Eugen Fink - Nietzsche's Philosophy

Nietzsche's Philosophy

This page intentionally left blank

Nietzsche'sPhilosophy

EUGEN FINK

Translated byGoetz Richter

A\ continuumW L O N D O N • N E W Y O R K

ContinuumThe Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX

370 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10017-6503

www. continuumbooks. com

English translation © Continuum 2003

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproducedor transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

including photocopying, recording, or any information storage orretrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 0-8264-5997-8 (hardback), 0-8264-5998-6 (paperback)

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, SuffolkPrinted and bound by Biddies Ltd, Guildford and King's Lynn

www.continuumbooks.com

Contents

Translator's Foreword vii

Chapter One: The 'Metaphysics of the Artist' 1

1. Nietzsche's philosophy behind masks 1

2. The fundamental equation of being and value. The perspective ofThe Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music 7

3. The psychology of art and art as cognition of the world 13

4. 'Socratism' against tragic wisdom. Concerning truth and falsity in theextra-moral sense 20

5. Untimely Meditations. Culture and Genius. Philosophy in the tragicage of the Greeks 27

Chapter Two: Nietzsche's Enlightenment 34

1. The psychology of unmasking and the scientific perspective.Human, All Too Human 34

2. The philosophy of the morning (Dawn and The Gay Science) 42

Chapter Three: The Proclamation 51

1. Form, style and structure of Thus spoke Zarathustra 51

2. The overman and the death of God 57

3. The will to power 65

4. The eternal return: Of the vision and the riddle, Before Sunrise 72

vi Contents

5. The eternal return: the cosmological conception of the problem ofmorality. The recurrence of the same 80

6. The eternal recurrence: Of the Great Yearning 89

7. The eternal recurrence: The Seven Seals. Zarathustra and theHigher Man 98

Chapter Four: The Destruction of the Western Tradition 107

1. The transcendental creation of value. Beyond Good and Evil 107

2. The Genealogy of Morals 114

3. The Antichrist and The Twilight of the Idols 121

4. The ontological idea and the moral ideal 129

5. The posthumous work The Will to Power. The problem of nihilism 137

6. The negative ontology of the thing 145

7. Discipline and Breeding - the Dionysian world 154

Chapter Five: Nietzsche's Relationship to Metaphysics asImprisonment and Liberation 164

1. The four transcendental dimensions of the problem of being andthe basic principles of Nietzsche's philosophy. The cosmic conceptof play as an extra-metaphysical question 164

Notes 175

Index 182

114

Translator's Foreword

Eugen Fink (1905-75) taught philosophy at the University in Freiburg from1946 to 1971. He was a close associate of the German phenomenologistsEdmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger and his thinking and language isinfluenced considerably by these two major thinkers of the twentieth century.

Fink frequently refers to the view that philosophy is not just an academicdiscipline. His lectures on Nietzsche demand a radical commitment to thinkingthat embraces the existence of the thinking person. For Fink serious philo-sophical engagement transcends historical curiosity and intellectual interest.The thought and language of a philosopher with this demanding vision of phil-osophy is somewhat difficult to translate. Fink's German text tends to be com-plex. It attempts to articulate visions of Nietzsche and his philosophical thinkingin a personal and engaged manner. Like any spoken language the text containsredundancies, neologisms and some grammatical errors. In addition it lacks adegree of detachment from Nietzsche that results in Fink's occasional emula-tion of Nietzsche's prophetic style. The translation has made the attempt topreserve Fink's idiosyncrasies in a literal sense and has not necessarily simplifiedseeming rhetoric complexities or smoothed over any apparent roughnesscreated by redundancies.

Fink's phenomenological method relies on a direct connection betweenthinking and expression that often discovers its own highly individual style oflanguage. In addition, Fink's close association and engagement with Heideggerhas made certain questions and concepts an integral part of his own thinking.The ontological difference between Being itself (das Seiri) and being (dasSeiende) and the corresponding distinction between ontological and ontic con-siderations form an important background to Fink's own thought. Rather thanfollowing the tradition of some Heidegger translations that create a peculiarEnglish Heidegger-jargon, the present translation has made the attempt to relyon context to elucidate these meanings. Even though, certain difficult concepts(such as Lichtung or 'clearing', Offenheit or 'openness', etc.) have been directlytranslated and may only be appreciated if the reader engages with Heidegger orFink beyond this book.

viii Translator's Foreword

Fink's own philosophical focus (also evident in these lectures) is the conceptof 'world' (Welt). Fink frequently uses this term by itself and without article inthe endeavour perhaps to avoid a simple and reifying understanding of it. Theterm is closely related to Heidegger's 'Being'. The present translation makes useof the two terms 'cosmos' and 'world' and retains them as a reference whereverFink refers to a related term.

Fink's Nietzsche lectures were written before the current critical Nietzscheedition came into existence. Fink accordingly discusses an edited version ofNietzsche's posthumous aphorisms that is known as The Will to Power. Thepresent translation copies Fink's text and referencing in this regard andtranslates his citations from Nietzsche's works. On occasion, some standardEnglish translations of Nietzsche's works by Kaufmann and Hollingdale wereconsulted.1

I am much indebted to Dr Ted Sadler (Sydney) for his inspiration and guid-ance in relation to philosophy in general and the work of Nietzsche, Eugen Finkand Martin Heidegger in particular. His illuminating interpretations and hisgenerous critical review of large sections of this translation have been invaluable.I should also like to thank Mr Georg Seifert (Winsen) for his early assistanceand for inspiring me to pursue the English language to a point where I was ableto adopt it as a voluntary exile. Dr Jeanell Carrigan (Sydney) has provided themost essential support at times when this translation appeared too difficult tocomplete.

Goetz RichterSydney, October 2002

CHAPTER ONE

The 'Metaphysics of the Artist'

1. NIETZSCHE'S PHILOSOPHY BEHIND MASKS

Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the great, fateful characters in the history of west-ern spirit. He is a fated person who demands final decisions and a terrifyingquestion mark on the path of European man, shaped by the heritage of classicalantiquity and two thousand years of Christendom. Nietzsche is a symbol for thesuspicion that this path was a wrong track, that man has lost his way and that areversal and a rejection of everything which hitherto had been considered 'holy','good' and 'true' is required. Nietzsche stands for a radical critique of religion,philosophy, science and morality.

Hegel made the tremendous attempt to grasp the entire history of the spirit asa process in which all preceding steps are assimilated yet nevertheless relevant intheir own right. Hegel considered himself able to evaluate the history of Euro-pean man positively. Nietzsche presents an absolute, decisive rejection of thepast, an overturning of all traditions, and an appeal to a radical reversal. WithNietzsche, European man arrives at a crossroad. Hegel and Nietzsche have ahistorical consciousness in common, which reflects upon - and evaluates -western history as a whole. Both are influenced by early Greek thinkers andreturn to origins. Both are Heracliteans. Hegel and Nietzsche relate to oneanother like absolute affirmation to absolute negation. Hegel's enormous con-ceptual labours reflect and integrate all human modes of ontological under-standing and all opposing motifs of the history of metaphysics in one systembringing this very history to an end.

For Nietzsche, the same history is only the history of the longest error. Heattacks it with unbounded passion and rhetoric resonating with tension andsuspicion, with fervent hatred and bitter mockery, with the wit and sly malice ofa propagandist. He mobilizes all weapons at his disposal in his struggle: hisrefined psychology, his cutting wit, his ardour, and above all his style. Nietzscheattacks with full commitment, but he neither engages in a conceptualdestruction of metaphysics nor does he demolish metaphysics through a methodof conceptual, ontological thought. He rejects the concept and opposes

2 The 'Metaphysics of the Artist'

rationalism with its conceptual violation of reality. Nietzsche struggles withthe entire past. He does not only take issue with traditional philosophy, butalso with traditional religion and morality. His struggle takes the form of acomprehensive critique of culture. This feature is of utmost importance.

Nietzsche's critique of culture can easily conceal the more fundamental factthat he is essentially only concerned with a philosophical polemic against west-ern metaphysics. To be sure, Nietzsche subjects the entire cultural past to hisdevastating criticism. With this comprehensive approach into the past, with thefundamental interrogation of our occidental origins Nietzsche distinguisheshimself immediately from the fashionable, moralizing critics of the nineteenthcentury. He does not only approach the past critically, but makes a positivedecision. Revaluing western values, he has a will to the future, an agenda and anideal. But he is no Utopian, no idealist wishing to make the world a happier andbetter place. He does not believe in 'progress'. He makes sombre predictionsabout the future. He is a prophet of European Nihilism, which appears to havebecome omnipresent - not only in Europe. Everyone knows that and discusses it- one is even in the process of 'overcoming' it.

Nietzsche predicts the advent of nihilism 'within the next two centuries'. Hishistorical consciousness extends far into the future. It accordingly shows a kindof pettiness and poverty of spirit if we attempt to enclose a thinker whoembraces our entire history and who projects a design of life over centuries, inour limited, contemporary context and interpret him from this perspective. Theattempts to drag Nietzsche into current political debate, to portray him as acharacteristic 'advocate' of violence, of German imperialism, as a Teutonic war-rior who runs amok against the values of Mediterranean culture must bestrongly rejected. Although Nietzsche cannot escape the fate of any philosophyto be vulgarized and trivialized, his political abuse is no argument against himunless it can be shown that the objectionable political practice derives from agenuine understanding of his real philosophy. The works of great systematicthinkers such as Aristotle, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, are perhaps less exposed tocrude misunderstandings than Nietzsche, who seems to be more accessible onaccount of his style. The splendour of his style and its aphoristic form captivatesand attracts us; Nietzsche entices and fascinates with the directness of his dis-course. He exudes an aesthetic charm and confounds us with an aura of excess.Considering Nietzsche's increasing influence, the following important questionposes itself: Is Nietzsche's influence based on his philosophy or on subsidiaryfeatures of his works? Is it perhaps even the result of a seduction by compellingstylistic features of his sharp mind? Our answer might be disappointing.Nietzsche's philosophy is actually hardly influential - it is perhaps still notunderstood and awaits adequate interpretation. Nietzsche, the philosopher, isconcealed by the cultural critic, by the mysterious, eloquent prophet. His masks

Nietzsche's philosophy behind masks 3

conceal his substance. Our century testifies to a diverse preoccupation withthese masks, yet it still remains out of touch with his philosophy. Nevertheless,our view of Nietzsche has undergone a characteristic change in the last decades.At the beginning of the century, Nietzsche was largely portrayed as the ingeni-ous diagnostician of the decline of culture and as the creator of an ambiguous,enigmatic psychology or of a high art of conjecture and interpretation.Nietzsche was praised as the keen investigator of 'resentment' and 'decadence'with an evil eye for all that is morbid and decayed. He appeared to be an artist,an eloquent poet and a prophet. Nietzsche invested the word 'life' (as Schelerput it) with a golden sound. He was the founder of the 'philosophy of life'(Lebensphilosophie). The Nietzsche cult increased with the ignorance aboutNietzsche. Nietzsche was made into a legendary figure or stylized to a symbol.Combining biography and work, interpretation created an artistic fiction.

The Nietzsche interpretations of recent times are characterized by a strongersense of reality. Now we can observe an inverted tendency. The approach isoften biographical and attempts are made to understand the work through thelife which created it. Nietzsche is looked at with fewer illusions. He is not seen asthe Overman proclaimed in the Zarathustra. Quite the contrary, the shrewdpsychology of unmasking, which Nietzsche developed with greatest virtuosity, isnow applied to himself. He appears as deeply suffering, crushed and forsaken bylife. The wild, infernal hatred against Christianity is apparently explained by hissimple inability to come to terms with it, his anti-moralism by the unconditionalhonesty of his critique of morality; his glorification of abundant, vigorous life,the Great Health and the man of power by needs arising from the privations of asuffering person. Peripheral aspects of his work determine this image ofNietzsche more than its philosophical substance.

Without doubt, Nietzsche's 'psychological achievements' are extraordinary:he has opened our eyes to the ambiguities, the hidden meanings of any spiritualexpression and to other countless ambiguities. His technique of psychologicalanalysis is highly sophisticated. Without doubt, Nietzsche is blessed with anuncanny instinct for historical processes; he can read the signs of the future andcan even predict it. No doubt, Nietzsche is an artist with the sensitivity of aMimosa, with a tremendous richness of intuition, with a fertile imagination andwith visionary powers. Without doubt, Nietzsche is a poet.

Nietzsche once said about himself: 'I am the most concealed of all the con-cealed.' Perhaps we understand the philosopher with such great difficultybecause he is the genuine Nietzsche. Concealing himself became a passion forNietzsche. He has an uncanny desire for deceit, masquerade and the pose of thejester. He assumes as many disguising as revealing 'roles': perhaps no otherphilosopher conceals his philosophy behind so much sophistry. It seems as ifhis shimmering, unsteady being was unable to find a clear and determinate


expression, as if he played too many roles. They include the 'free spirit' from thetime of Human, All Too Human, the 'Prince Vogelfrei', Zarathustra, and his finalself-identification with Dionysos.

What, however, is this desire for the mask? Is it merely a literary device, amystification of the public, a safe method to advocate a position without beingcommitted to it? Is this feature ultimately the result of Nietzsche's absence ofany roots, of his suspension over an abyss, wishing to conjure up a secure basisfor himself and others? Psychological information will never be able to solve thisenigma within Nietzsche's being. In a metaphor full of symbolism, Nietzschespeaks of the 'labyrinth': for him man is essentially a labyrinth from which noone has escaped and where all heroes have perished. Nietzsche himself is theexemplary man in a labyrinth. The secret of his being cannot be wrestled fromhim; he safeguards himself through many false tracks, through his many dis-guises and characters. However, is this relevant to us? In general, the interpret-ation of Nietzsche suffers from the fact, that the work is approached through thepersonality, that biography is used as a key. Nietzsche's life is more concealedthan his work. But the extraordinary nature of his fate, his passion and hismessianic claims, the outrageous pathos with which he postures, angers, con-fuses and fascinates - all these tempt us again and again to look to the personrather than the work. Nietzsche seduces us. All his books are written in themanner of confessions. As an author he does not remain in the background, butspeaks in an almost unbearable manner about himself, his spiritual experiences,his illness and his taste. It takes a peculiar arrogance to burden the reader withthe personality of the author and to imply at the same time that all his books areessentially only monologues. Nietzsche uses the audacity of such an impositionon the reader as an artistic device and literary delicacy; he secures himself afollowing just because he repels. This aristocratic pathos stimulates and inter-ests. As a writer, Nietzsche is sophisticated, he is able to pull out all stops, createtender, sublime sounds as well as blazing fanfares. He has a developed sense forthe natural melody of language, constructing a long-winded sentence as anartful period, with the timing of the accelerando, with a flight that puts everyword just right. He also commands the staccato rhythm of the short, captivatingsentence that hits like lightning. His style teems with the scintillating electricityof spiritual tension, appealing to the irrational forces of the human soul in avirtuosic manner. Nietzsche's style is intentionally affected. His analysis ofWagner's music applies to his own style. There is a great deal of affectation, ofseduction and magic in Nietzsche's style. However, where thinking comes intothe genuine closeness of poetry we also encounter great profundity. The bril-liance of Nietzsche's style, its extreme subjectivity, tempts us repeatedly to lookback from the work to the author who is reflected in his work in so many ways.

There is a further reason for the usual approach to Nietzsche. A few works

Nietzsche's philosophy behind masks 5

aside, Nietzsche's books generally do not follow one train of thought or progres-sively unfold a path of thought. They are collections of aphorisms. Nietzsche,whose poor eyesight prevented him from spending long hours at his writingdesk, developed the aphorism into an art form. However, it would be pre-sumptuous if one were to explain his aphoristic style simply through this afflic-tion, categorizing it as a virtue arising from a need. The aphorism, rather,reflects the character of Nietzsche's thought. It allows the short, surprising for-mulation without need for any justifications. It appears that Nietzsche thinks inflashes, not in a cumbersome way of conceptually developing long sequences ofthought. As a thinker he is intuitive and imaginative, possessing extraordinarypowers of concretization. Nietzsche's aphorisms are very succinct. Theyresemble cut stones. And yet they do not just stand on their own, but formsequences and (within the unity of a book) a unique whole. Nietzsche is amaster of composition; each book has its own unique spiritual mood which isfound in all aphorisms, each has its own pace, its own unmistakable individualsound. No two books of Nietzsche resemble each other. The more one becomessensitive to this, the greater becomes one's awe about his artistic achievements.At the same time, however, the wonder grows why Nietzsche, who gave so muchto his books, always withdrew from organizing his thought within a systematicconceptual framework. We find systematic sketches, conceptions of a plannedpath of thought only in the posthumous writings. Nietzsche's highly poeticalquality and the aphoristic form of his books are disadvantageous to theexposition of his philosophy. Nietzsche concealed rather than revealed his phil-osophy through a style which equally intended to attract attention, persuadeand aesthetically charm be it through conscious provocation or extreme, eristicexaggeration.

We would not have to bother about Nietzsche if his work merely articulatedthe particular existential experience of an extremely tormented person. Hewould not be a fateful figure, but an interesting person, a great individual whodeserves our moderate admiration. If he is, however, a philosopher, i.e. someonewho spiritually safeguards our humanity and the truth of our existence, he mustconcern us, whether we like it or not. Does Nietzsche share the responsibility forthe kind of modern mankind we are? Where does he stand as a thinker? We cannever find an answer to this question by focusing intently on Nietzsche's per-sonality, by accumulating reports about him and by having recourse to the mostpenetrating psychology. Only the reflection of his philosophical thought canexperience where Nietzsche is located in the history of western thought andgains a glimpse of the seriousness of his questions. Even if we diligently andhonestly strive for this understanding we find ourselves in danger. Nietzsche is athreat to everyone, not only to the young person who is defencelessly exposedto his scepticism, his abysmal suspicion and his art of psychological seduction.


Nietzsche is not only dangerous because he is a pied piper, because the music ofhis language is so persuasive. He is dangerous rather because of the uncannymixture of philosophy and sophistry, of original thought and radical scepticismof thinking against itself. Nietzsche is the philosopher who places the entirehistory of philosophy in question and who sees in this philosophy a 'deeplynegative movement'. Nietzsche does not follow the path broken by centuries offundamental thinking. Nietzsche questions this path and attacks metaphysics ina way that differs from the affirmation of everyday life or from the sciences.

His attack on metaphysics does not proceed from a pre-philosophical sphereof being; he is not 'naive'. In Nietzsche thinking itself turns against metaphysics.After 25 centuries of a metaphysical approach to being Nietzsche searches for anew beginning. In his battle against western metaphysics he still remains tied toit, he only 'inverts metaphysics'. However, the question which is posed in thisbook is whether Nietzsche is merely the inverted metaphysician or whether anew ontological understanding announces itself through him. This questioncannot be answered briefly and decisively. We must rather engage in a long andinvolved reflection. Following the paths of Nietzsche's thought, we mustimmerse ourselves in his work, and, finally and most importantly, we must arguewith him.

We attempt a preliminary interpretation. In a concentrated journey throughNietzsche's writings we will firstly expose the fundamental features ofNietzsche's thought. We will then pose the question how these fundamentalfeatures relate to the basic questions of traditional philosophy. Do they show thefeatures of a metaphysical inquiry or not? This will prepare the question aboutNietzsche's new ontological understanding.

We are looking for the philosophy of Nietzsche, which is concealed in hiswritings by his dazzling language, his seductive stylistic power, his unique aphor-isms, and behind the fascinating personality which repeatedly demands atten-tion. However, before we look for his philosophy we must obviously already havea preconception of what philosophy is. We are not searching blindly and withoutguidance nor do we rely on the assurances of the author about his understand-ing of 'philosophy'. The preconception that guides us all is - in accordance withour historical origins - that of metaphysics, which Nietzsche is challenging. Wefind ourselves in a peculiar situation. In searching for Nietzsche's philosophy,we may have lost the thread, the thread of Ariadne, which could guide us intothe labyrinth of Nietzsche's thought. With what legitimation do we speak about'philosophy' if Nietzsche casts off an entire tradition? Should we not invent andcoin a new word to designate whatever Nietzsche's philosophy is? However,Nietzsche's thinking, which passionately questions an entire historical age, doesnot deny the origins of occidental philosophy. Nietzsche returns to Heraclitus.His battle begins with the Eleatics, against Plato and the metaphysical tradition

The fundamental equation of being and value 7

originating from him. The primordial origin of Nietzsche's philosophy remainsHeraclitus. After 2500 years a repetition of Heraclitus occurs accompanied bythe tremendous assertion to wipe out and oppose the extended reflection of anentire tradition formed in the meantime and to show humanity a new yetancient path. This stance towards history illustrates Nietzsche's exaggeratedmissionary consciousness, his feeling of destiny, as he expresses it in Ecce Homo;

I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory ofsomething tremendous - a crisis without equal on earth, the most profoundcollision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everythingthat had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I amdynamite.1

2. THE FUNDAMENTAL EQUATION OF BEING ANDVALUE. THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY

FROM THE SPIRIT OF MUSIC

Nietzsche's philosophy is hidden rather than evident in his work. To be surephilosophy is hardly ever objectively present and accessible to everyone in itsliterary form. Accordingly, there is a peculiar tension between the utterance, thecommon meaning of the words, and the philosophical thought. Nietzsche's'philosophy', however, does not just show aspects of such concealment. Rather,it is hidden in a work appearing under many guises. It is obscured by his culturalcritique, by his psychology, by his poetry, and it is concealed beneathNietzsche's masks, beneath the manifold roles and characters he plays. It isovershadowed by his 'literary trickery' which is acquainted with every device ofcharm and seduction. It is distorted by the immoderate subjectivity of theauthor, and by a never ending, painful self-examination. Nietzsche, who oftengets caught by the resentment of thinking against itself, states on one occasion:

If thinking is your fate, revere this fate with divine honour and sacrifice to itthe best, the most beloved.2

Nietzsche's fateful existence is respected most if we search for his philosophyin the labyrinth of his work. Is Nietzsche's disdain for metaphysics really to betaken seriously, or is it only an arrogant prejudice? His attacks on occidentalphilosophy from Parmenides and Plato onwards are certainly not the expressionof a radicalism that finds the ontological question of metaphysics wanting orthat wishes to overcome this philosophy because it does not pose the question ofbeing in a sufficiently decisive manner. Nietzsche rejects metaphysics and its


concept of philosophy from a quite different perspective. Metaphysics is under-stood 'morally', not ontologically. For Nietzsche metaphysics is a process of lifein which above all 'value judgements' assert themselves, a movement in whichcrippling, subjugating, life-denying 'values' achieve supremacy.

Metaphysics is understood as a process of life which Nietzsche assessesaccording to its value. He views metaphysics through the 'perspective of life'.Nietzsche considers the ontological reflections of metaphysics in respect of theirsymptomatic importance. The distinction between appearance and thing-in-itself expresses a declining passion for life. A life which no longer feels at homein the sense-world invents itself an 'otherworld' beyond appearance. Nietzschedoes not examine or evaluate the ontological representations of the meta-physical tradition, but sees them merely as symptoms of vital tendencies. Inother words, he does not himself pose the question of being - at least not in thetraditional way. The question of being gives way to the question of value.

Nietzsche's own unreflected basic presupposition must become an explicittopic of our interpretation. Nietzsche himself passes over the ontological ques-tion of value and poses questions about the unclear basis of the phenomenon ofvalue. The philosophical significance of Nietzsche's categories, his main con-cepts of cultural critique, psychology and aesthetics, can only be understood iftheir foundation, the interpretation of being as 'value', is clarified. In order toarrive at an interpretation we intend to present the work of Nietzsche in acompressed overview and highlight its basic features. The extent of Nietzsche'sliterary work was only possible through a remarkable productivity that createdworks in quick succession. The 27-year-old Nietzsche, who had been professorof classical philology at the University of Basle for two years, wrote his first workThe Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music in 1871, the first Untimely Meditation,namely David Strauss, the Confessor and Writer in 1873, On the Use and AbuseHistory in Regard to Life in 1874, Schopenhauer as Educator still in 1874, RichardWagner in Bayreuth in 1876, Human, All Too Human in 1878, Miscellaneous Beliefsand Sayings in 1879, The Wanderer and his Shadow, which was later combined(1886) together with Miscellaneous Beliefs and Sayings as the second volume ofHuman, All Too Human; Daybreak appears in 1881, The Gay Science in 1882, thefour parts of Zarathustra between 1883 and 1885, Beyond Good and Evil in 1886,On the Genealogy of Morals in 1887, The Case of Wagner, The Twilight of the Idols,The Antichrist, Ecce Homo and Nietzsche contra Wagner in 1888. Nietzsche'sbreakdown in 1888 propelled him into darkness. In less than twenty yearsNietzsche pours out his works; his production has an eruptive character. A rangeof important treatises was finally published from his posthumous writings, inparticular The Will to Power.

On many occasions attempts have been made to order Nietzsche's literarywork chronologically to show an evolution within his thought. Accordingly, one

The fundamental equation of being and value 9

often speaks of Nietzsche's romantic period, which is characterized by The Birthof Tragedy and the Untimely Meditations. This is followed by a critical, more soberperiod, in which Nietzsche closely approaches positivism. With Dawn and TheGay Science a new existential sentiment announces itself. These books sup-posedly express an expectant mood and return towards himself. Nietzscheexperiences an 'advent', which then finds its first fulfilment in the fourthperiod of the Zarathustra. The fifth period (Beyond Good and Evil and On theGenealogy of Morals) again forms a preparation to a final period (The Will toPower), the non-poetical, reflective completion and final form of Nietzsche'sphilosophy. The value of such a schema, which operates mainly with bio-graphical concepts presenting the spiritual history of his life, is doubtful. Thisdevelopmental schema does not establish if the temporally later is necessarilyalso substantially more important. A path of life is conceivable in which athinker falls down from an achieved height, shrinks back from his own audacityor sinks to his knees.

Accordingly, we would like to focus on Nietzsche's works outside their bio-graphical context and investigate their basic features. We start with The Birth ofTragedy from the Spirit of Music. This book is firstly an act of homage to RichardWagner, an interpretation of his musical drama as an all-inclusive work of artcomparable to the classical drama. Nietzsche's understanding of tragedy isbased on a fundamentally new view of the classical world. Later in lifeNietzsche's judgement about the book became quite severe: it seemed to himspoilt by a 'reliance on Wagnerism', by confusing the understanding of theGreeks with the phenomenon of Wagner, a phenomenon which was by nomeans a 'symptom of ascent' but rather the opposite, a sign of decline.Nietzsche's later re-evaluation of his first book is indeed fitting. The glorifica-tion of the Wagner opera overshadows the basic feature of the book, demotes itso to speak to a preliminary reflection.

The genuine problem is Nietzsche's essential conception of the tragic.Regardless of whether Nietzsche portrays the classical tragedy correctly, heexpresses at any rate the central concern of his philosophy for the first timethrough it. He formulates his philosophy within aesthetic categories. The truenature of reality is seen through the phenomenon of the tragic. The aestheticmotif assumes the position of a basic ontological principle. Art and tragic poetrybecome the keys that unlock the essence of the world. Art becomes the instru-ment of philosophy. It is understood as the deepest, most authentic approach, asthe most primordial form of understanding. The concept can, at best, follow it.Understanding becomes immediate only where it commits itself to the moreprofound vision of art and reflects its creative experience. Although Nietzschefollows the classical ontological insight that the beautiful is a mode of being, hedoes not achieve a conceptual, ontological grasp of the phenomenon of the


aesthetic. On the contrary: Nietzsche expresses his fundamental vision of beingin aesthetic categories. This lends a romantic character to The Birth of Tragedy,Nietzsche calls it a 'metaphysics of the artist'. Art achieves supremacy. Theworld is understood through art and in relation to it. In this context art is notonly, as Nietzsche puts it, 'the genuine metaphysical activity of man', but, moreimportantly, a metaphysical revelation of being in its entirety. Only the perspec-tive of art allows the thinker to look into the heart of the world. However, it isessentially tragic art, the classical tragedy, which possesses this quality.Nietzsche grounds the authentic nature of art in the tragic. Tragic art grasps thetragic essence of the world.

The tragic is Nietzsche's first fundamental formula for his ontological vision.For him, reality is the conflict of primordial opposites. Already at the start of hisphilosophical path the tragic pathos puts Nietzsche in an irresolvable conflictwith Christianity. Christian dogma with its necessary idea of redemption doesnot only contradict Nietzsche's instincts, it contradicts his basic sentiment, thebasic mood of his life and of his experience of reality. The tragic world does notknow any redemption, any salvation of the finite being from its finitude. Itknows only the inexorable law of universal decline of the individual existenceand of everything that has been severed from the teeming All-life. In this tragicview of the world, life and death, the ascent and decline of all finite beings,embrace each other.

The tragic pathos is no passive pessimism: Nietzsche is struck by this and itprevents him from being a mere successor to Schopenhauer. The tragic senti-ment of life is rather a yes-saying to life, a joyous affirmation even of the terribleand horrible, of death and decay.

It is, however, wrong to interpret this as a heroic attitude, as reckless courage.Tragic affirmation (including even the affirmation of one's own destruction) isbased on the realization that all finite manifestations are just temporal waves in agreat flood of life, that the destruction of finite being is not simply an annihila-tion, but a return to the ground of life from which all individual beings ascend.The tragic pathos lives through the knowledge that 'all is one'; life and death arefundamentally related and embraced by a mysterious circle. Where one ascends,the other must descend; all forms emerge through the destruction of others.Where the one steps into the light the other sinks into the night. However, lightand night, appearance and the shadow of the underworld, ascent and decline,are only aspects of one wave of life. According to Heraclitus, the way up anddown are one and the same.

The tragic pathos understands the identity of Hades and Dionysos. Nietzschediscovers the playful encounter of form and the amorphous flux of life in theclassical tragedy. He discovers Peras and Apeiron, finite being consecrated todecay in the infinite ground and the abyss itself which brings forth ever new

The fundamental equation of being and value I I

forms. He calls this antagonism the opposition between the Apollonian and theDionysian.

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche deals with this distinction in a genuinelyantithetical manner, as if the Apollonian and the Dionysian were simplyopposed. Later on, this original antithesis is grasped in a more radical waythrough the inclusion of the Apollonian itself into the Dionysian. Infinite lifeitself is the building and creative force which produces forms and destroys themagain. Towards the end of Nietzsche's development the Apollonian is grasped asan aspect of the Dionysian. Looking back at The Birth of Tragedy in Ecce Homo(1888), Nietzsche interprets the discovery of the 'marvellous phenomenon ofthe Dionysian' as the decisive feature of his first work. We find here a mostinformative comment:

I had discovered the only parable and parallel of my intimate intuition inhistory.. .3

Is this only an 'intimate' existential experience of Nietzsche, the person, con-firming his position as an outsider in a distant historical past? Or is Nietzschethe medium of a new ontological experience? To begin with, it must remainundecided what value, rank-order or relevance this 'intuition' has. Nietzscheexpresses it as a theory of art, which in turn has the form of a psychology of art, apsychological analysis of mutually opposing artistic drives combining in theunity of the tragic art-work.

The aesthetic values, as stated further in Ecce Homo, are 'the only valuesrecognized in The Birth of Tragedy'*. One can pose the following question: DidNietzsche not damage his philosophical problem through the aesthetic-psychological approach in this first work much more than through 'Wagner-ism'? This is indeed so, but it is no mistake which could be counted against him.The basic equation 'being equals value' characterizes his philosophy. It cannotbe ignored without ignoring Nietzsche on the whole. It is his basic, operativepresupposition. Perhaps all human philosophy is a finite patchwork wherefundamental assumptions always remain obscure.

In the Attempt at a Self-Criticism drafted in 1886, as well as in Ecce Homo,Nietzsche erases all the 'Wagnerism' and places the emphasis on the discoveryof the Dionysian and its opposing phenomenon. The latter, however, is not theApollonian, since Nietzsche has already included it in the concept of the Diony-sian. The playful antithesis between Dionysos and Apollo is grasped as a com-plex unity. The opposite phenomenon of the tragic world view, of this deepestview of the cosmic essence, is Socratism, the advent of 'logic', the advent ofrationality without a vision for the 'life' teeming behind appearances, creatingand destroying them.


'What', Nietzsche asks, 'is the significance of the tragic myth for the Greeks intheir best, their strongest, their most courageous period? And the tremendousphenomenon of the Dionysian - and, born from it, tragedy - what might theysignify? - And again: that which killed tragedy, the Socratism of morality, thedialectics, frugality, and cheerfulness of theoretical man - how now? Might notthis very Socratism be a symptom of decline, weariness, of infection, of theanarchical dissolution of the instincts?'5

Just like tragic pathos, Nietzsche understands Socratism as a fundamentalhuman stance, as the so-called 'scientific' relation to being. Looking back afterfifteen years, Nietzsche states that in The Birth of Tragedy science is posed as aproblem,

What I grasped then, something terrifying and dangerous, a problem withhorns, not necessarily a bull, nevertheless a new problem: today I would saythat it was the problem of science itself - science for the first time madeproblematic, worthy of questioning.6

Such an inquiry into science is not self-evident, it is not a problem which scienceposes itself. For Nietzsche, science as a whole (with all its problems) becomesworthy of questioning. It becomes problematic and suspect when it is contrastedwith the different truth of the tragedy, which sees through all appearance andsuperficiality to discover the creative and destructive play of life called Dionysos.Nietzsche thus approaches science from the perspective of art, and art in turnfrom the perspective of life.

With the title 'perspective of life' we refer to a fundamental characteristicthroughout Nietzsche's entire thought. It is only comprehensible if the conceptof life remains primarily guided by the tragic experience, by the tragic revela-tion, by an ontological understanding of tragedy, i.e. by the knowledge of thenothingness of all finite beings and the infinity of the Dionysian world-ground.All too often and for mainly polemic reasons Nietzsche himself conceals hisdeep and abysmal concept of life beneath a biological concept. His reliance onDarwin is not to be taken seriously. His concept of'life' is only understood if hiskey-concept of the 'tragic', the antithetical play of the fundamental powers ofthe world, Apollo and Dionysos, is grasped. Although Nietzsche also operateswithin aesthetic and psychological categories, and even says in 1888 about TheBirth of Tragedy that it provided the first psychological analysis of the tragic poet,we must recognize that in reality he is concerned with something entirely differ-ent. He is concerned with a primordial experience of Being, with an ontologywhich is merely concealed by psychology and aesthetic theory. In Ecce Homo hecalls himself the first tragic philosopher, and refers, across the metaphysical andscientific centuries back to his kinship with Heraclitus:

The psychology of art and art as cognition of the world 13

Before me, this transposition of the Dionysian into a philosophical pathos didnot exist: the tragic wisdom was absent - I have looked in vain for signs of iteven amongst the great Greek philosophers, of those in the two centuriesbefore Socrates. I retained some doubt in the case of Heraclitus, in whoseproximity I feel altogether warmer and better than anywhere else. The affirm-ation of passing away and destroying, which is the decisive feature of aDionysian philosophy, saying Yes to opposition and war; becoming, along witha radical repudiation of the very concept of being - all this is clearly moreclosely related to me than anything else thought to date.7

3. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ART AND ART AS COGNITIONOF THE WORLD

From the start, Nietzsche's distinctive approach unfolds as part of an aestheticand psychological problem. A strong feeling of alienation from the tradition ofconceptual, ontological reflection ensures that Nietzsche dispenses, indeedmust dispense, with the tools and methods of classical philosophy. Accordinglyhis thinking hides itself behind aesthetics and psychology. This concealment ismaintained for some time. Since all of Nietzsche's aesthetic-psychological con-cepts resonate as it were with the energy of philosophical inquiry, they are alsooverloaded, exaggerated and deceptive.

'What found expression here was anyway', Nietzsche says fifteen years later,'. . . a strange voice, the disciple of a still "unknown God", one who concealedhimself for the time being under the scholar's hood, under the gravity anddialectical ill humour of the German, even under the bad manners of the Wag-nerian . . . a mystical, almost macnadic soul ... It should have sung this "newsoul" - and not spoken. What I had to say then - too bad that I did not dare say itas a poet: Perhaps I had the ability.'8

The Birth of Tragedy displays a strange methodological character which isdifficult to comprehend. A fundamental philosophical thought is disguised inpsychologizing aesthetics and turns aesdietics at the same time into an instru-ment of philosophy. Nietzsche has a vision of the cosmos as tragic play. In histragic vision of this cosmic essence, he refers to the tragic artwork as just that'key' that unlocks and opens up its true understanding. The aesthetic theory ofthe classical tragedy discloses in this way the essence of being in its entirety. Theaesthetic occurrence of the birth of tragedy out of the spirit of music reflectsthe primordial event of the birth of the anthropocentric world, unfolding fromthe chaotic, primordial ground into a multitude of forms. The 'tragic' is under-stood as a cosmic principle. In outlining a theory about the origin of the Attictragedy, Nietzsche reveals his 'intimate intuition'. He projects himself into the


Greek world and interprets himself from that perspective. He recognizes himself(not personally, but through his tragic cognition of the world) in the Greeks ofthe tragic age. The rejection of Nietzsche's treatise by traditional philologists isin some degree justified. No less than Wilamowitz-Mollendorf led a sharpattack against the treatise, which he accused of 'a dreamy ingenuity andimpertinence, ignorance and insufficient love of truth'. However, it rests on themisunderstanding provoked by Nietzsche himself, namely that he was con-cerned with a philological question. The presentation of this treatise differs in allrespects from the level of its actual conception. It appears to deal with aesthetic,psychological and philological problems, but it is in reality Nietzsche's firsttentative attempt to articulate his philosophical understanding of the world.This flaw, which already characterizes his first work, remains a feature ofNietzsche's entire oeuvre despite its significant later developments. It lends aprovocative ambiguity, a mysterious aura and unfathomable depth to his works.However, it does not sound convincing when this proud and self-consciousmind implies with a prophetical smile that he concealed on purpose, that he hadmore arrows in his quiver, that this inadequacy was 'intended' in order toaddress those with ears to hear and those able to read between the lines. Sincehe does not engage historically with metaphysical concepts, yet refuted (and hadto refute) them through his new fundamental intuition, and since furthermorehis conceptual identification of 'logical' with 'abstract' and 'inanimate' makeshim unable to conceptualize his thinking adequately he becomes diverted andhas to philosophize in the guise of an aesthetic theory.

Nietzsche's first treatise shows some distinctive characteristics of his thinkingwith striking clarity. For Nietzsche, intuition is always primary. In The Birth ofTragedy the fundamental thoughts are expressed thetically. They are asserted,affirmed and they obtain a kind of confirmation through their powers ofillumination. The phenomena become illuminated and comprehensiblethrough them. They show the projected outline, the inner plan and structure ofthings. For Nietzsche intuition is an instant view of an essence. It is divination.His most fundamental insights always have the character of illuminations. Thisis not meant in a derogatory sense. Nietzsche distances himself from any specu-lation. His thinking emerges from a fundamental experience that is poetical andsymbolic. Nietzsche is subject to the powers of thinking and poetry, or rather, heis torn apart by their antagonism. However, there is a kinship between hismythical divination and speculative thinking in so far as both 'leap ahead' of thephenomena to be brought into view.

In Nietzsche's first treatise this 'leap-ahead' is very obvious. What looks like aprelude is the heart of the treatise. Nietzsche begins by stating, that it would be again for an 'aesthetic science' if it reached the 'immediate certainty of intuition',and that the continued development of art is connected to the dualism of the


Apollonian and the Dionysian comparable to the reliance of procreation on theduality of the sexes. We already find all the relevant elements in this firstsentence. Nietzsche purports to formulate insights of a science of aesthetics.Aesthetics appears to be the context of his inquiry. Furthermore, he demandsfor his inquiry an 'immediate certainty of intuition'. He proclaims a divineintuition and at the same time alludes to it in a mythical metaphor. The mythicalsymbol is borrowed from the Greeks, who - as he puts it - 'disclose to thediscerning mind the profound mysteries of their view of art, not, to be sure, inconcepts, but in the intensely clear figures of their gods.'9

The 'profound mysteries' of classical art are now brought into view, i.e. theso-called aesthetic theory is extended to include an understanding of the cos-mos supposedly revealed by Greek art. The classical work of art becomes thekey to the classical world view. The Apollonian and the Dionysian are initiallyrevealed as aspects of the artistic drives of Hellenic man. Apollo symbolizes theformative drive; he is the God of clarity, of light, of measure, of shape, of beauti-ful proportion. Dionysos on the other hand is the God of unbounded chaos, ofthe disproportionate, of the teeming flood of life, of sexual frenzy. Dionysos isthe God of night, and, in contrast to the image-rich Apollo, the God of music -not, however, of the strict domesticated kind that is merely a 'Dorianarchitecture of sounds', but of the seductive, evocative music which releases allpassions. Initially Apollo and Dionysos are merely metaphors for the oppositeartistic drives of the Greeks, for the antagonism between image and music. Tofurther clarify the opposition between these artistic drives Nietzsche refers to a'physiological' antithesis in human life. He crosses over into psychology. Theantithesis is restated in the understanding of dream and intoxication. Thedream, as it were, is an unconscious and imaginative human power:

The beautiful illusion of the dream worlds, in the creation of which every manis truly an artist, is the prerequisite of all plastic art . . .10

he states now. The dream creates the world of images, the scene of appearancesand characters. It conjures up the beautiful semblance blessing the soul with aparticular vision. Regardless how arbitrary its plot, the dream is a creative vision,a formative force, which creates images over and over again. Apollo, statesNietzsche, was recognized by the Greeks as the power creating the imaginaryworlds of man's dreams. But he is an even more powerful force. And hereNietzsche suddenly leaps out of the psychological interpretation of dreams:Apollo creates not only the world of images in human dreams, but also the worldof images, which man usually takes to be reality. Apollo, the God of form,Nietzsche says, should be called 'the glorious divine image of the principiiumindividuationis, through whose gestures and eyes all the joy and wisdom of


"illusion", together with its beauty, speak to us.'n How is this to be understood?The principiium individuationis is the basis of the individual separation of allbeings. Things are in space and time. They are collectively in space and timeprecisely because they are separated from each other: wherever one ends theother begins. Space and time join and divide at the same time. What we com-monly call things or beings is an incalculable manifold of all that is differentiatedand detached, yet jointly gathered in space and time. The world-view whichaffirms the division of being, its multiplicity and separation, is caught in anillusion - as Nietzsche following Schopenhauer believes. It is unwittingly misledby the veil of the Maja. This illusion is the world of appearance which weencounter through the subjective forms of space and time. The world as itreally is, as 'thing-in-itself is not dispersed into a multiplicity, but is an undif-ferentiated life, a unified flux. The multiplicity of being is an illusion, a mereappearance. In truth all is one.

It is of utmost importance to remember that Nietzsche's point of departure isSchopenhauer's distinction between thing-in-itself and appearance, betweenwill and representation. Interpreted psychologically this distinction resurfacesas the one between dream and intoxication mentioned above.

Nietzsche follows Schopenhauer particularly in the remarkable leap from thehuman dream to the dream of primordial being itself at the beginning of The BirtTragedy. He thus extrapolates a finding from the psychology of human artisticdrives to a principle of the world summoning Schopenhauer as a crown witnessfor this view. What was initially a human tendency becomes an ontologicalpower. Nietzsche thinks analogically here. The dream of human imagination iscomparable to the ontological power creating appearances and images calledApollo. This power of beautiful semblance creates the world of appearance.Individuation and separation are an Apollonian mirage. In this analogypsychology is transformed into a peculiar metaphysics.

The same analogy applies to intoxication. Initially it is regarded as a humanphenomenon, as that ecstatic condition in which we feel that all confines fallaway and we step out of ourselves, become unified with all being, flow and sinkinto one infinite sea. But it suddenly assumes a cosmic significance: Man 'is nolonger an artist, he has become a work of art: in these paroxysms of intoxicationthe artistic power of all nature reveals itself to the highest gratification of theprimordial unity.'12

Intoxication is a cosmic ecstasy, a bacchantic frenzy which explodes, ripsapart, assimilates all appearances. It is the great elan of life. It transcends allfinitude and individuation. The Birth of Tragedy is indeed a 'metaphysics of theartist', an aesthetic interpretation of the world in its entirety. The two compet-ing fundamental forces of being reveal themselves through art as it were. Artbecomes a symbol. In one unified, magnificent and autonomous vision


Nietzsche's art-metaphysics introduces itself complete in its basic form alreadyat the beginning of the book. No attempt is made to demonstrate the pathleading to these assertions. At no point do we encounter a reflection if theunderlying ontological conception is justified or not. One is amazed atNietzsche's uncritical reliance on Schopenhauer. A critical and suspicious spiritsuch as Nietzsche displays an astonishing degree of naivety in the area of onto-logical reflection, in regard to fundamental ontological concepts. Nietzsche doesnot in any way assess and scrutinize Schopenhauer's fundamental distinctionbetween world as will and world as representation. He has no assessmentcriteria for it. He does not think in a speculative way himself. But he fillsSchopenhauer's questionable framework with unprecedented life; he conjuresup mythical symbols and interprets Greek art through them as a key to theessence of the world.

Furthermore Nietzsche describes the development of classical Greek cultureinfluenced by the great forces of art. The Apollonian struggles with the Diony-sian and vice versa. There is a hostility between these opposing powers: theydisplace and battle each other, but (and this is Nietzsche's profound insight)neither can exist without the other. Their contest, their dispute, is also a peculiarharmony. They are bound together as contestants. The Apollonian world of theGreek culture, the preference for measure and harmony rests on the suppressedground of titanic formlessness which nevertheless remains present. The Diony-sian is the foundation on which the visible world is based. The Olympian'Magic Mountain' has its roots in the Tartarous. Beyond the world of beautifulappearance lies the Gorgo.

The Greek knew and felt the terror and horror of existence. That he mightendure this terror at all, he had to interpose between himself and life theradiant dream-birth of the Olympians.13

Apollo, however, cannot live without Dionysos. Nietzsche contrasts the naivepoet Homer, the dreamer of the great Apollonian dream of the Olympic Gods,with Archilochos. The lyric poetry of Archilochos has nothing to do with 'sub-jectivity'. This is a modern concept totally inappropriate in this context. Lyricpoetry is the original musical element of art, the Dionysian counter-feature toepic imagery. Lyric poetry resounds from the depth of the world beyond allappearances for Nietzsche. Music and lyric poetry make clear that the truesubject of art is not man, who believes himself to have created it, but the groundof the world itself, which acts through man and makes him receptive to itsforces. The cosmic ground itself searches for 'redemption' from the frenziedrestlessness, avarice and 'eagerness' of a restless 'will' precisely in the deceptionof beautiful semblance, the seeming eternity of form, the firmness of appearance


and the proportionate harmony of things. In truth, human artistic endeavour isa play in which humans themselves are only characters and appearances. From ahuman perspective art is - viewed metaphysically - an 'artistic comedy'.

For to our humiliation and exaltation, one thing above all must be clear to us.The entire comedy of art is neither performed for our betterment or educa-tion nor are we the true authors of this art world.. .. Thus all our knowledgeof art is basically quite illusory, because as knowing beings we are not one andidentical with that being which, as the sole author and spectator of thiscomedy of art, prepares a perpetual entertainment for itself.14

With this view Nietzsche inverts his original approach. He departed originallyfrom the human, artistic drives to establish an analogy for the ontologicalpowers of dream and intoxication (or Apollo and Dionysos) as cosmic prin-ciples. What served as a starting point is now reinterpreted through the attainedresult. Nietzsche arrives at metaphysical principles of the world through thehuman artistic drive, and he now interprets human art itself as a cosmic event.In becoming receptive to the fundamental power of Dionysos and Apollothrough art man becomes the medium and location of a cosmic event.

Nietzsche uses for this the concepts of 'redemption' and 'justification'; theseare concepts which are initially familiar to us through the doctrine of Christian-ity. There can be no redemption in a tragic view of the world. Nietzschetransforms the concepts of redemption and justification, he employs them for aprocess which belongs to the world and contributes to its ontological constitu-tion. The primordial Dionysian ground casts itself repeatedly into appearance.Its emergence into appearance is transfigured in the phenomenon of art. Theworld of appearance is, as it were, the beautiful dream of the cosmic spirit.Eternal form, the beauty of the created appearance, the limelight of the greatstage on which things appear in space and time - this illumination of the abys-mal night is its 'redemption' 'for it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that exist-ence and the world are eternally justified.'15 Like a dark urge redeeming itself inthe image, like the indeterminate yearning presenting itself on the stage of theworld, the happy dream satisfies and art transfigures for Nietzsche the severityand heaviness, the absurd and abysmal character of being.

However, Nietzsche is not satisfied with the opposition of both cosmic andartistic principles, nor does he refer just to their mutual dependency in whichone necessitates and at the same time opposes the other. He rather searches forthe highest unification and interpenetration of the Dionysian and the Apollon-ian and finds this in the classical tragedy. For him this is not an art form whichexhausts and looses itself in beautiful semblance, but, to express it paradoxic-ally, the Apollonian presentation of the Dionysian itself. Beautiful semblance


here resonates with the raging power of the depth it conceals. 'Appearance' istransparent for, as it were, being-itself beyond it and light reveals the shadows ofthe night. Appearance is recognized as such which means at the same time thatit is exposed. The beautiful image reveals the wave which devours it. Tragedycontains both elements: the abyss of the primordial One (Ur-eine) which dis-closes itself only in music and the luminous dream world of appearances.Apollo and Dionysos form a 'brotherhood', as Nietzsche calls it: 'Dionysosspeaks the language of Apollo; and Apollo finally the language of Dionysos.'16

The tragedy is music and image, dream and intoxication, form and chaos, lightand night, appearance and essence, more precisely the disclosure of the cosmicessence.

Based on this view of the tragedy as an Apollonian-Dionysian artwork,Nietzsche develops a theory of the historical development of the Attic tragedy.He postulates music as its basic feature, which he finds in the chorus. The musicof the chorus creates the vision of the dramatic scene, which is entirely con-cerned with the sufferings of Dionysos. Oedipus and Prometheus are masks ofthis God. Nietzsche is convinced that all tragedies reveal one mysterious truth,namely 'the fundamental knowledge of the oneness of everything existent, theconception of individuation as the primal cause of evil, and of art as the joyoushope that the spell of individuation may be broken in augury of a restoredoneness'.17

Nietzsche's hypothesis about the development of tragic poetry may be ques-tionable. A philological profession may reject it. His interpretation of the chorusor his identification of Wagner's opera and Greek tragedy may be problematic orhis psychology concerning the associative connection between music and imagemay be spurious. All this is of minor importance. What matters is that Nietzschegives an interpretation of the world and constructs a schema of being in itsentirety in his theory of tragedy.

The vagueness of Nietzsche's concept of the Dionysian ground is largelyresponsible for the difficulty in understanding The Birth of Tragedy rather thanthe unclear methods, such as the use of analogy as a tool of knowledge. Themeaning of the Apollonian, the principium individuationis, is more easily graspedgiven that we live in a world where things and human beings are individuated.But the ground of this world of appearance, the essence behind the manifold ofbeings, remains peculiarly foggy. Nietzsche adopts Schopenhauer's term 'will'while taking over his distinction between essence (thing-in-itself) and appear-ance. He expresses the primordial One18 through ever new images and meta-phors: he speaks of the core of being, of the bearers of being, of the primordialOne and of the living One. The dimension of Dionysos is mystically intuitedrather than conceptually grasped. It almost has the dubious character of an'Other-world'.


For this reason, Nietzsche could say in Thus spoke Zarathustra (alluding to TheBirth of Tragedy):

Once Zarathustra too cast his deluded fancy beyond mankind, like all after-worlds-men. Then the world seemed to me the work of a suffering and tor-mented God. Then the world seemed to me the dream and fiction of a God;coloured vapour before the eyes of a discontented God.19

4. 'SOCRATISM' AGAINST TRAGIC WISDOM.CONCERNING TRUTH AND FALSITY IN THE

EXTRA-MORAL SENSE

The Birth of Tragedy is a peculiar book. A thinker makes his debut as a philologistwith a questionable interpretation of the stylistic elements of Greek tragedyfrom a new view of classical antiquity. He psychologizes and exaggerates psy-chological concepts to cosmic dimensions. He proclaims - based on Schopen-hauer's philosophy - an alternative sentiment of life and attempts to interpretRichard Wagner, a phenomenon of the present, through reference to the mostdistant past of classical antiquity. The book wishes to achieve too much at once,it is so to speak overambitious. Yet, it pays remarkably little attention to its mostimportant concern. It seems as if Nietzsche is not yet able to articulate hisinsights directly so that he needs to take roundabout ways. However the casemay be, Nietzsche's first work appears to be a symbol. It expresses and conceals,insinuates and remains silent. For him philosophy is tragic wisdom, the essentialunderstanding of the primordial strife between the opposing principles ofDionysos and Apollo, the intuition of the strife between the all-bearing, all-devouring, formless foundation of life and the domain of light forming theappearances. Or in other words: Philosophy is the grasp of the eternal discordbetween all-unity and individuation, between the thing-itself and the appear-ance, between dream and intoxication. It is the grasp of the dismemberment ofbeing as a whole20 into the opposites of night (in which all is one) and day(where all appears individually). The ancient motif of the strife between dark-ness and light dominates Nietzsche's fundamental conception. When he laterattributes his revelation to Zarathustra, this is not only necessary because thisPersian must be the first to revoke his own moral dualism, but becauseNietzsche's Zarathustra remains true to the original Persian motif of the strifebetween darkness and light in his tragic, Dionysian wisdom.

In The Birth of Tragedy, ait becomes the instrument of philosophy. Art is notonly the theme of philosophical interpretation but its instrument and method.Nietzsche's interpretation of tragedy already relies on a tragic understanding of

'Socratism' against tragic wisdom 21

the world. He uses the 'perspective of art'. From this perspective he sees theenemy and opponent of the tragedy: Socratic reason which killed - in his words- the classical Greek tragedy. Socrates marks the end of the tragic age andintroduces the age of reason and of the theoretical man. According to Nietzschethis involves an enormous loss of world. Human existence looses its sensitivityfor the dark aspect of life, looses its mythical knowledge about the unity of lifeand death, looses the tension between individuation and the primordial unity ofthe ground of life and becomes superficial, trapped in the appearances, yetsupposedly enlightened. For Nietzsche Socrates is a world-historic figure of aGreek enlightenment in which the classical existence did not only loose itsremarkable instinctive reliability, but even more relevantly the ground of its life,its mythical depth.

Nietzsche's intuition and his astute perception recognize the enormous his-torical importance of Socrates. However, his interpretation exhausts itself inpsychological terms. Perhaps Nietzsche foresaw that we are concerned here witha change in our ontological understanding, that in the disputes between thesophists and Socrates western thinking was turning towards anthropology andmetaphysics and that this constitutes an event, which indeed can hardly beoverestimated. The philosophical perspective is accordingly redirected awayfrom the ruling entirety of the cosmos to inner-worldly (ontical) being for thenext 2000 years. Nietzsche recognizes the key position of Socrates but he graspsit within psychological concepts. According to Nietzsche Socrates denies theGreek essence, rejects Homer, Pindar, Aeschylus, Phidias, Pericles, Pythia andDionysos. However it seems that this rejection of Greek tradition originatesfrom some extreme, individual, psychological characteristics. Socrates appearsto Nietzsche as a paradigmatic example of an unauthentic Greek, who isdriven by an enormous need and characterized by a complete lack of 'instinc-tive wisdom'. In Socrates, Nietzsche alleges, only the logical and rational sideof the spirit was developed excessively. Socrates did not possess a mysticalorgan. He was the original non-mystic. However, he was obsessed by the driveto change everything into something rational, logical and thinkable.21 Socratesappears thus to be a rational demon, a human being in whom all desire andpassion was sublimated into a will for rational structure and domination ofbeing. Socrates was the inventor of the 'theoretical man'. With this he intro-duced a new type, a new ideal and seduced the Greek youth and in particularthe magnificent Greek adolescent Plato. Socrates created the delusion thatthinking according to the principle of causality could reach into the mostunfathomable depth of being. The theoretical cognition of the world, whichNietzsche extracts from his psychological analysis of Socrates, does not onlyfunction as a contrast to an artistic mode of life, but Nietzsche alleges that theabsolute domination of 'theory' constitutes a hidden assertion of a tendency of


art. Nietzsche writes that 'in the logical schematism the Apollonian tendencyhas disguised itself22.

The theoretical cognition of the world is based on a weak and impotent art-istic drive. The logical concept is as it were the withered and dried leaf whichonce grew as metaphor on life's 'golden tree'. A theory, a conceptual fiction canbe interpreted from the perspective of art because it conceals an artistic drivedespite the fact that it is removed from its antithetical tension with the Diony-sian and consequently increasingly impotent. According to Nietzsche, theoryand science are comprehensible from the perspective of art, but not vice versa.Nietzsche's view of Socrates is not only problematic because of his psycho-logical approach. The assumed absolute identification between the Socratic andPlatonic concept of 'theoria' and a general scientific tendency in the modernsense is even more questionable. Nietzsche conflates essentially two differententities: classical theory and nuova scienza. The way in which Nietzschedescribes the decline of the tragedy brought on by Socratic rationality and theway in which he attributes the victory of the logical over the mythical drive toEuripides appear irrelevant to our main concern.

The interpretation of the tragedy reaches its climax towards the end of thebook which understands the tragic myth's mode of existence. The antagonismbetween Apollo and Dionysos, between thing itself and appearance, betweendream and intoxication is understood as a unity of an antithetical, basic devel-opment. Existence can only be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon. Art trans-forms being. Not only the beautiful in its ordinary understanding, but also theterrifying, the ugly, the horror of existence are moved towards a splendid trans-formation. In art, the primordial ground of being encounters itself, perceivesitself through the images of beings.

Nietzsche approaches this riddle through the phenomenon of dissonance.The tragic reality consists in the fact that we desire 'to simultaneously perceiveand yearn for a transcendence of perception' just as in musical dissonance we'listen and yearn beyond listening'. Nietzsche believes that in dissonance andtragic myth we encounter analogical Dionysian phenomena. This encounter'continuously reveals the playful creation and destruction of the individualworld as flowing from a primordial desire, comparable to the comment byHeraclitus, the dark, who likens the world creative power with the power of achild who moves stones and builds sandcastles only to destroy them again'.23

Being in its entirety, the world as a whole is at play. The realm of individuation,the appearance of the many individual things in their distinctive beauty andhorror is - considered as a whole - a beautiful semblance perceived by the tragicvision, or, as Nietzsche puts it, 'an artful play, which the will plays with itself forits own infinite fullness of pleasure'.24


The ontological distinction between 'will' and 'representation', thing itselfand appearance which Nietzsche borrows from Schopenhauer is not taken as ademarcation of two distinct realms but is interpreted as a dynamic and as a cre-ative process. The primordial ground plays the world, it creates the manifold ofthe individual things like artists creating artworks. Or better: the activity of theartist, the creative process, is only a reflection, a poor replication of the originalpoeisis of cosmic life. Tragic art becomes an ontological symbol for Nietzsche. Thereality, the essence of being is conceived through art. Like man the re-creativeartist is redeemed in his creativity through the work of art. Like the beautifulsemblance of an art-work that transfigures suffering and ugliness alike, the cre-ative ground of the world achieves a temporary repose and rest through the beau-tiful semblance of the manifold appearances of finite beings. However, the prim-ordial ground does not only play with creation but also with destruction. The seedof decline is already implanted in all becoming. The pleasure of death and decayresonates in the pleasure of generation and love. The crucial characteristic of thisbasic conception is firstly Nietzsche's transformation of Schopenhauer's schema.For Schopenhauer, the will, the blind drive towards life, is the only true reality.The world as representation only exists for the human mind. The subjective formsof intuition, space and time, have no metaphysical reality but are only at home inthe human spirit. The world as representation exists accordingly only for man.

Nietzsche distances himself from this conception. The primordial grounditself playfully creates the world of appearance. This world is a product ofits artistic drive and a way to encounter and affirm itself. Yes, one may evenbe justified to say that the will comes to itself, becomes conscious of itself,takes possession of itself through consciousness and redeems itself in beau-tiful 'semblance'. The appearance is accordingly necessary to ensure the self-consciousness of the will. The will must alienate itself in order to own itself andreunite itself from this alienation in order to realize its self-consciousness.Nietzsche assigns tragic art to the realm in which true Being gains self-consciousness. The tragic play achieves the cosmic realization of being itself. InEcce Homo Nietzsche remarked much later about this characteristic of cosmicself-consciousness in The Birth of Tragedy that it smelled 'offensively Hegelian'.25

The second characteristic factor of this book is the exposure of primordialreality through the metaphor of play. Nietzsche discloses a central and funda-mental concept of his philosophy that reaches back to Heraclitus already here.What is meant by play and how it is to be ontologically determined or con-ceptualized in more than a witty metaphor is not yet obvious. Ultimately,Nietzsche's concept of play unifies the opposition of Dionysos and Apollo andconstitutes the reluctant synthesis of two fundamental powers. The unity ofopposites is articulated but is not grasped adequately in any ontological concep-tion. The metaphor of the 'world as play' remains at first a grand intuition. The


concept of play becomes for Nietzsche later in retrospect a first formula for his'innocence of becoming', for a view of the world which opposes all Christianand moral interpretations, for a holistic view of being beyond good and evil.'Indeed', he writes in 1886, 'the entire book only knows an artist's sense anddouble-meaning beyond all appearance, a God if you like, but certainly only anentirely questionable and immoral god of the artist, who wishes to becomeconscious of his own magnificence and pleasure through generation anddestruction, through good and evil, who world-creating, is redeemed from theneed of fullness and plentifulness, of suffering from the oppressive oppositeswithin itself.. ,'.26

The Birth of Tragedy contains almost all elements of Nietzsche's philosophy.For the first time and with the appeal to an original and fresh intuition itdevelops the contrast between the Dionysian and the Apollonian, develops theperspective of art and the perspective of life derived from it and displays ananthropomorphic metaphysics which looks at first sight strange and arbitrary.This book practises the art of suspicion in the attack on Socratism. It alsointroduces the fundamental concept of play - reminding us of Heraclitus.

From Nietzsche's posthumously published work we know the treatise Con-cerning Truth and Deception in the extramoral sense written, but not published in1873. Truth and deception do not refer to any conscious human behaviour butto a moral issue. The treatise deals with the role of the intellect in the world.Moral truth and untruth are determined within an understanding of the worldin the human mind. However, the extent to which the mind itself is true, theextent to which it aims at real truth are different matters. Perhaps the mind withall its pursuit of truth is more radically false. Yet, from which perspective doesNietzsche intend to judge the truth and untruth of the mind? Does he occupy aplace outside the mind from which he could view it? It is remarkable thatNietzsche never poses this question, that in his aesthetic vision of the primordialreality of 'becoming' he seems so certain about his intuition. With a kind ofcruel irony Nietzsche presents the pitiful, contemptible and superficial charac-teristics of human cognition. He cites as it were a nature-historical aspect:

In some remote corner of the universe of innumerable, shimmeringly dis-persed solar systems there was once a planet on which clever animals in-vented cognition. It was the most arrogant and untruthful moment of worldhistory.. ,27.

However, this external biological view is only an intellectual way of discussingthe intellect. Nietzsche does not fall into the traps of the natural scientist. The'deception' of the rational mind is grounded in the inability to understandthe metaphysical rather than the biological concept of life. At the same time


Nietzsche interprets the role of cognition pragmatically. Reason serves the willto live. It is based on a life-preserving illusion. The arrogance of the cognitiveanimal convinces it of its existence and seduces it towards it. The most universalcharacteristic of reason is deception, a clever cunning which assists the survivalof the fittest. This tendency attains its fulfilment in man where the art of decep-tion reaches its climax. Nietzsche refers here sarcastically to the futile play of themany human vanities, to the flattery, lies and deceptions and the pretencesabout oneself and others. He poses the question how in such a context thegenuine, pure drive for truth could emerge. Normally we perceive thisirreconcilable contradiction: reason is an instrument of clever cunning or vainpretence is opposed to the integrity of the will to truth. However, Nietzsche triesto reflect beyond this distinction here and tries to substantiate that the drivetowards truth flows from the instinct towards disguise.

One basic aspect emerges in this approach for the first time which is going tobe crucial later. Although the development is still elementary at this point it is atthe same time clear in its original intention. Nietzsche proceeds from language.Language is seen as a convention which occurs when a peace pact is made in thebattle of all against all. According to Nietzsche language essentially conceptual-izes conventions and constitutes agreement about henceforth valid significa-tions. However, how does the sign or the word relate to the thing itself? Are theytrue? Nietzsche denies this:

The development of language has no logical determinants. The entirematerial within and with which the human being, the scholar, the philosopherworks, creates derives, if not from cloud-cuckoo land, certainly not from theessence of the things themselves.28

This conception of language may seem questionable. For now, Nietzsche'stheory of language or concepts are not relevant but we need to focus onwhat is responsible for the 'deception' of language, the 'deception' of theconcepts - deception understood in the extra-moral sense. 'Truths are illusionsof which one has forgotten that they are illusions.'29

The subconscious use of words and concepts, i.e. the forgotten history oftheir dubious development, is the condition for an honest, scientific commit-ment to truth. The scientist uses concepts without being aware any longer thatconcepts are only empty metaphors devoid of sense. The logical commitment totruth is - according to Nietzsche - only the withered remnant of an originallyartistic, that is sensual encounter of man with a dazzling world. The concept isthe empty shell of a metaphor once inspired by intuition. Nietzsche contraststhe scientific man who remains blind to the falsity of the concept with theintuitive, artistic mind. The former has retreated into a shell and believes that


concepts are the things themselves. The latter knows the untruth of all conceptsand metaphors, but he relates freely, creatively to reality creating its images.Compared to the logician and the scientist the intuitive person or the artist is thehigher type for Nietzsche. For Nietzsche he constantly attacks conceptualconventions. He is no longer guided by 'concepts but by intuition'.

From these intuitions no regular path leads into the land of the ghostly sche-mata, the abstractions. For these the word is not made, man becomes silentwhen he sees them - or speaks in all sorts of forbidden metaphors and unheardof conceptual constructs in order to at least correspond creatively to theimpression of the powerful intuition created by a destruction and a ridicule ofthe old conceptual limits.30

Does Nietzsche's discussion of truth and deception make any proper sensegiven that he as it were inquires into the truth of the human cognition and thusquestions a kind of meta-truth? His fictional theory of cognition serves reallyonly as an illustration for Socratism. Nietzsche judges in favour of the artist andagainst the 'theoretical' man.

Art seems to be the true method of philosophy because the primordial groundof being itself playfully creates the world like a 'primordial artist'.

Wherever an intuitive man uses his weapons more powerfully and victoriouslythan his enemy (as in classical Greece) a culture may be formed by itself atbest to create the domination of art over life.. . .31

For Nietzsche culture is intimately connected with the striving of the cosmic willto reach self-consciousness in the tragic human work of art. The essence ofculture is the genius. The genius is a human being who has become the focus fora justification of being in the beautiful appearance of an aesthetic phenom-enon.32 Nietzsche thus portrays culture in two small fragments (from the time ofThe Birth of Tragedy) entitled Greek State and The Greek Woman with an almostinhuman bluntness. He formulates the 'cruel sounding truth', that 'the essenceof culture demands slavery'33 that is the sacrifice of the majority to serve thecreation of the genius. This has nothing to do with social arrogance. Nietzsche'sconcept of culture is grounded in a fundamental understanding that the world istragic. He considers the 'breathtaking' thought 'that the will (in Schopenhauer'ssense) perhaps manifests itself in these worlds, stars, bodies and atoms in orderto come to art'.34 Nietzsche's concept of culture and the metaphysics of thegenius underpinning it are inseparably linked to his metaphysics of the artist.

Untimely Meditations. Culture and Genius 27

5. UNTIMELY MEDITATIONS. CULTURE AND GENIUS.PHILOSOPHY IN THE TRAGIC AGE OF THE GREEKS

The concept of the genius accompanies Nietzsche's intimate intuition of cosmictruth. He finds it confirmed in the two passionately revered figures of Schopen-hauer and Wagner. The genius can not be understood by its merely humancharacteristics. The genius is not the great human being which is quantitativelydistinguished from his fellow humans through a number of steps. It is not themost developed type, no ideal type, but rather a human being that is subject tothe superhuman and to a cosmic mission, a human being yet a destiny. For theearly Nietzsche the concept of genius is a forerunner of the overman. 'Great-ness' is primarily a mode of truth. It opens up the reality of the Dionysian playand its manifestations of word, appearance and music. The 'great' human beingis only understood through that which manifests itself in it. The genius is aninstrument of the creative ground of life, which reflects and represents its ownessence in the artistic creation. Without this basic connection of the genius to acosmic tendency Nietzsche's conception of culture would be inhuman andabsurd.

Like his concept of the overman, Nietzsche's concept of the genius mustultimately be understood and interpreted via the human dedication to truth.Truth here does not refer to scientific cognition but to the tragic intuition of thecosmic ground. This conception of the genius as a mouthpiece of a cosmictendency and of culture, as an interpretation of life and world that is accom-plished in a unified artistic style by the genius, this conception is repeatedlyconcealed by Nietzsche himself through the superficial, simplifying heroism ofthe genius. Nietzsche's cult of the genius often assimilates traces of a hero wor-ship. His superhuman understanding of genius and his function in a unified,primordial will of the world is almost obscured by the emphasis on a 'greatness'which portrays itself as a human achievement. The pathos of distance, of socialrank order determines the theory of culture on the surface.

We have identified here an essential feature of Nietzsche: his concept of thehuman being is ambiguous. He is torn between a purely anthropocentric con-ception distinguishing the extremes of the creative and impotent type, thegenius and the herd member and a more profound conception of humanity,which transcends humanism and understands man through his cosmic missionin which he becomes the medium of universal truth. This tension in the conceptof the human being remains always alive in the development of Nietzsche'sphilosophy. Although he inquires into the 'great man' whenever he wishes toexpress the essence of humanity his exposition of human greatness vacillateswithin the mentioned ambiguity. In Nietzsche's first period however, it isclear that his metaphysics of the genius is firmly based on the general


artistic-metaphysics of the cosmos, that the concept of culture is firmly based onthe tragic world-view. His concern for cultural regeneration should be under-stood from this aspect. Despite its foundation on Schopenhauer's dogma,Nietzsche positions himself already against it. Nietzsche also distinguishes him-self from Schopenhauer in his conception of appearance which he interprets asan Appollinian expression (rather than as a mere fiction of the human intellect)which is established and created by the cosmic, Dionysian ground. The latter is- although an illusion - not nothing.

A further distinguishing mark is a more significant understanding of time.Time does not only exist for the intellect but designates a mode of being of thecosmic ground. The Dionysian play is pure becoming. Because it is rooted in thecosmic ground time is significant for the realm of appearance. The historicaldevelopment of culture is the human response to the reality of the Being as playas disclosed by the genius. This is the fundamental horizon of Nietzsche's phil-osophy of history. Even as a cultural critic Nietzsche can only be understoodthrough interpreting these concealed ontological and fundamental thoughts.

Nietzsche's theory of culture is at once a diagnosis and a programme. TheBirth of Tragedy unfolds his understanding of the cosmos and establishes a cen-tral concept of culture. His portrayal of the 'tragic age' of the Greeks with its'mythical groundedness', its comprehensive artistic style, its creative productiv-ity, its self-representation in the tragic work of art give his thought its directionfollowed further by the Untimely Meditations. The first Untimely Meditation,David Strauss, the Confessor and Writer, is not only an attack of an 'educationalphilistine'. It is more: it is an attack on the complacent and self-satisfied Germanculture. Nietzsche's subsequent comment becomes true in retrospect: he onlyattacks things which are victorious. After the war of 1870-71 and the success ofthe new German empire and its emerging culture, the German Bildung*^ whichhe regards - as he puts it in Ecce Homo - with merciless contempt appears to himdevoid of 'meaning, without substance, without aim; a mere public opinion'36.His polemic treatise against David Straufi establishes a contrast to true cultureand shows that true culture can not and is not meant to exist. The critique ispoignant and cutting.

A more fundamental critique also dominates the Untimely Meditation, Con-cerning the advantage and disadvantage of history in regard to life. This work isconcerned with a critique of'historical meaning' as an indication of the declineof culture. The hidden theme of the book is human historicity. The critique ofculture engages with the decay of historical meaning, with the exaggerated turnto the past which erodes the vitality of a culture. Nietzsche distinguishes threepossible modes of historical engagement: the antiquarian, the critical and themonumental history. The first corresponds to a preserving and reverential kindof person or to a humanity which lives entirely in the past and takes its lead from


a tradition. Life becomes essentially a remembrance and a recollection. Thebasic attitude of critical history on the other hand opens itself to the present andmakes this the standard for the past judging history from the horizon of thepresence. The approach of monumental history projects itself into the future. Alife which sets itself great aims has a sense for comparably audacious attempts ofthe past. The visions of the past reveal themselves only to those with a deter-mined will to a future. Where the vital plan, the projection of life into the futuredeclines the assembly of historical knowledge becomes a burden or even a dan-ger for life itself. In this case man only learns to surrender in the face of history.The futility of all plans and the life which is no longer sustained by intentions tocreate its own future escapes into the past and seeks to forget its own emptinessin the remote richness of a past life. This work is not only important because itexposes the dangers of an excessively historical culture, but because it interpretsthe temporality of human existence. The human being is not merely ready tohand in the dimensions of past, present and future like other things. Thesedimensions are rather horizons which are kept open by the human being itself indifferent ways.

In the other two Untimely Meditations, Schopenhauer as Educator and RichardWagner in Bayreuth, Nietzsche portrays the genius which symbolizes the centralessence of a culture. He does not simply refer to the present culture (the geniusis 'untimely' in relation to his respective contemporary culture) but rather to afuture culture. In retrospect37 Nietzsche comments that Schopenhauer andWagner only served as 'occasions' in these two essays 'to make a few moreformulas, signs and means of expression available'. Plato used Socrates in simi-lar ways to express himself. Schopenhauer and Wagner refer to 'Nietzsche, inone word'. However, the meaning of the essays is not exhausted by Nietzsche'spsychological identifications, by the allegorical use of two figures. Nietzschedepicts his vision of a future culture in the way in which he depicted the possibil-ity of the greatest culture of history in The Birth of Tragedy. The ambivalencewhich overshadows all Untimely Meditations is created by the implied, silentmetaphysics of the genius expressed so clearly in The Birth of Tragedy. On thewhole the presentation of culture remains within the domain of the 'merelyhuman'. The cosmic and instrumental function of the genius remains seeminglyobscure. As a result a superficial reading gains the impression of an extraordin-ary idolization of the genius. In addition Nietzsche seeks an argument. Hewishes to assault the 'democratic' levelling tendencies of the time. He is fever-ishly ready to attack and fight, his 'wrist is dangerously loose'.38 This is a clearexample how Nietzsche's writing and his desire for the spectacular endangershis philosophy. On the whole, Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations belong to hisfirst period. The metaphysics of the artist underpin them even though thisremains implicit. In discussing 'culture' Nietzsche does not betray his original,


metaphysical approach and his debt to Schopenhauer. Although his approachhas a human focus this is not an anthropology removed from metaphysics as weencounter it in Nietzsche's second period. Culture is not merely a human prod-uct. The saint, the artist, the leader and the human genius influence and form aculture. They are the instruments of a divine power which the cosmic groundcreates in order to encounter itself. The genius is the caretaker of the truth of theprimordial cosmic ground, the location of its revelation.

Nietzsche's first period sketched here from its metaphysical aspect and itsconcept of culture is essentially determined by Nietzsche's view of the problemsof Greek culture and philosophy. In his profession as a classical philologistNietzsche already engaged with Greek philosophy extensively. He did not onlywrite a treatise on Diogenes Laertius, an important traditional source for Greekphilosophies. He also gave repeated lectures on the 'Pre-platonic Philosophers'and further an 'Introduction to the study of Plato's dialogues' during his time inBasle. Furthermore, he compiled different sketches made between 1872 and1875 (including the small essay Philosophy in the tragic age of the Greeks written inthe spring of 1873) into a 'book on philosophy'.

Nietzsche's engagement with Greek philosophy is rather peculiar. Its funda-mental ontological problems do not seem to concern him. He is almost blind tothem. He is influenced most by Heraclitus and identifies the essence of theprimordial ground in accordance with Heraclitus as 'play'. NeverthelessNietzsche's concept of play is radically distinct from Heraclitus. It is mostimportant that Nietzsche perceives a historical break between Socrates andPlato and the thinkers preceding these. Nietzsche's uncanny instinct for thetragedies of the spirit senses a deep rift here. However, he does not expressclearly what constitutes this rift. The philosophers preceding Plato and Socratesare called 'tragic'. Are they tragic because they lived and thought in the age oftragedy or are they themselves inspired by (what Nietzsche calls) the brother-hood of Dionysos and Apollo in the tragedy? Does the tragic understanding ofthe world determine their thinking? The philosophy of the tragic age disap-peared because of the dialectic of Socrates akin to the tragedy itself which dis-appeared because of the Socratism of Euripides' 'rational' muses. ThusNietzsche attributes a change of view and method to human influence here,when this change should perhaps be understood more profoundly as a change oftruth itself to which humanity reacts and which humanity follows. The heroic,tragic pessimism is contrasted with an optimistic confidence; artistic intuition iscontrasted with the assembly of concepts, vision with dialectic. In other words,Nietzsche's characterization of the difference between Pre-Socratic and classi-cal Greek philosophy occurs entirely within anthropological, often psycho-logical categories. The contrast between Nietzsche's intuition of this differenceand its interpretation is very peculiar. We can also sense this contrast in his


relationship to Greek philosophy as a whole. Nietzsche feels its unique import-ance, feels the greatness of its origins, but he understands it in a way whichobliterates the ontological questions entirely. He sees the classical spirits as'great men' or as 'personalities' of unique stature. He appears to have an aes-thetic interest in them. He does not believe in the truth of their systems; he onlyaccepts these as evidence for their rich lives.

Whoever enjoys . . . great men at all also enjoys such systems even if they arewholly mistaken: they have some point which is completely irrefutable, apersonal mood, a colour, one can use it to gain an image of thephilosopher . . . .3<i

Nietzsche uses the system to sketch the image of the creative personality.Did the classical thinkers use their 'personality' perhaps to think the essence ofbeing? Nietzsche tells the story of these philosophers in a 'simplified manner'.He simplifies and obliterates subtleties and distorts unbearably - and yet hiswork is characterized by a peculiar aura. Nietzsche talks about his spiritual idols.The idolized portrait of every thinker whom he describes includes an aspect ofhis own life. The Greeks symbolise the daring courage to lead the radical philo-sophical life and make it visible even in the style of their dress. They create thesage, a new mode of existence manifesting itself in manifold and fundamentallydistinct ways. He sees the richness of intuition, the rigorous demand forautonomous thinking in all respects and the re-evaluation of the importance andvalue of Being. He interprets the history of these thinkers as a 'profound spirit-ual dialogue': 'A giant calls the other through the desolate intervals of theages.'40

In particular, Nietzsche questions these philosophers about their judgementsof the value of existence. These judgements are more important to him than anyjudgement from enlightened times as they are based on the tragic experience.For Nietzsche, they heal and purify Greek culture, thus occupy a role akin to hisown in regard to German culture. Nietzsche finds 'metaphors', immediate intu-itions spoilt by reflection in the great thoughts of the Pre-Socratics. Thales had avision of the unity of being and expresses this vision in the symbol of water.Nietzsche interprets the great allegories of Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus,Parmenides and Anaxagoras. The centre of the work is the exposition ofHeraclitus. Parmenides is emphasized strikingly to provide a contrast.

Anaximander is interpreted morally. He was supposedly 'the first Greek tocapture the complexity of the deepest ethical problem in a daring grasp'. Dikeand Adikia are interpreted as fundamental moral concepts, in which the guilt forthe existence of being is determined. It is particularly obvious here howNietzsche transforms (and perhaps must transform) all ontological questions


into questions of value. Nietzsche believes he encounters his own questions inHeraclitus. Heraclitus denies constant being, recognizes becoming and the flowof time as the true dimensions of 'reality'. He is also sensitive to the polarizedtension between the opposites within the temporal flux. Nietzsche believes thatthe Heraclitean opposites are precursors to his own opposition betweenDionysos and Apollo. More specifically he finds an interpretation of a reluctantunity of opposition in the fundamental concept of play. How can the One existconcurrently with the many?

Nobody with dialectical intuition can guess or seemingly calculate the third,solely remaining possibility for Heraclitus: what he found here is rare even inthe area of the mystically unbelievable and the unexpected cosmic metaphors.- The world is the play of Zeus or expressed physically, the play of fire withitself; the one is only in this sense concurrently the many.41

Heraclitus illustrates the transformation of one fire into the manifoldness ofthings in a 'sublime metaphor'. Nietzsche writes:

In this world only the play of the artist or the child compare with this becom-ing and decay, this building and destruction, without any moral responsibil-ity, in eternally identical innocence. And just like the child and the artist, theeternally living fire plays, builds and destroys innocently - and in this eternityitself is at play.42

Nietzsche's interpretation of Heraclitus thus focuses on the fragment 52(Diels): 'Aion Pais esti Paizon, petteuon; paidos he besileie,/Etermty is a child atplay, playing draughts: the kingdom is a child's'43.

Heraclitus' concept of play becomes Nietzsche's deepest intuition for thegrandly symbolic and metaphorical nature of the cosmos. He feels a kinshipwith him in the 'fundamental aesthetic conception of the world at play'. 'Whathe saw' - Nietzsche says with greatest sincerity - 'the doctrine of the law withinbecoming and of the play within necessity, are from now on eternal visions; herevealed the greatest spectacle.'44

Nietzsche establishes a contrast to this view of Heraclitus which in its oppo-sition is equally revealing. Parmenides relates to Heraclitus like ice to fire, likelogical concept to intuition, like life to death. Nietzsche does not understandParmenides' originality because he fails to see the speculative depth of the onto-logical problem altogether. 'Being' is only an abstract term for a fiction ofhuman imagination, for an ideal object without corresponding reality for him.Being is something fixed, immovable, rigid, lifeless and opposed to becoming forhim. Nietzsche has made no attempt to overcome the common dichotomy and


to think the opposition between being and becoming from within the onto-logical problem. Accordingly, he interprets Parmenides as a thinker who isfrozen in his lifeless abstractions. He invokes all kinds of colourful metaphors toillustrate the distance between mere concept and life.

But nobody tackles such terrifying abstractions as 'Being' and 'Non-Being'without punishment; the blood curdles if one touches them. . . . Truth is nowsupposed to live only in the most pale, most abstract generalities, in the emptyshells of the most indeterminate concepts like in a house of cobwebs. And thephilosopher sits next to such truth similarly bloodless like an abstraction andtrapped in formulas.... A Greek was able in those days to flee from anexcessive reality as if from a mere pretentious schematism of imagination intothe rigid deadly calm of the coldest, most empty concept of being.45

This is how Nietzsche views Parmenides. He draws an unprecedented carica-ture of highest symptomatic significance. Nietzsche opposes the Eleatic alreadysharply in his first period where he attempts to think metaphysically and wherehe constructs his metaphysics of art on the basis of Schopenhauer's philosophy.A main reason why Nietzsche does not carry his intuition of the Dionysian andApollonian play beyond a poetic image - introducing with this a reorientationthat leads to his second period - may be this very denial of an ontologicalconcept.

CHAPTER TWO

Nietzsche's Enlightenment

1. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF UNMASKING AND THESCIENTIFIC PERSPECTIVE. HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN

Human, All Too Human and to a certain extent also Dawn and The Gay Sciencerepresent Nietzsche's second period. This commences suddenly and appears tobe a sudden interruption of the original path of thought or even a radical turn.Nietzsche appears to deny everything he has asserted so far. He destroys whathe worshipped and worships what he destroyed. His positions seem to beinverted. However, it is a question whether the second period signifies as it weresimply a new, opposing world-view of the thinker extinguishing the earliermotives of his thought, or whether it constitutes a more profound developmentof thought, that is the unfolding of an original intuition.

We only indicate our concern about the usual, biographical interpretation ofNietzsche's thought with this question. To be sure, Nietzsche's second periodconstitutes a biographical break, a deep or possibly irreconcilable rift. It hoststhe inner separation from Wagner and the turn away from Schopenhauer, thatis a farewell to the 'heroes' of his youth that he worshipped with burningenthusiasm and in whose name he only succeeded to articulate his newconceptions.

Biographically, Nietzsche awakes from the romantic dream of his hero wor-ship. A cooler, colder atmosphere surrounds him, he gains a distance to hisidols, and he becomes emancipated to become himself. He discards the clichesof Schopenhauer's metaphysics and Wagner's worship of art and searches for anew, individual expression. To be sure, he already had expressed a differentsentiment of life and a different existential mood on the basis of Schopenhauer'smetaphysics and had replaced passive pessimism with a tragic attitude overcom-ing the flight from the world with the transfiguration of the world through art.But he also changes Schopenhauer's ontological conception, firstly throughtracing 'appearance' back to a cosmic tendency. The primordial One im-merses itself in the appearance. The appearance is the Apollonian dream of theDionysian ground of the world. On the other hand Nietzsche engages more

The psychology of unmasking and the scientific perspective 35

profoundly with the essence of time than Schopenhauer. Time is not just anintellectual form of intuition but the mode in which the primordial cosmicground is at play for Nietzsche. The inner confrontation with Schopenhauerand Wagner leaves a concealed and hidden stage and comes to an obvious, acutecrisis in Human, All Too Human. When Nietzsche sends the book to Wagner hereceives - as he puts it - 'through a miracle of significant chance' a copy ofParsival with the dedication: 'to his valued friend Friedrich Nietzsche fromRichard Wagner, Church Councillor'.

This crossing of the two books - It seemed to me as if I heard an ominoussound. Did it not sound as if two swords were crossed? In any case both of usfelt that way, because we both remained silent.1

Human, All Too Human has an important place in Nietzsche's spiritual his-tory. In Ecce Homo he refers to this work retrospectively as the 'monument of acrisis'. He understands this to refer to a liberation from the bounds of reverencewhich held him captive for too long and prevented him from seeing the indi-vidual and autonomous mission of his own life. Nietzsche himself gives a bio-graphical account, an existential interpretation for this sudden 'break' andchange in his philosophy on numerous occasions. Are the biographical motif ofself-realization, the emancipation from Wagner, the change from a reverentialtendency to a self-assertion or the temporary influence of his friend Ree thereasons for his intellectual change? If this were the case then thoughts would bemere reflexes, documents, expressions and symptoms of a psychological history.They would have little to do with truth, but would be mainly traces. Systemswould be mere manifestations of 'personalities' in which the 'great man' revealshimself. Nietzsche attempted to understand the Pre-Socratic thinkers in thisway. His anthropological approach remained infinitely distant from thePre-Socratics. He remained engaged in sophistry.

Like perhaps no other philosopher, Nietzsche understood and interpretedhimself almost exclusively biographically. Every book talks about his life, hisexperience, his loneliness or his self-doubts. Sometimes one has the feeling ofattending an enormous self-exhibition and self-display, a peculiar, dazzling mix-ture of confession and posture which can be equally interesting and disgusting.Nietzsche lifts the tone of the spiritual biography - and even more so that ofthe autobiography.

One may be tempted to apply the biographical method to Nietzsche himselfand to use it as the key to detect the changes in his thinking. We regard this as awrong approach.

Nietzsche is two-headed: he is a philosopher and a sophist. He did notdevelop sophistry as the art of disputation, not on the rhetorical level. He

36 Nietzsche's Enlightenment

developed it as a prophetic art. Thoughts are no longer primarily true or false;they are symptoms of life, they are revealing symbols of an existence. Nietzschepractised an 'existential sophistry' with much virtuosity. If, however, he was notmerely a sophist but also a thinker and if a question assumed the power over himto guide his life then any changes in his thinking would need to be grasped in amore profound way. They would need to be related back to the demands of thesubject matter itself which asserts itself in Nietzsche's philosophical thinking.This is initially a demand. It only tries to challenge our complacency in regard toa biographical approach.

Purely superficially Nietzsche's second period appears to be an inversion ofthe first. The latter contained a fundamental distinction between the primordialground and the realm of appearance. Religion (understood in the Greek sense),metaphysics and art were considered as ways to approach the essence of thecosmos and as infinitely superior to all science. The Greeks, Schopenhauer andWagner were the trinity of true understanding for the early Nietzsche. And nowall this is inverted. Science, critical reflection, methodical critique assume theleading roles now. Metaphysics, religion and art become subjected to theirjudgement. They appear to be no longer the fundamental modes of truth butillusions in need of destruction. Socratism, the theoretical man, pure cognitionand anything else Nietzsche ridiculed mercilessly in The Birth of Tragedy, nowappear of the essence and determine the pathos of the entire book. Nietzschebecomes a champion of 'enlightenment'. He even dedicates the first edition toVoltaire, 'one of the greatest liberators of the spirit'. However and very import-antly, Nietzsche's enlightened stance focuses its attention and its questions onthe human being. Nietzsche's thinking turns into anthropology. It is no longerprimarily a contemplative expression of universal truth and the resulting humancondition but it focuses on the human condition first and interprets being fromthis aspect. This human focus is accompanied by a change in the concept of life.Life is no longer understood metaphysically or mystically as universal life tran-scending the appearances but it is interpreted as the human life and furthermoreas a biological concept.

This change in Nietzsche's basic view is initially incomprehensible. Does itsimply constitute a return to the domination by the world of appearance? CanNietzsche simply forget his metaphysics of the artist and return to an innocentperspective? Surely not! His enlightenment is after all a battle against his veryown approach determined by the tragic age of the Greeks, by Schopenhauer andWagner and the conception of an intelligible world-as-such beyond the appear-ances. Now he denies this distinction between a primordial One, the thing itselfand the appearances. His argument is directed at this difference. In Human, AllToo Human the aggressive attitude against the two worlds and against 'other-worldliness' already resonates through the enlightened pathos. Here we find


prototypal expressions of what he will call later the apology of man and thedeath of God. Nietzsche's change comes as a surprise to all. Its inner work-ings are not easily understood. Its enlightened rhetoric conceals rather thanclarifies it.

Nietzsche now proclaims the supremacy of science. He will use it to examineand judge the claims of religion, metaphysics and art. This examination takes apeculiar form. It occurs as an unmasking. He does not use any particularmethods of any particular science but his tools are analysis and history in gen-eral. 'Analysis' includes the critical deconstruction of a seemingly simple phe-nomenon into a complex formation of multiple levels of relationships. Itincludes the infinite resolution of the threads of a web, the patient and discip-lined pursuit of a well-concealed subject and the investigation of the surface tothe point of transparency. Nietzsche believes that the traditional philosophicalapproach suffers from a genetic defect. After all, traditional philosophy onlyconsiders the human being of the last four thousand years, that is the product ofhistorical conditions, of morality, religion, etc. Nietzsche demands a 'historical'philosophy which refuses to believe readily in 'eternal facts' and 'absolutetruths' but understands man as the product of history. Philosophy is supposedto become analytical and historical and in summary: 'scientific'. The vaguenessof Nietzsche's continuous reference to science is remarkable. Strictly speakinghe does not refer to any of the positive sciences but to a general, approximatetype of inquiry and critical examination. Science is essentially critical forNietzsche. However, he envisages a critique of traditional philosophy, religion,art and morality.

Accordingly, science does not refer to an inquiry into any region of reality butto the exposition of the deceptive characteristics of those human attitudes iden-tified by him in his first period as the primordially true approaches to the uni-versal essence. Nietzsche believes that he can expose these scientifically througha psychological analysis of illusion. As in The Birth of Tragedy he uses psychologyas a conceptual method. On this occasion, however, it is not a speculative butrather a destructive and an unmasking psychology. It is not readily available likea tool which one can just use. Nietzsche has the questionable honour to be theinventor of a particular, sophistical psychology which explains matters ab inferi-orf. This is often regarded as a great achievement. To us it seems to be a trulysophistic and an unphilosophical aspect of his works. Nevertheless, we can notjust ignore it as unimportant because Nietzsche generally expresses his phil-osophy through psychology, that is through his own peculiar sophistry. Thebasic characteristic of his psychological analysis is the assertion of a 'genealogy'of the ideal derived from its opposite, namely of the derivation of right fromcommon utility, of truth from a deceptive, illusionary instinct and of holinessfrom the very unholy basis of vengeful drives and instincts. He analyses the great


human sentiments critically, suspiciously and vengefully and exposes them as'higher forgeries' or in brief as 'idealism'. The book is a sharp, a cutting andindeed a cynical rejection of any form of idealism. In Ecce Homo he writes aboutit: 'Wherever you see ideals, I see human, all-too-human things.'3

Accordingly, the title should not be trivialised, as if it was concerned withweakness, with pettiness or with the insignificant machinations of human van-ities. Its basic theme is rather the so called 'super-human' which is in truth onlyan all-too-human illusion. Contrary to the view of the metaphysician, thehuman being cannot grasp the heart of the world. He cannot recognize the thingitself because the belief in a thing itself which exists beyond the appearances(and is initially concealed from our view although disclosed throughphilosophy) is a metaphysical superstition.

We regard all things through the human mind and cannot eliminate thismind. But anything that has made metaphysical assumptions valuable, terrify-ing, pleasurable was created by passion, error and self-deception. The worstmeans of cognition, not the best have compelled us to believe them. Ifone exposes these methods as the foundations of all actual religions andmetaphysical systems one has refuted them.4

Nietzsche leads his battle with the psychological exposition of the evolution ofmetaphysics, religion, art and morality from the largely concealed, subconsciousinstincts and desires of man. A psychological clarification constitutes already arefutation for him. He does not examine the truth of religion or metaphysics.This question is dismissed at the mere possibility that the search for truth isbased on motivations within life which are not disinterested but aim for redemp-tion or the like. This interestedness or this yearning for redemption leadNietzsche to the immediate conclusion that the metaphysical will to cognition ismerely a disguised desire, an all-too-human need.

Nietzsche's psychological interpretations have an element of cunning: theunmasking and the revelation of disguises and masks allow him to expose anycontrary evidence simply as deceptive. For example: Altruism is merely thedisguised form of a subconscious egoism. The psychology of the hidden motiv-ations can bring anything hidden to light. No argument can be successfulagainst this approach because any contradiction can be 'unmasked' and thusovercome. One can merely question the entire style of such a psychology ofsuspicion.

The psychological destruction of metaphysics which Nietzsche undertakesprimarily in Human, All Too Human is directed against Schopenhauer's firmdistinction of thing itself and appearance which in turn is a very rough renditionof a Kantian conception. Nietzsche's psychological attack is accordingly


directed against a crude form of metaphysics and does not meet the enemy inhis strongest position.

And yet, we should not underestimate this attack. Perhaps it conceals morethan a 'psychological unmasking', perhaps Nietzsche's enlightenment is a sur-face phenomenon which hides a deeper truth? Coming to Nietzsche from hisfirst period one tends to be at first profoundly disappointed about his turn.Despite all the sophistic psychology his thinking seems peculiarly 'shallow',narrow-minded and all too trivial. He has lost the great inspiration and he doesnot live through one fundamental experience. He has become 'critical', engagesin a sobering analysis of man and limits his view to the human perspective. Manbecomes the basis of all questions. His method assumes the characteristics of auniversal argumentatio ad hominem. How does this affect metaphysics?

Metaphysics appears to be an enormous fiction, a dream invented by man or aliving lie with which he consoles himself and through which he copes withfinitude and gives his existence an absolute meaning. Metaphysics - Nietzschesays - can be called 'the science which deals with the basic human errors,however, as if they were basic truths'.5

Nietzsche gives a number of subtle, psychological interpretations of themetaphysical need for consolation. He intends to show how human needs andyearnings underpin all metaphysical concepts - even such concepts as thing,substance and freedom of will. Nietzsche believes that the psychologicalanalysis of religion, art and morality will make metaphysics trivial, yes, boringin future. It is only of vital significance if it remains related to the basicconcerns of the human heart and provides these with a conceptual frame-work. On its own, metaphysics becomes a meaningless repetition ofunfounded reflection.

Nietzsche sees metaphysics now only as a tool of life or as a way of deceptiveself-interpretation. He likens it to the romanticism of the adolescents who valuemetaphysical explanations because they expose a deeper meaning even in thedeplorable and unpleasant aspects of life:

if he is dissatisfied with himself, this sentiment is relieved if he recognizes theinner cosmic riddle or cosmic suffering in that which he rejects within him-self. To experience himself more irresponsibly and to find at the same timeeverything more interesting - this is for him a double delight which he owes tometaphysics.6

Metaphysics becomes consequently a spiritual release valve and nothing else.Religion is interpreted similarly as well. Its claim to truth, be it allegorical orliteral is rejected from the start. 'Never has any religion' - Nietzsche says mostemphatically - 'neither mediately nor immediately, neither as doctrine nor as


allegory contained any truth. Because religion is born from fear and need, itsneaked into our life through false paths of reason.'

He gives a similar psychological explanation of the saint, of the ascetic whomhe explains through a lust for power and tyranny against himself, through adesire for revenge, through an enjoyment of great sentiments, through a desirefor pretentiousness and in particular through the misconception that othershave about this failed person. They do not see 'the eccentric, the sick aspect ofhis character with its combination of spiritual poverty, bad understanding,eroded health, exhausted nerves'7. This example already shows Nietzsche's styleof analysis and psychological explanation. One feels immediately that thismethod is dangerous and questionable. Soon one recognizes the illusion whichdominates this sobriety, namely the enlightened belief that all 'striving for thesuper-human is an idealistic self-deception'. Nietzsche seems to have lost thesense for human greatness. He has an almost heroic desire to deny, to profaneand to attack any human ideals. He invents a psychology of metaphysical andreligious need for consolation which could hardly be more sceptical and moresuspicious. Metaphysics and religion can only exist so long as man does notknow himself and remains alienated from himself. The spirits disappear with thepsychological understanding of the self.

Nietzsche demands a philosophy of consistent and active disappointment. Hedemands a human return from the cloud-cuckoo-land of the ideal in a numberof variations.

Compared to the first period even art is now interpreted differently. It is nolonger a mode of profound cosmic understanding. It is primarily the self-exhibition of the artist. Inspiration is no longer viewed as a flash of deepestinsight into the heart of the world but as a kind of spiritual burst, as a suddenrelease of long-stored energies, as a release with a highly complex and to inno-cent minds hardly transparent structure, which is often all too easily understoodas a 'miracle' and a manifestation of a strange power. According to Nietzscheart, the vital illusion which seduces us towards life, is in the grip of metaphysicsand religious illusions. It transforms and even solidifies them.

One does not admit it without deep regret that the most inspired artists of alltimes just elevated those representations to a divine transfiguration that wehave recognized to be false: They glorify human religious and philosophicalerrors and they could not have existed without believing their truth. If thebelief in these truths, the rainbow colours surrounding the extreme boundariesof human cognition and aspiration decline, such art can never flourish again.'8

The role of the genius is also perceived differently and more soberly. Nietzscheargues polemically against his own earlier view in which the genius had a cosmic


function and his education remained the purpose of any culture. He rejects suchthings as 'superstition'. He puts the scholar, the scientist on a same level withthe artist, indeed, he even ranks them higher since they are not deceived bymetaphysical delusions. The problem of culture is now posed more criticallyand not in the context of a glorification of the Greeks but as a merely futurehuman aim, that is as a task of humanity liberated from illusions.

Nietzsche's second period is an inversion of the first in almost all respects: theformer viewed the theoretical approach of science from the perspective of art.The latter views art from the perspective of science. However, in both cases wefind the perspective of life. Nevertheless, the concept of life is understood in twodifferent ways: firstly cosmologically and metaphysically and now psychologic-ally and biologically. Man is understood as an animal with ideals. These areallegedly concealed instincts, wishful projections and yearnings. However, themain human psychology is always a psychology of his many metaphysical,religious, artistic, moral and cultural illusions. Man is understood through hisgreat aspirations. Even in its sobering psychological unmasking Nietzsche'smain topic remains the human greatness. However, it is always the philosopher,the saint, the artist and the genius who remain the human mystery. ThusNietzsche's two early periods have something in common here. The existentialsentiment, dominated in his first period by the tragic pathos is now stronglycharacterized by the dissonance of human life resulting from the tensionbetween innocence and critical knowledge. 'We are from the start irrational andtherefore unjust creatures and can recognise this: this is one of the greatest andmost irreconcilable dissonances of human existence.'9

Critical knowledge becomes a power which attacks life itself and destroys itssecurity and its misleading illusions. Nietzsche is conscious of the dichotomybetween life and science and he now opts for the latter. This decision showsitself in the character of the 'free spirit'. Nietzsche invents its marvellous charac-teristics far removed from the common and clumsy free-spiritedness of thetraditional enlightenment and from the deadly serious belief in reason.Nietzsche's free spirit has a distance to himself. He has a daring, ruthless spirit.He is a precursor to the Prince Vogelfrei, to the light-footed dancer and to thepeaceful gaiety and relaxation of Zarathustra. He has a seductive, daring cour-age. He experiments with himself, with the world and with God. He challengeseverything and disregards even the most revered things. He is suspicious like noone else. He practises a psychology of secrecy and ambiguity and brings morethan one background to the fore. He has no inhibitions and no respect, least ofall for those things that are valued by the world. He has a sixth sense for thehidden path of the ideal. He is a hunter pursuing many traces. He has the icycoolness of a relentless thought which 'cuts into life's flesh' and which pursuestruth directly even when this could be deadly.


Nietzsche's character of the 'free spirit' must not be understood as a fixed orstatic attitude. It is a transitional figure. Nietzsche liberated himself spiritually inHuman, All Too Human. The turn away from Schopenhauer and Wagner is notan event in his life but rather and more authentically a turn in his thinking.However, the object and aim of his liberation are not easy to see or to con-ceptualize clearly. Does he merely break with all metaphysics? Does he breakaway from a path leading through the centuries? The fact that he develops nopositive scientific research programme anywhere indicates also that his newlysung praise of 'science' must be regarded with some caution. He unmasks onlyall the idealism and discovers, as he believes, in all human self-transcendencemerely the 'human, all-too-human'.

The book is filled with a peculiar mood of suspense. It is a monument of acrisis, however, not of a static and fixed one, but it expresses as it were a dynamictransition. It articulates a strange philosophy. It gives expression to a first tempt-ing clarity, to a dawn of a demystified world no longer hidden behind a mysticalveil or beyond the metaphysical clouds yet nevertheless itself only provisionaland transitional. It is the hunting ground of the 'free spirit', who is a 'wanderer'and a 'departure on all gates' - who

freely receives many good and light things, the presents of all those free spirits,who are at home in the mountains, the forest and in the solitude and who arewanderers and philosophers like him with an occasionally gay or contempla-tive manner. Born from the secrets of sunrise, they wonder how the daybetween the tenth and twelfth hours can have such a pure, ethereal, trans-figured, gay expression - they are searching for the philosophy of themorning.10

2. THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE MORNING (DAWN AND THEGAY SCIENCE)

The philosophy of the morning, however, which expresses itself in these peculiarwritings by Nietzsche and which we have just summarized under the heading ofa second developmental period (i.e. in Human, All Too Human, Dawn and TheGay Science) is a strange philosophy indeed with hidden depths that do notbecome readily transparent. To be sure, it pretends to be purely prosaic andlucidly clear. It just pretends to be a critique which has become immune todeceptions. It just pretends to be scepticism and deep suspicion, in one word: itjust pretends to be science. Yet at the same time it has already gained an ironicdistance to science and harbours exuberant suspicions against suspicion itself.Despite its entire cool and scientific attitude it is gay. Despite its entire coolnessof the dawn one senses the rising sun.

The philosophy of the morning 43

Nietzsche's second period is perhaps most difficult to understand. It does notonly turn away from the first, but it turns towards a third period, if in a con-cealed and mysterious manner. All the important, basic thoughts are becomingrecognizable and appear on the horizon. They illuminate the attitude of thefree-spirited enlightenment with the deeper, fuller light of the midday. Anaffirmation of Nietzsche's true philosophy slowly rises from the negation ofenlightenment. The second phase appears to be largely transitional.

Nietzsche's philosophy of the morning is documented in a number ofambiguous books. However, they precisely conceal this ambiguity. The 'freespirit' seems to be an enlightened mind. He operates with the cunning of thesnake, with understanding and he unmasks. At first one does not realize that heis himself intoxicated, that the wisdom of this spirit is a bird's wisdom whichtranscends all fixed determinations. One does not realize that his coldness andhis suspicion symbolise a negation which will be replaced by affirmation.Nietzsche's enlightenment is enlightened about itself. It does not believe inreason, in progress and in science with dead-seriousness, but it uses science as away to question religion, metaphysics, art and morality and to transform thelatter into 'question marks'. Whenever Nietzsche's 'free spirit' sings the praise ofscience, he does not forget that science itself is also a problem. He selects so tospeak a 'scientific perspective' because this corresponds to the fundamentalmood which dominates the entire second phase of Nietzsche. Life is an experi-ment. He refers repeatedly and variedly to the experimental character of life, tothe creative risk or to the projections of one's own aims. The free spirit is notfree because it lives according to a scientific experience. It is free because it usesscience to free itself from the existential imprisonment in the ideals by breakingthe domination of religion, metaphysics and morals. The scepticism directedagainst religion, metaphysics and morality uncovers - as Nietzsche believes -their roots and exposes their timidly concealed and forgotten foundations scien-tifically. It does not only intend to 'unmask' and to demonstrate the falseness ofreligion, metaphysics and morality. The leading thought guiding this unmaskingasserts that man has lost himself. He has succumbed to the super-human.Religion, metaphysics and morality are the forms of his servitude. Man worshipsthe divine, adjusts his entire life in accordance with it and forgets that it is manhimself who puts the Gods in his own divine heaven. Man worships his owncreations. The divine is only an illusion of something human, an external mirageof the creative powers of man.

The sobering revelation of the all-too-human foundations of all 'ideals' thusdoes not only lead to a collapse of the religious, metaphysical and moraluniverse which man has erected beyond his existence. More importantly, ittriggers a human conversion, a change of man's fundamental stance, an evolu-tion of his existence. Man must not search for transcendental aims but must


search inside himself. Life no longer has a pre-given meaning, it is no longerbound, it is no longer led by a divine will, it is no longer controlled by moralprecepts, it is no longer determined by a metaphysical world transcendingthe world of appearance. It is not constricted by any superhuman powers, butit has become free. Man understands that existence includes a risk. Lifebecomes possible as an experiment. An entirely new existential sentimentbecomes possible in the form of the greatest spiritual boldness which isdependant on nothing, entirely free to do anything and required to deter-mine its own aim and path. Nietzsche summons this mood of departure orof the highest risk in many ways. He compares himself more than once toChristopher Columbus from Genoa. He steers the human ship into newwaters. He leaves all shores behind to voyage towards eternity itself, whichhovers no longer above man as the God, as the moral law or as the thing itself.Eternity is now discovered within man himself. The human being can transcenditself. The heavenly constellations of idealism are only the projections of thisself-transcendence.

Nietzsche actualizes the experimental style of human existence himself. Heexperiments with the existence of a scientist. In doing this he already has somedistance to such a 'science'. He is no scholar, no researcher, because such aperson - unless he philosophizes - lives in the thematic engagement with hisscience. The natural scientist is absorbed by science. He experiments scientific-ally, but he does not experiment with science itself. However, this is preciselywhat Nietzsche does. He uses the methods regarded by him as scientific todestroy religion, metaphysics and morality. He plays with the scientific pathosand distils this pathos into the character of the 'free spirit'. The science of the'free spirit' is 'gay' - La Goya Scienza. It does not have a heavy, solemn serious-ness, not the conceptual rigidity or the clear engagement with the concealmentof being. He is inspired by - and attuned to the radical emancipation of manfrom the age-old, self-imposed servitude to seemingly strange ideals.Nietzsche's fundamental mood expresses itself in the songs of the Prince Vogelfreiwhich conclude The Gay Science., in particular in the dancing song 'To themistraF. For Nietzsche, dawn is the symbol for the power of his type of science. Itclears away the clouds, the deceptions of'superhuman' powers from the humansky. We quote just two verses:

Mistral wind, you rain cloud leaperSadness killer, heaven sweeperHow I love you when you roar!Were we two not generatedIn one womb, predestinatedFor one lot forever more


Let us break from every flowerOne fine blossom for our powerAnd two leaves to wind a wreath!Let us dance like troubadoursBetween holy men and whoresBetween God and world beneath!11

Unmasking the saint and reducing him to all-too-human needs and misunder-standings in his own 'scientific' way and with his revealing psychology enablesNietzsche to reconcile the difference between saint and whore within the onehuman dimension. Greatness and baseness of human existence are embraced bythe one arch. God and man are no longer separated. Whatever seemed divine orwhatever seemed to transcend man and earth is merely a creation of humanexistence. The distance between God and world, between saint and whore giverise to the dance, namely the expression of a new human thinking which hasbecome conscious of his own freedom.

Nietzsche's second period is characterized by the fact that 'science' becomesincreasingly more 'gay' and by an increasing transformation of the scepticalinvestigation into a new, a joyful prophecy. Similarly, the figure of the free spiritbecomes further and further removed from the image of the cold-bloodedinvestigator. The characteristics of the daring and adventurous type of personwho experiments with life become more pronounced. The methodical attitude ofthe positive sciences and the critical and historical perspective seem strongest inHuman, All Too Human. Dawn already brings a change which gains momentumin The Gay Science. The next step is the Zarathustra. Nietzsche swiftly passesthrough positivism. It is only a means of liberation, of emancipation from thetraditions for him. And yet, the positivistic period has some consequences.Nietzsche uses it to perfect a style of suspicion and a sophisticated polemic. Heperfects a high art of unsubstantiated allegations and unmasking, takes sacri-legious pleasure in explaining the higher through the lower, the ideal throughinstinct or the greatness of existence through commonness. His exposition usesa genealogy ab inferiori. This remains a fateful burden for his thinking as it turnstowards sophistry. However, his sophistry and his philosophy do not exist separ-ately. Both are always connected. Nietzsche thus offers us many opportunities toargue against him. However, one does not overcome Nietzsche if one can refutehis psychology of unmasking. The essence of his thought lies elsewhere. All hisbooks are ambiguous. One should not be misled by his aggressive style. Oneshould not take his battle slogans too seriously because his strife loves strongexpressions, gross simplifications, the knockout and the poisoned arrow.

Nietzsche fights like a sophist but he is nevertheless a philosopher. Todistinguish both aspects is difficult and the real challenge of any Nietzsche


interpretation. Although Nietzsche's philosophy of the morning, his cool scien-tific scepticism towards all ideals, towards all 'idealistic swindle' and 'other-worldliness', towards transcendence and any divinity argues in a sophisticalmanner it is nevertheless guided by more profound philosophical thoughts. InHuman, All Too Human the mask of science appears still firm. It introducesa new attitude. The scientific perspective replaces the perspective of artdominating in the first phase.

The 'free spirit' is the great sceptic who doubts whatever man has so fartrusted most. He has an evil eye. He sees the biological foundations of all'ideals'. He illuminates the other-world of the divine, of truth and the Goodand exposes peculiar things. As long as Nietzsche's concept of science remainsguided by positivism the result is enormously sobering. It profanes humanity.The most basic and elementary instincts supposedly generate the self-transcendence of man and the 'greatness' of his existence. Common needsgenerate morality, repressed and misdirected instincts and needs create thesaint and subconscious deceptions create the philosopher. Increasingly, how-ever, and proportionally to the experience of science as a temporary disguise,the free spirit assumes the characteristics of the Prince Vogelfrei. Increasingly,science becomes a conscious experiment and a means of emancipation. With itthe view of human greatness returns and the profanation, this cheap, all-too-cheap unmasking recedes. The disguise of cold-blooded science conceals anew enthusiasm. A new image of man emerges from the disillusionment. Thisis no longer a being who bows to and worships superhuman powers, whokneels in front of God or who submits to the moral law and reflects andinquires beyond the appearances. It is rather a being who understands thesuper-human as a hidden dimension of his own existence and who becomesaccordingly an 'overman'. Dawn and The Gay Science undeniably dissolves thehuman image derived through the unmasking psychology. The greatness ofexistence is now conceived as an attitude of daring projections, as the adven-turous existence which experiments with a freedom without God, morality andmetaphysics.

Basically we have to distinguish two forms of one fundamental characteristicin Nietzsche. The human emancipation from the servitude to transcendentalideals (God, morality, metaphysically conceived otherworld) occurs on the onehand as a psychological unmasking. This leads to a human profanation. Thetranscendental urges are put aside as mere obsessions, that is man is mutilated,he is inadequately understood as a mere instinctive being which under certainparticular and complex, instinctive conditions develops into the preposterousfigures of the saint, the artist and the sage. On the other hand, however, whilethe transcendental meaning of human greatness is denied, the possibility of self-transcendence is not denied and man is not reduced to trivial instincts. Instead


the greatness of human existence remains but it is interpreted differently,namely as a human self-alienation or as a projection beyond itself in which manforgets that he is responsible for the projection. This distinction is of funda-mental importance. The two ways to view man, that is as profane or as 'preserv-ing the hero in his soul' relate to each other like sophistry and philosophy. Andthey are just mixed and connected in Nietzsche and can only be separated withsome difficulty. We find the method of profanation in many aphorisms of Dawnand The Gay Science, but the basic attitude of these two books is different. Theyare on the way towards the Zarathustra.

Nietzsche's decisive and fundamental thoughts are initially, if somewhatindirectly expressed at this point. The light of noon falls upon his philosophy ofmorning. He becomes increasingly fond of parables and more poetical. Hisscience becomes 'gay', his rejection of positivism more decisive. Positivism isonly a guise behind which Nietzsche conceals himself for a while, a temporaland serpentine wisdom. He soon starts to remove it. At first his arguments arehardly bearable, for example when he deduces morality from the humanexperiences of the useful and harmful.

Morality signifies the experiences of early man in regard to what is supposedlyuseful and harmful - however, the moral sense does not relate to those experi-ences themselves but to the age, the sanctity, the unquestionability of morals.And with this, this moral sense combats new experiences and the correctionof customs. That is morality suppresses the development of new and bettercustoms, it makes us stupid.12

This short aphorism is telling. One can as it were recognize the device whichNietzsche employs in his profaning perspective. His thesis is this: morality isformed entirely by assembling experiences in relation to advantage and dis-advantage. But it shows itself differently to us, namely as an ancient tradition ofthe supposedly holy and venerable. Although he does not neglect these apparentcharacteristics he interprets them away. The phenomena conceal the utilitariancharacter of morality. Nietzsche does not show why and whence such conceal-ment occurs. Why do these stored experiences of advantage and disadvantagedisguise themselves in a venerable aura? A similar deduction of morality abinferiori reduces the former to an instinct for cruelty. According to this, moralityis supposedly sublimated cruelty. One aphorism speaks for many:

Here is a morality, which rests solely on the drive for recognition - do notthink too highly of it. What is this drive and what is its deeper meaning?One wishes that our presence hurts others and inspires their envy, a feelingof impotence and inferiority in them; one wishes to make them feel the


bitterness of their fate in dripping on their tongue a drop of the honey andlooking into their eyes in a straight and triumphant manner when committingthis act of charity. The others have become humble and are most perfect intheir humility - he searches for those whom he has meant to torture for a longtime in turn! You are certain to find them. One shows pity towards animalsand is admired for this - but there are people on whom he just wanted toexercise his cruelty: The intuitive pleasure about rivals defeated by envy didnot let his powers rest until he has become great - how many bitter momentsin other souls did this greatness cost! The celibacy of the nun: How punishingare her looks when she encounters the faces of the women who lead otherlives. How much pleasure for revenge is in these eyes! .. .13

Nietzsche completely neglects the difference between the genuine and the falsetype of humility, of asceticism and of artistry here. The fact that immodesty candisguise itself as humility is beyond doubt. However, the revelation that allmodesty should be nothing but hubris, nothing but the drive for recognition andcruelty against others misses the point.

The great man is not just a disguised and concealed small man. In almost allrespects Nietzsche's second phase is characterized by a profaning demolition ofthe three basic forms of human greatness, of the saint, of the sage and of theartist. However, the great man assumes now the form of the enlightened, freespirit. He only seems initially and superficially to have the characteristics of thepositive scientist and Nietzsche tries hard to reinforce this appearance. He emu-lates the scientific pathos, its critical objectivity, its radical dedication to truthand its intellectual rigour. However, he does not deal with the same things as apositive scientist. He does not deal with things, with being as presence or withthe constitution of things, indeed strictly speaking not even man is the naturalobject of his psychology. The free spirit, which dominates Nietzsche's secondphase is not the counter image of the saint, the artist or the metaphysical sage.The three basic human characters are not just put on trial by the positivesciences and Nietzsche does not arbitrarily leap into a new perspective.

The free spirit is rather a development of the saint, of the artist and of thesage. Although these are existential modes of human greatness their existence isa form of self-alienation. They are only possible where man forgets his own rolein creating his idols. They rely on the fact that man does not become consciousof his secret creativity and that man believes God to be elsewhere. They regardmorality as an external, binding moral law and devalue the real world as anappearance of the more essential, transcendental one. The free spirit is the saint,the artist, and the metaphysical philosopher with a 'self-consciousness'. It is thereturn of these figures from their alienation. It is their inversion. This alonemakes the free spirit philosophically important. The free spirit is the truth of the


alienated existence oblivious to itself. This also implies that the free spirit is noattitude that one could assume and attain. It is rather a change of existence, therecovery of the self from its transcendental overcoming and oblivion. The freespirit is the human emancipation towards an autonomous life. It is the humanself-empowerment.

One has reflected and finally realized that the Good as such, beauty itself, thesublime itself, the evil itself do not exist, however there are psychologicalstates in which we give the external and internal things such attributes. Wehave withdrawn these attributes, or at least have remembered that we havebestowed these attributes on them - we must beware that this insight does notrob us of our ability to bestow.14

Human emancipation occurs thus through contemplation of the fact that theessence, the transcendence of the Good, the beautiful and the holy are justappearances created and forgotten as such by the human being itself. Thiscontemplation is no simple thought. It implies rather the overcoming of themost profound oblivion and the recovery of the transcendental tendencies of lifeinto life itself. This perspective of life remains Nietzsche's basic concern and isdeveloped in various and radical ways. It has some similarity with Hegel's con-cept of self-consciousness. Hegel calls self-consciousness only this step of thedialectic, ontological thinking in which the I or the subject recognizes itself inthe object and in which the separation between both is sublated. Nietzsche's'free spirit' is the self-consciousness of the saint, the artist and the philosopher.But from this it does not follow that these living characters would understandthemselves subjectively as free spirits. On the contrary: they believe in tran-scendence, bend their heads and submit to it. The free spirit stands for a radicalcontemplation of these characters. It stands for the emergence of human free-dom within these all and for a gaining of a creative self-determination which isno longer reactive to the designs of a creation. Dawn had the subtitle: 'Thoughtsabout the moral prejudices'. The 'free spirit' inverts the human self-forgetting intracing the 'values themselves' back to the positing of value. The free spiritdiscovers himself as positing values. This insight gives rise to the possibility torevalue and newly create all values. The approach towards a philosophy ofvalue belongs essentially to the development of the saint, the artist and thesage into the free spirit. It is amplified further when Nietzsche turns from themerely critically-suspicious, from the ice-cold destruction of moral sentimentsto an experimental existential attitude and to the daring lightness of the PrinceVogelfrei, to a 'gay science'. All three modes of human greatness bound by theirservitude to an apparent transcendence are approached through the concept of'idealism'.


He accepts the inversion of idealism as his mission. It is the joyful messagewhich increasingly finds its first careful expressions in Dawn and The GayScience. The destruction of an idealistic world-view, the destruction of religion,of the moral and metaphysical other-world is attempted once in Nietzsche'spsychological destruction. It is attempted again in a more profound and philo-sophically more important sense by inverting the human self-alienation. In thefirst case, idealism is not really inverted. It is rather denied. In the second case,human existence retains its 'greatness'. Man is conceived as a self-transcendingbeing and idealism is inverted. Man recovers all transcendental attributes. He isgiven thus the utmost freedom of a bold mission. The feeling that only the endof idealism provides the great human possibilities occupies Nietzsche andconstitutes his gaya scienza.

The fundamental, leading thoughts of Nietzsche's philosophy are alreadyobvious in Dawn and The Gay Science. They constitute the deeper meaning ofthese works: the death of God, the will to power, the eternal return and theoverman. They come fully to the fore in Zarathustra.

CHAPTER THREE

The Proclamation

1. FORM, STYLE AND STRUCTURE OF THUSSPOKE ZARATHUSTRA

The third, definite phase of Nietzsche's philosophy commences with Zamthus-tra. It introduces the noon of his thinking in which his spiritual powers reachtheir climax. Following the romantic approach of his earlier writings and thecritical, scientific turn a new identity is established.

Zarathustra exposes the crucial fundamental thoughts, however, not in anunexpected or surprising manner. Their motifs are recognizable within his pre-vious works, however, there they are seemingly concealed beneath the conceptsof Schopenhauer's metaphysics or beneath those of 'scientific' positivism.Nietzsche's thinking finds its authentic expression in Zarathustra. It constitutes agreat turn in his life. From now on Nietzsche knows his goal. The time afterZarathustra is merely an unfolding or an exposition of whatever is expressed there.

To the untrained eye this work appears to be a distinct break with - and anattack on - his previous writings. How is it possible that the most insistentproclamation of this strict scientific attitude with its repeated demand forsoberness and cool critique is followed by such a passionate eruption embracingan entire spectrum of spiritual moods with all-encompassing and increasingpathos? Whatever remained submerged in Dawn and The Gay Science eruptswith primal force in Zarathustra. The spirit of the daring risk and of an experi-menting life resonates already through the 'free spirit', blurring its definitionand corrupting the scientific attitude. The hidden tendency of Nietzsche's'philosophy of the morning' already endeavours to return man to freedom, tothrow off his oppressive weights such as God, morality and transcendence whichenclose, burden and determine man externally and to give human freedom anew scope in which it constitutes itself radically and completely and in which itprogresses towards new experiments in life.

Zarathustra does not suddenly erupt as an entirely new form of expression inresponse to a positivistic period. It was already prepared in the adventurouscharacteristics of the 'free spirit', in the songs of the Prince Vogelfrei and in the

52 The Proclamation

hidden indications which contribute to the suspense in Dawn and The GayScience. His poetry does not erupt suddenly, taking the place given emphaticallyto science so far by Nietzsche. If the 'free spirit' is the self-consciousness of thegreat human existence, that is the essential truth of the religious, artistic andmetaphysical genius or the key concept of his early romantic 'metaphysics of theartist' then the Zarathustra is the completion of the 'free spirit'. Genius, freespirit and Zarathustra are aspects of the same idea.

The work with the title Thus spoke Zarathustra is already difficult to formallydefine. It eludes ready, all too readily available categories. What is it? Is it phil-osophy disguised as poetry or poetry disguised as philosophy? Is it a religious orpseudo-religious prophecy or a world-view full of pathos? Does it contain say-ings of profoundest meaning or jests and spiritual clowneries? Is it a new mythor Nietzsche's glorification of himself? These questions have often been posed.More questionable however is whether these alternatives are comprehensive inthemselves and whether one can decide such an 'either-or'. Perhaps the thinkingwhich attempts to leave the path of metaphysical ontology requires a closenessto poetry? Perhaps the style of Nietzsche's Zarathustra is a result of a deep non-conceptual perplexity of a thinking blinded by the light of a new question ofbeing? These are questions and question marks and not yet hypotheses. How-ever, they are meant to protect us from the all too easy interpretations ofZarathustra which use Nietzsche, the person, or his poetical talent and musicalinspiration which had allegedly carried him away here.

Nietzsche refers to himself repeatedly as the 'poet of Zarathustra' and at thesame time to the work as the 'yes-saying part' of his philosophy. In retrospect itseems to him in Ecce Homo that this part has been completed and that his aimshave been fulfilled in this positive part. Nietzsche himself does not believe thatZarathustra requires further qualification through a theoretical exposition. Theyes-saying part of his philosophy is for him a poem of high or even highestquality. He does not shrink from comparing it to those of the greatest westernpoets even with the implication to have surpassed these in Ecce Homo:

That a Goethe, Shakespeare would not for one moment be able to breathe inthe tremendous passion and height, that Dante is merely a believer comparedto Zarathustra and not someone who creates truth in the first place, a worldruling spirit, a fate - that the Vedic poets are priests and not even allowed toloosen Zarathustra's bootlaces - this is the least and does not give us an ideaof the distance and the bluish solitude in which this work resides.1

One can only listen to such a statement with bewilderment. Does this express alack of standard, a loss of perspective or a mad overestimation of himself? Ordoes this only seem so since Nietzsche compares the Zarathustra with something

Form, style and structure of Thus spoke Zarathustra 53

that it cannot be compared with anyway? The above quote contains the peculiarstatement that the genuine poet is a creator of truth. For Nietzsche the poet issomeone whose Poeisis aims towards primordial truth or towards the emergenceof a new cosmic conception. The poet is already close to the thinker. Nietzschesees their closeness in the original creation of a new revelation of being in itsentirety. Zarathustra is neither poetry nor philosophy as long as these are under-stood traditionally as conceptually opposite poles characterized by thinkingand poeticizing. With Nietzsche the duality and dichotomy of the essentialunderstanding of the cosmos becomes questionable.

Zarathustra's literary quality is certainly not as high as Nietzsche believes. Itcontains too much effect, word play and conscious effort. Only the occasionalsymbol - this mysterious coincidence between the particular and the universal,this presence of a cosmically universal power - is successful. Image and thoughtremain mostly separated in Zarathustra. The image becomes a metaphor. Zar-athustra cannot be denied some literary greatness, but this rests with its parables.

At times the exposition becomes an unbearable parody of the Bible withcountless flaws in which the excessive style suddenly comes to grief. And thenthere are sections of impeccable beauty. Formally, Zarathustra is somethingbetween reflection and poetry. Nietzsche expresses his intuitions in a flood ofimages and in countless parables which he often interprets himself sub-sequently. His thinking as such occurs in the form of images and visions. Hemoves within concrete images and not within speculative concepts which seemto him empty abstractions. His deepest thoughts assume a concrete shape andform. They solidify into the Zarathustra character.

A new 'perspective of art' shows itself here. After expressing his thoughtsthrough the metaphysics of art, through his interpretation of classical art andWagner's music, Nietzsche does not continue to theorize about art. He does notuse art as a tool, but he philosophizes artistically and he thinks poetically. How-ever, the question of the relationship between poetry and philosophy or the dualcharacter of poetic reflection and reflective poetry is not addressed, indeed, it isnot even clearly posed. Despite this the book does not seem to be a mere fiction.It is rather driven by a strong force and it is conceived through this drivingpower.

The character of Zarathustra was not just invented by Nietzsche as an alterna-tive to the traditional views of man. 'He surprised me' he writes in Ecce Homo.Although the previous writings prepared its basic themes, the final assertion ofNietzsche's authentic philosophical individuality takes the form of a volcaniceruption or of a revelation. He writes in Ecce Homo'.

Does anyone at the end of the nineteenth century have any idea what thepoets of the vital ages called inspiration? If not, I will describe it. If one had

54 The Proclamation

the slightest degree of superstition one could hardly reject the idea to be anincarnation, a voice, a medium of superhuman force. The term revelationused in the sense of a sudden, indescribable, certain and subtle vision, aperception of something, which shatters and moves one deeply describes thisphenomenon simply. One hears without seeking to, one takes without ques-tioning the giver. A thought appears like a flash, with the force of necessityand without hesitation — I never had any choice. . . . Everything happens tothe highest degree without free choice but through a tempest of liberatingsentiment, of necessity, of power, of divinity. The necessity of the image, ofthis metaphor is most peculiar. One no longer knows what is the metaphorand what is the image. Everything offers itself as the closest, the most perfectand most simple expression. It really seems as if the things themselves comeclose and offer themselves as metaphors - to use an example from Zarathus-tra. This is my experience of inspiration. I do not doubt that one has to goback thousands of years to find someone who may also say: This is minealso.2

Is this merely a psychological statement by Nietzsche about his creative style?This famous statement about inspiration is often not exactly understood.Nietzsche expresses the pure essence of an ontological experience in auto-biographical form. A corresponding passage may be found in Hegel's Phenom-enology of Spirit. Nietzsche characterizes here with unprecedented lucidity anemerging new conception of the cosmos, a sudden flash like inspiration in whichall things and the thinker alike are changed, moved and overwhelmed. And ifNietzsche talks in millennia this is not - as one may perhaps be inclined to think- grotesque boastfulness. If he questions and challenges western metaphysics asa whole, the ontological structure of the world becomes questionable afterhaving been valid for more than two thousand years.

If, however, such an attack is not just an empty, meaningless suspicion, if it isdriven by a genuinely philosophical impulse and not by the vain desire to criti-cize while admiring itself in the role of a radical thinker and waiting for a pos-ition to emerge on which it can exercise its critical playfulness - if the scepticismis genuine in other words, then it already emerges from an intuition of a newcosmic emergence of being itself. Zarathustra is the original expression of a'revelation' rich in image and parable - at least this is how Nietzsche experiencesit. The conviction of having this genuine experience however, does not decidethe question of its truth. Nietzsche himself argues against existential evidence,against the blood of the martyrs in Zarathustra:

Blood is the worst evidence for truth. Blood poisons the purest doctrine andturns it into an obsession and towards hateful hearts. And what if someone

Form, style and structure of Thus spoke Zarathustra 55

went through the fire for a doctrine, what does that show? It is more likely thatthe doctrine is produced by the destruction of the individual . ..

Nietzsche can only be a challenge for us which is met in the attempt to followhis central thoughts. The style of Zarathustra, the metaphorical expressioncreated in a twilight zone of poetry and conceptual thinking makes it difficult tofollow Nietzsche's path although one might rather expect the opposite. Theimage is no easier to understand than the concept but it seems rather otherwisewhich tends to mislead us.

The conceptual structure of the work is not simple. It falls into four partswhich are each created within the one tempestuous spirit. Nietzsche calls them'ten day works'. However, there are big differences between these parts. In totalit took barely a year from its conception to its writing. A long period of concep-tion had passed including the famous and much discussed, almost mysticalexperience at the rock near Silvaplana and Surlei in the Engadine 18 monthsago where the thought of the eternal return took hold in his mind '6000 feetbeyond man and time'. His thoughts had already been germinating in manyguises such as the artist's metaphysics and his positivism. Purely superficiallyZarathustra appears to be a weak fable holding together a chain of parables. Inthis regard the parts appear similar. Each one contains many thoughts and alsosome weaker speeches. However, the increasing dramatism of the work cannotbe missed. The first two parts culminate in the third as a climax which containsmost of the profound speeches. The fourth part constitutes a steep decline inwhich an allegorical and mythical type of exposition takes over and affects usoften embarrassingly. Nietzsche left different drafts for a continuation andalternative conclusion of Zarathustra which - although highly suggestive to anyparticular interpretation - point somehow to the closed, fragmentary characterof his fundamental philosophical experience. It will be impossible to interpret allspeeches; however, it seems to me equally impossible to talk about Zarathustrawithout at least attempting to interpret some sections.

Regarding the name, we should briefly note that Nietzsche intended to referto a historical turn with the allusion to the figure of Zarathustra. He writes inEcce Homo:

One did not ask me, one should have asked me what is the meaning ofZarathustra in my mouth, the mouth of the greatest a-moralist - since theimmense uniqueness of this Persian in history is based on precisely the oppos-ite. Zarathustra was the first to see the real cog in the wheel of the things in thestruggle between Good and Evil - the transformation of morality into meta-physics through power, cause, purpose as such, is his work. However, thisquestion would really be the answer already. Zarathustra created this fatal

56 The Proclamation

mistake: morality. Accordingly he must be the first one to recognize it. Notonly does he have more and a longer experience of it than any otherthinker.... It is more important that Zarathustra is more truthful than anyother thinker. His doctrine alone designated truthfulness as the highest virtue. .. the self-overcoming of morality through truthfulness, the self-overcomingof the moralist into its opposite - into me - this means in my mouth the nameZarathustra.3

The basic plot - in essence a short fable - is told quickly: At the age of 30 (theage in which the corresponding figure of Jesus of Nazareth begins his teaching)the thinker commences his descent after withdrawing for another ten years intothe mountains, into the solitude and with this into an essential closeness to thethings. He descends to the people to teach his doctrine proclaiming it firstly inthe market-place and then to individuals. However, their ears are neither opennor receptive to his message. He returns again and makes a second set of allegor-ical speeches to his disciples, yet he hesitates to proclaim his most abysmalthought, namely the thought of the eternal return of the same. And thus hereturns a third time to find himself and the central essence of his thought. Thefourth, declining part shows the attempt to live the life of the 'higher person',that is of those who constitute the 'remnants of God' - the idealists whose idealheaven has collapsed and who now experience a great emptiness: 'all thosepeople of the great yearning, the great disgust, of the great tiredness' and thenihilist. However, the thinker also overcomes the 'higher man' although he cele-brates the sacrilegiously mocking 'eucharist'. But when his time comes he leaves'his cave, glowingly and strong like a morning sun which comes from the darkmountains'4 with the lion and the dove, the symbols of strength and gentleness.The book closes with the departure into the unknown which is perhaps itsstrongest if least intended parable.

The first part opens with a prologue including Zarathustra's double-sidedportray of man. It deals with the overman and with the last man. These are nottwo rough extremes which exist side by side. The overman is not yet concrete atall. It is a possibility, a hope whose reality is the last man. At the cosmic hour ofthe last man the time has come to create the overman and to reach out to it asthe highest hope. Nietzsche conceals this relationship by inverting their succes-sion. Zarathustra creates the image of his hopes in the market-place, that isamong the last men, among the people who have lost their idealism and theirpower of self-transcendence and of people who risk nothing, wish nothing, whono longer design the future and who are tired of the game because they aresaturated with history. This is the man of a passive nihilism who believes innothing. His creative human powers are extinguished and burnt out and despitehis extensive education he vegetates. He does not present any challenge to

The overman and the death of God 57

himself. This is the small man without any further burning fire of enthusiasm inhis soul. 'One has the pleasures for the day and the pleasures for the night, butone respects one's health.'5

Nietzsche portrays modern life with astute accuracy. We are all the last man,we who believe in God on Sundays, we who need the seductions of mass enter-tainment and the organized leisure in order to escape the temptation of bore-dom of a life which does not aim for anything or which aims for 'nothing'. Thetime which Nietzsche foresaw and whose visions frightened him deeply hasarrived. 'Beware! The time comes in which man no longer aims the arrow of hisyearnings beyond himself and in which the sinew of his bow has ceased to knowhow to swirl.'6

Nietzsche's doctrine of the overman and of the last man contains aspects of aprologue. It seems merely a prelude, an upbeat to his philosophical attempt tounderstanding man's essence anew through the basic truth of the will to powerand through the eternal return of the same. Neither the overman nor the lastman exist concretely. Their existential characterization has a preparatoryimportance. They are first indicators of the path of thinking which Nietzschefollows in Zarathustra.

2. THE OVERMAN AND THE DEATH OF GOD

On his descent towards the world of men following his decade-long solitude inthe mountains Zarathustra encounters the saint in the forest, the hermit whowithdrew from a life among men to dedicate himself to God. He does not careabout men and has no wisdom for them. His isolated existence reaches towardsGod. He leads his dialogue with Him. His essential discourse is the prayer or thehuman address of God. The hermit Zarathustra who says to himself: 'Should itbe possible? This old saint has not heard in his forest that God is dead.' - Thishermit without a dialogue with the divine must precisely lecture to men. Hemust teach if he wishes to say anything meaningful. With the death of God thetrue human expression is no longer the address of the Gods and the divine butthe dialogue between men. The articulation of the highest human possibility isnow the doctrine of the overman.

The death of God is accordingly the starting point for Zarathustra's teaching.Nietzsche illustrates Zarathustra's teaching with the help of a 'parable of thesun': Happiness for the sun is that its plentiful light is absorbed by the things forwhich it shines. The thinker Zarathustra compares himself to the sun. Theteacher of the overman turns into the 'light of the world' which replaces God.The death of God, that is the demise of all transcendental 'ideality', of objectivetranscendence and the destruction of the heavenly stars above the living human

58 The Proclamation

world, creates the danger of a tremendous impoverishment of humanity or of adreadful trivialization if agnosticism becomes common and morality becomesabsent. Idealistic tendencies wither away, life becomes enlightened, rational andcommon. Alternatively the idealistic tendency remains. It does not loose itselfby worshipping the self created as something alien, as the transcendental Godand His revealed orders - the idealistic tendency becomes conscious of itscreative essence and creates now consciously new and humanly created 'ideals'.

The last man and the overman are the two human possibilities following thedeath of God. Nietzsche himself takes over one part passionately: he teaches theoverman by illustrating the profoundly deplorable nature of the last man. Andhis teaching does not have the coolness of a theoretical exposition. It vibrateswith emotion and aims to inspire Zarathustra's speech to reach a hymn-likeenthusiasm. Nietzsche writes in Ecce Homo:

What language will such a spirit speak if it speaks to itself? The language ofthe dithyramb. One should hear how Zarathustra speaks to himself beforedawn; such a turquoise happiness, such a divine tenderness has never beenpreviously expressed.7

Strictly speaking, only Zarathustra's monologue is dithyrambic, in particularsongs such as the The Night Song, The Grave Song, Before Dawn, Of the GreatYearning, The Seven Seals (The Yes-and-Amen Song). Zarathustra's speeches tothe people and to his disciples are parables filled with the strongest pathos.However, Nietzsche does not only teach through Zarathustra's sermons, butmore so through his dithyrambic monologues where he portrays the kind ofoverman, imitates his existential mood and his most direct experience. Zar-athustra's poetical form can ultimately not be understood through Nietzsche'seffort to express the inspiration of a new, inverted idealism and to call ferventlyfor a greatness of existence.

'Oh, I knew noblemen' - says Zarathustra - 'who lost their highest hopes. Andnow they deny all high hopes. Now, they live audaciously with brief pleasuresand do not conceive any aims beyond a day. But through my love and hope Ibeseech you: Do not expel the hero from your soul! Keep your highest hopesacred!'8

It is important to retain the heroic character of human existence even after thedeath of God and to incorporate into life what seemed as transcendent and asremote as a divinity. Since Nietzsche attempts this universal appeal, since heaims to create a mood of human heroism and greatness in addition to facing thedestruction of an 'ideal heaven' Zarathustra is overloaded with exaggerated


pathos, with appeals and mood flashes and with demands and aversions. Thehymn-like character of the language in Zarathustra does not simplify theapproach to it but on the contrary makes it rather difficult. The inner structureof the work and its path of thought cannot be detected easily beneath the manyparables and speeches. And yet it is there. If one has once sensed it one marvelsat the consistency of its structure.

The 'prologue' sketches a brief image of the overman. He is the 'essence ofthe earth'. Man, this self-transcending being, has so far only transcended himselftowards the divine. God is for Nietzsche the essence of all transcendental ideal-ity. Man has used and abused the earth to beautify the image of the otherworld.From this he took his colours, his desire and his representations with which hefurnished the transcendental realm of eternal light and of the imperishableideas. Denying the earth he abused it. The overman is conscious of the death ofGod and of the end of an idealism connected to transcendence. He recognizesthe ideal otherworld as an Utopian reflection of the earth. He returns what isborrowed and stolen from it to it. He farewells all transcendental dreams andturns to the earth with the same commitment which previously attached itself tothe dream world. The highest pinnacle of human freedom turns towards thegreat mother, the broad-breasted earth and finds in it the boundary and weightwhich balances all ideals. Man returns to the earth and grounds his freedom onthe earth. His freedom is no longer a freedom towards God or towards non-being but towards the earth, the source of all that emanates in the light and thetime and endures in time and space. With it the human being gains a positiondespite all the risks. The earth replaces the God of a self-alienated humanity.

Once upon a time the divine sin was the greatest sin. But God died and withthis the sinners. To sin on earth is now the most terrifying, to value the insidesof the unknowable more than the meaning of the earth.9

Nietzsche starts directly with the transcendental characteristics of man: 'Manis something that must be overcome.' However this is also generally, biologicallyexpressed: 'All beings so far created something beyond themselves and youwish to be the low tide of this great flood and rather turn back towards theanimal than overcome man?'10 Does this ultimately resemble Darwinism? IsNietzsche's metaphysics based on a scientific hypothesis? Not at all! The thinkermerely refers to common, familiar ideas to capture his problem. Man is a self-overcoming being because the universal essence of life as such, the will topower becomes conscious in him and conscious of itself. The realization of thewill to power implies the recognition of the death of God and vice versa. Boththoughts have an inner connection. Ignoring the death of God, self-overcomingaims at a transcendental world. Asceticism, contempt for the body, overcoming

60 The Proclamation

of the finite or the sensual are a betrayal of the earth: 'But whoever is even thewisest among you is only a mixture and hybrid of plant and spirit.'11 What doesthis mean? He is torn by the opposites of the here and the beyond, of the sensualand the spiritual. The spiritual is Utopian, removed from the earth and fantastic.The sensual is seemingly ignored by the spirit and has an animalistic, plant-likepresence. The unfaithfulness to the earth splits man into a duality of sense andspirit, into an opposition of body and soul. Idealism makes man a twofold,unhappy being. He despises the body to which his soul is chained. He wants toescape from diis prison. The inversion of idealism in the conception of theoverman cures this rift which splits man and separates him. It means the recon-ciliation in which the separation of body and soul is sublated. 'I beseech you mybrothers, remain faithful to the earth and do not believe those who speak abouttranscendental hopes. They mix poison whether they realize this or not.'12

The image of the overman remains initially undefined. Nietzsche, however,gives an approximation by describing the premises and precursors of this perfectand complete human being which he calls the overman. He thus determines theoverman further indirectly and by inference: 'What is great about man is that heis a bridge and no aim itself. What can be loved about man is that he is atransition and a decline.'13 The precursors identified by Nietzsche are the bridgebetween man and the overman: the great despisers, who sacrifice themselves tothe earth, the disciples, the workers and inventors, diose who love their virtueand perish through it, the wasteful of the soul, the bashful of happiness, theapologists of the entire future and past, the persecutors of God, those withdepth of spirit, the over-rich or the free spirits. Nietzsche takes his honey frommany rare flowers of the human garden. The overman focuses and prepareshimself in any of these precursors, however what remains separated in thesetypes is synthesized in him.

I love all those who are like heavy drops, falling separately from a dark cloudwhich hovers above men. They announce the coming of the lightning andthey perish as prophets. See, I am a prophet of lightning and a heavy drop inthe sky, the lightning is called the overman.14

Zarathustra starts his speeches to his companions with his animals, the eagleand the snake, that is, with pride and cleverness and commences his 'descent'.The choice of pride and cleverness is intentional. They present a consciouscontrast to humility and the 'poverty of spirit' for which the wisdom of the worldturns into foolishness. They are anti-Christian.

The central theme of the first part of Zarathustra is the 'death of God'. Allspeeches must be related back to this essential focus of the death of God.Zarathustra's first series of prophecies aims to invert idealism. One could show


this convincingly through a detached and continuous interpretation of the indi-vidual speeches. We concentrate on a few central aspects. The first speechentitled 'On the three metamorphoses'I5 indicates the basic concern: the trans-formation of the human being following the death of God that is the changefrom a self-alienation to a creative freedom of self-consciousness. 'I name threemetamorphoses of spirit. The spirit becomes a camel, changes from a camel to alion and finally from a lion into the child.' The camel already implies the pos-sible greatness of human existence. It implies the person of great respect, whosubmits to the superior powers of God and to the supremacy of the moral law.He sinks to his knee and carries great weights willingly. 'What is the heaviest,you heroes - the enduring spirit asks, so that I carry it and enjoy my strength..."

The human being burdened by the weight of transcendence, the human beingof idealism resembles the camel of Zarathustra's speeches. He does not want aneasy life. He despises the weightlessness of everyday, prosaic life. He longsinstead for challenges. He longs to fulfil stringent and arduous duties, which aredifficult for us and which burden us heavily. He wills his duty and, furthermore,he seeks to obey God and submit himself to the meaning of life which isimposed on him. The submissive spirit finds its own greatness in obedience andsubmission. Imprisoned by a firm world of values he submits willingly andsubmissively to the commands of the 'thou shalt'. The camel which stands withits load in the desert experiences its change into a lion. Idealism destroys itself.Morality refutes itself through truthfulness and idealism is inverted by idealmotivations. The respectful and complicit spirit turns into a lion, that is hethrows off the weights which oppress and suppress him from 'outside'. Hestruggles with his 'last God', namely objective morality and he recognizes hisprevious self-alienation. And he struggles now against the thousand year olddragon and against apparently objective values. In the lion-fight against themorality of idealism and its transcendental basis, its 'intelligible world' and itsdivine will, man creates his freedom. He uncovers his own latent freedom andovercomes his position of radical slavery, namely the determination of lifethrough a given meaning of life which must be merely accepted. However, thisnegative lion freedom which denies God, the objectivity of morals and themetaphysical thing in itself as mere illusions of idealistic self-alienation is notfinal. It is only a negative freedom, freedom from but not freedom to. 'To createfreedom and a holy No also from duty - for this my brothers the lion isrequired.'

However, the denial of the old, honoured values or rather more accurately thedenial of the transcendence of these values or the liberation of human existencefrom this self-alienation is no new initiative, no creative, constructive productiv-ity of a liberated humanity. The lion confronts the 'thou shalt' which dominatesthe camel with its own masterful 'I will'; however, there is much opposition and

62 The Proclamation

effort in this 'I will' and much defiance and spite. The new will is itself stillwilled. It does not have the true ease of a creative will or of a new creation ofvalues. This only belongs to the child.

Innocence is the child and forgetting, a new beginning, a play, a wheel turn-ing through itself, a first motion, a holy yes-saying/ Yes to the play of creation,my brothers, we require a sacred affirmation: The spirit wills its will now, aworld is gained by the one lost in the world.

The true, primordial essence of freedom as a creation of new values and realmsof value is addressed in the metaphor of the play. Play is the essence of positivefreedom. The death of God reveals the playful, risky dimension of human exist-ence. Human creativity is play. The progress from man towards the overman isnot an evolutionary leap of a biological kind in which a new kind of living beingappears beyond the homo sapiens. This progress is the development of finitefreedom, its retrieval from a self-alienation and the free emergence of thecharacter of play.

It must be pointed out that Nietzsche takes up the concept of play already inthis first period in the attempted continuation of Heraclitus and uses it to focuson the fundamental concept of the Dionysian. The play is not yet the entireDionysian world in this speech by Zarathustra. Play is here understood as theplayful design of the worlds of value, not as the primordial ground which consti-tutes and destroys the world of appearance. The play of creative valuation,however, makes the entire metaphysical structure of sensible and spiritual, ofmundus sensibilis and mundus inteUigibilis or of this world and the other world,questionable. Like the transcendence of values, the transcendence of metaphys-ics is based on a living God. After the death of God, however, such a distinctionis superfluous. The metaphors of the camel, the lion and the child do not onlypresent essential transformations of the freedom which comes to itself and thusgenerates the overman, they are in some ways steps of Nietzsche's path ofthought. These cited characters correspond to the order in which Nietzschearticulates his understanding of himself. The genius, the most subservienthuman being who becomes the medium of a superhuman power corresponds tothe camel. The free spirit, the critic and revolutionary and the daring explorer ofdistant, unknown shores, corresponds to the lion. And Zarathustra himself, theyes-saying spirit who posits new values corresponds to the playing child. At thesame time the message of the 'speech' is far removed from an autobiographicalexposition. The fact that Nietzsche's own life went through stations and trans-formations which he demands for man himself only shows the seriousness andconsistency of his thought. He leads an existence of a thinker who lives histhought and reflects on his life. The radical existential change expressing itself in


the first speech remains the condition of all subsequent transformations. Fromthis perspective he can characterize the understanding of virtue as it occursbefore such transformations as a sleep of life in which man has not yet awokento himself, in which he is caught in the appearance of transcendence and inwhich he forgets his own creative existence.

The teachers of virtue preach a sleep or the self-oblivion of freedom at play.And similarly, the metaphysical thought of an 'otherworld' has a worldly originfor Nietzsche. It is as it were merely a dream which seeks redemption fromsuffering. 'Tiredness, which aims to reach the ultimate with one leap, with onedeadly leap, a poor, ignorant tiredness, which does not even will any longer; thiscreated all Gods and other-worlds.'16

In the idealistic contempt for the body Nietzsche sees consequently anunenlightened will for decline. The knowledge of the death of God expressesitself in a tripartite view of virtue, otherworld and contempt for the body. Thesame view engages in an interpretation of death, war, friendship and love: allhuman fundamental concerns are revalued, examined and judged anew. Thistime the measure for existence is not in God's hand. Since God is dead all isseen differently. The earth becomes the final measure. The examination ofhuman things must be true to it. Man is regarded abstractly as the creator.

'The path of the creator' is the title of one speech17 which again takes up theissue of an existential change. The path of the creator leads to extreme solitude.It excludes us totally from living communities, from society and from love andpity. Solitude isolates us within ourselves. However, not everyone has the rightto such a search and desire for the self.

You call yourself free? I would like to hear your leading thought and not thatyou have escaped from a yoke. Are you one that was allowed to escape from ayoke? There are many that threw their last value away when they threw awaytheir servitude. Free to do what? What concern is this to Zarathustra! Clearlyhowever, your eye must announce: Free to do what?

The decisive, final speech of the first part Of the Giving Virtue19 expresses thegenuine human existence and the liberation which commences with the know-ledge of the death of God. Being oneself is no static preservation and assertionof self. It is a playful, self-transcending activity. The egoism of the creator doesnot have the characteristics of the small, petty egoism, it is pure self-sacrifice.

Truly, a robber of values must such giving love become; but complete andsacred I call this egoism. There is another egoism, an ail-too pure and hungryone, which attempts to steal all the time - the egoism of the sick, the sickegoism.

64 The Proclamation

The rich, generous egoism does not intend possession but transformation into aricher, fuller and more powerful life or a life which overflows and shares itsriches. This drive of life, of increasing, swelling life for more power andempowerment, this search of the self for ever new self-overcoming and self-transcendence is the true mode of a human existence and of a creator who isliberated from God.

If your heart flows broadly and fully, akin to a stream, a blessing and dangerto your neighbours. This is the origin of your virtue. If you stand above praiseand reprimand, and if your will commands all things as the will of the lover,then you have the source of your virtue.

The basic manner in which the creative, overflowing existence which searchesfor a supreme empowerment of life is determined here already indicates thebasic thinking which will dominate the second part of Zarathustra, that is thethought of the 'will to power'. The will to power is basically still conceived froma human perspective, namely as a creative self-transcendence of a freely creativeexistence. Idealism, be it moral, metaphysical or religious, seems to be the greathuman error.

A hundredfold did the spirit and virtue alike attempt and fail so far. Yes, manwas an attempt. Oh how much ignorance and error do we embody. Not onlythe reason of thousands of years - even its madness shows itself in us. It isdangerous to be an heir . ..

The insanity of millennia is for Nietzsche the idealistic interpretation of manand world. The insanity of idealism is to be inverted precisely into the insightthat God is dead. Only this will show the free human possibilities: 'There are athousand paths, which have not been used, a thousand healths and hiddenislands of life. Man and the human earth are still untouched and undiscovered.'

The possibilities of freedom are infinite if God no longer limits man, if thisinsurmountable wall no longer blocks the ascending human path and if thegigantic shadow of the master no longer falls on the human land. Nietzsche doesnot place man within God's plan. He does not deify and worship finite exist-ence. He puts the earth into the place of the Christian God and of the Platonicrealm of ideas. Perhaps this is also an ancient Goddess, but an abstract onewithout concrete form which is 'near but hard to grasp'. Nietzsche concludesthe first book with a dedication of the parting Zarathustra to his disciples: 'AllGods are dead: Now let us wish that the overman lives - this may be our lastwish at the great noon.'

The will to power 65

3. THE WILL TO POWER

The second part of Zamthustm reveals explicitly the cosmic force withinthe realm of human freedom. The fundamental thought is now the doctrineof the will to power. However, this is not introduced suddenly. Nietzsche doesnot leap to a new thought. He develops it from previous material. The childlike,transfigured man has become the creator. He is the genuine and authentic man.The 'creator' does not refer to the human being at work of course, but to the onewho plays creatively, who sets values and to the person focused on a great willwho has created an aim for himself and who courageously risks a new vision.The creator does not recognize the existence of any ready-made world of senseperception to which he adapts or which he accepts. He posits new standards andvalues, he re-invents human life and he exists in the most authentic sense 'histor-ically', that is creatively. 'And what you called world, this you are supposed tohave firstly created, your reason, your images, your will, your love are to becomethis.'19

This radical, creative stance would be limited and restricted if there are Godand Gods. Freedom would be defined through instructions, laws and prohib-itions. God stands in opposition to human freedom. If it is properly understoodthe latter can no longer allow the thought of God. 'If there were Gods how couldI bear not to be a God.'20

This statement by Zarathustra is not intended to be blasphemous - it is ratherconceived from a perspective which contrasts finite freedom and the divine will.The freedom of the creative person cannot be restricted by divine freedom. Theonly limit which is acceptable to the creative person is the earth, that is not thepower of an individuated, separate being, but the omnipresent power of the all.The creative person knows himself to be in harmony with the creative power ofthe earth in his creation. 'God is an assumption. But who would drink all thepain of this assumption without dying? Is faith to be taken away from the creatorand the love for distance from the eagle?'21

However, the thought of God is not the only restriction of human freedom onits path towards the open, hitherto unknown possibilities. Because creation assuch is essentially historical, it is related to temporality. It is committed to time.It projects itself into the future. It anticipates time in its intentions and itshighest hopes precede it. However, the metaphysical, transcendental conceptionof God presupposes a transcendence of space and time in which time does notreally exist and is a mere appearance. Time is devalued. It is excluded from truereality. The idealistic approach of the Christian transcendental conceptiondenies the reality of time and constitutes for Nietzsche a deadly devaluation ofthe creator's will to a future. If time is ultimately not real, history is meaningless,man's path in time and his projected aims make no sense. The death of God

66 The Proclamation

implies accordingly for Nietzsche the demise of the denial of time and therecognition that time is an essential dimension of all being. As opposed to ideal-ism, which exorcized time from being, Nietzsche reinstates time within being as'earth' and recognizes the fundamental relation between being and time. 'I callit evil and anti-human. All these doctrines of the one, of the full and immovableand the self-sufficient and the eternal. All eternity is only a symbol. And thepoets lie too much.'22

The true, omnipresent, all-encompassing time, the ascent and decline of thethings, the eternal change or the rapid decline of all finite things is the only pathfor the creative person. He has his ethereal home in the finite and the earthly.His creation is itself created and destroyed, a vision of finite aims and theirovercoming. The creative person who gains a radical freedom through the deathof God and who discovers the earth, places himself consciously and intention-ally within time, accepts finitude and with it his own demise. Placing himselfwithin time, in the turn towards the earthly dimension of all things, the overmanexperiences and accepts his finitude: 'But the best metaphors are to report to usabout time and becoming. They are to be praises and apologies for allfinitude.'23

The freedom of the creative person establishes itself through the vision oftemporally finite possibilities or in other words through the will. The essence ofcreation is always an overcoming, not, though an ascetic, world negating over-coming of time and life but the overcoming of finite steps and of finite inten-tions. The creative person transcends himself through time, destroys what hewas and searches for what he is not yet. 'Yes, there must be much bitter death inyour life, you creators. You are consequently the advocates and apologists offinitude.'24

The creative person is always on the way between ascent and decline. He doesnot only live within time, he participates in the play of cosmic time. He is the'playing child' (Pais Paizori) of Heraclitus. The commitment to time, the inver-sion of the idealistic negation of time, the temporal, temporally directed will offinite, continuously self-transcending aims of the will establishes the human-superhuman freedom of the creative person. 'Willing liberates: This is the truedoctrine of the will and of freedom - this is taught by Zarathustra.'25 Looking atthe ontology of creation, Nietzsche discovers as it were the characteristics of lifeitself. The creative person reveals the essence of finite being purified from alltranscendental, metaphysical representations.

We are by no means dealing with an uncritical application of anthropocentriccategories to being as such. We must see the connections much clearer here.The human transformation resulting from the experience that God is dead leadsto the ascent of the earth which had been obscured and disfigured by misleadingidealistic interpretations for too long. The here and now of the world in space


and time that is the realm of life is no longer devalued as a superficial, redundantand inauthentic appearance. The true world is no longer found beyond space andtime in the thing-in-itself, in the realm of the ideas, in God and the divinesphere. Spirit and freedom return to the earth in the existential transformationof man into overman and recognizes itself as part of the earth and as united withthe earth. Nietzsche invents for this the comparison which is frequently per-ceived to be objectionable that spirit and soul are only physical. The body or theearthly manifestation of our existence is the only reality. We are no citizens of anintelligible world and no members of a spiritual realm. We are wholly and totallyearthbound. Only the inversion of idealism presents Nietzsche with the possibil-ity to identify humanity and being as such and to find the key to life and even toall being in the human essence. Nietzsche does not ignore the obvious differ-ences between the diverse ontological modalities of things in the world. Thestone, the animal and the human being are certainly not identical. There aredifferences of what-ness and that-ness. Nietzsche does not obliterate these dif-ferences. He does not arbitrarily equate the creative person with the pebble. Herather links them in a deeper sense: Despite their difference of appearance theyare similar in so far as they are 'forces' or 'products' of the earth.

The earth, however, is not just the present stuff and not just the mere totalityof things. The thing or the existing individual has already emerged from theearth, however, not to leave it behind but to rely on it as the sustaining groundfor all finite being. The earth is omnipresent but not near or distant like things.It is always present but never itself an object. The concept of the earth as itshows itself in Nietzsche's thinking is hard to grasp. We can merely indicate thatNietzsche does not think of earth as merely present-at-hand but as that whichallows emergence, as the bearer of all things or as the dynamic of bearing lend-ing shape, nature and duration to the manifold of individuated and contingentbeing. Nietzsche thinks earth as a creative force, as poieisis. And similarly, theessential human characteristics are conceived as creativity and creative freedom.Nietzsche accordingly gains an insight into the creative nature of earth - andwith this into the cosmic principle of all things - from the perspective of humancreativity.

The second part of Zarathustra sketches the image of the creator and hisrelationship to time and his inevitable atheism in the chapter On the blessedislands. In the following chapters he takes a position (from the perspective ofthe creator) against the compassionate, against the priests and against the virtu-ous and against the riff-raff. The chapter entitled On the Tarantulas exposesthis argument more clearly and prepares the important message of this secondpart. Nietzsche uses the metaphor of the tarantulas to characterize the spirit ofrevenge, of those who have missed out on greatness and well-being in life. Thetarantulas are the preachers of equality. The impotence of their life takes

68 The Proclamation

revenge at all powerful and accordingly unequal forms of life. Nietzsche doesnot only argue here polemically against modern trends, that is against theFrench Revolution, Rousseau, socialism and democracy, but equally againstChristianity with its understanding of human equality in the face of God.Nietzsche places himself in distinct opposition to western tradition and to thetraditional views of justice. The more powerful, creative or influential a life, themore it will assimilate the inequality of men into its own system of values andposit a hierarchy and a spiritual aristocracy. And vice-versa: the more impotentand powerless a life, the more it will insist on equality attempting to drag theexceptional individual person down to an average, mediocre level. It will viewgreatness as a crime against equality and it will attempt to take revenge at thosewho are powerful and well adjusted in life.

The will to equality is accordingly only the impotent yearning of the weak forpower. Nietzsche attempts to reveal here that the apparent idea of justice ismerely a frustrated will to power concealing itself while abusing the appearanceof virtue and moral honesty in order to succeed. The ordinary notions of justiceharbour revenge. The tarantula weaves its web and chokes life in it. Nietzschepoints here already to the big theme of a 'master and slave morality' which isgoing to play a central role following Zarathustm. However, this difference whichremains a human one or these different conceptions of 'justice' are not theessential point. The crucial point is Nietzsche's move from the battle of valuesystems or from the battle between the ideas of good and evil to the battle of lifeitself, that is the move to the will to power.

Good and evil, rich and poor, high and low and all kinds of values - these areto be weapons and resounding characteristics that life must always overcomeitself anew. It builds itself up with pillars and steps, life itself: It wishes to enjoya distant view and view blessed beauties - that is why it needs height! Andbecause it requires height it needs steps and conflict between the steps and itsclimbers. Life wishes to climb and to overcome itself in climbing.26

Earth is addressed as 'life' in its absence and as the generating force. Life heredoes not mean the essence of organic life as in the plant, the animal and man.Life as organic life is merely a part of being. It cannot yield insights into essentialcharacteristics of all things. Nietzsche's fundamental conception of life is notvery developed conceptually. It is described in ever changing images.Nietzsche's central intuition does not succeed in becoming conceptualized. Andyet - notwithstanding the frequent accusation - he is far from vague or nebu-lous. Life has to be conceived in a multi-dimensional context. The main relationis that between earth and life. Earth lives. Earth grants presence to all beings. Allthings, humans or animals, or even simple stones are children of the earth and


generated from its bearing, giving life. And this life of the earth is - for Nietzsche- the will to power. Nietzsche reflects on creativity itself, on the earth's will topower itself from the point of view of human creativity.

Nietzsche interrupts the internal train of thought moving towards a concep-tion of the will to power with three songs: The Night Song, The Dancing Song andThe Grave Song. The meaning of these songs is not easily established. Are theyexpressing moods and is it in fact futile to investigate their deeper meaning? TheNight Song is a love song, a song of yearning of the solitary thinker who longs forthe night, the abyss and the shelter in the sunlight of his understanding. 'It isnight, now all bubbling fountains speak, and my soul is also a bubbling fountain/It is night: only now the songs of all lovers awake. And my soul too is a song of alover.'27 In Ecce Homo Nietzsche comments on the night song: 'This has neverbefore been written, never before been felt, never before been endured. Thisis the suffering of a God, of Dionysos. The answer to such a dithyramb ofsolar solitude in the light would be Ariadne . . . who knows except for me whoAriadne is!'28

The Night Song sings of the light's yearning for the night. Night appears to befeminine or to be Ariadne. The Dancing Song, however, addresses life. 'Into youreye I looked recently, o life! And I seemed to disappear into the infinite.' Lifeappears in the form of a woman: 'But I am only fickle and wild and a woman inall respects - and not a virtuous one either ...' And similarly, Zarathustra's'wild wisdom' is a woman and is somehow infinite life itself.29

In The Grave Song Zarathustra remembers the graves of his youth or of thepast life and he experiences the pain of finitude against which he summons his'rock-shattering' will. 'Yes, you are still the destroyer of graves, Hail thee mywill! And only where graves are can there be resurrections.'30

Love, death and lust - night, infinity and grave - all this is implied in the song-like address of the feminine, of the woman of all women or of the all-bearingearth. One has been tempted to interpret these songs as expressing Nietzsche'spersonal experiences. It may be that such experiences have given Zarathustra'ssongs a certain colour and atmosphere. However, they are found at a decisivepoint of the work and they are more than existential confessions.

In the chapter On self-overcoming the basic characteristic of the second partis exposed. Nietzsche commences again with man, with the thinker and with thecreator of value. Thinking appears to be free of any will to power; it appears tobe a pure, disinterested human attention to Being itself. However, Nietzschestates that precisely this is a will to power, the will to make Being conceivable.The thinker organizes being through concepts, arrests the flow of becoming andsolidifies what does not essentially remain static. The framework of words andconcepts casts - as it were - a net into the river of time and only catches fishesafter all which it had released itself into it in the form of substance, causality, etc.

70 The Proclamation

'You wish to make Being conceivable because you are rightly suspicious if it isalready thinkable. This is your entire will - you wisest of men, as a will to power,even though you may talk about good and evil and about values.'

Nietzsche departs again from the human will to power and proceeds to auniversal will to power determining all being. 'Wherever I find life, I found thewill to power. And even in the will of the servant I found the will to be master...and this secret life itself confided to me: see, it said, I am that which needs tocontinuously overcome itself.'

Self-overcoming does not refer on this occasion to an ascetic meaning but tothe precise opposite of this. Life has the tendency to 'climb'. It creates forms ofpower and never comes to rest in itself. It is existential excitation and motion,but precisely not a linear motion which would not transcend itself. It does notresemble the play of the waves in which form is created and destroyed. It ratherresembles an enormous and ever-growing tower. Every achieved positionbecomes the starting point for a further ascent. Life is no all-embracing flood. Itis rather the permanent struggle and the conflict of all individual beings witheach other. It constitutes so to speak the opposing poles in which all struggleswith all and yet all embraces all. However, the totality of things does not merelydisappear and dissolve in an amorphous, all-embracing life but the things aredriven towards opposition and strife. The play of life contains the differencewhich limits and creates a disharmony between the particular things. However,its limits are not fixed as the one attempts to overcome the other. Will to poweris not the attempt to remain within a position of power once achieved, but it isalways the will to overpower and to transcend power.

And as the smaller submits to the larger so that this may have enjoyment anduse of the smaller: so the larger submits itself and looses - for the sake ofpower - its life. This is the dedication of the greatest, that it contains a riskand a danger, and a gambling with death.

Nietzsche turns explicitly against Schopenhauer: 'Whoever coined the phraseof the "will to being" did certainly not hit the truth. This will does not exist. . . .The living value many things more than life itself, but the valuing exposes this -the will to power.'

The fundamental ontological meaning of the will to power is not explicatedby the Zarathustra. Nietzsche characterizes life with it. Life, however, is no merebiological category which defines the 'animated' as opposed to the dead matter.But because Nietzsche progresses from human life to life itself in the Zarathus-tra, the basic conceptual importance of the will to power is not easily under-stood. Nietzsche conceives with it the constitution of all finite things and theirdynamic: the interplay of opposition and strife. The second part of Zarathustra


leads from the creator to the fundamental concept of the will to power. Thecreative spirit is only possible in a serious relationship to time. Life ascends toever-higher forms of power in the flow of time. Every step already prepares thenext. How does this ever increasing and continuously self-overcoming will topower relate to time? This is obviously a serious question. Can the game ofovercoming and ascending be continued into infinity? Does an infinite tower ofthe self-overcoming life not contradict the essence of time? In thinking the willto power, Nietzsche arrives at a major riddle. This is at first conceived in the willto power. The will to power is the principle of the ambitious life. And life itself isnow again brought into view as the aspiring human life. In the chapter Ofredemption Nietzsche does not only turn with scathing sharpness against theidea of Christian redemption, against metaphysics itself which he conceives as arejection of the concrete world and places the overman, his form of redemption,against it, but he shows that the deeper issue is the relationship between thefuture when the overman is realized and the presence or between the presenceand the past. Zarathustra moves among men as among 'human fragments andhusks'. He finds the present and past human being most unbearable and rejectshim in the creative will to the overman. He would not be able to live if he was notthe seer of the future and if he did not live with a hope for the overman. Heaccordingly lives in the will to the future, in a tension towards the future whichdrives him on. All human fragmentation appears justified to him by the futureand is consequently 'redeemed'. The will to a complete and unified humanbeing or to the overman condenses into one what is presently 'a fragment and ariddle and a terrifying chance'. However, this will can only redeem in the future.It wills the possible or the not yet realized. The present and the past are its limits.It can only progress not regress. 'The will cannot turn back. That he cannotovercome time and the desire of time - that is the most isolated regret of thewill.' The absolute character of time limits any power of the will.

Does the will to power merely need to accept the higher power of time, whichmanifests itself in the determinations of the past to achieve the reconciliationwith time? Can the will only progress infinitely and never turn back? The chap-ter Of redemption ends with the indication of this problem. Nietzsche viewsredemption within the context of power and time. Within this context a solutionwould need to oppose all Christian and metaphysical conceptions of a transcen-dental world and of a negation of time itself. There has to be a more radicalreflection about 'will to power' and time. The aspiring will to life is not onlylimited by the unchangeable past. It can also not progress into infinity, infinitelyovercoming itself. It appears doubtful that that there can be an infinite over-overman or an overman of infinite potency. The aspiring, progress of life cannotlead to a self-transcendence into infinity. The question here is this: Is time reallya succession of moments where the past is completely determined and only the

72 The Proclamation

future is subject to the will? Is time comparable to an infinite line which is splitinto two heterogeneous parts by the present, into pasts and future? Is it true thatthe past can never be the future and vice-versa? Or is there a 'deeper under-standing' of time? Zarathustra has such an understanding - he has a premon-ition of it at least, however, it is not yet a conceptual understanding. It is ratherhis most intimate thought.

In the chapter The quietest hour which concludes the second part31, Zar-athustra experiences the call of this intimate, concealed truth. The quietest hourreveals time in its essence. It is so quiet because it reveals the conditions of allsound and noise. The forests hum, the trains rattle, the clocks chime and thesand flows quietly through the hourglass - time is the quietest. The silent hours,its powerful mistress speaks to Zarathustra: 'You know it.' But what does heknow? What seems to exceed his powers driving him back onto his solitude andseparating him from his disciples is the new and secret knowledge of the essenceof time which no longer holds fast to the inevitable difference between past andfuture. This knowledge of time which forms the basis for any relation betweentime and will to power is the fundamental thought of Zarathustra and at thesame time the climax of the entire book: the doctrine of the eternal return ofthe same.

4. THE ETERNAL RETURN: OF THE VISION AND THERIDDLE, BEFORE SUNRISE

The third part of Zarathustra is the centre and heart of the work not only in theformal sense and in relation to its composition. The story certainly builds upconsciously towards the third part. Following the proclamation on the doctrineof the overman in the market-place and the teaching of the 'death of God' andthe 'will to power' to his disciples the third part does not constitute a teachingdoctrine. Zarathustra is on the way to his cave in the mountains, on the way tohis last and highest solitude where he confronts his most abysmal thought whichleads to his last transformation. Although he addresses the sailors who carry himacross the sea, his speech is couched in riddles. He addresses the 'buffoon' of thegreat city which he passes in more than one way. His speech is essentially notdirected at others but constitutes a monologue. However, the stylistic and for-mal elements are not unimportant or arbitrary. Nietzsche does not just use themto make the story more interesting or exciting. The parable does not merelyserve to enrich a seemingly monotonous collection of doctrines. It is intended tobe more important. Zarathustra speaks about the overman to all, about thedeath of God and the will to power to fewer and about the eternal return of thesame really only to himself. This obviously implies a rank order of his

The eternal return 73

fundamental thoughts. Nietzsche says about Zarathustra in Ecce Homo: T amnow relating the story to Zarathustra. The basic conception of the work, thethought of the eternal return, this highest formula of affirmation which can bereached at all, belongs to the August of 1881 ,'32

This seems to identify the eternal return decisively and explicitly as his essen-tial concern. The formal structure of Zarathustra's story emphasizes this. Thesequence of Nietzsche's fundamental thoughts is not arbitrary. Although theyare related and mutually explicative overall, their sequence of development can-not be reversed. The overman which is initially only posited as a human possibil-ity is intimately dependent on the death of God. Only when it is recognized thatthe transcendental God, morality and the other world are dimensions of humanself-alienation, the inversion of idealism can occur and Zarathustra can state:'All Gods are dead, we will now that the overman may live.' And the death ofGod itself, the insight that the ideal does not exist is in turn only possiblebecause Zarathustra questions life, investigates the immanent constitution oflife and discovers the will to power.

For Nietzsche, the will to power is the ontological substance. Substance ishere not understood to mean 'essential', the static formation of the appearanceor of the image or idea. It rather refers to subsisting in the literal sense or to anontological dynamic. All being is will to power. This cannot be observed as such.Existing things appear to be highly different to us. We are used to distinguishingdifferent kinds according to their difference in observable appearance -inanimate stones, living plants, animals and humans. Alternatively we dis-tinguish the things which exist through themselves and those created things(tools, houses, states) and again things like number and shape. As long as onelooks towards difference from the aspect of difference in appearance one will beunable to bring the will to power into view. Only the focus on the ontologicaldynamic of becoming and passing away or of ascent and decay referred to in theconcept of 'life' by Nietzsche leads to an understanding of the will to power. Allbeing is will to power in so far as it is temporal. The temporality as struggle andstrife for power, as overpowering and as progress, constitutes the path of the willto power which extends into the future. The will to power wills essentially thefuture, the possible and the yet undetermined. As the dynamic and as the dir-ected temporality of all being the will to power is subject to the determination oftime which opens the possibilities of the future and closes any possibilities of analready determined past. The will cannot turn back. It is bound to the passage oftime. It has to conform to the latter, it must progress and it cannot regress. Thewill to power is grounded in the passage of time.

Considered as a whole, we find a peculiar, fundamental connection betweenNietzsche's four basic thoughts. The overman depends on the death of God.The death of God depends on the will to power and the will to power depends

74 The Proclamation

on the flow of time. Nietzsche's thought has the character of a peculiar re-reflection or of a remarkable return. His progress reflecting about inner-worldlybeing to the embracing and circumscribing world itself distinguishes him per-haps most from the metaphysical tradition. He turns from man and God via thebecoming of all things to the cosmos as a whole. He conceives the totality of thecosmos as the thought of the eternal return of the same.

This thought is more implied than truly explicated. Nietzsche appears almostafraid to articulate it. In essence his reflection defies the word. It is a secretunderstanding. Nietzsche hesitates and conceals his secret behind increasingwalls because his most profound intuition eludes a conceptual grasp. The secretof his fundamental thought remains for him itself in mysterious darkness. Per-haps he escapes thus initially from the metaphysical path and finds his placewithout any path and in a state of perplexity in a new dimension.

A superficial reading could easily and erroneously assume that the eternalreturn represents the central and essential topic of the third part of Zarathustm.It seems as if it is only one among many aspects holding the balance with equallyimportant ones such as Of old and new laws and Of the three evils. In truth,however, the eternal return is its only concern. The substance of the revaluationof values is re-examined through it. We attempt to follow the inner structure ofthe third part.

Initially we find peculiar indications and hints. The direction of the secondpart which closes with Zarathustra's most silent hour in which the abysmalthought and knowledge of temporality approaches him is continued: Zar-athustra returns. He ascends into even higher regions of the mountains anddraws circles and divine boundaries around himself. He is on the way to hislast summit. He has to become loneliest in order to see into the heart of theworld.

You, however, Zarathustra, wanted to see the ground and background of allthings; you have to ascend beyond yourself. Go on, ascend until you evenleave your stars beneath you. Yes, to look down upon myself and even uponmy stars, that only is my summit, this remains my final summit.33

The climax of Zarathustra's thinking is reached where even the self-overcomingand the will to power are transcended and where the conditions of the latterbecome conscious. Zarathustra's ascent to his last summit is at the same timeparadoxically the steepest descent. In thinking the deepest thought Zarathustracomes to his highest height:

Where do the highest mountains come from? This is what I once asked. Ilearnt that they come from the sea/ this testimony is written into their rock


and into the walls of their summits. The highest gains its height from thedeepest.34

This means: Zarathustra's last transformation, his superhuman greatness con-sists in the conception of the all-embracing ground. The greatness of the over-man is based on the understanding of the sea of time. The chapter Of the visionand the riddl^5 contains the first metaphoric expression of the eternal return.Zarathustra reports the 'intuition of the hermit' to the 'daring searchers andseducers' or to the seafarers and to those enjoying riddles. The loneliest man hasa vision and intuition of the eternal return. The most individual thinks the mostunusual. Only the lonely man is exposed to the vastness of the universe andrelates to it in the 'great yearning'. This tension between solitude and the worldin its entirety dominates the highest reflection of Zarathustra.

Zarathustra tells his vision to the sailors. He relates a metaphorical experi-ence: once upon a time he climbed a mountain. On his shoulders sat the spirit ofheaviness, half dwarf, half mole. He ascends to defy this spirit and despite theweight of his thoughts which are heavy like drops of lead. Zarathustra's ascent isthe human path, the ascent to the highest humanity or to the overman. Thisascent is accomplished against the resistance of the spirit of heaviness. It is thepath of the creator, of the creative will which always projects itself ahead of itself.But can this continue ever further and higher? Can the creator ascend continu-ously beyond itself and yet never reach an end? The spirit of heaviness whispersthe defeating thought to Zarathustra which breaks all will to the future: 'OZarathustra, you stone of wisdom, you sling-stone, you destroyer of stars. Youthrew yourself too high - but every stone once thrown must fall.'

All human projections must finally sink. An infinite ascent is not possible,because this is prevented by infinite time. All power exhausts itself in it. Timedominates the strongest will and it breaks the back of the most powerful hopes.Whatever hopes the spirit of heaviness attracts he converts them to fall. Theview into the abyss of time and accordingly into the futility of all hopes, para-lyses and creates a 'dizziness' in the thinker who reflects upon the greatesthuman possibilities. In view of infinite time all meaning becomes meaningless,all risk becomes wasted and all greatness shrinks. The spirit of heaviness pre-vents the genuine exposition of the human being to the openness of the cosmos.Empty infinity repels. Just like gravity which exhausts the finite power of thethrower and destroys it ultimately, the infinite power of time exhausts and des-troys all the powers of human self-overcoming which follow its path. Zarathustrasummons his courage against the paralysing thought of the dwarf to conceivethe 'most abysmal thought'. This courage kills death and facing life itselfexpresses a will to repetition. Against the lead drops of thinking by the dwarfhe proposes the most courageous human thought. The dwarf jumps off

76 The Proclamation

his shoulder. He is redeemed from the spirit of heaviness. And finally theconversation about the flow of time can take place between them.

One may remember that the will to power was limited by the path of time.One can only will the future. The determined, immovably fixed past is notsubject to any effort of the will. One can merely 'accept' it and affirm its inevit-ability in particular. In this respect it is possible after all to take an intentionalattitude towards the past. One can change one's will to sublate that whichcannot be changed. One can sublate the deterministic aspects of the factthrough an intentional acceptance of the fact and achieve thus a reconciliationof freedom and necessity by submitting freely to necessity. Schiller hasexpressed this idea as the reconciliation of fate and freedom. However, on afundamental level Schiller's idea is not even vaguely approximate to Nietzsche'snovel conception of time. In the dialogue with the dwarf Zarathustra arguesfrom the basis of a new understanding of time against the dwarf, who, as we haveseen, represents a particular understanding of time which Zarathustra in factuses as his premise. The gateway 'moment' is a junction between two long paths.These extend forward and backward into unfathomable infinity. The differenceof these paths is initially characterized with striking clarity. They oppose eachother where and when they meet. The past is determined, the future is as yetundetermined. Past and future are fundamentally different. They contradicteach other. And yet they meet in the present moment. The incompatibles meetat their borders. The essentially different paths continue into infinity from thiselusive, withdrawing border of the now. They present an 'eternity' in the pastand a future infinity.

It becomes clear that Zarathustra approaches time immanently. Time isconceived as a sequence of moments. A given moment is preceded by aninfinite sequence of moments in the past and followed by a similarly infinitesequence of future moments. However, and this is the crucial question, doesthis sequence really extend into infinity? Do both temporal paths reallyextend into opposite directions? Is every distant past preceded by a moredistant past and so on ad infinitum? And how about the future? Is the fur-thest future followed by an even more distant future? Is human thought notutterly destroyed by such dimensions? Is such an infinity of time reallyconceivable?

Zarathustra asks the dwarf if the two opposing paths of time contradict eachother for ever. This question implies if the conception of temporality which isbased on the two paths of time is the last and decisive truth about time. Whatdoes 'eternal' mean in reference to 'eternity' and the unfathomable past and theinconceivable future? Do we really have a conception of 'eternity'? Or do wemerely imply here an ordinary notion of an infinite sequence? The answer fromthe dwarf is from Nietzsche's point of view correct; however, it is also much too


simple: 'All straightness is a lie, muttered the dwarf, all truth is crooked, timeitself is a circle.'

What is too easy here? Time is circular. Past and future are connectedinconceivably like a snake which bites its own tail. The circle of time is conceivedas an ontic round, as a cycle of moments of time. This however distorts animportant meaning of the thought of the eternal return. Nietzsche himself con-tinuously falls into the mode of thought of the dwarf and into metaphors whichare borrowed from the sequence of time. He expresses the eternal return throughthe image of the ring. But perhaps it is impossible to do otherwise since we haveinitially no concepts or representations which belong to time itself. All our con-cepts of time have an inner-worldly perspective. We do not think of time in itsentirety because this is an essential aspect of the world as a whole. Perhaps theconception of the entirety of time is as it were only possible in a permanentrejection of an inner-temporal conception. In the chapter Of the vision and theriddle the thought of the eternal return is not fully developed. It is indicated andimplied in a preliminary way. It is important that the issue is approached fromwithin an ordinary understanding of time. Zarathustra exposes the difference ofthe paths of past and future within this horizon and refers to their infinity inorder to question the opposition and exclusivity of these two kinds of eternity.

What does it mean to speak about infinity of time or about an eternity of thepast and future time? Zarathustra draws a conclusion from the twofold eternityof time which contradicts all common conceptions. If any moment is precededby an eternity then all 'the things which have run must already have run thispath once before'. In other words: an infinite past is not conceivable as aninfinite chain of ever-new events. If there is an infinite past then all that canhappen must have happened and nothing can be a mere possibility or future anyfurther. An eternal past cannot remain incomplete. If the depth of the pastcontains an infinity of actual events nothing can any longer be excluded from itand any possibility must have already become actuality. The infinity of the pastdemands that the possible has already occurred. The completion of the totalityof time and similarly an infinite, eternal future demand the future realization ofall inner-temp oral events. The conception that the past and the future are eter-nities necessarily includes the totality of both possible temporal events. Twicethe same tune - is this not paradoxical? Nietzsche's Zarathustra is led to thedoctrine of the eternal return of the same. All things, all inner-temporal thingsand anything temporal have already occurred and must occur again if past andfuture are supposedly totalities. The eternal return of the same is based on theinfinity of time. Everything must have occurred and must occur again:

And this slow spider, which crawls in the moonlight and this moonlight itselfand you and I on the gateway, whispering together, whispering about eternal

78 The Proclamation

things - have we not already been there and come again - and run the otherpath ahead in front of us, this long, terrifying path - do we not have toeternally recur?

When Zarathustra progresses so far he hears a scream and fiends a shepherdwho has swallowed a snake. This means: the thought of the eternal return crawlsinto the human throat to provoke a disgusting convulsion. It is a suffocatingthought. If everything recurs, human efforts are futile. The steep path towardsthe overman is a senseless folly because the small, contemptible man returnsforever. All risk appears wasted. Even more than before the spirit of heaviness,the thought of the eternal return contradict the will to power and the self-overcoming of life. However, this only seems so. Zarathustra calls upon theshepherd to bite the snake's head off in his mouth: 'No longer shepherd, nolonger man - a transformed, a transcended being who laughs. Never before didman laugh as he laughed.'

The endurance and the acceptance of the thought of eternal return effects adecisive existential transformation. It results in a transformation of all serious-ness and heaviness into a lightness or into the superhuman lightness of laugh-ing. The thought of the eternal return has seemingly two aspects. It can beviewed primarily from the perspectives of the past or from that of the future. Ifall events are merely repetitions of the past, the future is obviously also alreadydetermined. It merely repeats what has already occurred. There is truly noth-ing new under the sun - the predetermined future unfolds itself inevitably. Alldoing, all risk is senseless and futile since everything is already determined. Butone could equally say this: all is still to be done, whatever we decide now, wewill need to decide over and over again. Every moment has an importancewhich extends beyond any individual life. It does not only determine the fore-seeable future but also the future of future recurrences. The importance ofeternity rests on the moment. Just like the worldly existence determines thetranscendental fate of the soul in the Christian conception, the worldlydecisions of the moment determine all unforeseeable recurrences of theworldly existence. Nietzsche refers frequently to the thought that the momentdetermines eternity - that the doctrine of the eternal return poses a new centreof gravity for human existence. Strictly speaking, both aspects, the fatalism andthe weight of eternity on the decision of the moment, have become question-able. The thought of the eternal return sublates the difference between pastand future or better it imbues the past with the open possibilities of the futureand the future with the determinations of the past. Both characteristics blendtogether in a peculiar way: events in time are on the one hand already deter-mined and on the other hand not yet determined, they are already decided andthey need to still be decided. The past shares the characteristics of the future


and the future those of the past. The will cannot only wish to progress now, butin willing progress it also wills regress. Time loses its unambiguous direction.The firm characteristics of the ordinary understanding of time are beingshifted.

We tend to find this all very confusing. We cannot yet grasp if Nietzsche onlythinks a fanciful thought which dissolves any understanding of time or if hegains a more profound understanding of time and the world as a whole or if heconceives time essentially according to the unambiguous path of the cosmicdirection of becoming or if he transcends this dimension altogether. The reflec-tion in the third part of Zarathustra has a peculiar form. The above mentionedchapter Of the vision and the riddle seemingly interrupts the proclamation ofthe eternal return. However, this interruption only leads to emphasize theimportance. As Zarathustra predicts in several chapters: 'See it will come, it isclose, the great noon.' The 'noon' is the proclamation of the eternal return. Thisis the centre of time where time reveals itself, where all-embracing time whichconstitutes a dimension for all being becomes itself openly exposed. The chap-ter Before sunrise^ is of utmost importance. One could see it as a lyrical expres-sion or as an ecstatic jubilation of the soul transfigured by the silent beauty ofthe morning sky. But this would be a severe misunderstanding. Nietzsche'simages are always symbols of his thoughts. Before sunrise Zarathustraencounters the abyss of light, the shimmering and open expanse of the cosmos,Ouranos in its splendour, which lends visibility to all things beneath it andcircumscribes, unifies and collects the manifold individuals.

'To throw myself into your light - this is my depth. To hide myself in yourpurity - this is my innocence.' The thinker becomes attuned to the vast heavenof light. The profundity of his thinking depends on the extent to which hesucceeds to expose himself to the openness of the light which transcends allthings within the light. 'Innocence' of being - this is for him the light which thecosmos throws on all things. Wherever the world is conceived, 'guilt' and 'pun-ishment' disappear, human words darkening the pure sky like clouds disappearand the wrath of the Gods and their governance of the cosmos disappears.

'All things are surpassed by the heaven of chance, the heaven of innocence,the heaven of approximation, the heaven of exuberance.' Cosmic time and thetemporal cosmos are the heaven which transcends all things. Wherever the cos-mos with its space and time opens itself up to reflection the realm of the tran-scendental spirit is dissolved and the moral and metaphysical interpretation ofbeing collapses. 'Since all things are baptized at the well of eternity and beyondgood and evil - Good and evil are themselves only intermediary shadows anddamp and sad trickles and clouds.' Things are described as baptized at the wellof eternity not because they have a supernatural essence over and above theirearthly significance and finite being or because they are 'things-in-themselves'.

80 The Proclamation

Eternity and temporality are not different; they are truly one. Time is eternal asthe eternal return. To see being in the light of the world means to divest thelatter from all categories such as 'divine premonition', moral importance orrationality of the cosmic unfolding within time and to interpret this unfolding asa 'dance' or as a round in which everything connects and turns.

'O heaven above me, you pure, distant heaven! This is your purity to me, thatthere are no spider and cobweb of reason - that you are my dance floor fordivine coincidences, that you are my divine fable for divine dice and gamblers.'The play of being is here understood to be divine and the thinker, who isexposed to the expanse of the heavens of light and to the expanse of the cosmos,is accordingly beyond good and evil and close to the whole. Yes, he can questionthe heaven: 'Are you not the light to my fire? Do you not have the sister-soul formy insight?'

Zarathustra's cosmic attunement is not a mere mood which comes to him bychance. It is essentially a fundamental attunement. It is the way in which theworld itself approaches the thinker, expresses itself to him and concerns him. Itis the ordinary way of encountering objects through an objectifying thought andwithin a vast horizon in which objects are encountered.

Perhaps, however, the attunement to the cosmos is a precondition of under-standing the eternal return more primordially. And vice versa one could perhapssay in Nietzsche's sense: If human understanding is blind to the cosmos and if itis captured by the urgency of being, if it fails to expose itself and to be exposedto the light-heaven above all things, it will be more likely to succumb to the spiritof heaviness and its creations of morality, metaphysics and religion. It will alsobe more likely to misunderstand the essence of time and to conceive it as alinear, dual formation with a distinct difference between an unchangeable pastand a not yet determined future. The entire problem of the revaluation of valuesis in this third part dominated by a leading fundamental thought which attemptsto question the character of time as the eternal return of the same.

5. THE ETERNAL RETURN: THE COSMOLOGICALCONCEPTION OF THE PROBLEM OF MORALITY. THE

RECURRENCE OF THE SAME

The 'eternal return of the same', Nietzsche's most abysmal thought appears tobe ambiguous. It seems that the thought lacks a clear conceptual definition andform. It rather resembles a sombre prophecy or an oracular and mystical revela-tion than a rational conception. Zarathustra is the teacher of the 'eternal return';however, he does not really teach it, he merely indicates it. His vision of theabyss of time expresses itself in a riddle. This, however, is no ambiguous enjoy-


ment of the mask and of concealment and disguise leading him to speak inriddles. Nietzsche's conception of the eternal return stretches the limits ofexpression, the limits of the logos, of reason and of method. His inability todevelop the doctrine of the eternal return conceptually is no individual short-coming but that of the philosophical tradition to which Nietzsche is bound.Although he opposes traditional metaphysics, his opposition is still dependenton it. He inverts it and he thinks anti-idealistically and yet still uses metaphysicaland conceptual methods. Nietzsche is an ambiguous figure. His backward-looking struggle against Platonism, Christianity and slave-morality or against aninterpretation based on human self-alienation follows largely a path of meta-physical categories and inverted modes of thought. The interpretation of beingor the interpretation of things in the world remains his main focus. With theeternal return Nietzsche questions the world in its entirety. He conceives ittemporally. The world as such is understood as the totality of time, as theeternity of time and as the eternal temporal existence of the world. Nietzschelooks ahead. He opens himself towards the unsayable and still-nameless. Thefact that there are no concepts, that he remains truly suspended above the abyssonly means that he is innovative. 'Oh my brothers, whoever is first will besacrificed.'37

Nietzsche is the explorer of a thought which attempts to grasp the worldbeyond all things. However, because he attempts to reflect beyond the thingsand beyond inner-worldly being his cosmic conception remains trapped withinthe realm which he wishes to transcend. Wherever world is thought as tran-scending things, as surpassing and embracing all being, it is still conceived froman ontic perspective even though this might be done negatively.

Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal return commences with linear time,namely with the temporal sequence and its firm distinction between the pastand the future. It progresses to sublating this distinction by questioning theinfinity of time and its eternity in a novel and peculiar manner. Nietzsche'sdoctrine of the eternal return turns on this conception of eternity. One must yetask and show if he means by eternity just the infinite continuation of the tem-poral sequence or if he articulates a substantial understanding about the natureof the world. Zarathustra fails to clarify the eternal return adequately.

The thought of the eternal return dominates the entire third part of Zarathus-tra. However, only two chapters out of sixteen deal with it directly. The first oneis Of the vision and the riddle and the other one is The recovery. However, allother chapters avoid the eternal return. All aspects (the overman, the death ofGod and the will to power) are now considered and reflected upon from theperspective of the eternal return.

Cosmic harmony and the cosmic stance of human existence become the scalewhich measures everything now. Human greatness depends on its measure of

82 The Proclamation

openness to the world. The life most exposed to the world has the highest rank.The overman exposes himself most to the entirety of the world and understandsthis entirety as a temporal infinity or as the eternal return of the same. Humanexistence approaches the overman the more it is torn away from the concretepresence and the more it is open to the abyss of light. Only from this perspectivedoes it make sense that the chapter Before sunrise, which expresses cosmictranscendence metaphorically as the ether of light, is followed by the chapter 'Ofthe diminishing virtue'.

Nietzsche does not loose the problem, he does not abandon the path ofreflecting on the cosmos and does not even - as one may be inclined to assume -tackle the issue of morality now. He rather approaches the problem of moralitycosmologically. He sees that the common notions of morality contain a loss ofworld. With its possibility to expose itself to the vastness of the world and toexperience and think the eternity the human being can also close itself to it andcan seemingly shrink and become small. This mediocrity is understood as a'shrinking'. If man accommodates himself in the near and nearest or if he limitshimself to attend only to the finite and the presence, if he only desires the littlehappiness, his contentment and comfort or if he lowers himself and arrangeshimself in a familiar realm or if he becomes weak and tame he has done sobecause the expanse of the world no longer resonates through his life. No yearn-ing tears and drives him into the terrifying eeriness. The 'diminishing virtue' is asymptom of the world-poverty of human existence.

Nietzsche contrasts again the man poor of world with the man open to theworld. In the chapter On the olive mountain36 Zarathustra praises the silentwintry sky. It is for him a symbol of the great man. It opens itself widely. It doesnot seek warmth from the 'neighbour' and it does not shelter in mutualbrotherly love. It rather endures the vast, icy realm which surrounds all warmthand closeness. The vastness of this realm relates to the limited, finite warmthlike silence to noise and like the great man who lives within the breath of theworld to the small man who is no longer exposed to infinity, who cowers andcringes and hides in his living room, in the house or the city or in the business ofcomforting company. 'You snow-bearded, silent winter's sky. You round-eyedwhite head above me! You divine symbol of my soul and its desire!'

Zarathustra conceives himself as the opposing possibility of the 'smoky, cosy,used, dead and resentful souls'. Zarathustra remains in the stream of the cos-mos. Open to the world he is also truly autonomous and full of character.Exposing itself to the vastness of the world does not extinguish the self. Quitethe opposite! Both belong fundamentally together.

The chapter Of passing39 does not only contain Zarathustra's rejection ofthe big city. The big city is just a metaphor for an extreme loss of world. Thegreat man can merely pass by such poverty. Zarathustra's decisive rejection of


all kinds of world-poor humanity causes the return to his freedom in the moun-tains and to his home in solitude. Man is not at home in the human hustle andbustle of the big city. He has no home among the mediocre and the weak, amongthe selfless and those poor of world. Nietzsche profoundly understands thathome is not only where there is world. We usually fail to grasp the essence ofhome when we think it is only the closest realm of experience such as forexample the small realm of house and garden and of childhood, which in retro-spect appears so small and insignificant. However, in this we misconstrue homeand childhood. Home is earthy ground or the familiar closeness to the earthwithin the openness of the world. The life of the child does not only experiencethe close and immediate things, the ball and the doll, but also the shimmeringdistance, the clouds in the sky and the eeriness of the night. Nietzsche addressesZarathustra's solitude as his home. Home, that is essential closeness to thethings and trusting love for the earth exists when human existence is granted animmediacy from the vastness of the cosmos. In the solitude of the mountainsZarathustra is embraced by the great 'blissful silence'. The world resonates in it.Beneath him among the many men dwells a noise, which discusses and dissectseverything and which does not allow the silence of the world to come forth inwhich human existence prepares itself for its purpose. 'One misunderstandsman if one lives amongst them. They live too much in the foreground. What useare far-sighted and far-reaching eyes?' Zarathustra has a yearning vision or avision of the great yearning, which reaches into the universal realm and searchesfor the man with the greatest openness to the world and for the man with theknowledge of the eternal return.

The chapter Of the three evils*0, which appears initially to be dealing withmoral questions, examines the three most condemned things critically, namelybodily lust, hunger for power and egotism. However, this analytical examinationis guided in a hidden manner and tacitly by the problem of the world. Werequire yearning eyes as well in order to see this. We need to approach thischapter through the argument of the third part. The focus of the entire thirdpart is the question of the world. How do desire, hunger for power and egoismrelate to the world? One could answer that these three evils are traditionallyconsidered to be aspects of a 'secular attitude' as opposed to a transcendentaland ascetic one. However, this would conceive the cosmos merely as a humanorientation or as a tendency and an instinctive delusion, but not as the Allwhich embraces all being. In an existential sense world would be just one aspectof human existence. However, Nietzsche examines lust, hunger for power andegoism according to their cosmic relevance. He examines whether they aremodes of existence in which the human being opens or closes itself towards theworld. Not only does Nietzsche oppose the traditional Christian values of chas-tity, humility and altruism, but he is also guided by the question if and in what

84 The Proclamation

respect they reveal an openness to the world or a transcendence towards thewhole.

'Lust, hunger for power, egoism: These three have hitherto been at bestcursed and at worst misrepresented and falsified. These three I wish to debatewell from the human point of view.' All three reveal for Zarathustra a mode ofessential engagement with the world if they are not understood in a vulgarsense. Lust is for him 'the pleasure of the earthly garden, the excess of futuregratitude for the now'. Lust elevates the individual existence beyond itselftowards the infinite chain of sexes. It exists in the wholeness of time although itappears to perish in the ecstasy of the moment. Lust is as it were the naturalexistence in the entirety of time or the excess of gratitude of the entire future orof all time. The finite moment includes time in its entirety. The hunger forpower seems to be the historical force for Zarathustra which aims to reachbeyond any rest and pause. It is the principle of restlessness that stirs up indi-viduals and people and pushes them on to the path of history. Dominance is thedriving and hunting aspect and it is time as history. Every epoch transcendsitself towards ever further distances and futures in the desire for dominance.Dominance does not loose itself in what becomes familiar by being achieved.It never stops. With this it refers towards the openness and towards theunpredictable. It is the opposite of the diminishing virtue and of all modestyand satisfaction. The desire for the self is no desperate egoism of a petty life, buta generous virtue of an overflowing soul and of a soul which needs the worldand finds a ground and basis if it is surrounded by the harmony of the mostdistant worlds. All three evils contain an explicit relationship to the world.If one wishes to speak of a 'revaluation of all values' here it must be clear thatthe principle of this revaluation implies only the greatness or smallness of therelationship to the cosmos.

This becomes even clearer in the following chapter Of the spirit of heavi-ness*1. Nietzsche summarizes here seemingly all negative aspects of the humanexistence which closes itself to the cosmos. Zarathustra sees himself as theenemy of the spirit of heaviness for whom he is the 'original, deadly arch-enemy'. Zarathustra's character is that of a bird. He elevates himself, he tran-scends himself and he exposes himself to the universe. He is the person of thecosmic transcendence. What perhaps had been earlier the enthusiasm or theoneness with God or the idealistic dissolution in a merely fictional other-worldbecomes for Nietzsche the profound and real human relationship with the cos-mos. The highest immanence of life is the immanence in the world. The spirit ofheaviness is the tendency to limit human existence and to chain it to being andthe inner-worldly things with the consequence of forgetting the world. Therecan be no absolute loss of world because man is essentially in the world. How-ever, the worldliness of human existence can experience a peculiar perversion


with a cosmic denial which is only possible for a cosmic being. The stone is notblind since it lacks the possibility to see. Blindness is a personal mode of being.There can only be forgetting of world where world belongs to the ontologicalmode of existence. The existence which forgets world is at the same time 'self-less'. World and self are related in an overarching tension. The more open to theworld the more man realizes himself. The fulfilment of the self is achieved in anexcessive existence of freedom and creativity. Life and earth seem light to thecreative person. Man liberates himself through creativity from the weight andload which commonly oppresses him. Nietzsche sees the essential connectionbetween lightness, creative excess, self-realisation and the cosmos. The spirit ofheaviness contrasts with all of these. It condemns man to self-alienation, bur-dens him with the weight of a transcendental God and morality and chains himto the ontic world. Gravity becomes the symbol of an oppressed life for whicheverything is heavy and which carries the burden of morality, other-world andreligion like a camel. It carries itself pompously with an expression of sombreseriousness. The forgetting of world and the loss of self correspond to theiropposites, the realisation of the self and its openness to the world. Zarathustracontradicts the spirit of heaviness with an extreme passion. He addresses thehuman forgetting of the cosmos like a tempest: 'Whoever teaches man to flymoves all border stones. All limits will be blown up, the earth will be renamed as"the light one".'

Flying becomes the symbol of world-transcendence and of the exposition ofthe self to the spatio-temporal expanse of the universe. The explicit relationshipwith the world leads to an overcoming of all ontic distinctions and separations.The limits dividing finite things from each other and the opposition of good andevil created by the spirit of heaviness are drawn into a vortex as soon as mansenses the cosmos, when his existence extends and expands into infinity andwhen he transcends finitude towards infinity. However, this is not a meta-physical infinity, an other-world, a thing-itself or a God. The metaphysical infin-ity is a denial of finitude. The world is the infinite which embraces all finitethings. The space, time and light of the world grant appearance to the things.Their infinity is not beyond them and it does not transcend the things. It isimmanent within them and embraces them. The contrast of the light and heavylife, of realization and loss of self, of opening to and forgetting of the worldbecomes now the distinctive principle between 'old and new tables'. Zarathustraapproaches the difference between two value systems now from the aspect of therelationship between human existence and the cosmos. However, the chapterOf old and new tables*2 goes even further. The connection between man andthe cosmos is exposed in a fundamental way. Zarathustra's wisdom is 'wild', a'great winged yearning'. His cosmically open wisdom reflects on the dance ofbecoming in which the world abandons itself and returns to itself. The new

86 The Proclamation

tables contain those of love for the farthest and those of the creative yearning forthe overman. They are tables of value created by excess, yearning and love forthe world. The soul is seen as the highest kind of being 'with the longest ladderand which descends the furthest... . The most expansive soul which can runthe furthest and err and roam; the most necessary one which takes pleasure inplunging itself into chance; the living soul which dives into becoming. Thepossessive soul which wills the will and the desire . . . the soul which loves itselfbest, in which all things have their flow and counter-flow, their low and hightide . ..'. The soul is not the highest kind of being because it is more powerfulor richer than other beings. It is the most embracing being because it is open tothe existence of the world. All things flow in it because it is conscious of theeternal return.

Nietzsche develops an even more profound understanding of the existenceopen to the world in the chapter Of the great yearning. The second, thematicexposition of the doctrine of the eternal return precedes it in the chapter entitledThe recovery*3. Here too we find a submerged form of exposition. The ani-mals, not Zarathustra, articulate the true content. The animals speak of beingitself which circles within time. Zarathustra wishes to confront his most abysmalthought finally in his solitude. He summons it. The abyss must speak. However,this does not occur. The thinker of the eternal return chokes with deepest dis-gust. Zarathustra is struck down for seven days, appearing to be dead. One maybe tempted to view this event as a kind of dramatic trick designed to emphasizeits importance. However, it is no mere stylistic decision adding tension to theplot. Nietzsche is indeed unable to articulate his most radical thought directly.He can just indicate it and he can only articulate it indirectly and by reference.According to the Christian account of creation, God created the world in sevendays. Zarathustra experiences the godless world in seven days. And now all istransfigured. The earth appears as a garden to him. What could this mean? Allthings are transfigured through their appearance in the light of the world. Alllimits are removed. Everything that is there is present at hand, given and iselevated from the burden of its individual concreteness. It appears in a contextof repetition as that which occurs always again in the eternal return. The past,present and future are no longer irrevocably separated and divested from eachother. In so far as it is understood as the eternal return, time has a suspended,light and dancing character. The future has already occurred and the past hasyet to occur. The moment contains the entire time in so far as it is the infinitelyrepeated moment. Man is suspended within a suspended time. He has learnthow to fly and he is flying. The power of the spirit of heaviness is broken. In hisdiscussion with the animals however, Zarathustra insists on the human solitudeeven though he grasps the eternal return. Such a knowledge does not dissolveinto a universal sympathy. It does not dissolve his individuality. On the contrary,


he only finds himself through it. 'Every soul owns a different world. Every soulconsiders any other soul to be an other-world. The most similar is best betrayedby semblance, because the smallest distance is hardest to cross.'

The eternal return is revealed differently to the animals than to humans. Theyare embraced by change and do not confront it. They are involved in the play ofbeing, they do not play against it like man. Whatever the animals themselves sayabout the eternal return is seen from the aspect of being itself.

Everything moves, everything returns and eternally the wheel of being turns.Everything dies and everything flowers and the age of being is eternal. Every-thing decays, everything is newly formed and being builds the same houseforever. Everything parts, everything welcomes itself again and the ring ofbeing remains true to itself eternally. In every now being commences. Every'here' captures the ball 'there'. The middle is everywhere. The path ofeternity is crooked.

What does this speech of the animals say? What does it aim at? It does notmention time itself but rather its path. The path of time is brought into view asthe path of the things within time. The relation of immanent temporality to timeor the immanence of temporal being within time are now the topic. Everythingthat comes and goes, dies and flourishes, decays and is formed anew - all this isconceived finitely. Although the manifold of being is inconceivable it is never-theless not infinite. The temporal within time is finite. Time itself however,within which all things occur is not finite. And hence the sequence must recurafter all events have occurred. It must recur and it must have recurred an infinitenumber of times and it must repeat itself ad infinhum.

The transition of the things through time is a year of being. However, aninfinite number of such years must have occurred and must still occur. Strictlyspeaking Nietzsche does not believe in unique or concrete time preciselybecause the acquaintance with the present time in which we live does not reflecta true consciousness of time. While time runs through our ringers and we realizethe unique and the fleeting transition of our existence our experience of decayconceals the premonition of eternity. It is not the case that from now on our lifeand the generation of things are repeated eternally. Our present life has alreadybeen repeated. There is no first life which is not itself a repetition and whichcould form the original basis for all repetitions. The character of repetitiveness isnot found within time, that is, not through the repetition of a primordial event.Or in other words: recurrence is not generated in time. It is time itself.

Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal return implies great conceptual difficul-ties. Nietzsche attributes a deeper dimension to time over and above itsphenomenal uniqueness and factuality. He attempts to conceive of time and

88 The Proclamation

eternity as a unity and to attribute eternal characteristics to time. Temporalindividuality of a moment is merely an appearance. An apparently singularevent is already an infinite recurrence. The apparently linear direction of time iscircular. The superficial perspective separates the distinctions between the pres-ent, the past and the future, between the 'here' and the 'there'. To Zarathustra'sdeeper perspective they are one: 'The centre is everywhere.' Time however isnot only the realm, the path on which all things begin and end, dissolve andform; it is the beginning and ending itself. Time is the power of letting be and itis simultaneously constructive and destructive. It is the Dionysian play of theworld.

Nietzsche has finally separated the thought of the eternal return from a meta-physical framework. Zarathustra accepts the presentation of the eternal recur-rence given by the animals conditionally: 'Oh you cunning jesters and hurdygurdies, Zarathustra replies . . . how you know what had to fulfil itself in sevendays.'

And yet there is an essential distinction between him and his animals. Theseare driven by the current of time. Unlike man, they have no aim. Although manhimself too is subject to time like any being, he relates to it. He has aims, ideasand he is his own task. The human task is the overman. The fear gripping thehuman conception of the eternal recurrence as the temporality of the world isthe premonition that everything, which has been overcome, is going to returnand will need to be overcome again. Man's fate resembles that of Sysiphos.Zarathustra's highest achievement is his reconciliation of freedom and necessity.In the face of all recurrent being he retains the will to will. The animals call himthe teacher of the eternal recurrence and they, not he himself, express thedoctrine:

See, we know what you teach, that all things recur eternally and we too andthat we have already been present eternally and all things with us. You teachthat there is a great year of becoming, a monstrous great year; This must turneternally around like an hourglass so that it continues to flow, so that all theseyears resemble each other in the biggest and smallest way, so that we tooremain the same in every great year in the greatest and smallest sense.

These sentences do not just state the recurrence but they state the recurrence ofthe same. This makes Nietzsche's thought even more difficult and obscure ormore paradoxical so to speak. What do we usually mean by the recurrence of thesame? For example: we repeat the same request, that is, we express it repeatedly.We do not utter the same sounds but always different ones. However, the differ-ent sounds, the sounds of our speech, have the same meaning. We use the samelinguistic expressions for our requests. The multiple requests with their identical

The eternal recurrence 89

meanings are distinguished from each other, however. One is the first, the otherthe first repetition, the next the second repetition of the 'same'. Identity ofmeaning is not the same as numerical identity. The repetition of the samepresupposes a real, temporal difference. The first one occurs first. It is, as itwere, the original. The others are repetitions. An ordinary understanding ofrecurrence presupposes a direction in time. We distinguish that which is soonerfrom that which is later. The thought of the eternal recurrence, however, pre-cisely destroys this distinction. There is no longer a difference between the threedimensions of time. And accordingly we cannot conceive the recurrence of thesame within a linear time. When Nietzsche uses the parable of the hourglass heborrows it initially from an ordinary conception of time. The flow of the sand isa temporal occurrence which can be repeated infinitely ad libitum, however, atdifferent points in time. The sequence of the repeated turns of the hourglassrequires time in itself. It occurs within an embracing temporality which consistsof temporal extensions measured by the hourglass. Does Nietzsche believe thatthe recurrence of the great year of being or the passing of the things in timeoccurs in an embracing time? Does he believe, as it were, that there is a time inwhich the cosmic years pass? The answer to this is not easy to find. The crucialproblem is that a thinking which turns from the dimension of temporality to thetemporality of the world itself can do so only in a constant rejection of- or flightfrom - the concepts of ontic temporality. It is not surprising that the reflectionsof the third part of Zarathustra express the relation between the human exist-ence and the world and its attunement to the world in a language resonantingwith a passion for distance. This is most evident in a chapter which is perhapsthe most beautiful of the entire work: 'Of the great yearning'.

6. THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE: OF THEGREAT YEARNING

The doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same is not developed beyond ameagre exposition of basic concepts in Zarathustra. Nietzsche approaches itthrough the common understanding of time. He focuses on the given momentas the gateway between the two long temporal paths with opposing character-istics. The problems emerge through the question of the relation between thefinite temporal content and time itself as Nietzsche defines the extension ofthese paths as eternity and eternity itself as infinite temporality. If every tem-poral event is finite then an infinite past must have already passed the entireontic past. No possibility remains unrealized.

Accordingly, everything concrete at any moment is essentially a recurrenceand, as it were, an infinite recurrence. Any future can only unfold as an infinite

90 The Proclamation

future in continuous recurrence. However, there are no longer two distinct eter-nities of the past and the future since the conception of eternity as an eternalrepetition of a temporal content sublates the difference between past and futurealtogether. The temporality of being is called the great year. In the recurrence ofthe great year the same returns or the recurrence of the same occurs. However,not only does the sequence of events, the creation and decay, the coming andgoing, the unfolding and destruction of being recur. The recurrence of the greatyear also recurs itself. The years are countless. No actual year is a recurrence ofn +1 potency. Does an eternal recurrence contradict itself? Can one speakabout recurrence even in this context? The obscurity of concepts such as 'eter-nity', 'recurrence', path of time and temporality in Zarathustra make Nietzsche'sdoctrine of the eternal recurrence questionable and ambiguous. There is noexplicit elucidation of any concept of time. One has rather the impression thatNietzsche attempts to express a tremendous inner vision which oppresses himand which trembles through the terror of its experience.

Eternity is within time, not beyond time. But since Nietzsche clings to theclassical conception of being as presence despite his inverted Platonism andsince all being threatens to disappear in the receding time he can think presencejust as an eternal recurrence of decay and generation. The guiding interpret-ation pervading all his thought of the connection between temporality and timeis itself perhaps most questionable. Is it not circular when Nietzsche infers thefinitude of the entire temporal content from the finitude of all temporal being?

All events and facts commence and terminate in time. All events have theirduration. 'All that can endure' commences in a now and endures for a sequenceof moments. If it is to commence, however, it must have been preceded by apast. Time itself transcends any given temporal content. Time as it were is largerthan any inter-temporal becoming. However, if every event is finite and if timetranscends any temporality is it a necessary conclusion that the temporalsequence or the entirety of the temporal events is also finite? For Nietzsche 'allpossible events' has a finite meaning. The possible consists of a tremendouslylarge but nevertheless finite number of constellations. The great year is the finitetotality of all events. All finite succession of events however can only occur in aninfinite time as a recurrence. The limited amount of sand in the hourglass canonly continue to flow if the latter is constantly turned around.

The souls are as mortal as the bodies. However, the knot of causes in which Iam tied recurs - It will re-create me. I myself am a cause of the eternal return.I recur, together with this earth, with this eagle, with this snake - not to a newlife or to a better life or to a similar life - I recur in this very same life, in allgreatest and smallest respects so that I again teach the eternal recurrence ofall things.44


Here Nietzsche augments the recurrence to include the recurrence of the pres-ence and thus achieves a complete paradox. The 'this-there', the uniquely indi-vidual and simple point is in precisely this time and at this point in space simplynot repeatable. To cite an earlier example: I can repeat the same request usingthe same words and the same manner of expression but not the identical soundsof language. Everything that happens is unique and is inevitably lost in the flowof time. Spatio-temporal being (that is being in the openness of the world)occurs only once. Birth and death are the boundaries of the unique, singularpath which we travel in the light. This provides man conscious of transiencewith an intense attention towards his own life. We are here and now: in this one,unique life which appears to be so short compared to the immense expanse oftime. Nietzsche attempts to conceive the eternity of the transient, not, however,by pointing to an eternity beyond time following death and by reducing time toa mere appearance. He rather conceives of time as eternal in positing transienceas permanence and singularity as recurrence. Recurrence is not supposed tooppose singularity but to eternalize it and to give it concrete and factual exist-ence and an infinite dimension. As long as one understands the thought of theeternal recurrence as an unrelenting repetition like the great records of allpossible events being played over and over again or as a never-ending per-petuum mobile of infinite monotony and boredom the paradoxical aspect ofNietzsche's conception is not recognized. All his concepts that he uses in thedevelopment of the doctrine of the eternal return sublate each other. An eternalreturn which has no original that recurs is just as paradoxical a conception as arecurrence of singularity with the recurrent characteristics of singularity.

The eternal recurrence is Nietzsche's doctrine of the entirety of being. It isluminously clear and it radiates through almost all the chapters of the third partthat Nietzsche refers to the world by referring to eternity which transcends alltemporal events, occurrences and facts and transcends all finite temporalityinfinitely. Everywhere we find the resonance of an aura of distance which onlygrounds the essential closeness of being. This is most obvious in the chapter 'Ofthe great yearning'45. It shows that every word and every expression in Zar-athustra is meaningful and it shows that Nietzsche's metaphorical language iseverywhere full of important thoughts. One has not read the Zamthustra if onehas merely heard an opulent, overloaded, and loquacious voice rich in metaphoror if one is not able to translate the metaphors into thoughts. Nietzsche's intui-tive and visionary style is usually not received very congenially. We will need towork hard to understand the powerful images of his thoughts in his language.

The chapter to which we are going to turn now deals with the great yearning.We all understand this human emotion. It refers quite obviously to a desire,namely a desire for something absent. We do not feel yearning for that which isin front of our hands and eyes or for that which we can see and touch. We may

92 The Proclamation

desire whatever is present and desire it perhaps vehemently and passionately butwe do not yearn for it. Yearning implies the extension of the desire into thedistance. We yearn for the distant lover, for the days of childhood and for death.Yearning liberates us from the present context and from its limited aims andpurposes. We are far removed from all oppressive closeness, are in a wayremoved like Iphigenie who looks yearningly across the sea on the beach ofTauris and searches with her soul for the land of the Greeks. Yearning implies anactive waiting for distant realms and times. We are also all familiar with theyearning for the indefinite and with a yearning without aim, with the soul'syearning for the distance or with the gaze towards the open sea. Yearning doesnot imply the desire to concretely fulfil itself. It has a mysterious and hiddentendency to keep the object of yearning at the same time out of our actual reach.The desiderium implies that the distance is kept intuitively at a distance.

Augustine states 'inquietum cor nostrum .. .' God is the object of his yearning.The desiderium is not fulfilled by finite objects. Only the infinite God can fulfilthe yearning of the human hearts. The small yearning is a desire for being whichreaches into the distance. The great yearning, however, is an attitude whichaccepts distance itself. It does not only permeate distance; it reaches for distanceitself. For Nietzsche this distance is no longer the divine Christian creator whotranscends the visible and created realm but the distance which embraces allthat is visible and tangible as the distance of space and time of the cosmos thatgrants all closeness. The great yearning is the human exposure to space and timeor his openness to the world.

The chapter deals with the cosmic openness in so far as it has the character ofan understanding of the eternal recurrence of the same. Zarathustra converseswith his soul: 'O my soul, I taught you to say "now" like "once upon a time" and"in the past" and to dance over all here, there and that.'

The common human ontological understanding conceives being within thehorizon of time in such a way that today, yesterday and once-upon-a-time areseparated and divided. If something exists today then it has ceased to existyesterday or in the distant past. The presence is separated from the past andfrom the future. A rock endures a long time. It exists differently in time than ashort event, for example a flash of lightning. But independently of these twomodes of temporal existence it is clear that past, presence and future are dis-tinctly and definitely separated from each other. They are the three dimensionsof time; they cannot loose their distinctness. Just like time, space is separable:here and there are in different realms. All existing things are dispersed throughdifferent spatial realms and have particular locations. To be sure, the differencebetween here and there is relative to the perspective of the observer. Whatever ishere for one person is 'there' for another. The fact however that here and thereapply in a definite sense is not based on its relation to any particular situation


but on the real spatial location. As long as the soul is subject to an ordinaryunderstanding of space and time or to a defined situation it is tied to an ego. It isplaced among the things and is itself a kind of object. It is found in the body.Zarathustra, however, has taught his soul (in the doctrine of the eternalrecurrence of the same) not to take the fixed differences between space andtime, the differences between today, yesterday and once-upon-a-time, of hereand there seriously in order to free himself from the spirit of heaviness whichcreates all such limitations. He taught it to see the today, the yesterday and theonce-upon-a-time as identical.

How are these identical? They are identical to the thought of the eternalreturn. If the eternal recurrence is the essence of time then the differencebetween past and future collapses. The future is then also always the past andvice-versa. The soul exists in the entirely of time if it 'devalues' the irrelevantdifferences of events. In a sense it acquires omnipresence. It exposes itself to thepresence of the all in which the differences of the temporal dimensions disap-pear. The soul which is thus enlightened can dance beyond the ontic determin-ations of spatial location and realms because it dwells in an universal realm. 'Ohmy soul, I liberated you from all corners, I removed the dust, the spiders and thetwilight from you . . .'.

The soul which has extended itself into the universal realm and yearns for thegreat yearning now stands within the open light and finds itself under the heavenof'innocence and chance'. Only as long as the human soul closes itself to theworld, clings to the given and obvious and only as long as it hides itself, can thedark knowledge of the cosmos remain concealed in a divine belief. God is, as itwere, the shadow of a world where human existence is diminished and does notdare to expose itself. If the human existence does not truly transcend itself thisshadow appears in the form of a transcendent, other-worldly God and with itthe entire interpretation of life as guilt, sin and shame. According to Zarathustraman has to face the sun 'naked'. The true human spirit resembles the tempestwhich clears all clouds. Clouds conceal the luminous expanse of the heavens. Allbasic concepts of the Christian tradition are like clouds, like dark shadowswhich, according to Nietzsche, are based on a basic human stance which forgetsand is blind to the world. Wherever the exposure towards the open realm andthe yearning extension into the deep cosmic dimensions of space and timeoccurs the tempest of the human spirit rages and the human liberation fromGod, other-world and cosmic empowerment eventuates. 'Oh my soul, I gaveyou the right to negate like the tempest and affirm like the open sky, you remainsilent like the light and you pass through negating tempests.'

And Zarathustra continues to converse with his soul. He demonstrates howthe doctrine of the eternal recurrence does not limit freedom but liberates thesoul from the inevitable past. If the entire past is also the entire future the soul

94 The Proclamation

has the freedom to determine the 'created and uncreated'. The creativity of thecreator, that is the human creativity, is given free reign like never before. Indeed,it has a secret connection with the creative and forming essence of the worldwhich lets a being be in the eternal return of the same. And Zarathustra speaksabout contempt. This contempt 'does not arrive like an infestation of worms,the great, the loving contempt loves most where it despises most.'

Such contempt is no dismissive ignorance. The human being which is tied toontic being can become conscious of this attachment and can feel contempt foritself as a servant to the things. The person conscious of the eternal recurrence iselevated above the attachment to and immersion in ontic being, however, hereturns from the open cosmos to the things. Transcending ontic being he re-encounters them in a primordial sense. He feels contempt for man as he is now,for this torso and this pitiful cross between nothingness and infinity. Man is thefinite being who has a premonition of the infinite. Because man mostly hidesaway, fails to expose himself truly to infinity and remains rather distant to infin-ity, indeed, even constructs the sculptured image of the transcendental God orbecause he is not what he could be, he is contemptible to Zarathustra yet at thesame time also lovable. He loves in man the ideal of the overman. He is the mostloved and the most condemned as a path to the overman. The overman, how-ever, is nothing but the human being in the mode of the great yearning. 'Oh mysoul I took from you all obedience, submission and worship of a lord. I gave youthe name "turn of need" and "fate".'

If man is transformed into the overman through the understanding of theeternal return and exists yearningly in the cosmos as a whole, the mirage of aGod to which he has to submit disappears. All human servitude ends. Man hasbeen liberated because he dwells in the freedom and openness of the cosmicplay itself. He has become necessary because the difference between will andnecessity has become superfluous, because whatever is willed must be realizedanyway through the eternal recurrence. The soul itself is 'fate' for Zarathustra.The last and the greatest will is to will the necessary. However, this is not theacceptance of a predetermined will for Nietzsche. As long as destiny is under-stood like this, man cannot identify himself with it. Nietzsche conceives a com-pletely different concept of fate. In the understanding of the eternal returnhuman existence joins into the play of the world and becomes a participant ofthe great game. The separation between freedom and necessity is sublated. Justlike the past acquiring characteristics of the future and the future characteristicsof the past, freedom is included in necessity and necessity within freedom.

Here again we see Nietzsche's desire for paradoxical expressions. Heapproaches the cosmos through a paradoxical sublation of ontic contrasts. 'Ohmy soul, I gave you new names and coloured toys, I called you "fate" and"circles of circles" and "umbilical cord of time" and "azure bell".'


What is the point of such metaphorical language? The change to the humanexistence created by the thought of the eternal recurrence also changes theentire ontological understanding. This is no longer primarily an understandingof being in its being, but an understanding of being in the light of the world, inan all-embracing light or in a light of an all-pervasive game in which all onticbeing receives its form, its appearance, its duration and direction. Exposed tothe all-embracing play of the world, the soul itself becomes cosmic and becomessimilar to the world. Like the world it is in some respects the 'circle of circles'. Itis itself related to all-pervasive, universal time like the child to the mother. It isthe 'umbilical cord of time'. It is like the azure sphere of the sky above allthings. The lonely earth supporting all things lies beneath the blue skyembracing all being. The fatherly ether embraces mother earth eternally. Simi-larly, the soul itself, thrown into this cosmic marriage by the great yearningitself, is ambiguous. It is sky and earth in one. Nietzsche conjures up some basicmythical ideas which are as old as mankind. 'Oh my soul, I poured all suns onyou and all nights and all silences and all yearning. You grew for me like a vine.'The primordial opposition and marriage of heaven and earth created all thingsthat endure on earth and come forth into the light. Heaven and earth are thefarthest ends and distances of the soul's yearning reach. They are no finitelimits. Man stands between heaven and earth. The human soul which is trans-figured through the eternal recurrence resembles the vine which grows from theearth towards the light, which carries fruit and which is a joint creation ofheaven and earth, the old sacrifice and the old sacrament. Heavy with a yearningthe soul resembles the vine. Having become as deep as the world it resemblesthe vine heavy with golden-brown grapes. The soul has become overripe. It canno longer bear its excess riches and its worldliness in a calm way. It embraces theworld in its ecstatic yearning. 'Oh my soul, there is no soul anywhere which wasmore loving, more embracing and more embraced. Where is the future and thepast joined closer than in you?' However, with all the energy of its yearning thusopen to the cosmos the soul expresses a melancholy. 'Your richness gazes acrossthe roaring seas and searches and wants.'

All cosmic yearning waits. It exposes itself and waits for space and time. Likeall other ontic things, the human being exists within the world and yet it is ableto expose itself yearningly towards that which is further afar than any thingcould ever be. Called upon by the whole cosmos man nevertheless remainsamong the things. Understanding the infinite he remains trapped in the finite.The infinity of the world confronts him with his own finitude. Precisely theecstatic openness to the world throws him back towards the things. Such suffer-ing creates the song to the world or the reflective poetic song. Zarathustra's soulhas to sing unless it wishes to perish in the suffering of the great yearning. It hasto sing

96 The Proclamation

with roaring song, until all seas become calm, so that they attend to youryearning - until the boat floats across all calm, yearning seas, the goldenwonder, the gold being surrounded by the dance of the evil, good, mysteriousthings - also many great and small animals and all that has miraculous feet sothat it can tread on paths lined with blue pansies towards the golden miracle,the free boat and towards its master. This, however, is the winemaker whowaits with the diamond-studded knife .. .

The great human yearning which understands the eternal recurrence as thecosmic essence and exposes itself receptively is to be fulfilled. That which isconceived within the yearning reach is to arrive by itself. The eternal recurrenceis not final.

The doctrine of the eternal return knows time as eternal recurrence. What,however, the eternal recurrence is in itself Nietzsche's Zarathustra expressesonly through song. The soul which reaches patiently across the silent, yearningseas encounters the boat which floats on the water of becoming. This is theultimate centre of being. All things dance around this boat like dolphins arounda boat. 'The heart of the earth is made of gold' an earlier chapter stated. Thecentre of being is addressed in a metaphor of a golden miracle. The master ofthe boat, however, is Dionysos, the god of intoxication, of love and of death andthe God of play. It is the God of tragedy and comedy, the master of the tragicand at the same time of the light-hearted cosmic play. However, it is no God thatappears in finite form among the ontic beings within the world. He has noepiphany in any defined form. He is a formless creator and the play of Beingitself. And he is the God of vine or Dionysos Bacchus. He liberates the vine fromoppression with the redemption of the knife. He cuts with the hardest knife, witha pruning knife made of diamonds. He is the cut of time itself, which takes allthat it has used. It gives and takes, builds and destroys, creates and decays.Dionysos is the donor and thief of the eternal recurrence.

You great reliever, oh my soul, the nameless - for whom future songs need toyet find names.. .. You are glowing already, you are dreaming already, youare drinking from all deep wells of comfort. Your melancholy rests already inthe bliss of future songs.

Dionysos is the answer to the great human yearning. He brings all being intopresence and absence. He is the master of all becoming, the master of all thingschanging in time. Wherever the Dionysian, which reigns and rules all change,appears itself the arrival of the world has occurred. Yearning for cosmic expan-sion, Zarathustra's soul has come home. Dionysos is Nietzsche's last word.Although Dionysos' name is not mentioned here, the knife indicates the master


of the vineyard. At the same time Nietzsche's reticence is very important. Thearrival of Dionysos rather than his actual presence is proclaimed. He remainsthe nameless of any future songs. The human being open to the cosmos issupposed to approach this ultimate goal in song: 'Oh my soul, now I gave you alland even my last and all my hands are empty for you. That I made you sing, thatwas the ultimate.'

The Dionysian song occurs in the last two chapters of the third part ofZarathustra. The Other Dancing Song*6 is a peculiarly suspended hymn to life inits concealment and obscurity. Life appears in the seductive guise of a womanwho is a witch and a snake or a tempest and an abysmal night. The descriptionof it as an abyss and a labyrinth is the decisive feature here: 'I recently lookedinto your eyes, O life, I saw gold shimmering in your dark eyes, my heart stoodstill with such lust.'

Zarathustra appears to sing a maenadic song about life. Perhaps the style isless successful than Nietzsche believes. In particular the attempts to rhymedisturb in the first third of the chapter. Life, however, says to Zarathustra:' . . . You are not true enough to me! . . . I know that you are planning to leaveme soon.' And Zarathustra whispers into the ear of life, the seductive witch'right into the midst of her tangled, silly plaits of hair'. He does not reveal whathe says. However, we can make a guess. It is not at all possible to leave life in anyabsolute sense. If Zarathustra intends to die soon he has to continuously returnan infinite number of times in the ring of eternal recurrence. 'You know that, OZarathustra - life answers - what nobody knows.'

After such a conversation Zarathustra strikes the bell of time twelve times. Hisunderstanding of time is expressed through the number of strokes of the bell.We are usually immersed in time. We live in it like a dream. It is the path of ourexistence, the medium of our life. It is the air we breathe but we are not con-scious of this, usually. However, we can wake from such a dream and suddenlystartle at midnight. The dream perishes. Time becomes a problem in such a waythat the depth of the world is recognized. If we reflect upon time, if we awakeand do not sleep the ordinary sleep, the world must appear deeper, more mys-terious and more questionable to us where it supports us. We hear the silentpassing of time, as it were, in the silence of the night, whereas the noise of theday with its colourful, intoxicating appearances hardly allows us to understandthe eerie breeze of transience. To understand transience is to understand thedeep suffering of the world. Everything perishes and nothing seems to endure.Wherever anything flourishes death already lurks in the wings. Everything isdevoured by it. The suffering of the world is deep. But Nietzsche contrasts thesuffering of the world with pleasure and its greater depth. Suffering sees only thepassing of time, the decay of being in time. Pleasure, however, is more profound.It does not only emphasize the contrasting aspect of the passing' time, it

98 The Proclamation

recognizes the eternal return of the same or the eternity within the natureof time. Suffering, pleasure, world, time and eternity are here thought in aconnection. The Other Dancing Song closes with the chimes of the bell.

O man, take care/ what speaks the deep midnight/1 slept, I slept/ from deepdreams did I awake/ Deep is the suffering/ Pleasure deeper than heartfeltsuffering/ Suffering says: perish!/ But all pleasure desires eternity, desiresdeep, deep eternity!

7. THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE: THE SEVEN SEALS.ZARATHUSTRA AND THE HIGHER MAN

The development of our preliminary interpretation of the eternal recurrencewas guided by the question whether Nietzsche's understanding of time isinformed by ontic time, by the temporal extension or by ontological time itself.It should have become clear from our interpretative attempts that the cosmosresonates through the third part of Zarathustra. Nietzsche's thinking surroundsthe unsayable and still nameless which is the harmony of the open, luminousdistance of the heavens and the closure of the earth and which grants space andtime to all being. Time shows itself to Nietzsche in two ways. On the one handwe view time from the aspect of suffering. Suffering or hurt does not refer hereto the encounter with pain or unhappiness, but refers to a basic structure ofhuman existence. The heartfelt hurt is the elegiac, fundamental experience oftransience. The Buddhist or Christian interpretation of the cosmos and alsoSchopenhauer's pessimistic metaphysics are based on the notion of suffering.For Nietzsche suffering is also an essential experience of the essence of time. Itexperiences absence and the nothingness of all being in time. Time removes. Itdevours its children. It constitutes decay. Nothing can resist it. The mountainserode and the heavenly fires extinguish. Nothing can endure. All is subject to theerosion of change. The focus on suffering regards time only as the inevitableloss, the disappearance of the presence, the departure and the path intonothingness.

Nietzsche does not ignore and he does not neglect the elegiac conception oftime provided to us by heartfelt suffering. He recognizes it, but he takes it to belimited and contingent. Pleasure provides him with a deeper insight. Pleasuredoes not refer here to the petty entertainment, of course, to the excitement or tothe sensual stimulation. Pleasure is a way in which man opens himself to theworld. It is a mode of excessive understanding. Hedone is the blessedness of thedust and the blessedness of man. Man disappears and decays in time but experi-ences pure, full and complete, unquestionable and unchallengeable being in the


embrace. Eating bread he tastes the calm and enduring earth in which the wheatripens in the wind in which all things have their own place. Human pleasure isnot merely the enjoyment of perceptions. It is no stimulation of the senses and ofsensuality but the experience of the concrete, embodied existence of the thingsand of the firm rootedness of being on the earth. However transient the thingsmay be in the flux of time the earth endures. We do not eat bread and drink wineas if these were separate things. We constantly celebrate the sacrament of ourbelonging to the earth. Bread and wine are body and blood of the great mother.They grant us revelation of Demeter's silent peace. The mystery cults ofantiquity understood the symbolism of bread and wine. They understood thereference of these finite things to the infinity of the earth. The pleasures of foodand sexual love were seen as symbolic experiences revealing the permanencewithin transience and passing away. They show how the earth resists in the windof time and how despite the transience life itself remains indestructible. ForNietzsche, pleasure provides a deeper insight into time. It even realizes, albeit ina subconscious manner, the eternal recurrence and the eternal return of thesame. 'Since all pleasure strives for eternity, for deep, deep eternity.'

The question whether Nietzsche was guided by a knowledge of the perman-ence of the earth which is the stage and dimension of all transience when heattributes a deeper understanding of time to pleasure will have to remain open.Is the eternity of the eternal return accordingly to be approached through thisknowledge of the earth or does he merely dogmatically assert a paradoxical viewon the eternity of time?

Nietzsche's understanding of pleasure is revealed in the last chapter of thethird part. This carries the heading The Seven Seals (or: The Yes-and-AmenSong)".

All seven seals with which Nietzsche intends to seal his book giving it anesoteric character are addresses of the cosmos and its eternity. Pleasure is cos-mic pleasure or the trembling experience of eternity. Cosmic pleasure is thefundamental stance of the thinker who is 'full of this prophetic spirit, whowanders on the high mountain path between two seas'. Even in the dull andblunt way of everyday life we are always standing between two seas. We live inthe present moment with an unforeseeable future ahead and an infinite pastbehind us. However, we are not on a high yoke like Zarathustra here. He standshigh above two seas. Inspired by the eternal return both seas are not different tohim. And yet they do not flow into one. Precisely because he knows the eternalsignificance of the moment, he can experience the moment more profoundlyand significantly. He does not only live within the path of time he shapes time.He wills the great will, however, not in a blind hope for a distant past which, isyet undetermined. The highest will joins with necessity itself. It does not willwhat he desires; it wills what must occur. 'Truly, long must the heavy weather

100 The Proclamation

remain in the mountains that is to illuminate the future in times to come.'However, precisely the long and difficult will to the future understands thelatter not as a realm of possibilities but as necessity. This highest form of thewill and the path towards a new humanity create and excite an infinite cosmicpleasure. The creative will to the future burns with the passion for the eternalreturn.

The second seal relates the death of God to the thought of the eternal return.'God' was the expression for any attempt to elevate the infinite beyond realtime. Only when the transcendental, eternal God dies or when he is killed thereflection of eternity can appear in this concrete, transient world.

When I sit jubilantly where old Gods are buried, blessing the world, loving theworld next to the monuments of those who renounced the world. I love eventhe churches and the graves of God, if the heavens become clearly visiblethrough their broken roofs; I sit with pleasure on the broken churches likegrass and red poppy.

These words do not express a mad, unrestrained hatred of God. They do notexpress an uprising of human prophets against any divine domination. Theeternal Gods must die so that finite man can understand his finitude as eternityand as eternal recurrence. Human and cosmic infinity cannot tolerate a separatedivine infinity. The desire for the world kills God.

And the third seal commences with the divine human characteristics, with thecreativity of the creator, with 'the divine need, which even overcomes chance inorder to dance starry rounds'. Man becomes divine through creativity. Thedisappearance of God enables the divination of man. Man can say: the 'earth is adivine table and shaking with new creative words and divine inventions'. Thiscreative dynamic has its deeper root in the desire for the world.

The fourth seal refers to the melting pot into which all things are thrown. Themelting pot is an ancient symbol for the world. The world unifies and combinesall, unites the opposites and provides the good with the taste of evil and viceversa. If we think beyond the obvious and firm opposition or if we understandthat opposites relate to each other like the tension of bow and lyre in Heraclitus'grand metaphor we understand the existence of the cosmos. This thinking tran-scends finitude and opposition towards the all-comprising whole and towardsthe' great fusion which joins all opposites. The strongest and most beautifulexpression of achieving cosmic openness through pleasure is given in the lastthree seals. The fifth seal invokes the image of the sea. The cosmic desire is a'yearning desire which sails towards the unknown' like the desire of the sailor.The transcendence of the existence which yearns for the world is expressed withalmost uncanny metaphorical precision and imagination: 'if my rejoicing ever


cried: "the coast is disappearing now my last chain is falling off - infinitythunders around me, space and time glow far beyond" . . .'

We live ordinarily in a manner in which the vastness of the world remainsobscure. We live within the limitations of finitude, within self-limitation. Thespace around us is always denned, limited and separated by boundaries. Andwhere we dare to venture outside into the open we stay close to the coast. Theopen sea is only the distant horizon for us. Space is limited and measured - timeas well. We do not usually think about space and time which are more pri-mordial than their determinations. We do not think about the open expanse ofthe cosmos, where the coast and the limitations disappear and space and timeshine into the distance.

The radiance of the luminous openness reveals the essence of space and timemore originally than the limitations of the things within space and time. Thepleasure of distance and infinity resonates with the cosmic splendour or spaceand time. Zarathustra speaks about the lightness of an existence which is athome in the openness of the world in the sixth seal. It transcends all boundarieslike a bird and knows no up and down. All things dance for it because it itselfdances above the wide expanse of the world: 'And if this is my alphabet, that allheavy things are light, that all bodies become dancers and that all spirits becomebirds - and I tell you this is my alphabet.'

Nietzsche does not praise the happy soul who leads a carefree and easygoinglife. His lightness is only achieved where life is seized by a thought of and by adesire for the world. The seventh seal explicitly speaks about the way in whichhuman existence turns towards the world. 'If I ever suspended quiet heavensabove me and flew with my own wings into my own heaven/ If I swam playfullyin deep reaches of light and came to the freedom of my bird's wisdom . . .'

The self-expansion of human existence towards its own heavens and towardsits farthest reaches of light is a way of turning towards the world. The turntowards the world is, however, always a love for infinity for Nietzsche; however,not for an infinity beyond the world or not for an other-worldly infinity, but forthe infinity of the world itself. All seven seals conclude thus:

0 how would I not lust for eternity and the wedding ring of marriage - thering of the eternal return. I have not found the woman who I love, with whom1 would like children, unless it is this woman, who I love; because I love you, Oeternity.

The love for infinity is compared to erotic love. Infinity is a woman; the ring ofeternal return is a wedding ring. Is this just accidental? Does Nietzsche use ametaphor which could easily be replaced? Or does the love for eternity comparewith erotic love? Does this metaphor perhaps indicate that similar to earlier


occasions, namely in The Dancing Song, The Night Song and The Grave Song,Nietzsche refers here to the woman of all women or the mother earth when herefers to eternity? Does this highest and deepest thought not invoke ancientmyth? Is the eternal recurrence of the same only explicable, so to speak, througha reflection on the essence of time? Or does this question refer to the puzzling,obscure relation of time and space, of heaven to earth and of the light to thesealed ground? Does it refer to the mythical dimension of a union betweenOuranos and Gaza? Is this the real source for the marriage ring of rings or thering of eternal return? This question does not have a ready and simple answer.The philosophical concept does not reach the complete dimension of this oldestof myths. Perhaps this is a task for the future? It may be that Nietzsche's theoryof the cosmos would gain a meaning then that is far removed from the hypoth-esis of infinite time and the finite temporal occurrences, which only repeatthemselves within it. The immense passion with which Nietzsche clings to thisthought makes it central to the Zarathustra and develops it accordingly into acentral thought of his philosophy.

This passion would appear extremely strange if it constituted no more than aview of time, which contradicted all pre-theoretical experiences and also thetraditional conceptual analysis of time but failed to reach itself a rigourousconceptual level of analysis of time. The thought of the eternal return is thefoundation for Nietzsche's main thoughts. These are the doctrine of the will topower, the death of God and the overman. The Zarathustra reaches its climax inthe third part. It concludes a gradual development of Nietzsche's centralthoughts. This part would be a natural end of the book. Nietzsche originallyintended it to be so as well, perhaps. The chapter The Recovery concludedwith the view of the animals that the proclamation of the eternal return was theend of their master: 'Thus concludes Zarathustra's descent.' If Nietzsche hadfinished the book with the third part, it would display a logical unity and style.The parable proclaims a new basic philosophical theory.

The fourth part, however, introduces new stylistic elements. The fable whichwas merely a superficial thread running through the first three parts and is onlydeveloped in so far as it is addressed to all, then to fewer and finally only toZarathustra himself in the soliloquy and song of his soul - this fable becomesfurther and even oppressively emphasized. There are some terrible and embar-rassing mistakes. On the whole the fourth part is a failure. The poetic-philosophical vision appears to be somewhat exhausted. The fourth part isattached to this work which reveals a new and tragic view of the world, like asatire. It was meant to portray Zarathustra's greatness in relation to the tra-ditional forms of human greatness and to show his superiority over all kinds of'higher beings'. However, just this fails and it remains a mere posture. He isportrayed as magnanimous, victorious, kind and confident among all the


fragmented existences which form the higher being. Zarathustra's characterdoes not gain significant depth or existential clarity through its superiority overthe higher beings. Nietzsche does not succeed to show how this being lives withits knowledge of the death of God, of the will to power and of the eternal return.His art to portray existential moods and stances fails here. Zarathustra eludesNietzsche's psychology as a thinker of new thoughts.

The fourth part commences after many years have passed. Zarathustra hasbeen living in solitude for some time. His hair has turned white. And yet he isonly waiting for his hour - the hour of his last and final descent to mankind. Hedoes not enjoy the solitude and its blessings. He is keen to act. Yet, he, 'the mostevil of all human pied-pipers' still waits on his high mountain peak. He baits thehuman fishes with the sweetness of his silent, private happiness and with hismountain freedom. The existence of Zarathustra, of the hermit who endures thesolitude or of the atheist who can live without God tempts the 'higher men' orthe men of the great disgust who can no longer live among the mass of theirsmall and oppressive fellow men and who can no longer endure the spiritualdivide and emptiness of modern life, to ascend to him. They are all searching forZarathustra. They are screaming for help. The scream of the highest men luresZarathustra from his cave and roaming through his territory he finds many typesof higher men whom he sends up to his cave. A peculiar society assembles there:the soothsayer of the great tiredness, the two kings, the pedant of the spirit, themagician, the old pope who lost his job when God died, the ugly man, thevoluntary beggar and Zarathustra's shadow. These higher men are the 'rem-nants of God' on earth. While man projected his yearning and his innermostlonging beyond itself the death of God did not kill the yearning and longinghuman heart. Man still wishes to transcend himself, but the direction in whichhe attempts this is now empty. His thrust amounts to nothing. God has beenreplaced by the silence of nothingness. The nothingness still inspires thesehigher men. They are not yet truly transformed like Zarathustra. They are stilltrapped within a kind of self-alienation, except this has now an uncanny, nega-tive character. The soothsayer of the great tiredness is the prophet of a futurenihilism. The magician is the artist who has become an actor. He has no genuinelife and no truth. He merely imitates truth and lives with a mask of a former,genuine existence. The two kings are tired of the false character of their royalty.They are not masters, they have no will to power and they are no warriors. Theyare the late grandchildren of warriors. They despise the false representation of apower which is no longer real. They too suffer from a falseness of life, from falseconcepts of power and mastery valid in modern life. However, they only despisethis falsity, they do not achieve a new truth.

They are searching for Zarathustra who preaches war and for whom the willto power is the essence of life. The pedant of the spirit suffers from this falsity as


well. He despises the falsity of apparent knowledge, the entire Alexandrian cul-ture of learning which enjoys knowledge, collects and gathers it in many com-municable forms without, however, really knowing anything truly. The pedantof the spirit despises the knowledge which does not flow from a real sacrifice andrisk of understanding. He only researches one thing, something highly special-ized or even something particular within the particular. He researches only thebrain of the leech. He is Nietzsche's symbol for the positive sciences that havelost the connection with the whole and have sunk into an extreme specializationwhile refusing to know anything where one can only appear to know. A profoundrespect expresses itself in this one-sided attitude. The pedant distrusts all theo-logical and metaphysical hypotheses that merely pretend to connect objects ofknowledge. He rather prefers to remain limited but precise than deceived byseemingly higher knowledge. Nietzsche declares thus that the limitations of thepositive sciences are a sacrifice and an indication of the necessary and trueknowledge of the whole. The pedant prefers to remain ignorant rather thanpretend to know or know falsely. He allows the leeches to suck his arm. Allgenuine knowledge eats into the flesh of life. The old pope is the venerable manwho embodies blessedness and veneration even though he knows that the beingin whose name he blesses is dead. He even loves the dead God and grieves forhim in sadness. The grief makes his life great although he is unable to transformit into an existence liberated from God. The person who grieves for God has ahigher rank than the worms of every day who accept the death of God readilyand who pursue their little pleasures. The ugliest man symbolizes the disgust ofman with himself. As long as the fragmented and the twisted aspects of humanexistence are clear or as long as man suffers from himself and desires totranscend himself he retains a trace of greatness.

Only the self-satisfied man, who is no longer driven and who has lost hopeand dissatisfaction is the last man. A similar thing can be said about the volun-tary beggar and Zarathustra's shadow. The beggar who voluntarily gives up allhis possessions and goes around as the preacher of the mountain preachinggentleness and forgiveness is also searching and yearning. Zarathustra's'shadow' is the 'free spirit' who daringly and recklessly abandons all safety. Henegates and attacks, he lives experimentally and even searches for evil and dan-ger; however, he has no firm base on which he could stand. There is no position,no substance and no halt beyond his negation. He is homeless and without ahome. The eternal nihilist is only Zarathustra's shadow. For Zarathustra eventhe strongest attacks and the most determined and stubborn denials flow from apersonal and rooted view of existence. Zarathustra is rooted - his shadow is not.He is homeless and a wanderer and ultimately destroyed by his homelessness:'What have I got left? A tired and daring heart, a wandering will, flapping wings,a broken back . . ,'.48 Nietzsche's characterization of Zarathustra's shadow is a


constant danger for his own substance: the daring free-spiritedness, the uncannydesire for a lack of commitment.

The entire set of the 'higher men' shows a common aspect. They are alldesperate. They are searching for Zarathustra who has overcome human des-peration and for whom God is dead. Zarathustra's knowledge of the death ofGod is no melancholy or sombre grief for a lost meaning of life. His knowledgeis joyful because it is conscious of the overman, the will to power and the eternalreturn. The higher men receive hope and joy in Zarathustra's cave in the face ofthe one upright person who overcame the death of God. Zarathustra talks tothem and invites them to eat but he does not receive them as equals. He honoursthe higher men as a bridge to the overman. A step-towards and a bridge are notyet the essence. Paying homage to the higher men, Zarathustra distinguisheshimself from them. They are addicted and yearning - he however stands on theearth. The higher men are higher because they are distinguished from the mob.Zarathustra loves them because he can no longer live in today's age of the mob.'And rather despair - he says to the higher men - than give up. And truly, I loveyou because you are unable to love these days, you higher men.'49 'The higherthe kind, the rarer its success. You higher men - are you not all failures? Havecourage - what does it matter? How much is still possible. Learn to laugh abouteach other - as one should laugh.'50

Human greatness reveals itself as a failure. The higher men in Zarathustra'scare are all failures - however they are failures if one compares them to theoverman. Compared to the mob they are great men. Zarathustra advises thesefailures to liberate themselves through laughter, which sees the comedy ofhuman life in the light of the beauty of the overman. 'This crown of the laugh-ing, the crown of thorns - I throw this crown to you my brothers. I declarelaughter to be holy you higher men - learn to laugh.'31

Zarathustra's advice is only partially understood. The higher men learn onlyslowly and painfully to make fun of themselves. The old magician sings asombre song, a song of melancholy in which he tries to ridicule himself. How-ever, the issue here is not only the tragi-comic nature of art which pretends to betruthful and is in reality only a blissful vision of a fool and poet who is 'banishedfrom all truth, merely a fool, merely a poet'.52 This song of melancholy throws adark shadow on Zarathustra's soul. Nietzsche makes the higher man a mouth-piece for his own message to articulate things that apply to himself. Zarathustrais by no means the only representative for Nietzsche. The higher men are char-acters in whom he conceals himself. It is no accident that the higher men areZarathustra's 'last sin'. His pity for them is his sin. However, this can only be thecase because Zarathustra suffers with the higher men and because their suffer-ing is in some ways also his suffering - or at least Nietzsche's suffering. Thehigher men are accordingly not just contrasting characters designed to clarify


the character of Zarathustra. They are all concealed shadows of Zarathustra'spsychic possibilities, perhaps possibilities which have been overcome. In over-coming his pity for the higher men Zarathustra achieves his last and highestmaturity. His sign arrives, the laughing lion and the flock of doves and he com-mences his task. He leaves the cave 'glowing and strong like the morning sunwhich shines from dark mountains'53. This concludes the book. One remainsuncertain whether Zarathustra embarks on new revelations of his doctrines oron the fulfilment of a great deed. It is a strange ending which leaves behind apeculiar void. Nietzsche made a number of different sketches of this end whichremained unrealized. The pathos of the work is exhausted and this does notpermit a powerful, logical end to follow the fourth part. The Zarathustra ispowerful and possesses an original power of language and thought as long asNietzsche philosophizes, that is, while he develops his thoughts of the overman,of the death of God, of the will to power and of the eternal return. Where he,however, develops an existential vision as in the fourth part in order to make thepersona of Zarathustra come to concrete existence, the work looses in quality.Nietzsche is awesome where he thinks, speaks and teaches like Zarathustra. Hebecomes weak where he speaks about Zarathustra. He is not sufficiently of apoet for this.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Destruction of the Western Tradition

1. THE TRANSCENDENTAL CREATION OF VALUE.BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL

In thinking critically about western metaphysics and in denying the traditionalconceptual forms of thinking Nietzsche does not achieve to overcome metaphys-ics himself conceptually. Instead, he sidesteps the issue and choses an existentialexpression in the Zarathustra. Existentialism is a sign of a profound conceptualneed. It is innovative where it achieves the highest level and does not degenerateinto philosophical chatter. Nietzsche's Zarathustra is an existential philosophy inthe form of a preliminary way of expressing thoughts which elude traditionalconcepts. This detour via a thought embodied in the lived life is in Nietzsche'scase accompanied by a re-interpretation of all ontological questions and ques-tions of value. Nietzsche did not venture beyond Zarathustra. 'It is' - as he saysin Ecce Homo - 'the yes-saying aspect of his task.'1

It is certainly not the case that the time following Zarathustra is dedicated to atheoretical analysis of its aspects in order to determine the death of God, the willto power and the eternal return more accurately and profoundly. Not even thelate and last unpublished work The Will to Power extends Nietzsche's ideasbeyond those of Zarathustra significantly. The time following Zarathustra isdedicated to the 'denying and rejecting half of Nietzsche's task. If the Zarathus-tra is the constructive part of his philosophy, the works following it are itsdestructive part. He realizes the philosophy of the hammer here. He attackstraditional philosophy, religion and morality with the blows of his critical ham-mer. He wishes to destroy and annihilate these disciplines in order to put thecreative existence onto a new path. Just like the chisel of the artist which ragesagainst the stone to uncover the image which slumbers in the block of marble,the hammer of critique rages against man as he is and as he understands him-self. The image of the overman slumbers within man. The destructive critiqueof concrete man is the bitter path to the future.

Oh you humans, the stone conceals an image, the image of all images. Oh,that it has to slumber in the hardest and ugliest stone!/ My hammer rages

108 The Destruction of the Western Tradition

cruelly against its prison. Splinters fly from the stone - what do I care!/1 wishto complete it because a shadow appeared to me - the quietest and lightest ofall things came to me!/ The beauty of the overman came to me as a shadow.What do I care about the Gods now?2

Nietzsche's approach is basically consistent. If the overman who is conscious ofthe death of God, the will to power and the eternal return is to appear and is tobecome the future of humanity (as 'our great Hazar1, as 'Zarathustra's empire of1000 years'3), the humanity of the western tradition must be destroyed. Thisrequires a relentless attack on Platonism and Christianity.

However, the peculiar manner in which Nietzsche leads this attack is highlyquestionable. He battles with psychological means. His subtle, cunning andclever psychology destroys the tradition. This means that he does not overcomehis real enemy. He does not overcome metaphysics because he does not ques-tion its truth conceptually but simply accuses it. He does not overcome Christi-anity because he attacks a caricature of Christianity. He attacks a psychologicalfiction of Christianity. Assuming that philosophy was required to advanceagainst traditional metaphysics, morality and Christianity, this battle wouldhave to be fought on its own ontological terms and without armour. It oughtnot to include psychological suspicion of the enemy but it should solely showthe falsity of the metaphysical and the Christian world-view. It is not question-able that Nietzsche attacks Christianity. It is only questionable how he doesthis. If Christianity is God's own revelation no philosophy can harm it. If the'gates of hell' themselves could not overcome it any finite human wisdom isdoomed to fail at the word of God's son. The 'denying, rejecting part' ofNietzsche's project is mainly rhetorical. However, its considerable qualitymakes it more dangerous. His sophistry, that is his psychological analysis, isbased on a psychological transformation of all ontological questions into ques-tions of value. The denial and rejection take shape as a 'revaluation of all values'and this occurs through a psychological analysis. Nietzsche believes that he cansupport and establish his by discrediting and dissolving the traditional systemof values. This - he believes - makes a new value path and a new start to lifepossible.

History may have seen many revaluations of value. It may have seen thedestruction of value tables and the establishment of new ones. Nietzsche, how-ever, implies a more radical revaluation. Firstly, he refers to a change of value assuch. If the human being lives within a coherent system of values, values arethings as such. If values are universally and eternally binding they are 'objective'.Only when the community dissolves within a system of value and the final stagesof an extreme individuation become evident, the values become relative to the

The transcendental creation of value 109

relevant subjects. Doubt and subjectivity threaten the unquestioned basis ofsocial life.

Nietzsche believes that so-called objectivity is precisely nothing but an inven-tion of the human being which has been forgotten as such. Human life impliesthe positing of value. In most cases it forgets its posits. The posited isencountered as the binding power of the moral law. Man transcends himself inpositing value and encounters his invention as a foreign object imbued with allproperties of venerable being as such. Nietzsche intends to radically suspendvalue theoretical dogmatism. Man does not awaken from the slumber of dogma-tism if he becomes a discerning individual who lives according to his whim and'values' things highly individually.

Nietzsche's philosophical reflection on value goes further: it targets the tran-scendental positing of value which occurs normally subconsciously. Nietzscheintends to discover the subconscious productivity of a life which creates valuesand value tables. Human existence transcends itself where it projects the aspectsof value ahead of its existence under which it then only encounters the things.Nietzsche does not consider the individual act of valuing but the creative one,which presupposes and directs all individual acts of valuation. Humanity, apeople or culture all have 'a priori values' or a basic valuation which establishesit within being and life. This 'a priori', however, is not a firm, genetically fixedknowledge of value but it has its own dynamic and history. Nietzsche believesthat the real segments of world history are subject to changing transcendentalcreations of value. His philosophy is thus an ultimate turning point, the centre oftime, the great noon, because it uncovers, as he states, for the first time theapparent objectivity of value and its dependence on value-positing life. It breaksthe dogmatic slumber which usually envelops the creative powers of humanexistence. Nietzsche's theory of the subjectivity of value is far removed from acheap relativism based on individual choice. One may even say that his theory ofsubjectivity does not deny the phenomenal objectivity of values but disclosesthis as a forgotten, transcendental invention of human existence. Revaluation ofvalue means thus sublating the self-alienation of human existence. It means theliberation towards a higher self-consciousness of life and an awakening from thetheoretical dogmatism of value. Nietzsche arrives at a view of life itself againstthe self-alienation of life and by returning to the forgotten creation underpin-ning all value systems. This appears to him as the will to power which returnseternally in the circle of time.

A universal critique of traditional systems of value could be undertaken tothrow light on the projection of value which created them in the first place. Thiswould criticize these values for their naivety and inauthenticity. All values arebased on the great game of life itself. Are these values not all of a similar rank?Are they not simply ways with which life experiments temporally? Or is there a


possibility to judge systems of value themselves? We encounter a decisive movein Nietzsche here. He is not satisfied with a philosophical reflection of the tran-scendental projection of value by the human being where life takes the finalresponsibility and risk in regard to any value, but he continues with a substantialand a material interpretation of life. This move is perhaps one of the mostcontentious aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy. One may imagine a critique ofChristianity, that is, of Christian morality which criticizes the foundation of allvalues in the existence of God in so far as this makes all values a given, imposedon the human being through external demands. It is conceivable to criticize thismorality as a kind of inauthentic life. However, this reflection about the way inwhich values are posited does not negate the values themselves. The justificationfor the values would merely differ. Nietzsche, however, does not only deny theobjectivity of Christian values, he also denies their substance. The return to lifeas value-giving becomes the new principle for creating values because heimplicitly judges life itself according to its 'strength' and 'weakness'.

Nietzsche uses these common biological concepts in a completely new man-ner. Strength and health of life seem to him to be present where there is asimultaneous consciousness of both the dreadful and the beautiful aspects ofexistence, where both are affirmed and where the constructive and the destruc-tive power or the Dionysian play is experienced as will to power and eternalreturn. Weakness and sickness, however, imply that man avoids the terrifying,dreadfully beautiful abyss of existence. He turns away, he avoids the fight andthe war and he searches for peace, for calm, for brotherly love and security.Strength of life rests in the knowledge of the will to power and weakness in theavoidance of it. Nietzsche's unreflected conceptual ambiguity is dangerous. Onthe one hand he sees the will to power as the fundamental drive in the unfoldingof all finite being. In this context everything is will to power including theheroic-tragic attitude and the Christian morality. On the other hand he takes amore substantive approach to the 'will to power' and sees in it a heroic mode ofexistence. He does not overcome this ambiguity. He appears to be able to dis-tinguish systems of value substantially which are consistent with the essence oflife and systems which deny life - moral systems created by weakness, by diseaseand by a decline of life. The difference between the systems of values which arebased on the unauthentic alienation and the authentic empowerment of life andthose which are derived through a strength or weakness of life become inter-mingled. The questionable and ambiguous approach determines the writingsafter Zarathustra. Nietzsche launches an attack. He has always been a master ofaggression. However, he now attempts to land his most fatal blow. He uses allweapons, fights with desperate passion and with diabolical hatred. It seemsinitially peculiar that Nietzsche returns to a critique of modernity, of the presentand the all-too-topical after the overview of the future of humanity in the

The transcendental creation of value I I I

Zarathustra. Nietzsche contrasts his vision of the future with man's destiny sofar. In this context the past is a false track. However, Nietzsche does not attemptto show the errors of this wrong path through an explicit examination of itsstated truths. He embarks on the indirect way of a psychological destruction:' . . . the psychology is applied with unashamed toughness and cruelty'4 he evenstates about the last period of his work. It comprises the books Beyond Good andEvil, On the Genealogy of Morals, The Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, aEcce Homo (in addition to two smaller essays which deal once again with Wag-ner). Beyond Good and Evil is the book following Zarathustra. It appears in 1886.In some ways it represents a re-engagement with ideas from Human, All TooHuman. Nietzsche who chose the free spirit as a persona and as a mask offersnow in the later life a more intense free spirit, a more daring wandering and amore courageous experimentation of possibilities. Nietzsche describes the workas a critique of modernity, of modern ideas, of objectivity, of history and thescientific spirit in Ecce Homo. However, this is only partially accurate. It isimportant that Nietzsche takes up the basic theme of Human, All Too Human ona higher level: he develops a critique of religion, philosophy and morality. Phil-osophy is a symptom for him. He views it through the perspective of life and as asign of a particular attitude towards life. Philosophers are all unconsciouslysubject to particular moral decisions.

I realized gradually what all philosophy has so far been, namely, the self-revelation of its creator and a kind of unintentional and unconscious memory.Furthermore, the moral (and immoral) intentions of a philosophy form theirtrue living seed from which the whole plant has always grown.5

Nietzsche sees in all traditional philosophy what he does himself: reducing theontological questions to questions of value: he investigates them all according totheir implicit value judgements. And he discovers within philosophy the worshipof the life-denying instincts. Traditional philosophy is for him essentially a flightfrom the real and concrete world towards a 'true' world. It is a symbol for adenial of the world even if it takes a modern approach like Kantianism, positiv-ism or Cartesian fundamentalism. Nietzsche polemically ridicules the uncriticalbelief in the ego, in logic with its supposed rigour and other so-called 'immediatecertainties'. Nietzsche perceives that the ultimate epistemological phenomena,the Ego, the will and the ability to synthesize are nothing but 'power relation-ships of life', that is, formations of the will to power. 'The power of moralprejudice has deeply penetrated the most spiritual, the most sober and themost presuppositionless sphere - and has (this goes without saying) damaged,inhibited, blinded and perverted it.'6

Nietzsche objects to this perversion and damage of life. He rejects traditional

I 12 The Destruction of the Western Tradition

philosophy because it dominates through moral prejudice even where it appearsto be completely pure cognition. Nietzsche uses psychology to establish this.His history of philosophy is sophistical because it declares a psychology whichoperates with ambiguous notions of strength and weakness, of health and sick-ness of life, to be the decisive judge. 'Never before have daring travellers andadventurers gained a deeper insight into the world of the "prejudices of phil-osophy" ' - he states at the end of the paragraph - 'and the psychologist must atleast be able to demand that psychology is again recognized as the master of thesciences and that the other sciences are serving it and are preparatory to it.Because psychology is now again the way towards the fundamental questions.'7

It is hardly possible to state more clearly that Nietzsche's psychology takesover the role of metaphysics. As an alternative to the morally dominated tra-ditional philosophers Nietzsche demands 'philosophers of the future' who admitthat the 'falsification of the world' is still the 'most certain and secure'8 aspectavailable to us. Unlike Descartes, these philosophers do not need the truthful-ness of God in order to recognize the transcendental things. Nietzsche callsthem 'experimenters'. They would find it tasteless if their truth were a truth foranyone. They would dare to gather knowledge in dangerous ways and theywould have secrets. 'In the end things must be as they always were: The greatthings remain reserved for the great people, the abysmal ones for the profound,the tender ones for the sophisticated and - on the whole and in brief- anythingrare for anyone rare.'9

Nietzsche conceives the free spirit in a more concealed, mysterious and pecu-liar manner than he had in Human, All Too Human. The pathos of truthfulness isno longer stated naively and directly. A greater and more determined scepticismawakens against the moral prejudice within the will to truth. The free spiritappears to be more abysmal, more nocturnal. 'Whatever is deep loves the mask;the deepest things even hate the image and the metaphor.'10

The chapter 'The religious existence' reveals a critique which contains thosecritical aspects hurled against Christianity with a fiery eloquence already earlier.Christianity leads the classical world towards the orient. It is the simple inver-sion of the noble Roman and Greek values. It is the uprising of the oriental slaveagainst his master. It is a religious neurosis and a sickness of life. Nietzscherejects Christianity on the basis of its plebeian character and on the basis of thesupremacy claimed by the values of the masses. The free spirit regards religionin any case only ever as an instrument of the will to power. A religion is aninstrument with which he plays independently and aesthetically. He uses it as a'punitive and didactic device'. He experiments with it in his creation andmanipulation of man which is directed by the will to power. From this point ofview Nietzsche finds some commendable aspects of religion: 'Asceticism andPuritanism are almost indispensable means of the education and improvement

The transcendental creation of value I 13

if a race wishes to conquer its fate of being derived from the mob . . .'.n How-ever, these instruments are lethal if they are not controlled by the philosopherbut operate autonomously. The two greatest religions, Buddhism and Christian-ity, are religions of the suffering, the sick and the weak. Eighteen hundred yearsof Christianity have turned European man according to Nietzsche into asublime cripple.

In the chapter 'On the natural history of morality' Nietzsche interprets moral-ity as a 'sign language of the affects'. All systems of moral value conceal a rankorder of life-dominating instincts. They may be promoting or weakening life.Nietzsche distinguishes particularly between individual morality and the moral-ity of the herd; furthermore, between the morality of timidness and the moralityas a self-discipline of a daring and powerful will. He believes that the appearanceof Napoleon is a 'beneficial deed' and a 'liberation from an ever-more oppres-sive need': Napoleon was the 'unconditional master' of the 'herd-animals ofEurope'.12 The same could be said about Alcibiades, about Caesar and aboutFrederick the Great. All present instance of the great life. In conclusionNietzsche states: 'Today's morality is the morality of the herd.'13

In the chapter 'What is noble' he finally introduces the essential distinctionbetween the morality of the master and the morality of the slave. These notionsare often criticized as signs of unbelievable and unjustified arrogance and of animpertinence which has the audacity to call itself moral. Outrage and disgust,however, clarify little. The two opposing kinds of morality, the noble and theignoble, do not just refer to life-promoting and life-weakening aspects. A newfocus is added. The noble master-morality grows from the pathos of distanceand from a proud, elevated spiritual condition. It is a morality of rank order. Theslave morality, however, is based on a levelling tendency, on a revolution againstrank order and on a will for equality. The master morality operates with thedistinction between 'good' and 'bad'. Whatever elevates the individual and leadsit towards its own life and authenticity is good. Whatever makes human exist-ence noble and great is good. The hero and the warrior are good. The mastermorality is first and foremost a morality of war. It is a chivalrous morality. Itrespects members of a community in which the superior person is among equalsand those of equal rank. However, it despises all lower ranks, all the lowerminded people who follow their ordinary desires and no longer extendthemselves. Anything low is bad.

The slave morality is different. It is inspired by the instinct for revenge againsthigher forms of life. It intends to level everything. It ostracizes the exception andjudges it to be immoral. It glorifies whatever makes life bearable for the poor, thesick and the poor of spirit. This includes the great brotherhood of mankind, thelove of kin and the love of peace. Slave-morality uses the distinctions betweengood and evil. The masterful life which is conscious of its power and ability is


dangerous and evil for the slave. Evil is despised because it is a fearful and ahateful danger, not because it is inferior. Nietzsche draws a detailed picture ofthese two opposing moralities. One important detail is that the noble moralitycreates and posits values. The slave morality accepts values. The former isactive, the latter reactive. This points the entire distinction ultimately towards adistinction between existential self-alienation and self-determination within acontext of a system of values. This connection, however, is not made explicitlyand it adds a further dimension of ambiguity to Nietzsche's already ambiguousworks following Zarathustra. Towards the end Nietzsche expresses the essence ofthe noble, masterful life and the powerful existence which exhausts itself in anallegorical manner. He calls it the 'genius of the heart'.

The genius of the heart, as possessed by the great concealed, by the God oftemptation and the born pied-piper of conscience, whose voice knows how todescend to any soul of the underworld, who does not say a word, who doesnot cast a look without sensitivity and trace of temptation, whose masteryincludes his ability to appear. ... Just like anyone who has been away andabroad from childhood on, who has encountered many strange and danger-ous spirits along the way - among those in particular the one just mentionedand always that one, none other than the God Dionysos, this great ambivalentGod of temptation to whom I dedicated once upon a time in all secret andawe my first-born.... In the meantime I have learnt much, too much aboutthe philosophy of this God and as stated from mouth to mouth - I, the lastdisciple and initiated of the God Dionysos.14

2. THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

All the writings following Zarathustra are dominated by the thought of the'revaluation of all values'. This means initially that Nietzsche thinks alongclearly defined lines which are themselves no longer subject to an inquiry. Allphilosophical questions are questions of value for him. The ontological natureof value itself does not become problematic. Wherever the philosophy of thepast pursued ontology this is - according to Nietzsche - secretly guided byconsiderations of value. It wishes to escape from 'becoming'; it values the firmand enduring higher and considers it more valuable than the original. Nietzscheovercomes the open question of the truth of value with the seemingly moreradical one of the value of truth. In this it is crucial that he uses a limited notionof truth which remains primarily guided by objective-scientific knowledge. Thetruth whose value he questions is the truth of things, the truth of the sciencesand the truth of metaphysics which concerns the foundation of being. Truth as

The Geneotogy of Morals 1 1 5

the revelation of the teeming life, as will to power and as eternal return is,however, the basis for Nietzsche's universal perspective of value and can itselfnot be a phenomenon of value. The essence of the truth which underpins hisown philosophy is not completely clarified. This is not accidental and no limita-tion that could be explained biographically. The ambiguity in the essence of thetruth of 'life', that is, of the truth of the will to power and of the eternal returnhides Nietzsche's ambiguous position towards metaphysics. It conceals a pro-found doubt if he is a part of metaphysics or if he has transcended it. It appearsto be a peculiar spectacle that Nietzsche explains all traditional conceptions oftruth through the will to power and its perspectives of value but fails in return toclarify the truthfulness of the will to power itself.

The quality of morality is determined according to Nietzsche by its truth, thatis by the way in which it uses the will to power as a measure and recognizes it as aprinciple of value-judgements. This means that the question of morality is in thefinal analysis also a question of truth for Nietzsche or a question how relevantthe will to power is as the essence of life. At the same time the ambiguity of thenotion of the will to power is never overcome by Nietzsche. The will to power isprimarily an ontological concept which refers to the way in which all things arein flux. The being of beings is a drive towards overpowering. The ontic modelfor this ontological conception is found by Nietzsche within organic nature.Here we find the drive towards self-realization, towards assimilation anddomination of the other. Here we find the struggle for power and super-power.Anything organic behaves in essence like auxesis and phthisis., like growth anddecay and the creation of one costs the destruction of the other. The will topower, however, is not limited to the region of organic nature, to plants, animalsand humans. It refers for Nietzsche to the ontological dynamic of being.Nietzsche remains highly ambiguous, however, in relation to morality in so faras he uses the concept of power in a shadowy way both as an ontological uni-versal and also as an ontic model. All morals are formations of power. The willto power is conceived ontologically here. There are morals of a flourishing or ofa powerful life and morals of a declining or of a powerless life. Power andpowerlessness are conceived here through an ontic model.

Nietzsche gains an insight into life as the basis of all value by sublating theself-alienation of the human existence. Values exist only because they are pos-ited by life. The human creation of values within life is a manifestation of the willto power. Man relates to himself either authentically (adopting the master-morality) or unauthentically (adopting the slave-morality). The will to powerhas so to speak a twofold appearance as power and lack of power. Wherever thisopposition is mentioned within the context of the will to power, power and itsopposite are understood in the ontic sense. Power can thus have characteristicsof strong drives, of uninhibited aggressive instincts or of high vitality. The lack


of power can likewise assume the appearance of a loss of drive, of a loss ofinstinct and of a bloodlessness. Power and lack of power are explained throughbiological categories. One should remember this context if one wishes tounderstand the disputations and writings after Zarathustra.

The difference between master- and slave-morality exists for timesimmemorial. There are attitudes of judgement which flow from an excessive,overflowing and richly oozing life and attributes which are the result of the needand the suffering of those whose life has not been favoured, of the sick, theweak, the suffering and the burdened. However, this difference between themaster- and slave-morality remains so to speak 'blind' within the traditionalhistory of morality. The noble, strong and vibrant masters, the elite, the warriorsand the aristocracy 'do not know who they are'. Their mastery is innocent,unreflected and subconscious. Only Nietzsche's value-theoretical reflectionabout the transcendental source of the apparent objectivity of all values makesgenuine governance, real mastery and true master-morality possible. Thesupremacy of the master is now grounded in the knowledge of the will to powerand the eternal return. The master-morality is the value system of the overman.And similarly, the servitude of the servant and the real longing for servitude inhumans are understood more radically. Not only do they reveal a lack ofinstinct, a lack of blood and a lack of power and vitality, but they also surrenderto God. The overman and the man who worships God are now the two oppos-ites. The life within the new morality of the master realizes the death of God.The new view of the slave-morality reveals that human servitude consists in theidea of a God. It is the result of the 'fear of God'.

The historically conceived interpretation of master- and slave-morality hasonly a preparatory importance for Nietzsche. They must not be understood (asfrequently the case) as Nietzsche's new ideal and counter-ideal. His centralissue is the articulation of the historical opposition between masters and slaveswithin in the context of a highly polarized antagonism between the atheism ofthe overman and any form of divine worship. The Zarathustra is the impliedfoundation of all subsequent treatises. Nietzsche wages a war, his Great Waragainst all kinds of self-alienation and enslaved human existence. He intends tostruggle for human liberation.

During this struggle he collapses. Under the cover of the night he is abductedby the God whose disciple and apostle he was. Nietzsche had already embarkedon developing a critique of religion, philosophy and morality in the secondstage. However, Human, All Too Human, Dawn and The Gay Science were largelyenlightening critiques which contrast the pathos of a rigorous, sober science orlater the experiment of life itself with metaphysical dreams and turned towardsthe concrete presence in a positivistic move. Zarathustra rejected positivism andthought about the 'here and now' more profoundly. After Zarathustra the

The Genea/ogy of Morals I 17

critique of religion, philosophy and morality assumes a more radical meaning. Itis no longer part of an 'enlightened' attitude but a struggle for life or death. ForNietzsche himself at least Zarathustra is the beginning of a new ontologicalexperience. The traditional ontological interpretation with its religion, meta-physics and ethics, appears to the ontological experience as a single massiveerror, as a horrific monstrosity, as an interpretation which violates life and as thegreatest lie and untruth. Nietzsche is struck by a terrifying insight. The mostdreadful suspicion has taken hold of him. Philosophy, religion and morality aswe know them pollute life. Was the traditional interpretation of life not the workof an essentially unified, healthy and strong life but rather the work of a power-less hatred of death intended to make life bearable for the weak, intendedto choke the strong and inspire their bad conscience and to take away theconfidence and trust in their drives and instincts?

Beyond Good and Evil is written from the perspective of this suspicion. It ischaracteristic for Nietzsche's method that the suspicion does not only dominateit instrumentally but that its presence justifies itself. That means his thinking isdetermined by the new conception of life without being objectively and criticallyexamined. His basic assumptions of the will to power, the death of God and theeternal return of the same are the product of his psychology. They are hisphilosophical thoughts. However, Nietzsche believes that he can endow histhoughts with better clarity and differentiation, with more substance and rich-ness through his subtle and sublime psychology. He believes that he can provehis philosophy through a sophistical method. He shows that the traditionalphilosophers are led by moral prejudices and that the believers are neurotic andmoralists full of revenge. However, this method of proof can always be increasedand overcome. It corrupts because it generalizes the understanding of particularcases. Neurosis can be disguised as religious belief. Vengefulness can find its wayinto morality. But this does not mean that all religion is neurosis and all moralityvengeful. One might just as well ask what it means if someone finds only revengein the morality of brotherly love and only neurosis in divine worship? Is such aresidual psychology itself the sign of a crippled and valueless life? Nietzscheintends to clarify Beyond Good and Evil in On the Genealogy of Morals. This bookfalls into three parts. The first is a psychology of Christianity. It commenceswith the well known distinction between master- and slave-morality and refersto a subdivision of master-morality into a warrior-like and a priest-like one.

The warrior possesses the virtues of the body. The priest invents the 'spirit'.Priests are 'the really great haters of world history . . . they are also the mostspirited haters'.15 The rivalry between the casts of the warriors and priests givesbirth to the change from the master- to the slave-morality. The priests are thedefeated masters who mobilize the weak, suffering and deformed against thewarriors. Nietzsche believes that the 'Jews' are the indirect manifestation of


spiritual power. They are the masters of revenge for Nietzsche. Nietzsche is noanti-Semite. He merely believes that the Jews are the 'priestly people' and leadthe revolution against anything masterful and noble.

The Jews have dared to invert with awe-inspiring logic the aristocratic equa-tion of values (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = beloved byGod) and have clung with their teeth of abysmal hatred (the hatred of impo-tence) to this: Namely, the miserable alone are good, the poor, impotent, low... the suffering, short-changed, sick, ugly.16

The inversion of all noble values creates the slave uprising of morality. Itcreates the birth of Christianity. Nietzsche believes that through Judaism'resentment becomes creative and creates values'.17 Defeated and subjugated byRome Judaism rises against Rome and inverts the values of antiquity. It occu-pies Rome in the form of Christianity. Nietzsche simplifies the history of west-ern culture incredibly. The Renaissance appears to him to be a brief awakeningof the classical values which, however, 'due to the radically plebeian (Germanand English) movements ofressentiment called reformation'18 soon returns to th'old peace of the grave of classical Rome'.

An even more decisive victory of slave-morality in Europe is the French Revo-lution, this triumph of mediocrity and the birth of modern ideas, for Nietzsche.Among this raging uprising of the mob only Napoleon ('this synthesis of over-man and monster'19) embodies for a brief historical moment the great, nobleperson. Nietzsche believes that Christianity suffuses even the most secularphenomena. Christianity is just the most striking symptom of something moreuniversal. Christianity is slave morality. This is the decisive reason for hisstruggle against it. He understands it primarily as a system of values, not as adoctrine and not as a divine revelation.

The second treatise contains a psychology of conscience. Here too, Nietzschedoes not start with an analysis of the phenomenon of conscience but jumpsstraight to a psychological explanation. Neither the immanent way of the exist-ential experience of the self nor the nature of the call of conscience come intoview. 'Immanence' is the result of a perversion of instincts: 'All instincts whichdo not relieve themselves externally become internalized.... The entire innerworld which is originally thin as if stretched between two skins, receives depth,width, height, where the human being is externally inhibited.'20

It remains unclear how the immanence constitutes itself as a consequenceand dimension of inhibited instincts. What is meant by 'external' which sup-posedly exists before any opposition between external and internal? Nietzscheclarifies his psychological preconceptions and the structure of the psyche itselfnowhere clearly. He rather throws an ingenious thought into the field, into this

The Genealogy of Morals 1 1 9

obscure, murky field of psychology which despite all its subtlety remains unableto grasp the ontological character of the human soul. Nietzsche refers in anobscure and general manner to drives and further to the masking of drivesbecause he argues rhetorically against the Ego and its function and against theconception of a psychic substance without developing a philosophical alterna-tive to the reifying psychological conception of man. Nietzsche's psychology issubstantially richer than its conceptual structure. He develops thus in this sec-ond treatise an insight into the nature and importance of cruelty. It seems tohim to belong to human nature, to a basic instinct, to a pleasure to see andproduce suffering and to a pleasure which is an aspect of the joy of life of strongand natural people. Even the punitive practices of a cultured society conceal theinstinct for cruelty. Cruelty is a hidden foundation of human culture. Nietzsche'shypothesis about the origin of conscience is as follows: It is only the instinct forcruelty which has been prevented to release itself externally and turns inward.

Man imprisoned by the oppressive confines and regularity of customs lacksexternal enemies and resistance and impatiently rips himself apart, per-secutes himself, mauls himself, startles himself, abuses himself, this animalwhich has wounded itself on the bars of its cage because one wishes to tame it,this suffering person destroyed by its yearning for the desert, who had tomake himself into an adventure, a place of torture, an unsafe and dangerouswilderness - this fool, this yearning and desperate prisoner became theinventor of the 'bad conscience'.21

Nietzsche interprets what is really only a kind of submerged bestiality as anideal bestiality. Man is always a beast, either externally or internally throughthe self-torture of conscience.

The third treatise contains a psychology of the priest. It asks 'What are theascetic ideals?'

Ascetic ideals can imply a form of self-discipline and economy of powers asin the philosopher for example. 'A certain asceticism ... a tough and joyfulrenunciation of best intention belongs to the most productive conditions ofhighest spirituality.'22 It is for this reason that Nietzsche believes that philosophyhas never completely recognized ascetic ideals as a pollution of the sources oflife. Philosophers have certain ascetic experiences. A long-term interest in think-ing or a perspective stretching over years or even decades requires self-disciplineand strength. However, in the case of the philosopher it is the creative impulse oflife which constrains the person. It does not stand in opposition to life. The caseis different and highly dubious in the case of the ascetic ideal of the priest. Here,it flows from 'the protective and regenerative instincts of a degenerate life'.23

Asceticism is itself a way in which the weak and the sick life survives. It has to


refrain from an explosion of the passions and the great sentiments. It mustsubjugate the passions if it wishes to scrape through. For Nietzsche the priest isthe 'false doctor and healer' who prolongs the lower, pitiful and short-sightedlife or the suffering life in its suffering and who heals the wounds of such a short-changed life while poisoning it at the same time to create an eternally openwound.

Nietzsche believes that the priest 'redirects resentment'. He convinces thesick person that he is responsible for his own sickness. He comforts him and sellshim the ascetic ideals.24 Nietzsche answers the question of the power of theascetic ideals as follows. So far, this was the only ideal. All historical ideas havebeen ascetic. Wherever man transcends the simple, animalistic instinctive for-mation, wherever he desires, he confronts his instincts with his will. He willsagainst them. The human being, however is free, that is, he must will where heawakens from the a-historical peace with nature towards history. He cannotmerely vegetate. He must erect ideals which refer beyond himself. He must seethe stars shine. All stars, however, have hitherto been transcendental. They havebeen inventions of priests and ideals opposed to nature. They constituted atough path of the will which gained its highest power through its tension withnature within the human being and became complete will. Nietzsche thuscombines will and ascetic ideal. In some way all will implies asceticism.

However, what did the will intend if it pursued ascetic ideals? Nietzsche'sanswer is: nothingness. The will was a will for nothing or a nihilistic tendency oflife.

One can simply not conceal what is expressed by the will as a whole whichhad been directed by the ascetic ideal. This hatred against humanity, more soagainst the animate, more so against the material. This disdain for the senses,for reason itself. This fear of happiness and of beauty. This desire to leaveappearance, change, becoming, death, wish, desire itself behind - this allimplies . . . a will for nothingness, a rejection of life, an uprising against thebasic conditions of life. However, it is and remains a will.25

The ascetically charged will wills nothing. It wills the transcendental nothing-ness or the nothing of the other-world and of the moral ideas. It denies the hereand now, the earthly life and the lived life. Where does this fascination with thenothing come from?

Nietzsche states: 'Man would rather will nothing than not will at all . . ,'.26

This means, that so far there has never been an alternative to the ascetic idealwhich denies nature. There has never been one in conformity with nature.

The difference between reality and ideality becomes only possible in theopposition to nature. An infinite hiatus opens itself which provides a path to the

The Antichrist and The Twilight of the Idols 121

will. From this point of view the ascetic ideal has even a tremendously positivemeaning. It firstly creates a rift and chasm which the will attempts to over-come. The human being becomes a bridge. Nietzsche inverts this existentialtension now. He is, however, not concerned to reject the ideal but to identify itcloser with life. Man becomes the bridge to the overman. Ideality must beunderstood anew through the self-overcoming of life and through the gradualprogress of the will to power. The ascetic ideal was so far the only ideal. TheZarathustra proposes an alternative. Nietzsche places himself into a radical,determined and burning opposition to anything considered 'valuable' so far.However, his choice is not an expression of stubbornness, pleasure for resent-ment or an arbitrary oppositional attitude. It follows from a thinking whichgrasps the essence of value in a fundamentally new way as an expression of thepower of life and as a positing of value by the will to power. Rethinking thenature of value gives Nietzsche the reasons to invert the table of values andto bless what has been cursed so far and to curse what has been blessed.The 'revaluation of values' remains fatefully burdened by the thought of an'inversion'.

3. THE ANTICHRIST AND THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS

In the book The Antichrist (An attempt at a Critique of Christianity) Nietzschestruggles with unprecedented hate and hurls a flood of insults and suspicionsagainst Christianity. His virtuosity to fight with all means excels. The lack ofmeasure, however, is self-defeating. One does not persuade if one foams at themouth. The book does not offer anything substantially new. Nietzsche summar-izes what he has already stated about the morality of pity and the psychology ofthe priest. However, he now articulates his thoughts with an unprecedentedsharpness. He intends to hurt, intends to hit out at tradition and intends to 're-value' in anti-Christian ways. Christianity seems to him to be the 'deadly waragainst the higher kind of man'. It is simply corrupt, namely the corruption ofthe human instincts. It is an unnatural religion and the seducer of Europeanphilosophy which now has theological blood in its veins. The Christian conceptof God is one of the most corrupt concepts of God on earth:

It presents perhaps the lowest form of a concept of God in the decliningdevelopment of divinities. God is degenerated into an enemy of life instead ofbeing its transfiguration and its eternal affirmation. To declare war on life, onnature, on the will to life with the help of God! God, the formula for any insultof the 'concrete presence', the formula for any lie of a 'beyond'. Godsanctifies nothingness and declares the will to nothingness to be holy.27


This quote shows particularly what underpins Nietzsche's critique of Christian-ity. Christianity is for him only the spiritually most significant symptom of aEuropean error of the instinct which shows itself as the invention of an ideal,transcendental world and with this devalues the real, concrete world. Christianityis an objectionable form of Platonism for Nietzsche. Nietzsche presupposes athe-ism. He no longer even questions this presupposition of his critique of Christian-ity. He avoids the Christian claim to be the revelation not only of the human sonbut also of the son of God. Let us assume firstly that Christianity did not inventGod through a human, all-too-human tendency of life, through the sick, resentfuland declining life which opposes a life full of power and secure instincts. Let usfurther assume that God himself served the low and the fallen, the despised, theburdened and the suffering and those who are pure of heart. Let us suppose thathe selected those who had been rejected by the world to be the vehicles of hisrevelation to turn the wisdom of the world into foolishness. Based on theseassumptions, a critique of the tendencies of life could never touch Christianity.Nietzsche's atheistic prejudice prevents him from considering this possibility atall and excludes it without further thought from the beginning. Atheism is self-justifying for him. He does not consider it appropriate to even doubt it for amoment. However, this means that he has lost sight of religion altogether.

Nietzsche's critique of Christianity is not met by showing the strong, cour-ageous aspects of Christianity or by asserting that Nietzsche only considered aweak, pietistic and moralistic form of a Christianity of pity. His dogmatic athe-ism or his fundamental conception of the death of God have to be questioned.Only if these are justified then all religions are indeed concealed tendencies oflife and nothing else. And if they are not justified no religion can be touched by acritique of an existential ideal constructed according to the standards of the willto power.

Religion and in particular Christianity is for Nietzsche a particular way of life,a relationship towards existence and an attitude towards life. Christ is not theSon of God for him. He does not take this seriously at all. He is the greatweakling, the gentle person and the 'saint'. His instincts are weak. He carries theheavenly paradise in his heart, in his gentle and weak heart. However, thisredeemer is no founder of a church, quite the contrary. He is the plain denial ofany organization, of any culture and of any work. He only carries the message ofsalvation, the message of peace, gentleness and forgiveness. Jesus of Nazareth isa new way of life. He rejects the hierarchical structures of Judaism. He deniesany structure and organization of life. He is the extreme introversion of theimmanence of the soul which does not require any institution because it carriesthe kingdom of God within itself. Nietzsche thus contrasts the evangelical Jesuswith the church-founding Paulus. Christianity is even more the work of Paulthan that of Jesus. Jesus is no fanatic. He is an innocent person.


The joyful message is just this, that there are no differences any longer. Theheavenly kingdom belongs to the children. The belief which becomes evidenthere is nothing that has been achieved. It is simply there from the beginning.It is, as it were, a spiritual naivety.... Such a belief is never furious, it doesnot criticize, it does not defend itself. It does not bring the sword. It does notsuspect how much it may once separate. It does not prove itself neitherthrough miracles, nor through rewards, nor through promises or even'through the book'. It is itself its own miracle, its own reward, its own proof,its 'kingdom of God'.28

Nietzsche thus constructs Jesus as a kind of harmless salvation-army guy whogoes through life with a gentle and concilliatory smile on his face. On thisbackground of the evangelical Jesus Paul becomes the intentional misunder-standing of Christianity. Paul changes the pure-hearted way of life into a churchwith miracles, with priests and with a system of rewards and punishments. Hechanges Jesus into the Son of God who sacrifices himself for the sins of theworld and invents the other-world, final judgement, resurrection and any otherso-called 'ultimate matter'. Paul magically removes the only reality of Christian-ity, the blessedness, the kingdom of God within the gentle soul, that is, the joy ofgentleness. He shifts human blessedness to the life after death to make it a futurereward. Paul is the victory of Orthodox Judaism. He is the victory of the Jewishpriest over Jesus of Nazareth. 'The joyful message was immediately followed bythe worst one: that of Paul. Paul embodies a contrasting type to the type of"joyful messenger", the genius of hatred, a vision of hatred with an untiring logicofhatred.'29

Paul is the creator of the doctrine of judgement. It was his way to form a herdand to establish again and more radically than before the tyranny of the priests.Paul concluded the demise of Christianity which commenced with the death ofthe Messiah with the logical cynicism of a rabbi. Paul represents the dominanceof all decaying values in the name of God. The Christian concept of sin is thegreatest human self-mutilation. It is an attack by the priest and by the parasiteon life itself. Nietzsche sees in Paul the simultaneous uprising of the priests andthe decline of all values. Priests assume power where life declines. Christian andnihilist rhyme, he thinks, and they do not only rhyme but form a necessaryconnection. Christianity brought about the end of the classical world not justhistorically, though, but also by destroying a noble way and value of life. This isfateful. Nietzsche's pathos is nourished by the belief that his philosophy is simi-larly fateful as it is the reconstruction of values in accordance with life whichChristianity had completely perverted and ruined. Anti-Christianity is accord-ingly the revaluation of all values in the form of an opposition against the mil-lennia of a decline of life. In the court of life, which is conceived as will to power,

123


Nietzsche raises 'the most terrifying accusations which have come across the lipsof any accuser'.30

For him Christianity is the worst of all conceivable corruptions with itsrevaluation of any value into a non-value and of all truth into a lie and vice-versa. It poisons life with the thought of sin, destroys real rank order through the'equality of the souls in the face of God' thus providing the explosive materialfor the mob-uprisings of European history. He calls Christianity 'a form ofparasitism which lives from the emergencies in the human soul - the thought ofanother world with its denial of any reality, the cross as the symbolic identifica-tion for the most hidden conspiracy ever - against health, against beauty, fitnessand courage, spirit, generosity, against life itself.' Nietzsche concludes hisdiatribe:

I intend to write this constant accusation of Christianity on to walls whereverthere are any. I have letters which can even make the blind see.... I callChristianity the one great curse, the one great internal perversion and the onegreat instinct for revenge to whom no mean is poisonous, secretive, concealedand small enough. I call it the one immortal embarrassment of mankind. /And one establishes the calendar according to the dies nefastus who broughtabout this fate. - According to the first day of Christianity. Why not accordingto its last? According to today? Revaluation of all values!31

One may find Nietzsche's sacrilegiously ranting language peculiar. He is,however, not concerned with religion in the genuine sense. Nietzsche passion-ately attacks primarily metaphysics and a way of judgement in Christianity.Christianity represents a factual, historical manifestation of such metaphysics.

Christianity represents something universal, not just another metaphysics orany set of values. It stands for the set of western ontological values which inter-prets the sensual, the here-and-now, the concretely experienced in the light ofthe ideas and in the light of the transcendental, 'true' and the real world as apreliminary or unauthentic appearance. He refers to this as 'Platonism'. Heattacks Christianity in the final analysis because it is a 'Platonism for thepeople'32; it is a common form of metaphysics. His philosophy, however, is as hecalls it an 'inverted Platonism'33. The revaluation of all values is more profoundthan an 'anti-Christianity' or an anti-Platonism. One will have to keep thiscontext in mind to see the limitations and the importance of Nietzsche's finalworks. Religion, morality and metaphysics are for Nietzsche connected. Theydo not have a separate or an independent relationship to man. God only repre-sents the transcendentality of values, their essence and objectivity which isultimately grounded in God as the highest existing Good or as the summum ens.This is Nietzsche's entire interpretation of religion. Man idealizes his highest


values through God and through the Gods and imbues them with personalexistence. If affirmative values dominate the way of life the Gods are accordinglylike Greek Gods, namely affirmative and idealizing Gods. If, however, the lead-ing values are derived from impotence, then God becomes crucified. The tran-scendental God who condemns the natural instincts and drives of life as sins isthe outcome. The death of God thus means for Nietzsche the revocation of thetranscendental nature of value and the discovery that values are humancreations.

Nietzsche's universal perspective of values or his thought of the revaluationof values is perhaps still connected to the metaphysics against which it turns.The inverted Platonism is indeed still a form of Platonism. This becomesclear in the treatise with the title The Twilight of the Idols. Although Nietzscheshows off results of his sophistic psychological investigation he surpassesthem in substance. We find in it the most important fundamental ontologicalthoughts. We find the interpretation of his fundamental thoughts derivedfrom a particular ontological conception. Although this had been frequentlyindicated he clearly and unmistakably articulates it here. His basic formula isthis: traditional metaphysical ontology regards as 'being' what is in truthmerely an illusion and a fiction and rejects non-being as unauthentic exist-ence when it is in truth the only effectively real being. What is regarded asessentially existing is nothing. What has been regarded so far to be nothing isthe only truly real being. 'Being' as opposed to 'becoming' is not; becomingalone is. There is no being beyond space and time, no intelligible realm ofthings as such and no world of eternal ideas. There is only a sensually experi-enced world which reveals itself within space and time - the earth beneaththe heaven with its infinite manifold things 'beneath heaven and earth'. Yet,this only, real, active, living and moving world which is driven by the will topower does not know fastness, calmness and foundations. It is dynamic, it istime and space and nothing else, that is it is will to power and 'nothingbeyond'34. Nietzsche inverts the foundations of the entire traditional meta-physics. But he simplifies on the way in a very dubious manner. He uses thesimplest contrast between being and becoming without developing these con-cepts at any stage properly and without elevating them above their common,everyday meaning. And yet, despite all the shortcomings of his ontologicalspeculations he nevertheless has an incredible instinct for the deep and genu-ine questions akin to his intuition of the importance of the Pre-Socraticswhom he interpreted entirely inadequately. As a facilitator, as a 'precursor',as a messenger of a future philosophical path and as a prophet of the 'changeof being' Nietzsche is more important and greater than as a thinker whocompletes conceptual work.

The real heart of The Twilight of the Idols is the section 'Reason within


Philosophy'. It is preceded by an interpretation of Socrates which is a brilliantexample of Nietzsche's sophistry:

I myself realized this fatal dishonesty that the great characters are instances ofdecline in one particular case which contrasts especially with the learned andunlearned prejudice: I recognized that Socrates and Plato are symptoms ofdecay. They are tools of Greek decadence, they are pseudo-Greek, they areanti-Greek.33

Before attacking Platonic ontology he attacks Socrates as a Platonic existence.This appears to demonstrate the decay of the Greek instincts. Nietzsche com-bines aspects of his image of Socrates with a sophisticated sophistry. Socrates isa commoner and plebeian by birth and in spirit. And he is ugly. He is externallya monster and had to - as Nietzsche says - become ugly internally as well sincethe Greeks were intoxicated by beauty and regarded ugliness as a refutation.The ugly person could never win over the beautiful admirers if he did notfascinate them with something incredible. This spell was the discovery of dia-lectic, a competitive art. However, the fact that dialectic can seduce, that logicstimulates and that the search for reasons and the refutation of apparent reasonsbecomes a new pleasurable exercise, a new Agon - this fact by itself shows thatGreek existence has lost its 'natural quality'. Socrates merely accelerates whathad already begun. Rationality takes the place of secure instincts. However, thisdisintegrating life needs reason more than it needs a tyrant. It wouldotherwise become the victim of an anarchy of conflicting drives which are nolonger ruled by a leading instinct. The Greeks must have needed reason sincethey committed to it so absolutely.

Nietzsche believes that the 'Socratic identification of reason = virtue = happi-ness' is 'the most bizarre identification there is and one which in particularcontradicts all instincts of the earlier Hellenic culture'.36 'To fight against theinstincts - this is the formula of decadence: As long as life ascends happinessequals instinct.'37 He even interprets the death of Socrates as a will to self-destruction. This wisest of the Greeks knows that such a sickness, that is such aconfusion of instinct requiring the rule of reason itself can only mean that 'deathitself becomes the healer'.38

Following this portrayal of the Socratic existence with its inversion of a tra-ditional understanding Nietzsche commences his real attack on metaphysics.Metaphysical philosophy is Egyptian in more than one sense. Nietzsche alludesto his frequent assertion that Plato was seduced by the Egyptian priests andestranged from the true Hellenic nature. Philosophical moralism is an Egyptianlegacy. It is the home of a denial of temporality. The Egyptianism of thephilosophers is 'their aversion against the idea of becoming':


For thousands of years philosophers have only handled conceptual mum-mies. . .. They kill, they preserve, these gentlemen who worship the idols ofthe concept where they worship.... Death, change, aging as well as pro-creation and growth are exceptions to them.... Being does not become,becoming does not exist.39

This means that in Nietzsche's view the history of metaphysics is dominatedfrom the beginning by the attempt to expel becoming from being, to deny thatbecoming truly exists and to keep being itself free of any form of becoming inreturn. This opposition between being and becoming remains a basic model heuses and the one he simply inverts. He interprets being as constant, resting,immovable and timeless and becoming as passing on, moving, temporal, that ishe separates being and time. This separation appears to him to be a dual worldtheory reflecting the difference between the world of appearance and the worldas such or the 'other-world'. Metaphysics, Nietzsche believes, has devalued thetrue, spatio-temporal world of appearance and pretends that a merely idealworld or a figment of the imagination is the true one. It distrusts the sensesbecause they show the transitory and it views the senses and sensuality as suchas an enemy of thinking and a 'deceiver' which fools us. It is accordinglyopposed to the senses and their evidence. Metaphysics becomes a reflectionof an intelligible world with transcendental predicates of eternal, infinite anda-temporal being.

The second basic mistake of traditional philosophy is a confusion of the firstand last principle. Nietzsche means here the dependence of metaphysics onhighest and universal principles. It is a kind of thinking in empty concepts.Nietzsche interprets ontological concepts as mere abstractions. This conceptionconceals a short-sighted theory of the concept and a considerable misunder-standing of metaphysical concepts in particular. Concepts are in general some-thing questionable for Nietzsche with only limited application to reality. Thewords which allow us to see and hear something are originally images andmetaphors; however, at the same time they interpret reality. However, conceptsare images which have become empty or symbols which have become pale. Theytake the place of past intuitions. Nietzsche thus believes that ontological con-cepts are 'abstractions' and 'abstract concepts'. He does not clarify his opinion.He does not analyse the abstraction itself. He merely asserts it. Philosophicalconcepts appear to him to be 'the final vapour of a condensing reality'40, that is atrace and a postscript. Concepts such as 'being' are for him utmost abstractionsand manifold copies of reality. Contrary to the metaphysical method one shouldcommence with the senses, the concrete presence, the changing reality and withintuition not with the concept.

In Nietzsche's view, metaphysics is the inverted world and it is even proud of


it. It relies on 'highest' and at the same time necessarily obscure concepts suchas 'being, the infinite, the Good, the true, the perfect'. Nietzsche refers herecritically to a number of transcendental concepts which conceptualize the high-est universals transcending abstractions of any kind. However, yet again he failsto reflect on the quality of this transcendental universality itself. He neglects thefundamental difference between concepts derived through abstraction and con-cepts which we rely on in order to experience a concrete, empirically given thingand subject it to abstractions. However, this refutation of Nietzsche's critiquedoes not completely hit the mark. Nietzsche attempts to attack metaphysics withunsatisfactory means, to be sure. He interprets it frequently inadequately but hisattack does find a target of sorts. He objects to the foundations of metaphysicsand to its dual structure as the question of being as such and as the search forthe highest being or for God. While the reasons for his objections are frequentlynot valid, however, his struggle against metaphysics is often more serious thanthe stated reasons suggest. He inverts metaphysics and he inverts the tradition-ally conceived relationship between becoming and being, between sensual andconceptual, between empirical world of appearance and the conceptual, that isthe intelligibly accessible 'true world'. He turns metaphysics on its head. How-ever, he only refers, as it were, to his intention to do so. He does not just avoidthe concrete critical analysis but, more importantly, he lacks the language for itsdestruction. He cannot express his true intentions because language itself ismetaphysical. It has in his own words a 'crude and fetishistic nature'41 since itdetermines act and activity, substance, causality, will and being. Language con-tains an ontological conception. This means for Nietzsche that it is rilled withfiction and with grammatical concepts that have become misinterpreted asentities. He states:

Indeed, nothing so far has had a more naive power of persuasion than theerror of being as it was for example articulated by the Eleatics. It is supportedby every word itself, by every sentence itself which we speak! ... 'Reason'within language: O, what a deceptive old woman! I fear we are not going to getrid of God, because we still believe in His grammar.42

The decisive aspect of traditional philosophy is for Nietzsche the much-variedappearance of the difference between 'true' and 'apparent' world. What is thispeculiar difference between being and appearance? This difference contains adichotomy within the being of beings and between authentic and unauthenticforms of existence. 'Being' divides itself into true, authentic and untrue,unauthentic being or into 'essence' and 'appearance'. This means that beingdoes not exist in any unqualified sense but distinguishes itself by grades andsteps. It distinguishes itself according to an ontological rank order. And any rank

The ontological idea and the moral ideal 129

is relative to its distance from the highest ranking with the highest being com-monly called the 'Absolute' or 'God'. The being of the highest ontological valueis the 'Good', the Agathon or the Bonum. Being is itself differently conceiveddepending on its relationship to the highest-ranking Bonum. Depending on thisrelativity it is itself a Bonum. Omne ens est bonum. Nietzsche does not only objectto the Christian understanding of this proposition, he also objects to the onto-logical conception of a ranked structure of being. He intends to unhinge meta-physics by refuting the ontological dualism of a real and an apparent worldimplied by the ens qua bonum that is the fundamental error of metaphysics.There is no other world than our concrete, spatio-temporally apparent world.The 'otherworld' of an intelligible, immovable and a-temporal being is an inven-tion or a mere theoretical construct. However, metaphysics always judges thisworld in relation to a transcendental world. Nietzsche objects to this devaluationwith his idea of a revaluation of the values. Approaching the question of beingthrough the question of value he nevertheless does not leave the path of anidentification of ens with bonum.

4. THE ONTOLOGICAL IDEA AND THE MORAL IDEAL

Ever since its beginning philosophy thinks about the ontological difference. Itthinks about the being of the many things (the polio) as a being mixed withnothingness and contrasts this with a more essential Being either as physis, aseon, as apeiron or as the idea.

In other words, philosophy starts with the destruction of a common under-standing which only knows the alternatives of being and non-being and excludesthe concept of being from any gradation. Ever since the days of Anaximander,Heraclitus, Parmenides and Plato the essential thinking has been directedagainst the indifference of the human ontological understanding for which allexistence of being 'amounts to the same'. Since then being has been conceivedwithin the horizon of a rank order and being and nothingness have been inter-mingled. More accurately, a more authentic being free from non-being and anunauthentic being that accommodates non-being have been conceived. Theorigin of western philosophy is grounded in the ontological difference betweenauthentic and unauthentic being. This difference creates the problem of ontol-ogy and the realm of its questions. Wherever philosophy commences this occursby opening an inner difference within the beingness of being itself. Philosophy isthe acute and explicit challenge to the indifference of human ontologicalunderstanding.

To put it more simply, from the beginning philosophy exposes the ontologicalproblem through a question about the one, the whole and indivisible


'real-being' free of any non-being. This provides it with the measure for anydetermination of ontological value. At the same time it exposes the ontologicalproblem through the question of the ontological mode of unauthentic being, ofthe manifold of the many, individuated and spatio-temporally dispersed things.The dimension of the question is the connection between the one and the manyor between the Hen and the Polla. The primordial one is regarded as true. Themany finite things are regarded as unauthentic while providing at the same timethe basic distinction between infinite and finite. A philosophy which no longeridentifies all modes of being and which is conceived as an awakening from theindifference of existence transcends the value of the individual, limited andfinite being through reflection and reaches beyond the realm of the sensuallygiven. We never encounter the whole, the one and true 'Being' as simply presentat hand. We do not encounter it as an 'object', as a finite thing with a firm shape,with a structure and with an appearance. We do encounter things, limited bytheir shape, by their spatial form and by their temporal duration. The realm ofthe concrete things is indefinite. These are constantly changing and moving,they increase and decrease and are generated and decay.

However, the dimensions in which they change and move, the dimensions ofspace and time are not themselves generated and do not themselves decay. The'earth' which supports all things and from which all things are made does notdecay, provided we do not interpret this to refer to the little planet on which wekeep ourselves busy but as the one closed ground from which all things comeinto being and into appearance. And the heaven, the light too, which providesthe form to all things. It is not generated and it does not decay provided we donot conceive it short-sightedly as the day following the night. What is the one,the essence, what is 'Being'? Is it physis, the opposing unity of revelation andconcealment, of heaven and earth or with one word: the realm-giving, time-giving, existing world or Being itself which contains 'becoming' within itself? Ordoes true Being exist beyond the world as an other-world of eternal things ofwhich the concrete finite things are only appearances?

It is difficult and beyond our scope to establish how the original interpretationof western philosophy conceives the essence of Being (as apeiron in Anaxi-mander, as physis in Heraclitus, as eon in Parmenides) and how this conceptionof the cosmos changes in Plato into an absolute concept with one aspect, namelythat of light which lends all things their appearance and moulds them into thedefinition of a form. Plato calls the defining power of light, its power to providethe appearance and the image itself appearance and image, that is Eidos andidea. The ideas pervade the world. They are the defining powers of any revela-tion and they shape all individuated, finite and limited being. They are presentthroughout any formation and yet separate from that which they form. All ideasare united and joined in the idea of the 'Good' or the Agathon. They are united

The ontological idea and the moral ideal 1 3 1

like the rays of light in the sun. The ideas are true being for Plato. They arethe ontos on whereas the definite things of appearance are only the unauthenticmean.

The reason for the difficulty and ambiguity of Platonic ontology is its inter-pretation of the relationship of the appearances to the ideas and that of thespatial matter (chord) or of the 'earth' to the power of the idea. Either relation-ship is interpreted through a relationship between authentic and unauthenticbeing. Being equals light is a basic Platonic equation. This is a decision of world-historical importance. It is possible that Nietzsche saw this beginning of a wrongtrack or perhaps he suspected it only. In the final analysis, his anti-Platonism hasto be understood more radically than he himself expressed. It is precisely not acritique of Plato, which makes him the founding father of a moralistic interpret-ation of being, but it is the beginning of a dissolution of an original cosmologicalconception.

To state it in the form of a thesis: Plato changes the primordial cosmologicaldifference between a one, whole and real world and the many finite, apparentlyreal things in this world into a difference between infinite, eternal, supersensualideas beyond space and time or universals and the finite, individual thingswithin time and space. At the same time the common view of a Platonic dualismin the sense of a two world theory (which Nietzsche himself had fallen prey tofrequently) is not tenable. It is the task of an interpretation of Plato to under-stand the metamorphosis of the cosmological problem through \h&para-ousia ofthe ideas within the things of appearance, that is in the methexsis or the participa-tion of the ideas in the individual things. Plato's philosophy is more complex,mysterious and profound than common interpretations suggest which continueto refer to a Platonic dualism. These construct a schema of two complementary,yet separate ontological realms: the realm of the ideas and the realm of theappearances. This schema already prevents an understanding of the Platonicissues. The idea is seen to be some kind of object - to be sure, not as stable as theappearances. They do not become or decay and they do not exist within spaceand time. Ordinary Platonism, which already existed during antiquity, thuslocates the difference between authentic and unauthentic being in the realm ofthe things, that is in the ontic realm. Thus the standard of being becomes finallysomething 'absolute', divine - a theion. It provides the measure for everything. Asecond, real world emerges beyond the world of appearance. Beyond the phys-ical world arises the metaphysical world. Beyond the finite things we find aninfinite God. The original ontological difference between authentic andunauthentic being becomes a 'theological difference', a difference between cre-ated things and the creating God. The original conception of the cosmoschanges into something existent, into God with the supposed attributes of in-finity, omnipotence, etc., attributes which articulate the ontology of the world


directly. The 'authentic', the 'existing being' becomes a highest being or a sum-mum ens. This is an ens and also the summum. It is supposed to be the Good itselfin relation to which all things achieve their measure. Through it all things areone separate bonum.

Nietzsche particularly objects to the connection between the ontologicalidea and the moral ideal in the term of 'God'. God stands for the devaluationof concrete existence and of the sensual evidence of the things. At the sametime it stands for a rejection of pleasurable and instinctive life as 'evil' andposits an Absolute in the form of a fanciful, imagined and merely abstracta-temporal being. This robs the temporal things of their real existence andauthentic being.

God thus refers for Nietzsche not primarily to a religious power but to aparticular ontology which articulates itself as a particular and life-threateningmorality. The thought of God is a vampire of life. It refers to a moralizingontology and to an ontological morality. The infinite, the unmoved and theideas are also the Good. The attention to the ideas, the elevation above thesensual and the contemplation of the ideas is the true human morality; the moreabstract and intelligible, the more moral.

Nietzsche's view is terrifyingly simplistic. He nevertheless is one of the first tosee a fundamental issue here. His critique of Plato does not really apply to thehistorical Plato but to a particular aspect of western history, rather more to thecommon traditional interpretations of Plato, to certain aspects of Neo-Platonism, of the Gnosis and of Christianity. The idea of a true world, the ideaof the reality of the divine Absolute is for him the most dangerous threat tohumanity. It presents a fateful renunciation of reality which occurs in the nameof truth. The desire for truth thus becomes a terrifying human deception. Itmisleads more than the naive reliance on the senses. One may say thatNietzsche's ontology intends to invert traditional ontology or at least the ontol-ogy which conceives the real existence as a-temporal, unchanging being and alltemporal being as unauthentic.

At first sight it seems that he opposes the real, changing things to the intelli-gible ideas, becoming to being, the concrete to the universal and the 'body' tothe 'spirit' - all this within an inverted ontological and also moral valuation.Nietzsche opposes 'God', that is, the difference between authentic andunauthentic, and promotes the indifference of existence or the equality of valuewhich is no longer unsettled by a merely imagined difference, as it were a secondand profoundly justified naivety and innocence of life. The philosophical inven-tion of a 'true world' (and with it that of an apparent one) has to be abolished.The interpretation of the concrete world as a mere appearance has to beremoved. It has to be cleaned from the fungus of the sick minds and sick bodieswhich infects it. The goal of the revaluation of all values is to liberate being itself


from moral ontology and ontological morality. The abolition of the ontologicaldifference of authentic and unauthentic or of'true world' and apparent world is,as he states, the 'climax of humanity' and the 'noon, the moment of the shortestshadow, the end of the longest error'.43

The parable of the 'shortest shadow' is revealing. This contains a reference tothe Platonic interpretation of sensual things that are generated and decay as a'shadow' of the 'idea' or as an image of the eternal idea. This is a reference to theallegory of the cave in the seventh book of The Republic. However, Nietzschedoes not refer to a disappearance of the shadow but to the shortest shadow.Does this not mean that he opposes the great division of the idea and the sensualthing but retains a trace of this division nevertheless while locating it in a com-pletely different context? This is the central issue of any interpretation ofNietzsche. Does Nietzsche indeed deny the above ontological difference as suchor does he retain it in a new yet extremely ancient way? Nietzsche opposes thetheological form of the ontological difference and attempts to conceive it cos-mologically. He does not simply stop with the contrast to the allegedly 'trueworld', with the senses, the things, the coming and going of things and theirchanges, with the individual, spatially and temporally limited things. He doesnot make the realm of the finite things absolute but he inquires in a new way intotheir depth in interpreting the change of all finite being as the will to power andtemporality itself as the eternal return of the same. Will to power and eternalreturn are not just simply present but are only revealed by a radical thinkingtranscending the appearances.

However, something like the will to power and the eternal return do notreside in a transcendental realm. It is no essence distinguished from appearanceor beyond appearance but it is the existing essence of that which is concrete,finite and transitory. In these fundamental thoughts, Nietzsche does not reflectabout an 'other-world' but about the existence of the world itself and about thegreat process of generation and destruction, of dawn, decline and return whichcreates all risks and brings all things into play. His thinking is also speculative.However, the speculation follows a different path than the reflection of meta-physics which posits an authentic, true and real existence beyond nature (phy-sis). Metaphysically conceived being is exactly what Nietzsche opposes in theconcept of'God'. The abolition of transcendence is the active consequence ofthe death of God. The death of God can accordingly become the dawn of theearth as in Zamthustra. We must understand that Nietzsche attacks a form ofontology when he refers to God and that the passion of his dispute with Christi-anity is not fuelled by a soul which refuses itself to God out of hatred againstGod but by a changed ontological conception. We must understand that he doesnot oppose the 'God of Abram and Jacob' but the 'God of the philosophers'.Even where he attacks the Jewish God and Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified, with


utmost vehemence, this attack is aimed at a moral ontology or an ontologicalmorality.

The Twilight of the Idols reveals his conceptual weapon of equating God withthe transcendental world of true being in principle. He condenses his 'newinsight' into four points on which he places greatest importance:

1. The reasons why this world is considered to be apparent are rather thereasons for its reality. It is absolutely impossible to prove a different reality. 2.The characteristics which have been assigned to 'true being' are the charac-teristics of nothingness, of the nothing, - one has constructed the true worldin contradiction to the real world: An apparent world indeed in so far as it isonly a moral-optic illusion. 3. To babble about 'another' world than this onedoes not make any sense, provided that we are not subject to an instinct ofinsult, diminution and suspicion of life. In the latter case we take revenge onlife with a fiction of 'another', 'better' life. 4. To separate the world into a'true' and an 'apparent' one, be it in the manner of Christianity or in themanner of Kant (a cunning Christian after all) is merely a trick of decadence- a symptom of declining life . . .

Nietzsche believes that his original intention is directed towards an inversion oftraditional ontology and values. What had been considered to be an appearanceis truly real, namely the sensual, the temporal and the things in the flux ofbecoming. What had been so far considered to be truly existing, that is the a-temporal, eternal and pure being is merely a thing of the mind and nothing else.However, in this inversion he uses the difference that he opposes. Whatever isconcrete is authentic and whatever is metaphysical is merely an appearance or amere illusion. In using this difference which he wishes to sublate to achieve thevery sublation of the difference itself he indicates that this difference may afterall make some sense which is not affected by the inversion. And Nietzsche refersimmediately to a justifiable difference of this kind in the artist. He attributes ahigher value to semblance. But the semblance which is created by the artist andwhich he worships as the divine power of the beautiful is no transcendentalworld and no image which abstracts the concrete existence from nature like avampire but the contrary. 'Because semblance refers to reality anew, only in aselection, emphasis or correction; the tragic artist is no pessimist, - he affirms allquestionable and terrifying things, he is Dionysian.'44 This reference to theartist is not incidental. It is a crucial hint. The appearance of the artist is differ-ent and more real than the appearance of a pure, conceptual thinking. Theappearance of art transfigures life itself. Nietzsche refers explicitly to the tragicartist; however, the naive artist remains trapped in his Apollonian world ofdreams and the tragic one breaks through all the appearances to the dreadful


truth which requires illusion as a form of consolation. Already in Nietzsche'sfirst work, tragic art was an instrument of philosophy. Does tragic, Dionysianart not require a tragic, Dionysian wisdom which renews the distinctionbetween being and appearance and yet does not deny and renounce the earth?The turn of reflection towards the will to power and the eternal return breaksthrough the surface of the phenomena to a depth of a tough philosophy withoutillusions. This philosophy remains open to the terrifying beauty and to themysterious ambiguity of all existence. It endures the death of God and probes allcherished beliefs and truths and all idols of tradition with a hammer. It is notafraid of the 'famous hollow sound' and it is not discouraged. It ratherunderstands the 'twilight of the idols' as a historical human task.

Nietzsche only indicates aspects of the history of the longest error. Nowheredoes he destroy the traditional ontological conception. His attacks on Plato,Kant and others are all combined judgements which formulate objectives butdo not truly prove them. On the whole Nietzsche deals with terrible simplifica-tions about Plato and Kant. Yet, his critique is not countered if one attacks thevagueness and obscurity of his generalizing conceptions.

Nietzsche's thoughts are always (and this is their fundamental validity)deeper and more profound than his arguments, proofs and his evidence. Hesenses a new dimension but he is unable to explicate it adequately. Even hismain posthumous work which he had frequently announced as the 'mostindependent book of mankind', The Will to Power, does not achieve a systematicdevelopment of his thoughts. Nietzsche admits that he despises the system. Hebelieves that it entails a massive rearrangement of and change to the subjectmatter itself, presenting it with a violating schema. The systematic person iseither infinitely naive or dishonest according to Nietzsche. 'He pretends to bemore stupid than he is.'45 Nietzsche does not have a genuine relationship withsystematicity. He is rather committed to the proposition that the enigmaticcharacter of reality cannot be captured in a system and that life is always morepuzzling, perplexing, ambiguous and mysterious than any human would know.Not only is truth a woman who will hardly be conquered by the clumsy attemptsof a philosopher but life itself is a mysterious, unfathomable and unconceivablewoman.

Nietzsche made a number of sketches of The Will to Power. The editors havefinally selected a sketch of 1887 and have ordered the aphorisms accordingly.The book available to us today is thus no longer Nietzsche's book but an editedversion following mere sketches. This shows itself in many ways. The aphorismsare not as polished as usual. They do not have the concise and precise characterof the later writings. The book does not have a particular pace and no individualstyle. Its structure contains again Nietzsche's four basic thoughts but the sec-tions are less clear. The edited version of the work falls into four books. The first


two deal with the death of God, the third with the will to power and the fourthwith the overman and the eternal return. However, why does Nietzsche dedicatetwo books to the death of God? Is this not a unified subject? The idea takes on apeculiar character. The death of God is a double-headed event. It is an eventwhich has occurred and one which still presents us with future tasks. We are in apeculiar situation. Nietzsche interprets modern man as an end. He is the end ofthe spiritual and moral development of the last two thousand years, the end ofmetaphysical philosophy and Christianity and the end of a system of values.Why should the end of this path become visible only now? Who has stoppedman in his tracks? Nietzsche's answer is as follows: the 'eeriest of all guests'46,'European nihilism' which already throws a dark shadow across man's path toarrest his foot and stop him in his tracks. Nihilism is on the rise; we live in itsadvent. What, however, is nihilism? "That the highest values are devalued. Theaim is absent, there is no answer to a why?'47

Human existence has become aimless. It has no stars that guide its path. The'starry heaven' of the moral ideals is extinguished. God is dead for us, that is themoral and ontological interpretation of being in the tradition of western meta-physics has lost its commitment for us. We are no longer supported; we aresuspended without foundation above empty space. However, this is no eventthat has burst in on man vehemently, suddenly or inexplicably. It is rather theresult of a long rule of natural morality and otherworldly metaphysics. Thecoming nihilism refers to the process of self-annihilation of Christian moralityand to the self-destruction of the distinction between transcendental, true worldand apparent, concrete world. 'However, among the powers reared by moralitythere was truthfulness. This finally turns against morality.'48

Nietzsche's basic belief here is that traditional morality was not finished by anarbitrary event or by a new living impulse but came to an end historically while itcompleted its original destiny. History brings the hidden seed of self-destruction, hidden from the beginning in the moralistic interpretation of theworld, to light. It sublates itself. It is already from the start nihilistic, albeit in aconcealed manner. However, history must run its course. Morality poisonsitself. Metaphysical ontology completes itself historically. We find ourselveswithin the final phase, within diis eschatology of metaphysics and in the midst ofthe death of God. In the problem of nihilism Nietzsche identifies our historicalsituation, our fate and evil inheritance.

In the second book, Critique of the highest values so far, Nietzsche becomesactive as a thinker. He understands his own task to be the active completion ofthe death of God, to be the audacity to eliminate the conception of God (in theway in which he sees it moral-ontologically) and to deal the dying God the finalblow according to Zarathustra's instruction: 'whatever falls should even bepushed'. The death of God is firstly a historic interpretation of the condition of

The Will to Power. The problem of nihilism 137

modern man who faces the advent of nihilism and further a radical critique ofreligion, morality and philosophy in the age of metaphysics. This very critiqueattempts to finish the drama of the death of God to open the view towardssomething new, dreadful and terrifyingly beautiful, towards a tragic view of theworld.

5. THE POSTHUMOUS WORK THE WILL TO POWER. THEPROBLEM OF NIHILISM

Nietzsche's greatness as a thinker is based on his diversion from a path whichhas guided western thinking for many centuries. His path leads into uncharteredterritory, however, not as an adventure and not because he finds pleasure inwhat is new and outrageous. It does not occur out of crazy vanity like Herostra-tus who burnt down the temple of Diana in Ephesus to gain fame. He does notburn down a holy temple, the house of morality and the citadel of ontologicalthinking. Nietzsche himself believed to have acted in conformity with fate, thatis, out of historical necessity. Whatever is necessary is always also that whichchanges the need and it is the turning point of need. Nietzsche experiences theneed of the times as an end-time. These are times in which the impulses of lifewhich have directed western history for more than two thousand years and havemanifested themselves in the philosophy, namely Christian religion and moral-ity, are coming to an end. Such an 'ending' process is no vital process that onecould simply understand with ready-made categories. In some respects we arefamiliar with the transition of 'world-views' and 'habits'. It seems that we arefamiliar with such 'cultural-historic changes'. We can refer to many 'changes ofthe spirit of the times' and to many a decline in the history of culture or inethnology. We possess much material about changes to the Babylonian andEgyptian culture. We know about the decline of many an Inca culture. Theworld is a field of cultural ruins and a wonderful treasure trove for scientificexcavations. There are yet many fragments in its ancient ground and muchblood that was spilled to honour Gods who have long gone. We know the phe-nomenon of a sudden invasion of a new spirit of life into history, the emergenceof original impulses - and also their slow and sudden disappearance. We knowabout the fresh innocence, the maturity, the age and the decline of cultures. Andin particular, since we are historically 'educated' and possess a rich museum of'preserved human goods', we are able to look upon our own culture from thepoint of view of a museum. However, there is a definite question whether weactually experience its fate within this view.

We do not experience how God dies if we turn away and look towards otherpeople and strange times and acknowledge a twilight of the Gods there or a


death of Gods in whom we do not believe. We do not understand how our Goddies even if we search through the entire department of dead Gods in ourmuseum. Nietzsche's concept of the death of God must not be trivialized. Hisinterpretation of our end-time should not be understood with the help of amuseum-schema.

The death of God becomes a dual subject in the posthumous work The Witt toPower. Firstly, it is the event of the self-devaluation of religion, morality andmetaphysics. Nietzsche calls this the arrival of nihilism. Secondly, it is the activeand explicit revaluation, the 'critique of all highest values to date'. The arrival ofnihilism is - even for Nietzsche himself - an uncanny matter. Everything thatelevated man beyond himself, everything he cherished and worshipped with hisinner soul and everything that made him human at all and distinguished himfrom the animals and mere animality - every star which has illuminated thelandscape of his life for over 20 centuries - suddenly reveals a dark backside andexposes an uncanny and frightening foundation. The wine of life becomes poi-soned by bitter yeast. It is most important that Nietzsche does not regard thenihilistic devaluation of traditional values as a consequence of an opposing spiritof life but as a consequence of the values themselves. Nihilism is hidden withinthem. It is their hidden dowry from the beginning. Values are first and foremostprogrammes of life. They are inventions to which life commits itself, whichinform its aims and according to which it designs its own mission. Values arehistorical extensions into the future; they are the human paths.

Nietzsche believes that a total set of values is a programme of life or oneattempt to live. Such a programme is not necessarily transparent to itself. It hasto assert itself in order to gain transparency. The frightening part about thetraditional values is that they destroy themselves in their historic mission. Truth-fulness, nourished by Christian morality, turns itself against this very morality.The latter destroys itself. At first, values are concealed and obscure in theirdirection. Only the historical realization develops their hidden aims. Thus amorality can appear for a long time to aim to realize the higher form of life suchas a life of modesty, brotherly love or purity. It thus saves many lives who wouldhave perished under the tougher conditions of a warrior-like morality. However,this salvation of the weak, tender and gentle lives and this opposition of stronglives is in reality an attack on life itself. What appears to be supporting lifebecomes a denial of life through the dominance of the poverty of life. Nihilism isalready present within Christianity, Nietzsche maintains. It does not only comeinto existence once Christianity and its values have lost their validity. Christian-ity, traditional morality and metaphysical philosophy are 'nihilistic tendencies'.They are directions of life towards 'non-being' even where they conceal this'non-being' for a long time as the summum ens or as God. We live in an end-timebecause all traditional values 'arrive at their final conclusions'. The hidden


directions have come to the surface after being at work within these values for along time. Perhaps this is in general the end of any historical epoch if the mys-tery sustaining life overtakes life and becomes fully conscious of itself. For Hegeltoo, the history of the spirit is finished when it owns itself, when the differencesbetween being as such and being for itself have disappeared and when it hasachieved being itself and being for itself.

Morality reveals its mysterious intentions because it draws conclusions fromits entire past: its path is a path leading nowhere. God was the mask of non-being. Nietzsche's moral interpretation of God and of the metaphysical 'other-world' allows him to speak of an unmasking of God, that is, of the hidden 'nihil'in the summum ens. However, even the cosmological concepts such as 'purpose'and 'unity' of the cosmic history, that is, the metaphysical conception whichunderstands becoming through finding a meaning or an aim of its history leadto nihilism. Nietzsche distinguishes three psychological kinds: firstly, desper-ation as the outcome of the futile endeavours to discover the meaning or thefinal aim of becoming. Then, the shock that it is impossible to discover a kind ofrule and a structural unity of the whole and to understand the structure of thecosmos and man's position within it. Thirdly, nihilism is also the feeling to beexposed to an unfathomable, puzzling world without knowledge of where we aregoing and whence we came. It is the paralysing feeling of an utmost homeless-ness and of a stifling lack of answers within an impenetrable situation in whichwe find ourselves like Oedipus who killed the father and entered the bed of themother. If the tragic knowledge of the human Oedipus-condition is experiencedand if this experience is cast into a negative form of a failure of a unified concep-tion of the world which understands the role of man through the overall context,then it turns into a nihilistic renunciation: nothing has any meaning any more ifthe human position in the cosmos is unknowable. And similarly discouraging isthe insight into the untenable, metaphysically conceived 'true world': ' Fromthis point of view the reality of becoming is admissible as the only reality. Anysecret passage to the other world and to the false divinities is forbidden -however, this world is not bearable although one does not wish to deny it.'49

This means that while nihilism is a new insight it still depends on old values.Since the transcendental world, which had hitherto been the focus of all value, isno longer, it appears to be a 'worthless' residue. Nihilism is thus essentially atransitional state or a bridge. It is overcome if the here and now are seen as agodless and godforsaken world following the death of God and if this godlessworld starts to reflect the light of a new ontological experience. Nihilism is a newpathological transition, that is, a transitional age in which one age comes to anend and a new one emerges. It is pathological because it carries with it thechange of the human existence which appears to be a great sickness. Man judgesin so far as he is human. Judgement is not a behaviour of choice which is


exercised here and there. Man exists as a human being within a realm of values;man's existence is judgement. Man already occupies a fundamental position.Human life is guided by ideals even though we usually fall short of these in dailylife. And if that valuing behaviour is transformed in its entirety so that nothingcounts and nothing matters or if everything appears to be meaningless andworthless, then life becomes abnormal. It has become pathological. Strictlyspeaking, we do not cease to judge but we judge according to an uncannystandard: the leading value is 'nothing'.

Nietzsche distinguishes many kinds of nihilism that do not simply coexist butpresent different stages in the transition from a past interpretation of existenceto the new and tragic experience of the world that Nietzsche intends to pro-claim. Pessimism is in this understanding for example a precursor to nihilism.However, Nietzsche distinguishes here again between a pessimism of weaknesson the one hand and a pessimism of strength on the other. The former accuseslife since life is cruel, excessive and loves becoming thus connecting love anddeath. The latter does not admit the idealization of life or euphemisms butconfronts the abyss of life yet nevertheless affirms it and human fate. Nietzschecalls an extreme nihilism the view that 'there is no truth, there is no absoluteconstitution of the things, no thing as such. It posits the value of things preciselyin denying a reality to these values. They are merely symptoms of the power ofthose who posit the value, a simplification to assist life.'50 Here Nietzsche referseven to his doctrine of the transcendental invention of values as nihilism. Thetranscendence of values is a fantasy; it is nothing. And he refers suddenly to thedeath of God, that is, to the denial of a metaphysically conceived true world as a'divine mode of thought'. The nihilistic mode of thought is divine, not because itbelongs to God but because it belongs to a humanity that has liberated itselffrom the burden of servitude to the Gods and has gained itself a kind of divinestatus. This type of nihilism is the opposite of the decline of life which Nietzscheterms decadence. He says about this nihilism:

If we are disappointed we are not so in regard to life, but because our eyeshave been opened to the 'desirables' of all kinds. We attend to the 'ideal' withmocking fury. We simply despise ourselves only because we are unable tosuppress the absurd desire called 'idealism' at any time.51

The problem of nihilism is without doubt regarded only 'morally' in this work.Nihilism is the devaluation of all traditional, higher values. This draws a finalconclusion from the traditional values themselves. The hidden, secret values,the secret intuitions of morality and metaphysics and religion have been broughtto light and have lead to an end of this history of value. On the other handnihilism already announces a new view, which, however, does not yet have


confidence in itself. Nihilism is a sign of decadence and of a decline of life -more precisely, it shows up a long and venerable tradition as decadence. Iterupts if the hollowness of the doctrine of the established Gods is recognized.However, it casts an immense shadow on all traditional ideals when a new sunrises on the distant horizon. Nihilism is thus the interim period where end andbeginning are locked together or the time of need where old stars have fadedand new ones are not yet visible. This interim time is our time. Nietzsche alwaysviews it as an ambivalent time of decline and assent. It is a time of change andneed and a time when change is needed. Nietzsche believes that this interimtime has four large periods. In the first period we may experience the devalu-ation of traditional values. The power of religion, morality and metaphysicsdiminishes and serious men attempt to resist change and to revive religion andChristianity with new impulses. However, such attempts to preserve the greatideals of the pious, the good and the wise are made in the 'modern' spirit. Oneattempts to reconcile contradictions. Following this time of failed attempts torescue western civilisation a 'period of clarity' occurs. One 'understands that oldand new are fundamental opposites; The old values are born from decline, newvalues from emerging life'.52

One knows about the irreconcilable contrast but has not yet found a newpath. According to Nietzsche the next period is characterized by the three greataffects of contempt, pity and destruction. Man attacks himself. And finally, thetime of the catastrophe. Nihilism leads to a disaster turning mankind aroundthrough a new doctrine which gains power over man: this doctrine is thedoctrine of the eternal return.

Nietzsche believes that the power of this doctrine is the heart of history. Thismeans that the time in which he proclaims his own doctrine is not the 'heart' butthe future time in which this doctrine comes to power, when it rules man, whenit 'selects' because only the strongest characters can stand up - and are up tothis doctrine. He believes in the future power of philosophy. He sees himself as afate and as a historical necessity. He believes to stand outside all chance andaccidental individuality. Human history changes with Friedrich Nietzsche.However his own grandeur does not achieve this. He merely fulfils what hasbeen prepared in European nihilism, namely the disappearance of the meaningof life and the devaluation of the traditionally highest values. He is able to see thedecadence of the modern world so clearly because he experiences it himself,because he is decadent himself and has converted to its opposite, because heendured nihilism and lived ahead of his time like the first-born who is sacrificed.

The Will to Power provides an essential new aspect of the importance attrib-uted here to the problem of nihilism. In truth, this contains Nietzsche's entirephilosophy of history. The substantial determinations of nihilism are not theonly important aspects accompanied by insights into the historicity of mankind


and being which is understood here as value. It is clearly visible in Nietzsche'sinterpretation of nihilism as a consequence of the traditional value-judgement ofhuman existence that temporal human existence has the ontological modalityof a 'history'. This is no string of sequential events but the completion of aprojection into the future.

The consequence is eschatological. Nihilism is contained from the startwithin metaphysical philosophy, within Christian morality and religion. Itremains concealed for long and emerges as the 'mystery' of the combinedpowers of history whenever the process of self-empowerment and self-realization of life concludes. Following the general characterization of nihilismand a sketch of its many possibilities Nietzsche proceeds towards an interpret-ation of the last centuries. He analyses the modern darkness and points to theambivalent characteristics of our time. Precisely because he lives in an 'inter-mediate time', in a transitional period, all forms and all kinds of life and allattitudes to life possess a profound ambivalence. One cannot simply view themas symptoms. The sophisticated intuition of the psychologist too no longer has astraightforward expression for the symptoms of modern life. Everything isambiguous and ambivalent. It can be a sign of decline and decadence but it alsocan be a sign of a new life and of a strengthening life. It seems to me thatNietzsche gains a deep insight with this that points to a limitation within hissophistical psychology as well, at least from afar. This psychology pretends tounderstand the language of the symptoms with certainty.

The ambivalent character of our modern world - just the identical symptomscan imply decline and strength. And the symptoms of strength, of accom-plished maturity can be misunderstood as a weakness on account of a con-ventional (residual) devaluation of sentiment. In brief, the sentiment for valueis out of touch with the times.53

The modern world is ambivalent because it is both decadent and at the sametime a new period of growth. It is the end of an era and a first dawn of a new age.Nietzsche tackles a grand vision within the concept of nihilism. He attempts toconceive the death of God as a consequence of precisely the history that createdGod, that is, the cosmology of the moral metaphysics and the metaphysicalmorality. In his view and his premonition of the coming nihilism Nietzscheunderstands his historical situation and attempts a historical philosophy ofcosmic dimensions.

The second book of the posthumous work also deals with the death of Godwith the difference that this is understood as a human challenge. Man is sup-posed to achieve his true potential. He must become explicitly and intentionallythe assassin of the Gods. He must become a destroyer of the moral and meta-


physical beyond and he must sublate the theologically conceived differencebetween essence and appearance or between being and appearance. The mur-der of God liberates man by uncovering the creative powers of human existence.The radical critique of religion, morality and philosophy that are ways of humanself-alienation, self-denial and self-forgetting constitutes a human apology onaccount of the destruction of these attitudes. The human justification takes theplace of a theodicy. Man requires a justification by the thinker because he cre-ated the Gods and submitted himself to the servitude of his own inventions. Thefundamental meaning of his critique and of the highest values so far is expressedby Nietzsche in a beautiful and clear way in the foreword to his critique ofreligion:

I intend to demand back all the beauty and sublimity which we have given tothe real and invented things as the human property and product, as man'smost beautiful apology. Man as a thinker, as a poet, as a God, as love, aspower - O, this royal generosity with which he has graced the things in orderto impoverish himself and to make himself feel miserable. This was his great-est selflessness so far, that he admired and worshipped and hid himself, that itwas him who created that which he admires.54

Man is that being which remains ignorant of itself and who conceals his creativ-ity in order to worship the products of his hands, his hearts and his thoughts.The apology of man, however, is Nietzsche's central thought which clarifies theinversion of the metaphysical modes of thought. Within metaphysics the humanrank is ascertained through the relation towards the highest being, be it theAbsolute or more concretely God. Man is a finite, limited and determined beingwhich does not only require justification in so far as it has the freedom to turnagainst God and which can choose evil but also in so far as it itself exists at all. Itis existentially carried by the Absolute. The finite human existence refers to theinfinite divine existence. God - the source of all Being and all value and thepossibility of evil as the possibility of a free decision even against God - requiresa cognitive justification, that is a theodicy. Nietzsche inverts this conceptualmotif. He does not, however, turn man into the essential or the highest being.He does not ignore human finitude, but he conceives the human essencethrough his creativity and through his finite creativity. The more creative man isand the more original he is as a thinker, poet, artist and creator of values, thehigher is his rank among human beings. Nietzsche does not know a rank orderamong the things and no accumulation of things towards a highest thing or atranscendent being. There is no ontological dimension which would be genu-inely 'more existing' than another. Because anything that we usually addressas existing and that metaphysics conceives basically in its basic design as the


structure of substance - all this does in truth not exist for Nietzsche. The thingsare only fictions or only illusions behind which there is a specific quantity ofpower and force. Flooding life that permeates the will to power, the unsteadyand always changing life is the only reality whereas all finite and limited thingsare only fictions. It is for this reason that Nietzsche believes that all things aresimilar. None are more existent than any other. There is no rank order of thethings as such but only a rank order in the human realm according to thecreative power which asserts itself in a particular person or people. PerhapsNietzsche takes up the issue of rank order within the human context with such apassion because he abandons the ontological rank order?

Whatever Nietzsche believes to be the 'apology of man' in detail, it is thereturn to a planning existence and the return from an attitude of value or fromtranscendental values to a creation of values. In such a return to a forgotten andconcealed creativity man comes to himself and conquers the most essentialaspect of his existence. If he recognizes himself as the creator of his values he hasgained the possibility to explicitly set new values and to embark on a new designof value. In regard to the substance of the critique there appears to be hardly anynew aspects that are not already contained in the late writings. We encounterhere too a fundamental reinterpretation of religion and philosophy according toprinciples of morality. One has frequently the impression that the editorsincluded in these passages some fragments that were substantially already con-tained in The Antichrist, in The Twilight of the Idols and in Ecce Homo. There areoccasionally some wonderful remarks which throw new light on knownthoughts. Nietzsche's critique of morality is a critique of Christian morality.The critique of philosophy is essentially a polemic critique of the moral denial ofthe world through metaphysics. It contains a rather less obvious tendencywhich, however, appears to be very important. Nietzsche does not only distrustother-worldly metaphysics which is fettered by moral prejudice. He is funda-mentally distrustful of philosophizing in general, indeed, he is even suspicioustowards his own philosophy in particular. The value of truth has become ques-tionable to him. Why do we need truth? What is the use and disadvantage forour life? Why do we need to illuminate human existence and why do we needclarity and understanding? Why should we not just vegetate in a subconscioushappiness, enveloped in the comfort of profound obscurity? Is the will to truthas such not an uncanny, questionable affair? Does the cognitive human beingnot recognize himself forever in the fate of Oedipus who chooses blindness to nolonger witness the terrifying aspects of an uncovered reality?

Nietzsche attempts a most extreme form of scepticism. He does not doubt thetruth of this or that, he doubts truth itself and as such. He despairs over it and heviews it as an uncanny and questionable thing. Perhaps life is in danger if ittrusts a 'truth'. Is 'being' conceivable as light or does this imply a one-sided

The negative ontology of the thing 145

interpretation? Is the world perhaps 'conceived deeper than the day' as it says inZarathustra's 'intoxicated song'? Especially in regard to this latter conclusion ofphilosophy we are not merely dealing with a critique based on a newly dis-covered truth, we are dealing with a submerged and extreme scepticism againsttruth itself. Philosophy is for Nietzsche rather a practice of life than a theoreticaltruth. 'One searches for the image of the world within that philosophy whichliberates our spirit most, that is, in which our most powerful instinct is free toact. This will also be the case for me.'

This statement about traditional philosophy is already expressed more pre-cisely and more sensitively in The Twilight of the Idols. One even finds therefrequently some prototypical expressions. From this aspect the collection of theeditors is not terribly successful. Nietzsche's attitude towards philosophy in thisbook oscillates in a peculiar manner between a contrast of metaphysical andDionysian philosophy on the one hand and a conflict of philosophy itself(including his own) and the innocent night of life that rejects truth altogether onthe other hand. Thus he can state:

I understand 'freedom of spirit' very specifically. To be one hundred timesmore superior to the philosophers and disciples of truth through a strict-ness against oneself.... I treat all traditional philosophers as despicablelibertarians disguised under the hood of the woman of 'truth'.55

And he continues to refer to the three great naiveties that believe that insight is apath to happiness, towards virtue and mastery of life. In all its critical acumenevident here he puts the German philosophy next to the classical one. He placeshimself next to Hegel. He writes: 'The importance of German philosophy:Hegel to conceive a pantheism in which evil, error and suffering are no argu-ment against divinity.'56 That means, he recognizes in Hegel a kind of Diony-sian truth. This is a very profound insight. He also knows and emphasizes thatGerman philosophy is in its greatest manifestations a yearning for the Greekworld - like his own philosophy. It is for this reason that he can say: 'What I wishis this: that the true concept of philosophy is not ruined in Germany. There areso many half-beings in Germany who wish to hide their deformity beneath sucha noble name.'57

6. THE NEGATIVE ONTOLOGY OF THE THING

The third book of The Will to Power engages with the theme of the work's title.However, even here we do not find a direct ontological analysis that wouldexpose the will to power as an essential characteristic of being. We are not


invited to participate in a development of the fundamental thought. Nietzschedoes not show a path that justifies his fundamental 'truths' of the will to powerand the eternal return. This critical thinker who inclines to any form of scepti-cism displays at the heart of his reflection a peculiar immediacy free of anycritical reflection. The will to power is not exposed as a basic character of thephenomena through their investigation. It is presupposed; it forms the basis of acritical and extremely suspicious interpretation of the phenomena. Nietzscheuses the will to power to achieve an ontological interpretation. However, theoperating presupposition is justified in no other way than through this 'inter-pretation'. Is the conception of the will to power more than a hypothesis andmore than a heuristic principle which is assessed according to its usefulness tounderstand a chaotic world with its countless contrasts through a unifying prin-ciple? The amoral conception beyond good and evil has the advantage over themoral value interpretations that it can view life with all its contrasts through onebasic aspect. The will to power operates perhaps in a disguised form but never-theless in all appearances and even in the life forms which appear to be itsopposite such as the morality of altruism. It is here the will to power of thepowerless, of those who have been disadvantaged in life and of those who dis-guise their resentments. In exposing the hidden enemy and the hidden meaningin all phenomena that appear to contradict superficially the principle of the willto power, Nietzsche achieves a unified interpretation.

The danger of such a method has already been pointed out repeatedly. It ismost dangerous, not for others but for the thinker himself who uses it. The'reversal' which 'unmasks' the presupposed aspects of the interpretative founda-tion and eliminates any contradiction excludes the interpreter in some way fromthe autonomy of the phenomena. He becomes a prisoner of his method andbecomes trapped in it. He is unable to leave his own perspective. The containedperspective, however, is not overcome as is naively believed by an approach ofthe phenomena without prejudices or by the thinker who observes and describesthem in a descriptive phenomenology and lets the 'things speak for themselves'.There are no such 'things as such' nor is there a thinking which faces beingwithout presuppositions. Thinking is no spiritual introspection. Thinking doesnot face being like the ass faces the haystack. Thinking has already been at workwhere we find being, things and properties of the things at hand. Thingsthemselves only exist where in some ways the substantiality of the thing is pre-reflected. Being exists only in the horizon of an ontological conception andinterpretation.

Our critique of Nietzsche that accuses him of operating with a conception ofthe will to power without elucidating this fundamental concept implies that wealso miss an explicit exposition of this central theoretical aspect in the workwhich carries its title. Nietzsche is unable to clarify his own intimate ontological


experience with a corresponding ontological theory that could be achieved in anengagement with the ontology of metaphysics. 'Will to power' and 'eternalreturn' are his main intentions for which he is not only unable to find refinedconcepts but which he also does not clearly distinguish from the fundamentalprinciples of metaphysics. Ontology has assumed the shape of a philosophy ofvalue. The will to power is introduced as 'the principle of a new positing ofvalues'. After dealing with nihilism as the experienced devaluation of all valuesand following a critique of all traditional higher values, that is, after the activedestruction of the traditional realm of values, the third book gives us the realrevaluation and the new valuation according to the standard of life which isunderstood in its essence as the will to power. The book falls into the chapters:'The will to power as cognition', 'The will to power in nature', 'The will topower as society and individual' and 'The will to power as art'. What does thisstructure imply? Cognition, nature, society, the individual and art? Are thesedifferent realms of existence? Nature and the socio-historical realm are obviousfundamental dimensions of reality, but what is the point of including 'cognition'and even 'art' in this structure? This schema of a division into metaphysicagenerate and metaphysica specialis hides the clarification of traditional metaphys-ics as it is applied for example in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in a seeminglyconcealed way. Metaphysica generalis is concerned with being as existing. Meta-physica sepecialis is concerned with being as nature, man and God. 'The will topower as cognition' is not an epistemology as is often assumed. The sectioncontains Nietzsche's negative ontology of the thing. And finally, the section onart is nothing else than his 'theology'. This is a theology without God, that is,without a Christian God and without a creator of the universe. It is a theologythat justifies existence as an aesthetic phenomenon and recognizes the whole-ness of the world in the appearance of beauty, the art religion of the playing GodDionysos.

These are at first simply assertions; however, they are made from the begin-ning to indicate the fundamental structure of this third book which is the centreof the entire work. The cognition of the will to power commences with thecognition of the will to power within cognition. The will to power is at work inthat which we ordinarily call cognition. This does not only mean that the desireto understand is an instinct of power or a drive to possess and conquer but evenmore that understanding is subject to the determinations of the will to power.To put it differently: what we ordinarily call cognition is not a suitable device tounderstand the will to power. Such understanding is already itself formed by thewill to power. As the forming element the will to power is not grasped itself bythat which it forms, namely by 'cognition'. However, how does Nietzsche knowthis? He only relies on his philosophical intuition which is different from allontological intuition of any kind. This intuition flows from a receptivity for the


flow of becoming, for the forming and destroying 'life' and for the force of thewill to power. Only the knowledge of tragic wisdom breaks through the structureof power and gains an insight into the power of life. Tragic wisdom becomescritical for all ordinary cognition. What does Nietzsche mean here by 'cogni-tion'? Nothing else than the cognition of being! This is on the one hand anempirical cognition but on the other also an a priori cognition, that is, theessential concept of the categories according to which we think being as onething, as a separate thing which exists for itself as a substance with propertiesand as an individual thing with a universal essence.

Nietzsche's thesis is this: in truth there are no things, there are no substances,there is no 'being'. There is only the wavering flood of life, only the stream ofbecoming and the incessant up and down of its waves. Nothing endures, staysand persists and all is in flux. But our cognition forges its reality and changes theflow falsely into the being of enduring things which endure in the change andwhich persist during the change of their states. The 'thing' or the substance is afiction. It is a structure created by the will to power which violates the reality. Itarrests, forges and grasps becoming and subjects it to the concept. It sub-sequently forgets this act of violence to the point where it believes to havegrasped reality itself in the created concepts of substance and causality. Manbelieves in the things but none exist. He believes in being, but being is his owncreation and his own net of concepts which he casts repeatedly into the streamof becoming. The world is no sum of different and separate things for Nietzsche,which coexist in connection with each other. It does not consist of things at all; itis one single stream of life, one 'sea' in which there are waves but nothing thatendures. The appearances obviously contradict this intuition. We see thingsafter all. We distinguish ourselves as a thing from others. In terms of appearancethe world is present to us as an infinite manifold of the many things. We do notabstract from the things what they are. Quite the contrary: we always live alreadyin a pre-understanding of objectivity if we record something empirically aboutthe particular things.

However, this a priori construct of the things conceived within categories is aforgery and a law made by cognition in order to enable itself to become thecognition of being. This means: at the beginning of cognition is the primordialsin or the lie of the categorical interpretation. True reality is becoming, howevernot a becoming of something already existent which merely changes in respectof its existence but pure becoming, a constant stream and a perennial dynamic.It is namely 'life' which is present everywhere, in the rocky walls of the moun-tains as much as in the thundering wild rivers, in the grass of the meadow asmuch as in the eagle which circles high above, in the stars of the night sky as inthe shepherd whose soul is moved by them.

What we believe to be things conceals our view of the infinite, indeterminate


and unlimited whole. The things obscure the world to us. However, we cannotlive in the flooding, universal sea of pure becoming. We need to distort reality.Becoming is for us inconceivable. It is that which makes our spirit turn dizzy anddrags it into a vortex where it is overcome by a dizziness which announces theworld. This distortion is a biological necessity for us. Necessity breeds inven-tion. The need to live in a world in which everything constantly changes,recedes, passes and spins has created the concepts and the categories whichmake this incomprehensible change comprehensible and fixes it, underpinningthe events with a basis. It posits something firm within change such as 'sub-stance' which is, as it were, the lifeline for us and that gains some security andorientation in a predictable world.

The categories represent a humanization of the world and they are theanthropocentric interpretation which 'fixes us up' in positing a fixity. The cat-egories do not possess objective validity, they are fictions. The thing is a humaninvention of the mind - nothing else. Man projects himself into everything. Andeven then, the conception he has of himself is an error, an illusion which remainsobscure to him. He calls himself'I'. The I appears to be a fixed, consistent entitywithin the changing and subjective set of experiences. However, the I is preciselya fiction according to Nietzsche. It is the paradigm of our illusions, because weapply this I and its supposed fixity to the things. The things are created after ourown image. Substances refer to their properties as the I to its actions. Theconcept of substance is a result of the concept of the ego.

Man has projected . . . the will, the spirit, the I from within himself. He firstlytook over the concept of being from the concept of the I. He positedthe 'things' as existing after his own image, after the image of the I as thecause . . ,58

The deception of the mind is the powerful aspect of cognition. The mind needsto deceive if it wishes to cognize anything at all, that is it needs to determine thepredication of the substances. It needs to state about being that it is such andsuch. The deception is thus a function of the categories used by the mind. Itsmeans of cognition are already faulty. The basic concepts contain the deception,not those things that are understood with the help of these basic concepts.

Nietzsche transforms the traditional question of the categories. The basicpropositions about being as such are 'exposed as deceptions' or as lies in theextra-moral sense. There is no cognition of the beingness of being which meta-physics aspires to because there are no finite things that might persist in theirfinitude. Nietzsche does not conceive being as the being of beings but as becom-ing or as the Dionysian truth of the cosmic interplay of universal production anddestruction. One misunderstands the extent of the polemic against the categories


if one sees it merely as a fictional epistemology. Nietzsche does not progressfrom a critical analysis of the faculty of cognition arriving at a rejection of thecategories in which the thingness of the thing is conceived as substance accord-ing to the ideal of the ego. He rather starts with a primordial intuition of hisHeraclitean philosophy that relies on becoming as the only truth. Since thecategorical concepts cannot grasp becoming, since they arrest it, forge it andbase it on something persisting, they are deceptions.

He denies finite and individual being with his fundamental conception ofbeing as becoming. Being does not exist because there is no individuation. Moreprecisely, Nietzsche does not deny the phenomenon of individuated being butonly its objective significance. What looks like a separate thing is only a wave inthe stream of life and temporary quantum and conglomeration of power whichonly presents a phase in the dynamic of the cosmic interplay. Nietzsche's fic-tional epistemology which understands the will to power as the deceiving andviolating power of the intellect is in its important aspects a negative ontology ofthings: there are no things. His critique does not target all cognition but only thecognition of being, empirical cognition and particularly a priori cognition, that isthe ontological interpretation in accordance with the categories. His intuition orhis philosophical vision of becoming is not affected by his critique of cognition.It is rather the presupposition that enables this critique in the first place. Inother words, if and only if this intuition is true does this critique of ontic andcategorical cognition make sense and have validity. Nietzsche himself does notdistinguish clearly enough between the truth of becoming and the truth ofbeing. The former is intuitive and the latter is conceptual.

However, this antithesis does not grasp the essence. The truth of becoming isa revelation of the existing cosmos that presents its creative dynamism as the willto power. The truth of being implies a belief in the fictions of substance and Ego.It opens itself towards an inner-worldly existence obscured by 'becoming'. Thereal distinction is thus not one between any intuition and any concept butbetween cosmic intuition and the categorical concept. One often criticizesNietzsche for using a circular argument. He connects cognition on the one handwith an instinct for deception but proclaims on the other hand a new philosophywhich is obviously a new form of cognition. He believes that cognition is anexpression of the will to power and yet claims cognition of this very will to poweritself. This critique misses the point because the cognition of becoming whichleads to a critical rejection of all categorical cognition destroying the authen-ticity of becoming is not itself subject to the criticized concept of cognition. Thetruth of becoming has a completely different nature than ordinary understand-ing of truth which is only achieved on the basis of the deceptive, fixed concepts.What we 'ordinarily' call being, the individual things and structures, are forNietzsche 'illusions'. Illusion, however, is not nothing. It is something real; it is


the formation of the will to power at work. Ordinarily, we succumb to thedeception of this appearance. We even call this very appearance being.Nietzsche's suspicion and doubt about the categorical interpretation of beingthrough substances, in the way that metaphysics since Plato and Aristotle con-ceives it, is not based on an extreme scepticism but is rather an almost dogmaticview about the ultimate reality of becoming. In this conception Nietzsche turnsaway from the traditional ontology of being. He turns the problem of the cat-egories purely negatively around into an uncovering of deception. The intellectand thinking, more specifically an ontological thinking of the entire meta-physical tradition starting with Parmenides, are deceptive. There are no things.Things are figments of reason that are nowhere and never real. Thinking andnot the senses are the subjective source of appearance. Reason invents the fic-tions of the Ego, of substance and causality, etc. This rejection of thinking, moreprecisely of ontological thinking, underpins his aggression against tradition andtranscendentalism. Man forges the world, because he thinks, because he inventsthe categories and the structure of the thing and pre-conceives the blueprint ofthe things and all experience. Man has separated and alienated himself fromreality in so far as he relies on the categories for cognition. He surrounds himselfwith fictions in which he is imprisoned as a separate thing among other things.Only the cosmic intuition of becoming makes genuine truth possible. He stateswith disarming precision: 'Parmenides said "one does not think whatever doesnot exist" - we are at the other end and in another state and say: "Whatever canbe thought must most certainly be a fiction.">59

An alternative argument against Nietzsche's position perhaps directs ourattention to the contradiction that is concealed by the hypothesis of a deceivingpower of the human intellect. If reason is deceptive and if man invents thedeception of the categories he must have a true individual existence as thedeceiving being. Not everything can be the same in the cosmic interplay ofthe will to power. To be sure, Nietzsche sees this conclusion. Man is a fiction tohimself. In the final analysis he is no absolute individual. Life itself createsfictions. The will to power is at work in these fictions and creates the finite livingform of the human being. It is only an idiomatic expression to speak abouthuman fictions. The stream of life is no homogenous flux. It is the interplay ofopposing waves, of concentrations of power and quanta of will which areimmediately dissolved like the waves of the sea. Nietzsche radicalizes a Kantianaspect. The substance of the thing is 'subjective'. For Kant, the categoricallyconceived substance enables us to experience the object. For Nietzsche, how-ever, the thing or the belief in the thing is an illusion which makes life possible.We do not engage with Nietzsche's many attempts of a psychological analysisnor with his thesis intended to expose the fictional nature of all categories.

If we read it as an epistemology these thoughts remain quite questionable and


even in parts very primitive with occasional digressions into the simplest form ofpositivism. Yet, the philosophical meaning does not rest here with a theory ofcognition but with a negative ontology of the things which does not only affirmthe falsity of the concept of the thing but rather denies the 'reality' of things assuch. Nietzsche does not only object to the ontological categories but he ispassionately committed to becoming and to dynamism: 'Against the value of theever-enduring "he posits" the value of the shortest and most finite, the seductiveflash of gold in the belly of the snake vita.'60 And elsewhere: 'Being - we have noother conception of this than "life". How can the dead exist then?'61

Nietzsche always remains within the opposition of being and becoming in away that prevents him from capturing the inner dialectic of these ontologicalconcepts and separates itself, opposing becoming to being and yet always strug-gling for conceptual unity of these opposing concepts. If the concept of beingincludes the aspects of permanence, endurance or fixedness, that is, if being isviewed in relation to the existence of things and ideas, Nietzsche discards thisconcept. If however, being is understood as truth, as life, as a dynamic and as thewill to power, he affirms it. Nietzsche appears to represent seemingly a turningpoint at which he rejects on the one hand the ontological understanding of themetaphysical tradition, the categories, and on the other hand has already afundamental conception of 'being' of a kind which must no longer be under-stood in opposition to - but is inclusive ofbecoming. Being is in time and timeis within being.

'To impose the characteristics of being on becoming - this is the greatest willto power'62 he states. He means with this the greatest will to power withincognition and as cognition. However, he does not refer here to a will to power ofdeception but to a will to power of the greatest cosmic truth. 'The eternalrecurrence is the most extreme approximation of a world of becoming to that ofbeing - pinnacle of contemplation.'63 This truth of the eternal return is exemptfrom his statement about the truth of things: 'Truth is a kind of error withoutwhich a particular kind of living creature could not live. The value for life isultimately decisive.'64

Men cannot live in the turmoil of the cosmos and in the blowing winds oftime in which nothing remains consistent and all is in flux. They must commit adeception out of biological necessity in order to live and arrange themselves.They need to surround themselves with fictions of finite things and need todismember the entirety of the cosmos into dissected separate entities. Theknowledge of the eternal return does not arrest and determine becoming butaffirms becoming as becoming. This is meant by the 'pinnacle of contemplation'because it reconciles the opposition between being and becoming. Nietzsche'sfictional epistemology can be characterized as follows: (1) It is not a generalscepticism. The insight into the fictional character of the categorial ontology is


grounded in an indubitable philosophical insight of the will to power, of becom-ing as ultimate truth and of the eternal return. (2) The will to power is at work inthe cognition of things as deception and violation and as the power of 'sem-blance'. (3) The decisive point here is not a biological epistemology, but a nega-tive ontology of the thing. Being as being or as On He On is merely a fiction.Only if we turn towards the cosmos and not towards the things do we find trueBeing or the flux of becoming. The will to power is the primordial event whichsymbolizes the dissolution of the unity of life, the interplay of generation anddecline and the construction of apparent formations of power which are dis-solved as soon as they are created. We humans are usually trapped within differ-ences and within limits and separations. We do not see the articulating powerand the existence of the difference itself. We do not see the primordial one in itsself-alienation or in the way in which it posits and sublates the difference. We donot realize how the will to power asserts itself. Nietzsche attempted to show thisprimarily in regard to cognition. He captured a problem here even if the bio-logical and pragmatic mode of expression obscures the meaning of his thoughtssomewhat.

The attempt to illustrate the will to power 'within nature' is considerablyweaker. His critique of mechanism and its concept of power remain inadequatealthough some essential thoughts are specifically indicated. The same applies tothe interpretation of organic nature. Here the references to the phenomena ofpower relations and transfers of power are confused with a philosophical tran-scendence of the realm of phenomena. It sometimes seems as if Nietzschewishes to use the presence of power within the phenomena to show that the willto power underpins the phenomena and is the truly real and significant.Nietzsche also says very little in terms of the quantity about the will to power inthe inorganic and organic nature. Perhaps this is no accident. Nietzsche neverworked out a regional ontology relevant to nature or history. He does not com-mand a differentiated intuition to analyse the essence of such basic realms andto perhaps discover a variation of the one cosmic principle of the will to power.In the final analysis it appears generally doubtful if a principle of cosmic ontol-ogy, that is, of the flux of the creating-destroying becoming can be 'proven'within the realm of things and if it manifests itself in the phenomena. Even in thesphere of 'society and the individual' Nietzsche's project to find evidence for hisbasic thoughts remains peculiarly fruitless. He interprets the state as a powerstructure and objects to the democratic trivialization of the state that attempts tomake it into a moral institution. (Example: 'A society which irrevocably andinstinctively rejects wars and conquering is in decline, it is ripe for democracyand petty government.. .'.65)

He perceives the manifestations of power in institutions such as marriage. Heopts for marriage as the expression of a tribal power that intends to extend its


possessions and its children and he explicitly rejects a marriage based on love.He also sees 'power' in the judicial structures of a state and in the whole systemof punishment and guilt, etc. Like the state, he finds traces of the will to power inthe great individual. Whoever stands out from the masses does not represent thehigher moral value but simply a greater power of life. Nietzsche gains someground only in the fourth section 'The will to power as art'. Art is no phenom-enon which is simply present in the artist and in his work. Art is tragic art in itshighest form, more precisely, it is a transcendence of appearance and a pro-found view into the heart of the world and at the same time a justification ofsemblance. The play of the artist reflects the primordial play of the world, itsexistence as will to power - or as Nietzsche puts it: 'The world as a self-creatingwork of art.'66 In addition to the psychological interpretation of artistic creativ-ity as an increased eras, as an overflowing power of life, there is a more profoundinterpretation of tragic art as a kind of cognition of the will to power. Tragic arteven affirms the uncanny and the deceitful, danger and evil. It even experiencesthe abyss of suffering as a profound pleasure. It does not flee from the terror intoa beautiful semblance but transfigures the dreadful, stony face of life withinappearance. Tragic art flows from the highest human power and reveals also thedreadful aspect in the appearance of beauty. Tragic art is thus for Nietzsche theanswer to the decline of religion, morality and metaphysics. It 'redeems' differ-ently than Christianity. Nietzsche calls art 'the redemption of those who cognize,of those who see, who want to see the terrifying and questionable dimension ofexistence, of tragic understanding.' He calls it the redemption of the actor of'the tragic, warrior-like human, the hero' and he calls it the 'redemption of thosewho suffer, a path to states which will transform, deify suffering where sufferingbecomes a form of great delight'.67The threefold redemption of art is, however,not just a human, all-too-human affair, but it constitutes the advent of aredeemer. Nietzsche creates a new theology of the master of the tragic andconcealed play. He thinks the epiphany of Dionysos.

7. DISCIPLINE AND BREEDING -THE DIONYSIAN WORLD

The final book of The Will to Power carries the heading Discipline and Breeding. Itfalls into three parts: 'Rank Order', 'Dionysos' and "The Eternal Return'. Thedeath of God was the topic of the first two books of this posthumous work. Thethird book deals with the will to power, however in a way that is still influencedby the concealed division of metaphysics into metaphysica generate and meta-physica specialis. The fourth book relates all these foundational thoughts to eachother. It does not only connect the aspects of the overman and the eternal return

Discipline and Breeding - the Dionysian world 155

with each other. It also relates nihilism, the revaluation of the values and themurder of God that is committed by a humanity under the influence of the willto power. Nietzsche is tremendously ambitious in this last book. He intends to'act' although he is a philosopher. He does not just wish to articulate insights, heintends to prepare world-historical decisions and to change mankind. His phil-osophy of the will to power aspires to gain itself power according to its ownontological experience and conception. It aspires to power not just in the formof a general recognition but as a doctrine of life for the few who are predestinedto rule and as an ontological understanding of the masters of the earth. Thecentral topic of the fourth book is thus a humanity which endures the death ofGod, which knows that the will to power is the essence of being and whichexperiences the infinity of existence in the eternal return. To put it differently:the revelation of being becomes a topic. It would, however, be intuitively wrongto regard this as a careful application of philosophical insights for life. We are notdealing with a practice following a theory. The usual distinction between theoryand practice is here completely inappropriate. The decisive point is the existen-tial exposure of the death of God, of the will to power and of the eternal return.

Zarathustra addresses a humanity that rejects all transcendental worlds andturns decisively towards the earth, recognizing contradiction and oppositionand recognizing the 'war' as the father and ruler of all finite existence. At thesame time it recognizes the infinity of all finite being in the eternal circle of timewith the creation of the overman. Here, in the fourth book of The Will to Powerthe character of the overman experiences a peculiar metamorphosis.

Nietzsche speaks about the strong human being, of the noble, the great andthe highest man. What was originally a seemingly distant ideal of the future hasnow become a progressive historical path. The overman becomes a concretegoal for Nietzsche. It is the goal of man's self-realization. The issue is the hier-archy of power. Since the meaning of life has changed with God man must givelife a new meaning. Following the devaluation of all traditional values, the newhuman creation of value becomes an unavoidable necessity. God punishes thosehe loves. The god-less man is no longer the subject of a divine authority. Hebecomes his own authority unless he wishes to sink into chaos or to vegetate indull animality on the deserted steps of the temples.

The great danger is a lack of authority. The approaching nihilism is the irrele-vance of all traditional laws. The demise of the religious and moral laws liberateshuman freedom to embrace nothingness. For Nietzsche human self-discipline isthe only possible way to overcome nihilism. However, this self-discipline is forhim neither a discipline with a reverence for moral laws nor an arbitrary com-mitment to any aims in order to escape from the desert of meaninglessness andaimlessness. Human self-discipline remains within truth. It is subject to theenlightenment through philosophical intuition. If the essence of being is the will


to power, then the autonomous human existence must also be determined bythe will to power. On the other hand this determination must occur within thetemporal understanding of the eternal return. This has a peculiarly contradict-ory meaning. As Nietzsche sees him future man wills a great will which definesitself and others as far as possible to give it a clear form, that is, he wills some-thing particular or a finite aim. In so far as he wills this he excludes other things.A will always makes things finite. However, the person who wills realizes thelimitations and the finitude of his will. Within the openness of the eternal returnhe knows of the final meaninglessness of his intended meaning. Will to powerand eternal return are opposed in a peculiar manner. This contradiction doesnot refute their truth but is rather a fundamental truth of life itself. The willseems to be a creative force which aims to create form. The eternal return,however, conceives time as an infinite circle which digests and returns all forms.It conceives it as the flux of life which manifests itself on the one hand always infinite forms but sublates these forms again on the other hand as the infiniteitself. A humanity that subjects itself to the discipline, that is, to the insight ofthe two truths of the will to power and the eternal return, is characterized by atragic pathos and by a dual and contrasting tension. The will to power willsform. The eternal return destroys form. The will to power projects itself into thefuture. The eternal return transforms all future into a repetition and thus into apast. One must realize this antithetical tension between Nietzsche's two mainthoughts if one wishes to understand the view of the human being portrayedhere.

Future man is a man of will and yet realizes the futility of the will. He isautonomous yet yearns for the amorphous ground of life. He is someone whohas a clearly defined day and yet he is rooted in the night where all is one. He issimilarly at home in the dual realm of light and concealment. Only in the con-text of Nietzsche's view of this human ambiguity can one judge the relevance ofthe ideas of discipline and creation. Nietzsche does not proclaim an absolutehuman domination when he refers to the masters of the earth. The mastery ofthe earth is not a technical dominance over the world and not the self-satisfaction of an absolute will to power that reifies all being and reduces it to amaterial to be used. Such a conception is one-sided and considers as it were theaspect of the will to power alone. Man is the master of the earth because he isempowered to such a human existence by the earth when he recognizes it as thegreat mother, as the source of all things and as that which gives and takes. Theruling human being returns to the earth if his will to dominate is conscious ofthe eternal return.

Nietzsche's view of the human being is double headed. It would be highlynaive if we overlooked the hidden double meaning that Nietzsche introducesinto all his visions of the future human world. Nietzsche's future human being is


ambivalent because truth itself has a dual nature. Reality is the will to power andit is the eternal return. Nietzsche thinks the flux of things, more precisely theflux which seems to solidify into things, forms, shapes and structures created bythe limited, finite and individual human being. The will to power is the cosmicprinciple of finitude and also the cosmic principle of opposition, of war, ofdifference; in other words it is whatever separates the primordial one, floodinglife into finite forms. However, the principle of finitude does not only achieve thesimple existence of the finite things but it is also the principle of their unsteadi-ness, of their opposing struggle and of their struggle for power in which theyovercome each other and ascend and in which one lives through the death of theother. The will to power does not only create the finite forms, it also drives theminto the arena of an opposing strife, that is it negates them again. It is - to quoteHegel - not simply a negation which dissects and separates the one life, but it isalso the negation of a negation.

The will to power is the negation within being itself. It is the forming principleand the creative power. The eternal return, however, implies the presence ofinfinity for and within all finite being. Understanding all forms as repetitionsmakes concrete and historical existence timeless. The individual and finite thingreflects the eternity of the cosmos. It disappears, so to speak, in the depth of thegaping abyss of time. The eternal return thinks the primordial existence ofthe cosmos. The will to power and the eternal return relate to each other like theprinciple of limit to the principle of infinity, like peiras to apeiron, like finitude toinfinity and like being to the cosmos. Nietzsche thinks radically within the cat-egories of the will to power and the eternal return. He conceives cosmologicallywhat he had already formulated in his first essay aesthetically as the oppositionof the two principles of art. The will to power and the eternal return relate toeach other like the Apollonian and the Dionysian. They take, rather, the dualismof Nietzsche's early metaphysics of the artist to its conclusion. All forms of thewill to power are really 'semblances'. They are no things. Only becoming andlife are real. The will to power as cognition arrests becoming in the realms ofnature, history and art. It creates the ontological illusion called being which is intruth the being of appearance. We experience eternal life, the cosmic time whichgrants temporality and the sea where the 'forms' are merely waves through theeternal return.

Nietzsche, however, does not stop here at the end of this path and with thisseemingly rigid dualism, but he combines the two ambivalent aspects in hisconcept of Dionysos. The original contrast between two artistic principles rad-icalizes itself to become a contrast between the will to power and the eternalreturn. It is unified in the name of the God Dionysos who is according totraditional myth an ambiguous God. He is mysteriously identical to Apollo inwhose temple he is worshipped in Delphi. He is the God of the overflowing


excess of life. He is also the dismembered and dissected God torn apart bythe Maenads. Phallic songs are addressed to him and he is the God of death.Houtos de aides kai dionysos - one and the same are Hades and Dionyos, statesHeraclitus.68 Nietzsche does not only refer to a mythical memory when heintends to articulate his ambivalent yet unified fundamental understanding oflife. He is exposed to the dawn of a new divine mythos of the cosmos.

If one has only understood that 'Dionysos' is Nietzsche's name for creativeand destructive being itself and that it thus refers to the will to power and theeternal return together without destroying their opposition it also becomes clearwhy the fourth book of The Will to Power focuses on Dionysos. Although thisfourth book is primarily an interpretation of a humanity formed by Nietzsche'snew truths, the human truth of Dionysos remains its central concern. It ispreceded by Nietzsche's doctrine of rank order, that is human existence is inter-preted in the light of the will to power. The 'Dionysos' chapter is followed by thehumanity illuminated by the eternal return. Human discipline is twofold. It issubject to the experience of the will to power and the eternal return. This dualand contradictory educating discipline is ultimately the divine life of the cosmos.Even the masters of the earth are still subject to the rule of the lord Dionysos.

Nietzsche's doctrine of rank order argues polemically against the Christianidea of the equality of man vis-a-vis God and not only against modern levelling.He calls the latter the 'ultimate nonsense known so far on earth'.69 Men are notequal. Men are subject to the will to power with its necessary distinctionbetween steps and those who climb them. Rank is determined as Nietzsche putsit accordingly 'solely through the quantities of power and nothing elsebesides'.70 Rank order is an order of power. The only true order of rank is thatcorresponding to the only true power, that is, corresponding to the power of lifeand to human vitality. 'A declaration of war by the higher being to the masses isrequired' he writes71 provocatively.

However, such a declaration does not intend to extinguish the masses (some-thing altogether impossible) but to use them as a condition of higher forms ofhumanity or to use it but not to succumb to it. The higher man must deal withthe masses through the strategies of war. The existence of the masses impliesitself a protection of the higher man from his kind and from its own acts ofviolence. The high existential tension characteristic of a higher humanity cannotbe part of everyday life. 'All great times have their price.'72 It is economicallyprudent for life to create the mass of average people as the basis for the highertype of man. The great man is a kind of luxury and an exception violating therule but still determined by it. Nietzsche states: 'He needs the opposition to themasses, of those levellers, the feeling of distance to them. He stands on them,he lives from them.'73

Realizing that humans are not equal Nietzsche demands that the rule of the

Discipline and Breeding -the Dionysian world 159

strong be organized aristocratically to use the masses in the age of the masses.This aristocracy would form a conspiring association of higher men who guidethe masses and rule them with two types of aims, namely open and secret ones.The issue, which Nietzsche encounters here with a cynical naivety, has alreadybecome a fatal issue for our own century. Nietzsche understands the creation ofelites as the aim of human breeding. These thoughts have become suspectthrough the disastrous attempts which have themselves arisen through themasses. One cannot breed the masters of the earth with the zoological methodsof horse breeders. For Nietzsche, the thought of breeding is much more radicaland profound.

One question poses itself continuously to us, a tempting and terrible ques-tion, perhaps. Let us whisper it into the ears of those who have a right to hearsuch doubtful questions, those strong souls of today who rule themselves.Would it not be appropriate to attempt the radical, conscious and artificialbreeding of a counter-type with corresponding virtues given the advance of atype of herd animal in Europe today?

Nietzsche does not fear consequences that horrify any moralist. He demandsthe use of all means including deception, betrayal and forgery:

A morality which wishes to breed man to be higher rather than comfortableand mediocre, a morality with the intention to breed a governing caste - thefuture masters of the earth - must be introduced through the existing morallaw, with its words and under its guise, in order to be teachable.74

It must invent many 'means and deception'. This ruling caste of the future is forNietzsche the condition of the new philosopher. 'The new philosopher can onlyexist in connection with the ruling cast as its highest spirituality . . ,'.15

This means, that the humanity which exists on the basis of the truth of the willto power is completed in the explicit knowledge of the will to power. Nietzscheconceives the nature of the philosopher anew:

After trying for a long time and without success to connect the term 'phil-osopher' with a particular concept, I recognized finally that there are twotypes of philosophers: (1) Those who wish to identify a particularly importantfact about value judgements and (2) those who are the creators of such valuejudgements.76

The greatest power is the establishment and the creative design of a valuesystem. The will to power establishes its own conditions of struggle and the


dimension of its war in so far as it is human. 'Whoever determines the valuesand directs the will of millennia by directing the most important characters isthe greatest man.'77 Nietzsche thinks of the philosopher here as the greatestman, however not like Plato or Aristotle who saw his highest rank in theoreia butin his creation of value and in his creative freedom.

In the next section entitled Dionysos it is difficult to recognize to what extentNietzsche has a new religious vision or to what extent he merely uses the name'Dionysos' as a label for the divinity of the cosmos. It would be a difficultinterpretation to find the precise border between Zarathustra's atheism, whichhe summons here yet again, and his own, as he calls it, intuitive and god-creatinginstinct.78

Whoever has learnt to look around here and to perceive the connotations willbe able to recognize the hesitant revelation of a new God in Nietzsche's last andfragmentary work. However, this is no God, no being and not even the highestbeing, no summum ens and no God of fixed shape or form. It is the inconceivableGod of being and of the existing cosmos. It is 'open like the heavens'79 in whoselight all things appear and it is immediate like the sealed earth to whom allcreated being returns. Dionysos is the holiness of being itself. Nietzsche con-trasts the Greek Dionysos with the Christian martyr and opposes their respect-ive conception of suffering. From a Christian point of view suffering is the pathtowards a sacred existence beyond the world. From a Greek perspective 'beingis sacred enough to justify a morality of suffering'.80

From this climax of joy, where man perceives himself and himself entirely as adivine form and justification of nature, to the joy of healthy peasants andhealthy half-human animals: This complete and immense spectrum of thelight and the colour of happiness was identified by the Greeks not without agrateful shudder of those who are initiated into a mystery and not withoutmuch care and holy silence in the name of the God Dionysos.81

Dionysos is the unity of the will to power, that is the Apollonian tendency and ofthe eternal return, that is the Dionysian temporal depth of all finite things. Theunity which unites the will to power and the eternal return is identified byNietzsche but he does not characterize this unity itself although he movestowards a characterization of 'play' at all decisive points in his thinking. Onlywhen we succeed to understand Dionysos as the God of play can the divine playof the cosmos in the realm between heaven and earth be understoodprofoundly.

The final section deals with the eternal return, however in no greater detailthan in the Zarathustra. It is regarded as a human challenge to human discipline.It is the great 'disciplining thought' condemning the weak races who cannot


endure it and elevating the strong races, who perceive it as highly beneficial,towards leadership. Whatever they do now, they will continue to repeat eternallyand continuously. Thus the thought of the eternal return becomes the greatestanchor of human existence. Although Nietzsche approaches the eternal returnthrough an interpretation of life it is clear that this is a new cosmology. Theimportance for life and the disciplining power of the doctrine of the eternalreturn are connected in the fact that all transience is only an appearance of aunique transience and is in truth infinite, that is it returns for ever. It can not bedecided with certainty if this is to be understood in a concrete sense and if ourexistence repeats itself an infinite number of times just like the sand runningthrough the hourglass or if Nietzsche starts to approach for the first time theexistence of the cosmos which provides all things and remains unexhausted inthe giving and taking. The philosophical importance appears to be the concep-tion of inner-worldly being through the inexhaustible space-time of the cosmos.'The world exists; it is nothing, that which becomes, nothing that which passesaway. Or rather: It becomes, it passes away, however, it has never commenced tobecome and never ceased to pass away - it persists in both.'82

The peculiar persistence of the world and its eternity within the transitorychange of the things is clearly and especially identified in this quote. And sincethe world is no vessel in which the things are present, since it exists in all things allthings have the cosmic property of eternal existence notwithstanding their tem-poral transience. The final section closes with the grand aphorism 1067 thatexists in two versions. Everything comes together here. He makes reference to allaspects of his thinking, to the fundamental connection between the Dionysianand the Apollonian, to the will to power and the eternal return and to the unity ofboth within the concept of play which separates itself into opposites and reunitesafter this separation. And whatever else Nietzsche identifies within the mysteri-ous concept of 'life' is explicitly conceived as the world or as the cosmic interplayof being. He identifies clearly a new path of thinking through which he opposesand rejects the tradition. And yet this aphorism contains the entire history ofwestern thought. Its cosmological categories are identical with those of Parme-nides of the Eon of being or of the primordial one. The world has no beginningand no end and yet it has a fixed form. In Parmenidean terms: the Eon is atelestonand telesmenon.93 Furthermore, Nietzsche's 'cosmos' is understood as a Levia-than of power. This directs the entire cosmos towards the path of an ontologicalinterpretation of being as an Ergon which Aristotle questions in the discussion ofdynamis and energeia, Leibniz in the concept of the monad and Hegel in thefundamental category of power. Power is conceived as play reviving a traditionfrom Heraclitus to Hegel. And although one can only understand Nietzsche'sphilosophical language if one hears the resonance of the two-thousand-year-oldwestern tradition in it, he nevertheless deviates from the path of this tradition.


The world is seemingly conceived as the all-embracing being in which all thingscome and go, in which all movement occurs and which remains eternal in itschange; however, not like an eternally present material but rather like time itselfwhich endures despite the passing of the temporal events. In the Timaios evenPlato had thought of the cosmos as a great thing. However, he uses the image ofthe Agathan, of the idea of the Good which contains all ideas. As a reflection of theAgathon the cosmos contains the many things like the Agathon the many ideas.The image-character of the cosmos, its idea tou agathon grants it the character ofreason. The heavenly notions of the stars reveal the reason of the universe as itwere. The cosmos is 'rational'. It rests in the light of being. This is different forNietzsche. Reason is no property which could be added to the cosmos fromsomewhere outside. Reason is a part and an aspect of the cosmos. It is not justrevelation (Lichtungf*, it is also the concealment of being. The cosmos is notcomprehensible through reason or through a relationship with an 'ideal' andtranscendental cosmos but rather the opposite. The rationale of all things followsfrom an aspect of the cosmos itself. The cosmos has no meaning and no purpose,because all its meaning and all its purpose are immanent. The cosmos itself isbeyond purpose, meaning, good and evil. It is not divine in the sense that thisdivinity retains a reference outside itself. It is divine in absorbing all referenceseven to God or to the devil, to light and night and to good and evil. Nietzscheexplicates his two fundamental thoughts of his positive philosophy, namely thewill to power and the eternal return. Since the will to power has been conceived inopposition to the eternal return and vice-versa, it is a limited view to see in the willto power Nietzsche's basic ontological formula and to view this as an extremeposition of contemporary subjective metaphysics which conceives the beingnessof being as an object of representation and thus as a product of a representativepower. This view which we will still need to deal with properly because it is theNietzsche interpretation of some of the greatest living thinkers perhaps onlyreaches the metaphysical aspects of Nietzsche and his reluctant dependence onhistory which he intends to overcome. But it does not reach the will to power andits inner relationship to the eternal return. Both opposing aspects have their unityand centre in Dionysos. Although the aphorism refers to the will to power as the'key to all puzzles' and thus emphasizes this aspect especially, the conceptualthrust of the entire thought shows the contrast of the will to power to the infinityof the eternal return. The concluding aphorism, which summarizes all aspects ofthis, his cosmic vision, in a remarkable way, should be cited despite its length. It isprofound in all its intricacies and full of a deep meaning that eludes an exhaustiveconceptualization perhaps for some time to come yet.

And do you know what the world is for me? Do you want me to show you it inmy mirror? This world, this leviathan of power, of beginning, of end, a firm,


iron edifice of power which does not increase or diminish, which does notexhaust itself but only changes, remains in its entirety constant, a budgetwithout expenses and income, but also without increase, without profit, isembraced by 'nothing' like a border, - nothing vague, nothing wasted, noth-ing infinitely extended, but a denned power embedded in a denned space andnot in an 'empty' space, but rather as power everywhere, as a play of powersand waves of power at once one and many, increasing here and diminishingthere at the same time, a sea of internally storming and flooding powers,eternally changing, eternally recurring with immense years of recurrence,with an ebb and flood of forms, expelling the simplest towards the mostdiverse, from the most silent, most fixed, coldest towards the hotest, wildest,most self-contradictory and then again returning from the fullness home tosimplicity, from the interplay of contradiction back to the pleasure of har-mony, to affirm itself even in this uniformity of its paths and years, to blessitself as that, which has to return eternally, as a becoming, which knows nosatisfaction, no weariness and no fatigue: This, my Dionysian world, of theeternally-self-creating, of the eternally-self-destroying, this mysterious worldof the double desires, this, my beyond of good and evil without purpose,unless there is a happiness of the circle in the purpose of no will, unless thereis a ring which wills itself- do you want a name for this world? A solution toall its puzzles? A light even for you, you most hidden, you strongest, mostcourageous, darkest? - This world is the will to power - and nothing else! Andeven you are the will to power - and nothing else!85

Is Nietzsche's cosmic vision only the end of metaphysics or is he the passionateherald of a new ontological experience?

CHAPTER FIVE

Nietzsche's Relationship to Metaphysics asImprisonment and Liberation

1. THE FOUR TRANSCENDENTAL DIMENSIONS OF THEPROBLEM OF BEING AND THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF

NIETZSCHE'S PHILOSOPHY. THE COSMIC CONCEPT OFPLAY AS AN EXTRA-METAPHYSICAL QUESTION

It is now particularly important to emphasize the question more strongly thatunderpins the representation of Nietzsche's philosophy. Does Nietzsche belongto the history of philosophy as one thinker among many, as one more or lessrelevant figure in the long succession of ontological interpretations, which havepursued a persistent basic question ever since the Eleatics or is he indeed aninnovator, a pioneer, a precursor, a 'herald and cock crow' of a new cosmic age,the dawn of a new, gay science which perhaps still stammers and searches for itsown voice in the 'drinking song'? Is he a thinker who has experienced impotenceand admits to be 'merely a fool, merely a poet' and who identifies himself withZarathustra 'full of prophetic spirit, on the high yoke travelling between theseas'? We have attempted to uncover the fundamental aspects of Nietzsche'sthinking in a journey through Nietzsche's writings. His basic ontological equa-tion of being and value, his doctrine of the will to power, of the eternal return, ofthe death of God and of the overman. We have been unable to engage truthfullyand comprehensively with the fateful thinker who also determines our lifewhether we choose to or not. However, we are not prepared for this anyhow. Atrue engagement would need to go further than a mere critique which detectsmistaken interpretations of traditional philosophies in this dazzling, in everysense of the word, dazzling spirit, which criticizes his sophistry, which reveals hisart of detection and which finds his inability for conceptualization and his pre-sumptuous divination suspicious. A true engagement could and would have tooccur in a pre-conceptual way grasping that which Nietzsche fails to grasp andwhich broke the will to power of his intellectual passion. He resembles themythical figure of Tantalous. The sole object worthy of thought, namely thecosmic All and aim of the 'great yearning' eludes his grasp. At the end of hispath of thinking he addresses the self-contradictory and ambiguous essence of

The four transcendental dimensions of the problem of being 165

the All in the mythical image of Dionysos. For Nietzsche this is the formlessly-forming, creatively-destroying God whose face is the mask, whose appearance isconcealed and who is one and many, overflowing life and the simple calmness ofthe underworld. Nietzsche's dithyrambs to Dionysos resonate with a tantalicpain within the magic circle of a language growing poetical through resignationand impotence at its most pure perhaps in the poem The sun is setting whichrefers in its final stanza to the 'golden boat' of Dionysos approached by the boatof the poet: 'Seventh Solitude/1 never sensed it/ closer to me sweet certainty/warmer the face of the sun/ Does the ice of my peaks still glow?/ Silvery, lightlike a fish/ my boat glides into the distance ...'.' Poetry becomes the prelimin-ary salvation of a pre-conceptual cosmic intuition beyond language thatdistinguishes itself from metaphysics.

In the context of the spiritual richness, experience, intuition and most sophis-ticated psychology and existential experience of Nietzsche's philosophy, thecategorization of his philosophy into four basic aspects may appear as animpermissible simplification. And yet, in their relation and interdependencethese aspects make up the essential and basic structure of Nietzsche's thinking.Only with the knowledge of the death of God, that is with the decline of theidealistic other-world can the will to power life come into view as constitutivefor life. And in so far as time is seen as a path for the will to power the eternalreturn can become visible and the overman can appear as that humanbeing with the tragic truth. Nietzsche proclaims his fundamental doctrine ina conscious and explicit contrast to tradition. He struggles against westernmetaphysics.

However, does he really find a new ground or does he remain dependent onmetaphysics in this struggle against metaphysics? This question of alternatives isput too simply. The rule of traditional metaphysics is not yet broken if onerenounces it. Here too, not everyone is free who ridicules his chains. The devi-ation from the path of metaphysics is not just a new method or mode of thought,something that man could accomplish through himself. It is rather and moreprimordially an event which captures man or a fate which he experiences. InEcce Homo Nietzsche finds the language for the consciousness of his fate. Oneunderstands little about the greatness of this thinker if one merely detects herethe tone of an immense hubris or of a mad self-overestimation. Nietzsche isstruck by lightning. He is burnt by a light of a new dawn of the truth of being inits entirety. He says there among other things:

The discovery of Christian morality has no equal. It is a real catastrophe.Whoever understands it is a force majeure, a fate. He breaks the history of maninto two parts. One lives before him, one lives after him. The lightning strokeof truth struck precisely that which was the highest so far.2

166 Nietzsche's Relationship to Metaphysics as Imprisonment and Liberation

One could hardly describe the essence of a new cosmic intuition more suc-cinctly and more convincingly. Such an intuition has the character of a lightningstrike. The highest is destroyed: everything is inverted. In Nietzsche's words:revaluation of all values. He concludes Ecce Homo with the aggressive sentencein which not only two religions collide. The statement 'Dionysos against theCrucified' places a caesura into the history of the world.

The uncanny symbolism of this sentence is not easily comprehended.Dionysos is the God of suffering like the Crucified, however die sufferingDionysos is always sublated by the dark pleasure of procreation of which he isthe master as he is the master of death. Suffering, death and decline are alwaysmerely the other sides of pleasure, resurrection and return. Dionysos is life itself,the deeply suffering and profoundly pleasurable, the creative and destructivecosmic life in which we are at home in a questionable way and which shelters butalso exposes us. The Crucified, however, is for Nietzsche a symbol of greatsuffering renouncing the concrete world and referring beyond itself as the greatleader towards a transcendental life. In Nietzsche's view die Crucified representsa morality which is foreign to life and a Utopian religious and metaphysical ideal.The Crucified is for him not only the symbol of Christianity but He also symbol-izes Plato and Socrates, that is, a philosophical tradition focusing on the order ofinner-worldly things rather than the existing all-comprising cosmos.

How can Nietzsche's relationship to metaphysics be determined? We do notmean with this question his own opinion about metaphysics but we ask how wecan and need to characterize this relationship. How do his four basic doctrinesrelate to die horizons of a metaphysical ontology? Metaphysics is the thinkingwhich determines being in its beingness. Metaphysics focuses basically on dieexisting diings, diat is on the manifold, finite and limited beings or on things.Things, which are themselves finite things in respect of time and space, meet usfrom the open realm of the cosmos.

The metaphysical approach is inner-worldly and fourfold. It investigatesbeing as such, the totality of being, die highest being and the revelation of being.The reason for this fourfold division is difficult to clarify. It is based on thedimensions of die concept of being itself. We already distinguish normally beingand nodiing, being and becoming, being and appearance and being and diink-ing. Wherever we encounter 'being' we encounter a hidden horizon of nothing,of becoming, of appearance and of thinking. We have just established howNietzsche uses the contrast between being and becoming and makes it thepivotal point of his philosophy. While it is crucial that philosophy relies on thefour-dimensional, ontological horizon this does not bring die ontologicaldimensionality itself into view. It reflects about being. If this is taken to be thething, die individual or die finite tiling tiien being already shelters nodiingnesssince it is limited. The limit is a boundary towards nothingness. In being a


defined thing, the thing is also not something else, it is no other thing. Omnisdeterminatio est negatio. Metaphysics thinks the ontological structure of thethings in an existence of a thing hollowed by nothingness. It thinks the On HeOn. For Aristotle this is the character of a categorical interpretation of Ousia onthe one hand and an interpretation of the thing as a work, as an Ergon in therealm of dynamis and energeia. Plato interprets being through a fixed, one andonly aspect of the manifold yet homogenous being. The non-existence of thethings shows itself in the unsteadiness of the future, created and destroyedthings of appearance and the being of the things shows itself in their participa-tion in the ideas. Plato sees an intimate connection between the ontologicalexplication of being and nothingness with that of being and becoming, beingand appearance and being and thinking. Appearances are not only not real, theyare also exposed to generation and decline and unauthentic and only apparentlyexisting. They do not belong to thinking but to opinion whereas the ideas are thetruly existing, immovable and most constant existing entities belonging tothinking.

The fourfold schema of traditional metaphysics could perhaps be developedonly properly in an analysis of the history and origins of metaphysical ideas. Wecan indicate this much: Wherever the ontological interpretation relies on thecontext and connection between being and nothing the attention is directedtowards being as such. If the context is the relationship between being andbecoming the attention is focused on motion and the totality of all the tilings inmotion. If the things are investigated in the light of their authenticity or unau-thenticity, the question of the highest being is posed. If the tension betweenbeing and thinking becomes predominant the truth of being and accordingly thehuman relevance of this truth is brought into view.

To put it simply: these four ontological horizons correspond to the four tran-scendentals which define classical, medieval and modern philosophy in theirown characteristic way, namely On, Hen, Agathon, Alethes or Ens, Unum, Bonum,Verum. We ask independently: does Nietzsche's fourfold division of his funda-mental questions have an immanent connection with this metaphysical division?

Does his attempt to invert metaphysics remain within the realm of meta-physical questions? The doctrine of the will to power is Nietzsche's doctrine ofthe existence of being. Strictly speaking he does not (as we have already seen)recognize firm, finite things. What appears to be a defined and individual thingis merely a transient formation of the will to power or a quantum of power whichdoes not remain constant but is rather in motion. All things are struggling. Thewill to power drives and urges all living things forward. The being of all finitebeing is a never-ending destruction of limits, however it does not absolutelysublate limitation as such but moves limits in an unstable way. It is a struggle forovercoming, a desire by the strong to rule the weak and an eternal struggle for


power. Nietzsche thus does not conceive the existence of things as an enduringform. All finite things are something unformed and restless which merelyassumes a form under the influence of power. He does not conceive the nothing,which inhabits being, as the limit of the latter but as a movement of this limitand as the existence of the difference which is created by life within itself andwhich continues to rage in the creations of this struggle negating their limits andcausing them to move forward. The doctrine of the will to power is Nietzsche'sanswer to the metaphysical question of being as such. It is his verdict in the caseof being against nothingness. Will to power is being and nothingness in theiroriginal relation to motion. What, however, is his intellectual focus in the doc-trine of the eternal return? Nietzsche conceives in this the totality of motionitself. Totality is not primarily set as a spatial totality and not as a sum or a heap ofthings. Since he denies fixed, unchanging things the totality cannot imply aconcept of resting things which are present. The totality of being can only makesense as a totality of change since the thing is primarily interpreted in respectof the change effected by the will to power. The whole which embraces allchanging things, which envelops and transcends the unsteady developmentof their struggle for power cannot be a result of the change to the limitationof the things. Since it is a temporal totality it precedes immanent temporalchange. How can the totality of time precede an individual extension of time,however? Our common understanding of time presupposes that time itself isbasically incomplete. The things are still changing, time has not yet run outand it still is continuing into the future. This matter is completely different ifall temporal events are understood to be repetitions in principle. This makes itpossible to conceive time as a totality or to conceive the totality of time. Time isno longer the infinitely incomplete which is only realized fully in the future. Itis the future already.

All events are transcended and embraced by time itself because they are repe-titions. Thinking about the death of God is thinking about the issue of being andappearance for Nietzsche. He objects to the opinion of an illusory, concreteworld and a real, metaphysical and transcendent realm. The Ontos On is no ideafor him and it is no God. It is no summum ens which could be approached as thehighest ranking Absolute or as an Agathon and thus as the measure of all things.The death of God implies a denial of the traditional distinction between beingand appearance. Despite his rejection of the Platonic, Christian or Kantianconception of this difference, Nietzsche remains trapped in it. Firstly he seesbeing through the perspective of value and secondly he takes up this distinctionagain in the phenomenon of art. All finite beings are seen as 'formations of theshaping will to power, artful creations of beautiful semblance' which are createdand destroyed, made and demolished by the primordial artist, namely theDionysian and Apollonian life itself. And finally the doctrine of the overman


is more than an instruction to lead a 'dangerous life' or the pathos of theZarathustra — character is (despite the fact that he uses these formulas) morethan a Caesare Borgia or a 'Caesar with a Christian soul'.

The overman is humanity that has realized the death of God, the will to powerand the eternal return. It is the Aletheia of a cosmically open existence.Nietzsche does not believe that this human truth of the cosmos realizes itself inan abstract or conceptual thinking. This thinking takes the form of an insight oran intuition. This implies however no immediate sense perception of the givenfor Nietzsche, but the divinatory intuition of the essence of the cosmos whichcannot be expressed in common everyday language. It eludes the concept andremains perhaps inexpressible. This inexpressible quality may find its voicepossibly only through poetry. Even for Plato for whom philosophy is otherwisedialegesthai - the account of being through a dialogue with friends or within thesoul itself - even for Plato the heart of philosophy is guarded by silence. It isArrheton - unsayable. Thus even in his rejection of the discursive concept andwith the conception of the highest truth as a 'showing' Nietzsche still remains onthe ground of a tradition which he intends to overcome. In summary,Nietzsche's questions correspond to the structure of western metaphysics. Hethinks the beingness of being as the will to power, being in its entirety as theeternal return of the same, the highest being on the one hand negatively as thedeath of God and then again positively as the Apollonian-Dionysian play whichcreates all things as products of appearance like an artist and the work of art.Finally he grasps the truth of all this in so far as it is human through the over-man. Nietzsche remains within the ontological dimensions of nothing, becom-ing, appearance and thinking like the metaphysical tradition that he opposes. Herelies on these dimensions but does not bring their role explicitly or radicallyinto view itself. Nietzsche's philosophy is in this sense ontologically as tame asthe tradition from which he wishes to distinguish himself. He remains within thespell of metaphysics even where he already celebrates his victory over it.

He is a prisoner of metaphysics in a further sense since he predominantlyinterprets being as value. Even the origin of this identification is found already inPlato. To be sure the Good, the Agathon which Plato calls megiston mathema, thegreatest thing worthy of knowledge and the target of all education of thephilosopher-king in The Republic is for Plato no value but the essence of the ideas,that is the idea of the ideas. Just like the sun that lends visibility to all things inthe realm of vision and grants them growth, the Agathon combines cognizanceand identity of existence to all ideas. As that which grants being, the Good isEpikeina Tes Ousias - beyond all being. The Agathon is not only more existentthan the things of sense perception, it is also more real than the enduring ideas.Such is the essence of the Platonic Good. All things appear in the light of theAgathon and thus every finite thing that is exposed to this light is in some ways


'good'. The goodness is a transcendental character of being. For modernity andespecially for Kant the transcendental ontological characteristics become neces-sarily relative to the subject for which all objects are since Kant determinesbeing through objects. And this enables Nietzsche to determine the goodness ofall things accordingly through a relativity of all things to man, that is to deter-mine it as value. Values do not exist as such; they always exist for someone.Values correspond to value judgements. They are no aspects of objects - at leastnot in the sense that the things exist first and receive added predicates of valuelater. The openness towards things, towards their mere simple presence isalready a matter of certain perspectives of value. Since according to Nietzschethe essence of things is the will to power values are presupposed and projectedby the will to power as 'conditions of survival and growth'. Such a projectionestablishes the directions and aims of the will to power. Every being has valuebecause the will to power flows through and permeates the motion of things.Nietzsche's basic approach is this: the ontological value follows from the modernmetamorphosis of the classical relation between On and Agathon. For Nietzscheall values are within life; they are in the cosmos. Life itself or the world itself hasno value. This does not imply a negative evaluation of life and world, but therealization of the impossibility to evaluate them since they are the whole inwhich all values occur and all valuing takes place. The eternal return establishesa spatial and temporal dimension for the expansion of the will to power. Thisdoctrine establishes precisely the meaninglessness and valuelessness of thatwhole in which all evaluation occurs. 'The total value of the world cannot beestimated.'3 Having value is a fundamental ontological determination whichNietzsche attributes to finite being. Absence of value, however, is a basic charac-teristic of the entirety of being or becoming in accordance with the thought ofthe eternal return. In the fourfold structure of his question and in the basicvalue-philosophical approach Nietzsche remains indebted to metaphysics.

However, it remains a central question of any interpretation of Nietzschewhether this dependency on metaphysics, which he nevertheless passionatelyopposes, is complete or if he somehow transcends it. Heidegger's interpretationof Nietzsche as contained in Holzzvege denies that Nietzsche essentially succeedsto break through towards a free cosmic vision. Heidegger believes that Nietzscheis a prisoner of metaphysics in so far as he completes its basic aspects in aparticular way. Heidegger's interpretation is predominantly guided by the willto power. Nietzsche essentially concludes modern metaphysics and thinks itthrough to its end. Modernity commences with an essential change towardstruth. Antiquity understands truth as uncovery of being (Aletheia) or as thelighting in which all things appear and show themselves. For modernity truthgains the character of certitude following the Platonic conception of truth as anadequate view or vision of the ideas. Truth becomes a way in which man, the


conscious subject, reaches certainty about being. Being is essentially conceived asan object that is as a thing, which is what it is by revealing itself to a subject. Thesubjective perception of being or the perceptio on the other hand is a drive whichrepresents or a representation which is driven - and this concurrently not separ-ately or successively. The subject is will and representation. The driving force ofthe representation is the will. Representation is an objectification. Representationas such is a violating will to power. Nietzsche brings this hidden basis into view.The subject's own experience of itself becomes the ontological essence. Every-thing is will to power. Heidegger interprets the will to power through a modernconception of substance which for Leibniz is the monad and both appetitus andperceptio and which is ontologically determined as power. With his doctrine of thewill to power Nietzsche completes in Heidegger's view the metaphysics of mod-ernity which conceives substance through power and through the self. The over-man is interpreted thus by Heidegger through the human being who is ready towill the will to power and who takes over the rule of the earth. It is thus notsomething that will occur as a completely new form of existence at some stage butit is inherent in our human and indeterminate subjectivity even if it is not yetdeveloped to gigantic excess. Heidegger's Nietzsche interpretation is essentiallybased on Heidegger's summary and insight into the history of being and inparticular on his interpretation of the metaphysics of modernity.

Nevertheless, the question remains open whether Nietzsche does not alreadyleave the metaphysical dimensions of any problems essentially and intentionallybehind in his conception of the cosmos. There is a non-metaphysical originalityin his cosmological philosophy of 'play'. Even the early writings indicate themysterious dimension of play including the metaphysics of the artist, hisHeracliteanism with Zeus, the playing cosmic child, the Pais Paizon. Even ifNietzsche comes frequently close to Hegel who says at one point that the play inits indifference and its 'ultimate recklessness is at the same time the most sub-lime and only true seriousness'.4 Nietzsche refers to their joint root Heraclitusand not to the metaphysician Hegel. While the idealism of Kant, Schelling andHegel referred often to the connection between imagination, time, freedom andplay, it referred to primordial being as will and spirit.

Nietzsche makes the human playing, the playing of the child and the artistinto a key concept for the universe. It becomes a cosmic metaphor. This doesnot mean that the human ontological modality is uncritically applied to being inits entirety. Rather vice versa: the human essence can only be conceived anddetermined through play if man is conceived in its ecstatic openness towards theexisting world and not simply as a thing among other things within the cosmosdistinguished by the faculties of mind and reason. Only where the cosmic playcomes into view, where the conceptual view breaks through the Apollonianillusion and sees through the constructs of finite appearance to perceive the


creative, productive and destructive 'life' itself- where the ascent and decline ofthe finite, temporal forms is experienced as a dance and a round, as the dicegame of divine chance, covered by the innocent and careless heavens, man canexperience himself in his playful productivity as connected to the life of the All,as embedded in the great play of the birth and the death of all things and asimmersed in the tragedy and comedy of universal being. The cosmos plays. Itplays the Dionysian ground which gives birth to the Apollonian illusion of theexisting forms and which drives the finite things 'with the whip to the fields'.5 Itplays joining and separating, weaving death and life into one beyond good andevil and beyond all value because any value only appears within the play. Thename for the fathomless all-power of play is Dionysos. The posthumous workcontains a late statement:

Tragic art, rich in both experiences, is described as a reconciliation of Apolloand Dionysos, the deepest importance is given to appearance by Dionysos:And this appearance is even denied and denied with pleasure ... and thedestruction even of the most beautiful appearance drives the Dionysianhappiness to its highest climax.6

The climactic Dionysian happiness is found in a frightening experience thatreveals the emptiness of all individual formations and reclaims all individualityfor the process of the individuating play. This ecstatic happiness of Dionysiantranscendence is already expressed in the fragment by Heraclitus which refers tothe cosmos as a scattered rubbish heap. Taking the perspective of a tragic-Dionysian worldview, the realm of a metaphysical conception of being as beingis the dimension of that which forgets itself, the realm of a pretended, illusoryworld of play. Man has the tremendous possibility to grasp illusion as illusionand to immerse himself in the great cosmic play through his own playing and toexperience himself in this immersion as the participant of the cosmic play.Where Nietzsche conceives being and becoming as play he no longer remainswithin the boundaries of metaphysics. Similarly, the will to power has no longerthe characteristics of reifying being for a conscious subject but it has the char-acter of Apollonian formation. The eternal return of the same on the other handconceives the all-embracing, all-providing and all-eliminating play-time of theworld. The halcyon aspect of the vision of the overman refers to the player not tothe violent aggressor or the technical giant. In Ecce Homo Nietzsche states: 'Iknow no other way to deal with great tasks than the play: This is as an indicationfor greatness and an essential pre-condition.'7 However, the playing man whoremains ecstatically exposed to the formless and forming God Dionysos doesnot live in the wandering wilfulness of absolute freedom. He is a participant inthe play of the cosmos and wills profoundly that which is necessary. Nietzsche


uses the formula 'amorfatf for this will which does not just resign itself to a fatebut which participates in the cosmic play. The Dionysian dithyramb Fame andEternity expresses Nietzsche's essential and existential experience of his thoughtand poetry as the cosmic harmony between man and world in the play of neces-sity: ' . . . shield of necessity!/ Highest stars of being!/ no wish reaches you/ nodenial can tarnish you/ eternal yes to being/1 am forever your yes/ because I loveyou, O eternity!'8

This page intentionally left blank

Notes

Translator's Foreword

1. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 'The Birth of Tragedy'. The Birth of Tragedy and The Caseof Wagner. Trans. Walter Kaufrnann. New York: Random House, Inc., 1967. pp3-144.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Ecce Homo. Ed. Walter Kaufrnann. Trans. WalterKaufrnann. New York: Random House, Inc., 1967.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus spoke Zarathustra. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Har-mondsworth: Penguin, 1961.

Chapter One: The 'Metaphysics of the Artist'1. Nietzsche's philosophy behind masks

1. Nietzsche. Ecce Homo. Random House, Inc.: New York, p. 326. Fink citesNietzsche from an edition of Nietzsche's works published by Kroner. As far ascould be established this edition is identical with the edition prepared by Elisa-beth Forster-Nietzsche in 1905. Citations used in this translation are those usedby Fink (Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche) and translated.

2. The fundamental equation of being and value

2. Nietzsche. Werke. XI, p. 20.3. XV, p. 63.4. XV, p. 62.5. I, p. 2.6. I, p. 3.7. XV, p. 65.

3. The psychology of Art and Art as Cognition of the World

8. I, p. 5.9. I, p. 19.

10. I, p. 20.

176 Notes

11. I, p. 23.12. I, p. 24.13. I, p. 31.14. I, p. 44.15. I, p. 45.16. I, p. 153.17. I, p. 74.18. 'Urgrund', 'Ur-Eine', 'Ur-Wesen'.19. VI, p. 41.

4. 'Socratism' against tragic wisdom

20. It appears that the context for Fink's terminology ('das Ganze des Seins') isHeidegger's ontological difference. 'Das Ganze des Seins' (Being as a whole,ontological Being) is distinguished from 'das Seiende im Ganzen' (being in itsentirety, ontic being).

21. I, p. 95.22. I, p. 99.23. I, p. 169.24. I, p. 168.25. XV, p. 62.26. I, p. 8.27. X,p. 189.28. X, p. 194.29. X,p. 196.30. X, p. 205.31. X,p.206.32. cf. footnote I.33. IX, p. 151.34. IX, p. 170.

5. Untimely Meditations. Culture and Genius

35. 'education'.36. XV, p. 68.37. XV, p. 72.38. XV, p. 68.39. X,p.5.40. X,p. 13.41.X, p. 37.42. X,p.41.43. Barnes, Jonathan. Early Greek Philosophy, p. 102.44. X,p.47.45. X,pp. 52, 57.

Notes 177

Chapter Two: Nietzsche's Enlightenment1. The psychology of unmasking and the scientific perspective

1. XV, p. 79.2. 'through/ from the inferior'.3. XV, p. 73.4. n, p. 24.5. II, p. 36.6. II, p. 34.7. II, p. 151.8. II, p. 200.9. II, p. 49.

10. II, p. 414.

2. The philosophy of the morning (Dawn and The Gay Science)

11. V pp. 360-361.12. IV, p. 28.13. IV, p. 36.14. IV, p. 213.

Chapter Three: The Proclamation1. Form, style and structure of Thus spoke Zarathustra

1. XV, p. 94.2. XV, p. 90.3. XV, p. 118.4. VI, p. 476.5. VI, p. 20.6. VI, p. 19.

2. The overman and the death of God

7. XV, p. 97.8. VI, p. 62.9. VI, p. 13.

10. VI, p. 13.11. VI, p. 13.12. VI, p. 13.13. VI, p. 16.14. VI, p. 18.15. VI, p. 33.16. VI, p. 42.17. VI, p. 91.18. VI, p. 109.

178 Notes

3. The Will to Power

19. VI, p. 124.20. VI, p. 124.21. VI, p. 124.22. VI, p. 125.23. VI, p. 125.24. VI, p. 125.25. VI, p. 125.26. VI, p. 149.27. VI, p. 153.28. XV, p. 100.29. VI, p. 157.30. VI, p. 163.31. VI, p. 203.

4. The eternal return: Of the vision and the riddle, Before Sunrise

32. XV, p. 85.33. VI, p. 224.34. VI, p. 226.35. VI, p. 228.36. VI, p. 240.

5. The eternal return: the cosmological conception of the problem of morality.The recurrence of the same

37. VI, p. 292.38. VI, p. 253.39. VI, p. 258.40. VI, p. 274.41. VI, p. 281.42. VI, p. 287.43. VI, p. 314.

6. The eternal recurrence: Of the Great Yearning

44. VI, p. 322.45. VI, p. 324.46. VI, p. 328.

7. The eternal recurrence: The Seven Seals. Zarathustra and the Higher Man

47. VI, p. 334.48. VI, p. 398.

Notes 179

49. VI, p. 419.50. VI, p. 426.51. VI, p. 430.52. VI, p. 437.53. VI, p. 472.

Chapter Four: The Destruction of the Western Tradition1. The transcendental creation of value. Beyond Good and Evil

1. XV, p. 102.2. XV, p. 101.3. VI, p. 347.4. XV, p. 103.5. VII, p. 14.6. VH,p.36.7. VII, p. 36.8. VII, p. 54.9. VII, p. 63.

10. VII, p. 60.11. VII, p. 87.12. VII, p. 130.13. VII, p. 135.14. VII, p. 271.

2. The Genealogy of Morals

15. VII, p. 312.16. VII,p. 313.17. VII, p. 317.18. VII, p. 336.19. VII, p. 337.20. VH,p. 379.21. VII, p. 380.22. VII, p. 419.23. VII, p. 430.24. VII, p. 436.25. VII, p. 483.26. VII, p. 484.

3. The Antichrist and The Twilight of the Idols

27. VHI, p. 235.28.' VIII, p. 256.29. VIII, p. 270.30. VIII, p. 312.31. VIE, p. 313.

180 Notes

32. VII, p. 5.33. IX, p. 190.34. XVI, p. 402.35. VIII, p. 68.36. VIII, p. 70.37. VIII, p. 74.38. VIII, p. 75.39. VIII, p. 76.40. VHI, p. 78.41. VIII, p. 79.42. VHI, p. 80.

4. The ontological idea and the moral ideal

43. VIII, p. 83.44. Vm,p. 81.45. XIV, p. 353.46. XV, p. 141.47. XV, p. 145.48. XV, p. 146.

5. The posthumous work The Will to Power. The problem of nihilism

49. XV, p. 150.50. XV, p. 152.51. XV, p. 153.52. XV, p. 187.53. XV, p. 222.54. XV, p. 241.55. XV, p. 489.56. XV, p. 442.57. XV, p. 446.

6. The negative ontology of the thing

58. VIII, p. 94.59. XVI, p. 47.60. XVI, p. 73.61. XVI, p. 77.62. XVI, p. 101.63. XVI, p. 101.64. XVI, p. 19.65. XVI, p. 179.66. XVI, p. 225.67. XVI, p. 272.

Notes 1 8 1

7. Discipline and Breeding - the Dionysian world

68. Fragment B 15, Diels-Kranz.69. XVI, p. 292.70. XVI, p. 277.71. XVI, p. 279.72. XVI, p. 285.73. XVI, p. 336.74. XVI, p. 338.75. XVI, p. 351.76. XVI, p. 347.77. XVI, p. 359.78. XVI, p. 386.79. F. Hoelderlin, In lieblicherBlaeue.80. XVI, p. 391.81. XVI, p. 389.82. XVI, p. 399.83. Diels-Kranz, Fragment B 8,4: 42.84. In Heidegger translations this is frequently referred to as 'Lighting'.85. XVI, p. 401.

Chapter Five: Nietzsche's Relationship to Metaphysics asImprisonment and Liberation

1. The four transcendental dimensions of the problem of being and the basicprinciples of Nietzsche's philosophy

1. VIII, p. 428.2. XV, p. 125.3. XVI, p. 168.4. Hegel, Erste Druckschriften (Lasson 1928), p. 128.5. Heraclitus, Fragment B 11 (Diels-Kranz).6. XIV, p. 365.7. XV, p. 47.8. VTII, p. 436.

Index

affirmation 10,43,73,125altruism 146Antichrist, The 8,111,144aphorism 5Apollo 12,15-20,22,23, 30, 32,157,

172Apollonian 11,15,17,24,28,33, 34,

134,157,160,161,168,169,171,172

appearance 16,18,19,22,23,28,34,36,38,44, 62, 85,95,127,128,130-3,135,143,148,154,157,166-9

Aristotle 151,160,161,167art 9,12,14-20,22,24,26,34,36-41,

43, 53,105, 134,147,154,157,168,169

tragic 23,134,135,154,172artist 26, 134atheism 122,160Attempt at a Self-Criticism 11Augustine 92

becoming 24, 28, 32,33, 66, 73, 74, 88,90,96,114,125-7,130,132,134,139,140,148-53,157,166,167,169,170, 172

Being 12,22,23,31,69,70,127,128,130

being 19,22,31-3,54,66,67,69,73,79,80, 81,84,85,87,90-2,94,95, 109,110,114,115,125, 128,129,132,134, 135,143-53,155,157,158,160,162,164-72

question of 52,128Beyond Good and Evil 8,111, 117Birth of Tragedy, The 8, 9,12-14,16,19,

20,24,28,29,37

Caesar 113Case of Wagner, The 8categories 149-51Christianity, Christian 10,18,68, 81,86,

93,98, 108,110,112,113,117, 118,121,122,124,129,132-4,136, 138,141,147, 154,165,166

cognition 147-51,153,154concept 25,33,55,127,128, 148-50,

169Concerning Truth and Deception in the

extramoral sense 24conscience 118,119cosmos 21,54,74,79,82-5,92-5,97-9,

101,102, 139,150,152,153,157,158,160-2,166, 169,171,172

see also worldcreator, creativity 63, 65,85, 92,94,100,

143,144culture 26-30,41,109,119,137

Daybreak 8, 9,42,45-7, 49, 50-2,116death of God 37, 50, 57-9, 60, 62,63,

65, 66, 72, 73, 81, 100,102-8,116,117,122,125,133,135,136,138-40,142,154, 155,164,165,168,169

decadence 140-2Descartes 112Dionysian 11-13,15,17,24,27,28,

33, 34, 62, 88, 96, 110,134,135,145,149, 157,160,161,168,169,172

Dionysos 10,12,15,17-23,30,32, 96,114,147, 154,157,158,160,162,165,166,172

dream 15,18,19,22

earth 59,60, 63-9,83,85,86,95,98, 99,102,105, 125,130,131,133,135,155,156,160

Ecce Homo 7,11,38,52, 53, 55, 58, 69,111,144,166,172

egoism 63, 64,83eternal recurrence, eternal return 50, 56,

57,72-4,77,79-82, 86-94,96-103,105-8,110,115,116, 117,133,135,

Index 183

eternal recurrence, eternal return(continued) 136, 141,146,147,152-8,160-2,164,165, 169,170,172

eternity 44,66,76,78-82,87-91,98,99,100-2,157,161,173

evil 55,104,114,145,154existence (human) 46, 63,81,84,85,93,

101, 104,110,122,132,135,136,139,143,144, 147, 154-7,161

free spirit 41-4,46,48,49,51,52,62,104,111,112

freedom 88,93,94Gay Science, The 8,9, 42, 44, 45-7, 50,

51,52,116

genius 27,29,40,41,52,62see also overman, higher man

God 51,57,59,63-5,67,74,85,92-4,100,104,121, 122, 125,128,129,131-4,136-40,143, 147,160

good and evil 55,100,113,146,162,172Good, The (Agathori) 46, 49,124,129,

130,132,169

Hegel 1,49, 54,139,145, 157,161,171Heidegger 170,171Heraclitus 6,10,12,22,24,30-2,62, 66,

100,129, 130,158,161,171herd 113,123,159Highermen 103,105,121,158,159history 28,37,65,111,120,136,141,

142,153,157home, homeless, homelessness 83, 104,

139Human, All too Human 8, 34,35,36,42,

45,46,111,116

idea 130,131,ideal, ascetic ideal 58,119,120, 121idealism 38,44,49, 50, 56, 59-61, 64,

66, 140inverted 58,60,61,67

infinity 75,76,77,81, 82, 85,94,95,100, 102, 128, 155,157

inspiration 54interpretations, of Nietzsche 3intoxication 18,22Introduction to the study of Plato's

dialogues 30intuition 14,26,30-32, 54,127,147,

150,151,165,166,169

Jesus, (the Crucified) 56,122, 123, 133,166

justice 68

Kant 134,135,147,151,168,170,171

language 25,128last man 56-8,104life 12,24,27,32-34, 36, 38, 41, 43, 44,

49, 51, 58, 59,61, 64, 66-71, 73,85,93, 97, 103,109-12,115,117,119-24, 132,134,135,138,140-2,144,145,147, 148,150-8,161,165, 166,168,170,172

lust 84lyric poetry 17

master-slave (morality) 68,81,112,113,115-18

metaphysics 6, 8,36-40,43,44,46, 54,55, 80, 81,107,108,112,114,115,117,124-9,136,140, 141,143,144,147,151,154,165-7, 169,171

Miscellaneous Beliefs and Sayings 8morality 38,39,43,44,46-8, 55, 56, 61,

73, 80, 82, 85,107,108,110, 111,114,115,117, 124,132,133,136,137,139-44,154, 165,166

music 17

Napoleon 113,118necessity 88, 94, 99,100,173negative ontology 150,151,153Nietzsche Contra Wagner 8nihilism, nihilistic, nihilist 2, 56,103,

104.120,123, 136-42,147,155non-being, nothing (see also being) 125,

129,138,166,167,168

On the Genealogy of Morals 8,111, 117ontological difference 129, 131,133openness 83,85,91,92,95,100,101otherworld, other-world 46, 50, 59,63,

85, 93, 120, 123,127,129,133, 139overman 27,46,50,56-8,60, 62, 64,66,

67,71-3, 75, 78, 81, 82, 86,88,94,102, 105-8, 116,121,136,154,155,164, 165,169,171

Parmenides 32,33,129,130,151, 161Paul,Paulus 123pessimism 10,140Philosophy in the tragic age of the Greeks

30Plato 6,29,30,126,129-33, 151,160,

162,166-9Platonism, inverted Platonism 81, 90,

108.122,124, 125,131

184 Index

play 24, 30, 32, 62, 87, 88, 94,96,154,160,161,169,171,172

pleasure (hedone) 98positivism 45-7,51,55,111, 116,151Pre-Socratic 30,31,35,125Prince Vogelfrei 41,44,46,49,51psychological analysis 3psychology 16,37,46,108,112,117,

119,142

rank order 27,143,144,158reason 25,40,43, 80, 81,120,126, 128,

151,162,171redemption 10,17,18,38,63,71,76,96,

154Ree, Paul 35religion 36-40,43,44, 50, 80, 107,111,

112,116, 117,122, 124,137,140,141,143,144,154

resentment 7, 118,120, 121,146revaluation 49,74,80,84,108,114,121,

123-5,132,155,162,166revenge 67,68,134

scepticism 6,43, 54,144-6,151,152Schiller 76Schopenhauer 10,16,17,19,22, 26-30,

34,35,36,38,42,51,98science 12, 36,41-6,52,104,112,114scientist 26,41self 85, 171self-alienation 48, 50, 61, 62, 73, 81, 85,

103,109,114-16,143,153Socrates 13,21,22,29, 30,126, 166Socratism 11,12,24,26, 36soul 78,86,87,90,92,93,95,96,122space 16, 18,23, 65, 67, 79, 85,92,

93, 95, 98, 101,102,125,130, 131,166

spirit of heaviness 84-6,93style 2,4,54,55

temporality 73, 89, 90, 91,126,133,157theory 21,22thing, thing itself, thing as such, thing in

itself 22,25,36,38, 61, 67,79,85,108,125,146,150-3,157,161,166-168

Thus spoke Zaraihustra 8,45,47, 53, 54,60, 64, 65, 67, 68,70, 75, 81, 90,102,107,110,115,121

time 16,18,23,28, 32,35, 65,67,71- 3,75-7,79-81,84-93,95-9, 101,102,125,127,130,131, 151, 155-7, 162,166,168

tragedy 9,13,18,22,30,96,172tragic experience, tragic view, tragic ,

pathos 12,102,156transience 97,99,161truth 24-7,33,37,38,40,41,54,103,

112,114,115,132,135, 144,145,150-2,155,157,170

Twilight of the Idols, The 8,111,125,144,145

Untimely Meditation (David Strauss, theConfessor and Writer) 8,28

Untimely Meditation (On the Use and Abuseof History) 8,28

Untimely Meditation (Richard Wagner inBayreuth) 8,29

Untimely Meditation (Schopenhauer asEducator) 8,29

value 11,32,49,62,74,80,86,109,110,113-15,121,124,125,130,134,138,141,142,144, 147,155,159,164,168-70,172

the question of 8,107,108,111,114

Wagner 4, 9,19,20,27,29,34-6, 42,53Wanderer and his Shadow, The 8Wilamowitz-Moellendorf 14will 23,26, 62, 66, 69, 88, 94, 99,100,

111,120,128,149,156,171will to power 50,57, 59, 64, 68-74,76,

78,81,102,103,105, 106,108-12,115-17,121,122,125,133,135,136,144-8,150-65, 167-71

Will to Power, The 8, 107, 135, 141, 145world 14,19,22,23,27,65,79,80,82,

83,85,86,89,91,92,95,97,98,100,101, 111, 125, 127,133,149,154,161-3, 170, 173

see also cosmos

yearning 83, 85, 86, 89,91-6,100,103-5,119,164

Zarathustra 20,50,51,55,57,62,66,69,72,74,76-8,80,82, 86, 88, 96,102,103,104-6, 108

Date post:	12-Nov-2014
Category:	Documents
Upload:	maybeth
View:	3,152 times
Download:	17 times

Eugen Fink - Nietzsche's Philosophy

Documents