clegg, jerry s. - nietzsche and the ascent of man in a cyclical cosmos

Journal of the History of Philosophy, Volume 19, Number 1, January1981, pp. 81-93 (Article)

DOI: 10.1353/hph.2008.0076

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Nietzsche and the Ascent of Man

in a Cyclical Cosmos

JERRY S. CLEGG

I. ANYONE WHO IS either innocent or determined enough to take the myriad specu- lative genealogies and prophesies of Nietzsche's work at face value will readily allow that it tenders an evolutionary theory of history. The Birth of Tragedy claims that we are nearing the end of a "Socratic" era and that the change impending will be for the better as we overcome in ourselves a debilitating, scientific outlook and acquire a more healthy mode of perception drawn from the arts. Later books insist on parallel historical divisions and make similar, equally celebrated prophesies. On the Genealogy of Morals, Beyond Good and Evil, and The Antichrist all identify our earliest ancestors as pagan, naive, innocent "beasts" whose Christian descendants, owing in part to the harsh repressions of military and priestly elites, have evolved into self-conscious, guilty "men" in need of redemption. These same works suggest that that redemption will come to our own descendants only by way of further evolution in an age now beginning that will result in self-conscious, but innocent "supermen." According to Thus Spake Zarathustra "man" is but a bridge between the prehuman and the posthu- man, and the "great noon" that will mark the second advance of the race is upon us.l A new habit, Nietzsche speculates in Human, All-too-Human, is forming in us that in time may be powerful enough to give humanity the strength to produce conscious, wise, innocent men as it now produces conscious, unwise, guilty men. 2 Our old sick ideals are now fighting their last fight, he avows in The Joyful Wisdom. 3 Indeed, according to The Antichrist* and On the Genealogy of Morals s a new age of emancipa- tion and innocence has already begun. Thus it would seem transparently clear that for Nietzsche we live at a pivotal point in our race's history, with a grim era behind us but with brighter prospects before us . It would seem, too, that that assessment of our age allowed him to flirt with a sense of historical mission, for--al though one may find an element of ironic bravado in his boasts he was ready to claim for his writings a millennial import in marking the end of one stage in our development and the beginning of another. "I might shoot the history of mankind into two halves," he wrote to his friend Overbeck, 6 thereby commenting in private on his public, Messianic stance

I Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in Drei Banden, ed. Karl Schlechta (Munich: Carl Hauser, 1966), 2:515-20. 2 Ibid., 1:514-15. 3 Ibid., 2 : 229-32. 4 Ibid., pp. 1212-14. 5 Ibid., pp. 830-31. 6 Ibid., 3:1323-25.

[811

82 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

as the antichrist who is, at once, the stern critic of the old and the joyful harbinger of the new.

The appearance of a theory of history in Nietzsche's writings is strong enough to have affected some of the more influential historiographies of the twentieth century. Heideg- ger's views on an impending and momentous departure from the faulty way we have tried to understand the world since the time of Parmenides were inspired, for example, by The Birth of Tragedy and The Antichrist. It would appear, too, to be On the Geneal- ogy of Morals that underlies Freud's millennial vision of man as a diseased animal, made neurotic by centuries of faith and repressive culture, who is on the point, nonetheless, of freeing himself from his adolescent, religious fixations and maturing with the help of that antipriest of our age, the psychoanalyst, into an illusionless adult.

If one is impressed by the apparent strength and obvious impact of Nietzsche's historiography, then a reading of some of his commentators who confidently deny that he ever entertained a theory of history might well provoke surprise, even astonishment. Walter Kaufmann asserts that Nietzsche always treated historical figures and events as but symbols of timeless themes and that for him world history does not tell a story of evolution or progress at all, but only "the endless and futile addition of zeros which does not show us that life can have worth or meaning. ''7 Carl Pletsch, too, declares that Nietzsche did not develop a theory of history, the reason being that "history cannot have any direction and certainly not that of progress. ''s These commentators dismiss the appearance of a Nietzschean historiography as just that: an appearance that masks a deeper, "superhistorical" point of view. Each thinks that such an interpretation of Nietz- sche is mandatory. His doctrine of eternal recurrence, they believe, will allow for nothing else. According to that doctrine space and energy are constant but finite while time is not. Thus, Nietzsche seems to have reasoned, all possible events must automatically repeat themselves an infinite number of times. We, at any rate, have all lived before exactly as we live now, and as we will live again forever and ever. 9 Kaufmann and Pletsche view this cyclical cosmology as being at odds with any possible theory of history, and so, to retain the cosmology, they deny that Nietzsche entertained evolutionary notions on our progress as a race.

The assumption that Nietzsche's cyclical cosmology and his evolutionary theory of history are incongruous is widely shared, although different views have been voiced on how his position is to be assessed. Tracy Strong has adopted a stance diametrically opposed to that of Kaufmann and Pletsch. History, he reasons, is obviously the result in Nietzsche's mind of free choices that need not be, and so it allows.for some steps forward. A cyclical, deterministic cosmology would conflict with that view; thus, he concludes, the doctrine of eternal recurrence is not really a cosmological theory.I~ It is the appearance, not Nietzsche's historiography. This line of reasoning may elicit some sympathy, but it is as hard to accept as the one it implicitly opposes. Nietzsche writes of all moments of time as necessarily repeating themselves in absolutely identical se- quences. ~ He also claims that his doctrine of eternal return reconciles opposed Platonic

7 Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1956), pp. 129-30, 276.

s "History and Friedrich Nietzsche's Philosophy of Time," History and Theory 16 (1977):30-39. Werke, 2:462-67.

~o Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Tranfiguration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), pp. 18,265.

H Werke, 2:202-3:3:704.

NIETZSCHE'S ASCENT OF MAN 83

and materialistic schools of cosmological thought.~2 To all appearances his doctrine is, then, a cosmological thesis. What else it could be even Strong is not prepared to say. Bewildered by what he takes to be a dilemma that Nietzsche's work presents, Strong concludes that references to eternal recurrence cannot be understood. He speculates that for Nietzsche a particular state of being as yet unrealized by us, his audience, is a prerequisite for grasping what that doctrine, if it is one, means.t3

A third, less Procrustean, but still unsettling effort to relate Nietzsche's cosmology to his historiography has been made by George Morgan and Crane Brinton. Morgan declares neither strand of Nietzsche's thought to be a mere appearance, even though he sees those strands as contrasting sharply. Rather, he holds--but without elaboration-- that Nietzsche sought a doctrinal "union of opposites. ''~4 Such a stance is attractive in that it grants that Nietzsche meant what he said, but it also leaves his position in apparent tension, if not outright disarray--and so vulnerable to Brinton's caustic sugges- tions that he was hopelessly inconsistent.~5

But, the question may now be pressed, does Nietzsche really present his reader with a dilemma? Is his evolutionary historiography actually at odds with his cyclical cosmology? Must he be read as either not meaning all that he said or as arguing for a paradoxical union of opposed doctrines? The answer to these questions should be a finn no. Nietzsche's historiography is a version of a much older one that had been supported by a metaphysical position he vociferously rejected. His doctrine of eternal recurrence replaces that rejected metaphysics. It thus serves as a means for him to salvage a certain familiar view of history from the ruins of what he takes to be a faulty philosophical perspective. There is, in short, no opposition or even tension between his cosmology and his historiography. The one supports the other.

II. Nietzsche's theory of history is Augustinian. Like the author of The City o f God he sees the human race as beginning its career in primal innocence, naivete, and mental health, then falling into subsequent guilt, knowledge, and neurosis. Like Augustine, too, Nietzsche sees a correction of the Fall as possibly immanent. His explanations of the Fall and its effects are, however, vehemently anti-Augustinian. That is because he rejects all explanatory principles that rely on what he sees as Christian teleological and ontological dualities. In trying to understand his position it will therefore be useful to keep in mind just how Augustine's historiography was tied to a metaphysics laden with dualisms.

For Augustine, the primal, innocent estate of man as described in Genesis was one in which a single teleology pervaded life. The will of Adam was in accord with the will of God.|6 Thus there was no discrepancy between human and divine purposes. At the same time there was no conflict between the various faculties of the human personality. All parts of the body, including the genitals, obeyed a single, homogenous will. ~7 With Adam's mysterious sin, however, a dual teleology arose. Even now some men can feign death and move their hair and ears at will, but no one can control his member of

12 Ibid., 3:919. 13 Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration, pp. 222,267-68. i+ What Nietzsche Means (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1941), pp. 289-90. 15 Nietzsche (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1941), pp. 140-41. t6 The Cir. of God, Bk. 14, chap. 26. 17 Ibid., chap. 17.


generation without the aid of lust~S--a force that Augustine describes as being totally independent of the human will.~9 This meeting in us of dual teleology is the chief psychological consequence of the Fall. It constitutes our inherited misery, for it makes us creatures divided against ourselves? ~ It also stands as testimony to our disobedience to God---and so to the existence of a discrepancy between divine and subhuman aims. As our sexual appetites will not obey us, so Adam would not obey God. 2~ Thus if the Fall is to be corrected, a new harmony of purpose must be won. The will of God must once more be the will of man. When it is, our psychic conflict will end.

This account of human psychological development has an important political and social component that gives to Augustine's historiography a clear sense of direction. An original wholeness of purpose and an innocence of mind were ours in Eden, or the Garden of God, but it is not by returning there that the Fall 's neurotic effects in us will be corrected. Rather, according to Augustine, it is in an ascent to the City of God that salvation lies. With Adam's sin nature itself fell, thereby becoming botched and subject to instinctual forces that must leave it so. Thus it is not a return to a defective wilder- ness but an ascent from it that should occupy our thoughts and claim our loyalties. Our journey as a race is properly from nature to culture, with the journey itself through the City of Man marked by a temporary conflict as we transform ourselves from citizens of one realm into citizens of another. Our psychic evolution parallels the start, development, and culmination of our ascent to culture.

The defective instincts that pervade the now fallen world are, of course, those that are so alien to our true character that they do not obey our wills. It is lust that now rules organic nature. Thus our rise to culture is in conflict with our sexual appetites. Why Augustine thought that our sexuality is hostile to our spiritual and cultural aspirations is best explained by the classical elements of his metaphysics. The sexual appetites are associated by him with the body, of course, while it is the sexless soul that is the carrier of civilized values. The doctrine that each of us is actually a society of agencies does not explain by itself, however, why we suffer from psychic conflict. Different agents can, after all, cooperate. The reason our bodily appetites and our souls are in conflict is that they respond to different teleologies and operate with different principles of causation. One represents a repetitive physis; the other, a novel nomos.

For Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus the sexual instincts--the agents of an organi physis--were essentially conservative. They seek to duplicate the past and thereby preserve all species of plant and animal life. They do this because they belong to mortal organisms that seek immortality and try to gain it, if only vicariously, by generating offspring that will keep their memories green. 22 According to Plato this striving after a vicarious immortality illustrates a fundamental metaphysical ambition on the part of all empirical things to incorporate into the world of appearance the features of reality. 23 By maintaining the race an organism helps to give to the world a version of an extraworldly trait. It makes of time, for example, an image of eternity. 24 Even Aristotle entertained a version of this familiar doctrine. The stars "rotate regularly, he writes, so as to partake of

is Ibid., chap. 24. ,9 Ibid., chap. 16.

Ibid., chap. 15. z: Ibid., chap. 17. zz Symposium 208; Laws 721 b--c. 23 Phaedo 75a-b. ,.4 Timaeus 37d-e.


the qualities of an invisible and immobile prime mover, 25 and they in turn are imitated through procreation by terrestial organisms that thereby acquire a version of extraworldly property? 6

The Platonic soul does not participate in this conservative principle of causation. It already is immortal, and so it fully possesses what a mortal organism can have only vicariously and incompletely. Free of any need to incorporate into itself a trait it already has, it can s e e k novelty, can invent, and can pursue supraorgnnic, cultural goals. It can add to the world and improve upon it. Thus it becomes the agent of industry and culture, or nomos, in which we create things unlike ourselves. Novelty, in short, is the prerogative of the supernatural. It is our industry and our handicraft that is responsive to our true wills; reproduction is not. This is, clearly, Augustine's own position. The hands and feet, he writes, respond to the will of handicraftsmen, whose industry has made dull nature nimble, but their members of generation obey only lust. 27 Our art, in orther words, is the product of our will; our progeny is not. Since we resemble our chi ldren--who belong to the same species we do---but do not resemble the artifacts of our industry, a similarity between source and issue marks that natural mode of production that fails to represent our wills. Novelty is left as the dis- tinguishing, diagnostic mark of what we, as culture-building creatures, truly desire and are the agents for. Our linear racial history thus reveals itself to be responsive to the distinctive teleology of art and culture.

The point of these observations is that Augustine's historiography is wedded to a teleological dualism that is, in tum, supported by an ontological distinction. The conservative instincts of the fallen, repetitive nature we are ascending from represent the less than successful effort of what is mortal and apparent to be like what is immortal and real. The contrasting, novel, supraorganic aspirations of the nomos-building soul belong to something that already is immortal and real. Because of these associations Augustine's historiography has some disturbing implications. Two are of particular im- portance. First, the conflict between culture and nature that afflicts us in the neurotic City of Man cannot be ended without divine intervention. The sexual instincts are in- trinsically conservative and, unless altered by a correction of the Fall that produced them, must always oppose the suprabiological drives of the soul. Only God, in Augus- tine's view, can rid us of neurotic self-division. Second, the ascent to culture that we are embarked upon looks as though it is life-denying, ever~ Manichean, for it is the life-affirming instincts that are seen as inimical to the soul 's values.

Both of these troubling implications are emphasized by Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Representation. In analyzing the conservative character of the erotic instincts, Schopenhauer noted--with Aristotle28---that an intelligent action is for the sake of an end, and that when that end is attained the action ceases. Thus the erotic instincts are irrational, for that life should have no end is their goal. They are ruled by a telos-less teleology that seeks to continue the processes of life forever. Their aim is to guarantee to organic species a continuing existence and thereby give to a mortal, apparent world of representations the marks of an immortal, real realm. To do that they must obviously repeat the past endlessly. There is no possibility of their ever chang-

9 -5 Metaphysics 12, 7. 9 -6 On Generation and Corruption 337a4. ~-~ Ci~ o f God, Bk. 14 chap. 23. ,.s Physics 199a9-12.


ing. The "will-to-live" is essentially conservative. It cannot be altered, only denied. Thus each generation is substantially identical with all that have previously existed. -'9

Schopenhauer also stressed that this conservative force in us is at odds with our moral, spiritual, and cultural aspirations. The tragic artist, saint, and philosopher--the three "geniuses" or heroes of culture for Schopenhauer--will therefore have denied the will-to-live. None will marry or reproduce, and all will try to show to others the folly of living in accord with the irrational pruposes of nature. If this seems to be a grim price to pay for upholding the interests of culture, Schopenhauer's reply is that the world is not simply a fallen one, from which we need to be redeemed, but is actually a kind of hell that should never have been. He also offers his readers the consoling observation that if they do learn to deny in themselves the will-to-live, they will come to see the world clearly, and thereby gain an answer to questions that otherwise must torment them. Individual actions exist for the sake of preserving the species, but for what purpose does the species exist? What is the use of the world of appearance? For what reason is there life at all? These tormenting questions cannot be answered by those in the grip of the will-to-live. The normal thoughts and perceptions of an individual are controlled by that force and are distorted by its irrational proclivities. A denial of the will is thus the prerequisite of wisdom and clarity. Seen sub specie aeterni from the will-less perspective o f the life-denying genius, the world's true character is revealed. Its riddle is solved. There is no reason for the effort to turn organic appearances into realities. The anxious care with which life is maintained is pointless. -~~ The genius who contemplates apart from any private perspective the ceaseless bustle of the world as a whole notes that it has no meaning, and so his tormenting questions about the purpose of life vanish as be becomes indifferent to their source. He notes that the irrational teleology of nature has failed to supply to the whole of life a property of its parts. He can therefore more easily accept his denial of the value of life, and he can do that serenely, without fear of loss or oblivion, for his tragic insight comes to him as a noumenal, indestructible ego who contemplates the world from a position beyond it in the way a playgoer contemplates an endless magic lantern show. ~

For Nietzsche this celebration by Schopenhauer of the genius who has solved the riddle of existence by denying the value of life, and who by the same means has overcome within himself the conflict between culture and nature, is the culmination of Greek and Christian nihilism---a nihilism that Nietzsche judges to be rooted in its teleological and ontological dualities. His doctrine of eternal recurrence is meant to replace those dualities and so to allow for a different, life-affirming account of what our ascent to culture from nature implies.

Ill. The Birth of Tragedy presents Socrates as a Greek Adam, whose loss of innocence altered human consciousness and led to a decline from which the likes of Wagner may save us. In spite of its historical themes, however, that book is not repre- sentative of Nietzsche's mature views, for it accepts a distinction between a noumenal and phenomenal self, 3-' along with a further distinction between reality and appearance that he later rejected. 33 It also makes no mention of the doctrine of eternal recurrence, it

-~ Schopenhauer, Stimtliche Werke, ed. A. H/ibscher. 7 vols. (Wiesbaden: F. A. Brockhaus, 1949), 2:578. .~o ibid., I : 195-96. ~1 ibid., p. 182. ~'- Werke, 1:25-28. ~-~ Ibid., pp. 21-25.


is therefore a text that is largely irrelevant to the question of how his cyclical cosmology is related to his evolutionary historiography.

In his mature writings Nietzsche rejected all ontological and teleological dualisms. There is, he insisted, no "real" world that stands in back of the "apparent" world we inhabit. ~ Even if there were, knowledge of it would be utterly idle, 3s and so the conscience of logical method commands us to think of our desires and passions as suffi- cient for the understanding of a world that is not representation, illusion, or sem- blance. 36 At the same time he insisted that there is no noumenal self 37 and that teleologically independent souls are not housed within our bodies. Indeed, Nietzsche goads his reader into thinking of all responses as physiological ones that obey only organic instincts. He describes thought, for example, as a form of digestion) 8 He calls aesthet- ics applied physiology, 39 and he says the same of moral i ty: ~ The varied works of Schopenhauer's philosophers, saints, and tragic artists thus all originate with organic conditions. Nietzsche is not to be read as a crude materialist, but he is clearly committed to the thesis that nothing in human productivity is to be traced to a suprabiological source. His point is that our standing as creators of culture is not to be explained by our being anything supernatural.

Yet, without the underpinnings of the dualisms that supported it in The City of God, Nietzsche clearly accepted an Augustinian historiography. He presents it with a Darwinian veneer. He makes use, for example, of Darwin's notion that organisms are prone to vary when subjected to new conditions, especially those of domestication, and that principles of selectivity will then gradually fix new forms of life, new organs, new instincts, and even new psychological traits--including, Darwin held explicitly, those of our own species : t Nietzsche also accepts Darwin's three-part classification of the kinds of selective principles that can influence a species's evolution. There is, first, natural selection that occurs independently of human beings; second, a similar, unconscious selectivity exercised by men on the plants and animals they associate with; and third, a fully conscious, artificial form of selection as seen in the case of plant and animal breeders: 2 In Nietzsche's view these types of selection are, in the case of man himself, temporally related in the order stated, so that our career as a race can be divided into three eras.

We began, he speculates, as a wild species subject to the selective conditions of nature that bred our ancestors into "beasts." Their survival was dependent upon their strength and cunning in a state of nature, and so they became a race of aggressive hunters and warriors. They also acquired a store of useful illusions and errors that helped them survive: 3 Those errors rendered them as naive and innocent in mind as they were cruel and unrestrained in conduct. Their naivete saved them from experien- cing guilt. In their innocence they learned to blame their gods for the ills that they themselves created. ~ In this way they evolved into a healthy, homogeneous race with,

Ibid., pp. 457-59 :2 :958 :3 :706 . 35 Ibid., I :452. ~' Ibid., 2 : 6 0 0 - 1 . ~7 Ibid., pp. 103-7. ~ Ibid., p. 569. 3~ Ibid., pp. 241--43. 4o Ibid., pp. 861-62. 41 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (London: John Murray, 1859), pp. 7 , 4 5 9 , 488. 42 Ibid., pp. 34-35 , 61. 45 Werke, 2 : I 16, 219-22.

Ibid., pp. 834-35.


it may be noted, the mentality of an innocent, naive, wholesome Adam before his Fall.

In early antiquity the selective conditions that governed human evolution changed. Natural selection was replaced by artificial, but unconscious selection. Blond "beasts" moved from the north first to encounter then to enslave a dark-haired race living on the shores of the Mediterranean. The enslaved race immediately became subject to novel evolutionary stresses. The traits of character that had stood it in good stead in a state of nature now became useless, even dangerous. The slave, for example, who re- mained aggressive in his deportment was likely to be killed by his unreflective masters. Thus a great "transvaluation" took place. Owing to their survival value the Chris- t ian virtues of humility and meekness replaced those of a warrior caste. With that transvaluation a slave race began to evolve with a radically new mentality. Housed in the "cage of culture," "men," not "beasts," developed. Like fish flung onto the land and forced to modify old organs and old instincts, they learned to curb their aggressive feelings by venting them inwardly upon themselves. 4s They also learned to think of their gods as good and of themselves as evil, and so began to spy on their suspect motives, thereby losing their naivete as well as their innocence. In the end they became self-conscious, guilt-ridden creatures divided against themselves, 46 with a sense of being souls locked in combat with recalcitrant, alien, organic instincts. 47 They transformed themselves, in short, into fallen Adams at odds with their bodies.

The fate that befell this race of slaves gradually befell its masters. Slave rebellions eventually destroyed the old, naive aristocracy and replaced it with a class of slave- priests who managed to preserve the state they first attacked by diverting, through Christian faith, the course of aggression from their own, newly acquired authority onto the rebellious, anticultural habits of those they led. ~ The priest managed to make his followers believe that their leaden unhappiness was owing to their guilty nature. He thus succeeded in keeping intact the harsh selective conditions that were unconsciously breeding guilty, self-aware, neurotic "men" from a stock of innocent, naive, healthy "beasts." Nietzsche's argument in The Antichrist and On the Genealogy of Morals is, in effect, that the era of the Fall is the era of Christian faith. Augustine's neurotic City of Man is Nietzsche's Christian society.

In an age to come the transformations of the race from savages into men adjusted to the demands of culture may have proceeded far enough to allow for a new, fully conscious, less cruel, and more careful principle of selection. Leaders instinctually committed to the tasks of culture may replace our priests who are, at best, half- savages trying to protect themselves with their official offices and their orthodox faiths from the evolutionary stresses they impose on others. 49 Should that happen, a new evolutionary era would open in which "men" would be consciously bred into "supermen." Such "supermen" would feel as much at home in the confines of culture as their ancestors had felt in the wilds. The long, arduous advance of the race from nature to culture would be complete. With its completion a correction of the fall into neurotic self-division would have already been effected. A self-conscious, knowing innocence of mind and wholeness of purpose would have been achieved. All that is

45 Ibid., pp. 824-26. "~ Ibid., pp. 828-829. 47 Ibid., pp. 824-26.

Ibid., pp. 866---69. 49 Ibid., pp. 1055-58, 1200-1201.


needed to inaugurate that age is a reorganization of society and an antichrist with a new set of values to do for "men" what Christ did for "beasts."

IV. Nietzsche's historiography amounts to a naturalistic Augustinian theory of history. How he managed to construct such a position is explained by the relations between his teleology and his cosmology.

The only teleological principle Nietzsche recognizes is the "will-to-power." It is, among other things, an evolutionary principle. One of its prime aims is novelty. If the power of the world were infinite, he writes, it would have a capacity for infinite new- ness (Neuheit). The very notion of power, however, excludes the notion of the infinite, and so the world--in spite of the teleology that informs i t--must repeat itself. 5~ Because power, or the will to it, promotes the rise of the novel, those in whom it expresses itself most forcefully seldom reproduce. 5~ When they do, they try to build themselves into something different and higher. 52 Mere reproduction is aimless. It represents, indeed, exhaustion of an organism's will. There is no innate desire for personal survival, let alone for a vicarious immortality through reproduction. 53 There is, then, no conservative eros, or lust, or what Schopenhauer called the will-to-live. The only purposes resident in the cosmos are those once credited to culture and the soul, or what Augustine termed our will. The will-to-power is, in essence, an organic teleology of the Platonic-Christian soul: the agent of culture. Thus, just as the world is not pictorial appearances, for Nietzsche, so it is not ruled by a conservative instinct. It is neither "representation" nor "will." Both of Schopenhauer's characterizations of it are false.

Because new, teleologically advanced forms of life are unstable and have no interest in perpetuating themselves, they, the most "fit," often fail to survive. 54 They suffer from a competitive disadvantage with the mediocre. Thus an explanation is needed for why, in the case of man, a long period of continued evolutionary development has taken place. The usual rule is that higher types die out while species stabilize themselves in aimless repetition. Man, the only cultural animal, has been an exception to this rule because he has become his own breeder or selector. In the form of the state he has replaced natural conditions of selectivity with new ones that promote and protect change. The "cage of culture" that he has built for himself supports the experiments of the will-to-power. Thus he is, unlike others, an "unfinished species." Of course there may come a time when our faculties and instincts become so well adapted to the selective conditions of our civilization that we will no longer advance as a race. That calamity may be near, Nietzsche warns. We may decline into "last men," becoming as stabilized as any other species. 55 Thus a new organization of our culture is needed in which fully conscious, artificial principles of selectivity replace the careless, unconscious principles of the past. He endorses Socrates' call for political leaders who will do for us and our recalcitrant habits what expert animal breeders have done for colts and calves. 56 Unless novel conditions of selectivity are instituted, the novel aims of the

5o Ibid., 3 : 459. ~t Ibid., 2:740--41. 5~ Ibid., pp. 369-72,457. 53 Ibid., pp. 115-16,215,578.

Ibid., pp. 998-99. ss Ibid., pp. 661-62; 740-41; 1225-28.

Apology 20a.


will-to-power will cease to find continuous expression in history. Higher types will still appear by chance from time to time but only to die out. The race will not advance, and the present will no longer be an improvement upon the past.

Nietzsche's warning on this point does not constitute a denial of progress. It therefore does not represent the antievolutionary, "suprahistoricai" point of view that Kaufman claims it does. 57 Nietzsche is committed to the thesis that our history as a race illustrates the successful workings of an evolutionary will-to-power and that it may well continue to do so. Since value must be measured in terms of a teleology, our history is the story of progress. It is the story of our becoming cultural animals; and because the novel teleology of culture is really the generally unsupported, thwarted teleology of organic nature, our seeming ascent from nature is actually a case of nature having been im- proved. Culture is nothing opposed to nature. It is the successful carrier of nature's thwarted purposes and so is nature repaired--just as, conversely, nature is broken culture. As cultural animals we are like mended pieces of art. ~8 For all our neuroses we are, then, an improvement upon the beasts who were our ancestors.

The doctrine of eternal recurrence is the key support Nietzsche offers for this benign view of the relationship between culture and nature. Thus it is the ally, not the enemy, of his historiography. If all events repeat themselves in sequence an infinite number of times, then all parts of the world must enjoy a queer but genuine form of immortality. Nothing exists throughout time, but everything nonetheless lives its life for an endless number of moments. The world possesses one of the chief traditional traits of Being, and so the eternal return of the same gives to "appearances" the status of "realities." In doing that it undermines, and as a doctrine replaces, an ontological duality that Nietz- sche objects to. At the same time it eliminates a tormenting teleological duality. It does for the world, in a purely mechanical manner and with greater success, what the conservative force of e r o s was credited with doing by Plato, Augustine, and Schopenhauer. If all things are guaranteed a genuine immortality, then there is obviously no point in their trying to gain a vicarious, bogus immortality through cyclical reproductions. No creature has a reason to strive after an inferior version of a property it already has. The teleology of Augustine's fallen nature and Schopenhauer's hellish world are eliminated. All that is left is the rival prupose of the culture-building soul, now recognized as an organic purpose latent in living tissue. Eternal return of the same allows apparently mortal but actually immortal creatures to assume a teleology that was once exclusively credited to supraorganic beings. It allows, in short, for a naturalistic but still purposeful interpretation of our evolutionary ascent to culture. In Nietzsche's own terms it reconciles materialism with Platonism by allowing for an antimetaphysical yet artistic view of life. 59

Such an interpretation is free of the disturbing aspects of Augustine's historiography that have been mentioned. If the only teleology in the world is the teleology of culture, then an ascent from "nature" need not give rise to a sense of conflict within us that, barring divine intervention, must be permanent. We can look forward to a time when the old habits of our faculties that are incompatible with our civilization will be out- grown. At that time our self-division should end. If further evolution in a new, reorga- nized social setting should occur, new stresses would undoubtedly be felt; they, how-

57 Nietzsche: Philosopher. Psychologist. Antichrist, p. 127. Werke, 1:327-44.

59 Ibid., 3:481.


ever, would be mitigated by a regimen of breeding that would substitute for the past 's careless maimings, malignings, and manglings of man a fully conscious, solicitous aid- ing of his instincts and faculties. The bright prospect of a new era of conscious innocence is not marred by the thought that our chronic self-division need be permanent. At the same time, and for the same reasons, we need not think of our. advance to culture in thanatological terms. Since there is no natural teleology opposed to that of culture, our growing racial maturation is not hostile to life. There are no conservative instincts we have to forswear. Indeed, the saintly ideals of the Christian era were the exact reverse of what their worshipers imagined them to be. 6~ They were actually means of enhancing life; and although they produced the disease of a bad conscience, that disease is to be thought of as a form of pregnancy that fosters rather than thwarts our deepest biological impulses. 6'

Apart from its role in helping Nietzsche to construct a benign, naturalistic vision of our ascent to culture, the doctrine of eternal recurrence performs still other services in behalf of his historiography. Considered purely as a doctrine it is itself of evolutionary significance. The world-weary will find it, Nietzsche stresses, a shattering notion that must paralyze and crush them. 62 A demonstration of its truth would weed the race, leaving the strong intact while culling the weak. Indeed, as a mere thought it serves as a

9 selective principle. 63 The preaching of it should thus abet further development- -and Nietzsche's spokesman, Zarathustra, proclaims it with that point in mind. The evolutionary rise of "men" to "supermen" begins with an announcement of a cyclical cosmology that, far from showing history to be an endless series of zeros, is itself of new selective value. It is laden with the promise of promoting a racial transformation of epochal dimensions. To those strong enough to welcome the thought that they must live again as they have lived before, an advantage will accrue. They will lose whatever cowardly habits they may have acquired that only serve to keep them alive. They will realize that they can afford to live dangerously without concern for mere survival. They will dare to experiment with themselves, and as a result evolution will be fostered. Old life-preserving illusions, lies, and faiths, for example, will be given up in favor of useless tenets that are accepted, not for their survival value, but simply because they are thought to be true. Our organisms were originally adapted to error, and the dangerous search for truth among modern scientists therefore represents a recent evolutionary advance. 64 The belief in eternal recurrence can only promote that advance, and so it is a key doctrine in the historical effort to rid the race of the neuroses induced in it by those old religious faiths, or lies, that arise from a cowardly desire not to know the dangerous truth. 65 Then, too, an acceptance of the doctrine must end the ancient practice of deni- grating life on the ground that it is merely temporary. 66 The good news of Nietzsche's counter-Christian gospel is that we enjoy already an eternal life on earth. Should that thought spread, its acceptance would mark a new epoch in human attitudes and "shoot" our history in two. So, even in this respect, Nietzsche's cyclical cosmology is an inte- gral part of his evolutionary historiography.

6o Ibid., 2 :861 -62 . 6. ibid., pp. 829-30. 62 Ibid., pp. 202-3; 3:856. 63 Ibid., 3 : 873.

Ibid., 2 :116-18 . Ibid., pp. 1211-12, 1220-22.

66 Ibid., 3 : 680.


Still, it may be objected that Nietzsche does write of a "suprahistoricar' point of view and that he does connect that view with his doctrine of eternal return. He writes that all individual evaluations, all ordinary yea-and nay-sayings, represent temporal, historical perspectives of the will-to-power in which the interests of some type of life is ex- pressed. 67 These evaluations may hold some moments or stages of history to be better than others. In itself, however, everything that is only says yes. The "ring's will" wants woe, hell, hatred, and tombs as well as joy. 6s The reason it does is that all things move in "a great ring" and therefore return to be themselves. The nay-sayer who says no to his life will, by living again his nay-saying role, say yes to himself--so long, that is, as he accepts his fate and wants the doctrine of eternal recurrence to he true. Should anyone adopt the point of view of all types and stages of life, he would say yes not only to himself but to everything else as well. He would affirm all evaluations of the will-to- power, wishing to see the forms of life they express repeated endlessly. In this sense of affirmation he would find all moments in the evolution of life to be of equal worth. Accordingly, he would subscribe to a doctrine of the democracy of time. This "suprahistoricar' point of view is that of Zarathustra, who affirms all the nays as well as the yeas of his tory . 69

Is, then, the doctrine of eternal recurrence diverted in this important case from its role in supporting a historiography that sees the present as an improvement upon the past? If not, is it to be seen as some kind of moral purgative only, not a cosmological thesis? When the niceties of Zarathustra's point of view are considered, the answer to these questions must be no. Anyone who rises above the interests of the type of life that he represents to contemplate unending cycles of time assumes a peculiar position. He contemplates the universe apart from any perspective of the will-to-power. He is thus like Schopenhauer's genius who looks at the world as a limited whole and who, free of the normal teleology that controls his mind, offers an utterly objective judgment on the value of existence. Zarathustra's judgment is the opposite of Schopenhauer's genius. He has looked inside that most world-renouncing of all possible modes of thought and found there an opposite ideal: that of the world-approving, exuberant, vivacious man. TM He has found that ideal because as he contemplates the cycles of time he realizes that they are not governed by an irrational, conservative teleology. He realizes, too, that their lack of an aim is not to be traced to a failure of the whole of existence to acquire a trait of its parts. He understands that Schopenhauer's irrational, defective teleology is no teleology at all. The cyclic return of the same is simply an innocent necessity arising from the finitude of power in an endless universe. An acceptance of that necessity is only an acceptance of fate and does not evince any loyalty to, or governance by, a n irrational purpose opposed to the evolutionary goals of the will-to-power. In affirming the return of the same Zarathustra is not guilty, as Schopenhauer would have him be, of betraying the cause of history and culture. On the contrary, at the same time that he accepts a cyclical necessity Zarathustra can affirm in all good conscience the evolutionary changes within a span of life, for he sees that their novelties, far from being in sickly opposition to a conservative instinct, are actually an expression of the only purpose life has. His "suprahistorical" point of view is not one in which an evolutionary

67 Ibid., 2 : 968. Ibid., pp. 556-57. Ibid., pp. 544-51.

7o Ibid., p. 617.


theory of history is denied. It is a point of view in which man accepts his long- recognized lot as a novelty-making creature in a cyclical cosmos. In this sense it is the point of view of a person who has reconciled within himself the rival claims upon him of "culture" and "nature." Since that reconciliation would in traditional terms mark the end of psychic conflict, and so would signal a correction of the effects of the Fall, Zarathustra's attitude is of historical sigriificance. As a termporal accomplishment it points to a closing of the era of the neurotic City of Man in which a linear cultural history was felt to be in conflict with the natural cycles of time and life.

To see that Nietzsche is embellishing rather than betraying his historiography when he credits to Zarathustra a love of fated returns it is only necessary to consider a figure he uses. The world-approving, exuberant man who says yes to all moments of time is in the position of Schopenhauer's play-going genius. He is like, Nietzsche suggests, a man in a theater who wants the whole piece and play (Schauspiel) that is life repeated to all eternity. 7t If a play-goer so likes a comic drama that he wants to see it from start to finish again and again he need not deny that it has a plot or hold that its characters are in error when they think themselves better off at the end than they were at the start. He may well endorse, wholeheartedly, that sentiment while still finding all the scenes cru- cial to the play's integrity and of equal worth. If life is like a play, then change and continuity are compatible. Any growth experienced by an actor may be accepted as genuine, though it be the very growth, now obliterated and lost even to memory, under- gone during a prior performance. That the play of life never closes guarantees to us, its actors and actresses, an eternal engagement. An engagement, however, is not a performance. The one may be endless, with neither start nor finish, but the other is not. The world--like a performance---does develop, but--l ike an engagement--i t never began. It simply plays its play forever. 72 Thus none of us is deprived of the right to say of his life that it has a beginning, middle, and end and is filled with significant change. Nor would any of us be deprived of that right should we, somehow, climb down from our stage to gaze at ourselves and experience such joy that we would want to repeat our roles forever. Such a world-approving perspective would commit us to the judgment that the painful but still wonderful story of our progressive ascent to culture deserves to be told again and again. Our approval would certainly not require of us a nihilistic stance in which we criticize that story as false and, in so doing, pronounce our lives so many meaningless zeros. Nietzsche's point is that the play of life deserves its eternal engagement precisely because in its finite changes of scene the only value existence has is revealed. If one should disagree with that judgment, it would be only because one was infected with a nihilistic attitude. It would not be because one had been forced to disagree by the laws of logic. The properties of an eternal engagement are not those of a temporal performance. Nietzsche's doctrine is the perfectly intelligible one that repetition is only a preservative and would destroy nothing--not even the novelties of an evolutionary sequence. Thus his cosmology remains in harmony with his theory of history. Neither strand of his thought has to be labeled an appearance masking a deeper reality. Like the Nietzschean "appearances" they are, both are "realities."

Mills College

71 Ibid., p. 617. 72 Ibid., 3 : 703-4.

clegg, jerry s. - nietzsche and the ascent of man in a cyclical cosmos

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