citing Ricoeur, observes that morality, rather than being
produced by the moral subject, is in fact a 'world we enter', a con-
versation which has been going on long before we arrived.
Moreover, discontent with the moral discourse of others is what
leads us to enter the discussion in the first place. One strategy for
exposing the limitations of a prevailing discourse is critical argu-
ment. And often, an agonistic combat with the other through critical
argument may benefit one's perfectionist project. This can happen
in several ways: sometimes we learn from the ideas of others during
our agonistic discussions with them; sometimes, in the process of
John Lippitt 113
arguing our own case, the discussion enables us to see how that
case can be even more firmly supported than we previously
realised. Sometimes, within the same discourse, both of these poss-
ibilities are realised. Some recent commentators have held such ago-
nistic argument to be central to Nietzsche's outlook. David Owen,
for instance, observing against liberals such as Rawls, that Nietzsche
'does not divide the self into political and personal components',
argues that rather, for Nietzsche:
one's substantive conception of the good is what is revealed in

the ordered set of values which one argues for in the political
arena; in manifesting the ordered evaluations of one's soul, one
reveals the ranked set of values which one recommends to the
community ... the formal conditions of holding one's perspective
to be true entail an open-ended agonistic process of dialogue
with persons holding other perspectives which cultivates our
capacities for truthfulness and justice. To put this point another
way, we can say that, for Nietzsche, tolerance for other views,
a willingness to engage with them in an open and fair-minded
way, is a condition of holding one's own beliefs to be true. In
other words, on this view, one does not tolerate the views
of others because this is the condition of reciprocal toleration
of our views by them, one tolerates the views of others because
this toleration is the condition of one's own integrity. More-
over, precisely because one's integrity is tied to tolerance, this
position commits citizens to a form of society which is charac-
terised by the cultivation of the conditions of honest and
just argument between free and equal citizens.
(Owen, 1995, pp. 161-2)
I find the overall argument in which this passage occurs quite per-
suasive; but that is beyond the scope of this essay. What matters for
the present argument is this: even if we agree with Owen that this
discussion and argument are to be 'open-ended', this does not
entail that they be ceaseless, in the sense of never pausing for
breaks. Agonistic discourse will, inevitably, need to pause from time
to time. Some of these pauses will come about when it appears to
the participants that they have each reached 'bedrock', and that
nothing of further use can be said; when the other's position seems
so radically different from our own that we have come to a point
beyond which further discussion seems pointless.22 Here is one way
in which laughter, operating as a 'non-discursive dismissal', can
enter the arena. In these circumstances, if we are to follow
Zarathustra, at the end of Part IV, in going about 'our work', and
moreover if we are to do this in a cheerful manner, a certain kind of
laughter can play an important role. {'Not by wrath does one kill,
but by laughter!' (Z I 'On Reading and Writing', p. 153). A laughter
of unconcerned dismissiveness can help, as we mentioned before, to
fortify us in our attempt to continue with a project that is our project.
Moreover, it can do so in the face of our realisation that there are
other competing points of view (at least some of them being points
of view that we cannot easily reject out of hand). If our project of
moral perfectionism is to be treated with the importance that it
deserves, agonistic discourse must be such that we are not knocked
too easily off our own paths. Recall, here, our earlier contrast of
seriousness and solemnity. Not being solemn about our project does
not mean we are not serious about it.23 But two further points are
important here. First, this laughter, although it is 'dismissive' in the
sense that it enables us to return, after our agonistic discussion, to a
path that remains essentially our path, does not foreclose the poss-
ibility (even the likelihood) of our returning to the arena of disputa-
tion with our interlocutor at some later date, perhaps once we have
thought of a way of taking the argument further in some fruitful
manner. Second,laughter's 'dismissal' is not (at least, not that often)
a dismissal of the other's point of view as worthless. Rather, the
point is simply that if my perfectionist project is to continue, then
there comes a point when, if your point of view is incompatible
with mine, I must 'dismiss' that point of view as a factor not rel-
evant to my own path (or at least, not to my own immediate
concerns), in order that I may not be swayed from that path.
The foregoing has assumed that the option of critical argument is
always available to us. However, as Zwart points out, this is not
always so. There can come a point when a particular moral dis-
course gains such dominance; and 'such an ability to conceal its
basic vulnerability' (1996, p. 10), that anyone aiming to challenge
the discourse is rendered apparently powerless in that their
attempts are dismissed as 'unreasonable'. (This is what has hap-
pened, according to Zwart, with the dominance of contemporary
liberalism. 24) Then, according to Zwart's account, something
important happens: 'all of a sudden, the basic vulnerability of the
dominant regime dawns on us or is revealed to us - and this is
the experience of laughter' (p. 10).
John Lippitt 115
So in both of the above cases - when agonistic discourse reaches
'bedrock'; and when genuinely' open' critical argument is not avail-
able - laughter can provide an alternative resource. In the latter
case, rather than feeling obliged to offer a detailed critical analysis
of the prevailing 'tyrannical' mode of moral discourse, we can
ridicule it; and thus attain a certain liberation from its hold over us.
The procedure Zwart is here suggesting, of course, is likely to strike
many philosophers as being a mere evasion. Yet whatever the
philosophical justification (or lack thereof) of such a procedure, I
think that a plausible case could be made for the claim that such
techniques are, pragmatically and existentially, indispensable to a
moral perfectionist project. For as outlined above, there may come a
point at which excessive discussion might actually hIlrm our project,
by getting us too far' off track'. And here, we can laugh a laughter
of non-discursive dismissal. In short: rather than feel that every
opposing position needs to be refuted - such an outlook would
involve being too much possessed by the 'spirit of gravity' -laugh-
ter at a position can expunge this need, providing a liberation from
this feeling of obligation, and a freedom to continue on one's own
path. Such laughter thus allows one to dispel that which threatens
one's flourishing without the need for further, potentially stultify-
ing, argument or rebuttal.25
Intemalisation and Comic Distance
But there is a second way in which laughter can function as a tool

in moral perfectionism, which is an important complement to that
discussed above. We can approach this second way by consider-
ing another angle on the potential tyranny of moral (or other)
discourses. Zwart's concern is with morality: more specifically,
with moralities which are both dominant and, in an important
sense, external to the agent. 26 But might not a laughter such as that
we are describing be used against any obstacle that impedes a per-
fectionist project? Consider here another point made by Bakhtin.
In discussing medieval laughter, Bakhtin contrasts the' official
and authoritarian' 'serious aspects of class culture', which 'always
contain an element of fear and intimidation', with laughter,
which' overcomes fear, for it knows no inhibitions, no limitations'
(1968, p. 90). This 'victory over fear' is what 'most impressed
medieval man' (ibid.). Importantly for the present discussion,
Bakhtin adds:
Laughter is essentially not an external but an interior form of
truth ... Laughter liberates not only from external censorship
but first of all from the great interior censor; it liberates from
the fear that developed in man during thousands of years: fear
of the sacred, of prohibitions, of the past, of power.
(p. 94, my emphasis)
Liberation from 'the great interior censor'? This idea prompts the
following question: if laughter can be used against dominant exter-
nal moral codes and discourses, as Zwart suggests, can it not also
be used to deal with obstacles to our 'perfection' which we have
effectively been complicit in putting in our paths ourselves, by inter-
nalisation? At the beginning of The Gay Science, Nietzsche speaks
of the 'ethical ... teacher of the purpose of existence': a recurring
figure in history who 'wants to make sure that we do not laugh at
existence, or at ourselves or at him' (GS 1). To this end, 'the human
race will decree from time to time: "There is something at which it is
absolutely forbidden henceforth to laugh'" (GS 1). This attitude
seems akin to Zarathustra's 'spirit of gravity'. But could it be that the
greatest threat posed by the 'teachers of the purpose of existence' is
something that does not explicitly emerge from Nietzsche's discus-
sion of them: namely that the real danger of their teaching is that it
becomes internalised? (Compare Nietzsche's account of the develop-
ment of bad conscience in the Genealogy (GM IT).) The real threat is
not the external command of 'thou shalt not laugh'. (After all, why
would we feel obliged to obey the 'teachers'? As the history of
comedy and satire under oppressive political regimes suggests,
people do not feel obliged to obey these commands when the exter-
nal censors' backs are turned.) They become most serious as a threat
precisely when, perhaps over the course of centuries, the various
prohibitions of the 'founders of moralities and religions' (GS 1) tum
inwards.
Feeling powerless in relation to a dominant external moral dis-
course is one thing; having allowed a particular discourse to get
'under our skin' and dominate our thinking and feeling is another.
If we realise that this is what is happening to us, laughter can playa
vital role here too. Nietzsche and Bakhtin seem united in this
respect; they both want to celebrate the importance laughter
can have in freeing us from both external and internal prohibitions.
But how could such laughter operate in relation to internal prohibi-
tions? As mentioned, this is an important complement to the idea of
John Lippitt 117
non-discursive dismissal. Consider the idea of 'comic distance'.
Seeing something as comical usually involves standing back from it
in some way; and the development of a sense of humour in relation
to X involves cultivating the ability to look at X from the 'outside'.
Seeing one's attitudes and values in this way, then, involves a need
to be able to stand back and judge oneself. So this is another sense
in which, in Zarathustra's phrase, laughter can 'kill'. What it kills, in
this context, is not the viewpoint of the other which, after consider-
ing it in agonistic debate, we then feel obliged to dismiss; but a
certain inflexibility of mind and attitude. Such laughter, therefore,
can prevent the ossification of our thinking and feeling, enabling us
to see beyond any given perspective, including those potentially
damaging ones which we have internalised.
But notice the difference between this more 'reflective' laughter
and the Dionysian, ecstatic laughter of the shepherd. Whereas the
latter kind of laughter appears to be ecstatic in a dual sense (imply-
ing a dissolution of subjectivity, as well as rapturous delight), any
laughter that would playa part in moral perfectionism must surely
be accompanied by a greater degree of self-consciousness. One
remains a conscious agent, concerned with one's values and one's
project of self-perfection. The contrast here, I suggest, is similar to
that between the experience of an 'ecstatic ephiphany' (which is, at
least from one point of view, accompanied by a dissolution of sub-
jectivity), and the use to which we may put the memory or thought
thereof in the process of self-overcoming.
To explain: this is where eternal recurrence can operate as a spur
to our future actions, as a 'touchstone of strength and affirmative-
ness', as Schacht puts it (Schacht, 1983, p. 259). Owen suggests that,
in our everyday existence:
if the thought of eternal recurrence gains possession of us, we

may experience this possession as feeling crushed (because we
are ashamed of many of our past actions), yet precisely because
this 'feeling crushed' is a feeling of a decrease of power, we are
motivated to overcome this feeling and we recognise that we can
overcome it by using it as an affective resource for performing
noble actions in the future.
(Owen, 1995, p. 114)
The thought of eternal recurrence (and the accompanying joy of its

affirmation) motivates us to act in certain ways. But the self that is
thus motivated is a self far more 'present' and self-conscious than
that which embraces eternal recurrence in a moment of Dionysian
ecstasy. Similarly, the person who laughs 'moral perfectionist'
laughter is more conscious; of herself and her relation to the dom-
inant moral doctrine, or internalised bad conscience, or whatever.
This kind of laughter does not require ecstasis; and thus can be of
use on this more 'mundane' level; can be of some use to a figure like
the more 'down to earth' Zarathustra portrayed by Schacht. 27
But finally, it should be evident from the above that we need to
add an important rider to Zwart's analysis. Zwart's Bakhtinian talk
of the vulnerability of prevailing moral discourses' dawn[ing] on us'
or being' revealed to us' overlooks something important as regards
the applicability of this to Nietzsche. Namely, that in order for this
experience to come about, Nietzsche would presumably want to say
that an act of the will is sometimes necessary. I suggest that
Nietzsche recognises this in having Zarathustra urge the higher
men to 'learn to laugh'. And learning to laugh, in the perfectionist
sense that I am here suggesting, requires our cultivating in our-
selves the ability to stand back and look at that which has been
dominating us; perhaps that which we have allowed to dominate us
by internalisation. What we must do is train ourselves continually
to take stock of whatever may have wormed its way into our selves
- nausea and pity; slavishness rather than nobility; a festering bad
conscience - and use laughter in order to kill these manifestations
of the 'spirit of gravity'.
Mockery, Sarcasm and Irony
But we may still have the following worry. What about the fact that
Zarathustra's Part IV laughter retains the element of mockery and
sarcasm mentioned earlier? In this context, consider a passage
quoted by Owen during his discussion of agonism. This is Hilary
Putnam, explaining why, as a welfare liberal, he has a fundamental
disagreement with a libertarian such as Robert Nozick:
In my view, his fundamental premises - the absoluteness of the

right to property, for example - are counterintuitive and not
supported by sufficient argument. On his view, I am in the grip
of a 'paternalistic' philosophy which he regards as insensitive
to individual rights. This is an extreme disagreement ... Each
of us regards the other as lacking, at this level, a certain kind of
John Lippitt 119
sensitivity and perception. To be perfectly honest, there is in each
of us something akin to contempt.
(putnam, 1981, pp. 164-5; cited in Owen, 1995, p. 162)
However, Putnam adds, along with this contempt goes a certain

respect:
I want to argue that there is all the difference in the world between
an opponent who has the fundamental intellectual virtues of open-
mindedness, respect for reasons, and self-criticism, and one who
does not ... [T]he ambivalent attitude of respectful contempt is an
honest one: respect for the intellectual virtues in the other; con-
tempt for the intellectual and emotional weaknesses (according to
one's own lights, of course, for one always starts from them).
(Putnam, 1981, pp. 165--6; cited in Owen, 1995, p. 162)
Something of this relation seems to hold between Zarathustra

and the higher men in Part IV. Zarathustra has a certain respect
for the higher men (in whom 'something [is] thronging and
pushing ... man'sfuture', and so through whom 'much is still pos-
sible'). But alongside this, he feels contempt for their weaknesses.
(This contempt, of course, manifests itself for much of Part IV as
pity.) Yet Zarathustra claims that 'much is still possible' through
the higher men provided they 'learn to laugh ... as one must laugh'.
And what kind of laughter is this? As we have just said, it is appar-
ently a laughter which retains, even into Part IV, elements of
mockery and sarcasm. Owen's use of Putnam furnishes us with a
suggestion as to why this might be so. First, Zarathustra's mockery
and sarcasm illustrates his contempt for aspects of the higher
men (and, by implication, humanity as a whole). Yet, following
Putnam, we might argue that 'the ambivalent attitude of respect-
ful contempt is an honest one'. Precisely because of Zarathustra's
outlook, mockery and sarcasm for certain alternative outlooks
remains appropriate. For this reason, we should not expect that
the laughter Zarathustra laughs will be totally devoid of any
mockery or sarcasm. Second, this mockery and sarcasm will some-
times need to be directed at one's current self, in the service of
creating the 'higher self presupposed by moral perfectionism.
So this 'honest', 'respectful contempt', sometimes manifested in
mockery and sarcasm, is not mere mockery and sarcasm; it serves
an important purpose. We can shed more light on the sense in
which such phenomena can be 'positive' by contrasting this with a
view (as well as that of Bakhtin and Zwart) in which they are purely
'negative'.
In his discussion of 'slave morality' in Beyond Good and Evil,
Nietzsche mentions the slave's 'pessimistic mistrust of the entire
situation of man' and his likely 'condemnation of man together
with his situation' (BGE 260). The suspicion, scepticism and mis-
trust of the slave are all mentioned. Now what would a laughter
be like that was pessimistic, suspicious, sceptical and mistrustful?
One suggestion might be a certain view of irony, damned by
both Hegel and Kierkegaard as 'infinite absolute negativity'.28
What both Hegel and Kierkegaard object to in the irony of German
Romanticism is precisely its negativity and cynicism. For Hegel,
such irony gives free rein to subjective arbitrariness; for
Kierkegaard, irony sees the limitations of living' aesthetically' (that
is, without any distinctively ethical commitments), but has nothing
to offer in the place of aestheticism. 'Slave' laughter, we might
suggest, would be akin to this; based on ressentiment, it would
laugh powerlessly at those who keep the slave in his place, but this
laughter would be all it had to offer. It would be a tool in the
service of ressentiment, not moral perfectionism.
So notice the difference between a purely negative, 'slave' laugh-
ter and a laughter of use in moral perfectionism. The irony, sarcasm,
and mockery of the Zarathustra of Part IV need not be viewed, as
Hegel and Kierkegaard view irony, as 'infinite absolute negativity'.
Kierkegaard's judgement about an ironic outlook's having nothing
to offer in the place of what it (implicitly) criticises is made from a
standpoint which has a very definite idea of what is missing: a
Christian 'God-relationship'. But for a thinker like Nietzsche, whose
'positive' suggestions are of a very different order, what is offered
'in its place' will not be a religious (or, for that matter, systematic
philosophical) solution; but precisely a continual process of self-
overcoming or 'perfection'. This very process is, for Nietzsche, what
matters. And, as we have been suggesting, laughter (including,
perhaps, irony, sarcasm and mockery), at prevailing ideologies in
the world, and at one's current self, may be precisely what is
required, as a matter of psychological necessity, as part of this con-
tinual process. Thus from the Nietzschean viewpoint, the laughter
of irony (and sarcasm and mockery) is not purely negative.
So although laughter, operating as a tool in moral perfectionism,
utilises some of the same qualities as 'slavish' laughter, it does so
John Lippitt 121
for the more 'noble' end that we have been describing: the retention
of one's integrity in the pursuit of one's projects; the prevention of
internalising (undesirable) external values that society at large takes
to be unchallengeably good; the prevention of the ossification of the
self; and, ultimately, to borrow Conway's neat phrase, 'fortifying
one's soul with the virtues constitutive of a sterling character'. It
may be that the laughter which is of use in moral perfectionism is
'reduced' in the sense of being less ecstatic than that of the shep-
herd. But in practical terms, this is of no consequence. It is a differ-
ent kind of laughter, with a different purpose; and - for the reasons
we have suggested about the need to start our perfectionist project
from the all too human position of where we are - it is none the
worse for that. 29
Notes
1. See, for instance, Whitlock (1990). At one point, Whitlock claims that
'Nietzsche's philosophy is the first and foremost recognition of the
value of humour for life', and he talks about 'a comical celebration of
the triumph of zarathustran lightness over rival nihilistic and desper-
ate philosophies' (p. 267). For sigla used in my citations, see the
Reference Key to Nietzsche's Texts on p. xii.
2. See, for instance, Higgins (1987), pp. 203--32. Higgins reads Part IV of
Zarathustra as an instance of Menippean satire modelled on
Apuleius's Golden Ass.
3. See Lippitt (1992). I associate the 'laughter of the herd' with the
crowd's mocking.. laughter at the Zarathustra who aims to preach a
doctrine of the Ubermensch in the Prologue. Bergson's account of
laughter as a social corrective can be found in Bergson (1956).
4. Cavell (1990). See especially the Introduction and Chapter 1.
5. R. J. Hollingdale (1969); in the 'Introduction' to his translation of
Zarathustra (Harmondsworth: Penguin), p. 35. Similar sentiments are
expressed in Hollingdale (1965), p. 190.
6. See, for instance, Lampert (1987), p. 7.
7. Zwart (19%), pp. 79-84. We shall discuss Zwart's reading, and the
meaning of 'reduced laughter', shortly.
8. I am not, of course, suggesting that this follows as a matter of neces-
sity; merely that it seems a possibility worth taking seriously.
9. For instance: Walter Kaufmann describes Part IV as 'held together by a
unity of plot and a pervasive sense of humor' (Kaubnann, 1976, p. 344);
Higgins says it 'tells a story that is not only funny but often raucous'
(Higgins, 1987, p. 304); and Gary Shapiro focuses upon the themes of
festival, carnival and parody in Part IV (Shapiro, 1983).
10. Note the importance of 'Schopenhauer as Educator' (hereafter SE) to
the discussions of Nietzsche as a moral perfectionist. See, for
instance, Cavell (1990), pp. 49ff.; Conway (1997), pp. 55ff.; and - the
most detailed treatment - Conant (1999).
11. Compare, in this respect, Shapiro, whose Bakhtin-influenced reading
of the text in terms of festival and carnival ends by claiming that Part
IV 'abdicates its own narrative authority' and 'calls its own narrative
into question at the end' (Shapiro, 1983, p. 61).
12. Though this latter query, of course, runs into the notorious problem
of how reliable (or otherwise) a guide is Nietzsche to his own earlier
work.
13. All quotations from Zarathustra are from the translation by Kaufmann
(1976); page numbers to this edition will be given, as well as section
titles and (where appropriate) subsection numbers.
14. An observation of Owen's puts this rather neatly. He remarks
that 'the practice of [Nietzschean] genealogy involves three rela-
ted interests: (i) "what are we?", (ii) "how have we become what
we are?" and (iii) "given what we are, what can we become?'"
(Owen, 1995, p. 40). The point to notice about this third question is
that 'what we can become' is intimately related to 'what we are'.
15. 'The greatest weight - What if, some day or night, a demon were to
steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life
as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more
and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but
every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything
unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in
the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moon-
light between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The
eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and
again, and you with it, speck of dust!"
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and
curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a
tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are
a god and never have I heard anything more divine." If this thought
gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps
crush you. The question in each and everything, "Do you desire this
once more and innumerable times more?" would lie upon your
actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have
to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than
this ultimate confirmation and seal?' (GS 341).
16. I am thinking especially of subsections 18-20.
17. For instance, in the first section of Part IV, Zarathustra says: 'Laugh,
laugh, my bright, wholesome sarcasm! From high mountains cast down
your glittering mocking laughter!' (Z IV 'The Honey Sacrifice', p. 352).
And shortly afterwards, it is revealed that the two kings, shown an
image of Zarathustra, thought he had 'the mocking grimace of a devil'
(Z IV 'Conversation with the Kings' 2, p. 359).
18. Bakhtin (1968); see especially the Introduction and Chapter 1.
19. lowe this distinction to Colin Radford.
John Lippitt 123
20. Note that this apology contains within it the seeds of a 'relief or
'release' theory of joking, developed in later years by Herbert
Spencer (Spencer, 1987), and most famously by Freud (1976). For a
critique of Freud's theory, see Lippitt (1995).
21. I borrow this phrase from Orellana-Benado (1985). However, I do not
know to what extent he would support the use to which I put it here.
22. I borrow the term 'bedrock' from Wittgenstein (1958), sect. 217.
Though the context of discussion is very different - Wittgenstein on
'rule-following' - some of his words in this section might well be
applied to what will inevitably sometimes happen in agonistic dis-
course: 'If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock,
and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: "This is simply
what I do.'"
23. I take this to be Schacht's point when he says that although
Nietzsche, in OHM, clearly still 'means the idea of "higher human-
ity" to be taken very seriously ... a part of what enables it to continue
to be taken seriously is that Nietzsche is effectively countering
any tendency one might have to take it seriously in the wrong way,
using comedy and absurdity to overcome "the spirit of gravity'''
(Schacht, 1995, p. 246). 'Taking something seriously in the wrong
way', I suggest, means what I have called taking something
solemnly.
24. Zwart (1996), Chapter 1; see especially the critique of Richard Rorty,
pp.35-41.
25. We might also, with a nod towards Milan Kundera, make a connec-
tion here between laughter and 'forgetting' (Kundera, 1980).
Compare the above discussion with Nietzsche's reference, in the
Genealogy, to a 'noble' attitude to one's 'enemies': 'To be incapable of
taking one's enemies, one's accidents, even one's misdeeds seriously
for very long - that is the sign of strong, full natures in whom there
is an excess of the power to form, to mold, to recuperate and to forget
(a good example of this in modem times is Mirabeau, who had no
memory for insults and vile actions done him and was unable to
forgive simply because he - forgot). Such a man shakes off with a
single shrug many vermin that eat deep into others' (GM I 10, first
emphasis mine). One can easily imagine this 'shrug' manifesting
itself in the form of a laugh; and clearly, any such laughter would be
closer to the kind of (,moral perfectionist') laughter I have been
describing than to the 'Dionysian' variety. Note, though, that this
connection between laughter and forgetting is quite different to the
one made by Alan White, in which forgetting is precisely what needs
to be avoided if we are to refrain from laughing kinds of laughter
which are potentially damaging to us (see White, 1990, pp. 134-5).
I am grateful to David Owen for first suggesting this connection
tome.
26. Recall his earlier claim that we only enter into such moral discourse
due to a sense of dissatisfaction with the views of others.
27. For a fuller account along these lines of the role of eternal recurrence
in self-overcoming, see Owen (1995), Chapter 5.
28. See, for instance, Hegel (1920), vol. I, pp. 93-4; and Kierkegaard
(1989), p. 254.
29. I am grateful to David Owen for comments on an earlier draft of this
essay.
Bibliography
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(Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press).
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Johns Hopkins University Press), pp. 61-190.
Cavell, S. (1990) Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of
Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago, lli: University of Chicago Press).
Conant, J. (1999) 'Nietzsche's perfectionism: a reading of "Schop-enhauer
as Educator" " forthcoming in Richard Schacht (ed.), Nietzsche's post-
moralism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Conway, D. W. (1997) Nietzsche and the Political (London: Routledge).
Freud, S. (1976) Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James
Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
Hegel, G. W. F. (1920) Philosophy of Fine Art, trans. F. P. B. Osmaston
(London: Bell).
Higgins, K. M. (1987) Nietzsche's Zarathustra (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press).
Hollingdale, R. J. (1965) Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press).
Hollingdale, R. J. (1%9) 'Introduction' to Nietzsche, F., Thus Spoke Zarathustra,
trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
Kaufmann, W. (ed.) (1976) The Portable Nietzsche (Harmondsworth:
Penguin).
Kierkegaard, S. (1989) The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates,
trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press).
Kundera, M. (1980) The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Michael Henry
Heim (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
Lampert, 1. (1987) Nietzsche's Teaching: An Interpretation of Thus Spoke
Zarathustra (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press).
Lippitt, J. (1992) 'Nietzsche, Zarathustra and the Status of Laughter', British
Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 32, no. 1, pp. 39-49.
Lippitt, J. (1995) 'Humour and release', Cogito, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 169-76.
Nietzsche, F. (1967) On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann
(New York: Random House).
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Random House).
Nietzsche, F. (1967b) The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York:
Random House).
Nietzsche, F. (1973) Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmonds-
worth: Penguin).
John Lippitt 125
Nietzsche, F. (1976) Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in Walter Kaufmann, (ed.), The
Portable Nietzsche (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
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trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
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Schacht, R. (1983) Nietzsche (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul).
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R. Sedgwick (ed.), Nietzsche: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell),
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Goicoechea (ed.), The Great Year of Zarathustra (New York: Lanham),
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Spencer, H. (1987) 'On the Physiology of Laughter', in John Morreall, (ed.),
The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor (Albany: State University of New
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White, A. (1990) Within Nietzsche's Labyrinth (New York and London:
Routledge).
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Sprach Zarathustra' (New York: Peter Lang).
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(Oxford: Basil Blackwell).
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Pharos).
Part Three
Art, Nature and the
Transhuman
7
A 'Pessimism of Strength' :
Nietzsche and the Tragic
Sublime
Jim Urpeth
I have the right to understand myself as the first tragic philo-

sopher ... the extremest antithesis and antipodes of a pessimistic
philosopher.
(EH BT 3)
In considering Nietzsche's thought in relation to the theme of the

'future of the human', the topic of the overcoming of pessimism
through art is particularly important. Nietzsche's discussion of this
issue concerns the affirmation of a tragic sublime that discloses the
limits of the 'human'.
Although Nietzsche was more sympathetic to philosophical pes-

simism than optimism, he offered a relentless critique of it. For
Nietzsche, pessimism - as merely the opposite of optimism - does
not develop a transvaluative critique of metaphysical values. The dis-
agreement between optimism and pessimism concerns merely the
extent to which human beings are judged capable of attaining the
ideals of the Platonic-Christian tradition in the secular guise
of modem humanism. Hence both optimism and pessimism pre-
suppose a negative evaluation of 'this world' (that is, the body, the
senses, becoming, and so on).
Pessimism, no less than optimism, underscores the values that
are, in Nietzsche's view, the origin of the dichotomy that under-
pins the dualist ontology of modern humanism, namely the
129
130 Nietzsche and the Tragic Sublime
'man/nature' opposition. Modem humanism inherits uncritically
from the Platonic-Christian tradition a commitment to the 'ascetic
ideal' in so far as it thematises the 'human' in idealist terms founded
upon the renunciation of instinct. Such complicity with theologico-
humanist values is the source of Nietzsche's condemnation of pes-
simism which, he argues, remains in this way under the shadow of
the ideals of Platonic-Christian metaphysics. The pessimist shares
with the optimist a negative assessment of determinism. Both leave
unchallenged the value of the metaphysical conception of human
freedom in terms of the transcendence of nature. The value placed
on freedom in this traditional sense, the basis of the notion of
'human dignity', is the source of the pessimistic response to the
insights of determinism which undermine the credibility of the
values of the rational-moral subject.
These points also apply to teleological conceptions of the relation
between man and nature regardless of whether they take a Kantian
(' critical') or Hegelian ('dialectical') form. This is an important claim
as it might be argued that teleological perspectives are exempt from
such criticisms in so far as they overcome the oppositional concep-
tion of the man/nature relation. Nietzsche attacks as thoroughly
anthropomorphic attempts to posit a harmony between nature and
humanist values. He rejects teleological modes of thought because,
as a form of optimism, they presuppose a pessimistic and negative
evaluation of the non-teleological processes of nature which, through
the notion of the Dionysian, Nietzsche accords primordial ontologi-
cal status.
For Nietzsche, a pessimistic response to a 'naturalistic' character-
isation of the essence of man is constitutive of the 'human'.
Pessimism, viewed broadly as the negative evaluation of nature, is
the condition of possibility of optimism. A pessimistic evaluation of
nature is, even for the optimist, a criterion of being human. The
project of becoming-human entails a becoming-pessimistic. All ide-
alisms (and all, merely anthropomorphic, materialisms) are pes-
simisms. For Nietzsche it is, strictly speaking, a contradiction in
terms to speak of a non-pessimistic 'human'. Hence, the overcoming
of pessimism and the critique of humanism are fundamentally
interconnected in Nietzsche's thought.
Nietzsche's critique of metaphysics argues that negation is the
anthropomorphism par excellence, the fundamental 'moral' corner-
stone underpinning post-Socratic culture. A 'will-to-purity' under-
lies the suppression of difference inherent to the privileging, albeit
Jim Urpeth 131
in different ways, of negation in both Aristotelian and Hegelian
lOgic. The traditional valorisation of negation is the ultimate target
of Nietzsche's critique of metaphysics. Negation constitutes the
'human' in so far as it is determined negatively through the
'man/nature' opposition. Nietzsche's critique of negation exposes
the derivative and merely 'pragmatic' nature of any distinction
between the 'human' and the 'non-human'. For Nietzsche the
desire to thematise the vast differences in complexity between 'man'
and other animals by appealing to a distinction in kind rather than a
difference in degree is the product of a merely 'moral' interpreta-
tion of life.
Nietzsche conceived pessimism as the affective and evaluative
condition of the possibility of negation, and hence the origin of
metaphysics. For Nietzsche modem humanism, the context for both
optimism and pessimism, is a particularly virulent instantiation of
this pessimism-negation complex, the critique of which is central to
the main task of his thought - the 'overcoming of man'. Only on the
basis of such a critique is it possible to view the demise of the
'human' non-pessimistically.
II
It is important to distinguish between two types of 'overcoming of

pessimism' found in Nietzsche's texts. First, there is the 'romantic
pessimism' (WP III 846) of Schopenhauer and Wagner which
Nietzsche attacks. I shall refer to this as the 'slave' overcoming of
pessimism. Second, there is the response to pessimism Nietzsche
proposes, which I shall term the 'noble' overcoming of pessimism.
In the 'slave' response to pessimism, the negative evaluation
of the manifest indifference of nature to the rational-moral ideals of
humanism is assumed as an ineliminable and universal criterion of
being human. From this perspective, the only overcoming of pes-
simism possible is a transcendence of 'this world', a 'redemption'
from the relentless cravings of the will, the unconscious, the body
and soon.
In contrast, the 'noble' seeks an overcoming of pessimism
through the elimination of the basic pessimistic evaluation of life's
intrinsic anti-humanism. The 'noble' overcoming of pessimism
tackles the evaluation of life behind the 'slave's' valorisation of
asceticism. It denies that an underlying pessimism towards 'this
world', the origin of metaphysics, is universal and ineliminable. For
Nietzsche, becoming-noble consists in an ever-decreasing suscep-
tibility to pessimism. The 'noble' overcoming of pessimism is based
on an affirmation of life that is valorised not merely despite but
because 'this world' is fundamentally incompatible with the meta-
physical ideals of humanism. The 'noble' celebrates the anti-teleolog-
ical trajectory of life and does not require the palliatives sought by
the 'slave'. For the 'slave', art provides an escape from life, for the
'noble' it offers access to the instinctual and energetic processes of
self-expenditure that characterise the essence of life.
m
Two themes in Nietzsche's texts are particularly relevant to the 'noble'
overcoming of pessimism. These are the notions of 'transvaluation'
(Umwerlung) and the 'transfiguration' (VerkliirunglTransfiguration) of
life in art. l
The key role of the notion of transvaluation in Nietzsche's thought
reveals how his thought surpasses both the mere inversion of the
oppositions of Platonic-Christian metaphysics and a Hegelian
Aufhebung of them. Nietzsche's critique of the 'slave' overcoming of
pessimism and development of a 'noble' alternative is engaged in the
transvaluation of the optimism/pessimism opposition. I shall argue
that Nietzsche's notion of a 'pessimism of strength' (Pessimismus der
Stiirke) gestures towards a 'noble' evaluation of life unthinkable in
terms of this opposition. Nietzsche conceived his thought to be 'far
beyond the pitiable shallow-pated chatter about optimism contra
pessimism' (EH BT 2).
Even though the term only occurs infrequently in his texts, the
theme of the transfiguration of life through art is an important aspect
of Nietzsche's thought. This is demonstrated by the preponderance
in his texts of a series of terms - such as 'spiritualisation', 'idealisa-
tion', 'perfecting' - thematically related to the theme of transfigura-
tion. It is possible to misinterpret these interrelated notions in
Nietzsche's texts in terms of the transcendence of 'this world'. If
severed from some of the most basic elements of Nietzsche's
thought, these terms could be mistakenly taken as evidence that
Nietzsche remained, despite his numerous protestations to the con-
trary, fundamentally Schopenhauerian in his conception of the
nature of art and its role in combating pessimism.2
Jim Urpeth 133
If the overall project of transvaluation which forms the context
for Nietzsche's use of the term is recalled, then it is clear that an
affirmation of the most fundamental material processes of 'this
world' through its transfiguration in art is not a contradiction in
terms. Nietzsche breaks the Platonic-Christian monopoly of notions
such as transfiguration. He develops a transvalued conception of
affirmative transfiguration, based upon his recovery of the
Dionysian as an alternative to the interpretation of transfiguration
in transcendent terms. As he states:
we infuse a transfiguration and fullness into things and poetize

about them until they reflect back our fullness and joy in life: sex-
uality; intoxication ... when we encounter things that display this
transfiguration and fullness, the animal responds with an excita-
tion of those spheres in which all those pleasurable states are situ-
ated - and a blending of these very delicate nuances of animal
well-being and desires constitutes the aesthetic state. The latter
appears only in natures capable of that bestowing and
overflowing fullness of bodily vigor.
(WP ill 801)
Nietzsche does not seek merely to give a 'naturalised' interpretation

of works of art that are transfigurative in the traditional sense, but
also reclaims the term in a positive application to affirmative works
of Dionysian art. This reveals a contrast between a 'slave' sense of
transfiguration concerned with an elevation toward a transcendent
realm, and a 'noble', transvalued conception of transfiguration
which affirms the immanent transcendence of material life. 3
There is, therefore, nothing contradictory about Nietzsche's reten-
tion of the notion of transfiguration within a 'physiology of art'. The
role of the term in his texts does not signal a residual Schopenhauerian
element in his conception of art at odds with the theme of affirmation.
There is no conflict in Nietzsche's thought between a conception of art
as 'an excess and overflow of blooming physicality' (WP ill 802) and
an insistence on its transfigurative power. It is only the Platonic-
Christian interpretation of transfiguration which precludes it from
being aligned with 'the images and desires of intensified life' (ibid.).
Nietzsche develops a non-moral conception of transfiguration
concerned with the enhancement of life rather than an escape from it.
He seeks 'to bring to light the "basic idealizing powers" (sensuality,
intoxication, superabundant animality), (WP ill 823). Nietzsche
develops this sense of transfiguration in a passage that responds to
the question' Pessimism in artr:
what is essential in art remains its perfection of existence, its pro-

duction of perfection and plenitude; art is essentially affirmation,
blessing, deification of existence.
(WP III 821)
In the following passage Nietzsche undertakes a transvaluation of

the supersensuous!sensuous opposition and conceives the trans-
figuration of life through art as the self-intensification of material life
itself which displaces the artist from creator to cipher:
[In] the highest and most illustrious human joys, in which exist-
ence celebrates its own transfiguration [das Dasein seine eigene
Verkliirung feiert] ... the most sensual functions are finally
transfigured by a symbol-intoxication of the highest spirituality [...
einem Gleichnis-Rausche der hOchsten Geistigkeit verklOrt werden]; they
experience a kind of deification of the body in themselves [sie
empfinden an sich eine Art Vergottlichung des Leibes] as distant as poss-
ible from the ascetic philosophy of the proposition 'God is a spirit'.
(WP IV 1051)
Nietzsche's thoroughly non-pessimistic evaluation of the reappropri-

ation of man into the auto-transfigurative artistic processes of life is
stated thus:
from that height of joy where man feels himself to be altogether a

deified form and a self-justification of nature ... the Greeks called
by the divine name: Dionysus.
(ibid.)
For Nietzsche art is the least human of all' cultural' products. It is a

fundamental process of material life that periodically invades the
'human' and employs it in order to expend itself 'without a
purpose' as Kant would say. Nietzsche conceives the relation
between nature and art in radically immanent terms. Art is nature's
form of 'self-overcoming':
art is not merely imitation of the reality of nature but rather a

metaphysical supplement of the reality of nature, placed beside it
Jim Urpeth 135
for its overcoming ... [the] metaphysical intention of art [is] to
transfigure.
(BT24)
A Schopenhauerian interpretation of this Nietzschean sense of

transfiguration is seriously flawed. For Nietzsche, the transfigura-
tive power of art offers' salvation' from the desire for the transcen-
dent and makes possible a transvalued, affirmative inhabitation of
the most basic material processes of 'this world'.
IV
That the later Nietzsche espoused what I haved termed the 'noble'
overcoming of pessimism through art is an uncontentious claim. As
he states:
The tragic artist is not a pessimist - it is precisely he who affirms all

that is questionable and terrible in existence, he is Dionysian ... an
overflowing feeling of life and energy ... provided us with the
key to the concept of tragic feeling, which was misunderstood ...
especially by our pessimists. Tragedy is so far from providing evi-
dence for pessimism ... in Schopenhauer's sense that it has to be
considered the decisive repudiation of that idea ... Affirmation of
life even in its strangest and sternest problems ... that is what
I recognized as the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet.
(TI "'Reason" in Philosophy' 6;'Ancients' 5)
However, many have challenged Nietzsche's retrospective claims for

the radicality of The Birth of Tragedy, agreeing with the more negative
self-assessments of texts such as the 'Attempt at a Self-Criticism'.4
Nietzsche's overall evaluation of BT is ambiguous. For example, in
ASC - a text which contains some very negative comments on BT -
Nietzsche states: 'here, perhaps for the first time, a pessimism
"beyond good and evil" is suggested' (ASC 5). Elsewhere, BT is
described as 'my first transvaluation of all values' (TI' Ancients' 5). A
principal source of error in readings of BT is a failure to appreciate
the complexities of the periodisation of Greek cultural history which
Nietzsche proposes, especially in his account of the pre-Socratic
period (d. BT 2-4). Nietzsche does identify a period of Greek art
history which can be legitimately interpreted in Schopenhauerian
tenns. However, Nietzsche argues that, through tragedy, the Greeks
surpassed such a conception of the relation between art and life.5
Nietzsche's portrayal of the pre-Socratic Greeks can be charac-
terised as a progression from the 'slave' to the 'noble' type of
overcoming of pessimism through art. In the pre-tragic period the
Greeks cultivated the Apollonian, the Olympian order of the gods
and Doric art. The 'shining images' of the Apollonian offered a
'redemption through illusion' (BT 4) from a negative evaluation of
life; a pessimism expressed in the 'wisdom of Silenus' (BT 3). A
Schopenhauerian interpretation of this period of Greek culture is
plausible, but this is not the period of Greek culture by which
Nietzsche is most impressed. Nietzsche argues that the Greeks suc-
ceeded, through the transfigurative powers of tragedy, in achieving a
'noble' solution to pessimism in terms of the affirmation of the
Dionysian. Thus the art of the tragic period cannot be adequately
interpreted in Schopenhauerian tenns.
Nietzsche offers a cultural pathology of Greek culture in tenns of
the ebb and flow of 'health' and 'sickness' within it. He charts a
becoming-noble (that is, the birth of tragedy) which overcomes the
pessimism of an earlier, 'Silenesian', period. This overcoming of
pessimism employs different artistic means from those found
during the pre-tragic period. The tragic period develops a new
configuration of the Apollonian and Dionysian that challenges the
'Silenesian' evaluation of life.
This tragic phase is superseded by a becoming-slave (that is, the
death of tragedy), the triumph of the 'weak' who supplant the
affirmation of the Dionysian found in the tragedies of Sophocles
and Aeschylus. Nietzsche's revaluation of Greek cultural history
interprets the rise of 'theoretical optimism' and 'aesthetic
Socratism' as a physiological degeneration. This post-tragic denial
of the Dionysian and valorisation of 'theoretical man' forms the
complimentary, optimistic opposite to the pre-tragic, pessimistic
phase of Greek culture. Nietzsche confirms this complicity, the
shared negative evaluation of the Dionysian, when he asks, 'is the
resolve to be so scientific about everything perhaps a kind of fear
of, an escape from, pessimism?' (ASC 1).
For Nietzsche, the achievement of the Greeks in the tragic period
lies in their non-dialectical overcoming through tragedy of the -
albeit complex - oppositionality that characterised the relation
between the Apollonian and the Dionysian in the pre-tragic period. 6
This non-totalising fusion in tragedy of the Apollonian and
Jim Urpeth 137
Dionysian in terms of a pre-oppositional relation of difference
allowed the Greeks to overcome, in a 'noble' way, the pessimism of
the pre-tragic period in which the Apollonian was negatively
related to the Dionysian.
The key element of this transformation is the nature of the 'tragic
effect' which Nietzsche describes as 'metaphysical comfort' (metaph-
ysischer Trost)? Through this, the Greeks achieved a transvaluation
of their earlier pessimism. As Nietzsche states:
the metaphysical comfort - with which ... every true tragedy leaves
us - that life is at the bottom of things, despite all the changes of
appearances, indestructibly powerful and pleasurable ... with this
... the profound Hellene, uniquely susceptible to the tenderest and
deepest suffering, comforts himself, having looked boldly right into
the terrible destructiveness of so-called world history as well as the
cruelty of nature, and being in danger of longing for a Buddhistic
negation of the will. Art saves him, and through art -life.
(BT7)
Undeniably, the notion of 'metaphysical comfort' has Schopen-

hauerian resonances and Nietzsche came to criticise it severely
(d. ASC 7). Yet this self-criticism can be questioned. In fact the
passage cited above does describe precisely that which Nietzsche
contrasts with it in ASC, namely the 'art of this-worldly comfort'
(ASC 7).8 Justification of this interpretation of the notion of'meta-
physical comfort' requires a consideration of two issues. First, the
precise context of Nietzsche's criticism of the term; and second, a
clarification of the sense of the term 'metaphysical' in BT.
It is clear that ASC as a whole offers a positive evaluation of BT
that clearly supports a reading which finds intimations in it of
Nietzsche's later conception of the nature of art, in particular his
attack on Schopenhauer's aesthetics (d. ASC 6). When Nietzsche
introduces his criticism of the 'art of metaphysical comfort' (ASC 7)
this refers not to the passage cited above but to the role of the term
in one of the more uninhibited and propagandising sections on
German cultural resurgence (BT 18). The specific context of the critic-
ism of the notion of 'metaphysical comfort' (ASC Cr7) shows that
Nietzsche's principal doubts about BT are not substantive in nature
but concern the language and rhetoric of the text, in particular its
residual resonances of Romanticism and pessimism (d. ASC 7).
Nietzsche acknowledges that the radicality of the claims made were
not matched by the terminology and parochial cultural politics in
which it is couched. The essential charge ASC levels against BT is that
of stylistic cowardice and modesty (d. ASC 6). In ASC Nietzsche
sacrifices a balanced interpretation of the notion of 'metaphysical
comfort' in order to emphasise, with unequivocal clarity, his break
with the cultural politics of BT. Nietzsche's interpreters do not, of
course, have to read BT from such a perspective.
Much of the Schopenhauerian resonance of the notion of'meta-
physical comfort' is dispelled once the meaning of the term 'meta-
physical' in BT is examined. Throughout the text (d. BT 1,4,6,7-10,
25) Nietzsche unashamedly and explicitly constructs a 'metaphysics'
in order to thematise the relation between art and life. Clearly this
'artist's metaphysics' (ASC 2, 5; BT 5, 24) must be distinguished from
the Platonic-Christian sense of the term which Nietzsche attacks as
an example of the type of metaphysics he rejects, namely 'moral'
metaphysics. It is this Platonic-Christian sense of the term that is pre-
supposed in a Schopenhauerian interpretation of the notion of'meta-
physical comfort'. The passage cited above which introduces the
notion of 'metaphysical comfort' lies at the heart of Nietzsche's
attempt to characterise the nature of Attic tragedy. If Nietzsche's
periodisation of Greek culture is recalled then it is obvious that he is
deploying the notion of 'metaphysical comfort' in order to specify the
pre-Socratic Greek's conception and evaluation of art and life. Hence
the 'metaphysics' Nietzsche finds inherent to Greek tragedy is clearly
to be contrasted with Platonic-Christian metaphysics which pre-
supposes the 'death of tragedy'. Thus it is Nietzsche's 'artist's
metaphysics' which is the sense of the term 'metaphysical' relevant to
the interpretation of the notion of 'metaphysical comfort'. The meta-
physics of the tragic period is fundamentally immanentist or 'this-
worldly' in orientation. The nihilistic Platonic-Christian identity of
the metaphysical with the transcendent has not yet triumphed. The
'aesthetical metaphysics' (BT 5) Nietzsche finds in the tragic period
identifies the Dionysian with the most primordial processes of
nature. This is a 'metaphysics' as it is concerned with dimensions of
life 'beyond', in the sense of 'irreducible to', 'appearances' or the
'empirical reality' of the discrete spatio-temporal objects available
to scientific investigation. The Dionysian cannot be objectified or
reduced to this order of representation. Whatever criticisms
Nietzsche later made of the Kantian-Schopenhauerian terminology
of BT, it is clear that the text's identification of the 'noumena' with the
Dionysian has already overcome the notion of the transcendent.
Jim Urpeth 139
As 'metaphysica1', the Dionysian is concerned with 'self-
transcendence'. 1bis is not to be interpreted in supersensuous terms,
but as the dissolution of the derivative field of the principium individu-
ationis and the reaffirmation of the more primordial dimensions of
'this world'. The 'mystical oneness' and 'primal unity of all things'
Nietzsche refers to concerns an economy of differential relations of
more primordial ontological status than the empirical order of discrete
identities founded upon negation. Hence the 'metaphysical', in the
sense it has in BT, is immanent rather than transcendent, as it refers to
the Dionysian essence of 'this world'.
Once the periodisation of Greek culture Nietzsche offers in BT is
appreciated, the 'salvation' through art described in the passage
cited above cannot be read in terms of the 'slave' solution to pes-
simism. Nietzsche does not align the 'metaphysical comfort' pro-
vided by tragedy with a flight from life towards the transcendent,
nor with the 'resignationism' which Schopenhauer found in
tragedy. Rather, Nietzsche conceives tragedy as that which,
through the 'metaphysical comfort' it offers, 'redeems' manfrom the
pessimistic evaluation of life which was the condition of possibility
of the pre-tragic Greeks' need for the distracting, illusory visions of
beauty (the Apollonian) to counter their negative response to the
truth (the Dionysian). Tragedy is that 'noble', transvaluative
response to existence which not only resists, without recourse to
optimism, the onset of pessimism but finds 'indestructibly powerful
and pleasurable' (BT 7) precisely those aspects of life ('the terrible
destructiveness of so-called world history as well as the cruelty of
nature' (ibid.» most likely to engender pessimism and the 'slave'
response to it.
As the passages cited above make clear, art, and in particular
tragedy, does not merely provide palliatives for pessimism. It makes
possible, principally through the transformation in the Apollonian
from the pre-tragic to tragic periods, an affirmative response to
Dionysian reality without recourse to a process of desensitisation. The
'profound Hellene' remains, Nietzsche insists, 'uniquely susceptible
to the tenderest and deepest suffering' (ibid.). The example of the
'slave' solution Nietzsche offers in the passage cited above is the
'Buddhistic negation of the will' (ibid.) which is an obvious implicit
criticism of Schopenhauer. It is precisely as this 'slave' solution to pes-
simism threatens to take hold ('and being in danger of longing for'
(ibid.» that art intervenes in order to prevent its onset The 'salvation'
provided through the 'metaphysical comfort' experienced in tragedy
is clearly of an immanent rather than a transcendent variety, a point
clearly signalled in the insistence in the passage cited above that art
saves not only the individual but, more importantly, life itself from the
denial of it inherent in the 'slave' solution to pessimism.
Thus for Nietzsche tragedy is a 'preventative' medicine that inoc-
ulated the Greeks not against suffering but against the pessimistic
evaluation of it. Schopenhauer's conception of the overcoming of
pessimism through art is implicitly rejected in the passage cited
above as it is no longer able to comprehend the advance Nietzsche
detects in Greek culture from the pre-tragic to the tragic age. As
Nietzsche later reiterated, 'precisely tragedy is proof that the Greeks
were no pessimists' (EH BT 1).
Thus a 'noble' overcoming of pessimism through the affirmation of
life in art can be clearly discerned in BT. Nietzsche confirms this
point when he states that, threatened with the onset of 'nausea ... an
ascetic, will-negating mood' (BT 7):
art approaches as a saving sorceress, expert at healing. She alone

knows how to tum these nauseous thoughts about the horror or
absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live.
(ibid.)
Nietzsche links his account of tragedy to the features of ancient

Greek religion he wished to contrast to the Platonic-Christian tradi-
tion (ASC 5). Greek tragedy is conceived as an essentially religious
phenomenon (d. BT 7,23) which offers an alternative form of'salva-
tion' and 'redemption' to that found in Christianity. As Nietzsche's
account of the 'mystery doctrine of tragedy' (BT 10; d. BT 8, 9)
demonstrates, tragedy affirms the pre-individuated and impersonal
nature of the Dionysian essence of the 'eternal life' of 'this world' in
contrast to the anthropomorphic notion of individuation through
negation. This inherently pessimistic category reaches its reductio ad
absurdum, in Nietzsche's view, in the Platonic-Christian notion of the
immortality of the individual soul.
v
For Nietzsche, the Greeks of the tragic period provide the key
historical example of an affirmative culture relevant to the question
of the 'future of the human', so far as this is identified with the
Jim Urpeth 141
nascent 'rebirth of tragedy' (BT 19) Nietzsche discerns on the horizon
of Western culture. This topic is introduced through the figure of
the 'music-practicing Socrates' (d. BT 14,15). In the modem period,
Nietzsche detects, especially in the thought of Kant and
Schopenhauer (d. BT 18, 19), an increasing momentum in the his-
torical process of the self-overcoming of 'theoretical optimism'. This
can be characterised as a becoming-noble, a process of cultural
revitalisation that announces the advent of a 'tragic culture' (BT 18).
However, it is important to appreciate the limits of such
favourable references to Schopenhauer in BT. Nietzsche's acknow-
ledgment of the key role played by Schopenhauer's thought in the
radicalisation of the Kantian project of the critique of metaphysics
does not, despite the presence in BT of many themes and terms
drawn from Schopenhauer's aesthetics, entail an agreement on
Nietzsche's part with Schopenhauer's conception of the nature and
role of art. The unequivocal and explicit rejection of Schopenhauer's
aesthetics found in Nietzsche's later texts is already apparent in BT.
Schopenhauer conceives art as a form of the 'denial of the will', all
manifestations of which are to be valued, as, for Schopenhauer, an
'affirmation of the will' - in the sense he understands it - inevitably
leads to pessimism given its incompatibility with the transcendent
form of 'transcendence' his thought sustains.
Nietzsche does not share his philosophical predecessors' ingrained
hostility towards the 'will' or their anthropomorphic conception of it.
Already in BT Nietzsche develops a non-transcendent conception of
'transcendence' - the 'transfiguration' discussed above. Nietzsche
rethinks the 'will' in the radically non-utilitarian guise of the
Dionysian. This makes possible a type of self-transcendence through
the affirmation, rather than negation, of 'this world'. Thus in BT
Nietzsche acknowledges Schopenhauer's thought as a crucial, but
ultimately only preliminary, phase in the process of the auto-critique
of reason which exposes the limits of an unfettered rationalism.
VI
For Nietzsche, a key aspect of Greek tragedy is the transvaluation it

made possible in the conception of, and response to, suffering.
Beyond a negative evaluation of the suffering associated with the
undermining of the principium individuationis, the 'noble' embraces
'suffering' as an affirmation of the priority of life over the delimited
individual. Nietzsche later characterises this 'noble' evaluation of
suffering as a 'joy in destruction' (TI, 'Ancients', 5). In ASC this 'noble'
embrace of the multiplicity and becoming intrinsic to life is
described as a 'pessimism of strength' (Pessimism us der Stiirke):
Is there a pessimism of strength? An intellectual predilection for the

hard, gruesome, evil, problematic aspect of existence, prompted by
well-being, by overflOwing health, by the fullness of existence? Is it
perhaps possible to suffer precisely from overfullness?
(ASC 1)
Nietzsche insists upon a 'physiological' interpretation of the 'noble'

and 'slave' evaluations of suffering. Both optimism and pessimism
are symptoms of sickness. The 'triumph of optimism' (ASC 4) is
described as 'a decline of strength ... physiological weariness' (ibid.,
d. TI, 'Expeditions', 36). The predominance of instincts of self-
preservation over self-expenditure within the 'slave', the source of
their valorisation of reason and morality, is for Nietzsche a physio-
logical weakness. The affirmative response of the 'noble' to the anti-
teleological essence of life is, as the passage cited above states, an
indication of 'overflowing health'. Only those who are themselves
dominated by instincts of self-expenditure (that is, 'fullness of exist-
ence') can affirm the priority of life over the individuated self.
Given these different instinctual and affective economies, the
'noble' and the 'slave' evaluate life differently and therefore experi-
ence distinct forms of suffering. In the passage cited above, Nietzsche,
in asking 'is it possible to suffer precisely from overfullness?', raises
the issue of the specific nature of the suffering that afflicts the 'strong'.
There are types of 'Dionysian madness' (ASC 4) that Nietzsche charac-
terises as 'neuroses of health' (ibid.). The 'pessimism of strength' can be
related to the contrast between the two conceptions of the 'meaning
of suffering' described in the following passage:
One will see that the problem is that of the meaning of suffering:
whether a Christian meaning or a tragic meaning. In the former
case it is supposed to be the path to a holy existence; in the latter
case, being is counted as holy enough to justify even a monstrous
amount of suffering. The tragic man affirms even the harshest
suffering: he is sufficiently strong, rich, and capable of deifying to
do so.
(WPIV 1052)
Jim Urpeth 143
The 'noble' type of suffering arises not from the threat posed to the
stability of the individuated self by the Dionysian, but from the
reductive nature of individuation and the imposition of negation on
self-differing life. In contrast to the sufferings of the 'slave' when their
predominant instinct of self-preservation is challenged, Nietzsche
describes a 'noble' type of 'Dionysian suffering' induced by the
'agonies of individuation'. This, he suggests, is the meaning of the
theme of the 'dismemberment' of Dionysus (BT 10). The Dionysian
type regards 'the state of individuation as the origin and primal cause
of all suffering, as something objectionable in itself (ibid.).
Hence the 'slave' suffers from the collapse of individuation, the
'noble' from its institution. The 'slave' defends negation and tries to
interpret life 'dialectically', the 'noble' abhors negation and con-
ceives life as an economy of pre-oppositional forces in excess of
all determination. Whilst the 'slave' can only interpret suffering
negatively, the 'noble', through art, attains a transvalued relation to
it. As Nietzsche states:
Art as the redemption of the sufferer - as the way to states in which

suffering is willed, transfigured, deified, where suffering is a form
of great delight.
(wpm 853)
Thus the issue of the 'future of the human' is, for Nietzsche, the
question of the continuing prevalence of the instinctual enfeeble-
ment which constitutes the 'human' and is the source of the pes-
simistic denial of the Dionysian. Nietzsche's texts are often
characterised by what can be termed an anti-humanist optimism based
on a conception of the historicality of the West in terms of a process
of 'self-overcoming'. Given both the transvaluative trajectory of his
thought and its rejection of transcendent in favour of immanent
models of 'transcendence', such 'optimism' concerns the demise of
theological and humanist values and the revival of'tragic insight'.
vn
In a text entitled 'On the Pessimism of Strength' (WP IV 1019),
Nietzsche offers a complementary account to that found in BT of the
historico-cultural conditions that point towards the revival of a 'noble'
interpretation of life described as 'this symptom of highest culture'
(ibid.). Nietzsche charts a gradual transvaluation of the initial
pessimistic relation to three features of existence - 'chance, the uncer-
tain, the sudden' ('der Zufall, das Ungewisse, das PlOtzliche). He states:
the whole history of culture represents a diminution of this fear

of chance, the uncertain, the sudden. For culture means learning
to calculate, to think causally, to forestall, to believe in necessity.
(WP IV 1019)
The rise of' civilisation', which requires, as its condition of possibil-

ity, the pessimism of the 'primitive', leads to the virtual abolition of
all'ills' and the submission to them, 'called religion and morality'
(ibid.). However, this investment in reason is only a prelude, albeit a
necessary one, that makes possible a transvaluative development.
The contemporary epoch's critique of the value of the unrestrained
advance of civilisation aims not at an impossible 'return to nature'
but to a transvalued affirmation of life not available to our fearful
predecessors. Hence:
belief in law and calculability enter consciousness in the form of

satiety and disgust - the delight in chance, the uncertain and
sudden becomes titillating.
(ibid.)
Nietzsche identifies this transvaluated relation to the anti-teleological

dimensions of life as a 'pessimism of strength'. A new taste is devel-
oped for the incalculable; increasingly modern man 'finds senseless
ills the most interesting' :
he now takes delight in a world disorder without God, a world of

chance, to whose essence belong the terrible, the ambiguous, the
seductive.
(ibid.)
The 'pessimism of strength' is characterised in terms which reveal

its distinction from the pessimism-humanism complex:
Animality no longer arouses horror; esprit and happy exuberance

in favor of the animal in man is in such ages the most triumphant
form of spirituality.
(ibid.)
Jim Urpeth 145
The final stage of the history of the emergence of a 'pessimism of
strength' illustrates the transvaluative radicality of Nietzsche's
thought as it concerns the religious affirmation of 'this world':
this pessimism of strength ... ends in theodicy, that is, in an

absolute affirmation of the world - but for the very reasons that
formerly led one to deny it - and in this fashion to a conception
of this world as the actually-achieved highest possible ideal.
(ibid.)
vm
Nietzsche's conception of the Greeks' non-pessimistic affirmation of
the Dionysian can be interpreted in terms of a tragic conception of
the sublime, a notion which makes a fleeting appearance in the
context of the discussion of 'metaphysical comfort' (BT 7). In
Nietzsche's case, the limit encountered in the sublime is that of
the negation which constitutes the 'human'; the dissolution of
the man/nature distinction. This is the key element in Nietzsche's
characterisation of the Dionysian.
The tragic sublime tacitly thematised in Nietzsche's texts is radically
distinct from metaphysical (in the transcendent sense) conceptions of
the sublime, most notably Kant's moral-humanist account of it.9 All
non-tragic conceptions of the sublime assume, with varying degrees
of complexity, the 'two-world' metaphysics inaugurated by Socrates.
They are therefore intrinsically pessimistic appropriations of the
sublime in transcendent terms that refuse to identify it with 'this
world'. The 'noble' conception of the sublime of the tragic period is
affirmative, not negative, in character. It challenges the pessimism that
underpins conceptions of the sublime such as Kant's, the aim of
which is to reinforce the man/nature distinction. The Kantian sublime
uncritically celebrates the supersensuous reference of the theoretical
and practical 'ideas of reason'. This rests on a reductive interpretation
of the sensuous and empirical in terms of utility. In contrast, the tragic
sublime implicitly developed in BT is concerned with the immanent
transcendence of the Dionysian. Nietzsche's transvaluative radicalis-
ation of the Kantian-Schopenhauerian project of critique rejects all
merely 'moral' or transcendent conceptions of transcendence. Hence
his thought contains a 'non-moral', tragic conception of the sublime in
contrast to Kant's' moral' conception of it.
In BT, the Dionysian is conceived in terms of the essential sublimity
of the return of the impersonal and self-differential forces of life which
undennines the principium individuationis, a surpassing of all empirical
limit and measure encapsulated in the statement' Excess revealed itself
as truth' (BT 4). The tragic sublime is the disclosure of the immanent
transcendence of the material forces of 'this world' rather than, as in
Kant, a 'negative presentation' of the 'intelligible in the sensible'.I0
Thus Nietzsche finds in the Greeks of the tragic period an over-
coming of pessimism through sublime art which transfigures the
self-overcoming material processes of nature. The tragic sublime
affirms the Dionysian state in which' everything subjective vanishes
into complete self-forgetfulness' (BT 1). Rather than underscoring
the man/nature distinction, the tragic sublime marks the moment of
its dissolution. As Nietzsche states:
under the charm of the Dionysian not only is the union between
man and man reaffirmed, but nature which has become alien-
ated, hostile or subjugated, celebrates once more her reconcilia-
tion with her lost son, man.
(BTl)
Nietzsche's tragic sublime is the celebration of the surrender to the

joys of 'this-worldly' intoxication, the pleasures arising from the
transgression of the limits of individuation. The sublimity of life itself
is described thus:
this world: a monster of energy ... as force throughout, as a play

of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many,
increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of
forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally
flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb
and a flood of its forms ... blessing itself as that which must
return eternally, as a becoming that knows itself as that which
must return eternally, as a becoming knows no satiety, no
disgust, no weariness ... my Dionysian world of the eternally self-
creating, the eternally self-destroying.
(WP IV 1067)
The overcoming of pessimism in the 'noble' sense affirms the
insignificance of the human in this 'sea of forces'. Refusing negation,
the 'noble' conceives the 'human' as a contested site of anonymous
multiple becomings. To affirm the tragic sublime is to evaluate
Jim Urpeth 147
non-pessimistically this becoming-impersonal. From a 'noble' perspec-
tive the topic of the 'future of the human' appears suspiciously
pessimistic and incompatible with Nietzsche's project of deanthropo-
morphisation. It risks perpetuating the anthropological misinterpret-
ation of history. The future is, like the past, not ours to ponder, let
alone determine.
For Nietzsche, the 'human' is a product of the self-interpreting
processes of material life. His critique of values is characterised by
an insistence on the anonymity of the forces that form the 'human'.
To overcome pessimism through an affirmation of the tragic
sublime is to acknowledge that:
many species of animals have already vanished; if man too

should vanish nothing would be lacking in the world. One
must be enough of a philosopher to admire this nothing, too.
(WP II 302)
Notes
1. For a discussion of the role of these two terms for 'transfiguration'

in Nietzsche's texts see Paul J. M. Van Tongeren, 'Nietzsche's
Transfiguration of History: Historicality as Transfiguration', Epochi,
vol. 2, no. 2 (1994), pp. 23-46. For other discussions of this topic see
David B. Allison (ed.), The New Nietzsche (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1985), part III. For sigla used in my citations, see the Reference
Key to Nietzsche's Texts on p. xii.
2. For such an interpretation see Julian Young, Nietzsche's Philosophy
of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Young's
Schopenhauerian reading of the account of the relation between
art and the overcoming of pessimism found in BT can claim some,
albeit superficial, plausibility. However, his attempt to force
Nietzsche's 1880s texts into a similarly Schopenhauerian mould is
unconvincing. For a brief yet more impressive discussion than
Young's of the key issues in this area, see Jacques Taminiaux, 'Art
and Truth in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche', in his Poetics,
Speculation and Judgment: The Shadow of the Work of Art from Kant to
Phenomenology, trans. Michael Gendre (Albany: State University of
NewYork Press, 1993), pp. 111-26. For a thorough and nuanced dis-
cussion of the Nietzsche/Schopenhauer relation, see John Sallis,
Crossings: Nietzsche and the Space of Tragedy (Chicago, ill: University
of Chicago Press, 1991).
3. Literary examples of the 'noble' type of transfiguration abound in the
'aesthetics of degradation' that characterise the texts of Charles
Bukowski, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Jean Genet and Henry Miller.
4. An example of such an assessment of BT is Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and
Philosophy, trans. H. Tomlinson (London: Athlone, 1983), pp. 10-38.
Unlike Young, Deleuze appreciates that Nietzsche's later conception of
art attains a radicality unthinkable in Schopenhauerian terms.
5. For a discussion of Nietzsche's account of the phases of Greek
culture, see M. S. Silk and J. P. Stern, Nietzsche on Tragedy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 150-9, 185-7.
6. I disagree therefore with Nietzsche's claim that BT 'smells offensively
Hegelian' (EH BT 1). Deleuze pursues the interpretative possibilities
of this comment: see Deleuze (1983), pp. 11-2.
7. My discussion of this theme is indebted to two texts by John Sallis:
'The Play of Tragedy', in Tulane Studies in Philosophy, vol. 19 (1970),
pp. 89-108; and Sallis (1991), pp. 91-101. Nonetheless, I conceive the
radicality of BT differently to Sallis. For an interesting discussion of
Nietzsche's criticism of the notion of 'metaphysical comfort', see
Daniel W. Conway, 'Returning to Nature: Nietzsche's Gotterdiim-
merung' in Peter R. Sedgwick (ed.), Nietzsche: A Critical Reader
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 31-52.
8. Obviously this raises complex hermeneutical questions concerning
both the applicability to Nietzsche's texts of the objectivist assump-
tions of periodisation and how to interpret Nietzsche's assessment of
his texts (particularly when, as with BT, they are conflictual). Any pri-
oritisation in principle of an author's evaluation of their texts over
other assessments of them rests on highly questionable hermeneutic
presuppositions.
9. I contrast Nietzsche's and Kant's conceptions of the sublime in my
"'Raw Nature": Figures of the Sublime in Kant, Nietzsche and
Heidegger', Manchester Papers in Philosophy and Phenomenology, vol. 1
(1996).
10. For an excellent account of the immanent nature of Dionysian 'other-
ness', see Jean-Pierre Vemant, 'The Masked Dionysus of Euripides'
Bacchae', in Jean-Pierre Vemant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and
Tragedy in Ancient Greece, trans. J. Lloyd (New York: Zone Books,
1990), pp. 381-412.
Bibliography
Nietzsche, F. (1967a) The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New

York: Random House).
Nietzsche, F. (1967b) The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and
R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House).
Nietzsche, F. (1968) Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmonds-
worth: Penguin).
Nietzsche, F. (1979) Ecce Homo, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth:
Penguin).
8
Creating the Future:
Legislation and Aesthetics
Gary Banham
In man creature and creator are united: in man there is material,

fragment, excess, clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos; but in man there is
also creator, form-giver, hammer hardness, spectator divinity,
and seventh day: do you understand this contrast? And that your
pity is for the 'creature in man', for what must be formed, broken,
forged, tom, burnt, made incandescent, and purified - that which
necessarily must and should suffer? And our pity - do you not com-
prehend for whom our converse pity is when it resists your pity as
the worst of all pamperings and weaknesses?
Thus it is pity versus pity.
(BGE 225)
The fundamental contrast drawn by Nietzsche in the above citation is

a reprise of Zarathustra's oration in 'Of Old and New Law-Tables'. I
will begin with an exposition of this oration. This exposition is
intended to demonstrate connections in the work between legislation,
creation and futurity. Having established these connections, I will
reopen the debate about Nietzsche's quarrel with Wagner, relating
this quarrel to the nature of aesthetics. I will then conclude with a
demonstration that the threefold insertion of aesthetics in Kant's criti-
cal philosophy led to the necessity of a new thought of futurity in
Nietzsche that could no longer be modelled on the human.
LEGISLATION AND CREATION IN ZARATHUSTRA
The oration 'Of Old and New Law-Tables' comes towards the end
of Part ill of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 1 By this point Zarathustra has
149
150 Legislation and Aesthetics
ceased speaking to anyone except himself, and this speech is
described by R. J. Hollingdale in his translator's introduction as
being part of Zarathustra's 'self-education'. Indeed, in the first part
of the speech, Zarathustra states that 'I talk to myself and, further,
'I tell myself to myself. What does he tell himself about? His visit to
humans.
On visiting people, he found that they had the conceit that they
knew what good and evil were. He disturbed this conceit by
declaring to them: 'nobody yet knows what is good and evil- unless
it be the creator!' (Z III 'Of Old and New Law-Tables' (hereafter
'ONLT') 2, p. 214). The creator gives humanity a goal and thereby
gives the earth meaning and a future. Having brought this truth to
the attention of humanity', Zarathustra is carried along by a great
eruption of laughter. This laughter is produced by an awareness of
the smallness of all that humanity has produced. The laughter
itself carries Zarathustra into the future 'there where gods,
dancing, are ashamed of all clothes' and 'where all time seemed to
me a blissful mockery of moments', and where Zarathustra discov-
ered again that which the discourse previous to this one had con-
cerned: the Spirit of Gravity; negation; nay-saying; 'thou shalt not'
(Z III 'ONLT' 2, p. 215).
It is when faced with the Spirit of Gravity that Zarathustra
announces that he picked up the word Ubermensch. Humanity is
revealed to be a bridge, and not a goal (as asserted before the crowd in
the Prologue). Humanity has always been 'fragment and riddle and
dreadful chance'.2 But Zarathustra came as a poet and a 'redeemer of
chance', and taught humans to create the future by redeeming and
creating 'all that was past'. So to transform every 'It was' into 'thus I
willed it' is the basis of redemption (Z III 'ONL1" 3, p. 216).
It is this teaching which underlies the commandment which
Zarathustra goes on to utter ('commandment' being the right word
here, as it is against Moses that these words are uttered). This har-
monises precisely with the insistence on creation already given. It
is: 'Do not spare your neighbour!' (Z III 'ONLT' 4, p. 216). This utter-
ance is an affirmation of the necessity of distance. It is through the
assertion of commands that one can create material which follows a
goal. The abyss between creator and created is what is asserted in
the commander-commanded relation. The formation of the self into
a rule-giver is what enables the rule to form the other.
But this economic relation between creation and commanding
requires a commitment to return anything which is given. This
Gary Banham 151
commitment requires the creator (or he of 'noble soul') to give back
life. 3 One of the things at stake in this return of a debt to life is
sacrifice. Those who are first-born (such as those who preach the
iibermensch) are required to pay by the calculative priests. The priest
'still lives on in us ourselves' (Z ill 'ONLT' 6, p. 217) and thus we, the
new law-givers, sacrifice ourselves to the law of life. In being so
sacrificed, we prepare the future.
This sacrifice must take place through a destruction of the law-
tables of old. The living will then be faced by an attack on the con-
nection they have made between time and legislation. They have
prepared the future according to their image of the law. The future
must be as the present; it must repeat incessantly that which is. This
rule of the living (the rule of death) can only be destroyed by the
revolt which is a submission to the command of life.
Zarathustra states:
My pity for all that is past is that I see: It has been handed over -
handed over to the favour, the spirit, the madness of every gener-
ation that comes and transforms everything that has been into its
own bridge!
(Z ill 'ONLT' 11, p. 220)
Humanity sees itself as a goal, though not only as a goal, but as one
which has been achieved in the present generation (for which the
sufferings of all the past have prepared us). This gives us two great
dangers: the first, that a 'great despot' (ibid.) or devil could frame all
that has been into the path to his own rule; the second, that the 'last
man' could come and'all time be drowned in shallow waters' (ibid.)
of no more than two generations' worth of memory, so that the past
will be lost altogether. This destruction of the past by the present
will destroy any possibility of futurity. It is this which is the greatest
danger (called by Zarathustra 'mob-rule').
To counter it, it is necessary to create or form a 'new nobility'
(ibid.). This nobility must face the future, not the past, as its
prospect. It cannot be founded upon a previous idea of rule but
must emerge from the feeling of debt. The debt owed to life must be
paid through sacrifice to the children of the future. The way to
redeem the past is through the destruction of the present's image of
the future. The present is formed from a view that the past has
reached its highest point in the reduction of the human. The recov-
ery of the past is the recovery of the movement it contained beyond
the fixed nature of the present. The past gives us an image of the
future which arches beyond the present. Rediscovering the form of
an anterior futurity, we can project the possibility of an overcoming
of the human through an overcoming of its self-reduction. This is
the basis of the new law-table.
However, for this new law-table to establish itself requires sweep-
ing away not just the law-tables of old but with them the education
which is built upon them. The education of old was only a schooling
for slavery. This schooling taught renunciation and submission to the
needs of the existing generation. This teaching of slavery has worked
all too well; some are now unreachable. 'One should not want to be a
physician to the incurable' (Z ill 'ONLT' 17, p. 224); therefore do not
spare your neighbour. But, as already stated, not sparing your neigh-
bour means also not sparing yourself. For how could the preacher of
the future not be contaminated by the past? This past clings to the
'highest type' of being as a parasite. Therefore in the 'highest type'
lies the lowest, the most slave-like. This is why we have come to a
period which requires acquiescence to sacrifice, a great sacrifice:
Everything of today - it is falling, it is decaying: who would

support it? But I - want to push it too!
(Z ill 'ONLT' 20, p. 226)
This means above all smiting the 'good'; the ones who know what
good and evil is, and wish the future to be sacrificed to themselves.
The whole of this oration therefore indicates that the question of
the relationship between creator and created is decisive for under-
standing the difference between legislating in a way that creates the
future and legislating in a way that perpetuates the present (and
thus the 'It was'). 'Thus I willed it' is a teaching which sacrifices the
present to the future and forces the creator to rule.
This discourse is further explicated by the earlier one in Part I, 'Of
Love of One's Neighbour', which is delivered to the crowd. There,
Zarathustra stated that the neighbour was the murderer of the 'dis-
tant man' (the futural man) (Z I 'Of Love of One's Neighbour', p. 87).
The neighbour exists because of the hatred of solitude. Therefore, 'I
do not teach you the neighbour but the friend' (ibid.). Again:
May the future and the most distant be the principle of your today:
in your friend you should love the Ubermensch as your principle.
(p.88)
Gary Banham 153
But the earlier discourse 'Of the Friend' made clear that the
friend cannot exist for either slave or tyrant and therefore, accord-
ing to Zarathustra, woman is not yet capable of friendship (as
woman can only act as slave or tyrant). Nor is the case any different
with men, however, as they too are compounds of tyranny and
slavery. Thus to replace the neighbour with the friend is to favour
the Ubermensch (who is in fact the enemy of humanity, the over-
comer of it). The friend is thus the noblest form of enemy. This
gives us a first clue to the ambiguous nature of Nietzsche's relation-
ship with Wagner. Having outlined the intimate connection
between temporality, legislation and creation in Zarathustra, I will
now go on to show that Nietzsche's presentation of aesthetics
depends intimately upon these themes.
AESTHETICS, MUSIC AND FUTURITY
It has become progressively clearer to me that everything Wagner

does and thinks is accessible to the 'cultivated person', to the
extent that he is wholly and completely a product of the present
age, only in the form of parody.
(RWB 1)
Wagner's music was promoted by the composer himself as a means

of opening the future. Nietzsche's early essay of 1876, 'Richard
Wagner in Bayreuth', takes this evaluation as its starting point. In so
doing, Nietzsche connects the music of Wagner with his notion of
tragedy. He writes in this essay:
There is only one hope and one guarantee for the future of what
is human: it consists in preventing the tragic disposition from dying
out.
(RWB4)
The tragic disposition guarantees the future, and Wagner embodies

this disposition. Thus Wagner provides us with an art that will
enable the future to be attained by humanity.
In embodying the tragic disposition, Wagner's music is said to
express 'reason, law, and purpose' (RWB 6). This is despite the
fact that Nietzsche tells us Wagner's drama transports us beyond
ourselves so that 'we no longer possess a criterion for judgements;
everything governed by laws, everything fixed begins to move'
(RWB 7). Tristan and Isolde, the 'true opus metaphysicum of all art' is
particularly praised for its 'severest austerity of form' (RWB 8).
Wagner's 'style of execution' is taken to found a stylistic tradition and:
His music is never indefinite, moodlike; everything that speaks

through it, human being or nature, has a strictly individualized
passion; in his music, storm and fire take on the compelling force
of a personal will.
(RWB9)
This panoply of praise is completed with a comparison of Wagner

and Heraclitus. Nietzsche writes:
Wagner's music taken as a whole is a likeness of the world in the

sense in which it was conceived by the great Ephesian philoso-
pher, as a harmony that discord produces out of itself, as the
union of justice and strife.
(RWB9)
The picture of 'Richard Wagner in Bayreuth' is that there is a futural

music which by restoring the tragic disposition will provide us with
purpose. Wagner thus founds a stylistic tradition of severe form
which produces the higher law of unity between discord and
harmony. Thus whilst the discourses of Zarathustra can be shown to
present legislation as based in creation, 'Richard Wagner in Bayreuth'
gives a concrete model for this in the music-dramas of Wagner. The
two pictures of the relation between legislation and creation are not
dissimilar in structure. But in Thus Spoke Zarathustra Part W, Wagner is
presented as a 'sorcerer' who trades in dubious arts of enchantment.
Nor is this portrayal of Wagner in Zarathustra sudden. As early as
Human All Too Human, Volume II, Nietzsche reevalutes Wagner. In
doing so, the instabilities of the image presented in 'Richard
Wagn~r in Bayreuth' become revealed. How could the earlier work
both suggest that Wagner's drama dissolves all standards of judge-
ment and law, and state that his music was the basis of a purposive
orientation of the human towards the future? Clearly only by
suggesting that the music gave a law to the drama. This is what
Nietzsche comes to question. In 'Assorted Opinions and Maxims'
he writes that Wagner's 'endless melody' is a product of a fear.
What Wagner fears is:
Gary Banham 155
petrification, crystallization, the transition of music into the archi-
tectonic - and thus with a two-four rhythm he will juxtapose a
three-four rhythm, often introduce bars in five-four and seven-
four rhythm, immediately repeat a phrase but expanded to two
or three times its original length ... close beside such an over-
ripeness of the feeling for rhythm there has always lain in wait
the brutalization and decay of rhythm itself.
(AOMI34)
This danger of a decay of rhythm is heightened when (as in Wagner's

case) an art of acting combines with the music which is 'uninfluenced
and uncontrolled by any higher plastic art' (ibid.). This leads to a
failure of proportion in the whole work. This failure of proportion
indicates a lack of organisation in the work. It does not supply a law.
But this criticism of Wagner is itself structured in the same way as
Wagner's own critical account of previous music. In Opera and
Drama, Wagner wrote of Rossini that:
All organisation of form he left completely on one side; and, as

against that, he took the simplest, driest, and most superficial
form which came to hand ... that being narcotic and intoxicating
melody.4
Just as Wagner's 'infinite melody' is accused of being a dissolution

of all melody (and with it all musical form), so Wagner himself
accused Rossini of failing to organise form except by recourse to
intoxicating melodic effects. Furthermore, this critique of Rossini is
part of a general critique of opera on Wagner's part. The problem
with opera as an art form is that it turns music, which is only
a means of expression, into the object of expression. Opera is
(according to Wagner) the degradation of drama by music.
It is at this point that we begin to see the point of proximity
between Nietzsche and Wagner and on discovering it also note the
distinction between them. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche
mounted an attack on opera. This attack was connected to the ques-
tion (raised again in 'Richard Wagner in Bayreuth') of that which
would guarantee a future for the human: tragic disposition. Opera
was stated here to be grounded in an altogether non-aesthetic need:
'the optimistic glorification of humanity as such' (BT 19). It is the
glorification of humanity which is the cause of the degradation of
humanity. The worship of the notion that humans are originally
good is the basis of the attempt to view humanity sub specie saeculi,
to undertake a 'frivolous deification of the present' (BT 24). The
opera's musical ideal is based on a 'yeaming for the idyllic' which
exhausts its effects in a worship of fashion. This general critique of
opera and the conjunction of this critique with the critique of
modernity are the common ground between the early Nietzsche
and Wagner. But whereas Nietzsche conjoins these critiques with a
defence of the power of music (and even condemns opera for its
subordination of music to drama), Wagner is clear in his contention
that the problem with contemporary culture is the insufficient
prominence given to drama.
Because of this difference, the question of the formation of art is
differently posed for each of them. For Nietzsche, the degeneration
of the significance of music is the occasion for the downgrading of art
in human culture; whereas for Wagner, it is the overestimation of
music which constitutes the decline of art and thus of culture. This
difference is revealed to have consequences for the picture of the
human that is drawn. Whereas for Nietzsche the tragic disposition is
the basis of the future of the human, for Wagner it is the 'relation of
Feeling to the understanding' that constitutes the 'purely-human'.s
Thus the music-drama will attempt to alter this relation between
feeling and understanding, and put it into a harmonic relation. This
is what would be the source of a 'law' of Wagner's music.
The distance which arises between Nietzsche and Wagner can be
seen to be a consequence of the clear distinction between their
cultural analyses. But what is the reason for the form this distance
came to take? H we look at The Case of Wagner, then we find a
summary verdict which could not be more different from that offered
by 'Richard Wagner in Bayreuth'. Nietzsche writes in the later work:
Is Wagner a human being at all? Isn't he rather a sickness? He

makes sick whatever he touches - he has made music sick.
(CW5)
This counter-Midas may not even be a human being at all. He could

be a manifestation of disease. The nature of the corruption he has
brought about is that sickness is accepted (as it once was by
Nietzsche) as being a law. Here Nietzsche understands that the
nature of the problem with Wagner is that he usurped the role of
creator that Zarathustra outlined. The criticism of Wagner that is
undertaken is expressed in consistently physiological terms, and the
Gary Banham 157
nexus of the problem of aesthetics is now so understood. In this
context, Wagner represents a 'total sickness' due to his transforma-
tion of music into a means for the stimulation of the nerves (CW 5).
This physiological criticism of Wagner is based upon the account
of aesthetics that Nietzsche advances in The Case of Wagner. In the
Epilogue, he writes:
Aesthetics is tied indissolubly to these biological presuppositions:

there is an aesthetics of decadence, and there is a classical aesthetics ... 6
The aesthetics of decadence represents declining life; classical aes-

thetics overabundant life. This contrast motivates the distinction
between Wagner (the sickness of life) and Bizet (the radicality of
abundance). The contrast between them sharpens the account of
legislation provided by Zarathustra. There are two forms of law
which are formed by two distinct forms of life. This reiterates the
opposition of master morality and slave morality provided in On the
Genealogy of Morals. But was this already implied by Nietzsche's
early aesthetics?
As we have seen, 'Richard Wagner in Bayreuth' already sug-
gested that the problem of aesthetic judgement was one of locating
which form of art provided a futurallegislation. This problem is also
presented in The Birth of Tragedy. There the conflict between opera
and music-drama was understood as related to legislations founded
purely sub specie saeculi and those founded sub specie aeterni. The
former will sacrifice the future to the present, the latter will mould
the present after the possibility of repetition which will not be a
reflection of the now but rather of the eternal (in section 10 of that
work, this is modelled precisely on the resurrected form of
Dionysus Zagreus).
At each stage of his work, Nietzsche presents the problem of aes-
thetics as a problem of futurallegislation. At each stage, this leads
him to judge works of art from a standard of 'higher lawfulness'
(the law of life), organisation of form and stylistic unity. On these
standards, The Birth of Tragedy attacks Platonic dialogue as 'a
mixture of all extant styles and forms' (BT 14), and condemns the
vain attempt to construct a 'world literature' to compensate for the
failure of national stylistic nerve (BT 18; see also the important
contrast between France and Germany in BT 23). Likewise, The Case
of Wagner attacks Wagner's 'incapacity for any style whatsoever'
(CW 7), and describes literary decadence as characterised by the
assertion of part over whole, as when 'the page gains life at the
expense of the whole - the whole is no longer a whole' (ibid.).
Whereas the earlier work can see a solution to this tendency to
decay in the form of a national assertion of spirit, the later work -
motivated by the Zarathustra call for a new nobility - extols the
noble affirmation of life (now markedly distinguished from all
nationalism).
The fundamental prescription in each case has the same struc-
ture, however, and it is from this structure that Nietzsche constructs
his contrast of two different futures for the human: that of being
preserved in the form of the 'last man', and that of being overcome
in the form of the Ubermensch. What this suggests, however, is that
the future of the human is thought of constantly by Nietzsche as an aes-
thetic problem. What I now want to suggest is that Nietzsche can so
conceive the problem because of his selective inheritance of the
Kantian legacy.
KANT: AESTHETICS, TEMPORALITY AND HUMANITY
The term' aesthetics' derives its importance in modem philosophy

from its use by Immanuel Kant. What is often not noted, however,
is that Kant's use of the term is made complicated by its triple
deployment within his Critical system. In the Critique of Pure Reason
he formulates a 'transcendental aesthetic' which is intended to
explicate the pure conditions of sensibility and does so through pre-
senting the pure forms of sensible intuition (Anschauung). This con-
trasts with the use of the term' aesthetics' in the Critique of Judgment,
where it refers to the critique of judgements of taste and intellectual
feeling. But these two forms of aesthetic do not exhaust the use of
the term for Kant.7 In the Critique of Practical Reason, there is con-
tained at the end of the 'Analytic of Practical Reason' a chapter enti-
tled 'Of the Drives [Triebfeder] of Pure Practical Reason'. In this
section, there is presented the basis of morality in the inclinations of
naturally determined beings, and the linkage between sensibility
and transcendental logic is presented in reverse order to that in the
Critique of Pure Reason (as Kant himself states in the Introduction to
the later work).8 This section of the Critique of Practical Reason is an
aesthetic in that it focuses upon the sensible conditions of morality
and delineates the possibility of an inclination which is formed
by something non-sensuous yet has sensuous effects. In other
words, this section of the second critique demonstrates the sensible
Gary Banham 159
possibility of morality. These three distinct senses of the term 'aes-
thetic' are unified in all pertaining in some way to perception and
embodiment.
The 'transcendental aesthetic' of the Critique of Pure Reason deter-
mines the pure forms of sensible intuition as twofold: the form of
'inner sense' (time) and 'outer sense' (space). Only the form of inner
sense accompanies all intuitions, however, as:
all representations, whether they have for their objects outer

things or not, belong, in themselves, as determinations of the
mind, to our inner state; and since this inner state stands under
the formal condition of inner intuition, and so belongs to time,
time is an a priori condition of all appearance whatsoever.9
Time is therefore a more inclusive form of a priori intuition than

space. Given this priority, it is given much wider scope within expe-
rience (and might correctly be thought to pose more considerable
difficulties for Kant, as the '5chematism of the Pure Concepts of the
Understanding' demonstrates).
But if we contrast this determination of pure forms of intuition
with the Triebfeder of practical reason, we will discover something
surprising. Here, where the deduction of the moral law as applying
to the creature of sense is given through the demonstration that it is
the only drive which has purity, we are also informed that the aes-
thetic of practical reason is not divided (as was the 'transcendental
aesthetic') into two forms of pure intuition, but is rather demon-
strated to be merely a subjective ground of desire (feeling). But this
subjective ground of desire is affected by the operation of the super-
sensible ground of the self (called by Kant 'personality' - Ak. 87). 50
whereas the aesthetic of pure practical reason is not itself divided
into two components (as was the 'transcendental aesthetic'), it does
reveal to us the dual nature of the self, split between empirical and
transcendental conditions. In doing so, it also reveals the limits of
the determination of time as being a representation which covers
all appearances. In the 'Critical Elucidation of the Analytic of Pure
Practical Reason', Kant writes:
[natural necessity pertains to the subject] only so far as the deter-

mining grounds of any action of the subject lie in what belongs to
the past and is no longer in his power; in this must be counted also
his already performed acts and his character as a phenomenon as
this is determinable for him in his own eyes by those acts. But the
same subject, which, on the other hand, is conscious also of his
own existence as a thing in itself, also views his existence so far as it
does not stand under temporal conditions, and himself as determinable
only by laws which he gives to himself through reason.
(Ale. 98, Kant's emphasis)
This important modification of the demonstration of the 'tran-

scendental aesthetic' leads us to be able to view ourselves from a
position which is not sub specie saeculi. This stamping of the imprint
of personality on the conditions of self-perception is the opening of
the self towards a region without temporal conditions.
If we now tum to the aesthetic which is revealed by the critique
of judgements of taste, we will discover that this third form of the
aesthetic involves even more divisions than the previous two. We
must initially distinguish two different kinds of judgements of taste:
pure and impure. Pure judgements of taste are formal intuitions
which do not concentrate on the material object but merely concern
the form or design of that apprehended.
An impure judgement of beauty is reached when we formulate
the ideal of beauty. As Kant states in section 17 of the Critique of
Judgment, an ideal is the presentation of an individual as adequate
to an idea of reason. We see that at which we look as representing
the most noble or sublime qualities. In so doing we contaminate the
apprehension of the intuition with a conceptual element (one of
morality). The intuition is thus rendered impure as the mind now
has an interest in that viewed which transcends concentration on its
form. An idea of reason is a regulative mode of apprehension
which, to be exhibited in sensible form, would require us to render
an intuition as an approximation to the ends of reason. But amongst
the objects of intuitive apprehension, only one can be brought into
approximation with these ends: the human being. Writing of the
human figure, Kant states: 'the ideal in this figure consists in the
expression of the moral' (Ale. 235). This ideal formulates the linkage
between judgements of taste and judgements of morality (more
fully explicated in section 59).
In addition to this distinction between pure and impure judge-
ments, we also need to distinguish between judgements of beauty
and judgements of sublimity. But just as judgements of beauty are
divided into two distinct kinds (which correspond to pure and
impure judgements of taste) so also are judgements of sublimity. The
Gary Banham 161
two kinds of judgements of sublimity are: the mathematical sublime
and the dynamical sublime. The mathematical sublime is pure when:
that magnitude of a natural object to which the imagination fruit-

lessly applies its entire ability to comprehend must lead the
concept of nature to a supersensible substrate (which underlies
both nature and our ability to think), a substrate that is large
beyond any standard of sense and hence makes us judge as
sublime not so much the object as the mental attunement in which
we find ourselves when we estimate the object.
(Ale. 255-6)10
The object's cognition supersedes the ability to determine its magni-

tude and the conjoining of the striving of the mind with its lack of
capacity produces the feeling of the sublime. This feeling manifests
itself in the respect which we pay both to our mind and the nature
which points beyond the apprehension we attempt to capture.
This form of sublimity leads us to something akin to the experi-
ence of the Treibfeder of practical reason. Just as the latter pointed us
to an apprehension which escaped the determination of time, so the
former overwhelms our determinations of space. The other form of
sublime feeling - the dynamical sublime - is experienced in the
presence of the might of nature as in principle awe-inspiring and
fear-inducing. As Kant stresses, however, the real feeling of sublim-
ity which thereby emerges is in relation to ourselves as able to view
might with courage and fortitude. This fact raises us above nature
(section 28). The dynamical sublime therefore tends to lead us back
towards the ideal of beauty. The feeling of sublimity requires recep-
tivity to ideas (and thus, although Kant does not state this, might be
thought always to involve an impure aesthetic judgement).
Both judgements of sublimity and the ideal judgement of beauty
point back to the human. But only the ideal of beauty concerns the
human alone. The revelation of the human as central to judgements
of taste (particularly in so far as they are conjoined with ideas of
reason) presents the human before us anew. We view humanity
hereby not schematically but symbolically (section 59), not, that is,
in relation to conditions of time but rather as providing us with an
image of the eternal.
This symbolic intuition of the human renders it beyond the con-
ditions of the transcendental aesthetic Gust as the Triebfeder of prac-
tical reason did). But whereas the Triebfeder induced a regret of the
past in the process of releasing us from the mechanical process of
temporality, the judgements of taste exalt the human in the direc-
tion of a futural development of cultural power (section 60). This is
determined by Kant as 'the law-governed constraint coming from
highest culture' (Ak. 356). The theory of culture in the Critique of
Judgment does not, however, emerge in the Critique of Aesthetic
Judgment alone but with its conjunction with the Critique of
Teleological Judgment and it is only when these are combined (in the
problematic unity that is the Critique of Judgment) that we receive a
Kantian account of law.
In the second half of the Critique of Judgment, what we discover is
the account Kant gives of living beings (organisms) as governed by a
form of causation which is distinct from that affecting inorganic
matter as dependent upon the work of final causes (sections 65 and
66). Amongst the creatures of the world, however, the human alone
as the embodiment of the moral sense is capable of prOviding us with
a way of combining these final causes into a systematic whole that
can justify the world (section 83). This is the secret of human culture.
Let us attempt now to draw together the threads of this discus-
sion of Kant so that we can reconnect it with the account of
Nietzsche. The three forms of the aesthetic are all accounts of forms
of perception. The 'transcendental aesthetic' points to a priori forms
of intuition needed for any form of perception in general but this
account of intuition provides merely the a priori ground of sensibil-
ity. Alone, this provides only the pure basis of 'empirical appercep-
tion' which is insufficient for knowledge. To achieve knowledge it is
necessary to refer to the 'pure unchangeable consciousness which I
shall name transcendental apperception' (A 107). The 'I think' to which
the pure forms of intuition have to be referred give both the
grounds for knowledge and the possibility of forming a kind of self-
apprehension which transcends temporal conditions precisely in
giving them sense. In the Triebfeder and the treatments of judge-
ments of taste and intellectual feeling, the human is shown to be
able to utilise the reference beyond the temporal to form a sense of
the ideal.
This sense of the ideal is what enables the existence of the lawful
form of life which is culture. From this life can emerge the possibil-
ity of legislation which does not depend upon time (and this is the
action of the Triebfeder). Therefore the threefold insertion of the aes-
thetic in Kant's system allows access to a thought of time (and law)
which does not constrain our action or sense of self by the fact of
Gary Banham 163
temporality. This openness to a region where the temporal is over-
come is what gives the future sense for humans.
Given that this capacity of humanity to experience itself in a way
which transcends the temporal is nonetheless revealed to us in the
elaboration of the aesthetics of the second and third Critiques, surely
we would be right in assuming that extra-temporal experience is
connected to the form of life? This is indicated by the important
statement in the 'General Comment on the Exposition of Aesthetic
Reflective Judgments':
Gemiit taken by itself is wholly life (the very principle of life),

whereas any obstacles or furtherances must be sought outside it
and yet still within man himself, and hence in the connection
with his body.
(Ak.278)11
Could there, then, be ascendant and declining life, and with this
differential access to the possibility of release from temporal chains?
Everything points to this. Kant's discussion of taste points to the dif-
ferential strengths of imagination and with this the importance of
class (section 83). But these different classes and different imagina-
tions bring with them different bodily conditions which provide a
whole form of human life.
However, this importance of the restraint of the class which pro-
duces the law-governed constraint which is culture is insufficiently
deduced in the Critique of Judgment, which is what enables the
dispute over the relation between Bildung and civil society to
emerge in the wake of Kant.
Like Kant, Nietzsche formulates the conditions of law as con-
nected to the question of assertive life (nobility). This enables the
human to be reassessed as no longer a goal (as it is for Kant) but as a
'bridge' towards the Ubermensch. However, for the Ubermensch to
come requires that the 'It was' of the Triebfeder be united with the
'thus I willed it!' of the creator. The creator thus legislates from the
perspective of sub specie aeterni. This legislation is what constitutes
the eternal return. But to say this is to suggest that the Dionysian
picture of The Birth of Tragedy (BT 10) is the image of law. The legis-
lator is thus understood by Nietzsche to be the one who constitutes
the conditions of a Triebfeder which is no longer constrained by the
deductions of categorial morality but rather forms the future itself
after the model of the law of life. But to form the future this way
means to re-form the body of the human. This re-formation is what
will create the basis for the iibermensch.
THE FUTURE OF THE HUMAN BODY
Just as there are two futures set out in the figures of the 'last man' and
the Ubermensch, so there are two forms of body which correspond to
these two figures. These figures are two models for the 'great squan-
dering' that is the economy of life. Both involve great sacrifices. Both
arise from the same condition that formulated the human as such and
which is discussed by Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morals:
the existence on earth of an animal soul turned against itself,

taking sides against itself, was something so new, profound,
unheard of, enigmatic, contradictory, and pregnant with a future
that the aspect of the earth was essentially altered.
(GM II 16)
From this taking sides of the 'animal soul' against itself came the
suffering of humanity from itself. Humanity experimented on itself,
and this is the origin of morality. Now we are faced with the continu-
ance of this experiment in the choice between the two regimes of
pity that are contained in the citation from Beyond Good and Evil
with which I began. The choice of pity for that which is formed by
law is the choice of the continuance of the downgrading of human-
ity. This is the choice of 'happiness' (condemned already by Kant in
section 83 of the Critique of Judgment). The choice of the Ubermensch
is the attempt to apply the procedures of reflective judgement to
the formation of the body. This requires viewing the body as mater-
ial to be formed in a continuous process of invention.
Both these economies require the sacrifice of part of the body of
humanity. The spirit of contentment that has finally asserted itself
in the longing of the present to be complete in itself is the product
of the continuous triumph of the herd, whose formation was 'a
significant victory and advance in the struggle against depression'
(GM III 18). The sacrifices required for this are what the present
wishes to see consummated in itself. This is the sickness of moder-
nity: the sacrifice of the future.
The other economy formulates itself after the model of the divi-
sion-in-oneness that Kant called Gemat. The body must be placed at
Gary Banham 165
the service of a regime of creation that would see time as consti-
tuted by the law that is modelled on the sacrifice of the present to
the future. This requires us to understand ourselves as formed men-
tally and spiritually by conditions of embodiment. Conditions of
hygiene, breeding and procreation (in every sense of the term) are
the basis of any growth.
The unity between Nietzsche and Kant comes from the triumph
of the judgement of taste over the 'transcendental aesthetic' as a
judgement from beyond the temporal conditions of the present; the
smashing of the transcendental aesthetic on the critique of taste as
the latter usurps the moral interpretation of the Triebfeder. What?
Could Nietzsche be the most consistent Kantian? And would this
finally allow the completion of the Critical system in a ruin that
Nietzsche constantly understood as Dionysian? These are the ques-
tions that finally formulate themselves around the conjunction of
Nietzsche and the future of the human.
But supposirig the body of the future is sexed: what then?
Notes
1. Part IV of Zarathustra poses some special problems. For a spirited

reading of this part of the work see Gary Shapiro, Nietzschean
Narratives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), Chapter 4.
For sigla used in my citations, see the Reference Key to Nietzsche's
Texts on p. xii.
2. In BT 3, Silenus is cited as referring to humanity as a 'wretched
ephemeral race, children of chance and misery' .
3. This question of returning life its due leads Nietzsche in a number of
places towards a form of eugenics. For a preliminary assessment of
what this means, its sources in philosophical tradition and its place as
a question about the human future, see Howard Caygill'Drafts for a
Metaphysics of the Gene', Tekhnema, Issue 3 (1996).
4. Richard Wagner, Opera and Drama, Vol. 1, trans. Edwin Evans (London:
W. M. Reeves, 1913), p. 183.
5. Wagner (1913), p. 417. But RWB adopts this perspective at least par-
tially; see the concluding paragraph of section 5 of this work.
6. It is worth comparing this contrast between two forms of aesthetics
with the two pictures of primitive nature given in BT 8. There the
satyr, the symbol of the 'sexual omnipotence of nature', is compared
with the 'mawkish' shepherd and this is connected to the sustained
attempt in that work to present a new account of the 'naive'. This
problem of the 'primitive' is tied in this work to the view of man
offered by rival forms of aesthetics and is revealed in BT 19 to be the
basis of Nietzsche's critique of opera.
7. The belief that these are the only two senses of the aesthetic is sug-
gested by Howard Caygill, A Kant Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995),
in the article on 'aesthetic'. Here this otherwise extremely valuable
and transformative account of Kant follows established convention.
8. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (New Yorlc
Ubrary of Liberal Arts, 1956), utilises the term 'aesthetic' in explicating
the Triebjeder in the 'Critical Elucidation of the Analytic of Pure Practical
Reason' - Ak. 90. (For ease of reference, both this work and the third
critique will be referred to throughout by Akadamie pagination.)
9. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London:
Macmillan, 1929), A. 34.
10. Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis and
Cambridge: Hackett, 1987).
11. The term Gemat is exceedingly difficult to translate, comprising as it
does a reference to both 'mind' and 'sensuousness'. For an invaluable
discussion of the complexities of this term in the Kantian lexicon see
Caygill (1995), entry on Gemat.
Bibiliography

Nietzsche, F. (1966) Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New
York: Vintage Books).
Nietzsche, F. (1967a) The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New
Nietzsche, F. (1967b) The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New
Nietzsche, F. (1967c) On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann
(New York: Vintage Books).
Nietzsche, F. (1986) 'Assorted Opinions and Maxims', in Human All Too
Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press).
Nietzsche, F. (1995) 'Richard Wagner in Bayreuth', in Unfashionable
Observations, trans. Richard T. Gray (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press).
9
Staying Loyal to the Earth:
Nietzsche as an Ecological
Thinkerl
Graham Parkes
I swear to you, my brothers, stay loyal to the earth and do not

believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! ... The
most dreadful thing is now to sin against the earth.
(Z Prologue 3)
It is customary in current discussions of the environmental crisis to

ascribe responsibility for the pernicious effects of our technological
domination of the earth to a tradition of thinking about the human
relation to nature that is characterised as Platonic and/or Judaeo-
Christian. Nor is it unreasonable to suppose that a world-view in
which the physical universe is denigrated as unreal by comparison
with an intelligible realm of unchanging ideas, or in which the
natural world has been created for the benefit of humans as the
only beings made in the image of God, is unlikely to be conducive
to a reverential attitude towards natural phenomena. There is,
however, a current of thinking that has been opposed to this main-
stream all along. Beginning with the pre-Socratic thinkers, it resur-
faces in the Stoics and Epicureans and with certain figures in the
Christian mystical tradition aJ;ld the Italian Renaissance, attains full
flow with Goethe and the Naturphilosophen in Germany, and even-
tually issues in philosophers like Emerson and Thoreau in North
America. What is not generally appreciated is that Nietzsche is a
major figure in this minor current of thinking, and that his philoso-
phy of nature qualifies him as one of the most powerful ecological
thinkers of the modem period. This prominent position derives
from his intimate personal relationship to the natural world, in
167
168 Nietzsche as an Ecological Thinker
accordance with his principle that philosophical thoughts grow
directly out of the life experience.
Nietzsche's ideas about nature underwent considerable change as

his thought developed - from an early Romanticist view, through a
sober, more rational understanding informed by modem science, to
a profound and comprehensive vision of humanity and the natural
cosmos as dynamiC and interpenetrating configurations of what he
called 'will to power'. His final view, based on a reverence for the
ultimately enigmatic nature of things, advocates a loyalty to the
earth and a reverence for and affirmation of the 'innocence' of
natural phenomena in all their transience. Because his conceptions
of the human relation to nature undergo considerable alteration, it
is advisable to consider them in chronological sequence - though
the first two phases can be given no more than a brief summary
here.
Nietzsche's early mentions of nature evince a feeling of mystical
union with the natural world, a tendency encouraged by his read-
ings in Byron and Shelley as well as the early Goethe and H6lderlin.
Subsequent immersion in Emerson's Essays and the writings of
Schopenhauer strengthened the animistic and hylozoistic features
of his early speculations about the natural world. 2 In a public lecture
from 1872 he asserts the indispensability for culture of a close, per-
sonal relationship with nature, and bemoans the tendency of edu-
cation to teach 'how one subjugates nature toward one's own ends'
through 'clever calculation'. And in teaching courses on the pre-
Socratic thinkers, Nietzsche develops a view that is in stark contrast
to the anthropocentrism characteristic of the modem attitude
towards the natural world: he cites with approval the view of
Heraclitus that 'the human being does not by any means occupy a
privileged position in nature'. 3
The salient feature of Nietzsche's coolly scientific phase of think-
ing about nature is his emphasis on the ways human conceptions
of nature from epoch to epoch are conditioned by various kinds of
fantasy projections, ranging from subjective caprice to impositions of
humanly created regularities. 4 Yet this more ironic attitude by no
means dispels his deep feeling of personal kinship with the natural
world, as evidenced by his reaction to discovering the alpine
Graham Parkes 169
landscapes of the Upper Engadin for the first time. Soon after arriv-
ing in St Moritz he writes to Overbeck: 'But now I am in possession
of the Engadin and am in my own element - quite astounding!
I am related to this very nature.'s The feeling is most forcefully
expressed in the aphorism 'Nature as Doppelganger', where the ulti-
mate joy is found in being able to say of one's physical environ-
ment: 'This [nature] is intimate and familiar to me, related by blood,
and even more than that' (WS 338).6 If this sounds extreme - his
feeling such close kinship with a landscape he had never even seen
before - recall that, having retired from his teaching position,
Nietzsche could spend six to eight hours a day, when not indis-
posed by illness, hiking through pine woods and around alpine
lakes. Consider too the distinctly mystical tone to the experiences
invoked in the aphorisms 'Et in Arcadia ego' and 'At noon' (WS 295,
308), and that he would spend almost every subsequent summer of
his career in nearby Sils-Maria, where he found the landscape even
more blutverwandt [related by blood].
Not long after this first, transformative summer in the Engadin,
Nietzsche seems to vacillate on the question of withdrawing the pro-
jections that condition our experience of the natural world (and of
the world in general). At times it seems that the best we can ever do is
to become aware that we are constantly 'dreaming' - or being
dreamed by -'the primal age and past of all sentient being' (GS 54), it
being impossible to withdraw the archaic 'phantasm and the entire
human contribution' from any particular experience of a cloud or a
mountain (GS 54), or to avoid 'veiling nature and mechanics' from
ourselves (GS 59). But then later in The Joyful Science is a passage that
suggests that a withdrawal of at least some kinds of projection may
be possible after all, thanks to the discipline of science:
The total character of the world is to all eternity chaos, not in the
sense of lacking necessity but lacking order, articulation, form,
beauty, wisdom and whatever else our human aestheticizings call
it ... When shall we have completely de-divinized nature! When
shall we be able to start to naturalize ourselves with pure, new-
found, newly redeemed nature!
(GS 109)
This 'chaos' seems to refer to what is left when the projections that
customarily divinise abysmal indeterminacy by giving it order and
form are withdrawn. The question then arises of how a human
being can experience this 'total character of the world', since
Nietzsche usually denies that there can be such a thing as perspec-
tiveless seeing. The same issue is addressed by an unpublished note
from the period, which characterises his 'task' as 'the dehumanizing
of nature and then the naturalizing of the human, after it has
attained the pure concept of "nature"?
The way to such an experience is surely not through dying to the
world (as the true philosopher is said to do in Plato's Phaedo) in
order to enter some eternal realm beyond: Nietzsche does speak of
a 'death with waking eyes' - but eyes open to the 'net of light' in
which all things are spun as if buried in it (WS 308).8 And yet this
'world of light' opened up by the collapse of the everyday human
perspective is one in which it is 'natural' (!) to project Greek heroes
and see the great god Pan slumbering (WS 295). The tension
between a view that understands fantasy projection as an
ineluctable (if occasionally see-throughable) aspect of the human
condition and one that allows for a seeing of the world of nature as
it is in itself, apart from human projections on to it, persists to the
time of Zarathustra.
II
Even though this favourite of Nietzsche's among his books contains

only a single mention of the term Natur (Z II 'On Poets') and not
one of its cognates, it is not that he has given up thinking about
nature, but rather that this thinking plays itself out here in concrete
images rather than abstract ideas. And when Zarathustra's life and
work (and his life as worked) are presented as a potentially inspir-
ing paradigm, they are seen to develop and unfold in the context of
the natural world.
Zarathustra is presented as the teacher of a new possibility for
human beings, the iibermensch, or overman. In his prologue he says
to the people in the market-place:
Behold! I teach you the overman! The human being is something that
must be overcome ....
The overman is the sense of the earth. Let your will say: the
overman shall be the sense of the earth.
I swear to you, my brothers, stay loyal to the earth and do not
believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! ....
Craham Parkes 171
Once the sin against God was the greatest sin, but God died
and these sinners died with him. The most dreadful thing is now
to sin against the earth.
(Z Prologue 3)
For humanity to come into its own it must overcome the chronic
tendency to project the source of human value in some realm
beyond or above this world. Whereas' God' here stands for all the
highest values that have grounded human existence in its post-
Platonic history, 'the earth' stands for all this-worldly value. Now
that transcendent grounds and sources are no longer viable ('God
died') and we are thrown back, as it were, into the world of nature
and history, 'the earth' also signifies what Spinoza called natura
naturans. (Since Nietzsche had been re-reading the Ethics with
enthusiasm around this time, the resonances between Zarathustra's
'earth' and the idea of deus sive natura are significant.)
It is remarkable, too, though not often remarked, that the
Ubermensch is introduced in Zarathustra's prologue primarily
through metaphors drawn from nature:
The overman is the sense of the earth ...

Behold, I teach you the overman: he is this ocean ...
Behold, I teach you the overman: he is this lightning ...
I love him who works and invents to build a house for the
overman and prepare for him earth and animal and plant: for thus
he wills his own going under.
(Z Prologue 3, 4; emphases added)
As Zarathustra elaborates his teaching of the Ubermensch and

himself develops as a teacher, the natural environment of moun-
tain and sea, lake and forest, is the indispensable context for
this self-unfolding.9 At the same time his psycho-spiritual devel-
opment is presented almost exclusively in images of natural
phenomena: there is preparing of soil and sowing of seed, trans-
planting of trees and pruning of vines, tending of gardens and
harvesting of crops, breeding and herding and training of animals
- and Zarathustra himself is likened, in Homeric-heroic fashion,
to thunderstorms, mountain cataracts, ripening fruit, and forests
of dark trees. 10 The role of nature in the cultivating of human
nature is thus central and all-pervasive - so much so that our
psychological development is impoverished to the extent that our
relations with the natural world are curtailed or our acquaintance
with it diminished.
A major consequence of Zarathustra's denial of transcendent
sources of value is that natural phenomena are understood as being
valuable in themselves and not just through being created by God.
This inherent validity is celebrated in Zarathustra's reiterated bless-
ings in the essay 'Before Sunrise':
But this is my blessing: to stand over every thing as its own

heaven, as its round roof, its azure bell and eternal security: and
blissful is the one who blesses thus!
For all things are baptized in the well of eternity and are
beyond good and evil ...
'Over all things stands the heaven Accident, the heaven
Innocence, the heaven Chance, the heaven Exuberance' ...
I redeemed [all things] &om their bondage under purpose.
(Z ill 'Before Sunrise')
In redeeming all things &om their bondage under purpose,

Zarathustra &ees them from any universal teleology, whether
stemming from divine providence or the projection of a scientific
view of progress, in order to let them be - or, rather, come and go -
in what Nietzsche calls 'the innocence of becoming'.l1 Zarathustra
owes his capacity for such redemptive blessing to his intimate
kinship with the distinctly un-Platonic-Christian heavens he
addresses before the sun rises in the sky, the abyss of light that
wise-smilingly affirms whatever arises and perishes within its vast
openness. This capacity derives in tum &om Zarathustra's realis-
ation of the world as perfect, just as it is, through his dropping off
into the well of eternity 'at noon' (Z IV 'Noon').
ill
One of the major revelations in Zarathustra is the idea that all life is
will to power. Much of Nietzsche's next book, Beyond Good and Evil,
is devoted to explicating this difficult idea and elaborating its impli-
cations for the future of humanity. It is introduced in the first
section of the book, 'On the Prejudices of the Philosophers', in an
aphorism addressed to the Stoics which opens with the question -
or exclamation: 'You want to live "in accordance with nature"?'
Graham Parkes 173
Think of a being like nature, extravagant beyond measure, indif-
ferent beyond measure, without intentions or consideration,
without mercy or justice, fertile and barren and uncertain all at
once, think of indifference itself as power - how could you live in
accordance with this indifference? Life - is that not precisely a
wanting-to-be-other than this nature?
(BGE9)
Human life is sustainable only in so far as it to some extent works

against nature, even while being a part of it. Culture in particular is
an opus contra naturam. But Nietzsche then accuses the Stoics of pro-
jecting their own morality on to nature while claiming to be reading
it off from it:
And some abysmal arrogance finally gives you the insane hope
that because you know how to tyrannize yourselves - Stoicism is
self-tyranny - nature, too, allows herself to be tyrannized: is the
Stoic not then a piece of nature?
(ibid.)
That last question invites an affirmative answer - in which case,

even though nature might not allow herself to be tyrannised by the
Stoics, she might nevertheless practise self-tyranny. (More on this
shortly.) After an ellipsis, signifying a move from the particular to
the general, Nietzsche concludes:
But this is an old, eternal story: what happened with the Stoics
still happens today, as soon as any philosophy begins to believe
in itself. It always creates the world in its own image, it cannot
do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself, the most
spiritual will to power, to 'creation of the world,' to the causa
prima.
(ibid.)
Rather than beginning from where Zarathustra left off, with the idea
that all life is will to power, Nietzsche here takes a special kind of life,
the philosophical, and styles it as the most refined form of the will to
create the world in one's own image: 'the most spiritual will to
power'. Three aphorisms earlier he had recounted his realisation that
'every great philosophy up to now' has been 'the self-confession of its
creator and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir' (BGE 6).
Is the great philosophy that Nietzsche has to offer us similarly such?
It surely must be - and just like the philosophy of the Stoics, his too
will project human concerns on to nature and create the world in its
own image. But since it will be aware of what it is doing, and will cel-
ebrate the 'innocence of becoming' simply by 'standing over every
thing as its own heaven', there is reason to suppose the resultant
picture will be fuller and clearer.
We heard Nietzsche's earlier suggestion that the order modem
science finds in the natural world is just as much a human projection
as the chaos of arbitrary wilfulness the so-called 'primitive' sees there.
He now suggests that in projecting 'lawfulness' on to nature physics
is pandering to the 'democratic instincts of the modem soul' with its
claim that' equality before the law' must hold for the natural world as
a whole (BGE 22). An alternative is voiced by someone who
could interpret the very same nature, and with respect to the same
phenomena, as the ruthlessly tyrannical and relentless enforcement of
claims of power - an interpreter who would present the exception-
lessness and unconditionality in all 'will to power' in such a
way that almost every word, and even the word 'tyranny,' would
ultimately appear unsuitable, or as a weakening and diluting
metaphor - as too human.
(ibid., emphasis added)
This is why it is wishful thinking on the part of the Stoics to believe

that nature allows itself to be tyrannised. When thunderstorms,
floods, drought or earthquakes assert their claims of power, there
are no exceptions made or conditions to be negotiated, no compro-
mises on behalf of the human realm.
In an unpublished note Nietzsche associates 'the naturalizing of
the human' precisely with an awareness of the tremendous contin-
gency of life: 'We can protect ourselves only a little in the great
matters: a comet could smash the sun at any moment [for example]
... To the naturalizing of the human belongs readiness for the
absolutely sudden and thwarting.'12 Such readiness involves
renouncing the fictions of the immortality of the soul and the sub-
stantiality of the ego by seeing through the illusion of duration, so
as to realise our implication in the utter momentariness of natural
processes, our suspension in the Heraclitean flux of arising and per-
ishing. Since the products of scientific technology afford us rela-
tively more protection and means of forewarning with respect to
Graham Parkes 175
those powers of nature that can be sudden and thwarting, we feel
less tyrannised than our forebears; 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.
Mer offering us an alternative interpretation (in terms of will to
power) to that of Newtonian physics, Nietzsche takes an ironical step
back: 'Given that this, too, is only interpretation - and you will be
eager enough to offer this objection? - Well, all the better' (BGE 22).
This twist draws our attention to the status of the aphorism and of
the book and Nietzsche's philosophy as a whole: it is not a presenta-
tion of the truth about the world, but rather a Versuch, an experimen-
tal proposition that we are invited to try out in our own experience.
Nietzsche will nevertheless supply some grounds for accepting this
proposition of his in favour of alternative interpretations.
IV
The second section of Beyond Good and Evil, where the topic of will
to power is most deeply engaged, bears the title 'The Free Mind' -
by contrast with minds still shackled by the philosophical preju-
dices discussed in the opening section. Nietzsche prepares the
ground by recalling the traditional distinction between the esoteric
and the exoteric in philosophy. 'Our highest insights', he writes
(with Plato, among others, in mind), 'must - and should - sound
foolish, sometimes even criminal, when without permission they
reach the ears of those who are not predisposed and predestined
for them' (BGE 30). What he has to say about will to power will
sound ludicrous to minds informed by unexamined presupposi-
tions about nature and the soul. Nor will it make sense from the
anthropocentric perspective, when inquiry into the nature of the
world is conducted in 'too human' a manner (BGE 35),I3 Note
the experimental tone established by the conditional with which the
key aphorism opens: 'Supposing that nothing is "given" as real other
than our world of desires and passions, that we are unable to get
down or up to any "reality" other than just the reality of our drives'
(BGE 36). Supposing we accept - to put briefly what Nietzsche has
taken many pages of previously published text to elaborate - his
idea of the soul as a 'social structure of the drives', and that these
drives working through the medium of fantasy interpret nerve
stimuli and thereby constitute, as will to power, the world of our
experience: the question is bound to arise concerning just what it is
the drives interpret. In other words, except when we are dreaming
and input from outside is minimal, the drives do not have com-
pletely free rein in constituting the world of our experience. There
is some resistance there, something appearing to 'push back' and
set limits on how the world can be construed.
But granted the supposition that we cannot get to any reality
other than the reality of our drives, Nietzsche asks:
Is it not permitted to make the experiment and ask the question

whether this given does not suffice for understanding on the basis of
things like it the so-called mechanistic (or 'material') world too? ...
as a kind of drive-life, in which all organic functions are still
synthetically bound up with each other ... as a preform of life?
'Will' can of course work only on 'will' - and not on 'matter'
(not on 'nerves,' for example). In short, one must venture the
hypothesis that everywhere that' effects' are recognized will is
working on will.
(ibid.)
What pushes back, then, as our drives interpretively project a

world, is will in the form of other drives - not only the drives of our
fellow human beings, but also those that animate animals, plants,
and other natural phenomena. Since Nietzsche warned us that his
ideas would sound foolish to ears not ready to hear them, we
should be wary of dismissing this hypothesis as primitive animism,
Stoicism without the God, or warmed-over Schopenhauer. Indeed
the idea of will to power is in a sense a culmination of profound
monistic tendencies in the tradition from Leibniz and Spinoza
through the German Romantic thinkers - and especially as epito-
mised by the much neglected J. G. Herder. 14
Backed by an understanding of more - and more sophisticated -
physics and biology than these predecessors had access to,
Nietzsche extends features of their conceptions of the human body
and soul to the rest of the world:
Supposing, finally, that we succeeded in explaining our entire

drive-life as the development and ramification of one basic form
of will - namely, of will to power ... one would then have the
right to determine all effective force univocally as: will to power.
The world seen from within, the world determined and defined
Graham Parkes 177
in its 'intelligible character' - would be precisely 'will to power'
and nothing besides.
(ibid.)
Not just my or our drive-life, nor even all life, but 'all effective force'
- the whole universe - is to be understood as will to power:
'What? Doesn't this mean, in vulgar parlance: God is refuted but

the devil isn't?' On the contrary! On the contrary, my friends!
And to the devil with whomever forces you to use vulgar
parlance!
(BGE 37)15
That playful little dialogue, one of the pithiest aphorisms in the

book, comes right after the major presentation of the idea of will to
power and shows its profoundest implication. Nietzsche's response
to the distressed objectors suggests that the devil would be refuted
by the idea of the world as will to power, but not God. In less vulgar
parlance: not the God of Spinoza - sive natura naturans - would be
refuted, but the devilishly transcendent God of orthodox Christian
monotheism.
v
The theme of tyranny returns later in the book, in significant con-
nection with the topic of nature and in the context of a 'natural
history of morals':
Every morality is, as opposed to 'letting go,' a piece of tyranny

against 'nature,' and against 'reason' as well ... The essential and
priceless thing about every morality is that it is a long compulsion
... The wonderful thing is that all there has ever been on earth in
the way of freedom, refinement, boldness, dance, and masterly
sureness ... developed only thanks to the 'tyranny of such arbitrary
laws' [as those of poetry]; and it is indeed quite probable that
precisely this is 'nature' and 'natural' - and not this 'letting go'!
(BGE 188)
How wonderful to hear that' old immoralist' Nietzsche singing the

praises of morality and propounding ethical naturalism with a
vengeance - even if only because morality shares an important
feature in common with artistic creation: namely, prolonged tyran-
nical compulsion. 16 In a move that must infuriate the Stoics excori-
ated earlier, he now suggests that the tyrannising of 'nature' (in the
form of natural drives and instincts) that characterises moralities
and creative disciplines itself turns out to be precisely 'natural'. And
to compound the infuriation, he writes again of "'Nature" as it is, in
all its extravagant and indifferent magnificence', saying that it
'appalls us, but is noble' (ibid., first emphasis added). The' as it is' is
clearly meant to suggest the possibility of encountering a dehuman-
ised nature on its own terms, and not just as it appears to human
beings within a projected horizon of utilitarian or scientific or aes-
thetic concerns. And while it may be appalling in its indifference, it
is also noble - and thus worthy of human emulation. This is the
sense in which nature can serve as a standard for the renaturalisa-
tion of humanity, which has too long suffered under regimes of
anti-natural moralities. But moralities need not be anti-natural, and
Nietzsche wants to say more than that nature can serve as a model:
It is the 'nature' [in a morality) that teaches hatred of 'letting go'

and excessive freedom and the need for restricted horizons ...
'You are to obey, no matter whom, and for a long time: or else you
will perish and lose the last shreds of respect for yourself - this
seems to me the moral imperative of nature [which is directed
toward) peoples, races, epochs, classes, and above all toward the
whole human animal, toward humanity itself.
(ibid.)
Nietzsche had suggested in his untimely meditation on history that

human nature is in part given by nature and in part a process of
creating a second nature, or culture, through disciplined working
of what is givenP Now it turns out that the (moral!) imperative to
work oneself into something, as well as the energies required for
the task, comes from nature itself.
The (self-)tyranny dictated by nature itself involves a certain
cruelty, and it is the aversion to cruelty on the part of many moral-
ists that has led them to misunderstand the nature of nature. Oust as
the failure of many readers of Nietzsche to see that the cruelty he
celebrates is cruelty directed primarily towards oneself leads to their
dismissing him prematurely.) 'One misunderstands the beast of prey
and the man of prey (Cesare Borgia, for example) fundamentally,
Graham Parkes 179
one misunderstands "nature," as long as one still seeks some "sick-
ness" at the bottom of these healthiest of all tropical monsters and
growths, or some "hell" that is inborn in them' (BGE 197). It is fear of
the more terrible aspects of the natural world, which can indeed be
'red in tooth and claw' and hostile - when not indifferent - to
human interests, that has contributed to the general denigration of
the natural world in favour of human culture.
In the course of a later discussion of a basic tendency of the
human spirit towards dissimulation, Nietzsche writes of the need
to recognise 'the terrible ground-text homo natura' beneath the
layers of self-serving valuations that have been applied to it over
the ages:
To translate the human back into nature ... to make it that the
human being henceforth stand ... before that other nature, with
fearless Oedipus-eyes and stopped-up Odysseus-ears, deaf to the
enticements of all the metaphysical bird-catchers who have been
whistling to him for too long: 'You are more! You are higher! You
are of another origin!' - that would be a strange and wonderful
task.
(BGE 230)
The twofold task, strange and wonderful, would be to strip away

the fantastic metaphysical interpretations of human origins that
have obscured human nature, and to confront human beings with
nature itself, similarly stripped of human projections. One may
infer that this 'terrible ground-text homo natura' mirrors that other
nature - nature dehumanised and dedivinised - in being' extrava-
gant beyond measure' and 'indifferent beyond measure'. Yet even
within nature per se that extravagance collides with and works
against itself in the phenomenon of life - and in the reflective space
that in human beings opens up between straight and retroflective
(or inhibiting) drives, this working against itself can become debili-
tating as 'bad conscience' (neurosis for Freud) and/or creative as
higher culture.
VI
When Nietzsche proposed that we understand all existence -

ourselves, humans, as well as animals, plants, and the realm of the
so-called inanimate - as will to power, he followed this propos-
ition with an allusion to the divinity of the world thus under-
stood (BGE 36-7). There is a further allusion to the divinity of the
cosmos in aphorism 56, one of the most affirmative expressions of
the most affirmative of thoughts, eternal recurrence. Here
Nietzsche suggests that in his confrontation with nihilism he has
at least overcome the Eurocentric perspective, if not the anthro-
pocentric perspective too, in so far as he has looked 'with an
Asiatic and supra-Asiatic eye into the most world-denying of all
possible ways of thinking ... beyond good and evil' - and has
thereby had his eyes opened to 'the opposite ideal ... of the most
exuberant, vital, and world-affirming human being'. Such a
human being, who could joyously affirm the world 'just as it has
been and is', would see what had looked like a vicious circle (the
thought of recurrence in its nihilistic aspect) tum out to be divine
- deus ex natura, one might say. IS
A number of unpublished notes from around the time of Beyond
Good and Evil show Nietzsche entertaining thoughts of the divinity
of the cosmos in terms of a Dionysian pantheism. He wonders
about the plausibility of' a pantheism in which evil, error, and suffer-
ing are not experienced as arguments against divinity' - and ends
the note by writing: 'Dionysos: sensuality and cruelty. Imper-
manence could be interpreted as enjoyment of the procreative and
destructive energies, as constant creation.'19 And in a later discus-
sion of the nihilistic aspect of eternal recurrence he questions
whether the collapse of the moral interpretation of the universe as
having some kind of meaning or purpose' also renders impossible a
pantheistic affirmation of all things':
Is it meaningful to think of a god 'beyond good and evil'? Would

a pantheism in this sense be possible? Could we remove the idea
of purpose from the process and nevertheless affirm the process?
This would be possible if something within the process were
attained in every moment of it - and always the same.20
That 'something' would be what Nietzsche later calls, in another

note associating pantheism with the Dionysian, 'the total character'
of life or existence. Here the Dionysian is said to be, among other
things, 'the great pantheistic sharing of joy and suffering
[Mitjreudigkeit und Mitleidigkeit] which affirms and hallows even the
most terrible and questionable features of life'.21
Graham Parkes 181
When Nietzsche added a fifth book to The Joyful Science for the
new edition of 1887, he returned to the theme of the great nobility
of nature as will to power and its possible divinity.22 Again this
insight appears to have emerged from an overcoming of the anthro-
pocentric perspective:
As a researcher into nature, one should come out of one's human

comer: and what reigns in nature is not deprivation but rather
abundance, extravagance, even to the point of senselessness ... in
accordance with the will to power, which is precisely the will of
life.
(GS 349)
Getting out of one's comer, one is granted a broader perspective

which reveals the Dionysian iiberfluss of the natural world - an
abundance too extravagantly alive to be comprehensible in terms of
dead matter alone. Nietzsche thus admonishes the 'materialistic
researchers of nature':
One should want above all not to divest existence of its richly
ambiguous [vieldeutigen] character: good taste demands that, gentle-
men, the taste of reverence for everything that goes beyond your
horizon! ... An essentially mechanical world would be an essen-
tially meaningless world!
(GS 373)
For all his admiration for the discipline of science and the insights it
affords into the natural world, Nietzsche makes it clear that mater-
ialism and mechanism are hopelessly shortsighted and without
'reverence' for those aspects of nature that lie beyond their
restricted horizons. The next aphorism shows just how constricting
the materialistic perspective can be.
The relevant premise is 'whether all existence [is not] essentially
interpreting existence' - which is equivalent to the hypothesis
advanced in Beyond Good and Evil (BGE 36) concerning all existence
as will to power:
But I think that today we are at least far from the laughable
immodesty of decreeing from our own little comer that perspec-
tives are permissible only from this comer. The world has rather
become 'infinite' for us once again, insofar as we cannot dismiss
the possibility that it contains within it infinite interpretations. The
great terror grips us again - but who then would want straight
away to divinise this monster of an unknown world again in the
old way?
(GS 374)
Nietzsche surely wouldn't - yet he gives every indication that this

monster of an unknown world presents itself as divine, in the new
way of a Dionysian pantheism, to those who are able to emerge
from their own little comer with sufficient reverence for what lies
beyond their human horizons. It is on these grounds that Nietzsche
deplores the arrogance of the modem stance towards the natural
world: 'Our whole attitude towards nature today is hubris, our
raping of nature by means of machines and the inconsiderately
employed inventions of technology and engineering' (GM ill 9).
But are there ways for mortal beings such as we are, being only a
small part of nature, to understand the whole - without going
beyond the world in a move of metaphysical transcendence? Ways
of transcending the human perspective while remaining faithful to
the earth?
vn
The joyful science that would assist us here embraces many
methods, in so far as it enjoys what Nietzsche calls 'the greatest
advantage of polytheism' (GS 143). And while many of the experi-
mental methods Nietzsche recommends involve inter- and intra-
personal relations (D 432), many demand relations with non-human
beings. One simple way of emerging from one's comer is to change
scale and 'become small' - and 'just as close to the flowers, grasses,
and butterflies as a child is'. For 'whoever wants to participate in all
that is good must also know how to be small at times' (WS 51). And
indeed Nietzsche's works are full of suggestions concerning how to
realise our participation in the vegetal soul.23
Another way is to return to the inorganic - to re-enter the flow, or
else to 'tum to stone' as the title of this gem of an aphorism has it:
'How one is to turn to stone. - Slowly, slowly to become hard like a
precious stone - and finally to lie there still and to the joy of eter-
nity' (D 541). While some of this hardness has to do with making
one's mark for the sake of posterity,24 a number of unpublished
Graham Parkes 183
notes from this period evidence a fascination with the benefits of
participation in the 'dead' world of the inorganic. For a start, one
can see better: 'To procure the advantages of one who is dead ... to
think oneself away out of humanity, to unlearn desires of all kinds:
and to employ the entire abundance of one's powers in looking.'25
And yet this unlearning of desires makes existence anything but
dull: 'It is a festival to go from this world across into the dead
1/
world." ... Let us not think of the return to the inanimate as a

regression! ... Death has to be reinterpreted!.'26 The image of the fes-
tival reappears in the same notebook, this time in connection with
love of nature: 'To be released from life and become dead nature
again can be experienced as a festival - of the one who wants to die.
To love nature! Again to revere what is dead!'.27 On reflection, what
makes us from the start intimate relations of this dead world is our
physical constitution as living organisms: 'How distant and super-
ior is our attitude toward what is dead, the anorganic, and all the
while we are three-quarters water and have anorganic minerals in
us that perhaps do more for our well- and ill-being than the whole
of living society!'28 And finally, a note adjacent to the one cited
earlier in which Nietzsche characterises his task as 'to dehumanize
nature and then naturalize humans', contains this pertinent observ-
ation: 'The inorganic conditions us through and through: water, air,
earth, the shape of the ground, electricity, etc. We are plants under
such conditions.'29
At the other end of the spectrum of ways to emerge from one's
corner is: getting into the flux of existence, life's flow, not merely
by going along with it but by flowing or streaming with it: no
passive or reactive laissez-aller, but an active participation that fur-
thers and amplifies life's flow - just as Zarathustra's soul 'rushes
into the valleys' and he becomes 'fully the roaring of a stream out
of high cliffs' (Z II 'The Child with the Mirror). If one emulates
Nietzsche's regimen of six to eight hours hiking per ~ay, it is not
hard to appreciate how he came to experience life as natural flux.
At the limit, this flow issues in the great human being, or genius:
'He flows out [stromt aus], he overflows [stromt uber], he consumes
himself and does not spare himself - fatally, disastrously, involun-
tarily, as a river that bursts its banks does so involuntarily'
(TI 'Expeditions' 44). With this passage from Twilight of the Idols
we reach the locus of Nietzsche's last great pronouncement on
nature, where he returns to the theme of 'translating the human
back into nature'.
An aphorism entitled 'Progress in my sense' begins as follows: 'I
too speak of a "return to nature," although it is not actually a going
back but rather a coming up - up into the high, free, even terrible
nature and naturalness' (TI 'Expeditions' 48). To reach 'the terrible
ground-text homo natura' requires gaining higher ground, an ascent
to a loftier level of human nature. Nietzsche cites Napoleon as an
exemplar of such a 'return to nature', and then turns to an attack on
Rousseau and egalitarianism. The French Revolution was regressive
because it tried to abolish the order of rank, the difference in levels
between lofty and base, that is to be found in nature.
We learn more about the nature of this 'return back up' from the
next aphorism, entitled 'Goethe' - a figure who, for Nietzsche, epit-
omises human greatness as the ultimate synthesis of spontaneous
nature and refined culture. He characterises Goethe as 'a tremendous
attempt to overcome the eighteenth century through a return to
nature, through a coming up to the naturalness of the Renaissance'
(TI 'Expeditions' 49) - the Renaissance being an age that achieved the
highest culture in the context of a life animated by the most powerful
natural drives:
What [Goethe] wanted was totality ... he disciplined himself into

wholeness, he created himself ... Goethe conceived of a strong,
highly cultured human being, adept in a range of physical skills,
self-controlled and with reverence for himself, who can dare to
grant himself the full range and richness of naturalness, and who
is strong enough for this freedom.
(ibid.)
It is a matter of daring to grant oneself 'the full range and richness of

naturalness' since such naturalness is possible only after one has
undergone protracted discipline in the form of tyranny by the 'task'
that has emerged from one's nature - a regimen prescribed by
nature itself, and one that can be fatal for unfortunate practitioners.
That same naturalness is 'terrible' also because the power of the
natural drives is channelled by configurations of other drives rather
than by some controlling centre of the psyche like the conscious ego.
Nietzsche's concern with self-discipline as a means of achieving the
best that human nature is capable of is by no means an end in itself,
however. Though indispensable, it is only a means: the end is
a natural spontaneity that is attained through the relaxation of self-
discipline (protracted also over generations preceding the individual's
Graham Parkes 185
lifetime), in which the configurations of drives, or will to power, that
constitute the individual work and play in productive interaction
with the configurations of will to power that constitute the natural
and cultural environment in which that individual lives.
Nietzsche's philosophy of the soul implies 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. 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 will to
power, can contribute to grounding a realistic, global ecology
that in its loyalty to the earth may be capable of saving it. In view of
the degradation of nature in the modem period, Nietzsche's
Dionysian-pantheistic affirmation of 'what has been and is' is not to
be taken as a fatalistic acquiescence in the ongoing devastation. In
the later works he writes frequently of the enormous responsibility
(Verantwortlichkeit) that accrues to those who would understand the
world, a responsibility to the nobility of nature as well as the nobil-
ity of millennia of past culture - and a responsibility to see to it that
'what will be' will be even nobler than 'what has been and is'.
Given the ways in which Nietzsche's understanding of the world
- and of the world of nature especially - furthers a strain of think-
ing that runs from Heraclitus through Boehme and Spinoza and
Goethe and Emerson, and in view of its profound resonances with
philosophies of nature from other traditions (Daoism and Zen in
particular), one might be tempted to think that understanding true.
But truth is not the crucial issue here: the urgency of our current
predicament does not allow the luxury of speculating about truth.
The major forces responsible for the devastation of the earth doubt-
less glimpse the truth of the situation already - but they are cynical
enough to let the destruction continue in the belief that they can
insulate themselves (and immediate progeny) from the dire conse-
quences. It all comes down to a question of will to power, conflicts
between competing interpretations and world-views: 'In the great
and small struggle it all comes down to preponderance, growth,
expansion, power' (GS 349). The more people can come to an appre-
ciation of Nietzsche's view of the natural world as divine, the better
the chances for the earth's future flourishing. And if that's what we
want, it's up to us to do what it takes.
A colleague of mine was disappointed with this conclusion, con-
cerned that it implied that the iibermensch would spend his or her
time going around planting trees. I can think of many more ignoble
occupations for the iibermensch - especially since Zarathustra
exhorts his disciples to 'prepare earth and animal and plant for
him'. But just as 'there are no scientific methods that alone lead to
knowledge' (D 432), there are no practical methods that alone can
solve our ecological problems. Even though most of the violence
Nietzsche advocates is to be practised on oneself, there is no a priori
reason why the iibermensch could not, under certain circumstances,
act like a member of Edward Abbey's Monkey-Wrench Gang,
engaging in the spiking of trees and other acts of 'ecoterrorism'.
Nietzsche considers 'the most important question for philosophy'
to be 'to what extent things have an unalterable character and form:
so that, once this question is answered, one can set about improving
those aspects of the world recognised as alterable with the most ruthless
courage' (RWB 3). As if in response to Marx's injunction to philo-
sophers to change the world, he goes on to add that 'This is what
the genuine philosophers teach, even in deed, insofar as they work
on improving the very alterable views of human beings.' And since
one of the most important weapons in the coming 'nature wars' will
be the ability to affect 'the very alterable views of human beings'
with respect to the natural world; and given that philosophy as 'the
most spiritual will to power' has the power to transform people's
experience and worldviews, we may hope to see its practitioners
wielding mightier implements than pens on a variety of fronts.
Notes
1. The present essay is in large part inspired by Laurence Lampert's

provocative remarks on Nietzsche's 'joyous science' as ecological phi-
losophy in Nietzsche and Modern Times: A Study of Bacon, Descartes, and
Nietzsche (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 278,404,418.
All translations are the author's own, from KSA. For sigla used in my
citations, see the Reference Key to Nietzsche's Texts on p. xii.
2. For a discussion of Nietzsche's early attitude toward nature, see the
first chapter of my Composing the Soul (Chicago, TIl: University of
Chicago Press, 1994), and for a more detailed comparison with
Graham Parkes 187
Emerson the essay 'Floods of Life around Granite of Fate: Emerson
and Nietzsche as Thinkers of Nature, in ESQ: A Journal of the American
Renaissance, vol. 43 (1997), pp. 207-40.
3. 'Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks', 7 (KSA 1:831). Compare
also the distinctly' entomocentric' opening of the contemporaneous
essay 'On Truth and Lie in the Extramoral Sense' (KSA 1:875; also
included in Daniel Brezeale (ed. and trans.), Philosophy and Truth:
Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870s (Atlantic
Highlands: Humanities Press, 1979».
4. See, for example, HH 8, 111; D 17, 23, 31, 142, 423, 424, 426, 427. I
discuss the much neglected topic of fantasy projection in Nietzsche in
several sections of Composing the Soul (in Chapters 3 and 8 especially).
5. Letter of 23 June 1879. Witness the numerous bursts of appreciation
for the landscape and the air around St Moritz, and expressions of
feelings of kinship with them, in several other letters from that
summer, as well as in the unpublished notes (KSA 8:41[8]-45[6)).
6. See also WS 14, 17,51,57,115, 138, 176,205,295,308,332.
7. KSA 9:11[211]; 1881. The theme reappears in 9:11[238].
8. Nietzsche returns to the theme of the perfection of the world at the
noon hour in the essay in Zarathustra Part IV entitled 'Noon'.
9. A note from 1884 reads: 'N.B. The highest human being to be con-
ceived as a copy [Abbild] of nature' (KSA 11:25[140)).
10. For more detailed discussion of this kind of imagery, see Composing
the Soul, Chapters 4, 5 and 6.
11. This affirmative attitude has deep parallels with the Indian Buddhist
response to tatluUd, or the 'suchness' of the world, or with what the
Chinese Daoists celebrate as ziran, or 'self-so-ing', or Japanese Zen prac-
titioners as jinen/shizen, or spontaneous unfolding in accordance with
one's particular nature. See, for instance, my essay 'Human/Nature in
Nietzsche and Taoism', in J. Baird Callicott and Roger T. Ames (eds),
Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought: Essays in Environmental Philosophy
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), pp. 79-98.
12. KSA 9:11[228]; 1881.
13. See Laurence Lampert's discussion of Leo Strauss's reading of these
(and subsequent) aphorisms in BGE, in Leo Strauss and Nietzsche
(Chicago, ill: University of Chicago Press, 1996), Chapter 2.
14. See the discussions of Herder in Composing the Soul, Chapters 3 and 7.
15. I am indebted to Laurence Lampert for pointing out the importance
of this profound little joke. [Editor's note: see Lampert's essay in this
volume, especially pp. 78-80.]
16. Nietzsche touches here on a feature that appears to be common to
the creative endeavour across a wide range of cultures. One thinks in
particular of the arts of Japan, in which natural impulses are trained
under severe constraint over long periods of time so that their even-
tual discharge attains a higher level of spontaneity - from which
something almost supernatural issues.
17. 'The best we can do is to combat our inherited and hereditary nature
with our knowledge of it, and even to have a new, disciplined culture
fight our archaic and innate acquisition, and to implant in ourselves a
new habitude, a new instinct, a second nature, so that the first nature
withers away ... always a dangerous attempt, because it is so difficult
to find the borderline in negating the past, and because second
natures are mostly weaker than first ones' (UD 3).
18. Recall the alternative to the nihilistic response to the thought in 'The
Heaviest Weight' - to say to the daimOn: 'You are a god, and never
did I hear anything more divine!' (GS 341) Also the transfiguration of
the shepherd in Zarathustra's vision into someone 'no longer a
human being - one transfigured, enlightened, who laughed!' (Z III
'On the Vision and the Riddle').
19. KSA 12:2[106]; 1885--6. It is no wonder that this notion caught the
attention of the Japanese philosopher Nishitani Keiji, since it is so
close to the notion of impermanence in Mahayana Buddhism.
Nishitani is one of the few commentators to have seen the import-
ance of what he calls Nietzsche's 'Dionysian pantheism': see the ref-
erences in The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, trans. Graham Parkes with
Setsuko Aihara (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990),
especially pp. 64-6.
20. KSA 12:5[71] 7 = WP 55; 1887.
21. KSA 13:14[14] = WP 1050; 1888.
22. This theme is treated, and the following aphorisms from The Joyful
Science discussed, in Part III of Laurence Lampert's Nietzsche and
Modern Times.
23. For more on this topic, see Composing the Soul, Chapter 5:
'Husbanding the Soul: Vegetal Propagation'.
24. As Zarathustra says to his 'brothers': 'For creators are hard. And what
bliss it must be, to impress your hand upon millennia as on wax - /
Bliss to write upon the will of millennia as on bronze - harder than
bronze, nobler than bronze' (Z III 'On Old and New Tablets', 29).
25. KSA 9:11[35].
26. KSA 9: 11[70].
27. KSA 9:11[125].
28. KSA 9:11[207].
29. KSA 9:11[210].
Bibliography
Nietzsche, F. (1980) Siimtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, Giorgio Colli

and Mazzino Montinari, eds, 15 vols (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter;
Munich: dtv).
10
Loving the Poison: On the
'Meaning' of the
Transhuman Conditionl
Keith Ansell Pearson
Probably we, too, are still 'too good' for our trade, probably we,
too, are still the victims, the prey, the sick of this contemporary
taste for moralization, much as we feel contempt towards it, - it
probably infects us as well.
(GM ill 20)
For the Platonic Eros, the genetic meaning of a free life, disap-
peared long ago beneath the turbid surface of the Libido, we asso-
ciate with everything sullied, despicable and ignominious in
being alive, to rush headlong with our customary, impure vital-
ity, with constantly renewed strength, in the direction of life.
(Artaud, 1993, p. 21)
The question of the future of the human opens up a zone of mon-

strous thought, calling into being the necessity of a thinking of the
transhuman condition. One thinks of Nietzsche's' great' question -
what may still become of 'man'? - in which 'man' only becomes as
such at a certain juncture in historical evolution, his name presup-
posing a transcendence of race and nation (WP 957).2 Critical ques-
tions proliferate: is the overhuman not the peculiar and unique
configuration of the future? Can new origins be created for man,
other than those which are canonically handed down to those chil-
dren of the future who patiently seafare their way to a land that is
far away from fatherlands and Oedipal complexes? In discovering
189
190 The 'Meaning' of the Transhuman Condition
'for the first time' the country of 'man' do we not also at the same
time discover the 'human future'? (Z III 'Of Old and New Law-
Tables' 28, p. 23O)? Is not the future our un-natural birthright? Is the
future at all intelligible to the human? Perhaps the unintelligibility
of the future applies only to the common sense of humanity and
the good sense of philosophic reason. Nietzsche claimed to be able
to decipher the hieroglyphs of the future, but for this task there is
required an extra-human - and inhuman - sense and sensibility.
Nietzsche portrayed himself as a posthumous destiny that
would belong to another history than the present; his is a philo-
sophy' of' the future which claims to speak not only' of the future
but 'from' the future. 'The future speaks in a hundred signs even
now' (WP Preface), and, 'It is the future which regulates our today'
(HH Preface). What is the 'appeal' to the future which informs
Nietzsche's writing? Is it a concern with the future which drives
Nietzsche's strange fascination with the 'beyond' of the human
and a possible 'redemption' of life? What would it mean to
'redeem' reality from the curse which the ascetic ideal has placed
upon it and to give the earth a 'purpose' (GM II 24)?
The question of time in Nietzsche has barely been thought in
relation to the question of the time of the overman. On the con-
trary, its actuality has been conceived either in conventional linear
terms, as that which comes 'after' man, or eschatologically and
apocalyptically as marking a new beginning. Derrida sought radi-
cally to problematise the various moves to think of man 'and'
overman in his now classic essay of the late 1960s on 'The Ends of
Man', noting that what is most difficult to think is an 'end' 'of 'man'
that would not be organised by a 'dialectics of truth' and 'be a
teleology in the first person plural' (Derrida, 1982, p. 121). Within
metaphysics the 'name of man' has meaning only in an 'eschato-
teleological situation'. Derrida selects Nietzsche as the key post-
metaphysical thinker - over and above Heidegger - on account of
his pluralisation of style and meaning. Within Nietzsche's styles we
can locate a 'laughter' and a 'dance' that come from' outside', that
is, which neither 'repeats' in the same old fashion of metaphysical
humanism nor pursues the 'beyond' in the form of a 'memorial' of
the meaning of 'Being'. Derrida's attempt to think the 'beyond' of
metaphysics is attentive to the paradoxes involved in such a move.
Heidegger's postwar reading of Nietzsche, by contrast, subjected
the figure of the overman to a historicism, imposing on it a reading
of technology by linking it to a 'future master of the .earth' who
wields to higher purposes and powers what'falls' to the man of the
future with the dawning of the 'technological transformation of the
earth and of human activity' (Heidegger, 1968, p. 59).
The only philosopher of postwar times to connect the overhu-
man with questions of form and forces in terms of a complex non-
evolutionist becoming is Deleuze: 'The question that continually
returns is therefore the following: if the forces within man compose
a form only by entering into a relation with forms from the outside,
with what new forms do they now risk entering into a relation, and
what new form will emerge that is neither God nor man? This is
the correct place for the problem which Nietzsche called the "super-
man'" (Deleuze, 1988, p. 130). Nietzsche does speak of man belong-
ing to a 'higher history' in the aftermath of the death of God, but
this higher history is implicated in a still formative 'pre-history' and
is bound up with history itself in complicated ways:
Man hitherto - as it were, an embryo of the man of the future; - all

the form-shaping forces directed toward the latter are present in
the former; and because they are tremendous, the more a present-
day individual determines the future. This is the profoundest con-
ception of suffering: the form-shaping forces are in painful
collision. - The isolation of the individual ought not to deceive us:
something flows on underneath individuals.
(WP686)
For Nietzsche, man is the temporal and futural animal par excellence.
The real 'problem' of the human is the breeding of an animal which
has the capacity or ability to make promises, and this requires a
certain training and cultivation. This is a paradoxical task that nature
has set itself in the case of the human animal (paradoxical because
nature has created a machine that goes beyond a mere mechanism; it
is a task that he says nature has set 'itself simply because no 'super-
natural' account is necessary to explain the phenomenon). The labour
of overcoming denotes the essence of the human, its being has
always involved a becoming and a birth from the future. The human
is constituted by the overhuman from the 'point' of his 'origin'.3 This
is why citations of Nietzsche's declared goal of translating man back
into nature, so as to be able to read the 'eternal basic text of homo
natura', in support of a Nietzschean naturalism or philosophical
ecology, are so problematic (BGE 230). It suggests, erroneously, that
the question of man's origin is straightforward, that man simply and
unambiguously 'belongs' among the animals. But we know that for
Nietzsche man is a sick animal, a strange animal, and that he calls
upon us always to aim our vision and riddles 'beyond' man.
Moreover, human becoming has never been a question of harmony
or balance; on the contrary, it has been characterised by the most
violent discord. The evolution of 'nature' could also be viewed in
such non-equilibrial tenns, but the difference in the case of man, as
Nietzsche's genealogy so spectacularly shows, is that he has inter-
nalised this discord in tenns of an 'inner evolution', pursuing an
experimental praxis of life that transcends any alleged natural laws
of being and becoming. The evolution of the human has taken place
in tenns of an involution. A genealogy of morals as a genealogy of
man has a different, more complex and difficult, lesson to teach us
than simply placing him amongst the animals.
A careful reading of On the Genealogy of Morality demonstrates the
extent to which for Nietzsche man is the site of a perpetual over-
coming. The question concerning origins, and the concomitant
desire for self-transparency, is displaced at the outset of the book.
'We' humans must remain strangers to ourselves 'out of necessity',
we cannot be knowers especially when it comes to ourselves.
Equally it is important to appreciate that Nietzsche's critical ques-
tion of a genealogy of morals - to what extent are moral values
signs of exuberant life or degenerating life? - is also subject to a
complication. In his uncovering of the history of morality, Nietzsche
discovers that it is in his becoming-sick, in his 'blood-poisoning',
that man's promise is to be found. It thus becomes possible to show
that any attempt to locate the overhuman outside of the human,
including outside of history, and to give the overhuman different
origins, such as is found in Deleuze's seminal 1960s reading of
Nietzsche, for whom man's becoming-reactive is a story of simple
'decline', is fundamentally misguided. The positing of a pure and
purely active overhumanity is out of tune with the spirit of
Nietzsche's music in On the Genealogy of Morality, in which all the
so-called 'reactive' values can be subjected to revaluation if one con-
siders them as tools (techniques) for the further cultivation and
enhancement of the human animal. Then one discovers that they
conceal an essential activity.
Nietzsche's articulation of the need for a critique' of moral values
I
can easily be interpreted as solely a fonn of negative critique. Such

a critique, however, Nietzsche designs in positive terms as
the development of a new kind of understanding and knowledge
concerning the conditions and circumstances under which particu-
lar values evolved and changed, and in which morality acts as a
symptom and a sickness, but also as a stimulant and poison.
Nietzsche insists that an inquiry into the 'origin' of values and into
our tables of good and evil is in no way identical with a 'critique' of
them. 4 Revelations of the shameful origin of values may result in a
feeling of diminution, but it only prepares the way to a critical atti-
tude towards them (WP 254). In this new general economy of
values and morals, in which some 'large-scale accounting' is permit-
ted to take place, the question of the 'problem of man' can be posed
in a way that leads us through and 'beyond' morality. The attempt
to cultivate a critique of morality and go beyond it also entails' dis-
covering' this hitherto uncharted land for the first time.
As the 'danger of dangers' morality is fundamentally ambiguous:
it has led to the poisoning of man, to the darkening of the skies over
him, culminating in our feeling nausea and pity at the sight of his
domestication; but it has also cultivated a strange and fascinating
breeding ground for his extra-moral self-overcoming. In section 6
of the Preface to the Genealogy, Nietzsche speaks of morality being
'responsible' - the accusation of blame by Nietzsche is an indication
of his, and our, implication in the evolution of morality - for the
human species never reaching his 'highest potential and splen-
dour'. Nietzsche informs us that he writes for a species that does
not yet exist (WP 958). In truth, however, the 'ones' he writes for
cannot, and will not, constitute a 'species'. In a note of 1883, in
which he writes of the rapport between the human and the overhu-
man, morality is placed within a restricted economy of life con-
ceived as an economy of the 'species'. H all moralities have hitherto
been utilised so as to maximise the 'unconditional durability' of the
species, then once this has been attained the goals can be set much
'higher' (KSA 10, 244). This openness to the future which is open to
the risk and dangers of experimentation, is part of Nietzsche's
promise - which is, as he tells us, a promise to write for the 'barbar-
ians of the twentieth century' (WP 868).
Nietzsche claims that his 'distinction' is to read 'critically' the
long, hard-to-decipher hieroglyphic script of our moral past and to
take this past seriously. He separates himself from Ree, the author
of The Origin of Our Moral Sensations, on this point. Although Ree
had read Darwin, Nietzsche contends that he had produced a
merely 'entertaining' account of the confrontation between the
'Darwinian beast' and the 'ultra-modem, humble moral weakling
who "no longer bites (GM Preface 7). In other words, Ree has
lll
simply not taken 'seriously' what is at stake in the return to the

question of man's origins (the 'real problem' regarding man). He
then speaks of the 'reward' one can expect from undertaking a
serious inquiry into the origin of morality, turning the tragedy of
human history into a comedy of existence, so that history becomes
subject to a higher 'eternal' becoming, and a new twist and
outcome unfolds for the Dionysian drama on the 'fate of the soul'.
The preface concludes by appealing to a new memory of man, one
that becomes attainable once we overcome that mode of forgetting
which plagues 'modem man', namely, a forgetting of the 'art of
reading'. Until this art - an art involving a certain praxis of memory
- is relearnt, it will be 'some time' before Nietzsche's script on our
moral past and extra-moral future can become readable.
What drives the psychologist? The question becomes acute in the
case of man when historical and psychological inquiry has degener-
ated into the task of belittling man. How can Nietzsche fight the
poison so as to resist the temptation of arriving at a pessimistic sus-
picion in the face of man, which would be no more reliable than the
mistrust of the disillusioned and of surly idealists who have turned
poisonous and green? The aim of Nietzsche's genealogist is not to
cut man down to size, to allow oneself to be bitten by the tarantula
of revenge, but rather to be brave and generous in the face of bitter
and ugly, unchristian, post-Darwinian truths.
What is the value of the priest? The priest is a bizarre creature
of 'life' in so far as he represents the turning of the fundamental
impulses of life against themselves. As a result it is he who makes
everything dangerous. It is on the 'foundation' of this dangerous
form of human existence that man first becomes an 'interesting
animal'. Contra Rousseau, Nietzsche conceives this profound
transformation the human animal undergoes in the hands of
morality in extra- or supra-moral terms. Thus he can write - as a
'contra Rousseau' position - that the problem of civilisation is not
that it has corrupted man but rather that it has failed to corrupt
him sufficiently. The two basic forms of human superiority over
animals - depth and a capacity for evil - both owe their emer-
gence to the priestly form of existence. It is the slaves' revolt in
morality which introduces intelligence - Geist - into human
history (GM I 7). By 'intelligence' Nietzsche means phenomena
such as cunning, mimicry, patience, dissimulation, self-control,
and so on (TI 'Expeditions' 14). The noble man is really quite
limited in intelligence. While the noble is confident and frank
with himself, being both 'upright' and 'naive', the man of ressenti-
ment is neither, being neither honest nor straight with himself;
hence his potentialities for self-overcoming are that much greater
(GM I 10).
In section 9 of the first essay of the Genealogy Nietzsche constructs
an imaginary discourse with a democrat. For the democrat it is
superfluous to talk about what is noble and to speculate upon
nobler ideals of the past, since it is clear that the morality of the
common people has triumphed through blood-poisoning
[Blutvergiftung] (it has mixed up the races), and its 'intoxication' has
succeeded and conquered over the limited noble morality of good
and bad. The secular democrat recognises that the passage of the
poison of the slaves' revolt through the whole body of man is irre-
versible and inexorable. The problem with the 'Church' for him,
however, which professes to be the saviour of the poison, is that it
alienates rather than seduces. It is committed to slowing down and
blocking its passage when creative energies should be devoted to
'accelerating it'. The democrat then confesses that he loathes the
Church, but 'not its poison ... Apart from the Church, we too love
the poison [Gift], (GM I 9).
Nietzsche offers this passage as the 'epilogue' of a 'free-thinker'
and an honest animal. It is the speech of a democrat who has lis-
tened to Nietzsche 'up to a certain point' but who cannot 'stand
listening' to his silence. How does one interpret the 'meaning'
of Nietzsche's crucial silence? I would suggest that Nietzsche is con-
cealing the 'truth' of his own confession within that of the demo-
crat, for as a genealogist he too loves the poison. However, unlike the
democrat who sees only a development (or evolution) moving in
the direction of an increasing homogenisation of the human type,
the genealogist of morals is able to detect the signs of a different
kind of becoming, an involution of forms and forces, in which novel
kinds of self-overcoming can be cultivated.
Man is the caged animal enclosed in the 'walls of society and
peace', subject to an 'internalisation' process, and notable not only
for his hubristic experiments on nature, but for his self-experimen-
tation. Originally man's inner world was stretched ever so thinly as
though 'between two layers of skin'. However, once internalised it
quickly expanded and extended itself, reaching the point where it
becomes distinctive of man's 'being'. Impatiently man rips himself
apart, gnawing at himself, subjecting himself to self-abuse, so 'full
of emptiness' in his natural state - his genetic make-up bestows
little - that he had to create for himself a torture-chamber, a 'haz-
ardous wilderness' entirely within. The invention of a 'bad con-
science' represents man's 'forcible breach with his animal past', it is
both a leap and a fall into new situations and conditions of exist-
ence (GM II 16). Nietzsche describes this 'evolution' in terms of a
'positive' critique, speaking of the prospect of an animal turning
against itself as something profound and new, as something
puzzling, contradictory, and as an event on earth that can only be
understood as 'momentous' [Zukunftsvolles] which has changed the
'whole character of the world' in an 'essential way'. This becoming
of man is a spectacle too subtle and wonderful, too paradoxical, to
be 'allowed to be played senselessly unobserved on some ridiculous
planet'. And yet, again, there is no hint of anthropocentric naivete
on Nietzsche's part in speaking of the animal 'man' in such privi-
leged terms. Rather, he construes the mark of man in terms of an
'announcement', as if through him something other were being
prepared, 'as though man were not an end but just a path, an
episode, a bridge, a great promise' (ibid.). Although the spectacle of
man necessarily strikes us as one almost too ugly and painful to
behold, it would be a mistake to adopt a disparaging attitude
towards it. Moreover, even though the intemalisation of man gives
way to the breeding of all sorts of reactive values and to the danger
of morality, it is also possible to locate an essential activity within
the formation of the bad conscience. 'Fundamentally', Nietzsche
writes, 'it is the same active force as the one that is at work on a
grand scale' in artists of violence who create and build 'negative
ideals'. He is able to contend:
This secret self-violation, this artist's cruelty, this desire to give form
to oneself as a piece of difficult, resisting suffering matter, to brand
it with a will, a critique, a contradiction, a contempt, a 'no', this
uncanny, terrible but joyous labour of a soul voluntarily split within
itself, which makes itself suffer out of the pleasure of making suffer,
this whole active 'bad conscience' has finally - we have already
guessed - as true womb of ideal and imaginative events, brought a
wealth of novel, disconcerting beauty and affirmation to light.
(GM II 18)
Nietzsche can only have belief in 'man' to the extent that it is possible
to identify in his evolution the 'time' and 'space' of the overhuman.
The promise of the overhuman forces us to return to man, to re-
collect his memory, while the discovery, or invention, of that
memory reveals to us this promise of overhuman futures. The
genealogy of morals constantly folds back upon itself in its unfold-
ing of man's identity and being, an identity that can only be con-
ceived in terms of an essential difference and a being that can only
be treated as a becoming. We return to the memory 'of man -
return in terms of a positive critique and history of the present - on
account of the promise of the overhuman. The task is to examine
the 'accumulation and increase of forces' so as to know 'what might
yet be made of man' and to learn that man 'is still unexhausted for
the greatest possibilities'. The genealogist of man knows from the
'most painful memories what wretched things have so far usually
broken a being of the highest rank that was in the process of becom-
ing, so that it broke, sank, and became contemptible' (BGE 203).
Nietzsche calls for a new willing and cultivation that will prevent
the degeneration of the human into a herd-animal by 'putting an end
to that gruesome dominion of nonsense and accident that has so far
been called "history''' (ibid.). In other places he recognises the futile
and counter-productive nature of this deluded quest for control over
evolution and history. The most promising possibilities for 'higher'
evolution arise unpredictably and incalculably from a new and spon-
taneous amalgamation of disparate forces and desires. As he notes, at
points of punctuated equilibrium 'variation' suddenly appears on the
scene in the greatest abundance as 'deviation' and as 'degeneration
and monstrosity'. With these non-calculable 'turning points of
history' it is possible to observe a mutual involvement and entangle-
ment of diverse and opposite values and desires, denoting a 'mani-
fold, jungle-like growth and upward striving', a 'tremendous ruin
and self-ruination' that breaks the discipline of the old morality and
renders superfluous the preaching of moral philosophers, including
that of Nietzsche himself (BGE 262). The attempt to 'save' activity
from the 'contamination' of morality results in a highly idealistic,
quasi-apocalyptic reading of Nietzsche and the figuration of the
beyond of man. We should not be surprised at the extent to which,
for example, Deleuze's reading in Nietzsche and Philosophy concludes
by placing all the emphasis on a conversion of thought in order
to reactivate active forces and effect the move from the negative
dialectic to the positivity of the 'Overman' (Deleuze, 1983, p. 175).
In working through the' real problem' of man, Nietzsche insists
on making a distinction between the 'actual instruments' of culture
and the 'virtual bearers' of culture. 'Culture' simply means the
breeding and taming of the beast of prey 'man' into a civilised
animal. The techniques of culture are to be cultivated without cul-
minating in a will to power that wills only 'nothingness', that is, a
passive nihilism in which the process of the intemalisation of the
will to power has gone so far that culture produces an animal that is
no longer able to produce anything out of its sickness other than
self-loathing and contempt. On account of what man has become
today, history results in the paradoxical situation in which we can
only identify a negative deformation taking place in the instru-
ments of culture, so that an attitude of suspicion towards the disci-
pline of culture becomes manifest and acute, resulting in our
peculiarly modem misarchism. One wants the poison not so as to
tum against man but so as to overcome him. Hence Nietzsche can
write that what constitutes our aversion to man today is that we
suffer from him because we have nothing to fear from him, for he
has become' a teeming mass of worms'. History results in the 'uned-
ifying' spectacle of the 'end of history', an end in which the 'incur-
ably mediocre' have learnt to regard themselves as the aim and
pinnacle, as the meaning, of history (GM I 11). We have grown
tired of man for not only have we lost our fear of him, we have
also lost our love and respect for him, our hope in him, and 'even
our will to be man' (GM I 12). We can no longer digest him (see
GM ill 16 on digestion and indigestion).
Out of this confrontation and reckoning with man and the
history of culture, Nietzsche will endeavour to argue that man
remains constituted by his futurity and by his inventions of the
future. Man, he says, is more uncertain, unstable and changeable
than any other animal. He can be defined generically as the sick
animal on account of the fact that he has dared, innovated, and
braved more' than all the rest of the animals taken together. As the
great experimenter with himself and insatiable struggIer for control
over' animals, nature, and gods' - through the aid of machines and 'the
completely unscrupulous inventiveness of technicians and engin-
eers' (GM ill 9) - man remains 'the still-unconquered eternal futur-
ist' whose 'future mercilessly digs into the flesh of every present
like a spur' (GM III 13). The promise of man lies in the fact
that even the 'no' which he says to life brings with it a 'wealth of
tender "yeses'" (ibid.). Although he is the animal who deliberately
wounds himself, it is these wounds - and the memory of them -
which forces this self-vivisectionist and master of destruction and
self-destruction to live and to live beyond, or outside, itself. The
immense danger of the ascetic ideal - an ideal that continues to
inform the dreams and schemes of the antichrists, immoralists,
nihilists, and sceptics of the present age - is that it culminates in
a will that no longer desires to let life live since it 'desires' only
nothingness (GM m 28).
II
From a 'Nietzschean' perspective, in the sense in which the term

can be said to possess meaning, recent reports on the transhuman
condition ironically amount to an annulment of that condition, to
an erasure of the 'memory' of man out of which the promise of the
overhuman can be thought. A recent popular account of 'postbio-
logical man', for example, treats the human condition as an
affliction which shouldn't happen to a dog. Humans are beings
with 'cheap bodies' subject to disease and disability, with 'erratic
emotions' and 'feeble mentalities', and 'battlegrounds of warring
impulses, drives, and emotions', with only a limited capacity for
memory and intelligence (Regis, 1992, p. 145). All that which
Nietzsche regarded as providing fertile soil for an immanent
process of continual self-overcoming is here treated as a condition
that is to be escaped from. As Hans Moravec, one of the chief engin-
eers of this profoundly un-Nietzschean vision of the transhuman
condition, has openly confessed, this is 'a sort of a Christian fantasy'
in 'how to become pure spirit' (Regis, 1992, p. 176; see also Moravec
1988). Indeed, this flight into 'machine intelligence' resembles a hi-
tech Hegelianism much more than it does the inhuman futurity
envisaged by Nietzsche. Downloading the brain into a computer,
in order to attain the transhuman condition (read: to become 'im-
morta!'), would involve 'losing the body' and all that goes with it: 'the
world, flesh' and, most revealing of all, 'the devil' (Regis, 1992, p. 5).
In contemporary discourse the question concerning the machine
is being posed in unequivocal linear terms as that which comes after
and supersedes the human. At present we see taking place a revival
of the 'cosmic evolutionism' associated with the work of TeHhard
de Chardin, in which machine intelligence is construed in terms of
a global cerebralisation leading 'inexorably to the emergence of the
"noospheric brain'" (Stonier, 1992, p. 190; de Chardin 1955/1971).
What is disabling about this revival of cosmic evolutionism is the
attempt to explain the alleged phase-space transition occurring in
'intelligent' evolution in strictly biological terms. Life then becomes
mapped in terms of a vertical and perfectionist evolutionism. The
result is a gross anthropomorphisation of the excessive logic of life.
Evolution, we are told, has been 'searching' the planet to find ways
of 'speeding itself up', not because it is anthropomorphic but
because 'the speeding up of adaptation is the runaway circuit it
rides on' (Kelly, 1994, p. 361). The evolution of technology is treated
as if it revealed a necessary and conscious 'desire' on the part of
evolution to become 'artificial' (it 'wants' to become metal). Kelly
speaks of 'what evolution really wants' as if evolution wanted any-
thing, and as if evolution could be readily treated as involving the
realisation of a plan or a programme.
On this model no interesting account of what Bergson called' cre-
ative evolution' can be generated since 'all is given' and 'in
advance'. Evolution then gets reduced to a programme of realisa-
tion, which is little more than a manufacturing process: 'What evo-
lution eventually found in the human brain', Kelly writes, 'was the
complexity needed to peer ahead in anticipation and direct evolu-
tion's course' (ibid.). Not only is such a view based on the 'complex-
ity fallacy' - the idea that complexity increases evolutionary
advantage, for which there is, in fact, no evidence - but evolution
loses its play of chance and necessity, and becomes nothing more
than a matter of design. Bergson insisted that evolution has to be
viewed as contingent in relation to the forms adopted and
invented, and relative to the obstacles that are encountered in any
given place and at any given time. Moreover, while recognising that
evolution requires a gradual accumulation of energy and an 'elastic
canalization' of this energy into variable and indeterminable direct-
ions, this does not mean that it was necessary for life to 'fix its
choice mainly upon the carbon of carbonic acid', or even that life
should be concentrated in organisms. Bergson insists upon the
reality of divergent lines of evolution, maintaining that there has
not been a project or plan in evolution:
it would be wrong to regard humanity, such as we have it

before our eyes, as pre-figured in the evolutionary movement. It
cannot even be said to be the outcome of the whole of evolu-
tion, for evolution has been accomplished on several divergent
lines, and while the human species is at the end of one of them,
other lines have been followed with other species at their end. It
is in a quite different sense that we hold humanity to be the
ground of evolution.
(Bergson, 1983, pp. 26~)
In contradistinction to this new linearism and perfectionism, and

in order to avoid anthropocentric naivetes, I would suggest that
'evolution' needs to be construed in terms of an originary machinism.
This is to concur with Deleuze and Guattari when they write that
evolution is not a matter of Geist but solely one of 'technics, nothing
but technics' (1988, p. 342). They combat formulations of 'ridiculous
cosmic evolutionism' by utilising models of symbiosis which radi-
cally call into question accounts which posit evolution in terms of a
logic of stages (Stufenfolge) and the positing of lower and higher
series. On their innovative model, there is neither simply a bio-
sphere nor a noosphere, but only the 'Mechanosphere' (1988, p. 69).
In placing the stress on the idea of a machinic phylum they are
seeking to show that all systems from the biological to the social
and technological are made up of assemblages, complex foldings,
and movements of deterritorialisation which serve to cut across and
complicate their stratification. For example, the organism is often
reified as a self-sufficient, monadic or autopoietic entity in a variety
of theoretical discourses, both within philosophy and the natural
sciences. Symbiosis challenges notions of pure autonomous entities
and unities evolving solely or strictly through genealogical lineages,
since symbiotic complexes function through assemblages that are
multiplicities made up of heterogeneous terms, and which operate
in terms of alliances rather than genealogical filiations. An animal,
for example, can be defined more accurately - at least from the per-
spective of the span of its potential becomings - in terms of the
assemblages it enters into (various symbiotic relationships) than it
can by standard biological classification systems which focus on
genus, species, organs, phyla, and so on. Models of symbioses
render problematic the emphasis on the notion of distinct king-
doms and what becomes important is a machinic phylogenetic
becoming.
Is it a case of nature selecting technics or of technics selecting
nature? Today, paleoanthropologists speak of our accelerated
'evolution' taking place in terms of a series of positive feedback
loops between 'learned behaviour' and biology in which the main
feature of this evolution is its 'techno-organic' nature (Schick and
Toth, 1993, p. 316). Leroi-Gourhan's meditations on the distinctive
features of human evolution pointed to the fact that man accesses
technology but then technology becomes the criterion of selection:
the evolution of an erect posture, a short face, a free hand for loco-
motion, the absence of fangs, all lend themselves to the use of
artificial organs and implements (Leroi-Gourhan, 1993, p. 19). Thus,
the uniquely organised mammalian body of the human 'is enclosed
and extended by a social body whose properties are such that
zoology no longer plays any part in its material development' (p. 21).
Leroi-Gourhan drew a decisive conclusion from his analyses:
'The whole of our evolution has been oriented toward placing
outside ourselves what in the rest of the animal world is achieved
inside by species adaptation' (p. 235). The freeing of tools and a
freeing of the word through the ability to transfer our memory to a
social organism outside ourselves are both essential aspects of this
technical invention of 'man'. However, it would be parochialism to
suggest that technics must be limited to humans since technical
action is found in invertebrates. The main difference lies in the
extent to which the human being has exteriorised its memory in
machines and apparatuses of all kinds. Our' organs' are extraneous
to us - the plough, the windmill and the sailing ship can be viewed
as 'biological' mutations 'of that external organism which, in the
human, substitutes itself for the physiological body' (p. 246). Thus,
the significant genetic trait of the human is 'physical (and mental)
nonadaptation'. Evolution has now entered a new phase with the
exteriorisation of the human brain, so that 'the distance between
ourselves - the descendants of reindeer hunters - and the intelli-
gent machines we have created is greater than ever' (p. 252). The
question then arises of our physical compatibility with the artificial
environment we now inhabit. Is, as our posthumanists would have
us believe, the human now compelled to withdraw into the paleon-
tological twilight with the rise of the machine?
Technics are driven by an evolutionary force that places them
outside of human control and regulation. But the idea that humans
are outstripped by their technology is commonplace and current
celebrations of evolution getting 'out of control' offer little more
than platitudes lacking in historical acuity.5 A biology of technics is
equally as 'metaphysical' as a biology of nature. A technics of evolu-
tion demands a critical and supra-moral reading. The task is to
render the concepts of soul, life, value and memory genealogical
in Nietzsche's (uncommon) sense, which means removing them
from the technosciences and their complicity with a metaphysical
humanism. This is tantamount to losing man in the act of finding
him. Man is forgotten in the praxis of making a memory of him. 6
It is a question neither of man nor of machines but solely of
non-human becomings.
Baudrillard is correct in my view to insist that the quest for com-
plete omnipotence and the 'gaining' of control over evolution
through biological manipulation - this lazy mode of thinking
simply fails to appreciate that models of 'evolution' are nothing
other than inventions of man - amounts to a caricature of the trans-
valuation of values (Baudrillard, 1994, p. 94). This desire for the
'beyond' of man no longer assumes the form of the old religion but
it remains entirely within the human, 'humanity reaching beyond
its own condition, achieving a transcendence which arises out of its
own capacities - an illusion perhaps, but a superior illusion' (ibid.).
In the face of this clean and tidy conception of the transhuman,
which smells offensively of an antiseptic (post-) humanism, it
becomes necessary to advocate once again Nietzsche's philosophy
of the future conceived as a complex teaching of 'evil'. 'Man',
Baudrillard writes, 'is the scorpion' (1994, p. 82). What binds living
things together is not' ecological, biospherical solidarity', a homeo-
static equilibrium that is another term for death. Rather, in liberat-
ing the good we also liberate the evil, and it is their inseparability
that constitutes our true equilibrium and balance. Rather than re-
conciling ourselves to nature we need to recognise that promising
futures reside only in the affirmation of a maleficent ecology: 'Good
and evil ... should be weapons and ringing symbols that life must
overcome itself again and again! ... the greatest evil belongs with
the greatest good: this, however, is the creative good' (Z IT 'Of the
Tarantulas'; 'Of Self-Overcoming'). There is no natural harmony
or balance with nature to be striven for, only non-equilibrial self-
overcoming, with the 'genius of the species overflowing from all
cornucopias of good and bad', and in which the 'highest desires'
get' gruesomely entangled' (BGE 262).
For Nietzsche the only condition to be 'perfected' is nihilism.
When he speaks of the 'arrival' of nihilism - which comes from an
ancient time - in terms of a 'pathological transitional stage', not only is
it important to 'hear' the reference to Ubergang in its formulation; it is
equally important to remember that the transition is without end. To
acclaim the coming of 'postbiological man' is not to announce the
'end' of man but to return us to the 'real problem' regarding him.
The problem of the human has never been a biological one. This is
the filthy lesson of Nietzsche's 'genealogy of morals'. This is a
,genealogy' that can only promise inhuman futures to the extent that
a monstrous memory of man is perpetually cultivated and overcome.
Notes
1. This chapter is a shortened and modified version of Chapter 1 of my

recently published book Viroid Life (Routledge, 1997). I am grateful to
John Lippitt for his editorial intervention. Translations are from the edi-
tions listed in the Bibliography, but sometimes amended. For sigla used
in my citations, see the Reference Key to Nietzsche's Texts on p. xii.
2. This section runs: 'Inexorably, hesitantly, terrible as fate, the great
task and question is approaching: how shall the earth as a whole be
governed? And to what end shall "man" as a whole - and no longer
as a people, a race - be raised and trained?' For the German see KSA,
11581ff.
3. It is misleading to refer to a point of origin since Nietzsche's complex
rendition of genealogy does not trace the evolution of man in terms
of a punctual system. On the significance of distinguishing the line of
the rhizome (becoming) from the point of 'genealogy' (memory) see
Deleuze and Guattari (1988, p. 294). While recognising the import-
ance of their novel conception of 'evolution', and the innovations it
offers, I remain keen to deconstruct the unmediated opposition
Deleuze and Guattari end up positing between becoming and
memory ('becoming is an anti-memory' of man, they maintain).
4. Heidegger is thus wrong to claim that in Nietzsche critique of the
highest values hitherto 'properly means illumination of the dubious
origins of the valuations that yield them, and thereby demonstration
of the questionableness of these values themselves' (1961, p. 35; trans.
1981, p. 26). For Nietzsche the question of 'origins' is not irrelevant to
the formation of a critique of morals but it is in no way the decisive
question concerning their 'value'.
5. For a recent example of the 'out of control' thesis see Kelly (1994). For
instructive historical insight into the thesis see Winner (1977).
6. Compare Derrida on the necessity of reinventing invention (1992,
p.339).
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Nietzsche: Critical Assessments (London and New York: Routledge, forth-
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Baudrillard, J. (1996) The Perfect Crime, trans. C. Turner (London: Verso).
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Index
Note: see also 'Reference Key to Nietzsche's Texts' on p. xii.
adaptation, speeding up of 200 as nature's form of

Aeschylus 66, 83 self-overcoming 134
aesthetic justification 37 overcoming of pessimism
aesthetics through 135,136,146,147
derived from Kant 158 as palliative for pessimism
derived from Stendhal 53 139
of decadence and classical perfection in 134
aesthetics 157 as redemption of the sufferer
erotic 54 143
future of human as problem in transfiguration of life through
158 134-5
and judgements of taste 160 artistic process, non-pessimistic
and legislation 149-65 evaluation of 134
music and futurity 153-8 ascetic ideal 17,21,23,24,28
in relation to humanism xvii see also cleverness
transcendental 158, 162, 165 , ass' joke 68
see also Critique of Judgement; 'Assorted Opinions and Maxims'
Critique of Practical Reason; 68,72,155
Critique of Pure Reason; taste 'Attempt at a Self-Criticism' xvii,
aesthetic state 133 30-5, 39-41, 47, 135, 136, 137,
agonism (Owen) 118 138,142
Ahuramazda 87-8, 97 authority, transcendent source of
Allison, David B. 147 11
Also Sprach Zarathustra, see Thus Avesta, see Zend-Avesta
Spoke Zarathustra
Ames, Roger T. 187 'bad conscience' xiv, 14-18,24,
animal 116, 179, 197
domesticated 5 Bakhtin, Mikhail xvi, 108-9, 110,
inman 17 111,115,118, 120, 122
animality 144 Baudrillard, Jean 203
Ansell Pearson, Keith 20, 45, 47 beauty
Anti-Christ, The 59, 60, 61, 68, 69 ideal of 161
Apollonian, the 136 judgements of 160-1
Aristophanes 67 see also taste
Aristotle 94,100-1 Bergson, Henri 121,200-1
art Bernoulli, Albrecht 96
and decadence 54-5 Beyond Good and Evil 3,9, 19,23,
Dionysian 133--46 26-9,36,46,66,68,71-3,76-7,
interpretation of 133 120, 149, 164, 172-9, 180, 181,
aslover 54 197
nature of 137 biology, suspicions about 76
'2iJ7
208 Index
Birth of Tragedy, The xvii, 40, 49, Coe, Richard N. 61
59-61,91,135-41,146,155-7, cognitive capacities
163, 165 truth as independent of 8-9
Bizet, Georges 54 Coker, John 28
Blondel, Eric 45 Colli, Giorgio 45,96
blood in post-Zarathustran works comedy xv
37 ground of, in Nietzsche 80-1
Brandes, Georg 30, 46 and tragedy 91-4
Brezeale, Daniel 187 see also laughter
Buddha 85 comic distance, internalisation and
Buddhism 115-21
Mahayana 188 see also comedy; laughter
negation of the will as 'slave' conscience
solution 139 innocent, of the wild beast 13
response to 'suchness' of world and promises 13
187 as realisation of responsibility
Zen 185,187 25
Bukowski, Charles 147 see also 'bad conscience'
Byron, George Gordon 168 contempt respectful 119-20
convalescence xiv
Callicott, J. Baird 187 Conway, Daniel W. xiv, 28, 100,
Case of Wagner, The SO, 56, 59, 60, 121,122,148
61,71,156-7 cosmic evolutionism (Teilhard de
preface to 48,50 Chardin) 199-200
Cavell, Stanley xvi, 100, 121 cosmos, divinity of 180
Caygill, Howard 165, 166 see also earth; nature; universe;
Celine, Louis-Ferdinand 147 world
Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de 108 'courtesy' joke 73
chance (der Zufall) 144 cowardice 4,5,6
chaos as total character of world creation xvii
169 and legislation in Zarathustra
Christianity 3 149-53
destroyed by own morality 23 critical argument 114
God relationship in 120 critical method revision, see
in Wagner's works 50 reclamation project
and Zoroastrianism 86, 89 Critique of Judgment 166
see also Judaeo-Christianity; aesthetics in 158
'Platonic Christian view' culture and 163
Christians, 'powerlessness of love happiness in 164
of humanity' joke 69 human as embodiment of moral
Cimarosa, Domenico 54 sensein 162
civilisation and abolition of 'ills' organisms in 162
144 theory of culture in 162
Clark, Maudemarie 8 Critique of Practical Reason 166
class culture 115 aesthetics in 158,159-60
cleverness drives (Triebfeder) 158-64
of the slave 20 Critique of Pure Reason 166
valuing of, as condition of transcendental aesthetic in
existence 23 158
Index 209
cruelty directed towards oneself drives (Triebfeder) (Kant) 158-64,
178 176
culture Duchesne-Guillemin, Jacques 83,
as opus contra naturam 173 88-9,92,96,97,98
theory of 162
without will to power 198 earth as natura naturans (Spinoza)
customs 14-15,16 171
'cynicism' joke 72 see also cosmos; nature; universe;
world
danger in modem times 55 East Asian thought xvii
Daoism 184, 187 Ecce Homo xiv, 25, 36, 38, 41, 46, 49,
Darwin, Charles 193 52,59,60,61,66,70,84,90-1,
Daybreak (or Dawn of Morning) 129,132,140
10-11,14-15,35,36,46,70,71, ecological thinker, Nietzsche as
74,182 167-86,191
prefaceto 32,39,47 ecstatic history 53-9
death as a festival 183 education for slavery 152
decadence egalitarianism 184
and art 54-5 emancipation 6
modem 48,50-2,55 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 82,96,100,
pre-Socratic 49 167, 168, 185, 187
resisted by Nietzsche 51-3 enlightenment
two types of 49 democratic 7
decadents as grave-robbers of in German philosophy 3, 4, 28
history 49-50,53 Kant, Nietzsche and the politics
de Chardin, Teilhard 199-200 of 3-11
Deleuze, Gilles 148,191,192,197, erroneousness of the world 76
201,204 'error' joke 74
democracy and perfectionism esoteric in philosophy 175
100 , esteem of others' joke 73
democrat, discourse with 195 'eternal recurrence' xvi, 102, 106,
Derrida,Jacques 47,82,190,204 117-18,122
,despair and Pascal' joke 71 affirmation and the laughter of
,despising oneself joke 71 the shepherd 105-6
Deussen, Paul 47 as central Nietzschean doctrine
'Devil, refutation of aphorism 78 103
Diogenes Liiertius 84 ecstatic embracing of 104,111
'Dionysian !!ladness' 142 eugenics 165
Dionysian Uberfluss (abundance) Eurocentric perspective and
181 nihilism 180
Dionysus 133-46 evil
distance idleness as the root of 94-5
see also 'pathos of distance' and and Zarathustra 86-8
'comic distance' see also Beyond Good and Evil
,divergent views' joke 72 evolutionary advantage and
dogmas 5,6 complexity 200
Doric art 136 evolution, human
drama, insufficient prominence control over, by biological
given to 156 manipulation 203
210 Index
evolution, human (cont.) 'God' jokes 66-70
divergent lines of 200-1 'one God' 66-7
as involution 192 'needing the wise and the
as a programme 200 unwise' 67
technics of 202 'refutation of aphorism 78-80,
in terms of' originary machinism' 177
201 'science and' 69
exoteric in philosophy 175 God relationship, Christian 120
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von
flux of existence getting into 183 167, 168, 184, 185
formulas 5,6 Goetz, Philip W. 98
Foucault, Michel 61 good
freedom and evil, knowledge of 150
and state organisations 15 and Zarathustra 86--8
weakness construed as 21 see also Beyond Good and Evil
as will to domination 19 grave-robbers of history, decadents
French Revolution 12, 184 as 49-50,53
Freud, Sigmund 123, 179 gravity
Friedrich Nietzsche Society xiii and levity 75--81
friend spirit of 105, 150
as noblest form of enemy 153 'great unthinking mass' (Kant) xiii,
not existing for slave or tyrant ch.1passim
153 Greece
Fuchs, Carl 60 cultural history of 135-6
future Homeric 55
as complex teaching of 'eviI' 203 pre-Socratic 136
creating 149-65 Greek gods 17
of humankind xiii, 48, 158, Greek tragedy 35
189-204 as affirmative culture 140-1
man's control over 14 overcoming of pessimism
futurity, aesthetics and music through sublime art in
153--8 146
as religious phenomenon 140
Gay Science, The xv, xvi, 23, 25, 35, and transvaluation of suffering
36,54,66,67,70,73,82-5,86, 141-2
87,88,91,93,104,116,169-70, 'guardians' 6
181-2, 188 as legislators 6
eternal recurrence in 103 'rule of 5
preface to 32,33,34,39,41,47 Guattari, Felix 201, 204
Geiger, Wilhelm 96 guilt 17
Gemut 163, 164, 166
genealogy Hand, Sean 45
and the noble ideal 11-27,29 'happiness', choice of 164
see also On the Genealogy of Haug, Martin 85, 86-7, 96, 97
Morals Hayman, Ronald 96
Genet, Jean 147 'health' xiii
Germany 39 Greek culture as ebb and flow of
,gloom' joke 75 136
goal, universally recognised 10 of modem people 48
Index 211
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich as its own goal 151
120,124 'love of joke 72
and man/nature duality 131 and nature as interpenetrating
Hegelianism in Wagner 50 168
Heidegger, Martin 59, 100, 190-1, nature of, given by nature and
204 culture 178
Heraclitus 154, 168, 185 viewed symbolically 161-2
Herder, J. G. 176 working against nature 173
herd, triumph of 164 'humility, limit of joke 69
Herodotus 84, 96
hierarchy, see social hierarchy 'ideals, refuting' joke 70
Higgins, Kathleen M. 121 idleness as the root of all evil 94-5
history illusion, as metaphysical non-reality
as antidote against decadence 48 24
end of 197 'immanent transcendence' xvii
isolationist 50-3 immaturity 6
Stendhal's ecstatic 53-9 see also maturity
see also' On the Uses and immortality of individual soul 140
Disadvantages of History for inhuman see Unmensch
Life' instincts
H6lderlin, Johann Christian repression of 18
Friedrich 168 turning inwards see
Hollingdale, R J. 45,59,97, 121, 150 internalisation
Hollingrake, Roger 85, 96 internalisation of man 15
Homer 95 and comic distance 115-21
human for self-experimentation 195
becoming as violent discord 192 intuition, pure forms of sensible
body, future of 164-5 (Anschauung) 158
degeneration and end of 'history' Irigaray, Luce 47
197-8 irony and laughter 109,118-21
as embodiment of moral sense Italian Renaissance xv, 167
162 view of laughter 108
'equality' joke 72
evolution as involution 192 Jesuitism 3
figure, ideal in 160 jokes
jokes 70-5 God 66-70
non-adaptation as genetic trait of human 70-5
202 'joyous science' X111
see also future of humankind Joyous Science see Gay Science
Human, All Too Human 35,46, 65, Judaeo-Christian, human relation
71,72,73,74,187,190 to nature as 167
preface to 32, 33, 37, 38, 47 Jung, c. G. 85, 96
humanism xiii, xvii
modern see man/nature duality Kant, Immanuel xiii, xvii, 6-7,
humanity 9-11,28,61,141,166
'Christian love of joke 69 aesthetics, temporality and
creature and creator united in humanity in 158-64
149 asceticism of 53
'divine origin of joke 69 disinterested aesthetics of 54
212 Index
Kant, Immanuel (cont.) self-conscious 117
and man/nature duality 130 seventeenth-century view of
moral-humanist account of the 108-9
sublime 145 of the shepherd 105--6,107,109,
Nietzsche and the politics of 117
enlightenment 3-11 'slave' 120
and the sublime 148 subversive experience of 112
see also Critique of Judgement; as tool in moral perfectionism
Critique of Practical Reason; 99-121
Critique of Pure Reason in Thus Spoke Zarathustra 106--8,
Kaufmann, Walter 45,59,60,83, 11~11
96, 98, 121, 122 'waves of uncountable laughter'
Keiji, Nishitani 188 (Aeschylus) 82-95
Kelly, K. 204 see also comedy; comic distance;
Kerenyi, Karl 47 irony; 'joyous science';
Kierkegaard,Seren 120,124 mockery; sarcasm
Kirk,G.S. % laziness 4,5,6
knowledge legislation xvii
of good and evil 150 and aesthetics 149-65
problem of 37 and creation in Zarathustra
Kaine (common Greek) 67 149-53
Kundera, Milan 123 legislators, guardians as 6
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 176
Lampert, Laurence 121, 186, 187, Leroi-Gourhan, A. 201-2
188 levity and gravity 75--81
Last Man (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) life
xiv,25,26,48,158,164 giving back 151
laughter xiii, xv-xvi sublimity of 146
as an act of will 118 'life as a tragedy' joke 71
ecstatic (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) Lippitt, John 121
111-12 love 55
and' forgetting' 123 Luther, Martin 67-8
'full' (Bakhtin) 108-9,110 lying 84
'higher men' and 107
as interior form of truth 117 machine intelligence 199
and irony 109 Magi 84
liberating from interior censor 'malice of others' joke 70
116 man
in medieval religious festivals with capacity to make promises
110 191
and mockery 119 post-biolOgical 199
neighing with 65 as rational, self-legislating being
as non-discursive dismissal 112, 7
114 man/nature duality (of modem
,at oneself joke 70 humanism) 129-31
'reduced' (Bakhtin) 101, 108-9, dissolution of 145
110 teleological view of 130
Renaissance view of 108 maturity 4, 7, 9
and sarcasm 109,119 see also self-government
Index 213
mechanical world as meaningless 'origin' of 193
181 as signs of exuberant or
'Mechanosphere' (Deleuze and degenerating life 192
Guattari) 201 Moravec, Hans 199
Melanchthon, Philip 67--8 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus,
memory, exteriorisation of 202 Stendhal's judgement of 54
metaphysical as immanent 139 music
metaphysical comfort 138,145 aesthetics, futurity and 153--8
metaphysical realism see realism overestimation of 156
metaphysics, moral 138 spirit of 37
Middleton, Christopher 45 asa woman 54
Miller, Henry 147
Mistry, Freny 97 Napoleon
mockery, sarcasm and irony as exemplar of ancient ideal 12
118-21 as example of 'return to nature'
modernity 184
and danger 55 natural phenomena, imagery of, as
and decadence 48, 50-2, 55 cultural necessity 185
and Italian Renaissance 55--8 nature
'moderns and Renaissance' joke 72 attitude to, as hubris 182
'monotonotheism' 65 and cruelty 178
Montinari, Mazzino 45, 96 in cultivating human nature
moral, the, ideal in human figure as 171-2
expression of 160 as divine xvii
moral commitments, value of 9 as enforcement of claims of
moral discourse 112-13 power 174
critical argument in 114 fear of, contributing to
morality denigration of nature 179
dominant and external 115 human life working against
Kant's conception of 7,9 173
origins of 37, 164 Nietzsche's ideas about 167--86
as responsible for humanity not order in, as human projection
fulfilling itself 193 174
as symptom of decadence 59 philosophy of, and global
as tyranny against nature 177 ecology xvii, 185
as a 'world we enter' 112 in psychospiritual development
see also moral metaphysics; moral 171
perfectionism; moral return to 184
reasoning; morals; moral translating the human back into
values; 'noble morality'; 179
'slave morality' see also cosmos; earth; universe;
moral metaphysics 138 world
moral perfectionism, laughter as a Naturphilosophen 167
tool in 99-121 negation as anthropomorphism
moral reasoning, styles of 10 130--1
morals see On the Genealogy of Newtonian physics 175
Morals Nietzsche, Friedrich
moral values and academia 39
need for a critique of 192 art of reading works of 33-5
214 Index
Nietzsche, Friedrich (cont.) On the Genealogy of Morals xiv, 3,
becomes a sign of health 42-5 7-8,9,12-17,19-20,25,28,29,
and diets 39 49,53, 60, 88, 116, 123, 164,
as disciple of Dionysus 39-41 192-7
early ideas on nature 168, 186 'On the Uses and Disadvantages of
in Engadin 169 History for We' xv, 59, 75
friends and family of 39 optimism see pessimism
friends as an audience of free OreUana-Benado, M. E. 123
minds 78-9 organism as monadic 201
ground of comedy in 80-1 Overbeck, Ida 45, 84, 96, 168-9
hiking by 183 overman see Ubermensch
isolation from history of 55-6 Owen, David 104, 113, 117, 119,
jokes of 65-81 122,123,124
letter to sister from 61
nature, ideas about 167-86 pantheism, Dionysian 180, 182
as in perfectionist tradition 'Pascal and despair' joke 71
100-1 'pathos of inner distance' 25
philology of 34-5,39 'pathos of distance' 19,22-3,26
rebirth in reclamation project of perfectionism
1886 38-42,47 definition of 100
recovery from sickness by 36, and democracy 100
42 in Thus Spoke Zarathustra 111
resisting decadence 51-3 Persians 84
self-mutilation of 42,44 'personal value' 6
Nietzsche Society see Friedrich perspectivism 23
Nietzsche Society; North advocacy of 7, 8-9, 24
American Nietzsche Society Kant's denial of 7,9
nihilism pessimism 137
and Eurocentric perspective art as palliative for 139
180 'noble' overcoming of 131-2,
perfecting of 203 135,136,140
'nobility, new' 151 'slave' overcoming of 131,136
see also 'noble ideal' romantic 131
'noble' of strength 129-47
'becoming-noble' (as death of phenomenal self, empirical will of
tragedy) 136,141 7
suffering from institution of philology 34-5, 39
individuation 143 'philosopher' jokes 73-4
'noble ideal' xiv, 3, 12,20 philosophers, modern
genealogy and the 11-27 as believers in truth of
'noble morality' xiii, 19 consciousness 76-7
nobles, ancient 12, 13, 16 as sceptics about the world 76-7
consciousness of power of 20 physicality and art 133
construed as evil 21 physics, suspicions about 76
repression of 20 Pick, Daniel 61
North American Nietzsche Society Pilate's question 67
xiii 'pity' joke 72
noumenal self, rational will of 6 pity, two regimes of 164
Nozick, Robert 118 Plato 27,61,95,100,170,175
Index 215
'Platonic-Christian' view xvii, ressentiment of the slave 20-2
129-30 exploited by priest 22
human relation to nature as 167 and self-overcoming 195
of individual immortality 140 threatening sociality 22
Pliny 84 'Richard Wagner in Bayreuth'
Plutarch 97 153-7,165
power Ridley, Aaron 13-18,28
and ancient nobles 16, 20 Ring (Wagner) 50
prejudice, economy of 37 Romanticism 137, 176
pre-Socratic thinkers 167, 168 Rorty, Richard 123
press, freedom of 5 Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio 155
pre-Zarathustran works (of Rousseau, Jean Jacques 6, 184,
Nietzsche), reclamation in 1886 194
prefaces 33-6,42 'noble lie' of 6
see also Thus Spoke Zarathustra
'pride' joke 73 sacrifice and Ubermensch 151
priest, value of 194 Sage, Robert 61
see also ressentiment Sallis, John 147,148
promises 'salvation of the souY joke 68
capacity to make 191 Sanctus Januarius (Nietzsche'S),
and conscience 13 35-8,42
psychology sarcasm and laughter 109, 118-21
driving force in 194 satire under oppressive regimes
suspicions about 76 116
'punishment' joke 73 satirical laughter 109
Putnam, Hilary 118-19 SchachtRichard 102-5,117,123
Scheier, Claus-Artur 45,47
quattrocento see Italian Schick, K D. 201,206
Renaissance Schmidt, J. 28
Schopenhauer, Arthur 141,176
Radford, Colin 122 aesthetics of 137
rational understanding 4 and artistic process 133, 135
rationality, transcendant standards as decadent 61
of 3 disinterested aesthetics of 54
Raven, J. E. 96 'metaphysical comfort' of 138
Rawls, John 100, 113 pessimism of 39
reading Nietzsche's books, art of as reformulator of Christian
32,33-5 decadence 60
realism, metaphysical 8,26 romantic pessimism of 131
reason 'slave' approach xvii
transcendental status of 7 Schopenhauer as educator to
unconditional value of X111 Nietzsche 102
reclamation project (1886) 32-5 'science and God' joke 69
Ree, Paul 193-4 science, discipline of 181
Regis, E. 199 self, political and personal
'relaxing the bow' and democratic components of 113
enlightenment 7 self-criticism see'Attempt at a
Renaissance see Italian Self-Criticism'
Renaissance self-discipline 184
216 Index
self-government 25-7 soul 15
maturity as 3 as a social structure of the drives
'self-overcoming' xiii, 27, 28, 175
120 vegetal 182
art as nature's form of 134-5 Spencer, Herbert 123
self-sublimation see Spinoza, Baruch de 171, 176, 185
, self-overcoming' 'squandering' (bestowing virtue)
'self-transcendence', Dionysian xiv,26
139 Stack, George 82
Seneca, Lucius Annaeus 99 state organisation and freedom 15
Shakespeare, William 108 Stendhal (pseudonym of Henri
Shapiro, Gary 121, 122, 165 Marie Beyle) 53-8,60
Shelley, Percy Bysshe 168 and aesthetics 53
'sickness' xiii, xiv and decadence 58
Greek culture as ebb and flow of, in Florence 56--8
136 andnihilism 58
, as stimulus to life' joke 71 Stern, J. P. 148
Silenus, wisdom of 136, 165 Stoics 167, 173-4, 176
Silk, M. S. 148 Stonier, T. 199
sin against the earth 171 Strauss, Leo 187
'slave' strength, pessimism of 129-47
'becoming-slave' (as death of sublime, the
tragedy) 136 judgements of 160-1
devaluation of external world by Kant's moral-humanist account
21 of 145
domination over, through social mathematical 161
rank 19 'this-worldly' xvii
lack of power of 20 see also tragic sublime
laughter 120 sudden, the (das PlOtzliche) 144
looking for culprit 21-2 suffering
morality 120,194 abolishment of 26
repression of 20 meaning of 142-3
suffering from collapse of 'suicide' joke 71
individuation 143 superman see Ubermensch
world view xvii 'symptomatology xiv
see also ressentiment
social constraints, ancient nobles Taminiaux, Jacques 147
released from 16 taste, judgements of
social hierarchy 19 and class 163
social rank see 'slave' and ideal of beauty 160
society, origins of 16 impure 160
Socrates 23,59,67,95 pure 160
decadent teachings of 50 theodicy as end of pessimism of
'music-practising' 141 strength 145
'two-world' metaphysics of Thoreau, Henry David 100, 167
145 'thoroughness' joke 73-4
see also pre-Socratic thinkers Thus Spoke Zarathustra xvi, xvii, 20,
solemnity 110 36, 46, 60, 66, 71, 82, 85, 87,
see also laughter 99-121,154,170-3,190
Index 217
books pointing backwards or transfiguration of life in art 132-3,
forwards to 35-6 134-5,141,147
'The Convalescent' 106 'transhuman condition' xviii, xviii
criticism of Wagner in 156-7 meaning of 189-204
'Do not spare your neighbour' ,transvaluation'
commandment 150 of life in art 132
ecstatic laughter in 111 of suffering and Greek tragedy
'Of the Friend' 153 141-2
'On the Higher Man' 106-7, Triebfeder, see drives
119 Tristan and Isolde 154
irony and sarcasm in 120 truth
laughter in 99-121, 150 'and antidotes' joke 71
legislation and creation in as illusion 23-4
149-53,157 as independent of knowledge
'Of Love of One's Neighbour' 8
152 as metaphysical reality 24
'Of Old and New Law-Tables' and rational acceptability 9
149-53 and Voltaire 77
'The Other Dancing Song' 106 see also will to truth
parallels with Zend-Avesta 85 Twilight of the Idols 23, 24, 30, 40-1,
as perfectionist text 111 50,55,56,60,65,72,81,142,
'On Reading and Writing' 114 183-4,194
reduced laughter in 110-11, 118
'The Seven Seals' 106 Ubermensch (the overhuman) 12,
'On the Vision and the Riddle' 19-20, 25, 26, 27, 102, 103, 121,
105 152,153,158,163-4,186,190,
Zwart on 109-12 197
see also Zarathustra as sense of the earth 170
toleration of other views 113 uncertain, the (das Ungewisse), 144
Toth, N. 201-2 universe as will to power 177
tragedy xv see also cosmos; earth; nature;
birth of ('becoming-noble') 136 world
and comedy 91-4 Unmensch (the inhuman) 12, 19-20
death of ('becoming-slave') 136 Untimely Meditations 35,46,59,61
as 'noble' response to existence unthinking mass see ' great
139 unthinking mass' (Kant) xiii
as preventative medicine against
pessimism 140 Van Tongeren, PaulJ. M. 147
'rebirth of tragedy' 141 Vemant, Jean-Pierre 148
see also Birth of Tragedy; 'tragic Vidal-Naquet, Pierre 148
sublime' virtue, bestowing see 'squandering'
tragic disposition 'virtue' joke 73
embodied by Wagner 153 Voltaire and truth 77
as guaranteeing human future
155 Wagner, Richard 165
tragic effect as 'metaphysical common ground with Nietzsche
comfort' 137 156
tragic sublime xvii comparison with Heraclitus
Nietzsche and 129-47 154
218 Index
Wagner, Richard (cont.) Zarathustra (Zoroaster) xv, 183, 186
criticism of, in Zarathustra 156 analysis of good and evil by 86,
on Rossini 155 94
Wagner's music xvii, 39, 48, SO, 153 age of 85
adopting decadent ideas from commitment to truthfulness
history SO 89-90
founding a stylistic tradition as educator to readers 101
154 and eternal recurrence 103
infinite melody of 154 historical, Nietzsche and the
Nietzsche's quarrel with 149 83-5
as product of present age initiating philosophy in the West
153-8 93
reason, law and purpose in 153 and later moralists 93
romantic pessimism of 131 as manifestation of collective
tragedy and 153-7 humanity 95
see also Case of Wagner; 'Richard in ~otley Cow 85
Wagner in Bayreuth' Nietzsche's choice of 86-9
'Wanderer and his Shadow, The' as Nietzsche's precursor 90, 92
68,73,170,182,187 as 'only an old atheist' 67
Warren,~ark 20 opposition to deva-worship 97
White, Alan 123 and perfectionism 99-121
Whitlock, Greg 121 realisation of the world as perfect
will, hostility towards 141 173
Williams Jackson, A. V. 96, 97 Schacht on 103
will to power 79 and the shepherd 105-6
culture without 198 and the tragic era 93
all life as 172-7 rev~uation of values by 89-91
natural cosmos as manifestation as Ubermensch 170-1
of 167-86 Zend-Avesta 84-5
Will to Pawer, The 39,60,61,135, parallels with Thus Spoke
142, 145, 189, 190, 191, 193 Zarathustra 85
will to truth 23 see also pre-Zarathustran works;
Windishmann, Friedrich Heinrich Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Hugo 96 Zoroaster, etymology of 84
Winer, L. 204 see also Zarathustra
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 100, 123 Zoroastrianism
woman not capable of friendship as attempt to unify polytheistic
153 religion 88
world and Christianity 89
genealogy of real 24 favouring naturalistic accounts
infinite interpretations of 182 over transcendental 88-9
knowability of 77 monotheistic tendencies of 86
real and apparent 21,23 as predecessor of Christianity
86,92
yin and yang 87 Zwart, Hub 109-12,114--15,118,
Young, Julian 147 120,121,123

Nietzsche's Futures

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NIETZSCHE'S FUTURES

First published in the United States of America 1999 by

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with

Part One: Nobles and Exemplars 1

1 Nietzsche, Enlightenment and the Problem of

Part Two: Laughter and Comedy 63

Part Three: Art, Nature and the Transhuman 127

AC The Anti-Christ (or The Anti-Christian)

I NOBLES AND EXEMPLARS

Major features of any future commended by Nietzsche, surely,

two crucial features: an aesthetics which is erotic, as opposed to disin-

n LAUGHTER AND COMEDY

Laughter is another feature which Nietzsche regularly hints would

ill ART, NATURE AND THE TRANSHUMAN

1. Nietzsche News, no. 16 (Spring 1995), p. 3.

This essay focuses on two questions in relation to Nietzsche's work.

KANT, NIETZSCHE AND THE PARADOX OF ENLIGHTENMENT

European man feels this tension as a state of distress, to be sure;

Immaturity, then, is the product of an originary laziness and cow-

However, it is by no means clear that this is anything like sufficient

that we recognise ourselves as capable of acting on our own under-

From now on, my philosophical colleagues, let us be more wary of

Maudemarie Clark (1990) has convincingly argued that

we can have no conception, or only a contradictory one, of some-

involves the recognition that the idea of truth as independent of

to see differently, and to want to see differently to that degree,

It is a necessary condition of such maturity or self-government that

It goes without saying that I do not deny - unless I am a fool -

At this juncture though we should recall that Nietzsche's critique of

Only if mankind possessed a universally recognised goal would it

This is the third purpose of genealogy - to recommend a goal.

And strange: it is precisely the spirits the Germans so eloquently

Against the Kantian project of replacing one transcendent source of

makes possible. Enlightenment, for Nietzsche, is a heightening of

GENEALOGY AND THE PROBLEM OF THE NOBLE IDEAL

The ideal which Nietzsche seeks to recommend to us is that of nobil-

True, the most dreadful and unexpected thing happened in the

It is notable that Nietzsche locates Napoleon as 'late-born', as the

Here there is one point which we would be the last to deny:

No doubt, as Ridley remarks, Nietzsche's reference to 'the innocent

so that a world of strange new things, circumstances and even

How do these preconditions come about? There are two aspects to

I look on bad conscience as a serious illness to which man was

On the one hand, unable to act on the basis of instincts attuned to

these poor things were reduced to relying on thing, inference,

On the other hand, the means by which the expression of instincts

First proposition of dvilisation. - Among barbarous peoples there

All instincts which are not discharged outwardly turn inwards -

At this juncture, we encounter certain difficulties in Nietzsche's

What capacities must someone have if he is to impose a custom

What is of interest here is not the almost inevitable circularity which

Let us immediately add that ... the prospect of an animal soul

On the other hand, bad conscience in its slave-moralised state -

the Greek gods, these reflections of noble and proud men in

Setting aside, for the moment, Nietzsche's repetition of the bestial

Their Yaweh was the expression of their consciousness of power, of

Apart from providing support for Ridley's argument, this passage

For every sufferer instinctively looks for a cause of his distress;

Ressentiment threatens sociality as such. It is to this problem that the