What a Philosopher Is: Becoming Nietzsche 9780226488257

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What a Philosopher Is

What a Philosopher Is Becoming Nietzsche

Laurence Lampert

The University of Chicago Press C h i c a g o & L o n d o n

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2017 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2017 Printed in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-48811-0 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-48825-7 (e-book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226488257.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lampert, Laurence, 1941– author. Title: What a philosopher is : becoming Nietzsche / Laurence Lampert. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017031739| ISBN 9780226488110 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226488257 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900. | Philosophy. Classification: LCC B3317 .L256 2017 | DDC 193—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017031739 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

It is certainly not an overstatement to say that no one has ever spoken so greatly and so nobly of what a philosopher is as Nietzsche. Leo Strauss

Contents

Abbreviations ix Introduction

1

P a r t 1 Young Nietzsche in the Service of Schopenhauer and Wagner 1

The Birth of Tragedy: Prometheus the Knowing Maker of Culture

19

2 Backgrounds of Schopenhauer as Educator

43

3 What a Philosopher Is: Schopenhauer as Educator

73

4 What an Artist Is: Richard Wagner in Bayreuth

102

P a r t 2 A New Public Nietzsche: Enlightenment Optimist 5 Backgrounds of Things Human All Too Human

127

6 The Philosopher as Free-Minded Enlightenment Optimist

155

7 An Enlightenment Optimist’s View of the Future of Morality, Religion, and Art

173

8 An Enlightenment Optimist’s View of the Transformation of Culture

189

P a r t 3 Nietzsche Enters His Mature Philosophy 9 “Sanctus Januarius”: The First Work of Nietzsche’s Maturity

205

10 The Opening of “Sanctus Januarius”

219

viii

Contents

11 The Center of “Sanctus Januarius”

231

12 Backgrounds to the Center of “Sanctus Januarius”

240

13 The Ending of “Sanctus Januarius”

270

14 Backgrounds to the Ending of “Sanctus Januarius”

284

Conclusion. The Philosophy and Art of Nietzsche’s Maturity

323

Works Cited 337 Index 343

Abbreviations

A AOM BGE BT CW D EH GM GS HH KGB KGW KSA KSB NCW PTA RWB SE TI TL UD UM WS Z

The Antichrist Assorted Opinions and Maxims Beyond Good and Evil The Birth of Tragedy The Case of Wagner Daybreak Ecce Homo On the Genealogy of Morality Gay Science Things Human All Too Human Briefwechsel, Kritische Gesamtausgabe Kritische Gesamtausgabe Kritische Studienausgabe Sämtliche Briefe: Kritische Studienausgabe Nietzsche contra Wagner Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks Richard Wagner in Bayreuth Schopenhauer as Educator Twilight of the Idols “On Truth and Lie in the Extra-moral Sense” On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life Untimely Meditations The Wanderer and His Shadow Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Introduction

What is a philosopher? That question occupied Nietzsche for his whole thinking life. While his answer grew more sophisticated and rich, also more personal, as his thinking deepened, from the beginning he held the philosopher to be the highest human type. It is important to find out from such people as Heraclitus that they once existed, he said when he was twenty-eight, because one would suppose that a striving for knowledge like Heraclitus’s would be, by its very nature, forever unsatisfied and unsatisfiable were there not a historical record of Heraclitus with his regal self-esteem, his conviction that he is the one favored suitor of truth herself (PTA 8). Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Empedocles, that is what a philosopher is, a human being driven to know, coming to know, and, with Pythagoras and Empedocles in particular, defining how a whole community should live. As these historic figures showed, a philosopher naturally generated the highest “art,” the highest making, a way of living that could structure the life of a whole people. Nietzsche’s view that it is important to find out from a philosopher that he once existed was shared by Plato who devoted his life to showing that Socrates, his model philosopher, once existed. And Plato arranged his artful dialogues chronologically to allow his attentive reader to see Socrates becoming a philosopher, a thinker on what is, and then, as a consequence, becoming a political philosopher, a thinker on what culture could become in order to support philosophy.1 Plato showed that it was important to find out that the 1. See my How Philosophy Became Socratic.

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philosopher Socrates once existed and to find out how he became the philosopher he was. Descartes had a similar view: after experimenting with many ways of introducing himself to the world but not publishing any, he chose to introduce himself through autobiography, his Discourse on the Method for Rightly Conducting the Mind, the tale of how he became a philosopher. He said his tale was a “history or if you prefer, a fable,” the becoming of a philosopher being in fact a tale fit for fable of the sort Descartes wrote.2 Through autobiography the philosopher Descartes showed that he too held that it was important to find out that such a man as he is once existed. While Nietzsche held very early that it was important to learn that philosophers existed, it was only late in his own career, just two and a half years from its end, that he himself began to report explicitly on his own existence, to write autobiographically of “Mr. Nietzsche.” He did so against a powerful inclination to privacy and for one reason only: to show the arc of thinking by which he became a philosopher, that “knower” of a special kind, the very possibility of which one could doubt, especially in modern times. He would show his reader what it was important for modern readers to learn: that a philosopher was possible in our time and that a philosopher could attempt in our time what the philosophers had always attempted in their times: to change “the measure, stamp and weight of things” (SE 3). Why did Nietzsche begin to publish autobiographical accounts of himself and his work when he did and in the way he did? He turned to explicit, public autobiography only after he had gained the chief tenets of his mature understanding and reported them in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, itself veiled autobiography. His explicitly autobiographical publication first took the limited form of one Foreword to one of his previous books; then, some months later, he decided to write Forewords to each of them. Collectively, his Forewords would show how each book took its place in the arc of his becoming a philosopher. The Forewords of 1886, Nietzsche’s first explicitly autobiographical publications, aimed to show his engaged reader that their author was a philosopher, a forerunner in experiencing what modern human beings would experience, what “you” were experiencing. He was a solitary high in the mountains, the first to see the new sun rising; by describing it, he advanced its ascent in you and in the culture shared by all moderns. My book aims to set out that Nietzsche, the Nietzsche who recognized that we need to find out that he once existed, he, the philosopher who first came to an understanding of what late 2. See my Nietzsche and Modern Times, 145–271.

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modern humanity could become as knowers of the world and as actors in the world.3

W h at to D o w i t h Things Human All Too Human?4 Nietzsche’s decision to publish autobiographical accounts of how he became himself came late in his career even though he had been writing private autobiographical sketches since he was a boy. Still, he knew when he was preparing entries for his 1878 book Things Human All Too Human that he had good reason to explain himself to the reader of this book because it marked an otherwise inexplicable break with the perspective of his first five books; so he wrote out autobiographical explanations in his workbooks: To readers of my earlier writings I want to state explicitly that I have abandoned the metaphysical-artistic views that in all essentials rule them: those tenets are comfortable but untenable. (KSA 8 23 [159] end of 1876–summer 1877).5

But he published no such notice. Nine years later, his decision to finally explain himself in autobiographical Forewords came about in a series of steps involving that very book, Things Human All Too Human. He had completed 3. In his authoritative and deeply instructive biography The Making of Friedrich Nietzsche: The Quest for Identity, 1844–1869, Daniel Blue shows that Nietzsche was a serial autobiographer from age thirteen onward. Nietzsche’s early autobiographical essays begin with “Aus meinem Leben” (KGW I 1 4 [77], pp. 281–311), which Blue calls “the masterpiece of his childhood years” (85) and to which he devotes six insightful pages (86–92). As Blue makes clear throughout his book, the self-knowledge Nietzsche gained was less from introspective dissection of his drives and inclinations than from judicious examination of the influences on him of his family, his teachers, his reading; reflecting on his past and present, Nietzsche collects himself even as a boy to face an unknown future knowing himself. 4. I adopt this uncommon translation of Nietzsche’s title from Paolo D’Iorio because it more accurately reproduces Nietzsche’s Menschliches, Allzumenschliches; see D’Iorio, Nietzsche’s Journey, 142n48. 5. In his workbooks for HH Nietzsche wrote out many other such explanations of himself, including a “Foreword” that elaborated his abandonment of his metaphysical-artistic views (KSA 8 25 [2] Fall 1877), and a different “Foreword” under the title “Wander-Book to Be Read Underway” (ibid., 23 [196], see also [156]). And he wrote an autobiographical “Epilogue” that expressed his new ambition in an image: “to stretch an electrical connection across a century from a death chamber out to the birth room of the new freedom of mind” (KSA 8 24 [10]).

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Thus Spoke Zarathustra in April 1885, and he knew while completing it that it was “dark and hidden and ridiculous to everyone,” as he said in a letter to his faithful assistant, Heinrich Köselitz (September 2, 1884)—this book, the book he regarded as by far his most important book, needed an explanation to help make it less dark and ridiculous. So he began writing an “introductory book,”6 as he said in a letter to Köselitz on January 24, 1886, after he had worked on that introductory book for more than nine months: It is very important for me to do the new edition now: just between us, I think I would not be able to come back to it again later. But the last summer and unfortunately this winter too would have been wasted on reworking this introductory book. I want to have it off my soul. A nightmare!

He calls the introductory book he wants off his soul a new edition, but it was the book that would appear that summer bearing the title Beyond Good and Evil. For its first nine months, months he now feared he had wasted, he called that book a new edition—of Things Human All Too Human. But what about the book that already bore that title? He had just told Köselitz what he would do with it: destroy it. Nietzsche wanted to buy back from his publisher all 511 remaining copies of the original 1,000 copies of Things Human All Too Human “in order to destroy them” (zur Vernichtung). Destroying those copies would allow him to publish the book he had just worked on for nine months as Things Human All Too Human, the proper introduction to prepare its reader for the world-changing book that was unavoidably dark and hidden and ridiculous to everyone. So important was Thus Spoke Zarathustra to him that he was prepared to wipe away four years of concentrated, demanding labor on Things Human All Too Human for the sake of a proper introduction to it. The nine months during which Nietzsche worked on his new book with the radical intention of destroying Things Human All Too Human came at the end of a two-year fight with his publisher, Ernst Schmeitzner, to gain possession of all the remaining unsold copies of all his books, 9,723 in all, according to Schmeitzner’s inventory list,7 a huge number that reflected Nietzsche’s be6. To reproduce Nietzsche’s emphases in his letters and workbooks, I use italics for his single underlinings and bold for his double or triple underlinings. 7. Schmeitzner to Nietzsche, July 1, 1886. All of the letters to Nietzsche are from KGB; the translations are mine.

Introduction

5

lief that Schmeitzner had failed to make his books available to the public. The earliest indication in the surviving correspondence of his intention to destroy Things Human All Too Human appears in a letter to his sister Elisabeth on August 15, 1885, a moment in his long fight with Schmeitzner when it appeared that he would in fact be able to buy back all the remaining copies of all his books.8 He gave Elisabeth strict instructions about his intentions for them in four numbered steps, doubly underlining what he wanted first: 1. I want above all to get possession of Things Human All Too Human. 1878 The Appendix to it: Assorted Opinions and Maxims 1879 The Wanderer and His Shadow 1880. these are absolutely in need of a speedy newly edited edition.

Then he listed his other books, showing no urgency whatever about getting possession of them.9 At the beginning of December 1885, Nietzsche wrote a long intimate letter to his dearest friend, Franz Overbeck, speaking first about the difficulties he had faced over the past seven years and turning eventually to his problems with Schmeitzner, Overbeck’s publisher as well, and his hopes for a possible new publisher, Hermann Credner: “I came to full agreement with Credner about a second edition of Things Human All Too Human, for which I’ve already done everything (except write the fair copy)—a whole summer’s work is invested in that!” With Overbeck too he spoke of destruction: “Schmeitzner raised an impediment by demanding the sum of 2500 Marks for the destruction of the remaining copies of the first edition. And with that, as I saw, case closed is laid forever to the possibility of a second edition.”10 8. In 1879 Nietzsche had entrusted his savings to Schmeitzner, asking him to invest the full amount of his annual pension from the university in order to accumulate savings that he could live on after his pension ran out a few years hence. This arrangement soured after four years, and he began a long fight to win back his savings and use them to buy back the unsold copies of all his books. William Schaberg sets out the full story in The Nietzsche Canon, 109–19. 9. In a September 22, 1885 letter to Köselitz, Nietzsche again spoke of “a new edition of Things Human All Too Human,” as he did in letter to Schmeitzner on October 20, 1885. All references to Nietzsche’s own letters and his drafts of his letters are to KSB by date only. 10. Reporting on that demand of 2,500 Marks in a December 6, 1885 letter to Köselitz, Nietzsche says, “an exceptional publisher has been found for the second edition of Things

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Introduction

In the middle of January 1886, Nietzsche drafted a letter to that “exceptional publisher,” Credner. Explaining first that it was not possible to work out an agreement with Schmeitzner for a new edition of Things Human All Too Human, he suggested instead that Credner publish “something new that is finished except for the fair copy . . . the second volume of Daybreak.” Instead of a second edition of Things Human All Too Human, a second volume of Daybreak, chapters 6–10: Daybreak he wanted to keep and expand, Things Human All Too Human he wanted to destroy and replace. This new intention lasted through March 25 when he told Overbeck in a letter, “Hard at work. In any case, have no concern, there will be no second volume of Daybreak.” Two days later he drafted a letter to Credner informing him that “the impossibility of publishing the new book as the 2nd part or the new extension revealed itself. It will get a title of its own (as it has a color and sense of its own).”11 He did not report the title in this draft, but in a long letter to Köselitz on the same day he drew a rectangular box to enclose the words of his newly minted title: Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft

The book prepared in the past year as a new introductory book to replace Things Human All Too Human was now Beyond Good and Evil. Its subtitle, Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, shows that it remained the new introduction to Thus Spoke Zarathustra. What was it about Things Human All Too Human that led Nietzsche to think it deserved destruction whereas Daybreak did not? No reason was necessary for an intention he never made public, and he gives no reason for what he decided to do instead of destroying Things Human All Too Human: write a Foreword for it. He begins that Foreword by stating the key fact about his early writings: one may be able to discern behind all of them a corrosive suspicion and an “unconditional difference of perspective.” Discerning that, one may also discern a search for shelter in which to protect himself against his Human All Too Human which I had prepared with hard work this summer:—finally I got a letter from Schmeitzner that took away once and for all my hopes for the ‘second edition.’ ” 11. March 27, 1886. He may never have sent a finished version of this draft letter: he wrote a draft of a letter to Credner at “the end of March” in which he again says that his new book is impossible as an “extension” of D, and he outlines a different structure for his new book.

Introduction

7

own radical difference (HH Foreword 1); he closed his eyes, for instance, to the deficiencies of Schopenhauer and to those of Wagner, whose views he advocated in his first five books. As for Things Human All Too Human, he sheltered himself there too but by “inventing ‘free minds’ ” (ibid., 2), acting as if they had existed though they had not. That’s all he says in an explicitly autobiographical way in his first Foreword, going on from there to trace the trajectory a mind must follow to genuinely free itself, a trajectory that makes Things Human All Too Human a mere beginning, an erring beginning as he leaves his reader to discern. He does not say in this first autobiographical Foreword what he will say in his Foreword to part 2 of Things Human All Too Human, that his reason for wanting to destroy it was that it hid his corrosive suspicion and his difference of perspective behind something alien, even opposite, to him, the optimism of the modern Enlightenment. Unable to destroy and replace Things Human All Too Human, Nietzsche wrote his Foreword to it in April 188612 and turned his full attention to the last stages of preparing Beyond Good and Evil for publication. Then, on August 5, the day after he received its first copies from the printer, he got a telegram from the publisher he had turned to with the hope that he would buy back the remaining copies of his books from Schmeitzner: “Finally in possession!”13 That good news led Nietzsche to take up in earnest what he had by then decided would be his next major project, the project he worked on to the end of the year: reread his previous books and write Forewords to all of them, autobiographical Forewords that would show how they collectively inscribed a coherent trajectory in his becoming what he was.

T h e F a l l 1886 F o r ewo r d s P roj e c t : N i e t z s c h e ’ s   E x pa n d e d A u t o b i o g r a p h i c a l T u r n At the start of his Forewords project Nietzsche wrote a series of letters to his new publisher, Ernst Fritzsch (who had already published his first three books). In those letters he took pains to explain to Fritzsch—who had just made a serious financial investment in his future—the unity of purpose binding his books into a single work of high importance for the European future. 12. In an August 16, 1886 letter (to Fritzsch) Nietzsche said he wrote the Foreword “in my last months of my winter stay in Nice, except for a few phrases the Engadin invented for it”—he left Nice on April 30. 13. As Nietzsche reported in a letter to Overbeck on that day, August 5, 1886.

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Introduction

The letters begin just after Nietzsche received Fritzsch’s August 5 telegram: he replied on August 7 with a letter that glows with the full flush of rekindled hope for writings Fritzsch had rescued from the “corner” in which Schmeitzner had buried them. Fritzsch clearly believed in Nietzsche’s future, and Nietzsche’s gratitude for his investment in it is evident as he describes his plan for his whole authorship to the publisher who now owned 9,723 copies of unsold books by one author. Regretting that he was not able to discuss in person what he wanted to do with the books, he set out in an uncharacteristically long letter what he planned and why. He had been set to thinking by the large number of unsold copies of each book: “it would seem to have to do with a whole new edition” whose new title pages could all say: New Edition Expanded by a Foreword (or Introduction?)

He explains that “there’s good reason” that Things Human All Too Human, Daybreak, and The Gay Science lack Forewords: “as these works were coming to be I imposed on myself a strict silence—I still stood too close, still too ‘inside’ them and hardly knew what was happening to me.” Now he knows and is therefore the one who can “best and most exactly see what is singular and incomparable in these works . . . the prelude to a moral self-education and culture that the Germans till then had lacked.” Knowing now just where those works led and where he now stands in relation to them, “I would like to turn to such retrospective and belated Forewords.” My writings represent a continuous development that is not only my personal experience and fate—I’m the first of an upcoming generation that will understand from out of themselves what I’ve experienced and will have a discriminating palate for my books. The Forewords can make clear the necessity in the passage of such a development.

Nietzsche’s personal way out of the cultural impasse of late modernity is the way out, the way out dictated by the problems themselves. And his way out was a continuous development: its stages follow one another with a necessity intrinsic to the problems. Writing to a businessman, he points out the practical advantage of the unity of his books in their development: “one who has bitten into one of my books will have to take up all of them”—buy all of them. He will spend the next winter thinking through his Forewords project, he

Introduction

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says, and “my endeavor will be to give each of these Forewords such independent worth that for its sake alone the works must be read.” Singling out Things Human All Too Human by speaking of it first, he asks Fritzsch if the remaining 511 copies are enough to represent a new edition. A little over a week later (August 16), he sent Fritzsch a copy of the Foreword to Things Human All Too Human that he had written in April, describing it as a “piece of psychology” interesting enough in itself to “give the book wings.” More importantly he says of the book he long intended to destroy that it is “an essential contribution to the understanding of my books and to the hardto-understand self-development that lies at their foundation.” The book is his “most easily understandable and preparatory book,” and, as he says in a second letter to Fritzsch that day, it is “a good and easily approached gateway to my own circle of thoughts” and should be reissued right away with its new Foreword. It is no contradiction for him to say of the book he wanted to destroy that it is “an essential contribution”: now he has a new way of introducing Thus Spoke Zarathustra—not only through a book replacing Things Human All Too Human but also through autobiographical Forewords that show that all his books, in the unity of their organic development, introduce Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Exhilarated by the promise of a new future for his writings, Nietzsche looked to his beginnings and wrote his next Foreword, his elaborate “Attempt at a Self-Criticism” for the now “impossible” Birth of Tragedy. He identified its erring with a precision that he had judged unnecessary in the Foreword he had written to Things Human All Too Human—there he had set out the whole process of freeing the mind that lay in the future of Things Human All Too Human while leaving to its reader the task of recognizing that that book stood as the erring beginning of the process. His Foreword to The Birth of Tragedy, written in Sils Maria in August, was the only Foreword he did not date and place or call a Vorrede, possibly because the degree of this book’s divergence from what he actually became was so great that it required “An Attempt at Self-Criticism” as a supplement. When he completed it he sent it to Fritzsch with a letter that again highlighted the importance of his Forewords project (August 29)—“All signs suggest that in the next years my books will occupy many”—and he described unabashedly who he thinks he is: “I am, if I may say so, by far the most independent and, in the grand style, the most thinking of thinkers in this age.” Of course he may say so; his wide reading confirmed its truth for him, and he is speaking to the publisher who invested in his future. He continued with what it meant to be that singular thinker:

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I will become necessary, one will have to make every attempt to learn who I am, to understand me, to make me “clear.” Nothing is more useful to prevent the grossest misconceptions. They point to the way I’ve taken, and said in earnest, if I myself don’t give a few hints as to how one should understand me, the greatest stupidities will undoubtedly happen

—and happened, and still happen, despite the effort he made to say who he was. Recognizing that he can’t judge the commercial advisability of reissuing all the past books of an author at the same time, he can judge exactly why it is advisable for the books themselves: because of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. And he allows himself to say to his publisher what is true of that book even if it’s shameless to say so: it is “an event without precedent in literature and philosophy and poetry and morality and so on and so on. Believe me, happy owner of this Wundertier!” For the sake of Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche wanted to destroy Things Human All Too Human and write a new introductory book for it; now, for the sake of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he wants to reissue all his books with new Forewords: to understand it “all my earlier writings have to be understood in the most serious and profound way, as must the necessity and sequential character of these writings and the development articulated in them.” The two Forewords he has already sent “reveal a true Aufklärung of me”—a telling word choice for a thinker who had, in his first five books, cast his lot with the counter-Enlightenment, and who then, in the book for which he had written his first Foreword, cast his lot with the Enlightenment. Saying that his Forewords collectively “are the best preparation for my bold son Zarathustra,” he set out his plans for the Forewords he expected to write that winter. “By spring, my whole literature, as far as it’s in your hands, will be ‘winged’ for new flight. For these ‘Forewords’ are meant to be wings!” He added parenthetically that he would not write separate Forewords for the four Untimely Meditations but had instead given a brief but necessary review of each in the Foreword to Things Human All Too Human, Volume II that he had just sent—these four “forewords,” despite their brevity, are of great importance in situating Schopenhauer as Educator and Richard Wagner in Bayreuth in Nietzsche’s development. Full of thoughts, Nietzsche adds an addendum that attests to the unity of the Forewords: he had been thinking of “a separate little book of mere Forewords” but rejected that as a “sin against taste”; still, taste would permit, even demand, a particular feature in a Foreword: “One can bear the horrible little word ‘I’ only under the

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condition that it’s lacking in the book that follows: it’s in the right only in the Foreword.”14 Nietzsche’s single-minded concern for the effect of his books is shown in his decision to destroy four years of intense labor with their innumerable great moments for the sake of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and its fabulous tale of the coming to be of the thinker and teacher—the Zarathustra!—of our time. Now, with their new Forewords, his whole series of books could show the actual coming to be of that actual thinker. Nietzsche knew that everyone would read his books as everyone in fact did. And what mattered after he achieved his mature view was that his readers be supplied with the route in to his mature thinking. Let Thus Spoke Zarathustra show the full achievement. Let the Forewords show how its author fit himself to write it, how he became that singularity. Nietzsche’s decision to write Forewords to all his books gave him an opportunity to state the reason behind his decision to destroy Things Human All Too Human without ever having to make that thwarted decision public. Having combined Assorted Opinions and Maxims and The Wanderer and His Shadow into a second volume of Things Human All Too Human, he explained in its Foreword the perspective he had adopted in both volumes. He wrote them during a period of extended and intense sickness, he says, years of acute physical suffering that naturally made the sufferer a pessimist about life—and for that reason he could not speak as a pessimist: “a sufferer has no right to pessimism.” Therefore, in these books “a sufferer and self-denier speaks as though he were not a sufferer and self-denier”; the books practice “the art of appearing cheerful, objective, inquisitive, above all, healthy and malicious.” His report builds to a single word naming the only perspective on life to which his sickness gave him a right, “optimism.” But optimism is 14. The letters from Fritzsch to which Nietzsche is here responding do not survive; it is possible that the suggestion for a separate little book of Forewords came from him, given the abrupt way Nietzsche introduces the possibility and only to dismiss it. Well after he wrote his Forewords, he recommended them in a letter to an intellectually gifted Sils acquaintance, Meta von Salis, telling her that a “preliminary orientation” to him as author can be gained by reading the sequence “from the Foreword to The Birth of Tragedy to the Foreword to” GM; they “offer a kind of developmental history” (September 15, 1887). He adds that “nothing is more contrary to good taste than to have to comment on oneself; but given the complete improbability that anyone else would be able to do me this service, I gritted my teeth and did it anyway.” A few months later (December 2, 1887) he said to Georg Brandes: “I recommend especially that you read their new Forewords . . . read in order, [they] may perhaps shed some light on me.”

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contrary to the pessimism that was his deepest tendency from the start. The book he wanted to destroy was written from a perspective not his own, alien modern Enlightenment optimism. That optimism is the modern version of what he identified in his first book as Socrates’ true crime: the belief that he, through reason, could correct existence, a belief founded on the passion that existence needed correction. Optimism in Nietzsche’s sense includes the view that we can correct existence to suit ourselves; pessimism is the view that that correction is not at our disposal, and it comes in two kinds, romantic pessimism that dreams of a magic correction not based on reason, and the pessimism Nietzsche eventually gained, “Dionysian pessimism,” the pessimism of strength that embraces existence as it is. The reason Nietzsche wanted to destroy Things Human All Too Human is founded on the core of his thought, on his fundamental disposition toward existence as such. Things Human All Too Human must therefore be read as his two Forewords to it direct: as an optimistic mask on his always fundamental pessimism, a mask he adopted in flight from a romantic pessimism and in the midst of profound physical suffering. That erring beginning to a freeing of the mind became expendable when, thanks partly to his burrowing into the underground of the human soul in Daybreak and The Gay Science, his always primary drive to inquire led to his discovery of the genuine ground of existence and the means to its affirmation, and he set them out in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.15 Completing his Forewords project some eight months after writing the Foreword to Things Human All Too Human, Nietzsche asked in the last of them, on our behalf, “What can it matter to us that Mr. Nietzsche is healthy again?” (GS Foreword 2). His Forewords as a whole show why it matters: his becoming healthy through writing his books is his becoming a philosopher in the full sense, the philosopher of our time. Nietzsche’s task of self-display, beginning with one Foreword and later continuing through all the Forewords and the 1888 Ecce Homo, began at the point at which it became necessary: after he completed Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the first full work of his maturity. His last Foreword ends his Forewords project on a homecoming: Mr.  Nietzsche’s  becoming healthy again is his becoming what he is. With his Forewords Nietzsche’s task of showing what a philosopher is to an age skeptical of the very possibility of philosophy became a display of his own 15. I treat this crucial passage on optimism and pessimism in the Foreword to HH 2 in greater detail below, pp. 150–52. Optimism and especially pessimism must be understood in the senses Nietzsche gave them; see below, pp. 22f., 38, 40f., 44–46, 59, 141f., 149–52, 263–65.

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becoming in his books. An essentially private man who treasured the ways of a hermit had to violate his privacy in the service of philosophy—while politely keeping a chair propped against the door to the privacy that did not concern his “masks,” the merely personal (GS 365). The young thinker who had said that it is important to find out from people like Heraclitus that they once existed came to recognize that it was important that his reader find out that he existed. * Given the importance Nietzsche assigned to his Forewords as guides to the continuity in his thinking, it is proper now to enter his books only through the Forewords he supplied. In the chapters that follow I treat each of the books that I consider in a dual way. First I look to the Foreword he wrote in 1886 that places the book in the full trajectory of his writings, using as well his comments on each book from his 1888 autobiographical Ecce Homo. Then guided by the Foreword and by my own primary question of what a philosopher is, I turn to the book itself. Where it is relevant I add a source that gives direct access to Nietzsche’s developing view of what a philosopher is, a source he did not know would ever be available to his readers: the voluminous workbooks in which he wrote drafts of what he intended to publish in his next book. In crucial cases the workbooks are a revelation, enhancing what he published by confirming what he indicated in his artfully crafted books.16 My book therefore contains an argument spread across the whole span of its exegetical treatment of the books selected: Nietzsche’s thinking from the beginning developed toward a natural conclusion that he understood and articulated only at the end: the philosopher as the exemplar of the highest human activity, thinking, can attain insight into the fundamental character of beings, of being as such, an always only inferential insight that is nevertheless rationally defensible and that he invites his reader to test. That insight grounds a second feature of Nietzsche’s thinking present at the beginning and fulfilled by the course of his thinking, the philosopher’s capacity to make, an 16. I do not regard the workbooks as ever taking priority over the books Nietzsche honed for publication. Their utility for my task is twofold: with respect to the early books, they contain conclusions Nietzsche preferred not to make public because they clashed with his public advocacies, and with respect to The Gay Science they reveal processes of discovery and experiments in argumentation that Nietzsche chose not to repeat in public.

14 Introduction

artist’s capacity to fashion a way of living out of a way of understanding. The argument of my book is that the course of Nietzsche’s becoming led to insight into the fundamental fact and the highest value. That argument dictates the selective character of my book. I treat in detail only those books that best show Nietzsche’s development as a philosopher and an artist: The Birth of Tragedy, Schopenhauer as Educator, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, Things Human All Too Human, Volume I, and, for the ultimate gains of his becoming, the book in which he first intimated the discovery of the key thoughts of his maturity, the fourth and final Book of the 1882 Gay Science, “Sanctus Januarius.” I treat even those select books selectively, concentrating on the parts that are particularly illuminating for my argument. I end with “Sanctus Januarius” not because Nietzsche’s philosophic development ended there—he continued to deepen and enrich his perspective as long as he kept publishing—but because the trajectory of his thinking naturally culminates in two matters reported first in “Sanctus Januarius,” that sacred January of a Book that looks back over an old “year” and out to the new “year” ushered in by his thinking. The first of those two matters is an ontological inference of a shared character in all beings that he will come to call “will to power”; the second is a consequence of that inference that could only have come after it as a human response to the ontology, a judgment of value that belongs to “art,” a human making that says to the totality of beings so understood: return, eternally return just as you are. It belongs to the new history of philosophy made possible by Friedrich Nietzsche—that theme of all my books—to make clear Nietzsche’s own place in that history. With this book on how Nietzsche became Nietzsche, I aim to show how he gradually grew into his understanding of that history and of his own place in it. His understanding begins in poetry, particularly in the Greek fable of Prometheus and in Greek tragedy as a culture-forming communal event; it grows through his intense study of the history of Greek philosophy through Plato that gave him his models for what a philosopher is as a thinker and actor immersed in a culture. The history of Nietzsche’s own self-understanding is displayed in the sequence of books he wrote as he passed through two long periods of deferring, of believing that the true bearers of culture are those whose advocate he was willing to be—Schopenhauer and Wagner first, then the thinkers of the modern Enlightenment. The end of his deferring is marked by a sequence of insights that build on his whole history as an investigator and grant him the perspective that is his mature understanding. With those gains Nietzsche became who he was, the philosopher of late modern times whose thinking and acting could be as decisive for our

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future as Plato’s was for our past. It is the coming to be of that philosopher that this installment in the new Nietzschean history of philosophy aims to chart.17 17. Paulo D’Iorio’s important and beautiful book, Nietzsche’s Journey to Sorrento, arrived too late for me to fully incorporate its insights into my own book. Prominent among its many merits is its proper periodization of Nietzsche’s career. D’Iorio shows that Nietzsche was right to maintain that there was a continuity in his becoming from his student days through his mature works. He shows that the true anomaly in Nietzsche’s publishing career is his first five books: they are a temporary break with what was most his own; the metaphysical/aesthetic view they advocate is foreign to “the analytical and disintegrating spirit of philosophy” (49) that he gained in his student years and began expressing publically in Things Human All Too Human. D’Iorio’s book joins the now growing number of writings on Nietzsche that do justice to his thought, recognizing in it the transformative new way of thinking that Nietzsche himself believed would take two centuries to be recognized for what it was.

*1* Young Nietzsche in the Service of Schopenhauer and Wagner Nietzsche as a young philology professor in Basel wrote five books in the service of a thinker and of an artist he wanted to believe were greater than himself, Schopenhauer and Wagner. Advancing them, he believed, would advance German culture and Western culture as a whole, both of which he judged to be threatened by a modern spiritual and intellectual malaise. The first of these books, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, set out Nietzsche’s view of philosophy and art in the great events of the success and failure of Attic tragedy in the tragic age of the Greeks. In Attic tragedy, the aspiration and achievement of human thinking and making reached a peak pictured mythically in Prometheus: the deepest wisdom led to the most ambitious founding, the wise founding of a people, the people that Attic tragedy could have made out of the Athenians had it not failed fortuitously at its height. That first book was followed by four Untimely Meditations, untimely because they opposed modern times on behalf of a future framed by Schopenhauer and Wagner. In Schopenhauer as Educator Nietzsche laid out what a Philosopher is, in Richard Wagner in Bayreuth what an Artist is. The four Untimely Meditations were to be the first of thirteen that would in their completeness demonstrate the necessity of overthrowing modernity and establishing the new philosophy and art. But Nietzsche brought his thirteen-book project to an abrupt end shortly after publishing the Wagner book in July 1876. That end meant in part a turn toward himself, toward the perspective he had been developing privately in workbooks and had “kept secret,” as he later said, for good reason: he judged that publishing such views would endanger the social order he advocated, not enhance it.

Chapter 1

The Birth of Tragedy: Prometheus the Knowing Maker of Culture

I completely ruined the stupendous Greek problem . . . by mixing it up with the most modern things. BT “Attempt at a Self-Criticism” 6

A F a l s e S ta r t o n t h e R i g h t P r o b l e m The first and remarkable sentences of Nietzsche’s 1886 foreword to The Birth of Tragedy, “An Attempt at Self-Criticism,” display his assurance of the scope and nature of his work: he knew his thinking to be a European event of the first magnitude. Even this now “impossible book” had been grounded in “a question of the first rank,” as evidenced by the Europe-changing events in whose midst he places it. “While the thunder of the battle of Wörth rolled across Europe,” the first major defeat of the French by the Prussian-Bavarian army on the sixth of August, 1870, the author “was sitting in some corner of the Alps,” in the Hotel Alpenclub in the Maderanertal, “writing down his thoughts about the Greeks,” his “Dionysian World View,” an essay partially taken up into The Birth of Tragedy. “A few weeks later” he was “under the walls of Metz” where the siege of August 19 through October 27 marked the decisive turning point in Germany’s favor; while performing the debilitating labor of a medical orderly he was “still obsessed with the question marks he had placed over the alleged ‘cheerfulness’ of the Greeks.” Finally, “in that extremely tense month when peace was being discussed in Versailles” from January 27 to February 26, 1871, he “made peace with himself ” and, while recovering from the diphtheria and dysentery “which had brought him back

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from the field,” reached a settled and definitive view about the “Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music.” The Birth of Tragedy, like the Franco-Prussian War, is a turning point in European history; each shifted the European center of gravity from France to Germany and, with this book, to a young German thinker preoccupied with thoughts of the Greeks.1 This bravado, justified for us by how things turned out, is justified for Nietzsche by his book’s understanding of the role of philosophy in history: Socrates, his book argues, was “the one turning point and vortex of so-called world history” (BT 15). Beginning with his first book, Nietzsche stands to German history in its becoming European history as Athenian Socrates stood to the so-called world history his thinking initiated. The first paragraph of Nietzsche’s 1886 foreword ends by defining the profound cultural question with which his book inadequately wrestled: “The finest, most beautiful, most envied race of humans ever known, the people who made life seem most seductive, the Greeks—what? even they of all people needed tragedy? More even—art? To what end—Greek art?” The second paragraph divides that question about art and “the value of existence” into its three main features as articulated in his book—key aspects of Nietzsche’s lifework. First: is pessimism as expressed in Greek tragedy necessarily a sign of cultural decay, or is there a “pessimism of strength” that springs from “a feeling of well-being, from overflowing health, from an abundance of existence”? Second: what is the meaning of “the immense phenomenon of the Dionysian,” that fundamental human experience out of which Greek tragedy sprang? Third: what is the meaning of the “things that gave rise to the death of tragedy,” of Socrates as a cultural event, or what is the meaning of “science itself, our science—what indeed is the meaning of all science, viewed as a symptom of life”? Driven to understand the spiritual situation of his age, Nietzsche from the beginning measured his present by the paradigm cultural events of the paradigm culture from which it sprang. And the features that mattered most were science and art, more narrowly Socrates and tragedy, more broadly truth and culture. As Nietzsche saw it in his first book, the problem of Socrates is the problem of the demise of the greatest of all cultures through an optimism about truth. The problem of Socrates is “the problem of science itself ” (2), now also part of the urgent modern problem. How does science stand to healthy cultural life? Science arose first in colony cities of 1. Nietzsche repeated this literary device of linking his history-making book to the historymaking war two years later when treating BT in the “Why I Write Such Good Books” chapter of EH.

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Greece and flourished in the healthiest cultural life ever, Athens in its age of tragedy; but, Nietzsche judged in 1871, science in the person of Socrates refused the Athenian celebration of tragic life and embraced mere optimism and good cheer at the promise knowledge offered. Fifteen years later, however, Nietzsche judged that his book, which “for the first time, grasped science as something problematic and questionable,” is “an impossible book . . . A first book in every bad sense of the word despite its old man’s problem,” the problem of truth and culture. Now he views his book with eyes that “are older and a hundred times more spoiled, but by no means colder.” With the same flaming intensity addressing the same issue, he can redefine the task: “to look at science through the optic of the artist, but the artist through that of life.” He does not say so here, but the optic of life he had ascertained from Life herself in the poetry of “The Dance Song” of Thus Spoke Zarathustra written three years earlier in 1883, Life who there suggests to Zarathustra that she is not “unfathomable.” If that’s the case, the artist in his highest task as the maker of culture can be looked at through the optic of life fathomed, and science can be looked at through the optic of the artist fathomed. In the compressed formula of the new foreword to The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche claims that the problems his book raised about science and art—truth and culture—and inadequately answered he can now answer more adequately on the basis of what he discovered in the interim. Nietzsche is merciless in setting out the faults of his book (2 and 3), and he is instructive in summarizing just how he treated the problem of the Dionysian (4 and 5). But it is when he restates the “task I was already daring to undertake with this book” (6) that he shows exactly what this first book aimed to initiate—and failed to initiate. He now very much regrets that he did not devise his own language for what was positive in his book but instead cast in the language of Kant and Schopenhauer “things which fundamentally ran counter to both the spirit and taste of Kant and Schopenhauer.” “But there is something much worse about the book that I regret even more than having obscured and ruined Dionysian intimations with Schopenhauerian formulas.” Worse even than ruining the way “Dionysos spoke to me”—and he “an initiate and disciple” of that god (4)? Much worse: “I completely ruined the stupendous Greek problem that opened itself for me by mixing it up with the most modern things” (6). The stupendous Greek problem is the problem of truth and culture—truth as lived and celebrated in Athenian culture, in Attic tragedy, but driven from the Greek stage and from Greek life by Socrates who corrupted Euripides and Plato. Much worse even than ruining the intimations of the god Nietzsche celebrated is ruining the problem of truth and

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culture. How did he ruin it? By mixing up that stupendous Greek problem with contemporary, merely local things, two things, “the latest German music,” Wagner’s, and “fables about ‘the German character’ ” retailed by Wagner. Wagnerism was just a form of romanticism, “the most unGreek of all possible forms of art.” And the German spirit was abdicating any aspiration to rule Europe and instead pursuing mere politics in the service of “mediocrity, democracy, and ‘modern ideas’ ”—letting Europe in its modern enthusiasms rule the German spirit with its decaying, merely commercial ideals. Nietzsche ends his “Attempt at a Self-Criticism” with a literary device he had mastered: a little dialogue in which he lets a critic speak. His critic criticizes the author by quoting him to himself, accusing him of what he has just accused himself of: “Aber, mein Herr, what in the world is romanticism if your book is not romanticism?” Nietzsche pluralizes his critic and makes an appeal: “you young romantics” you, my young readers, do me the justice of recognizing this as a book of my youth: Yes, I spoke like a romantic, imagining that it was necessary to embrace a metaphysical comfort, but it’s you who are in danger now of falling prey as I did then to metaphysical comfort and ending “as romantics end . . . as Christians”—as Wagner ended. Nietzsche ruined the Greek problem of truth and culture with what now threatens to ruin his young reader—but he stands with them in facing this problem, so he addresses “my young friends” with a challenge: Learn a new, nonromantic, non-Christian art of comfort, the art of earthly comfort introduced by Zarathustra. The cure for the book he ruined is the cure he himself found and that others, the capable young, can now find by studying his books. His attempt at self-criticism ends by inviting to self-criticism the only readers who count for him, the passionate young who long as he longed and who, tempted by romanticism, must follow the course he followed. For the 1886 edition of his first book Nietzsche not only added his new foreword but also changed its title: The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music became The Birth of Tragedy; or, Hellenism and Pessimism. This change demotes the first part of the title in favor of the second: pessimism and how to live it culturally is the genuine subject of his first book. Guided by his foreword, we can read that book to learn how he ruined the stupendous Greek problem of truth and culture by imagining, by dreaming, that the pessimistic truth, deadly truth, could be parried by a culture steeped in Wagnerian-Germanic illusion. The Greek problem continued to occupy Nietzsche throughout his thinking life as one of the permanent problems, but a permanent problem he believed his mature thinking had solved as far as a

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solution is at all possible. Guided by “Hellenism and Pessimism,” we can read his first book for its instruction on the nature of the Greek problem of truth and culture where truth is pessimism and culture is modern scientific society. Wagner cannot offer a genuine solution to the problem—can Nietzsche? As Hellenism and Pessimism, Nietzsche’s first book forces his reader to wonder how he could believe that he had achieved the genuine modern solution to that permanent problem, a Nietzsche and Pessimism solution that somehow matches for our time the Hellenism and Pessimism solution of Attic tragedy. The arc of Nietzsche’s thinking traced by his Forewords shows that he began in error on the greatest of all problems but began with the right problem. Nietzsche’s final autobiographical comment on The Birth of Tragedy deserves notice before entering the book. It is the last sentence of “What I Owe to the Ancients” in Twilight of the Idols, a last summary of what he owes to the Greeks in particular before he ends with his quotation from Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He had just spoken of his understanding of Attic tragedy and the Dionysian as the expression of being “oneself the eternal joy of becoming” and he ends: “with that I touch again the point from which I first set out—the Birth of Tragedy was my first revaluation of all values: with that I take my stand again on the ground out of which my Wollen, my Können—my wanting, my being able—grows.” Out of that beginning this is what he became: “I, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysos—I, the teacher of the eternal return . . .” Nietzsche’s last words on The Birth of Tragedy assign it its honored place within his body of writings: he owes it to these Greek beginnings that he became himself.

Attic Tragedy as the Model o f C u lt u r e F o r m a t i o n Nietzsche’s statement of what ruined his first book licenses us to plunder it for what survives his ruining it or what persists in Nietzsche’s solution to the problem of truth and culture.2 The early sections of The Birth of Tragedy 2. Nietzsche composed BT (and the separate essays that treat many of its themes) from the summer of 1870 to the winter of 1871 (to Brandes, April 10, 1888). Silk and Stern lay out in rich detail the events of these months and the particular projects and essays that engaged Nietzsche in composing his first book (Nietzsche on Tragedy, 31–61). Publication of BT was delayed because the publisher to whom Nietzsche sent it first (April 20, 1871) declined it and he had to turn to Wagner’s publisher to whom he sent it on October 13; he made changes through December. The book appeared on January 2, 1872.

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articulate that problem in a way that makes the Greeks of the age of tragedy the paradigm culture. Earlier, Homeric Greeks had an Olympian serenity born of Apollo, “the luminous one,” the god of light, of measure, of semblance and wise calm (1). But anyone encountering “these Olympians with another religion in his heart,” anyone now, will be disappointed by the lack of “moral loftiness,” of “holiness or incorporeal spirituality, or a loving gaze filled with compassion” (3)—we will be disappointed because even post-Christian atheists bring Christian expectations to the Olympian gods. They puzzle us because everything about them “speaks to us only of an opulent, yes triumphant existence, in which everything in existence is divinized, regardless of whether it is good or evil.” But wait, Nietzsche says to a spectator turning away disappointed at this seeming moral indifference: “Don’t leave. Listen first to what popular Greek wisdom has to say about this inexplicably serene existence.” And he reports an ancient Greek legend told of King Midas. This ruler hunted in the forest for a long time for a certain wise being, “Silenus, companion of Dionysos,” but failed to catch him. When Silenus finally fell into the king’s hands—when the ruler finally brought the wise man under his power—he posed the most serious of questions: “What is the very best and most excellent thing for human beings?” Dionysos’s wise companion, forced to violate his reticence, answers only after denouncing the folly of the king and his kind, who insist on knowing more than it is healthy to know: “Wretched, ephemeral race, children of chance and tribulation, why compel me to tell you what it would be most fruitful for you not to hear?” But he is compelled, he must speak his truth that it is wise to leave unspoken: “The very best is utterly beyond your reach: Not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. The second best however is for you—to die soon.” Nietzsche quoted these words of wise Silenus from a lost dialogue by the young Aristotle, regrettably lost because Aristotle, trained in the reticence of the Socratic tradition by Plato, knew how to give the forbidden wisdom a proper setting that would make it easily dismissible by those ill-served by hearing it: he allowed the forbidden words to be spoken in a dialogue that edifyingly covered over that deadly truth by proving the existence of the immortal soul. Ancient Greek wisdom kept the forbidden truth veiled from those for whom it would be deadly while allowing it to be discovered by those for whom it would do good.3 Nietzsche brings the forbidden wisdom into the open as the fundamental experience explaining Olympic serenity: “The 3. For a summary of Aristotle’s dialogue, see Croust, “Eudemus or on the Soul.”

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Olympian magic mountain now virtually opens up and shows us its roots. The Greeks knew and felt the terrors and horror of existence; in order to live at all they had to place in front of it the resplendent dream-birth of the Olympians.” The Greeks veiled from view their “enormous distrust of the titanic forces of nature” and did so by living in “the artistic middle world of the Olympians.” The Olympians “justified human life by living it themselves—the sole satisfactory theodicy!” The art of Homer succeeded in representing human mortal life as the life lived by the gods in every respect except having to die. Olympian-Homeric art “reverses the wisdom of Silenus” by keeping it out of sight. That great and rare attainment came only through “the complete victory” of Olympian-Homeric culture in its constantly celebrated overthrow of the Titans and their many monsters—the Dionysian had to be condemned as “Titanic” and “barbarian.” But it was known. Nietzsche then sets out his history of the great moment in which “the artificially dammed-up world founded on semblance and measure” finally made place for the Dionysian. Tracing the rise of Attic tragedy (5–8), he sees it as the supreme late attainment of Homeric culture, marrying Olympian serenity with Dionysian truth and celebrating that artistic unity in the religious festivals lived out by the whole population of male Athenian citizens. Attic tragedy civilized the primal force of the Dionysian, Hellenized it, transfiguring it into Apollonian measure while permitting it still to sing the satyr’s song of “the genuine truth of nature,” the terrible truth. Performed in the Dionysos theater on the south slope of the Acropolis before steep, enclosing, terraced arcs of citizens (8), Attic tragedy was the defining cultural event of Athenian life in what could, as a result, come to be called the classical age. A large fraction of the male population gave itself up to days of absorption in the deeds and words of the chorus. Drawn up into this “enchantment,” “the collective is just one sublime chorus” sharing in the suffering of the god and thereby becoming “the wise chorus which proclaims the truth from the heart of the world.” The tragic experience spread through the hovering, absorbed, enchanted public as an “epidemic” of shared celebration of Dionysian truth. It was not catharsis, release from pity and fear; it was vicarious identification with the tragic hero and, religiously, with Dionysos himself as the dying and rising god, or, abstractly, identification with life itself which generates all individuals for their brief moment in the light and claims them again in death, drawing them back into the only immortal, life itself. Attic tragedy solved the stupendous problem of truth and culture; it succeeded in being both an affirmation of life in its terrible truth and a culture-creating force shaping the whole citizenry by

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stamping in its ideals and standards through the shared lived experience of celebrants.4 Nietzsche individualizes what the experience of tragedy would have meant to the thousands of spectator-participants in the Dionysos theater by imagining the experience of one: made a “profound Hellene” by the mix of Homeric and Dionysian cultural forces in which he has been raised, he would be “uniquely susceptible to the tenderest and deepest suffering” (7). That Hellene “comforts himself ” through what the chorus exposes him to: “the wisdom of the sylvan god Silenus,” reluctantly told to King Midas, is shared with the participating thousands. Through the satyr chorus that gives voice to the Dionysian wisdom, the thousands of individual Hellenes collectively experience “an overwhelming feeling of unity leading back to the very heart of nature.” The “metaphysical comfort” offered by the existence of the chorus is that “life, despite all the changes of appearance, is at the ground of things, indestructibly powerful and pleasurable.”5 Through the tragedy the spectatorparticipant looks “boldly right into the terrible destructiveness of so-called world history as well as the cruelty of nature.” After this brief characterization of the appalling truth to which tragedy exposes its audience, Nietzsche ends his sentence with a remarkable conclusion: exposed to the truth, the spectator-participant “is in danger of longing for a Buddhistic negation of the will”—in danger of longing for the salvation Schopenhauer offered. So little is the young Nietzsche in the grip of his “first and only educator” (HH 2 Foreword 1) that he can take the negation of the will to be the danger to which tragedy exposes the Hellenic participant. From that danger, “art saves him, and through art—life.” Art is the salvation of the individual who has gazed 4. It is now estimated that about half of the 30,000 adult male citizens attended the theater festival at the Great or City Dionysia (Cartledge, “ ‘Deep Plays,’ ” 17). The festival was held in late March at the beginning of the shipping season and included powerful political-imperial elements celebrating Athens: sacrifices were held in the theater on the first of the theater days in the presence of the representatives of the cities of the Delian League who had brought their annual tribute payments to the imperial city. Also present were the war orphans who came of age that year; paraded in full hoplite armor, they took seats of honor in the front rows. As a professional philologist with a specialist’s interest in the history and nature of Attic tragedy, Nietzsche knew the details and weighed them in his thinking about a modern version of this culture-creating festival. In his reflections on Attic tragedy, Nietzsche recognized that two of its three essential elements, music and dance, are inaccessible to modern audiences, as is its being the collective experience of a large fraction of the whole citizen population. 5. Nietzsche expanded his account of the “metaphysical comfort” of tragedy in sections 17 and 18.

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into the wisdom of Silenus; art transforms him into a celebrant of life, not its negator. In the Dionysos theater wisdom and art combine to create a population of the profound who celebrate life as it is. And that experience, spread through the thousands of spectator-participants in the Dionysos theater in Athens, is what Nietzsche wanted to believe could be reproduced in modern German citizens experiencing Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk across four days in the Bayreuth Festspielhaus.

P r o m e t h e u s t h e C u lt u r e - M a k i n g T i ta n The Birth of Tragedy arrives at one of its peaks in section 9, where Nietzsche describes what Attic tragedy attained at its highest reach in Sophocles’ Oedipus and Aeschylus’s Prometheus.6 Those two figures show tragedy at its height to be both insight into the ultimate fate of humans and gods and communal affirmation of that fate in shared, community-making events. Here, Nietzsche’s understanding of human culture displays the features that will in time break through the limits of his Wagner subjection that taints both his words and his concept of heroic action in The Birth of Tragedy, for the thought and deed of Sophocles and especially of Aeschylus anticipate those of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and testify to the continuity of Nietzsche’s thought from his beginnings through his maturity. Nietzsche’s Sophocles is a profound poet and “a religious thinker” who, with his Oedipus, “wants to tell us” that the noble human being, driven to solve a riddle of nature, solves it by “gazing into the inside and terrors of nature.” But one must pay for forcing nature to reveal her secrets; Oedipus’s murder of his father and incest with his mother show that the drive for knowledge destroys “every law, every natural order, even the moral world.” Still, with that destruction, “a higher, magical circle of effects is drawn which found a new world on the ruins of the old one.” Nietzsche barely touches the new world founded by Oedipus, emphasizing instead that his fate “seems to whisper to us that wisdom, and particularly Dionysian wisdom, is an unnatural 6. Nietzsche devoted a great deal of effort to preparing his university lectures; during the semesters it occupied almost all his time. He lectured more frequently on Greek tragedy than on any other topic, paying special attention to Aeschylus whose Libation Bearers, the second of the three-part Oresteia tragedy, he taught seven times; Prometheus he taught three times, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex four times, Euripides’ Bacchae once. An instructive, complete list of Nietzsche’s courses at the university and the Gymnasium, plus the frequency with which he taught the various authors, is given in Janz, “Friedrich Nietzsches akademische Lehrtätigkeit.”

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abomination.” “ ‘The sharp point of wisdom turns against the wise; wisdom is a crime against nature’: such horrible sentences the myth proclaims to us.” Sophocles does not repudiate the crime while fully recognizing its cost; he goes so far as to put the criminal truth on stage, and Nietzsche stands with Sophocles while spelling out even more explicitly what the myth whispers. It is not Oedipus and the “glory of passivity” that dominate Nietzsche’s argument about the highest insights of Attic tragedy; Prometheus and the “glory of activity” do. Nietzsche made the overriding importance of Prometheus evident to his readers even before they opened his book: on its front cover, large and forceful, stands a vignette of Prometheus at the moment he breaks the bonds Zeus commanded to chain him to a rock in the far-off Caucasus: he has just broken one chain and will momentarily break the others—his gaze is upward in defiance and triumph.7 Complete victory is signaled by the eagle lying dead under his foot, shot through by Heracles’ arrow: Prometheus is free of the agony of having his liver eaten out every night by the eagle Zeus sent. The vignette, added late, is referred to just once in the text, in the “Foreword to Richard Wagner,” also added late. In that Foreword for the first edition Nietzsche pictured Wagner picking up his book for the first time: “you observe Prometheus unbound on the title page and read my name and you are immediately persuaded that, whatever this writing may contain, the author has something serious and urgent to say.”8 If Wagner is the singular special reader of The Birth of Tragedy, what he observes and thinks are an emblem of what each reader is to see and think: see Prometheus breaking free and think of the author assigning himself the gravest of actions at the turning of an age. For unbound Prometheus in his moment of deliverance takes up the mightiest of tasks, one with which Nietzsche was intensely familiar: he was only fourteen when he wrote his own one-act play on Prometheus, already knowing its precedents in Aeschylus and Goethe. His play depicts the decisive moment when young Prometheus is confronted by his father and told to submit to the

7. When his book was accepted for publication in mid-November 1871, Nietzsche had his friend Carl von Gersdorff commission an artist friend of his in Berlin, Leopold Rau, to draw the vignette. The woodcut that the publisher then made from it proved unsatisfactory, and Gersdorff had a second woodcut made, late in December when the book itself was almost completely set in print. 8. Martin Ruehl shows that there is a decidedly anti-Wagner element in Nietzsche’s vignette with its dead “vulture” (as Nietzsche called it), an early break with Wagner over politics, particularly the necessity of slavery; see Ruehl, “Politeia 1871,” 79–82.

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superior force and guile of Zeus.9 Refusing, Prometheus declares his rebellion by proclaiming his contempt of Zeus and his intention to supplant Zeus’s rule with his own. The play is, among other things, evidence of Nietzsche’s “fascination with the problem of the succession of the gods,”10 a problem given additional content for the boy Nietzsche by his avid investigations of the Norse and Germanic sagas of the death of the gods. In The Birth of Tragedy the boy’s fascination with the deed of Prometheus, a death and birth of gods, receives distilled, long-pondered expression. Aeschylus, like Sophocles, was both a poet and a thinker, and “what the thinker Aeschylus had to tell us” in his Prometheus, the poet Aeschylus allows us only to suspect through “symbolic image.”11 But the youthful Goethe, in “the reckless words” of his “Prometheus,” knowingly revealed what Aeschylus left to be inferred. Twenty-seven-year-old Nietzsche repeats the reckless words of twenty-five-year-old Goethe: Here I sit forming humans In my own image A race to be like me To suffer, to weep To delight and rejoice And heed you not As I do not!

Aeschylus, Goethe, and Nietzsche combine to state that “man, raising himself to Titanic heights, fights for and attains his own culture”—founds his culture by refashioning humans and gods: he “compels the gods to ally themselves 9. KGW I 2 6 [2], pp. 36–40. Entries 6 [3]–[7] consist of further drafts and notes on Prometheus. 10. Krell, The Good European, 32. 11. Contemporary scholarship has shown that it is unlikely that Aeschylus is the author of the Prometheus trilogy; instead, its style and content attest to its having been written by a later author around 440–435, two decades after Aeschylus’s death; see West, “The Authorship of the Prometheus Trilogy,” who dates it c. 437 (Studies in Aeschylus, 51–72). Marty Sulek, The Gifts of Fire, 87–91, 103–7, summarizes research on the question of authorship and makes the important argument that the Prometheus trilogy represents the thinking of the philosopher Protagoras, important partly because it expands our knowledge of the thinker Protagoras, all of whose works are lost. To keep to Nietzsche’s usage, I refer to the author of Prometheus as Aeschylus.

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with him because, in his own rising wisdom, he holds their existence and their limits in his hands.” In his first book Nietzsche already pictured the cultureforming, god-forming power of the human at its height, deeds reenacted by Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s chosen literary vehicle for his own Promethean act of creating a new weight and measure for the human and the divine. Remarkably, the great human action of fashioning humans and gods—that “veritable hymn of impiety”—is not “the most wonderful thing” in Goethe’s poem. That honor falls to a deeper feature of the culture-creating act of the founder: “its profound Aeschylean drive for justice.” More worthy of wonder than the most glorious action is the ground of that action, the motive driving the poet-thinker at the height of culture creation: the traditional motive for Prometheus’s act, philanthropy, love of humanity, has its foundation in the passion for justice. Nietzsche gives the drive for justice a precise articulation that begins with the shared human-divine crisis expressed in Goethe’s poem, “the limitless suffering of the bold ‘individual’ ” coupled with the “divine plight,” the gods’ premonition of their twilight. The Promethean aspiration of a human being to found a just new world drives the ruling gods into the most extreme neediness and the potentially ruling human being into the most profound suffering—the ruling god of the old order still has the power to command an eagle to eat out Prometheus’s liver night after night at the thought of what he is doing. The “power of both these worlds of suffering” leads in Aeschylus to a sublime outcome, a “reconciliation” built on a conviction: “the center and principal tenet of the Aeschylean view of the world . . . sees Moira enthroned above gods and humans as eternal justice.” A fatedness ultimately rules the world, and both gods and mortals must submit—to that even the revolutionary poet-thinker of the Prometheus trilogy submitted. “The astonishing boldness” with which Aeschylus “set the Olympian world on his scales of justice” has a ground: “the deep-thinking Greek had an unshakably firm foundation for metaphysical thought in his Mysteries, and all his skeptical impulses could be discharged on the Olympians”—skepticism about mere Olympians is grounded in belief in a higher power ruling them. Persuaded of the mutual dependence of humans and Olympians on Moira, the author of the Prometheus trilogy is the prototype of “the Titanic artist [who] found within himself the defiant faith that he was capable of creating human beings and of destroying at least the Olympian gods by means of his superior wisdom.”12 12. If the Prometheus trilogy is in fact written by a thinker inspired by Protagoras, then the submission to divine Moira is a figurative representation of submission to necessity, to

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Yet even “this interpretation that Aeschylus gave to the myth does not plumb its astonishing, terrible depths.” Its deepest layer can be gained only by peering through “the bright image” of “the artist’s delight in becoming, the serenity of artistic creation in defiance of all misfortune [Unheil ],” and discerning beneath it “a dark sea of sadness,” the sovereignty of becoming spoken as doom to humans by wise Silenus. To indicate the range of this understanding of the “dark sea of sadness,” Nietzsche invokes a theory of the origin of the Prometheus myth that had recently been advanced by the German philologist Adalbert Kuhn. Instead of being simply Hellenic as had been supposed, the Prometheus myth originally “belonged to the entire community of Aryans” or Indo-Europeans.13 Assuming with Kuhn that the gift of fire was fundamental to Prometheus’s act, Nietzsche states that the human command of fire, the precondition of any rising culture, “struck those contemplative original men as sacrilege [Frevel ], a theft perpetrated on divine nature.” The “very first philosophical problem” thus took the form of “a painful, irresolvable conflict between human and god.” More than that, it pushed that conflict “like a mighty block of rock up against the portal into every culture”—culture is overreach, hybris, mortal trespass on the domain of the immortals. The first philosophical problem entails a “bitter thought”: The best and highest that humanity can come to enjoy, it achieves through sacrilege and must in turn accept the consequences, the whole flood of suffering and tribulation which the offended heavenly powers must visit upon the human race as it strives nobly toward higher things.

This bitter thought “accords dignity to the crime” by rooting it in what is best in humans, the capacity to aspire and to attain; the bitter thought contains “the sublime view that active sin is the genuine Promethean virtue.”14 which even Socrates pictures himself submitting: in the Republic he prostrates himself before Adrasteia; he leaves to necessity the ultimate fate of the teaching he is about to unfold, for he has no way of knowing with certainty whether it would in the long run help or harm his friends (Republic 5.451a); see my How Philosophy Became Socratic, 310–11. 13. Kuhn, Die Herabkunft des Feuers und des Göttertranks. Kuhn’s theory was discarded by later nineteenth-century scholars but revived in the twentieth century. See Sulek (Gifts of Fire, 19–50) for a full reconstruction of the origins of the Prometheus myth that builds on Kuhn and on contemporary scholarship. 14. Throughout his account, Nietzsche contrasts this Indo-European myth of an original sacrilege with the Semitic myth of the Fall that made Eve or the feminine responsible for all human woe. As Sulek shows, recent scholarship endorses this: “Nietzsche, following Kuhn, has

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By making the highest action a virtuous crime, the Prometheus myth sets out “the ethical foundation” of Attic tragedy, “its justification of the evil [Uebels] in human life, both in human guilt and in the suffering caused by it.” Nietzsche gives an extended account of Attic tragedy’s moral justification of human suffering and, what is more, of “the misfortune [Unheil ] in the essence of things.” His praise of Attic tragedy’s moral justification of things does not infect what The Birth of Tragedy insists on in sections 5 and 24, and again in its 1886 “Attempt at a Self-Criticism”: existence and the world are justified only as aesthetic phenomena. In 1871 as in 1886, Nietzsche is far from finding any moral justification for suffering or from desiring to find it: the moral ground invoked by Attic tragedy he never invokes, however much he admired the dignity, sublimity, and wisdom of tragedy. Attic tragedy itself is on trial here, as his 1886 foreword suggests by pointing to the “hardest question” that he pursued longest: “What is the meaning, seen under the optics of life—of morality?” The optics of life for the mature Nietzsche is the optics of will to power, an optics that leads him to his own highest affirmation of life, amor fati, love of the fatedness of things, of blind necessity that resists deification as Moira. In the optics of life as will to power, justice cannot have the transcendent or ruling meaning Aeschylus gave it; instead, humans as the sole source of justice confer a new justice, allowing all things to be what they are—more than that: wanting all things to return eternally exactly as they are. In the myth of Prometheus, “the misfortune in the essence of things” reveals itself to the contemplative Aryan “as a clash of different worlds, e.g. of a divine and a human one”; splitting “the contradiction at the heart of things” into two separate realms assigns each realm a right to its action, as each does what its nature is to do. In 1871 Nietzsche can employ Schopenhauer’s notion of individuation to judge the individual itself a crime against the primal unity, but this deflection into Schopenhauer cannot be said to ruin Nietzsche’s account because in his next paragraph he employs his own categories of Apollonian and Dionysian to account for the deepest layer of the Prometheus legend, restated as “the necessity of sacrilege imposed on the Titanically striving individual.” To understand that deepest level is to sense the “un-Apollonian” character of this “pessimistic view of things,” for Apollo wants to bring “rest to individual beings precisely by drawing boundaries between them”; by insisting on “self-knowledge and measure,” he makes these boundaries “the been shown to be fully justified in viewing the Promethean myth as essentially Indo-European in character, and even in assigning it the same importance for that cultural tradition as the myth of the Fall in Genesis has for the Semitic tradition” (Gifts of Fire, 50).

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most sacred laws in the world.” Against the threatening rigidity to which Apollo’s law may lead, “the suddenly swelling Dionysian tide” rises. To picture this great event, Nietzsche invokes the titanic urge of another Titan, Prometheus’s brother, Atlas, in his defining act of bearing the whole world on his shoulders: titanic Atlas embodies the urge of the titanically striving individual to carry all beings on his back, to carry them higher and farther, to offer them all a justification and meaning, the urge that is “the common feature shared by the Promethean and the Dionysian.” That “double essence of Aeschylus’ Prometheus”—the titanic brothers’ separate actions merged as the Apollonian and Dionysian merge—“could therefore be expressed this way: ‘All that exists is just and unjust and in both ways is equally justified.’ ” The world as product of the titanically striving individual is Nietzsche’s world to the end, with no need to split the world into divine and mortal to find justice in it, and no need for a theodicy: the world is justified as aesthetic phenomenon. To present his mature view, his ultimate aesthetic cosmodicy, Nietzsche composed the mythic-autobiographic Thus Spoke Zarathustra with the historical Persian Zarathustra returning as the titanically striving individual who shows the way to his ultimate understanding and ultimate task, the fashioning of humans and gods that fell to the mature Nietzsche as the task of a Prometheus unbound. And Nietzsche’s world resembles Aeschylus’s world in the fundamental respect: as a pessimism rooted in the Dionysian.15

P ro m e t h e a n S o c r at e s The Prometheus tragedy, with its clash of a resolute Prometheus and a terrified Zeus, puts on stage the wider historic event acted out in Aeschylean and Sophoclean tragedy: “Dionysian truth takes over the entire territory of myth in order to symbolize its own knowledge”; “the Homeric myths are reborn to a new life” within “a yet deeper way of viewing the world” (10)—Zeus lives on ruling, seeming to rule, a world become Dionysian. Still, for all its promise and profundity, the expropriation of Olympian myth for Dionysian truth is brief, for “Greek tragedy perished.” Nietzsche’s pages take on drama as he prepares his stage for the arrival 15. The Prometheus drama continued to interest Nietzsche: in 1874 he wrote drafts that appear to list events and characters for a new Prometheus play (KSA 7 38 [1]–[7]); the 1882 GS (300–301) contains an important reflection on Prometheus as a paradigm knower whose knowing is creating; see Picht, Nietzsche, 226–38. On Prometheus in Nietzsche, see also Thatcher, “Nietzsche and Byron.”

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of the destroyer of Greek tragedy. The magnitude of the deed—ruin for the greatest of all cultural achievements, Dionysian truth celebrated by a highly civilized population amid the highest peaks ever attained of visual and literary arts—defies even Nietzsche’s power of description, and he turns instead to identifying the source of ruin. The initial identification is an accusation: “What did you want, wicked Euripides, when you sought to force this dying figure to do slave’s work for you once more? He died at your violent hands.” The death of Attic tragedy appears first as “a suicide,” with Euripides its perpetrator (11). He brought the spectator onto the stage and broke the spell of communal absorption in the tragic hero who masked the god Dionysos. That spectator was not everyman but Euripides himself as thinker, rational critic who “held reason to be the real root of all enjoyment and creation.” Did no one else share his critical judgment against his great predecessors? Nietzsche pictures Euripides searching for someone like himself in his suspicions and finally finding “the other spectator who did not understand tragedy and therefore had no respect for it.” One other was enough, for “in alliance with that one, [Euripides] could dare to embark on an enormous campaign against the works of art of Aeschylus and Sophocles.” Not naming that one, the prosecutor describes the crime. “The deepest drive of Euripides  .  .  . was to expel the original and all-powerful Dionysian element from tragedy and to rebuild tragedy in a new and pure form on the foundations of a non-Dionysian art, morality, and worldview” (12). But great Euripides, “in the evening of his life,” came to recognize what he had done and to repent: the Bacchae is his cry of repentance. Having forcibly attempted to eradicate the Dionysian from Hellenic life, aged Euripides came to see that it was not possible: “the god Dionysos is much too powerful.” The Bacchae “is a protest against the feasibility of his own deepest tendency.” But it was too late. Dionysos had been driven from the tragic stage and not by Euripides who proves to be “merely a mask.” No, “the deity who spoke out of him was not Dionysos, nor was it Apollo, but an altogether newborn daemon called Socrates.”16 So the death of Attic tragedy was a murder and Socrates the murderer. As Nietzsche turns “to take a closer look at this Socratic drive,” he is not in the least concerned with what mattered most to Athenians: Socrates’ corruption of Alcibiades and Critias and what Athenians believed their corruption did to weaken and destroy the rule of their greatest of Hellenic cities. Nor is 16. Socrates (469–399) was some ten or eleven years younger than Euripides (480–406), whose Bacchae was first produced posthumously in 405.

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he concerned with what mattered most to Aristophanes: Socrates’ heedless exposure of the deadly truth to old simpletons like Strepsiades and clever youth like Pheidippides, whom it would liberate to low crimes and high crimes. Nietzsche is concerned with Socrates’ corruption of Euripides and their shared destruction of the central engine of the Dionysian high culture achieved in Athens, tragedy, Dionysian truth lived by the Athenian public in their communal celebration of tragedy. “Aesthetic Socratism is the murderous principle” that caused Dionysian tragedy to perish at the hands of Euripides (12). Socrates is “the new Orpheus who rises up against Dionysos”—against the god himself, not simply the acting out of his truth on stage. And the new Orpheus, though “fated to be torn apart by the maenads of the Athenian court of justice,” succeeded in driving out “the mighty god himself ”—mortal Socrates forced the god Dionysos to “save himself in the depth of the sea, that is, in the mystical waters of a secret cult that gradually spread across the entire world,” the cult of Dionysos that defied his essence by making him a guarantor of a happy life after death. To define the Socratic Tendenz Nietzsche emphasizes the Socratic Instinkt. “Only by instinct”—Nietzsche uses against Socrates the phrase Socrates used in Plato’s Apology to refute “existing art and existing ethics,” for he judged that if instinct ruled, “a lack of insight and the power of delusion” ruled, and if that ruled, “what exists is inwardly wrong and objectionable.” That negation led Socrates to his world-changing conclusion: he “believed that he was obliged to correct existence”—the desire to correct existence itself will remain the core of Nietzsche’s understanding of Western civilization’s course after Socrates, even though he greatly deepens his understanding and transfers its primary originating force to Plato. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche sees Socrates, that one man, step forth with a demeanor of disrespect and superiority as the forerunner of a completely different form of culture, art, and morality— and in the midst of a world in which we would count ourselves supremely happy if we, in awe, could touch even the hem of its garment. (13)

That thought launches the young Nietzsche in love with the Greeks into eloquent anguish: This is the monumental occasion for reflection that befalls us whenever we contemplate Socrates . . . the most questionable appearance of Antiquity. Who is this who dared, as a single man, to deny the Greek essence

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which, as Homer, Pindar and Aeschylus, as Phidias, as Pericles, as Pythia and Dionysos, as the deepest abyss and the highest height, is certain of our astonished worship?

Who is he? The answer lies in Socrates’ instinct, “the daimonion of Socrates,” that “wonderful phenomenon” that came to him only to “warn him to desist . . . to hinder conscious understanding.” Through the action of the daimonion, “the wisdom of instinct shows itself in [a] completely abnormal nature,” for “in all productive people instinct is precisely the creative-affirmative force whereas consciousness makes critical and warning gestures.” In Socrates the reverse occurs: “instinct is the critic and consciousness the creator.” This reversal of the natural means that Socrates had, on the one hand, “a monstrous lack of any capacity for mysticism” and, on the other, was possessed of a “logical drive . . . completely incapable of turning against itself.” In the Platonic writings, that “enormous drive-wheel of logical Socratism” appears as something “behind Socrates,” something to which he is obedient and which he expressed “in the dignified seriousness with which he asserted his divine calling.” His assertion brought him into conflict with the Athenian state, compelling him to insist on death at its hands. And that death, that heroic stance taken by the servant of an unnatural instinct, transformed Greek culture: “The dying Socrates became the new, hitherto unknown ideal of noble Greek youth.” One particular Greek youth, Plato, “with all the passionate devotion of his enthusiastic soul, threw himself down before this image” of the dying Socrates. And through Plato’s writings the dying Socrates became the hero on whom the whole of the Western world turned. Wicked Euripides drove Dionysos from the Athenian stage, but intoxicated Plato drove a cultural revolution that transformed the West. Plato’s dialogues overturned the highest culture ever attained in the way a culture is best overturned: through a new ideal. That ideal inspired all “noble youths” for whom aspiration, emulation, and surpassing were the only things that counted; collectively that new nobility redefined culture. Euripides used Socrates to help justify his antiDionysian tragedy; Plato made Socrates the new Prometheus. When Nietzsche turns to Plato in section 14, he turns away from Socrates’ effect on the past—Euripides’ ruin of Attic tragedy—toward the future Socrates fated, the total cultural future of the West, for Nietzsche says that the influence of Socrates, his “shadow,” spreads “down to the present moment and even into all future time” (15). Nietzsche’s account of Socrates’ effect on Plato in The Birth of Tragedy makes a cardinal point that he will modify in its particulars but maintain throughout his maturity, an interpretation of philosophy’s

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present task based on the sweep of Western culture from the demise of the Homeric down to our present. His first book exercised a “careful and hostile silence toward Christianity” (“Attempt” 5), but his lifelong view was that postHomeric Western culture became Platonic even or especially after it turned Christian and that Platonism continued to rule even after the modern revolt, which merely transmuted Christian virtue into the secular virtues of modern times. The spiritual situation of our singular present, Nietzsche judged from the start, is a world-historical crisis brought on by the demise of what Socrates initiated. That demise made philosophy’s present task clear: philosophy must respond intelligently to an unparalleled cultural crisis created by philosophy and its religious and cultural effects. That intelligent response Nietzsche assigned to himself from the beginning.17 Imagining Socrates with a single Cyclops eye and hence lacking depth perception, Nietzsche accuses him of being unable to see into the Dionysian depth of tragedy (14). Using Plato’s Phaedo as his guide,18 he says that Socrates grasped only one kind of poetic art, “the Aesopian fable,” and he understood that as he did tragedy, as addressed only to “those who are not very bright.” So Socrates required his disciples to abstain from poetry: Plato burned his tragedies when he took up with Socrates. But in Plato, the “unconquerable propensities” of art plus the overwhelming power of Socrates’ character combined “to force poetry itself into new, hitherto unknown channels”—the Platonic dialogue was born. In Plato “artistic necessity” compelled the “creation of an artform inwardly related to the existing artforms he repudiated.” Plato the thinker condemned dramatic poetry and all imitative poetry as a copy of a copy and therefore belonging “to a sphere even lower than the empirical world,” while he himself aimed to transcend the empirical world to the “idea” beyond it. Plato the poet succeeded, making the Platonic dialogue with 17. Nietzsche’s silence on Christianity in BT not only distorted the essential history but also made it seem that his deep opposition to Christianity arose only late. In fact, what arose late is only his recognition of the need to denounce Christianity publicly and forcefully: earlier he believed it would wither away without such help. 18. Nietzsche regularly taught Plato’s Phaedo to his Gymnasium students in Basel. He also conducted four university courses on Plato: “Introduction to the Study of the Platonic Dialogue,” winter semester, 1871–72; “Plato’s Life and Writings,” winter semester, 1873–74; “On Plato’s Life and Teachings,” summer semester, 1876; and “Plato’s Apology,” summer semester, 1878. Plato’s Symposium had been his favorite dialogue in his youth when he carried a copy of it in his pocket. In his last year at Schulpforta, when he was nineteen, he wrote an essay on the relation of Alcibiades’ speech to the other speeches (KGW I 3 17 [12] (April–September 1864), pp. 384–88).

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its mixture of all existing styles and forms “the barge on which shipwrecked ancient poetry saved herself and all her children . . . timidly submitting to the single pilot, Socrates” (14). Plato, with his dialogues as “infinitely enhanced Aesopian fable[s],” made poetry ministerial to Socratic philosophy, its “handmaid.” Plato thus served what Nietzsche calls “the optimistic element in the nature of dialectic,” its celebrating a little victory in every conclusion and its supposing that it breathes only the air of cool clarity and consciousness. Optimism, fundamental to the Socratic and antipodal to the pessimistic wisdom of tragedy, took over Greek culture, shifting it away from its wise pessimism to the optimism embedded in the three Socratic maxims that Nietzsche calls “the three basic forms of optimism”: “virtue is knowledge; sin comes only from ignorance; the virtuous are the happy.” The optimistic conviction that humanity can, through knowledge, deliver itself from ignorance and suffering degrades “the transcendental justice of Aeschylus” by calling in a “deus ex machina” to set things right: the Socratic deus ex machina is the rational intellect that supplies the necessary knowledge to avoid all “sin” or error and render humanity happy. Socratic optimism justifies life but only as corrected, as comprehensible and moral; Socratic optimism with its new deus ex machina opens the new chapter of Western history written by theoretical man as moral man. Optimism and pessimism remained Nietzsche’s fundamental terms for the two basic and opposed dispositions toward life. In Nietzsche’s use they go far beyond conventional modern hopes and fears about how the future will turn out. As he exclaims in Ecce Homo about the Dionysian and the Socratic in The Birth of Tragedy: “How high I had leaped away from the wretched superficial chatter about optimism versus pessimism!” Optimism and pessimism reach down to the instincts where a “pessimism of strength” (BT “Attempt” 1) can affirm life as it is whereas an optimism like the one he attributed to Socrates can demand the correction of life and believe it possible. The words also designate for him opposite stances toward possible knowledge of the world, pessimism recognizing the fundamental limits on knowledge, optimism affirming some Socratic or Platonic access to knowledge of the world as it is, the presupposition of correcting it. Nietzsche’s criticism of Socrates and his rational optimism forces him to raise the question of where the “phenomenon of Socrates points,” because, given the success of the Platonic dialogues, “we are certainly not in a position to grasp it as a merely disintegrative, negative force.” What is its positive element? Nietzsche turns exegete, looking to a passage in Plato’s Phaedo that refers, he says, to “a profound life experience of Socrates himself that compels

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us to ask if in fact there exists between Socratism and art necessarily only an antipodal relation and if the birth of an ‘artistic Socrates’ would be altogether a contradiction in terms.” In the Phaedo Socrates reports a recurring dream in which the same figure appeared saying, “Socrates, make music!” For Nietzsche that command is evidence of “a lack, an emptiness, a half-reproach, a perhaps neglected duty”; it is “the only sign of any misgivings [in Socrates] about the limits of logic”; it bespeaks a gnawing “perhaps” that ends section 14: “Perhaps art is even a necessary correlative and supplement of science?”19 Nietzsche’s question of the relation of art and science could not be more important: in it lies enfolded “all posterity down to the present moment, yes, out into all futures” (15). Section 15 is the decisive section because it argues that Socrates is history’s prototype of the wholly rational man, optimistic, theoretical, scientific man—even in him a dream commands him to make music, even in him a shrunken remnant of the other inextinguishable spiritual drive in humans speaks: the drive to make, to create music and poetry. Because Socrates’ corruption of Plato made the theoretical drive culturally dominant, and because the artistic drive will always insist on its right to rule, Socrates is the person in whom the spiritual warfare of all futures first broke out, the war between science and art. From then till now there would never not be a problem of Socrates. As “the archetype of the theoretical human,” Socrates had no higher passion than to unveil truth, “an ever happy uncovering that succeeds through his own efforts.” But its success is always limited; it can turn unhappy because there always lies another still-veiled step beyond. Despair caused by recognizing the impossibility of ultimate success could be avoided in Lessing’s way, that “excess of honesty” with which he dared to announce “that he cared more for the search for truth than for the truth itself—and thus revealed the fundamental secret of science.” Or despair could be avoided by what Nietzsche had already argued was Socrates’ way, “the profound delusion . . . the 19. The view of Western history Nietzsche will build on this “perhaps” in sections 14 and 15 is roughly the view he maintains throughout his thinking life; the validity of that view is independent of his exegesis of the Phaedo, which is open to question: the poetry reported at the start of the Phaedo, Socrates’ prelude to Apollo and versification of Aesopian fables, can be read as a foretaste of poetry to come in the Phaedo, Socrates’ prison poetry on the grand scale, his proofs for the immortality of the soul and his myth of the geography of the earth that the immortal soul inhabits. Reading the Phaedo as edifying poetry accords with the later Nietzsche, a “complete skeptic about Plato” (TI Ancients 2) skeptical of his “pious fraud” as a thinker who “wanted to teach as true what he did not hold as even conditionally true . . . the separate existence and separate immortality of ‘souls’ ” (KSA 13 14 [116] Spring 1888).

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imperturbable belief that thought, following the web of causality, reaches down into the deepest abysses of being and that it is capable, not simply of understanding existence, but even of correcting it.” That delusion is “an instinct that belongs inseparably to science.” But because it is a delusion and because science is inquiry, it is ever again threatened by the recognition of its illusory base, and then, if it is not to despair, science “must turn into art—which is really the aim of this mechanism.” Socrates became the archetype of the theoretical human because he was the first to be capable not just of living by the instinct of science but, “what is far more, also of dying by it.” The ideal of the dying Socrates became “the heraldic shield over the portals of science,” for Socrates’ heroic death reminded everyone of the purpose of science, “to make existence appear comprehensible and thereby justified.” This theodicy, Socrates’ rational justification of life, supplanted tragedy’s moral justification. Only incidentally does Nietzsche acknowledge a prominent feature of Socrates’ speech: where reason proved unable to make existence appear comprehensible, that end “must ultimately be served by myth.” Nietzsche minimized this artistic, myth-making Socrates in The Birth of Tragedy; there he is the archetype only of a deluded scientific spirit. The ideal of the dying Socrates as a martyr for rational optimism was elevated in the Socratic schools that began in Greece and became “a universality, a common network of thought that spread over the whole globe with the prospect even of encompassing the laws of the entire solar system.” Nietzsche’s hostile silence toward Christianity in The Birth of Tragedy is evident here: from the “Socratic man” of Greece and Rome, he leaps to the present, mentioning neither Christianity nor the modern philosophic and scientific revolution that broke its hold over Western civilization. “At present, science, spurred on by its powerful delusion”—that it can understand and even correct existence—“is rushing unstoppably to its limits where the optimism hidden in the essence of logic will founder and break up.” Modern science, Nietzsche wanted to believe in 1871, is losing its energy, an event he pictures in the experience of a young science enthusiast: that “noble and gifted person, unavoidably and before the mid-point of his existence, encounters boundary points on the periphery” of science where, “to his horror, he sees how logic curls up around itself and bites its tail”—he learns the horrifying truth about what he lives for: truth is founded on illusion. For such a knowledge-driven person, “a new form of knowledge breaks through, tragic knowledge” that knows it limits, knowledge “that, simply to be endured, needs art as protection and medicine.”

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Optimism, whose overcoming Nietzsche pointed to in section 15, becomes his topic again when he turns to two consequences of “its delusion of limitless power” that are bound to destroy it (18). The first is the dire social consequence of its “belief in the earthly happiness of all.” While Socratic or scientific culture “requires a slave class” for it to exist, its optimistic view of life denies the necessity of such a class, and its belief in “the dignity of man” and “the dignity of labor” teaches the slave class to “regard its existence as an injustice” and to “take revenge.” A second consequence is intellectual, and it destroys the foundational belief of optimism, that it can know and therefore correct the world: “the enormous courage and wisdom of Kant and Schopenhauer” allowed them to win “the most difficult victory, victory over the optimism concealed in the essence of logic, which is in turn the substratum of our culture.” With its substratum refuted, the present age can revive “a tragic culture” in which “wisdom takes the place of science as the highest end.” After that affirmation comes a paragraph that Nietzsche singled out for ridicule in his 1886 foreword, his “dragon-slayer” paragraph with its desire for “a new art, the art of metaphysical comfort”; in 1886 he judged this paragraph “a piece of anti-Hellenism and romanticism, ‘as intoxicating as beclouding,’ in any case a narcotic” (“Attempt” 7). He condemns himself for falling prey to a ridiculous romantic dream, and he warns his “young romantic” readers that they are in danger of ending that way, seeking metaphysical comfort instead of the “this-worldly comfort” they should learn. But in 1871 Nietzsche held that science with its Socratic delusion is collapsing, thus opening the way for a rescue of modern culture by art. This historic moment, called forth in section 15, is the rhetorical high point of Nietzsche’s first book. Its particulars are marred by the all too parochial view of a Wagner enthusiast, and an all too narrow view of science, and an all too inarticulate hostility to Christianity, but the experience of standing at an unprecedented revolutionary moment in human history and feeling called to action as the singularity who came to understand it—that is definitive of Nietzsche’s sense of himself. At the end of section 15, the end of his brief sketch of Western history, he pictures himself “knocking, deeply moved, at the gates of the present and future,” asking if the turn to tragic resignation and the need for art will lead “to new configurations of genius and precisely to the music-making Socrates,” or will ‘the present’ be torn apart by its restless, barbarian drive and whirl?— Concerned but not disconsolate, we stand apart for a while, as contemplatives to whom it is granted to witness these enormous struggles and transi-

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tions. But ah, it is the charm of these struggles that he who beholds them must also take part and fight!

He beholds them, he is the contemplative who witnesses our present as the outcome of “the one turning point and vortex of so called world history,” Socrates. And who is he himself ? In his “Foreword to Richard Wagner,” written late and last, in December 1871, just before his book was published on January 2, he addressed Wagner and pictured him picking up his book for the first time, seeing the vignette of Prometheus unbound on its title page, and being persuaded that its author had something serious and urgent to say. He speaks too of “anyone” who mistakenly thinks of his book as a contrast between patriotic seriousness and an aesthetic game. If that anyone, wrongly thinking of art as mere recreation compared with the great political movements reordering Europe in 1871, really read his book, he would be astounded at the dimension of the problem it sets out and at the hope it raised as a “vortex and turning point.” Those words, vortex and turning point, say who Nietzsche thinks he is: the thinker who, with the artist Wagner, sets in motion a turning of the world potentially as world-reordering as the one set in motion by the “turning point and vortex” that was Promethean Socrates. Nietzsche ruined his first book by misunderstanding the stupendous Greek problem of truth and culture and tying his hopes to something unworthy of hope, something merely local and deeply infected by the worst passions of that localism. As he spelled out his initial hopes in the remaining ten sections of The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, Nietzsche lavished praise not only on Schopenhauer and Wagner but even on Luther (23), whom he later judged a “calamity of a monk” (EH 3 “Wagner” 2), and even on the German Reformation (23), that beginning of modern Christian fanaticism that he later said cost Europe the Renaissance, an event that rendered “the whole labor of the ancient world in vain,” an event “so tremendous” that even he had “no word” for his feeling for it (A 59). Ruined his first book may be, but as the beginning of his authorship The Birth of Tragedy stands as an instructive indicator for what he held the thinker and the artist to be as founders of culture, pointers to what he himself eventually became. The other two early books that I will consider, Schopenhauer as Educator and Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, offer even clearer instruction on the philosopher and the artist. What Nietzsche learned from reading Schopenhauer, his “one and only educator,” was his vocation as a philosopher. What he learned from his proximity to Wagner was what an artist can aim to make.

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Backgrounds of Schopenhauer as Educator

in the third Untimely Meditation . . . I was . . . already, in my own person, in the midst of moral skepticism and dissolution, that is to say, as much in the critique as in the deepening of all hitherto pessimism— HH I I Foreword

T h e 1886 “ F o r ewo r d ” to S c h o p e n h au e r a s E d u cato r Entering Schopenhauer as Educator, the third of the Untimely Meditations, through the portal Nietzsche provided in 1886 requires reading the Foreword to Things Human All Too Human, Volume II. He chose not to write separate Forewords for the four Untimely Meditations while writing Forewords for the “new editions” of his already published books, but he did need to explain just where the four belonged in the trajectory of his writings. For that it was enough to write a brief orienting notice for each and place them in the Foreword to the second volume of Things Human All Too Human. That was the best place remaining for them because the Foreword to the first volume of Things Human All Too Human, their natural place, had already been written, and it had its own singular task: to report on Things Human All Too Human as his erring break with his preceding books. When he did finally decide to write Forewords for all his books, he wanted to highlight a fact that was much deeper than that break and far transcended it in importance: his continuity of thought on what mattered most, the passion for truth and what it could discover.

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These brief “forewords,” written in Sils Maria in September 1886, begin by characterizing all his published work: he worked through to conclusions in his thinking long before the desire awoke to expose them; “all of my writings with a single, admittedly essential exception, are to be dated earlier—they always speak of something ‘behind me.’ ”1 The first three Untimely Meditations, he maintains, go back to experiences preceding even The Birth of Tragedy, the first two back to his student days. With respect to the third, Schopenhauer as Educator, he says first that he would now express his “reverence” for his “first and only educator . . . much more strongly, also more personally.” Then, reviewing his 1874 book and speaking of “my own development,” he says that “I was  .  .  . already in the midst of moral skepticism and dissolution, that is to say, as much in the critique as in the deepening of all hitherto pessimism—, and already believed ‘in nothing at all,’ as people say, not even in Schopenhauer.” His underlined statement on pessimism, added later (see KSA 12 6 [4]), helps define moral skepticism or dissolution;2 he trusts his reader to recognize pessimism as a marker for what characterizes all his later writings—not the superficial pessimism about the future opposed to superficial modern optimism but a deeper pessimism regarding the possibility of knowledge and the nature of what can be known about the world and the human, the broad sense that the word pessimism had for him even in The Birth of Tragedy. But how could he prove his claim, a claim that he had covered up his true views? His proof is an appeal to a writing no reader could have heard of because he had not published it and never did publish it: “On Truth and Lie in the Extra-moral Sense.” That writing was “kept secret” (geheimgehalten). He gives it no date, but his workbooks show that he finished preparing it for publication in June 1873, more than a year before Schopenhauer as Educator was published. He dictated the finished version to his friend Carl von Gersdorff, who copied it out in a fresh workbook in a flowing, Latin-lettered script of schooled formal penmanship, apparently meant as the fair copy for a publisher. But he got deflected into a different task, mainly at Wagner’s request, it seems, and began publishing critiques of contemporary culture, the Untimely Meditations that began in the spring of 1873 with the attack Wagner 1. The single exception must be Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 2. Dissolution is Auflösung, which Hollingdale, the translator of HH, translates as “destructive analysis”; it refers to Nietzsche’s already present historical or genealogical method of tracing the origins of concepts, dissolving them in the acid of their origins.

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encouraged on David Strauss.3 Studying “On Truth and Lie in the Extramoral Sense” does in fact prove that Nietzsche came early to his moral skepticism and dissolution, his critical deepening of pessimism.4 By showing exactly what he means by skepticism, dissolution, and pessimism, “On Truth and Lie” puts Schopenhauer as Educator—and all the Untimely Meditations—in an entirely different light: they aim at cultural reform, not at truth.

“On Truth and Lie in the Extra-moral Sense” Six months before he dictated “On Truth and Lie” Nietzsche wrote a brief essay, “On the Pathos of Truth,” that already stated aspects of his form of pessimism. That essay was the first of “Five Forewords to Five Unpublished Books,” his gift for Cosima Wagner on Christmas 1872. In a letter to Erwin Rohde he singled it out as the one “major piece” among the five ( January 31, 1873). Never intending to publish this brief essay, Nietzsche used its main points in “On Truth and Lie.”5 “On the Pathos of Truth” is an essay on the philosopher in his singularity among the great, all of whom are fated to fame. “It is important to discover that such people once lived,” Nietzsche says of the philosophers, because they are almost unimaginable in their striving for knowledge, which “seems in its nature intrinsically unsatisfied and unsatisfying” (757/63).6 Heraclitus the solitary, but also Pythagoras and Empedocles who were led back to human beings by their compassion, prove the possibility that “self-love” can be “the love of truth, and this truth tells [Heraclitus] that the immortality of humanity needs him and not he the immortality of 3. He sent the manuscript of “On Truth and Lie” to his publisher Fritzsch on June 25, 1873, along with the manuscript for the first Untimely Meditation, David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer. 4. Schlechta and Anders, in a book with the suggestive subtitle “On the Concealed Beginnings of His Philosophy,” show that Nietzsche’s skepticism can be traced as far back as his first reading of Schopenhauer in November 1865, when he was twenty-one (Friedrich Nietzsche, 50–59). 5. As Daniel Breazeale notes in footnotes to his translation, Nietzsche also used passages from “On the Pathos of Truth” in the 1874 UD. For “On the Pathos of Truth” and “On Truth and Lie” I use Breazeale’s translations in Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth, modifying them for greater literalness. Translations of both are also found in Nietzsche, Writings from the Early Notebooks, 248–64. 6. Nietzsche modified this sentence for PTA 8. My references are to the pages of KSA 1/ Breazeale.

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the man Heraclitus” (759/65). Yet “a demon without feeling” might perhaps respond to Heraclitus’s great self-affirmation with a speech that Nietzsche used with slight changes to open “On Truth and Lie”: Once upon a time in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowledge. It was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of world history, but only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star cooled and solidified, and the clever beasts had to die. (759/65)

They died cursing truth, Nietzsche says in the original version, because they “discovered with great reluctance that they had understood everything falsely.” Without explaining why that was so, Nietzsche states his pessimism about knowledge: This would be the fate of humanity if it were only a knowing animal. The truth would drive him to despair and destruction: the truth that he is eternally damned to untruth. All that is fitting for humanity however is belief in attainable truth, in trusted, enclosing illusion. Does he not actually live by means of a continual process of deception? Does nature not conceal most things from him, even the nearest things? . . . He is locked within his consciousness and nature has thrown away the key. (760/65)

Only in the larger “On Truth and Lie” will Nietzsche make clear his grounds for his epistemological skepticism and his view that humanity necessarily lives within inescapable illusion; and he will expand on what humanity is in addition to being “a knowing animal,” a basic matter touched in a most telling way in “On the Pathos of Truth”: Oh, the fatal curiosity of the philosopher, who demands just once to peer out and down through a crack in the chamber of consciousness: perhaps he will suspect how a human being is sustained by what is greedy, insatiable, disgusting, pitiless, murderous while in the indifference of his ignorance it is as if he were hanging on in dreams to the back of a tiger.

Peering into that crack, the philosopher “suspects” that humans are sustained by what is base or criminal—a taste of the “dissolution” that was already part of Nietzsche’s method.

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‘Let him hang on,’ cries art. ‘Wake him up,’ cries the philosopher, in the pathos of truth.7

The knowing animal is also the artful animal, the making being who fashions his lived world, the dream world within which alone he can dwell. Art wants to sustain that dream world, but the philosopher, driven into a magic slumber by his passion for truth, risks the whole of humanity, shaking it awake from the dream world art created, the world of illusion that makes life seem worthwhile. But Nietzsche adds that the philosophers actually did produce something fortunate for dream-needy humanity, for they did not do what they thought they were doing, shaking dreaming humanity awake: Yet he himself [the philosopher] is sinking in a still deeper magic slumber while he believes he is shaking the sleeper—perhaps he then dreams of the ‘ideas’ or of immortality.

Philosophy suffered a fortunate fall into the deeper dreams of Platonism, products of Platonic art. Nietzsche concludes his paragraph and “On the Pathos of Truth”: Art is more powerful than knowledge because it wants life, whereas knowledge reaches only its final goal—annihilation. (760/66)

The final paragraphs of “On the Pathos of Truth” give clear evidence of the principle guiding Nietzsche in his early work: he himself will not be a foolish philosopher shaking dream-struck humanity into fatal wakefulness. Because he knows humanity’s need for a sheltering art, he lets it “hang on,” he writes in a way that encourages dreaming the Wagnerian dream. Ten years later Nietzsche employed just the right term to explain this stance not only of “On the Pathos of Truth” but of his first five books: Leering out of the writings of my first period is the grimace of Jesuitism: I mean the conscious holding on to illusion and forcibly incorporating that illusion as the foundation of culture. (KSA 10 16 [23] 1883)

Nietzsche’s precise, nonecclesiastical definition of Jesuitism attests to his clear sense of the restraints he placed on himself as a philosopher, not in his 7. Nietzsche did not reproduce this final paragraph of “On the Pathos of Truth” in “On Truth and Lie.”

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inquiry but in publicizing its conclusions: the illusory foundations of culture require the philosopher to keep his conclusions secret and forcibly make illusions, old or new, the foundation of culture. “On the Pathos of Truth” shows that Nietzsche came to know very early his difference as an inquirer into knowledge and to believe that what he knew demanded of him culture-saving silence and open advocacy of illusion. Recognizing that necessity, did he also recognize that it had been characteristic of the philosophers to recognize the difference between the exoteric and the esoteric, as he clearly did later when he exposed it in Beyond Good and Evil (30)? “Wake him up” seems to testify that at this point he did not, and the way he refers to the Platonic dreams does not suggest a Plato who knew that “noble lies” were foundational to any political order, as his Socrates attests when he makes them foundational even to his.8 But here, already, is the Nietzsche who knows the complementarity of philosophy and art, of the knowing and making that constitute genuine philosophy as he found it in the Greek philosophers and would express it in his own mature philosophy.9 It was not “On the Pathos of Truth” but “On Truth and Lie in the Extramoral Sense,” dictated six months later, that Nietzsche cited in 1886 as proof of the skepticism and pessimism he kept hidden behind Schopenhauer as Educator.10 “On Truth and Lie” is now a much-cited writing, but its purpose has not been well understood because it has not been interpreted as what it originally was: the opening two sections of the book on philosophy that Nietzsche planned as a companion to The Birth of Tragedy. When he dictated “On Truth and Lie” in May or June 1873, Gersdorff wrote it in a workbook 8. Republic 414c. Throughout this book, I use, along with exotericism, Nietzsche’s term Jesuitism to name this practice by the philosophers because his definition of it is so exact a description of the core of the practice. 9. Did perceptive Cosima recognize in this Christmas gift what she so intelligently said in a letter four years later?: “I think that there is in Nietzsche a darkly creative substratum of which he is himself hardly conscious; it is from this that the important element in him springs but he takes alarm at it . . . [i]n him it is the tellurian element that is of importance . . . his great thoughts come to him, not from his brain, but from what? Ah, who can say?” (quoted by D’Ioria, Nietzsche’s Journey, 51). 10. While writing SE, Nietzsche told Gersdorff, a friend since Schulpforta who was especially close to him at this time, visiting him often, taking dictation, and reading aloud to him: “There’s a great deal fermenting in me right now, including extreme and daring things. I’d like to know just how far I may share such things with my best friends—by letter of course nothing at all” (July 9, 1874).

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designated U II 2.11 Its section 1 raises the emphatic question “Where in all the world . . . did the truth-drive come from!,” and sections 1 and 2 together give a theoretical answer that seems to complete “On Truth and Lie.”12 But Nietzsche meant his theoretical answer to prepare his historical answer, as workbook U II 2 makes immediately clear: after Gersdorff wrote out the fair copy with its 1 and 2, ending with five lines on page 32 of the workbook, he wrote on the very next line a “3,” which was followed by an outline in different handwriting: 3. Depiction of the chaotic confusion in a mythical age. The Oriental. Beginnings of philosophy as the orderer of the cults, the myths; it organizes the unity of religion.13

Section 3 of the book would begin the historical answer to the book’s main question—Where in all the world did the drive for truth come from? The first historical step came from the need some Greeks felt to order the chaos of cults and myths that characterized their religion, spread as it was across a large geographic area with many separate cultic centers, each with its local cults and stories. That would have been a large chapter, one that continued to interest Nietzsche as he twice taught courses on the religious history of the Greeks.14 The next historical step is the rational upshot of this ordering of the cults: 11. In the early 1930s Hans Joachim Mette classified all of Nietzsche’s Nachlass for the Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe, assigning the workbooks and manuscripts designations that are still useful. KGW/KSA has its own designations for them, but because their versions are incomplete, being only selections and not full reproductions, I will use the Mette designation to indicate the actual workbooks. 12. A workbook entry from late 1872 describes the two parts as “1. The Pathos of Truth. 2. The Genesis of Truth” (KSA 7 19 [191]). 13. KSA 7 29 [170]. KGW/KSA hide the fact that Gersdorff ’s dictated copy of 1 and 2 is followed in the workbook by a “3.” and a next entry. Their version of TL does not include the “3.” (KSA 1, p. 890), nor does KSA 7 29 [170] give any indication that it follows TL on the same page; neither the KSA Kommentar nor the English translation of the KGW/KSA version of U II 2 gives any information about this most salient fact. 14. For the winter semester of 1875–76, beginning in October 1875, he taught a course entitled “Antiquities of the Religious Cult of the Greeks”; a year later, after his break from teaching for a year, he taught a course entitled “Religious Antiquities of the Greeks.”

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4. Beginnings of an ironic stance toward religion. New emergence of philosophy.

No mere ordering principle, philosophy emerges from the ironic stance toward religion engendered by ordering its cults and myths: ordering the stories naturally kindled doubt about the truth of conflicting stories—and if they are not true, what is? The wonder and inquiry that are philosophy had their origin in religious doubt.15 5. etc. narrative

The “etc.” after 5 shows that Nietzsche planned many sections, one for each philosopher perhaps, constituting the “narrative” of the history of philosophy as the history of the drive for truth in its sequential achievements among the Greeks, a simplified version of which he had already dictated earlier in 1873 as the nineteen sections of Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks.16 The “Conclusion” Nietzsche planned for this history is highly significant: Conclusion: Plato’s state as trans-Hellenic, as not impossible. Philosophy here reaches its height, as founder of a metaphysically ordered state.

Plato’s Republic is the highest achievement of Greek philosophy; while it is in the spirit of an Empedocles, it transcends the Hellenic with non-Hellenic elements such as those Nietzsche spelled out at the end of “On the Pathos of Truth”: “perhaps he dreams then of the ‘ideas’ or of immortality.” Nietzsche in no way endorses these non-Hellenic Platonic dreams even this early; but the height he will aim at is similar, a philosophically ordered state on the Greek model but one where philosophy has become aware of the limits of possible knowledge. The next entry on that page of U II 2, [171], continues these thoughts by 15. BT had already argued that religions die when their myths are systematized and one begins, anxiously, to defend the believability of the myths (BT 10). 16. Nietzsche had his student Adolf Baumgartner prepare a fair copy of this manuscript; he wrote alterations himself, and then a new Foreword in 1879, but never had it published. It is not clear whether the “narrative” of this U II 2 entry refers to that version of his history of Greek philosophy or to the much more extensive and detailed version he had written out in the summer semester of 1872 for his lectures on the pre-Platonic philosophers; for this important lecture series, see Nietzsche, Pre-Platonic Philosophers.

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setting his book on philosophy within a group of three books titled overall Greeks and Barbarians: First Part: Birth of Tragedy. Second Part: Philosophy in the Tragic Age. Third Part: On Decorative Culture.

In this plan, the already published first part would be followed by the part now being completed and then by a third part whose title is clarified by a U II 2 entry that Nietzsche wrote on its inside cover: “Romans and Greeks: the stance of the Romans toward Greek culture. Their judgment on it. From them stems the decorative manner of culture” [168].17 This plan, with its pair of books on Greek culture followed by a book on the decorative culture of the Romans, would probably have prepared an account of Wagnerian culture as a decorative culture on the Roman model, a culture forcibly incorporating Wagnerian illusion as the foundation of culture just as Roman culture incorporated Greek culture and incorporated Christianity after the decline of the Greek and Roman gods. Such a continuation of Nietzsche’s writing career would have been the natural extension not only of his Birth of Tragedy but of the main focus of his study for many years: the history of Greek philosophy that he had been studying intensely since reading F. A. Lange’s History of Materialism in 1866.18 In November 1866 he began his detailed investigations into the sources of Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the Philosophers and in 1868 into the fragments of Democritus.19 He continued to advance these studies in the history of philosophy with his course on the pre-Platonic philosophers that he offered four times in his short teaching career, first in 1870 in his second semester of teaching, then a second time in the summer of 1872 when he wrote out his lectures, and a third time in the summer of 1873, during which 17. Nietzsche wrote this entry just above Gersdorff ’s attractively written title for TL. KGW/ KSA arbitrarily stations it as [168], just before the extensions of TL that are [170], even though it probably was written later. 18. On Nietzsche’s discovery of Lange in August 1866, see Blue, Making of Friedrich Nietzsche, 236–43: “the influence [of Lange’s book] on his undergraduate years can scarcely be exaggerated” (237). 19. His study of Diogenes Laertius led to his prize-winning essay in Latin published serially in 1868–69 in two volumes of Ritschl’s Rheinisches Museum, a leading philological journal. On the philological significance of that essay, see “Nietzsche and Diogenes Laertius,” by the scholar of Greek philosophy Jonathan Barnes. Nietzsche’s assiduous work on Democritus (see Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future, 21–26, 82–126; Swift, Becoming Nietzsche, 21– 33) never gained a finished form.

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he dictated “On Truth and Lie in the Extra-moral Sense.”20 His studies in Greek philosophy were accompanied by studies in Greek religion, Greek tragedy, and Greek culture generally, and as his book plans show, these studies culminated in Plato as the culture-creating philosopher: entry [174], entitled “Plato,” outlines a treatment of Plato similar to his treatment of the other Greek philosophers.21 It is divided into three parts, Youth, Travels, and Academy, each listing important subtopics in Plato; the last lines of its third part treat the dialogue Parmenides as Plato’s “preliminary skepticism toward the theory,” the theory of ideas that the old Parmenides showed a young Socrates to be rationally indefensible. That skepticism is instructive: “Plato chiefly legislator and reformer, never a skeptic in that.” Plato practiced a decorative Jesuitism that brought the whole of Greek philosophy to its culmination; a skeptical Plato stands behind the decorative “ideas.” Nietzsche’s unpublished work on what he called “the pre-Platonic philosophers” has become well known, but he intended that work to show that these great philosophers were preparatory to the most important event in Greek philosophy, Plato: it is less well known that Plato is Nietzsche’s ultimate Greek model. It was on Plato that he lavished the most attention, teaching his university introductory course on Plato four times and, at the Gymnasium, treating the Phaedo six times, Protagoras four, Symposium twice, and Gorgias, Phaedrus, and Republic once each.22 During the crucial years of 1871 to 1874 when he was preparing a book on Greek philosophy that ultimately resulted in his book on the philosopher, Schopenhauer as Educator, he taught his Plato course twice, in the winter semesters of 1871–72 and 1872–73. At the start of that course he made a remark about Plato that typified his treatment of the Greek philosophers: “the person [is] even more remarkable than his books” (KGW II 4, p. 7). He went on to make a most arresting point about Plato: “For a literary age like ours it is very hard to hold on” to the essential character of the Platonic dialogue; it is fundamentally a “reminder” (p. 8). Instead of the literary being primary,

20. See Janz, “Friedrich Nietzsches akademische Lehrtätigkeit”; Nietzsche also taught the course in summer 1876 and planned it for summer 1879, but he was unable to meet the classes and had to retire from the university. 21. Entry [174] in U II 2 comes some nine pages after the outline of the book on Greek philosophy in [170]. In addition to the intervening entries in KGW/KSA is a three-page omitted entry that is a draft taken up with a few changes in UD 6, paragraph 2. 22. See Janz, “Friedrich Nietzsches akademische Lehrtätigkeit,” for the dates of all these courses.

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[o]ne gains from some actions that have been handed down a more correct picture of Plato’s essential character than from his writings. We should not consider him a system-builder living a retired life [i.e., a writer’s life] but rather an incendiary politician who aims to revolutionize the whole world and who became a writer, among other things, to serve that goal. Founding the Academy is for him something much more important: he writes in order to strengthen his Academy-companions in battle. (Pp. 8–9.)23

Plato followed his great predecessors by establishing a school; his dialogues provided his students with an elaborate set of reminders enabling them to carry forward and secure the social and political goals of the teaching they learned firsthand in the Academy. His ultimate goal is what Nietzsche described at a peak of his book on the philosopher: a social order whose “highest objective [is] to produce new Platos” (SE 8). After securing this crucial point about Plato’s dialogues, Nietzsche’s lectures treat each of them, returning only occasionally to his argument about Plato’s aim and means.24 Plato as the supreme example of the philosopher thinker/actor remains Nietzsche’s Plato to the end. But after gaining a deepened understanding of the human soul and of the history of Western culture, and thereby of the true nature of the Christian religion and the modern morality that continued it, Nietzsche was compelled to condemn the great actor/revolutionary who was his primary model, compelled to take action against his sublime model of the thinker/ actor.25 Nietzsche’s deflection into the culture criticism of the Untimely Meditations can well be regarded as a betrayal of his essential work on the origins of philosophy through a desire to serve Wagner and German culture. Had he written his books on Greek philosophy and Greek and Roman culture, his career would look very different, and the academic study of these topics would perhaps have been permanently deepened and enriched, schooled in Jesuitism, particularly Plato’s Jesuitism, by a philosophic skeptic who was 23. Among the “other things,” Plato’s actions on behalf of philosophy included, as Nietzsche explains in detail (pp. 49–54), strenuous efforts to persuade the tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse and Dion to rule for the good of philosophy. 24. Before treating the individual dialogues he concluded his twenty-page account of the “Life of Plato” by saying, “The central point of Platonic desire is to be found in his legislative mission: he counted himself among the Solons and Lycurguses” (KGW II 4, p. 54). 25. On the continuity of Nietzsche’s view of Plato from beginning to end, see Drochon, Nietzsche’s Great Politics, 36–47: “Plato provides him with a vision on how to develop a political strategy to restore the authentic culture to which he aspires” (36).

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never a skeptic about philosophy’s task of legislation and reform for philosophy’s sake. “On Truth and Lie” opens with a shortened version of the “fable” in “On the Pathos of Truth” about the clever beasts who invented knowing in one corner of the universe only to die out. The fable, Nietzsche says, illustrates “how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature; there were eternities in which it did not exist; and when it is again all over for it, nothing will have happened.” Diminishing human knowing cosmically, Nietzsche also diminishes its particular faculties. The intellect in all its facets is originally only a survival device in the evolutionary success of the human species, with deception and dissimulation being the chief devices preserving the species and advancing individuals. That being the case, a primary question for the truthseeker must be where his own truth drive could have come from (877/80). Driven by necessity, humans had to suspend the war of all against all and establish peace. An unintended consequence of the “peace treaty” appears to be the first step toward acquiring that puzzling truth drive. That was fixed which from now on would count as ‘truth’; that is, a uniformly valid and binding designation for things is invented and this legislation of language likewise gives the first laws of truth.

With truth fixed, “the contrast between truth and lie” arose for the first time: a “lie” is a misuse of fixed conventions, and if it is intentional and aimed at private gain with possible harm to others, “society will cease to trust [the liar] and will thereby exclude him.” What is hated is not the lie but the harm, and for that reason truth is desired and elevated; the desire for truth is initially simply a desire for “the pleasant, life-preserving consequences of truth.” Having linked the desire for truth to the language of benefit and harm, Nietzsche inquires into the linguistic conventions themselves: are language’s “designations congruent with things? Is language the adequate expression of all realities?” (878/81). His negative answer asks first “What is a word?” and states: “It is a copy in sound of a nerve stimulus.” These terms and many more to follow, plus the genetic analysis itself, Nietzsche took directly from Gustav Gerber’s Die Sprache als Kunst (Language as Art), an 1871 book he checked out of the Basel library in September 1872.26 In the Gerber-Nietzsche 26. See Meijers, “Gustav Gerber und Friedrich Nietzsche.” Meijers’s account of Nietzsche’s use of Gerber focuses on Gerber’s role in the lectures Nietzsche wrote out for his course on Greek rhetoric in the winter semester of 1872–73 (October–May). Nietzsche never men-

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account, language originated in a “nerve stimulus” experienced as an “image” that seemed to represent an event in the world; the image in turn generated a “sound,” a “word” to designate it. From words, “concepts” sprang spontaneously and were themselves reified as things in the world. Following Gerber, Nietzsche names the transitions metaphors, a Greek word whose two parts, μετα and φερω, over and carry, are exactly reproduced by Nietzsche’s übertragen: each of the transitions, nerve stimulus to image, image to sound, etc., is a carrying over, a transferring from one domain to a different one: “every time a complete overleaping from one sphere into the middle of a wholly other and new one” (879/82). Nietzsche draws the necessary inference: “we believe we know something of the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers and yet we possess nothing but metaphors of the things.” He then focuses on the formation of concepts: every word immediately becomes a concept insofar as it does not hold in memory that one-time, completely individualized experience but instead must stand for countless more or less similar cases, that is, strictly speaking, never equal and therefore completely unequal cases. Every concept arises from a making-equal of the not-equal. (879–80/83)

With the concept, the notion arises that in addition to each of the “leaves”— Nietzsche’s example—“there exists in nature the ‘leaf,’ an ur-form, according to which all leaves were spun, sketched, measured, colored, curled, and painted.” The young Nietzsche thus describes the natural basis of the Platonism built into all human experience, an involuntary automatic belief in the external reality of ideas as the primordial model or form of individual items of which our experience wholly consists. Nature itself “is acquainted with no forms and concepts, therefore also no species, but rather a for us inaccessible and indefinable X.” Nietzsche ends his genetic analysis with the now-famous statement: “What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms . . . Truths are illusions that we have forgotten are tioned Gerber by name either in his workbooks or in “On Truth and Lie.” He does name him in a footnote in his lectures and in an August 4, 1871 letter to Ritschl. Meijers shows that Gerber’s book, so pivotal for Nietzsche, received very little notice and disappeared with hardly a trace. At about the same time Nietzsche seems to have made use of the work of another author whose name he kept entirely out of his workbooks, lecture notes, and every other written form: the much-reviled Max Stirner (Johann Caspar Schmidt) and his book Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (1844). See the recollections of Ida Overbeck, Franz Overbeck’s wife, in Bernoulli, Franz Overbeck und Friedrich Nietzsche, 1: 238–39.

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illusions” (880/84). The universality of this judgment on truth must however make room for what the essay itself is stating: a true account of illusions taken as truths, a second-order truth that can be known to be true about truth as illusion—as “lie” in Nietzsche’s more dramatic designation. At this point in “On Truth and Lie,” having described the experiential and social origins of language and knowledge, Nietzsche grants that “we still do not know where the drive for truth comes from” (881/84), and he turns to that primary topic. So far, he says, he has shown that a society, defined as such by language use, implicitly imposes a “duty” to be truthful, that is, to “employ the usual metaphors.” That duty can be “expressed morally: as the duty to lie in accord with a fixed convention, to lie collectively in a way that is binding for everyone.” The origins are “forgotten,” he maintains, and one lies “unconsciously and in accord with centuries-old habits—and arrives precisely through this unconsciousness, this forgetting, at the feeling of truth.” This “moral impulse” not to lie, to hold to fixed convention, is reinforced by the contrast between “the liar whom no one trusts and all exclude,” and “the venerability, reliability, and utility of truth.” Here, as so often in this essay, Nietzsche’s claim in his 1886 foreword to Schopenhauer as Educator is confirmed: his 1873 essay demonstrates that his “moral skepticism and dissolution” began at least this early even though his books make it appear that it began only after his 1876 break with Wagnerism. “On Truth and Lie” now turns to a characterization of the whole of human history as ever more sophisticated concept formation, a history of the human lived world as life within metaphors, which lose all trace of their original transferences and appear instead to be a solid hierarchical structure of “regulative and imperative” concepts. After some pages of explanatory excess with image after image picturing the basic points already made,27 Nietzsche ends section 1 of “On Truth and Lie” by emphasizing how implausible the truth is that life is lived wholly within metaphor, a view he calls “idealism” (885/87), implausible because of the universality, solidity, repeatability of the evidence that the world exists as experienced, external to us and present in the same way for all observers. But all such “evidence” is circular, he argues, because it can never appeal to anything outside of experience and all experience derives 27. For all its merits as the essay Nietzsche recommended as proof of his early skepticism, “On Truth and Lie” is marred by the same rhetorical excesses he came to regret in BT: “imagemad and image-confused . . . without the will to logical cleanliness, very convinced and therefore disdainful of proof, mistrustful of even the propriety of proof ” (BT Attempt 3).

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from nerve stimuli, images, words, and concepts. Implausible but inescapable, this view makes the experienced world an aesthetic construct, produced by an “artistically creating subject” (883/86). Between the human subject and any supposed object “there is, at most, an aesthetic reaction”; the “regularity of nature,” “the laws of nature” (885/87), derive from the universality in human individuals of faculties of perception, cognition, and imagination functioning in the same way for each. Nietzsche ends his first section on this extended argument for “the artistic process of metaphor formation” (886/88). The details of this “aesthetic relation” (884/86) articulate what he calls “dissolution” in his 1886 Foreword to Things Human All Too Human, Vol. II: dissolution dissolves the initial assumptions of experience, tracing them to a making, a constituting: the world as experienced is a product of art. Art thus assumes its place—already in 1873—as the initiating core of human experience. Nietzsche’s 1886 Foreword emphasizes the continuity of dissolution in his method; it is the continuity of the primacy of art, art uncovered as the fundamental human activity of world-making. In moving from section 1 to section 2 it is useful to remember that this planned book on philosophy has a section 3 that moves from “On Truth and Lie” to history, to the organizing of Greek myths that was responsible for philosophy’s beginnings: section 2 prepares that move. Nietzsche injected science into the final paragraphs of section 1 on the implausibility of the true view of the experienced world, science which “will be able to dig successfully forever” (885/87) in that world experienced as law-governed by all human subjects. Section 2 begins, “On the construction of concepts it is, as we saw, initially language that works, in later times, science” (886/88). Working ceaselessly on the great structure of concepts constructed by language, science develops “truths” that compete with and replace the “different kinds of ‘truths’ ” developed by other “powers.” Different truths are different metaphors, and “the drive to metaphor-formation [is] the fundamental drive of human beings.” That drive, confronted now by “the regular and fixed world” of scientific metaphor, “seeks for itself a new realm for its works . . . and finds it in myth and in art generally.” Nietzsche’s example is first of all the world of dreams that contrasts so dramatically with the wakeful world science studies. Dreams lead him to “the ancient Greeks” and how “the waking day of a mythically inspired people” is experienced, as the place into which “continuously active miracle” breaks: “in every moment, as in a dream, anything is possible, and all of nature swarms around a person as if it were nothing but the masquerade of gods who were amusing themselves by deceiving people

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with all these shapes.” The Greek example then becomes the basis for generalizations about the myth-making power of the human intellect, “that master of deception” (888/90). The final paragraph of section 2 contrasts “the rational man and the intuitive man . . . the latter as irrational as the former is inartistic,” each “desiring to rule over life” (889/90). The culminating argument repeats the Birth of Tragedy, with modern man, the historic product of Socratic rationality, aspiring to recover pre-Socratic Greek sensibility. The intuitive man of that age, handling “his weapons more forcefully and victoriously than his opponent,” was able to “give shape to a culture and establish art’s mastery over life.” Within that culture neither the house, nor the gait, nor the clothing, nor the clay pot gives evidence that pressing need invented them; it seems as if in all of them an exalted happiness and an Olympian cloudlessness and at the same time a play with seriousness speaks out. (889/91)

The man guided by reason never gains such happiness, however much he is able to ward off unhappiness. This contrast between the two kinds of man extends to the end of the paragraph, emphasizing finally not happiness but the way in which each kind deals with suffering. It is unclear whether Nietzsche intended to continue section 2 and perhaps compose a bridge between it and section 3. But the contrasts just drawn, between the two kinds of human beings and their different ways of experiencing happiness and suffering within a Greek culture based on cult and myth, themselves serve as a fitting prelude to his historical account of how the drive for truth arose in the Greece of cult and myth. Nietzsche’s 1886 appeal to his 1873 essay “On Truth and Lie” asks that its “moral skepticism and dissolution . . . and deepened pessimism” be the focus: already in 1873, despite five books from 1872 to 1876 advocating a new set of cultural myths, this is what he held to be true. The “moral skepticism” his essay exhibits is already a skepticism about moral virtue even though he had hardly begun to trace its social origins; his method of “dissolution” leads to skepticism about morality by leading first to comprehensive epistemological skepticism: Auflösung is a quasi-chemical method of dissolving “wholes” into their constituent elements where the wholes are images and concepts that derive from nerve stimuli stimulated by the unknowable. Nietzsche’s method of reduction guided his work from very early on to the end. In “On Truth and Lie” dissolution to skepticism about knowledge is achieved by knowledge:

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coming to know the nature of knowing in its origins in nerve stimuli and images compels one to a rational skepticism about all experienced knowledge of the world. Together, moral skepticism and dissolution ground Nietzsche’s “critique and . . . deepening of pessimism”; pessimism is not a belief about how the future will turn out, nor is it a mood or an emotion or a disposition; it is the reasoned stance of the intellect toward the possibility of knowledge based on what can in fact be known about knowing. This critique and deepening of pessimism led Nietzsche early to the “true but deadly” fundamentals: “the sovereignty of becoming; the fluidity of all concepts, types and kinds; and the lack of any cardinal difference between humans and animals” (UD 9). His “critique” of pessimism destroys the romantic pessimism held by Schopenhauer and Wagner with its imaginary sources of supposed awareness and intuition; his “deepening” of pessimism embraces the finitudes of human existence and its cosmic insignificance while finding in it grounds for celebration and awe. His 1886 Foreword to The Birth of Tragedy calls it a “pessimism of strength,” and his final revaluing of pessimism calls it “Dionysian pessimism,” the way of thinking that is the new ground for art, for the aesthetic construction and celebration of a livable world (GS 370). Nietzsche’s mature views work out what is present in principle in his 1873 “On Truth and Lie in the Extra-moral Sense.” Nietzsche’s thinking is a continuous development; what he advocates is discontinuous. The continuity he kept hidden in his workbooks is far more important than the discontinuity prominent in his books.

Workbook P I 20, Summer 1872–Beginning 1873 When Nietzsche invoked “On Truth and Lie” as proof of the continuity of his thinking at least since 1873, he knew that proof of an earlier and more extensive kind existed in other writings of his which he did not invoke, probably because he never expected them to be accessible: workbooks in which he first wrote out the thoughts expressed in “On Truth and Lie.” The assiduous collecting and publishing of Nietzsche’s surviving workbooks by his sister has made accessible extensive writings that give rich proof of the continuity of his philosophy. The workbook that best shows the early, continuous presence of Nietzsche’s skepticism, dissolution, and pessimism bears Mette number P I 20.28 This workbook also shows his plans for the book he intended 28. KGW III 4 19 [1]–[330]/KSA 7 19. KGW calls this part of the workbook “P I 20 b” because its first 83 pages, not reproduced by KGW here, are “Entries of philological content” that Nietzsche wrote in the winter of 1870–71 on his new view of Greek metrics (Nachbericht

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to write after The Birth of Tragedy, “The Philosopher-Book” or “The Last Philosopher.”29 And P I 20 powerfully confirms Nietzsche’s early Jesuitism, his felt need for a politics for philosophy to shelter its radicalism within a cultural program that remedies the ills of the modern age. Jesuitism dominates the early entries of P I 20 in a precise form, philosophy’s need to shelter the results of the knowledge drive and science’s blindness to that need. The verb bändigen (bind, tame, control, subdue, harness) and its synonyms appear often, stating the philosopher’s responsibility to limit public disclosure of knowledge. Early in P I 20, a fresh left-hand page toward the back, where Nietzsche began, opens with “My task: to comprehend the inner coherence and necessity of every true culture” (KSA 7 19 [33]), and that sentence can function as a title for the sequence of entries through [39], a sequence showing how Nietzsche conceived his task after completing The Birth of Tragedy.30 He had to “hold fast to the intellectual mountain chain that extends across the centuries” [33]; elevating the great philosophers this way required marking philosophy off from science: “For science there is no great and small—but for philosophy! The zur dritten Abteilung, KGW III 5/1, p. 103). P I 20 is not yet among the workbooks available electronically at Nietzsche Source. 29. KSA 7 19 [36], [318]. In a letter to Gersdorff (March 3, 1873) Nietzsche says, “My writing is growing and is forming itself into a counterpart to ‘Birth.’ The title will perhaps be ‘The Philosopher as Physician of Culture.’ ” Other projected titles include Wisdom and Science: On the Philosophers/Dedicated to the Immortal Arthur Schopenhauer [85]; The Philosopher: Considerations on the Struggle between Art and Knowledge [98]; Oedipus. Soliloquies of the Last Philosopher [131]; On the Lie [180]. Later titles include History of Greek Philosophy till Plato [188], see [190]; Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks [214], see also [13]; The Justification of Philosophy by the Greeks A Festschrift by Friedrich Nietzsche [316]. When he called his book The Last Philosopher in his letter to Rohde (November 20–21, 1872), he said that he was considering it as a “Festschrift for the year 1874 and Bayreuth,” 1874 being the year anticipated for the first Bayreuth Festspiel. 30. I use the translation by Richard T. Gray in volume 11 of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, the English version of KSA, and modify it for greater literalness. P I 20 is also translated, as “Notebook 19,” in Nietzsche, Writings from the Early Notebooks, 93–162. Daniel Breazeale’s Philosophy and Truth includes selections from the 1872–75 workbooks including P I 20; his introduction and his footnotes to the texts he translates provide insightful guidance to these unpublished writings. Unfortunately, his translations are based on now obsolete editions of Nietzsche’s works; the individual entries in those editions are mostly accurate, but their arbitrary selection from Nietzsche’s workbooks makes their assemblages and orderings unreliable, as the polemic against them by Karl Schlechta makes clear (Schlechta and Anders, Friedrich Nietzsche, 37–49).

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value of science is measured by that statement”; science in principle refrains from judgments of high and low and is valuable insofar as it serves philosophy in its task of recalling and generating greatness in thinking. Nietzsche’s task belongs in modern philosophy’s sequence of mountain peaks: his next entry quotes Kant’s famous conclusion in the second preface to his first critique [34]: “I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.”31 Nietzsche also quotes the less familiar words that complete Kant’s sentence and state his intention of refuting the knowledge claimed by metaphysics because metaphysics is “the true source of all that lack of faith, always very dogmatic, which wars against morality.” Nietzsche sees Kant’s task as a version of his own: “Very important! A cultural need drove him.” But Kant’s “curious opposition, ‘knowledge and faith,’ ” is obsolete: “Kant knew of no other opposition! Aber wir!”—we know a new opposition from Schopenhauer, who replaced faith with “all the highest and most profound things, art and ethics . . . everything worth being known for all time . . . how little the Christian faith suffices for the deepest need: the question of the value of existence!” But we understand the opposition of knowledge and culture differently even from Schopenhauer: we know it as “the struggle of knowledge with knowledge! Controlling the drive for knowledge—whether for the benefit of religion? Or of an artistic culture? That is about to become evident; I stand on the side of the second”—twenty-seven year old Nietzsche takes his place as a philosopher advancing beyond Kant and Schopenhauer. His new struggle of “knowledge with knowledge” means that “I add the question of the value of historical iconic knowledge, also [knowledge] of nature.”32 Philosophy’s task on behalf of an artistic culture now compels it to question the value of the two vast fields in which modern science is extending knowledge: history and nature. He has no question about the value of historical knowledge for himself: he employs his specialist historical knowledge of the early Greek philosophers to help him understand his own historically defined task.33 The Greeks, he says, bound or limited knowledge “for the benefit of 31. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B xxx. 32. “Historical iconic knowledge” is the name Nietzsche gave in P I 20 to the goal of the modern science of history: reporting historical events in icons or images of what actually happened (see also [10], [23], [248], [319]). Two years later, when he published UD with its critique of historical knowledge, he no longer used this term. 33. In his 1886 “foreword” to UD Nietzsche made the important remark that “[I] was in no way prepared to give up ‘history’ because [I] had once suffered from it” (HH II Foreword 1). While writing these early entries of P I 20, Nietzsche was teaching his course on the history of the pre-Platonic Greek philosophers for a second time (May–October 1872) and writing out his

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an artistic culture (and religion?).” But however exemplary the Greeks are for current philosophy, their situation differed from ours: their “binding seeks to prevent a complete unleashing [of the knowledge drive]: we seek the binding back again of the completely unleashed.” As a post-Kant, post-Schopenhauer philosopher looking to benefit artistic culture, Nietzsche says, “The philosopher should know what is necessary, and the artist should create it” [23]. It was as that knower that Nietzsche placed himself in Wagner’s service; that is, Wagner served him.34 “The philosopher of tragic knowledge,” the title of entry [35], can only be Nietzsche, the post-Kant, post-Schopenhauer philosopher who revives the tragic knowledge of the Greeks in the age of the unleashed knowledge drive: “He binds the unleashed knowledge-drive, not by means of a new metaphysics,” as the Greek philosophers did; nor does he “establish a new faith.” Instead, “he senses as tragic the cut-away foundation of metaphysics and yet can never be satisfied by the colorful kaleidoscope of the sciences. He builds toward a new life; he gives art back its rights again.” Opposite that philosopher of tragic knowledge stands “the philosopher of desperate knowledge consumed with blind science: knowledge at any price.” For the philosopher of tragic knowledge, “the image of existence is made complete by the insight that metaphysics is only anthropomorphic”; an epistemological skeptic, he knows that no nonanthropomorphic insight into the fundamental character of things is available; all metaphysical conclusions are human projections onto the everunknowable. But Nietzsche adds immediately that the philosopher of tragic lectures for the first time. He was also completing the last strictly philological study of his life, on the so-called “Florentine Tractate” on the contest of Homer and Hesiod (completed August 1872 and published in Rheinisches Museum in February 1873). While writing the later entries in P I 20, Nietzsche’s teaching responsibilities were reduced because for the winter semester of 1872–73 (October to April) no students enrolled in his course on Homer and the so-called Homer question, shying away because Nietzsche’s reputation as a philologist was tainted by controversy over BT; only two, non-philology students enrolled in his course on the rhetoric of the Greeks and Romans. 34. Wagner of course never doubted his superiority to the young philosopher he judged his most significant servant, but Nietzsche knew the true order of rank while accepting his service role as Wagner’s philosopher-advocate. It was natural for the long lionized maestro to regard the young philologist as only a talented assistant. In a February 11, 1870 letter he assigned Nietzsche the task he thought proper to him: after enthusiastically reading aloud Nietzsche’s lecture “Socrates and Tragedy” to Cosima, he told him, “So you should show what philology is for and help me bring about the great Renaissance in which Plato embraces Homer, and Homer, filled with Plato’s ideas, can really become Homer the greatest of all.”

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knowledge “is no skeptic”; fully skeptical of the possibility of knowledge of nature, he is no skeptic of what can and must be done and by whom: “Here there is a new concept to create,” that of a philosopher unknown to ancients and moderns alike, “for skepticism is not the aim.” He is no more skeptical of the power of art than was Plato (KSA 7 29 [174]). Once “the knowledge-drive reaches its limits it turns on itself to proceed to a critique of knowledge”; this critique is “in the service of the best life,” the life of knowing, not of Kant’s faith.35 Such knowledge “must even desire illusion—therein lies the tragic”: driven by the desire to know, the knower must learn, against his fundamental drive, to desire illusion. “The last philosopher” (KSA 7 19 [36]) makes Nietzsche last in the line of the philosophers Kant and Schopenhauer; not the last simply but the last “for our world,” the one who “proves the necessity of illusion, of art and the art that dominates life” and gives our post-Christian life its sense of worth and purpose. The last philosopher knows that “the binding of science” happens “only through art. It is a matter of value judgments about knowledge and excessive knowledge.” “Enormous task and dignity of art in this task! ” Nietzsche exclaims. “What it can do, the Greeks show us: if we didn’t have them, our belief would be chimerical.” But we face a problem they did not: “Whether a religion can establish itself here, in this vacuum, depends on its strength.” The Greek philosophers adapted Homeric religion to their ends, whereas we post-Christians face a “vacuum” in religion. But Nietzsche’s hopes for Wagner’s art are firm: “We have returned to culture: the ‘German’ as redeeming force!” He ends on a further hope: “But might art perhaps be capable of creating its own religion, of giving birth to myth? So it was among the Greeks”—so it might be among the Germans. The last philosopher must bind the science of history [37]. “The now annihilated philosophies and theologies” continue to influence historical science even though it aided their annihilation: historical science was “widely developed particularly as a counterforce to theological myth, but also to philosophy.” To win the modern warfare between science and religion, philosophy had to claim certainty for itself, “absolute knowledge” that is in fact possible only in trivial matters.36 In the science of history “the degree of certainty determines value, not the degree of indispensability for human beings,” 35. While usually using Erkenntniß for knowledge throughout this entry, in this sentence Nietzsche uses Wissen, the word Kant used in the famous sentence he had quoted. 36. Nietzsche’s insight into the strategy of Descartes’s claim to absolute knowledge in a context where the absolute knowledge of Revelation was granted by almost all seems not to

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philosophy’s measure. As history shrinks to trivialities that it can settle with certainty, philosophy, which must rule it, faces the disadvantage that it “can now emphasize only the relativity of all knowledge and the anthropomorphic, as well as the universally dominant strength of illusion. With that it can no longer restrain the unleashed knowledge-drive.” The dissolution Nietzsche develops throughout the workbook puts philosophy at a grave disadvantage in its need to control science, crippling it in its essential task. To replace lost certainty Nietzsche looks to a different weapon for philosophy: “only the aesthetic standard has validity for us: the great has a right to history, not iconic history but rather a productive, stimulating historical portraiture.” The kind of history Plutarch painted could aid philosophy [33]: Nietzsche was lecturing on the Greek philosophic heroes at this time and would soon begin writing his Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks; he would paint the historical portraits that would make the philosophers objects of awe and emulation, higher than mere scientists. The next entry37 compares the early modern revolutions with the revolution possible now: “The historical and natural sciences were necessary against the Middle Ages: knowledge [Wissen] against faith. We now raise art against knowledge: return to life! Controlling the knowledge-drive! Strengthening the moral and aesthetic instincts!” [38]. The final entry in this sequence returns to the problem of establishing religion in the vacuum of contemporary times: “It is unlikely that this can happen again since the Critique of Pure Reason” [39]. The need is moral; while “goodness and compassion are independent of the decline or flourishing of a religion . . . good actions are largely determined through religious imperatives,” a judgment he reinforces: “The punishing and rewarding metaphysics seems indispensable.” Or is it? The creation of “powerful mores [Sitte]” seems to be sufficient for “morality” (Sittlichkeit), and education may be enough for that, as the entry speculates at its end.38 have been a result of careful study of Descartes’s books. See below, pp. 156f., and my Nietzsche and Modern Times, 145–271. 37. The continuity of entries [37] and [38] is indicated by the content but also by the fact that [37] ends on two lines written below the ruled lines of one page of the workbook and [38] begins at the top of the next. 38. For the rest of P I 20, I confine myself to the topic of skepticism or pessimism and its implications for culture, even though other philosophic topics that persist throughout Nietzsche’s career receive early formulation here, further evidence of the continuity of Nietzsche’s thinking on the essential matters: e.g., the philosopher as “the philosopher of the future” [73] whose “philosophical thinking” differs from scientific thinking in its “rapidity,” its “leaping from possibility to possibility,” its “power of imagination in the quick recognition of similari-

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Nietzsche had already arrived at the chief epistemological conclusion of “On Truth and Lie”: “The proposition must be established—we live only through illusions—our consciousness scratches the surface” [48]. And he already knew what it implied: “in order to live we need in every moment, art” [49], art as the basic human activity of structuring a world through percepts and concepts. With these already present conclusions, his discovery of Gerber’s Language as Art in September 1872, while writing these entries in P  I  20, came as an unexpected gift. There he read a genetic analysis of language and of sensation and cognition that augmented the epistemological perspective he continued to deepen and extend throughout his thinking life—and that advanced his task of elevating art. How better to establish the importance of art than by showing that we inescapably live within a world ordered by art: the myths and illusions of Wagnerian art were simply part of the comprehensive category of aesthetic creation. In P I 20, as in “On Truth and Lie” a little less than a year later, Nietzsche simply uses Gerber’s language and concepts without mentioning his name. Entry [66] is the first clearly based on Gerber: Our understanding [Verstand] is a surface force, is superficial. One also calls it ‘subjective.’ It recognizes through concepts: that means that our thinking is an ordering under rubrics [Rubriziren], a naming [that] does not touch the thing itself.

He uses Gerber’s words for all the steps in the process: To the concept [Begriff ] corresponds in the first place the image [Bild ]; images are primal thought [Urdenken], that is, the surfaces of things combined in the mirror of the eye. [66] The word contains only an image, out of that, the concept. [67]

He draws the conclusion that befits Gerber’s title, Language as Art: “thinking therefore calculates with artistic magnitudes” [67]. This broad understanding of art—all human making from “perception” through Wagnerian opera— leads directly to Nietzsche’s “Apologia for Art” [68]. It rests on the “two-fold ties” [75], its being “unprovable” and having “its ground in aesthetic value” [76], its being a “legislation of greatness, a ‘name-giving’ ” that “begins with the legislation of morality” [83]. Also important are the series of entries from [98] to [107] that begins with a title and subtitle written large inside a drawn box and stating the topic of the entries: “The Philosophers. Considerations on the Fight between Art and Truth.”

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artistic power” [79]: “1) the power that generates the profusion of images; 2) the power that selects and emphasizes what is similar” [78, see also 67]. The powers of generation and selection are in no way arbitrarily inventive: as “the most refined emanations of nerve activity,” they are, “physiologically considered, absolutely determined and necessary. All thinking appears to us on the surface to be voluntary, as at our discretion; we don’t notice the infinite activity”—that occurs prior to our noticing as its very condition. Entries like these on the fundamental artistic powers are mixed with entries on the highest achievements of Greek art [70] as Nietzsche oscillates between the most primitive and most sophisticated forms of human making. Later entries add precision to the generative and selective powers of art: the formation of concepts means “identifying similar with similar—finding one similarity or other in one thing and another thing is the fundamental process.” That is, “Mistaking is the fundamental phenomenon” [217]; as “identification of the non-identical, the similar, [it] is essentially illogical”; it is “an overlooking of the individual” [236] and thereby an “anthropomorphism” [237]. Among the important entries after Nietzsche’s discovery of Gerber is a series of short entries on the “struggle in the philosopher” with truth and lie [103]–[105]. Moved “to be completely truthful . . . in the midst of a lying nature,” the philosopher is in a “tragic” situation [104]. But in that situation “art acquires an entirely new dignity” while “the sciences are degraded by a degree.” Dignity and degrading both rest on “Truthfulness in art: it alone is now honest” [105]. The honesty of art in consciously creating allows the philosopher to resolve his struggle: “So we come back, by means of an immense detour, to the natural demeanor (that of the Greeks),” a demeanor embracing art now seen in the fundamental making or lying of perception and cognition. The brief entry ends: “It has proven impossible to build a culture on knowledge.” Thus judging the experiment of the modern Enlightenment a failure built on belief in knowledge, Nietzsche returns to the Greeks. This is the history of philosophy in part already present in The Birth of Tragedy: the way taken by Socrates exhausts itself in the failure of our time, dictating a return to pre-Socratic philosophy in its naturalness. Encouraging that return is Nietzsche’s task: his new book would elevate the Greek philosophers as heroes of thinking and acting, and its introduction, “On Truth and Lie,” would show that the metaphysical foundations appealed to by the Greek philosophers are no longer available but can be replaced by an elevation of art even broader than theirs. Gerber thus contributed useful elements to Nietzsche’s skepticism and dissolution, and numerous entries restate its conclusions. “We do not know

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the true essence of a single causality. Absolute skepticism: necessity of art and illusion” [121]. “It must be proven that all constructions of the world are anthropomorphisms  .  .  . Viewed personally however this entire position is useless. In this skepticism no one can live . . . We must get beyond this skepticism, we must forget it” [125]—knowing it to be insurmountable we forget it by embracing art. Later in P I 20, long sequential entries raise the questions of the origin of truth as a value [175] and of the truth drive itself [177]–[178], questions Nietzsche consolidated in “On Truth and Lie.” Such entries assume the basic skepticism (“Nature embedded the human being in nothing but illusion.—That is his genuine element” [179]), and they begin to sketch the appropriate rhetoric, as this entry does with a fragment of the image that will open “On Truth and Lie”: “For a long time human beings did not exist and even when they ceased to exist nothing will have happened.” This entry is followed by an illuminating outline of Nietzsche’s planned book. Entitled “On Lies” [180], it weaves together Nietzsche’s history of Greek philosophers with his basic skepticism and dissolution. Its first two lines are: Heraclitus. Belief in the eternity of truth. Disappearance of his work—one day the disappearance of all knowledge

After this dramatic opening on the ultimate disappearance of both humanity and its truths, Nietzsche introduces his fundamental point and brings in other Greeks philosophers: Portrayal of his doctrine as anthropomorphism The same for Anaximander. Anaxagoras. Relation of Heraclitus to the character of the Greek people. It is the Hellenic cosmos.

Heraclitus’s supposedly eternal truth is historically relative, derived from the Hellenic character. This historical criticism of Greek philosophy leads Nietzsche back to his basic topic: The origin of the Pathos of Truth. Accidental origin of knowledge. The lying-ness [Verlogenheit] and illusion within which humanity lives. Lies and speaking the truth—myth poetry. The foundations of everything great and vital rest on illusion.

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After these theoretical matters planned for his second book, Nietzsche adds the element that his critique of Socrates in his first book emphasized: The Pathos of Truth leads to doom. (There lies the ‘great.’) Above all to the doom of culture.

This crisis leads Nietzsche to the solution that Greek philosophers found: Empedocles and the sacrifices. Eleatics. Plato needs the lie for his state.

Greek philosophy moved from a belief in the eternity of truth to a recognition of the need for lies at least with respect to the state. Nietzsche would end his book on his own task: We are trying to restrain again the philosopher’s knowledge without measure and convince him again of the anthropomorphism of all knowledge.

Nietzsche’s second book would have merged his historical investigations and his theoretical investigations into an argument: the history from Heraclitus’s eternity of truth through Empedocles’ sacrifices to the Platonic lies would lead to modern philosophy, with its outcome of the Kant-SchopenhauerNietzsche progression in a theoretical understanding of the foundations of knowledge in illusion and its underwriting of new cultural lies. A set of entries from [188] to [191] illustrates graphically Nietzsche’s intentions for his new book, for these entries are scattered across two facing pages of P I 20 evidently expanded at different times. [188] is a title: History of Greek Philosophy to Plato Recounted in Its Essentials by F. N.

Nietzsche wrote that title on the lower half of the left-hand page in small script bunched up on the extreme right-hand side of that page: he projected that title for the book whose outline dominates the facing right-hand page in heavy ink and a column of numbered sections for each of the philosophers from Thales to Socrates [190]. Its initial title is simply “Geschichte der griech[ischen]

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Philosophie”; under it stands “Einleitung,” its numbered list of names, and finally “Nachtrag.” Off to the side of its columns of numbers and names in lighter ink stands [191], the outline of its “Introduction”: Introduction on Truth and Lie 1. The Pathos of Truth 2. The Genesis of Truth 3. ———

The arrangement of these facing pages shows that by this point in P I 20, probably late in 1872, Nietzsche’s book had already taken the shape it would have in June 1873 when he dictated its introduction, “On Truth and Lie,” with its 1, 2, and following 3.39 By combining a skeptical genetic analysis of the origins of knowledge with the history of Greek philosophy leading up to Plato, Nietzsche’s companion book to The Birth of Tragedy would have elevated the philosopher as “the most rare among the great . . . also the highest type of the great” [195] and shown how within the history of Greek philosophy itself truth and art came to be combined—all aiming toward Nietzsche’s own refounding of society on philosophy after the modern illusion that society could be founded on the truths disclosed by an unbound science of nature had been exposed. Later in P I 20, in the midst of drafts that receive final form in “On Truth and Lie,” Nietzsche reflected on the language appropriate for his book: “Every artificial word to be avoided as far as possible” [208].40 The language Nietzsche consciously chose for his book on philosophy was itself part of his effort to return to the natural world of the Greeks; his studied use of common terms would show in the words themselves that philosophizing arises naturally out of wonder generated by common experiences, and that it can arise now as it 39. The Nachbericht volume KGW III 5/2, p. 1135, reproduces Nietzsche’s arrangement on his page of [190]–[191] along with some of the page calculations he scattered on that page, but without saying that [189] appears at the top of that page or that [188] is a title written on the facing left-hand page in the closest proximity to the list of subtitles on the right-hand page. 40. Gray’s translation often uses the artificial words of professional philosophy— paralogism, manifold—to translate Nietzsche’s common German words. Nietzsche knew the technical language of philosophy, particularly that of the Kantian tradition employed by the authors to whom he was especially devoted like Schopenhauer, Lange, and Gerber, and by the professional philosophers he was reading such as K. Eugen Dühring and Eduard von Hartmann, and by other writers he was reading on philosophic topics like Afrikan Spir, Johann Zöllner, and Otto Caspari.

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arose among the Greeks who used common terms for uncommon notions. His chosen language for his philosophy book aims to show by its very words that philosophy is not an arcane subject that begins with specialized training in universities. Nietzsche also reflected on the audience he desired: I am making an attempt to be useful to those for whom it is worthwhile to be introduced to the study of philosophy in a timely and serious manner . . . For good reasons such persons would be advised not to entrust themselves to the guidance of any professional academic philosophers but instead to read Plato. Above all they should unlearn all kinds of fancy ideas and become simple and natural. Danger of falling into the wrong hands. [211]41

Numerous other entries in P I 20 advance his plans for his companion to The Birth of Tragedy. But a shift occurs at [259] that presages the shift in Nietzsche’s writing career away from a book on Greek philosophy to topics of German culture. The cause of the shift seems to have been the inspiring weekend he spent with the Wagners in Strasbourg on November 22–24, 1872. Entries now appear that begin to prepare the first Untimely Meditation on David Strauss, a book Wagner encouraged him to write. While Nietzsche continued to plan a book that would include “On Truth and Lie” and his history of Greek philosophy, his actual books became the series of Untimely Meditations dealing with timely matters in contemporary culture and advocating Wagnerism as the only hope for cultural renewal.42 A final feature of the skepticism elaborated in P I 20 is crucial: Nietzsche held that the actual processes of human sentience and cognition can be known: they are inescapably artistic or constructive and are employed in all possible human knowing with no way of getting around them. But he wondered: could knowledge of the origin and nature of sentience and cognition itself provide rational grounds for inferences about the always unknowable? 41. One prospective title for his Philosophers Book ran: Ancient Philosophical Masters in Greece./Written for a Young Friend of Philosophy by———[325]. 42. Nietzsche continued to refine his thoughts on skepticism and dissolution after P I 20. Of special interest are KGW III 4 23/KSA 7 23 (Mette number Mp XII 4), a collection of manuscript pages on Greek philosophy from the winter of 1872–73, and KGW III 4 29/KSA 7 29 (U II 2), the workbook from the summer–fall of 1873 already discussed in connection with TL (see above, pp. 64ff.).

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His questioning inexorably forced him beyond the limits of knowledge: “the development of philosophy” leads one “ultimately to sensation,” and there one finds “a great question: Is sensation the ur-fact of all matter? Attraction and repulsion?” [149]. Examining sensation itself, Nietzsche wonders if “memory must then belong to the essence of sensation”; accumulated traces of experience must then structure sensation itself [161]. A further conclusion follows: “The inviolability of the laws of nature means: sensation and memory is in the essence of things.” The inviolability of the laws of nature could mean that what is knowably true of one’s sensing and cognition could apply to unknowable nature itself. “That a material, in its contact with another, decides just so is memory and sensation . . . But then the decision must have been made through pleasure and displeasure.” And that leads, after a line left empty in P I 20, to a comprehensive conclusion: But if pleasure displeasure sensation memory reflex-movement belong to the essence of matter, then human knowledge reaches much deeper into the essence of things. The whole logic of nature reduces itself then to a pleasure- and displeasure-system. Everything grasps for pleasure and flees displeasure, these are the eternal laws of nature.

Slightly later Nietzsche states, “We know only one reality—that of thoughts. What if that was the essence of things!” [165]. “Thought gives us the concept of an entirely new form of reality: it is composed out of sensation and memory” [166]. Reflections of this kind exhibit one important aspect of the continuity of Nietzsche’s thought; while the specific conclusions arrived at here do not survive, the process of arriving at them does: it belongs to Nietzsche’s skepticism to push beyond the limits of the knowable inquiringly, in a rational manner. As the knowledge drive comes to know the artistic or constructive character of sentience and cognition, it asks itself: From what can be known about knowing could one infer rationally some true notion of the inprinciple-unknowable? The seeds of Nietzsche’s later will to power view lie in such questioning: that view is an ontological conclusion he always presents as inferential, never as knowable; and he presents it invitationally, as an inference to be considered by those who are like him in being driven primarily by the drive to know.43 43. Other items in the 1872 P I 20 demonstrate the continuity of Nietzsche’s thought: it contains for instance an early version of the famous description in the 1887 GM of “the seduction

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P I 20 shows that the conclusions of “On Truth and Lie in the Extra-moral Sense” have a long, deep history in Nietzsche’s development; the radical skepticism and dissolution, the critique and deepening of pessimism that he “kept secret” was his genuine thinking. Nietzsche’s Foreword to the second volume of Things Human All Too Human invites his reader to discover that fact, to learn that as a philosopher his development has been continuous; his thinking did not make the great shift to which his published writings attest. His Foreword explains that obvious break: it was a break in allegiance, not in his essential thinking. By inviting the study of writings he kept secret, Nietzsche’s Foreword invites his reader to view his first five books in the light of their Jesuitism: a skeptic and pessimist erred in attempting to forcibly incorporate the Wagnerian illusion as the foundation of culture. of language” that leads people to posit an entity lightning as the cause of the flash and leads our science to do the same when it says “force moves, force causes” (1.13): having analyzed causality in P I 20, Nietzsche says: “Therefore: first is the action, this we connect with a characteristic . . . First ‘seeing’ then ‘sight.’ The ‘see-er’ is taken to be the cause of the ‘see-ing’ . . . A primordial phenomenon is relating the stimulus experienced in the eye to the eye, that is, relating a sensory impression to the sensory organ” [209].

Chapter 3

What a Philosopher Is: Schopenhauer as Educator

In Schopenhauer as Educator my innermost history, my becoming, is inscribed. Above all, my promise! . . . How I understand the philosopher—as a terrible explosive, endangering everything . . . this essay gives inestimable instruction about that. EH 3 “ U n t i m e l y O n e s ” 3

In a brief 1876 workbook entry entitled “Untimely Meditations,” written after he had published the first three and was preparing to publish the fourth, Nietzsche drew up yet another list of topics for his projected thirteen volumes (KSA 8 16 [10]). Describing most in one or two words, he wrote, instead of Schopenhauer as Educator, “The Philosopher,” and instead of Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, “The Artist.” These titles name the authentic topics of these two books: not the persons but the type of which each is an exemplar; “Schopenhauer” and “Wagner” are stand-ins for the two highest human types, each performing one of the two fundamental human activities, thinking and making, each doing what befits the type as Nietzsche stated in an entry in P I 20, four years earlier: “The philosopher is to discern what is needed, and the artist is to create it (KSA 7 19 [23]). In neither book does Nietzsche criticize the person its title names, even though he held deep criticisms of each: both books succeed in “getting away . . . from the narrow world to which every question about the worth of persons condemns the spirit” (CW Epilogue). Privileged to discover Schopenhauer’s books early, when he was twenty-one, privileged to meet Wagner when he was twenty-four and to become his close associate, the young Nietzsche used these two persons as occasions to reflect on the phi-

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losopher as such and the artist as such. On these themes, the highest themes, Nietzsche’s thought is a consistent, continuous development. Prepared to enter Schopenhauer as Educator through the “foreword” provided in Things Human All Too Human, Volume II and the earlier writings to which it pointed, the reader interested in Nietzsche’s becoming reads the book knowing that Nietzsche had, in his thinking, already moved beyond Schopenhauer’s metaphysics to his own skeptical conclusions. That reader can read the book as a work of advocacy that paints a portrait of the philosopher for an age that had lost the notion of what a genuine philosopher is.1 Schopenhauer as Educator, however Untimely a Meditation, is difficult to read today because it is just too timely, too tied to its time as a relentless complaint about the culture of its time.2 It reads as if Nietzsche imagined that yet one more insulting image could straighten up an age of readers he speaks of as hopeless. Still, his complaints expose an indispensable element of his task: understanding the spiritual situation of his age in order to transcend it toward a greater future on the basis of understanding. What makes Schopenhauer as Educator required reading today is its timeless portrait of what a philosopher is as the person of understanding plus its timely portrait of what the vocation of the philosopher is in late modern times, portraits Nietzsche wrote even before he was fully aware of where that vocation would take him as a philosopher. Schopenhauer as Educator educates in who Nietzsche will become as a philosopher; it trains in giving Nietzsche his due.3 1. Nietzsche wrote SE in the spring–summer of 1874; it was published on his thirtieth birthday, October 15, 1874. On Nietzsche’s discovery of Schopenhauer just after his twenty-first birthday, see Blue, Making of Friedrich Nietzsche, 217–24. A workbook from October 1867–68 when he was twenty-three shows that Nietzsche had already detached himself from Schopenhauer’s metaphysics: he calls it “a failed attempt” to give “the thing-in-itself one of its possible shapes” in an opening outline of an essay or book or dissertation he was planning to write, as shown by the expansions of his arguments on the following pages of the workbook. His detachment from Schopenhauer and his attendant critique are part of what he kept secret in the interests of elevating the philosopher as a model for emulation and, if possible, surpassing. See Nietzsche, Writings from the Early Notebooks, 1–8. 2. “If I once wrote the word untimely on my books, how much youth, inexperience, corner, expresses itself in this word! Today I know that with this kind of complaint, enthusiasm, and dissatisfaction I belonged precisely to the most modern of the moderns” (KSA 12 2 [201] fall 1885–fall 1886). 3. Rudiger Safranski’s Nietzsche treats Nietzsche’s Schopenhauer book where Nietzsche said it belonged: in his student years. With Nietzsche’s early view of the philosopher in hand, Safranski can then treat his philological studies as Nietzsche did: as the disciplined undertak-

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The Opening: The Philosopher as Odysseus “That traveler who has seen many lands and peoples”—Schopenhauer as Educator opens invoking Odysseus at the opening of the Odyssey: “Of that much-traveled man who has seen many peoples and known their ways, tell me, Muse.”4 Nietzsche’s traveler, asked what he discovered to be common to all humans, answers, “They are inclined to laziness.” Immediately, “some” speak up to correct him: “They’re all fearful. They hide themselves in customs and opinions.” Mass fearfulness—does this alternate charge against humanity offer a deeper knowledge than the traveler’s judgment of mass laziness? The author grants that it may be “a sense of shame in the few and rare” that compels such an individual “to fear his neighbor and to think and to act herdlike and not to be happy with himself,” but a different fear moves “the vast majority”: “that tendency to laziness of which the traveler spoke.” So the author judges the traveler right because the vast majority “fear most of all the burdens that unconditional honesty and nakedness would load on them.” The fear that some interpret as primary is actually fear of burdens, fear of having to see something and then do something, fear of being disturbed in their lazy self-understanding: humans desire rest in the easeful more deeply than they desire understanding and the action it demands. So the traveler is profoundly right: desire for repose is the almost universal passion, desire ultimately to be spared the activity that is the traveler’s life. In particular, the vast majority are unsettled by the action required by “unconditional honesty,” by what philosophy is. And the reason is that philosophy imposes nakedness on everyone, forcing humanity—not to gaze on what it is, but to demand covering it up again. Philosophy and the vast majority are deeply at odds. Nietzsche’s Odyssey-inspired opening separates out three kinds, the traveler, some, and the vast majority, the classical three kinds Nietzsche knew from the Greek philosophers: the solitary traveler driven to gain knowledge for himself; the few courageous who may be teachable; and the lazy multitude who neither know nor care. The traveler knows better than the teachable couing of a young thinker who fully recognized the limitations of his chosen field while also knowing what is best in it: the philosophers of the Greeks (33–47). 4. Nietzsche used the opening words of the Odyssey in Z to open “On the Thousand Goals and One,” the chapter in which Zarathustra first names the ultimate understanding toward which he has traveled, “will to power” as more fundamental than “the greatest power on earth,” good and evil.

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rageous that knowledge threatens the vast majority, who, learning of it, may well threaten them. Classical philosophy’s view of exotericism and the reasons for it are present at the opening of Nietzsche’s early book on the philosopher. With the superior judgment of the traveler vindicated, Nietzsche invokes two mighty forces to challenge the rule of laziness: artists and the great thinker. “Artists alone hate this aimless drifting about in borrowed manners and superimposed opinions and they reveal everyone’s bad conscience . . . and dare to show us humanity as it is.” “The great thinker,” on the other hand, “is contemptuous of humanity.” By singling out the artist in his judgment against his age and then giving priority to the great thinker as a critic of his age, Nietzsche gives his first intimation in this book of his own two key points in criticism of late modernity. What is worthy of the artist’s hate in the present age, the historical age, is its lack of anything genuinely its own, its dressing itself up in all the costumes and beliefs of past ages and peoples who actually had an authentic core, an ideal and a purpose unique to itself that marked it off from its neighbor. What is worthy of the thinker’s contempt runs deeper. It is a lament for modern humanity’s unworthiness of the instruction he alone can give: his gains as a traveler will die with him if there is no one who feels a need for instruction. The positive side of the traveler’s contempt is his lament for the modern lack of aspiration to greatness that characterized the Greek civilization of the traveler Odysseus, a wise man driven by the same pride that Peleus planted in his son Achilles: “You shall always be first and excel all others” (Iliad 11.784). Nietzsche’s understanding of the spiritual situation of the age measures its self-satisfied laziness against Greek civilization, where pride turned every encounter into a contest that called out the best in each contestant. The thinker can usefully communicate his thought only to one passionate to take on the intense and unremitting labor of a contest for understanding that is a contest to outdo even Odysseus, wisest of the Greeks at Troy according to Plato’s Socrates. The image Zarathustra placed at the beginning of his search for his proper audience makes the same point: he wants to be heard only by one who has the camel’s spirit, who is willing to take on the heaviest burden. Modern culture, moved by what Nietzsche later identified as its two ideals, “the two songs and doctrines” of modern times, “ ‘equality of rights’ and ‘sympathy for all that suffers’ ” (BGE 44), reinforces the fundamental laziness in humanity. Furthermore, its conviction that here, at the end of history, it already possesses the highest wisdom, robs it of the very possibility of generating travelers. Nietzsche’s understanding of the spiritual situation of the age thus invades his first paragraph and gives the necessary urgency to

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what the book will offer its reader, a portrait of a modern Odysseus, “one of the teachers and taskmasters of whom I can boast, Arthur Schopenhauer—and later on I shall recall others.”

L e a r n i n g H i s V o cat i o n f ro m S c h o p e n h au e r ( 3 ) Nietzsche’s claim that in this book “my innermost history, my becoming, is inscribed . . . my promise,” nowhere rings more true than in section 3. Here, he sets out the dangers Schopenhauer faced and they are the dangers Nietzsche faced, dangers of the philosophic life itself that here receive the elevated expression permitted an author not speaking of himself. Nietzsche says he can profit from a philosopher “only insofar as he can be an example” (3)—an extraordinary statement for a university professor, especially when he adds that a philosopher is “capable of drawing whole nations after him through his example,” not merely by his books but by “his outward life.” Schopenhauer made himself an example by breaking away from the professor model of the philosopher established by Kant—who “clung to his university, submitted himself to its regulations, retained the appearance of religious belief, endured living among colleagues” (emphasis added). By breaking away, Schopenhauer exposed himself “to the most tremendous dangers that would have crushed or shattered any weaker being,” for his great work, The World as Will and Representation, was met by “unbreakable silence,” and when its first edition failed to sell, it was pulped into waste paper. No wonder Schopenhauer exhibited, in addition to the traits of the great philosopher, the traits “of the suffering human being in anguish for his most noble possessions.” Schopenhauer faced three “constitutional dangers” that belong to the philosophic life so intrinsically that they help define it. The first was that “he was through and through a solitary; not a single friend of his own kind consoled him.” “Ah, I note well,” Nietzsche adds, looking to his reader, “that you don’t know what solitude is.” So he offers a glimpse of the philosopher’s solitude for the uninitiated that depends not only on Schopenhauer but on the Greek philosophers. “Where there have been powerful societies, governments, religions, public opinions, in short wherever there has been tyranny, there the solitary philosopher has been hated”—and Nietzsche’s book tirelessly sets out the tyranny peculiar to modern times, public opinion, which he defined early: “public opinion . . . private laziness.” Hated for the refusal to submit to his times as shown by his private assiduousness, the philosopher

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withdraws to “an inward cave,” “an asylum into which no tyranny can force its way . . . it is the labyrinth of the heart—and that angers tyrants”—angers the modern public, then. Wise reflection on the suspicion and hate that the wise awaken in the powerful has a long history, for the wise learned early the precautions necessary to their difference; but the powerful never cease suspecting that the wise know something and could contrive something. But the danger Nietzsche describes is less the hate of the powerful than the solitude of the philosophic life: “there lurks the greatest danger.” Having fled inward to gain freedom, the philosopher-solitary still has to “live outwardly,” be seen by those with whom he has unavoidable social ties. Wise solitaries know they are being interpreted, misinterpreted, seen as what they are not. This inevitability brings melancholy because, for these lovers of truth, “it is more hateful than death itself to be forced to present a semblance to the world.” A volatility rises from this “enforced concealment and compelled restraint,” this “torment of silence and dissimulation,” and it can lead the solitary to “emerge from the cave wearing a terrifying aspect”—and to take revenge. “This was the dangerous way in which Schopenhauer lived,” but “there will always be demigods who can endure to live and live victoriously under such terrible conditions”— and Schopenhauer belongs among the demigods.5 Nietzsche tells moderns who don’t know what solitude is that a philosopher, by definition a solitary, must learn the good will to exotericism, to keeping secret what his solitary wandering has taught him. The second danger besets moderns who must “set out from the Kantian philosophy”: they “despair of the truth.” Giving the noble examples of Hölderlin and Kleist, Nietzsche expresses concern that “if Kant ever should begin to exercise any wide influence we will be aware of it in the form of a gnawing and disintegrating skepticism and relativism,” a noteworthy judgment in a thinker who keeps it secret that he has already entered the most extreme skepticism and pessimism—he can bear what Hölderlin and Kleist could not. What Schopenhauer, “after Kant, can be for us” is monumental: the antidote to the threatening despair of the truth in those who take Kant seriously, and the means of averting the more universal threat of Kant’s philosophy, culture-wide nihilism. Schopenhauer, after Kant, can be “the leader who leads us from the depths of skeptical gloom or criticizing renunciation up to the heights of tragic contemplation.” Of course the true philosophic 5. The same dangers are described in BGE 25. Rules for the philosopher-hermit’s life receive definitive comic expression in the 1886 part 5 of GS: “The hermit speaks” (364) and “The hermit speaks once more” (365).

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greatness of Schopenhauer lies in his aim to understand the whole and not get lost in the pursuit of particulars as did “the whole guild of all the sciences.” But Nietzsche does not set out Schopenhauer’s understanding of the whole, his ontology, nor does he set out Schopenhauer’s response of resignation and refusal of the world viewed as a whole—Schopenhauer’s aim and his way of life in serving that aim are Nietzsche’s inspiring model, not his doctrine or the counsel of his moral teaching.6 But Nietzsche’s loud silence on Schopenhauer’s ontological and moral teaching suggests a rejection of both while allowing praise for his aspiration to a comprehensive teaching and the resultant existential element: like “every great philosophy . . . it says only and always: this is the picture of all life, learn from it the meaning of your own life.” That turn to your own life blossoms into a comprehensive responsibility: “through one’s self, finally for all.” Schopenhauer educates to the highest aspiration of understanding and to the personal and social consequences of that understanding—he is like the great Greeks. The third constitutional danger Schopenhauer faced threatened the active presence in him of “the root of all true culture”—Schopenhauer could have been lost to culture had he yielded to this danger. The root of all culture, Nietzsche asserts, is a profound twofold longing for the genius in oneself and for the saint in oneself, a longing that dies in most because “a chain of toil and burdens is suspended from it.” In “Schopenhauer’s nature” this twofold longing expressed itself in the extreme measure of his “talent” as an “intellectual being” and of his “moral will,” the striving of the saint in him. Certain of his intellectual genius, he lived in the promise of the saint in him “that there would be no deeper furrow than that which his plowshare was digging in the ground of modern humanity.” This longing of his moral will allowed him, “from his watchtower,” to look “down into the reconciliation of knowledge and being, out into the domain of peace and denial of will, and over onto the other coast of which the Indians speak.” His nature, “inconceivably whole and unbreakable,” allowed him to sustain this longing too without either being destroyed or suffering petrifaction. Nietzsche ends his description of Schopenhauer’s moral will by saying, “What this means, each will understand according to what and how much he is: and none of us will ever fully understand it.” Just here, with respect to Schopenhauer’s morality of renunciation and life de6. In a December 19, 1876 letter to Cosima Wagner, Nietzsche spoke of his “difference with Schopenhauer’s doctrine . . . In almost all general principles I do not stand on his side; already as I wrote about Sch. I saw that I was beyond everything dogmatic in him; to me everything lay on the man.”

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nial, Nietzsche has the most to criticize and the least to say, for he is writing a book on the philosophic life. To the degree that it is also a book of praise for one of his educators, it has no aspiration to be an “objective” assessment and certainly not a critique from the perspective of the opposite moral will that he finds within himself: gratitude drives Schopenhauer as Educator. Nietzsche’s refusal to criticize his educator quietly receives its positive supplement at the appropriate points in his book where he intimates that his other “teachers and taskmasters,” in their longing for the saint in them, became for him what Schopenhauer could never become, educators of his moral will predisposed to affirm life.7 Schopenhauer faced a fourth danger, not “constitutional” but posed by modern times, and here too he is “exemplary and educative.” To describe this fourth danger—the one he describes in greatest detail—Nietzsche must first define what a philosopher is, and his words deserve to stand in italics over his own life as a statement of its essential drive: Let us think of the philosopher’s eye resting on existence: he wants to determine its value anew. For that has been the proper work of all great thinkers, to be lawgivers for the measure, stamp, and weight of things.

The philosopher’s task, rising out of his nature, drives him to gain the freedom necessary to know more comprehensively and, on the basis of that knowledge, to determine the value of things anew. Because “everything contemporary is importunate,” the philosopher’s eye, desiring to “rest on existence” itself, must first resist the forceful demands of present existence and penetrate its limiting character; it must gain knowledge of the spiritual situation of the present to ensure that its view is not distorted by the merely timely. The timeless problem of transcending one’s time in thought is particularly acute in modern times because of the modern belief, not wholly unfounded, that time is progress and that the present is therefore the highest point so far reached by the human species—no past could offer fundamental instruction to such a present were one to yield to its importunate sway. To properly understand and evaluate the cultural moment of the present, then, one must defy it and look to the past, to what Nietzsche had long been studying with the greatest intensity: “the philosophers of ancient Greece.” 7. Nietzsche also chose not to say what he said in EH: “It was atheism that first brought me to Schopenhauer” (EH 3 UM 2).

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Their “verdict on the value of existence says so much more than a modern verdict because they had life itself before and around them in luxuriant perfection.” Denying modern self-praise as the best of all times, Nietzsche retains the notion of a privileged time, one that could offer our time fundamental instruction on the question “what is existence finally worth?” Inwardly free and outwardly surrounded by the highest human achievements in beauty and greatness of life, the Greek philosophers could judge what existence was worth while actually possessing what modern thinkers imagine they possess. Historic privilege makes each of the Greek philosophers exemplary but one most exemplary: “It will always be worth knowing what Empedocles had to say about existence” because Empedocles is the philosopher who lived “in the midst of the most vigorous and exuberant vitality of Greek culture”; that is, he lived in the midst of that highest achievement of art, Greek tragedy. Nietzsche’s intense, years-long study of the history of Greek philosophy led him to conclude that Empedocles stood at the peak of the Greek tradition of inquiry into the nature of nature, philosophy’s ultimate theme. For his Basel lectures on the history of Greek philosophy, Nietzsche undertook original investigations into the chronological order of the pre-Platonic thinkers and arrived at new conclusions about their dates and sequence.8 He judged that Empedocles lived from 492 to 416 and therefore lived out his maturity in the moment of greatest Greek achievement, the height of both Attic tragedy and the Greek enlightenment.9 A historical prejudice that assumes the supremacy of politics calls that “the age of Pericles,” but to Nietzsche, for whom art and philosophy are primary, it is the age of Aeschylus and Empedocles, that acme of Greek natural philosophy who “discovered the foundational conceptions of atomism, the fundamental hypothesis of the scientific view of 8. See Nietzsche, Pre-Platonic Philosophers; Greg Whitlock’s translation of this lecture course also gives an informative commentary plus details of Nietzsche’s early and lasting concern with natural science: “Nietzsche’s knowledge of natural philosophy from Newton to Boscovich was far greater than is generally assumed” (203). In a January 16, 1869 letter Nietzsche told Rohde that he would be offered the philology professorship in Basel; accepting the offer changed his life, making him, he said, a “fool of fate” because he had to abandon their plan to study chemistry in Paris, chemistry being his word then for the field that pursues the elemental in nature. 9. Nietzsche, Pre-Platonic Philosophers, 106–10: “Empedocles [was] some twenty years of age” at the time of “Theron’s death in 472,” the event that led to the rise of Pericles, “he is the tragic philosopher, the contemporary of Aeschylus” (110, 113). PTA stops just before Empedocles.

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nature of the ancients”—that is, the isolation of elements and of a principle of motion.10 Empedocles was the philosopher who lived at the moment in which the worth of existence could be judged at the point of its highest attainments and from the perspective of a complete naturalism. Empedocles’ verdict is in this way singular, but it “is not contradicted by a counter-verdict from any other great philosopher of the same great era”—and the great Greek philosophers were avid to counter. Therefore, “It will always be worth knowing what Empedocles had to say about existence.” What did Empedocles say about existence? Nietzsche does not say yet what Empedocles says, but turns from the Greeks back to the modern thinker facing the fourth danger, the danger of his particularly importunate times. Called by his thinking to make a judgment on life, the modern thinker will want first to be shown life again, true, red, healthy life, so that he may then pronounce his judgment upon it. To himself at least, he will regard it as necessary that he should be a living human being before he dares to believe that he can be a just judge. Here is the reason why precisely the more modern philosophers belong among the mightiest promoters of life, of the will to live.

With that last phrase an uncomfortable contrast with Schopenhauer begins to suggest its unspoken presence. How did Schopenhauer elude the modern danger presented by the inevitable struggle within the modern thinker “between the reformer of life and the philosopher, that is to say, the judge of life”? Nietzsche goes as far as he can with Schopenhauer: he won freedom from the view of the more modern philosophers, the Hegelian view that a thinker is the child of his time who, necessarily a latecomer, brings the implicit thought of his time to full consciousness—and if modern times are the fulfillment of all times, its child is the ultimate thinker, the simply wise man, Hegel. In Schopenhauer, however, Nietzsche sees the philosopher struggling against the thinking of his time and winning freedom from its “indecent compounding” of the merely timely with the timeless. Nietzsche defines that freedom by altering the Hegelian notion of the “child” of his time: Schopenhauer became the “stepson” of his time. Freed into stepson status, Schopenhauer “turned 10. Ibid, 118. Nietzsche also identified the limits of Empedocles’ view: “if all motion is reduced to the workings of incomprehensible forces [love and strife], then all science basically dissolves into magic” (119).

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his fearless eye upon the question ‘What is life finally worth?’ ” Nietzsche’s eloquence reaches a new height as he approaches a crisis moment in a work in praise of Schopenhauer. For Schopenhauer, having learned that there is something higher and purer than the life of his own time, was in a position to judge “whether genius, the highest fruit of life, can perhaps finally justify life.” Qualified as fit by his intellectual genius, a judge steps forward to judge life itself; it is “the glorious, creative human being who is to answer the question, ‘Do you affirm this existence in the depths of your heart? Is it enough for you? Would you be its advocate, its redeemer? For you have only to pronounce a single heartfelt Yes!—and life, though it faces such grave accusations, may go free!’—What answer will he give?” Nietzsche had prepared this question in the context of Schopenhauer, and at the rhetorical peak reached by “What answer will he give?” he says: “The answer of Empedocles.” Empedocles? No word of criticism escapes the encomiast’s mouth, but even the most superficial reader of Schopenhauer will know that his answer was No! An answer not given hangs obtrusively over the end of the section in which Schopenhauer is praised for living and even defining the life of the philosopher. The answer not given is, in the language of this section, the answer given by the philosopher’s “moral will,” his longing for the saint in him. Does the philosophic life, the life inquiring into life, investigating and to a degree understanding life, justify life, advocate life, even redeem life? Can the highest practice of reason justify the life that generated it? Schopenhauer answers No. By calling in “The answer of Empedocles,” Nietzsche confirms his remark about the Greek philosophers: “It is important to find out from such people that they once existed.” Given the judgment against life by the modern philosopher Schopenhauer, it is especially important now to know that the Greek philosophers once existed and that they were unanimous in sharing Empedocles’ most privileged judgment on life, unanimous up to Socrates at least, that turning point and vortex of so-called world history. A modern student of philosophy, intoxicated by the genuine philosopher Schopenhauer and experiencing profoundly the pressure of the moral will to judge the worth of all existence—“Do you affirm this existence? Is it enough for you?”—looks to the Greeks: Was it enough for them? Having ended his section with “The answer of Empedocles” when his reader expected to hear Schopenhauer, Nietzsche jumps to a new section but says: “This last hint may be allowed to remain incomprehensible for the time being.” Nothing said later explains his hint; comprehending it falls to the reader, who is left to draw the natural inference that in educating his own moral will, Nietzsche looked not to Schopenhauer but to Empedocles and

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the Greek philosophers in their unity until Socrates.11 Nietzsche thus aids in educating his reader on the most important question without stooping to criticize the educator to whom he is expressing his gratitude. As Nietzsche’s reflection on the meaning of modernity deepened in the years ahead, he came to understand Schopenhauer’s No as the merely timely word that spoke the despair of an age of decline, a romanticism of disappointment on its way to the nihilism that is the ultimate consequence of the turn in Greek philosophy initiated by Socrates.12 In Nietzsche’s mature judgment, Schopenhauer, that stepson of the Hegelianism of his time, was a true child of the history of philosophy that began with Socrates’ No to the Greek life around him. Schopenhauer was the late modern, post-Christian version of the No that made “the problem of Socrates” a world-historical problem with profound contemporary implications.

E m e r s o n a s E d u cato r ( 8 ) “[W]e possess the advantage of really knowing this age” through Schopenhauer, Nietzsche says, and he eloquently describes just what one can learn from him: How does the philosopher view the culture of our time? . . . When he thinks of the haste and hurry now universal, of the increasing velocity of life, of the cessation of all contemplativeness and simplicity, he almost thinks that what he is seeing are the symptoms of a total extermination and uprooting of culture. The waters of religion are ebbing away and leaving behind swamps or stagnant pools; the nations are again drawing away from one another in the most hostile fashion and long to tear one another to pieces. 11. Nietzsche’s full answer is in The Pre-Platonic Philosophers: Empedocles holds that “all living things are one,” a view that entails “the most internalized empathy, an overwhelming sympathy, with all of nature” (109, see 115). In 1870–72 Nietzsche toyed with writing a play about Empedocles (KSA 7 7 [116]–[118] (September 1870–January 1871), 8 [30]–[37] (Winter  1870/71–Fall 1872)); see Krell, Postponements, 40–50. Krell states that Nietzsche “looked to Empedocles, as Hölderlin had, seeing in him the very model of a tragic thinker”; “Empedocles’ self-understanding vis-à-vis the gods . . . intrigued him: Empedocles mourned the disappearance of ‘his’ gods, those of the sky, but now declared himself a loyal son of the Earth” (Krell and Bates, Good European, 78, 30). On Empedocles, see Kingsley, Ancient Philosophy and “Empedocles.” 12. Nietzsche’s analysis and leave-taking of Schopenhauer find definitive expression in “The Soothsayer” in Z part 2 and in the 1886 entry of GS, “What Is Romanticism?” (370).

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The sciences, pursued without restraint and in a spirit of the blindest laissez faire, are shattering and dissolving all firmly held belief; the educated classes and states are being swept along by a hugely contemptible money economy. The world has never been more worldly, never poorer in love and goodness . . . Everything, contemporary art and science included, serves the coming barbarism. (4)

By the time he reached the final section of his book Nietzsche could summarize what would allow “the philosophic genius” to exist in late modern times: “free manliness of character, early knowledge of humanity, no scholarly education, no narrow patriotism, no necessity for bread-winning, and no ties to the state” (8). And he further compressed these radical (“no scholarly education”!) conditions: “freedom and again freedom: the same wonderful and dangerous element in which the Greek philosophers were able to grow up.” Immediately, the Greek philosopher who counts the most historically becomes his example: Plato, the Plato blamed for being a “bad citizen” by the loyal citizen historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr, the Plato blamable for “presumption” by those for whom it would in fact be outrageous presumption to undertake free actions like those Plato undertook. Plato knew well the natural resistance in every father to his son’s becoming something as radical and tradition-destroying—fathers-destroying—as a philosopher. And Plato knew the only remedy: establish a state whose “highest objective would be to produce new Platos.” That Platonic goal can be said to be Nietzsche’s most basic political motive from the beginning to the end of his career—despite the unforgettable critiques of Plato’s actual teachings in Nietzsche’s best-known works.13 From this call for new Platos in his first two paragraphs, Nietzsche could go on to devote the rest of his final section to the actual fate the modern world imposed on philosophy by confining it to universities—his restatement of Schopenhauer’s devastating criticism of university philosophy. The spiritual situation of the present dictated that philosophy follow Schopenhauer out of the universities and abandon them for its own good.14 And because the uni13. On the continuity of Nietzsche’s view of Plato from these beginnings to the end, see Drochon, Nietzsche’s Great Politics, 36–47; the primary lesson was practical as Drochon shows: “Plato provides [Nietzsche] with a vision on how to develop a political strategy to restore the authentic culture to which he aspires” (36). 14. Six years later, in May 1879, Nietzsche followed this imperative and retired from the University of Basel, but the reason was ill health.

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versities were run by the state, the issue expands into a contemporary version of the permanent problem of the relation of philosophy and power. In the consolidated German Reich the powerful are freed of any need for approval by philosophy, now that the final philosophy to offer it, Hegelianism, was a spent force. For the sake of philosophy, the state should “have nothing at all to do with philosophy.” And if the state cannot be indifferent to philosophy because philosophy, in its independence, has become dangerous and hostile to it, “then let the state persecute it.” Let the state persecute it—knowing the history of the persecution of philosophy by the powerful, Nietzsche is willing to invite it for the sake of philosophy’s independence: so necessary is it to create “a higher tribunal” outside the universities to judge them and the state that runs them. Only in independence can philosophy be what it is, “fearsome and mighty” as “Schopenhauer demonstrated.”15 With his last naming of Schopenhauer in this charged political context Nietzsche closed his book. So he ends by praising Schopenhauer. But just before he ended, in the third paragraph from the end, he quoted a long passage on what the appearance of a genuine philosopher would mean for the earth, and he quoted Emerson, not Schopenhauer. He had said at the start that he would recall other teachers. Emerson, named only at the end, has been silently present throughout the book, as James Conant showed.16 Conant’s exegetical demonstration of the quiet presence of Emerson is important because it recovers a cardinal matter about Nietzsche’s book that Nietzsche, in his writerly audacity, left almost 15. Having just completed Z part 3, Nietzsche could say in a letter to Overbeck that he was “in all probability the most independent man in Europe” (April 21, 1884). He used the phrase at least twice more about himself: to his publisher Fritzsch, August 29, 1886, and to the Swiss author Carl Spitteler, July 25, 1888. 16. Conant, “Nietzsche’s Perfectionism,” esp. 232–39. Conant builds on a claim about Emerson’s presence in SE made by Cavell (Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 33–63). Daniel Blue shows that Emerson was the first philosopher Nietzsche studied seriously, beginning at age eighteen with Emerson’s late The Conduct of Life (Making of Friedrich Nietzsche, 129– 38). By the time of SE he also knew the 1858 German translations of Emerson’s Essays (1841) and Essays: Second Series (1844). In July 1874 Nietzsche took Emerson’s Essays with him to Bergün, where he reread it while completing SE. Then, returning via Bayreuth to Basel, he had his travel bag stolen in the Würzburg train station and immediately bought another copy (to Gersdorff, September 24, 1874). For a concise but rich account of Nietzsche’s debt to Emerson, see Kaufmann, introduction to GW, 7–13. Just how avidly and continuously Nietzsche read Emerson is shown by Brobjer, Nietzsche and the “English,” 155–82: it is “likely that Emerson was the most read and reread author of all [whom] Nietzsche read” (159). Marco Brusotti is particularly instructive on the matters on which Emerson most influenced Nietzsche; see Die Leidenschaft der Erkenntnis, 471–78.

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unspoken, left for those few who would notice and use what they noticed to help educate themselves. Emerson is introduced near the start, Conant showed, for Nietzsche’s opening reflection on the traveler’s judgment about our common laziness ends with a question, “Who was it who said: ‘a man never rises higher than when he does not know whither his path can still lead him?” Who was it? A reader of Emerson’s “Circles” would know because “Circles,” the essay from which Nietzsche took his long quotation near the end of his book, almost ends with Emerson quoting an unnamed source quoting Oliver Cromwell, who seems to have said it first. The lovely artifice of Who was it who said? invites a not lazy reader at the very start to be educated by looking beyond Schopenhauer. For if Schopenhauer educated Nietzsche on the philosophic life with its disciplines and challenges, Emerson stands beyond him as a philosophic educator because his teaching educates: he answered the all-important question “Do you affirm this existence? Is it enough for you?” with Empedocles’ answer. Nietzsche celebrated a key aspect of Emerson’s affirmative teaching in his epigraph to the 1882 edition of The Gay Science: To the poet and to the wise, all things are friendly and sacred, all experiences useful, all days holy, all human beings divine. Emerson

These words from Emerson’s “History” appear again in partial form at the crucial dramatic moment of Thus Spoke Zarathustra when Zarathustra has just gained the essential insight into “Life”: Life herself tempted him by suggesting that she was not unfathomable (Part 2 “The Dance Song”). Following that, Zarathustra can say in “The Tomb Song”: “ ‘Divine shall all beings be to me’ . . . ‘All days shall be holy to me.’ ” Emerson’s words help Zarathustra celebrate his recovery of “the wisdom of my youth,” a wisdom almost killed off in him by his “enemies,” by Schopenhauer in particular whose dangerous judgment against life is presented soon after in “The Sorcerer” chapter.17 Emerson, with the Greek philosophers, was Nietzsche’s educator on the possibility he found deepest in himself, an affirmative view of life that will ultimately be grounded for him in the insights of his maturity. 17. Nietzsche also quoted Emerson’s words in his lament to Overbeck on Christmas Day, 1882, about his treatment by Paul Rée and Lou Salomé: “I have here the most splendid opportunity to prove that for me ‘all experiences are useful, all days holy, all human beings divine’!!!! All human beings divine.”

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The paragraph in which Nietzsche finally named Emerson opens with a momentous claim about philosophy: compared with the existence of a state or the means of education in a state, “what matters above all is the existence of philosophy on earth!” Saying this once is not enough because he wants “to leave absolutely no doubt about what I think.” So he says it again: “so unspeakably more depends upon a philosopher appearing on the earth than that a state or a university continue to exist.” That’s why Nietzsche introduced Emerson by name; Emerson can educate on the most important of all human events, the existence of philosophy on earth. Nietzsche had just put philosophy on trial with the powerful as its judges: a modern field marshal or a great statesman judge the philosophy they learned at university to be a joke.18 They are the them of whom Nietzsche says, “Let an American tell them what a great thinker who arrives on this earth signifies as a new center of tremendous forces”—let a wise American tell the modern German powerful what a philosopher is, and Nietzsche quotes a passage from near the center of Emerson’s “Circles”: Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end. There is not a piece of science but its flank may be turned to-morrow; there is not any literary reputation, not the so-called eternal names of fame, that may not be revised and condemned. The very hopes of man, the thoughts of his heart, the religion of nations, the manners and morals of mankind are all at the mercy of a new generalization.19

Skipping almost a page of Emerson’s text, Nietzsche quotes two more sentences: The things which are dear to men at this hour are so on account of the ideas which have emerged on their mental horizon, and which cause the present 18. It is 1874, three years after Germany’s great statesman, Bismarck, reestablished the German Reich in the aftermath of unified Germany’s victory over France led by the great field marshal Helmuth von Moltke. On the German setting for Nietzsche’s discussions of culture, see Blue, Making of Friedrich Nietzsche, and Williamson, Longing for Myth in Germany, 234– 283, and n. 79, p. 371. 19. This is Emerson’s English; Nietzsche quoted the German translation.

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order of things, as a tree bears its apples. A new degree of culture would instantly revolutionize the entire system of human pursuits.

This overwhelming promise of philosophy animates all of Nietzsche’s work. It is the promise he dreamed could be advanced through Wagner, and it is the promise he made in Zarathustra part 1 that some future Übermensch would fulfill; above all, it is the promise he came to think he himself fulfilled and whose fulfillment he mapped out in the journey he showed Zarathustra completing in Zarathustra parts 2 and 3. So why not write Emerson as Educator? Was it because of the prohibition he wrote out in a workbook seven years after Schopenhauer as Educator? “Emerson.—Never have I felt so much at home in a book, and in my home, as—I may not praise it, it is too close to me.”20 Or was it because of Emerson’s pious transcendentalism? About that Nietzsche had nothing to say, but he could no more endorse it than he could Schopenhauer’s No to life. Schopenhauer as Educator shows in its quiet way that Emerson helped educate Nietzsche on what a philosopher could mean to culture. But Emerson came up short on what Nietzsche had, on his own, been learning a philosopher could know. He stated in a letter to Overbeck on December 24, 1883: “Tell your wife that I feel Emerson to be a brother-soul (but his mind is badly educated).”21 A year later, having commissioned a translation of Emerson’s Historical Notes of Life and Letters in New England, he offered it to Overbeck and his wife while making his reservation clear: “I don’t know how much I would give if I could effect a change in the past and give such a glorious great nature, rich in soul and spirit, strict discipline, a truly scientific culture. As it stands, we have lost a philosopher in Emerson!” (December 22, 1884). A truly scientific education included for Nietzsche the great modern enterprise of science: Emerson’s education lacked what Nietzsche’s education lacked. He blamed Schulpforta for that lack in him and tried to make up for it with independent study of science—his plan to study chemistry in Paris for five years after completing his philology degree or to study natural science in 1882 in some university town with Paul Rée and Lou Salomé.22 But even more importantly, disciplined scientific education in the broad sense was what Nietzsche worked to gain for himself in private, education that by the time he wrote Schopenhauer 20. KSA 9 12 [18] Fall 1881. 21. On Ida Overbeck and her love of Emerson, see also Nietzsche’s letter of April 7, 1884. 22. See Binion, Frau Lou, 56, and D 195.

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as Educator had already led to the skepticism, dissolution, and pessimism that he said he kept out of that book, kept secret. If he had lost a philosopher in Emerson, Nietzsche was bent on not losing the philosopher in himself. Edification was a public necessity; skepticism, dissolution, and pessimism could be kept secret but they were the necessary conclusions of a disciplined, truly scientific education. It is a lovely moment in Nietzsche’s careful superintendence of his books when he replaced the Emerson epigraph of the 1882 edition of The Gay Science with a new epigraph for the 1886 edition: I live in my own house, Never took nothin from no one And—laughed away every master, Who did not laugh away himself. Over my house door.

Laughing away his not laughing educator Emerson with the jaunty lie that he never took nothin from no one, Nietzsche rises as the philosopher lost in Emerson. He speaks his little verse as a philosopher who had great educators from whom he took things, the Greeks, Schopenhauer, Emerson, but who in the end made his own house with his own advances that led through skepticism and pessimism to what he recorded in Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, the books that present the house of the new educator whose way of thinking could revolutionize the entire system of human pursuits. What a philosopher is: that ultimate independence and right to give a new direction to culture Nietzsche won by breaking free of his educators, as necessary as they were for pointing the way. The supremacy of the philosopher, spiritual rule by the wise man, perhaps the most difficult thing of all for modern, democratically disposed minds to credit, Nietzsche gained with his ultimate insights recorded in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Nietzsche learned what a philosopher was early in his life, and the life he lived in the possession of that knowledge led to his actually becoming a philosopher in the highest sense.

Nietzsche’s Deepening View of the History of Greek Philosophy After the publication of Schopenhauer as Educator in October 1874, Nietzsche’s writing plans turned to a fourth Untimely, “We Philologists,” an attack

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on his own discipline for its reduction of the greatest age of cultural achievement to a specialized field for academic professionals. Writing when he could between semesters and during breaks, he composed workbook entries in the spring and summer of 1875.23 That summer he began a series of entries on the Greek philosophers themselves, not the modern study of them, entries for his book on the history of Greek philosophy that would do what the unpublished 1873 Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks did inadequately and incompletely.24 The new book would not be an Untimely Meditation—it was not polemically focused on the present; it would be the companion to his book on Greek tragedy, a book on philosophy and the Greek philosophers. Its focus falls ever again on Socrates, a sharply different Socrates from the founder of the scientific tradition attacked in The Birth of Tragedy. With these entries Nietzsche took further steps toward his mature view of the Greeks and the role of Socrates and Plato in Western culture. The first line of the new beginning in the workbook “Imitation of the Ancients” stands like a title over everything that follows: the ancient Greek philosophers are his models. He begins by mentioning modern views of the Greeks that are not his own, those of Philology and of Goethe, and moving to his own: Greek antiquity “is a means to understand ourselves, to judge our time, and thereby to overcome it. The pessimistic foundation of our culture”—our culture is founded on a pessimistic perspective and on opti23. In the late spring and summer of 1875 Nietzsche suffered particularly frequent and acute attacks of headache, stomach pains and vomiting, and pain in his eyes. He took a cure in Steinabad bei Bonndorf in the Schwarzwald from July 16 to August 11, but it did little good. The attacks led him to change his lifestyle. After living in the same house as Overbeck for five years and enjoying daily close contact with a like-minded scholar, he persuaded his sister to move to Basel to live with him and set up a strictly regulated household with a view to controlling his sickness by the diet he followed at Steinabad: four meals a day each four hours apart from 8 in the morning to 8 at night, the same food every day in small portions. 24. KGW IV 1 6 [1]–[51] (KSA 8 6) Mette number U II 8c (trans. in Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth, 127–46). The different intention of these entries from those for “We Philologists” is indicated by the way Nietzsche used the workbook in which both sets of entries appear, U II 8. The “We Philologists” entries (U II 8a and b) follow his custom, beginning at the back and moving forward on the left-hand pages, leaving the right-hand pages blank. When he began writing entries for a book on Greek philosophy he simply turned his workbook over and upside down and wrote entries beginning at the new back, again writing on the left-hand pages and leaving the right-hand pages mostly blank. All the middle pages of U II 8 (44–107) are blank because he began at both ends. Nietzsche’s letters from the hard sick summer of 1875 give no hint of his renewed work on Greek philosophy.

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mistic Christian misunderstanding [1, 2].25 Socrates first appears in an aside that became famous: “Socrates, to simply confess it, stands so close to me that I am almost always fighting a battle with him” [3]—his imitation of Socrates battles against him, against the philosopher on whom the culture of the West turned. The next entry, entitled “Science and Wisdom in Battle,” places his opponent’s view at the end of a summary of the rise of “the drive to science” in Greece and of the characteristics of wisdom; Socrates combined science and wisdom: Socratism is first second third

wisdom in taking the soul in earnest. science as fear and hate of illogical generalizations. something singular in the furtherance of conscious and logically correct action.

From these spring damage for science, for the ethical life. [4]

Opposite this entry, on the right-hand page, Nietzsche wrote an expanded version of its title: “Science and Wisdom in Battle / Portrayed in the Ancient Greek Philosophers” [5]. Subsequent entries describe the damage Socrates wrought in science and the ethical life as his decisive influence on the history of philosophy. After a brief summary of his book in five numbered items [6], Nietzsche listed some of the characteristics of his book, putting two issues of style and content first: There is also a way of relating this history ironically and full of sadness. I will in any case avoid the earnest even tone. Socrates throws the whole thing over, at a moment in which the truth had been most nearly attained; that is especially ironic. [7]

Avoiding the earnest, even tone of mere philology, Nietzsche’s history would make its sad outcome prominent, with its most ironic, saddest event occurring as it approached its peak. Subsequent entries show that near-peak to be Democritus’s achievement viewed as a natural outcome of the whole line of previous scientific and wise thinkers but not yet their ultimate attainment: 25. The opening pages of the workbook’s new beginning are uncharacteristically roomy with much open space perhaps meant for alterations. The entries are written in relatively large Latin lettering instead of Nietzsche’s usual German script.

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Socrates threw that whole line over at that high but not highest point, blocking its natural fulfillment in a thinker and actor now barely imaginable, a now irrecoverable type whose loss is the greatest sadness. After these entries on the tone of his book comes a paragraph that showed that irony and sadness would be accompanied by celebration: the only U II 8c entry KGW/KSA omits says how beautiful these philosophers are, how worthy of imitation in their contrast with the grim gloominess of self-denial and asceticism marking the philosopher in the Socratic tradition of earnest soul-care.26 One of Nietzsche’s plans for ordering the topics of his book is particularly important because it displays the major conclusion of his years-long study: after an “Introduction” comes a first chapter, “Comparison of the older Greek philosophers with the sect-philosophers after Socrates,” followed by his wellresearched topic, “the chronological order of the older philosophers” [11]. The “Narration” of that order would show that so much hangs on the development of Greek culture because our whole Western culture took its impetus from that: fate willed that the younger and decadent Hellenism have the most historical power. Because of that the older Hellenism was always falsely judged.

Nietzsche’s book would establish the truly judged order of rank that places the pre-Socratic thinkers high above the post-Socratic moralists. After another list of the philosophers, this time itemizing the “dangers intrinsic to Greek culture” [12], Nietzsche asks, “How did this age die? Unnaturally. Where then did the seeds of ruin lie?” [13]. The first of a series of answers runs: “The flight of the better out of the world was a great misfortune. From Socrates on: the individual at one stroke took himself to be too important”—took himself out of a concern for Greek culture into a concern for his own soul. Entry [14] expands this claim. “The older Greek philosophy is the philosophy exclusively of statesmen”; with them one did not see “ ‘the loathsome pretention to happiness’ as from Socrates onward.” With Socrates philosophy turned to the pursuit of a private happiness foreign to the statesman’s concern for public well-being, among the Greek philosopher-statesmen, a concern to preserve Hellenism with its unique em26. KGW/KSA omits it because it is a draft of a later U II 8c entry that is even more celebratory and begins “How beautiful they are!” [48.2], see below, p. 99. The omitted draft is printed in the Nachbericht volume, KGW IV 4, p. 381.

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phases on philosophy and art. With them it was “not the case that everything turned on the condition of their soul.” Crucially, this entry looks to the most fateful consequence of this Socratic turn to the soul, its opening the way for Christianity: Weakened Hellenism, grown romanticized, coarsened, decorative, then as decorative culture accepted as confederated with a weakened Christianity, expanded with violence among uncivilized peoples—that is the history of Western culture. The great feat is accomplished and the Greek and the priestly brought together.

Nietzsche then lists the historic consequences for philosophy of the Socratic turn [15, 17] and comments: My overall task: to show how life, philosophy, and art can have a deeper and kin-like relation to one another without philosophy becoming flat and the life of the philosopher dishonest or lying . . . The false opposites of the vita practica and contemplativa is Asiatic. The Greeks understood it better.

Nietzsche’s overall task aims at understanding the history of Greek culture as determined by philosophy, and it expands to a historical understanding of Rome and subsequent Western history. This history impels him to his task of restoring the greatness of lost origins, the kin-like unity of life, philosophy, and art. Nietzsche’s overall task as a thinker engaged with the actual world is therefore to reestablish the height of the ancient at the depth of the modern— without making philosophy flat or lying, without reverting to Jesuitism. Nietzsche understands practice as the early Greek philosophers did: as statesmen, they understood the relation of thinking and acting better than Asiatics did, Asiatic meaning Christian here. Secular moderns misunderstand the contemplative life Christianly; its highest form is not monastic withdrawal but engagement with the life of the “city” on the model of Greek philosophers prior to Socrates, reforming engagement with the political life within which philosophy is set. Plato enters Nietzsche’s new thoughts on the history of Greek philosophy in entry [17], with a more detailed notice in entry [18]. There he says that the early philosophers are “the forerunners of a reformation of the Greeks: but not Socrates.” Their reformation, viewed wholly positively by Nietzsche, never came because of Socrates. “The unsuccessful reformer is Empedocles; when it failed with him only Socrates was left.” As for Plato, “he was deflected

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by Socrates.” With respect to Plato as the possible reformer, Nietzsche gave himself a task: Attempt a characterization of Plato without Socrates. Tragedy—profound grasp of love—pure nature—no turning away into the fanatical: clearly the Greeks were in sight of finding a still higher type of human than the earlier [philosophers] were: [fate’s] scissors cut that off.

This Plato without Socrates signals the higher type in the immense promise of a deeper understanding of tragedy, love, and nature, without fanaticism and with a statesman’s imperative—Plato without Socrates is evidently most visible in Plato’s Symposium. Socrates’ deflection of Plato’s promise was the saddest turning point in Western history; in that event a higher type was lost and the prepared reformation failed to occur; in its place came the turn inward to concern for the soul and an ethics of private purity. The new Platos Nietzsche called for at the opening of his last section in Schopenhauer as Educator would be Platos immune to Socrates’ charm, allowing their own nature to flower in a teaching of tragedy with its profound conception of love and with no turning away from the world as it is; they would be Plato as Nietzsche. Further sketches of the coherence and promise of Greek philosophy follow, with entry [21] setting out very brief characterizations of the stages of philosophy’s progressive development up to Socrates: Thales—the unmythic. Anaximander—Passing and arising in nature as moral guilt and punishment. Heraclitus—order and justice in the world. Parmenides—the other world behind this one; this as a problem. Anaxagoras—a world master-builder. Empedocles—blind love and blind hate; the deeply irrational in the most rational man in the world. Democritus—the world is wholly without reason and drive; mixed together. All gods and myths useless. Socrates—there is nothing for me but myself; anxiety about oneself becomes the soul of philosophy. Plato’s attempt to think everything to the end and to be the redeemer.

Nietzsche’s next entry states his way of treating these figures: “The persons must be described: as I’ve described Heraclitus. The historic must be woven in” [22]. Socrates is the persistent focus: “With the Greeks things went

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forward quickly but also terribly quickly downwards . . . A single powerful wrong-headed person like Socrates—the break was unhealable. In him the self-destruction of the Greeks completed itself ” [23]. With Empedocles and Democritus the Greeks were on the best path to correctly assess human existence, its irrationality, its suffering; they never succeeded in getting there. Thanks to Socrates. The unself-conscious, impartial view on the human is lacking in all Socratics; they have the horrible abstracta ‘the Good, the Just’ in their heads. [25]

In entry [26], titled “Socrates’ Effect,” Nietzsche listed his summary judgments on Socrates: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

he destroyed the unself-consciousness of ethical judgment, annihilated science, had no sense for art, tore the individual out of the historic associations, advanced dialectic speechifying and babbling.

Annihilated science: within a list of devastating judgments against Socrates, this one stands out for the author of The Birth of Tragedy: there he blamed Socrates for being the founder of optimistic science that believed it could understand and correct existence, the science that passed through the Alexandrians and, unbridled in modern times, became a chief threat to culture. Nietzsche’s new judgment on Socrates bespeaks a change in himself: he has gained a far better informed and more positive view of science both ancient and modern, one that will, with his break from Wagnerism, come into the open in Things Human All Too Human. The Socrates of the five indictments is the Socrates of Nietzsche’s maturity, blamable for annihilating Greek natural science and for corrupting Plato. Entry [27] contains a series of judgments that show how Nietzsche’s continued intense study of the Greeks led him to views radically different from his previous views and from those that had become conventional.27 It begins: 27. His university courses, to which he gave undivided attention during the semesters, were part of his self-education. Besides his frequent courses on the Greek tragedians they included courses on Greek rhetoric, Greek lyric poetry (six times), Greek religion, pre-Platonic Greek philosophy, Plato, and a seminar on Democritus. See Janz, “Friedrich Nietzsches akademische Lehrtätigkeit.” As for his Gymnasium teaching, also very demanding, Nietzsche proudly re-

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“I no longer believe in the ‘natural development’ of the Greeks: they were far too gifted to be gradual in that step by step manner,” a judgment that nevertheless allows him to continue to see in the philosopher-statesmen a chain of progress. His next sentence shows that a major alteration in his view of Greek history came from recognizing the importance of politics: “The Persian wars are the national misfortune: the success was too great, all the bad drives broke free, the tyrannical appetite to rule all Hellas transformed individual men and individual cities.” The success that was too great is “the hegemony of Athens” won after the wars; Athens eclipsed other centers of culture that Nietzsche saw as potentially superior to it: “Miletus was for example much more gifted, Agrigento too,” Miletus being the city in which philosophy first arose, Agrigento the city of Empedocles. “With the hegemony of Athens (in spiritual matters) a throng of forces was crushed; think only on how unproductive Athens was in philosophy for a long time.” A list follows of figures of high achievement—Pindar, Simonides, Empedocles, Heraclitus—whom he finds unimaginable in Athens. The author of The Birth of Tragedy goes so far as to say that “Athenian tragedy is not the highest form that one can think. The Pindaric is too much lacking in its heroes.”28 Then, curtly, “How awful it was that the fight precisely between Sparta and Athens had to break out—that can not be considered deeply enough.” Thinking of the detrimental effects of Athenian hegemony and reading Plato against the background of Thucydides, Nietzsche assigns primary blame to imperial Athens for that Greece-crippling war; a later entry refers to “the horrifying dialogue of the Athenians with the Melians in Thucydides!” His example is the Athenian speech to the Melians on the gods:29 “With such a mentality, the Hellenic had to go under, through anxiety on all sides” [32]. For Nietzsche such a mentality is not false, but it is disastrous as public policy. He underlined only one sentence in [27], its primary point: “The spiritual hegemony of Athens was the impediment to that reformation”—that reformation being what the history of Greek philosophy promised as its culmination. Instead, Athenian hegemony, won after the Persian wars, opened Greece and the whole of the West to the eventual rule of the Socratic in spiritual matters. How different a Nietzschean ported that Jakob Burckhardt said, “The people of Basel will not see his like as a teacher again” (to Rohde, October 7, 1875). In a reflective letter to Gersdorff on the value of life (December 13, 1875), Nietzsche spoke of “the unwavering good fortune . . . of having found the Greeks as the daily object of my work.” 28. Pindar was a major subject of Nietzsche’s courses on Greek lyric and Greek literature. 29. Thucydides 5.105.

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history of Greek philosophy and Greek spirituality would have been from the still conventional one had he written it.30 After these entries with their primary focus on Socrates as the new and sad way taken by Greek philosophy comes a series of entries that introduce an element almost as important as his new interpretations of Socrates and Athenian hegemony. Nietzsche looks back to the sequence of philosopher-statesmen that Socrates broke, ending with a well-honed entry that is a draft for the introduction to his new book on Greek philosophy [48], followed by a sketch of how he will now treat each of the philosopher-statesmen in the sequence [50]. The introduction and book plan provide instructive guidance to Nietzsche’s conception of his philosophic task: the Greeks are his models, and each is a philosopher-statesman who looked first to the nature of nature and then to the formation of a human community on the basis of that understanding of nature. Each is an ontologist with a conclusion about the being of beings, and each pursues a politics for philosophy that recognized the threats philosophy faced and acted to meet them. The introduction consists of three numbered paragraphs [48], the first being an enticing entry to his book: the Greek philosophers are like worldcircumnavigating explorers whose inventiveness as thinkers could mirror a rising inventiveness one may see in oneself. Listen closely and the doubledrivenness of each to know and to live could become a model one could strive to be like; setting off for the new from the familiar, one could aim to secure a new place to stand as a knower and a new way to live that knowing, not only for oneself. Paragraph 2 lauds “a sequence of thinkers,” the Greeks before the Persian wars, who, each in turn, succeeded in finding a new and beautiful possibility for life that the later Greeks forgot. That sequence “began with Thales and ended with Democritus,” and we should compare them with “Socrates and his students and all the sectarians of later Greece.” “That’s what we want to do in this writing,” Nietzsche says, while hoping that “others will do it still better”—this is a first report on a new way of looking at Greek philosophy that 30. On the crucial question of Plato’s revolutionary/reformer role, greater appreciation of Plato’s form of exotericism could have led Nietzsche to see that the reformation he anticipated did in fact occur and occurred with Plato, whose statesman-like politics for philosophy entailed an exoteric emphasis on the well-being of the souls of young Athenians troubled by a relatively unbridled science, and an esoteric conveying of precisely what Nietzsche thought the history of Greek philosophy was moving toward: cool, profound thinking on tragedy, eros, and nature: Plato was the achievement of a higher type. Still, the Socratic/Platonic opening for Christianity and its annihilation of science remains indictable. See my How Philosophy Became Socratic.

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Nietzsche hopes will found a tradition of such writing and become the standard way of looking at the Greeks. This is how he sees them: “How beautiful they are!” with a beauty that derives in part from what they are not: I see no warped and wasted figures among them, no priestly visages, no skeletal desert-solitaries, no fanatical varnishers of present things, no theologizing counterfeiters, no pressured and pale scholars; I also do not see among them any who take “the healing of your soul” or the question “What is happiness?” to be so important that they forget the world and other humans because of it.31

The beautiful ancient Greek thinkers display no hint of what a philosopher became with sectarian Socratics and Christians. “Poets and historians should ponder this task” of making these beautiful thinkers and their different possibilities of life visible again in their beauty, the task for which his planned book is a first effort. Paragraph 3 of [48] begins by asking whether one should take seriously the proposition that “Water is the source and womb of all things.” “Yes,” he answers, “and for three reasons.” First, the proposition expresses something about the origin of things and leaves Thales within the company of the religious and superstitious. Second, by expressing its view without image or mythic fable, the proposition takes Thales out of that company and shows him to be the first investigator of nature. Third, by expressing a version of “Everything is one,” it makes Thales the first Greek philosopher. In his summary conclusion Nietzsche says, “In Thales for the first time scientific man is victorious over the mythical and the wise man over the scientific.” Thales took the two indispensable steps into philosophy, into scientifically grounded wisdom. The next paragraph is not numbered and the editors treat it as a separate entry [49], but in the workbook the new paragraph simply continues on the same page without skipping a line; the new paragraph is a continuation of paragraph 3 that extends Nietzsche’s thought on Thales in a remarkable way—the first of the Greek philosophers, a scientific and wise thinker, was a statesman who looked to politics, an element wholly lacking in the Thales of the 1873 Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. “How is it at all possible that Thales said good-bye to myth! Thales as statesman!” Something must have happened, Nietzsche says, to cause this statesman, this leader of a polis, 31. Entry [48.2] is the later version of the draft KGW/KSA omitted after entry [7]; see above, p. 93.

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to abandon myth, knowing its importance to the polis: “To abandon myth means as much as abandon the polis.” Why would a Greek thinker-statesman abandon the polis given its historic role in Greekness? We know, Nietzsche says, that Thales tried to establish a confederacy of cities but failed—failed because of the power of myth in the polis: a confederation of cities would compromise the purity of local myth, and the conservatism of religious superstition would not permit it. The statesman Thales had good reason to risk the radical step of abandoning the polis for a confederation: “He had a presentiment of the immense danger Greece faced precisely because the power of myth kept the cities separated. In fact, had Thales accomplished his confederacy of cities, Greece would have been spared the Persian war.” The threat of the Persian colossus forced the first Greek philosopher-statesman to advocate a confederation of cities—he knew that Greekness was independent of and more important than Greek myth and the Greek polis that were the deepest attachments of most Greeks. Nietzsche completes his sentence by adding that Greece would also have been spared “Athenian victory and supremacy”— Athenian hegemony being part of the “national misfortune” described by entry [27]. Nietzsche extends his point that philosophy’s first exemplar understood that philosophy had a political task: “All the ancient Greek philosophers concerned themselves with altering the polis-concept and creating a panhellenic mentality.” One of them went beyond even the panhellenic: “Heraclitus even seems to have torn down the barrier between barbarian and Hellene in order to create greater freedom and to bring narrow points of view forward” (for criticism). Philosophy as such leads to a recognition of shared humanity across all local difference: Nietzsche’s Greek models were partly responsible for his politics of “good Europeanism” amid the growing fanaticisms of European nationalism during these decades, most especially the German nationalism Nietzsche deplored. The entry ends on a note that at first looks curious: “—The meaning of the water and the sea for the Greeks.” It is not curious: he is discussing Thales, and his proposition about water leads to this final point; the physical geography of Greece with its old mainland cities and its more dynamic, experimental colony cities across the sea east and west, north and south, is relevant to understanding the Greek achievement: to understand the Greek models in their novelty, one must pursue all the influences on their thinking, including geography and the role seafaring played in their culture with its resultant exposure to a variety of different cultures.32 32. The next entry [50] gives Nietzsche’s most complete and informative list of the sequence of philosophers from Thales to Socrates; because I have already discussed its main

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It’s not hard to wish that Nietzsche had written his book on the Greek philosophers instead of getting deflected again into the Untimelies, this one on Wagner himself, their original impetus. His own mature investigations of the nature of nature and his own “great politics” for philosophy would then be seen to be grounded in his Greek models and would be more easily recognizable as the unified core of his mature thinking. Still, the Wagner book he turned to instead contains something of great value: Nietzsche’s most illuminating portrait of what an Artist is.33 novelties, I do not treat it here. A translation is found in Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth, 146. 33. In Nietzsche’s Great Politics Hugo Drochon presents a detailed and persuasive defense of Nietzsche’s politics for philosophy. He shows that such a politics began very early for Nietzsche and that he remained true to his Greek models, particularly Plato, while growing more nuanced and more practical to the end of his career. Not frightened by the words aristocracy, slavery, breeding, Drochon attends to the unique content Nietzsche poured into each of them and to their relevance for the late modern culture that Nietzsche worked to understand. Drochon shows Nietzsche to be an acute observer of the rise of democratic politics in Bismarck’s Germany (“Nietzsche may be one of the most acute commentators on democracy we have,” 102) and a prescient critic of its future course. Out of Nietzsche’s observation and critique arose the reasonable, not utopian, future he envisioned for “good Europeans,” the future of an order of rank in which both the democratic many and the more spiritual/intellectual few play essential and interconnected roles, each fulfilling its own kind of drives. And Drochon recognizes that the ultimate purpose of Nietzsche’s great politics remained Greek: to create a cultural climate that would generate philosophers.

Chapter 4

What an Artist Is: Richard Wagner in Bayreuth

[In Richard Wagner in Bayreuth], the absolute certainty about what I am was projected onto some accidental reality—the truth about me spoke from some gruesome depth . . . The essay Richard Wagner in Bayreuth is a vision of my future. EH 3 BT 4 and UM 3

Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations treat the Artist just as they did the Philosopher: the two highest attainments in the fundamental activities of human beings, thinking and making, can be represented by exemplars whose deficiencies with respect to the ideal can be safely ignored. In the case of Wagner, Nietzsche ignored deficiencies he had clarified for himself in a workbook two and a half years before he published his book. The book moderates the criticisms or folds praise out of them as only the eulogist speaks: the purpose of Richard Wagner in Bayreuth is to depict the Artist in his highest reach just as Schopenhauer as Educator did the Philosopher. How high can the Artist reach? What can his ultimate making be?

T h e 1886 “ F o r ewo r d ” to R i c h a r d   W a g n e r i n B ay r e u t h In his 1886 Foreword to Things Human All Too Human, Volume II, Nietzsche said that like the other three Untimely Meditations, “even” Richard Wagner in Bayreuth should be dated earlier despite its “appearance of ‘topicality,’ ” its belonging to the moment of the 1876 Bayreuth Festival for which it was

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finished in a rush with copies arriving there by July 10 just as the public began gathering for the festival. Despite its timeliness Nietzsche claims that his book was “in its background an act of homage and gratitude for a piece of my own past”—the time of Tribschen, 1869–72, when he was so close to Wagner and Cosima that he had his own room in their house.1 He described that piece of his past in Ecce Homo, speaking of his gratitude for what has been by far the most profound and cordial recreation of my life . . . my intimate relationship with Richard Wagner . . . I should not want to give away out of my life at any price the days of Tribschen—days of trust, of cheerfulness, of sublime accidents, of profound moments . . . I call Wagner the great benefactor of my life. (EH 2 5, 6)

In his 1886 foreword he describes this period as “the most beautiful but also the most dangerous period of dead calm of my whole voyage.” He adds that his book of homage and gratitude was also “in fact a breaking-free, a taking leave,” giving as evidence a passage from the first paragraph of section 7 of Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, in which he interprets the word meditation (Betrachten) as proving that he had taken a distance from its subject: “to meditate there already belongs a mysterious antagonism, that of seeing-over-against”; the word is “a revealing and melancholy usage that was perhaps for only a few ears.”2 He could have called in earlier and more direct evidence of his seeingover-against by referring to his workbooks, as he did with Schopenhauer as Educator, in this case a workbook from the beginning of 1874, two and half years before his break with Wagnerism. There, he took the measure of Wagner and found him wanting.

T h e E a r ly - 1 8 74 W o r k b o o k E n t r i e s o n W a g n e r While making his last changes to On the Use and Disadvantage of History in January 1874, Nietzsche began writing workbook entries for an Untimely 1. Nietzsche had moved to Basel in May 1869, a short train and boat trip away from Tribschen on Lake Lucerne; in April 1872, the Wagners moved to Bayreuth to supervise construction of the Festspielhaus, ending Nietzsche’s Tribschen idyll. 2. Nietzsche’s analysis of Betrachten fully befits that word from the title of the series; it befits less well the customary English translation of the title “Meditation”; literally betrachten means to look at or consider.

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Meditation on Wagner. The workbook he used already had a few pages of entries for a projected Untimely Meditation on classical philology, but suddenly the entries become critical assessments of Wagner, and they continue for twenty pages with entries only on Wagner that are increasingly systematic and comprehensive. Nietzsche then refined and expanded these entries on separate sheets.3 Workbook U II 5 is one of the most remarkable of all Nietzsche’s workbooks. After its early criticisms of Wagner he set it aside, returning to it two and half years later for the first entries initiating his post-Wagner phase, entries he would rework for Things Human All Too Human: U II 5 contains both his early criticisms of Wagner and his first post-Wagner reflections. The entries of January 1874 come more than five years after Nietzsche’s enchanted first encounter with Wagner in Leipzig on November 8, 1868, and a little less than five years after the May 8, 1869 start of his close relations with Wagner and Cosima at their home in Tribschen, thirty-six paradisiacal meetings during which he became part of the household for visits that included intimate family occasions like holidays and birthdays. Nietzsche remained profoundly grateful for this closeness to the end—the last sentence of The Wagner Case, his 1888 indictment, runs: “This writing is—you hear it—inspired by gratitude.” After writing the Wagner entries in early 1874 for his next Untimely Meditation, Nietzsche turned away from Wagner as a topic and began instead to prepare his “philosophers book” which became Schopenhauer as Educator. He did not return to his Wagner book until July 1875; working on it through October, he wrote its first eight sections but again set it aside, telling Rohde it “would never be published” (October 7, 1875).4 But when Heinrich Köselitz, the young composer and Wagner enthusiast, came to Basel expressly to study with him in the spring of 1876, Nietzsche allowed him to read the draft, and Köselitz was so taken with it that he persuaded Nietzsche to publish it after all. Aiming then to finish it before the rehearsals of the first Bayreuth Festival in late July 1876, he wrote sections 9 to 11, revised the rest, and sent it to his publisher on June 22, 1876. The book was already available for purchase in 3. The workbook is KGW III 4 32 [8]–[61]/KSA 7 32, Mette number U II 5. The separate sheets are KGW III 4 33/KSA 7 33, Mette number Mp XIII 4, whose rewritten entries reach only as far as 32 [15]. I use the translation of Richard T. Gray (Complete Works, vol. 11) with modifications. 4. In an earlier letter to Gersdorff, Nietzsche called his draft “unpublishable” and requested silence about its existence (September 26, 1875).

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Bayreuth three weeks later, July 10, 1876, the Bayreuth in which the top rungs of German society both musical and political were beginning to gather, including Kaiser Wilhelm himself (to whom Wagner sent a copy of Nietzsche’s book), Emperor Pedro II of Brazil, King Karl of Württemberg, and many others.5 It is useful to read the 1874 workbook entries on Wagner before entering Richard Wagner in Bayreuth because the open blame of the entries puts the book in the proper light, the light of Nietzsche’s Jesuitism. The entries do for Richard Wagner in Bayreuth what “On Truth and Lie in the Extra-moral Sense” and workbook P I 20 do for Schopenhauer as Educator: show what Nietzsche actually thought but “kept secret” in the interest of what he was publicly advocating. This work too is an exercise in forcibly making illusion the foundation of culture. The workbook entries assign Wagner two defining features, an “actor’s nature” and a “lawgiving nature.” The first is more important because Nietzsche sees it as basic to all of Wagner’s achievements; even lawgiving is pressed into an actor’s service. The first Wagner entry appears suddenly in U II 5: If Goethe can be viewed as a “displaced painter” and Schiller as a “displaced orator,” Wagner can be viewed as a “displaced actor” [8], necessarily displaced because he lacked “the stature, the voice, and the self-contentedness” to succeed as an actor [15].6 The next entry, [9], especially in its much expanded version, 33 [2], looks to a transforming event in Wagner’s life, his observation of a great actress whose talent so enhanced insignificant music and trivial drama that the whole had the effect of great tragedy. Wagner asked himself what heights of effect could be attained if the greatness of the music and the drama matched that of such an actress. Thus did Wagner’s “actor’s ideal” gain its full form by uniting acting with music and poetry of a high level. Although Nietzsche can say “about [Wagner’s] earliest work . . . that the music does not have much value, nor does the poetry, nor does the drama,” still, “everything forms a totality and at the same level and derives its greatness from this” (33 [5], refin5. Knowing how demanding his courses were and having suffered particularly intense and frequent attacks, Nietzsche planned ahead and assigned for the summer semester during which the festival would occur “a pair of old pious horses . . . that I can ride half asleep”: “The PrePlatonic Philosophers” and “On Plato’s Life and Teaching.” He added, “My work, for which I’m gathering all my strength, is the month in Bayreuth” (to Rohde, May 16, 1876; at this time he was writing the final sections of RWB). 6. Other actor references are found at [10], [20], [24], [41], [55].

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ing 32 [10]). Rendering his judgment as an image—“Wagner’s talent is a growing forest, not an individual tree” (32 [11])—Nietzsche says just why he can believe in a new future for German culture through Wagner: “He has a sense for unity in diversity—that is why I consider him a bearer of culture” [12]. But even this judgment on the vaunted unity turns negative: “Wagner’s organic unity lies in the drama but that is why it does not (frequently does not) permeate the music, just as it does not permeate the text” [26]. Later analyzing the very possibility of organic unity in music, gesture, and words, Nietzsche states that “the unification of all these factors seems impossible” [52]. Finally, while Wagner’s actor nature led him to display people experiencing extreme affect, “for the artist, the peril of portraying affect is extraordinary. The intoxicating, the sensual-ecstatic, the impulsive, being moved at any price—horrible tendencies!” [16].7 As for the “lawgiving” aspect of “Wagner’s dual nature” [18], when it is satisfied he can be “secure, moderate, and stable,” but when not he becomes “immoderate, eccentric, obstreperous” [20], and this “lack of restraint” drives him to “the last rungs of his strength, of his emotion” [15]. The “false omnipotence” of creating a world in music, drama, and acting “gives rise to something tyrannical in Wagner,” which feeds “the feeling of having no successors” and requires a “striving for legitimacy” [32]. Entry [44] is especially important because it moves beyond acting and tyranny to what Wagnerism actually stands for—the entry is an early installment in Nietzsche’s condemnation of romantic pessimism. “Wagner’s art is soaring and transcendental . . . It has something like a flight from this world, it negates this world, it does not transfigure it.” It does the opposite to what Attic tragedy did, affirm and transfigure the world as it is—and it is the opposite to Nietzsche’s own deepest tendency. Nietzsche sees Wagnerism and Christianity as kin: Wagnerism “saps away part of the strength of the dying religion.” In Wagner, “the Schopenhauerian ‘will to life’ receives its artistic expression”— the will to life that Schopenhauer negates—“this dull drive without a purpose, this ecstasy, this despair, this tone of suffering and desire, this accentuation of love and of ardor . . . Improvement of the real is no longer the goal; rather the annihilation of or delusion about the real.” Not even this insight into the deepest tendency of Wagnerism was enough to cause Nietzsche to break with the movement with which he had so publically identified himself. 7. In entry [14] Nietzsche employs his knowledge of classical Greek and Roman rhetoric to understand Wagner’s effect on audiences; he had taught his course on classical rhetoric a year earlier, winter 1872–73.

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At the end of his 1874 Wagner entries,8 Nietzsche measures Wagner against the culture-creating power of Attic tragedy: Wagner attempts a renewal of art on the only basis that still exists, from the theater out, [but] to this very day it has proven impossible to regain control of the theatrocracy . . . Is it possible to bring [art] to mastery again? Here lies Wagner’s significance: he attempts to establish a tyranny with the aid of the theater masses. [61]

Nietzsche traced the greatness of classical Athens to the community-generating power of tragedy experienced by Athenians in the annual Dionysos festival in the theater on the south side of the Acropolis—four consecutive days of communal immersion in a mix of music, dance, and poetry united into the highest art. Just so, Nietzsche could imagine a new greatness for modern humanity through the transformation of the audience in Bayreuth exposed to the four consecutive days of Wagner’s music-theater. But to be fundamentally an actor and establish a spiritual tyranny by that means is a profound criticism: it is to lack substance, a core for whose sake the acting and the tyranny exist. And on the one occasion in these early entries that he refers to the perspective served by Wagner’s acting and tyranny, Nietzsche judges its tendency to be the opposite to that of Attic tragedy: Attic tragedy existed for the sake of Dionysian truth; it staged that truth in order to have it lived communally [44]. Wagnerism, to the degree that it had a core, harbored an antilife, romantic tendency, part of the reason it so naturally tended toward Christianity. Twenty-nine-year-old Nietzsche had already so freed his mind from discipleship to Wagner that he could measure Wagner from a distance. As a thinker, he knew himself driven primarily by the passion to know, and he held the knower to be higher than the maker. Taking Wagner’s measure in his 1874 workbook, Nietzsche detached the inner bonds that had put him almost unconsciously into Wagner’s service. Knowing his difference as a superiority, he could serve Wagner only for conscious cultural ends. And if he came to doubt the cultural value of Wagnerism, he would have to become Wagner’s opponent despite the gratitude he felt to the end.9 8. Entries [65] and [66] return briefly to Wagner. 9. The negative conclusions of the 1874 U II 5 entries return fully worked out fourteen years later in the 1888 Letter from Turin: The Wagner Case, especially section 8. Using the light touch of humor to devastating effect, Nietzsche sets out his case against Wagner: “the actor Wagner is a tyrant”; he is “the most amazing genius of theater”; “what he wants is effect”; “what is meant

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T h e i n B ay r e u t h o f R i c h a r d W a g n e r i n B ay r e u t h Nietzsche’s title has two parts, and the in Bayreuth is as indispensable as the Richard Wagner, for his book recounts a modern version of Aeschylus in Athens. Just as the Greeks of the tragic age were formed by the communal experience of the music drama of Aeschylus in the Dionysos theater in Athens, so the Germans of the dispersed modern crowd would be formed by the communal experience in the Bayreuth theater specially designed and built by Wagner to house his new music drama. The first Bayreuth Festival was the first performance of The Ring of the Nibelung, the music drama Wagner had worked for twenty-five years to compose and whose performance, like the Athenian Dionysian festival, would be spread across four days of collective experience for the same audience. Nietzsche’s book amounts to an exhortation to the first audience and, one supposes, all subsequent audiences. Here, omitting some rhetorical flourishes, is how Nietzsche opened his book: For an event to have greatness, two things must come together: the greatness of spirit of those who create it and the greatness of spirit of those who experience it . . . Consequently, anyone who sees such an event approaching is overcome by care that those who experience it be worthy of it . . . He who gives must see to it that he finds recipients who are sufficient for the meaning of his gift . . . [Wagner] believes in the greatness of his deed just as he does in the greatness of those who are to experience it. All to whom this belief is accorded should be proud of that fact.

Beset by care that the audience be worthy of what they are about to experience, Nietzsche, privileged with closeness to Wagner, gives the audience an account of Wagner that informs them of just who this artist is while telling them what they must be to be worthy of him. His book is for the Betrachtender, the viewer-auditor-participant in the drama he will experience for four days and whose effects compel meditation on them—with Nietzsche’s help.10 Twelve years later, in 1888, no longer wanting to prompt and prepare to have the effect of truth must not be true”; those “demanding substance above all else . . . are scarcely taken care of.” 10. English has no word for Betrachtende, the viewer-participant passively taking in what is performed and actively meditating its transforming power. Betrachtende is a form of the word Nietzsche chose to title this whole series of writings, Untimely Betrachtungen.

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his reader to be worthy of Wagner, but instead having become a vehement opponent of Wagner and Bayreuth, Nietzsche could tell his Ecce Homo reader to pay special attention to passages that were important for their understanding him, for their being worthy of him: “Listen to the world-historical accent . . . at the end of section 4” (EH 3 BT 4). The world-historical accent Nietzsche wants us to listen to at the end of section 4 is his praise of the tragic view of life and announcement of the need to recover it. Toward the end of that praise he declares dramatically, “That is my view of things!” Even an 1876 reader could feel impelled to ask: Is that Wagner’s view of things? Nietzsche had already traced the youth and early manhood of Wagner, lauding most his talent for sheer work, his immense powers of absorption in history and philosophy. What he absorbed he molded into poetic invention, a “truth of representation” in which whole ages could be typified in single events and persons. Wagner did not employ history and philosophy in the modern way as mere decoration or to soothe and console, and Nietzsche can characterize Wagner’s aim while stating his own antimodern view of the purpose of philosophy: To me . . . the most important question of all philosophy appears to be, to what extent things have an unalterable character and form: so as, once this question is answered, to set about with the most ruthless courage improving that part of the world recognized as alterable. (RWB 3)

Philosophy’s great task of understanding—learning the unalterable in the order of things—entails a task of alteration that leads the philosopher into unavoidable engagement with the world: “True philosophers themselves teach this lesson.” Nietzsche’s models, the Greek philosophers, “worked to improve the very much alterable judgments of humanity and did not keep their wisdom to themselves.” Only under Christianity did philosophy withdraw into contemplation, mere reflection on a supposedly permanent order constituted by a perfect being. The Greek lesson of engagement is taught by “the true disciples of true philosophers . . . like Wagner,” a disciple of Schopenhauer who “is most a philosopher when he is most energetic and heroic.” Being a stepson of modern times, not simply its offspring, and having culture as a chief concern, Nietzsche is able to win a very broad view of the history of culture and consequently of the spiritual situation of the present. Section 4 gives a capsule account of that history and of the view of life that grounds a need for action at this historic moment—section 4 rises as Nietzsche’s most

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important early statement of the mission assigned the philosopher by the cultural crisis of late modernity: Listen to how it ends, he says in 1888 in what turned out to be his last work. To act for the future of culture requires knowledge of its history, of “the evolution of culture since the Greeks” (4). “The last great event in that history” is, astonishingly, “the twofold task of the great Alexander,” “Hellenization of the world and, to make that possible, orientalization of the Hellenic.” The two broad categories of Hellenic and Oriental, given different names such as Athens and Jerusalem or the Dionysian and Platonism, and given even broader scope, remained for Nietzsche the two poles whose “rhythmic play” “determined the course of history hitherto.” The two poles of 1876 are saved from oversimplification by their depth of conceptualization and the richness of detail with which Nietzsche articulates them. The spiritual situation of the present can be defined by the fact that as Christianity’s “influence has waned, the power of the Hellenic cultural essence has again increased”— for Christianity is “a piece of oriental antiquity.” Section 4 offers examples of what Nietzsche had described in On the Use and Disadvantage of History as “the republic of genius” in which great individuals “do not carry forward any kind of process but live contemporaneously with one another” (UD 9): Kant, Schopenhauer, and Wagner would each “hang in the air incomprehensible to us were we not able . . . to connect them to their Greek counterparts”—Kant to the Eleatics, Schopenhauer to Empedocles, and Wagner to Aeschylus, author of the tragedies most constitutive of the highest of all cultures. Nietzsche adds a fourth example that would become the most telling: the history of the exact sciences especially evokes the impression that we even now stand in the closest proximity to the Alexandrian-Hellenic world and that the pendulum of history has swung back to the point from which it started its swing into enigmatic distances and lost horizons.

Nietzsche had schooled himself in the history of the exact sciences by close study of Lange’s monumental History of Materialism, by intense work on ancient Greek physics, especially Democritus, and by wide reading in modern physics. He would continue to supplement his knowledge of the exact sciences for the rest of his life by reading the leading books that presented the methods, debates, and conclusions of contemporary science to an educated public, reading for instance the pioneering books in paleo-anthropology that applied the method of the exact sciences to the human sciences, aiming to recover the history of human social life and for Nietzsche the history of the

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human soul.11 As his work progressed, he dropped the comfortable image of a pendulum swing because the two contrary forces were in fact at war, spiritual war on which the future of humanity now hinged. The extremity of the present situation is reflected in the extremes of The Antichrist, the last reflection on this lifelong theme that Nietzsche would get to write and in which he said he had “no word” to describe his feeling about something so gigantic as Christianity’s rendering “the whole labor of the ancient world in vain,” a labor that had over time developed “all the presuppositions for a scholarly culture, all scientific methods” (A 59). The spiritual warfare of Nietzsche’s future lies enfolded in his 1876 description of the spiritual situation of the present in Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. He can say that “the spirit of Hellenic culture lies endlessly dispersed over our present-day world . . . The earth, which has now been sufficiently Orientalized, longs again for the Hellenic.” That longing calls for “a series of counter-Alexanders”—counter not in being anti-Hellenic but in performing the task opposite to Alexander’s cutting the Gordian knot: now the ends of the knot must again be tied together, tying the contemporary longing for the Hellenic to the actual achievements of the Hellenes, reproducing at the height of the modern the height of the ancient. Nietzsche can “see in Wagner such a counter-Alexander”—but only for a few months more. Nietzsche wanted to believe that Wagner’s revolution in German theater could revolutionize the total social order. That imaginary hope drives the three-page second paragraph of the four-paragraph section 4, but in its course Nietzsche introduces the nonimaginary hope that survived hope in Wagner as the inexpungeable hope of his maturity. What is basic to it appears suddenly as the mighty force supposedly inhabiting the Wagnerian, “love and justice.” What survives his identifying “love and justice” with the Wagner movement is his application of these two driving forces to the Hellenizing cultural revolution that he sees himself furthering. The last two paragraphs of section 4 show the “love and justice” basic to Nietzsche’s lifelong project to be the reHellenization of Western culture—however much he later repudiated, to his own disadvantage, “the garish finery of such moral word tinsel” as love and justice (BGE 230). 11. Brobjer shows that Nietzsche read widely in the relevant scientific fields; see Nietzsche and the “English” and Nietzsche’s Philosophical Context. In paleo-anthropology he read Lubbock, Tylor, Draper, Spencer, Bagehot, and the Darwinian English/German journal Kosmos. He sustained to the end his interest in science and its cultural impact; see Brobjer, “Nietzsche’s Last View of Science.”

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Introducing the end of section 4, Nietzsche employs a military metaphor to explain the role art plays in cultural revolution: “Bayreuth signifies the morning consecration on the day of battle.” In the spirit of “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,” Nietzsche sees “the tragic art-work of Bayreuth” preparing the warriors for the coming battle against “the whole prevailing order of things.” “The individual cannot live more beautifully than in being prepared to die in the struggle for love and justice and in sacrificing himself to it.” In the battle for the tragic view of things, “art does not exist for the battle itself, but for the intervals before and in the midst of it.” In the “morning consecration” of art the individual dedicates himself “to something higher than his own person,” a “something higher” that begins with a profound understanding of human suffering. The greatest causes of suffering for an individual—that humans do not share all knowledge in common, that ultimate insight can never be certain, that abilities are divided unequally—all this puts humanity in need of art.

The three greatest causes of human suffering are spiritual and concern the possibility of knowledge.12 Ineradicable spiritual suffering reaches deeply into human aspiration: One cannot be happy so long as everything around us suffers and creates suffering; one cannot be moral so long as the course of human affairs is determined by force, deception, and injustice; one cannot even be wise so long as the whole of humanity has not struggled in competition for wisdom and conducted the individual into life and knowledge in the way dictated by wisdom.

Happiness, morality, and wisdom hang on the possibility of so mitigating spiritual suffering that it does not render these human aspirations moot—and art finds its purpose, its something higher, in this mitigation. “How could we endure to live in the feeling of this threefold incapacity if we were unable to recognize in our struggles, striving, and failures something sublime and significant and did not learn from tragedy to take delight in the rhythm of grand 12. It is remarkable that the author of this view of suffering had, for a year, been suffering with increased frequency and intensity the days-long bouts of headaches, vomiting, and eye pain that would plague the rest of his active life.

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passion and in its victim?” Art does not directly instruct action; it schools our “evaluation of things” by simplifying “the real struggles of life,” abbreviating the “endlessly complex calculus of human action and desire,” producing an appearance of things that relaxes “the tension between the general knowledge of things and the individual’s spiritual-moral capacities. Art exists so that the bow does not break.” The “world-historical accent” we’re told to listen to in the final paragraph of section 4 gathers the topics of love and justice, suffering, and art into the most eloquent early statement of Nietzsche’s view of life. Repeating that “the individual must be consecrated to something higher than himself,” Nietzsche identifies that something higher as “the meaning of tragedy.” One must be free of the terrible anxiety that death and time evoke in the individual: for at any moment, in the briefest atom of his life’s course, he may encounter something holy that endlessly outweighs all his struggle and all his distress—this is what it means to have a sense for the tragic. And if the whole of humanity is destined to die out—and who dares doubt that?—so the goal is set for it that is its supreme task for all coming time, so to grow together in one and in common that it sets out as a whole to meet its common demise with a sense for the tragic; in this supreme task all the ennoblement of humanity lies enclosed; the definite rejection of this task would be the saddest picture imaginable to a friend of humanity. That is my view of things!

Nietzsche is prohibited from saying that this cannot be the view of things of one who is essentially an actor, though the work of an actor could well be indispensable as the morning consecration to a battle far higher in importance than any human being. The sadness evoked by the rejection of the supreme task is allayed by joy at believing that “the tragic idea has again been born into the world. For this joy is altogether universal and suprapersonal, the rejoicing of humanity at the guarantee of the unity and continuance of the human as such.” “That is my view of things!”—this eruption in Richard Wagner in Bayreuth resembles “the answer of Empedocles” in Schopenhauer as Educator: Nietzsche’s own view surfaces without compromising his praise of a not fully exemplary artist, as it did with a not fully exemplary philosopher. Listening to the world-historical accent at the end of section 4 confirms what Nietzsche claimed of his book: “Everything in it points to the future,” it “is a vision of my future” (EH 3 BT 4, UM 3).

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T h e B ay r e u t h A u d i e n c e a n d t h e D i t h y r a m b i c D r a m at i st ( 7 ) Nietzsche’s description of what will occur in Bayreuth through the coming together of theater audience and artist peaks in section 7. He begins his single-paragraph section looking first, as he did in the opening paragraph of the book, to the Betrachtender. With Wagner’s artist-nature on display in the music, poetry, and action before him, the observer-participant will feel his own smallness and fragility and ask, “What does this nature require of you? For what do you actually exist?” With that self-emptying experience, you take part in Wagner’s mightiest expression of life, the central point of his power, that daimonic transmissibility and self-relinquishment of his nature which can share itself with others as it shares other essences itself and in giving out and taking in has its greatness.13

In this complex thought Nietzsche expresses in all brevity his view of Wagner’s nature and its effect on the viewer-auditor who finds it so overwhelmingly, demandingly before him. The greatness of Wagner’s “art permits us to experience everything” that a soul can experience of the fate of others, teaching us to view the world through many eyes. “We feel with utter certainty: in Wagner everything visible in the world wants to become audible, deepening itself and becoming inward.” And everything audible wants to become bodily, displaying itself in the visual, a double movement of world revelation in seeing and hearing in which nothing can resist the revelatory drama. Nietzsche, the young thinker who devoted extended and profound reflection to Greek tragedy, can say: “All this is the essence of the dithyrambic dramatist, taking this concept so comprehensively that it embraces at once actor, poet, composer.” Wagner does for modern society what his only model, “Aeschylus and his fellow Greek artists,” did for classical Athens. Wagner, that reappearance of the culture-making genius banished from the world by Socrates, kindles a counterrevolution against the Socratic that promises cultural achievements as high as those of the Greeks. 13. “Self-relinquishment” is Selbstentäusserung. This important word, repeated later in this section as Wagner’s action, is a word that in the Neoplatonic tradition names the selfrealization of God, and in the Christian tradition the kenosis or self-emptying of God in the person of Jesus Christ (Philippians 2:5–11).

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At this moment of highest praise—Wagner is our Aeschylus—Nietzsche turns from the viewer-auditor to look to the artist’s soul. Could his “magnificent developments” be “traced back to inner constraints or lacks”? Here, Nietzsche transforms his 1874 critique of Wagner as essentially an actor into a possible explanation of his comprehensive greatness. After speaking of Goethe and Schiller as he did in the 1874 workbook, he turns to “Wagner’s becoming” and says that “one might assume the existence in him of an actorly Ur-talent” that had to deny itself its natural route of expression on the stage but “found its expression and its salvation in the merging of all the arts into a great actor’s revelation.” But Nietzsche denies any importance to the basic point of his earlier critique: here he says that if one traced Wagner’s greatness to a source in an actor’s nature, one would have to say that it could with equal justification be traced to a most powerful composer nature. In the end though, all such reductive efforts are pointless: “However one might imagine the development of the primal dramatist, in his maturity and perfection he is a figure without any constraint or lack.” This dismissal of his own analysis of origins will not survive. It is precisely as a genius actor, an enchanter of the first rank, that Nietzsche will judge Wagner in his later polemics against him: he is “the Magician” of book 4 of Zarathustra whose fundamental crime, fake allegiance to the tragic view of life—his singing “Ariadne’s Lament”—Zarathustra sees through and punishes. And in his 1888 Letter from Turin: The Wagner Case, Nietzsche reinstates in prose his critique of Wagner as fundamentally an actor and therefore, in his pretension to the insight and understanding of a philosopher, a fraud.14 Refusing now any analysis of the possible origins of Wagner’s dramas in a lack in Wagner’s nature, Nietzsche turns back to the viewer-auditor “before whom this deed is suddenly performed” and gives an ecstatic description of his enchantment by a “magician.” He welcomes the magician’s power “to cancel the resistance of reason” and make “everything in which one has lived till then appear unreasonable and incomprehensible”—a reemphasis of the emptying Nietzsche described earlier. “You” becomes “we”: “placed outside ourselves, we swim in a riddling, fiery medium, we no longer understand ourselves, we do not recognize the most familiar.” The enchantment is total: “we no longer have any standard of measure; all that is lawful, all that is fixed begins to move; each thing glows with new colors and speaks to us in new signs.” 14. For a defense of Nietzsche’s late attack on Wagner, see Winteler, “Nietzsches Bruch mit Wagner.” Prange, “Was Nietzsche Ever a True Wagnerian?,” argues that Nietzsche was a true Wagnerian only briefly. See also Love, Young Nietzsche and the Wagnerian Experience.

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“One would have to be Plato” to resist, Nietzsche says, to banish the “mimetic artist” as Plato did in the Republic. Not being Plato or a member of the community Plato imagined, “all the rest of us,” living in the debased modern community, demand that “the magician come to us, fear him though we may, so that our community and the evil reason and power it embodies might for once be negated.” We differ from Plato in that he “had the right to be blind to Hellenic reality after a single glance of his eye into the Hellenic ideal.” Into what have we looked, we moderns? Not an ideal but instead “the face of reality.” Being members neither of the Hellenic community generated by Attic tragedy nor of the imaginary Platonic community generated by his ideal, we moderns, facing reality itself, stand in need of art, “we need the universal dramatist.” Here is that remarkable Nietzsche, the Jesuit welcoming the magician who will found culture on the illusions of Wagnerian art that he knows to be illusions, he who has, as a philosopher, devoted his life to looking into reality as far as that is possible. The reality he refers to here as what moderns look into is what his second Untimely Meditation called the “true but deadly” reality of “a sovereignty of becoming, a fluidity of all concepts, types, and kinds, and a lack of any cardinal difference between man and animal” (UD 9). He described there his expectation of the effect of that reality on modern humanity: if these true but deadly doctrines “are thrust upon the people for another generation with the craze for instruction that has now become normal, no one should be surprised if the people perish of petty egoism, hardening, and greed.” Forced to look at reality by an unbridled public science, modern humanity is desperate for a magician whose magic can constitute a world for it: let Wagnerian illusion be the means to bridle science and create a viable culture. Nietzsche goes on in section 7 to say that we moderns “need the universal dramatist in order to be redeemed, if only for a matter of hours, from the fearsome tension which the seeing-human now senses between himself and the tasks imposed on him.” What the redeemer, the welcome magician does is allow us, with him, to “climb the highest rungs of sensation and there alone fancy ourselves once again in free nature and in the realm of freedom.” To fancy is wähnen, the verb for Wahn, illusion or mania: fancy is our means of willingly embracing illusion. Nietzsche goes on to describe our absorption in the sufferings of the tragic hero as our own being “transformed into tragic human beings,” after which we return to life “with a new sense of security” that makes us more benevolent and more noble than we were. Nietzsche can even imagine Wagner’s success on the model of what he earlier in this section spoke of as Christianity’s success: an initial emptying of self akin to the “deep

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earnestness” of the Christian Reformers leads to the “revelation” that “redeems” us and to “security” that makes us virtuous, “benevolent and noble.” Nietzsche’s use of Christian imagery and language continues as he turns away from the experience of the auditor-viewer back again to the artist for a final description of what transpires in the soul of the dithyrambic dramatist in his act of creation—a description far more adulatory and excessive than anything in The Birth of Tragedy. The artist, feeling like the only one awake “among confused and tormented sleepers, among the mad, the suffering,” is tempted to treat our world with high-spirited derision; but a wholly different urge wins out: “the longing of the high for the depth, the loving longing for the earth, for the happiness of togetherness . . . as if he should immediately, like a god descended to earth”—and here, where his imagery could seem most Christian, he adds a non-Christian quotation: “ ‘raise up with fiery arms to Heaven’ all that is weak, human, lost, so as at last to find love and no longer only worship, and in love to relinquish himself utterly!” Nietzsche’s quotation adjusts the last line of a poem by Goethe that he can expect his reader to recognize, “The God and the Bayadere,” a poem on a legend of India in which a god descends to earth and takes as a lover a disreputable woman, and then, when he apparently dies and is burning on a funeral pyre and she casts herself on the fire, he raises her up with him to heaven. Wagner is an ecumenical god, bestowing his grace on us the unworthy, raising us all up to heaven. Nietzsche, Wagner’s apostle, continues in this religious vein with no pause in the piety, and it is necessary to consider the details of his description in order to appreciate just how far he is willing to go in raising to worship-worthy godhood the man whose faults he has studied.15 The mix of contempt and longing felt by this god descended to men, this “crossing” of emotions, is the “miracle” occurring “in the soul of the dithyrambic dramatist, and if his essence can anywhere be grasped in concepts, it must be” in this crossing as he “approaches this world as a lover.” The view he casts on the world is twofold, “at once sun-cleared sight and selflessly-loving,” and his view compels nature itself to respond with what Nietzsche can call a “revelation,” using the Bible’s word, Offenbarung. It is “more than an image,” he says, that with this twofold view that surprises nature, “he has seen her naked,” with the result that 15. Was it passages like this that triggered Wagner’s response to his first quick reading of the book: “Friend! Your book is tremendous! How did you ever find out so much about me?” (July 13, 1876, KSB).

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now she seeks to flee in shame into her opposites. The till now invisibleinner saves itself in the sphere of the visible and becomes appearance; the till now only visible flees into the dark sea of sound: so does nature uncover, in that she wants to hide herself, the essence of her opposites.

In Wagner’s music-drama the once invisible becomes visible while the once merely visible becomes audible, and to the newly seen and newly heard Nietzsche adds the third dimension of dramatic theater that he emphasized in accounting for the force of Attic tragedy, dance—flowing, rhythmic bodily movement that becomes the third element of revelation: In an impetuously rhythmic yet still hovering dance, in ecstatic gestures, the foundational dramatist speaks of that which in him, that which in nature itself, is now occurring: the dithyramb of his movements is as much dread understanding, exuberant insight, as loving nearness, joyful selfrenunciation. Word follows intoxicated the train of this rhythm; paired with word melody sounds; and in turn melody casts its sparks into the realm of images and concepts.

All three modes of revelation—poetry, music, dance—combine to allow the auditor-participant to access naked nature in a united seeing, hearing, and conceptualizing; senses and intellect respond in threefold form to the threefold stage presentation as Wagner shares his privileged experience with his audience. A dream-appearance, like and unlike the image of nature and her liberator, floats by, it condenses itself into more human form, it spreads itself out as the sequence of a wholly heroic-exuberant willing, of a blissful goingunder and no-longer-willing:—so does tragedy come into being, so is bestowed to life its most glorious wisdom, that of the tragic thought, so finally arises the greatest magician and benefactor among mortals, the dithyrambic dramatist.

And that ends Nietzsche’s prophecy of the revelation that will occur on the Bayreuth stage in August 1876. For all the precision of his account of naked nature coming to expression in the visible, audible, and bodily moving, Nietzsche has of course been able to say nothing of what naked nature is. That cannot be a surprise: “On Truth and Lie in the Extra-moral Sense,” written in 1872, four years earlier, denies the possibility of access to reality through sen-

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sation or intellect, and ten years later, in 1886, Nietzsche said that that essay was evidence of the early appearance of the skepticism and pessimism that he consistently held. Richard Wagner in Bayreuth cannot really be Nietzsche’s imagining that Wagner had access to reality in some non-sensing, nonconceptualizing, yet transmissible intuition. Nothing is actually stated here in mere prose about the content of what can allegedly be seen, heard, and felt in the poetry, music, and dance of Wagner’s music-theater. Nietzsche’s conscious Jesuitism is directing his prose, allowing him to claim for Wagner what remains illusion for the philosophic inquirer, culture-founding illusion as Nietzsche wants to dream. The excesses of the final page of section 7, its portrait of the miracle in the soul of the descended god Artist of Bayreuth, are matched by a different excess in section 8 as Nietzsche moves from his examination of souls to the cultural revolution he can imagine Bayreuth initiating.16

W h at O u r A rt i st C o u l d M a k e ( 8 ) “Wagner’s actual life [is] a gradual revelation of the dithyrambic dramatist,” and by tracing Wagner’s life in section 8, Nietzsche provides a revelation of what the highest Artist could make in our time. The “ruling thought” of Wagner’s life is “that from the theater there could be exercised an incomparable influence, an influence greater than that exercised by any other art form.” This ruling thought is driven by a “dark, insatiable personal will demanding power and glory.” Thought and will combine to ask, “Influence, incomparable influence—How? Over whom?” Learning how and over whom are the essential subjects of Wagner’s actual life. “He wanted to triumph and conquer like no other artist, and if possible with a single blow attain that tyrannical omniscience to which [his head and heart] so darkly drove him.” The lawgiving nature, the tyrannical urge Nietzsche criticized in Wagner in 1874 appears in Richard Wagner in Bayreuth as the precondition of success in the most necessary project, the transformation of modern culture, with Wagner, modern German culture. The first step for the budding dramatist was to understand his audience, the 16. What is excess in application to Wagner is not simply excess: Nietzsche later said that “the entire picture of the dithyrambic artist [in RWB] is a picture of the pre-existent poet of Zarathustra . . . The idea of Bayreuth should not puzzle those who know my Zarathustra . . . that great noon at which the most elect consecrate themselves to the greatest of all tasks” (EH 3 BT 4), the event after which everything else is mere execution.

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modern audience he would have to master through means he never doubted he could create. He was never deflected by a need to please the aesthete, the critic-minority that felt itself above “the great multitude”; instead, he aimed to intoxicate the passions of the multitude, for they evoked in him “the ardent hope for the highest power and influence.” Initial failure led him to study the modern audience and to understand that that audience had already been shaped and stamped by the pressures of modern society with its merely commercial goals and its view of art as diversion and entertainment. Success could come only by giving the modern audience new goals and a new seriousness. But Wagner first had to transform himself, to become himself through the long discipline of training his “higher self,” his “spirit full of love” (2), to subdue into its service “its violent, more earthy brother,” his lust for power. The way to ultimate success passed through Wagner’s becoming “a social revolutionary” (8) in the revolutionary movements of 1848 and his recognizing that “the only hitherto existing artist [was] the poetizing people.” His focus on “the people,” das Volk, led him to see that the modern artist had become a slavish instrument of a “luxury society,” serving it by making the people “ever more subservient and abject” through “the gratification of illusory needs.” Insight into modern mass man, “the modern ‘worker,’ ” proved fundamental: modern society had robbed das Volk of what was natural to it, “its myth, its song, its dance, its linguistic-inventiveness”—here lay the opening for the most ambitious dramatic artist. Modern society had invented substitutes for traditions of myth, song, dance, and language: a domesticated Christianity had allowed itself to be used as a fortress for this society and its property; and science and scholarship had submitted to slave labor on behalf of modern ideals. In these reflections, the young thinker Nietzsche seems to be transferring to the young Wagner his own “long, serious study of the average man” (BGE 26) and of how modern impetuses and goals had altered the average man. With the conclusion he now draws Nietzsche arrives at a crucial feature of his own future politics for philosophy. Having learned that modern humanity lacked what made a people, Wagner asked himself the indispensable question: “How does a people come into being?” Recognizing a community of feeling between the people and himself, he saw that a people came into being through myth and music, the two elements in which he himself “bathed and healed his soul, what he most fervently needed.” But if the myth and music he most needed was kin to what a people needed in its coming to be, myth and music had been debased in modern society, myth into mere fairy tale, music into an instrument of the luxury industry. Here the Artist Wagner “clearly heard the command issued

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to him alone: to return to myth its manliness and to break the spell over music and bring it to speech.” Wagner’s “new work of art” answered that command by setting the question before the modern audience: “Where are you who suffer and need as I do? Where is the multitude which I long to see become a people? . . . Thus did the solitary thirst for the multitude.” Influence, incomparable influence, Wagner now saw, could be exercised in one way only, the old way of founding a people. This is the highest possible aim of the Artist: to be the maker of a people, to be a Homer, a Zarathustra, a Moses, a Romulus. This sublime aim of the Artist survived Nietzsche’s recognition that he had assigned to Wagner an aspiration that grotesquely misplaced the actual aim of Wagner’s actual life, an actor’s life. While retaining his insight into the ambition of the highest making, Nietzsche came to see that that ambition belonged in fact to what a philosopher is, a “genuine philosopher,” whose fundamental aspiration of truth-seeking comes to recognize the necessary, consequent aspiration to be a “commander and legislator” who “creates values” for a whole people (BGE 211, Nietzsche’s italics). Having described the highest aspiration of making, Nietzsche traces the particulars of Wagner’s course as he set out to fulfill his commission as a revolutionary and create a new people out of the modern mass, thus actualizing “the possibility of a total upheaval of all things.” As the final event in that course Wagner had to “set an example,” to show in practice how his art could transform the souls of his audience; he had to “found a stylistic tradition” by giving “an example for all ages.” The “idea of Bayreuth” was to put on stage the theatrical-musical event through which the founding Artist would transfer the sensibility of the creator to those experiencing it in the theater. In Bayreuth, on August 13–17, 1876, Wagner’s example was to be enacted for the first time, the modern reenactment of the annual Dionysian festival in Athens. In Athens, the days of theater at the Dionysian festival were attended by all the leaders of the city along with representatives of the allied cities bringing tribute to the cultural center while experiencing the spiritual core of its political power and influence, its right to rule. In Athens, those days of tragedy, comedy, and satyr play molded the Greeks of the tragic age into the greatest of all peoples in their cultural creations. In Bayreuth, before an audience including the modern powerful, those Attic days were to be reenacted in myth and music as soul-forming, as community-creating as Attic tragedy had been. Bayreuth’s four-day-long theatrical-musical example was to be the model for festivals to be repeated elsewhere in Germany on annual cycles spreading and reinforcing what these first days were first to create.

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Given these expectations for the first Bayreuth Festival, these grotesque imaginings, no wonder the rehearsals of late July 1876 appalled him.17 He described his experience best in a rejected first version of Ecce Homo’s account of Things Human All Too Human.18 While he had always been clear about the illusoriness of the Wagnerian “ideal,” what struck him “above all” at Bayreuth was that that ideal was far from the main matter even to those most closely involved with Wagner—“completely different things were taken more importantly, more passionately.” Even Wagner’s “patrons,” Nietzsche himself being a patron, appeared “bored and unmusical.” “The whole wretched leisure class of Europe was gathered and any old nobleman went in and out of Wagner’s house as if it were all some kind of sport—and at bottom that’s all it was.”19 And Wagner himself seemed to savor it all while showing no special attention to the disciple who had just published a worshipful, divinizing book to explain its world-historical significance. Bayreuth was a colossal refutation of the dream Nietzsche had nurtured since the laying of the foundation stone in May 1872. But if the audience, the rehearsal performances, and Wagner’s own behavior shocked him, he must have been most appalled at himself, at what his book had said this artist and these performances could mean for the future of the human species, the book that appeared just in time to be read by the audience it had elevated to cultural models for the new Europe. No wonder Nietzsche had to flee Bayreuth: he had to recover from what he had done. In the end, however, what matters is not Nietzsche’s flight or what he fled but his means of recovery, for in Klingenbrunn, the village in the Bayrischer Wald to which he fled, he did not simply pause or divert himself to win release from what he had said of Wagner and Bayreuth: he focused immediately on the radically different project for the cultural future of Europe whose initial probes he had already begun while writing his books for the public on Schopenhauer and Wagner. Workbook forays into this project were replaced by total preoccupation as he set out on the most decisive shift of his writing life, freeing himself from the subjections of his young manhood. His shift as an author-publicist concerned his hopes and expectations for culture, for a re17. Nietzsche attended the rehearsals perhaps at the suggestion of Malwida von Meysenbug, who said they might be preferable to the actual first performances for him because of the stress (Janz, Friedrich Nietzsche Biographie, 1: 714). 18. The rejected paragraph is reproduced in the extraordinary Faksimile/Transkription edition of EH. See also KSA 14, pp. 492–93. 19. The rejected paragraph reported, “Typical was the old Kaiser who applauded with his hands while shouting out to his adjutant, Graf Lehndorf, ‘Hideous! Hideous!’ ”

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newal of European civilization. But the deepest element of the Klingenbrunn event was not a shift at all but an intensification of what he had already long pursued, the freeing of his own mind as far as that was possible from the limitations and prejudices that belong to human awareness as such, the freeing that had already made the advances recorded four years earlier in “On Truth and Lie in the Extra-moral Sense.” At Klingenbrunn Nietzsche imagined, and imagined for four more years, that the freeing of his own mind and the minds of his readers could best be portrayed publicly as part of the advancement in freeing the mind that was already being carried forward on a Europewide scale by the modern Enlightenment. The young thinker well known to a growing readership as an advocate of Wagner and thereby of the counterEnlightenment20 would come forward as an advocate of the Enlightenment. When his new book was published it carried a dedication to Voltaire that Nietzsche wanted no reader familiar with his name to miss: he put it in large print in the middle of the title page between his title and his name. As if in anticipation of his shift, Nietzsche had gone on a pilgrimage to Voltaire’s house in Ferney on April 6, 1876, before Bayreuth. In a letter to Elisabeth (April 8, 1876) reporting that visit he said, “My highest respect goes to Voltaire whose house in Ferney I sought out”; to Gersdorff he spoke of his “genuine homage” to Voltaire (April 15, 1876).21 At Klingenbrunn in August 1876, Nietzsche used an already-begun workbook for entries expressing his new undertaking—the very workbook in which he had last written out his assessments of Wagner two and half years earlier, U II 5. The Klingenbrunn entries in U II 5 were for a book that remained within the confines of his project to write nine more Untimely Meditations; its initial title was to be The Plowshare, and its primary subject was

20. A workbook entry from the spring of 1877 calls Schopenhauer and Wagner “the peak of the counter-Enlightenment” (KSA 8 22 [17]). 21. After spending about ten days in Klingenbrunn at the Gasthaus zum Ludwigstein Nietzsche returned to Bayreuth on August 12 and stayed for two difficult weeks. His return was made more tolerable by the presence of Gersdorff, Rohde, Rée, the Overbecks, and by a new friendship with Louise Ott. He attended most of the first full performances without being any more impressed with them than with the rehearsals. His sister, who was in Bayreuth, reports a conversation that seems an accurate measure of how transforming his days in Klingenbrunn had been. He was now visibly embarrassed when admirers of RWB wanted to speak with him about it; an observant woman asked Elisabeth why, and when she in turn asked Nietzsche, because “after all the book appeared only five weeks ago,” he answered, “It strikes me as five years” (Förster-Nietzsche, Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsche’s, 260).

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indicated by its subtitle: Instructions for Spiritual Liberation.22 But Nietzsche soon recognized that the project begun at Klingenbrunn took him well beyond the polemical aims of a merely Untimely Meditation.23 The new book would in fact mark the abandonment of that whole project and initiate in its stead a new project in the service of a new allegiance. The project advancing the modern Enlightenment shared with his wrecked dream for Wagner the necessity that a new human future be created beyond late modernity. That future, Nietzsche now saw, would have to honor the single greatest cultural fact of modernity, public pursuit of truth through the modern sciences of nature and human nature. Learning that he was wrong about his Wagner dream was far from learning that he was wrong about the Artist: human making still found its peak in the making of a people, now a postnational European people pursuing the goals of the Enlightenment. The new book would be far more open about Nietzsche’s actual thinking as a philosopher, the thinking kept secret behind the Untimely Meditations. But it would still be a book that looked to an already existing option for the culture-making height of art’s ambition. Only after four years of publicly pursuing the ideals of Voltaire did Nietzsche the philosopher begin the burrowing into morality that led him to his ultimate insights into what a Philosopher can know and an Artist make. 22. In a workbook from the spring/summer of 1878 dedicated to rethinking Wagner, he said, “My portrait of Wagner went much beyond him; I had sketched a monumental ideal which was perhaps in a position to ignite other artists. The real Wagner, the real Bayreuth was to me like a last print from a copperplate engraving on inferior paper. My need to see real people and their motives was powerfully stimulated by this shameful experience” (KSA 8 27 [44]). 23. When the third UM appeared, Nietzsche spoke of the remaining ten as giving full expression to “everything negative and outraged” in him (to Meysenbug, October 25, 1874), cleansing his soul of its “whole polemical-passionate wasteland” (to Bülow, January 2, 1875).

*2* A New Public Nietzsche: Enlightenment Optimist In late 1876 or early 1877 Nietzsche wrote a workbook entry intended for Things Human All Too Human: “To readers of my earlier writings I want to state explicitly that I have abandoned the metaphysical-artistic views that in all essentials rule them: those views are comfortable but untenable” (KSA 8 23 [159]). But his huge 1878 book nowhere states explicitly that he had abandoned the untenable metaphysical-artistic views of his first five books. Instead, he left it to a reader made faithful by his first five books to be shocked gradually by what he had become, he who had presented himself as an advocate of the counter-Enlightenment of Schopenhauer and Wagner, and now presents himself as an advocate of the optimism of the modern Enlightenment with its public effort to found society on the truth. His new book publicly advocates the freeing of the mind that Nietzsche had begun before he embraced Wagnerism and pursued further in his workbooks. But in this book too he came forth veiled. When he began his free mind project with Things Human All Too Human he had no way of knowing how it would turn out, but it turned out to have a reasonable end that he announced on the back cover of the final book of this project, The Gay Science: “With this book a series of writings by FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, whose common goal is to erect a new image and ideal of the free mind, comes to its end.” Thus Spoke Zarathustra, written next, gave public expression to what he had gained through his completed free mind project. Then, after finishing Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he believed his purpose would be best served by destroying Things Human All Too Human and re-

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placing it with a proper introduction to Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Nietzsche judged Things Human All Too Human to be an erring beginning, however much it ultimately made possible his greatest achievements as a philosopher and artist.

Chapter 5

Backgrounds of Things Human All Too Human

Things Human All Too Human is the monument to a crisis. EH 3 HH 1

R e c o v e r y a n d A d va n c e : T h e M a k i n g of Things Human All Too Human When Nietzsche began publishing autobiographical accounts of his writings, he consistently pointed back to one crisis event as the turning point in his becoming himself. He situated that event in the Bayreuth of the first Bayreuth Festival in July and August 1876, and in Klingenbrunn, the village in the Bayrischer Wald to which he fled in early August to physically escape Bayreuth and mentally and spiritually shed the whole Wagnerian world in which he had almost lost himself. Things Human All Too Human is the monument to that crisis. Ecce Homo devotes seven pages to that book, more than to any other except Thus Spoke Zarathustra, yet it says nothing at all about the book’s actual content. It describes instead Nietzsche’s condition, the transformation he underwent in beginning and writing Things Human All Too Human, a transformation that led to the recovery of his genuine nature and disposition after “ten years” of subjecting himself to something alien. Nietzsche chose to subtitle Ecce Homo, that autobiography of a philosopher, “How One Becomes What One Is.” He had used those famous words of Pindar in an entry in the workbook that contains his first entries for Things Human All Too Human, and his explanation there shows the singular sense these words had for him: “Become who you are: that’s a shout that is always

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allowed only for a few people but for the very fewest of those few it is superfluous” (KSA 8 19 [40] (October 1876)). Those fewest pursue so naturally what the words command that they have no need for them: they find themselves commanded.1 In Things Human All Too Human: A Book for Free Minds, he “freed” himself from “what did not belong to my nature” (EH 3 HH 1) because his spirit was “merciless” with him in a war against ideals and idealism, “freezing” to death central themes in his first five books, “the genius,” “the saint,” “the hero,” “faith,” “conviction,” “the thing in itself.” Merciless though he was with himself in no longer indulging these romantic ideals, he pictures himself passive to a compulsion. “The beginnings of this book,” he says, “belong in the middle of the weeks of the first Bayreuther Festspiele,” in the “alienation” he felt against everything around him in Bayreuth (2). It was as if he awoke from a dream and everything he thought he had experienced with Wagner—“Tribschen . . . a distant isle of the blessed,” and the promise of that special day in 1872 “when the foundation stone” of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus was laid—turned out to be false when seen from the reality on view at the rehearsals.2 Overwhelmed by the reality that destroyed the imaginary world-historical event he had allowed himself to fabricate, he abruptly left Bayreuth for Klingenbrunn, a hidden place deep in the woods of the Böhmerwald where I dragged around my melancholy  .  .  . like a sickness—and from time to time wrote a sentence into my workbook under the general title ‘The Plowshare,’ hard psychologica that can still perhaps be found in Things Human All Too Human.

That workbook is the remarkable U II 5, and “hard psychologica” from Klingenbrunn can be found there, but readers who turn to the KGW/KSA version to read the entries from these decisive weeks will be disappointed: that version contains little evidence of hard psychologica. The reason lies in the editorial policy of KGW, which dictated silent omission of all entries in the workbooks that are drafts either for later drafts or for a section of a published

1. Nietzsche first used those words as the epigraph for his prize essay on the sources of Diogenes Laertius, which he completed in July 1867. 2. Relations between Nietzsche and Wagner had not simply carried forward those inspiring Tribschen days: they had not met for almost two years, from August 1874 to July 1876.

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book.3 The number of Klingenbrunn entries omitted is large: in a letter he wrote two years later, Nietzsche estimated that “about a third of my book” was written out “in the small forest village” (to Mathilde Maier, July 1878). Any student of Nietzsche, spurred by Ecce Homo’s reference to his workbook to want to find out what he actually wrote at the most decisive turning point in his writing life, will have to either read the workbook in the Weimar archive, first learning the Old German Script in which he wrote it, or attempt the complex task of reconstructing what the Klingenbrunn entries might have been from information in the KGW Nachbericht volume to Things Human All Too Human (KGW IV 4).4 Ecce Homo mentions another workbook source for Things Human All Too Human in addition to U II 5 (EH 3 HH 2): intending to make a new Untimely out of his Klingenbrunn entries, Nietzsche dictated a majority of them a month later in Basel to Heinrich Köselitz, who wrote them out in a fresh workbook under the title Die Pflugschar.5 KGW printed its version of The Plowshare right after its version of U II 5b (IV 4/2 18; KSA 8 18, Mette number M I 1), but drastically reduced it to only 62 of the 176 numbered entries, omitting the others because published versions of almost all of them appear in Things Human All Too Human. The KGW versions of both these workbooks 3. The KGW editors call the Klingenbrunn part of U II 5, U II 5b (KGW IV 2 17/KSA 8 17) to distinguish these summer 1876 entries from the early 1874 entries (U II 5a, KGW III 4 32/ KSA 7 32) and from the later, fall 1876 entries (U II 5c, KGW IV 2 19 = KSA 8 19), most of which Nietzsche dictated to Paul Rée in Bex, Switzerland, where they spent some weeks together (October 1–19) on their way to Sorrento. 4. A professionally photographed copy of U II 5 is available at the New York Public Library, and a digital version at Nietzsche Source. The Nachbericht volume (KGW IV 4) indicates which entries were omitted from “U II 5b” in the “Beschreibung der Manuskripte,” pp. 517–22. Each entry is listed by the page number of U II 5b, using one of three indicators: the number of the entry published in KGW/KSA (e.g., “116 17 [104]”); or the number of a later version of an omitted entry itself never published (e.g., “117 18 [61]”); or the section number of the published version of an omitted entry (e.g., “117 MA 453”). The list is a complete guide, but the omitted entries are not printed as Nietzsche wrote them, only as he later rewrote them. 5. The result was a lovely production, beautifully written by Köselitz in a large, flowing, Latin-lettered script intended as the fair copy for the fifth UM. In a postcard to Elisabeth on October 18, 1876, Nietzsche says, “the Vth Untimely is finished, I need only someone to dictate it to (in Basel I had Köselitz day after day for that).” This was the first time Köselitz performed this service, having arrived in Basel in October 1875 with the express purpose of studying under Nietzsche, quickly making himself useful and eventually indispensable. On The Plowshare see Large, “Nietzsche’s Helmbrecht.”

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are therefore worse than useless for discovering Nietzsche’s thoughts during this crucial time of transition because they contain only the least important of them, those he did not think worth dictating a month after writing them and those from The Plowshare that he did not take up into Things Human All Too Human. Only by reading all the Klingenbrunn entries in U II 5 and then the whole text of The Plowshare can one recover what Nietzsche wrote first during the most important shift in his writing life.6 Ecce Homo reports on “hard psychologica” written in Klingenbrunn, and scattered throughout the omitted Klingenbrunn entries are statements like “When virtue sleeps it arises again refreshed” (U II 5, p. 151;7 HH 83) or “Few there are who, lacking matter for conversation, will not yield up the more secret affairs of their friends” (U II 5, p. 123; HH 327) or “To persons we don’t like we count the courtesies they do us offences” (U II 5, p. 143; HH 309). But the workbook lacks the deeper, more theoretical psychological investigations present in Things Human All Too Human such as the egoistic basis of supposed altruistic acts. Many entries provide a prelude for such theoretical conclusions, like “One who gives a great gift receives no gratitude, for the recipient has already, by receiving it, too much of a burden.”8 But the more wounding analysis of gratitude found in later reflections—gratitude as a form of egoism—is not present in U II 5. The dominant theme of the Klingenbrunn entries is, however, not psychologica but winning freedom of the mind and spirit, the natural topic for a 6. Nietzsche wrote some of the “U II 5b” entries before Klingenbrunn. The approximate beginning of the Klingenbrunn entries can be determined by the long poem that is 17 [31]: he wrote that poem while he was still in Basel and learned of Rohde’s engagement; he then sent it to him in a letter on July 18, 1876, saying he had composed it the night before. Given his weakened condition prior to going to Bayreuth on July 23 and also in Bayreuth, very few of the entries after [31] can have been written before he went to Klingenbrunn around the fifth of August. Similarly, his condition on his return to Bayreuth and then to Basel where he dictated The Plowshare from U II 5 entries suggests that the Klingenbrunn entries continue through the end of U II 5b [105]. The Klingenbrunn entries in U II 5 thus include the KGW entries from shortly after 17 [31] to [105], plus what KGW omits, mostly the 140 or so entries that were drafts for The Plowshare, more than 90 of which passed into HH. Some of the Klingenbrunn entries rework entries Nietzsche first wrote in the little notebook N II 1 that he carried on his walks in Klingenbrunn (e.g., [32], [33]). 7. Page numbers refer to the pagination written into U II 5. The hard psychologica present in U II 5 received some of their impetus from the pleasure Nietzsche had reading Paul Rée’s Psychologische Beobachtungen the previous October (to Rée, October 22, 1875). 8. U II 5, p. 155, a draft for HH 323.

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thinker facing the fact that he had bound his mind to a perspective he now renounced. The most important of these entries are unusually long drafts completely filling four closely written pages late in the workbook and then passing into the first chapter of The Plowshare, “Ways to Spiritual Freedom.”9 From there they pass into what Nietzsche initially intended as the first chapter of Things Human All Too Human, “Signs of Higher and Lower Culture” (now HH 225–29).10 The entries ask how a free mind stands to the bound minds of the people, how the question of truth fares with free minds and bound minds, how bound minds view the free minds, what their likely fate is, and how they can defend themselves against the predictable charges made by bound minds. Noteworthy throughout the Klingenbrunn entries is the complete absence of personal remarks about Nietzsche’s “crisis”: no recriminations, no regrets, no ruing the years spent on the Wagner advocacy he repudiates without mentioning.11 As for The Plowshare, when Nietzsche dictated it in September 1876, he supplied it with an epigraph quoting Meier Helmbrecht, a character in a thirteenth-century German poem. It begins, “If you want to follow me, farm with the plow.” Nietzsche postponed saying what that meant until the final section of The Plowshare (176): The plowshare cuts into the hard and the soft earth, it moves over the high and the low, and brings it near. This book is for the good and the evil, for the low and the powerful. The evil who read it will be made better, the good worse, the weaker more powerful, the powerful weaker.

The Plowshare version leaves it to the reader to think the final sentence that Nietzsche wrote out in the U II 5 original (p. 128): “Behind the plow walks 9. The omitted entries are on four consecutive left hand pages of U II 5, pp. 137–131 which spill over onto the right-hand pages 138, 136 and 134; in The Plowshare they are sections 40–44, 46, 47. 10. The initial draft of section 224, which sets out the principles of HH 225–29, is found in N II 1. 11. Other themes that appear with some frequency in the Klingenbrunn entries of U II 5 are indicated by the other chapter headings of The Plowshare: “Human and All Too Human,” “Woman and Child,” and “The Light Life”—Das leichte Leben, the light or lightened life not weighed down by oppressive religious and metaphysical concern with some life beyond this life. The final chapter is “On the Greeks,” on which U II 5 has almost no entries—The Plowshare gathered these entries from 1875 workbooks on “We Philologists.”

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the seed-sower,” an indication of his growing rhetorical reserve in allowing his reader to supply what his words only imply.12 The Plowshare’s first chapter, by far its longest and most important, “Ways to Spiritual Freedom,” has 47 sections, 34 of which Nietzsche used in Things Human All Too Human. Fully 24 of these 34 he placed in the intended first chapter of Things Human All Too Human, “Signs of Higher and Lower Culture.” Later, however, he decided to make that the fifth chapter and to place a chapter on philosophy first, “On the First and Last Things.” This late elevation of philosophy to the place of greatest prominence shows graphically what is most lacking in both the Klingenbrunn entries in U II 5 and The Plowshare: philosophy and its primary epistemological theme of what can be known, the topic that had been Nietzsche’s profound concern at least since his 1872 workbook P I 20. Only later in his plans for his first book after the break with Wagnerism did he decide to make prominent in it the long-reflected epistemological and ontological themes of philosophy that were his most basic concerns. While the Klingenbrunn crisis triggered immediate thoughts on freedom of the mind, only later did Nietzsche decide to partially break his long silence on some of the conclusions that he had judged dangerous to the public or to the mythic fictions of romanticism. His new book opens a long first look at the pessimism that is his genuine philosophy.13 In Ecce Homo Nietzsche’s escape to Klingenbrunn is an escape from Wagner’s Bayreuth, but he is emphatic about its being more than that: what “reached a decision in me at that time was not simply a break with Wagner” (3). Something more elemental was involved, “a total aberration of my instincts” that had occurred because of three “particular blunders.” Wagner, yes, but also “the professorship at Basel,” and especially “my whole philologist-existence.” It was “clear in a terrifying way how much time had already been wasted . . . ten years behind me in which the nourishment of my mind had in fact come to a stop”—from 1866 on, the beginning of his immersion in professional philology at Leipzig. In Klingenbrunn “a truly burning thirst took hold of me,” leading him to pursue “nothing more diligently than 12. The plowshare is the sharp metal cutting edge of the plow that cuts into the earth and turns it over, leaving a trench in which seed can be sown. 13. The Plowshare did intend to make one of Nietzsche’s basic epistemological conclusions public: 5 of its 176 sections ended up in the philosophy chapter of HH; 4 of them became the consecutive sections 30–33, which deal with the truth most disheartening to the truth-seeker: that the illogical, the unjust, and the erroneous are necessary for life, a key point of the 1873 “On Truth and Lie.”

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physiology, medicine, and natural sciences”; he returned to “properly historical studies only when my task despotically forced me to.” Given this deeper ten-year deprivation, Nietzsche can excuse his whole Wagner discipleship as an antidote: “a narcotic, deadening the feeling of desolation and hunger” brought on by having chosen a “ ‘calling’ to which one is least of all called.” He needed “Wagner as an opiate.” In Klingenbrunn in August 1876 “my instinct made its inexorable decision” (4). It chose sickness as its means: Nietzsche attributes a kind of grace to the days-long attacks of headache and vomiting from which he suffered and which increased in intensity and frequency during the years of writing Things Human All Too Human, sending him fruitlessly to numerous specialists and forcing his retirement from the Gymnasium (1878) and the university (1879). “Sickness detached me slowly”—that was its first grace, sparing him “any violent and offensive step,” so that “I did not lose any good will.” Sickness also “gave me the right to a complete turnabout in all my habits. It allowed, it commanded me to forget; it bestowed on me the necessity to be still, to leisure, to waiting and patience . . . but that means, to thinking.” Sickness made impossible the vocation he had followed for ten years, forcing him to end his “bookwormishness.”14 Nietzsche’s testament to his sickness leads to this remarkable sentence: “Never have I felt so much happiness with myself as in the sickest most painful times of my life.”15 Nietzsche shows his true view of Things Human All Too Human by describing it as his new beginning that came out of his sickness but then not recommending that it be read as evidence of his “return to himself,” his “supreme kind of convalescence”— instead “Daybreak or perhaps The Wanderer and His Shadow” are evidence of that. 1880 is as far back as he is willing to go: Things Human All Too Human with its Appendix: Assorted Opinions and Maxims is not yet adequate evidence of his return to himself. Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo account of Things Human All Too Human leaps from Klingenbrunn to Sorrento, his stay on the Bay of Naples from October 27, 1876, to May 7, 1877, with Paul Rée, Malwida von Meysenbug, and his Gymnasium student Albert Brenner. There, Things Human All Too Human “was in all the main matters written down” (5). His summary skips 14. Thomas Brobjer’s assiduous pursuit of Nietzsche’s actual reading proves that his claim that “for years I did not read a thing” is exaggerated; see especially Nietzsche and the “English.” 15. He said the same thing in a letter to a doctor friend (Eiser, beginning of January 1880) at what turned out to be nearly the end of the years of his worst suffering—but that end too proved temporary.

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the months spent developing his new thoughts after Klingenbrunn, first in September in Basel with The Plowshare, then in Bex from October 1 to 19 where he dictated many new entries in U II 5 to Rée.16 Nietzsche owed his Sorrento winter to Meysenbug, whom he had met in May 1872 at the laying of the cornerstone of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. Subsequent meetings and an extensive correspondence established a strong bond between them. After reading her book Memoiren einer Idealistin in April 1876, he expressed his admiration and gratitude in a long letter. Written on “Good Friday, April 14, 1876,” it cultivates an aura of pious awe at what her book did for him. After receiving his letter and knowing well how much his increasing attacks were disabling him, she wrote back inviting him to join her and her young ward, Brenner, for “at least a year” in a haven on the Mediterranean (April 30, 1876). “You have to get out of Basel next winter. You have to rest under a milder sky among compatible people where you can freely think, speak, and create what satisfies your soul, and where true understanding love surrounds you.” Nietzsche acted immediately, asking for a year’s leave. Certain it would be granted, he wrote back accepting her offer (May 11, 1876). His exhilaration in standing at the very beginning of a year of freedom must have helped him break with Wagner and Wagnerism that August.17 Ecce Homo’s final section on Things Human All Too Human (6) returns to the decisive 1876 beginning for a final report on the “tremendous certainty with which I got hold of my task and its world-historical aspect.” His certainty was hidden from his readers because his “instinctive cunning” was still at work in once again avoiding “the little word ‘I.’ ” This time it was not “Schopenhauer or Wagner” that covered up “Nietzsche” but the name of “one of 16. See U II 5c for Bex entries not taken up into HH. A little poem Nietzsche wrote while working on HH the following summer in Rosenlaui gives a fuller geographic account of his composition of his book. “In the Bayrischen Wald it first began / Basel added its piece to that / In Sorrento it expanded into its size and breadth / And Rosenlaui gave it air and freedom / The mountains labored on start middle and end! / Terrible for those who know the saying! / Thirteen months till the mother of the child convalesced—/ Was an elephant born? / Or only a laughable mouse?—/ These are the father’s cares. Just laugh him off.” KSA 8 22 [80]. The “saying” has a mountain give birth to a mouse (Horace, Ars Poetica 139). 17. Reporting to Gersdorff that he would spend a year in Italy, Nietzsche says, “Freedom! You can’t believe how I fill my lungs when I think about that! . . . All my hopes and plans for ultimate spiritual freeing and for tireless moving ahead are in bloom again.” He reports turning to “the Greek philosophers again as models of an attainable way of life” and that he is reading Xenophon’s Memorabilia [of Socrates] “with the deepest personal interest.—The philologists find him deadly boring, you see how little I’m a philologist” (May 26, 1876).

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my friends, the excellent Dr. Paul Rée”—“Rée the incomparable”18—whose excellence enabled him to see that Nietzsche was the author of insights that went far beyond what he could achieve. Rée would not have misunderstood Nietzsche’s book as mere “higher Réealism” as others did.19 To end his Ecce Homo account of Things Human All Too Human, “the first immoralist ” quotes his book for the only time to claim for himself the honorable position he had assigned his excellent friend as “one of the coldest and boldest thinkers” (HH 37). His quotation allows him to end his 1888 account of Things Human All Too Human on an image that captures his book’s content: “looking into the world with that double-vision that all great insights share”—the immensely consequential looking backward and forward that plows up the past while seeding a new future. Ecce Homo calls the product of his Sorrento winter and spring a “monument to a rigorous self-discipline.”20 Despite continued severe attacks and eye problems during the period from Klingenbrunn to the actual assembly of entries for Things Human All Too Human, Nietzsche did a prodigious amount of work writing, rewriting, dictating, rewriting again. When he was finally ready to assemble the finished entries into the sequence they would have in the chapters of Things Human All Too Human, he performed an elaborate

18. As he said in a postcard from Bex to his mother and sister, October 9, 1876. 19. Rohde misunderstood Nietzsche’s book that way, and Nietzsche responded: “By the way, look only for me in my book and not friend Rée. I’m proud to have discovered his fine qualities and goals but on the conception of my ‘philosophia in nuce’ he had not the slightest influence: that was finished and in good part entrusted to paper when I made closer acquaintance with him in the fall of 1876” (after June 16, 1878). What Nietzsche “entrusted to paper” in U II 5 in the summer of 1876 and what he dictated to Köselitz in September confirm that the advances he made were his own. Rée’s influence on HH was primarily on its aphoristic style and on his increased interest in the French moralists; see Small, Nietzsche and Rée, for an analysis of their respective views. 20. Most of Nietzsche’s letters from Sorrento are postcards because of the severely restricted use of his eyes; almost all mention his frequent attacks and diminishing eyesight, despite his visits to specialists, including a German eye specialist at the University of Naples. None of them mention his work even though his later accounts say that HH was written mostly there. Nietzsche’s daily life in Sorrento is illuminated by often humorous letters Brenner sent to his family; a rich selection was published by Carl Albrecht Bernoulli in his idiosyncratic but still useful two-volume work, Franz Overbeck und Friedrich Nietzsche: Eine Freundschaft, 198–208. Paulo D’Iorio’s Nietzsche’s Journey to Sorrento, especially his chapter “Walks on the Land of the Sirens” (55–63), vividly portrays what Sorrento meant to Nietzsche in liberating him to pursue what was most his own.

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scissors-and-paste operation with the help of Köselitz.21 By December  3, 1877, he could send his publisher the exact wording of his title page and its final arrangement of elements with the title and subtitle at the top and his own name at the bottom. Despite that, he wavered about putting his name on it: in a draft of a letter in early January 1878, to Wagner of all people, he includes Wagner in a secret about his now virtually complete book: By sending—, I lay my secret trustingly in your hands and in those of your honored wife and assume that it will now be your secret too. This book is by me: I have brought to light in it my innermost sentiments about humans and things and circumnavigated for the first time the periphery of my own thinking. A pseudonym had to be chosen . . .

Nietzsche not only believed that his antiromantic, anti-Wagner book had to be published under a pseudonym, he believed that it was better that Wagner, to whom he owed so much, know why. Fully aware that the volatile Wagner would hate it, he tells him that his book was a “means of comfort” during difficult times and “never failed” him “while all other means of comfort” did. “Perhaps I’m still alive because I was capable of it.” He wants Wagner to know his reasons for using a pseudonym: [F]irst because I did not want to disturb the effect of my previous writings; also because the public and private besmirching of the dignity of my person would be avoided that way (because my health could no longer bear that); and finally and precisely because I wanted to make possible an objective discussion in which my so intelligent friends of all kinds could participate with no delicate feelings on their part getting in the way. None want to speak and write against my name. But I know none of them who holds the view of this book but I am very eager to learn about the counter-arguments that may be brought forward in this case.

Only the middle reason, his health, could be genuine: he published his new book with the purpose of countering the effect of his previous writings, and his so intelligent friends would know perfectly well that he wrote it; Rée, 21. The fair copy prepared for the publisher consists of long sheets with separate, already written out entries cut out and pasted on in the final sequence Nietzsche desired. The structure of the HH chapters therefore has an ad hoc quality and lacks the organic unity and flow of the BGE chapters.

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Gersdorff, Overbeck, and others had even helped in its production, and more distant or nameless friends would have no compunction about speaking and writing against it even if it bore his name. Still, his dramatic description of his feelings as its author puts perfectly his sense of being the forerunner of the future course of European thinking: I feel like an officer who has stormed a barrier. Wounded, yes—but he made it and—unfurls his flag. More happiness, much more than pain, as fearsome as the surrounding spectacle is. Although I know, as I said, no one who is like-minded, I nevertheless have the sense that I have thought not as an individual but as a collective— the strangest feeling of solitude and multitude.—a herald who rode forward, not exactly knowing if the knights are following him or if they even exist.

The courage to be that herald in a letter that is the only direct evidence that his courage failed him for a moment—that seems an appropriate portrait of the solitary author at the point of making public the book that began to show the radicality of his thinking.22 After his book was published and as the reactions to it were coming in, one special reaction stimulated him to respond with a letter of major biographical significance because it already states all the main points about the events of Bayreuth/Klingenbrunn that he set out publicly ten years later in Ecce Homo. That July 15, 1878 letter is a reply to a faithful reader of his earlier books, the Wagnerian Mathilde Maier, who read Things Human All Too Human as soon as it appeared and was deeply hurt by it.23 In a long letter (beginning/middle June 1878) she eloquently expressed her sense of the desolation implied in the new view of things advocated by an author she held in the highest regard. 22. Schmeitzner vetoed a pseudonym (to Nietzsche, January 25, 1978). The KGW editors date Nietzsche’s draft of his letter to Wagner “Beginning of 1878.” On January 1, Wagner sent him a special copy of his just completed libretto of Parsifal bound in leather with a goldlettered cover and a cover sheet dedicating it to him. No response letter actually sent by Nietzsche survives. Nietzsche had Schmeitzner send copies of the completed HH to Wagner and to Cosima, listed 20th and 21st on his numbered list of 28 recipients (mid-April 1878). 23. Maier first introduced herself to Nietzsche as a friend of Cosima Wagner’s in a December 10, 1872 letter. She wrote that letter to thank him for “the great and rare joy” BT had given her. Her letter shows her to be a well-informed reader and judge of some of the main points of that book. They maintained sporadic contact, and Nietzsche had his publisher send her one of 21 gift copies of RWB in July 1876 (to Schmeitzner, June 25, 1876). He also listed her as one of the 28 recipients of free copies of HH.

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Nietzsche’s response, gracious but unyielding and unapologetic, states that “the battle with reason against reason that wants to see in everything and in each thing a miracle and non-thing—and in addition a fully commensurate baroque art of extravagance and glorifying immoderation—I mean the art of Wagner” made him “sick and sicker and almost estranged me from my good temperament and my talent.” His liberation from all that brought him “a hundred steps closer to the Greeks” and to a life lived in his own “striving for wisdom,” whereas before he had sought wisdom only in others. What happened to him is “a transformation and crisis” that, if she could empathize with it, “oh then you would have to desire to experience something like it yourself.” He describes that “Bayreuth summer” two years earlier in which all of that became clear to him, and how, “in a small forest village,” the first sketches for his offending new book were made, “about a third of my book, then under the title of ‘the Plowshare.’ ” Returning to Bayreuth, he says, and speaking to no one about what happened, “I shook off what did not belong to me” and lived “in solitude in the years after until I again, as a philosopher of life, ripened and finished, allowed myself to return (and then probably had to).” As you see, he says to close, “I’ve arrived at a degree of honesty in which I can stand only the purest of human relations.”24 Nietzsche’s stylistic breakthrough in Things Human All Too Human owed much to Rée and Rée’s French models and would be perfected only in later books, but it is also a consequence of his failing eyesight and his sickness: his Sorrento months of trying to think and write under the constant pressure of sickness led him to a pattern of daily life that enabled him to continue thinking and writing for another twelve years despite his health problems—a pattern of writing that had a direct influence on his style. In a letter to Overbeck from Rosenlaui,25 the remote resort high in the Swiss Berner Oberland where he spent the summer of 1877 honing Things Human All Too Human, he described the new features of his daily life shortly before he had to return to Basel to take up his teaching duties again (August 28, 1877). Saying first that “my stay up here was certainly the most pleasant of my whole hunt for 24. Maier began her long letter of response saying, “Dear Herr Professor! Your letter made me ill, and I still can’t completely get over the agonizing feverish condition in which it left me. To me, it’s as if the whole world has fallen into an unbearable swerving. What can still stand fast when you, you have undergone such an immense transformation that you now toss away what you used to preach with a prophet’s tongue as Gospel?!” 25. Given the state of his eyes, Nietzsche took only three books with him to Rosenlaui, Rée’s recently published The Origin of the Moral Sensations, Plato’s Laws, which Rée had read aloud in Sorrento, and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

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health,” he reports that he can’t take the reason for it back to Basel with him. He has realized that he “has daily about 1½ hours to use my eyes . . . If I read and write longer than that I have to pay for it with pain on that very day and a few days later with one of the old severe attacks.” Despite that limitation of his eyesight, “my thoughts press me forward, I have such a rich year (in inner results) behind me; it is for me as if the old layer of moss of the daily philological duties needed only to be lifted off—and everything stands there green and succulent.” “If only I had a cottage somewhere,” he says, dreading his return to Basel, he would continue there his now daily pattern: I would go on daily 6–8 hour walks as I do here and think through what I afterward put down on paper in a flash and in complete assurance—that’s what I did in Sorrento and what I do here, and in a completely disagreeable and desolate year won a great deal. (It’s true isn’t it that with you I don’t have to excuse myself for the openness of this self praise?)

What Nietzsche began in Sorrento was the thoroughly remarkable practice of thinking and writing that became his pattern to the end: six to eight hours, on his good days, he walked and thought, following out the logic of his thoughts and their implications while composing and rehearsing the rhythm and tempo of the sentences that would set out those thoughts. The depth and penetration of Nietzsche’s thinking and the beauty, brevity, musicality, and punch of his writing all came together in the hours spent walking, a practice forced on him by the disaster of having only one and a half hours every day to use his eyes to read and write. Back in his room—usually a spare single rented room after his relatively palatial apartment in the Villa Rubinacci in Sorrento with its terrace opening onto a spectacular view of the Bay of Naples framed by the isle of Ischia on the left and Vesuvius on the right—he would copy out his thoughts in the workbooks whose orderly script and complete paragraphs bear witness to the mastery with which he could think and compose while striding hour after hour, out of the sun if possible, with a croupier’s shade shielding his eyes. The philosophy and art of Friedrich Nietzsche are the achievement of a supremely gifted scholar of texts compelled by near blindness to leave his books and his chair and his room and to walk, to think and compose while walking. Sorrento meant for Nietzsche the invention of the only possible way to continue his life as a thinker.26 26. Numerous later letters confirm that he sustained this practice; in the months after the necessary resignation of his professorship (July 12, 1879, to his sister); August 29, 1879, to

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The other two installments of Things Human All Too Human—Assorted Opinions and Maxims and The Wanderer and His Shadow—Nietzsche wrote under increasingly desperate conditions of sickness, with his headaches in particular increasing in intensity, frequency, and duration until at last he reached what he called “my Minimum” in the spring of 1879 when his health forced him to give up his professorship and he “spent the summer in St. Moritz like a shadow, and the next winter . . . in Naumburg as a shadow” (EH  1 HH 1). His letters and postcards from St. Moritz, and from Wiesen where he spent his earlier weeks in the Alps, speak almost exclusively of his wretched health. Then, suddenly, on September 11, he informs Köselitz of “my manuscript”—of The Wanderer and His Shadow. The only hints that he might be writing anything at all, having been forbidden to read and write by his doctors, were these: “I’m daily 7–8 hours in the open air” (to Elisabeth, July 12) and “I’m daily 8 hours in the open air” (to his mother, August 29). Writing The Wanderer and His Shadow on these walks, he was not permitted by his eyes to follow his usual practice of copying out and refining his thoughts in his room; instead, he sketched them in small notebooks underway and trusted Köselitz in Venice to decipher them, write them out, and send them back; then he cut them out and put them into the order he desired. When the whole process was finished, he wrote to his publisher: “The completed ‘Wanderer’ is something almost unbelievable to me . . . The whole ‘Human’ with its two trailers stems out of the time of bitterest and most sustained pain—and appears to me in spite of that a thing full of health. This is my triumph” (to Schmeitzner, December 18). He described his disposition during this period in an 1880 New Year’s letter to his doctor-friend Otto Eiser: My existence is a terrifying burden: I would long have cast it off if I could not have made the most instructive tests and experiments in the spiritualmoral field precisely in this condition of suffering and its almost absolute renunciation—this knowledge-thirsty joyousness brings me to a height his mother); in the darkest months of his sickness (“I can hold out only in the taking-walks existence,” December 11, 1879, to Overbeck); in the months he composed D (“ten hours of the day” walking, July 18, 1880, to Köselitz; “at least 8 hours daily underway,” (August 12, 1880, to his mother and sister). Walking had been a favorite recreation for Nietzsche long before Sorrento; in an April 7, 1866 letter to Gersdorff he speaks of his “recreation, but rare recreation, my Schopenhauer, Schumann’s music, and finally solitary walks.” Nietzsche’s walking-existence was coupled with a solitude that his sickness forced on a man who was naturally gregarious and friend-loving; that he was loved in return is evident from his extended letter exchanges especially with Overbeck (and later his wife, Ida), Rohde, Gersdorff, and Rée.

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where I am victorious over all torment and all hopelessness. On the whole, I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life. (beginning of January 1880)

T h e A p r i l 1886 F o r ewo r d to Things Human All Too Human Nietzsche wrote the Foreword to Things Human All Too Human, his firstpublished autobiographical work, because he could not destroy the book. He wrote it before deciding to write Forewords for all his books. It describes the whole course of a mind driven to free itself but refuses to say where this book stands in that course. He opens masterfully, engaging his reader, drawing him into a near dialogue that presents a bifocal perspective on his writings, the perspective “one” has as a reader about which he “has been told often enough” and his own more nuanced perspective that he will ultimately address to “you.” Nietzsche turns to autobiography in order to help you come to the same understanding of his hard-to-approach writings as their author has. “One” sees a unity in all his writings from The Birth of Tragedy through the “most recently” published Beyond Good and Evil27 and one is not wrong: all his writings are snares and nets for unwary birds and invitations to overturn habitual values and valued habits; they do reduce everything to the human all too human. But their author insists on a deeper unity than one has been able to discern: he does not believe anyone has ever looked into the world with an equally deep suspicion, not simply as an occasional devil’s advocate but as “an enemy and indicter of God.” Anyone who suspects what lies in such deep suspicion—such “unconditional disparity of view”—would also understand how often he sought “to recover from myself, to seek shelter temporarily in some self-forgetting—in some revering or hostility or scientificality or frivolity or stupidity.” Anyone who understood that would also understand why, when he did not actually find what he needed, he “was forced artificially to falsify into suitability, to poetize into suitability”—there is a natural connection between radical philosophic insight and an art of sheltering that does what poetry has always done. As far as Nietzsche’s insight is concerned, no reader of his artful books could, even in 1886, know how early his suspicion had brought him to his pessimistic conclusions—no reader had access yet to the critique and deepening of pessimism that he confined to his workbooks even though he had prepared for publication his 1873 essay on that pessimism, 27. Nietzsche wrote this Foreword in “Nice, spring 1886,” but it was not published until October 31; BGE had been published on August 4.

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“On Truth and Lie in the Extra-moral Sense.” Nietzsche’s first autobiographical publication points to the very early arrival of the profound pessimism he kept secret; he neither dwells on it nor explains it but suggests that his books of advocacy poetized a shelter for his philosophic pessimism. While needing art to recover from the depth of his pessimism, what he needed most for his “cure and self-restoration . . . was the belief not to be singular in this way, singular in seeing.” That need led him to “an enchanted surmise of relatedness and equality in eye and desire” where no such relatedness and equality existed, “a blindness in concert with another without suspicion or question marks, a pleasure in foregrounds, surfaces, things close and closest, in everything that has color, skin, seemingness.” Of course he could be blamed for allowing himself such blindness, reproached for “knowinglywillfully [closing] my eyes before Schopenhauer’s blind will to morality at a time when I was already clear-sighted enough about morality.” He could “likewise” be reproached for deceiving himself about “Wagner’s incurable romanticism as if it were a beginning and not an ending.” He could “likewise” be reproached for deceiving himself about Greeks and Germans; “perhaps there’s a whole long list of such Likewises?”—one such likewise being the perspective he adopted in the book to which this is now the Foreword. Granting the legitimacy of a reader’s reproaches, Nietzsche defends himself: “what do you know, what could you know, of how much cunning in selfpreservation, how much reason and higher safeguarding, is contained in such self-deception?” He gradually accepted that he was singular in seeing and therefore alone knew the necessity in doing what he did; his reader will have that same difficulty in accepting the singularity of his seeing, a philosopher’s singularity that may still demand deception: how could you know “how much falsity I shall still need in order to be able to allow myself ever and again the luxury of my truthfulness? . . .” Thus inviting a question about whether his truthfulness still needs a beautifying art, he ends: “Enough, I’m still living and life, after all, has not been devised by morality: life wants deception, life lives on deception.” If life is primary and lives on deception, you are going to have to work to understand just what life’s need now implies about art for the one most driven to see the truth. But “there I am, already off again, doing what I’ve always done, old immoralist and bird-catcher that I am—speaking immorally, transmorally, ‘beyond good and evil’?—” Only from beyond morality can one fittingly assess Nietzsche’s singular view of truth and of the art truth generates as its consequence. This ending of his first explicitly autobiographical communication with “you” hints at what Nietzsche’s mature thinking arrived at:

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his passion for truth culminated in truth and generated art out of that truth, art on which life can live, life as truth-seeking. Things Human All Too Human, however, anticipated the withering away of art. The 1886 autobiographical writing through which the reader now enters Things Human All Too Human sets that book squarely within Nietzsche’s history of deceptive surfaces, his belief in others to whom he could defer. The book may seem to be his first to abandon deferring and to take his own singular way, but the second section of his Foreword explicitly adds a last major “inventing” he found necessary: he imagined that free minds, the ideal of his book, already existed in his heroes of the Enlightenment, Voltaire above all. Having freed himself from the moralism/romanticism of Schopenhauer and Wagner, he wrote this book under the delusion that the Enlightenment represented true free-mindedness. But “such ‘free minds’ do not exist, have not existed” (2). Unable to destroy and replace this book of his last deferring, he outfits it with a Foreword to replace his Voltaire dedication and his Descartes quotation that served “In Place of a Foreword.” His Foreword says he still believes that “such free minds could exist”; he thinks he “already sees them coming.” He sees them coming because his own freeing of his mind is a pattern, but he does not tell his reader as openly as he will tell his publisher that he is the pattern setter for “an upcoming generation that will understand from out of themselves what I’ve experienced.”28 Having been told often enough what readers make of his books, he addresses his readers directly to tell them what to make of this one: Think of his first book on the free mind as erring in the modern way, deferring to Enlightenment orthodoxy as if that were true free-mindedness; treat it with the suspicion its deference deserves; count it too among the works in which he was not yet himself.29 If the free minds that could exist really are coming, perhaps he can do something in his Foreword to accelerate their coming by describing “under what fates he sees them arising and along what paths he sees them coming?——” They will arise under the same fate he arose under and advance along the same path he trod, and he can do them the service of describing that fate and path by setting out the stages through which his free mind passed before coming to a kind of comple28. To Fritzsch, August 7, 1886; see above, pp. 7–11, for his many letters to his new publisher explaining his intention for his new Forewords. 29. The account of HH in EH echoes his Foreword by speaking of his new deferring as his “instinctual cunning” in replacing his own name with that of Paul Rée, a more conventional devotee of the Enlightenment.

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tion of its journey. Autobiography can show that his singular journey was an advance in thinking that others, drawn to his books, could come to share as their journey. At the beginning of the path stands “a great liberation” (3), but before that, for those “of a high and select kind,” came a being-bound to what binds firmest, the inwardly felt duties and reverences proper to youth, the natural binding of the youthful mind to the honored things passed down to their grateful heir—Nietzsche had already written “On the Three Metamorphoses,” that first of “Zarathustra’s Speeches” describing the indispensable camel spirit that wants to bear the heaviest burden and that Zarathustra presupposed in those he wanted as disciples. “The great liberation comes suddenly for such minds,” he reports, and as he moves to “the history of the great liberation,” his report explodes into a dramatic account of the victory a lion spirit wins over its former reverences. Yet such a beginning “is at the same time a sickness,” a “will to free will” in need of its own cure, and he traces the growing isolation and solitude of such a spirit and ends, “but who today knows what solitude is? . . .” After this theatrical description of the opening act of a free mind’s journey—“these years of temptation and experiment” (4)—Nietzsche reports in an equally dramatic half-page sentence that there is still “a long road to that tremendous certainty and health which cannot do without even sickness as a means and fishhook of knowledge, to that ripe freedom of mind that is equally self-mastery and discipline of the heart and permits access to many and contradictory modes of thought,” and on through a magnificent lyric to “a tenacious will to health” whose “midway condition” is a conscious breaking free of the compulsions of conviction until the free mind concerns itself only with things “that no longer trouble it.” “A step further in convalescence: and the free mind again draws near to life”—here Nietzsche pauses to describe the gratitude experienced by one who was sick a long time and then “even longer becomes healthy—I mean ‘healthier’ ” (5). “At that time it may finally happen”—this final step begins an “unveiling of the mystery of that great liberation which had till then waited, dark, questionable, almost untouchable in his memory” (6). Daring at last to ask why he has inflicted this severity on himself, he hears a speech addressed to him alone as “something like an answer.” It repeats six past or fulfilled commandments, each a “Thou hadst to.”30—a remarkable summary 30. Du solltest. In the Luther Bible the Ten Commandments and other commandments are du sollst, the present tense of what Nietzsche here describes as commandments he has obeyed.

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of his long underground burrowing into morality and what it led to: insight into a “greatest injustice” in which the judgment of “the smallest, narrowest, neediest, most rudimentary . . . puts in question the higher, greater, richer.” This injustice triggers the sixth “thou hadst to”: seeing with his own eyes “the problem of the order of rank and how power and right and spaciousness of perspective grow into the height together.” Seeing the greatest injustice led to seeing the height, the peak at which three things come together: power, right, and a spaciousness of judgment. When he wrote this in the spring of 1886 he had already written his description of this peak, “the complementary man,” in Beyond Good and Evil (207). Gaining that peak leads to a seventh and final “Thou hadst to”—but he breaks off, leaving almost unspoken that last thing he had to do after his insight into the highest stage of the order of rank, saying only, “—enough, the free mind now knows which ‘thou shalt’ [du sollst] he has obeyed, and also what he now can, what he only now—may . . .” Having structured his account with repetitions of the past tense of the modal verb sollen, he makes his only use of sollen in the present tense as what he now knows he has to do, and he expresses that present shalt with the present tense of two other modal verbs, können and dürfen, what he can do and what he has the right to do: knowledge of the height of the order of rank grants him the power and the right. His six Thou hadst to’s, each a stage of understanding, make possible the seventh as the power and right to act—but that he refrains from describing in this Foreword. It can only be what his Zarathustra had done in his act of legislating a new justice. It is the spring of 1886 and Nietzsche is writing a Foreword for the book he wanted to destroy in order to replace it with a more fitting introduction to Thus Spoke Zarathustra: he here tacitly introduces Zarathustra as the book that has already performed his final Thou hadst to. Nietzsche structured Zarathustra as veiled autobiography to show him moving through the free mind’s stages of liberation and insight leading up to this final stage, the legislative actions on behalf of justice that his freed mind found itself commanded to do. In 1886 Nietzsche knows where his 1878 beginning in Things Human All Too Human would eventually end, knows what he had no way of knowing at the beginning. His new Foreword shows his reader how his erring beginning led ultimately to the insights and actions of Zarathustra, the insights of understanding and the actions on their behalf, a philosopher’s insights that compel him to action and give him the power and the right. What “may finally happen” receives a second description in section 7, not as what the free mind heard at the end but as what “he says to himself ”—what happened to him “must happen to everyone in whom a task wants to become

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incarnate.” Task is Aufgabe, what has been given him to do, dictating his action as the final stage of what the previous section said he heard. His task leads Nietzsche to speak of we and our for the first time in the Foreword.31 The problem is still “the problem of the order of rank,” but we may say of it “that it is our problem, we free minds.” The plural arises only now because each one who has followed Nietzsche through his solitary course faces the problem of action on behalf of what he discovered. That shared problem of action became clear only at the point Nietzsche calls “the midday of our life.”32 From that midday point of seeing the task, “we” can look back with understanding at the whole course of investigation: we first had to experience the most manifold and contradictory states of joy and distress in soul and body, as adventurers and circumnavigators of that inner world which is called ‘human,’ as measurers of that ‘higher’ and ‘over one another’ that is likewise called ‘human.’

Nietzsche and his kind investigate the human soul, his own and others, and arrive at: ‘Here—a new problem! Here a long ladder, on whose rungs we ourselves have sat and climbed,—which we ourselves have some time been! Here a higher, a deeper, an under-us, an immense long order, an order of rank which we see: here—our problem!’——

As the problem of the order of rank, Nietzsche’s problem is the problem of philosophy, of preserving it and advancing it in a time of new “emergency conditions” for philosophy that it has been a part of his task to understand (GM 3 10). As the problem of maintaining the order of rank in late modern times, it is a problem that can be solved only if it becomes a problem shared by others who come to see what he saw. That problem requires of Nietzsche what the history of emergency conditions for philosophy consistently exhibits as the problem a philosopher ultimately comes to see, a problem of action on behalf of understanding, the establishing or reestablishing of philosophic rule. All this became visible to Nietzsche only after the erring beginning whose 31. The we at the end of section 3 is merely a generalized plural for what is commonly the case. 32. Nietzsche had already written “At Midday,” the middle and turning point of part 4 of Z; the midday moment of perfection in solitude knows it has an afternoon task.

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particular erring he will name only in the Foreword to the second volume of Things Human All Too Human.33 After Nietzsche’s autobiographical description of his arrival at his problem, he can return to the purpose of his Foreword: to show just where Things Human All Too Human belongs in his authorship. But now he can leave that to his reader: “It won’t remain hidden for a moment to a psychologist or sign-reader at just what stage in the evolution just described the present book belongs” (8). At the very beginning, of course, in the excesses of the “great liberation” that can have no inkling of where it will lead. Not quite disowning the book that marks a first stage of his beginning, Nietzsche outfits it with a description of the path subsequently traveled by its author, leading to where he now stands after completing Zarathustra. Nietzsche’s new Foreword is an entranceway inviting his reader to be continuously aware in reading Things Human All Too Human that it was a start that wrongly believed that free minds already existed in Enlightenment optimists like Voltaire. The Foreword’s fervent and weighty report on the free mind’s progress is balanced by the lightness of the new “Nachspiel” or ending play Nietzsche added to his book for its 1886 relaunch, the poem “Among Friends.” It invites his friends to read his now-surpassed book as he now reads it. Read it and laugh, laugh with him as he now laughs at himself, laugh and make “No excuses!” for him, grant him “No forgiveness!” but do grant “this unreasonable book” residence in your free hearts. Believe me, friends, nothing to curse Was, for me, this my unreason!

Because you too can Learn from this fool’s-book, How reason comes—‘to reason’! So friends, shall we do this? Yes we shall! And auf Wiedersehen! ” 33. A year and a half after this Foreword Nietzsche gave greater precision to the order of rank that was his task; see KSA 12 9 [153] fall 1887. In Nietzsche’s Great Politics, Hugo Drochon shows how Nietzsche’s understanding of modern democracy grounded his program for a political order of rank that would give philosophy its due as the intellectual/spiritual ruling rank (85–88).

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“Good-bye” to all that but also “Let’s see one another again” after you’ve seen his book as he now sees it, a human all too human unreasoning indulgence of reason after his all too long indulgence of the folly of counter-Enlightenment romanticism. Nietzsche could not destroy the book that irrationally indulged reason, but he could make it fun for his friends in identifying its Enlightenment excesses and occasioning their overcoming of them too.

T h e S e p t e m b e r 1886 F o r ewo r d to Things Human All Too Human, Volume II As remarkable as the Foreword to Things Human All Too Human is, it refuses for good reason to explain the book itself: it is concerned with the outcome of what the book merely initiated. But Nietzsche did explain his book five months later, in September 1886, after he had decided to write explanatory Forewords for all his books. Assorted Opinions and Maxims and The Wanderer and His Shadow, the two other books he had intended to destroy, he now made Things Human All Too Human, Volume II, and the Foreword he wrote for it covers the whole of Things Human All Too Human.34 This Foreword explains what it is about Things Human All Too Human that led him to think it best to destroy and replace the whole of it. It tells a tale of sickness, cure, and convalescence. The sickness was his years-long but “temporary attack of the most dangerous form of romanticism” (2), under which he wrote his first five books. Assorted Opinions and Maxims (1879) and The Wanderer and His Shadow (1880) were “a continuation and redoubling” of the cure, “the antiromantic self-doctoring” begun in Things Human All Too Human. Now, after “six years of convalescence,” from 1880 when he began Daybreak to this 1886 Foreword, he can at last present himself as he is, “ego ipsissimus,” my very own self, or even “ego ipsissimum,” my innermost self (1). He hopes that these two books bound together can do for his reader what they did for him, teach “the precepts of health” (2) that cure a culture-wide sickness. But who is the ego who speaks out of them? A “pes34. The first editions of AOM (1879) and WS (1880) differed significantly. The first appeared with the same title page as HH except that “Appendix: Assorted Opinions and Maxims” appeared under the title where the dedication to Voltaire had appeared in the 1878 edition. The Wanderer and His Shadow was the complete title of that book: Things Human All Too Human appeared nowhere on its title page. The title pages of all three books and the 1886 reissues are pictured in Schaberg, The Nietzsche Canon, 62, 71, 75, 133. When Nietzsche first sent AOM to his publisher, he asked that it continue the pagination and section numbering of HH, with its first page numbered 379 and its first section 639 (to Schmeitzner, November 23, 1878).

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simist whose insights often made him jump out of his skin but who always knew how to get back into it again, a pessimist . . . well disposed toward pessimism”; his book can be “a lesson for today’s pessimists who are one and all in danger of romanticism” (2). The pessimism to which Nietzsche invites his reader is not present in the books of his cure, Things Human All Too Human, Volumes I and II, so one must read on, read the books of his convalescence as well, Daybreak and The Gay Science, which complete the freeing of his mind, and Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, the books of his maturity. When he abandoned Wagnerism, he says, he lost his “task” (3), the action to which his thinking impelled him.35 He did not lose his way of thinking; that he had arrived at early and chosen to keep secret while writing the books that performed the tasks of his sickness. Having lost his task and grown mistrustful of himself (4), “I took sides against myself and for everything painful and difficult precisely for me”—a revelatory statement preparing his exact description of what was painful. Taking that route, writing these books of his cure, allowed him to succeed, to find his way “to that courageous pessimism that is the antithesis of all romantic pessimism and also, as it appears to me today, the way to ‘myself,’ to my task.” This brief claim to have succeeded completes his preliminary sketch of sickness, cure, and convalescence, and he turns to a more complete elaboration of his cure in section 5, his taking sides with what was painful to him. In Things Human All Too Human, he learned “the solitary’s speech . . . I spoke without witnesses or rather in indifference to witnesses.” But he spoke, he kept writing books; “so as not to suffer from staying silent, I spoke only of things that had nothing to do with me.” To keep speaking, he “learned the art of appearing cheerful, objective, inquisitive, above all healthy and malicious . . . here a sufferer and self-denier speaks as though he were not a sufferer and self-denier.” In these writings there is “a determination to preserve . . . a composure in the face of life and a sense of gratitude toward it . . . defending life against pain.” The foreign perspective he adopted in Things Human All Too Human involved a principle: “it was then that I acquired for myself the proposition: ‘a sufferer has no right at all to pessimism because he suffers!’ ” His principle forced him into silence about the profound pessimism to which he in fact adhered: speaking it would sound like sickness speaking its natural, earned complaint, its outrage at suffering. 35. Just what his task meant to him, he made clear in a letter to his friend Seydlitz on November 18, 1878, ten months after HH appeared. Explaining that his health had become so precarious that he had to give up writing letters even to his best friends, he said, “I have to live my office and my task—a master and a lover and a goddess all at the same time.”

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The pain and suffering of which Nietzsche speaks here must in large measure be the physical suffering that so dominated his life in these years and filled his days and his correspondence but is absent from his books. Does suffering refute life? He never believed it, and in these years of deepest suffering he could not allow himself to speak his pessimism. It was then that I conducted with myself a long-term, patient campaign against the unscientific basic tendency of every romantic pessimism to interpret and inflate individual personal experiences into universal judgments and indeed into condemnations of the world . . . in short, I turned my perspective around. Optimism . . .

Optimism—Nietzsche’s explanation of his newly adopted task comes to its climax in this one word, the word he used from his beginning as the opposite of his own view, the word he used to condemn Socrates and the turn the world had taken under his influence. This explains Things Human All Too Human as the anomaly in his writings, a book that should have been destroyed once the necessity compelling its adopted optimism had passed. Refusing his sickness its natural, pessimistic speech, the speech natural to both his inclination and his intellectual insights, meant adopting the opposite speech, optimism. And that meant advocating the optimism of the modern Enlightenment: .  .  . I turned my perspective around. Optimism, for the purpose of restoration, so that at some future time I could again have the right to be a pessimist—do you understand that?

Understand that, he asks, understand that he chose Enlightenment optimism with a view to winning a right to his natural pessimism once he had recovered his health, if not his bodily health, spiritual health, “the great health” (GS 382). Understanding that is greatly aided by a remarkable passage Nietzsche wrote in Daybreak, the book after Things Human All Too Human, “On the knowledge of the sufferer” (114), a report on his own experience that he did not write autobiographically, submerging the ich as he would for another five years. He reports on his privileged position: “The condition of sick people who suffer dreadful and protracted torment from their suffering and whose minds nevertheless remain undisturbed is not without worth for knowledge.” He who suffers intensely looks out at things with a terrible coldness: all those little lying charms with which things are usually surrounded when the eye

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of the healthy regards them do not exist for him . . . If until then he has been living in some dangerous fantasy, this supreme sobering-up through pain is the means of extricating him from it, perhaps the only means.

Read autobiographically, this is a claim that the onset of his severe and prolonged attacks before his break with Wagner made his break possible. Extricating himself from Wagner was not simply cold resistance: Our pride towers up as never before: pride discovers an incomparable stimulus in opposing such a tyrant as pain is, and, in answer to all the insinuations it makes to us that we should bear witness against life—precisely to advocate life in the face of this tyrant. In this condition one defends oneself desperately against all pessimism, in order that it not appear to be a consequence of our condition and humiliate us in defeat.

The optimism Nietzsche embraced in Things Human All Too Human is what Daybreak said it was, proud defiance, absolute refusal to allow it to seem that he had given in to the prolonged acute suffering that assailed him. His Foreword five years later explains that what appeared to be an intellect-based embrace of Enlightenment optimism was in fact his cure for sickness, including the dangerous fantasy of romantic pessimism: I compelled myself to an opposite, untried climate of the soul . . . a curative wandering into the strange, into the strange . . . some cynicism perhaps, some ‘barrel’

—the self-inflicted hardship of a latter day Diogenes. And life rewarded him with “the greatest of its gifts,” he says, life gave him back his task. His is not the task of the advocate of Enlightenment optimism adopted in these three volumes, but the task they ultimately helped make possible for him, advocacy of what he named “Dionysian pessimism” a few months after this Foreword in his definitive judgment against romantic pessimism, “What Is Romanticism? ” (GS 370).36 But was his experience of illness and recovery, his passage through Enlight36. Nietzsche’s public advocacy of the Enlightenment meant in part advocacy of science— and that was not temporary, nor was it opposed to his true inclinations. Instead, it brought into full public view what he had always acted on in his private investigations and would now publicly affirm to the end, science as inquiry, as the human effort to understand the world. Oppos-

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enment optimism, his alone, only “my ‘Things Human All Too Human’ ” (6)? He would like to believe the reverse, knowing as he does that these, “my wander-books,” do not wander aimlessly about but instead track the historic European experience to this point and beyond. “May I now, after six years of growing confidence, venture to send them off again?” Instead of destroying them, he can send them out into the world again because he is not alone; they are now for you, you rare, most endangered, most spiritual-mindful, most courageous, the you who must be the conscience of the modern soul and as such must have its knowledge . . . because you are not ‘only individuals.’

Required himself to be the conscience of the modern soul and possessing its knowledge and not being only an individual, Nietzsche, the first good European, becomes the educator of “you good Europeans!——” As that educator he helps his reader think through the optimism of the European Enlightenment and on beyond it to the health that he was the first to experience, postmodern health that affirms the world as it is, an affirmation that knows how and why to curb modern optimism’s urge to correct existence, to remake the planet and machine humans immortal—it is not science that must be bridled but its technological cousin. It is good to still have Things Human All Too Human, Nietzsche’s book of Enlightenment optimism. Guided by its two Forewords, we can now read it from the perspective of the Dionysian pessimism beyond it: from that perspective it rises as the form of Jesuitism that Nietzsche compelled himself to adopt, forcibly making the illusions of Enlightenment optimism the foundation of culture. Like romantic pessimism, Enlightenment optimism masked what was Nietzsche’s own, the skepticism and pessimism whose chief features he had already worked out by 1872 but kept secret, the view that achieved its deepest insight and highest affirmation only in 1881 as a result of the burrowing begun in Daybreak. The interpretation of Things Human All Too Human in the following chapters has as its main aim the identification of what the Foreword to its first volume and its “Nachspiel” leave to his reader: discover and learn from the chief errors of this beginning what its ultimate, later gains make visible and laughable, Enlightenment errors on both chief themes, Philosophy and Art. Nietzing romanticism meant abandoning the bridling of science that he had taken as his public task, silencing science for the sake of fable, for “dangerous fantasy” (D 114).

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sche never repudiated the Enlightenment as he did counter-Enlightenment romanticism, but his Enlightenment brings reason to reason, having learned both the limits of reason and what limited reason can ultimately attain, and having learned as well the reasonable role art can play in ebb and flood with reason. * What his winter in Sorrento, that place of origin for Things Human All Too Human, meant for Nietzsche in his life and his writing has been fittingly memorialized by Paulo D’Iorio in Nietzsche’s Journey to Sorrento. In the chapter that marks its peak, “The Bells of Genoa and Nietzschean Epiphanies,” D’Iorio provides a model exegesis of a Nietzschean text, thirty-six pages unfailingly illuminating a five-line section of Things Human All Too Human, “Seriousness in play” (628). Fully appreciating Nietzsche’s “strategy of reticence,”37 D’Iorio first secures the biographical origins of the experience Nietzsche reports of hearing the peal of bells on the evening of his return to Genoa from Sorrento on May 11, 1877. He then traces the roots of the classicist Nietzsche’s immediate recall of Plato’s words on the insignificance of human experience. Spelling out Nietzsche’s deepening iterations of his experience of the bells in his unpublished and published texts, D’Iorio culminates his account with the expressions of that experience in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He then ends by articulating the anti-Platonic sentiment that lies encapsulated in the single word Nietzsche used to end section 628, “trotzdem——,” the nevertheless that recognizes just where the significance of human experience lies and how it can best be celebrated.38 D’Iorio’s model exegesis depends in part on his meticulous study of Nietzsche’s actual workbooks and notebooks, not on the incomplete versions published in KGW/KSA. Using the word epiphany, which Nietzsche never used, a word designating a religious experience, he gives a rational account of Nietzsche’s experience of thinking, its being stretched out over time in repeated returns to a particular thought written out and rewritten out in workbooks, deepening it, expanding it, and finding superior ways to express it—each workbook gain coming with the rapidity characteristic of human insight at its highest. Nietzschean epiphanies are “the 37. D’Iorio, Nietzsche’s Journey, 109. 38. D’Iorio does not fail to report the workbook entry “in which Nietzsche declares that he prefers his em dashes to his fully formulated thoughts” (KSA 11 34 [147] 1885, in German “em dashes” are Gedankenstriche).

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concentration or the condensation of multiple rational fields of knowledge . . . moments in which all the fertile semantic wealth of an event, an object, or a concept appears to the philosopher unexpectedly,”39 a definition D’Iorio then expands into the “three characteristics” of such an event of thinking. Nietzsche’s own way of characterizing his philosophic epiphanies is typically playful and curt, demanding investigation and reflection: it is “thinking and living gangasrotagati” (BGE 27), as the Ganges flows, swift, relentless, sacred—the way of thinking of the philosopher in its difference from the typical, more pedestrian ways of thinking and which he invites a gifted reader like D’Iorio to experience. 39. D’Iorio, Nietzsche’s Journey, 100.

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Optimism, for the purpose of restoration, so that at some future time I could again have the right to be a pessimist HH 2 Fo r e w o r d 5

Nietzsche’s 1886 Foreword for Things Human All Too Human replaced the dedication to Voltaire and the quotation from Descartes “In Place of a Foreword.” But that now indispensable entrance to his book should not blot out all memory of the Voltaire and Descartes notices that accurately reflect the Nietzsche of 1878, who publically embraced the Enlightenment of Descartes and Voltaire.

T h e V o lta i r e D e d i c a t i o n Right on the title page of the 1878 Things Human All Too Human, the cover of the book as published, Nietzsche had these lines printed under the title and above his name: To the Memory of Voltaire dedicated on the Memorial Celebration of his Death-day, the 30th of May, 1778.

Nietzsche, an author already well known for clear positions of attack and advocacy, has his reader enter his new book through an emphatic elevation of

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Voltaire, a most unexpected figure for this author to honor. Turning the page, the reader finds on the back of the title page a curious remark about the book, a near apology written in small print: This monological book which originated in Sorrento during a winter stay (1876 to 1877) would not have been handed over to the public if the approach of May 30, 1878, had not awakened the all too lively wish to offer at the right moment to one of the greatest liberators of the mind a personal homage.

Reaffirming Voltaire, this note almost says that Nietzsche had reservations about his book even at the start. Beyond Good and Evil—the 1886 book he began writing just after completing Thus Spoke Zarathustra in order to have it replace Things Human All Too Human as its introduction—employs the jauntiness of his new style to give the reason for removing the Voltaire dedication: just after the central section of its chapter “The Free Mind,” a section criticizing the supposedly free minds of those who follow Enlightenment teachers, Nietzsche named Voltaire and pointed to what made his mind unfree: O Voltaire! O Humanity! O Nonsense! There is something about ‘truth,’ about the search for truth; and when a human being is too human about it— “il ne cherche le vrai que pour faire le bien”—I bet he finds nothing! (35)

Voltaire’s search for le vrai, the True, was too human and found nothing because he gave priority to le bien, the Good, to “Humanity,” the modern Good. This section is prelude to the next, where Nietzsche indicates that his search for the true, not guided by the Good, found something, the True: that section gives his only argument for the truth of will to power in the book. Nietzsche structured his new book to have his argument for an ontology that can claim to be true follow immediately his critique of the epistemological skepticism of Enlightenment enthusiasts: genuine skepticism, continued zetetic inquiry, can lead the skeptical mind to the true because it is not blocked by bondage to the merely moral. Farewell, Voltaire and the Enlightenment free mind he represents.

T h e D e s c a r t e s Q u o ta t i o n On the first page of the 1878 Things Human All Too Human, under the title, “In Place of a Foreword,” Nietzsche placed a long quotation from Descartes,

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one of the founders of the Enlightenment.1 What he chose to quote is highly significant: a passage from Descartes’s Discourse on the Method, his first book, his mounting the stage after experimenting with many other ways of introducing himself to the world. He chose an autobiographical way, a careful sketch of how he became himself. Nietzsche chose to quote what Descartes placed at its very center—his moment of decision choosing the way of life of a philosopher. Descartes situated his choice of the philosophic life at the end of what he had introduced as the “three or four” maxims of his “provisional morality.” His careful reader, “you,” addressed eight times in his book, will notice that the fourth of these “three or four” is in no way provisional and is no mere maxim: it suggests in fact that its definitive choice of the philosophic life is the reason he needed the three previous items, each a provisional moral maxim in the service of the philosophic life, sheltering its radicality. Nietzsche, a young thinker now setting out publicly on the philosopher’s essential journey of freeing his mind for the ultimate inquiries open to a human being, chose the single passage from Descartes that depicts him at that decisive moment: Nietzsche aligns himself with one of the historically pivotal thinkers of the Enlightenment at the moment in which that thinker, far more important than Voltaire, took up the philosophic life. Why replace the Descartes quotation? In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche says he doubted that Descartes doubted everything (2). And while Descartes, as “the father of rationalism (and hence the grandfather of the Revolution),” should perhaps be excepted from the generalization that after Plato, all “philosophers are on the same track,” Nietzsche can say that Descartes held reason to be “merely an instrument” and was “superficial” (191). Nietzsche failed to see in Descartes a precursor as radical and singular as he was.2

1. Nietzsche had experimented with many forewords; one, titled “Foreword,” addressed “readers of his earlier writings . . . to whom he owes an explanation” (KSA 8 25 [2] Fall 1877); but he dropped that explicitly personal element when he rewrote that workbook entry for section 34 of HH. See also KSA 8 23 [156]. 2. It seems unlikely that Nietzsche knew that his quoted passage came from the central paragraph of Descartes’s book. His superficial judgments on Descartes stem from his failure to really study him: under his HH quotation he wrote: “From the Latin of Cartesius”; he did not know that Descartes wrote his Discourse in French and that the Latin version appeared seven years after his death. Descartes was in fact a profound philosophic practitioner of the hermit’s art who very much had revolution on his mind, the modern, Baconian revolution that succeeded in establishing the Enlightenment. See my Nietzsche and Modern Times.

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T h e F o r ewo r d N i e t z s c h e P l a n n e d f o r H i s 1886 Replacement of Things Human All Too Human “In June 1885”—these words close the Foreword Nietzsche wrote for the book he was then beginning to compose with the intention of having it be the new Things Human All Too Human, the book he later called Beyond Good and Evil. The argument of that great Foreword culminates by identifying the enemy of the present “tension of the spirit” that alone could carry Europe forward into a future that would fulfill the spiritual promise of its past. The enemy? “The democratic Enlightenment.” So far from advocating the Enlightenment, the book Nietzsche wrote to replace his book of advocacy takes war against the democratic Enlightenment to be its essential task, spiritual warfare that would direct modern humanity to the future foreseen in his just completed Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Instead of a title page dedication to an Enlightenment hero, the new Things Human All Too Human makes war against the democratic Enlightenment the task its Foreword announces, war against the moral teaching of the modern world, the secularized Christian moral teachings that imperil the order of rank—and maintaining the order of rank is essential to Nietzsche’s task according to his 1886 Foreword to the reissue of Things Human All Too Human.3

The Philosopher’s Task: Things Human All Too Human, Chapter 14 Nietzsche’s title for his chapter on philosophy in Things Human All Too Human, “First and Last Things,” claims again for philosophy free inquiry into the ultimate topics supposedly settled by the now-dying religion. That religion understood itself to be the true revelation of first and last things that supplanted mere philosophy while pressing it into maid service to its own sovereignty. Nietzsche’s title announces that philosophy is taking up again the rational investigation of origins and ends that our religion believed were settled by its Creation and Apocalypse tales. The artful author fulfills his chapter title in his chapter’s structure: its first section deals with first things, its last 3. War against Enlightenment moral teaching in no way entailed war against science, which the Enlightenment advanced. His “gay science” was, as Georg Picht said, “Nietzsche’s enlightenment of the Enlightenment” (Picht, Nietzsche, 51). 4. I use chapter where both HH and BGE use Hauptstück: the nine Hauptstücke of HH gather its 638 Stücke under general themes.

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with last things; what falls between them reclaims from philosophy’s Greek origins the genuine love of truth falsely claimed by obedient lovers of what they were told to believe. Nietzsche’s philosophy chapter is never far from Voltairean contempt and ridicule for philosophy’s false claimants. Things Human All Too Human treats philosophy in a single chapter; Beyond Good and Evil spreads it across its first two chapters: it had to clear away “The Prejudices of the Philosophers” (chapter 1) before inviting “The Free Mind” (chapter 2) to consider a possibility that Things Human All Too Human ruled out: an ontological conclusion to which Nietzsche will invite skeptical modern free minds. Things Human All Too Human was the work of a skeptical mind freed of any “metaphysical need,” the illusory need that seemed elemental in Nietzsche’s first five books even though his 1873 “On Truth and Lie” showed why he himself held skepticism, dissolution, and pessimism to be true. What Things Human All Too Human initiated led Nietzsche to a new understanding of the way of all beings while preparing The Gay Science in 1881; he made that understanding basic to Thus Spoke Zarathustra: a proper introduction to it had to introduce Nietzsche’s new ontology of will to power as Beyond Good and Evil does.

“ C h e m i st ry o f co n c e p t s a n d s e n sat i o n s ” ( 1 ) Nietzsche paid attention to the first-ness of his first section: its first word, its title, its first sentence, its sentences as a whole, all announce a new beginning now becoming possible for philosophy as pursued by moderns schooled in the Enlightenment. Chemistry—the first word of this book on philosophy nicely captures its chief feature of method in treating the concepts and sensations that are the subject matter of philosophy: its treatment of its subjects resembles that of the foundational science of chemistry, reducing compounds to their elements. Method sees no cardinal difference between the essential procedure of philosophy and of chemistry: reduction to the elemental.5 The first sentence claims a privileged position for late modern philosophy: “The problems of philosophy now again in almost all their parts take on the same form of question as two thousand years ago.” Philosophic questioning can skip back two millennia and again address the fundamental questions 5. BGE returns to the Greek philosophers’ use of physis and speaks of physics as the science of the elemental. Nietzsche’s 1878 replacement of physics by chemistry seems influenced by his reading of Robert Mayer, for whom physics is the science of force and chemistry the science of matter; see Small, Nietzsche in Context, 139.

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without being deflected by questions that occupied the intervening period, questions toward which the Socratic turn seemed to point: entities and another world different from nature and not subject to the laws of chemistry. Freed of the binding character of such beliefs, today’s questioner is kin to Nietzsche’s philosophic models, the pre-Platonic thinkers.6 But Nietzsche does not tell his reader to study the ancient philosophers as he did: he does not aim to create philologists or university philosophers; instead, he invites his reader to consider the natural questions of philosophy that we too, like the Greeks, encounter directly and not in textbooks. The first such question is the question of causation naturally asked by reflective humans always already thrown into a world of concepts and sensations fixed by prejudgments: “How can something arise out of its opposite?—for instance, the reason-like from the reason-less, sensation from the dead, logic from illogic, disinterested contemplation from covetous desire, living for others out of egoism, truth out of errors?”7 “Metaphysical philosophy,” the philosophy of the intervening two thousand years, imagined away such difficulties by assuming a miraculous or nonchemical origin for its permanencies. “Historical philosophy,” lacking even in the pre-Platonics, is novel because it “is unthinkable” now for philosophy “that it be separated any longer from natural science.” Natural science, called until the mid-nineteenth century “natural philosophy,” is how philosophy began, and historical philosophy welcomes the discoveries of science, acknowledging the rational authority of what natural philosophy has become.8 Historical philosophy, asking the questions ancient Greek philosophy asked, employs “the very youngest of all philosophic methods” on the reductionist model of Thales, now the model of modern chemistry. It can already demonstrate in individual cases what “it will probably conclude in all of them”: “that there are no opposites” and that “an error of reason lies at the base of setting up such opposition.” Historical philosophy has already succeeded in applying its chemistry to dissolve an important “opposite” in morality, already Nietzsche’s special domain: the most painstaking observation reveals that no unegoistic action or completely interest-free contemplation exists; what 6. This temporal cast of the first section, its claim to be a recovery of the questioning basic to Greek philosophy, Nietzsche added only at the last minute: the words wieder (again), dieselbe (the same), and wie vor zwei tausend Jahren (as two thousand years ago) he wrote onto the page that Köselitz had already carefully written out as the fair copy for the printer. 7. BGE starts the same way (sections 2–3)—but only after a first section questioning the cause and the value of the will to truth that only the mature Nietzsche could have written. 8. Socrates on his last day reports that he too started out with natural questions about cause (Phaedo 96a–b).

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appear to be such are “sublimations in which the basic element appears to be almost evaporated.” Initial success applying chemical method to altruism promised success with what matters most, the highest products of culture: “a chemistry of moral, religious, and aesthetic conceptions and sensations.”9 But this philosophic investigator using the new tools and peering into a future made inevitable by their use poses a question: When the chemistry of concepts and sensations demonstrates that even in the cultural domain “the most glorious colors are derived from base and even despised substances”— what then? “Are there many who will desire to pursue such investigations? Humanity loves to put the question of origins and beginnings out of mind: must one not be almost dehumanized to feel in himself the opposite inclination?” And so, impishly using opposites—human/inhuman, high-inclinations/ base-inclinations—to end a section that claims there are no opposites, the new inquirer points an accusing finger at himself: he could ruin everything; his argument that there are no opposites could bring down everything high and noble; his kind of inquiry threatens humanity itself. What an opening! The author of five books, each an extended essay, now mounts the stage already adept at a new medium for his thoughts, brief probes bristling with implication, mixing gravity with levity, instruction with challenge, setting out a complete reductionism—everything “high” rises out of the “low”—and looking back to his great Greek predecessors and looking forward to being denounced as a nihilist and destroyer. A possible new Voltaire or Descartes mounts the stage in an arresting way. These are the first of “First and Last Things.” What are the last? Its last section treats the potential disaster raised in the first section: “will our philosophy thus become a tragedy?” (34), the tragedy of truth destroying everything held to be worthwhile. Not necessarily, Nietzsche answers, and defends his answer with what “I believe.” This 1878 belief Nietzsche will believe to the end, through all the changes he has yet to undergo, changes he will serially greet as gains implied by what he here begins. “I believe that the decision about the effect of knowledge is determined by a person’s temperament.” Whether knowledge leads to the tragedy of destroying culture or to something positive is a “decision” each person makes, one that is itself “determined”—its roots too are in the elemental, in the person one unalterably is. Here in the last section is the future advocate of “the great health” (GS 382), one who will become ever 9. On the origins of altruism Nietzsche opposed his good friend Rée, whose books he admired for their psychological observations and concise formulations, not for their theoretical assumptions about morality.

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more aware of the fundamental sickness bred into our souls by the founding philosophy and religion of our culture—bred in and therefore not elemental but acquired and time-bound. A chemistry of concepts and sensations can discover and appeal to deeper elements than those bred in by Platonism and Christianity.10

Sections 2–11 “Lack of historical sense is the family failure of all philosophers.” Before Nietzsche. His historical sense allows him to view humanity as a product of evolution whose now relatively fixed nature gained its essential features long before the “four thousand years we more or less know about” (2). These features are “the unalterable facts about humanity” that philosophy can now consider across the whole historical range of empirical evidence being supplied by the growing science of paleo-anthropology, evidence Nietzsche was avid to acquire by reading the pioneers of that science like John Lubbock, Edward Tylor, and Walter Bagehot, whose books were being translated into German as soon as they appeared.11 Honoring such facts destroys errors “which blind us and make us happy”—to insist on knowledge at the cost of happiness demands a new kind of virtue in individual inquirers and those who attend to them, a “manliness” willing to pay that price for the sake of truth. Gradually, “all humanity will be raised to this manliness” (3). Meanwhile, philosophy must renew itself if it is to aid in this task, for philosophy is “the summit of the entire scientific pyramid.” Modern sciences seek knowledge and nothing besides and are gaining knowledge. And philosophy? An event within ancient philosophy still governs philosophy’s approach: it “separated itself from science” by asking, “What is the knowledge of the world and life by which humanity lives most happily?” This separation occurred in “the Socratic schools,” the dominant one being Plato’s Academy, and “this concern for happiness tied off the arteries of scientific research—and still does so today” 10. I return to this important end of the first chapter below. 11. See Brobjer, Nietzsche and the “English,” 138–44, 167–82, 235–71; Nietzsche’s Philosophical Context, 63–66. British scholars were likewise reading the Germans: through his long talks with George Croom Robertson, the editor of Mind, in Rosenlaui in the summer of 1877, Nietzsche learned that his books were being discussed in British journals. See Croom Robertson to Nietzsche, September 20, 1877; his letter is in English but their talks must have been in German because of Nietzsche’s very limited English. The letter quotes portions of a review of Nietzsche’s first three UMs that appeared in the Westminster Review in April 1875; they are uniformly critical of Nietzsche’s stance.

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(6–7). Nietzsche’s new advocacy of science did not alter his view of the one turning point and vortex of so-called world history, but he now sees burgeoning modern science as breaking the two-millennia-long hold of Platonism. In restored confederacy with the sciences it generated, philosophy can now not only address the problems it addressed before the turn effected by Socrates but hope to understand them properly and complete the rout of Platonism through genuine knowledge of the cosmological and moral issues addressed so nobly in pre-Socratic Greek philosophy. Nietzsche’s level-headed judgments about modern science, stated publicly for the first time here, remained basic through his remaining ten years: the power of the sciences had become a social fact that philosophy had to deal with, that wisdom could neither bridle nor ignore.12 What Nietzsche’s inquiries led him to modify was his calculation of the cost: nihilism was a much more ominous consequence than he here supposed. In 1878 Nietzsche already advocated philosophy’s rightful leadership of science as he would to the end; but what about philosophy’s most basic enterprises, inquiry into the being of beings and into our ability to know, ontology and epistemology? He held that philosophy had a preparatory critical task: it could measure the knowledge claims about being and knowing made by religion and the metaphysical philosophy that sprang from it. Now, for the first time, it could treat those claims as “purely scientific problem[s]” and, employing chemical method, reduce them to the compounds out of which they were composed, namely, “passion, error, and self-deception . . . the worst of all methods of acquiring knowledge.” When chemical method has exposed these roots “as the foundations of all extant religions and metaphysical systems, [it] has refuted them.” The genealogical refutation leaves open the possibility that some metaphysical world exists, a mere possibility that cannot be investigated (9), and the exposure of its roots makes any such world morally suspect. A “harmlessness” of metaphysics results, allowing us “with complete calm to hand over to physiology and the evolutionary history of organisms and concepts the question of how our world-picture could have been so different from the disclosed essence of the world” (10). Calm inquiry shows “the significance of language for the evolution of culture”: “humanity set up in 12. Some scientists were reading Nietzsche’s books: in Florence on November 7 or 8, 1885, Paul Lanzky introduced Nietzsche to the famous German astronomer Wilhelm Tempel, the discoverer of numerous comets. Nietzsche reported in a letter that next to Tempel’s work desk lay a well-thumbed copy of HH and that Tempel enthusiastically recited passages from it to him (to Seydlitz, November 24, 1885).

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language a separate world” (11)—here Nietzsche reports publicly core elements of “On Truth and Lie” without saying that he “kept [them] secret” for years and without mentioning the details of his or Gerber’s genealogy of concepts. Language inadvertently tricks us into supposing we know the separate world it creates; its words and concepts consistently generate sames out of similars and posit fixity of the sames while letting fall the differences always present in always changing particulars: Nietzsche detects a natural human propensity to “Platonism” in the very activity of language, one that can be understood by a science of language.

Sections 12–19 Sections 12–19 are related as probes that employ paleo-anthropology and evolution to help investigate the false concepts basic to the world picture of religion and metaphysical philosophy. Each section is a fragment of refutation serving the overall project of the first chapter of Nietzsche’s new enterprise, personal and cultural liberation from the prejudices of philosophers and teachers of religion. Section 16, “Appearance and thing in itself,” is of special importance because it treats the efforts of post-Kantian philosophers to arrive at an epistemology that can secure a rationally defensible ontology. Here Nietzsche gives his view of the spiritual situation of his present as regards philosophy. Some philosophers, like the unnamed Schopenhauer, stand before the world of appearance and work at deducing a reality that must have caused it. “More rigorous logicians” argue that “every conclusion” drawn from appearance about a metaphysical realm “is to be denied”; “logicians” means primarily Afrikan Spir, whose epistemological skepticism entailed ontological skepticism.13 But both of these kinds of philosopher lack the historical sense and fail to see that “what we humans call life and experience has become and is still fully in becoming.” Historical philosophy recognizes that across the millennia humans have made moral, aesthetic, and religious demands on the world that were based on passion or fear and subject to bad habits of illogical thinking. The world thus gradually “became marvelously variegated, frightful, meaningful, soulful, it had gained color—but we were the colorists.” “Late, very late,” the human intellect began to reflect on this fact, and now, with “the world of experience and the thing in itself seeming so extraordinarily different and divided,” the intellect rejects the notion that the latter could be inferred 13. Nietzsche had studied Spir closely in 1873; on Spir and his influence on Nietzsche, see especially Green, Nietzsche and the Transcendental Tradition.

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from the former. Romanticism stands as an alternative to that skepticism and “in a chillingly mysterious fashion” abandons intellect in order to fuse with some real world beyond it. “Others,” instead of viewing the intellect as responsible for the world of appearance, blamed the essence of things as the cause of the “uncanny character of the world and preached redemption from being.” All of these options are vulnerable to “the steady and laborious process of science.” In 1878, Nietzsche already points the way to a viable future for philosophy, the genealogical way he advocates at the end of section 16: on the basis of insight into the history of human agency in creating and coloring the lived world, science could develop a “history of the genesis of thought ” that would ultimately be celebrated as its “greatest triumph.”14 Section 16 ends by sketching what a history of the genesis of thought may recover: “what we now call the world” will be known to be “the result of a host of errors and fantasies which came about gradually in the overall evolution of organic beings and are now inherited by us as the accumulated treasure of the entire past.” Treasure, not something we can abandon for it is now built into the way we think and cannot be thrown off: “from this world of representation rigorous science can detach us only to a limited degree.” But a genuine possibility of human transcendence presents itself: rigorous science “can . . . step by step illuminate the history of the genesis of that world as representation— and, at least for brief moments, lift us up out of the entire proceeding.” Edification may lie in this skeptical insight: the fact that the thing in itself, the transcendent world that once seemed to be so much, to be everything, evokes “a Homeric laugh.” The historical view of humanity’s spiritual past offers a comedy that affirms us as the colorists of the world who are now in a position to assess the deep psychological need for that coloring. This maturing of the species in section 16 leads to the maturing of the individual in section 17 in which Nietzsche traces the development of a young reader who values metaphysical explanation as he himself once did. The last stage achieved by that maturing person is a twofold feeling based on science’s physiological and historical explanations: no longer feeling responsible, no longer subject to moral blame or praise for what is or what he is, he feels an interest in life and 14. Beginning with D in 1881, Nietzsche himself focused on the genesis of morality, not that of thought, working to gain knowledge of the origins of good and evil that he would offer as his own main contribution to science (GM part 1 end). Spurred by disagreement with Rée’s view of the origin of moral categories, he began to investigate this issue in HH, but made it his primary polemical focus only with D; its 1886 Foreword (2) and the 1888 EH emphasize that “With this book my campaign against morality begins” (EH 3 D 1).

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its problems becoming “even more enflamed.” The innocence of becoming and the celebration of the human species are already present in this period of Nietzsche’s becoming—nihilism is not the permanent upshot of disappointed desire for the meta-physical.

Sections 20–29 Beginning at section 20 Nietzsche’s first chapter turns toward culture and pursues a single question to the end: given that modern science and historical philosophy liberate from the historic superstitions, what can philosophy now say and even do about the future of culture? The broadest gain, liberating the mind from superstition, frees the mind from metaphysics but finds itself arrested by the sobering recognition that advancement in culture has till now always depended upon the very beliefs that the free mind strips away (20). Looking ahead and assuming that metaphysical skepticism will become general, we must ask, “What shape will human society then assume?” (21). Human concern with the future will be foreshortened, Nietzsche anticipates, as the religious or metaphysical perspective is lost; one will turn to one’s own satisfaction within the span of a single lifetime; interest in enduring institutions will be lost. Perhaps science itself could legitimate long-term cultural interests, but for now at least, the contrast between the ephemeral existence of the individual and institutions that existed for the sake of the eternal is still too strong (22). The task of the present is comparison, selecting among “the various worldviews, customs, cultures” that modern investigations place side by side. Nietzsche turns hortatory: Let’s not be afraid of the task to which the present calls us but conceive that task as greatly as we can! But why? “Posterity will bless us for it,” a posterity that stands beyond our culture of comparison and looks back on it with gratitude. Nietzsche’s Enlightenment appeal to Posterity invokes the long-term perspective we are in danger of losing (23) and posits progress as possible if by no means necessary or even likely (24). The question of progress can be intelligently addressed only from the perspective of the historical sense, which knows that the old culture “can never be fresh again.” If there’s no going back, the problem of the way forward must be consciously faced. This uninvited modern task has global consequences; humans can “administer the earth as a whole economically”—ökonomisch, Nietzsche would understand that word in its original Greek sense: the earth is becoming a household that humans must consciously manage. Nietzsche’s reflections on philosophy’s present task thus culminate in a challenge. Modernity—science, the historical sense, the departure of God—

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sets humanity on a trajectory that allows no return and has reached a crisis without precedent. The challenge is to set “ecumenical goals embracing the whole earth” (25). What morality would serve such goals? Kant’s moral teaching won’t do because it demands of the individual actions that would benefit all humanity, “a nice naïve thing, as if everyone knew without further ado what mode of action would benefit the whole of humanity . . . Maybe a future survey of the needs of humanity will show that it is absolutely undesirable that all humans act in the same way.” Nietzsche stands at a stage in solving the modern cultural problem that cannot yet know what a solution might be. Still, clarity is possible about what is needed: if humanity is not to destroy itself through such conscious universal rule, it must first discover a hitherto altogether unprecedented knowledge of the preconditions of culture as a scientific standard for ecumenical goals. Herein lies the immense task facing the great minds of the coming century.

The alternatives are destruction or gaining knowledge of how to manage a global culture that faces a challenge unknown to previous cultures, a cultural challenge requiring solutions built on knowledge of culture. The chapter “First and Last Things” goes on from its anticipation of the task of the twentieth century to further reflections on the knowledge of cultural history required for understanding the preconditions of future culture. Intimate, extended association with Jacob Burckhardt, attending his classes and discussing the issues in private conversations, helped Nietzsche gain more nuanced and detailed knowledge of the great turning points in Western cultural history: the Greek achievement, its transmission to Rome, Christian capture of Rome, its liberation in the Renaissance, Christian renewal in the Reformation. And Nietzsche’s own studies led him to embrace the two great events of post-Renaissance, post-Reformation culture, the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment.15 15. In Sorrento Rée read aloud the written record that two students had made of Burckhardt’s lecture course on Greek culture and civilization. Nietzsche had attended that course and gave a running commentary on Rée’s readings. Meysenbug wrote in 1898 that “certainly this most glorious cultural epoch of humanity has rarely been given a more luminous and complete representation than here in writing and in speech” (Janz, Friedrich Nietzsche Biographie, 1: 749). Nietzsche’s knowledgeable embrace of Renaissance Italian culture is brilliantly displayed by the art historian Tilmann Buddensieg in Nietzsches Italien: Städte, Gärten und Paläste. His meticulous and celebratory book adds a new chapter to Nietzsche’s biography by showing how his spiritual life embraced and exalted the highest achievements of visual art as

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Things Human All Too Human 20–29 hands off to the next century any solution of the modern cultural problem while endorsing Enlightenment optimism’s gradualist approach. But continued intense study of the roots of morality and the modern problem made hope-based deference unnecessary for Nietzsche within a few years. As early as August 1881, three and a half years after the publication of Things Human All Too Human, his gains in understanding “the preconditions of culture” allowed him to conclude that he had gained knowledge of the solution to the great modern cultural problem. The decisive workbook from that summer shows him arriving at his core achievements in understanding and action and then preparing to present them in what he regarded as the fitting way: the veiled autobiography of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. That book of his own becoming showed his way in to the solution of the problems of understanding and action, and its very title suggests the immensity of his achievement—only the epoch-making Persian founder who cursed the world with the morality of good and evil could effect its epoch-making solution. After completing that most important of his books and shown his entry into his maturity as a thinker, Nietzsche judged it desirable to write a new Things Human All Too Human to introduce it. Beyond Good and Evil corrects the Enlightenment optimism he adopted while awaiting a better solution and shows, with a restraint and indirection Nietzsche thought fitting, the chief teachings Zarathustra entered.

Sections 30–34 The final five sections of the first chapter of Things Human All Too Human end the chapter on philosophy with a brief essay on the free mind’s passion for truth and the ominous foreboding that truth now awakens in the inquirer about the future of culture. First comes a brief corrective review of two “Bad habits in drawing conclusions” that have characterized most thinking till now (30). Three sections follow on three insights that truth-seeking gains: the illogical is necessary for life (31), as are injustice (32) and error (33). These hard truths seem to condemn the passion for truth to despair at itself for what it is; inquiry into knowing seems to culminate in a private nihilism at inquiry’s

indispensable affirmations of life. Buddensieg shows Nietzsche to be deeply informed on the painting, sculpture, architecture, and gardens of the Italian Renaissance, all of which he viewed as model expressions of human greatness to be admired, envied, and surpassed. For HH and its reflections on culture, his chapter on Sorrento (pp. 13–25) is particularly valuable.

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refutation of it own worth, at truth’s foundation in lie.16 Section 33 dwells on the question raised by these conclusions of the passion for truth: do they require the self-condemnation of reason? While illusory beliefs allow “the great majority to endure life without complaining overmuch [because they] believe in the value of life,” the inquiries of the free-minded exception compel him to conclude not only that “humanity as a whole has no goal” but that the goal reached by his own fundamental drive is at odds with the needs of life itself; the inquirer seems “reduced to despair” and feels his own life “squandered.” The penultimate section of the first chapter thus draws pessimistic conclusions contrary to Enlightenment optimism and its secularized Christian eschatology, its hope that history ends in universal peace and shared wisdom. In 1878 Nietzsche made public conclusions he had arrived at as early as 1872 and dictated for his 1873 “On Truth and Lie”—the “skepticism, dissolution, and pessimism” he “kept secret” behind his culture-supporting masks. Advocating Enlightenment optimism did not entail keeping secret any longer these radical views, however disharmonious with Enlightenment optimism they are. But despairing conclusions are not the last things of “First and Last Things”: Nietzsche added a section with no forerunner in the Plowshare drafts; it offers words of comfort perhaps required of a thinker daring to make public thoughts that seem to refute the value of inquiry itself. Entitled “Zur Beruhigung” (With a view to consoling or calming), section 34 makes the last things calming assurance that history will after all successfully counter such profoundly unsettling thoughts.17 The reassurance that ends the chapter comes only after a restatement of the profound questions rising out of the previous three sections: “But doesn’t our philosophy thus become tragedy?” Tragedy is what Nietzsche was schooled in longest, from his early writings as a teenager, to the frequent university courses he taught on Aeschylus and Sophocles, through his first book on Attic tragedy and its demise. Does philosophy itself end tragically? “Won’t the truth become, for life and for the better person, the enemy?” An initial answer presents itself as not wanting to be spoken aloud: “Can one remain consciously in untruth? Or, if one must do this, is death not to be preferred?” Must 16. These three sections, crucial to the rhetorical end of the first chapter of HH, were already a series in Plowshare, and Nietzsche edited them only lightly for HH. In Plowshare they are the three central sections (107, 108, 109) of the fifteen in “The Light Life.” The HH introduction to these three sections, 30, is also among the Klingenbrunn entries of U II 5 (pp. 133–34). 17. In Plowshare the sections that follow what became HH 31–33 are concerned with the presence of happiness in the world and with ways of dealing with self-contempt (among them are drafts of HH 591, 549; Plowshare 117, 108, 148).

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the truth-seeker kill himself when he comes to know that he and humanity as a whole are fated to live lies? A can and a must belong to his questioning, können and müssen belong, but sollen (ought) no longer belongs: “Because ought doesn’t exist any more; morality, insofar as it was an ought, has been as much annihilated by our way of thinking as religion has.” Our way of thinking bases no action on a merely moral premise; it “can allow as motives only pleasure and pain, benefit and harm.” But then, “how will these motives come to terms with the sense for truth?” This is the self-reflexive question for the new philosophy that knows itself to be guided solely by judgments of benefit or harm to oneself and to the social order: what does the passion for the true compel one to do after discovering the consequences of truth—the necessity of lies? Before he answers his question, Nietzsche adds an instructive caution that shows why his answer cannot be other than it is. Even the universal motives of pleasure and pain lack uniform content; the same phenomena may evoke either pleasure or pain among different humans. Feelings of pleasure and pain stem from more basic predispositions: “inclination and disinclination and their unfair standards essentially determine our pleasure and pain.” Pleasure and pain are merely signs of more fundamental dispositions given by nature itself. And humans like us, he says, speaking for those disposed to the passionate pursuit of the freedom of the mind in order to know, seem already shaped by nature. So his answer to the question about the fate of the passion for the true cannot be a categorical judgment but one made by a human being who knows himself predisposed to experience only the possibly true as pleasurable: can he and his like find it pleasurable or at least not-painful to know that knowing is based on lies? His answer, finally given, restates the serial conclusions of the previous three sections, “All human life is sunk deeply in untruth,” and restates the response of the one to whom this becomes clear: the individual cannot pull [his life] up out of this well [of untruth] without growing profoundly disillusioned about his own past, without finding absurd his present motives like honor, and without pouring scorn and contempt on the passions that push one to the future and to happiness in it.

With this dispiriting outcome of the inquirer’s measure of his past, present, and future, his question must be: “Is it true?—Is there only one way of thinking left, one that draws after it despair as its personal consequence and a philosophy of destruction as its theoretical consequence?” Is what he will learn to call nihilism our necessary fate?

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A dash separates his question from the answer that ends the chapter: “—I believe that the decision about the aftereffect of knowledge is given by the temperament of a person.” And Nietzsche can “just as easily think of ” an aftereffect different from despair, an aftereffect that springs from a different temperament, one that could gradually recognize that the despair arises from an “acquired and time-bound need” (27) and is therefore itself subject to alteration or education. For those of that temperament he can think of “a much simpler, emotionally cleaner life.” Yes, it would at first experience “the old motives of intense desire produced by old inherited habit,” but those motives would “gradually grow weaker under the influence of cleansing knowledge.” Knowledge would gradually free such a temperament of acculturated bias and allow one to live among others and with oneself “as in nature without praising, blaming, getting worked up, feasting as on a spectacle on much that one had earlier only feared.” Nietzsche can easily think of a calm and peaceable resolution of what begins in a sense of despair. He presents it not as an argument but as “reassurance.” Is this only Nietzsche’s new Jesuitism—his forcibly making Enlightenment optimism the foundation of culture? Instead, it seems that he offers his own experience as a model, for his comforting thought goes on: above all, “one would no longer feel the sting or infection of the thought that one was not only nature or more than nature”—the sting left in the whole population led to believe its true nature was supernatural or not subject to the laws of chemistry. Free of such beliefs and of any “envy and annoyance” at their loss, such a person finds it “enough” to contemplate the long history of their overcoming. And he is willing to embrace “one more privation and renunciation”: he is “happy to share his joy in this condition and he has perhaps nothing else to share.” The philosophy chapter of Things Human All Too Human ends on the right temperaments gradually shedding despair at the loss of fictional beliefs trained into the post-Platonic Western population and finding the self and the earth as they are enough. A coda follows that invites the reassured, contemplative knower to do more. But he points to “his brother, the free man of action,” to take his place and adds of his brother, “his ‘freedom’ is another matter entirely”—it is not freedom at all. Let others engage in the wars of advocacy that may be necessary to educate a whole population.18 This end to the first chapter of Things Human All Too Human, its phi18. Parts of the second half of this final section of the first chapter Nietzsche first wrote as parts of a Foreword for HH in the fall of 1877 that describes the kind of reader he wanted for his book (KSA 8 25 [2]).

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losophy chapter, contrasts sharply with the end of the first of two philosophy chapters in Beyond Good and Evil. There, inviting his reader to set his book aside if he can (23), he invites those who can’t to follow him on a path that will lead through an understanding of the human soul into the “the fundamental problems”—the second chapter of the book to replace Things Human All Too Human does what Things Human All Too Human had no way of doing: instead of ending on a vague hope of a future avoidance of nihilism through the gradual spread of Enlightenment calm by his active brother, it leads its philosophically inclined reader into a consideration of the fundamental insight Nietzsche had in the meantime gained and set out in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. That reader is then taken directly into what Things Human All Too Human denied was possible or desirable, a religion chapter in which the Enlightenment view that religion would wither away is replaced. That chapter shows his philosophically reeducated reader what religion is good for, necessary for, and what its core could be, training a whole population in a new view and in festivals and rites to celebrate it. Those men of action, apostles of a new, natural, earth-centered religion, will advance the new philosophy through the old and only means of philosophy’s advancement, a culture that honors it. Friends of Nietzsche growing aware of his new perspective on philosophy and its attendant religion will read Things Human All Too Human and laugh with him at the ungrounded optimism of his philosophy chapter while appreciating its attempt to bring reason to reason even though it had not yet fully understood reason’s potential and religion’s necessity.

Chapter 7

An Enlightenment Optimist’s View of the Future of Morality, Religion, and Art

Moral man stands no closer to the intelligible (metaphysical) world than does physical man—for there is no intelligible world. EH 3 HH 6

The three chapters of Things Human All Too Human that serially treat morality, religion, and art exhibit stark deficiencies when compared with their intended replacements in Beyond Good and Evil. Religion provides the most striking example because Nietzsche came to view religion as indispensable to culture: he placed his chapter on religion in Beyond Good and Evil just after his two chapters on philosophy and separated these three on the most important topics, knowing and believing, from his final five by “Epigrams and Interludes.” Even morality, his own special subject of inquiry, he demoted to derivative status in relation to philosophy and religion while treating it most extensively as the explicit subject of “The Natural History of Morality,” “Our Virtues,” and “What Is Noble?” As for art, Nietzsche gave it no separate chapter in Beyond Good and Evil but showed in a different way art’s indispensability for culture: religion is a form of art.

Morality In an autobiographical reflection in the Foreword to On the Genealogy of Morality, that addendum to Beyond Good and Evil in which he gave his most complete elaboration of his ongoing discoveries in morality, Nietzsche states that his “ideas on the origin of our moral prejudices received their first, brief,

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and provisional expression . . . in Things Human All Too Human . . . begun in the winter of 1876–77; the ideas themselves are older” (GM Foreword 2).1 He expressed those ideas “ineptly,” he says, “as I would be the last to deny, still constrained, still lacking my own language for my own things and with much backsliding and vacillation” (4). Two years later, in Ecce Homo’s autobiographical comments on Things Human All Too Human, he ends with a section devoted to “How I thought about myself at that time (1876)” (6): “with what tremendous sureness I had taken in hand my task and the worldhistorical within it, the whole book and above all one very express passage attests—only that I, with my instinctive cunning, here too avoided the little word ‘ich.’ ” In that passage, section 37 of Things Human All Too Human, his instinctive cunning did not write “Schopenhauer” or “Wagner” in place of ich but the name of “a friend of mine, the excellent Dr. Paul Rée2—fortunately a much too refined creature to . . .” He stops there, leaving to his reader the easy inference that Rée was too refined to have misunderstood his attribution: he knew that the radical ideas about morality first expressed there were Nietzsche’s own. “Others were less refined” and showed it by supposing that “they had to understand the whole book as higher Réealism,” even though it “contains the refutation of five or six principles of my friend.”3 Nietzsche’s “instinctive cunning” in making Rée “the boldest and coldest of thinkers” (HH 37) is his instinctive deferring, his yielding authority to others he is willing to serve, at least publicly. After August 1876, he no longer deferred to 1. He lists the sections in HH in which his ideas on the origin of our moral prejudices were first expressed: 45, 136, 96, and 99 (his order), and in “Volume II,” AOM 89, 92, and (still naming it by its separate title, The Wanderer) WS 26, and D 112, and WS 22, 33. He credits Rée for the impetus to publish his own ideas on the origin of moral prejudices: in Rée’s The Origin of the Moral Sensations he “encountered distinctly for the first time an upside down and perverse species of genealogical hypothesis” that attracted him “with that power of attraction which everything contrary, everything antipodal possesses” (GM Foreword 4). 2. In fact he did not write the name Rée in HH, he stated the title of his book and quoted the first part of the sentence that is the epigraph of my chapter. 3. Rohde was less refined. Writing to Nietzsche some five weeks after receiving his copy of HH (June 17, 1878), he said his “surprise over this newest Nietzscheanum was, as you can imagine, all too great,” and he made Rée the culprit: “Can one pull out such a soul and take another soul for it? Instead of Nietzsche now suddenly Rée? I still stand astounded before this miracle and can be neither happy about it nor have any other distinct opinion: because I don’t yet grasp it completely.” The vehemence of Rohde’s rejection contrasts with Nietzsche’s calm response: he did not expect even this close friend to understand him immediately. Two months later he wrote to Rée, “All my friends are of one mind, that my book was written by you . . . so I congratulate you on your new authorship” (August 19, 1878).

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Schopenhauer or Wagner: he deferred to Rée in this passage, but in the book as a whole he deferred to Voltaire and the orthodoxies of Enlightenment optimism that he would repudiate when speaking for himself in his mature books. Section 37 is the third section of the chapter entitled “On the History of the Moral Sensations.” The merest glance shows that it belongs in a sequence: its title is “Despite that,” and it follows a section titled “Objection,” which objects to the first section of the chapter, “Advantages of psychological observation” (35). “Despite that” draws the main conclusion of these three sections and can be followed by a section entitled “To what extent useful ” (38), which ends with a terminal dash. Nietzsche’s chapter on morality thus opens with an arresting four-section argument that treats the spiritual situation of the present as regards morality. These are the chapter’s most important sections because they present for the first time Nietzsche’s thoughts on the theme that he regarded as most his own, the philosophic problem that appeared to him before any other, “as a boy of thirteen,” and that persisted throughout his thinking life “until at length I had a country of my own, a soil of my own, an entire discrete, thriving, flourishing world, like a secret garden the existence of which no one suspected” (GM Foreword 3). And what a garden: in the Bible’s pleasure garden of our origins the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is the forbidden fruit, the fruit whose tasting brought death into the world and all our woe. Defying the Bible’s command to ignorance of this knowledge, Pastor Nietzsche’s son made it his life work.4 Nietzsche’s title for his chapter, “On the History of the Moral Sensations,” adjusts slightly the title of the book Rée wrote in Sorrento and published in 1877, The Origin of the Moral Sensations, his second book.5 Nietzsche’s title for his opening section, “Advantages of psychological observation” (35), employs the title of Rée’s first book, his 1875 Psychological Observations. The theme of the section is that we have lost both the topic of psychological observation and its appropriate style of communication, “the art of the polished maxim,” which can be recovered only if one has been “drawn to it and competes in it.” Nietzsche began competing in this book whose new style owes 4. Nietzsche began his Foreword to GM on an accusation, “We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers,” and discusses in great detail his own history with the problem of knowledge of good and evil in order to justify his claim: he is a knower who knows himself, having dedicated himself to that problem from the start. 5. In the copy he sent to Nietzsche, Rée wrote, “To the father of this work most gratefully from its mother” (Small, Nietzsche and Rée, 33). Robin Small shows how far beyond Rée in historical and philosophical depth Nietzsche moved; his intelligent discussion in Nietzsche and Rée helps clarify Nietzsche’s position at this important transition moment in his thinking.

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much to Rée though it is less aphoristic, relying more on the brief, provocative essay of which he became the supreme master.6 The “Objection” of the second section (36) is genuine and profound; it was Nietzsche’s objection, held to in his first five books: the loss of psychological observation and its fitting style is a social good because “a certain blind faith in the goodness of human nature” advances “the welfare of human society.” Nietzsche contrasts that concern for social well-being with what took him over in this book: the drive that “serves truth” instead of the social order. He names “La Rochefoucauld and the other French masters of psychical examination” who engage in psychological observation and adds “a German author, the author of Psychological Observations”—those who read these authors today not in “the spirit of science but in that of friendliness toward humanity” will “curse an art that appears to plant in the souls of humans a sense of diminishment and suspicion.” “Despite that ” (37), the section Nietzsche singled out in Ecce Homo, flicks away such philanthropic objections by invoking historic necessity: today “the awakening of moral observation has become necessary; humanity cannot continue to be spared the cruel sight” of psychological dissection. A specific science “now rules which inquires into the origin and history of the so-called moral sensations and which in its progress must pose and solve the social problems bound up with it.” While it takes seriously its responsibility to solve the social problem it generates, the new science’s importance lies in the fact that ignoring it can infect the whole of science, has infected it: “on the grounds of an erroneous [psychological] analysis, for example the so-called unegoistic actions, a false ethics is built,” which in turn can lead to “religion and mythological monsters” to defend it, and “the shadows of these dismal spirits fall over even physics and the entire perception of the world.” Once aroused, psychological investigation proceeds as all science does, minutely investigating particulars, building “brick by brick” until conclusions can be drawn whose consequences are as immense as those that followed from neglecting it. Nietzsche caps his argument by quoting Rée: “Moral man . . . stands no closer to the intelligible (metaphysical) world than physical man.”7 With this conclusion, the science of psychological observation destroys the 6. On the art of the polished maxim see Small, Nietzsche and Rée, 57–61; Small is appropriately strict in not using the English word aphorism for Nietzsche’s short essay sections. 7. See Rée, Origin of the Moral Sensations, 87. When he cites this passage again in EH, he adds as if it were part of Rée’s original statement, “—for there is no intelligible world” (EH 3 HH 6).

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whole of romanticism with its fiction of special, nonintellectual access to a fictional world of supposed realities. But Nietzsche sees even more: a conclusion like Rée’s “can perhaps in some future serve as the axe laid to the root of the ‘metaphysical need’ of humanity.” Eliminating that supposed need has “the weightiest consequences, fruitful and frightful [ fruchtbar und furchtbar] at the same time, and [sees] the world with that double-sight which all great insights have”—he ends his section on what a plowshare does, turn over the old or past while breaking ground for the new or future. Psychological observation is for Nietzsche the conscious recovery of the Socratic view that the way to an understanding of the whole of things passes through knowledge of the soul: “psychology is once again the path to the fundamental problems”— these last words of the first chapter of Beyond Good and Evil (23) prepare the second chapter where psychological observation leads to the fundamental ontological insight (BGE 36). Near the end of “Despite that” Nietzsche added as an aside a judgment from “Objection” that becomes the theme of the final section in the series: “—whether more as blessing than as curse to the general welfare, who knows enough to say?” “To what extent useful ” (38) does not claim to know enough but does suggest a way in which the science of psychological observation can benefit humans. Benefit can never be the aim of science: “Science . . . knows no regard for final goals, precisely as little as nature knows them.” Still, like nature, “genuine science will occasionally, yes, often, advance the utility and well-being of humanity and achieve the goal-like—but likewise without having willed it.” Nietzsche looks to his audience and speaks as if he too has no regard for how people take his judgment on how science must proceed: “He who finds the breath of such thinking too wintry perhaps merely has too little fire in him.” But he ends on the opposite note: do not we, the more spiritual human beings of an age that is visibly being set on fire, have to reach for all quenching and cooling means that there are in order that we at least remain so steady, harmless, and measured as we now are and so perhaps one day become useful to this age in a way that serves as a mirror and self-reflection of itself ?—

With that dash Nietzsche brings his four-section opening of “On the History of the Moral Sensations” to its end on the question about being of service to the age after all. He and like-minded scientific investigators of the soul are driven not by the spirit of service but by the spirit of science; still, patient inquiry into the small, hidden truths of the human soul may lead eventually

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not only to an understanding of the soul and the world it occupies but also perhaps to historic benefits that the species as a whole can enjoy. Before setting out his own psychological observations, Nietzsche dismantles the primary conceptual fiction of the moral view of human existence, freedom to choose. “The fable of intelligible freedom” (39) is a two-page argument refuting that fiction—a human being, as a part of nature, cannot be the originating cause of his deeds or his nature and consequently cannot be held responsible or accountable for them, praised or blamed for them. The undeniable feeling of responsibility is something one can “disaccustom himself to” because it is “a matter tied to the evolution of culture and morality.” Standing in the way of accepting the clear fact of nonresponsibility8 for one’s actions is “fear of the consequences.”9 That ends the section, but Nietzsche returns to the topic of nonresponsibility in the last three sections of the chapter, which seem calculated to mitigate the feared consequences of accepting nonresponsibility.10 The first of the three final sections, “The rewarding justice” (105), argues for continuing to punish and reward human actions even though punishing and rewarding cannot be said to be just in the classical sense of giving each his due. No one is due punishment or reward, but wisdom recognizes the utility of both and dictates that punishment be retained as a deterrent and reward as an encouragement. “At the waterfall ” (106) uses the image of the waterfall to picture nonresponsibility in human actions: the surging complexity of the 8. Nonresponsibility seems the best translation for Unverantwortlichkeit because it retains the direct force of the word responsible, the ground of supposed praise- or blameworthiness; unaccountability, a frequent translation, misleads because its direct meaning denies what Nietzsche is affirming: every human action can in principle be accounted for by natural causes. This was Rohde’s objection to HH: “No one could ever make me believe in this nonresponsibility, no one believes in it, not even you” (to Nietzsche, June 17, 1878). 9. The central part of section 39 refutes Schopenhauer’s notion of “intelligible freedom,” his means for saving human free choice in a totality of actions governed by necessary causes. 10. Between the more theoretical beginning and end of the chapter, most of the sections are psychological observations, small, hidden truths that, brick by brick, may build a more complete understanding of the soul and the world it occupies. The three sections of the chapter referred to in the Foreword to GM all show that Nietzsche’s view of the genealogy of morality differed from Rée’s from the start and in these ways remained consistent from start to finish: 45 gives the twofold origins of good and evil in the ruling caste or in the ruled; 96 argues that the basis of morality is custom where the “good” is what preserves custom; 99 details the true grounds of actions judged “evil” prior to the establishment of custom, self-preservation and indignation. Franco sets out the shifts in Nietzsche’s view of morality and the continuing debates about them in Nietzsche’s Enlightenment, 24–35.

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water’s movement makes any particular part of its movement seem capricious, even though it is the effect of causes that could explain it completely if the complexity could be known—if one were all knowing, one could know the natural causes of each human “choice” and so its necessity. The title of the final section of the morality chapter, “Nonresponsibility and innocence” (107), names the positive side of nonresponsibility. Nietzsche barely develops it, but he will retain and deepen the notion of innocence to the end of his career in his affirmations of nonresponsibility: amor fati and eternal return. The section opens by declaring that the truth of nonresponsibility is “the bitterest drop that the knower must swallow” because all his “evaluations” are devalued and wrong, and his deepest “feeling,” offered to the victim, is proved an error. The knower sees that the grounds of all human actions are drives that are not different in kind, not good or evil, but different only in degree; and that it is out of their conflicts that what seem like “choices” actually follow. “—To see into all this can cause deep pain, but after that there is consolation.” This second chapter of his book endorsing Enlightenment optimism ends as its first chapter did, mitigating the pain of true insight with comforting thoughts. The comfort here is the key hope the Enlightenment offers: “such pains are birth-pangs” of a possible new future. And, more personally, the pained knower can know himself to be fulfilling a necessary historic function: “With such human beings capable of that sorrow—how few they will be!—the first experiment will be made whether humanity can transform itself from a moral to a wise humanity.” Nietzsche can even speak of “the sun of a new gospel” and picture its “first rays strik[ing] the highest peak in the soul of those solitaries,” an image for the herald of a new way of human life that he will use repeatedly. “Everything is necessity . . . Everything is innocence.” The knowledge that recognizes that is, as Nietzsche will emphasize to the end, a product of “moral phenomena and its highest flowering, the sense for truth and justice in knowledge.” Seeing these high gains as product, “who could dare scorn the means?” Nietzsche then ends his chapter with a statement of Enlightenment optimism that will prove uncharacteristic, however much it remains the hope behind his continuing work on behalf of a human future beyond moral judgment: “everything is in flux, it is true:—but everything is also flooding forward: toward one goal.” The inherited habits that still rule the first who come to a knowledge of good and will grow weaker under the influence of expanding knowledge, and a new habit in accord with the new knowledge will take their place, a habit of “understanding, not-loving, not-hating, [but] surveying.” Out of that habit, “in thousands of years” will perhaps spring “wise, innocent (innocence-conscious) humans as regularly as

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the inherited habits now produce unwise, unjust, guilt-conscious humans— who are the necessary preliminary stage, not the opposite of those.” Nietzsche’s genealogy of morality began with Things Human All Too Human. In On the Genealogy of Morality he says, “Let us hope that the long interval” between his first account of his “ideas on the origin of our moral prejudices” and their mature expression “did them good, that they have become riper, clearer, stronger, more perfect!” (GM Foreword 2). The ten years did do them good, but the advance was along the path he first made public in Things Human All Too Human. Still, Ecce Homo emphasizes that Daybreak really begins his task regarding morality: it marks the beginning of his “campaign against morality . . . the fight against the de-selfing morality . . . and a revaluation of all values” (EH 3 D). Nietzsche did more than make psychological observations, he made war on moral values and advanced the alternative he discovered after completing Daybreak. Things Human All Too Human became expendable despite the fact that it first expressed his genealogical understanding of morality. Daybreak is indispensable because it advanced the genealogical understanding and moved into spiritual warfare on behalf of a new human future, preparing new values affirming life.

Religion In his chapter “The Religious Life” in Things Human All Too Human Nietzsche embraced the Enlightenment belief that religion will wither away in the science-dominated future culture. But by 1882 when he finished The Gay Science he had recognized that religion is indispensable for culture; and in 1886 he could criticize Enlightenment free minds for “no longer even knowing what religion is good for” (BGE 58). In his chapter on philosophy Nietzsche asserted that religion could wither away because the supposed “metaphysical need” that religion satisfied was “acquired and time-bound” and could be “weakened and exterminated” (27).11 The religion chapter opens by returning to this “need,” now 11. The withering away would take a long time. In chap. 8, “A Glance at the State,” the longest section in the book, “Religion and government” (472), argues that the interests of governance dictate that religion be preserved, with enlightened political figures utilizing religion. But the rising power of democratic governments will not so easily use religious drives and consolations for political ends and will make religion a “private affair.” This will eventually result in irreligion, the death of the state, and unpredictable future forms of social order. Therefore, it is wise for the foreseeable future that the enlightened tolerate religion for its political utility, religion here being a moderated Christianity. Drochon shows that these political reflections

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an “ill,” and the proper way to view it: religion is a “narcoticizing” way of treating the illness that leaves its cause untreated (108). As religion wanes, the ill that causes it becomes more evident, making it easier to treat its cause successfully. Still, Nietzsche expects that liberation from religion will entail a personal and cultural trauma because truth is deadly. The second section of the chapter, “Sorrow is knowledge” (109), looks to that trauma. It opens on a profound longing: how gladly one would exchange all the comforts of a God who knows us and loves us and wants the best for us for “truths that would be as salutary, pacifying, and beneficial as those errors are!” But “there are no such truths.” What can philosophy, love of truth, do with this clash between truth and comfort? “Philosophy can at best set against [religious errors] its own metaphysical feignings (at bottom likewise untruths).” This classic Platonic solution of “noble lies,”12 this Jesuitism, is no longer possible for him and his readers, “children of the Enlightenment” (55), and he views our late modern situation to be nothing less than a “tragedy” (109). It has two elements: first, it is impossible “to believe the dogmas of religion and metaphysics if one has the strict methods of truth in one’s heart and head”; second, “the development of humanity has made it so delicate, sensitive, and afflicted that it needs means of healing and comfort of the highest kind.” The dénouement of this tragedy may well be that “humanity . . . bleeds to death from knowledge of the truth.” Long reflection on this cultural tragedy plus wide reading in those who had already faced it enabled Nietzsche to quote two great poets, a modern on the problem itself and an ancient on a possible solution. Byron expressed the problem in the “immortal verses” of act 1, scene 1, of his dramatic poem Manfred, a poem Nietzsche had admired since he was sixteen; he quotes in English:13 are anchored within Nietzsche’s consistent thinking about politics from “The Greek State” through TI Skirmishes 39 where he quotes HH 472 and deepens his critique of modern institutions as not providing a foundation on which a long future can be built (Nietzsche’s Great Politics, 62–64). 12. Plato’s Socrates solved the problem of truth and culture through “noble lies”: in the Republic he asks who is fit to take up philosophy and classes as “maimed” a soul that hates the willing lie while being content to receive the unwilling lie (7.535d). He implies that the unmaimed soul fit for philosophy will do the opposite, hate the unwilling lie but learn to endure the willing lie because of its necessity for others. At 2.382a–c Socrates distinguished the willing lie and the unwilling lie in reference to his own new lies about the gods. At 3.414b–e, he calls the two lies foundational to any political order “noble” or “well-born.” 13. At sixteen Nietzsche wrote an essay on Byron for the Germania club he had organized with his Naumburg friends Gustav Krug and Wilhelm Pinder. Regarding Manfred, he speaks of

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Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth: The tree of knowledge is not that of life.

“Fatal truth”—Nietzsche had long held the conviction so beautifully and exactly expressed by Byron: the wisest see most clearly and feel most keenly the tragedy of truth. He wrote his first five books under that conviction, advocating a new mythic horizon to focus modern attention and generate a new people. But advocacy of the Enlightenment gave the old problem of truth and culture new intensity because it seemed to offer no possible outcome to the cultural tragedy except bleeding to death, a metaphor for the nihilism he would diagnose adequately only much later. He shows how far he is from the solution he will discover when he states that “no better antidote” to such cares exists than repeating to oneself the lines of Horace he quotes in Latin:14 Why torture your poor reason For insight into the riddle of eternity? Why not come and lie under this tall plane tree Or this pine?

This nonsolution, this diversion of attention into “frivolity or melancholy” can recommend itself to Nietzsche because he is now avid to avoid at all cost what appeared to be the only other option, “a romantic return and desertion, an approach to Christianity in any form.” But he knows the situation is fluid for he speaks of “the current state of knowledge,” a passing state in the advancement of learning that could lead to some more promising solution. But regardless of what the future holds, it is absolutely prohibited to “dirty one’s intellectual conscience and prostitute it before oneself and others” by any return to Christianity: his 1888 outburst—“Incredible! Wagner “the productive sublimity of these spirit-dominating Übermenschen” (KGW I 2 12 [4], August 1861). In EH Nietzsche said Byron was a poet for whom he was ready by age thirteen (EH 2 4). HH 221 praises Byron for his criticism of what he was as a romantic poet. Blue sets out the origins of Nietzsche’s interest in Byron in the “underworld” of Schulpforta (Making of Friedrich Nietzsche, 144–54); see Brobjer, Nietzsche and the “English,” 74–80, and Thatcher’s “Nietzsche and Byron.” 14. Nietzsche’s admiration of Horace as a model is expressed in TI “What I Owe to the Ancients” 1. In the “Horace” article of Grafton, Most, and Settis, The Classical Tradition, 458–59, Glenn W. Most provides the evidence for viewing Nietzsche’s praise of Horace as a great event in the history of the classical tradition.

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had become pious!” (EH 3 HH 5)—gives late voice to the sense of desertion he experienced in 1876 when he put “a sudden end to all my infections with ‘higher swindle,’ ‘idealism,’ ‘beautiful feelings,’ ” while Wagner, whom he had held up as a model, moved ever closer to Christianity. In section 109 Nietzsche publicly states for the first time the rejection of Christianity that will deepen and gain ferocity as his understanding of what drives Christianity grows more sophisticated, a ten-year process of learning that led to profound insight into the genealogy of morality and the seat of the reigning religion in vengeful passions. He ends with a remark that shows what audience he wants: if one lacks the agonies of this modern cultural tragedy, “one cannot become a leader and educator of humanity; and woe to him who wants to attempt that and no longer has that clean conscience!” The view of culture he held from the start—“the culture of the Renaissance was raised on the shoulders of . . . a band of a hundred men” (UD 2)—animates his hope for the culture of the Enlightenment: he writes to educate or generate the hundred educators of humanity on whose shoulders it will be raised. “Truth in religion” (110), the next section, adds another element to Nietzsche’s analysis of religion’s demise. Knowledge of the truth may bring sorrow because truth lacks the solace religion offers, but what is religion’s relation to truth? Does it express some basic truth about humanity and the world that is better expressed and advanced by metaphysical philosophy, as Schopenhauer wanted to believe? Nietzsche answers with the strongest possible italicized No: “a religion has never yet, either directly or indirectly, either as dogma or as parable, contained a truth.” Religion has no cognitive value whatever. And metaphysical philosophy, imagining that it retains the core truths of religion, is itself cognitively worthless. Nietzsche states openly the critical judgment of the cultural effect of Schopenhauer’s philosophy that he consciously kept out of Schopenhauer as Educator.15 Because philosophers always philosophized within a religious tradition or under the inherited power of a religious tradition, they assigned a family resemblance to religion and science that is completely misleading: “in fact there exists between religion and real science neither affinity, nor friendship, nor even enmity: they dwell on different stars.”16 15. HH 110 excuses Schopenhauer for his failure to criticize the “scientific” teachers of his time, all of whom paid homage to romanticism and renounced the spirit of the Enlightenment: born now, he says, Schopenhauer would have honored truth, and he graciously assigns the just-quoted italicized words to Schopenhauer. 16. In a crucial later statement on the origins of philosophy in a religious tradition (GM 3 10), Nietzsche corrects this judgment as regards philosophy’s initial appearance in the world: the

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“Incidentally”—Nietzsche appends to his section on religion and truth a remark that is not at all incidental; it speaks of a criterion of truth based on the consensus opinion of humanity. What truth-value does such consensus have? None. Or less than none, for he cites Goethe on a narrower consensus: “The consensus of the wise is that the consensus of humanity counts as foolishness.” The wise agree on the incurable foolishness of the many: even during this first and fullest embrace of the Enlightenment, Nietzsche could not share its optimism about the educability of the multitude; he appeals always to spiritual leadership by the wise. After this forceful judgment against religion, Nietzsche’s religion chapter moves to a section called “Origin of the religious cult” (111) that shows how much he was learning about human origins from the new science of paleoanthropology, whose pioneering English practitioners and theorists he read avidly.17 He integrated this new scientific perspective with what he was gaining on his own and taught in two courses during his years of composing entries for Things Human All Too Human: knowledge of the religious origins of Greek tragedy and philosophy, the highest achievements of Greek culture.18 The genealogical roots of the highest things were already basic to his inquiry with no suggestion that the highest things such as tragedy and philosophy were necessarily tainted or diminished by such origins.19 original philosophers were fully aware of the “emergency conditions” in which their philosophizing landed them and they took defensive steps, wrapping their philosophy in a religious exoteric cocoon to give it the legitimacy in the eyes of outsiders that enabled it and them to continue to exist. 17. Speaking of “the present stage of the science of comparative ethnology (völkervergleichende Wissenschaft),” he recognizes that it has a promising future while being able already to account for such matters as how “the idea of a God originated” (133). 18. He taught “Antiquities of the Religious Culture of the Greeks” in winter 1875–76 and “Religious Antiquities of the Greeks” in winter 1877–78. 19. Nietzsche’s early reflections on the evolutionary origins of religion can be read as sophisticated versions of conclusions drawn by the present-day cognitive science of religion. For instance, that science identifies “mental modules” like “ADD,” the “agency detecting device” that moves humans to quickly assign causes to events, and “TOMM,” the “theory of mind mechanism” that turns those causes into intentional minds whose aims may be malevolent, and it sees these two modules as propensities that conduced to survival over the millennia. Unfortunately, in its present early stages, this contemporary science is ignorant of its sophisticated predecessors in the history of philosophy and puffs itself up as being the first-ever solution to a problem for the ages. Oddly, some of its practitioners call all religious concepts like gods “counterintuitive,” even though their science exists to show why such concepts are in fact ex-

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From this point on, Nietzsche’s religion chapter deals primarily with our religion, the Christianity to which his forebears, his father included, devoted their lives and to which he himself was so piously obedient as a boy that he earned the nickname “the young pastor.” Sections 112–44 represent his first public attempt to analyze the religion that shaped Western culture and, as he emphasizes, Western souls. They focus on the deleterious effects of Christianity’s debasement of humanity (which reach a fine nadir in Calderón’s statement of “the most perverse paradox there is,” namely, that “the greatest guilt of a human is that he was born” [141]) and Christianity’s imaginary cure for the sickness it imagines to be so total. Still, Nietzsche’s attack on Christianity would soon achieve deeper insights into its roots in revenge, and he would attack it with greater passion because his insights showed Christianity, or monotheism as a whole, to be a more dangerous and perverting power than he can state here. But even this earliest attack goes far beyond the modern superficiality that imagines an easy break with religion’s rule: he already recognized that religion, inculcated from the first moments of awareness onward, so shapes and stamps the soul that what it breeds in persists not only through an individual’s maturity but even on into generations that lack the conviction and zeal of the founding generations. Nietzsche’s attack continued to grow richer and more nuanced in insight and more vehement in expression right through his late writing, the Antichrist, the work he projected as the first of four parts of his new Hauptwerk. Nietzsche’s new major work would have begun with the absolute denunciation of the religion he dissects more coolly and superficially here.20 plainable evolutionarily as natural intuitions: they are “counterintuitive” only to minds trained by science to disregard intuitions trained in by evolution, minds freed of religion but hardly free minds in Nietzsche’s sense. See, e.g., Tremlin, Minds and Gods. 20. In his 1887 list of HH sections proving that his ideas on the origin of our moral prejudices were first expressed in HH (GM Foreword 4), he includes one section from the religion chapter, “On Christian asceticism and holiness” (136). Part of the significance of that section lies in its being the last one in the chapter to bear a title: all eight remaining sections, fully eleven pages, continue to treat “those strange phenomena of morality usually called asceticism and holiness.” (Similarly, the three untitled sections following 132 “On the Christian need for redemption” explain aspects of that need.) Section 136 focuses on the scientific urge to explain these phenomena naturally, an urge whose failure hitherto has given heart to those who claim that they are simply miraculous; the rest of the religion chapter lays out the complex naturalness of asceticism and holiness in a scientific manner. Nietzsche ends this sequence and his religion chapter with a quiet reminder that he is an artist of words, with humor as part of his

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The religion chapter of Things Human All Too Human is naturally preoccupied with the religion of the past because it anticipates no viable future for religion in a more scientifically enlightened society. But Beyond Good and Evil does. Religious conviction of course played no role in his changed stance. Instead, free-minded investigation of the human soul and of culture led Nietzsche to a conclusion—pessimistic in his sense—that all healthy culture needs religion and that a healthy postmodern culture needs a post-Christian, postmonotheist religion purged of the base elements of our religion, its negative judgment against existence and consequent cultivation of vengeance, its felt guilt and dream of deliverance that reduced it to groveling for favor. Healthy religion was belief expressed in poetry and art that reflected the true, plus communal exercises of gratitude in culture-forming festivals and celebrations of existence, in song and dance as Plato’s Laws said (2.654a, 2.659e). Nietzsche’s shift against the Enlightenment on the question of religion assigned him one of his most challenging rhetorical tasks: knowing where he stood in the history of philosophy and religion, knowing the exhilaration of release from the old religion, he knew that if he even whispered of gods he would be speaking “too soon” (BGE 295). But he had no choice. His shift on religion, coupled with his still more elemental shift on the possibility of ontology in an age of liberating epistemological skepticism, dictated that the new Things Human All Too Human have a new structure in order to properly introduce Thus Spoke Zarathustra in which ontology and religion find their proper place. In Beyond Good and Evil, after its two opening chapters on philosophy, Nietzsche placed his wholly new chapter on religion; its tight historical argument tied it to philosophy in the very way anticipated in the moment of highest reach in the philosophy chapters (36–37), for it peaks with the new affirmation of eternal return (56) and ends on the argument that religion has an indispensable role even in a culture successfully advancing knowledge (61–62). And Beyond Good and Evil’s way of looking to a future for religion includes its remarkable end: Dionysos returns, as he did in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, returns in the most enchanting of all sections of Beyond Good and Evil, for Nietzsche, knowing that his friends no longer like to hear of gods, forces them to hear of Dionysos—and of Ariadne—in so artful a way that they will be charmed into wonder about what he, a philosopher, could possibly mean.

art: asceticism and holiness will, “as signs of unholiness, be rejected and renounced”—that last word is verketzert, which has heretic, Ketzer, as its root. Écrasez l’infame.

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Art Beyond Good and Evil has no chapter on art, but that does not mean that art has diminished in importance for Nietzsche. On the contrary, continued thinking about the free mind and the social order of the future led him to elevate art to one pole of the “new law of ebb and flood” that the first book of his maturity, in its first section, invites his “brothers” to understand (GS 1). Truth and art in mutual ebb and flood are the twinned poles of Nietzsche’s mature thought: the Philosopher and the Artist rise there to their natural height. Things Human All Too Human is starkly different: the first section of its chapter on art, “What is perfect is supposed not to have become” (145), argues that what the artist produces can have its desired effect only if it creates an illusory sense of timelessness, and the conclusion of that opening section assigns the Enlightenment its task with respect to art: “The science of art must, as is selfevident, contradict this illusion most definitively and display the faulty conclusions and spoiling of the intellect by means of which it runs into the trap of the artist.” The chapter as a whole argues that enlightened exposure of that trap will make art, like religion, wither away in the science-dominated culture of the future. The Gay Science maintains the opposite. The final section of its “Book 2,” devoted mainly to art, is entitled “Our ultimate gratitude to art,” and it opens: “Had we not approved of the arts and invented this type of cult of the untrue, the insight into the general untruth and mendacity that is now given to us by science . . . would be utterly unbearable . . . art [is] the good will to appearance” (GS 107). Between his first book endorsing science and his last book in that series, Nietzsche reversed his view of the future of art. That reversal recovers his initial view of art as salutary but does so on wholly different grounds, as the works of his maturity show. Things Human All Too Human section 27 already welcomed art’s future demise; it could recommend art as a better means than religion for a society making the transition to science because “from art it will then be easier to go over to a truly liberating philosophical science” and that would then liberate humanity from the illusions of art. The opening section of the chapter on religion (108) put art and religion together as unsatisfactory means of treating ills that will be supplanted by the genuine means, science. The opening section of the chapter on art spoke of the necessity of opposing art’s illusions (145). and its closing section, entitled “Evening twilight of art,” is a haunting lament on the sad truth that “the artist will soon be regarded as a glorious relic” (223). Part of what made it seem desirable to replace Things Human All Too Human must have been its judgment that science will eliminate art, for Nietz-

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sche’s mature view elevates art to the role of essential complement to truth. Art as complement to truth, art in its elevated Platonic sense of making, includes both religion and morality, beliefs in the highest and in the good. As modes of human making, art of this kind is as useful to the new understanding as it was to the old understanding.21 Beyond Good and Evil therefore has no chapter on art because it has chapters on religion and morality, the two main facets of art whereby the new philosophy will take its place in the world. With Nietzsche, as with Plato, philosophy engenders new art or poetry ministerial to its purposes because ministerial to society. 21. In HH 178, “The effectiveness of the incomplete,” the writer Nietzsche reflects on the new art he practices in this book, the art of the aphorism, which surely has a future: “more is left for the beholder to do . . . to think it through to the end, and to overcome the constraint which has hitherto prevented it from stepping forth fully formed.” Folded into the last clause is the unexpressed thought of escaping the censor while burning the forbidden thought into the mind of the one who works to complete it. See also 199 and 207.

Chapter 8

An Enlightenment Optimist’s View of the Transformation of Culture

Among the Greeks every great thinker became a tyrant of the spirit. HH 2 6 1

In the fall of 1877 Nietzsche dictated a list of all nine chapters of the book he had been preparing since Klingenbrunn (KSA 7 25 [3]). Only two differ from the actual chapters of Things Human All Too Human: he switched the first with the central chapter and changed its title from “Philosophy of Culture” to the bolder “Signs of Higher and Lower Culture.” The change made central what had always been central for Nietzsche, the problem of culture.1 Culture still means what it always meant for him, cultivation and upbringing within a social order, implanting a good and bad with its structures of loves and hates, of longing and revulsion, that come to seem a part of nature. The problem of modern culture became ever more enflamed for Nietzsche as his awareness deepened that he stood at the turning of an age with the ruling religion in decline, science opening new vistas of knowledge in every field, and historical science reopening a noble but misinterpreted past that showed what culture could achieve if those who understood it also directed it. After Klingenbrunn, Nietzsche’s fight for culture embraced the Enlightenment claim to cultural 1. Paul Franco, a close reader of the works of Nietzsche’s middle period, says that “Nietzsche’s reflections on culture constitute the climax of his argument [in the book] . . . the axis around which all his other reflections . . . revolve” (Nietzsche’s Enlightenment, 54). Putting the chapter on culture at the center also allowed Nietzsche to put “On the First and Last Things” first, to put philosophy first.

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progress through advancing science, an advance he knew to be a renaissance of the science originated by his models, the Greek philosophers. The modern advance of science compelled the contemplative man to think through the preconditions of culture with a view to securing science within a culture that celebrates what science teaches. But the culture chapter of Things Human All Too Human proved to be marred by a temporary abandonment of his Greek models, those tyrants, in his embrace of Enlightenment optimism.

W ay s t o S p i r i t u a l F r e e d o m Nietzsche chose a paradox for the title of the first section of his central chapter, “Ennoblement through degeneracy” (224), and argued that it is no paradox at all.2 The principles of his “Philosophy of Culture” are that culture is historical and rooted in peoples and that history teaches that a people’s culture develops through a dialectical struggle between two contrary forces: communal holding fast to habitual and undiscussable rules based on shared beliefs, and “individuals” who defy the collective and are the precondition of any “spiritual progress” in the collective, “the unbound, much less certain, morally weaker  .  .  . who attempt new things.” Nietzsche’s chapter on culture in his “Book for Free Minds” thus opens by flattering free minds as the indispensable advancers of culture while belittling them as “morally weaker” and embodying “degeneracy.” The free mind is the nonconserving, nonconforming force that wounds the social order into altering itself for the better, inducing it to absorb the change that its “best” representatives want only to exterminate—the “best” being the loyal, those sunk in the “stupidity” of loyalty, in the pure virtue of devotion to the good. The opening section ends on what is to be done, “the task of education” now: First is educating “the individual human being” through a total baptism in the firm standards of the social order. Then, with the given rules and commonplaces stamped in, the educator must wound the firmed youth, or use the wounds fate inflicts, to implant the new and noble: “the totality of his nature will absorb it and later, in its fruits, allow the ennoblement to be felt”—over time, the novel noble will belong to what seems given. A comparable process is at work in the social order, the “state.” Nietzsche endorses Machiavelli’s view that “the great goal 2. The first six sections of “Signs of Higher and Lower Culture” (224–29) have forerunners in The Plowshare that are very close to these finished versions; all are from its opening chapter, “Ways to Spiritual Freedom”; all but the first derive from Klingenbrunn entries.

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of statecraft should be duration, which outweighs everything else in being far more valuable than freedom,” but with the durable social order well founded, “ennobling inoculation becomes possible.” The opening section ends: “Of course, authority, the dangerous companion of all duration, will customarily defend itself against that.” Nietzsche knew as well as Machiavelli did that he would not go unpunished. Inviting denunciation by the good who are also the strong with the laws on their side, Nietzsche is a solitary inflicting wounds on potential solitaries on behalf of a social order that can advance in that way only. Nietzsche is already a strategist of writing who appeals to his select audience, the great minds of the coming century (25), while risking exposure to those who listen in without permission. The free mind is the exception, bound minds are the rule; as Nietzsche draws his portrait of each in the following sections, he usually uses the singular for the free and the plural for the bound. The primary basis of his distinction is that the free mind seeks truth and demands reasons while bound minds hold fast to beliefs they believe are truths (225). Bound minds, habituated to what they hold, are confirmed in holding it because of its utility; utility becomes their criterion of truth (226). The free mind, they conclude, must hold his views because they are useful to him even though they are the opposite of what is useful to the country or class shared by bound and free alike. The vast majority conclude that the free mind is dangerous; “they say, or sense, he must not be right for he is harmful to us” (227). The vast majority hold a natural suspicion of the free mind, who in turn recognizes that the habituating character of culture naturally “seeks to make every person unfree” (228). For his final thought in this sequence Nietzsche pluralizes free minds: free minds who press their case before a forum of bound minds are on a hopeless venture; he is not making his case for a free mind to the bound minds generally.

Strengthening the Free Mind Given the weakness of the free mind and the strength of those who have “tradition on [their] side and need no reasons for [their] action,” the necessary strategic question is: how can the free mind be made “relatively strong . . . in order not to perish?” (230). Nietzsche uses French—Esprit fort (230)—to title the section that begins his strategic calculations on the success of the free mind as an exception to the naturally generated replicas. “Where does the energy come from, the unbending strength, the endurance, with which the individual, opposing what is handed down, tries to gain a wholly individual

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knowledge of the world?” The question concerns “The coming into being of the genius” (231), a notion Nietzsche redefines for an age that romanticized the genius as the sublime product of god or nature effortlessly spinning off what his gifts make easy for him: “I ask that the word be understood without all its mythological and religious flavor.” Nietzsche naturalizes the genius by making him the highest attainment of all-too-human striving, the self-made product of contesting in the thinking and making that define the human. He reports what “The voice of history” says about the production of the genius (233) or what “in general seems to be what history teaches”: “it cries out to the passions of envy, hate, and competitiveness: Mistreat and torment human beings, drive them to the limit, one against the other, people against people, and centuries on end.” The result of such treatment is a perhaps: “then there would perhaps flame up, out of a passing spark, the thereby kindled fearsome energy of the sudden light of genius.” History’s hard words teach: he who gained awareness about the production of genius and wanted to proceed practically in the way nature generally acts would have to be just as evil and ruthless as nature is.—But perhaps we’ve misheard.

Has Nietzsche misheard history’s lesson? A perhaps closed that section and a perhaps opens the next, “Value of the middle of the way” (234), which gives an alternative teaching of history: “Perhaps the production of genius is reserved to only a limited period in the life of humanity.” The production of religious genius seems limited in this way: “Perhaps even the type of the saint is possible only with a certain imprisonment of intellect which, it appears, is now done with for all future time.” That fate may await artistic genius: the forces that produce it “could simply die out”; life “in the perfectly completed state,” free of the imprisonment of mind necessary for religious genius, would experience no “motive for poetry”; only “the retarded” would have a desire for poetic unreality; they alone would look back on “our time,” on “the imperfect state, the half-barbarian society, with longing.” The perhaps of “The voice of history” (hard struggle alone generates genius) and the perhaps of “Value of the middle of the way” (times generate genius of different sorts) force a choice, and “Genius and ideal state in contradiction” (235) implies Nietzsche’s choice. He has not misheard history’s hard words; the only possible way to genius is harsh and must be embraced. But our age refuses it: the moral teachers of the Enlightenment aim to create soft conditions of ease for all. Nietzsche imagines “the warmest heart” longing passionately to realize the “good” of comfort for all. That heart “took its fire, its

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warmth, yes its very existence out of the savage and violent character of life.” So “the warmest heart wills the abolition of its own foundation, the destruction of itself, but that means it wills something illogical, it lacks intelligence”— Nietzsche can issue no judgment more severe than that on the moral teachers of the Enlightenment. It follows that the highest intelligence and the warmest heart cannot coexist in one person; the one in whom the highest intelligence existed, “the wise” (der Weise), would, in his judgment on life, place himself above that good (die Güte) of Enlightenment moral teachers and regard it only as something that in the total measuring of life must be co-considered. What is the ultimate criterion in the wise measurement of life if not the good defined by the Enlightenment? “The wise must resist the extravagant wishes of the unintelligent good because his concern is the continuance of his kind and the ultimate coming into being of the highest intellect.” The good of the wise is the preservation and advancement of his own kind, the selfishness of a self that sees in itself the refinement of the highest reach of the species, its capacity to exercise rational judgment. Having stated his choice, Nietzsche names the alternative, “Christ whom we may think of as possessing the warmest heart,” and condemns him from the standpoint of his own kind: Christ “promoted the stupidification of humanity, placed himself on the side of the poor in spirit and retarded the production of the supreme intellect.” Christ is the source of the Enlightenment’s moral teaching; its moral teaching is the secular heir of the Christian religion. What Nietzsche values in the Enlightenment, its advancement of science and its experiment of founding society on the truth, derives from the other source of Western culture, the Greek philosophers prior to Socrates. Nietzsche’s advancement of the Enlightenment requires the Enlightenment to perform intelligent surgery on itself: slice away that part that would consume its most valuable part; its mind, its Greek-science root, must cut away what seemed its heart, its Christian root. Nietzsche’s “great politics,” present in inchoate form since his imaginings about Prometheus, begins to take on its mature form; his break with Wagnerism requires total and rational opposition to Christianity and all forms of its modern descendants. History’s harsh lesson calls its student to spiritual warfare. After taking the temperature of the “spiritual climate” of the present (236), Nietzsche turns to the “Renaissance and Reformation” (237), the pair of historical/cultural events that are massive eruptions of the two founding events contrasted in section 235, the classical view of Greece and Rome and the biblical view that captured it in Rome. Understanding our spiritual climate required knowledge not only of its founding roots, which Nietzsche studied from his beginnings, but also of the two historic events that founded moder-

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nity, one of which knew itself to be the rebirth of Greece and Rome while the other knew itself to be a revival of the spiritual imperatives of the Bible. What Nietzsche describes here marks a complete rejection of his view in The Birth of Tragedy, a withdrawal of praise for Luther. But this is only a station on the way to his definitive account in The Antichrist, where his mature weighing of the Renaissance and the Reformation that destroyed it comes to its culmination in impassioned words (58–61) that make the Renaissance “the transvaluation of Christian values,” where “my question is its question” and the Reformation the disastrous work of Luther, “that calamity of a monk” (EH 3 CW 2). “The Italian Renaissance contained within itself all the positive forces for which one is grateful to modern culture” (HH 237); it is “the golden age of this millennium,” and the six features Nietzsche assigns it capture all the main points of his new embrace of modernity: “freeing of thought, disrespect for authorities, victory of education over the arrogance of ancestry, enthusiasm for science and the scientific past of humanity, unbinding of the individual, a fervor for truth and revulsion against appearance and mere effect,” this last point being the engine behind the unparalleled flowering of representational art in the Renaissance.3 The Reformation is a German rising up against this Italian event; “an energetic protest of retarded minds” aiming to restore the worldview of the Middle Ages, it threw humanity backward again and “compelled the Counter-Reformation,” the Catholic reaction to Protestant revolt, and “delayed by two or three centuries the complete awakening and hegemony of the sciences” that Nietzsche now embraces.4 After these sections of reasoned short essays whose links the reader must in part supply, the chapter loses its structural grip, devolving into a list of more or less important points on culture and its future, an indulgence Nietzsche did not permit himself in his mature books. Still, some sections contain

3. On Nietzsche’s knowledgeable appreciation of the Italian Renaissance, see Buddensieg, Nietzsches Italien. 4. Regrettably Nietzsche never studied the great post-Renaissance philosopher founders of the Enlightenment carefully enough to celebrate them fittingly. Schooled by Machiavelli and Montaigne, the radical foundational thinkers Bacon and Descartes shared Nietzsche’s perspective on all its main points. Reacting with philosophic greatness to the Christian fanaticism that overthrew the Renaissance, they responded to that disaster with strategic mastery by plotting the future recovery of the Renaissance through an advocacy of science that sold it as an application of Christian virtue. I set out the exegetical arguments for this view in Nietzsche and Modern Times.

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observations of importance for his view of culture at this turning point, especially those concerning the reconciliation of culture and truth.

S o lv i n g t h e P r o b l e m o f S c i e n c e A metaphor helps Nietzsche pose the defining question of our unique cultural situation (“Bell-founding of culture” 245): Culture comes into being as a bell does, inside a casing of coarser, commoner stuff: the casing was untruth, violence, unlimited stretching of all individual I’s, all individual peoples. Has the time now come to remove [the casing]? Has what was molten become hardened, have the good, useful drives, the habits of the nobler disposition, become so secure and general that they need no longer lean on metaphysics and the errors of religion, on hardness and violence as the strongest cement binding human to human, people to people?

One chief feature of the culture-forming casing of all historical cultures is already gone: “No wink of a god helps us any more in answering this question: our own insight must here decide. Humanity itself must take into its own hands the global governing of humanity at large; its ‘omniscience’ must watch over the fate of culture with sharp eyes.” Human omniscience is no omniscience at all; the human future, absent a governing god, depends upon limited and faulty human knowledge. Has the time now come to remove the casing within which culture has hardened? Nietzsche has already answered; science is removing the casing and there is no going back: we may be faltering in our “interim state” with “the old culture partly still with us,” but “we cannot return to the old, we have burned our boats” (248). “Future of science” (251) stands out because of its title but gains its lasting importance from the problem it treats and the solution it imagines. The problem is philosophy’s old problem of truth and culture, treated here as a problem of science and pleasure. “Science gives to him who works and researches in it much satisfaction, to him who learns its results very little.” Over the longer term even that little satisfaction will vanish as science discovers all the important truths and they become common knowledge. But if science in itself produces less and less joy and takes away through suspicion comforting metaphysics, religion, and art, then it impoverishes

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that greatest source of pleasure to which the human species owes almost its whole humanity.

The future of science portends disaster for the future of culture. This is an old theme for Nietzsche, as it is for philosophy; new in Things Human All Too Human is the “therefore” he proposes as the solution. Therefore, a higher culture must give people a double brain, two brain chambers as it were, one to experience science, the other to experience the non-scientific, lying next to one another, without confusion, separable, closed off; this is a demand of health.

If health demands it, the health of culture as well as of the individual, that demand must be met. One brain chamber would be its “power source,” heating with illusions, one-sidednesses, passions; the other would be its “regulator,” with knowledge supplied by science obviating the evil and dangerous results of overheating. To this completed thought Nietzsche adds the alternative after a dash: absent the double-brain solution to the problem of truth that the Enlightenment has made the problem of science, the further course of human development can be forecast with near certainty: interest in the true will cease the less it gives pleasure; illusion, error, the fantastic will win back the ground they formerly held because they are tied to desire: the ruin of science, the sinking back into barbarism is the attendant result; humanity must then begin again to weave its web after it has, like Penelope, destroyed it in the night.

This is the problem that Nietzsche’s form of Jesuitism imagined it could solve by forcibly incorporating the illusions of Wagnerism as the basis of culture. Having seen how impossible and undesirable that solution was, the best he can do now is picture an imaginary anatomical solution of a double brain. This nonsolution, this picturesque way of putting the problem, simply defines what the great minds of the coming century (25) will have to solve. But in fact Nietzsche himself discovered the solution to the problem, for his concession to the Enlightenment that metaphysics, religion, and art will all die out does not survive his continued efforts to free his mind, his burrowing into morality to discover the bondage it imposes. His imaginary anatomical solution of the double brain will become his actual philosophic solution as he replaces the double-brain image with the image of ebb and flood, solving the problem

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in accord with his Greek models. On the basis of his coming discoveries, both religion and art prove to have a future in healthy service to human passion: the power supply and the regulator both have a future in Nietzsche’s thought. In the first stages of freeing his mind from Wagnerism, Nietzsche was prepared to advocate Enlightenment optimism even while holding the profound reservation expressed in his double-brain image. But after his free mind led him to new perspectives on ontology, religion, and art, he knew that his primary rhetorical task was to make plausible to free minds what his own free mind had concluded. “Sanctus Januarius,” Book 4 of The Gay Science, makes the first steps in that effort of persuasion. And Thus Spoke Zarathustra shows the coming to be of the new foundational teacher with an ontological claim to challenge “you wisest” and a new affirmative teaching that can count as religion and art. And a new Things Human All Too Human would introduce that book’s ontology, religion, and art without confusing matters through an embrace of Enlightenment optimism.

An Oligarchy of Philosophic Founders Nietzsche’s thoughts on culture and its future turn ever again to the model culture of the Greeks and their philosophers, to the trajectory of the philosopher’s development and the reason for philosophy’s demise. The longest section of the chapter, “The tyrants of the spirit” (261), is a compacted history of philosophy in the tragic age of the Greeks that focuses on the philosophers’ natural rule over culture. Here is Things Human All Too Human’s treatment of the subject Nietzsche worked on for years, as a student in 1867–69, in the university course he taught in 1869–70, 1872, and 1873, and in the book he prepared in 1873 and again in 1875.5 But here the Greek philosophers cease to be Nietzsche’s models in one basic way even though they continue to show philosophy’s true dignity in contrast to its modern debasement as a university discipline. In the radiant culture of the Greeks, the truth gained by their early philosophers did not bring that onset of sadness that is the usual human experience when myth loses its power to truth. Instead, those philosophers “sought a brighter sun,” and each believed he had found it in “what each of them called his ‘truth.’ ” Knowledge was in its youth then, and each of the philosophers 5. Many of the curt conclusions drawn in this section stem from drafts in the summer 1875 workbook (U II 8) initially intended for the companion philosophy book to BT (KSA 8 6 [1–51] and 7 [1–7]; see above, pp. 90–101.

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could believe that his truth could “solve the riddle of the universe.” Each naturally became “what every Greek wanted to be and what each was when he could be,” a tyrant, with the philosopher “a warlike brutal tyrant.” Was Solon an exception?, Nietzsche asks, for his love was for his work. No, his work was lawgiving, and “being a lawgiver is a sublimated form of tyranny.” The philosophers were that kind of tyrant: “Parmenides gave laws; Pythagoras and Empedocles too; Anaximander founded a city. Plato was the wish become flesh to be the highest philosophical lawgiver and founder of cities.” Nietzsche condemns Plato not for his tyrannical drive but for his reaction to his failure to fulfill it: “toward the end, his soul became full of the blackest gall.” After Plato, Greek philosophy declined as it lost its ability to exercise power, degenerating into warring sects driven by the thwarted tyrannical drive within them: “no spark of love and all too little joy in their own knowledge remained.” A small dash marks the second part of this reflection on philosophy’s place in Greek culture. The quick demise of tyrants and tyrannies in Greece applies to “the tyrants of the spirit” too: with Aeschylus, Pindar, Demosthenes, Thucydides—“one generation after them and it’s all over . . . Ah, Greek history moves so very fast!” This rapid demise could not be natural, Nietzsche judges, and its cause is the one person he held responsible from the start, Socrates: “In a single night the till-then so wonderfully regular if all too rapid evolution of philosophic science was destroyed,” the night Plato fell under Socrates’ spell. In the dramatic turn of his imagination, Nietzsche assigns to Socrates and Plato what Alcibiades reports as the culmination of his experience with Socrates, except that the night it all went wrong for Alcibiades becomes a night Socrates succeeds with Plato. As he did in his drafts for years, Nietzsche sees the greatest possible promise in Plato: “It is no idle question whether, if he had stayed free of the Socratic enchantment, Plato might not have found a still higher type of the philosophic human being who is now lost to us forever.” Looking back over the whole of pre-Platonic philosophy, Nietzsche sees it as a successful “workshop” turning out philosophic types in rapid evolutionary advancement. But then the workshop failed with the unrealized type that mattered most, the singularity at its end who could have gathered into himself the evolutionary gains of Greek philosophy in insight and cultural force, the whole achievement of “the sixth and fifth centuries,” classical Greece itself as the product of philosophy. Nietzsche imagines Plato making himself the truth-bearing, culture-creating founder who would, out of the resources of Greek philosophy in its gathering successes, carry forward the heights of Greek culture, the greatest of all human achievements so far. “There can hardly be a more grievous loss than the loss of a type, of a new,

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till-then undiscovered lasting highest possibility of the philosophic life”—not just a possibility then, but the highest possibility, the unachieved culmination of Greek philosophy. But for that one night, Plato might have become that. Socrates’ enchantment of Plato had another, backward-looking effect: “even the older, realized types have come to us ill-defined; all the philosophers from Thales to Democritus seem to me extraordinarily hard to discern.” Plato’s success almost wiped out memory of the previous types—it is reported that Plato wanted all of Democritus’s books burned.6 Nietzsche exercised his own great powers of discernment over a very long period to discern those types as types and to trace their evolution as an actual progress in understanding that had culminated in Empedocles and in Democritus while promising something still greater—greater perhaps by making the peak achievement of Greek science, atomism, the foundation of an enlightened culture. Instead, after Socrates-charmed Plato came Aristotle, who “especially seems to have no eyes in his head” for the philosophers before him, and after Aristotle came “the quarrelsome and loquacious hordes of the Socratic schools.” What happened? “Some great disaster must have occurred and the only statue from which we could have perceived the meaning and purpose of that great preparatory exercise in sculpting must have miscarried or been shattered.” Grieving over that most grievous of all possible historical losses, loss of the culminating philosopher of the evolutionary Greek philosophical tradition, Nietzsche closes the central part of his section: “what actually happened must for ever remain a secret of the workshop.” In the years after Things Human All Too Human did Nietzsche come to think that he knew what happened? In the great Foreword to its intended replacement he can call Plato “the most beautiful growth of antiquity” and assign a successful spiritual tyranny to him that reduced the other Socratic schools to historical footnotes: Plato is the philosopher-tyrant with “the greatest strength any philosopher so far had at his disposal,” who put “all theologians and philosophers on the same track” (BGE 191). Plutarch held the view that Plato saved Greek science from the fate of Socrates by encasing it in divinity, and Plutarch lauded him for that achievement.7 But Nietzsche blamed the Plato Plutarch lauded: Plato unwittingly prepared a disaster for philosophy by encasing it within divinity; he paved the way for the Christian capture of Western spiritual life. In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche seems in fact to have come to the view that the Greek workshop did not fail to generate 6. As reported by Diogenes Laertius, Lives, book 9, chap. 7, “Democritus,” 40. 7. Plutarch, Nicias, chap. 23.

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its culminating philosophic type, however disastrous his achievement proved to be.8 A little dash introduces the third, concluding part of “The tyrants of the spirit.” Here Nietzsche looks to subsequent history and sees the Greek paradigm of spiritual tyrants being repeated but ever less frequently down to the most recent times, and in the present, “contradiction and skepticism speak too loudly” for spiritual tyranny to be established. “The period of the tyrants of the spirit is past.” In justifying this judgment Nietzsche aligns himself with the Enlightenment view of historical progress. While holding that “in the sphere of higher culture there will always have to be rule,” he can say that “from now on that rule will lie in the hands of the oligarchs of the spirit.” Picturing this oligarchy as geographically and politically diverse, Nietzsche sees them as nevertheless “a close-knit society whose members will recognize and acknowledge one another,” thereby uniting what has, under spiritual tyrants, been divided and hostile. These oligarchs will have joy in the signs of their kind while each will remain free and fight and conquer in his own place. Oligarchs of the spirit? We should laugh with Nietzsche about this judgment in the book he wanted to replace. Zarathustra an oligarch? Nietzsche an oligarch? The mature Nietzsche wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra in part to show that the future of culture and the future of philosophy depend on a founder as singular as Zarathustra, the founder of our whole tradition of morality and religion. After he finished Zarathustra, his decision to destroy Things Human All Too Human and replace it with a proper introduction seems in part to have been precipitated by his mistaken judgment that oligarchs of the spirit could found a new future for philosophy and culture. After all, that new introduction devotes a whole chapter to countering that notion. “We Scholars” begins with a section identifying the issue of the chapter as the problem of the age: “the harmful and unseemly shift in the respective ranks of science and philosophy” (204), and the chapter builds to a definition of what can remedy that shift, a tyrant of the spirit called the “complementary man” (207) or the “genuine philosopher,” the “commander and legislator” of the “Where To” and the “What For” of our age (211)—a tyrant of the spirit, not an oligarch. And when he could not replace the book that advocated an oligarchy of the spirit, he wrote a Foreword for it and had that Foreword culminate in “the problem of the order of rank of which we may say that it is our problem . . . A new problem! . . . an order of rank, which we see: here—our problem!” (HH 8. The next section, HH 262, shows that Greek culture did not lack a founding genius: Homer is the spiritual tyrant under whose sway the whole Greek cultural achievement unfolded.

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Foreword 7). The mature Nietzsche repudiated the notion of an oligarchy of founding free minds and returned to his Greek models; one solitary thinker only gains insights into the new ontology of will to power and presents the new teaching of eternal return, reestablishing the order of rank with the philosopher at its peak. Nietzsche’s autobiographical turn, precipitated initially by his need to replace Things Human All Too Human and leading ultimately to Forewords for all his books and to Ecce Homo or How One Becomes What One Is, serves the purpose of showing that his becoming is the becoming of that philosopher. Yes, a new nobility will result, but the model founder is Plato, who seems after all to be the ultimate product of the Greek workshop and the philosopher-artist who gave his stamp to millennia. * In keeping with the aim of this book to trace the development of Nietzsche’s view of the philosopher and the artist, I now leap directly from Things Human All Too Human to his first report on the two chief discoveries of his mature thinking in “Sanctus Januarius,” Book 4 of the 1882 Gay Science. As important as Daybreak and the first three Books of The Gay Science are for other aspects of Nietzsche’s developing view, particularly for his own special subject, morality, they can be set aside here in the interests of the basic themes of philosophy and art, what can be known and what can be believed.9 9. On the developments from HH to D and GS, see Franco’s Nietzsche’s Enlightenment, a book that is remarkable for its meticulous and persuasive tracing of the subtle shifts in Nietzsche’s thinking, particularly on morality.

*3* Nietzsche Enters His Mature Philosophy The free mind experiment, begun early for Nietzsche yet first expressed publicly in Things Human All Too Human, came to its end with The Gay Science, as he announced on the back cover of its first edition in 1882. The Gay Science consisted of four “Books,” but the fourth was unique; most obvious was its having a title, “Sanctus Januarius,” its own introductory poem, and a place and date; but most important was its showing how and why the free mind experiment could end successfully. “Sanctus Januarius” is a January of a Book, ending an old “year” of human achievement and opening a new “year” in Nietzsche’s work and beyond. Nietzsche placed and dated “Sanctus Januarius,” “Genoa in January 1882,” but its essential gains he had made in Sils Maria in the summer of 1881 and recorded in a workbook, M III 1. In “Sanctus Januarius” he artfully stationed the two greatest gains of M III 1 at the middle and the end, and did so only after settling on an expansive, definitive plan for presenting those gains: Zarathustra, the founding teacher of the old “year,” would return to found the new. Study of “Sanctus Januarius” allows the pivotal insights of Nietzsche’s mature philosophy to come to light through the careful staging, the literary theatrics, of an artist of writing. Those insights can also be viewed in their original, not yet fully artful form in the workbook in which he first wrote them out, a workbook whose involuntary chronological order displays the true character of the two fundamental insights by allowing the reader to watch their coming to be. Those insights structure Thus Spoke Zarathustra just as they structure the book he planned and wrote after that as its proper introduction to replace Things Human All Too Human: Beyond

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Good and Evil. Nietzsche became what he was as a philosopher and an artist during the hard summer of 1881, when his sickness granted him enough good days to take his daily six-to-eight-hour walks and gain his most fundamental insights and compose their fitting sentences.

Chapter 9

“Sanctus Januarius”: The First Work of Nietzsche’s Maturity

Oh those Greeks! They knew how to live. GS Fo r e w o r d 4

The Free Mind Project Comes to Its Successful End Out of a solitude in Genoa that he likened to being “snowed-in,” Nietzsche wrote to Köselitz on January 25, 1882, to console him after his opera had again been rejected for performance. He added “a few words about my ‘literature’ ”: I’ve been finished for a few days with Books VI, VII, and VIII of Daybreak, and with that my work for the time being is done. Because Books 9 and 10 I want to save for next winter—I’m not yet ripe enough for the elemental thoughts that I want to present in these concluding Books. One thought is among them that in fact needs “millennia” in order to become something. Where will I get the strength to express it!

His intended extension of Daybreak very soon took on a different shape that allowed him to publish what he now called The Gay Science just six months later. It included “Books VI, VII, and VIII,” but “Books 9 and 10” were replaced by only one Book, “Sanctus Januarius.” The Gay Science is an anomaly: its Books 1–3 are one thing, revised versions of Books 6, 7, and 8 of Daybreak; Book 4 is quite another. It is not Book 9 or 10 of Daybreak, and it does not quite “present” the elemental thoughts Nietzsche did not think he

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was ripe for on January 25; instead, it intimates one of those thoughts and almost ends by announcing the one that would take millennia as a what if, inviting wonder about what he could mean. Book 4 of The Gay Science attests to a major shift in Nietzsche’s plans for his literature—the strength to express his new elemental thoughts, including that thought, would come through an entirely new kind of writing that he had already begun to lay out: its opening ends “Sanctus Januarius”—he wrote “Sanctus Januarius” knowing he would write Thus Spoke Zarathustra next. Given Nietzsche’s statement in his January 25 letter to Köselitz, he composed “Sanctus Januarius” sometime after that, but when exactly? He himself says repeatedly what at first seems impossible: in the remaining days of January. He says so on its title page: “Genoa in January 1882.” And in Ecce Homo: “this whole book [The Gay Science] was [the] gift” of “the most wonderful month of January I ever experienced.” And in a letter to Georg Brandes in April 1888: “Die ‘fröhliche Wissenschaft’ Januar 1882”—underlining only that one word as if to suggest his own amazement that he composed the whole book in a month. It is not impossible: each of the first three parts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra was composed in a period of ten days. Such feats of composition were possible because he did with each what he did with The Gay Science: its major components already existed in polished workbook entries written from the spring to the winter of 1881—and after its January composition, he spent months refining it further. Finally, when Elisabeth read the text aloud to a copyist who wrote out the fair copy for the printer in May and June in Naumburg, Nietzsche listened and made final changes orally.1 The vehemence of Nietzsche’s celebration of January 1882 suggests that the initial composition of “Sanctus Januarius” was in fact what he celebrated.2 1. Nietzsche to Rée, May 24, 1882. He sent the first parts of the finished manuscript after June 19 and the last on July 3 (postcards to Schmeitzner, June 19 and July 3). Further additions, some major, he made while reading the page proofs through mid-August. 2. Also suggesting a late January date for the composition of “Sanctus Januarius” is a letter to Köselitz on February 5 referring to “the ‘9th Book’ of Daybreak” as if it already existed. On the other hand, he said in a January 29 letter to Overbeck, “still missing are books 9 and 10 [of D] which I can now no longer manage—fresh strength is needed for that and the deepest solitude . . . maybe I’ll find a month this summer that will give me both . . . But maybe I’ll have to wait till winter for this most difficult of all my tasks.” On February 4 Rée visited him in Genoa and stayed until March 13. As they had in Sorrento in 1876–77, both probably did their own work in the mornings of this six-week period. On March 29 Nietzsche sailed to Messina, where he spent three weeks and finished the poems first published as Idyllen aus Messina.

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When Nietzsche was almost finished preparing The Gay Science for publication, he decided to make an announcement on its back cover: With this book a series of writings by FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, whose common goal is to erect a new image and ideal of the free mind, comes to its end.3

Comes to its end: Nietzsche wanted his reader to know that the four writings he then listed4 were a completed project; what followed would be something different from erecting the ideal of the free mind. In a June 1882 letter to the first acquaintance he believed fit to become his disciple, Lou Salomé, he used the same words that his published notice would contain to report that ending to her. Five days later he wrote to her celebrating that ending as a success: “the work of six years (1876–1882), my whole Freigeisterei ! Oh what years! What tortures of all kinds, what solitudes and weariness with life! . . . selfcompassion and the feeling of victory fill me completely. For it is a victory and a complete one.”5 For the six years of the free mind ideal to end and end in complete victory points to a philosophic achievement gained by the free mind but reaching beyond it. But what could lie beyond the ideal of freeing the mind? Beginning with “Sanctus Januarius,” the books that followed show exactly what: the free mind can gain knowledge to which it can willingly bind itself. That there could be such a knowing and such a binding is the step of highest significance for the teacher of the free mind, and he had to handle it in the most careful way for the sake of his genuine audience, whom he had taught to hold the free mind as the highest ideal. No wonder he thought it would take him years to work out the writing project that the successful erection of the 3. The notice is not reproduced in KGW/KSA. See Schaberg, Nietzsche Canon, 86. A telegram to Schmeitzner on June 21, 1882, suggests that Nietzsche spoke to him about the notice for the back cover in Leipzig on June 22. The notice was important to him: shortly before the book was published in August 1882, he reminded Schmeitzner in a postcard of “the text for the notice on the back side of the cover that we spoke about” (July 28, 1882). 4. “Things Human All Too Human With Appendix: Assorted Opinions and Maxims; The Wanderer and His Shadow; Daybreak: Thoughts about the Prejudices of Morality; The Gay Science.” In August 1882, then, Nietzsche kept WS separate from HH. 5. Nietzsche to Lou Salomé, June 27/28 and July 3, 1882. He expressed a similar judgment on those years a few weeks later in a poignant letter to Rohde. He warned his once dear but now estranged friend that his new book would be even more distant from the Nietzsche with whom Rohde had once been so close (mid-July 1882).

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free mind ideal assigned him. It did take years, the years writing Thus Spoke Zarathustra. But “Sanctus Januarius” already suggests just what “a victory and a complete one” means. Nietzsche’s hopes for Lou Salomé reached their high point while he was refining “Sanctus Januarius” and The Gay Science generally.6 That he was wrong to believe she was a potential disciple does nothing to alter the importance of his singling her out: he knew he needed disciples; he knew they had to have refined qualities of mind and spirit; he suspected that none of his previous acquaintances had those qualities. The Nietzsche who sought disciples was what he had long been, a student of the Greeks; he too aspired to set up a philosophical school.7 Singling out Lou Salomé in 1882 as a potential disciple is instructive because it helps show Nietzsche’s intentions for the books that followed the successful completion of his Freigeisterei: they were to be “fishhooks” to draw interested and capable young students to him; the essential instruction he would conduct in a school like the Greek schools, training minds and bodies to the rigor of philosophy.8 He wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra as “the entrance hall” to his philosophy.9 It was meant to have wide appeal but to be selective in singling out fit hearers like the aspiring young man who appears in “On the Tree on the Mountainside” in Zarathustra I.10 “From [Zarathustra] on, all my writings are fishhooks” (EH 3 BGE 1). As fishhook suggests and the books from Zarathustra on con6. Their only extended opportunity for private exchange occurred in Tautenburg near Jena, where Nietzsche spent the summer of 1882. Lou visited him there, rooming with Elisabeth at the home of Pastor Hermann Otto Stölten from August 7 to 26. Nietzsche and Lou spent these weeks in hours-long discussion on long walks and late meetings at a Gasthaus. Pious Elisabeth had arranged that Nietzsche spend the summer in Tautenburg because she hoped the charismatic Pastor Stölten would be able to talk her brother out of his atheism. See Schaumann, Tautenburg bei Jena, 77. 7. During the months they shared in Sorrento in 1876–77 Nietzsche and his three companions planned the establishment of such a school. Meysenbug, a talented inspiration to talented young women especially, was particularly interested in the project. 8. On Nietzsche’s conscious revival of the disciplines of the Greek schools, see Hutter, Shaping the Future: Nietzsche’s New Regime of the Soul and Its Ascetic Practices, esp. 32–42. 9. Nietzsche to Overbeck, March 8 and April 7, 1884; to Meysenbug, end of March and beginning of May 1884. 10. Or the brilliant young Heinrich von Stein, who visited Nietzsche in Sils Maria for long talks in the summer of 1884 and whose sudden death at age thirty struck Nietzsche extremely hard (to Meysenbug, July 30, 1887) because he viewed him as a man of his own kind destined to make the same discoveries he had and abandon his avid Wagnerianism.

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firm, Nietzsche had no intention of saying everything in his books. The two that take their reader closest to the core of his thought—Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil—treat that core obliquely, leading the reader up to the essential point and leaving it almost unspoken, certainly not defended or backed by arguments: the rhetoric is that of temptation, leaving the reader wanting more on what counts most. Knowledge of that intention may now be indispensable for Nietzsche’s reader: with no school to attend, the reader has to discover that the books take one only so far; the reader must marshal the arguments for and against the conclusions the fishhooks suggest. Understanding Nietzsche’s books has been seriously impaired by the false assumption made by their professional readers that he had the same honorable aim we do: to make everything clear to everyone. No fishhook has that character. “Sanctus Januarius,” the Book of January 1882 celebrating successful completion of his free mind experiment, marks Nietzsche’s most important transition to his mature thought, the 1876 transition to the free mind ideal being a more public exposure of the free-minded thinking he had already long undertaken—and the public embrace of an optimism not his own. A solitary thinker pursuing the most complete freedom of mind possible over six hard years had just attained the greatest reward of that pursuit. A whole new “year” of human experience rose up as possible: events in pure knowing could lead to culture-transforming events of the magnitude Nietzsche had always viewed as the consequence of the appearance of a new knower, a Prometheus of a knower. “Sanctus Januarius” gives the first intimations of that knowing; Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the “entrance hall” to it, a dramatic narrative tracing the coming to be of the philosopher of late modern times; Beyond Good and Evil is the “Prelude” that introduces Zarathustra by showing its only possible audience, modern free minds, what the philosophy of the future can be. But Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil were not enough, as Nietzsche indicated in a letter to Fritzsch, his new publisher, at the end of December 1886, just after he completed his project of writing Forewords to his pre-Zarathustra books. First he looks back: “so now I’m finished, even before year’s end, with everything I’d set myself to do for the good of my earlier literature.” Then he looks ahead: “—I now need, for long, long years, deep calm: because before me stands the working out of my whole system of thought.—” Nietzsche, alleged by so many to be a philosopher without systematic thought, planned a new major work under such potential titles as The Will to Power or The Revaluation of All Values; it would set out the phi-

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losophy of the future in the most complete form possible at its beginning— but still in a form wholly Nietzsche’s own, not that of conventional university philosophy whose limits were clear to him. Only this larger setting of Nietzsche’s whole corpus can make the larger importance of “Sanctus Januarius” clear. This January ends what Things Human All Too Human began. And this January begins the positive phase of what began with the warfare of Daybreak: “With Daybreak I first took up the fight against the de-selfing morality” (EH 3 D 2). The fight that began in Daybreak looks ahead to something monumental, the end of what had prevailed for “the last ten thousand years  .  .  . in a few large regions of the earth,” the end of the “moral period” of human existence (BGE 32). “Sanctus Januarius” adds to the fight for the moral future of humanity its two foundational or positive elements: it is the first writing by Nietzsche to intimate his discovery of both those elements, the fundamental ontological truth about human beings and beings as such, and the highest possible affirmation of that truth. He structured it to intimate these two foundational matters, ontological and evaluative, foundational because the human species inevitably lives out some understanding or other of nature and some set or other of evaluations, some good and bad. “Sanctus Januarius” starts with Nietzsche’s own private liberation into a full embrace of necessity: amor fati is his new year’s resolution in its first section. At its complex center he placed his fundamental ontological inference, treating it as a kind of secret he is unwilling to betray. And at its end, he placed the dying of the old ideal, a first display of the new ideal, and a glimpse of the preparations for descent by the founding teacher of the old de-selfing morality now promising a new founding teaching. “Sanctus Januarius” is the first writing of Nietzsche’s maturity because it is his first to intimate his new ontology and his new ideal. Here, the new philosopher and artist begins his essential work.11 11. The sainted figure of the title, “Sanctus Januarius,” is the month of January 1882, the month in which Nietzsche first saw just how he would complete the essential work of his future. He appropriated for this purpose Sanctus Januarius, the legendary Christian bishop of Naples, the liquefying of whose relic blood reflects the liquefying of the ice of Nietzsche’s soul, the metaphor he used in the epigraph-poem and in the 1886 Foreword. Brusotti shows that Nietzsche came across Sanctus Januarius in Stendhal, Promenades dans Rome (Die Leidenschaft der Erkenntnis, 384n10). Brusotti’s book is an astonishingly rich and nuanced guide to Nietzsche’s writings from D through Z and to the works Nietzsche consulted and to the secondary literature. If he takes every shift in Nietzsche’s terminology to be the shift to a new “philosophy,” that can be ignored while learning from his deeply informative book.

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T h e 1 8 8 6 F o r e w o r d t o T h e G ay S c i e n c e , t h e l a st o f t h e F o r ewo r d s Nietzsche’s 1886 Forewords project aimed to show how his trail of books mapped stages on the way to his becoming a philosopher. The chief topic of the last of them therefore had to be convalescence. Three years earlier, in January 1884, he had assigned the title “The Convalescent” to the chapter of Zarathustra in which the event occurs that the whole book exists to prepare, Zarathustra’s embrace of eternal return. A few weeks after he completed his Forewords project, he assigned the title “The great health” to the penultimate section of the Book 5 he added to The Gay Science—so his Forewords project, a record of his becoming, had to end on “the gratitude of a convalescent” (GS Foreword 1). The convalescence of “Mr. Nietzsche” comes first, but renewed health in a mere person could seem to matter only incidentally, so the Foreword moves to what matters to everyone, convalescence in a type, the philosopher. Because of what a philosopher is—“when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet . . . everything is at risk” (SE 8)—convalescence in the philosopher means the recovery of health on the broadest scale of culture, recovery from the long sickness of moral teachings. Written in “Ruta bei Genoa, in the Fall, 1886,” the last of the Forewords looks back to what Nietzsche first celebrated in Genoa in January 1882, in “Sanctus Januarius,” the possibility of healthy cultural maturity. The first section of the last Foreword uses a metaphor for the spirit of his book: “it seems to be written in the language of the wind that brings a thaw.”12 The wind bringing this thaw melts the snow and ice of the one set of experiences Nietzsche focuses on, those of the “winter” of his six-year-long discipline in free-mindedness, the self-inflicted cruelty of a thinker denying himself hope. That “icing-up in the midst of youth” was “a self-defense . . . prescribed by the nausea that had gradually developed from an incautious spiritual diet and pampering—one calls it romanticism.” Nausea at his self-indulgent hopes for Wagner in his first five books prescribed as medicine the winter of severity behind the books of his Freigeisterei. In The Gay Science hope returns; the schooled, legitimate hope intimated in “Sanctus Januarius”—not his 12. I use the Cambridge translation by Josefine Nauckhoff, a truly superior translation that succeeds about as far as it is possible to succeed in letting the gravity and levity of Nietzsche’s compact, sinuous German speak English. I modify her wording here and there to gain a stricter literalness.

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rhetorically adopted hope of the Enlightenment but hope for pessimism, as odd as that sounds. All four sections of the Foreword resemble the first in dealing chiefly with what is past, but each ends as the book itself ended in 1882, intimating a new beginning in recovered hope. The end of its first section extends his playful apology for his book’s playful excess in “venting his malice: who knows what kind of victim he’s looking for, what kind of monster of parodied material will in a short while stimulate him?” Who knows the monster victim? He ends by letting us know: “ ‘Incipit tragoedia’ it says at the end of this suspiciously innocent book: Beware! Something utterly wicked and mischievous is being announced here: incipit parodia, no doubt . . .” His noninnocent book had ended by announcing the rebirth of tragedy to be brought about by his Zarathustra. The monster victim of that tragedy is the cosmic comedies that taught the hope of deliverance from life: the victims parodied in the first section of The Gay Science, the teachers of a moral purpose to existence. This beginning of the suspiciously innocent Gay Science makes its author guilty: Nietzsche, the teacher of tragedy, invites us too to convalesce by laughing off the stage all the teachers of cosmic comedy, all the systems of deliverance invented in the moral period.13 The final three sections of the Foreword take leave of “Mr. Nietzsche” to report on the experience of the philosopher as “psychologist,” student of the soul whose great advantage is studying the temptations of his own soul during its long winter of suffering. What follows is the most detailed account Nietzsche ever gave of the gains he reaped from his suffering, his gratitude for his suffering. He often caught his mind tempted to “weakness or repentance or resignation or hardening or gloom,” temptations his “pride of mind” opposed. His new self-knowledge permitted an “experiment” that gave him “a subtler eye for all philosophizing to date.” Having resisted temptations that previous thinkers had not, he saw the grounds of their “bold lunacies”: that there exists “some finale,” “some Apart, Beyond, Outside, Above,” and he was permitted “the question whether it was not illness that inspired the philosopher.” His experiment forced a radical conclusion: “to have the courage to push my suspicion to the limit and risk the proposition: what was at stake

13. Certainly not parodied is Nietzsche’s own new tragedy of Z. Many of Nietzsche’s free-minded readers have wanted to save him from his seriousness, save him for mere freemindedness, by making his Z, particularly part 4, his parody of himself.

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in all philosophizing hitherto was not at all ‘truth’ but rather something else, let us say health, future, growth, power, life . . .” The ellipse ends section 2 and leads to the concession that opens section 3: “I do not want to take my leave ungratefully from that time of severe illness whose profits I have not exhausted even today.” The chief profit of understanding himself through suffering is understanding the philosopher as such, and he offers an extended autobiographical definition of what a philosopher is in his difference: we philosophers are no thinking frogs, no objectifying and registering devices with innards set on cold—we must constantly give birth to our thoughts out of our pain and mothering them endow them with all we have in us of blood, heart, fire, pleasure, passion, agony, conscience, fate, disaster. Life—to us that means constantly to transform all that we are into light and flame, and also all that wounds us, we simply can do no other.

He can treat his frequent long bouts of great pain as positive and indispensable: “great pain is the final liberator of the spirit as the teacher of the great suspicion”—suspicion exercised on himself and on the great historical enterprises of philosophy and religion and their founders. Only great pain, that long slow pain that takes its time . . . forces us philosophers to descend into our ultimate depths and put aside all trust, everything good-natured, veiling, mild, average in which we perhaps till then invested our humanity. I doubt that such pain makes us “better”—; but I know that it makes us deeper.

Reporting as a convalescent even though he continued to suffer from the attacks and from diminished use of his eyes, Nietzsche can say that “one emerges from such dangerous exercises in self-mastery as a different person, with a few more question marks, above all with the will henceforth to question further, more deeply, severely, harshly, evilly, quietly than one had previously questioned.” The deepest consequence of deepening questioning he reports as a loss: “Trust in life is gone; life itself has become the problem.” He warns that “one should not jump to the conclusion that” life’s becoming a problem “necessarily makes a person gloom-filled!” Instead, “Even love of life is still possible—only one loves differently. It is the love for a woman who makes us doubt.” Nietzsche thus touches the theme that is deepest for him as inquirer:

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love, the philosopher as lover whose deepest object of love is life itself. “Vita femina,” “Life—a Woman,” is the positive promise that almost closed the 1882 Gay Science (339). Here, at the end of the convalescent’s statement of “triumphant gratitude,” he briefly describes the philosopher’s love: The attraction of everything problematic, the delight in an X, is so great in highly spiritual, spiritualized people such as these that this delight flares up like bright embers again and again over all the distress of what is problematic, over all the danger of uncertainty, and even over the jealousy of the lover. We know a new happiness . . . 14

The concluding fourth section of the Foreword does what all the great works of Nietzsche’s maturity do, move from the passion to understand to a celebration of the understood, from philosophy in its severity of understanding to philosophy in its indulgence as art. When he finished the fair copy of this Foreword, he told Overbeck, “Yesterday the Forewords to Daybreak and to The Gay Science were made ready for the printer by me . . . These 5 Forewords are perhaps the best prose I’ve written till now” (November 14, 1886). Even after saying that, he made major changes to the fourth section while correcting the page proofs: it mattered greatly that he get the end of his last autobiographical Foreword exactly right.15 He rewrote the first two-fifths of the section, so that it now begins: “Finally, in order that the most essential not remain unsaid”—it is essential that the convalescent say that convalescence made possible for him an art appropriate to his newly gained health, an art that can transform culture.16 Its precondition was the “abysses” of “such severe illness, also . . . the illness of severe suspicion.” A convalescent from such illnesses is “newborn” to new experiences of joy, the theme of his ending. He returns “more childlike” and “a hundred times more subtle than [he] had ever been before”—subtlety rules the end of this Foreword too, with its portrait of the new philosopher as artist. Contemporary forms of the experience of joy repel him, and he finds new ways to summarize his revulsion at late modern society with its need for constant deflection into entertainment among 14. Nietzsche reports during his period of greatest suffering that he is happier than he has ever been in his life (to Eiser, beginning of January 1880). That letter to his then doctor and letters to his most intimate friends, especially Overbeck, report that what his Foreword calls his “weakness” was often the temptation to kill himself in the depth of his attacks. 15. See KSA 14, pp. 231–34 for the variants; a note says “NB! Conclusion of the last section!” 16. KSA 3, p. 351, lines 5 to 29 are lines Nietzsche added while correcting the proofs.

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“our ‘educated,’ our rich, and our rulers.” The convalescent needs “a different art . . . a divinely untroubled, divinely artful art that like a bright flame blazes up into unclouded skies”—the new divine art fulfills Zarathustra’s requirement that it be an art of the open sky and not cloud the sky with fictions of purpose and ultimate ends (Z 3 Before Sunrise). “Above all,” Nietzsche says, “an art for artists, only for artists.”17 This restriction cannot mean art for the artist’s sake but rather must mean art that stems from and services the genuine artistic impulses of the philosopher that the public may experience as more than art, as the Athenian public at Attic tragedies, satyr plays, and comedies did. “[W]hat is needed for that is cheerfulness, any cheerfulness my friends! also as artists.” Cheerfulness, Heiterkeit, is so intrinsic to a gay science that Nietzsche would open the 1886 Book 5 with it: “What it is with our cheerfulness” (343) is a reflection on the fit response to “the greatest recent event, that ‘God is dead’,” not obviously a cheery event. In his Foreword he says, “I would like to prove that cheerfulness is needed for art.” His proof proves artfully that the cheerful art made possible by his victory as an impassioned seeker of knowledge is an art of needed veiling. Nietzsche’s convalescence ends, his Forewords end, on the necessary art of veiling. Nietzsche restores while transforming a cardinal feature of classical philosophy: art is an exoteric necessity that shelters in beauty the esoteric it veils. The premise of his proof is what he now knows: “There are some things we now know too well, we knowers.” That knowing can only be what he placed at the various centers of “Sanctus Januarius,” Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Beyond Good and Evil. Instead of stating what that knowing knows, he simply claims knowledge and moves to its consequence: “oh, how we learn now to forget well, to be good at not-knowing, as artists!” The convalescent has experienced the victorious outcome of the long process of his learning, and the sobriety of his discoveries requires him as knower to learn as artist the art of forgetting—when that knower learns the art of forgetting, it is art in its most expansive sense, culture-forming art as Nietzsche has known it since his beginnings. Having stated with a brevity true to his art both its premise of knowing and its being an art of forgetting, he looks to “our future” as artists and invokes the classical image of veiled truth. Nietzsche’s autobiographical Forewords end by celebrating his version of the ancient philosophic art of the exoteric. “One will hardly find us again on the paths of those Egyptian youths who make temples unsafe at night, embrace statues, and want by all means to unveil, uncover, and put in bright 17. The part added during page proofs ends here.

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light whatever has with good reason been kept covered.” Invoking Schiller’s famous poem “The Veiled Image at Sais,” based on a story in Plutarch he must have known, Nietzsche says, “No, this bad taste, this will to truth, to ‘truth at any price,’ this youthful madness in the love of truth—puts us off; for that we’re too experienced, too serious, too merry, too burned, too deep . . .” No Egyptian youth, Nietzsche is an experienced philosopher driven by the “will to truth”—he cannot possibly be repudiating the passion to know that defines him as philosopher. He means instead what the reader will discover in the book his Foreword is opening: “Sanctus Januarius” shows that there are truths better secreted away at the center and truths of a different sort better flaunted at the end. To end his autobiographical Forewords on an art of veiling is a veiling, artful veiling of the ultimate fruit of his passionate pursuit of truth. As a lover of truth Nietzsche pursues truth at the price of years of winter; as an artist he practices an art of forgetting, the art of the thawing wind promising summer. The artist celebrating forgetting tells an unforgettable, tender, bewitching little tale: “ ‘Is it true that the dear God is present everywhere?’ a little girl asked her mother; ‘I think that’s indecent!’ ” The little girl’s judgment, offered in proof of the need for forgetting, has a very special audience: “—a hint for philosophers.” Called to attention by being addressed in the midst of a statement about the art of veiling, those moved by the passion for truth, those Egyptian youths, will judge the little girl’s offense insufficient reason for ceasing to be what they are, but they may well learn to know themselves in the story: like the little girl’s mother, they can assuage offense and preserve decency about the highest things. Be what you are, philosophers, but be it motheringly. Nietzsche shows himself to be a philosopher who recognizes the tension between his passion and the demands of the society of which he, ever a hermit, is inevitably a part. His hint for philosophers continues to the end with a lesson on philosophy’s primary object of inquiry, nature. “One should have more respect for the bashfulness with which nature has hidden itself behind riddles and iridescent uncertainties.” There is a truth about nature, and the philosopher sides with nature’s way of sheltering it: “Perhaps truth is a woman who has grounds for not letting her grounds be seen?” Entering the world of the Greeks with a version of Heraclitus’s “Nature loves to hide,” Nietzsche proposes a Greek name for truth who is a woman: “Perhaps her name, to speak Greek, is Baubo?” He leaves her name a mystery for it invokes an event central to the Eleusinian mysteries, the Athenian sacred mysteries revealed only to initiates sworn not to speak it. A Christian apologist, Clement

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of Alexandria, spoke it with a view to discrediting Greek religion. Baubo is the crone who comforted and cheered Demeter over her loss of Persephone, and she did so by revealing the naked truth to her, not veiling it: Baubo lifted her skirts for Demeter to show “child Iaccus” painted on her belly; her showing comforts Demeter on the return of her fertility, her Persephone. If Baubo is truth’s name, she is exemplary in revealing the veiled truth, this once, to a grieving goddess; her revelation cheers Demeter, makes her a convalescent.18 A philosopher who aims by nature to view truth naked, Nietzsche offers a complex hint for philosophers, inviting them to ponder a mystery revealed to those sworn to secrecy. His hint leads him to celebrate Greek celebrants: Oh those Greeks! They knew how to live: what is needed for that is to stay bravely standing at the surface, the fold, the skin, to worship appearance, to believe in forms, in tones, in words, in the whole Olympus of appearance! Those Greeks were superficial—out of profundity.

The last words of the autobiographical Forewords pose questions, “And are we not coming back precisely to this, we daredevils of the spirit who have climbed to the highest and most dangerous peak of contemporary thought and looked around from up there, we who have looked down from up there?” Are we coming back to that? To what exactly? The metaphor of looking down from the highest height repeats the passage in Nietzsche’s just published Beyond Good and Evil in which he, looking down from the highest height, looked into the total of human woe, looked down into tragedy, without experiencing the tragic effects of pity and fear (BGE 30). The issue in that passage is the issue that ends the Forewords: “the difference between the exoteric and the esoteric formerly known to philosophers.” Those Greeks of the tragic age knew how to live partly because they knew the difference between the exoteric and the esoteric and invented a way to live the tragic view of life. Are we coming back to that? With that question Nietzsche ends his Forewords. If we are, “Are we not precisely in this—Greeks? Worshippers of forms, of tones, of words? And therefore—artists?” We is one philosopher looking down from the height who, as an artist, has come to know the difference between philosophy and art, truth and art, knowing and making, as necessary features of human nature. Nietzsche sends his reader into The Gay Science alerted to the presence in it of a fundamental new knowing that leads to the cheerfulness of 18. See my Nietzsche and Modern Times, 304–5. On Baubo, see Langer, Nietzsche’s Gay Science, 9–11.

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a new art, the presence in it of what the Greeks achieved in an art that shelters tragic understanding. In “Sanctus Januarius,” the final Book of the 1882 Gay Science, Nietzsche intimated for the first time his insight into the truth of nature and displayed if mysteriously his discovery of the affirmative core of the new art.19 19. Almost two years later Nietzsche reused the last two sections of his 1886 Foreword to GS as the epilogue of NCW: the end of his autobiographical Forewords also ends the book that looked back over the most significant relationship of his life, the relationship with the artist Wagner for which he was most grateful. His main alteration in this late reuse of the end of his Forewords returns for the first time in his published writings to the phrase that opened “Sanctus Januarius,” amor fati. What in GS looked to his future as a new year’s resolution, in NCW looks to his past as a resolution fulfilled: “Amor fati: that is my inmost nature.”

Chapter 10

The Opening of “Sanctus Januarius”

Genoa in January 1882 “ Sanctus Januarius” title page

When a reader of the 1882 edition of The Gay Science reached the end of the “Third Book” and looked across the page, what appeared on the title page of the “Fourth Book” was a surprise: there stood a title, an epigraph-poem, and a place and date, all of which the title pages of the first three lacked. “Sanctus Januarius,” the title, announces a new beginning, the turning of a “year” whose place and date had to be noted: “Genoa in January 1882.” Genoa is the city from which Columbus set out, and his later discovery of the Americas assigned a kind of January before and after to every place in the world. As for the eight-line epigraph-poem, Nietzsche so valued it that he repeated it whole in his one-page account of The Gay Science in Ecce Homo, an account that after its first sentence speaks only of poetry in the book, the poem on this title page and the poems added to the 1887 edition, some of which had their origin in the months just after January 1882.1 Introducing the epigraphpoem in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche says it expressed his gratitude for “the most wonderful month of January I ever experienced” and that “it reveals suffi1. The eight poems of “Idylls out of Messina” were the lead entry of Schmeitzner’s Internationale Monatsschrift, May 1882. Written in Genoa after the completion of “Sanctus Januarius” and in Messina in April 1882, six of them Nietzsche revised for the poems of “Appendix: Songs of Prince Free as a Bird” in the 1887 GS. See Schaberg, Nietzsche Canon, 80–83. On the poems, see Grundlehner, Poetry of Friedrich Nietzsche, 122–46.

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ciently out of what depths ‘science’ here became gay.” What depths does the poem reveal? It opens addressing January—“du”—as the “flaming spear” that “broke up the ice of my soul,” and it goes on to describe what this “miracle” of a January did for his soul. Freeing it to speed toward “the sea of its highest hope,” January made his soul “ever brighter and ever healthier” and made it, in the decisive words, “Frei im liebesvollsten Muss”—free in the most lovefilled necessity, different words for what the first section of “Sanctus Januarius” names amor fati. The author thus attests on the title page of the fourth Book to a profound, transforming event that separates this Book from the first three. Compressed into the image of ice are five and a half hard years in which Nietzsche forced all hope out of his awareness in order to free his mind for its inquiry into truth. He pursued that inquiry out of the passion to know with no tincture of expectation that the knowledge gained might be beneficial for anything but itself. These were the hard years of Things Human All Too Human and Daybreak, years marked by increasingly intense and frequent attacks of the headaches and vomiting that disabled him for two or three days at a time. But now, thanks to his January thaw, hope returns, accompanied by what seemed to be a return to health.2 As for what his “highest hope” is, “who can be in doubt about” its meaning “who sees the diamond beauty of the first words of Zarathustra flashing out of the conclusion of the fourth Book?—Or who reads the granite sentences at the end of the third Book, in which a destiny finds for the first time a formula for itself for all times.” By making the granite sentences and the first words of Zarathustra indicators of his “highest hope,” Nietzsche calls attention to the structure of The Gay Science: these two items isolate Book 4 as a 2. The first weeks of Nietzsche’s return to Genoa on October 2, 1881, were among the worst of his life in the frequency and severity of his attacks: “I sank to the lowest step of my capacity to endure” (to his mother and Elisabeth, October 29, 1881) and in the limits his eyes placed on him: after only fifteen minutes of reading, the pain in his eyes became so severe that he had to stop (to Elisabeth, November 18, 1881). When he finally moved to an acceptable room on October 28 and the weather turned sunny and mild in early November, a period of calm productivity began that culminated with his January experience. Contributing to his growing exhilaration was experiencing Carmen for the first time in the Genoa opera house (postcard to Köselitz, November 28, 1881) and hearing a non-Wagnerian future for music, a music appropriate to his philosophy and one to which he imagined Köselitz was making essential contributions. Less important but not wholly incidental was his hope that the typewriter he planned to buy would ease his difficulties with his eyes. He first mentions a typewriter in a postcard to Elisabeth, December 4, 1881; on February 4, 1882, Rée brought it to Genoa.

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separate whole within The Gay Science; the eight questions and answers that end Book 3 introduce the author of Book 4 as the destiny visible in that formula, while the words that end Book 4 introduce the historic, transformative figure Nietzsche will employ to present his greatest gains in more complete form.3 Ecce Homo confirms what a study of “Sanctus Januarius” reveals: standing between the winter of Nietzsche’s freeing his mind and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “Sanctus Januarius” is the work that first expresses his highest hope and its legitimating grounds, the first work of his maturity.4 In the account of “Sanctus Januarius” that follows I will concentrate on the opening sections, the center, and the end in order to illuminate its January character, its introduction of the new foundational philosophy.

“To the new year” (276) The first section of “Sanctus Januarius” expresses Nietzsche’s new year’s resolution as a thinker—“I still live, I still think: I must still live because I must still think.” Nietzsche reverses Descartes, founder of so much in modern philosophy: his formula runs: “Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum.” Nietzsche’s thinking is founded on his existence, whose purpose it is to think; only derivatively, nonfoundationally is Descartes’s formula true. “Today” Nietzsche must think one thought in particular, for it is the day on which “everyone allows himself to express his wish and dearest thought,” the first day of a new year, the day to take leave of the old with a resolution for the new: a “thought shall be for me the reason, warrant, and sweetness of all further life!” That thought is rooted in the trajectory of his thinking about morality that began with Things Human All Too Human: “I want to learn more and more to see the necessary in the things as the beautiful—so will I be one of those who make the things beautiful.” Countering the whole tradition of moral thought whose fiction of free choice defies necessity, Nietzsche vows to raise necessity to the beautiful.5 He expresses his thought in a formula that had not appeared 3. The granite sentences Nietzsche added late, writing them on the page proofs in July 1882. 4. Nietzsche’s account of Z in EH (Z 1) places GS within the gestation period of Z, eighteen months, spanning Recoaro in the spring of 1881, his first summer in Sils Maria in 1881, through his stay in Rapallo, February 1883, when he completed part 1 of Z. 5. When preparing the fair copy Nietzsche deleted a passage from this sentence that tied his resolution more closely to what began in HH: “I will from day to day more unlearn to weigh with moral weigh-scales; I will treat the appearance of a moral judgment as a hint that in this

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before in his books: “Amor fati.” Remarkably, the term never appeared again until his last two books, six years later; still, he can there call the love of fate or of his fatedness “my inmost nature” (NCW Epilogue 1; EH 3 CW 4) and “my formula for greatness in a human being” (EH Clever 10).6 But if “Sanctus Januarius” opens with a resolve whose formula he will rarely speak, it ends on another, more exuberant formula for expressing the love of life as necessity, the eternal return of the same, the formula he will make the fundamental affirmation of the public teaching for which he wants to be known. The private new year’s resolution that opens “Sanctus Januarius” is fulfilled at its close in a public teaching brought by Zarathustra. “Sanctus Januarius” is the sacred January that opens a new epoch of human history based on the passion of love. And it closes the moral epoch during which humans believed themselves to be free in their actions and therefore responsible for their choices and rightly rewarded or punished for them. Nietzsche’s inquiry into morality exposed the deepest root of the moral view to be the passion of hatred for life, hatred that festered into the need to take revenge on life, which in turn generated schemes of punishment and reward in invented afterlives that called in gods and ultimately the one true God as agents of just Judgment. Amor fati is a love of life that can potentially flower into teachings expressive of love. January thus takes its place among Nietzsche’s metaphors meant to express the cultural transition dividing two ages of human history: daybreak yields to year-break to express the change from the “moral period” to the postmoral period. By opening on a new year’s resolution, ending on a promise, and centering on a discovery, “Sanctus Januarius” earns its exclusivity in having a title, an epigraph poem, and a date and place. moment my nature is without its whole strength and height and errs in the pathway of its past and at the same time among the graves of its fore-world” (KSA 14, p. 262). 6. Amor fati appeared first in a workbook dated fall 1881, M III 4a (KSA 9 15 [20]). A second appearance is in a workbook dated December 1881–January 1882, M III 6a (KSA 9 16 [22]), where it is part of a dialogue between one who affirms it and one who does not: “ ‘Yes! I will still love only that which is necessary! Yes! Let amor fati be my ultimate love!’ ” The exchange that follows should have made it into one of his books: “Maybe you can attain that, but first you must become the lover of the Furies: I confess, the snakes would drive me mad.—‘What do you know of the Furies! Furies—that’s only an evil name for the Graces.’ He’s crazy!” Nietzsche used amor fati in a note in 1884, KSA 11 25 [500]; two in 1888, KSA 13 16 [32], 25 [7]; and once in a letter to Overbeck (around June 5, 1882). These are its only uses in Nietzsche’s writings. On amor fati see Brusotti, Die Leidenschaft der Erkenntnis, 452–71; on amor fati in Nietzsche, Spinoza, and Maimonides, see Yovel, Dark Riddle, 87, 116, 182.

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“Personal providence” (277) The second section is part of the January event because the “high point” reached by the free mind leads him into temptation, into “the greatest danger” and “hardest test,” the all-too-easy belief that some divinity made it all possible, that a “personal providence” blessed his life by making every event in it seem intended to advance him to that peak. How easily the “god-making instinct” (KSA 13 17 [4 §5]) could have tempted him away from the uncaring gods of Epicurus toward a god like the god of Jesus who cares about every hair on your head (Matthew 10:30). But even if he does what he tells us to do, “leave the gods alone,” and assumes that human capacity took him to this apex, there remains the danger that he will think too highly of his talent. His January warning to himself is to view what happened to him as neither the gift of some god nor the product of some native genius; it sprang from the practical and theoretical relentlessness of his passion to know, with “good old chance” playing the decisive role, chance as necessity.7 When Nietzsche affixed “Genoa in January 1882” to the title page of “Sanctus Januarius,” it was the first time he had ever noted the location of one of his writings. It was entirely fitting to do so with “Sanctus Januarius” because many of its early sections bear traces of their place of origin more explicitly than does any other extended writing in Nietzsche’s corpus, this situated character being one feature of its belonging to the “most personal” of Nietzsche’s books (letter to Knortz, June 21, 1888). The Genoa that opens so many of these sections typically expands into some general feature of human existence and, frequently, into an imperative of action aimed at enhancing that feature or bringing it into being. The last of the Genoa sections is fittingly titled “Genoa,” and it brings the whole marvelous sequence to its end, its proper end, as one could expect from one of its sections, “Knowing how to end ” (281). In a postcard to Overbeck written days after arriving in Genoa for his second winter there (October 14, 1881), Nietzsche said it was a city in which he lived “under the protection of the native patron saints, Columbus, Paganini, and Mazzini,” each exceptional in ways important to Nietzsche: an intrepid explorer with an educated idea of what lay beyond the known world, a musical creator and performer who could inspire and transfix his audience, a political actor with a vision of unitary founding for a whole dispersed peo7. Nietzsche repeated a version of this danger in EH: speaking of the composition-events that created the first three parts of Z, he says that had he the slightest tendency to superstition he would have to attribute his achievement to revelation (EH 3 Z 3).

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ple.8 In addition to these defining human exemplars, Genoa was a harbor city of commerce whose prosperity during the Renaissance made possible grand actions of building and shaping that Nietzsche, on his observant walks, saw as models of knowing and making. And Genoa is a steep city whose amphitheater shape, rising out of its curved harbor, offered vistas of grandeur in all directions. Nietzsche, that temporary alien resident occupying a single room—164 steps up, he reports of one of those winter residences—used his three winters in Genoa as the enriching stimulus to his thinking, which made essential gains in this unique city.9

“ T h e t h o u g h t o f d e at h ” ( 2 7 8 ) An observer savoring the surge of life in the city begins with “a melancholy happiness,” melancholy because the life lived full all around him is shadowed by his awareness of the certainty of death. Genoa, whose life occasions this reflection, also provides Nietzsche with its central image: Genoa was the port of embarkation for emigrants from northern Italy to the new world, and Nietzsche probably observed such embarkations: the shadow of death makes life “always like the departure of an emigrant ship” with keen passions of last words for family, friends, and acquaintances with whom one will never speak again. But only he thinks of death; those he observes in their vivid aliveness do not, and because they do not, the melancholy shadowing his opening happiness is gone by the end: it “makes me happy to see that human beings do not at all want to think the thought of death!” His happiness is anti-Christian, opposing the Christian “memento mori ”—remember in every pleasant moment of life that you die. And, in anticipation, it is anti-existentialist, opposing 8. Nietzsche met Mazzini and conversed with him during an evening and morning in Airolo, Switzerland, in the Gotthard Pass in February 1871, as Elisabeth records; see Benders, Friedrich Nietzsche: Chronik in Bildern und Texten, 237–38. 9. In a letter to Köselitz (February 5, 1882), Nietzsche spoke jokingly of himself and Rée sunning themselves at a spot on the Genoa coast “where someone would build in a hundred years (or 500 or 1000 as you will take in the best sense!) a little pillar in honor of Morgenröte,” which at the time included what became GS. There seems to be no pillar or plaque in Genoa honoring its philosophic admirer, not even on Salita della Battestina 8, the favored place across from the garden Villeta di Negro where he spent two winters. Buddensieg’s Nietzsches Italien (27–57) provides detailed, sympathetic, and deeply informed guidance to Nietzsche’s experience of Genoa. He shows how Nietzsche’s knowledge of Renaissance art and architecture enabled him to experience Genoa as a place in which the unique achievements of the Italian Renaissance took monumental shape in the Genoa palaces and gardens.

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Kierkegaard and his secular followers with their invitations to despair at the nihilism of it all. Knowing that “thirsty life and drunkenness for life” turns its back on “the dark fellow traveller” who actually shadows every act of life, and wanting that, Nietzsche ends on a deep wish: “I would like very much to do something to make the thought of life a hundred times more worth being thought to them.” This is no mere wish: he already possesses the thought of the eternal return of life which he is saving for the dramatic announcement that will end “Sanctus Januarius,” the consoling, comforting, invigorating thought of the eternal return of life that suits humans who in the main do not want to think the thought of death.

“ S ta r f r i e n d s h i p ” ( 2 7 9 ) The January theme of leaving behind turns to a final departure from a special friend pictured as their embarking on different journeys for different projects in different seas under different suns. Nietzsche’s words may apply to various departures in his life,10 but the magnitude of the tasks pictured in two ships that once lay together in harbor but were destined to embark on completely different journeys suggests that this leave-taking is from Wagner, the most important friendship of his life. It expresses full acceptance of the necessity of that great loss: “That we had to become estranged is the law above us—and through that we should become more worthy of honor to each other! And through that the thought of our former friendship should become more sacred!” But he may be invoking even greater departures: as a philosopher he knows he must depart from each of his true kin, from each of the few philosophers with whom he shares the most but from whom he must inevitably depart on that journey solely his own in a time solely his. With this departure, “Star friendship” repeats the final section of Daybreak: he must depart from all his “great teachers and predecessors,” and it will happen to him too: “Other birds will fly farther” (D 575).

“Architecture for knowers” (280) Contemplative Nietzsche speaks here explicitly of the buildings and gardens that would enhance a modern life of contemplation. Buildings built for Christian contemplation, the form of contemplation that coopted and almost ruined the very idea of contemplation, will not do for us, the “godless”; their 10. In Nietzsche and Rée, Robin Small applies the image to Nietzsche’s departure from Rée.

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buildings, even stripped of all decoration by the most drastic iconoclasm, still suggest by their structure self-abnegation and transcendence.11 In their place we need “quiet and wide, expansive places for reflection—places with long, high-ceilinged arcades for bad or all-too-sunny weather”; we need “a whole complex of buildings and sites that would give expression to the sublimity of contemplation and of stepping aside.” Nietzsche the walker aware of his setting says that “We want to have us translated into stone and plants; we want to take walks in ourselves when we wander these halls and gardens.” In Genoa Nietzsche was to a degree already experiencing such places. In a letter to Köselitz (November 27, 1881) he speaks of being “in my garden, the Villeta Negro near which I live (Stendhal once called it ‘one of the most picturesque spots in Italy’).” This garden lies across the steep walkway from the house in which Nietzsche rented a room; he walked it frequently, savoring its views of the whole of Genoa from its curved harbor below to the surrounding circle of steep hills above. A Renaissance garden, it was admired by Nietzsche for imposing a human shape on nature, a more congenial idea of a garden for him than the supposed “natural” wildness of the English garden, an ideal of garden architecture derived from romanticism and Rousseau.12 Genoa provides Nietzsche with the image for “Knowing how to end ” (281): a master’s knowledge of how to end is like what lay before him as he looked out to the sea from the Villeta Negro, like “the mountains of Portofino—there, where the bay of Genoa sings its melody to its end.” And his daily long walks provide the theme of “Gait” (282): the gait of his sentences, aided by the tempo of walking during which he composed them, allows him to criticize those who lack a sense for the gait of majesty.

“ P r e pa r a t o r y h u m a n b e i n g s ” ( 2 8 3 ) This Genoan section is martial and invigorating, calling for open spiritual warfare on behalf of the rule of knowledge. The preparatory ones addressed are “you knowers” only, you who are driven by the passion for 11. A summer 1881 workbook entry states: “That the vita contemplativa has always had to be religiosa has cost humanity dear!” KSA 14, p. 263. 12. See Buddensieg, Nietzsches Italien, 34–44. The metaphor of taking walks in ourselves provides Buddensieg with his theme for describing Nietzsche’s walks through Genoa and outlining a history of twentieth-century architecture responsive to Nietzsche’s demands for a new architecture for contemplation (Nietzsches Italien, 27–63). Buddensieg’s “Architecture as Empty Form” illuminates Nietzsche’s long interest in architecture by showing architecture to be a paradigm form of human ideal-based making.

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knowledge.13 They are to live in a way that helps prepare a “higher age” of spiritual courage in which knowers will want to be warlike, daring to advance a culture of rational enlightenment. The core of this call for a new nobility of knowers is a majestic martial sentence recruiting the “many preparatory human beings” necessary for such an undertaking, tolling the word Menschen nine times in a ringing call-up of “what certainly cannot spring from nothing, and just as little from the sand and slime of the present civilization and bigcity training.” “Believe me!,” he says, “the secret for harvesting the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest pleasure from existence is, live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius!” He spent a whole winter in sight of Vesuvius, and his visit to Pompeii made clear the disaster that could befall such daring. He commands “you knowers” to live dangerously, knowing full well that knowers traditionally commanded themselves to “Live cautiously!” Live knowing that genuine knowledge endangers both the community of believers and the rare unconventional knower! He ends on an insult: “The time will soon be past in which it could be enough for you to live hidden away in forests like shy deer!” He aims to end philosophy’s traditional practice of overt conformity hiding covert radicalism, by definition free, heretical, and vulnerable to persecution. “Knowledge itself will reach out for its due—it wants to rule and possess, and you with it!” This January beginning includes having the champions of knowledge aim for the wider rule of knowledge by displaying their own being ruled by knowledge, consolidating the Enlightenment that had already broken the rule of traditional superstition. In this section, as in many others in “Sanctus Januarius,” Nietzsche addresses an audience that he treats as his like. But the impression is misleading: he is the solitary who has completed the journey of the free mind into the essential insights; he has no like except the great singularities of the past and those of the future bound to fly farther. Those he addresses as his own kind are those who can constitute the new nobility of the new year, a nobility of knowers or seekers of knowledge whom he both challenges and flatters but above all seeks to generate.

“ fa i t h i n o n e s e l f ” ( 2 84 ) Section 284 uses the nine-times-repeated Menschen of section 283 to add a thought on the most select Menschen: knowers are the “the great selfdissatisfied,” with “a skeptic housed in them” against whom alone they can 13. Nauckhoff, like Kaufmann, translates “ihr Erkennenden” as “you seekers of knowledge.” The exclusive emphasis on seeking hides what the German words literally say, “you knowers.”

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win faith in themselves. “Excelsior” (285)14 begins with a speech addressed to one who has selected himself out by a radical renunciation of comforts that his passion for knowledge commands. The speech ends: “Mensch of renunciation, all this you want to renounce? Who will give you the strength for that? No one yet has had the strength for that!” That challenge to be the first leads to an image of gathered strength if one’s power “no longer flows off into a god.” It can be no accident that the speech to the renouncer employs two phrases that anticipate the two great topics that “Sanctus Januarius” is preparing to introduce: beyond the “seven solitudes” (309) lies the greatest possible gain of insight (310), while “eternal return,” the thought that dominated Nietzsche’s reflections in the previous summer, receives its long pondered first announcement in the penultimate section of “Sanctus Januarius” (341). The two phrases for these two gains appear first in this speech to the man of renunciation: these are the ultimate rewards reaped by the renunciations made for the sake of the passion for knowledge, the gains made by a disciplined thinking that does not flow off into a god. The “Interlude” (286) that follows looks back on the previous sections as “hopes” for “rosy dawn” (Morgenröte) that can be realized only on one’s own. In mentioning Orpheus, the author seems to renounce Orpheus’s legendary capacity to order the very stones and animals by his song, but these sections aspire to help their auditor reorder his thinking and join the new nobility of the mind: the author is an Orpheus who is not a magician but who knows the means of transformation. Two sections that look to future possibilities, “Delight in blindness” (287) and “High spirits” (288), are followed by three sections with a decidedly Genoan flavor.

“To the ships!” (289) “To the ships! ” is an exhortation that ends by identifying its audience: “To the ships, you philosophers!” Philosophers are its proper audience because what is needed is a new “overall philosophical justification of one’s way of life and thinking”: “a new justice is needed! And a new watchword!” Needed is the historic voyage of a Columbus to a new world that transforms the morality of pity, “however long humanity has spent learning and practicing it.” New philosophic voyagers will discover that “the moral earth too is round!” 14. Nietzsche was introduced to Longfellow’s Excelsior in 1876 by Mathilde Trampedach and may have it in mind in this celebration of persistence in face of life-threatening challenge.

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and not the flat earth of the old teaching. Nietzsche calls his proper readers to discover the actual round new world with antipodes, a new world of good and bad whose overall philosophical justification will also be learned and practiced for millennia. “One thing is needful” (290). The needful thing, giving style to one’s character, is a lesson for the philosophers called to the ships. They are to take as a model those who had “palaces to build and gardens to design” in Genoa: they teach that one must “resist giving nature free rein.” Theirs is the way of life contrary to those “who hate the constraint of style,” whose who “could be minds of the first rank” but who “shape or interpret their surroundings as free nature—wild, arbitrary, fantastic, disorderly, and surprising.” Self-constraining Nietzsche displays a desire to let be when he adds, “they are well advised to do so because only thus do they please themselves!” So “the one thing needful” receives a second definition: “that a human being attain satisfaction with himself.” This is desirable because of humanity’s long moral history: it forestalls the worst, “that one avenge oneself for” one’s self-dissatisfaction.

“Genoa” (291) Nietzsche knows how to end his Genoa-based reflections: celebrating the builders of Genoa’s Renaissance palaces, he casts their achievements in the language of the ontology his workbooks show him discovering in the previous summer. What drove the builders of Genoa’s palaces is a visible expression of what drives every event.15 With their stone monuments to themselves, their builders say “they lived and wanted to live on.” He sees their “faces” in their buildings, and they tell him “they were well disposed to life however badly they may often have been disposed to themselves.”16 Nietzsche’s word builder fuses architect and owner, for the builder designed the building and its ornaments and did so out of the experiences of the Genoan commercial elite that sent their ships around the globe newly discovered by one of their own, placing “a New World next to the Old.” Nietzsche sees the builder resting his gaze on everything built near and far, and his gaze “perpetrates violence and 15. Krell gives a poetic translation of this section in The Good European, 216. Buddensieg, an architectural historian, gives a rich account of the section (Nietzsches Italien, 45–51). 16. In the notebook he carried on his walks in Genoa in the fall of 1881 (N V 7), Nietzsche assigned these initial judgments about Genoan architecture to “Z” (KSA 14, p. 265). His first-ever mention of his Zarathustra appeared in this notebook only a few pages earlier.

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conquest” because he “wants to fit all this into his plan and finally make it his property by making it a piece of his plan.” Genoan palaces attest to a “magnificent insatiable self-centeredness of the lust for possession and spoil.” Nietzsche’s singular becomes plural as he thinks of the European global expansion that followed Columbus’s discoveries and pictures “these people” as “recognizing no boundary in the wider world,” while at home “each flared up against the other and invented a way to express his superiority,” placing between himself and his neighbors his personal “infinitude” of unsurpassable singularity. Nietzsche looks “north” to his homeland to contrast the spirit displayed by German urban architecture, a spirit in which “law rules along with the common desire for law-abidingness and obedience.” The soul of the builder there is governed by an “internal making yourself the same and getting in line.” This contrast leads to a culminating thought on the Genoan palaces, focused not on the builder but on the person you see, or imagine you see when you turn any corner in Genoa: “a human being apart who knows the sea, adventure, and the Orient,” “who measures everything already established and old with envious eyes”—envy being the positive envy of Hesiod that does not poison the soul of the envier or aim to bring down the envied but admires the envied with a passion to surpass it. The envious Genoan viewer of a Genoan palace would like to “found all this anew at least in thought, to lay his hand on it and his meaning into it.” That spirit of self-admiration and imagined surpassing he may well experience “only for the moment of a sunny afternoon when his insatiable and melancholy soul feels sated for once, and only what is his own and nothing alien may appear to his eye.” And he ends in the Genoan present, imagining what it means to live amid such past greatness: the Genoan builders do live on in the life of the Genoese, edifying and instructing those who live amid the stone grandeur they built to memorialize themselves.

Chapter 11

The Center of “Sanctus Januarius”

Oh ihr Habsüchtigen, ihr Wissensgierigen KSA 1 4 , p . 2 6 8

“ T h e h i s t o r y o f e v e r y d ay ” ( 3 0 8 ) Who are you, my dear reader, you, du? Are you of the standard sort who spend every day seeking the usually sought “praise, usefulness, respectability”? Or are you of the rarer kind, a Nierenprüfer who spends every day examining your inwardness, driven to understand who and what you are, driven to know yourself—one of those few with a conscience on your conscience, a passion to turn your conscience and all the other drives of your moral nature into an object of science? If you are, consider what I want to say to you here at the center, for it’s you I want as a reader, one whose history of every day resembles my own in being a passionate search for knowledge where it lies nearest, self-knowledge.1 Thus does Nietzsche prepare the central sections of “Sanctus Januarius,” selecting out his special reader, inviting his own kind to what he presents as a secret. But presenting it at all makes it a secret he does not want to keep wholly to himself. A secret of the deepest solitude or inwardness, it is not a wholly 1. Nierenprüfer is apparently Nietzsche’s coinage, his adjustment of the phrase auf Herz und Nieren prüfen; the word singles out one who scrutinizes his innards down to his very kidneys. See Langer, Nietzsche’s Gay Science, 192n1.

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secret secret; he would like to share it with you, du. These are speeches written out of love for the unknown ones whose special teacher he can be.

“Out of the seventh solitude” (309) The “seventh solitude” is an image of Nietzsche’s own devising, his play on the traditional image of the seventh heaven, the ultimate state that can be arrived at—bliss in the seventh heaven, what in the seventh solitude?2 Because this section follows 308, the seventh solitude appears as what a knower of conscience is ultimately driven to understand, the ultimate gain for the seeker of self-knowledge. But the section reports only another tearing away, yet another forsaking of a place in which “the wanderer” could have pleasantly tarried and given up his wandering. But this wanderer is the author of four previous books on the free mind, and he knows that here he is completing the last book of his wandering, completing it because his wandering, his always tearing away, brought him to an ultimate point, for the wanderer did not meander, he was driven, and what drove him is “This inclination and compulsion to the true, actual, un-apparent, certain!” He is driven by what is given in him, what he cannot shed, and it drives him now to his deepest experience. For what the wanderer now forsakes is a “garden of Armida,” the garden that tempted Rinaldo, the leader of the First Crusade, to forgo capturing Jerusalem at the very moment capture seemed possible.3 Section 309 is rightfully the center of “Sanctus Januarius,” the thirty-fourth of its sixty-seven sections, for this tearing away is the last before the victory of understanding treated as a secret in the next section, “Will and wave.” That section, by intimating a kind of ultimate understanding, an ultimate conquest and victory, completes the report from the seventh solitude. Tearing himself away from 2. In Nietzsche’s books “seventh solitude” appears only twice, here at the center of “Sanctus Januarius” and at the center of what turned out to be one of the last works he finished for publication, Dionysos Dithyrambs. “Das Feuerzeichen” is the fifth of the nine poems in that collection, and its last two stanzas end on “the seventh solitude” as what he still aims to capture. That center therefore has the same structure as “Sanctus Januarius”: it too is prelude to what is next, and there too, what is next, The Sun Sinks, ends by having gained what lies beyond the seventh solitude; just what that is is set out in the next poem, “The Lament of Ariadne.” The expression sieben Einsamkeiten, “seven solitudes,” appears in GS 285 and in A Foreword; Nietzsche also used it in a letter to Resa von Schirnhofer, June 1885, and ten times in the Nachlass from 1882 to 1885, some in 1883 in connection with Zarathustra. 3. As first set out in Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Gerusalemme Liberata (1575) and later a popular opera theme.

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Armida’s garden—from the last temptation of the inquirer, which turns out to be a comfortable skepticism4—allowed this Rinaldo to enter the holy city and possess it, possess the ultimate, inferred truth of understanding based on self-understanding: bliss for a seeker of knowledge. The center of “Sanctus Januarius” artfully moves the focus to “Will and wave,” justifying its finality beyond the seventh solitude.

“ W i l l a n d wav e ” ( 3 1 0 ) The two chief words of the title, Wille and Welle, share all their letters but one: the very letters of the words suggest the foundational gain beyond the seventh solitude, insight into the kinship of the wanderer’s will to know and the surge of the waves crashing into the rocky cliff on the sea near Genoa—the human in its highest drivenness is akin to the rest of nature, whose secret the wanderer can now infer. In the prose poetry of “Will and wave,” Nietzsche offers his first intimation of insight into the fundamental fact and his first statement of the affirmation that insight evokes. The center of “Sanctus Januarius” is the true center of Nietzsche’s life of inquiry, and it is structured to intimate to you what the figure introduced at its end, Zarathustra, will speak only to “you wisest.” “How greedily this wave comes in, as if it had to reach something! How it creeps with terrifying haste on into the inmost crevices of the rocky cliff ! It appears that it wants to beat someone to it, that there is something hidden that has value, high value.” These first abrupt descriptions of the actions of the wave focus on the appearance its action suggests to the wanderer who refuses Armida’s garden: the wave seems to him to evince his own drivenness in his greed to penetrate to the inner truth of things resistant to entry. The wave’s crashing into the rugged cliff and penetrating its cracks and crevices make it seem that it has what he has, an intention and a goal; and in its action of surging into the most hidden nooks, the wave too seems to want to outdo some rival, all rivals, to be the first to enter what has remained hidden from all driven inquirers that all have highly prized. His next observation, linked to and separated from the first by a dash, is the next action of the wave: “—And now it comes back, somewhat slower, still completely white from excitement,” an appearance that again compels him to wonder what appearance hides: “— is it disappointed? Did it find what it sought? Is it feigning disappointment?” The observer’s three questions resemble his initial observations in the essen4. Judging from Nietzsche’s later presentations of this greatest event, especially BGE 34–37.

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tial respect: they betray what he is like in his seeking. Was he disappointed or did he find what he sought and feign disappointment to keep his hard-won secret secret by feigning? Another dash introduces the next onrushing wave: “—But already another wave nears, greedier and wilder still than the first, and its soul too appears to be full of secrets and of the passions of treasurehunting.” The same appearance by that still more driven treasure-hunter is enough to allow its observer a settled inference as a satisfied conclusion: “So live the waves,—so live we, the willing!—More I won’t say.” His promise not to say more seems to be addressed to the waves, for he says: “—So? You mistrust me? You’re upset with me, you lovely monsters? You fear I might betray your secret completely?” The threat of betrayal pervades the rest of the section, a dialogue between observer and observed to which the observer supplies all the words. The scene seems to have shifted, with the observer no longer safely watching as waves crash and penetrate the rocky cliff, for he says, “Well, be upset with me, lift your green dangerous bodies as high as you can, build a wall between me and the sun—as now!” Now he is in the waves, immersed in what lives as he lives and whose rising green now blocks out the sun—the sun that seemed to be the source of all sight and insight, the traditional image of the fixed and knowable for those who took themselves out of the constant flow. By rising into a wall between him and the sun, the endlessly moving waves block out any illusion of fixity and permanence, for “Truly, there is nothing more left of the world than green twilight and green lightning.” Submerged within waves—as Nietzsche, an avid swimmer in the Mediterranean, often was—he finds that they now image the whole for him, suffusing everything in their flowing green. Immersed, limited to what they permit him to see, he is utterly well-disposed toward them: “Do as you want, you exuberant ones, roar with passion and malice—or dive under again, pour your emeralds down into the deepest deep, toss your endless white mane of foam and spray over them.” A human being immersed in waves, inviting them to be what they are, to do what they do, confers on them the ultimate blessing: “—es ist mir Alles recht—,” everything you do is right to me, everything you do suits me as fitting. He, a human in the waves, expresses his nature by judging worth; he unconditionally affirms what they are as they are. Speaking the straightforward language of everyday usage, far from technical or arcane formulations, he states with engaging simplicity the most profound human embrace of the world as it presents itself and is to one immersed in it, enclosed within it. His profound affirmation—es ist mir Alles recht—is grounded in an equally profound reason: “everything suits me because everything befits you so well, and I am so well disposed to you for

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everything.” Immersed in surging passage, he declares his love for it as it is, and his declaration of love performs the human act of conferring rightness and goodness on the surgings and plungings wholly lacking right or good apart from human conferral. The lover’s declaration of love responds to what he feared the waves might suspect: betrayal in his speaking of them as he did. Nature loves to hide and would find it unbecoming for its nakedness to be revealed. He therefore avows that his love precludes betrayal: “how could I betray you!”—you, sign and symbol of an endless process of surging and subsiding, giving and taking that I find right and good. But he has a better proof of his love and loyalty, and he offers it to the waves in his last words; appealing to them to “Listen well!,” he says, “I know you and your secret, I know your kind! You and I, we are of the same kind!—You and I, we have one secret!” Their secret is safe with him because betraying them betrays him. Betraying neither, his words are nevertheless enough for anyone of his kind to be set on the path of discovery: a driven inquirer and the waves of the sea off Genoa are of one kind, kin in their nature; the highest form of nature is akin to nature itself, exemplary of nature itself. How could the highest nature do anything but love the whole which shows itself to him as akin? And how could he not look for ways to declare his love? “Will and wave” closes by swearing secrecy to his kin. But it is the oath of a lover who writes what he loves, and he ends his book on a double promise: a new teaching and a new teacher. That teaching, when fully set out by the new teacher in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, will openly declare his love while only intimating what he loves and why he loves it—and the intimations will not, or not quite, betray the shared secret.

“Refracted light” (311) Section 311 artfully meets the challenge of its placement just after the insight gained and the resolve marshaled at the center, the delicate restraint that implied the secret beyond the seventh solitude while not betraying it. Insight and restraint are the topic of “Refracted light,” a framed speech meditating on the harm that a knower of the secret can inflict. The frame enclosing the speech takes bravery as a settled condition but acknowledges “that one is not always brave.” The speech is a lament that one of “us,” solitaries beyond the seventh solitude, allows himself when he tires. Knowing the secret, he knows his knowledge can harm, and it hurts him to harm. He knows too the extreme degree of deviation within the human species, the order of rank that has led him to know too that he is “so little in agreement with you people and have

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so much truth on my side.” And he knows finally that he looks ridiculous to the rest of us in the life he has chosen. Knowing all that, it pleases him to give pleasure as a knower knowing the limits of knowledge: “Here are my faults and slips,” he could say, “here is my delusion, my bad taste, my confusion, my tears, my vanity, my owl-hiddenness, my contradictions! Here you can laugh! Laugh and be merry!” A profound reason allows him to take pleasure in others’ pleasure in finding him ridiculous: “I’m not angry at the law and nature of things that want faults and slips to cause merriment!” But the extreme degree of deviation within the human species extends to those who are deeply, spiritually angry at the law and nature of things, as he indicates by quoting sacred Christian words that begin the Sermon on the Mount: “Jesus began to preach, and to say, Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 4:17). He ends his speech on how different he is: “I would not miss myself if I were not there. Dispensable are we all!” The law and nature of things dispenses with everything it generates—a truth that could harm those trained to believe otherwise about themselves. The framing sentence at the end acknowledges that when he is brave he does not “think about that”—about the harm his difference can cause and the pleasure he could give as an object of comedy. But when the title is applied to the bravery of the frame and the pleasure-giving accommodation of the speech, the now settled course for the knower of the secret beyond the seventh solitude becomes visible: so refract the light as to invite to it those who can share its pleasures while avoiding harm to the others as far as that is possible. “Will and wave” refracts the light: More I won’t say, said the driven inquirer to the waves of the sea. But more he did say in his original version of “Will and wave,” for he deleted five words from the fair copy of his text before sending it to the printer. The resulting deepened silence makes good his oath to the waves because the words he deleted could well betray the secret beyond the seventh solitude at the center of “Sanctus Januarius.” The words assign two names to the waves and fail to refract the light: “Oh ihr Habsüchtigen, ihr Wissensgierigen”—“Oh you possession-addicts, you knowledge-greedy.”5 The deleted words say more because they name two qualities that the waves 5. See KSA 14, p. 268. Before giving the names, the shorter original version ran: “These waves come on so greedily, as if there was something to reach, and they crawl into the inmost crevices of the rocky cliff—is then something hidden there? Then they come somewhat more slowly back—but already a new wave nears, greedier and wilder than the first, and appears again to be full of mysteries and hidden treasures.”

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metaphorically exhibit and that he knows to be true of himself, a general quality and a particular one: Habsucht, the drive to possess, is the comprehensive quality of all beings, Wissensgier is the most spiritual quality of beings.6 These terms or their equivalents appear with some frequency in early entries in the workbook Nietzsche filled during the spring, summer, and fall of 1881, Mette number M III 1 (KGW V2 11 [1]–[348]/KSA 9 11). These entries show him learning his greatest insight into himself as inquirer and into all other objects of inquiry and then experimenting with a vocabulary to capture and convey it, the Wissensgier or passion for knowledge that he knew in himself and that he treats as the key to the comprehensive quality, the dynamic force of Habsucht he infers to be present in all things. The importance of these terms for Nietzsche’s course as a philosopher lies in their being early versions of the phrase he would settle on in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil to express both the comprehensive quality of all beings and the defining quality of the highest beings, Wille zur Macht, will to power, a phrase that first appears in its full sense for the mature Nietzsche in a workbook that prepares Thus Spoke Zarathustra (KSA 10 5 [1] November 1882–November 1883) and then in the carefully plotted sequence of chapters that present it to his reader in the proper way in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil.7 The center of “Sanctus Januarius” takes the one who forsakes Armida’s garden into the deepest reach of Nietzsche’s philosophy, the ultimate fruit of the hard years of disciplined solitary inquiry; “Will and wave” belongs just after the temptation at the center of “Sanctus Januarius” as the report on the basic insight made possible by moving beyond the seventh solitude. Gaining this insight, the lover of knowledge finds that it has consequences. The center of “Sanctus Januarius” implies the end of “Sanctus Januarius”; es ist mir Alles recht triggers a love, a consequent love: to know the world is to love the world. That love belongs at the end of “Sanctus Januarius” as the first announcement of eternal return, the highest affirmation of the world most deeply known, just as that love belonged at the beginning of “Sanctus Januarius” in the thinker’s resolve for the new year. “More I won’t say”—that declaration of restraint on the fundamental matter holds not only for “Sanctus Januarius” but also for the two great works 6. Habsucht is a common German word for greed or avarice and is literally “addiction to having”; Wissensgier is a rarer word meaning literally “greed for knowledge.” 7. Langer recognizes that the kinship between the thinker’s will and the wave in GS 310 indicates the will to power view (Nietzsche’s Gay Science, 191).

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of Nietzsche’s maturity: while not shy about stating the will to power view baldly, Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil are restrained both in describing what it means and in arguing for it. And for good reason: this is a province of inquiry reserved for one like himself who refuses Armida’s garden and pursues the true to the end. Pointers are enough, they are all that is wanted by such a wanderer with such a truth. But it is not only restraint that the center of “Sanctus Januarius” shares with the two books that present the central matter more elaborately: the peculiar structure of the central sequence of “Sanctus Januarius,” its center of temptation followed by a slightly eccentric presentation of the fundamental inference that lies beyond it, is a model for Nietzsche’s other two presentations that offer more complicated versions of this movement. The central section of “The Free Mind” chapter of Beyond Good and Evil (34) raises a serious question about the epistemological skepticism that dominates contemporary philosophy. While such skepticism is necessary, Nietzsche suggests that it is found desirable because it makes modern morality unassailable (35). Just after these central considerations, Nietzsche presents his inferential conclusion as a hypothetical argument (36), but its conclusion shocks the invited auditors into revulsion at the seeming immorality of his inference (37). The Armida’s garden in which contemporary free minds find a comfortable end to their journey keeps them from pushing on to the ultimate inference that looks so horrifying. The author’s response in Beyond Good and Evil, “On the contrary! On the contrary, my friends,” could well be worded es ist mir Alles recht. Thus Spoke Zarathustra too follows this pattern of temptation and a move beyond. The even more complicated center of its second part places the fundamental event of temptation and the inducement to move beyond it in the poetry, the song and dance of “The Dance Song,” where his love of the temptress Wild Wisdom, skepticism in its most alluring form, is overcome by love of Life for what she alluringly suggests about herself, that she is “not unfathomable”—and what Life hints leads an at first unbelieving Zarathustra to report to “you wisest” what Life taught him and to suggest to them that they speak of it together and recognize the consequence of this knowledge: “There is many a house yet to be built” (“On Self-Overcoming”). If the look forward into the books that followed “Sanctus Januarius” helps illuminate its center, the look backward into that workbook that preceded it helps even more. For what “Will and wave” suggests appears in far greater detail in M III 1, the workbook celebrated for the first-ever entry on eternal return and the first glimpse of Zarathustra as the returned founding teacher. As a writing intended for the public, “Sanctus Januarius” does what M III 1 could not: plot a location within a writing as the proper place to first an-

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nounce the two fundamental thoughts: let the insight into will to power arise out of the center and let its consequent thought of eternal return come at the end, just after “The dying Socrates” or the death of the old teacher/teaching, and just before “Incipit tragoedia” announces the return of the most portentous of all founding teachers, Zarathustra. In M III 1 the placement of the two fundamental thoughts is not plotted; they just fall where they fall within the chronological sequence of entries as Nietzsche, returning from his walks, wrote them out in his workbook, day after day, in his room in the Durisch house in Sils Maria. For that reason M III 1 is of singular interest with respect to those two thoughts whose public disclosure demanded artfulness by an artist of writing: Just where did they fall nonartfully? Did preceding thoughts give their coming a logic? Yes, M III 1 answers, and shows what they were. In particular and of greatest importance, M III 1 shows that the thought of eternal return—whose coming Nietzsche dated “beginning of August 1881”— did not fall from the sky but welled up as a consequence of the indispensable preceding thought, itself arrived at in the previous days or weeks, with the previous months displaying a gradual deepening of insight into its range and applicability as Habsucht and Wissensgier.8 8. A second workbook, containing entries made in Genoa in the fall of 1881, is also important for entries whose fresh gains Nietzsche could often copy almost unchanged into his manuscript of GS, especially “Sanctus Januarius.” It is a small pocket notebook, Mette number N V 7 (KGW V 2 12/KSA 9 12), of the sort Nietzsche carried on his daily walks, one of the “splendid” notebooks he received from his mother and Elisabeth on October 4, 1881, in Genoa; it has a soft, flexible, white faux-leather cover and is well bound with high-quality paper; its two hundred pages are almost completely full of writing, all in pencil.

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Backgrounds to the Center of “Sanctus Januarius”

Herrliche Entdeckung KSA 9 11 [72]

After sending the fair copy of Morgenröte to Schmeitzner on March 13, 1881, Nietzsche, still in Genoa after his first winter there, began a new workbook to carry forward the thinking of Morgenröte. That large-format workbook, M III 1, is the kind he kept in his room to write down the thoughts composed on his seven- to eight-hour walks; it is completely filled with entries from the spring, summer, and fall of 1881.1 These were months of desired solitude that began in Genoa, was broken by a May spent with Köselitz in Recoaro,2 but resumed in Recoaro for all of June before he moved to the Engadin for his first summer in Sils Maria, arriving on July 4 and leaving on October 1.3 During 1. M III 1 is a hardcover workbook, 9 by 6 inches, with 158 lined pages. Entries fill the two inside covers as well as almost all the pages. Nietzsche began at the back and moved forward, writing on the left-hand pages only, sometimes in pencil, mostly in ink. When he reached the front he crossed to the right hand pages and moved toward the back. Only on the front pages and the back cover are the entries out of chronological order. 2. This long-anticipated stay with Köselitz turned out not only to be difficult but to be the last extended period Nietzsche ever spent with a friend; his health and his task would permit only solitude (to Overbeck, May 3, 1881). 3. In a letter to Köselitz (July 8, 1881) Nietzsche reported the lucky accident that introduced him to Sils Maria—“a gift as unexpected as unearned.” Three hours in St. Moritz persuaded him that he would have to change his summer plans and leave the Engadin; a fellow traveler in

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this time he had no visitors and wanted none, asking his sister to please keep the name Sils Maria a secret from his friends and acquaintances.4 The M III 1 entries from these solitary months of discovery are neat and serial, usually without even a line separating the entries; their chronological sequence gives passive evidence of Nietzsche’s actual movement of thought in mid-1881. The entries are rarely diary-like or confessional; most of them, already well polished and organized, are drafts meant for publication after further polishing. M III 1 displays a thinker long practiced in pursuing his thoughts on long walks on his good days, the initial honing and ordering occurring underway and written out later in his room.5 The first of the only two entries to bear a date, “Beginning of August 1881 in Sils Maria,” falls almost halfway through the workbook and memorializes Nietzsche’s first mention of eternal return as his own teaching by assigning it its own date [141].6 Numerous entries on the days and weeks before this date display a process of reasoning in which his burrowing into morality, begun in Things Human All Too Human, leads to a the coach from St. Moritz, a young man from Sils Maria, a few miles up the valley, the owner of the Hotel Alpenrose, suggested that he try Sils. This lucky accident solved permanently a serious problem Nietzsche faced: where could he tolerate summers? 4. Nietzsche to Elisabeth, July 7, 1881. Protection for his desired solitude had become characteristic; he asked Overbeck to “Hide the place I’m staying from everyone” during his first summer in the Engadin (June 23, 1879). In late 1880 when he first moved to Genoa he told his mother and Elisabeth to tell everyone that “I’m in San Remo: in fact I’m in Genoa and will remain here” (November 16, 1880); he asked Köselitz to do the same (November 17, 1880), and asked Overbeck to help him secure his “attic room solitude” and “deny my existence in Genoa” (second half of November 1880). In Sils Maria in mid-August 1881, after more than six weeks of solitude, he learned that Rée planned to visit him to serve as secretary and aide to the author of Daybreak, a book that deeply pleased him. Nietzsche wrote to Elisabeth pleading with her to forestall any such visit, even threatening to leave Europe for the highlands of Mexico if his solitude could not be maintained (postcard, August 18, 1881). 5. This practice of ambulatory thinking allowed Nietzsche to say of Flaubert, a sedentary writer who claimed that one cannot think except while sitting, “Caught you, you nihilist. Ass-iduity is the sin against the Holy Spirit. Only thoughts reached by walking have value” (TI  Maxims and Arrows 34 [Polt translation, modified]). “On his good days”: Nietzsche’s summer stay in Sils Maria in 1881, like his previous month in Recoaro, was marked by particularly frequent and acute attacks of headaches and vomiting lasting two or three days during which he was confined to his room. Almost all of his letters from Sils Maria mention the attacks. 6. All references to entries of M III 1 in the KGW V 2 11/KSA 9 11 version will be to their bracketed number and included in the text. The only other entry in M III 1 to bear a date is [197], dated “26. August 1881”; it too is a book plan to announce eternal return.

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breakthrough in understanding the drives and then to a comprehensive ontological inference. Nietzsche recognized that inference to be the ultimate positive gain of his free mind experiment, allowing him to say on the back cover of the 1882 Gay Science that his series of writings on the ideal of the free mind here comes to its end. M III 1 is the most valuable of all of Nietzsche’s workbooks because its pages make visible through their chronological sequence his arrival at conclusions that move beyond the ideal of the free mind to an insight and to an ideal to which the free mind can freely bind itself. But M III 1 as it exists in the KGW/KSA version thwarts any effort to read it in a chronologically attentive way. Its editors simply omit without notice entries that they judged to be drafts of some section of a published work or a later workbook. Some omitted entries are reproduced in the KSA Kommentar volume (KSA 14), but they are usually designated only Vs. (Vorstufe) with no indication of their original workbook.7 The few that do state that they are from M III 1 sometimes give a page number, but the page number is to the pages of the workbook with no indication of where that page might be in reference to the entries in their printed version. The chronology of Nietzsche’s crucial discoveries during his writing of the entries in M III 1 can be recovered only through a study of the actual workbook.8

Habsucht, the Comprehensive Drive Synonyms and near-synonyms of Habsucht appear early in M III 1, in the first entry in fact, although the word itself appears only later.9 That first entry, omitted by KGW, begins on the first page, the left-hand page opposite the back inside cover; it bears a title that Nietzsche seems to have written above it after beginning the text on the first ruled line:

7. The omitted entries will be listed in the Nachbericht volume of The Gay Science, which does not yet exist. Groddeck, “ ‘Vorstufe’ und ‘Fragment,’ ” shows the arbitrariness of KGW’s distinction between Vorstufe and Fragment (its printed entries) but without considering the impediments the omissions introduce for studying any of the workbooks in which a chronological order might be important. 8. M III 1 is housed in the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv in Weimar, Bestand 71; a photographed version is available at the New York Public Library, and an online facsimile version at Nietzsche Source. 9. My account of Habsucht and its near synonyms benefited greatly from discussions with George A. Dunn, who read an earlier version of this chapter. Some of the language I use and the concepts I develop are his.

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‘I ’—‘Property’—‘Love’—‘Nourishment.’— Our love for the neighbor is often our urge for new property—likewise our thirst for knowledge (for novelty) We become surfeited with the old, as with a landscape, after 3 months. The possessed becomes less through possession, therefore we desire more. Our passion for ourselves so wants to  maintain itself that it more and more transforms itself into ‘our very self.’ It is egoism: also precisely our love[,] that outstretching of our arms for possession. When we see someone suffering, we use the opportunity to take possession of him.—The meaning of boredom: our possession diminishes almost excruciatingly.—Even surfeit of too much possession can be love.

The title of the entry could serve as a fitting title for the whole workbook: primary matters like its list of four, beginning with “I,” with self-knowledge, can all be understood to share a primary “urge” (Drang). That urge is present in phenomena as diverse as the moral matters that dominate Nietzsche’s concerns throughout the workbook like “love of neighbor” and the drive that moves an inquirer like Nietzsche, the “thirst for knowledge.” All can be understood to share a fundamental drive to acquire: Habsucht.10 As Marco Brusotti remarks, this first entry “makes out of the urge for property a near universal pattern of interpretation,” a pattern that becomes in fact universal as Nietzsche’s reflections on Habsucht deepen.11 The first entry of M III 1 thus stands with its title at the head of the workbook as a herald of Nietzsche’s dual investigations: into the self-knowledge of the rare being defined by the passion for knowledge, and into knowledge of the passions driving moral judgments; self-knowledge and knowledge of good and evil are Nietzsche’s way in to his comprehensive ontological thought. Entries in M III 1 turn early to a “Chief thought! ” [7], an imperative investi10. As Nietzsche stated when he rewrote this first entry of M III 1 for GS 14, “All the things that are called Love”: it begins “Habsucht and love: such different feelings these terms evoke!”—yet they name the same thing, as the section goes on to argue. A first brief statement on the “habsüchtig” character of human beings appeared in D 281. Habsucht appears in GS 7, 14, 242, 249; in both 14 and 249 it is the chief theme. 11. Brusotti, Die Leidenschaft der Erkenntnis, 317n18; see 471–78 for the roots of Nietzsche’s term Habsucht in Emerson. Rereading Emerson in late 1881, Nietzsche wrote in the margin of page 1 of his copy of Versuche, “Oh, about our Habsucht! I feel nothing of selflessness, much more an all-desiring self which through many individuals—as through their eyes sees and as with their hands grasps, a self that also calls back the whole past, that wants to lose nothing of what could belong to it” (KSA 9 13 [7]). Nietzsche rewrote this marginal note for GS 249.

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gation of the errors of individual consciousness. Just before that chief thought Nietzsche wrote an entry that KGW omitted because it is a draft for Gay Science 107, “Our ultimate gratitude to art.”12 The omission deprives the reader of KGW of Nietzsche’s direct association in two sequential items of two kinds of illusion; in the omitted entry, the illusions of art we affirm, in “Chief thought! ” illusions we must learn to reject like the illusion of fixed individuality: the individual is only a sum of conscious sensations and judgments and errors, a belief, a particle of the true life-system or many particles thought together or imagined together, a ‘unity’ that does not stand fast. We are buds on a tree—what do we know of what can become of us in the interests of the tree! . . . Stop feeling like such a fantastic ego!

Seeing through the false suppositions about one’s very self allows one to see the continuity between what I am and what is, “the true life-system.” The way Nietzsche wrote out this “Chief thought!” testifies to its intensity, for it grew under his pen. Instead of turning the page when he reached the bottom of the left-hand page with this underlined sentence he continued across to the bottom of the blank right-hand page in order to expand, possibly later, the imperative of this insight into the self: Learn step by step to throw away the putative individual! Realize egoism is an error! And don’t understand altruism as its opposite!

The imperatives go further: these four added lines took him to the bottom of the right-hand page and forced him to draw a line leading further up the page to continue his reasoning about altruism, still in exclamatory sentences: That would be the love of the other apparently other individual! No! Get away from ‘me’ and ‘you’! Think cosmically!

The imperatives about morality imply a wider imperative about cosmology. The rhetoric of this entry leaves open whether Nietzsche addressed its imperatives to himself or to his imagined audience; here it may be both. On the 12. This omitted entry is found whole in KSA 14 Kommentar on GS 107, p. 253. The entry is the first three sentences of GS 107, with some alterations in the published version. GS 107 was one of the last that Nietzsche rewrote after receiving the page proofs, and the changes he made are highly important; I discuss them in my Conclusion, below, pp. 329–31.

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whole he rarely addressed the entries to himself; they are even more rarely confessional but are instead drafts for publication, less an account to himself of what he is thinking than an account of what he is thinking he should say. Still, the next entries continue his thoughts on egoism with notes that do seem to be addressed to himself: “Egoism as the general ‘great madness’— likewise to deduce—physiological” [8].13 “To cultivate the evil but indispensable drives in the same way; like those of dissimulation (in art) therefore nondamaging. To seek the parallel to ‘art’!” [9]. Entry [10] fulfills this imperative: Wanting to know the things as they are—that alone is the good disposition . . . not the looking to others and seeing with other eyes—that would only be a place-change of egoistic seeing. We want to heal ourselves of the great fundamental madness of measuring everything by ourselves.

Rigorously aware of the propensity that makes this Protagorean dictum seem inescapably true, Nietzsche seeks a fundamental thinking about consciousness that investigates its physical basis in complex unconscious processes, his goal being to free consciousness from the prejudices of those processes. That requires: Increase indifference! And thereby practice seeing with other eyes: practice, to see without human relations, therefore objectively. To cure the great human madness! Where does it come from? From fear . . . The highest selfishness has its opposite not in the love of the other! Instead, in neutral, objective seeing! The passion for that despite all personal considerations, despite all ‘comfortable’ and uncomfortable ‘truths’ is the highest— therefore rarest till now!

Highest is the mind freeing itself into indifference in order to understand and assess the understood. Only indifference, seeing with nonegoistic eyes, can break through the narrow perspective of both our individuality and our humanness.14 Parallel to art’s conscious making are unconscious makings of human instinct and human perceiving and conceiving: together they construct 13. Above the ruled first line on which he wrote these words, Nietzsche wrote out a thought on egoism that he must have added later: “Egoism is the perspectival law of selfishness [Eigennutzes].” It begins in the upper margin above entry [8] and continues in three more half-lines written into the space between [8] and [9]. KGW omitted this addition. 14. On “indifference” see Brusotti, Die Leidenschaft der Erkenntnis, 312–28.

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an inhabitable world for humans—“On Truth and Lie in the Extra-moral Sense” would be a fitting title for this whole workbook. These entries on illusion bring together two primary matters customarily kept separate, the pleasurable gains of art and the unpleasant gains of insight into the involuntary activities of instinct and awareness; together the pleasant and the unpleasant show the inevitability of deception, of living in untruth. The parallels between conscious and unconscious making continue in entry [18], “Extent of the poetic force,” which brings together the poetic force and science as an aspect of the drive to understand. Science is a latecomer to the primordial, unavoidable image- and ideal-making that is the constructive force behind all human action and human development. That entry is followed by a page-long entry over which stands a large “Or?—.” KGW omits it because Nietzsche used it as section 192 of Beyond Good and Evil.15 This use of the entry five years later shows that the “Or?—” in the 1881 M III 1 gives Nietzsche’s settled view of the relation of science and the poetic force. In Beyond Good and Evil, he added a summary to close: “we are from the ground up and from time immemorial—accustomed to lying. Or, to express it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short more comfortably: one is much more an artist than one knows.” From the poetic drive and science, M III 1 turns back to “the moral drives” and their fundamental ground. Entry [19] opens on the possibility that the moral drives all express a single basic force not yet known but perhaps knowable: “Perhaps all the moral drives can be traced back to Haben-wollen and Halten-wollen”; our desire to have and to hold on to becomes ever more refined because we “grasp more and more how hard it is to have and how merely apparent having always knows how to escape us.” Finally, we realize that only “complete knowing” can count as complete having; complete knowing is therefore “possession,” Besitz, the word that dominates the rest of the entry, the word present in the very first entry of M III 1. “To this degree knowledge would be the last stage of morality”—morality culminates in knowledge of the submoral passion driving all morality. The drive to know comes to know itself as a transmoral spiritual/intellectual Haben-wollen and Halten-wollen. The truth-lover comes to know the truth that his passion is a refined expression of the primitive will to appropriate, the drive that constitutes the self and the self ’s unconscious production of the world, a drive deeper even than the drive to self-preservation. Conclusions about the nature of knowing that Nietzsche 15. The entry itself is reproduced in KSA 14, p. 358.

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first wrote out in the 1872 workbook P I 20 and then dictated for his 1873 essay “On Truth and Lie in the Extra-moral Sense” remain the basis for his continued reflection on what can be known. But how can a drive-driven impulse legitimately claim that what it comes to possess is true and has worth in being true?16 Nietzsche’s thoughts on haben and besitzen, having and possessing, in M III 1 then move directly to a “Chief question” on “the value tablets of the goods” [20]. Noting first that “what was easy to have . . . would be relatively undervalued,” Nietzsche wrote a long entry expanding the question, arguing first that the differences among human beings lie in what count as “goods” worth striving for and in “what counts as genuine having.” KGW omits the entry because it too is a draft used five years later in Beyond Good and Evil, this time for section 194.17 Like its M III 1 draft, section 194 first considers three ways of a man “having” a woman and then moves from having to possessing for the long reflection on which both versions end. The first words of the next entry, [21], are a kind of title, “The history of the I-feeling,” which turns out to be a history of Besitzenwollen, wanting-topossess. The entry is Nietzsche’s first outline in M III 1 of a philosophic project uniting knowing and acting, insight and teaching. It begins: “To describe the history of the I-feeling [Ichgefühl ]: and to show that in altruism too this Besitzenwollen is the essential matter.” Nietzsche’s moral investigations into egoism and altruism, those supposed irreducible contraries, lead him to a foundation they share and that opens the way to insight into a still broader unity:

16. Nietzsche’s thoughts on an ontology of Haben-wollen were influenced by reading physicists who opposed the dominant mechanistic model of modern physics, contemporaries like Julius Robert Mayer (named in this context in M III 1 [24], [25]) but especially Roger Joseph Boscovich, who wrote a century earlier. Nietzsche’s first reference to Boscovich is in the fall of 1881 (KSA 9 15 [21], [24], [25]); he checked Boscovich’s book out of the Basel library in 1873– 74 (Crescenzi, “Verzeichnis”); see Small, Nietzsche in Context, 135, 139–43, 147–50, and letters to Köselitz who was himself reading these physicists (April 10 and 16, 1881; March 20, 1882). Nietzsche was also reading Wilhelm Roux while writing the M III 1 entries of the fall of 1881; Roux’s book Der Kampf der Theile im Organismus was published in 1881 (KSA 14, p. 645 at [128]). See Müller-Lauter, “Der Organismus als innerer Kampf.” Always present in Nietzsche’s ontological reflections are his Greek model philosophers of physis, especially Empedocles, who aim at a rational understanding of the whole and build a new teaching on it to reorient the social order. 17. KSA 14 prints the draft, p. 359. The forms of Besitz include Besitzdurst, thirst to possess.

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To show that the chief progress of morality does not lie in the concept ‘Not-I and I’ but rather in the sharper-grasping of the true in the other, in me, and in nature, therefore to free Besitzenwollen more and more from the mere appearance of possession, from fabricated [erdichteten] possession, and therefore to purify the I-feeling from self-deception.

The history that shows this freeing and purifying yields a perhaps: “Perhaps it ends in this: that instead of the I, we recognize the relatedness and enemyness of things, variety therefore and its laws: that we try to free ourselves from the error of the I (altruism is also till now an error).” The I, then, would be the erring portal through which the truth about the I and not-I as the relatedness and enemy-ness of things is grasped: the disjunction I and not-I is not dissolved but understood in its shared feature. Gaining such an insight presupposes an ideal different from altruism: “To live not ‘for the sake of the other’ but ‘for the sake of the true!’ ” This imperative for the way of life of the knower is followed by a list of ten more imperatives, and collectively the ten seem to define the whole history of the I-feeling from its presupposition in truthseeking through the truths gained. All the imperatives obey the first: they aim to possess the true by knowledge. The second, “Not ‘I and you!,’ ” leads to a denial of the primacy of “you”: “How could we dare promote ‘the other’ (itself a sum of delusion!)!” Instead: Reshape the I-feeling! Weaken the personal tendency! Habituate the eye to the actuality of the things! Refrain provisionally from the personal as much as possible! What consequences this must have! Aim to become master over the things and in this way satisfy its desire to possess! Do not desire to possess humans!—

This dash, the only one in the paragraph, leads to a question: “But doesn’t that also mean weakening the individual?” The answer is the final imperative, a kind of yes and no: “There’s something new to create: not I not you not all!”18—a new I a new you a new all sharing the relatedness and enemy-ness of the things. This crescendo of imperatives leads to a new paragraph that earns the “NB” Nietzsche assigned it: NB a program of education to shape the new 18. “nicht ego und nicht tu und nicht omnes!”—as Brusotti shows, the all refers to all other people, a “not all” that negates Spencer’s ideal, Spencer’s ethics being what Nietzsche here opposes (Die Leidenschaft der Erkenntnis, 320).

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creation. It would inculcate “in youths” no striving for “having or wanting to possess!: similarly no prestige for command over others—these two drives are not to be developed at all!” Instead, the new education inculcates the opposite of Besitzenwollen: “besitzen lassen,” letting-be-possessed, an allowing that is a letting-be-taken-over “by the things—(not by persons) and by the largest possible range of true things!” Besitzen lassen is founded on the insight into the full extent of Besitzenwollen; it does not contradict it but expresses what the knower of Besitzenwollen and its history ultimately desires: that nature be what it is. With such knowing and such allowing, the species that has always constructed moral fictions that deny nature achieves a new stance toward nature that requires a new education in letting be that would have its own natural products: “What grows out of that can be anticipated: we become Ackerland for the things”—farmland, arable soil for the true things. Out of our soil, out of our natural fecundity as the always-making kind, grow “images of existence” different from the images that stamped us as a species till now: “we would be as this fruitfulness compels us to be: our inclinations-disinclinations are those of the farmland that would bring forth such fruit.” Nietzsche ends his history of the I-feeling by assessing this natural fruit of our soil: “These images of existence are the most important that there have been till now—they will rule over humanity.” A new education ruling humanity is the ultimate fruit of Nietzsche’s insight into the Besitzenwollen that is common to egoism and altruism. That education has the effect education always has in our plastic, produced-productive species: new images of existence, the natural fruit of our soil, will for the first time be generated by a true understanding of things, and those images will rule those raised in them, making them loyal to true images. The new people differs from all previous peoples in the fundamental respect: on the basis of true opinions about what we are and where we are, trained into us by images of the true things, the new people will be grateful for what we are and for what is; its schooled desire is not a Besitzenwollen but a Besitzenlassen, a letting be possessed by what is, celebrating what is for what it is. The new people will know this desire as their always old desire, having been raised in it from the start. That is the complete history of the “I-feeling” from time immemorial to a time not yet come. At a late point in the history of the I-feeling made possible by that history’s refinement of the basic passion into a passion to possess by knowing, the desire to possess possesses one who wants only to possess in knowledge the true history of the species of which he is an instance, the moral species acting out its now innate sense of good and bad. That knower, driven to know and coming to know what he is and what his species is, experiences

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a transformation of the I-feeling: he wants what is to be what it is. And that I-feeling of that knower becomes—“NB”—the need to act, to educate, to make his solitary I-feeling the communal I-feeling through images in which future generations will be trained from their youth on up. One last thought seems necessary to complete the history of the I-feeling, the four words of entry [22]: “The Education of the Genius.” Nietzsche wrote those four words on the right-hand page opposite “The history of the I-feeling,” and he wrote them in large formal lettering using the Latin script he usually saved for titles in place of the old German script he used for everything else.19 The ultimate aim of the new education, the natural fruit of our farmland, seems to be the production of exemplary types, exceptions in whom the whole species can glory. This thought in M III 1 was taken up in the dramatic entry of “Sanctus Januarius” titled “Preparatory human beings” (GS 283) addressed to “you knowers.” They alone are told “to live dangerously,” to “Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius!” They can no longer be the “shy deer” their kind has been because “knowledge will reach out its hand for its due:—it will want to rule and possess, and you with it!” “The history of the I-feeling” tells an early version of the whole story M III 1 will tell, the impassioned drive to understand morality leading to an ultimate insight about humans and to its ultimate consequence of rule through new images. The first appearance in M III 1 of the actual word Habsucht occurs four pages after entry [21] in the context of Nietzsche’s rejection of Herbert Spencer’s goal for humanity (which Spencer “does not see”): “the greatest possible similarity of all human beings.” Nietzsche “thinks of the everlasting differentness and of the greatest possible sovereignty of the individual” [40].20 That means, the next entry suggests, “The coming into being of the thinker” and the dangers that threaten to make his coming into being impossible. The entry closes with a personal remark: “What matters to me is the preservation of my kind!!—” [41]. To preserve the kind philosopher, the “tyranny of the advantage of the type” must ignite in his type a “counter-conquest” [42] on its own behalf. For that to happen, “Habsucht” [43], along with the “Fear” and “Envy” coupled to it, must cease to be regarded as “evil” and instead be seen as an essential element that has always been the agent in the advancement of 19. Entry [21] had already spilled over from the bottom of the left-hand page to the bottom of that right-hand page, beginning with the words “pictures of existence.” 20. The entries to be considered now, [40]–[47], are sequential items in M III 1 not separated by omissions. They investigate the same set of concerns in sequential paragraphs that are not separated even by blank lines.

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humanity; fear, envy, and Habsucht must be embraced as both worthy and indispensable for the preservation of his kind, “the richest, most noble, most fruitful human beings.” The entry closes with a separate paragraph on a consequence of recognizing the role Habsucht plays in human history: “By the way, one could, as an individual, in many respects anticipate the immensely slow process of selection and show the person in advance his goal—my ideal!” Nietzsche’s rhetorical task employs the classical means to long-term success, erection of a new “ideal.” “Solitude” and a certain “blindness deafness of the wise!” [43 end] turn out to be necessary for “The Anticipators,” those who take the foreseen way [44]: unlike the animal species that have all settled into a fixed kind, “humanity still alters itself—is still in becoming” and could therefore avoid the customary evolutionary fate of uniformity within the kind and preserve Nietzsche’s odd kind, the rare philosopher. Considering the unfinished character of humankind, “we do not overlook the greatest consequences: we could still bring the species to ruin” [45]. “As a result of an accidental throw of the dice a being is there that seeks its conditions of existence—let us take that seriously and not be fools to sacrifice for the unknown!” [46]. The imperative that ended The Wanderer and His Shadow is still in place: “We must proceed with the greatest caution” (WS 350). The first use of Habsucht in M III 1 treated it as an evolutionary fact expressed even by the highest kind in our species [43]; that use led to reflections on the fate of the highest amid the evolutionary pressure toward uniformity or homogenization within species. These thoughts lead to a term closely related to Habsucht, Eigentumstrieb (drive for property) [47], a word that serves as a kind of title to a short entry that looks first to basic functions; the Eigentumstrieb can be seen as “continuation of the drive for nourishment and the hunter-drive.”21 Its other sentence links this comprehensive drive to the highest spiritual drive that defines Nietzsche’s kind: “The drive for knowledge too is a higher drive for property.”22 21. The prominent presence of Spencer in these notes accounts for Nietzsche’s insistence that the metabolic processes of all forms of life express the drive to appropriate, not the drive to self-preservation. Eigentumstrieb appears only in this entry and at TI Skirmishes 39, where it refers to the institution of marriage as founded on “the sexual drive, on the drive for property (wife and child as property), on the drive for rule.” 22. Nietzsche linked Habsucht with love in the notebook he carried on his walks in Genoa in the fall of 1881, N V 7; its entry 12 [194] prepares GS 363 (1886), Nietzsche’s comparison of male love and female love; Habsucht (Haben-Wollen in GS 363) describes the primary force at work in male love and is a great danger: coming–to-have typically means love’s dying. Habsucht also appears in the 1881 fall notes that Nietzsche wrote in the margin of Emerson’s Versuche

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Habsucht is next mentioned in entry [56] but receives its fullest treatment in M III 1 in entry [134]. That entry opens by acknowledging that “if we translate the properties of the lowest living being into our ‘reason,’ we turn them into moral drives.” After this reminder of the distortion built involuntarily into reason, Nietzsche sets out his view of the fundamental properties of aliveness, giving rational expression to what is involved in aliveness in language as morality-free as possible. His initial focus is on the activity of “the lowest living Wesen” as it “assimilates to itself what is nearest, transforms it into its own property” where “property is first nutrition and the storing up of nutrition”; “it seeks to ‘incorporate’ [einzuverleiben] into itself as much as possible, not only to compensate for the lost but because it is habsüchtig”—it is, as alive, possession-addicted. “Only so does it grow and it will finally be reproductive in this manner—it divides itself into 2 beings.” Nietzsche then uses a word even more emphatic than habsüchtig to summarize “growth and generation: the unlimited drive to appropriate [Aneignungstrieb].”23 “This drive brings [the lowest living essence] into exploitation [Ausnützung] of the weaker, and into competition with the similarly strong, it fights, that is, it hates, fears, dissembles. Assimilation is making something alien like itself, tyrannizing—cruelty.” A new paragraph then views matters from the side of the object of the appropriation-drive; it is similarly driven but weaker: “It submits, it transforms itself in function and forgoes many of its original forces and freedoms almost completely and so lives on.” Nietzsche states the conclusion in human terms: “Slavery is necessary for the formation of a higher organism, likewise castes”; he can even impute to the greater force “Demand for ‘honor’  .  .  . wanting to know its function is acknowledged.” Consequently, “Obedience is compulsion as a condition of life, ultimately a stimulus to life.” This account of aliveness solely in terms of Habsucht explains the apparent teleology of organisms, the ordering of parts to the whole, as the product not of prior design but of powerful forces incorporating weaker ones as “functions” of themselves. Nietzsche may have in mind Kant’s claim in the Critique of Judgment that “there will never be a Newton for a blade of grass”24—life (KSA 9 13 [7]): Habsucht as the opposite of “selflessness,” “an All-desiring Self ” that wants to see through others’ eyes, grasp with others’ hands and call back the whole past, wanting “to lose nothing that could at all belong to it.” GS 249, “The sigh of the knowing,” summarizes these thoughts on Habsucht; it begins the sigh, “Oh, about my Habsucht!” 23. Aneignungstrieb is used only here and in GS 118. 24. Nietzsche studied the Critique of Judgment in Leipzig in the spring of 1868 and planned to write a dissertation entitled “On Teleology or the Concept of the Organic since Kant.” See Swift, Becoming Nietzsche, 71–117.

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can never be explained purely in terms of efficient causality and so will never be able to dispense with what look like teleological explanations. Is Nietzsche aspiring to be that Newton? His view of will to power, present in nascent form as Habsucht, is at least in part his attempt to refute teleological explanation by interpreting functional relationships within the organism as forms of tyranny—tyranny rather than legitimate monarchy because it seeks no good beyond the sheer exercise of power. Having no telos beyond indulging its own drive, tyranny can serve as a political metaphor for force understood as Habsucht: force is the drive to discharge itself within a field of forces enacting the same necessity. This explanation of organic structure in terms of weaker and stronger explains the “moral drives” as well, our distinctively human ends: they too are ultimately reducible to this nonteleological foundation. Following this general comment on subordinate force, entry [134] continues after a dash that looks like a structural element of the entry maintained to the end: it is the first of a series of dashes each isolating a separate item in the general condition of life as a war among Habsüchtigen. First, “That which has the most force to reduce others to function rules”—and Nietzsche sustains this political metaphor to the end of the entry. A hierarchy of rule results as “the subjugated have their own subjugated.” Maintaining this hierarchy of subjugations is “the condition of life for the whole [organism],” which in turn “seeks its advantage and finds opponents.” Nietzsche then pictures a sequence of stages from an initial state of yielding out of which “the adversary awakens. An association must strive to become overrich (overpopulated) in order to produce a new one (colonies), in order to divide into two independent entities,” the natural means of an organ’s gaining persistence. The series then turns to what persistence demands, cutting out everything not useful, excreting “what it names evil.” The itemizing ends on the contrary of rejecting the excreted: “ ‘Love’ is a feeling for one’s own [das Eigentum] or what one wishes were one’s own.” The reflection on Habsucht in entry [134] is of capital importance because of what Marco Brusotti calls “the inner dialectic of workbook M III 1,”25 a chronological dialectic. That dialectic is about to reach the entry that has been regarded as the most important in M III 1, the first ever discussion of “The eternal return of the same” in [141], just three pages after [134]. The importance of that first entry on eternal return lies not merely in the fact of its firstness but in its dialectical proximity to Nietzsche’s comprehensive reflection on aliveness, on ontology. Entry [134] shows Nietzsche arriving at the conclu25. Brusotti, Die Leidenschaft der Erkenntnis, 359.

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sion that the lowest living essence embodies the fundamental property active in all aliveness up through the most intellectual/spiritual features of human aliveness as it inquires into those properties: to be alive is to be habsüchtig, addicted to acquiring, a driven-ness the driven mind can grasp even if it is compelled to use distorting categories that tend to moralize it. In [134] the description is expressly a statement of the properties of aliveness, but Nietzsche applies “aliveness” to the universal, as the center of “Sanctus Januarius” attests: the very waves are habsüchtig.26 Just here M III 1 offers its reader its greatest reward: eternal return as the unbounded affirmation of all that is follows the comprehensive insight into “life”: affirming the eternal return of all that is is a consequence of the most spiritual form of life understanding what is. And that, the dialectical appearance of eternal return as the upshot of a philosopher’s insight, is the relationship between these two key matters that Nietzsche will build into “Sanctus Januarius” and into the two books of his maturity that tell the whole story. Reflection on Habsucht as the fundamental quality of life continues in M III 1 after the initial entries on eternal return, entry [182] being the last to use the word Habsucht. There, it appears as the first item in a list of three, “Habsucht Aneignungslust Machtgelüst,” the second two being near synonyms that enrich the content of Habsucht: Aneigungslust is the passion to appropriate, to make one’s own, and Machtgelüst the passion for power—a word clearly anticipating the term that Nietzsche came to favor for the fundamental phenomenon, Wille zur Macht.27 Entry [182] is particularly important, as its first sentence indicates: “A strong, free human feels against everything other, the properties of the organism”—six properties that Nietzsche enumerates and elaborates for two and a half pages.28 That first sentence states the basic principle of Nietzsche’s ontological method: the self-knowledge of the “strong” and “free” human provides the basis on which inferential knowledge of the organic as such is possible. This is the method of Thus Spoke Zarathustra as Zarathustra invites “you wisest” to consider the truth of such selfknowledge in the most complete argument for will to power Nietzsche ever 26. The universality of that ontology is somewhat masked in the decisive chapters of Z, which use the word “Life” for the totality of beings; the universality is clear, however, in BGE 36. 27. Nietzsche used the term Machtgefühl in GS 13 and in M III 1 [59], [130], [284]; see also KGW V 2 12 [163]. He had used it often in D (112, 199, 204, 403) and once in notes preparing D (KGW V 1 4 [202] Summer 1880). 28. Habsucht Aneignungslust Machtgelüst appear in the second of the six items on the list. Each of the six bears a title of one of the properties of the organic as such: self-regulation; overrich replacement; assimilation as such; secretion and excretion; metabolic force; regeneration.

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published (part 2, “On Self-Overcoming”). And it is the method of Beyond Good and Evil as the culmination of Nietzsche’s attempt to persuade the free minds he has schooled that “the world viewed from inside, the world defined and determined according to its ‘intelligible character’—would be ‘will to power’ and nothing besides.—” (BGE 36).29 Entry [182] says that this gain in understanding comes very late to the “the human who has become free” but who began as all humans do, as part of a collective: “he . . . inherits [these six properties] as an organ of the community: as an organ he receives the first flickers of the collective properties of the organic.” Incorporated into the community as a functionary of its drives, a late-arriving individual, driven by the need to know, experiences flickers of the properties of the organic itself in his own acting and thinking; fully investigated, these flickers culminate in the ontological inference that Habsucht is the fundamental property of all things.30

Wissensgier, the Highest Drive In “Sanctus Januarius” the secret of the waves that would have betrayed them by naming them “ihr Habsüchtigen” makes their action exemplary of the active force present in all things. The secret of the waves that would have betrayed them by naming them “ihr Wissensgierigen” is the secret of the speaker who comes to know himself as embodying the highest form of the general drive in the particular drive that rules him, the passion for knowledge. All beings come to be in a hierarchy of beings, a rank order in which the more spiritual qualities of being are properties of an ever-diminishing number of beings up to the rarest and highest being, the Wissensgierigsten. The word Wissensgier is not used in M III 1,31 but its synonyms, especially “die Leidenschaft 29. The term Wille zur Macht first appears in its comprehensive sense a year and a half after M III 1 in entries preparing Z: “Will to life? I found in its place always only will to power” (KSA 10 5 [1] November 1882–February 1883). The concept represents an advance in Nietzsche’s thinking beyond the universalization of Habsucht and its synonyms: will to power has no aim but discharge of the total quanta of its force at every moment; such discharge is always an event within a relatively unstable field of such impulses to discharge, the relation among them being simply that of greater or lesser; all beings are ultimately more or less stable collections of such impulses and themselves express the fundamental quality of impulse, will to power. 30. I treat the rest of entry [182] below, pp. 306f. 31. The word is rare in Nietzsche, being used only once in the published works (BT 15) in a sentence identical to one in the unpublished “Socrates and Greek Tragedy” (KSA 1, p. 638); wissensgierige is also used once (UD 4). My word searches use Nietzsche Source, the online version of KGW, which does not include deletions like “Oh ihr Habsüchtigen, ihr Wissensgierigen.”

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der Erkenntnis,” the passion for knowledge, are used frequently in this workbook’s continuing pursuit of what occupied Nietzsche from the beginning. Synonyms for Wissensgier appear in M III 1 in the entries where Habsucht first appears as the comprehensive drive. It is the passion Nietzsche sees as his own in the already-quoted entries countering Spencer’s ideal of homogenization.32 He no longer indulges his early deference to philosophers like Schopenhauer, Emerson, or Voltaire but fully embraces his belonging to the kind, Philosopher, as he wrote in the pocket notebook he carried on his walks in Genoa during the fall of 1881: “How I have sought a human being who is higher than I am and who actually outsees [übersieht] me! I did not find him. I don’t dare compare myself with W[agner]—but I belong to a higher rank, aside from ‘strength.’ ”33 An entry editing this one in the workbook he kept in his Genoa room expands his thought: “Why did I not find among the living the humans who saw further than I do and under whom I would have to see myself ? Did I only seek poorly?—And it drove me toward just those!!”34 An entry from the same time gives names and expresses his own belonging to the kind philosopher: When I speak of Plato Pascal Spinoza and Goethe, I know their blood runs in mine—I’m proud when I speak the truth from them—the family is good enough that it has nothing it needs to fabricate or hide; and so do I stand to all who have been, I’m proud of humanity, and proud precisely of the unconditioned truthfulness.35

This highest rank is gained by the few in whom the drive to know has won supremacy; like all drives it is one form of the comprehensive drive: “The drive for knowledge is also a higher drive for possession” [47]. The most spiritual drive drives for supremacy in its own domain, rule over the other drives. That contest for rule is the theme of entry [56] where the victorious drive interprets itself as “something higher, more noble, different!” If it interprets its difference by “idealizing” it, it misunderstands itself, as all the dualisms constructed by morality, the historic religions, and Platonism have done. In entries that appear to be drafts for a public presentation of “The 32. See above, p. 250, on entries [40], [41]. 33. KSA 9 12 [8]. The context of this statement in N V 7 is consistent with Nietzsche’s thoughts on the Philosopher: reflections on gods and heroes. 34. KSA 9 14 [6] (M III 5, Fall 1881). 35. KSA 9 12 [52]. This N V 7 entry is written in much larger letters than the ones before it.

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new view of the world in relation to intelligence and good” [60], Nietzsche asks, “Is humanity an exception?” and presents the hierarchy of drives as in fact continuous through the whole of nature up to and including what defines the human, “intelligence and good.” Given that continuity, the long-alleged “end-directedness” and “intelligence” of nature looks different: “it is not there at all!” The new, nonteleological view of nature makes imperative the task of trying “to understand our small script out of the large script-characters of nature” in a setting ruled by powerful misunderstandings of nature that attribute to it qualities it does not have but that we, as wholly natural beings, do. To understand these higher qualities it is necessary to see that they evolved from the qualities of nature generally. The one uniquely stationed to understand that evolution is the one who possesses those higher qualities to the greatest degree: the self-knowledge of the most spiritual/intellectual is the route to knowledge of the whole.36 A title stands at the head of the next page of M III 1, “neue Praxis.” It titles entry [63], which fills the whole page, but it could well title the subsequent entries through [72], for they exhibit an internal logic that unites them into a relatively complete statement of the new practice dictated by the new view of the human in nature.37 The new practice begins by viewing the human “first as a thing, an object of knowledge,” a subject of scientific method that alone can “do it justice”; “intellectual probity” (Redlichkeit) forbids “misreading” the human, “treating it under presuppositions that are fabricated and superficial” [63]. Instead, the same method must be applied everywhere: “The way we deal with things in order to know them, so too with living entities, so too with ourselves.” And when we do come to know them? “We use them for our own goals—how else?” Just who this we is becomes clear in a statement explicitly designated “New.” “Redlichkeit,” it says, “denies the human . . . it denies common goals,” seeing instead a variety of goals for the various human sorts. But humanity as a whole is “the power-mass [Machtmenge] over whose use and direction the solitaries compete,” the “solitaries” being those singular, knowing humans with goals different from the common goals. He becomes the solitary in question, his goal is that the nature of the human “be known and then judged and used.” The entry concludes with him asking, “My goal would again be knowledge? Placing a Machtmenge in the service of knowledge?” The 36. Later in M III 1 Nietzsche discusses the knower’s imperative as “the dehumanization [Entmenschlichung] of nature and then the naturalization [Vernatürlichung] of humanity” ([211]; see [197], [228], [238] and GS 109, BGE 230). 37. There are no omissions in KGW’s entries [63] through [72].

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answer can only be Yes; as a knower coming to know that what is is a hierarchy of Machtgelüste, his own goal is knowledge and he must devise the “new practice” that best places humans as a power-mass in “the service of knowledge.” The new practice may call for new means, but viewed historically, the practice is old: a human being driven to know ultimately concludes that he must rule for the sake of knowledge, as his Greek models did, as Plato’s Socrates did. Entry [64] stands at the top of the next page, after [63] ended at the bottom of its page with its last three lines squeezed together in the margin below the last ruled line: with both in ink, it is not evident that the new paragraph warrants a new number: [63] ends on “my goal” of knowledge, and the brief entry [64] begins, “According to my goal of evaluating among higher and lower characteristics.” That goal requires that he “examine all things on their worth for knowledge”—this criterion of good in turn assigns him his “Task,” on which the next section opens: “to see the things as they are!” [65]. The long paragraph that follows, written in pencil, describes the “Means” to this end as the ability “to look at things out of a hundred eyes, out of many persons!”38 The imperative adoption of multiple standpoints grounds Nietzsche’s perspectivism as a means to knowledge; it is not skepticism: so far from shipwrecking the possibility of knowledge, multiple perspectives are its indispensable means. The entry emphasizes that looking at things through the eyes of many persons reduces the importance of “the impersonal [which] is only the weakened personal,” a standpoint, the prevailing scientific one, that can be useful only to distance oneself from its “dulling of the passions.” At the other extreme, “the best ground for knowledge” is “the strong powerful natures,” but those natures can “be mastered for knowledge only late (made fit for cultivation etc.)” The task of seeing has become a task of doing by the one who has seen, a task whose program includes shaping the most powerful natures to serve his goal of knowledge. But with those natures in which “the driving forces are greatest,” it is “most probable” that “they completely err and become wild and shoot up in weeds (religion and mysticism).” A second parenthetical remark identifies the most powerful natures that it is his particular task to shape: “(the ‘philosophers’ are such powerful natures that are not 38. Does Nietzsche’s switching back and forth from ink to pencil in M III 1 suggest different stages of completeness? It seems unlikely that a writer as assiduous and regulated as he was would leave his means of writing to what he happened to have on hand in his room, for he had followed the same practice of writing for years. From [63] to [72], only [63], [64], and [70] are in ink. The switch from pen to pencil for [65] does seem to reflect degrees of completeness— the task it describes is evidently not yet fully formulated.

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yet fit for cultivation by knowledge; they construct, tyrannize reality, building themselves in.)” What role can science play in his task of shaping natures for their use for knowledge? “Everywhere where love and hate etc. are possible, science has been completely wrong.” The reason lies in the prevailing science itself: “here ‘the impersonal’ is without eyes for the actual phenomena,” the deeply personal, deeply passionate. On the other hand, “the strong natures see only themselves and measure everything by themselves.” Therefore: “New beings must fashion themselves.” Prevailing science is Baconian science, the science founded by a philosopher who well knew the difference between scientific and philosophic natures and drew up the program for “new beings” who would live the life of the scientist.39 Regarding the passionate pursuit of the truth, Nietzsche says in a brief entry, “To seek the truth for truth’s sake—superficial! We don’t want to be duped, it insults our pride” [66]. For the pursuit of truth, “the harmfulness of ‘the virtuous,’ the utility of the ‘unvirtuous’ has never been seen in its full breadth. Without fear and desire—what would humanity be! Without errors even!” [67]. As for not being deceived, could science guarantee against it? Entry [68] reflects on how much history (“Thucydides, Tacitus”) and science (“Mayer”) depend on imagination and fancy in the face of “the fantastic oppositional-force of nature!” And if in exercising imagination “deception can arise,” its opposite, mere sobriety or matter-of-factness (Nüchternheit), is not at all productive. The next entry [69] begins with “The passion for knowledge,” a phrase that introduces the next three as well; all four are linked as the passion for knowledge drives toward its fulfillment in the greatest possible achievement of insight. These four entries have a claim to being the most important entries in a workbook that soon yields the first entry on eternal return. Written in pencil, entry [69] begins as instruction for an audience: it traces the passion for knowledge through a series of self-corrections that are steps in freeing the mind that Nietzsche had long since taken. At first the passion for knowledge misunderstands itself teleologically, as the “goal of existence.” When the drive for knowledge is forced to deny any such teleology, “it sees itself as the most value-full result of all accidents.” And when it is forced to deny the objectivity of value? “Can it not maintain that it is the highest pleasure?” Yes, it can, but 39. Nietzsche could have found in Bacon’s fable of Daedalus in The Wisdom of the Ancients a philosopher’s portrait of the scientific nature as he himself understood it; Bacon’s fable, as well as his New Atlantis, shows that he well knew how to put the scientific nature to use for his own philosophic ends, creating the Machtmenge to advance the rule of the philosopher Bacon.

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when the passion for knowledge gains that insight into its own character, two further questions arise: “But to seek for that?” No, seeking pleasure would be redundant in the one possessed by the passion for knowledge. “To educate the most pleasure-capable being as means and task of this passion?” Yes, educating these rarities could well be the means and task of this passion in one who comes to understand it. And to that end: “Intensify the senses and pride and the thirst etc.” The trajectory of the released passion for knowledge is clear: it has no deeper ground than its own pleasure, and reaching that ground brings neither satiation nor rest but intensifies the drive for pleasure and aims to increase the “thirst” for this pleasure in others.40 A new paragraph in [69] assigns to the intensification of the passion for knowledge the task of “climbing down from a mountain and embracing the region with the eyes, unstilled craving present.”41 This is no descent to report discoveries and educate others; it is a descent toward continued discovery, for the “region” descended to and embraced with the eyes is the whole of things, the totality to which the passionate lover of knowledge descends with the aim, first, of achieving union. In the penciled shorthand of the entry, as if giving himself notes, Nietzsche names these pleasure-seeking descenders “the passionate lovers.” But the lovers he first describes “do not know how to achieve union.”42 A parenthetical remark names one such lover: “(—in Lucretius).”43 The passionate lovers are great lovers of knowledge like Lucretius who pursue the most comprehensive of all possible beloveds—union with the whole through knowledge of the ground of the whole. Nietzsche describes the fate of a Lucretius: “The knower demands union with the things and sees himself cut off—that is his passion.” The descended philosopher-lover can satisfy his passion in two possible ways: “Either everything should dissolve in knowledge or he dissolves into the things—that is his tragedy.” An opening parenthesis that Nietzsche never closed explains: “(the latter [dissolution in the things] 40. The process is notably Socratic without the moral shelters Socrates constructed to hide it. When Socrates first turned to his own way, as he reports in Plato’s Phaedo, he began with a teleological misreading of mind; and he too reached a foundation in pleasure as the ultimate ground for the philosophic life, while recognizing that this conclusion had to be sheltered from misunderstanding and abuse by the moral, who rule every viable social order including the one in which he knew he lived. Socrates too aimed to educate others: his love for the political genius Alcibiades is one prong of his insight that philosophy must rule, and his love for Xenophon and Plato is the other prong. That he became their beloved was only natural. 41. “Craving” is Begierde, whose root is Gier—greed, lust. 42. “Union” is Vereinigung, which also means sexual union—a natural aim for lovers. 43. KSA 14, p. 645 gives as the reference Lucretius, On the Nature of Things 4.1058–1120.

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his death and its pathos.” This could refer to Empedocles,44 who chose death, legend says, by throwing himself into the volcano of Etna, and whom Nietzsche views as the great thinker who founded the tradition of atomism that culminated in Lucretius. Ancient atomism, the tradition of philosophy he held in highest regard, ended in tragedy. As for “[t]he former case,” it strove to make everything into spirit—“pleasure to triumph over matter, to vaporize it, to rape it etc.” This option is a kind of cosmic philosophic comedy acted out by philosophers who followed Plato into an idealism that spiritualized, made idea-like, even matter. Entry [69] identifies the two historic forms of metaphysics advanced by Western philosophers, materialism and idealism, which ended in different but equally unsatisfactory conclusions. A final thought added to [69] points to a new way to satisfy the pleasure-drive of the descended philosopher-lover, neither a comic making nor a tragic failure of union but a pleasure Nietzsche endorsed in other contexts and mentions here in a bare phrase: “Pleasure of the atomism of mathematical points.” Coming after the two failed ways that philosopher-lovers attempted to gain union with their ultimate beloved, the whole of things, this phrase points to the pleasure of success based on new insight into the whole reflected in the atomism of Roger Joseph Boscovich that Nietzsche regarded as a forerunner of his own view. The intense pleasure latent in what he calls the atomism of mathematical points leads him to end his shorthand paragraph on a single final passionate word exulting in that pleasure: “Gier! ” That is, Lust! Wissensgier erupts in an exaltation of passionate pleasure that receives poetic expression in the kinship claimed in “Will and wave.” This consummated highest pleasure is the successful alternative that appears in the ruins of the whole failed sweep of Western philosophy just described—greedy spiritual embrace of the whole by that one of the Wissensgierigen whose hundred eyes enabled him to see deeper than the tragedy of Empedocles-Lucretius and the fraudulent spiritualizing of rapists of matter; he sees the genuine way of satisfying the philosophic eros driving all true philosophers. The last words of [69] beginning with “to rape” and ending with “Gier! ” spill over onto the bottom of the right-hand page in Nietzsche’s workbook, a blank page when he wrote that single line at the very bottom. Entry [70] begins at the top of the next left-hand page. It differs in being written in ink, 44. As Brusotti suggests, Die Leidenschaft der Erkenntnis, 323. Brusotti gives a helpful reading of [69] partly because he recognizes its connection to [70]. Unfortunately, by stopping at [70] and not pushing on to [72], he can conclude that the passion for knowledge ends for Nietzsche too as an “unglückliche Liebe.”

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but it continues the thought of [69] by treating the nontragic option pursued by knowers in the penciled shorthand of [69], the view of those who sought to rape what is, assimilating everything to spirit. Entry [70] begins by stating its topic: “Fundamentally false value assessments of the sensed45 world against the dead [world].” Those assessments are Grundfalsch, “Because we are it! Belong to it!” With these assertions, Nietzsche begins a kind of dialogue for the rest of the entry, first speaking for himself: “And despite that,” despite our belonging to that world, “with sensation [Empfindung], the superficiality, the fraud sets forth . . .”—and Nietzsche allows fraud to give its view of the world, beginning with a conviction that could not be more basic or more contrary to his own view—“what do pain and passion have to do with the real course of events!—it’s only a side issue that does not press on to the depth!” Fraud draws its inference: “But we call it the inner and we view the dead world as outer—” Nietzsche pronounces judgment “—grundfalsch!” and gives his view of that so-called “dead” world: “The ‘dead’ world! eternally in motion and without error, force against force! And in the sensed world everything is false, shadowy!” Fraud imagines deliverance from the false, shadowy sensed world, and Nietzsche allows fraud to express its feeling, “It is a festival to pass out of this world into the ‘dead world,’ ” and its conclusion: “the greatest greediness [Begierde] for knowledge goes on to set against this false, dark world the eternal laws where there is no passion and no pain and no fraud”—that is the historic fraud, the grundfalsch perpetrated even by thinkers moved by greediness for knowledge. Himself knowledge-greedy, Nietzsche asks, “Is this selfdenial of the sensing faculty in the intellect?” The next sentence could well be spoken by either party: “The meaning of truth is to understand the sensing faculty as the external side of existence, as a misreading of being, a hazardous enterprise.” But what follows seems to be fraud speaking: “It lasts short enough at least! Let’s see through this comedy and so enjoy [it]! Let’s not think of the turn back into sensationlessness as a backward step! We become wholly true, we complete ourselves.” This fraudulent comedy then seems to draw its conclusion: “Death is to be reinterpreted! We reconcile in this way with the real, that is, with the dead world.”46 45. Empfindenden means both sensed and felt; it covers both perception and sentiment, merging epistemological and psychological states. The epistemological predominates here, and I translate it sensed, but the felt is co-present and part of Nietzsche’s meaning: the knowers Nietzsche opposes here are those dispositionally opposed to the Lucretius/Empedocles view. 46. What I take to be a kind of dialogue in which things irreconcilable with Nietzsche’s view are both spoken and spoken against, Krell, Infectious Nietzsche, 160–61, and Brusotti, Die

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Having presented in two entries the two views that dominate the philosophic tradition and having indicated his opposition to the grundfalsch idealist comedy, Nietzsche wrote a four-line paragraph in pencil that runs to the bottom of the page. It leaves behind both the tragedy of materialism and the comedy of idealism to state the way the world “receives dignity from us” [71]: “In the degree to which the world shows itself calculable and measurable, hence dependable”—that is to say, open to rational investigation.47 He contrasts the calculability we value with what gave the world dignity “back then”: “the incalculable world (of the spirits—of spirit).” Back then they had a reason for according dignity to that aspect of the world: “it excited more fear.” But “we see the eternal power completely elsewhere.” So “we” too see an “eternal power” at work, one not named here but the one that drew names like Habsucht in other entries. Nietzsche ends his short paragraph on a final contrast with back then: “Our sensibility about the world turns itself around: pessimism of the intellect.” Our intellectual pessimism, the skepticism of modern free minds, is the well-earned sobriety replacing the misplaced optimism of intellect that imagined it could know the purposes and wishes of feared eternal powers that ruled the incalculable world—and Nietzsche had been pursuing and deepening his own pessimism of intellect at least since his 1872 workbook P I 20. Our pessimism of intellect, he says, can value the world only to the degree that it is calculable and measurable. What degree is that? Nietzsche’s assessments of modern epistemological skepticism reach a peak of criticism at the center of “The Free Mind” chapter of Beyond Good and Evil. He argues there that a powerful desire not to know the world dominates modern skepticism: denying knowledge of the world gives good conscience to modern wishful thinking that wants to hold on to a moral remnant of a world once governed by the eternal power of a moral God meting out just deserts.

Leidenschaft der Erkenntnis, 324–25, interpret as stating a single view, allegedly Nietzsche’s own even in the phrases and clauses most opposed to what he usually held; they thus assume that Nietzsche vacillated and while writing the entry held the view contrary to the skepticism and pessimism he had been developing since “On Truth and Lie,” the view expressed in the surrounding entries. It seems to me impossible that a philosopher, years into his deepening perspective, could suddenly think the opposite true, and then, after advocating this opposite in parts of this entry, revert back to the view he had held for years. To spare Nietzsche vacillation on the fundamental matters at a fundamental moment, it seems necessary to recognize the ambiguity of dialogue in what is after all a draft. 47. Nietzsche later said he shared the untenable view of modern materialist atomic physics to this degree: that the world “has a ‘necessary’ and ‘calculable’ course” (BGE 22).

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God may be dead, but, Nietzsche judged, the moral view lives on, aided by epistemological skepticism.48 And Nietzsche himself ? “Herrliche Entdeckung,” entry [72] begins, “Glorious discovery.” These two words at the start of a new page respond directly to the words in the last space of the last line of the previous page, “pessimism of intellect.” Nietzsche’s editors mislead their readers by breaking into two entries the central event of the logic of discovery set out in these paragraphs. The “glorious discovery” is an event within the pessimism of intellect; it is the achievement of the intellect forced into pessimism about itself by its own rigor and its rejection of intellect’s historic willingness to denounce the sensing part of itself and to believe in the reality of its own inventions. Moved by the passion for knowledge and that alone, intellect repudiated its historic indulgence and embraced a pessimism that here proves to be, insofar as it is complete epistemological skepticism, not warranted. For the glorious discovery is that “it is not all unberechenbar, unbestimmt! ”—incalculable, indeterminate! Incalculable shows literally that entry [72] simply carries forward the reasoning of entry [71]—it is not a separate entry at all. The glorious discovery that the world is not wholly “incalculable,” its being in some fundamental way calculable or measurable, legitimates our way of giving the world dignity. And humans, evaluative beings by nature, inevitably live some interpretation of good and bad; the seeker after knowledge can value the world—confer dignity on it, view it as good—only to the degree that it is knowable, that it rewards human inquiry because it is ruled by necessity and not by complete indeterminacy. That dignity extends to the necessity that grounds its calculability, which the first of the three paragraphs in this sequence stated: that “completely different place in which we see die ewige Macht” [71]. The dignity of the world for us therefore extends through its calculability and determinateness to the ground of these characteristics, the eternal power, the ontological ground of calculability that Nietzsche has been calling Habsucht and will learn to call “will to power.” These three united paragraphs in M III 1, separated by Nietzsche’s editors into two entries, [71], [72], constitute the chronologically first written statement of Nietzsche’s ultimate ontological insight, the inferential insight that he sustained through the end of his work and that he took great care to present in the most economical and entrancing way to the most select audience at just the right dramatically prepared place in the book he now knows 48. BGE 34, the central section, sets out and cautions modern skepticism; 35 judges its failure.

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he will write in order to give this discovery of 1881 its proper public form, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. When first affirming the “Glorious discovery” in M III 1, Nietzsche used a word he would soon repudiate: “There are laws that remain true over the mass of the individuals! After all, a different result could have happened.” A few months later he found good reason to argue that law is the wrong word, law being a human construct of command and obedience whereas “in nature there are only necessities” (GS 109).49 But the main point stands: beyond the individual instance the human intellect can discover dependable, calculable kinds or structures that are themselves in process—and to that degree the world has dignity for us. The last sentence of [71] made “pessimism of the intellect” what “[o]ur sensibility about the world turns itself” into when it recognizes the unknowability of the supposed eternal powers; the glorious discovery of [72] turns our sensibility, our feeling about the world, away from complete pessimism of intellect with its understandable roots and around to a well-policed insight of intellect into the world’s knowability—“Dionysian pessimism,” Nietzsche will call it, that stands against all “romantic pessimism” because it is based on entirely different drives (GS 370). Intellect’s capacity, within its pessimism, to make the glorious discovery recovers intellect from complete pessimism while continuing to exercise intellectually responsible restraints. The third and final paragraph of the sequence, the second of [72], reflects on the consequence of the new insight, the diminished place that the individual or the instance now occupies in contrast to the “laws,” the calculable and relatively determinate species or regularities of nature. It too answers the first paragraph of the sequence, [71]: “The individual no longer as the eternal strangeness and worthy of honor! But as the most complicated fact in the world, the highest accident. We believe in its law-abidingness too, even if we don’t see it.” The individual is not irreducible but the product of natural processes whose complexity makes them impossible to know in their totality—we 49. GS 109 with its succession of injunctions, “Let us beware,” is one of the most important sections in GS because it treats what the gay science must beware of in viewing and judging the world. Many drafts of GS 109 fall among the entries of M III 1 that deal with the ontology of Habsucht and the affirmation of eternal return. KSA 14, pp. 253–54, gives some of those entries omitted in KGW; its references to M III 1 are followed by numbers 49, 34, 14, 18, which are page numbers in the workbook and are completely useless for locating the omitted entries among KGW’s published entries from M III 1.

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“believe” in the individual’s being a part of the necessary whole now discovered to be in some degree knowable. Giving the world dignity to the degree that it is calculable recognizes that there are only individuals, each relatively incalculable or unknowable in the totality of necessities that brought it about; we believe in its “law-abidingness,” its necessity, even if we cannot discern why it is as it is or acts as it does. The glorious discovery can therefore explicitly rehabilitate an earlier stage that “the passion for knowledge” found itself forced to repudiate [69]: the passion for knowledge, now judging the individual as “the highest accident” [72], can as a result judge itself, the passion for knowledge, as in fact “the most valuable result of all accidents” [69]. Existing within the totality of accidents that is the totality of individuals, the most driven individual, coming to know that “not everything is unberechenbar, unbestimmt!,” judges that knowing that is “the most valuable result of all accidents.” The act of knowing comes to know itself as not fundamentally different from other processes of nature that it comes to understand; its own dignity consists not in transcending nature but in being nature’s crowning expression.50 An “Or?” underlined three times ends the sequence of reflections in these three paragraphs of M III 1 ([71] and [72]): instead of stating a belief about the law-abidingness of the relatively unknowable individual, state the ambiguous place of the individual “as withdrawn from knowability but a means of knowledge, also a hindrance to knowledge.” This alternative way of stating how the individual stands to knowledge makes the essential points: the individual is withdrawn from knowability but can be a means to knowledge through selfknowledge. Knowledge is generated through an individual’s drives, one drive in particular; and the drive for knowledge can ground an induction that becomes ever more comprehensive—as M III I shows.51 Still, the individual remains a “hindrance to knowledge” because each individual has only a limited, partial view of the whole. This “or,” which states the way Nietzsche actually took the glorious discovery, has the same result as the first alternative: the in50. The glorious discovery too is notably Socratic once it is understood that Socrates too knew where he was: compelled by his knowledge of his setting, he found it advisable to present his discovery of the power of the intellect—that the ever-changing things have “ideas” or natures—as if it were the discovery of another world, a world Glaucon and Kebes and their like could believe in as a support for their moral view of things, while the philosophically driven could find out what Socrates truly, gloriously meant: that the world has a calculable course and is not wholly unknowable as the “wise,” the sophists, maintained. 51. Nietzsche will use this argument in BGE 36, the sole argument on behalf of the will to power ontology in that book.

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dividual is “—not worthy of reverence, something dubious!” Two pages later, in an entry that can be seen as a summary of what entries [70] to [72] set out, Nietzsche affirms that “[k]nowledge has the value 1) of refuting ‘absolute knowledge’ 2) of discovering the objective calculable world of necessary succession” [80]. That twofold value gives the new gain its proper place in the history of philosophy: there is no need for “absolute knowledge” to value knowledge absolutely, as the passion for knowledge does. The glorious discovery is glorious not only because it provides the insight that “not everything is incalculable and indeterminate” [72] but especially because intellect can, to a degree, know “the eternal power” [71] that grounds the calculable and determinate. Here, in these three connected paragraphs written out in the summer of 1881, Nietzsche wrote out for the first time the comprehensive insight that in a way fulfills the history of philosophy that he had just surveyed in its two thwarted foundational possibilities. His eyes embracing the actual world to which he has descended [69], the lover of knowledge moves beyond the tragedy of the Empedocles-Lucretius tradition to a kind of union or kinship with the things from which he has been cut off. That kinship deepens the repudiation of fraudulent unity with the things on the part of the intellect whose fraudulent victory over them transformed them into what they were not. The tragedy and comedy of the history of philosophy are overcome in the glorious discovery that grounds the new history of philosophy made possible by Friedrich Nietzsche. Thus Spoke Zarathustra in its pivotal moment of discovery alters the wording of the glorious discovery but adheres to its sense. In the poetry of his dance with Life in “The Dance Song” (Z 2.10), Zarathustra names Life “unergründlich,” unfathomable, and Life responds laughing, “so runs the speech of all fish, what they do not fathom is unfathomable. But I am only changeable and wild and in all things a woman, and not a virtuous one.” Suggesting that she is not unberechenbar but can be fathomed, Life offers Zarathustra what he reports to “you wisest” two chapters later as “the secret that Life itself spoke to him: ‘Where life is, there is will also, but not will to life but—so I teach it to you—will to power!’ ” (Z 2.12). Entry [72] completes the series of entries that began with “new Praxis” [63] and pursued the passion for knowledge [69], a trajectory of inquiry that results in a knower conferring value on the inquired and on the inquirer; knowing leads to doing, that doing. Forced underway to deny that value has objective reality among the totality of fated events, the inquirer does not ultimately have to “deny value” [69] but finds grounds for valuing the whole, grounds in himself, in the knower knowing himself to be part of the in part knowable

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whole; self-affirmation leads to world-affirmation. In this way fact grounds value in Nietzsche, understanding leads to a teaching as the chronology of M III 1 makes clear. After entry [72] the epistemological/ontological reflections give way, via Spencer [73], to the initiating and continuing task of M III 1 to burrow into the underground of morality.52 But as M III 1 continues with morality as its most constant theme, its gains in epistemology and ontology become the basis for a historic gain in “art”: a new teaching on good and bad. The passion basic to that new good and bad finds expression in entry [125]: “Love nature!,” a love that implies the establishment of a “new nobility” [126]. But the ultimate evaluative gain of the insight into Habsucht is insight into a new ideal. The glorious discovery of entry [72] is the ground for what will come a few pages later in M III 1, the affirmation of eternal return, the unbounded affirmation of the world known to be Habsucht and nothing besides. At the “beginning of August 1881 in Sils Maria” [141] Nietzsche can write out his first outline for a book teaching eternal return because that affirmation of the world is grounded in his glorious discovery, days or weeks earlier, that the ultimate character of the world is what the lover of knowledge can most love as making the knower possible. That first entry on eternal return [141] will confirm that it is “the passion for knowledge” that grounds the affirmation of eternal return and not the need for a new ideal.53 The impetus that drove Nietzsche’s expanding application of Habsucht into a general ontology from Wissensgier on down is the same impetus that drove him nine years earlier while writing entries in workbook P I 20 on the necessary limits of knowledge; there he left it at wondering if knowledge of knowledge could justify inferences about the unknowable.54 And it is the same impetus that moved his model Greek philosophers in their ever more sophisticated accounts of the quality shared by all beings, the impetus intrinsic to philosophy itself in its drive to know and ultimately to know what may be the intelligible character of all beings. What M III 1 arrived at regarding Habsucht, Nietzsche published just after the center of “Sanctus Januarius” in “Will and wave”—almost published because he deleted “Oh ihr Habsüchtigen, ihr Wissensgierigen” the better to treat as a secret what makes himself and the waves one kind. That way of “publicizing” this truth proved pattern-setting for the two books of his maturity that present more than an announcement of his 52. There are frequent moves from moral issues to epistemological ones, particularly the fraudulent knowledge claims indulged in by science of which we have to “Beware” (GS 109). 53. I deal with the rest of [141] in chap. 14, on M III 1 and eternal return. 54. See above, pp. 70f.

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will to power view: Zarathustra reports it only to “you wisest,” inviting them to reason with him on its possible truth (Z 2.12), and Beyond Good and Evil reports it only to the audience he has shrunk to the fewest, freest minds who celebrate their epistemological skepticism (BGE 36). And that other great discovery of M III 1 that follows as a consequence, eternal return? How different his reports on that will be: he draws all attention to it at the end of “Sanctus Januarius,” and in the culmination of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and at the culminating point of Beyond Good and Evil’s chapter on the fate of religion in the West. In his different ways of treating these two discoveries of M III 1 lie the deepest grounds for Nietzsche’s mature art of writing as a showing and a hiding, the art he shared with the other great philosophers, all of whom knew the difference between the exoteric and the esoteric (BGE 30). The cardinal importance of the chronological order of M III 1 entries lies in its involuntary exhibition of Nietzsche’s sequential discovery of the two fundamental points of his total philosophic project. M III 1 shows involuntarily what “Sanctus Januarius,” Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Beyond Good and Evil show artfully: the inferential glimpse into the world as it is leads to the unbounded affirmation of that world. Will to power is an insight, eternal return is an estimate of worth. Will to power is a knowledge claim that invites testing, eternal return is a teaching that can be lived. M III 1 shows Nietzsche coming into possession of both fundamental claims, an understanding of things that impels a making of images to create the social order that will live that understanding. M III 1 shows Nietzsche becoming the Philosopher and the Artist in his own sense of those exalted figures.55 55. On the rationality and defensibility of Nietzsche’s mature view of will to power, see Galen Strawson, “Nietzsche’s Metaphysics?” Strawson presents a powerful and persuasive account of Nietzsche’s process ontology in the language of contemporary analytic philosophy. The aim of his essay transcends Nietzsche: “to give a brief exposition of what I take to be the right view—the best description—of the fundamental nature of reality, with special reference to Nietzsche” (13). As Strawson shows, part of Nietzsche’s view’s being “the right view” is its full compatibility with “the intuitive metaphysics of contemporary physics” (19); another part is its being the ontological view shared by major figures of the philosophic tradition such as Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. Strawson also shows that Nietzsche’s having a view of the nature of reality is not in tension with his views on the limits of knowing. Strawson’s essay is a significant advance in understanding the continued relevance of Nietzsche’s ontology of will to power as “the right view.”

Chapter 13

The Ending of “Sanctus Januarius”

“The tragedy begins” GS 342

“Sanctus Januarius” ends oddly, inexplicably for its first readers, with a closing section that announces an opening, “Incipit tragoedia,” the tragedy begins, and tells of a Zarathustra, named only here in the book, who went into the mountains for ten years of solitude and is now preparing his return.1 The preceding section, “The greatest weight,” describes two different reactions to your being told in eerie circumstances that you will live this exact life you are now living an untold number of times. The book thus ends announcing a mysterious new teaching and a beginning that is a return of what very few will know was a historically pivotal teacher. One year later, at the end of August 1883, that teacher reappeared in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, whose opening section was the very one that ended “Sanctus Januarius”—but that book did not say it was a part 1 and said nothing about the new teaching. And when Thus Spoke Zarathustra 2 appeared at the end of 1883, that new teaching appeared 1. Nietzsche removed the name Zarathustra from early versions of some sections of “Sanctus Januarius”: Zarathustra spoke the philosopher’s words in 332 and the description of the city in 291, and most notably brings the news of God’s death announced in the published version by “The madman” (125). See KSA 14, pp. 265, 270, and the twenty pages Brusotti devotes to GS 125 (Die Leidenschaft der Erkenntnis, 404–23; see also 389–404 on a book that influenced Nietzsche’s view of madness, the German translation of the English psychiatrist Henry Maudsley’s Responsibility in Mental Disease [1874]).

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only indirectly as a “redemption” not yet achieved. Only when Thus Spoke Zarathustra 3 appeared on April 10, 1884, did the mysterious teaching in the penultimate section of the 1882 Gay Science receive a full presentation as what Zarathustra said was necessary from the beginning, a new teaching to meet the cultural crisis brought on by the demise of the millennia-long false teaching he himself first brought. It thus took Nietzsche almost two years to write out serially his chosen vehicle for the teaching and teacher he announced at the end of “Sanctus Januarius,” the end of The Gay Science, the end of his free mind experiment. But if “Sanctus Januarius” ends by pointing to a new beginning, it almost ends on what is ending, “The dying Socrates,” the death of the ideal that sustained Western culture; it almost ends on Nietzsche’s campaign against Socrates, begun more than a decade earlier in The Birth of Tragedy. Just before “The dying Socrates” came “Vita Femina,” a section on the new sense of things that will replace the nihilism that accompanies the demise of what Nietzsche takes to be Socratic. The “January” that opens a year and closes one in “Sanctus Januarius” aims to be a millennial month. This “January” also breaks Nietzsche’s life as a writer into two parts, a first part of deferential books analyzing a cultural crisis and freeing the mind, and a second part of books that deepen the analysis of a culture in crisis and, primarily, bring the new view gained by the freed mind.2

“ V i ta F e m i n a ” ( 3 3 9 ) Preparations having been made for the ending that is coming, a warning is in order: “To see the ultimate beauties of a work—for that, all knowledge and all good will are not enough.” Not enough are the best gains made by the two forces driving the whole inquiry, the passion for knowledge and the good will that is the agent and the object of that passion. The “work” for whose ultimate beauties these are not enough extends through “humanity” to the totality of which the human is a part: “nature” or what the title and final sentence of this section call life. But if the passion for knowledge and all good will are not enough, what could possibly be enough? 2. In dealing with the end of “Sanctus Januarius,” I omit some sections of great importance for the new beginning, most notably the celebration of science applied to morality, “Hooray for physics! ” (335), the future of the historical sense and its cost, “The ‘humanity’ of the future” (337), and the summary statement on suffering and the modern virtue of pity, “The will to suffer and those who feel compassion” (338).

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An event must occur, Nietzsche answers, “the rarest happy accident so that for once the cloud-veil on these peaks gives way for us and the sun shines on them.” That happy accident has two preconditions; first is a twofold selfpreparedness: “Not only must we stand on just the right spot, but our soul itself must have pulled away the veil of its heights”—one must station oneself in just the right place, and self-knowledge, knowledge of one’s own soul, must already have attained its highest point of insight. In that attainment, Nietzsche reports, the soul is seen as still “in need of an external expression and parable, as if needing a hold to remain powerful over itself.” The rarity of this conjunction of an internal lifting of the veil and its external confirmation leads Nietzsche to report what he is “inclined to believe” about it: “the highest heights of everything good, be it work, deed, humanity, nature have so far been something hidden and veiled for most and even for the best”—the “ultimate beauties,” then, concern the “good” of the human and of nature itself: at stake in the ultimate beauties is the goodness of the whole. And Nietzsche is inclined to believe that even for the best the highest heights of the beautiful and the good have remained veiled. Three sections remain after this one, and two historic persons appear in them, two of the best. First is Socrates, the dying Socrates, whose last words Nietzsche interprets as betraying his judgment against life, a judgment his dying made historic by certifying a transcendence of life as the ideal or highest good. Second is Zarathustra, the Persian prophet Nietzsche understood as the ultimate source of the view of life represented by the dying Socrates. Socrates’ dying is an ending, Zarathustra’s returning is a beginning as fateful as the dying because it will elevate the opposite ideal, that conjunction of effort and accident that reveals the hitherto hidden ultimate beauty of humanity and nature. Having stated his belief in the historic rarity of the unveiling of the highest heights, Nietzsche affirms its rarity for one who experiences it: “—what does unveil itself to us, unveils itself to us once only!”3 And he moves directly to the paradigm, to the Greeks and the Greek prayer that everything beautiful be given “two or even three times.”4 The Greek saying is only a prayer: they “had good reason to call in the gods because ungodly reality gives us the beautiful not at all or One Time only!”—but ungodly reality does give the beautiful. Nietzsche finds it necessary to state what “I mean to say” with this judgment: “the world is overfull of beautiful things but in spite of that, poor, 3. Nietzsche struck the words “it is a mistake to wait for a return [Wiederkehr]” (KSA 14, p. 271), perhaps because it introduced an ambiguity about the doctrine he would soon announce. 4. KSA 14, p. 271 gives possible sources in Empedocles and Plato.

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very poor in beautiful moments and unveilings of these things.” The problem of experiencing the beautiful lies in us; its rarity is a function of who we are, not of what the world is. The next sentence speaks of numberless beautiful possibilities engendered by life but does not alter the rarity of the experience of the genuine beauty of life, for the possibilities it speaks of are a “veil”: “But perhaps this is the strongest magic of life: it lays a gold-interwoven veil of beautiful possibilities over it, promising, resisting, bashful, mocking, compassionate, seductive.”5 That gold-interwoven veil is art, the human capacity to beautify, beautify with a veil. An earlier section of great importance, one Nietzsche radically altered at the last moment of correcting the page proofs, treated this function of art under the title “Our ultimate gratitude to art” (107): art has reestablished itself for Nietzsche, who no longer imagines that art will wither away in the enlightened future. Describing our ultimate gratitude to art, he can again use the language of The Birth of Tragedy: “As an aesthetic phenomenon the world is still bearable to us” (GS 107; cf. BT 5, 24, and its foreword 5 [1886]). But the Nietzsche writing “Sanctus Januarius” is not the Nietzsche who wrote The Birth of Tragedy but the one who wrote “Will and wave” and is preparing to write Thus Spoke Zarathustra.6 A final sentence remains, the fitting sentence after the last item in the newly adjusted list of qualities of “the gold-interwoven veil,” seductive:7 “Yes, life is a woman!” This translated repetition of the title opens a whole new dimension for Nietzsche’s thought and poetry, for while he has frequently written about man and woman, now he understands womanliness and manliness with the new depth that will enable him to close his two greatest books on the manliness and womanliness embodied in the return of Dionysos and Ariadne, manliness and womanliness divinized. “Life—a woman” is also prelude to two of the most important events in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Zarathustra’s dance with Wild Wisdom and Life in “The Dance Song,” where Life suggests, contrary to his Wild Wisdom, that she is not unfathomable, and his dance with Life in “The Other Dance Song,” where their dance ends with Zarathustra confirming his love of life in willing life’s eternal return. “Vita femina” is a section of first importance placed just right: affirming that “the strongest magic of life” is the art of affirmation that accompanies the new understanding, it prepares the artful close of “Sanctus Januarius,” the 5. “Veil” is Schleier, just used for what hides the peaks of what is and the heights of our soul. 6. I treat “Our ultimate gratitude to art” (GS 107) in the Conclusion pp. 329–31. 7. See KSA 14, p. 271.

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writing that placed the new understanding at its center as a secret. With “Vita femina,” “Sanctus Januarius” unites the true understanding with the art that celebrates it; the new Philosopher becomes what he must, the new Artist.

“ T h e dy i n g S o c r at e s ” ( 3 40 ) It is hard to imagine higher praise than Nietzsche lavishes on Socrates in his opening sentence. The two qualities he admires most, “courage and wisdom,” are the highest qualities of action and thought, and he admires those qualities in “everything Socrates did, said—and did not say.” He seems to admire everything, with moderation added to courage and wisdom because Socrates restrained his speech. But no, Nietzsche withholds highest praise because Socrates failed to sustain silence at the last moment. There is much that Nietzsche does not do or say with Socrates: he does not, as he had intended, place Socrates’ last words among the set of “Last words” he considered in an earlier section (36)8 but instead singles out Socrates’ last words to place them in the most significant spot: as his sole statement at the end of “Sanctus Januarius” about what is ending with the old year. And he focuses on one thing only. About to intimate the new ideal of eternal return and the descent of a new teacher to bring it, Nietzsche reduces the end of the old year to what ruled it through its teacher Socrates’ last words. Had Socrates kept silent, had he not lifted the cloth that covered his face as cold death moved up his body and said to his lifelong friend, “O Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius,” he would perhaps belong to “a still higher order of minds.” For “those who have ears,” Nietzsche says, Socrates’ words mean, “O Crito, life is a disease.” He can barely believe it: “Is it possible! Socrates, Socrates suffered life!” His suffering led to the worst possible action: “And then he still took his revenge for it . . . ! Did a Socrates still have to revenge himself ? Was there one ounce too little magnanimity in his superabundant virtue?” Nietzsche’s warfare against morality, begun in Daybreak, had isolated hatred of self and life and the need to revenge oneself on life as the primary passions driving spiritual life in the moral age of humanity. Thus Spoke Zarathustra will make that disastrous event in the history of humanity the moment in which revenge gained spirit and interpreted life as a sickness that death could heal (Z 2.20 “On Redemption”). In the economy of “Sanctus Januarius” it is enough to distill this millennial event into the words of the dying 8. See KSA 14, p. 271.

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Socrates, who inspired noble Greek youths, most especially Plato, to be like him, to take spiritual revenge on life. Nietzsche seems not to have had ears for the actual subtlety of Socrates’ last words: they allow Simmias and Kebes and almost all auditors of Phaedo’s account to interpret them as Nietzsche does, in the way that gives heart to those who need to believe what Socrates has argued for throughout the Phaedo, that their souls are immortal and that at death they pass to a better existence, the belief consistent with Socrates’ public speech since the Republic thirty years before—restrained speech, as Nietzsche did recognize. Socrates’ last words could be heard differently by the rare sort Nietzsche himself appeals to in his writings. Such an auditor could hear those words as completing the theme of healing that began near the beginning of the Phaedo with Phaedo’s statement, “Plato, I think, was sick,” and ran through the twin diseases isolated at the center, the misology and misanthropy to which the seemingly rational are susceptible because of reason’s limitations in demonstrating what most find necessary, that their souls are immortal and that there’s a cure for life. Socrates owes a cock to Asclepius for his historically most important act: he saved philosophy’s life in the world through his politic teaching of another world. The words of the dying Socrates encourage an ideal of life-transcendence while leaving open the possibility of a different ideal for someone like Socrates who learned very early from Diotima that to be is to be eros. Nietzsche’s last words in “The dying Socrates” point to his coming words and deeds: “O friends! We must overcome even the Greeks!” To overcome even that Greek who, in the ideal of his dying, became the one turning point and vortex of so-called world history is to perform a world-historic action of similar magnitude. And it is not mere magnanimity or generosity that moves that overcoming; nor is it even a matter of doing life justice: it is not mere virtue. Instead, the next section suggests that the act of overcoming even the Greeks is an act of love, of the passion as deep as revenge but opposite to it; an act of eros generates the justice of giving each thing its due, willing its eternal return as the thing that it is.

“ T h e g r e at e st w e i g h t ” ( 3 41 ) Perhaps the single most important thing about Nietzsche’s first ever public announcement of his eternal return teaching is the focus he chose: omitting crucial aspects of the teaching like the question of its truth, he chose to emphasize how you will react when you first hear it. The workbook entries on

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eternal return have the same focus; the very first entry is already concerned with how to introduce it: that entry outlines a five-part book entitled “The Eternal Return of the Same.” Nietzsche dated it “beginning of August 1881” and in the months following wrote numerous entries on eternal return, working through the questions it raises—cosmological, historical, cultural, psychological. But most prominent is the problem of how best to introduce it to readers for whom it would be new and baffling. Even “Sanctus Januarius” introduces eternal return through the problem of introducing eternal return.9 The reader of “Sanctus Januarius,” having just read “The dying Socrates” and seen that it treats the death of the ideal that ruled the “year” now passing, here encounters an unfamiliar “greatest weight,” a title inviting that it be seen as the new ideal for the new “year.” How could that replace the old? Nietzsche answers with the following, final section of “Sanctus Januarius”: a teacher is preparing his return, Zarathustra himself, the founding teacher of the moral view advanced by both Socrates and the writers of the Bible. The founding teacher of our two-pronged tradition is preparing his return in order to bring a new “greatest weight.”10 “The greatest weight” begins with “What if,” a speech to you, du, by a “demon” who creeps into your “loneliest loneliness” and speaks the most basic point of eternal return to you alone in a wholly personal and singular manner—offering no argument. Your “loneliest loneliness” cannot be some forlorn feeling of abandonment or mere gloom but must be the experience of being most yourself, alone with yourself, in touch with yourself “as you are”— your most solitary solitude. The demon says to you in that solitude, “This life as you now live it and have lived it”—your whole present and past—“you must live once again and innumerable times again.” He means live it again literally: “there will be nothing new in it but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything indescribably small or large in your life must come again to you and all in the same order and sequence.” He makes the sameness of each living of your life eerie by eternalizing this moment: “— and even so this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even so this moment and I myself.” A final sentence ties your personal recurrence to the recurrence of the largest possible whole: “The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again—and you with it, dust-particle of dust.” The 9. KSA 9 11 [141]. Chap. 14 will treat this M III 1 entry and other eternal return entries. 10. “The greatest weight” or the new center of gravity fulfills the second of the eight “granite sentences” Nietzsche added late to the end of book 3 of The Gay Science: “What do you believe in?—In this: that the weight of all things must be determined anew” (269).

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image binds your insignificant fatedness to the fatedness of the whole: “hourglass” is Sanduhr in German, and turning over the sand-clock of the totality of events turns you over too, you dust-particle of sand-dust. After the demon’s last words, Nietzsche pictures two possible reactions springing involuntarily from your hearing the demon’s what if; he puts the reactions into two questions posed to you. The first pictures the typical case: “Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke this way?”—the biblical echoes, cursing and “wailing and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 13:42), suggest that you will hear the demon as a devil speaking. The second pictures an exceptional case at an exceptional moment: “Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered, ‘you are a god and never have I heard anything more divine!’ ” A tremendous moment seems to be the only possible ground for your exuberant embrace of the new thought; only in the grip of such a moment could you hear the speech of the demon as the word of a god. The introduction of the new teaching is more than precarious if these are the two possible responses to your first hearing it: typically you would curse as a devil the one who spoke it; only a few and only at a special moment could hear it as the speech of a god. What is the fate of a teaching likely to be if its introduction falls out this way? Nietzsche’s first public announcement of the teaching repeats his overwhelming concern throughout the workbook in which he first treats the thought: how to introduce it. The next sentence transports you to an entirely different setting. Instead of hearing a demon speak the teaching for the first time, you are pictured after “this thought gained power over you.” Now, with that thought resident within you, it “would, as you are, transform you and perhaps crush you.” The thought as resident within you is a winnowing force; it would, on the basis of who you are by nature, perhaps crush you or, what seems the more standard reaction, leave you exalted. Whoever you are, you experience the teaching with profound gravity, for “the question in each and every thing ‘do you want this once again and innumerable times again?’ would lie as the greatest weight on your actions!” With the thought having gained power over you, your every action is weighted from a new center of gravity: there will be a center of gravity, and depending on who you are and on your disposition toward yourself, you will be exalted or perhaps crushed. The final sentence Nietzsche added to the page proofs he was correcting in Tautenburg; it replaced two sentences already there. A question introduced by an “Or,” it gives the ultimate ground of your response to eternal return by looking explicitly to who you are: “Or how well disposed toward yourself and

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toward life would you have to become in order to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?—” This new final question in the section introducing eternal return asks about what is given in you, in your nature. The sentence is a great gain over the two it replaced, however much those two succeeded in ending the book on themes important to The Gay Science, most particularly a new “ideal.”11 The new final sentence brings to a positive end the chief theme of Nietzsche’s burrowing into morality to discover its foundations. The books of that burrowing set out with increasing intensity Nietzsche’s critique of what he found at the core of morality, particularly Christian morality and its modern heir, a disposition toward oneself that is a self-loathing or self-hatred that craves nothing more fervently than redemption from one’s self and putting on a new self—a morality Nietzsche can call the de-selfing morality, when he describes in Ecce Homo what began with Daybreak.12 With his new sentence Nietzsche ends his second book of warfare against the de-selfing morality on the ideal of the opposite natural craving felt by one with the opposite natural disposition to oneself. And while the new final sentence brings to a victorious end the project he began with Daybreak, it also brings to an end the more comprehensive project that he began with Things Human All Too Human, “erecting a new image and ideal of the free mind”: now Nietzsche’s freed mind can point to the new ideal that freed minds can embrace, the good to which the freed mind can freely, knowingly bind itself because it is so well disposed toward itself and life. That this first public introduction of eternal return takes the form that it does is no casual matter: Nietzsche’s M III 1 entries on eternal return, beginning with the very first of them, repeatedly raised the problem of just how to introduce it in a way that would give it its best chance of taking root. The problem is an old one: how to introduce a radically novel teaching, knowing that it will at first inevitably sound offensive or even criminal but that it is needed as the thought that will eventually have power over everyone. Could Nietzsche have been schooled in the introduction of novel teaching by another radical innovator in the philosophic tradition, Plato? When Plato has Socrates first introduce the novel teaching that he aims to make the new ground of vir11. The replaced sentences run: “Or would you become that athlete and hero who is able to bear this weight and even to climb higher with it? Place the most powerful thought before your eyes—and you will at the same time glimpse the ideal that stands before the most powerful humans of the future!” KSA 14, p. 271. 12. EH 3 D 2; 4 7. The term Entselbstungs-Moral appears first in workbook entries from late 1887, KSA 12 10 [128], and 1888, KSA 13 12 [1, §243], 23 [3].

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tue, the teaching that there are permanent, gloriously beautiful ideas or forms of the moral virtues and that they are shepherded in their permanence and beauty by an ultimate good and reinforced by moral gods—all novelties in a world stamped by Homer—he did not neglect to include a reflection on the introduction of great novelty. Long before Socrates set forth his novel teaching just after the center of the Republic—the exact center being the thought that the philosopher must rule—he spoke of the “noble lie,” the charter myth that is to be the sustaining belief of the city he is constructing in speech.13 Having told that lie, he asks Glaucon if he has “some device for persuading [the citizens] of this tale.” Glaucon is a youngster with a spirited nature and not a philosopher, but he has listened to the teachers who are called wise, the “sophists,” and he knows how to answer: “not for [the current citizens] themselves; however for their sons and their successors and the rest of humanity who come afterward.” Socrates adds the word implied in Glaucon’s answer: “then this will go where tradition shall lead it.” Tradition will make what no one now believes into what has power over everyone. Shortly after looking to tradition to establish the innovative teaching as what every child is raised in, Socrates can introduce the necessary laws against innovation to protect his innovation.14 Plato, introducer of fictions that became foundational, knew the problem Nietzsche faced, and Plato solved that problem all too successfully. And Nietzsche? He ends The Gay Science by introducing Zarathustra: let our original foundational teacher, more foundational even than Plato, solve the problem of introducing the new foundational teaching.15 Whether Nietzsche learned the problem from Plato or on his own makes no difference; all foundational teachers face the same problem, and Nietzsche’s first public announcement of what he means to make foundational indicates that he knows the problem and acts to overcome it. In M III 1, Nietzsche’s first entries on eternal return appear in the midst of reflections on how the moral tradition became established: by a process of einverleiben, incorporating a teaching in childhood, making it second nature long before one can even think about it.16 “Sanctus Januarius” thus ends on a moment of supreme historic importance that is also the moment of greatest importance in the trajectory of Nietzsche’s writing life. From his beginnings he held to the need for a teaching— could it be Wagner’s?—fit to gather the dispersed and distracted modern mass 13. Plato, Republic 415d. 14. Ibid., 422a–424a. 15. On Plato as a foundational teacher see the Note at the end of this chapter, pp. 282f. 16. On incorporation and eternal return, see pp. 285–94.

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under a new meaning and ideal that would give life weight again: introducing the teaching of eternal return is the supreme action of the new Thinker as Artist. “The greatest weight” is the second-most important section of “Sanctus Januarius,” exceeded in importance only by “Will and wave” at its center; the importance of the second event lies in its connection, as a teaching, with the first, an insight. While the teaching is the new art that meets the most pressing cultural deficit of modern life, the warrant for the teaching, the reason it is necessary, lies deeper: it is the teaching that rises reasonably out of the insight into the universal character of Habsucht, whose highest form is Wissensgier. “Sanctus Januarius” offers no explanation of this link between the insight at its center and the teaching at its end, but it is the link between knowing the world and affirming the world. By closing “Sanctus Januarius” with Zarathustra’s return, Nietzsche closes by promising the book that will make that link between knowing and acting a chief feature of its structure— and only of its structure: it is not spoken directly: after discovering that to be is to be will to power at the center of part 2, Zarathustra goes on to discover, in the chapter “On Redemption,” that its ultimate implication is willing the eternal return of the same.17

“Incipit tragoedia” (342) “Sanctus Januarius” and The Gay Science end by introducing Zarathustra with what became the opening section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.18 The Gay 17. Hugo Drochon has a clear insight into the cultural relevance of Nietzsche’s teaching of eternal return: “the doctrine’s aim is to restore precisely the healthy instincts that are the bedrock to a healthy culture, and that has given way to the decaying moralism of the postSocratic ancient Greeks” (Nietzsche’s Great Politics, 115). He also sees its practical goal: Nietzsche “desires to resuscitate healthy instincts, notably through the doctrine of eternal return— instincts that would lead to the re-creation of purposeful institutions” (126). And Drochon sees a strategic intelligence at work in the late effort of Nietzsche’s “great politics” to establish “the new party of life” (EH 3 BT 4) to fight for these teachings against the prevailing morality: “Nietzsche’s war of spirits (Geisterkrieg (EH 4.1)) will be an intellectual struggle” (174); “good Europeans” will “fight a mind war against the Christian party so as to delineate a new sphere of existence, with its own, appropriate morality” (177). 18. Nietzsche made minor changes when the opening section of the prologue to Z appeared with the rest of the first part a year later, in the fourth week of August 1883. He removed the title, broke the single paragraph into eleven paragraphs, and broke up two long sentences; and he replaced “Lake Urmi” with “the lake of his home,” a sign of his intention to strip his Zarathustra of the historic and geographic particularity of the Persian prophet while retaining his primary feature as the historic founder of the moral view of history.

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Science as a whole thus flows seamlessly into Thus Spoke Zarathustra. That book would be the full introduction to eternal return even though the first hint of it appears toward the end of part 2.19 “The tragedy begins”—and that’s a good thing for Nietzsche, tragedy properly understood being a definition of life itself as well as being the foundation of the greatest cultural life till now. Nietzsche used the title Incipit tragoedia again—translated into German—when he ended The Gay Science a second time, in late 1886, with Book 5. Its final section before its “Epilog,” “The great health” (382), ends with the words “the tragedy begins . . .” That second ending of the book says the same thing as the first: here begins a new age in the history of humanity. It can begin because of what The Gay Science helped end: all the old comedies of invented fictions about a better life elsewhere for the redeemed. What begins with Thus Spoke Zarathustra is tragedy, the historic revival of the view of life that animated the highest civilization yet achieved, the brief moment in which the tragic age of the Greeks celebrated the truth about life on the Athenian stage and shaped a high civic order around that celebration. In his 1886 Foreword to The Gay Science, Nietzsche could again use incipit as a word for the new beginning, warning his reader that his “suspiciously innocent book” ending with “Incipit tragoedia” also contains “[s]omething downright wicked and malicious . . . incipit parodia, no doubt.” “Incipit parodia” says something suspiciously innocent about his book while meaning something wicked and malicious: the tragedy now beginning destroys by parody all the possible cosmic comedies that the first section of The Gay Science viewed as ruling humanity till now. Parody is not a higher form than tragedy, nor does it replace tragedy; tragedy employs parody to laugh the teachings of purpose off the stage, but tragedy is fundamental, not as a refutation of life but as the celebration of what life is.20 No one could know when first reading The Gay Science during the year after its publication that its author intended to write a book about Zarathustra’s new descent to humanity. The reader would have to wait to solve the puzzles raised by the end of The Gay Science and its incipit. But Nietzsche 19. EH 3 Z 1 says explicitly that Thus Spoke Zarathustra exists for the sake of eternal return. 20. Nietzsche again invoked the historic pivot point in a later use of incipit: he ends his capsule history of the moral age of humanity, “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable,” by adding what follows its last stage, the abolition of the mere apparentness that “true” worlds assigned the only world: “(Midday; moment of the shortest shadow; end of the longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.)” (TI, chap. 4)

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did give a further assist to the eventual understanding of that incipit by adding his notice about an end on the back cover: this book brings to an end the series of books whose common goal is to erect a new image and ideal of the free mind. Whatever appeared next would not be another book on that ideal. What then? A reader paying close attention to “Sanctus Januarius”—that final Book of the series made pivotal by its title—could possibly have deduced that whatever began with this January would explain the new year’s resolution of amor fati at its opening, and would give more aid in entering the secret beyond the seventh solitude at its center, and would help explain the words of the demon placed at its end. The book that was coming did all that and more. To fully understand “Sanctus Januarius” with its compact riddles, it is useful to return to M III 1, for that workbook shows Nietzsche arriving at the teaching of eternal return and immediately thinking about how best to present it. What Nietzsche thought about eternal return is clearer in the privacy of M III 1 than anywhere in his public writings. *

N ot e o n P l ato a s a F o u n dat i o na l T e ac h e r In his Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible Russell E. Gmirkin adds an unexpected dimension to Nietzsche’s judgment on Plato and his historic importance as a preexistent Christian. Building on previous scholarship but significantly advancing it, Gmirkin offers a massive and painstaking demonstration of his thesis that the Hebrew scriptures were written by Jewish scholars working at the great Library in Alexandria around 270 BCE and that they were schooled by Greek philosophers, particularly Plato, most particularly Plato’s Laws. In that dialogue an “Athenian Stranger” gives instructions on how best to found a people by supplying it with laws and customs that would make it eternal. Gmirkin makes a powerful case that the laws of the Pentateuch, particularly those of Deuteronomy, and the history of the founding hero Moses, and the charter myth of God’s deliverance from Egypt into the Promised Land, plus the tribal structure of twelve tribes and priestly authority for the continuation of culture, and numerous other features large and small of Jewish practice and belief have precise precedents in Greek writings especially Plato’s Laws and virtually no precedents in Middle Eastern traditions generally. Gmirkin has put us all in his debt for a stupendous amount of research into the beliefs, laws, customs, and institutions of the Hebrew Bible, the Greek writers, and ancient Middle Eastern documents and records, and,

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not less, for his meticulous and judicious comparative assessments of this massive amount of material. He makes a persuasive case for a radical reinterpretation of the foundations of Western monotheism and the populations that lived it and live it. What was for centuries piously imagined to be Plato’s clear dependence on the laws and teachings revealed to Moses turns out to have a basis in fact: “Moses” clearly depended on Plato, taking over not only the basic laws and institutions but also the necessity that they be believed to be revealed by God to the founding patriarch. Plato, Plato, would thus be the ultimate author of the monotheistic religion that became philosophy’s most intransigent and effective enemy, author indirectly of the Revelation basic to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Plato, developing a civic order ultimately for the protection and well-being of philosophy, the most important of all human achievements, would thus be responsible not only for Athens but also for Jerusalem. For a Nietzschean history of philosophy this would be a historic irony than which there could be none more savory.

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Backgrounds to the Ending of “Sanctus Januarius”

We teach the teaching M III 1 [141]

Nietzsche chose to open his Ecce Homo account of Thus Spoke Zarathustra by relating “the history of Zarathustra.” Its “fundamental conception, the thought of eternal return, belongs in August of the year 1881: it was jotted down [hingeworfen] on a sheet with the subscript, ’6000 feet beyond man and time.’ ” That may be true, he may have thrown that thought down with that subscript in a no-longer-extant notebook he carried that day on his walk along Lake Silvaplana. But the first mention of eternal return in the workbooks that still exist falls in the middle of a long entry carefully written out in M III 1, the workbook he kept in his room in the Durisch house. That mention is anything but “jotted down on a sheet”; instead, it stands in its sequential place on a page well into M III 1 as the title, “The Eternal Return of the Same,” above a well-thoughtout, carefully written out “draft” for a book in five parts.1 The draft lists five numbered chapter titles, with eternal return appearing only in the fifth, followed by a list of some of its key consequences. After that list stand three lines: Beginning of August 1881 in Sils Maria, 6000 feet above the sea and much higher above all human things!—2 1. The page on which it begins already had entry [140] at its top. 2. Nietzsche quoted these lines exactly in a letter to Köselitz two years after writing them (September 3, 1883): “The Engadin is the birthplace of my Zarathustra. I just found the first

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And after these lines comes the longest part of the draft, and it expands the fourth item and does not mention eternal return. This first-ever appearance of eternal return in Nietzsche’s writings confirms what the rest of M III 1 attests: the thought of eternal return did not fall from the sky but arose, abruptly, yes, but in a setting and as a consequence of the chains of reasoning that had occupied Nietzsche for years and achieved a kind of fulfillment in M III 1. Every appearance of eternal return in the published writings resembles this first unpublished one: each is well planned by a master writer, plotted to appear as a thought the understanding of which depends in part at least on the setting he chose to give it. Despite the priority that the published writings must always have, the setting of the first-ever mention of eternal return in a private workbook has its own kind of authority: by assigning eternal return the final place in a five-item list, it sets eternal return within the unfolding chronological order of topics in M III 1 with their own internal logic. What did eternal return mean for Nietzsche? Why did he want this to be the teaching identified with him? M III 1 helps answer those questions, and not with speculative answers but with Nietzsche’s own. M III 1 displays the embedded place of eternal return in the unfolding gains of Nietzsche’s thinking as it pressed inexorably to its ultimate gains in the spring and summer of 1881.

The First Appearance of Eternal Return [141] The celebrated entry with Nietzsche’s first reference to eternal return as his own teaching3 bears the title “The Eternal Return of the Same,” but its dominant theme from start to finish is Einverleibung, incorporation, a word used in the titles of its first three chapters and again in the description of its final chapter.4 All five chapters see humanity as radically historical: they set out draft of the thought that is bound up with him; under it stands, ‘Beginning of August 1881 in Sils Maria, 6000 feet above the sea and much higher above all human things.’ ” 3. Nietzsche was familiar with the notion of eternal return from his study of the Greeks (UD 2). In EH he says: “The doctrine of ‘eternal return,’ that is, of the unconditional and infinitely repeated circular course of all things—this doctrine of Zarathustra might in the end already have been taught by Heraclitus. At least the Stoa has traces of it, and the Stoics inherited almost all of their principal notions from Heraclitus” (EH 3 BT 3). See Kaufmann, Nietzsche, 316–320. Ansell Pearson and Large, Nietzsche Reader, has a complete translation of [141] that I use with minor adjustments. 4. Nietzsche first used einverleiben in M III 1 at [134], shortly before this first entry on eternal return. On einverleiben, see Brusotti, Die Leidenschaft der Erkenntnis, 424–37; Anselm Pearson, “Incorporation of Truth”; and Krell, Infectious Nietzsche, 158–76. All three consider

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the intellectual/spiritual formation of the human species across the millennia, and incorporation is the key to its history. The first three chapters—“1. The Incorporation of the Fundamental Errors. 2. The Incorporation of the Passions. 3. The Incorporation of Knowledge and of the Renouncing Knowledge (Passion for Knowledge)”—cover Nietzsche’s deepest discoveries in his 1873 “On Truth and Lie” and in the years since, discoveries driven by the passion to know as it turns on itself to examine knowing’s place in the formation of “knowledge.” Even before “On Truth and Lie,” Nietzsche had concluded that the basic activities of knowledge, perceiving and conceiving, construct a world. Is it at all possible then to know the world?5 To understand understanding entailed recognizing that the human was itself the result of a long process of involuntary incorporation of constructed error, taking it into the mind the way the body takes in what it eats, digesting and transforming it, in-corporating it into the flesh and bone of thinking and imagining. The titles of the first three chapters summarize the four basic phases in Nietzsche’s history of humanity as a history of incorporation, three stages of unconscious activity that stamped humanity with the perceptual and cognitive categories that became second nature, and a fourth stage in which knowledge came to recognize “knowledge” as incorporated error. Incorporation is absent from the first brief description of chapter 4 but proves decisive in the elaboration Nietzsche gave of that chapter. In the fifth chapter—for whose sake the first four exist as summaries of Nietzsche’s recent gains in thinking—eternal return is the issue: incorporating it would make possible the dawning of a new age in human existence. “1. The Incorporation of the Fundamental Errors” would treat a massive theme in the workbooks of this period, one that reached back at least as far as his 1872 workbook P I 20: the errors built into the very processes of human perceiving and conceiving construct our world in our every awareness of it, processes Nietzsche viewed as honed by evolution; survival depended on the fundamental errors of construing the world of absolute flux as a totality of things that perdure through time and exist in a nexus of cause and effect. CorM III 1. Franco entitles his chapter on GS “The Gay Science and the Incorporation of Knowledge,” Nietzsche’s Enlightenment, 101–60. 5. His topics seem to demand it, but Nietzsche avoided the standard term of university philosophy, epistemology, and used the term ontology only three times: Ontologie in PTA (11 on Parmenides) and in the Nachlass of 1886 (KSA 12 7 [4] end of 1886–spring 1887 in connection with Kant); ontologisch in the Nachlass of 1888 (KSA 13 14 [169] spring 1888, in the phrase “the ontological proof of God”).

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responding to the seemingly perduring things are fixed concepts that seem to represent them. The “fundamental errors” are the inexpungible ontological errors about beings derivative from the inexpungible epistemological errors in our “representing” the world. “2. The Incorporation of the Passions” would deal with a chief theme of Nietzsche’s burrowing into morality that traced egoism and altruism to a common egoism exercising the passions of love and hate, human forms of attraction and aversion, pleasure and pain. That genealogy, supplemented and deepened throughout Nietzsche’s working life, grounded explanations of how the negative passions of hate and vengeance won supremacy and incorporated as primary truth a constructed world of freely chosen actions for which the chooser was responsible, earning deserved punishment or merited deliverance into some imaginary other world—the whole baroque panoply of morality whose future can now be known: “3. The Incorporation of Knowledge and of the Renouncing Knowledge. (Passion for Knowing)” would deal with an essential gain first made by Greeks and Romans and advanced in the modern world: the drive for knowledge and incorporation of the results of that drive. Even “the renouncing knowledge” was being incorporated, knowledge renouncing the satisfying view of morality and human specialness among the animals, knowledge that would eventually plunge humanity into nihilism. Nietzsche’s parenthetical mention of his own defining passion signals his characteristic view of himself and his kind: the thinker gains the first glimpses of what is coming for society given the trajectory of incorporation. The particulars of this present stage of human becoming are dealt with next: “4. The Innocent. The Solitary as Experiment. The Lightening of Life, Abasement, Weakening—Transition” would deal with the successes in the modern experiment of living with the truth that Nietzsche had been writing about since the 1876 Plowshare, historic deliverance into innocence made possible by burrowing into morality. “The solitary as experiment”—Nietzsche, that is—discerns the trajectory of incorporation’s future course: the lightness of being felt as incorporated morality loses its believability; the seeming abasement of humanity as it is compelled to abandon any capital difference from the other animals; the weakening of resolve as humanity loses its attachment to anything higher than commerce and entertainment. But the experimenting solitary views this historic loss of purpose as a preparation for “—Transition.” Chapter 4 would thus mix the necessity of decline with a possible ascent through recognizing the innocence of becoming.

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“5. The new heavy weight: the eternal return of the same.”6 Chapter 5 is the only one whose title is immediately expanded into a brief explanation, an important matter because it helps clarify how Nietzsche construed eternal return shortly after it first came to him at the pyramidal rock near Lake Silvaplana. That there is also more to his thought than is stated in this first entry is clear from entries in M III 1 over the coming days, but this first explanation enjoys the priority of firstness. Its most important feature is that it moves toward a final mention of incorporation, a most illuminating mention given the previous chapters in which incorporation is the essential formative element in the history of human development. The new heavy weight, replacing the now dissolving one, assigns “infinite importance” to “our knowing, erring, our habits, way of life for everything coming.” After this bare statement comes a question: “What will we do with the rest of our life[?]” The point is not the doing but rather the we: what will we do now? Which we? —we, the we who have lived the greatest part of [our lives] in the most essential ignorance[.] We teach the teaching—it is the strongest means to incorporate it ourselves. Our kind of blessedness as teachers of the greatest teaching.

“We” is Nietzsche as the model first teacher of eternal return; we have only the rest of our lives in which to incorporate this thought: those who come after us will have incorporated it from the beginning of their lives, they will always already have “known” it. We are the transition generation who have lived the bulk of our lives unaware of what those to come will know from the beginning of theirs. We in our irremediable deficiency take the second-best way to incorporate it. Future generations, taught by the founding generation, will incorporate the new greatest weight in the way cultures have always shaped their members, through stories and songs, through gesture, dance, and ritual that make up every individual’s infancy and become the givens acquired through all our training, schooling, and education, our acculturation, our being made. Here, then, in his first mention of eternal return, is the ultimate reason that Nietzsche announced on the back cover of The Gay Science that it ends the series of writings whose common goal is to erect “a new image and ideal of 6. In this first mention, “eternal return” is ewige Wiederkunft; later Nietzsche also used ewige Wiederkehr. As Ansell Pearson notes, Wiederkunft is Christian eschatology’s word for the “Second Coming” of Jesus (“Incorporation of Truth,” 247n2); Nietzsche used Wiederkunft in that sense in A 41.

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the free mind”: Nietzsche’s freed mind learned the necessity and nature of the different ideal that would guide not only the few inquirers but the whole of postmoral culture. His series of books on the ideal of the free mind could now end and new books be planned on the new ideal for the bound minds that all human minds past and future inevitably become via the inescapability of incorporation in the nurture and development of body and mind. Within the future culture of minds bound to the incorporated ideal of eternal return, the few minds driven by the passion to know will find their solitary way to satisfy their almost solitary urge to know the truth about themselves and the world amid the limitless affirmation of our selves and our world. This five-part outline for a book on the new thought draws the subscript dating and placing it, a rare occurrence in Nietzsche’s workbooks. Following the subscript he wrote a long paragraph that begins “On 4) The Philosophy of Indifference,” a statement twice as long as his whole sketch of the five chapters. This expansion of item 4 lays out the elements of the “Transition” at the moment at which a successful transition first appeared as a possibility in the glimpse of a new ideal, the moment at which the idea of eternal return first appeared. The phrase Nietzsche uses here for chapter 4, “The Philosophy of Indifference,” did not appear in his initial list of five chapters.7 Indifference is a defining feature of the free mind: committed only to its passion to know, it permits itself no other attachments, interests, or purposes. A philosophy of indifference transforms one’s relation to things: What used to be the strongest stimulus now has a quite different effect: it is seen and agreed to as just a game (the passions and labors), as a life of untruth rejected on principle, as form and stimulus aesthetically enjoyed and cultivated: we adopt a child’s attitude toward what used to constitute the seriousness of existence.

The indifferent mind, freed of the life and death concerns that moved past generations, finds a new seriousness of existence arising from its passion for knowledge: The seriousness of our striving, though, is to understand everything as becoming, to deny ourselves as individuals, to look into the world through as many eyes as possible, to live in drives and activities so as to create eyes 7. The phrase “the philosophy of indifference” appears only here in Nietzsche’s writings.

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for ourselves, temporarily abandoning ourselves to life so as to rest our eye on it temporarily afterward: to maintain the drives as the foundation of all knowing, but to know at what point they become the enemies of knowing: in sum, to wait and see how far knowledge [Wissen] and truth can be incorporated—and to what extent a transformation of the human occurs when it finally lives only so as to know [erkennen].

This summary of the philosophy of indifference brings Nietzsche to his present: to wait and see how far truth can be incorporated, to learn the limits of incorporation or just how much truth human beings are capable of incorporating and still find life worth living. Here, late in his freeing of his mind, Nietzsche confronts again his old question: at what point does truth become deadly?—not deadly to his indifferent mind but to humans at large. Knowing the truth of infinite becoming, knowing the truth of our lack of individual importance, the free mind persists in its effort to know the drives in order to grasp the point at which “the drives become the enemies of knowing.” That is the ultimate practical issue confronting the one who comes to understand the inevitable process of incorporation whereby humans necessarily live within a made world. Knowing the process by which humans are made by culture, knowing the history of our being made by our particular culture, Nietzsche asks if incorporation by humans generally can extend itself to the truth as uncovered by the indifferent thinker driven by the passion for knowledge. Can humanity incorporate the whole truth? The pivotal character of this question is obscured for the reader of KGW because it omits a two-page entry just before this reflection in [141] on the limits of incorporation. That omitted entry is a draft of section 110 of The Gay Science, the section that ends by stating the conclusion the draft implies but does not explicitly draw: “To what extent can truth be incorporated?—that is the question; that is the experiment.”8 That experiment clarifies itself for the solitary free mind living its philosophy of indifference; but that solitary knows that this is the public experiment of the modern Enlightenment, the civilizational experiment now being experienced to its end by the solitary thinker. As entry [141] continues, it has the fate of the whole modern experiment as its theme. “On 4)” now makes three observations, each introduced by a dash, a sequence of insights by the indifferent observer that will determine his decisive action. The observations amount to a reflection on the philosophic life at this point in philosophy’s history. 8. I deal with this omitted entry and GS 110 below, pp. 295f.

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—This is a consequence of the passion for knowledge: there is no way of ensuring its existence except by preserving as well the sources and powers of knowledge, the errors and passions: out of their battle it draws its sustaining strength.

Continued existence of the passion for knowledge, of philosophy, is the one thing needful, and Nietzsche will do what is necessary to preserve it. Therefore, if the passion for knowledge draws its strength from its battle with the errors and the passions, they must be preserved for the sake of his particular passion. A knower, living that conflict, will weigh the whole of life from the perspective of a strict standard: —What will this life look like from the point of view of its sum total of wellbeing? A children’s game under the gaze of the wise man having control over the latter and the former condition—and over death, if such a thing is not possible.

“This life” could seem to refer to the life lived for the passion for knowledge, but what follows the third dash shows that to be far too limited: —But now comes the weightiest knowledge and prompts the fearsome reconsideration of all forms of life: an absolute surplus of pleasure must be demonstrable or else we must choose to destroy ourselves with regard to humanity [in Hinsicht auf die Menschheit] as means of destroying humanity.

The judge and actor is the wise man (“we”), the one who is able to view the whole of life as a children’s game if he has “control over the latter and the former condition,” control over the knowing and over the errors and passions that are the source out of which the passion for knowledge grows. Weighing “the sum total of well-being” offered by life, the wise man can judge it a children’s game provided that he can maintain control over these conditions. If he cannot, he can take a calm view of the “death” that would then be rational, given the surplus of suffering. His own death? The death of the wise judge and actor? One could think so except for the final sentence: the death of the whole species is what is at issue. In this book the weightiest thought is pictured as arising at a precise moment to a particular person: the indifferent wise man, viewing the whole human tale, finds himself compelled to measure the sum total of well-being with a view to continuing it as play or terminating it. The thought of eternal return, arising for the wise man, entails considering

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the whole play from one standpoint: if there is not a demonstrable surplus of pleasure, including of course the highest pleasure, then he must choose to destroy himself with a view to the rational destruction of humanity itself.9 His project of weighing seems at first to demand a weighing of the past: Just this: we have to set the past, our past and that of all humanity, on the scales and also outweigh it—no! this piece of human history will and must repeat itself eternally: we can leave that out of account, we have no influence over it: even if it afflicts our fellow-feeling and biases us against life in general.

Here, just before the transition to the last of the five chapters that set out humanity’s historic moments, the wise man, judging the preceding historic phases in the awareness of the weightiest knowledge, weighs the total of wellbeing in the past. But “no!”—only the present and future over which he can have some influence can count in his judgment. However much suffering may have outweighed well-being in that past, the past plays no role in the wise man’s weighing of whether a surplus of pleasure permits him to will the future of humanity.10 Even if past pain outweighs past pleasure, the wise man learns to be indifferent to it by one means only, a means that also governs his weighing the present and future: If we are not to be overwhelmed by it, our compassion must not be great. Indifference needs to have worked away deep inside us, and enjoyment in contemplation, too. Even the misery of future humanity must not concern us. But the question is whether we still want to live: and how!

The thinker’s single counterbalance to present and future human suffering, itself weighed indifferently, is “enjoyment in contemplation.” That standard in that judge determines his all-important future action: does he, viewing the 9. Schopenhauer seems to be a source of this grave consideration; in The World as Will and Representation he suggests that the eternal return of the world could be affirmed as long as one did not know the wretchedness of life (section 54), but when one knows the history of suffering, one judges annihilation to be desirable (section 59). 10. This “no!” with its quick dismissal of the past as a measure of pain and pleasure seems to be a forerunner of a pivotal, more extended event in Z: in “The Soothsayer” the past appears in a nightmare as transparent coffins that threaten Zarathustra’s judgment on the value of life. That chapter prepares the next, “On Redemption,” in which eternal return is glimpsed for the first time as the redeeming thought (Z 2 19–20).

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whole of human suffering, still want to live? And how would he want to live? He gives no answer, for “On 4)” ends here. But item 4 ends on the “Transition” to chapter 5, and it gives the answer on how he is to live. This five-chapter book plan for introducing eternal return was eventually replaced by Thus Spoke Zarathustra with all its differences from this sketch of a projected book. Zarathustra, the actual book, must be the standard for measuring Nietzsche’s view of why and how to introduce eternal return, however interesting and provocative this first plan is. Still, this first plan shows with particular intensity the gravity for him of discovering eternal return. No wonder he said in his first letter after the discovery: “I [must] hold myself in unshakeable calm.”11 Holding himself in calm led to Zarathustra, as later M III 1 entries show, and Zarathustra, while not imagining his own decision as determining the life and death of the species, has his own historic way of measuring the teaching as a turning point in the history of the species. The teaching Zarathustra brings on his return will teach that this life is worth living an infinite number of times, whereas he was known for teaching what the historic wise after him all taught, that only another life can make this unworthy life worth living. Entry [141] of M III 1, Nietzsche’s first-ever written statement of eternal return, is not a guide to how he first thought about his thought but a guide to how he first thought he might present it. Entry [141] shows that from the start he intended eternal return to be the new culturally formative teaching, replacing the old teachings that formed the old and now dying culture. Those teachings owed their success to having been incorporated, bred into humanity by being grounded in the passions and omnipresent in molding the beliefs of countless generations through all the facets of Bildung: training, acculturating, educating, first with fable, song, and dance, on through all the actions praised and punished, up to the most sophisticated forms of intellectual/ spiritual discipline. The new teaching could succeed only if given time to be incorporated. M III 1 is the workbook in which Nietzsche had been thinking through the nature and extent of Habsucht as the true ground of moral categories and of so much else. What does the first mention of eternal return indicate about the truth-status Nietzsche assigned to it? He touches this point in an instruction to himself that he wrote at the bottom of the right-hand page of M III 1 opposite [141] on the left, possibly as a later reflection:12 11. Nietzsche to Köselitz about two weeks later, August 18, 1881. 12. KGW simply adds this consideration for himself to [141], after leaving a blank line.

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To consider: the different sublime states I have experienced as the basis of the different chapters and their materials—as regulator of the ruling expression, presentation, pathos of each chapter,—so to gain a depiction of my ideal, as it were through addition. And then rise higher!

He would have to make clear in his historical sketch that sublimity or high human aims ruled each of the historic stages of incorporation. Eternal return belongs to a history of rule by sublime states; it will rule in the regulative way of an ideal in a history of regulative ideals, just as the ideal of the dying Socrates ruled Western culture. His final chapter would show how his new ideal would add to that history by rising higher than past ideals, affirming life as it is. From the start, then, Nietzsche intended eternal return to be a way of construing the actions and events of self and world that shared with all other such construals the fact of its having been made and then incorporated. In an older language, Nietzsche viewed eternal return from the start as poetry in the broadest sense of Greek poiein—a thing made by human desiring and framed by intellect and imagination. Taken as such, eternal return is art, art lived out as truth, art of the sort he envisioned from early on as formative of a social order. But while eternal return is a culturally regulative ideal, could it also be factually true? Many subsequent entries in M III 1 raise the question of its factual truth while considering too its psychic truth, its being true to the deepest passion of love. M III 1 will eventually settle the issue of whether Nietzsche took eternal return to be fact or poetry while confirming that the overriding concern of the first entry remained basic: how to introduce eternal return in a way that will secure its future incorporation in place of the loosening incorporation of the moral view, a false view that is also malign.

The Setting of [141] in M III 1 Nietzsche knew immediately that the thought that invaded him in early August 1881 placed a great responsibility on him, and he fell silent as a correspondent. In his first letter after the event, a long letter to Köselitz on August 14, he refused to describe it: “Thoughts have mounted up on my horizon the like of which I have not yet seen—I want to say nothing about them and to hold myself in unshakeable calm. I really will have to live a few more years!” Four days later he sent a postcard to his mother and another to his sister that stated his need for absolute solitude: “My good Lisbeth, I cannot bring myself to telegraph Dr. Rée, although I regard anyone who interrupts my Engadin work-summer, i.e., the demands of my task, my ‘one thing is necessary,’ as my

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enemy.” He vowed to leave Europe altogether if she could not help ensure his solitude.13 The solitude he demanded he got: for six more months he did not see a single friend or acquaintance but dedicated himself solely to his work as recorded in M III 1. The entries after early August are the solitary work of a thinker in the process of making what he regarded as his essential gains after years of deepening insight in freeing his mind to think the fundamental problems. In solitude from May 31, 1881, when Köselitz left him in Recoaro, to February 5, 1882, when Rée arrived in Genoa, Nietzsche came into his maturity as a thinker. M III 1, not being a writing composed for publication, lacks what Nietzsche’s long schooling in writing increasingly gave his books: a carefully built structure whose order and progress instruct and train his attentive reader. But the involuntary structure of M III 1 given to it by its chronological order of entries displays two essential things about eternal return: the context of thoughts within which that overwhelming thought first arose, and the expanding and deepening of that thought in the weeks that followed its discovery as he explored its implications. Regrettably, the version of M III 1 in KGW robs Nietzsche’s first entry on eternal return of its immediate context. The entry that precedes [141] is the two-line [140],14 but just before that is a one and three-quarters page entry omitted in KGW.15 KGW thus obliterates the fact that the first entry on eternal return is preceded by a long reflection on its overriding theme, incorporation. That reflection became Gay Science 110, the indispensable published version of incorporation. As written out in M  III  1, it is an already polished draft of most of section 110, lacking only its title and last eight lines. Both the draft and GS 110 present a history of knowledge that begins as incorporated error and moves through stages of the increasing power of actual knowledge leading up to the battle now facing us between “the drive for truth” and “the life-preserving errors.” The published version adds that “[i]n relation to the significance of this battle everything else is a matter of indifference.” Everything else. In the workbook the setting out of this most significant of all events immediately precedes the first entry on 13. Duty bound him to reserve a room for his friend at the Hotel Edelweiss, but Rée did not visit. In August, Nietzsche asked him not to visit in Genoa, where he would spend the fall and winter, because he needed “unconditional solitude not as a whim but as the condition under which I may perhaps hold out in life a few years more” (end of August 1881). 14. “Oh the false opposites! War and ‘peace’! Reason and passion! Subject object! There are no such things!” 15. KSA 14, p. 255, gives its last third as a draft of GS 110 with no notice of its M III 1 source.

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eternal return, an entry that restates the history of incorporated error in order to make the incorporation of eternal return the culmination of that history— the teaching of eternal return could secure victory in the battle in relation to which everything else is a matter of indifference. The published version of Gay Science 110 adds a final sentence that focuses the problem and heightens the tension without pointing to a resolution: “To what extent can truth stand to be incorporated?—that is the question, that is the experiment.” This is not the only loss of context that KGW inflicts on the first entry on eternal return: more omissions immediately follow [141]. The one-paragraph entry [142] is actually two paragraphs gratuitously plucked out of a longer chain of thought in M III 1, two paragraphs that without their context give no indication that they fall within a series of paragraphs stating “Let us beware” warnings that became Gay Science 109. Versions of the first, sixth, and seventh of those warnings in GS 109 occur before the paragraphs published in [142], and versions of the fifth and another part of the seventh occur after them. The part the editors chose to publish as [142] runs: “Do I speak like one who has received a revelation? Then have contempt for me and don’t listen to me.—Are you still of the sort who need gods? Does your reason still experience no disgust at letting itself be fed so cheaply and badly?” Putting that just after the first entry on eternal return does Nietzsche the disservice of making his question about sounding like a prophet refer to eternal return. In fact, in its actual context his questions about revelation and gods refer to the Biblelike commandments of his series of “Bewares” addressed to “you.”16 But the most serious disservice to Nietzsche in KGW’s unremarked omissions after [141] is that his first-ever entry on eternal return loses its setting within his concern about properly construing the world that is coming to light through science, his concern that incorporated error be identified and avoided as far as possible and not be replaced by new errors about the whole of things that science may seem to favor: “Beware.” The actual setting of [141] in M III 1 demonstrates that the thought of eternal return is part of Nietzsche’s great 16. In M III 1 the warnings are in the second-person plural, “Hütet euch,” not the firstperson plural of GS 109: prophet-like commandments to others became a far more effective injunction to himself and his reader. KSA 14, pp. 253–54, reproduces the entry, referring to “M  III  1, 49,” its page number in the workbook, but gives no indication that [142] was cut out from the middle of the entry, and no indication of where p. 49 is. The whole entry is reproduced in Brusotti, Die Leidenschaft der Erkenntnis, 360n100. On this entry in M III 1, see D’Iorio, “Das Gespräch zwischen Büchern und Handschriften,” 95–96.

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aim to “de-deify nature” and “naturalize humanity” in unbounded affirmation of both nature and humanity as they are. Entry [141] rises as the plan for a book introducing the thought whose successful incorporation would replace the old misconstruals of nature and human nature incorporated into human beings since the beginning of the moral period and would help ensure that they not be replaced by new ones. Incorporation of eternal return would secure dedivinized nature and naturalized humanity in the ultimate judgment of their worth: I want nature and myself to be what we are an infinite number of times. Once the new affirmative ideal dawned on Nietzsche, it dominated his thinking as M III 1 shows. The workbook records his explorations of the new thought in relation to the gains he has already made in understanding nature and the morals and culture of humanity. The rest of M III 1 is the extraordinary document in which Nietzsche, insisting on absolute solitude and aiming at unshakable calm, prepares the fundamental steps of his coming forward as the teacher of his age.

I n co r p o r at i o n o f E t e r na l R e t u r n v e r s u s I n co r p o r at e d M o r a l i t y [ 1 4 3 ] – [ 1 47 ] The next entries in M III 1 emphasize the need to incorporate the new teaching as a revolutionary replacement of the long-incorporated moral perspective. Entry [143]17 is a little dialogue that opens with someone expressing a concern with eternal return that will be profoundly felt by all who have incorporated the principles of morality, that is, everyone: “ ‘But if everything is necessary, how can I have control over my own actions?’ ” Nietzsche’s response assumes the truth of eternal return and in its defense exploits the fact that “you” (du) would grant that certain forces do determine actions: The thought and belief [of eternal return] is a heavy weight that along with all other weights presses down on you and more than they do. You say that food, place, air, society change and determine you? But your opinions do that even more because these determine you for this food, place, air, society.

And if opinions determine your actions, then, 17. In M III 1, entry [143] comes just after early versions of GS 109 that KGW omits; [143] begins a sequence in KGW that has no omissions until [157].

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—If you incorporate in yourself this thought of thoughts so will it transform you. The question in everything you want to do, ‘Is it such that I want to do it countless times?,’ is the greatest weight.

Instead of asking if an action is good or bad, if it would be praised or blamed, incorporated eternal return impels you to ask whether you want to perform this act an infinite number of times: will it contribute to my sense of well-being or not? What is most immediate are not abstract thoughts of determinism/ free will but existential thoughts of moral praise and blame or greater or lesser well-being. From the beginning Nietzsche took eternal return to be an alternative way of inhabiting the world, a transmoral as opposed to a moral way; both ways give gravity to actions, but the gravity derives from two wholly different measures. Entry [144] also measures the new thought against what was incorporated in the millennia of morality: “It would be terrible if we still believed in sins: rather what we will do in countless repetitions is innocent.” And incorporating eternal return means judging others differently: “If the thought of the eternal return of all things has not taken you over there’s no guilt: and there’s no merit if it has.” And judging our forebears differently: “—We think more mildly about all of our forebears than they themselves thought, we’re sad about their incorporated errors, not about their evil.” These new assessments under the new thought lead to a four-point plan that appears to be another book plan: 1. The most powerful knowledge. 2. Opinions and errors transform the human and give it the drives—or: the incorporated errors. 3. Necessity and innocence. 4. The play of life.

This outline begins with eternal return as the most powerful knowledge and only then turns to incorporated opinions that have transformed humans by creating our very drives or teaching us what to need. Incorporated belief in eternal return entails a recognition of necessity, which in turn entails innocence—at the fundamental level of the drives, the whole apparatus of reward and punishment poetized into existence by the incorporated error of responsibility vanishes. Life is construed not as the plane on which some ultimate destiny is decided but as play to be enjoyed for itself. In these first entries, eternal return is simply the alternative incorporated teaching that dissolves

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the incorporated morality Nietzsche had inquired into since Things Human All Too Human; they give no arguments for its truth beyond its appealing results. Incorporating eternal return entails a new “Erziehung” [145], education in the comprehensive sense of molding into fixed shape the still plastic and unformed young. Incorporating the new thought via the new education “hinders” and creates, hinders the modern tendency toward a single type built for service while creating, in accord with “the natural tendency to a division of labor,” “mastering, overseeing beings who survey the play of life and play along with it, now here now there without being drawn in all too intensely.” Ultimately, “power must be entrusted to them.” But who will educate these educators? “The first educator must educate himself !”—does the exclamation mark attest to Nietzsche’s recognition that that role falls to him? “Thus will a new ruling caste be formed.” From the start, Nietzsche looks to the politics of the thought of eternal return, a politics of education forming a new nobility directed by the founding thinker, who directs himself—this is rule by the philosopher, the way of Nietzsche’s models, the pre-Plato Greek philosophers, and of Plato himself. Questions about introducing the new teaching continue in the next entries: Is there a natural aversion to affirming the eternal return of life? Entry [146] denies it: “Revulsion against life is rare.” More commonly, “even at the end and in difficult circumstances” we hold on to life. Entry [147] recognizes that a new teaching needs time, it “finds its best representatives only last, the long-assured and secured natures” in whom the earlier thoughts have been most securely incorporated. The weaker and needier “take in the new infection first—these first adherents prove nothing against a teaching.”

A r g u m e n t s i n F av o r o f E t e r n a l Return [148]–[163] The first arguments on eternal return are exercises in persuasion; the very first supplements its logic with dramatic rhetoric, dressing it in eerie dread [148] as his first published argument will. It begins with three premises about “the world of forces,” the whole of physis that he had long investigated in the Greeks and in contemporary writers: The world of forces suffers no diminution: for otherwise it would have grown weak in endless time and perished. The world of forces suffers no standstill: for otherwise it would have been reached and the clock of exis-

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tence would be standing still. The world of forces therefore never comes into equilibrium, it never has a moment of rest, its force and its movement are equally great at every time.

Omitting the necessary premise of a finitude of states, Nietzsche draws his conclusion: “Whatever state this world can arrive at it must have arrived at and not once but countless times.” He focuses on “this moment,” arguing that “it was already once here and many times and will likewise return, all forces precisely so distributed as now, and so is it with the moment that bore this one and with the one that is the child of this one.” Addressing “Mensch!,” in the singular, he uses words he will polish for his first public version: Your whole life will, like an hourglass, be ever again turned over and ever again run out—one great minute of time in between until all the conditions out of which you came to be in the circulation of the world come together again. And then you will find again every pain and every pleasure and every friend and enemy and every hope and every error and every blade of grass and every sunbeam, the whole connectedness of all things. This ring in which you are a grain gleams ever again.

The focus then moves to the hour in which the teaching first arrives for humanity: “And in every ring of human existence as such there is always an hour when first for one, then for many, then for all, the most powerful thought arises, that of the eternal return of all things—it is each time for humanity the hour of midday.” This first argument does what the arguments will typically do, focus on you while hailing the cultural revolution it brings. This argument is followed immediately by an ontological consideration countering the possibility of the eternal return of the same [149], one that will later appear as the definitive counterargument [311], [313]. It begins: “Even the chemical qualities flow and alter themselves”—chemical qualities being what physics treats as the properties of the fundamental particles and processes.18 Flow is total and unceasing: “given eternal change, eternal flux of all things, in no moment is oxygen exactly the same as in the previous, but some18. Nietzsche’s examples are oxygen and hydrogen (the water molecule) [149], [311]. This understanding of chemical explains his aspiration to study chemistry in Vienna or Paris: it is the study of the basic constituents and processes of nature. That aim became a fixed plan for the following summer of 1882 for a threesome with Paul Rée and Lou Salomé.

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thing new, though this novelty is too fine for every measurement.” If Nietzsche really means “eternal change, eternal flux,” then the eternal return of the same is impossible: it would require an eternity encompassing the eternity within which oxygen is never the same, an eternity enclosing eternities—an impossibility. The next entries concern the limits of our thinking and restate conclusions as old as “On Truth and Lie”: “We are capable of thinking becoming in no way other than as the transition from one perduring ‘dead’ state to another perduring ‘dead’ state” [150]. “Our assumption that there are bodies, surfaces, lines, forms is the result of our assumption that there are substances, things, perdurances.” Such concepts are “fabrications” (poetizings, Erdichtungen) [151], inescapable errors. These thoughts lead to an argument for eternal return: “If all possibilities in the order and relation of the forces were not already exhausted, no infinity could have gone by. But because it must have, there are no more new possibilities and everything must already have been there, countless times” [152]. The next entries return to the limits of sensibility and cognition. “Our intellect is not set up to grasp becoming, it strives to prove a general fixity, thanks to its origin in pictures” [153]. “Space and the human laws of space presuppose the reality of images, forms, substances, and their perdurance, that is, our space is valid for an imaginary world. Of space to which the eternal flux of things belongs we know nothing” [155]. The fabricating activities of sensing and knowing place limits on science [156] which is unable to capture fundamental truth because it simply “continues the process of constructing the essence of the type,” thereby making even more firm the conviction that the fabrications of senses and intellect are simply true. Science secures the “mass-instinct,” “the standard taste,” “the belief in the enduring” that was a precondition of evolutionary success but now, ever more completely, blocks access to the truth by the “exception,” the driven knower with his “idiosyncratic taste.” His idiosyncrasy proves to the normative mass that he’s wrong, and the mass has science on its side. Nietzsche, an advocate of science, recognizes that at least in its current state science is an impediment to his task of persuasion. As the teacher of eternal return he is a man without scientific authority, as easily discredited by authoritative science as by the good and the just. In the midst of experiments for introducing his new teaching that include generating scientific or quasi-scientific arguments for it, its teacher reflects on his authoritative scientific judges and the limitations their practice imposes on them and the impediment their authority imposes on him. How can he even begin to teach what demands time to be

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incorporated and that enters a world that increasingly looks to science for its view of what is true about the world?19 The following entry unites eternal return with “Let us beware,” the phrase repeated seven times in The Gay Science 109 to list what we are to beware of in construing the world as a whole [157].20 Beware of misconstruing eternal return, attributing “some kind of striving, a goal” to it; or “thinking of the law of this circle as having become.” Instead, “all becoming is within the cycle,” and false analogies of cycles of coming and going such as that of the stars or of day and night are not to be applied to eternal return. This “Let us beware” had to be kept out of The Gay Science 109 because eternal return had not yet been introduced.21 Entry [158] begins with another “Let us beware” regarding eternal return: Let us beware of teaching such a doctrine like a sudden religion! It must sink in slowly, whole generations have to cultivate it and become fruitful—so that it will become a great tree that will cast its shade over all coming humanity. What are the few millennia in which Christianity existed! For the most powerful thought many millennia are necessary—long, long must it be small and powerless!

This entry, like the next three, shows where eternal return belongs: within religion. It is not to be introduced as a sudden religion but will grow into the communal belief that will train and house all of humanity.22 Having been 19. In BGE Nietzsche criticizes the reigning view of contemporary physics, “materialistic atomism” (12), and anticipates a physics of process in keeping with his own view (22). 20. Nietzsche took the phrase “Hüten wir uns” from Eugen Dühring, who used it in a polemic against Otto Caspari, another writer on cosmological themes whom Nietzsche read in the summer of 1881 (see D’Iorio, “Das Gespräch zwischen Büchern und Handschriften,” 103, 108). D’Iorio shows how the idea of eternal return arose within Nietzsche’s intense reading of the contemporary cosmological debates. His essay is in part an appeal to study the actual workbook M III 1 in order to gain an adequate grasp of the issues surrounding the first appearance of eternal return in Nietzsche’s writings. 21. An omitted entry between [157] and [158] belongs in the series of “Let us bewares” as a warning about our actions. A draft of GS 321, it addresses those who introduce the new teaching: “Let’s stop thinking so much about punishing, reproaching, and improving!” 22. BGE confirms that eternal return belongs to religion: its sole mention of eternal return comes in the religion chapter, and it appears at the decisive historical moment in religion: in the midst of the crisis of nihilism brought on by the death of God and the assassination of the soul (BGE 53–56).

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warned about what we must beware of doing, we are told what we are to do: “Let us press the image of eternity on our life! This thought contains more than all religions which taught contempt for this life as something fleeting and looked to an indeterminate other life” [159]. Eternal return contrasts with past religion in other ways: “This teaching is mild against those who do not believe in it; it has no Hells and threats” [160]. “Not to look for distant and unknown salvations and blessednesses but to live in such a way that we want to live again and want to live this way in eternity!” [161]. M III 1 contains a late entry on eternal return that simply states its proper domain: Are you prepared now? You must have lived through every degree of skepticism, must have bathed voluptuously in ice-cold streams—otherwise you have no right to this thought. I will know how to resist facile believers and enthusiasts! I shall defend my thought from the outset! It is to be the religion of the most free most cheerful and most sublime souls—an enchanting meadow between gilded ice and pure sky! [339]23

Eternal return belongs to religion understood as art, imaginative making that celebrates by holding sacred, religion as Plato understood it, the “poetry” generated by philosophy.24 Entry [162] follows [161] without a break and deals with a matter basic to religion: “For there to exist any degree at all of consciousness in the world, an unreal world of error must come to be,” fundamental errors like belief in the perdurance of individuals. After a sequence of thoughts that tie erring to life itself, [162] ends on an edifying interpretation of erring that will be basic 23. Krell trans., Infectious Nietzsche, 170. Entry [339] is among the entries that the editors judged to be written later than the fall of 1881, when the chronological sequence that began in March ended. They placed these entries from the front and back pages of M III 1 at the end of their version of M III 1 under the title “Later” without specifying when “later” might be; the first, [336], from p. 10 of M III 1, is dated “February 1882”; entry [339], which was quoted above, is on the page facing the inside cover of M III 1. See KGW V 2, p. vi, n. 3. 24. Poetry in its more customary sense also flooded up in GS: it is the first of Nietzsche’s books to contain his own poems, the sixty-three “German Rhymes” that make up “Foreplay: Joke, Cunning, Revenge.” While completing GS, he wrote the eight poems of Idyllen aus Messina, poems that often contrast their own levity with the gravity of the pursuit of knowledge. See Grundlehner, Poetry of Friedrich Nietzsche, for translations and insightful commentary. Blue shows that Nietzsche began composing poems at age eleven and that he worked at it and became quite accomplished by the time he was thirteen (Making of Friedrich Nietzsche, 65–72, 80–84).

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to Nietzsche’s introduction of eternal return in The Gay Science, the “ebb and flood” of hard truth and edifying erring. Entry [162]’s case for illusion (Wahn) leads to an entry on “political illusion,” the last entry in this first set of thoughts about teaching the new teaching. Nietzsche smiles at the modern political illusion just as his contemporaries smile at the religious illusion of earlier times: socialism is “above all a secularization, a belief in the world,” and a “knocking-the sense-out-of ” a “Beyond,” a “world behind the world” [163]. “The fleeting individual” wants to find immediate happiness in socialization, having “no reason to wait, like humans with eternal souls.” This religion of modern times contrasts with what “My teaching says: so live that you have to want to live again is the task—you will in any case!” His “teaching says” something more, remedying the modern drive to sameness: One to whom striving gives the highest feeling, that one strives; one to whom rest gives the highest feeling, that one rests; one to whom getting along, following, obeying gives the highest feeling, that one obeys. He must only become aware of what gives him the highest feeling and shy away from no means! Eternity is at stake!

Almost immediately after Nietzsche’s first-ever mention of eternal return, he situates it in its proper field, religion. The common perception of Nietzsche as an enemy of religion is wrong: he is the enemy of our religion and its secular modern form. Understanding the necessity of belief, Nietzsche, having just gained insight into the highest possible formula of affirmation, does what a philosopher does: he becomes an artist of beliefs.

S t r at e g i e s f o r I n t ro d u c i n g Eternal Return [164]–[194] Nietzsche’s reflections on a future for eternal return occur within his thoughts on incorporation, his fundamental insight into the process of acculturation: I speak of instinct when some judgment or other (taste in its lowest stage) is incorporated such that it now itself spontaneously moves itself and no longer needs to wait for a stimulus. It has its own growth and consequently also its own activity-sensibility that works outwardly. Intermediate stage: the half-instinct that reacts only to stimulus and is otherwise dead. [164]25 25. There are no omissions in KGW from [158] through [171].

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So-called human “nature” is a solidification of adaptive evolutionary incorporations subject to further adaptation through further incorporations. The stages of incorporation set out here have judgment harden into taste and solidify into instinct: a viable future for “my teaching” depends upon its passing from judgment to taste to instinct. A future for eternal return is the subject of the next entry as well: We want to experience a work of art over and over again! Just so should one fashion one’s life that one has the same wish for its individual parts! This the chief thought! Only at the end then will the teaching of the repetition of all that is be set forth, after the tendency is first planted to create something which under the sunshine of this teaching can flourish a hundred times stronger! [165]

Eternal return is the return of the “same,” not of the “similar”; its purpose is to give “meaning” even to “the nearest, small, fleeting” [166]. It can give meaning “A. Inasmuch as one grasps it as the root of the habitual; B. as eternal and likewise conditioning the eternal” [167]. Success in making it habitual means that “He who seeds the intellect/spirit plants trees that become great very late” [168]—its teacher can expect success only after it has been passed on through the generations. But that is problematic because “What is inherited from the father by the son are the most practiced habits (not the most valued!). The son betrays the father.” Nietzsche’s examples of practiced habits are “the diligence of a scholar” and “the Greeks” whose “higher classes were so individually productive because they inherited no thoughtless diligence.” A single-sentence entry shows the range of Nietzsche’s hopes for his new thought: “I want to teach, against the art of the artwork, a higher art, namely, that of the invention of festivals” [170]—a student of the culture-forming power of Attic theater festivals, a former believer in a similar power for the Bayreuth Festival, naturally looks to festival as the vehicle that will secure the future to his own new thought. The next entry lists items that the strategist introducing eternal return must attend to, the first being particularly important. I recognize something true only as opposite to an actual living untruth: so the true comes into the world wholly without strength, as a concept, and must first give itself strength through fusion with living errors! And for  that reason one has to let the errors live and grant them a large domain. [171]

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The next entry states why the religion that once gave community to our social order no longer has purchase: “What decides against Christianity now is our taste not our reasons” (omitted from the KGW/KSA version because it is a draft of GS 132). The next entries also concern problems that the spiritual situation of our present pose for introducing the new thought: Religious faith is giving way and the individual learns to conceive of himself as fleeting and as inessential, finally he’s made weak by that; he does not accustom himself to striving, to enduring, he wants the present pleasures, he makes it easy for himself—and perhaps employs much spirit thereby. [172]26

Entries [173] and [174] consider other aspects of the present unfavorable to the introduction of a demanding new thought, while [175] looks back to a successful transformative introduction: “How nastily Christianity behaved against the ancient inasmuch as it demonized the ancient itself ! The peak of all slanderous evil!” After a series of brief entries dealing with Darwinian ideas of survival and the introduction of novelty, Nietzsche returns, in an entry almost three pages long, to incorporation as a feature of the organic as such [182].27 The human is a product of its history of incorporations. As “herd-animals,” as “parts of a whole, we incorporate into ourselves . . . the experiences and judgments” generated in the social whole. Then, as the bonds of social custom inevitably decay, beings resembling an individual arise, but “these experimentindividuals mostly perish.” Within such conditions of literal “de-moralizing,” “moralists” (Ethiker) appear who urge the necessity of conformity to the old ways and condemn novelty as “immoral and destructive”; “they are reactionaries,” “they maintain that there are eternal moral laws.” A final short paragraph speaks up for the individual: “we are long since misshapen and to that corresponds the much greater discontent of the individual who is becoming free.” This long reflection on incorporation brings Nietzsche’s own special 26. There are no omissions in KGW from [172] through [188]. The absence of omissions here accidentally testifies to the private character of these reflections: they are strategies for introducing his teaching and therefore Nietzsche did not need to polish them and of course he kept them out of the public writings that advocate his teaching. 27. Because this entry was crucial for Habsucht and its synonyms, I dealt with its first parts in the chapter on Habsucht (pp. 254f. above). Here I consider only the second half of its treatment of incorporation.

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theme, morality, to bear on the aspect of eternal return that has been the main concern of his entries after it first appeared: how can he, a solitary thinker without authority, introduce an alien thought to a social whole stamped by incorporated needs, dispositions, and ideals antithetical to that thought and well protected by moralists only too eager to denounce him as immoral and destructive, as “evil”? The next entry [183] responds to that final concern of [182] by looking to what a hermit must do to teach novelty, this novelty to a whole culture.28 His strategy has two Chief Tendencies: 1) Plant the love of life, of one’s own life, in every way! . . .  2) Be united in enmity against everything and everyone that aims to cast suspicion on the value of life . . . But our enmity must itself be a means to our joy! So, laughing, poking fun, destroying without bitterness! This is our fight to the death. This life—your eternal life!29

As a teacher of self-love, Nietzsche advocates “something late and still rare”  [185]. With “the herd-feelings” now at the height of their power, his strategy for introducing his teaching can learn from those who resembled him in “the Middle Ages.” There, it was natural that the freer human beings . . . believed that above all the herd-feeling must be maintained, the rare individual must, with respect to this, practice deception, without shepherds and belief in common laws everything was finished. We no longer believe that—because we have seen that the inclination of the herd is so great that it always breaks through again against all freedom of thought! Even now there exists very seldom an ego! The demand for State, social foundations, Churches, etc. has not grown weaker. Look at the wars! And the ‘Nations’!

28. KGW’s separation of [182] and [183] into two entries masks their direct connection. In M III 1, the three paragraphs of [183] simply follow on the next page the last paragraph of [182], which had spilled over onto its facing right-hand page. 29. These are early and private appearances of the political strategy to which Nietzsche gave public expression only very late: his founding of a “new party of life” EH 3 BT 4; see Drochon, Nietzsche’s Great Politics, esp. 151–57, 167–69.

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The solitary introducing a new teaching in the unpromising setting of late modern times “no longer believes” that the herd feeling must be maintained. Nietzsche stops there, not extending his thought to a strategy appropriate to his historic setting. Instead, he moves back from the Middle Ages to pre-Christian civilizations, still thinking of the fate of cultures, their founding, their defenses, their demise, and of his problem of how a new teaching can be incorporated by a social mass committed to the already incorporated teaching. He thinks of “the Greek lawgivers” [186] and their strategies for peaceful order, adding an aside on Richelieu’s possible strategy. He turns to “Alexandrian culture” [187]: it collapsed because of its incapacity, despite “all its discoveries and the joy in knowledge,” “to give this life the ultimate importance; the Beyond remained more important! ” He draws a lesson for himself: “to teach otherwise [is] now the most important thing—perhaps if metaphysics assigns this life with the weightiest accent—in accord with my teaching!” He thus stations his teaching among the strategies for healthy culture and counts it as metaphysics. As for current impediments to a new teaching on the individual and egoism, socialism and nationalism stand out [188].30 Reflecting then on the historically late appearance of “the amoeba-unity of the individual,” Nietzsche notes the resultant mistake of “the philosophers,” who now act “as if everyone” is an individual. Wherever genuine individuals appear, so does “the corruption of morals” “and the whole ordinarily goes to ruin!—with that begins the time of the free human—countless go to ruin.” Seeing that, “the wise call for the old morality and try to prove it fitting and useful for the individual” [189]. And a wise man who does the opposite? The next paragraph in M III 1, omitted in KGW because it is The Gay Science 156, answers: the person “most influential ” on his time is the one who “resists his whole age, stops it at the gate and demands an accounting—that must exercise an influence!” These entries on cultural history and the problems of introducing a novel teaching are interrupted by a four-line argument for eternal return (the impossibility of an equilibrium [190]). But the next entry, omitted in KGW because part of it is Gay Science 250, returns to the history of culture: “Although witches and their judges were convinced of their guilt, it did not exist. So it is with all guilt. The devil as the means of power could not remain unused.” Entry [191], beginning on the next line, reflects on the history-changing individual: “The  herd-humans and the self-directed human: the latter first 30. KGW here omits a draft for GS 174 and one for the first lines of GS 156.

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as shepherds.—” The dash seems to lead to a longer entry starting on the next line:31 Is it virtuous when a cell transforms itself into a function of a stronger cell? It has to; and is it evil when the stronger assimilates it? It has to, it is necessary for it, it strives for over-rich replacement and wants to regenerate itself. So is it with benevolence: to distinguish the drive to appropriate and the drive to subjection (to want to be a function), according to whether stronger or weaker (relative to something) feels benevolence: joy and desire are firmly together, joy and desire melt there.—Pity is essentially the former, an agreeable stirring of the drive to appropriate at the sight of the weaker.

These contrasts extend the shepherd-sheep contrast on the line before it: the relation among cells is a natural necessity, as is the new teacher’s relation to the taught; applying a term like “benevolence” adds a moral dimension but does not alter the character of the event. The relation of teacher and taught is a power relation expressing the drive to possess and the drive to be possessed. Entry [192] continues the thought: “wanting-to-damage,” “wanting-to-use,” “wanting-to-luxuriate” are “means of achieving,” drives behind strategies of success in parties, states, and faiths. This sequence of workbook entries shows the solitary of Sils Maria thinking about how he, the one who has gained a new understanding and a new teaching based on it, now stands to the whole social order he keeps at a distance. He takes his daily six- to eight-hour walks along Lake Silvaplana and Lake Sils thinking his thoughts—and recognizing his singularity in relation to the multitude his writings aim to alter. With these entries Nietzsche is reaching the front of M III 1, where he had already filled the pages with writing; after [192] come two facing pages of extracts from Spinoza [193] that he copied out of a book he asked Overbeck to send him and acknowledged receiving on July 23.32 He wrote these extracts before his discovery of eternal return in the “beginning of August,” as he did his exultant postcard to Overbeck on July 30 that began, “I’m completely astounded, completely delighted! I have a predecessor and what a 31. Omitted in KGW because it is a draft lightly edited for GS 118. 32. The book is Kuno Fischer, Geschichte der neuern Philosophie, volume 1, part 2 (Heidelberg: Winter Verlag, 1865). Amid the Spinoza extracts are three short remarks in which Nietzsche states his differences; he organized and elaborated those differences in “Sanctus Januarius” 333.

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predecessor!”33 Nietzsche’s discovery of eternal return occurs just after his discovery of his kinship with Spinoza and his recognition that he cannot share Spinoza’s response to those discoveries. His own ultimate response seems to be part of his reflection on Spinoza and his own sameness and difference: Nietzsche’s amor fati occasions the teaching of eternal return, not a bloodless intellectual love of God or Nature (GS 372).

A New Book Plan for Introducing Eternal Return [195]–[197] The entry that KGW numbers [195] is on a left-hand page in M III 1, page 2 of normal pagination. At the top of the page is a title, written large and lovely in Latin script and doubly underlined, “Mittag und Ewigkeit,” “Midday and Eternity,” plus an underlined subtitle, “Pointers to a New Life.”34 Under these 33. His postcard states only what he shared with Spinoza: “Not only is his whole tendency like my own—to make knowledge the most powerful passion—but also in five main points of his doctrine I find myself.” Those five points are of the highest interest: “he denies freedom of the will—; the end-goal—; the moral world order—; the nonegoistic—; evil—;” Nietzsche’s solitude is now a “duo-tude. Miraculous!” 34. The ten front pages of M III 1, including the inside front cover, are not part of the chronological flow of Nietzsche’s thoughts as he moves forward from the back on the left-hand pages to a point near the front at which he moves across to a right-hand page and then moves toward the back on the right-hand pages he had left empty. Because the chronology of the entries in M III 1 matters for understanding Nietzsche’s movement of thought in these crucial months, it is important to see how these first pages fit chronologically. The most reasonable way to order them seems to be the following, beginning at the point where his chronological forward movement ends and he moves across to a right-hand page. (The following list uses the pagination written into M III 1, where page 1 is the inside cover): Facing pages 11 (left) and 12 (right): p. 11 contains entries [191], GS 118, and [192]; p. 12 contains [199] and [200]. Shortly before entry [192], entry [189] initiated a series of thoughts on what we should “Beware of ” in cosmology; this theme is continued in entries [199] and [200] and those following it. Nietzsche’s move from the left-hand page 11 across to the right-hand page 12 thus continues this sequence, as does his next move, backward to p. 14 (right). He turned toward the back to continue his “Beware of ” statements because the forward pages were already filled. Facing pages 9 (left) and 10 (right): These are the two pages of Spinoza extracts [193] that probably began shortly after his July 23 receipt of their source book from Overbeck. After the extracts, at the bottom of p. 10, is [336], which the editors place among the “Later” at the end of their version of M III 1.

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titles the name Zarathustra makes its first-ever appearance in Nietzsche’s workbooks: let Zarathustra solve the problem Nietzsche had been considering since the new teaching first appeared to him, let Zarathustra introduce eternal return.35 Nietzsche already describes Zarathustra with a sentence similar to the one that actually opened Thus Spoke Zarathustra almost two years later: “Zarathustra, born on the Sea of Urmi, left his home in his thirtieth year, went into the province of Aria and in the ten years of his solitude in the mountains composed the Zend-Avesta.”36 By calling in Zarathustra, Nietzsche entrusts the introduction of his new teaching to a historical figure of the greatest significance, the transformative teacher who first introduced the cosmological/historical dimension to the moral view Nietzsche had been investigating so intensely and that he viewed as fully incorporated into every member of modern culture. Destruction of the premises of that incorporated view by the modern Enlightenment made all the more imperative the incorporation of a new teaching—and what better teacher for that than the teacher of the dying incorporated views?37 After his sentence on Zarathustra, Nietzsche left the page empty and wrote a sentence at the bottom that KGW numbers [196]: “The sun of knowledge stands once again at midday: and the snake of eternity lies coiled in its light—it is your time, you midday-brothers!” This page arrangement suggests that Nietzsche left space open on the page intend-

Facing pages 7 (left) and 8 (right): p. 7 contains extracts from other early modern philosophers [194] plus the omitted draft of GS 333 (KSA p. 270); p. 8’s entry [198], “Great form in an art work,” seems to be an isolated entry written on a page Nietzsche left blank after the extracts. Facing pages 5 (left) and 6 (right): occasional prescription notations. Facing pages 3 (left) and 4 (right): Mittag und Ewigkeit and the new book plan dated “26 August 1881” [195]–[197]. Facing pages 1 (inside cover) and 2 (right): a large title, “Gaya Scienza” (inside cover), and on both pages notes that the editors consider “Later” [337]–[339], [334]). 35. The Greek name for Zarathustra, Zoroaster, appears in an early workbook whose dominant theme is tragedy: “The religion of Zoroaster would have ruled Greece had Darius not been defeated” (KSA 7 5 [54] (September 1870–January 1871); see also [55]. PTA refers to Zoroaster (section 1). 36. Nietzsche copied this information from one of the books he had asked Overbeck to send him on July 8, Hellwand’s Culturgeschichte; see D’Iorio, “Beiträge zur Quellenforschung.” 37. Nietzsche found it necessary to explain his choice of Zarathustra in EH, where his explanation begins: “I have not been asked as I should have been asked what the name Zarathustra means in my mouth” (EH 4 3).

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ing to add to his Zarathustra notice: the page is not two separate entries but the start and finish of a Zarathustra book plan. Across from [195]–[196], occupying the full right-hand page, stands a different plan for a book to introduce eternal return, one that leaves no room for Zarathustra. This plan in four “Books” has a superscript similar to the subtitle of [195], “On the ‘Plan for a New Way of Living’ ” [197], suggesting that it too may belong under “Midday and Eternity.” Like the first eternal return book plan [141], this one is dated: “August 26, 1881.”38 The plan is precise and detailed, setting out sequential topics leading up to the Midday announcement of eternal return; the topics link Nietzsche’s latest discoveries in M III 1 to some of his earliest preoccupations. First Book in the style of the first movement of the Ninth Symphony. Chaos sive natura: ‘On the de-humanization of nature.’ Prometheus is nailed to the rock in the Caucasus. Written with the cruelty of Κράτος, “Might.”39

The first sentence of the sketches of each of the four Books states the style in which it is to be written; the styles of the next three do not explicitly relate to the other movements of the Ninth Symphony.40 Nietzsche’s reading of Spinoza during the previous month is reflected in “Chaos or nature”: it replaces Spinoza’s “God or nature”; its or is conjunctive, two ways of saying the same thing. As Marco Brusotti says, “Nietzsche means to set out from a determinate interpretation of nature,”41 an interpretation indicated by the synonyms chaos or nature, for the next phrase shows what chaos means: dehumanized nature, nature after subtracting all forms of anthropomorphizing, including calling it “God.” Nietzsche retained the word chaos in revising this entry for The Gay Science 109 but it can be misleading: nature is the realm of necessity for Nietzsche; chaos cannot mean haphazard.42 He said later to modern physicists who mistakenly view nature as machinery: “we end up asserting the same about 38. The two elaborate book outlines, [141] and [197], are the only dated entries in the workbook; they fall some three weeks apart. Entry [144], a numbered list of four items, may also be a book plan; see above, pp. 298f. 39. A translation of [195]–[197] can be found in Krell, Infectious Nietzsche, 167–68. My translations use some of Krell’s phrases in this entry as well as in some of the later entries I treat below: [202]–[203], [292]–[293], [311]. 40. That the first be in the style of the Ninth Symphony is in keeping with Nietzsche’s later statement that the whole of Z could count as music (EH 3 Z 1). 41. Brusotti, Die Leidenschaft der Erkenntnis, 353. 42. As Franco recognized, citing GS 109, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment, 142.

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this world as you do, namely that it has a ‘necessary’ and ‘calculable’ course” (BGE 22). Chaos means “necessary and calculable” without being amenable to complete explanation—and wholly lacking any humanizing sense of order including mechanics. “Chaos or nature”: the new plan for introducing eternal return begins with nature, with the ontology of Habsucht that M III 1 shows him discovering shortly before. The Prometheus Nietzsche here introduces is the Prometheus of Prometheus Bound, the second play in the trilogy traditionally ascribed to Aeschylus. Prometheus is there nailed to the rock in the Caucasus by Zeus’s agents because he stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans—would Prometheus replace Zarathustra as the one to introduce eternal return, bringing humans that gift? To write the first Book “with the cruelty of Κράτος” is to write it with the cruelty of the Titan “Might” whom Zeus enlisted, with his brother Bia (Violence), to punish Prometheus. Nietzsche’s use of the Prometheus tale makes Zeus’s agents punish him for the act Nietzsche is performing: the “dehumanization of nature” is the hard Promethean gift that weans humanity of the incorporated interpretations of nature that made humans God’s favorites, ultimately followed by the gift of eternal return.43 Second Book. Fleet-skeptical-Mephistophelean. ‘On the Incorporation of Experiences.’ Knowledge = error that becomes organic and organizes.

The second Book examines the insight gained by one who comes to understand dehumanized nature and to understand human nature as the settled result of the process of incorporation. He therefore knows the grounds of the cruelty exercised on Prometheus: the “knowledge” of those who nail Prometheus to the rock consists of incorporated errors that have come to seem true and that organize human experience. The skeptical-Mephistophelean style of this Book is the style of the books Nietzsche has been writing for five years, the style of one whose passion for knowledge aims to free the mind for insight into the true. Third Book. The most inward thing that has ever been written and the most high-floating over the heavens: ‘On the Ultimate Happiness of the 43. Nietzsche’s reference to Prometheus survived in the version of this entry he prepared for GS 109 until he corrected the page proofs (Brusotti, Die Leidenschaft der Erkenntnis, 354f.); when he deleted Prometheus he replaced the “dehumanization of nature” with “When will we have completely de-deified nature?”

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Solitary’—that is the one who, out of ‘those who belong,’ has become the ‘for-himself ’ to the highest degree: the perfected ego: this ego alone has love; at the earlier stages, where the highest solitude and glorification of the self have not been achieved, there is something other than love.

This is the ultimate step, the one placed at the center of “Sanctus Januarius,” for “the ultimate happiness of the solitary” is the happiness beyond the seventh solitude, the happiness of understanding poetized in “Will and wave.” Nietzsche uses the herd-shepherd distinction of entry [190] to define the singularity of the one achieving that final stage of the perfected ego: out of those defined by their belonging to the collective arises a self-knower who becomes a self-affirmer to the highest degree. Love, gained last, at the highest, marks this one off from all who stand at earlier stages of egoism. This is the pivotal step, the move from the passion for knowledge to knowledge, and, thereby, to love, the new disposition toward the whole.44 This is amor fati, totalizing love of the fatedness of things and of self. Fourth Book. Dithyrambic-encompassing. ‘Eternal Year.’ Craving to experience everything once again and eternally again.

Out of the love gained through the singular insight of the third Book springs the craving to experience each beloved thing an endless number of times, the craving that it eternally return. That craving, “Dithyrambic-encompassing,” generates celebrations to secure the gains of the solitary in structured public festivals that help incorporate the new disposition toward nature. A logic unites the four Books: eons of incorporation of morality produce functioning cultural wholes out of which, eventually, a disciplined, indifferent seeker of knowledge arises who moves from insight into self to insight into the world and finds triggered in him love for the known; from that love springs an ideal that the beloved eternally return exactly as it is. This book plan confirms what M III 1 shows: gaining the deepest insights of his philosophy, Nietzsche moves from the passion to know to knowing, from knowing to loving, and, on that basis, acting to found the festivals of a new culture. These are the crystalized gains Nietzsche first reported to Köselitz as the “thoughts that have

44. This completed process corresponds to the completed history of the I-feeling in [21], in which the passion to possess completes itself in a passion to let be; above, pp. 247–50.

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arisen on my horizon the like of which I have never seen”; for them “I will have to live some years more!” (August 14, 1881). An additional paragraph follows the four-Book summary. KGW separates it from the four Books with a blank line, but Nietzsche used an elaborate flourish of his pen to mark the separation. The paragraph runs: Unremitting transformation—you [du] must in a brief period of time [pass] through many individuals. The means is unremitting battle.

When he added under this paragraph, “Sils Maria August 26, 1881,” he enclosed within his book plan this invitation to you to engage in that battle, to move through “many individuals” by moving through the stages his book shows him passing through. Nietzsche added a final paragraph after the date, on the bottom margin under the ruled lines. It seems at first to be unconnected to the book plan: (“refuse everything pretty and pleasing as a world-contemptuous man of power”—says J. Burckhardt of the Palazzo Pitti)

Perhaps this is connected to his book plan. Nietzsche had not yet seen the Palazzo Pitti when he wrote this, but he would make a trip to Florence in November 1885 primarily to see it.45 Tilmann Buddensieg argues that Burckhardt’s judgment contributed greatly to Nietzsche’s understanding of style, particularly the modern decline marked by the Counter-Reformation and what Nietzsche called the “Counter-Renaissance,” counter movements that degenerated modern style. In response Nietzsche elevated the “Grand Style.” Burckhardt’s judgment on the Palazzo Pitti may be Nietzsche’s final statement on the style that would govern his book as a whole with its varied styles for each Book: it would be a book in the grand style aiming to recover, as his notes after seeing the palazzo indicate, the style of its nameless architect and of another “Gewaltmensch,” Phidias, chief architect of the Parthenon.46 A page consisting of entries [199]–[200] follows this book plan in KGW; they return to the moral and political matters Nietzsche had been considering in the entries immediately preceding the book plan and the extracts from 45. According to Buddensieg’s informative account in Nietzsches Italien, 136–41, esp. 138; see also Buddensieg, “Architecture as Empty Form,” 269–73. 46. See Buddensieg, Nietzsches Italien, 139–40.

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Spinoza. But after that page, M III 1 picks up its theme of eternal return again in order to consider the implications of his ontology for it.

The Argument against Eternal Return as Cosmology [201], [202]– [ 2 0 3 ] , [ 2 9 2 ] – [ 2 9 3 ] , [ 3 1 1 ] , [ 3 13 ] 47 Entry [201] sets out a warning against one option for cosmology after belief in God disappears: “Let us beware” of construing the “universe as an organism . . . The organic is extremely rare” in a universe of more elementary forces. It ends by repeating Nietzsche’s view that “the change in chemical qualities is perhaps occurring even now but in such a refined degree that it escapes even our most refined examination.” Entry [202] follows immediately with an argument in favor of eternal return, the only such argument he will ever publish: “The amount of force in the universe is determinate, nothing ‘infinite’: let us beware of such excesses in concepts!” This premise with its “beware” yields an inference: “the number of states alterations combinations and developments of this force, while immensely large and ‘immeasurable’ in a practical sense, [is] in any case also determinate and not infinite.” Positing then the infinity of time with force as constantly active, he moves to the present moment, “Augenblick,” to draw his conclusion: —until this moment an infinity has run out, that is, all possible developments must already have been there. Consequently the present development must be a repetition and likewise that which bore it and that which proceeds out of it and so backward and forward again! Everything was there countless times, inasmuch as the collective state [Gesammtlage] of all forces always recurs.

This argument, outfitted with a dramatic context that raises serious questions about its general applicability, appeared two years later in “The Vision and the Riddle” chapter of Zarathustra 3. As for the entry in M III 1, it turns to a question about possible sameness: “Whether apart from that anything the same is present is entirely indemonstrable.” Apart from the argument just given that each “collective state” must be the same through its every return because of the finitude of possible states, sameness seems impossible: 47. Brusotti entitles his helpful “Excursus” on these arguments “Nietzsche’s Early Insight into the Aporias of the Proofs” (Die Leidenschaft der Erkenntnis, 358–75).

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It appears that the collective state forms the properties anew down to the very smallest, so that two different collective states could have nothing the same.48 If there can be something the same in one collective state, for instance, two leaves? I doubt it: it would presuppose that they had an absolutely same origin, and with that we would have to suppose, that back into all eternity something the same subsisted, in spite of all alterations in the collective state and creation of new properties—an impossible supposition!

Apart from the demonstration just given of the eternal return of the same, there can be no sameness because the apparent sameness of any two things requires positing two continuing samenesses of cause maintaining itself consistently back through all time—“impossible.” Its impossibility seems to be based on Nietzsche’s view of absolute flux. The next entry, [203], reverts to the issue of introducing eternal return: Let’s examine how the thought that something repeats itself has worked till now (the year for example, or periodic sicknesses, waking and sleeping, etc.). If the circle-repetition is even only a probability or possibility, even the thought of a possibility can shake us and transform us, not only sensations or determinate expectations! How the possibility of eternal damnation has worked!

Let the success of the false teaching of eternal damnation in ruling a whole culture prove the potential success of eternal return viewed even as a mere possibility. After [202] and [203], Nietzsche continued to experiment in M III 1 with possible arguments demonstrating eternal return, [232], [245], [269], [305], and [318]. But they draw counterarguments [231], [233], [235], [268], [292], [293], [311], [313], and [330], the most definitive of these being the last, [311] and [313]. Just before [292] and [293] take up the cosmological status of eternal return, entry [291] states: There are probably many kinds of intelligence but each has its lawfulness which makes the representation of an other lawfulness impossible for it . . . also, every route to insight into the source of intelligence is blocked. The

48. This statement about two different collective states or Gesammtlagen helps define Gesammtlage as the state of the whole at a particular moment.

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general phenomenon of intelligence is unknown to us; we have only our special case and are incapable of generalizing.

Granting this limit on our intellect, entry [292] presents the reasoning about eternal return possible for our kind of intellect. Stating again his standard argument against the world having a “goal” or “final state,” Nietzsche considers the contrary possibility of the world “becoming eternally new,” that is, never returning as the same: “it would be posited as something in itself miraculous and a free- and self-creating divinity.” Eternal becoming-new presupposes one of two possibilities. Either “force increases itself by the power of its will, [and] has not only the intention but the means to guard itself against repetition, to land back in an old form, so that in every moment it controls every motion to avoid that.” Or force has “the incapacity to land in the same position: that means that force-mass [Kraftmenge] is nothing fixed and similarly the properties of force.” For our kind of intelligence, “[s]omething unfixed about force, something undulatory, is for us altogether unthinkable”—but not thereby impossible. The entry then ends: “If we do not want to fantasize in the unthinkable and do not want to fall back into the old concept of the creator (increase out of nothing, diminution out of nothing, absolute arbitrariness and freedom in growth and in properties)—” Then what? The dash ends this much-worked, much-crossed-out paragraph without saying what, but the dash may signal a link to the next, cleanly written out entry that begins on the next line and in fact says what we must do in the face of the two things we don’t want to do: rather than fantasize in the unknowable or fall back to the old Creator concept, we should act in accord with the limits of our intelligence: With regard to all our experience we must remain ever skeptical and say for example: we can maintain for no ‘law of nature’ an eternal validity, we can maintain for no chemical quality its eternal perdurance; we are not refined enough to see the conjectured absolute flux of events: the lasting is present only thanks to our coarse organs which gather together and lay out on surfaces what does not at all exist that way. [293]

We must remain skeptical about two things: the eternal validity of what our kind of intellect necessarily formulates as a “law of nature,” and the eternal perdurance of atomic qualities. Still, throughout this entry on our skepticism about apprehending what is as it is, Nietzsche maintains his “conjectured”

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view of absolute flux lying beyond the constructs of our way of knowing such as “law of nature” or “eternal perdurance” of qualities: The tree is in every moment something new: its form is asserted by us because we cannot perceive the finest absolute motion: we read a mathematical median line into absolute motion, we add on to it lines and surfaces on the basis of the intellect which is error: the assumption of the same and of perdurance because we can see only perdurance and can remember only what is similar (same).

A final sentence written with different ink adds a general caution: “However, in itself it is otherwise: we dare not carry over our Skepsis into the essence”— because we are limited to our kind of intelligence [291]. This caution places the necessary curb on every possible argument for eternal return as cosmologically true. More importantly, the absolute flux maintained here and elsewhere, a flux extending to the “chemical properties,” rules out not only the premise of Nietzsche’s typical argument for eternal return—the finitude of possible states—but rules out the very possibility of the eternal return of the same: sameness is ruled out. In the terms used in these entries, if force is finite but variable, “undulatory” or indeterminate, then the infinity of possible states makes a return of the same states impossible—though if we dare not carry over our Skepsis into the essence, then we dare not assume we have demonstrated this absolutely. Still, Nietzsche explicitly draws his skeptical conclusion in a final set of counterarguments against eternal return that seem to settle the issue for him. In two substantive entries, [311] and [313], he considers in turn a “counterproof ” and a “counterhypothesis” to the possibility of a cosmological eternal return. Entry [311] raises what could be a “sufficient counterproof against a regular cyclic-form of everything that exists.” It develops his view of the changeability of “chemical qualities,” a fundamental indeterminacy whose existence would rule out the possibility of eternal return: Could the origin of qualities be in itself not lawlike? Could, out of “force,” different things originate? Contingent things? Could the lawfulness that we see deceive us? Not be a fundamental law? Could the multifacetedness of the qualities even in our world be a result of the absolute origin of utterly contingent properties? Except that in our corner of the world it no longer comes forward? Or a rule has been adopted that we call cause and

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effect without it being that (a contingency that has come to be the rule, for example oxygen and hydrogen viewed chemically)??? Could this “rule” be only an extended caprice?———[311 end]49

The “counterproof ” is not itself a proof against eternal return but simply a possibility raised by the questions posed. But Nietzsche moves from what he called a “counterproof” to a “counterhypothesis” [313], the appropriate name for the possibility raised in both entries. Before the long paragraph of [313], however, comes a one-sentence paragraph, a warning [312]: “Whoever does not believe in a cyclical process of the universe must believe in the ungrounded [willkürlichen] God—this conditions my consideration in opposition to all hitherto theistic considerations! (s. Vogt, p. 90.)”50 This either/or, Vogt’s, also entertained in [292], drives his inclination to think the merits of the a-theistic position as refuting a theistic one. But entry [313] is headed by a one-sentence paragraph: “What I raise as counterhypothesis against the cyclic-process:” The underlined I before the doubly underlined raise and counter signals the importance of what follows: it is Nietzsche’s not Vogt’s counterhypothesis to the thought of the eternal return of the same. The rest of [313] runs: Could it be possible to derive the laws of the mechanical world as just exceptions and in a way accidents of universal existence, as one possibility among many countless possibilities? That we are accidentally thrown into this mechanical world-order corner? That all chemistry is likewise the exception and the accidental in the mechanical world-order, and finally the organic the exception and the accidental within the chemical world ?—Wouldn’t we have to suppose, as the most universal form of existence, truly a not yet mechanical world, lacking the mechanical laws (though not unopen to them)? Which in fact the most universal would also now and always be? So that the originating of the mechanical world would be lawless play, which would ultimately gain exactly such a consistency as the organic laws now have for our examination? So that all of our mechanical laws would be not eternal, but have become, among numberless different mechanical laws, left over from them, or in individual parts of the world succeeding to mastery 49. The three dashes are Nietzsche’s own at the end of the line at the very bottom of the page, perhaps suggesting continuity with [312], which follows at the top of the next page. 50. Nietzsche was reading J. G. Vogt, who imagines the “magic spell of a higher being” in order to argue that even then “the cyclical process must with absolute necessity still follow the same course” (Die Kraft: Eine real-monistische Weltanschauung, 89).

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and in others not?—It appears that we need a contingency, an actual unlawfulness, only a capacity to become lawful, an original stupidity that is not suited even for mechanics? The origin of the qualities presupposes the origin of the quantities, and this in turn could originate a thousand kinds of mechanics.

Nietzsche left a full page blank after this entry, the only such blank in M III 1, perhaps to leave himself space to further work out his counterhypothesis or to raise counterarguments to it. But the page stayed empty. Let that blank page stand as a silent sign that he found no need to expand this counterargument to eternal return and no way to counter it. The possibility that eternal return is cosmologically true he abandoned from this point on.51 This M III 1 entry on the counterhypothesis to eternal return as cosmology has special authority: written while Nietzsche was testing arguments for his new thought of eternal return, it arises from his actual view of becoming and knowing, and no answer to it appears. Still, the authority of a workbook must always yield to the authority of the published books that Nietzsche plotted and polished and that give each main topic the well-structured placement he thought appropriate. Therefore, the greatest confirmation of the entries countering the cosmological truth of eternal return comes from the book that exists to present the thought of eternal return, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Zarathustra does use the cosmological argument for eternal return but only against his archenemy, the Spirit of Gravity: his argument is wholly ad hominem and clubs to death an enemy who holds its premise of cyclical return. When a cosmological eternal return is actually celebrated in Zarathustra, no arguments accompany its being sung—sung by Zarathustra’s animals while he stays purposely silent (Z 3 13). The evidence of M III 1 is confirmed by Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Nietzsche himself thought that the teaching for which, to the end, he wanted to be known could not be cosmologically, ontologically true. Eternal return must be interpreted in a way that locates its truth and desirability elsewhere, in the obvious place. Eternal return belongs to art as a thing made, the latest among all the historic made things that have housed human beings within inhabitable worlds. The “counterhypothesis” to eternal return as cosmologically true in M III 1 51. As Brusotti says, “With the counterproof and the counterhypothesis Nietzsche, in the fall of 1881, spoke fundamentally his last word on eternal return as a cosmological hypothesis” (Die Leidenschaft der Erkenntnis, 374). The spring 1888 notes on the cosmological eternal return, “The New World-Conception” (KSA 13 14 [188]), are largely copied directly out of M III 1.

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[313] marks a culminating stage in Nietzsche’s gaining the basic premises of his mature thought. Most basic is the ontology arrived at as an inference from self-knowledge and knowledge of morality or the human soul: to be is to be habsüchtig, whose highest form is Wissensgier, a hypothesis about the character of the constant change Nietzsche infers to be basic to what is. Habsucht, will to power in Nietzsche’s later, more adequate view, is an ontological conclusion that claims to be true of the world. In the internal dialectic of M III 1, discovering that foundational truth about the world leads its discoverer to a consequent ideal, the desire that what I am and what the world is be what they are an infinite number of times. That ideal cannot be cosmologically/ontologically true, but M III 1 shows the way in which it can be true: as a measure of desire, of love of life. Here, at the core of Nietzsche’s thought, “fact” leads to “value.” Nietzsche expressed his own way of construing the relationship between Habsucht and eternal return in a metaphor that appeared in M III 1 in two later entries. The dialectic of discovery in M III 1 led to a metaphor that captures the status of Habsucht and the different status of eternal return, showing each to be both true and necessary in their different ways. Nietzsche made that metaphor prominent by placing it at the end of the very first section of The Gay Science—and challenging his “brothers” to understand it. The metaphor of ebb and flood can serve as a conclusion to Nietzsche’s essential becoming as a philosopher.

Conclusion

The Philosophy and Art of Nietzsche’s Maturity

This new law of ebb and flood GS 1

Philosophy and art were basic to Nietzsche’s thinking from the start. But the true content of the two and the proper relation between them were the achievements of his mature thinking visible first in M III 1. The fitting metaphor for their relationship appeared at just the right point in the chronological sequence of entries in that workbook. Having just gained his fundamental insights into Habsucht and eternal return, Nietzsche united them into a complementary pair in two entries, [162] and [217]. Entry [217] begins with two imperatives: We have to have temporary blindness and must leave untouched in us certain articles of faith and errors—so long as they preserve us in life. We have to be conscienceless with respect to truth and error as long as it has to do with life—so that thereby we then use life again in the service of truth and employ the intellectual conscience.

Truth and life: the relation between these two had occupied Nietzsche from the start. His first five books were guided by the judgment that the fundamental truths of becoming, of knowing, and of our animal nature were “deadly” to life and therefore dare not be “flung” at the public (UD 9). Now, after three books on freeing the mind to pursue truth alone and after arriving in his

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current workbook at deeper insights into both truth and life—after all that, he gained his settled version of the relation between truth and life or philosophy and art. Certain articles of faith and errors must be left untouched if they preserve us in life—us, the free minds who embrace a strict intellectual conscience in pursuit of truth. Those of that conscience must be conscienceless in sustaining the conditions of that life: service to life in service of truth adjudicates, and it demands temporary blindness to truth from us, the doubly underlined thereby insisting on that one reason. The philosophic life adjudicates, continued, enhanced existence of what he here calls the “intellectual conscience,” a term he will make prominent as the title and theme of the second section of The Gay Science, the book M III 1 is preparing.1 The final sentence of [217] captures this unity of truth-seeking and temporary blindness in a metaphor: That is our ebb and flood, the energy of our contraction and expansion.

The intellectual conscience defining the truth-seeker ebbs into consciencelessness with respect to truth in order that its life, life serving truth, flood again. The “article of faith” that matters in this entry is the one that has overwhelmed M III 1 since it first arrived, the eternal return of the same, a belief that cannot be cosmologically true but is true to what our love of life most desires, life in its highest range, the philosophic life. Truth ebbs, belief floods— belief in the ideal of the lover of life, eternal return. Belief ebbs, truth floods— truth in the form of the truth-seeking life.2 Mere mention of ebb and flood suffices Nietzsche here because he is repeating what he arrived at and expanded earlier, in entry [162], which falls 1. Nietzsche makes clear that intellectual conscience is not a moral phenomenon but a term for inquiry into truth, especially into morality; his later use of the term probes its limits (BGE 45, GM 3 24) while recognizing its necessity for the inquirer in a nonmoral form (BGE  30). 2. Entry [217] follows a series of paragraphs that may be relevant to this ebb and flood; they deal with elements in how human beings are bred: “The inorganic conditions us through and through: water, air, soil, topography, electricity, etc. we are plants under such conditions” [210]. Next is an entry modified for BGE 230: “My task: the dehumanization of nature and then the naturalization of the human, after it has gained the pure concept of nature” [211]. Then come entries on specific habits that breed a “a certain kind of human. So look around yourself! Examine the smallest! What will it lead to? Does it belong to your kind, to your goal?” [212]. Entries follow on salt [214], tea [215], other foods and stimulants [216], ending on an omitted draft for GS 246 on mathematics, after which comes the ebb and flood entry [217].

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among his earliest reflections on the implications of eternal return that he first wrote out some nine pages earlier in [141]. Entry [162] begins with a brief history of incorporated error in the formation of our species, the issue that had engaged him since 1872 and dominated his first entry on eternal return: In order that there could exist some degree of consciousness in the world an unreal world of error had to—come to be: beings with the belief in a perduring, in individuals, etc. Only after an imaginary counterworld had come to be in contradiction to the absolute flux could, on this foundation, something be known—yes, finally the fundamental errors can be seen on which everything rests (because opposites let themselves be thought)—still, these errors cannot be destroyed except with life [being destroyed]: the ultimate truth of the flux of things cannot stand incorporation, our organs (for life) are fitted for error. Thus there arises in the wise man the contradiction of life and his ultimate decisions; his drive for knowledge has as its presupposition faith in error and life therein.

The wise man, named late in the entry, was present from its start: he learns that to be human is to live within a conscious world of fundamental, incorporated error; he learns that the ultimate truth of the flux of things cannot stand incorporation; he alone experiences the contradiction: his ruling passion for truth has its foundation in error. In the middle of the word contradiction, after contra and before diction, the last quoted sentence spilled over to the bottom of the facing right-hand page for two full lines after it had filled the lower margin of the left-hand page below the ruled lines. But the completed sentence turns out not to have completed the thought, and Nietzsche added a small x and a corresponding x four lines up the page in its center and wrote the next sentences: Living is the condition of knowledge. Erring the condition of living and indeed the deepest foundational erring. Knowing about the erring does not cancel it! This is nothing bitter!

The judgments are emphatic: erring cannot be overcome even when known! and there is nothing to lament in learning this! Erring is a condition of life, even of the wise man’s life! Those emphatic additions still did not finish the thought. Putting a small xx after the end of this paragraph, Nietzsche put a corresponding xx

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four lines further up the center of the right-hand page and wrote the next sentences: We have to love erring and care for it, it is the womb of knowing. Art as cultivation of illusion—our cultus.

A passion is loosed in the pure inquirer disciplined into indifference to all passion except his own as knower: he comes to love erring and to see the need to care for it as a lover because it is the womb of knowing. Loving care of illusion encompasses the whole dimension of human experience that is “Art,” and now includes art generated by the lover. He goes further: art, lovingly cared for, we elevate to our form of the sacred. The truth-seeker embraces art, a form of untruth, furthering art as the precondition of truth. Even that proved not to be enough, for “art” and “our cult” seem to have triggered a further thought, and Nietzsche began yet another paragraph, five lines up the page, beginning again near the center of the page. For the sake of knowing[,] love and advance living, for the sake of living[,] love and advance erring deluding [Irren Wähnen]. To give existence an aesthetic meaning to increase our taste for it is the fundamental condition of all passion for knowledge.

Knowing is primary: for its sake, love and advance life. And because life demands erring, love and advance erring. Art thus receives its knowing rationale, art of the comprehensive involuntary kind as the human power that constructs an inhabitable false world in the service of life, and art of the voluntary kind that constructs a cultus for loved life. Inhabiting the incorporated constructed world of error and coming to know it, the austere thinker yields to the fundamental passion of love its essential place, a place that is a consequence of the passion to know that naturally came to rule his passions: love of life surges over the knower of life in its becoming known to him. And love generates an imperative to give life an aesthetic meaning in order to increase our taste for it. The thinker here finds the full rationale for the new ideal, an ideal of the lover of knowledge made a lover of life: the eternal return of life, just discovered in M III 1, increases our taste for loved life. Even that is not the end, for after these five lines Nietzsche added an x inside a circle, and drew that symbol again four more lines up the center of the page. The final paragraph in this whole furious flow of unfolding

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thought assigns a fitting and lasting metaphor to the wise man’s embrace of erring: So we discover here too a night and a day as a life-condition for us: to want knowledge and to want error are ebb and flood. If one rules absolutely, so the human goes to ruin; and at the same time the capacity.

An ebb and flood are the culminating attainments of the movement of thought traced by Nietzsche’s pen in its march up the page. That ebb and flood are preconditions of life for “us,” those driven by the passion for knowledge, the ebb and flood of wanting truth and wanting illusion, involuntary illusions that structure flux into thinkable fixities and voluntary illusion that paints life beautiful: the ideal of eternal return, in the fresh presence of which this reflection occurs, is the lover’s ultimate beautification of the actual and the constructed world. The metaphor of ebb and flood assigns truth and illusion a coexistence in mutual undergirding. Nietzsche had just used ebb and flood as one of the false analogies for the circulations of becoming [157], but the ebb and flood of [162] is, like the ebb and flood of [217], “our ebb and flood, the energy of our contraction and expansion.” Truth and art are a natural opposition coexisting in a natural oscillation in the service of life as the knowing of life.3 These are the two most dramatic pages in M III 1 as the driven truth-seeker, knowing the inescapability of error, resolves the problem of the relation of truth and error. The resolution is built on the deepest propensity of man the maker, maker of worlds within which alone humans can live. For “the past ten thousand years in a few large regions of the earth” (BGE 32), those madeworlds were moral worlds that seemed to justify the suffering in the world by imagining a release. Now, man the maker, doing what man inescapably does, makes a world that celebrates the actual world, embracing it as it is in the highest imaginable affirmation of it. Begun presumably like most entries, as the written-out version of a thought honed while walking, this thought kept giving while Nietzsche sat writing it out, marching across the bottom of the 3. Nietzsche used the metaphor of ebb and flood twice in D but in less totalizing ways; in section 60 for the ebb and flood of two kinds of happiness, and in 119 for the ebb and flood of the cruder drives. In Z 3 he will use it in a generalized sense for the experience of the highest soul (“Old and New Tablets” 19); he quoted that passage in EH and after “ebb and flood——” added “But that is the concept of the Dionysian itself” (EH 3 Z 6).

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facing page and on up the center of that page, its implications unfolding as permanent gains to be expressed in various ways in his coming books.

E b b a n d F l o o d i n T h e G ay S c i e n c e The ebb and flood of truth and illusion first set out in entry [162] of M III 1 gained fundamental authority when Nietzsche opened The Gay Science with a dramatic use of that metaphor. Its first section, “The teachers of the purpose of existence,” describes the old law of ebb and flood, the total flow of human cultures till now as they passed through ever-different teachings of purpose: as one ebbed to the forbidden laughter that its inherent ridiculousness eventually evoked, another flooded to its place. Despite all that corrective laughter, human nature was altered by the ever-repeated ebb and flood: humanity has incorporated a need for a teaching of purpose and must fulfill “one more condition of existence than any other animal: the human must from time to time believe he knows why he exists.” As each new teaching of purpose rose, it issued the same decree: “there is something one is henceforth absolutely forbidden to laugh at. And”—and Nietzsche adds to this decree a judgment made by a speaker identified as “the most cautious friend of man,” who “will add ‘Not only laughter and gay wisdom but also the tragic with all its sublime unreason belongs to the means and necessities of the preservation of the species!’ ” The most cautious friend of man can only be Nietzsche, bringer of laughter and gay wisdom but also, as a lifelong student of tragedy, the one who brings back the tragic in all its sublime unreason, replacing any teaching of purpose with the ultimate affirmation of purposelessness, the teaching of the eternal return of the same. And he brings back the tragic precisely as a means for “the preservation of the species” in its highest type. “And therefore! Therefore! Therefore! Oh, do you understand me, my brothers? Do you understand this new law of ebb and flood?” No, of course Nietzsche’s potential brothers do not understand the new law of ebb and flood yet. Only the most careful attention to the rest of the book, keeping in mind that opening challenge to understand, could yield some understanding of a new law of ebb and flood.4 That attention will require relentless pursuit of the truth by the “Intellectual conscience,” the title 4. That Nietzsche intended his new law not to be understood at this opening point is evident from a late change erasing a near answer; originally it ran: “Do you understand that two self-contradictory conditions are now in human nature which want to form a rhythm in their succession? Do you understand why we must all have our ebb and flood? Which we cannot

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and topic of section 2, and the pursuit will have to continue after the book ends, because it ends on the promise of a teaching of eternal return and of a Zarathustra to bring it. If you aspire to be a “brother” of mine, Nietzsche suggests by the way he opens and closes the book that ends his series on the free mind, then read my book with careful attention and read the book it promises: it will present the new tragedy and the new teaching of purposelessness in a way befitting the most cautious friend of man, it will lead you into understanding regarding the new law of ebb and flood. But even when he was making his last changes while correcting the page proofs of The Gay Science, Nietzsche offered his potential brothers aid in understanding his new law of ebb and flood: he altered the end of Book 2.5 Art is the chief theme of Book 2, and its final section expresses “Our ultimate gratitude to art” (107); it begins with a lightly edited entry from M III 1: Had we not approved of the arts and invented this type of cult of the untrue, the insight into general untruth and lying that is now given to us by science—the insight into delusion and error as a condition of cognitive and sensate existence—would be utterly unbearable. Honesty would lead to nausea and suicide. But now our honesty has a counterforce that helps us avoid such consequences: art, as the good will to appearance.6

Ending his use of the M III 1 entry here,7 Nietzsche adds a passage to section 107 whose first lines are especially remarkable because they redeploy a judgment intended for a later section (“Excelsior” 285) and reverse its meaning. As first written for section 285, the passage required you to renounce a fabricating art, “to keep your eye from rounding off, from finishing off the poem; you will take all on your back as the eternal imperfection and without the illusion that you are carrying a goddess across the river.”8 But now, depicting our ultimate

have at the same time? Which we may not have at the same time?—Well then! Let us be the inventors of this new rhythm! Each for himself and his music!” (KSA 14, p. 238). 5. Brusotti sets out the details of this late alteration of 107 (Die Leidenschaft der Erkenntnis, 419–20, 438ff., 490–91). Not even Köselitz, who helped with the corrections, saw this late one. 6. The M III 1 entry came very early in the workbook, at the top of its page 3 just before [7]; it is omitted in KGW but printed in KSA 14, p. 253, as the first “Vs.” (Vorstufe) for 107. 7. The M III 1 entry went on: “we remind ourselves that we are pleased by and hold high the lie and being lied to as long as art is present.” 8. Brusotti, Die Leidenschaft der Erkenntnis, 419.

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gratitude for art, Nietzsche celebrates art for the action he forbade and sees in it the opposite effect: We do not always keep our eyes from rounding off, from finishing off the poem; and then it is no longer eternal imperfection that we carry across the river of becoming—we then feel that we are carrying a goddess, and are proud and childlike in performing this service.9

Through art we finish off the endless poem, we carry a perfection across the river of becoming and are transformed: “As an aesthetic phenomenon existence is still bearable for us . . .” These words of The Gay Science 107 go back a decade to The Birth of Tragedy and bring into Nietzsche’s maturity the elevated purpose of art present at the beginning of his authorship but lacking the foundation in understanding he has now gained. Nietzsche completes his sentence in section 107 by bringing in conscience, what M III 1 [217] had made pivotal to the ebb and flood of truth and art: “. . . and art furnishes us with the eye and hand and above all the good conscience to be able to make such a phenomenon of ourselves.” The intellectual conscience is not compromised by the good conscience of art’s conscious illusion. And the phenomenon of ourselves is Nietzsche and his brothers, driven by the passion for knowledge and experiencing that very passion as mandating the turn to art: At times we have to have a rest from ourselves by looking at and down at ourselves and, from an artistic distance, laughing at ourselves and crying at ourselves; we have to discover the hero as well as the fool that hides in our passion for knowledge; we must now and then be pleased about our folly in order to be able to stay pleased with our wisdom!

As in M III 1 [217], but far more artfully, our ultimate gratitude to art is gratitude for its support of our wisdom and what wisdom has made of us: precisely because we are in our ultimate ground grave and earnest humans and more weights than humans, nothing does us as much good as the fool’s 9. Writing to Köselitz on August 20, 1882, when he sent him the first copy of GS, Nietzsche said that there is “much that will be new to you,” even though Köselitz had helped him correct the proof pages, Köselitz in Venice, Nietzsche in Tautenburg. Nietzsche points him to the end of book 2, section 107. Brusotti shows what Nietzsche’s last-minute work on 107 entailed (Die Leidenschaft der Erkenntnis, 419–20, 438–68, 490–91).

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cap: we need it against ourselves—we need all exuberant, floating, dancing, mocking, childish and blissful art lest we lose that freedom over things that our ideal demands of us.

Our passion for knowledge plus the knowledge it gains require art because only art’s play can keep us from what Nietzsche calls a “relapse,” the relapse most to be avoided, falling back into morality, the morality of “our irritable honesty” and “its overly severe demands” that could cause us “to become virtuous monsters and scarecrows.” Art makes us “able to stand above morality,” including our own, and not just to stand there, anxious and fearful, “but to float and play above it!” Our ultimate gratitude to art is for its indispensable ebb and flood with our defining passion for truth.10 The aid of section 107 guiding his brothers to an understanding of the new law of ebb and flood helps them prepare for “Sanctus Januarius,” the chapter that is the primary exemplar of our new law of ebb and flood. The prominent event that ends it on the bringing of the new teaching exists in complementary ebb and flood with the almost secret insight into the fundamental truth put poetically, put guardedly as a secret, just after its center. The teaching of eternal return belongs to Art as the new Beautiful enhancing the True as Habsucht. And the new Beautiful works its effects in the sphere of evaluations, the necessary human constructs of good and bad, approval and disapproval that ground our actions: the new Beautiful dictates a new Good, guiding the new culture to acts befitting its love of the earth as it is, the acts of a naturalized humanity within a dehumanized dedivinized nature. Nietzsche confirmed the indispensability of the new law of ebb and flood by the way he ended his 1886 Foreword to the expanded version of The Gay Science: he introduces his defining book on science with praise of art. “Oh those Greeks! They knew how to live: what is needed for that is to stop bravely at the surface, the fold, the skin, to worship appearance, to believe in 10. Nietzsche added a new ending to book 3 as well while correcting the page proofs as guidance to who he is. The eight added sections, each a question and answer, are wholly autobiographical, as if we had to learn who the author was before reading his decisive chapter, “Sanctus Januarius”: what he held heroic (268), what he believed in (269), what his conscience said (270), where his greatest dangers lie (271), what he loves in others (272), what he calls bad (273), what is most human to him (274), and what the seal of becoming free is (275). By happy coincidence, all eight of these sections and they alone lie on the left-hand page of the first edition of GS, facing the title page of “Sanctus Januarius.” EH states that the “granite words” of these sections express the destiny he is as the one who determines the weight of things in a new way (EH 3 GS).

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shapes, tones, and words, in the whole Olympus of appearance!” (GS Foreword 4). And the 1886 Book 5 itself ends by exemplifying the new law of ebb and flood: the “spirits of [his] book” put a stop to his sober intention to end by reminding his reader of “the virtues of right reading” through which alone the truths of his book could be entered. Instead, the spirits of his book force him to end on art, for “Was there ever a better hour for gaiety?” So end with “Songs of Prince Free as a Bird,” a flood of gaiety celebrating what the flood of inquiry had revealed. Nietzsche fashioned The Gay Science out of M III 1; discoveries with a merely chronological order in the workbook receive an artful ordering for their first public display.11 But M III 1’s involuntary chronological order of entries displays the proper, sequential way of understanding our new law as the ebb and flood of truth and art. Nietzsche discovered first the truth of the habsüchtig character of the absolute flux that our perception and cognition construct into perduring objects. As truth’s consequence, art appeared suddenly as eternal return, a lover’s construct of the whole viewed as habsüchtig. The ebb and flood of knowing and erring then appears, shortly after these two fundamentals of truth and art are in place. The involuntary order of M III 1 also shows that our new law of ebb and flood appears to the understanding at a particular historic point in the moral history of the ebb and flood of teachings of purpose, the point at which the old moral constructs that made good and evil part of nature become wholly untenable and visible as deeply damaging to the well-being of the species, however indispensable they were in its formation. Unbounded affirmation of the world, bringing its own constructs of good and bad, now takes its place in an ebb and flood of an entirely different character: not a sequence of differently formulated purposes to life but an oscillation of two fundamental drives of the human, to know and to love, where love impels the highest making, formulating in image and word what is most deeply known and most deeply desired.

11. Other workbooks from late 1881 and early 1882, including notes he wrote in his copy of Emerson, Versuche (KGW V 2 13 and 17/KSA 9) also played a part in GS. The most important is Mette number N V 7, KGW V 2 12/KSA 9 12, the small notebook he carried on his walks in Genoa in the fall of 1881, and in which Zarathustra plays an increasing role.

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M I I I 1 , “ S a n c t u s J a n u a r i u s ,” a n d t h e B o o k s o f N i e t z s c h e ’ s M at u r i t y M III 1 is a private document of public importance: the progress in thinking plotted by the chronological order of its entries shows Nietzsche coming into possession of the fundamental conclusions that will structure the greatest books of his maturity. The most important fact that M III 1 shows is the fundamental role the question of being, ontology, played for Nietzsche: his basic ontological inference—to be is to be habsüchtig—comes before and is the premise of his public teaching of the new ideal, eternal return. However much the genealogy of morality remained the special focus of his investigations, these two core matters of M III 1, an insight and a teaching, earn their status as the peak achievements of Nietzsche’s maturity as a philosopher because they fulfill what drove him from the start, the need to understand the Philosopher and the Artist in the context of modern culture. Prometheus stands at the beginning of Nietzsche’s work as the mythic embodiment of that dual role of thinking and making. Zarathustra stands at the peak of his work as the human exemplar of that thinking and making; the historic founder of the moral view of history is the fitting founder of a postmoral humanity. The mature Nietzsche is true to his Greek models: like a modern Empedocles or a modern Plato he founds a way of life on an understanding of nature. Having gained through disciplined practice an inexhaustible and unsurpassable power of passionate and fascinating speech, Nietzsche employs his rhetorical power in the service of a civilizational project of unprecedented proportion, modeled though it is on the civilizational projects of mythic and historic precedent. “Sanctus Januarius” ends by pointing forward to the singular importance of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in Nietzsche’s authorship, as his later books do by pointing back to it. And Thus Spoke Zarathustra exists in order to introduce eternal return as the teaching for which Nietzsche wanted to be known. The dramatic form he gave that book shows Zarathustra passing through Nietzsche’s own stages of intellectual/spiritual growth, peaking with a singular event of insight that is the precondition of the dawning of eternal return. Nietzsche set that singular event just before the center of the second part, the center itself being his recovery of the “visions and apparitions” of his youth (Z 2 “The Song at Grave-Side”) paired with his inviting “you wisest” to test with him what life taught him—that life is will to power and nothing besides. “Let us speak of this” together, he says to you wisest, for “There is many a house yet to be built” (“On Self-Overcoming”). Consider this insight,

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you wisest, it can ground the new culture the wise must build. But how did he gain that insight? The poetry of “The Dance Song,” just before “The Song at Grave-Side,” sings how and lays a claim to being the finest achievement of Nietzsche’s fascinating speech. The dance is Zarathustra’s dance with Life herself, a dance of lovers that stimulates a rivalry of loves, for Zarathustra loves his Wild Wisdom first, taking her to be life itself. Wild Wisdom is a jealous lover as Life is not, and Zarathustra’s dance song dissolves the rivalry in Life’s favor, for in it Life invites him to think that she is not unergründlich, not unfathomable, as his Wild Wisdom insists she is—Wild Wisdom, that skepticism to which free-minded inquiry inevitably drives an inquirer like Zarathustra. Is epistemological skepticism the highest peak of inquiry? No, Life hints alluringly, the drive to wisdom can lead the driven to the consummation Life offers her aspiring lover; to say she is unergründlich is, she says, only to do what the wise have always done, hang a lying label on her. The beauty and mastery of this lover’s song are Zarathustra’s way of not betraying the secret Nietzsche shares with the waves, the secret not quite betrayed, the secret Zarathustra invites you wisest to consider: what he says life taught him, that she is will to power (“On Self-Overcoming”). Beyond Good and Evil repeats the pattern of “Sanctus Januarius” and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, moving in its own way from “Let us speak of this” to “there is many a house to be built.” Its way is that of a “No-saying book” after the “Yes-saying part of [his] task had been solved” with Zarathustra (EH 3 BGE). Having used the phrase “will to power” four times in part 1 as a dogmatic claim about the ultimate ground of philosophy (9), life (12), nature (22), and the soul (23), Nietzsche offers an argument on its behalf in part 2 to those he has prepared, modern free minds who have followed their suspicions into the deepest epistemological skepticism—about which Nietzsche makes them suspicious in the central section 34 which linked to 35. They and only they, now suspicious of their suspicion, are invited to conduct an experiment with him that leads to the inferential truth at which he had arrived (36). When they hear his conclusion that to be is to be will to power and nothing besides, they react in a way that explains Nietzsche’s strategic care in presenting his fundamental conclusion: skeptics themselves, they nevertheless see it as a demonic teaching refuting everything high (37). Nietzsche’s double “On the contrary!” points ahead to his next chapter, the religion chapter whose historical arrangement stations eternal return at just the right spot (56): it rises amidst the present religious crisis placed at the center of the chapter, the death of God and the assassination of the old soul concept (53–54), and amidst the nihilism

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that crisis caused (55). Eternal return belongs to the future of religion, the future of art, a future made problematic by the withered status of religion among Enlightenment moderns, who “no longer even know what religions are good for” (58). They will have to learn, and Nietzsche assists by pointing to a possible postmonotheist religion when he ends his book with its most beautiful section intimating a return of Dionysos and Ariadne (295), gods who divinize nature as it is in its fecund maleness and femaleness. This pattern of presentation in Nietzsche’s two main books follows that of “Sanctus Januarius”: penetrate to the deepest insight, allude to it as a secret for those akin to him, and have that central secret herald an ending on the coming of a celebratory earth-centered teaching. But “Sanctus Januarius” followed the pattern of discovery in M III 1: first the insight into a comprehensive Habsucht, then the highest ideal of one who gains that insight, then the ebb and flood of insight and celebration, philosophy and art. That pattern of presentation in Nietzsche’s mature books led him to the decision that followed his failed decision to destroy Things Human All Too Human and replace it with a proper introduction to Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Write autobiographical Forewords instead, show how the trajectory marked out by his sequence of books describes his own becoming the Philosopher and Artist of our time. Nietzsche’s mind, the mind of an explorer setting out from Genoa and eventually discovering a new world, continued to work out new aspects of his basic thoughts and new ways of presenting them, but the works after M III 1 all testify to the settled character of his mature thinking regarding an ontology of will to power, a teaching of eternal return, a good and bad true to the earth and to humans as the intellectual/spiritual animal, and the politics of a good European looking beyond to the global character of the species and to the advancement of universal science—all for the preservation and advancement of philosophy, rational investigation of the world by humans, beings only barely and rarely fit for it. * The history of philosophy made possible by Friedrich Nietzsche situates him as the philosopher of our time in a legible sequence of philosophers he helped his reader learn to read. What began as a boy’s imaginings about the antiOlympian god Prometheus; what took historic shape in a student’s and young professor’s studies of the almost lost progression of philosophers behind the

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Greek achievement; and what finally took shape in a thinker’s recognition of what he himself, he alone, had to say to a modern world whose history and condition he had come to understand; all that and more—the physical suffering, primarily, that he experienced in the acutest relentless way and heroically learned from—led Nietzsche to understand what a philosopher is and what he was. His late turn to autobiography was part of his gift to his times and times to come. Such a man once existed. Ecce homo.

Works Cited

Work s by Nietzsche In German Briefwechsel: Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1975–. (KGB) Ecce Homo: Faksimileausgabe der Handschrift. With a commentary by Karl-Heinz Hahn and Mazzino Montinari. Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 1985. Friedrich Nietzsche Schreibmachinentexte: Vollständige Edition, Faksimiles und kritischer Kommentar. Ed. Stephan Günzel and Rüdiger Schmidt-Grépály. Weimar: Universitätsverlag, 2002. Nietzsche Source. nietzschesource.org Sämtliche Briefe: Kritische Studienausgabe. Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Berlin: DTV/de Gruyter, 1986. (KSB) Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe. Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Berlin: DTV/de Gruyter, 1988. (KSA) Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1967–. Workbooks. Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, Weimar.

English Translations Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1967. The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Ed. Bernd Magnus. Vol. 11, Unpublished Writings from the period of Unfashionable Observations. Trans., with an Afterword, by Richard T. Gray. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1999. Daybreak. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Ecce Homo. In On the Genealogy of Morality and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1969.

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The Gay Science. Ed. Bernard Williams. Trans. Josefine Nauckhoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Human All Too Human, Volumes I and II. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. On the Genealogy of Morality. In On the Genealogy of Morality and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1969. Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s. Ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale. Atlantic Heights, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1979. The Pre-Platonic Philosophers. Trans. and ed. with an Introduction by Greg Whitlock. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche. Ed. and trans. Christopher Middleton. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. Graham Parkes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Twilight of the Idols. Trans. Richard Polt. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997. Untimely Meditations. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge University Press, 1983. Writings from the Early Notebooks. Ed. and trans. Raymond Geuss and Alexander Nehamas. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2009.

Other Works Ansell Pearson, Keith. “The Incorporation of Truth.” In A Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Ansell Pearson. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. Ansell Pearson, Keith, and Duncan Large, eds. The Nietzsche Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. Barnes, Jonathan. “Nietzsche and Diogenes Laertius.” Nietzsche Studien 15 (1986): 16–40. Benders, Raymond J., et al. Friedrich Nietzsche: Chronik in Bildern und Texten. Munich: Hanser Verlag, 2000. Bernoulli, Carl Albrecht. Franz Overbeck und Friedrich Nietzsche: Eine Freundschaft. 2 vols. Jena: Diedrichs, 1908. Binion, Rudolph. Frau Lou: Nietzsche’s Wayward Disciple. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968. Bishop, Paul, ed. A Companion to Friedrich Nietzsche: Life and Works. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012. ———, ed. Nietzsche and Antiquity: His Reaction and Response to the Classical Tradition. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. Blue, Daniel. The Making of Friedrich Nietzsche: The Quest for Identity, 1844–1869. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Brobjer, Thomas H. Nietzsche and the “English”: The Influence of British and American Thinking on His Philosophy. Amherst, MA: Humanity Books, 2008. ———. “Nietzsche’s Last View of Science.” In Nietzsches Wissenschaftsphilosophie: Hintergründe, Wirkungen und Aktualität, ed. Helmut Heit, Günter Abel, and Marco Brusotti, 39–53. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012. ———. Nietzsche’s Philosophical Context: An Intellectual Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008.

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Index

Aeschylus, 29, 29n11, 30–33, 114 Alexander the Great, 110–11 altruism, 161, 161n9, 244, 247–49, 287. See also morality amor fati, 32, 179, 210, 218n19, 220, 222, 222n6 Antichrist (Nietzsche), 185, 194 Apollo, 24–25, 32–34, 39 architecture, 168n15, 225–26, 229–30. See also art; Genoa; Nietzsche, Friedrich Ariadne, 186, 273, 335. See also Dionysos Aristotle, 24, 199 Armida’s garden, 232–33, 237–38 art, 20–21, 26–27, 34–35, 37, 39–41, 47, 57, 94, 102, 124, 335; culture creation and, 63–67, 121, 214–18; Enlightenment and, 187–88; experience and, 113–14; illusion and, 47, 244–46, 273, 294, 326, 329–32; knowledge and, 47, 112–13; language and, 54–55; poetry and, 246, 330; religion and, 173, 186, 197; Wagner and, 106–7, 112–13. See also ebb and flood; truth Assorted Opinions and Maxims (Nietzsche), 11, 140, 148 atheism, 80n7, 208n6 Atlas, 33 atomism, 199, 261, 318

“Attempt at a Self-Criticism” (Nietzsche), 9, 22, 32 Attic tragedy, 17, 23, 25, 27–28, 32, 34, 106–7, 116, 118, 131, 169. See also Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, The (Nietzsche); and specific tragedians and tragedies audiences, 26–27, 115–16, 118, 120–22, 177, 183, 207, 209, 216, 227, 228, 259, 269 Bacon, Francis, 157n2, 194n4, 259, 259n39 Bagehot, Walter, 111n11, 162 Baubo, 216–17 Bayreuth Festival, 27, 102–8, 112–14, 118, 122, 124n22, 128–32, 138 beauty, 81, 99, 115, 120, 139, 272–73, 279 becoming, 1, 31, 59, 77, 115, 166, 251, 301, 318 belief, 30, 40–46, 63–68, 76–80, 293–304, 316, 324–25. See also knowledge; religion; truth Bernoulli, Carl Albrecht, 135n20 Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche), 4, 48, 90, 154, 187, 209, 217, 238, 246 Bible, the, 175, 194, 276–77, 282 Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, The (Nietzsche), 17–23, 27–29, 35–42, 58, 66–68, 96, 117, 330

344

Index

Blue, Daniel, 3n3, 51n18, 74n1, 86n16, 88n18, 182n13, 303n24 Boscovich, Roger Joseph, 247n16, 261 bound minds, 131, 144, 190–91, 242, 269, 289. See also free minds Brandes, Georg, 11n14, 206 Breazeale, Daniel, 45n5, 45n6, 60n30 Brobjer, Thomas, 86n16, 111n11, 133n14 Brusotti, Marco, 86n16, 210n11, 222n6, 243, 245n14, 248n18, 253, 261n44, 262n46, 270n1, 285n4, 296n19, 312, 313n43, 316n47, 321n5, 329n5, 330n9 Buddensieg, Tilmann, 167n15, 168n15, 194n3, 224n9, 226n12, 229n15, 315 Burckhardt, Jacob, 167, 315 Byron, George, 181, 181n13, 182 Caspari, Otto, 302n20 castes, 178n10, 252, 299. See also order of rank chemistry, 159, 159n5, 160–63, 316, 318–19 Christianity: anti-Christianity, 224; as antiscience, 98n30; culture and, 92, 94, 106, 110, 116, 120; history and, 306; knowledge and, 61; morality and, 37; pre-Christianity and, 308. See also Dionysos; God and gods; religion “Circles” (Emerson), 87–88 Clement of Alexandria, 217 Columbus, Christopher, 219, 223, 228, 230 complementary man, the, 145, 200 Conant, James, 86, 86n16, 87 Conduct of Life, The (Emerson), 86n16 consciousness, 36–38, 65, 82, 244–45, 303, 323 contemplation, 31–32, 42, 94, 109, 171, 190, 225–26, 226n11, 292 convalescence, 133, 144–49, 211, 213–15 Creator. See God and gods Credner, Hermann, 5–6 Critique of Judgment (Kant), 252, 252n24 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 64 Cromwell, Oliver, 87 culture: art and, 61–62, 66, 89, 109, 121, 173; community and, 70, 120; creation and, 14, 21, 30–31, 111, 190, 195; crisis and, 37, 110,

167, 271, 308, 334–35; history and, 190, 195, 199; human development and, 124, 246; illusion and, 105, 116, 120, 281; knowledge and, 167–68; philosophy and, 1, 120, 162– 66; revelation (poetry, music, dance), 114– 19; science and, 166, 194, 196; truth and, 20–25, 42, 66, 68, 167, 181n12; Wagner and, 114–15. See also ebb and flood; Jesuitism; knowledge; philosophy; religion; science cyclical process, 320, 320n50, 321. See also eternal return Darwinism, 306 Daybreak: Thoughts and Prejudices of Morality (Nietzsche), 5–6, 180, 210, 240, 278 death of God, 29, 270n1, 302n20, 334 Descartes, René, 2, 63n36, 143, 194n4, 221 Die Sprache als Kunst (Gerber), 54 Diogenes Laertius, 51, 51n19 Dionysian, the, 121; art and, 25, 27, 59; theater and, 25–26, 26n4, 27, 29, 36, 107–8; tragedy and, 20, 23–24, 33, 37; truth and, 25, 34; wisdom and, 27–28. See also Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, The (Nietzsche); pessimism Dionysos, 23, 24, 25, 34–35, 186, 273, 335. See also Ariadne D’Iorio, Paulo, 3n4, 15n17, 135n20, 153–54, 302n20 Discourse on the Method for Rightly Conducting the Mind (Descartes), 2, 157 dissolution (Auflösung), 43–46, 57–59, 64–67, 70–72, 90, 159, 169, 260. See also pessimism; skepticism double-brain solution, 196 Drochon, Hugo, 52n25, 85n13, 101n33, 147n33, 180n11, 280n17, 305n29 Dunn, George A., 242n9 ebb and flood, 153, 187, 196, 303–4, 322–24, 326–27, 327n3, 328–35 Ecce Homo (Nietzsche), 12–13, 38, 103, 109, 122, 127–37, 174–76, 180, 201, 216, 219–21, 278, 284, 336

Index education, 85, 89–90, 190, 222, 232, 248–50, 288, 299 egoism, 244–45, 245n13, 248, 287, 307–8, 314. See also morality Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 86, 86n16, 87, 87n17, 88–90, 243n11 Empedocles, 1, 45, 50, 68, 81–82, 82n10, 83, 84n11, 87, 94, 261, 333 Enlightenment, the, 10, 14, 66, 123–25, 143, 152–53, 155, 156–58, 158n3, 166, 172, 180– 82, 186, 192–93, 196, 200, 227, 290, 311. See also Kant, Immanuel Enlightenment, counter-, 10, 123n20, 125, 148, 153 Enlightenment optimism, 7, 12, 150–52, 168– 69, 171, 179, 190, 197, 212 eternal return, 186, 201, 222, 225, 228, 237–39, 241, 253–54, 268–69, 275–80, 280n17, 284– 85, 285n3, 288–89, 293–305, 310–13, 316–22, 324–35; counterargument to, 316–22. See also ebb and flood; incorporation; religion Euripides, 34–36 exotericism, 48n8, 76, 78, 183n16, 215, 269. See also Jesuitism flux, 300–301, 325, 332. See also becoming Forewords project, 5–13, 11n14, 12–13, 23, 28 Förster-Nietzsche, Elisabeth, 5, 123, 129n5, 206, 208, 239n8 Franco, Paul, 178n10, 189n1, 201n9, 286n4, 312n42 Franco-Prussian War, 20 Franz Overbeck und Friedrich Nietzsche: Eine Freundschaft (Bernoulli), 135n20 free minds, 130, 143–46, 157–59, 168–70, 190– 97, 238–42, 255, 282–89. See also bound minds; free will; truth free will, 144, 178, 178n9, 179, 221 Fritzsch, Ernst, 7–9 Gay Science, The (Nietzsche), 125, 159, 180, 187, 203, 205–12, 219, 271–81, 296 Genoa, 205, 211, 219, 223–24, 224n9, 226, 229–30. See also architecture

345

Gerber, Gustav, 54, 54n26, 55, 65–66, 164 Gersdorff, Carl von, 28n7, 44, 48n10, 49, 140n26 Glaucon, 266n50, 279 glorious discovery, the, 264–68, 266n50, 267–68 Gmirkin, Russell E., 282 God and gods, 141, 166, 181, 215, 223, 264, 316, 320. See also religion Goethe, Johann, 28–30, 105, 117, 184, 256 Gray, Richard T., 60n30, 68n40 Greeks, the: culture and, 51–52, 58, 61, 68; history and, 97–99; philosophy and, 7, 70, 80–81, 85, 90–101, 198–201; tragedy and, 17, 20–22, 97, 217–18. See also Attic tragedy; Plato; Socrates Haben-wollen, 246–51, 247n16 Habsucht, 237, 242–55, 242n9, 243, 243n10, 250–51, 251n21–251n22, 252–68, 255n29, 256, 263–68, 293, 313, 322, 335 Hegelianism, 82, 84, 86 Hellenism, 24–25, 34, 50, 93–94, 97, 110–11, 116, 198. See also Greeks, the “Hellenism and Pessimism” (Nietzsche), 23 Helmbrecht, Meier, 131 Heraclitus, 1, 13, 45–46, 67–68, 95, 285n3 herd mentality, 75, 306–9, 314 hierarchy, 251–58. See also order of rank Historical Notes of Life and Letters in New England (Emerson), 89 history, 50, 64, 162–64, 267, 335 History of Materialism (Lange), 51, 110 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 78 Homer, 24–25, 33, 36–37, 62–63, 121, 279 Horace, 182, 182n14 idealism, 56, 128, 183, 261, 263 I-feeling (Ichgefühl), 247–50, 314n44. See also egoism illusion. See art; Jesuitism; religion; skepticism; truth incorporation, 51, 252, 279, 304–6, 313–14, 325–26; of error, 286–87, 295–96, 298,

346

Index

incorporation (continued ) 325; eternal return and, 285–90, 294–97, 301, 304–6; Gay Science and, 295–96; Jesuitism and, 47, 196. See also culture; knowledge; truth indifference, 245, 289–90, 292. See also free minds; truth intellect, 265, 324, 324n1 Jesuitism, 47–53, 60, 72, 94, 105, 116–19, 152, 171, 181. See also exotericism Jesus Christ, 193, 223 justice, 30, 32–33, 38, 95, 111–13, 168; the new, 145, 179, 228, 275 Kant, Immanuel, 21, 41, 61, 63, 77, 252 Kierkegaard, Søren, 225 Kleist, Heinrich, 78 Klingenbrunn event, 122–24, 123n21, 127, 128–35 knowledge: knowers and, 227, 262n45, 291; limits of, 226, 236; morality and, 179, 246; nature and, 63, 264–65; passion for, 45–47, 62, 245, 249, 258–66, 271, 287–91, 314, 326–31; pleasure and, 196, 236, 246, 260– 61; science and, 167, 196; self-, 32, 212, 232, 243, 254, 257, 272, 332; sensation and, 71; skepticism and, 58–62, 67–70, 164–66, 238, 263–64, 318–19, 334; tragedy and, 40, 62, 161, 182, 217–18; truth drive and, 46– 49, 54–57, 75, 132, 171, 183, 197–98, 238. See also art; life; Nietzsche, Friedrich; truth Köselitz, Heinrich, 4, 6, 104, 129, 136, 206, 240n2, 295 Krell, David Farrell, 84n11, 229n15, 303n23 Lange, F. A., 51, 110 Language as Art (Gerber), 65 Lanzky, Paul, 163n12 Laws (Plato), 138n25, 186, 282 life, 213, 222–27, 235, 291–93, 307, 323–27. See also knowledge; philosophic life Life (in Dance Song), 21, 97, 238, 267, 273, 334

Lives of the Philosophers (Diogenes Laertius), 51 Lubbock, John, 162 Lucretius, 260–61 Luther, Martin, 42, 194 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 190–91, 194n4 Machtgelüst (passion for power), 254, 258 Machtmenge (power mass), 257–58 Maier, Mathilde, 137, 137n23, 138n24 Manfred (Byron), 181 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 223, 224n8 Memoiren einer Idealistin (Meysenbug), 134 Mette, Hans Joachim, 49n11 Meysenbug, Malwida von, 122n17, 133–34, 167n15, 208n7 M III 1 (workbook), 203, 237–47, 240n1, 249–57, 257n38, 264–69, 279–97, 302n20, 303n23, 307n28, 308–10, 310n34, 316–17, 321–22, 333, 335, 339–40 Montaigne, Michel de, 194n4 morality: beauty and, 331; calculation and, 264; consequences and, 222; crisis and, 167; de-selfing, 278; determinism and, 298; dissolution and, 44, 59; Enlightenment and, 192–93; establishment of, 56; evolution of, 165, 251, 257, 305–6; free will and, 221; future of, 210; history and, 332; incorporation and, 297–99, 311, 313–14; injustices and, 145; justification and, 32; knowledge and, 231, 246, 248, 253; laws and, 306–7; Nietzsche and, 79; philosophy and, 173; pity and, 228; reason and, 252; religion and, 24, 37, 64, 173, 279; skepticism and, 44, 58–59; Socrates and, 39n19; suffering and, 112; truth and, 142; virtues and, 279. See also altruism; egoism; nonresponsibility nationalism, 100, 308 natural philosophy, 81–82, 81n8 nature, 26–28, 55, 235–36, 257, 312–13; calculability of, 264–65; dehumanization of, 297, 324n2, 331; knowledge of, 46, 57, 61,

Index 63, 81, 98, 117–18, 216, 235, 269n55; laws of, 57, 71, 236, 265, 318–19 Nauckhoff, Josefine, 211n12, 227n13 Niebuhr, Barthold Georg, 85 Nietzsche (Safranski), 74n3 Nietzsche, Friedrich: art and, 1, 14, 17, 20, 26–27, 39, 41, 47, 57, 63, 65–67, 107, 112, 142–43, 187–88, 214–18, 283, 294, 305, 326, 329–32, 335; autobiographical writings of, 2–3, 7, 127, 141–44, 150–51, 201, 213–18, 336; epistemology and, 39–41, 46, 56, 65, 132, 153, 163–64, 268, 286n5; history and, 109–11, 192; illness of, 12, 112n12, 133–40, 149n35, 150, 213, 214n14, 220, 220n2, 336; as lecturer, 17, 27n6, 37n18, 49, 49n14, 51, 96, 105n5; maturation of, 2, 8–10, 65, 87, 96, 200–203, 214, 238, 269; ontology and, 20–26, 32–41, 80–88, 152, 159, 178, 210, 242, 247, 253, 264, 269n55, 276–80, 319–29, 335; optimism and, 12, 38, 41, 125, 150–51; pessimism and, 11, 38, 149, 169; philosophy and, 14, 160, 165, 208–11, 213, 256, 336; Plato and, 1, 14, 36–38, 50, 52–53, 70, 85, 94–95, 188, 198–99, 256, 279; psychology and, 178, 180; religion and, 37n17, 40, 42, 49–50, 61, 117, 167n15, 182–84, 184n19, 185, 185n20, 186, 193; Schopenhauer and, 78– 79, 79n6, 80, 84n12; Socrates and, 34–36, 38–40, 68, 91–92, 94–96, 134n17, 198–99, 271–80; solitude and, 77–78, 138, 140n26, 205, 216, 240–41, 241n4, 294–95, 310n33, 314; suffering and, 30–32, 112–13, 140–41, 149–50, 212–13, 214n14, 271n2, 292–93, 336; Wagner and, 103–7, 109, 121–22, 124n22, 132–33, 136–38, 149–51, 225. See also Jesuitism; philosophic life; science; workbooks Nietzsche’s Enlightenment (Franco), 178n10, 189n1, 201n9, 286n4 Nietzsche’s Great Politics (Drochon), 101n33, 147n33, 180n12, 280n17 Nietzsches Italien (Buddensieg), 167n15, 224n9, 226n12, 315

347

Nietzsche’s Journey to Sorrento (D’Iorio), 15n17, 135n20, 153–54 “Nietzsche’s Perfectionism” (Conant), 86n16 nihilism, 163, 166, 170, 182, 225, 271, 334 noble lies, 181, 181n12, 279. See also Jesuitism nonresponsibility, 178, 178n8, 179. See also free will; morality Odyssey, The (Homer), 75–76 Oedipus, 27–28 “On the Pathos of Truth” (Nietzsche), 45, 47–48, 50 On the Use and Disadvantage of History (Nietzsche), 103, 110 “On Truth and Lie in the Extra-moral Sense” (Nietzsche), 44–59, 66, 118–23, 142, 159, 246–47 optimism, 11–12, 38–41. See also Enlightenment optimism; pessimism order of rank, 41, 53, 85, 93, 101n33, 145–46, 147n33, 158, 191, 200–201, 235, 255–56, 299. See also castes Origin of the Moral Sensations, The (Rée), 138n25, 174n1, 175 Orpheus, 228 Ott, Louise, 123n21 Overbeck, Franz, 5–6, 89, 138, 214, 223 Persian Wars, 97, 100 perspectivism, 57, 80, 116, 131, 142, 179, 258, 332 pessimism: Dionysian, 12, 151–52, 265; intellect and, 44, 59, 263–65; romanticism and, 106, 142, 150, 265. See also dissolution (Auflösung); Enlightenment optimism; Nietzsche, Friedrich; optimism Phaedo (Plato), 39, 39n19, 260n40, 275 philology, 61n33, 91–92 philosopher-statesmen, 98–100 philosophic life, the, 77–80, 83, 87, 157, 260n40, 290–91, 324 philosophy: action and, 28, 30, 41, 145–46, 149, 168, 274; art and, 94, 139, 142, 169, 215; concepts and, 48, 55, 58, 66, 159–61;

348 Index philosophy (continued ) history and, 50, 64, 162, 164, 267, 335; metaphysics and, 3, 61, 125, 132, 158, 164, 183, 269n55; the philosopher figure in, 13, 60, 78, 80, 83, 85, 90, 93, 256; relationship to the state of, 85–86, 88; religion and, 50, 183, 183n16, 199; science and, 60–61, 64, 162, 269n55. See also chemistry; culture; ebb and flood Philosophy and Truth (Nietzsche), 60n30, 100n32 Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (Nietzsche), 64, 99 P I 20 (workbook), 60, 61n32, 68–73, 71n43, 132, 247, 268, 286 Picht, Georg, 158n3 Plato, 1, 15, 36–39, 48, 50, 52–53, 70, 85, 94– 98, 181, 188, 198–99, 258, 278–79, 292–93, 303, 333; art and, 37, 116; culmination of Greek philosophy and, 52; culture creation and, 50, 52–53, 85, 94–95, 198; dialogues, 37–38, 52–53; Hebrew scriptures and, 282–83; Platonism, 37, 47–48, 52–53, 55, 163, 188; Socrates and, 1, 24, 36, 94–95, 98n30; tyranny and, 198–99 Plowshare, The (Nietzsche), 123–24, 130–32, 132n13, 134, 169n17, 287 Plutarch, 199 Pre-Platonic Philosophers, The (Nietzsche), 84n11 Prometheus (Aeschylus), 29 Prometheus (figure), 28–31, 30n12, 32–33, 33n15, 209, 313, 333 Psychological Observations (Rée), 175 Redlichkeit, 257 Rée, Paul, 87n17, 89, 135, 138, 138n25, 167n15, 174–75, 174n1, 176–77 religion, 64, 158, 164, 171–76, 184n19, 185–89, 303–6, 334–35; truth and, 183–84. See also Ariadne; art; Christianity; culture; Dionysos; Nietzsche, Friedrich Renaissance, the, 42, 167–68, 190, 193–94, 194n4, 224, 229

Republic, The (Plato), 50, 279 Richard Wagner in Bayreuth (Nietzsche), 17, 102–3, 105, 108, 111, 119 Ring of the Nibelung, The (Wagner), 108 Robertson, George Croom, 162n11 Rohde, Erwin, 45, 104, 135n19, 174n3 Romanticism, 22, 106, 128, 142, 148, 150, 165, 265 Safranski, Rudiger, 74n3 Salis, Meta von, 11n14 Salomé, Lou, 87n17, 89, 207, 207n5, 208, 208n6 “Sanctus Januarius” (Gay Science Book), 203, 205–6, 208–10, 216, 254, 273 Schiller, Friedrich, 105 Schlechta, Karl, 45n4, 60n30 Schmeitzner, Ernst, 4–7, 5n8, 137n22, 219n1, 240 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 17, 21, 32, 41, 63, 74, 74n1, 77–89, 174–75 Schopenhauer as Educator (Nietzsche), 17, 44, 52, 56, 73–74, 90, 183 science: history and, 63–64; knowledge and, 167, 177, 259; limitations of, 301–2; Nietzsche’s view of, 20–21, 39–41, 57, 60– 64, 81n8, 85, 89, 92, 96, 110, 116, 151n36, 159–60, 162–63, 165–66, 176–77, 184, 187, 189–90, 246, 259, 301–2; philosophy and, 60–61, 190, 195–96; religion and, 63, 176, 180; truth and, 40, 57. See also skepticism self-knowledge, 212, 242–43, 254, 257, 272, 322 self-love, 45, 307 sensation, 71, 116, 160–61, 262, 301 Silenus, 24, 26, 31 skepticism, 30, 59, 67–70, 70n42, 164–66, 238, 318–19; epistemological, 46, 156, 263– 64, 269, 334 slavery, 28, 34, 41, 101, 252. See also Nietzsche, Friedrich Small, Robin, 175n5 Socrates, 1, 84; courage and, 274; daimonion and, 36; death of, 40, 239; end of Helle-

Index nism and, 91–96, 198–99; as ideal, 271–72, 274–75; illusion and, 48; optimism and, 12, 20–21; philosophy and, 92–97; pleasure and, 260n40; Promethean, 33–42; rationalism and, 58; tragedy and, 21, 34–37, 39; truth and, 39; Western culture and, 294; wisdom and, 274. See also Plato Sophocles, 27, 29. See also Attic tragedy soul, the, 146, 152, 178, 185 Spencer, Herbert, 248, 251n21, 256, 268 Spinoza, Baruch, 309–10, 310n33, 312, 316 Stein, Heinrich von, 208n10 Strauss, David, 45, 70 Strawson, Galen, 269n55 suffering, 21, 30–32, 77, 106, 112–13, 117, 133, 140, 149–51, 179, 212–14, 292–93, 336 Sun Sinks, The (Nietzsche), 232n2 Tasso, Torquato, 232n3 teleology, 252–53, 257, 259, 260n40 Things Human All Too Human (Nietzsche), 3–6, 9, 43, 104, 127–32, 138, 148–50, 187, 197 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche), 87–90, 125–27, 145, 168, 208–9, 267, 270–71, 280n17, 333–34 tragedy, 17, 20–21, 23, 26–27, 32, 33–38, 81, 95, 107, 113, 121, 161, 169, 181–82, 212, 261, 267, 281, 328–29 Trampedach, Mathilde, 228n14 truth: culture and, 20–25, 42, 188; deadly, 22–24, 35, 116; despair and, 170–71; illusion and, 55–56, 328; knowledge and, 156, 183, 210; pursuit of, 210, 238, 259, 323–24; veiling of, 215–16. See also art; ebb and flood; Jesuitism; knowledge; Nietzsche, Friedrich Tylor, Edward, 162 tyranny, 53n23, 78, 106, 107n9, 119, 151, 197– 200, 250–53 Übermensch, 89 U II 2 (workbook), 49–51

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U II 5 (workbook), 104–5, 123, 128, 130, 130n6, 131, 131n11, 135n19 U II 5b (workbook), 129, 130n6 U II 8c (workbook), 91n24, 93 Untimely Meditations (Nietzsche), 10, 17, 43–44, 53, 74, 91, 102, 104, 124 “Veiled Image at Sais, The” (Schiller), 216 Vogt, J. G., 320, 320n50 Voltaire, 123–24, 143, 147, 148n34, 155–57 Wagner, Cosima, 45, 48n9, 79n6, 103–4 Wagner, Richard, 17, 22–23, 27–28, 42, 44–45, 62, 62n34, 70, 102–7, 109, 111–22, 124, 128, 133–34, 136, 174–75, 225 Wagnerism, 22, 47, 51, 72, 96, 106–7, 111, 132, 149, 182–83, 193, 196–97 Wanderer and His Shadow, The (Nietzsche), 11, 140, 148, 251 “We Philologists” (Nietzsche), 90, 91n24 Western culture, 34–37, 41, 53, 91, 167, 199, 271, 283. See also Enlightenment, the; Greeks, the; Hellenism; Renaissance, the “Will and wave” (Nietzsche), 232–36, 238, 261, 268, 280, 314 will to power, 14, 32, 71, 159, 201, 239, 253, 255, 269, 269n55, 334–35. See also knowledge; life Wisdom of the Ancients, The (Bacon), 259n39 wise man, 78, 291–92, 325 Wissensgier, 236–37, 255–56, 261, 268. See also knowledge workbooks, 13n16, 49n11, 59, 60n30, 73, 92n25, 104n4, 129, 129n3. See also Nietzsche, Friedrich; and specific workbooks World as Will and Representation, The (Schopenhauer), 77, 292n9 world-historical events, 37, 84, 109, 113, 128, 134 Zarathustra (figure), 33, 76, 115, 144–45, 211, 270, 279–84, 293, 311–21. See also Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche)