Nietzsche attacks the ‘despisers of the body’. It is clear, in his eyes, that the body and the spirit are one. ‘The soul is only a word for a piece of the body’. He reproaches the great universalist religions for having denigrated the body, for having made it a miserable corpse, an inferior object, a source of temptations. Deploring the effects of an education which only treats things of the spirit, he calls for a return to the ‘complete man’ of Antiquity. ‘Of all that is written’, he declares, ‘I love only what one writes with his blood. Write with blood and you will find that blood is spirit’.
Our body itself is principle of hierarchy: that which we value depends on the qualities of which it is the support. And just as the body and the spirit are one, all beings are linked in the specific milieu that is compatible with their worldview (Weltsicht): ‘When man will have known all things, then he will know himself. Things, in effect, are only his own limits’.
‘In maltreating the body’, writes Nietzsche in The Will to Power, ‘we produce favourable conditions for feelings of culpability, that is to say, a state of malaise demanding an explanation’. This explanation is given by the priest (he who, according to Nietzsche, ‘changes the direction of the hostility’), when he affirms that the disease is not only an evil, it is a punishment. From suffering sickness, man is then transformed into sinner. He is the prey of bad conscience.
The Dwarf and the Giant
‘This man of bad conscience has seized on religious presupposition in order to provide his self-torture with its most horrific hardness and sharpness. Debt towards God: this thought becomes an instrument of torture. In God he seizes upon the ultimate antithesis he can find to his real and irredeemable animal instincts, he reinterprets these self-same animal instincts as debt/guilt before God (as animosity, insurrection, rebellion against the ‘master’, the ‘father’, the primeval ancestor and beginning of the world), he pitches himself into the contradiction of God and Devil, he emits every no which he says to himself, nature, naturalness and the reality of his being as a yes, as existing, living, real, as God, as the holiness of God, as God-the-Judge, as God-the-Hangman, as the beyond, as eternity, as torture without end, as hell, as immeasurable punishment and guilt. We have here a sort of madness of the will showing itself in mental cruelty which is absolutely unparalleled’. (On the Genealogy of Morality).212
The danger, continues Nietzsche, is not the ‘wicked’ — for their wickedness can pass. It is the ‘sick’ — for their state dwells. ‘The sick’, he writes, ‘are the greatest danger for the healthy’. This is because the sick hate (at the same time that they desire) this ‘great health’ which they do not possess, in the same way that the weak are horrified of strength. The weak would like it if the whole world was exhausted. The sick would wish that everything was attained. Thus their illnesses would appear lighter to them. The dwarf who fells a giant is still found to be small.
‘The weak say: “We alone are the good, the just, we alone are the homines bonae vonuntatis”. They walk in our midst like living reproaches, as if they would serve as warnings to us, as if health, robustness, strength, pride, and the feeling of power were simply vices which must be expiated, bitterly expiated, and they are thirsty to play the role of hangman!’213
Nietzsche gives the speech to the weak. He has them explain the causes implicit in their hate: ‘”Ah! If I could be someone else, no matter who!” Thus does his glance sigh. “But there is no hope. I am who I am: how would I know how to get away from myself? And also — I am tired of myself!”’214
In Zarathustra, Nietzsche surpasses the critique, now classic, of Judaeo-Christian morality and of the role of the priest that he developed in The Genealogy of Morality and The Twilight of the Idols in order to directly approach the problem of the creation of a ‘new objectivity’ on the very ruins of the notion of the absolute.
‘Previously’, he writes, ‘blasphemy against God was the worst blasphemy; but God is dead, and with him all his blasphemers are also dead. The worst sacrilege at present is to blaspheme the earth’. Zarathustra is ‘true to the earth’. But he also knows to withdraw. For Nietzsche, ‘he must quit life like Odysseus would quit Nausicaä, with recognition sooner than with love’. He adds: ‘the maturity of man is to rediscover the seriousness that he placed in games as a child’. And further: A man approaches genius when he can simultaneously love a thing and mock it’.
Friedrich Nietzsche proposes to replace the morality of sin with an ethic of honour in which life is only worth the price of being lived under certain conditions. ‘My ego has taught me a new pride’, declared Zarathustra, ‘I teach it to mankind: no longer bury your head in the sand of heavenly things, but bear it proudly’. ‘Nietzschean morality will therefore be a morality of life, it will only condemn enslaved and fallen lives’ (Thierry Maulnier, Nietzsche. Gallimard, 1943).
Faced with inferior beings (‘When they say “I am just”, this always sounds like “I am avenged” …’), the superior man is caught by the trap of his humanity: — ‘Because you are mild and just, you say: They are innocent by their petty existence. But their narrow souls think: — All great existence is guilty’.
‘A Rope Over an Abyss’
The decline of aristocracies has gone hand in hand with a process that has given power to those who Nietzsche calls ‘the last men’. With this term, he denounces in advance the representatives of the society of consumption and the morality of merchants: those who think that the human adventure is too risky, that it must put an end to history, abolish tensions, give everyone the same comfort, submit politics to economics, and economics to society. ‘We have invented happiness, say the last men, blinking’.
In fact, man is something that must be overcome. ‘Man is a rope stretched between beast and overman, a rope over an abyss (…) What is great about man is that he is a bridge and not a goal’. We know the attention with which Nietzsche followed the works of Darwin on the evolution of the species. However, for him, the Overman (Übermensch) is not an inflation of man (übermenschlich). It is an entirely different being, with its own way of being, its own way of seeing the world and evaluating the meaning of things. The Overman is one for whom the affirmation of the self gives birth to a new species. One for whom the worldview is imposed by itself with such power that afterwards, one can no longer think outside of it. It is the culmination of a creative projection of the past into the present, the ‘return’ in another form of that which was. And at the same time an achievement: for the being who realises itself, at the same time overcomes itself.
The Meaning of the Eternal Return
For Nietzsche, man only has meaning if he attempts to go beyond his condition, that is to say, if he proceeds to pursue his own demise: the demise of his ‘nature’ for the benefit of the ‘higher nature’215 that it will be given. ‘The overman corresponds to a goal, a goal given at every moment and which it is perhaps impossible to attain; better, a goal which, at the very instant it is attained, proposes another on a new horizon. In such a perspective, man is presented as a perpetual surpassing of man by man’ (Giorgio Locchi, L’histoire, in Nouvelle école Nr. 27–28, autumn–winter 1975).
‘The Overman is the meaning of the earth! Let your will say: let the Overman be the meaning of the earth!’
In order to express this necessity for surpassing, Nietzsche takes up the hammer of Eternal Return. In Zarathustra, the theme is illustrated by the enigma of the gate: ‘See this gateway! It has two faces. Two paths come together here, which no one has yet followed to the end. A long path back, which lasts an eternity; and this long path forward — which lasts another eternity. They contradict each other, these paths, they lock heads: and it is here at this gateway that they come together. The name of the gate is written above it: “Moment”’.
‘Everything comes and reaches out its hands and laughs and retreats — and comes back. Everything goes, everything comes back; the wheel of being rolls eternally. Everything dies, everything blos
soms again, the year of being runs eternally. Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; the same house of being builds itself eternally. Everything separates, everything greets itself again; the ring of being remains eternally loyal to itself. In every Moment being begins; around every Here rolls the sphere There. The centre is everywhere. Crooked is the path of eternity’.
Here Nietzsche does not hide his debt to the Greeks of the Presocratic era: Heraclitus, Parmenides, Anaximander. But he also adds, in the same intuition, the incessant renewal of the seasons and of generations — and the discoveries of modern science: the carbon cycle, the oxygen cycle, etc.
In the same period that he formulated this idea, Gustave le Bon writes: ‘If it is the same elements of each world that serves, after its destruction, to reconstitute other worlds, it is easy to understand that the same combinations, that is to say the same worlds inhabited by the same beings, must have been repeated many times’ (L’homme et les sociétés, Vol. 2. 1881).
We know that Nietzsche studied much contemporary science, and that he once thought to demonstrate the concordance of atomic theory, then nascent, with the idea of Eternal Return. At the beginning of this century, Gabriel Huan wrote: ‘The scientific character of the doctrine of Return is undeniable; perhaps it is even the only cosmological system that adapts itself to the most recent hypotheses of modern science’ (La philosophie de Frédéric Nietzsche. E. de Boccard, 1917). Ten years later, Abel Rey confronted the theories of Nietzsche with the teachings of thermodynamics and the kinetic theory of gas. He remarks: ‘The idea of the Eternal Return is ultimately only the affirmation that all evolution is relative. Considered over a sufficiently long time, it unfolds itself as if it could begin again’ (Le Retour Eternel et la philosophie de la physique. Flammarion, 1927).
Since then, the idea of the Eternal Return has found a new justification in the notion of the discontinuity of the real elicited by microphysics. Disputing the universal extrapolations of Carnot’s theorem — which is applied to complex results but not to molecular events — modern science tends to deny the idea of a generalised fundamental irreversibility, to return the irreversible to the reversible — and the generalised disorder to a possible order.
On a more directly philosophical plane, the Eternal Return is often poorly interpreted — when it is not considered ‘marginal’ in the work of Nietzsche. In reality, as Gilles Deleuze has remarked, identity refers less to the nature of what comes back than to the fact that difference returns eternally. This is the expression of a principle which is the reason for diversity and its reproduction, the reason for its difference and repetition. In his critique of the ‘linear’ conception of history (which implies that there is necessarily a beginning and an end, as well as a meaning to history), Nietzsche goes further than the simple cyclic conception of the Ancients — of which he himself expresses the limitations (‘where does the diversity within a cycle come from?’) by specifying that ‘we do not go back to the Greeks’. He asserts that history is like a sphere: that in every moment dwells a possibility for the regeneration of time.
A Sphere Whose Centre is Everywhere
In order to understand the conception of history that Nietzsche proposes to us, it is necessary to place it alongside a four-dimensional perspective — for which we are indebted to the relativist conception of the physical universe. Whereas in Antiquity, moments were still seen as points following each other on a line, for Nietzsche, becoming is conceived as a collection of moments of which each forms, like a sphere, the interior of a ‘four-dimensional supersphere’ (one spatial dimension, three temporal dimensions), such that each moment occupies the centre in relation to the others.
From this perspective, indicates Giorgio Locchi (L’«idée de la musique» et le temps de l’histoire, in Nouvelle école Nr. 30, winter 1976–77), not only does the universe have neither beginning nor end, but the most appropriated image to express the idea of time is no longer the circle (as in the cyclic conception of the Ancients), but the sphere. Time is a sphere, in which, as Nietzsche says, the ‘centre is everywhere’. The ‘complete position’ of the totality of forces is always destined to return, because each combination conditions an infinity of other combinations.
Destiny is a game of dice, observes Gilles Deleuze: ‘If the dice that are thrown are the affirmation of chance, the dice which fall are the affirmation of necessity, the number or the destiny that brings the roll of the dice back down’ (Nietzsche et la philosophie. PUF, 1962 and 1970).
This theme has an obvious ethical aspect. Of the thought of the Eternal Return, Nietzsche says that it is ‘heavy and difficult’. In effect, the pressure that it exercises on man is not elective, but selective. It implies a selection of choices. Only that which has decided to return returns eternally. ‘Only he who holds his life eternally capable of being repeated, remains’. Nietzsche deems that this thought — to live in such a way that one can will to eternally revive his life — is susceptible to transform man more actively than the myth of ‘eternal damnation’. He makes this maxim: ‘Impress on your life the image of eternity’.
For Nietzsche, a perspective established in history is all the more ‘just’ because it is expressed with a force that is more susceptible to realise it. It is for this reason that, in his eyes, the will to power is the ‘very essence of life’. It is this, and not ‘class struggle’, that is the engine of the causality of history.
‘I am a Man of Fatality’
Just as aristocratism does not consist primarily in rights, but first of all duties, so too the will to power, before the authority to take, first obliges us to give. Being pure affirmation in and of itself, it is necessarily creative: affirmation adds, it does not take away. The tragic heroes do not ask, like the ‘bourgeois’ (or the ‘proletariat’, as Marx defines it), what it can take away or extract from existence, but what it can give to life.
Following from this, history is not to be defined as a series of events or facts without links, like a simple succession of generations; it is no longer a ‘spectacle’ or a ‘cult object’. It is the perpetual transformation of societies by a historical consciousness specific to man, served by the will to power which only gives meaning to history by imposing the strongest perspective upon it.
In this conception proposed to us by Nietzsche, man is the only one who makes history — not as a member of a class, or because he satisfies the prescriptions of a dogmatism, but as an undetermined individual free to choose, finding in himself alone the possibility to be more than himself. History is wholly his making: faber suae fortunae. His freedom consists in always being able to choose between different possible historical perspectives — the only situation in which this freedom is not a pretence.
Thanks to his action within (and upon) time, man overcomes the object by everything that cannot be reduced to it. Chaos is not that which was ‘before’ — all things have at once become and not-yet-become — but that which of all time is unformed: the ‘chaos of all’, also eternal, excluding the finality and the unequivocal ordering of history, the very condition of the ‘spherical’ movement of things within becoming. Freely creative, man is creator of himself: he is sufficient unto himself. (And what applies to individuals also applies to cultures and peoples).
In contrast to Marx, Nietzsche does not speak merely in terms of society, but in terms of civilisation. In socialism, he detects a profane reiteration of this ‘gospel of the petty’ which renders petty, a resurgence of this ‘poison of the doctrine of equal rights for all’ through which ‘Christianity has destroyed our happiness on earth’ (The Twilight of the Idols). To the inescapability of the society of equals, he opposes the permanent possibility of an aristocratic society, rendering to each according to his merits, where man will be the measure of all things, where life would find its own justification in itself — and which would enrich the world instead of impoverishing it.
‘I am a man of fatality’, he writes. ‘For
when the truth enters into conflict with the lies of a thousand years, we will have shocks like never before, convulsions and earth quakes, a shifting of mountains and valleys likes we have never dreamed. The concept of politics will then be completely consumed by spiritual warfare (…) There will be wars like never before on earth. It is only starting with me that great politics will exist on earth’.
Affirming that Europe will make itself, by itself, ‘fatally’, he adds: I would like to see Europe create itself by means of a new caste which would rule it, a unique will, tremendous, capable of following a purpose over thousands of years, in order to put an end to the too-long comedy/farce of its petty politics and its paltry and innumerable dynastic and democratic wills. These times of petty politics is passed, already the coming century predicts the struggle for the sovereignty of the world. And the irresistible push towards great politics’ (Beyond Good and Evil).
Free from the unbearable tension resulting from the antagonism between morality and life, man bursts with laughter. Like the young shepherd from the vision of Zarathustra, when he has spat out the head of the serpent which was choking him, he finds innocence and joy at the same time.
All Joy Wants Deep Eternity
The theme of joy (or ‘pleasure’ in the translation of de Gandillac) bursts forth at the end of Zarathustra like in the Ninth Symphony, where the sky clears after the storm. Zarathustra, like all heroes, is above all joyous. In the midst of the path leading to the Overman, when the hour of the Great Noontide comes, he begins to sing a ‘song of drunkenness’. For joy is more profound than toil. And this is why it is immortalised: ‘Pain says: pass and finish! But all joy wants eternity. Wants deep, deep eternity’.
‘What we do’, writes Nietzsche, ‘is never understood, but only praised or blamed’. He himself has not escaped this law. But the ‘joyous messenger’ does not intend to found a new religion. ‘Now, I bid you to abandon me and find yourselves, for it is only when you have all denied me that I will return to you’.
Heritage and Foundations Page 17
