Nietzsche’s Final Teaching

285 Pages·2017·1.86 MB·English

by  Michael Allen Gillespie

NIETZSCHE’S FINAL TEACHING
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Nietzsche’s Final Teaching
MICHAEL ALLEN GILLESPIE
The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London
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The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2017 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For
more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.
Published 2017
Printed in the United States of America
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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-47688-9 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-47691-9 (e-book)
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226476919.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gillespie, Michael Allen, author.
Title: Nietzsche’s final teaching / Michael Allen Gillespie.
Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016049886 | ISBN 9780226476889 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226476919
(e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844–1900. | Nihilism.
Classification: LCC B3317 .G5155 2017 | DDC 193—dc23 LC record available at
https://lccn.loc.gov/2016049886
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).
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CONTENTS
Preface
INTRODUCTION
Nietzsche’s Deepest Thought
NIHILISM AND THE SUPERHUMAN
Nietzsche and the Anthropology of Nihilism
Slouching toward Bethlehem to Be Born: On the Nature and Meaning of
Nietzsche’s Übermensch
NIETZSCHE AS TEACHER OF THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE
What Was I Thinking? Nietzsche’s New Prefaces of 1886
Nietzsche’s Musical Politics
Life as Music: Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo
NIETZSCHE’S FINAL TEACHING IN CONTEXT
Nietzsche and Dostoevsky on Nihilism and the Superhuman
Nietzsche and Plato on the Formation of a Warrior Aristocracy
CONCLUSION
What Remains
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List of Abbreviations
Notes
Index
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PREFACE
I first encountered the work of Friedrich Nietzsche as a first-year college
student. The excitement and enthusiasm that that experience engendered is
hard to describe or recapture, but it was real and compelling. Nietzsche
speaks to the reader with an intimacy that is unusual among authors and
unique among philosophers. When first reading Nietzsche, one feels as if one
is being invited into a secret society, offered knowledge and insight available
only to a select few, and allowed to experience feelings unknown to the rest
of humanity. To read Nietzsche is to be suffused with a sense of soaring
above the world and looking down on everything and everyone. To read
Nietzsche especially when young is often simply to be carried away.
When so gloriously flying over humanity, however, it is difficult if not
impossible to maintain any critical distance on oneself or on the author. I
certainly had none in those faraway days. Such enthusiasm is not accidental.
Nietzsche’s goal is not to persuade but to enthuse, entrance, and overpower
the reader, to initiate him into sacred mysteries and impel him to action. For
many he is hard to resist. Over time, however, the attentive reader
experiences a nagging suspicion that he has missed something, that
exhilaration cannot be all of the story, that Nietzsche demands something
more. The suspicion arises, to paraphrase the subtitle of Zarathustra, that
Nietzsche does indeed write for all and for none, and that if one is not
suspicious and critical, if one does not read Nietzsche “as good old classicists
read their Horace,” as he puts it in Ecce Homo, one will simply be taken in
(KGW VI 3:303).1 As I have gotten older and turned a more critical eye not
only on Nietzsche but also on my own reaction to Nietzsche, I have had to
confront questions that in my initial enthusiasm I did not even realize existed.
I have asked myself again and again, what is so compelling about his books?
Where do his haunting exhortations lead? Is this all just a virtuoso
performance that signifies nothing, or at least nothing real, or is there some
fundamental teaching that he means to impart? And if so, what is it, and
where does he want to take humanity? I wish that I could say that after forty-
five years of effort I had final answers to these questions, but that would be
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an exaggeration.
Nietzsche tells us repeatedly that he thinks the forbidden and traverses
entire lands of thinking that others do not dare to enter, and raises questions
that others are unable to endure. I think that this is correct and explains in
part his phenomenal impact. On the surface Nietzsche’s texts are filled with
images and ideas that whirl about and are borne aloft by the flames of his
passion, but underneath this spectacular bonfire, questions pile upon
questions, relentlessly, burning red hot. Indeed, for one who has gained some
distance on Nietzsche, Nietzsche himself becomes questionable, questionable
in ways that admit of no unequivocal answers. He himself seems to be on
fire.
The question of questions and of questioning is itself close to Nietzsche’s
heart. At the beginning of Beyond Good and Evil, he asks, “Who among us
here is Oedipus? Who is the Sphinx?” (KGW VI 2:10) The depth and
importance of this question is hard to exaggerate. It is a question that in a
sense goes to the heart of thinking and reveals its dangers. Oedipus, as he
first appears on Sophocles’ stage, describes himself as the one whom all men
call great, great not because of his physical prowess but because of his ability
to solve riddles and answer questions. And yet what he himself does not
realize is that he is the greatest of all riddles, the deepest of all questions. And
when he stumbles on the question of his own identity, he is driven by his own
hubris to seek an answer to it, fatefully and disastrously, destroyed in
horrifying fashion by his own virtue. Nietzsche like Oedipus lived in
questions, and he too happened upon the question of himself. Who was he?
What was his role in life? What was his task or calling?
Many of us at one time or another face these questions. Nietzsche asked
himself these questions over and over, as his repeated autobiographical
efforts demonstrate. His restless movement from one field to another at
university, his dissatisfaction with theology and his turn to classical
philology, and then despite his early success, his turn to philosophy and
cultural criticism; his enthusiasm for the Wagnerian project, and his
subsequent critique of everything Wagnerian, his hopes for the future of
Germany followed by his rejection of everything German—all bespeak a
restlessness in search of a goal, someone on a quest for he knows not what,
constantly dissatisfied, constantly moving on, repeatedly leaving things
undone. However, when all else had failed and his life had come to a crisis,
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physically near death, and intellectually isolated and forgotten, Nietzsche
found what he came to believe was the answer to his questions, and from that
point forward he was a man possessed, caught up in his fate as inescapably as
Oedipus, and in many respects just as tragically and disastrously. In that
moment he became convinced not only that he had a task that could give
meaning to his life, but that this task was of world-historical importance, and
that his role was equal to that of Socrates, Buddha, or Christ. In his view, and
contrary to what many commentators today suggest, this task was not merely
a task of thinking but also of doing, deeply practical and political.
Nietzsche’s goal was not a professor’s goal or even a poet’s or philosopher’s
goal. He did not intend merely to fence with ideas, even with the ideas of the
greatest poets and philosophers. His task, he came to believe, was nothing
less than the revaluation of all values, the complete transformation of
European civilization.
Not only did he recognize his goal but also the means to attain it, and they
were not pretty. He quickly came to see that to give birth to a new Europe,
the old Europe had to be destroyed. Such a destruction in his view was in any
case inevitable and indeed was already under way. His hope was that out of
the wars he saw coming a hardened elite would arise who would hear and
respond to his message giving birth to a group of superhuman creators. Only
in this way could the decadence and degeneracy of the current nihilistic world
be overcome.
Nietzsche was also well aware that the only means he had at his disposal
were pen and paper. Fortunately or unfortunately depending on one’s point of
view, he had a capacity for using them that has seldom been equaled. With
these tools alone, he sought to set in motion the development of an elite who
would construct a new world on the rubble nihilism would leave in its wake.
The pursuit of this goal was his sole and unrelenting task from 1881 until he
slipped into madness in early 1889. It would not be too great an exaggeration
to say that in this effort he expended all of his life force trying to fully
articulate his teaching and foster the apocalyptic transformation it entailed.
This volume is an attempt to lay out Nietzsche’s final teaching. It is by no
means a full or comprehensive account. That would require many, many
more pages. Nietzsche claims with some justification to say more in ten
sentences than others say in a book (TI, KGW VI 3:147). It thus seems
unlikely that I can encapsulate and explicate everything that Nietzsche says in
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seven books in a single volume. This volume instead consists of a series of
essays that try to come to terms with what I take to be the principal ideas that
shaped Nietzsche’s final project.
The volume is divided into five parts. In the introductory essay,
“Nietzsche’s Deepest Thought,” I describe the moment of insight that gave
rise to the idea of the eternal recurrence of the same. It was this idea, I argue,
that gave his final teaching its coherence and direction, providing the basis
for an (anti-)metaphysics that rejects traditional metaphysics but still operates
within the larger horizon of metaphysics, constituting a new metaphysica
generalis (ontology and logic) and a new metaphysica specialis (theology,
cosmology, and anthropology). I thus suggest that Nietzsche’s rejection of
systems and systematizers does not mean that his own thought is simply a
disordered collection of aphorisms, as has often been suggested, but (at least
from Zarathustra onward) a comprehensive whole shaped and guided by a
poetic/musical logic.
The second part of the book, “Nihilism and the Superhuman,” looks at the
new anthropology that Nietzsche deploys in his efforts to come to terms with
the nihilistic consequences of the death of the Christian God in Thus Spoke
Zarathustra. In the first essay in this part, “Nietzsche and the Anthropology
of Nihilism,” I argue that while Nietzsche did not use the term “nihilism” in
print until 1886, his understanding of the forms of nihilism was rooted in the
anthropology that he laid out at the beginning of Zarathustra. This
anthropology not only clarifies the character and varieties of nihilism but also
reveals the necessity of the great decision that confronts humanity in the
aftermath of the death of God. Humans, in Nietzsche’s view, must choose
between the last man and the Übermensch.2 I examine the reasons Nietzsche
believes it is necessary to choose the latter, despite what he readily admits are
the cataclysmic consequences of this choice.
In the following essay, “Slouching toward Bethlehem to Be Born: On the
Nature and Meaning of Nietzsche’s Übermensch,” I lay out in greater detail
how Nietzsche believes this Übermensch will come to be, and focus in
particular on the extraordinary burden that the Übermensch must bear in
order to escape from the dead hand of the past and create a new world, what
he has to do in order to become active and not merely reactive, and thus
become truly creative rather than driven by the spirit of revenge.
The next part of the book examines Nietzsche’s acceptance of his own
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