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Paul S. Loeb
The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 30, Autumn 2005, pp. 70-101
(Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/nie.2005.0013
For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nie/summary/v030/30.1loeb02.html
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Finding the bermensch in Nietzsches

Genealogy of Morality
PAUL S. LOEB
lthough it is natural to study a philosophers works in chronological order,

and to suppose that what is written later supersedes what is written earlier, this scholarly practice proves complicated in Nietzsches case. For he himself privileges above all his other works Thus Spoke Zarathustra (TSZ), a book
he wrote before his widely acknowledged twin masterpieces Beyond Good and
Evil (BGE) and On the Genealogy of Morality (GM).1 According to Nietzsche,
these later works are fish hooks (Angelhaken) meant to attract and prepare
readers for the superior insights of TSZ. These later works, he tells us, are Nosaying, destructive books focused on the contemporaneous; while TSZ is a Yessaying, constructive book focused on the future (EH Books BGE). So, contrary
to scholarly expectation, Nietzsche himself instructs us to think of the analyses
in BGE and GM as pre-emptively superseded by the philosophy of TSZ.
Most Nietzsche scholars today ignore this instruction. Although they sometimes cite TSZ as a source of confirming textual support, they mostly regard this
work as an embarrassment that needs to be finessed. Their chief reasons for this
opinion are well known. First, TSZ is a poetic fictional work that is not written
in Nietzsches own voice. And, second, it centers around two philosophical
ideas, the bermensch and eternal recurrence, that are not substantially revisited in any of his later works.2 As for Nietzsches instruction mentioned above,
it cannot be taken seriously because it appears for the first and only time in Ecce
Homo, the book he was writing as he quickly approached his breakdown. When
we consider the problematic aspects of TSZ alongside the sustained brilliance
and power of BGE and GM (especially the latter), we have no choice but to
regard the later works as mature by comparison. Michael Tanner sums up the
case as follows in his Past Masters introduction:
[Nietzsche] insisted that everything he wrote after TSZ was a commentary on it,
but that seems to have been more in the nature of an attempt at self-reassurance
than a genuine assessment of their nature or quality. For one thing, the bermensch is never heard of again; the Eternal Recurrence rarely recurs. . . . For
another, the progress through the first post-TSZ book, Beyond Good and Evil,
through his masterpiece The Genealogy of Morals, to the torrential pamphlets of
the last year, has little do with anything stated or adumbrated in TSZ.3
Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 30, 2005

Copyright 2005 The Friedrich Nietzsche Society.
70
FINDING THE BERMENSCH IN NIETZSCHES GENEALOGY OF MORALITY
71
One of my goals in this essay is to suggest a line of defense against this scholarly consensus. More specifically, I wish to address the claim that the bermensch plays no role in Nietzsches most important mature work, GM, and
therefore does not warrant much attention from his commentators.4 Against this,
I will argue that Nietzsches supposedly immature and discarded TSZ concept
of the bermensch does indeed supersede his supposedly mature and final ideas
in the second essay of GM. This does not mean, of course, that Nietzsches
thought simply stopped evolving after TSZ. He obviously did develop a new and
sophisticated analysis of bad conscience in GM II. But I will argue that he developed this analysis on behalf of his earlier and superior insights in TSZ, and that
this analysis is therefore best appreciated when understood against the background of these insights.
Nietzsche and Zarathustra

The most obvious problem for todays consensus about the relation between TSZ
and GM is the conclusion to the second essay of GM. Alluding specifically to
the Vision and the Riddle chapter in TSZ, where Zarathustra challenges the
sailors to guess who it is that must come one day, Nietzsche writes as follows:
24. [. . .] But some day, in a stronger age than this decaying, self-doubting present, he must yet come to us, the redeeming man of great love and contempt, the
creative spirit whose surging strength always pushes him out of any outside or
beyond, whose solitude is misunderstood by the people as if it were a flight from
reality: whereas it is only his sinking, burrowing, diving into reality, so that,
when he one day emerges again into the light, he brings home the redemption of
this reality: its redemption from the curse that the hitherto reigning ideal has laid
upon it. This man of the future, who will redeem us not only from the hitherto
reigning ideal but also from that which was bound to grow out of it, from the great
nausea, from the will to nothingness, from nihilism, this bell-stroke of noon and
of the great decision that makes the will free again, that gives back to earth its
goal and to humankind its hope, this Antichrist and anti-nihilist; this conqueror
of God and of nothingnesshe must come one day . . .
25.But what am I saying here? Enough! Enough! At this place only one thing
behooves me, to be silent: otherwise I usurp that which only one younger, one
futurer, one stronger than I am is at liberty to dothat which only Zarathustra
is at liberty to do, Zarathustra the godless.5
For anyone reading through GM without any prior knowledge of TSZ, this fervent encomium to Zarathustra is bound to seem jarring and puzzling.6 Except
for his brief recommendation of TSZ in the Preface ( 8), there is nothing in what
Nietzsche has written up to this point in GM that would help such a reader understand these concluding passages. This is why every edition and translation of
GM includes a note at this point explaining Nietzsches allusion to the
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PAUL S. LOEB
protagonist of his earlier work. It seems obvious, then, that Nietzsche intends
his readers to go back and look up his earlier work so as to understand his allusion (in fact, he says just this in Preface 8). Indeed, since this allusion is the
climax to the entire second essay, it seems clear that Nietzsche intends his readers to think of his analysis in the second essay as needing completion through
the ideas of his earlier TSZ.7 This reading is supported by the fact that, at one
point in the composition of GM, Nietzsche envisioned his work ending entirely
with the conclusion to the second essay and with his deferring to the younger
and stronger Zarathustra.8
If we look now at the details of Nietzsches GM II conclusion, we can notice
further that the terms in which he alludes to TSZ are strikingly similar to those
he employs in Ecce Homo when discussing the relation of GM to TSZ. The way
in which Nietzsche dangles the name of Zarathustra without further explanation
fits his characterization of GM as a fish hook to find readers for TSZ. His reference to Zarathustra as the man of the future who must come one day, who
belongs to a stronger future age than this decaying self-doubting present, and as
a younger man futurer (Zuknftigeren) than he is, fits his description of TSZ
as future-oriented compared to the present-oriented GM. And his description of
Zarathustra as the anti-nihilist, as the redeemer from the will to nothingness, as
the conqueror of nothingness, fits his description of TSZ as a Yes-saying book
compared to the No-saying GM. Pointing forward to his concluding praise of
Zarathustra, and gesturing back to his just-completed critique of bad conscience
and guilt, Nietzsche writes: In order for a shrine to be set up, another shrine
must be shattered: that is the lawshow me the case where it is not so! (GM
II.24). But the consensus cannot point here to Nietzsches fragile mental state.
Indeed, the more this consensus praises GM as the peak of Nietzsches mature
philosophical thinking, the more it is committed to taking this concluding allusion seriously and to offering an interpretation that does justice to this allusion.
One option, given my focus in this essay, is for the consensus to target the TSZ
concept of the bermensch. It might be suggested, that is, that much of TSZ is
important and continuous with Nietzsches later mature thought in GM, and that
we need only dismiss those aspects of TSZ having to do with the discarded bermensch. So perhaps Nietzsches concluding allusion is only to this valuable and
anticipating material in TSZ: for example, to its introduction of the will to power,
or to its analysis of values, or to its preaching of an ideal contrary to the ascetic
ideal. But I do not think this option will work either. For Nietzsches phrase he
who must come one day is a quite specific reference to Zarathustras prevision
of himself jumping up radiant and no longer human, with a laughter that is no
human laughterthat is, to Zarathustra become bermensch (Z:3 On the Vision
and the Riddle 2).9 Nor is this an incidental reference: if I am right in my interpretation below, this will turn out to be a very precise suggestion as to how the
bermensch supersedes the entire analysis of the second essay of GM.
73
Before I discuss this interpretation, let me say why I think the passage just
noted undermines the two chief reasons behind the current consensus for not
taking TSZ seriously. From my perspective as a student of TSZ, GM II.2425 is
one of the most important moments in all of Nietzsches published post-TSZ
writing. For it is the only published place where Nietzsche explicitlyif very
briefly and crypticallyexplains why he chose not to write TSZ in his own voice
and how TSZ therefore relates to all the later writing that he did write in his own
voice. TSZ, he explains (see also his long sentence prior to the quote above), is
his attempt to imagine a philosopher stronger than himself: more warlike, more
comfortable with solitude, more malicious, more healthy, more self-assured,
more courageous in the face of reality, more atheistic, more anti-Christian. This
philosophernamed Zarathustra in honor of the Persian metaphysician of
good and evil (EH Destiny 3)will be able to do what he, Nietzsche, knows
he can never do himself: overturn the hitherto reigning ascetic ideal, abolish the
nihilism that grew out of this ideal, and liberate the human will so that it can
once again give itself a collective goal. No matter how strong and healthy he
deems himself, perhaps stronger and healthier than almost all his contemporaries, Nietzsche sees himself as inheriting the base-line weakness and pathology of one of the weakest and most pathological of all ages. Still, he is strong
enough to criticize this age on just these grounds and thereby set up the conditions for the emergence of a stronger age that can produce a fundamentally
stronger philosopher than himself. TSZ, then, is the constructive work in which
he imagines what such a future philosopher will experience, teach, and legislate. And GM is one of the later destructive works in which he criticizes his contemporaries and prepares the way for this future philosopher.
Now, to this it will no doubt be replied that, if Nietzsche is right about being
bound by the decadence of his own age, then the most he can hope to accomplish is a diagnosis of this decadence. But he would be deluded to think that he
can somehow transcend this decadence so as to imagine a future philosopher
who is not bound by it. Whatever limits Nietzsches age sets on his ability to
overturn the ascetic ideal, abolish nihilism, and liberate the human will, surely
it sets these also on his ability to imagine a future philosopher who will do these
things. As Daniel Conway comments: Agents in late modernity, including
Nietzsche himself, simply lack the volitional resources needed to orchestrate
the redemption of the age.10 I think this is an important objection, but not fatal.
Indeed, I will suggest at the end of this essay that Nietzsches bermensch gives
him the conceptual resources to answer this objection. But if we suppose for
now that Nietzsche is entitled to his distinction between himself and Zarathustra,
then I think we can see right away the general interpretive mistake behind the
two usual reasons for dismissing TSZ.
In the first place, Nietzsche indicates, the reason he wrote TSZ in poetic fictional form is that he is trying to imagine a type that does not yet exist. But of
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PAUL S. LOEB
course this does not mean that he does not believe in the futuristic ideas communicated in this workanymore than Wagner does not believe in the futuristic ideas communicated in Siegfried.11 On the contrary, Nietzsche thinks these
ideas are more belief-worthy than the preparatory ideas communicated in his
nonimaginative later works addressed to his contemporaries. Second, Nietzsche
tells us, the reason he does not write TSZ in his own voice is that he is not strong
or healthy enough to do justice to the philosophical ideas he believes will dominate a stronger and healthier future age.12 In particular, as we know from his
notes, letters, and published works, Nietzsche does not regard himself as strong
or healthy enough to affirm his lifes eternal recurrence: I do not want life again.
How have I borne it? Creating. What has made me endure the sight? the vision
of the bermensch who affirms life. I have tried to affirm it myselfalas! (KSA
10:4[81]).13 But, again, this does not mean that he does not believe in these futuristic ideas. Rather, his whole point is that he does not believe in himself enough
to express these ideas in his own voice.14 As he says at the very end of GM II,
when cutting off his own forgetful exuberance, he must keep silent about the
ideas in TSZ because he is not entitled to them.15 For example, he himself should
not teach the thought of eternal recurrence because he is not strong enough to
affirm it. So instead he imagines what a philosopher would have to be like in
order to affirm this thought and then constructs a narrative around him. For
Nietzsche, this is a principled quarantine around the philosophical ideas he
deems most important. By keeping them out of his later post-TSZ works, he singles them out for special attention and points to his, and indeed his entire ages,
deficiency with respect to them. So when we turn to these later works, and we
find that the TSZ ideas of the bermensch and eternal recurrence are no longer,
or very seldom, discussed in them, we should not suppose that Nietzsche abandoned these ideas, or that he lost faith in them, or that his thought evolved beyond
them. On the contrary, Nietzsche tells us, this is reason to suppose that these are
his most cherished and valuable ideas, the ideas he recommends to us for study
in TSZ after we have digested his post-TSZ criticism of our own most cherished,
but actually impoverished and decadent, modern ideas.16
Bad Conscience
I turn now to consider the rest of GM II.24, just before Nietzsche begins praising Zarathustra. The lead-in to this praise is his suggestion that only a stronger
future age can produce someone strong enough to reverse [umgekehren] our
inheritance of millennia of conscience-vivisection and of the interweaving of
our natural inclinations with bad conscience. Such a man of the future, as
imagined in TSZ, would instead wed bad conscience to the unnatural inclinations and to all ideals hithertoideals that are one and all hostile to life, ideals
75
that slander the world (the aspirations to the beyond and to that which runs
counter to sense, instinct, nature, animal). Notice that Nietzsche does not suggest here that Zarathustra will destroy bad conscience, but only that he will
reverse it, turn it against something different. This is initially surprising, since
the second essay seems highly critical of this psychological phenomenon. But
in fact, as most commentators have noted, a closer reading shows that Nietzsche
is deeply ambivalent throughout the essay. In his most famous formulation, he
grants that bad conscience is an illness, but only in the same way that pregnancy
is an illness (19; see also 16 and 18). So Nietzsche is not in any way suggesting that we should, or even that we can, jettison the various instruments of
self-torture humans have refined over the millennia.17 Rather, he hopes to show
how these very same instruments are the means whereby Zarathustra achieves
his goal of destroying all human ideals hitherto and of erecting new ideals that
will promote life, world, sense, instinct, nature, animal.
At any rate, Nietzsche asks us to think specifically about bad conscience
(schlechtes Gewissen) if we want to understand his concluding allusion back to
TSZ. At first glance, this clue would not seem very helpful since conscience and
bad conscience are the subject matter of most of the second essay of GM. Also,
as recent commentary has shown, Nietzsches account of this subject matter has
many layers and complications. For example, a close reading of the text shows
that Nietzsche distinguishes at least four different contexts for conscience and
bad conscience: the morality of custom (Sittlichkeit der Sitte) ( 23), the
debtor-creditor relation ( 410), the imposition of society (1618), and religion (1923).
Nevertheless, if we look at the very beginning of GM II, where Nietzsche
introduces his concept of conscience, I think we can find two fundamental and
related aspects of this concept that run through all of these contexts and that help
explain his concluding allusion to TSZ.18 The first of these is Nietzsches claim
that conscience is what allowed the emergence of the human animal from the
mere animal, and the second is his claim that conscience did this by granting the
human animal power over time through memory. As Nietzsche writes in section
1, the human animal bred for itself a counter-faculty, a memory of the will, by
means of which its merely animal forgetfulness was suspended and it was now
able to ordain the future in advance: between the original I will, I shall do
this, and the actual realization of the will, its act, a world of strange new things,
circumstances, even other acts of will may be interposed without breaking this
long chain of the will.
Now, in a parallel fashion, TSZ opens with Zarathustras call for the bermensch to emerge from the human animal, just as previously the human animal
had emerged from the mere animal (the ape, the worm) (Z:P 3). And it closes,
in its published Part 3, with Zarathustras invocation of the thought of eternal
recurrence that he had said would grant the human will power over time (Z:2
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PAUL S. LOEB
On Redemption Z:3 The Convalescent).19 Nietzsches implication, I want

to argue, is that the paired GM II claims about humankind and memory are preemptively superseded by the paired TSZ concepts of the bermensch and eternal recurrence.20
But I can imagine two objections at this point: one exegetical, and the other
more substantial. First, the exegetical objection. When Nietzsche turns from his
introduction of conscience in the context of the morality of custom to his examination of bad conscience in the context of the debtor-creditor relation, it is easy
to see how he carries over his introductory claim about the new mnemonic capacity of the human animal. As Nietzsche writes in section 5 about the debtors: it
was here that a memory had to be made for those who promised. And since
Nietzsche appeals to his analysis of the debtor-creditor relation when he later
examines bad conscience in a religious context, we can see how his claims about
human memory carry over into his analysis of guilt in the concluding sections
of GM II. But we might wonder how Nietzsche is interested in memory in his
later, and most famous, claim that bad conscienceand, indeed, the human
soulhad its origin in the internalization of instincts imposed by the sudden
enclosure within the walls of a peaceful society. Because these two theories of
conscience seem unrelated, and a lot of material is covered in between, a firsttime reader of GM might be forgiven for thinking that Nietzsche has simply
changed the topic of his second essay.
Although I have not seen this question addressed in the literature, I think there
is a good answer to it. On the one hand, Nietzsche obviously thinks of the memory-enabling morality of custom as an instrument of society and as a product
of social enclosure. Thus, in section 2, he writes that it was with the help of the
morality of custom and the social strait-jacket (socialen Zwangsjacke) that the
human was really made calculable and that society and its morality of custom are merely a means to the sovereign individual. And in section 16,
Nietzsche identifies being enclosed within the walls of society and peace with
being forcibly confined to the oppressive narrowness and punctiliousness of
custom (Sitte). So in Nietzsches view, human memory is made possible by
society and its morality of custom. But on the other hand, Nietzsche suggests
that the existence and advantages of society depend upon memory. Thus, in section 3, he writes that the severity of the penal code provides an especially significant measure of the degree of effort that was needed to triumph over
forgetfulness and to make the moment-slaves of the affects and desire hold as
present a few primitive requirements of social cohabitation. Also, that, with
the help of frightening means, the German plebeian eventually memorized five
or six I will not, thus giving his promise in order to live under the advantages
of society.
The key to understanding Nietzsches claim of the interdependence of human
memory and society lies in his analysis of the role pain and cruelty play in both
77
phenomena. Nietzsche argues in section 16 that the imposition of peaceful society and its customs (above all, punishment) prevented the nomad half-animal
from venting its aggressive and warlike instincts against external enemies. So
the half-animal was forced to turn these same instincts against itself: The human
who, from lack of external enemies and resistance and forcibly confined to the
oppressive narrowness and punctiliousness of custom, impatiently lacerated,
persecuted, gnawed at, assaulted, and maltreated himself [. . .] Nietzsche summarizes this thesis in Ecce Homo: The second inquiry [of GM] gives the psychology of the conscience: [. . .] it is the instinct of cruelty that turns backward
after it can no longer discharge itself externally (Books GM). But a central
proposition of the oldest psychology on earth, he writes in section 3, is that pain
is the most powerful aid to mnemonics and that only that which never ceases
to hurt stays in the memory.21 This is why societys morality of custom that
forged memory in the human animal consisted above all of rituals of cruelty and
torture: The worse the humans memory has been, the more fearful has been
the appearance of its customs; the severity of the penal code provides an especially significant measure of the degree of effort that was needed to triumph over
forgetfulness. There is thus a deep continuity between Nietzsches claims about
memory at the start of GM II and his claims about the internalization of the
instincts toward the end of GM II: society and its punishment-centered morality of customs causes the human animal to inflict upon itself the kind of incessant pain that is needed for it to develop the kind of memory required for social
cohabitation.
The Sovereign Individual

The second, and more substantial, objection to my suggestion about the relation
between GM and TSZ has to do with Nietzsches famous sovereign individual,
the ripest fruit of humankinds entire prehistoric labor. It might be objected, that
is, that there is no need for us to think of GM as superseded by TSZ, since in sections 2 and 3 Nietzsche praises this sovereign individual as the completion of
humankind, as emancipated from morality, and as the master of a free will with
power over himself and over fate. As Aaron Ridley writes, perhaps one should
construe the sovereign individual as a prediction or a wish or a hope about that
future with which man is said to be pregnant.22 Indeed, Ridley suggests, we
can stop looking for the bermensch in GM since this is he: What [the sovereign individual] does involve is a journey through to the other side of internalization, where one arrives . . . at the superhuman itself.23 Similarly, Simon May
argues: And the absolutely sovereign individual is, I suggest, none other than
the bermensch: for in mastering every obstacle to promising himself, he, like
the bermensch, has nothing left to overcome.24
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PAUL S. LOEB
However, as Christa Acampora has convincingly argued, there are many reasons for rejecting the scholarly consensus that sees the GM II sovereign individual as Nietzsches ideal, much less as his bermensch.25 First, the sovereign
individual is not mentioned or celebrated anywhere else in Nietzsches published writings, nor is he linked anywhere to the bermensch.26 Second, the
introductory section to GM II celebrates the instinctive, regulative, and active
force of forgetting and warns about the costs of countering it. For example, in
the mnemonic sovereignty, no room is left in consciousness for the proper oligarchic functioning of our instincts.27 Third, the kind of freedom and autonomy
Nietzsche associates with the sovereign individualresponsibility, promisekeeping, accountabilityare traced by him in the first essay to slave morality,
and so cannot be regarded as his ideal.28 Finally, Nietzsche does not suggest that
the sovereign individual lies in the future with which humankind is said to be
pregnant, but rather that he represents the already-attained completion of
humankind that he says in TSZ is supposed to be overcome in the bermensch.29 As Acampora writes, Nietzsche does not call us to realize the height of
our humanity in becoming sovereign individuals (a capability already characteristic of the human animal, a fruit already borne). Rather, what he anticipates is precisely the overcoming of the human and the ideal of the sovereign
individual: and that requires the cultivation and heightening of different powers, which are not alien to us but which are nonetheless latent.30 Confirming
this last point especially, I think, is Nietzsches obvious allusion to TSZs bermensch at the end of GM II, section 16: [the human animal with bad conscience]
gives rise to an interest, a tension, a hope, almost a certainty, as if with it something were announcing and preparing itself, as if the human were not a goal but
only a way, an episode, a bridge, a great promise.31
I do not agree completely with Acamporas observations, however. First,
although Nietzsche does praise animal forgetting, it is clear that he does not
atavistically think that humankind can somehow go back to this state (TI
Skirmishes 43, 4849). Yet Acampora valorizes the merely animal, prehuman forgetting of GM II.1 (and HL) as though it were Nietzsches future
post-human goal.32 For this reason, she does not say anything about what
Nietzsche thinks forgetting might look like after our millennia-long history of
mnemonic breeding. I will do so. Second, Nietzsches claim that Zarathustra
will employ the resources of bad conscience, rather than abolish it, suggests
that Acampora is too quick to dismiss the sovereign individuals perfection of
bad conscience. Although she rightly notes Nietzsches depreciation of the sovereign individuals talent for responsibility and autonomy, she assumes without much argument that these qualities are in themselves depreciated by
Nietzsche.33 But this assumption is contradicted, I think, by Zarathustras
extravagant praise and exemplification of these qualities: as obtaining, for
example, in the self-legislator who must obey his own laws and commands (Z:2
79
On Self-Overcoming); or, more radically, in the spirit-become-child and selfpropelled wheel that wills its own will (Z:1 On the Three Metamorphoses).34
So perhaps Nietzsche depreciates the sovereign individual because he is not
responsible and autonomous enoughcompared, that is, to Zarathustra or the
bermensch. I shall argue that this indeed the case.35 Finally, although I think
Acampora is right to cite Nietzsches TSZ claim that the already-completed
human must be overcome in the bermensch, this citation assumes precisely
what most scholars deny: namely, that studying TSZ is important or relevant
for studying his post-TSZ works like GM. But if the mature Nietzsche did
indeed abandon TSZ concepts like the bermensch, then her citation would be
inappropriate here. In other words, Acampora simply assumes what I aim to
show here: that Nietzsches TSZ concept of the bermensch pre-emptively
supersedes his analysis of bad conscience in GM II.
The Imprisoned Will

Let me return, then, to Nietzsches claim in GM II that bad conscienceof which
the sovereign individual is the ripest fruitis an illness, in fact the worst illness
ever contracted by the human animal, one from which it has not yet recovered,
one that makes the human animal the sickest animal on earth ( 13, 16, 19). As
Nietzsche vividly describes the terms of this illness, it involves above all a kind
of social incarceration or imprisonment in which the will to power cannot be
externally discharged and therefore must be turned inward so as to inflict selftorture, self-punishment, and self-cruelty:
The human who, from lack of external enemies and resistances and forcibly confined to the oppressive narrowness and punctiliousness of custom, impatiently
lacerated, persecuted, gnawed at, assaulted, and maltreated himself; this animal
that rubbed itself raw against the bars of its cage as one tried to tame it; this
deprived creature, racked with homesickness for the wild, who had to turn himself into an adventure, a torture chamber, an uncertain and dangerous wildernessthis fool, this yearning and desperate prisoner became the inventor of bad
conscience. (see also GM III.20)
According to Nietzsche, the conquered, imprisoned, and tamed human animal

invented bad conscience in order to hurt itself. Worse yet, it then seized upon
the presupposition of religion so as to drive his self-torture to its most gruesome
pitch of severity and rigor. Whereas previously the human animal felt itself
able to repay its debts to its ancestors and gods (for example, through sacrifice
and achievements), the aim now was to invent a holy God so as to preclude
pessimistically, once and for all, the prospect of a definitive repayment.36 In
this new psychic cruelty, where the human will now infected the fundamental
ground of things with the problem of eternal guilt and punishment, Nietzsche
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PAUL S. LOEB
finds an unexampled madness and insanity of the will, an earth that has become
a madhouse (21; see also GM III.20).
Now, as far as I know, no one has yet pointed out that these famous remarks
contain clear allusions to Nietzsches earlier TSZ chapter, On Redemption (Z:2).
For Zarathustra speaks there of the human will as a prisoner in chains or fetters,
as being powerless and impotent, as foolishly trying to escape its dungeon by
seeking a revenge that it calls punishment, and finally as becoming insanely
obsessed with finding this punishment in the very nature of existence. Even more
specifically, Nietzsches analysis of bad conscience and guilt in GM II alludes
back to Zarathustras further claim that the prison of the human will is the past.
For although Nietzsche emphasizes the role that social confinement plays in the
inhibition and suppression of the human animals instincts (so that they are eventually internalized), his deeper point is that the socially-bred memory faculty is
the true inhibitor and suppressor of these instincts.37 This is because the memory
faculty suspends or disconnects (ausgehngt) active forgetting and represents an
active will not to let go, to keep willing, that which it once willed in the past (GM
II.13).38 But this means that the remembering human animal is forced to recognize for the first time an entire arena of possible willingmuch more extensive than the sphere outside societythat is completely and forever outside of
its reach: namely, that which was willed and can now never be unwilled, deeds
that can never be undone, in short, the past, the it was. As Zarathustra says in
his redemption speech:
It was: that is the name of the wills teeth-gnashing and most solitary affliction.
Powerless against that which is doneit is an evil spectator of all that is past.
The will cannot will backwards; that it cannot break time and times desirethat
is the wills most solitary affliction. [. . .]
That time cannot run backwards, that is [the wills] wrath: That which was
that is the name of the stone that it cannot roll away.
Anticipating his later GM II analysis of guilt, Nietzsche has Zarathustra teach

that it is not a deed, but rather the pastness of a deed, its undoability, that leads
to self-lacerating guilt: No deed can be annihilated: how could it be undone
through punishment! This, this is what is eternal in the punishment existence,
that existence too must eternally be deed and guilt (Schuld) again!
Before socially-bred memory, the prehuman will actively forgot anything outside the present moment that could confine its activity. But with the advent of
society and its mnemotechniques, some things were impressed upon the
moment-centered animal affects and desire so that they remained thereinextinguishable, omnipresent, fixedjust as they once were. The human will therefore now perceives itself as confronted with a new stone, a new barrier, that
which was, that it cannot move and in relation to which it is impotent and
inhibited. It is interesting, then, that the second section of GM II emphasizes
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above all else the power and freedom of the sovereign individual. For insofar
as this power and freedom depend upon the sovereign individuals highly developed faculty of memory, they are in fact sharply curtailed. Unlike the mere animal, the sovereign individual that is the completion of the human animal is at
each and every point confined and burdened, not only by the immovable it was
of his own life, but also by the it was of the whole human prehistory of custom and tradition that has led up to him. The sovereign individual may seem to
have power and mastery over circumstances, nature, accidents, fate, himself,
and others less reliable than himself. But since he has no power over any of the
it was that determined all of these, he ultimately has no power over these either.
Indeed, because the sovereign individuals mnemonic will has itself been determined by a past that is fixed and gone forever, this will cannot be said to ordain
the future in advance after all. So the sovereign individuals power over time
turns out to be illusory. This is why, I would suggest, Nietzsche describes the
sovereign individual in terms that he has already criticized in TSZ as being linked
to the spirit of the camel and the spirit of gravity: namely, as bearing on his strong
shoulders a tremendous responsibility and weight that makes him proud, selfconscious, measured, controlled, serious, solemn, and grave.39
Freedom of the Will

So what is required for the human will to liberate itself from the prison of the
past imposed by its socially-bred millennia-old capacity of memory? Although
there has been much discussion lately about Nietzsches views on freedom and
determinism, none of it has framed the question in this way or looked for his
answer to this particular question. This is because, as I have said, most commentators assume that Nietzsches definitive answers to the traditional questions of philosophy are to be found in his mature post-TSZ works. If I am right,
however, these works contain only Nietzsches destructive critiques of the
accounts of freedom accepted in his day (e.g., Schopenhauers in BGE 19; Kants
in GM I.13) and nowhere offer what he regarded as the proper constructive solution to the problem of the freedom of the will. It is no wonder, then, that most
scholars judge the account of freedom they find in BGE, or GM, or Twilight of
the Idols, too thin, too provisional, or too fragmentary. Robert Solomon sums
up this point of view when he writes recently that we get nothing even remotely
approaching a theory of freedom and responsibility from Nietzsche, nor does
he even talk about such things exceptusuallyto mock various extravagances
and liberties taken with free will in particular.40
On the reading I am offering, by contrast, Nietzsche certainly does have a
positive theory of freedom, and he intends his negative critical analyses of his
contemporaries to prepare the ground for this theory. But he confines himself
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to imagining how the philosopher of the future named Zarathustra will discover and teach this theory. This is why at the end of GM II Nietzsche designates Zarathustra as the man of the future who makes the will free again.
Characterizing Zarathustras task four separate times (two of these emphasized)
in terms of redemption or liberation (Erlsung), Nietzsche again points us back
to his TSZ chapter On Redemption:
he must yet come to us, the redeeming man of great love and contempt [. . .] whose
solitude is misunderstood by the people as if it were a flight from reality:
whereas it is only his sinking, burrowing, diving into reality, so that, when he one
day emerges again into the light, he brings home the redemption of this reality:
its redemption from the curse that the hitherto reigning ideal has laid upon it. This
man of the future, who will redeem us not only from the hitherto reigning ideal
but also from that which was bound to grow out of it [. . .] this bell-stroke of noon
and of the great decision that makes the will free again [. . .] (underscoring is mine)
As students of TSZ know, this solitude-enabled sinking, burrowing, diving

into reality refers to Zarathustras descent into his own depths (his subconscious)
so as to bring up to the light (his consciousness) his most abysmal thought, his
deepest instinctive wisdom about the true nature of reality: the eternal recurrence of the same (Z:3 On Involuntary Bliss, The Convalescent 1).41 With
this thought, Nietzsche writes, Zarathustra makes the will free againthus
alluding specifically to the conclusion of the redemption speech in which
Zarathustra indicates that there is a wise and sane method for the will to liberate itself, to escape its prison and its chains. This method is what he calls
backward-willing (Zurckwollen):
Is the will already unharnessed from its own folly?
Has the will already become its own redeemer and joybringer? Did it unlearn the
spirit of revenge and all gnashing of teeth?
And who taught it to be reconciled with time and what is higher than all reconciliation?
Higher than all reconciliation must that will will which is the will to power:
but how does that happen to it? Who taught it even backward-willing?42
Yet, even though TSZ begins by predicting a culminating spiritual metamorphosis into a childs creative freedom whereby the will wills its own will,43 and
even though Zarathustras redemption speech suggests that eternal recurrence
is the key to this metamorphosis,44 the current debate about Nietzsches account
of freedom rarely mentions eternal recurrence as a necessary component of
this account. Indeed, when this debate does invoke eternal recurrence (or the
related idea of amor fati), it is typically concerned to show instead Nietzsches
commitment to fatalism.45
Against these points, it will rightly be objected that I have so far explained
only the way in which Nietzsches GM II analysis of bad conscience refers back
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to his TSZ problematic of the freedom of the will. So I turn now to explain the
way in which the GM II analysis also refers back to the TSZ solution. As I have
outlined it so far, Nietzsches suggestion at the end of GM II is that a future
Zarathustra must turn bad conscience against the unnatural inclinations. But bad
conscience is fundamentally memory, and the unnatural inclinations are all traceable to bad conscience.46 Further, the law of life, the law of necessary self-overcoming, dictates that all great things are the cause of their own destruction (GM
III.27).47 Hence, in an act of self-cancellation, memory must be turned against
memory itself so as to bring about the kind of forgetting that Zarathustra equates
with freedom and innocence (Unschuld). As Zarathustra says: Innocence is the
child and forgetting, a new beginning, a play, a self-propelling wheel, a first movement, a holy Yes-saying (Z:1 On the Three Metamorphoses).48 However, this
cannot be a going back to the forgetting of our animal ancestry, to the partly
obtuse, partly flighty understanding of the moment (Augenblicks-Verstande), or
to the moment-enslaved (Augenblicks-Sklaven) affects and desire (GM II.3).
Nor should we hope for such a return (TI Skirmishes 43).49 Instead, Nietzsche
suggests, we must go forward and exploit to its fullest the very illness that is also
a pregnancy in order to attain a new and bermenschlich forgetting.
Although scholars do not mention it, it is obviously quite significant that
Nietzsche concludes his GM II discussion of Schuld with an appeal to the
Zarathustra figure whose very first speech to his disciples explains and promotes a culminating spiritual transformation into Unschuld. Indeed, the only
time in GM that Nietzsche mentions this same Unschuld is in section 20, when
he claims that the development of atheism should lead to the weakening of
Schuld in humankind, and that the complete and definitive victory of atheism
might allow humankind a kind of second Unschuld in which it might be
redeemed entirely from the feeling of indebtedness toward its origin. But at the
end of GM II, as we have seen, Nietzsche gestures toward the future
Zarathustrathe conqueror of God, the godlessas the only true and complete atheist who can completely redeem humankind.50 So in this way too,
Nietzsche lets us know that we should think of his analysis in GM II as finding its completion and resolution in the ideas of his earlier TSZ. Again, it is
important to notice Nietzsches careful reference to a kind of second Unschuld
(he underscores the word zweiter). He is not making the atavistic suggestion
that we should, or even can, go back to the merely animal first Unschuld that
he associates with the blond beasts of prey (GM I.11; GM II.7).51 Instead,
Nietzsche suggests, his earlier TSZ has shown how humankind can turn its
socially inculcated millennia-old Schuld against itself so as to allow the
emergence of a new and bermenschlich Unschuld.
To continue Nietzsches answer, then, memoryor the suspension of mere
animal forgettingis what forces the human will to hold onto the past, to fix
the past, and thereby to recognize an immovable it was in relation to which it
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is impotent and inhibited. Memory is what teaches the human animal that it cannot will backward. In order to liberate itself, therefore, the human animal must
employ this same memory to recover the past so deeply and so completely that
it is led to forget the past in a new and bermenschlich sensethat is, to let go
of the past, to unfix the past, and thereby to recognize that the it was is not
immovable after all. But what causes the human will to perceive the it was as
immovable is its limited perspective on time that shows it running forward in a
straight line for eternity. From the perspective of the human animals present
willing, the it was always appears behind and gone forever out of reach. As
Zarathustra says in his redemption speech, the will sees that everything passes
away and that time devours her children. The human animal must therefore use
its memory to recover the past so thoroughly that it recognizes that time actually circles back upon itself and that the it was always returns. Hence
Zarathustras new teaching: Do not be afraid of the flux of things: this flux
turns back into itself: it flees itself not only twice. All it was becomes again an
it is. All that is future bites the past in the tail (KSA 10: 4[85]). With such a
mnemonic self-overcoming, the human animal learns how to will backward,
how to break time and its desire, and how to gain a true power over time (something higher than mere reconciliation with time).
Eternal Recurrence
Those familiar with TSZ, and in particular with that books key chapter entitled
On the Vision and the Riddle, will of course recognize the allusion I have just
made to Zarathustras doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same. As
Nietzsche describes it in Ecce Homo (BT:3), this is a cosmological theory of the
unconditional and endlessly repeated circular course of all things. Because he
rejects any conception of universal and absolute time wherein time exists independently of these things, it follows for him that time itself has an endlessly
repeated circular course.52 Nietzsche first proposes this theory when he has the
demon in Gay Science 341 make a categorical assertion as to the cosmological
truth of eternal recurrence: The eternal hourglass of being is turned over again
and again. He returns to this same description in TSZ when he has Zarathustras
animals proclaim what they know his teaching must be: You teach that there
is a great year of becoming, a colossus of a year: this year must, like an hourglass, turn itself over again and again, so that it may run down and run out anew:
so that all these years resemble one another, in the greatest things and in the
smallest (Z:3 The Convalescent 2). And he expands upon this theory in TSZ
when he has Zarathustra present a dialectical proof in support of cosmological
eternal recurrence that is drawn from his own notebook proofs in support of
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what he called the most scientific of all possible hypotheses (Z:3 On the Vision
and the Riddle 2; KSA 12: 5[71]).
Despite these explicit and repeated presentations, commentators persist in
claiming that Nietzsche was not really interested in the truth of a cosmological
doctrine but only in the significance of his hypothetical thought for human life.53
But, again, their reasons typically include their dismissal of TSZ as a merely
fictional or poetic work and their refusal to consider Nietzsches literary
devicesthe demons revelation in Gay Science 341, Zarathustras dialectical
contest with a dwarf, Zarathustras animalsknowledge of his teachingas vehicles for his most important insights into reality. Moreover, and notwithstanding
a long-accepted dichotomy in Nietzsche studies, there is actually no incompatibility between his interest in the cosmological truth of eternal recurrence and his
belief that eternal recurrence could have tremendous significance for human life.
For Zarathustras cosmological doctrine entails the unconditional and endlessly
repeated circular course of every human life (KSA 9: 11[148]).54 Thus, from his
proof of the circular course of all things, Zarathustra deduces that he and his
dwarf-archenemy must have already encountered each other before eternally and
must return to encounter each other again eternally (Z:3 On the Vision and the
Riddle 2). And Zarathustras animals know that he teaches that all things recur
eternally and we ourselves with them, and that we have already existed an infinite number of times before and all things with us. Similarly, from the revolving great year of becoming, these animals know Zarathustras deduction that we
ourselves resemble ourselves in each great year, in the greatest things and in the
smallest. And they know as well what he would say to himself if he were about
to die: But the complex of causes in which I am entangled will recurit will
create me again! [. . .] I shall return eternally to this identical and self-same life,
in the greatest things and in the smallest (Z:3 The Convalescent 2).55
According to Zarathustra, therefore, every human animal has lived its qualitatively identical life innumerable times before. And since every human animal
possesses a faculty of memory, it must be possible for it to remember these innumerable identical previous lives. More precisely, as we have seen, Nietzsche
defines human memory as a counter-faculty by means of which animal forgetting is suspended or disconnected. And animal forgetting, he writes, is
an active and in the strictest sense positive faculty of repression that is responsible for the fact that what is only absorbed, experienced by us, taken in by us, enters
just as little into our consciousness during the condition of digestion (one might
call it inpsychation) as does the entire thousand-fold process through which the
nourishing of our body (so-called incorporation) runs its course. (GM I.1)
Thus, every human animal subconsciously absorbs and experiences the reality
of its innumerable identical previous lives, but this reality is actively forgotten
and suppressed for the sake of psychic room and order. Nevertheless, this
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forgetting and suppression can be suspended, in which case the cosmic reality
of eternal recurrence will enter into human consciousness and thought.56
Two important questions arise at this point. In the first place, as most commentators have argued, it seems impossible that any human animal could ever
remember the recurrence of its life. For any such memory would add something
new to that life and thereby violate Nietzsches insistence on the qualitative identity of that life. However, this objection presupposes some initial or original life
in which there was not yet a recollection of its eternal recurrence. On Nietzsches
view, there is no such original life, and as long every recurring life contains the
qualitatively identical recollection of this recurrence, there is no inconsistency
in supposing that there could be such a recollection.57 Indeed, quite the reverse:
given Nietzsches anthropological account of the human animal as the remembering animal, and given Zarathustras cosmological teaching of the eternal
recurrence of the human animals qualitatively identical life, it must be the case
that every human animal has the potential to recall this recurrence.
We still might want to ask, however, why Nietzsche needs to emphasize
Zarathustras doctrine of eternal recurrence if he thinks that this is something
every human animal can remember on its own. In answer to this question, we
have already seen that Nietzsche did not think himselfor, indeed, anyone
belonging to his agestrong or healthy enough to affirm the thought of an eternally recurring life. Due to their base-line life-impoverishment, he and his contemporaries were far from being well-enough disposed toward themselves and
their lives to desire their identical return. In Gay Science 341, Nietzsche imagines that he and his contemporaries would feel the thought of eternal recurrence
as a crushing one: the question in each and every thing, do you want this once
more and innumerable times more? would lie upon their actions as the greatest heavy weight. He even imagines that he and his contemporaries, upon hearing the news of eternal recurrence, would throw themselves down, gnash their
teeth, and curse the bearer of this news as a demon. But, according to the doctrine, this messenger, this news-bearer, must be memory itself. And according
to Nietzsches proto-Freudian psychology, the human animal will repress any
memory that is too painful to bear: I have done that, says my memory. I cannot have done that, says my pride, and remains unyielding. Eventuallymemory yields (BGE 68). Extrapolating from GS 341, Nietzsche directs us to
suppose a similar sequence of psychological events with respect to our memory of eternal recurrence: I have lived this identical life innumerable times
before, says my memory. I cannot have done that, say my life-hatred and my
self-hatred, and remain unyielding. Eventuallymemory yields.58 In terms of
Nietzsches definition of memory, although we may at some point be led to suspend our forgetting of the recurrence-reality that we have subconsciously experienced, we will certainly return to this forgetting if the recurrence-reality is too
painful to bear.
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On Nietzsches epistemic account of eternal recurrence, there is thus no

important distinction to be drawn between the question whether we are able to
affirm eternal recurrence and the question whether we are able to know it. It is
precisely because we are not strong enough to affirm recurrence that we will be
led to keep our latent knowledge of it repressed and forgotten. Hence
Zarathustras challenge to the dwarf who is a symbol of the weak human: I,
however, am the stronger of us both: you do not know my most abysmal
thought! Thatyou could not bear! (Z:3 On the Vision and the Riddle) I
think this point helps to explain Nietzsches predictions in his notebooks that
the truth of eternal recurrence would not be accepted for hundreds, perhaps even
thousands, of years (see KSA 9 11:[158]). Anticipating what in fact has been the
history of its reception in the last hundred years, Nietzsche believed that his
thought of eternal recurrence would necessarily face deep skepticism and resistance from even his most sympathetic readers.
The bermensch
In Gay Science 342, Nietzsche presents us with his contrasting vision of a far
stronger and healthier future age (enabled by Nietzsche himself) in which there
will arise an individual, Zarathustra, so overflowing with energy and vitality
that he is completely well disposed toward himself and toward his life. Such an
individual, he proclaims, will long for nothing more fervently than for the eternal recurrence of his identical life. For this reason, he will bless the news of such
recurrence as an eternal confirmation and seal, and he will regard the bearer of
such news as a god. This affirmation, Nietzsche predicts, will be the start of the
great noon [Grosse Mittag] hour for humankind, that is, the hour in which the
shadows of God cease to darken the human mind and the sun of human knowledge stands at its peak: And in every ring of human existence as such there is
always an hour in which the mightiest thought emerges, at first for one, then for
many, then for allthe thought of the eternal recurrence of all things (KSA
9:11[148]).59 This is why Nietzsche ends GM II by proclaiming Zarathustra as
this bell-stroke of noon [dieser Glockenschlag des Mittags] and why he begins
GM by alluding to Zarathustra as one divinely preoccupied and immersed in
himself into whose ear the bell has just boomed with all its strength the twelve
strokes of noon [and who] awakens all at once and asks himself: what really
was that which just struck? (GM P:1).60
By way of preparing Zarathustras great-noon affirmation, Nietzsche spends
some time showing that he carries within him a latent knowledge of his lifes
eternal recurrence.61 For example, after his terrifying prevision of the serpent
biting itself fast in the throat of the shepherd, Zarathustra speaks of having been
bitten himself by the silent burrowing worm of his most abysmal thought (Z:3
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On Involuntary Bliss). This poetic image, with its allusion to death (worms
burrowing in corpses), and to the ancient ouroboros symbol (a worm that bites
its own tail), captures Nietzsches idea that Zarathustras eternally recurring life
is a closed circle in which the end always returns to the beginning.62 Zarathustras
knowledge of eternal recurrence is most abysmal (abgrndlicher) and blind
because it lies burrowing in the darkest depths of his subconscious. And it is
silent and sleeping because Zarathustra has so far repressed and buried it in subconscious depths where it is then carried as a fearfully heavy weight. This is
why Nietzsche is especially interested in depicting Zarathustras experience of
falling asleep, when his conscious intellect drops away and no time passes for
him until he awakens. In this blink of an eye (Augen-blick) between falling asleep
and waking, Zarathustra paradoxically feels himself falling into the well of
eternity (den Brunnen der Ewigkeit) and sleeping half an eternity, in which
he perceives the world as a perfect golden round ring (Z:4 Noon). With these
metaphors, Nietzsche indicates the descent of Zarathustras sleeping mind into
its subconscious awareness of his eternally recurring life. This awareness,
Nietzsche suggests, necessarily has an infinite depth that is beyond the scope of
Zarathustras waking consciousness comprehension (Z:3 Before Sunrise,
On the Three Evils).
At the right time, however, Zarathustra must choose to deliberately awaken
and summon up his dormant knowledge so that it may speak to him directly (Z:3
On Involuntary Bliss). Since the rest of humankind will still be concerned to
keep this reality suppressed, Zarathustra will have to escape collective thought
and choose the most solitary solitude (einsamste Einsamkeit) as a means of diving, burrowing, and sinking into reality (GS 341; Z:3 On the Vision and the
Riddle 1; GM II.24). So in TSZ, Nietzsche poetically imagines the strong and
solitary Zarathustra summoning and awakening his knowledge of eternal recurrence out the darkness of his deepest, subconscious depths (Z:3 On the Vision
and the Riddle 2; The Convalescent 1). This invocation leads to an awakening or enlightenment in which Zarathustras long-hidden knowledge is finally
revealed in the full light of day and rationally understood at a surface, conscious
level (Z:3 On the Vision and the Riddle 1).
It is true that Nietzsche also imagines Zarathustras initial fear and weakness
in relation to his latent knowledge of eternal recurrence (Z:3 On Involuntary
Bliss); as well as his nausea, horror, and sickness once he has fully awakened
and incorporated this knowledge (Z:3 On the Vision and the Riddle 2; The
Convalescent 2). Indeed, Zarathustras awakening of this knowledge requires
such courage and poses such a grave threat to his health that he falls down as if
dead. But a close reading of these same passages shows that Zarathustras
ambivalence about his knowledge does not in any way concern the eternal
recurrence of his own life, but only that of the dwarfishly small human. However,
Zarathustra makes the great decision [der grossen Entscheidung] that makes
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the will free again, that gives back to earth its goal and to humankind its hope
(GM II.24)that is, he decides to affirm his thoughts selective power against
the continued and future existence of the human. Having done so, and thereby
made room for the emergence of the bermensch, his previsioned self springs
up, no longer human, a transformed being, enlightened and radiant, laughing a
laughter that is no human laughter.63 In the concluding chapters of the published
ending of TSZ, Nietzsche depicts the soul of this enlightened, laughing bermensch as affirming and blessing the seal of eternal recurrence in just the manner he had anticipated in GS 34142 (Z:3 The Seven Seals).
According to Nietzsche, then, the experience of the reality of the eternally repeating cosmos cannot be incorporated by mere animals (not even Zarathustras)
because they have no faculty of memory.64 Nor, however, can it be incorporated
by most human animals, because their ill-disposition toward themselves and their
lives keeps them from suspending their forgetting of this experience. Only an
exceptionally strong and self-loving individual like Zarathustra, who fervently
longs for nothing more than his own eternal recurrence, is able finally to recover
and incorporate his deeply buried subconscious experience that this is actually the
case. As a result, however, his relation to time is completely transformed. Since it
is a cosmological truth that Zarathustra will eternally relive the qualitatively identical life he has already lived, his faculty of memory is no longer confined just to
the it was of his life. Whereas mere animals can live only in their present moment,
and whereas human animals can also mnemonically live in their past, Zarathustras
recovered memory of his eternal recurrence allows him to live even in his future.
This is why Zarathustra calls himself a prophet (Wahrsager) throughout the narrative of TSZ, and this is why Nietzsche calls attention to Zarathustras prophetic
ability by constructing crucial narrative episodes in which Zarathustra has previsions that are later fulfilled. Commentators usually interpret these previsions as literary devices meant to convey Zarathustras psychological states. But Nietzsches
claim that eternal recurrence is the basic conception (Grundconception) of TSZ
(EH Books Z:1) suggests instead that they are devices meant to convey the manifestations of Zarathustras eternally recurring life. In particular, and most important, the convalescent Zarathustra tells his animals that his confrontation with his
most abysmal thought was a horrific torture and crucifixion (Z:3 The
Convalescent 2). Since Nietzsche argues that pain is the most powerful aid to
memory, it should be the case that he depicts this experience as the one Zarathustra
remembers the best. And, indeed, in the Prophet and Vision and Riddle chapters, we see the younger Zarathustra having an accurate previsionthat is, recurrence-memoryof this later experience.65
In TSZ, then, Nietzsche imagines a future Zarathustra who employs his memory against itself so as to attain a kind of second forgetting of the remembered
past that previously seemed fixed and immovable. Unlike the mere animal, he
still has a memory-faculty that allows him to transcend the present moment.
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But also, unlike the merely human animal, he is able to employ this faculty so
as to transcend the past as well. Because he has a recovered memory of the entire
circular course of his life, Zarathustra no longer shares the limited human perception that there is an asymmetry between the past and the future such that the
past is always fixed and gone forever compared to the future. Instead, his recurrence-memory shows him that his eternally returning past also lies ahead of his
present and is therefore just as open to his wills influence as is his future. Of
course, this does not mean that Zarathustra can change or alter the past, or that
he can undo what is already done. Nowhere does Zarathustra claim to have
stopped the flow of time or reversed the direction of this flow.66 In fact, he goes
out of his way to trace the origins of such stomach-turning ideas to the thought
of God (Z:2 Blessed Isles). Instead, Zarathustras recurrence-memory shows
him only that what he has already done may be such precisely because of the
influence of his willing in the present or even the future. Speaking to his it
was, he may therefore say: But thus I will it! Thus I shall will it! (Z:2 On
Redemption).
Indeed, considered more closely, it is precisely Zarathustras faculty of memory that makes his backward-willing influence possible. For by impressing
or storing mnemonic messages, commands, or reminders that are addressed to
himself at an earlier stage in his life, the fully developed and perfected
Zarathustra can transmit this very same development and perfection throughout his entire life so as to guarantee it meaning, necessity, and wholeness.67
Alluding to Socrates daimonion (BT 1314, TI Socrates), as well as to the
Christian conception of conscience as a kind of divine voice that conveys
warnings or instructions (GS 335, EH Books GM), Nietzsche imagines that
Zarathustra will hear disembodied whispers calling to him, admonishing him,
and commanding him at critical times in his life when he is tempted away from
himself or does not feel adequate to his destiny (see especially Z:2 The Stillest
Hour). Because this voice is easily identified as that of his own self at a later
point in the narrative, Nietzsche imagines that Zarathustra will possess a kind
of second conscience, a recurrence-conscience, that enables him to keep promises to his future self and to become who he is in the future (GS 270, 335). In
fact, Nietzsche suggests, it is this very backward-willing that allows
Zarathustra to affirm his life in such a way that he is led to long for its eternal
recurrence and thereby becomes able to recover the experience of recurrence
that teaches him backward-willing.68 Zarathustras self-liberated will is thus a
truly sovereign self-propelled wheel (ein aus sich rollendes Rad) or circulus vitiosus (BGE 56) that wills its own will and that enables Zarathustra to
become a fully self-actualized poet-artist-creator of his own life and self (GS
290, 299).69
This is the right place, then, to return to our earlier objection against the possibility of Nietzsche imagining a future philosopher who would not be bound
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by the decadence of his own age. For this objection presupposes a linear
conception of time according to which the path of influence in human history
moves in one direction only, from past to present and from present to future.
On Zarathustras new teaching, however, there can also be an influence in the
reverse direction, from the future to the present, and from the present to the
past. This is because those individuals who have a recurrence-memory of their
future may also have a memory of their future interaction with others who are
positioned still farther in the future, and the latter may have a memory of their
own such future interaction, and so on. Since these individuals are also able to
use their recurrence-memory to backward-willthat is, to send their
younger selves mnemonic reminders, commands, or messageswe can see
why Nietzsche thinks himself justified in moving beyond diagnosis and
into prophecy at the end of GM II and in TSZ. Although he does not regard himself as strong or healthy enough to teach the doctrine that will steer the course
of human history toward its own overcoming, he does regard himself as
uniquely positioned to hear and communicate the glad tidings that come from
the future regarding the advent of just such a teacher (Z:1 On the Gift-Giving
Virtue).
To return to Nietzsches famous formulation, human memory is an illness as
pregnancy is an illness. By increasing its power and sophistication to a horrific
and deforming extent, the human animal is at the very limit finally able to recover
its deeply forgotten experience of lifes eternal recurrence. Because this new
knowledge releases and opens up an arena of possible willing that had seemed
forever blocked, the self-overcoming human animal is once again free to fully
externalize and discharge its instincts. This time, however, its will to power
extends vastly further, and is directed in a vastly more focused manner, than that
of his merely animal ancestor tethered to the present moment. Since the past is
now just as open and malleable as the future, there is no longer any deterministic influence of the past to chain, imprison, haunt, and burden its present willing. And because the it was is also the it shall be, its memory (a suspension
of its first forgetting) is now precisely the means whereby the self-overcoming
human animal is able to attain a new kind of forgetting of the it was and to
influence its own development in a way that truly grants it freedom, autonomy,
and self-mastery. This new forgetting will extend to the past millennia of breeding and custom that produced its faculty of memory in the first place. Hence,
the crushingly heavy debt of millennia that once seemed irredeemable will
finally be lifted and redeemed. From the womb of bad conscience, a new child
will be born: self-propelled, free, weightless, innocent, affirming, joyful, and at
play with novelty and creation.
Department of Philosophy
The University of Puget Sound
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
An earlier version of this essay was presented at the annual conference of the Friedrich Nietzsche
Society in September 2004. I would like to thank those attending my session for their valuable
questions and comments, especially Thomas Brobjer and Herman Siemens. I am also grateful to
Keith Ansell Pearson for his helpful comments on this essay.
NOTES
1. Nietzsches privileging of TSZ extends as well to the works he wrote before: Reading
through Dawn and Gay Science I have found that there is hardly a line in them that cannot serve
as introduction, preparation and commentary to the above-mentioned Zarathustra. It is a fact, that
I have composed the commentary prior to the text (letter to Overbeck, 7 April 1884; KSB 6,
496).
2. More controversially, some commentators argue that these two ideas are empty,
incoherent, or inconsistent with each other. And recently, some have even argued that these two
ideas are criticized or abandoned in TSZ itself. I criticize these additional arguments in Loeb, 2001
and 2005.
3. Tanner, 59.
4. Leiter (2002, 115 n. 2). See also Leiters more recent claim that the bermensch never
appears again in Nietzsches corpus after Thus Spoke Zarathustra, except briefly in Ecce Homo
when Nietzsche discusses the former book and plays no role in any of his major mature
works (Leiter Reports, March 14, 2005, on Nietzsche). Strictly speaking, the claim that GM
does not mention the bermensch is false, since the first essay concludes with a description of
Napoleon as a synthesis of the inhuman and the bermensch (GM I.16). Nietzsche also
mentions such a synthesis at the end of his post-TSZ Gay Science Book V (GS 382). Aaron
Ridley (1998, 151n), by contrast, claims that GM nowhere refers or even alludes to the doctrine
of eternal recurrence. But I argue here that the whole second essay of GM alludes to this
doctrine. Also, most commentators (see, e.g., Leiter, 2002, 28788) rightly find an allusion to
eternal recurrence in Nietzsches GM III invocation of an opposing or counter ideal to the ascetic
ideal.
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5. Here and throughout this essay, I have relied on the translations by Walter Kaufmann
(along with R. J. Hollingdale for GM), although I have sometimes modified them in the interest
of greater literalness.
6. Nor is this gesture back to TSZ unique to GM among Nietzsches post-TSZ writings.
Besides his book-long extravagant advertisement for TSZ in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche also concludes
BGE and Gay Science V with poems announcing the arrival of his friend Zarathustra; he
concludes Twilight of the Idols with a quote from TSZ; he introduces The Antichrist with an
invitation to read TSZ; and he introduces The Case of Wagner with praise of Zarathustra.
7. For a similar reading, see Ansell-Pearson, 15152. Brian Leiter (2002, 24344) argues that
the concluding allusion in GM II is supposed to set the stage for GM III because Zarathustra
preaches a contrary ideal to the ascetic ideal. But when he finally turns to say what this alternative
ideal is (28788), Leiter merely gestures at TSZ and its teaching of an eternal recurrence that can
only be affirmed by the bermensch. Although Ridley does concentrate on GM II.2425 as the
single passage in GM that most points to Nietzsches constructive solution (1998, 134ff.), he does
not follow up Nietzsches explicit allusion to TSZ.
8. I am grateful to Thomas Brobjer for calling my attention to this point. See Brobjer, 34,
and Nietzsches letter to Naumann, 29 July 1887 (KSB 8, 116); letter to Kselitz, 30 July 1887
(KSB 8, 117).
9. Since the subsequent Convalescent and Seven Seals chapters clearly instruct us to
identify this figure with Zarathustra (whose redeemed soul is radiant and laughing), we can be
sure that Zarathustra has become an bermensch at the end of Nietzsches published TSZ. Despite
these very clear instructions, some commentators (see, e.g., Schrift, 54ff.) persist in suggesting
that the figure of the radiant, laughing shepherd in the Vision and the Riddle chapter is not
supposed to be the bermensch. These same commentators then go on to argue that Zarathustra
never does become the bermensch, or that Nietzsches bermensch is devoid of content, or that
Nietzsche refuses to present the bermensch in TSZ, or that he does not present the doctrine of
eternal recurrence as linked to the bermensch. But these seemingly rigorous and strict arguments
presuppose that Nietzsche holds philosophical views only where he explicitly writes prose
explaining and defending them. In refusing to admit the very clear evidence that flows out of a
literary analysis of Nietzsches poetic work, these arguments are interpretively idle.
10. Conway, 2.
11. In Ecce Homo (Clever 4), Nietzsche suggests that no one would have noticed if he had
published his TSZ under the name Richard Wagner. See Loeb, 2002, for my analysis of the
influence of Wagners Siegfried on Nietzsches TSZ.
12. Writing specifically about Nietzsches deference in GM II.2425 to one younger and
stronger than himself, Laurence Lampert claims that Nietzsche was only attempting to avoid the
praise of oneself that offends good taste (4). Indeed, Lampert suggests more generally that
Nietzsche chose a fictional character Zarathustra because in this way he observes the appropriate
moderation about his immoderate task and avoids being seen to be an intolerable boaster (157).
However, this suggestion lacks textual evidence and also the explanatory power commensurate
with Nietzsches choice of a highly complex and elaborate literary invention. Moreover, the
interpretive claim that Nietzsche wanted to appear modest requires that we read his assertion in
GM II.2425 (and elsewhere) as intentionally deceptive. Finally, this interpretive claim is
contradicted by Nietzsches obvious and explicit immodesty in so many other places (especially
Ecce Homo).
13. At the start of August 1881, in his very first note after discovering eternal recurrence,
Nietzsche writes: But whether we still want to live, is the question: and how! (KSA 9: 11[141]).
Later, on March 8, 1884, he writes to Overbeck of the courage he needs to carry his thought of
eternal recurrence and adds: For I am still far removed from being able to express and present
it (KSB 6, pp. 48485). And later still, in Ecce Homo, he writes that, although Zarathustra finds
95
in his most abysmal thought no objection to existence, not even to its eternal recurrence (EH Z:6),
he himself does: But I confess that my deepest objection to the eternal recurrence, my truly
most abysmal thought, is always mother and sister (EH Wise 3). Citing this last remark, some
commentators (Clark, 26162) have questioned whether Nietzsche actually identifies
Zarathustras most abysmal thought with the thought of eternal recurrence. For what sense does it
make to write of finding in the thought of eternal recurrence no objection to eternal recurrence?
But Zarathustras most abysmal thought concerns the eternal recurrence of existence in the
specific sense that this entails the eternal recurrence even of the smallest human (Z:3 The
Convalescent 2). So Nietzsches point above is simply that, although Zarathustra does not
consider this entailment an objection to eternal recurrence, he himself does.
14. Applying Nietzsches own warning, we should be on guard against confusing the artist and
his creation: as if he himself were what he is able to represent, conceive, and express. The fact is
is that if he were just that, he would in no way represent, conceive, and express it (GM III.4). A
Nietzsche would have created no Zarathustra if Nietzsche had been a Zarathustra. Hence
Nietzsches unpublished remark shortly after finishing Part 3 of TSZ in the spring of 1884:
Decision: I want to speak and no longer Zarathustra (KSA 11: 25[277]); and his later remark to
his sister: Do not think that my son Zarathustra expresses my opinions (7 May 1845, KSB 7, 48).
Nietzsches clear distinction between his own voice and Zarathustras helps to explain his
contemporaneous statements in his letters that he had just finished building an entrance hall
(Vorhalle) to his philosophy (see KSB 6, 485, 490, 496, 499). Heidegger (1979, 1:12ff.) speculated
that these statements were meant to diminish the status of TSZ in relation to Nietzsches
unpublished Will to Power project. Although no one takes this particular argument seriously
anymore, commentators who assume that Nietzsche regarded his own projects as coextensive with
Zarathustras still have a difficult time explaining why Nietzsches Vorhalle statements do not
prioritize the post-TSZ works as the completed edifice, or at least a systematic advance over
Zarathustra (Lampert, 4; see also Rosen, 1722). By contrast, my reading of Nietzsches
conclusion to GM II suggests that these statements were meant to enhance the status of his justcompleted TSZ in relation to what he was about to write next in his own voice.
15. In connection with the related theme of freedom, the German literally says that only
someone younger stands free (freisteht) for these ideas, thus implying that Nietzsche is not free
enough for them.
16. On my reading, then, Nietzsches post-TSZ wide-ranging discussion of issues in diverse
philosophical fields such as ontology, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and value-theory are all
destructive and preparatory to the constructive and conclusive ideas about these issues in TSZ. In
Loeb, 2004, I apply this point with respect to Nietzsches project of revaluating our values, and
argue that we should read Nietzsches GM (especially the first essay) as a past-oriented valuecritique that merely prepares the way for the creation of new noble values that he had already
depicted in TSZ.
17. Versus Mathias Risse, for example, who suggests that at the end of GM II Nietzsche
proposes our escaping from or undoing of bad conscience (70).
18. This continuous reading is supported by Nietzsches EH review of GM II as offering the
psychology of conscience.
19. See Loeb, 2001, for an analysis of Zs redemption speech that shows this. Also, see Loeb,
2000 and 2004, for my argument that Nietzsche intended the end of Part 3 as the chronological
conclusion of TSZ.
20. This reading is supported by Nietzsches emphasis in GM II on the concept of will to
power that he first introduced in TSZ as a second element in the triad: bermensch (Part 1)will
to power (Part 2)eternal recurrence (Part 3).
21. It may be wondered (as Elijah Milgram has done in a recent lecture on Nietzsches
conception of agency) whether Nietzsches central proposition is coherent, since the very
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procedure that is supposed to incalculate memory requires that pain be remembered. But here we
need to keep in mind that Nietzsche defines memory as a counter-faculty by means of which
active, positive forgetting is in certain cases suspended. And the function of this forgetting, he
writes, is to ensure that what we subconsciously absorb through experience impinges as little as
possible on our consciousness. Forgetting enables the temporary shutting of the doors and
windows of consciousness and a little tabula rasa of consciousness (GM II.1). Nietzsches
central proposition is therefore coherent as long as we suppose that the subconscious absorption
(but not the conscious memory) of pain is an aid to the development of conscious memory, that
is, of conscious suspension of forgetfulness. Hence his remarks in GM II.3 that pain is required to
impress something on this incarnated forgetfulness (dieser leibhaften Vergesslichkeit), to make
certain ideas unforgettable (unvergessbar), and to triumph over forgetfulness (gegen die
Vergesslichkeit zum Sieg zu kommen).
22. Ridley, 1998,143; see also 18.
23. Ibid. 145.
24. May, 117. However, May argues that Nietzsche does not actually endorse this figure as an
attainable or desirable ideal but rather as an ironic depiction of the human urge to be insulated
from contingency that he so powerfully decries in its metaphysical or religious manifestation.
By contrast, I argue in this essay that the reason Nietzsche does not endorse the GM II sovereign
individual as his bermenschlich ideal is that he is not sovereign enough.
25. Acampora, 2004. Other reasons Acampora cites are these: the sovereign individual is at
odds with Nietzsches account of the composite and changing nature of the self, with his critique
of the concept of free will, and with his emphasis on amor fati (133). However, the first two
reasons are drawn from Nietzsches post-TSZ critical works and therefore (I would argue) do not
reflect his final constructive accounts of the self and freedom in TSZ. As for the third reason, I
argue in this essay that Zarathustras achievement of bermenschlich autonomy is not only
compatible with his attitude of amor fati, but is actually a prerequisite of this attitude.
26. Acampora, 2004, 134.
27. Ibid., 12931.
28. Ibid., 132, 13638.
29. In writing at the end of GM II that he is only preparing the way for a Zarathustra-type who
must come one day, Nietzsche obviously invites his readers to think of the New Testaments
relation between John the Baptist and the Messiah. But he also implies that he and Zarathustra are
related as the sovereign individual is to the bermensch, and as the No-saying freedom-seizing
lion-spirit is to the Yes-saying free child-spirit in Zarathustras Three Metamorphoses speech.
Hence Nietzsches claim to have written in his own voice the No-saying, destructive BGE and
GM; and to have poetically imagined the voice of Zarathustra in the Yes-saying, constructive TSZ.
In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche asks us to behold himself, the best among men, but still decadent and to
be overcome; whereas in TSZ, he has Zarathustra ask his audience to behold the bermensch.
30. Acampora, 2004, 13637. See also 139.
31. See Zarathustras speech to the townspeople in which he says that the human being is a
rope, fastened between animal and bermensch and that [w]hat is great in the human being is
that he is a bridge and not a goal (Z:P 4).
32. Acampora, 2004, 12931, 135. Another way to put this point is that Acampora identifies
what might be called untermenschlich forgetting with the bermenschlich forgetting mentioned at
the end of Zarathustras Three Metamorphoses speech.
33. The closest Acampora comes to making such an argument is her suggestion that the ideal
of a reliable promise-keeper is at odds with Nietzsches philosophy of becoming, especially as
applied to the subject: how could it be that the Nietzsche who so emphasizes becoming, and who
is suspicious of the concept of the subject (as the doer behind the deed), think that it is
desirablelet alone possiblethat a person could ensure his or her word in the future? How
97
could one promise to do something, to stand security for something, that cannot be predicted and
for which one is, in a sense, no longer the one who could be responsible for it? (2004, 1345; see
also 138). I think that Acampora is right to raise the question whether promise-keeping is really
possible for the sovereign individual and I argue in this essay that, because of the it was
problem, Nietzsche himself ultimately denies that it is. But this does not mean that he denies this
capacity to the bermensch that has solved the it was problem through Zarathustras teachings
of eternal recurrence and backward-willing. By contrast, Acamporas question whether promisekeeping is really desirable for the sovereign individual presupposes that Nietzsche associates
memory and its manifestations (such as promise-keeping) only with permanence, on the one hand,
and forgetting only with becoming, on the other. However, Nietzsches association is more
complex: he thinks that human animals need their power of forgetting to protect themselves from
the reality of cosmic becoming that is revealed through their faculty of memory (HL 1).
34. At the start of TSZ, Zarathustra himself is described by the saint as having been
transformed into such a child (Z: P 2); and, at the published end of TSZ, Zarathustra describes his
own redeemed soul as a newborn child that is just washed, naked, innocent, yes-saying, free, tied
to times umbilical cord, baptized with new names, and playing with colorful toys (Z:3 On the
Great Longing). In Loeb, 2001, I argue that these two scenes are connected by a circular narrative
that shows the eternal recurrence of Zarathustras life.
35. In making this argument, I aim to refute the interpretation offered by Peter Berkowitz (176ff.),
and endorsed, for example, by Simon May (117), that Nietzsche constructed the narrative of TSZ in
such a way that Zarathustras praise and exemplification of godlike bermenschlich autonomy is
criticized and deconstructed. The key to this refutation consists in my reading of Zarathustras
recurrence-based solution to the problem of willing backward. Although Berkowitz argues that
Zarathustras solution renders illusory the freedom of the will (179, 199, 209), I claim that this
solution is supposed to show for the first time why the freedom of the will is not illusory after all.
36. Although Risse (6366) correctly interprets GM II.2122 as arguing that the invention of
the Christian God helped to introduce the moral notion of guilt, he misses Nietzsches repeated
emphasis on irredeemability as the feature that transformed debt into guilt. Because of this, Risse
also misses Nietzsches understanding of the relation between bad conscience and guilt. Recoiling
from the iron impossibility of repaying its debt to God, the human animal turned its debt against
itself and thereby pushed it back into the pre-existing bad conscience. Just as the inability to
discharge its will to power in society forced the human animal to turn its aggression back against
itself, so too the inability to discharge its debt to God now forces the human animal to turn this
debt back against itself and eventually against the very ground of its existence.
37. See, by contrast, Henry Statens claim (51, 61, 65ff.) that for Nietzsche the imprisonment
in society is an empirical condition of humankind, while the imprisonment in the it was is a
transcendental condition of life. But Nietzsches emphasis on the mere animals ignorance of the
past, and on the human animals socially inculcated and memory-enabled awareness of the past,
shows that he considers the it was to be equally an empirical condition of humankind.
38. In GM III.20, Nietzsche writes that, under the influence of the ascetic priest, the human
animal is led to believe that the physiological suffering resulting from his internalized cruelty is
to be found in a piece of the past (einem Stck Vergangenheit). Hence, wherever we find the
sight of the sinner, we find the regurgitation of the past, the distortion of the deed (die
Vergangenheit zurckgekut, die That verdreht).
39. See also GM III.25. In HL also, Nietzsche had already written in section 1 of the human
that braces himself against the great and ever greater pressure of what is past: it pushes him down
or bends him sideways, it encumbers his steps as a dark, invisible burden that he would like to
disown. This weight, Nietzsche suggests in GS 341 and the TSZ chapter On the Vision and the
Riddle, becomes the crushing greatest heavy weight when accumulated in an eternally recurring
life. On my reading, Zarathustras bermenschlich forgetting lifts the weight of the past from his
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soul and renders him weightless so that his body dances and his spirit flies like a bird (Z:3 The
Seven Seals 67). Also, in contrast to the regular, calculable, and predictable sovereign
individual of GM II, Zarathustras bermenschlich soul is sudden like lightning and earthquakes,
stormy like the wind, chance-governed like the dancing stars, playful like the gambling gods, and
adventuring like the seafarer (Z:3 The Seven Seals 13, 5).
40. Solomon, 207.
41. See, e.g., TI, The Problem of Socrates, for Nietzsches equation of surface and daylight
with consciousness and reason, and of depth and darkness with the unconscious and instinct.
42. In an unpublished preparatory note, Nietzsche has Zarathustra draw an explicit connection
between redemption and backward-willing: Redemption! I spat out the head of the serpent!
Redemption! I taught the will backward-willing! (KSA 10:18[45]). Since this spitting-out of the
serpent-head is performed by the Zarathustra-shepherd-turned-bermensch who must come one
day (der einst noch kommen muss) (Z:3 On the Vision and the Riddle 2; The Convalescent
2), Nietzsches GM II.24 description of Zarathustra as the redeemer who must come one day
(muss einst kommen) points us directly to Zarathustras teaching of backward-willing as the
specific method whereby he makes the will free again. In Loeb 2001 and 2002, I offer exegeses
of different aspects of Nietzsches vision-riddle of the shepherd and serpent.
43. Although the lion-spirited capture, create, and rob freedom, it is only the child-spirited that
are actually free. This distinction is emphasized in Zarathustras remark that the might of the lionspirited cannot create new values, but only create the freedom that is needed for the child-spirited
to create new values.
44. See Loeb, 2001, for a more detailed analysis of the links between Zarathustras redemption
speech and his thought of eternal recurrence.
45. See Leiter, 2001, 284ff.
46. See Ridleys perceptive criticism of the more usual face-value interpretation of Nietzsches
answer according to which one should learn to feel bad about oneself for ones transgressions
against immanence (1998, 13435).
47. Here I have in mind the second sense of self-overcoming described by Ridley, according
to which the logic immanent to a concept or an institution finally brings about its transformation
(or destruction) and the self is overcome in virtue of structural features intrinsic to its very
constitution (1998, 14243). Although Ridley considers the idea that Nietzsche proposes this
kind of self-overcoming of bad conscience, he is led to dismiss this proposal as thin and empty
(14246) and to suggest that this is the point at which Nietzsches imagination reaches its limit
(154). But he does not follow up Nietzsches allusion to TSZ and he conflates the bermensch
with the sovereign individual.
48. Most TSZ commentators (see, e.g., Gooding-Williams, 4344) fail to notice this important
link between Zarathustras Three Metamorphoses speech on forgetting and Unschuld, on the
one hand, and Nietzsches GM II analysis of memory and Schuld, on the other.
49. See, by contrast, Joan Stambaughs suggestion (105ff.) that Nietzsche aims for us to regain
the mere animal state (as described by him at the beginning of HL) in which we live totally in
the moment, in the present.
50. According to recent commentary (Risse, 6869; Leiter 2002, 23742; Ridley 2005, 42),
Nietzsche argues in GM II.2021 that atheism is not sufficient to eliminate guilt (that is, the
moralized consciousness of indebtedness). But this is a misinterpretation of Nietzsches
transitional remarks. What Nietzsche actually argues is that if we assume we have begun to move
in the direction opposite from faith in the Christian God, then we should notice a considerable
weakening in the human consciousness of indebtedness. But the real situation is fearfully
different: not only has the human consciousness of indebtedness not weakened, but the
moralization of indebtedness into guilt actually represents an attempt to reverse the direction of
the development just described, or at least to halt its movementthat is, to reverse or halt any
99
movement in the direction opposite from faith in the Christian God. So our initial assumption was
false: we are not moving toward the complete and definitive victory of atheism. This interpretation
of Nietzsches remarks is consistent with his claim in Twilight of the Idols that Christian morality
stands and falls with faith in God: when one gives up the Christian faith in God, one pulls the right
to Christian morality out from under ones feet (Skirmishes 5). As Risse points out (69),
Nietzsche thinks that the so-called atheists of his time (who mock the madman of GS 125) are not
really such and have not at all accepted the full implications of the death of God. Indeed, as we
have seen, Nietzsche suggests at the end of GM II that he himself, perhaps the most atheistic
thinker of his time, has not yet fully conquered God and is not yet a true and complete atheist. So
Nietzsches point in GM II.2021 is that guilt and Christian morality can only survive the advent
of false and incomplete atheism (see also May, 68). Hence his call at the end of GM II for the true
and complete atheism of a future godless Zarathustra who will free humankind of its feeling of
guilt, that is, of its feeling of irredeemable indebtedness toward its origin and causa prima. More
precisely, Nietzsche argues (KSA 13:14[188]; WP 1066), the conquest of God refutes the
theological concepts of the worlds origin and creationthereby making room for the doctrine of
eternal recurrence that will grant humankind power over its origin. As Zarathustras animals
remark, he himself belongs to the causes of the eternal recurrence that continually re-creates him
(Z:3 The Convalescent 2).
51. Nor is Nietzsche making the psychologically implausible suggestion that the human
animal should, or even can, somehow go back to the kind of first Unschuld that it enjoyed before
becoming an adult (see, e.g., Stambaugh, 105ff.). It might seem, that is, that Nietzsches TSZ
emphasis on the child as the third metamorphosis of the spirit should be interpreted in terms of his
HL description of the child as not yet having a past to disown, play[ing] in blissful blindness
between the fences of the past and the future (1). But this cannot be right because the HL
description is linked to the Unschuld and forgetting of the mere animal. Instead, it must be the
case that Nietzsche envisions a kind of second childhood for the bermensch.
52. See Loeb, 2001 and 2005. In the first essay, I argue that Zarathustras dismissal of the
dwarfs answer in On the Vision and the Riddle (Z:2) is not also a dismissal of circular time
because the dwarfs Platonic answer assumes a background of atemporal reality compared to
which time is an illusion.
53. In addition, and ironically, as Gnter Abel (1988) and Alistair Moles (1989, 1990) have
shown, most of the commentators ostensibly rigorous objections to the scientific status of
Zarathustras doctrine presuppose an outdated Newtonian physics (e.g., absolute universal time)
that was rejected by Nietzsche himself when formulating his premises for eternal recurrence. Most
of these objections are also quite uninformed about the diversity and peculiarity of recent
cosmological theories. In particular, Gdels 1949 valid solutions to Einsteins GRT field
equations, widely discussed today, certainly allow the kind of global closed timelike curve that
seems described by the Ecce Homo phrase, unbedingten und undendlich wiederholten Kreislauf
aller Dinge. For a philosophical examination of Gdelian spacetime structure and its
implications, see Yourgrau (1999) and the essays by Paul Horwich and John Earman in Savitt
(1995). For a physics-based examination of other possible global timelike curves, see Gott (2001).
54. Since Nietzsche holds a perspectival view of time, and since ones perspective does not
exist in the time observed by others between ones death and ones re-creation, ones last
conscious moment is immediately followed by ones first conscious moment and (KSA 9:
11[318]). See Loeb, 2001 and 2005, for a further explanation of this argument that an individuals
eternally recurring life has a self-enclosed circular course.
55. Heidegger (2:5259) argues that Zarathustra rejects his animals testimony for the
following reasons: they use the dwarfs word bent (krumm); Zarathustra speaks of their words
as illusory bridges between things eternally separate; he calls them buffoons (SchalksNarren) and barrel organs (Drehorgeln) and says that they have made a lyre-song
100
PAUL S. LOEB
(Leier-Lied) out of his bitter experience; he says that their lack of empathy reminds him of
human cruelty; and he finally tells them to be quiet and stops listening and speaking to them
altogether (Z:3 The Convalescent 2). Against this reading, however, it should be emphasized
that Zarathustra smiles as he speaks to his animals (and he is not angry, as he is with the dwarf),
and tells them how well they know what had to be fulfilled and what comfort he had invented
for his convalescencenamely, to make a new lyre for his new songs. Also, in his preparatory
notes for TSZ, Nietzsche actually has Zarathustra himself teach all of what his animals say they
know he teaches (KSA 11: 25[7]). Nietzsches point, therefore, is not that Zarathustras animals
do not know what he teaches, but rather that they are not able to understand why this new
teaching should cause him such pain, nausea, and sickness. This point derives from Nietzsches
claim that mere animals have no memory, and therefore cannot be nauseated or burdened as
Zarathustra is. See Lampert (21213) for other objections to dismissing Zarathustras animals
speeches.
56. There are of course strong affinities between this epistemology of eternal recurrence and
Platos theory of anamnesis, and Nietzsche himself points to this influence when he alludes to
Platos Phaedo in GS 34041 and when he depicts Zarathustras dialectical contest with the
Socratic dwarf (Z:3 On the Vision and the Riddle 1). Although Pierre Klossowski is famously
concerned to show that [a]namnesis coincides with the revelation of the [Eternal] Return
(57), his point is quite different from mine. Whereas I am arguing that for Nietzsche forgetting
eternal recurrence is a suspendable condition of psychic efficiency, Klossowski argues that
forgetting eternal recurrence is an unsuspendable condition of the truth of eternal recurrence
(59). But it seems to me that Klossowskis argument (see also Allison, 122)how could the
return not bring back forgetfulness? . . . I learn that I was other than I am now for having
forgotten this truth, and thus that I have become another by learning it (57)depends upon the
mistaken argument (initiated by Georg Simmel and criticized in Loeb, 2005) that any memory
of eternal recurrence adds something new that violates the qualitative identity of eternal
recurrence.
57. I discuss this objection at length in Loeb, 2005.
58. In Loeb, 1998, I argue that Gay Science 34041 convey Nietzsches conjecture that
Socrates hatred of life led him to conceal from himself his subconscious knowledge of his lifes
eternal recurrence until his deathbed daemonic reminder loosened his tongue and led him to take
revenge on life. In Loeb, 2005, I show how Nietzsche leads us to interpret the demons message
in Gay Science 341 as a recollection of lifes eternal recurrence.
59. See KSA 9: 11[196]; GS 1089; Z:1, On the Gift-Giving Virtue: and TI, How the True
World finally became a Fable. Although Zarathustra announces the dawn of his great-noon day
at the end of Part 4 of TSZ, I argue in Loeb, 2000 and 2004, that Nietzsche intended us to read this
ending as leading chronologically into the start of the Convalescent chapter where the fully
ripened and lion-voiced Zarathustra awakens his thought of eternal recurrence during the highnoon moment of this same great-noon day.
60. Notice that Nietzsche here compares and contrasts the noon-bell awakening of the future
Zarathustra with his own lesser awakening: so we sometimes rub our ears afterward and ask,
completely astonished, completely disconcerted, what really was that which we have just
experienced? still more: who are we really? and, afterward, as aforesaid, count the twelve
trembling bell-strokes of our experience, our life, our beingand alas! miscount them.
61. Although Nietzsche most often characterizes Zarathustras doctrine of eternal recurrence
as his most abysmal thought [abgrndlicher Gedanke], he also has Zarathustra agree with his
stillest hour that he knows [weiss] his teaching but will not speak it (Z:2 The Stillest Hour).
And Zarathustras animals ask him if perhaps a new, bitter, and oppressive knowledge
[Erkenntnis] has come to him once he has awakened his most abysmal thought (Z:3 The
Convalescent 2).
101
62. See also Z:3 The Convalescent, where Zarathustra describes his most abysmal thought
as a sleeping, blind, depth-burrowing worm. Upon being awakened, this worm transforms itself
into a monster [Unthier] that creeps into Zarathustras throat and chokes him (just as he had
foreseen in Z:3 On the Vision and the Riddle). In Loeb, 2002, I discuss Nietzsches use here of
Wagners Siegfried image of the monstrous serpent-worm (Schlangenwurm).
63. I explain how Zarathustra reaches such a decision in Loeb, 2002.
64. Hence, I would argue, Nietzsches important narrative distinction between what
Zarathustras animals say eternal recurrence is for those who think as they do and what they say
eternal recurrence is according to Zarathustras teaching (Z:3 The Convalescent 2).
65. See Loeb, 2001, for a further analysis of this scene that shows more precisely how
Zarathustras psychic pain is an aid to his recurrence-memory.
66. See, by contrast, Joan Stambaughs interpretation of literally willing backward in time as
reversing the direction of time so as to change what has already occurred (8586). Given this
extreme interpretation of literal backward-willing, Stambaugh (along with most other
commentators) sees herself as forced to choose a merely metaphorical interpretation of backwardwilling that at least makes more sense: to will things and events back, to will them to come
again, to return. But Zarathustras whole point in his redemption speech is that we already do
will things and events to return, and that it is precisely this willing that founders against the
immovable stone it was. We will things and events in the past to return, but our willing seems
impotent. Stambaughs interpretation thus merely poses the terms of Zarathustras problem
without offering a reading of his solution.
67. See Loeb, 2001, for an exegesis of TSZ that explains, supports, and illustrates this claim.
68. This interpretation should be sharply distinguished from the usual, and I think wholly
unconvincing, interpretation according to which backward-willing is merely metaphorical and
Zarathustra (or Nietzsche in Ecce Homo) retrospectively reinterprets his past in such a way that
he finds it all worthy of affirmation. See Ridleys persuasive argument (13542), and Nietzsche
own suggestion in GS 277, that this merely metaphorical backward-willing must at some point
involve some kind of self-deception and therefore never actually succeeds.
69. On my interpretation, then, Nietzsches claim that Zarathustra succeeds in giving aesthetic
style to his life and self depends on his assumption of the literal truth of cosmological eternal
recurrence. As such, my interpretation helps to explain Nietzsches famous but puzzling praise of
physics (Physik) as the means whereby certain unique and incomparable individuals may become
those they are, give laws to themselves, and create themselves (GS 335). By contrast with Walter
Kaufmanns dissatisfying explanation of Nietzsches term Physik (in his footnote to his
translation of GS 335, also adopted by Leiter, 2001, 31516), my account explains Nietzsches
characterization of physicsthe study of everything that is lawful and necessary in the world
as naturally pointing forward toward his unveiling, six aphorisms later, of the cosmological
doctrine that the eternal hourglass of being is turned over again and again (GS 341). In addition,
my interpretation shows how Nietzsches doctrines of eternal recurrence and backward-willing
allow him to conceive of a truly radical self-creation that does not depend upon the causa sui
theory of free will that he criticizes in BGE 21 and that does not conflict with his teaching of amor
fati (Leiter, 2001, 29293 and 28689; Acampora, 2004, 1323, 140). By contrast, Brian Leiter
writes that we need to acknowledge that by creation, Nietzsche really doesnt mean creation
in its ordinary sense (2001, 317) and that his talk of creating the self is merely the employment
of a familiar term in an unfamiliar sense, one that actually presupposes the truth of fatalism
(2001, 319).

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