Abstract
The argument advanced in this essay is that Hegel and Nietzsche’s method of critical enquiry is not only consonant but embraces a concept of practical freedom that for both philosophers tethers the affective will to the empty formalism of the Kantian rational will. Defining his own philosophical practice as a ‘yea-saying to opposition and war’ (Ecce Homo), Nietzsche engages in a rigorous discipline of thought that proceeds on the dialectical principle of affirmative negation, thereby recuperating what Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit refers to as ‘the labour of the negative’. Contrary to Deleuze’s emphatically anti-Hegelian reading of Nietzsche, it is contended that Nietzsche’s yes is the fruit of a cruel and resolutely dialectical no – a no that not only undergirds his affirmative ideal but constitutes the sine qua non of his ethical project of self-overcoming.
Ours is a birth-time and a period of transition to a new era. Spirit has broken with the world it has hitherto inhabited and imagined, and is of a mind to submerge it in the past, and in the labour of its own transformation. (Hegel, 1977: 11)
Hegel and Nietzsche have long been held to be fundamentally irreconcilable, but the voice of dissent grows ever louder. 1 Robert Williams (2012) and Will Dudley (2002), whose recent monographs aim at a rapprochement between the two philosophers, are a case in point. The former seeks to establish points of convergence in the specific areas of tragedy, recognition and the ‘death of God’; the latter in the philosophers’ shared rejection of Kantian autonomy as heteronomously thwarted by internal and external necessity, and in their locating of true freedom in the practice of philosophy. Dudley goes on to argue, however, that Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s conceptions and practices of philosophy are so radically distinct as to compromise their respective refinements on Kant’s notion of freedom, an argument with which my essay is emphatically at odds. It is my contention that Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s methods of critical enquiry are not only consonant but embrace a concept of practical freedom that for both philosophers tethers the affective will to the empty formalism of the Kantian rational will. Defining his own philosophical practice as a ‘yea-saying to opposition and war’ (1988, 6: 313), 2 Nietzsche engages in a discipline of thought that proceeds on the dialectical principle of affirmative negation, and in doing so recuperates Hegel’s (1977: 10) ‘labour of the negative’.
For Gilles Deleuze, upon whose authority the Hegel versus Nietzsche camp rest their case, affirmative negation is quite simply an oxymoron. In his seminal study Nietzsche and Philosophy Deleuze derides what he loosely and reductively understands as Hegel’s dialectical negation of a negation, 3 and on the basis of this simplification asserts that Nietzsche’s philosophy of affirmation is ‘resolutely anti-dialectical’. Unless we recognize the ‘anti-Hegelianism [that] runs throughout Nietzsche’s work as its cutting edge’, writes Deleuze, ‘Nietzsche’s philosophy remains abstract and barely comprehensible’ (1986: 8). This is a very large, if not preposterous claim and one which flies in the face of Walter Kaufmann’s earlier characterization of Nietzsche as a ‘dialectical monist’ (1974: 235). 4 Deleuze’s chief textual support for his anti-dialectical stance is Nietzsche’s remark in Ecce Homo (1988, 6: 310) concerning the ‘offensively Hegelian’ odour of his first publication, The Birth of Tragedy. At the heart of the young Basel professor’s inaugural work is a dialectical representation of Greek tragedy as the sublated unity of Dionysus and Apollo, Nietzsche’s respective emblems for the primordial One and the principle of individuation, or, in Hegelian terms, undifferentiated substance and subject. Nevertheless, while it is evident that in the development of Nietzsche’s thought antithesis dissolves into differential relation, the movement of negation upon which the Hegelian dialectic turns retains a pivotal position in Nietzsche’s ethics of self-overcoming. To insist, as Deleuze insists, that ‘Nietzsche’s “yes” is opposed to the dialectical “no”; affirmation to dialectical negation … [and] lightness, dance, to dialectical responsibilities’ (1986: 9, emphasis added), is to celebrate Nietzsche’s affirmative ideal while disregarding the means by which such an ideal is to be realized.
Nietzsche’s ‘yes’ was the fruit of a cruel and resolutely dialectical ‘no’, a ‘no’ moreover to the binary mode of argumentation unwittingly displayed in Deleuze’s stout defence of the alleged philosophical ‘dancer’. In the opening aphorism of Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche dismantles the type of binary oppositions routinely employed by metaphysicians and substitutes organic relation for crude opposition. ‘How can something originate in its opposite’, he asks, ‘for example, rationality in irrationality, the sentient in the dead, logic in illogic … truth in error?’ Such oppositions, he argues, ‘are only sublimations in which the basic element appears to have almost evaporated and which crystallizes only under the keenest observation’ (1988, 2: 23–4). Accordingly, the exultant ‘yes’ which Deleuze opposes to Hegel’s dialectical ‘no’ needs to be approached with considerable circumspection. As Nietzsche cautions, a philosophical ideal must always be viewed in light of the physiological need of the one who promotes it (1988, 3: 621), and elsewhere confides that the need to alleviate the burden of ‘sickness, loneliness, isolation, [and] acedia’ spawned the fictitious ‘free spirit’ (1988, 2: 15) with which Deleuze is so patently enamoured. From observations/confessions such as these, one can justifiably infer that Nietzsche’s rhetorical flourishes and staged joie de vivre mask an underlying need which his entire post-Birth of Tragedy output was committed not only to unmasking but quashing through a rigorous discipline of self-negation. ‘Whatever I create, and however much I love it’, declares Zarathustra in his discourse ‘On Self-Overcoming’, ‘soon must I be opposed to it, and to my love’ (1988, 4: 148).
Self-negation, which for Nietzsche is the precondition of ‘self-overcoming’, corresponds to Hegel’s ‘labour of the negative’. A critical method whereby ‘the concrete particular’ or particular form is negated and transformed into the ‘concrete universal’ of which it is a particularized instantiation, the labour of the negative requires a thoroughgoing fastidiousness of speculative thought. ‘By the removal and negation of the shell’, elucidates Hegel in his Science of Logic, ‘the kernel within the sense-percept is brought to the light’ (1892: 104). This negation of particular form to reveal the kernel or ‘universal’ that lies within it is a cognitive stripping away of erroneous philosophical postulates and positions that have nevertheless contributed to ‘the progressive unfolding of truth’ (1977: 2). 5 And for all his withering condescension towards ‘philosophical labourers’, Nietzsche has sufficient intellectual honesty to acknowledge the indispensable groundwork of those who labour in the ‘noble’ tradition of Kant and Hegel (1988, 5: 144). His own philosophical method, a veritable demolition of systems and categories, is the labour of the negative par excellence, and in his retrospective Ecce Homo (1988, 6: 265), Nietzsche lays claim to ‘a dialectician’s clarity’, the ‘cold-blooded’ ruthlessness of which typifies his caustic, if humorously irreverent style. The boisterous belligerence of his hermeneutics of suspicion should not, however, blind one to those aspects of Nietzsche’s thought which he arguably inherited from thinkers he was wont to deride. It was, for example, Hegel not Nietzsche who first railed against the moral prejudices of philosophers. Deploring the philosophical propensity of his peers towards moral edification rather than rational insight, Hegel contemns the ‘rapturous haziness’ of indeterminate abstractions such as ‘the holy’ and ‘the eternal’ as an appeal to feeling rather than understanding (1977: 4–6). Eighty years later, Nietzsche would renew Hegel’s attack but with far more devastating effect. Diagnosing ‘the most abstruse metaphysical assertions of a philosopher’ as symptomatic of an unconscious moral disposition, Nietzsche notoriously dismissed all philosophical works as will to power tricked out in epistemological finery (1988, 5: 20).
If thought, in its pursuit of knowledge, is the labour of the negative, so too is spirit, for it is in thought, avers Hegel, that spirit has its active being. Without thought, spirit has no means of coming to consciousness of itself, and without spirit, in which alone thinking has its being (1977: 14), there can be no thought. Thought is thus the mediating activity of spirit’s self-recognition; it is the means by which spirit’s undifferentiated substance actualizes and differentiates itself by becoming subject. To adopt the formulation used by Hegel in his preface to the Phenomenology, spirit’s ‘reflection into self’ is the transition from being ‘in itself’ to being ‘for itself’; it is the moment when spirit ‘relates itself to itself’ and thus becomes determinate. Such self-reflection is ‘the moment of the “I” which is for itself pure negativity’ (1977: 11–12), for when substance posits itself as ‘other’ and the unawakened ‘I’ becomes conscious of its subject–object bifurcation, spirit’s internecine but transformational battle within itself commences. And in the ‘objectivity negative to knowing’ (1977: 21), spirit’s rite of passage from innocence to experience and from complacency to contestation is effected. As Hegel affirms in his lectures on the philosophy of history, self-consciousness is spirit’s ‘judgment of its own nature and, at the same time, the operation of coming to itself, to produce itself, to make itself (actually) into that which it is in itself (potentially)’ (1953: 23 6 ). This formative–transformative negativity, or negation as the necessary (but, as we shall see, far from sufficient) condition for spirit’s creative act of self-realization, is a central tenet of Zarathustra’s teaching. Literalizing spirit’s ‘operation of coming to itself’ as a form of invasive surgery, Nietzsche’s protagonist warns that ‘Spirit is life which itself cutteth into life; by its own torment doth it increaseth its own knowledge’ (1988, 4: 134). Only through violent confrontation with itself can spirit, through the negative, self-critical mediation of thought, cut free its constitutive freedom and tackle the existential imperative of making itself into that which it is in itself, or, to borrow the subtitle to Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, of learning ‘how to become what you are’.
Freedom, will, and the labour of the negative
Freedom is the sole truth of Spirit. (Hegel, 1953: 22) O my soul, I gave back to thee freedom over the created and the uncreated. (Nietzsche, 1988, 4: 278)
Hegel attributes to Christianity the realization that ‘man as man is free and that freedom of Spirit is the very essence of man’s nature’ (1953: 24). In its Christianized form, ‘spirit’ or the ‘Holy Spirit’ is the divine breath or wind with which man is, or ought to be, imbued. Secularized as mind or thought, spirit, as defined by Hegel, is the ‘rational and necessary will’ of the Idea (1953: 10) and the principal means by which the latter is realized. This Idea is freedom:
Freedom alone is the purpose which realizes and fulfils itself, the only enduring pole in the change of events and conditions, the only true efficient principle that pervades the whole. This final aim is God’s purpose with the world. But God is the absolutely perfect Being and can, therefore, will nothing but Himself, His own will. The nature of His own will, His own nature, is what we here call the Idea of freedom. Thus we translate the language of religion into that of philosophy. (1953: 25)
In the rhetoric of Zarathustra, the language of religion is parodied and translated into the language of will to power, and in a striking coincidence of thought, Nietzsche, like Hegel, identifies the ‘efficient principle’ of freedom with the equally efficient and equally pervasive principle of will: ‘Willing liberates: that is the true teaching of will and freedom – thus Zarathustra teaches it’ (1988, 4: 111). 7 But if freedom is of the essence of will and will of the essence of freedom, it is necessary to differentiate between two distinct but not mutually exclusive types of will: the rational will of mind or spirit and the non-rational will of the affects. In this section of my essay, correspondences will be drawn between Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s delineations of the ‘rational and necessary will’ of spirit in its guise as thought, while in the subsequent section, the efficacy of the affective will as handmaiden to the rational will in spirit’s phenomenological progression to a higher form of being will be examined. In both discussions, Zarathustra will be the focus of enquiry.
Freedom of spirit, then, which for both philosophers under discussion is the quintessence of human nature, is the freedom to will its ‘own will’, its ‘own nature’, and thereby realize and fulfil its purpose in the world. This purpose, for Nietzsche as for Hegel, cannot be fulfilled until spirit has judged for itself the true nature of its freedom. Hegel is very clear about this in his lectures on natural right:
Particular self-determination, as the inward self-determination of the will that is for itself, and as a mode of self-determination that is intended to be realized, is known by the subject and is its purpose; [it is] a judgment that in its determinacy comprises universal thought. (1995: 109, emphasis in the original)
Only when spirit has judged (in the sense of rationally determined) the nature of its freedom can it will its ‘own nature’ and so determine (in the sense of objectively realize) its immanent freedom. ‘Canst thou give unto thyself thy bad and thy good, and set up thy will as a law over thee?’ demands Zarathustra; ‘Canst thou be judge of thyself, and avenger of thy law?’ (1988, 4: 81). Correspondingly, Hegel states in his Logic that ‘freedom means that the other thing with which you deal is a second self – so that you never leave your own ground but give the law to yourself’ (1892: 49). 8 These subjective moral judgements are neither relative nor self-interested but predicated on what Hegel refers to as ‘universal thought’ or ‘a higher universal’ (1953: 39), and Zarathustra as a ‘ruling thought’ (1988: 4: 99). Having reached this judgement, however, spirit will often find itself in conflict with the (spent) cultural spirit of the age (Zeitgeist), and it is notable how forcefully both Hegel and Nietzsche impress upon their readers the exigent need for spirit’s regeneration. In his prefatory preamble to the Phenomenology, Hegel adverts to spirit’s impoverished ‘sense of solid and substantial being’ and excoriates contemporary scientists and scholars for ‘shroud[ing] in a mist the manifold variety of [man’s] earthly existence and of thought’, rather than confining the spirit of enquiry to ‘Notion and Necessity as products of that reflection which is at home only in the finite’ (1977: 4–5). In a similar vein, we find Zarathustra in the early stages of his prologue exhorting the people to ‘remain true to the earth’ (1988, 4: 15), and vilifying the poverty and complacency of spirit, epitomized by the ‘last men’, which has lost both its integrity and any real sense of active being in the world (1988, 4: 19–20).
To recover its integrity, liberate its innate freedom and ascend to a higher form of being, spirit as thought must first negate the shell of ethical norms within which it has ossified. As Hegel astutely observes, the moral law of a people is intrinsically unstable since the universal it purports to manifest is but a flawed particularization of that universal:
[A] moral whole, as such, is limited. It must have above it a higher universality, which makes it disunited in itself. The transition from one spiritual pattern to the next is just this, that the former moral whole, in itself a universal, through being thought (in terms of the higher universal), is abolished as a particular … It is at this point that appear those momentous collisions between existing, acknowledged duties, laws, and rights and those possibilities which are adverse to this system, violate it, and even destroy its foundations and existence. (1953: 38–9)
The agents of this spiritual progression are those exceptional individuals 9 who are able to grasp ‘a higher universal, make it their own purpose, and realize this purpose in accordance with the higher law of the spirit’ (1953: 39). In Beyond Good and Evil (1988, 5: 145), Nietzsche refers to such exceptional individuals as the ‘true (eigentlichen) philosophers’, whose greatness lies in the ability to apply ‘the vivisector’s knife directly to the breast of the virtues of the age’, and in Zarathustra (passim) as the ‘free spirits’ (freier Geist), the ‘truthful ones’ (Wahrhaftig), or ‘the discerning ones’ (Erkennenden). Each of these epithets testifies to the necessity of thought in spirit’s journey towards absolute freedom, for without cognition spirit could neither discern (erkennen) nor grasp the idea of a ‘higher universal’. As I have argued elsewhere (Cauchi, 2013), the verb erkennen plays a dominant role in the reformation of spirit towards which Zarathustra’s teaching and his own Bildung is directed. Distinct from the verb kennen, meaning ‘to know’, erkennen means ‘to discern’ or ‘to recognize’. What is significant here is the inseparable prefix er. Like the verbs erfahren (to experience or find out), erfassen (to grasp or apprehend), erforschen (to investigate), and ermitteln (to determine), the prefix in erkennen implies an analytical process, a cognitive striving towards knowledge and truth. ‘Spirit is indeed never at rest’, pronounces Hegel, ‘but always engaged in moving forward’ (1977: 6). And when Zarathustra professes, ‘I love him who liveth to discern (erkennen), and who willeth to discern in order that the Übermensch may one day live. Thus willeth he his own annihilation (Untergang)’ (1988, 4: 17), he is celebrating ‘the man of discernment’ (der Mensch der Erkenntniss) who, upon recognizing a higher universal, wills to make it his own purpose so that spirit might one day realize the freedom that is its essence and goal (1988, 4: 101).
The higher universal in Zarathustra is of course the Übermensch. An abstract universal that has yet to be actualized as a concrete universal, the Übermensch signifies both the ‘free(d) spirit’ as man and the spirit as essence or force. As the former, he is the ideal man of the future who has realized the world-historical goal of freedom by embodying in thought and deed the universal Idea of freedom: if man qua man is to evolve into a higher, übermenschlich human being, he must liberate the immanent freedom of mind and body from the trammels of Christian reasoning and propel himself towards humanity’s ‘highest hope’ (1988, 4: 19). As essence or force, the Übermensch represents metaphysical being as becoming, which in turn is represented by the figure of the sea. A key trope in Zarathustra (1988, 4: 15), sea represents the immanent necessity of freedom in its most elemental form, the endless play of its waves (1988, 4: 123) connoting flux and the innocence of becoming that, as we shall see below, is spirit’s ultimate goal. 10 To reach this goal, spirit must first recognize its inherent freedom and then instantiate it through the labour of the negative. As explicated above, recognition, for Hegel, occurs in the negative moment of reflection when spirit relates itself to itself and becomes an object of reflection. And in that ‘objectivity negative to knowing’, spirit labours to return itself to itself by negating the determinate or concrete forms in which it has formerly taken shape. This dialectic of self-negation, this willingness of spirit to negate the earlier forms in which it has instantiated itself, is what Zarathustra articulates as the spirit of discernment desiring its own annihilation, or as spirit taking the knife to itself in order to become what it is.
Spirit’s consciousness or recognition of its innate freedom to become what it is qua spirit is allegorically rendered in Zarathustra as the first of a three-phase metamorphosis of spirit from camel to lion to child. The first stage occurs at ‘the hour of the great contempt’ when the docile, domesticated, ‘camel’ spirit takes a good look at itself and in the objectivity negative to knowing de(s)cries a stinking rag of ‘poverty, filth, and abject contentment’ (1988, 4: 15). Here in the desert of solitary introspection the truthful spirit takes upon itself a new burden: the burden of self-scrutiny and self-reformation. ‘What is the heaviest thing?’ asks the truthful spirit:
Is it not this: to humiliate oneself in order to mortify one’s pride? … Or is it this: to feed on the acorns and grass of knowledge and for the sake of truth suffer hunger of soul? Or is it this: to be sick and forgo comforters, and make friends with the deaf, who never hear what thou wouldst? Or is it this: to wade into filthy water when it is the water of truth, and not repulse cold frogs and hot toads? (1988, 4: 29)
This labour of the negative is to be undertaken for the sake of earthly truths: ‘I beseech you, my brethren’, exhorts Zarathustra, ‘remain true to the earth and believe not those who speak to you of beyond-earthly hopes’ (1988, 4: 15). The Judeo-Christian values of humility, self-denial and pity are to be humbled, denied and spurned: humility and the sanctimonious pride of hair-shirted mortification are to be humiliated by a more discerning pride mortified by such contemptuous shifts (both those of the hair-shirt variety and those of a cunningly resourceful affective will); the emaciated soul, long fed on a (starvation) diet of transcendent Truth, is to hunger after the coarser, less digestible ‘acorn and grass’ fare of earthbound knowledge; 11 the succour of the pitying is to be abjured because it wounds the pride of the sufferer and thereby increases his shame and suffering; and the swampy, murky habitat of human pond-life is to become the habitat of choice, wherein the clammy and hectic humours are to be accommodated so that man’s ‘sultry heart and cold head’ (1988, 4: 119) might burn for the Idea of an immanent freedom rather than a deus ex machina.
Implicit in Zarathustra’s interrogatives (see indented citation above) is spirit’s transition from one particularized universal to a higher species of the same universal and the moral imperative to destroy with impunity the particular forms within which the concrete universal has become enmeshed. Spirit’s truth must now succumb to a higher truth, its love to a higher love, and its knowledge to a more enlightened knowledge. Thus, while the concrete universal, which for Hegel is ‘an essential phase in the development of the creating Idea, of truth striving and urging towards itself’ (1953: 39), undergoes (untergehen) a radical reformulation entailing the annihilation (Untergang) of its particularized form, the concrete universal qua universal or defining essence remains constant.
12
This negative movement of untergehen, to be discussed at the close of this section, is absolutely crucial to Zarathustra’s project of self-overcoming wherein spirit’s Übergang to a higher concrete universal is consummated. A kindred paradigm shift, in which the integrity of the universal is preserved, occurs in the third section of ‘Zarathustra’s Prologue’. Here, the Judeo-Christian ‘soul’, the ultimate universal in Judeo-Christian belief, appears as sullied spirit when thought of in terms of a higher universal, namely the free, life-affirming, übermenschlich soul to which the body-despising soul must submit:
Once the soul looked contemptuously on the body … wished it meagre, ghastly, and famished. Thus it thought to slip away from the body and the earth. Oh, that soul was itself meagre, ghastly, and famished: gruesome was the lust of that soul! (1988, 4: 15)
The soul that had hitherto sought to free itself from the body by reducing the latter to a spectral counterpart of the soul must now liberate itself from the ‘fetters of false values’ 13 (1988, 4: 117) and return the body to its proper earthly sphere.
Liberation from the prescriptive and proscriptive tenets of Christian dogma to which the venerating spirit has long been in thrall constitutes the second metamorphosis of spirit from ‘camel’ to ‘lion’. A purgatorial interregnum between the recognition and actualization of freedom, this phase of spiritual transformation entails an epic battle for the recovery and restitution of spirit’s immanent freedom:
Spirit becometh a lion; freedom will it capture, and be master in its own desert. Its last Lord seeketh it here: inimical will it be to him, and to its last God; for victory will it wrestle with the great dragon. What is the great dragon which spirit no longer careth to call Lord and God? ‘Thou shalt’ is the great dragon calleth. But the lion spirit saith, ‘I will’. (1988, 4: 30)
Vanquishing the great dragon ‘Thou shalt’, with its implicit prohibition of ‘I will’, spirit frees itself from the trammels of error and illusion and thereby ‘creates itself freedom for new creating’ (1988, 4: 30). In saying ‘I will’, spirit affirms the freedom that is intrinsic to its being and that, in Hegelian terms, achieves consciousness of itself through such affirmation:
[I]t is Freedom in itself that comprises within itself the infinite necessity of bringing itself to consciousness and thereby, since knowledge about itself is its very nature, to reality. Freedom is itself its own object of attainment and the sole purpose of Spirit. (1953: 25)
But if freedom brings itself to consciousness and to the reality of its nature, there is, as Zarathustra’s troubled Bildung amply demonstrates, a yawning abyss between the knowledge of freedom and its realization, between the freedom to destroy the old values and the freedom to create new ones, between the Untergang and the Übergang (1988, 4: 17) of spirit in its journey towards a higher stage of development. ‘I will’, saith the lion, but in this second phase of spiritual transformation the leonine ‘I will’ is less a performative act than an ‘I am willing’ declaration of intent.
In spirit’s Untergang-Übergang movement towards freedom, Hegel’s dialectical schema is clearly if unwittingly rehearsed. A versatile pun, the verb untergehen means ‘to undergo’, ‘to go under’ (in the sense of submersion and subjection), and ‘to perish’, each of which meaning constitutes the negative moment in the Hegelian dialectic. If spirit is to entertain any hope of realizing its innate freedom, it must first undergo the labour of the negative, for without the negative Untergang of spirit, no transformative Übergang can be effected. As noted earlier, this labour requires spirit to subject itself to a higher law or universal and in accordance with that law to destroy the particularized form in which it is currently confined. In the words of Zarathustra, once the law of ‘Thou shalt’ has been repealed and the incrustation of herd values removed, spirit can recover its innate freedom and create laws commensurate with its higher purpose. ‘Aye, for the game of creating, my brethren, a holy yea-saying is needed: its own will willeth now the spirit; its own world gaineth the world’s outcast’ (1988, 4: 31). Ventriloquizing Hegel, for whom the Idea of freedom is identical with God, who ‘will[s] nothing but Himself, His own will’, Zarathustra celebrates the free(d) spirit of the future that will spontaneously will its own will and thereby become master in its own world. In the law tables of the future, to be inscribed by the genuinely free spirit for whom the higher law is the immanent and necessary Idea of freedom, necessity will be freedom itself (1988, 4: 248). That is to say, when the lion will has been successfully transformed into the spontaneous innocence of becoming – the ‘child’ phase of spirit’s ultimate metamorphosis – freed spirit can actualize the freedom that is both its substance and its object and so become ‘a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a holy yea-saying’ (1988, 4: 31). Once again, the language of religion has been transposed into the language of will to power. The demiurgic power which Enlightenment man had, in Promethean fashion, wrested from God is now the power of the spirit to will its constitutive freedom: its new beginning is a continual self-Creation, its self-rolling a causa sui, and its eternally recurring first movement a Prime Mover. ‘Once spirit was God’, recalls Zarathustra, ‘then it became man, and now it is even becoming rabble’ (1988, 4: 48), and it is from the rabble spirit that the awakened spirit, through the labour of the negative, must now dissociate itself.
The dialectical interplay between thought and passion
[N]othing great in the world has been accomplished without passion. (Hegel, 1953: 29) Thou placed thy highest goal into the heart of [the] passions. (Nietzsche, 1988, 4: 43)
On Hegel and Nietzsche’s showing, thought is paramount in spirit’s transformative endeavours. But if thought’s negative labour is the mediator of spirit, for spirit to be translated into action the passions must be pressed into the service of spirit. Without the ‘the need, the instinct, the inclination, and the passion of man’, argues Hegel (1953: 28) in his lectures on the philosophy of history, the Idea or ruling thought must remain an empty, abstract universal rather than a concrete universal with living content. 14 As is evident from his discussion on the passions, Hegel’s concern is not with blind animal instinct but with Idea-driven desires or desires that are yoked to a higher universal. The same is true of Zarathustra for whom the anarchic passions, transmogrified into ‘wild dogs’ (1988, 4: 43), are the chief saboteurs of the Idea of freedom. ‘Doth the animal speak in thy wish’, demands Zarathustra, or the desire to create a ‘higher body’ beyond the animal in man (1988, 4: 90)? Accordingly, when emphasizing the ‘interest’ a man necessarily has in any volitional act and the ‘satisfaction’ he expects to receive from such interest being met, Hegel is at pains to distinguish between interest in an idea and self-interested ‘private advantage’. With regard to the first, the relation between interest and satisfaction is intrinsically connected to that between Idea and its realization, whereas in the case of the second, advantage is pursued solely for its own sake. Interest in, insists Hegel, is subsequent to reflection, understanding and the awakening of reason (1953: 28), and thus bears no relation to naked instinct. It is the same reflection, understanding and awakening of reason that Zarathustra dramatizes as ‘the hour of the great contempt’, when spirit undergoes its first transformation.
A similar distinction between interest in and naked interest is made in Zarathustra between a ‘healthy’ selfishness and a ‘sickly’ selfishness. The first, driven by the Idea of freedom and the will to create life-affirming as opposed to afterlife-affirming values, ‘thirsts to heap all riches in [its] soul’ – the riches of reflection and understanding – the better to bestow them in the form of new values. The second, diminished and debilitated by the invidious effects of the old values and thus no longer able to create beyond itself, robs from those whose abundance it lacks and consequently covets (1988, 4: 98). As Nietzsche incessantly reminds us, the satisfaction sought by these base, covetous types is the ‘invisible vengeance’ of a degenerate, ressentiment-filled heart (1988, 4: 68), 15 and at the semantic and psychosomatic root of this degeneracy is the inability to generate, or in Hegelian terms to ascend from a concrete universal to a higher universal. ‘Upward goeth our way, from genus to super-genus’, declares Zarathustra, ‘but a horror to us is the degenerate sense, which saith, “All for me”’ (1988, 4: 98). Such sickly, selfish men are neither interested in a higher idea nor, more importantly, in ‘transforming it into action, into actuality’ (Hegel, 1953: 28); they are merely the conduit for base instinctual need.
Hegel’s rationale for identifying ‘interest’ with ‘passion’ is instructive. It is, he claims, because
the whole individuality is concentrating all its desires and powers, with every fibre of volition, to the neglect of all other actual or possible interests and aims, on one object … indeed everything else is sacrificed to this aim. This particular objective is so bound up with the person’s will that it alone and entirely determines its direction and is inseparable from it. (1953: 29)
Described here, and with startling clarity, is the dynamic of what Nietzsche more than half a century later would term ‘will to power’, namely the will’s will to discharge its power as manifested in the domination of one affect over all other competing affects. Once again, it is important to note that the particular aim or objective here referred to is not the blind satisfaction of desire but the satisfaction of a considered aim duly realized through the passions. Nor is the concentrated will, surging exclusively towards its ‘particular objective’, raw animal passion, but rather the combined rational and non-rational will to power of ‘the whole individuality’ focused on a single aim.
16
Upon this particular subject Zarathustra descants at length early in his Prologue:
I love him who liveth to discern, and who willeth to discern in order that the Übermensch may one day live. Thus willeth he his own annihilation (Untergang). I love him who laboureth and inventeth that he may build the house for the Übermensch … thus willeth he his own annihilation. I love him who loveth his virtue: for virtue is the will to annihilation and an arrow of longing. I love him who retaineth no drop of spirit for himself, but wanteth rather to be wholly the spirit of his virtue: thus walketh he as spirit over the bridge. I love him who maketh his virtue his inclination (Hang) and his destiny (Verhängniss):
17
thus, for the sake of his virtue, is he willing to live or to live no more. (1988, 4: 17)
To the single aim, the ‘one goal’, all else – knowledge, labour, creativity, virtue, spirit – must be subordinate. And if the goal is freedom and freedom is the Idea or concrete universal, then what Zarathustra says of the Übermensch echoes what Hegel says of reason: ’to this reason, which is universal and substantial, in and for itself, all else is subordinate, subservient, and the means for its actualization’ (1953: 31).
When the will is so bound up with desire and with the object of that desire ‘that it alone and entirely determines its direction and is inseparable from it’, any desire which is still allied to a concrete particular that has yet to recognize its immanent concrete universal must be sacrificed to the latter. This negation of the concrete particular in spirit’s dialectical ascent to the concrete universal is the mantra of the passage cited above from ‘Zarathustra’s Prologue’. The contemptible ease of a comforting, conformist knowledge must succumb to a more dangerous knowledge, and the old crumbling edifice of moral values must be razed to enable the construction of a new set of values that will reinvigorate a sickly body debilitated by a creed that despises and deprecates the body: ‘More honest and pure speaketh the healthy body, perfect and square-built; and it speaketh of the meaning of the earth’ (Nietzsche, 1988, 4: 38). If spirit is to walk over the bridge (the synaesthesia is more than rhetorical here) and thereby actualize the Idea of freedom as a concrete universal, it must join forces with the non-rational will of the affects. At the same time, if virtue is to become ‘inclination and destiny’ and thus inseparable from the one goal, it must negate those passions which stand in its way. In short, the individual must surrender himself to a higher universal:
What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what can be loved in man is that he is a going over (Übergang) and a going under (Untergang). I love those that know not how to live save as under-goers (Untergehende), for they are the over-goers (Hinübergehenden). (1988, 4: 16–17)
For this sacrifice to be willingly made, such that ‘the particular and definite and its negation’ can bring about the universal (Hegel, 1953: 43), man’s ‘highest goal’ must be grafted onto the passions (see the second epigraph to the second half of this essay). Only when the Idea is hungered after with every fibre of one’s being can it flourish as inclination and destiny; only then can the gulf between the ‘I will’ of the lion spirit and the spontaneous, self-rolling activity of a spirit reborn be bridged.
This ideal of an incarnate Idea or concrete universal is, for Zarathustra, glimpsed at ‘the hour of the great contempt’, when spirit first becomes aware of its compromised state:
The hour when ye say: ‘What is the point of (Was liegt an) my reason! Doth it crave knowledge as the lion its food? It is poverty and filth and abject contentment!’ The hour when ye say: ‘What is the point of my virtue! As yet it hath not made me rage. How weary I am of my good and my bad! It is poverty and filth and abject contentment!’ The hour when ye say: ‘What is the point of my justice! I see not that I blaze and burn. The just, however, blaze and burn!’ (1988, 4: 15–16)
The verb ‘liegt an’ is significant here in that it denotes a dependency, and that upon which the abstract nouns depend is desire: reason must ‘crave’, virtue must ‘rage’, and justice must ‘blaze and burn’.
18
In other words, the higher universal to which spirit’s reason, truth, virtue and justice are passionately committed is to become what Hegel refers to as the ‘distinct object of desire and interest’ (1953: 31).
19
It can only become so, however, by the determined and determinate exertions of a restored and ruling spirit to implant its ruling thought – the Idea of freedom – into the soil of the passions: ‘Art thou the victor’, demands Zarathustra, ‘the self-conqueror, the arbiter of meaning, the master of thy virtues?’ (1988, 4: 90) As noted above, if the universal or Idea is to be actualized and spirit is to walk over the bridge, it must forge an ardent union with the passions. Hegel is explicit on this point:
first, the Idea, secondly, the complex of human passions; the one the warp, the other the woof of the vast tapestry of world history. Their contact and concrete union constitutes moral liberty in the state. (1953: 29)
The concept of the state was of course abhorrent to Nietzsche, and in Zarathustra (1988, 4: 63) is vilified as a cold and calculating leviathan, false to the core – a core which in its naked pursuit of power and wealth is intrinsically true only to itself. What concerns us here is not the state per se, but the fragile state of the union (the third term in the Hegelian dialectic) between the concrete universal and the concrete particular.
‘I love him who is of free spirit and free heart: thus is his head only the entrails of his heart, but his heart compelleth him to his undergoing (Untergang)’ (Nietzsche, 1988, 4: 18). Thus pronounces Zarathustra in his prologue, but in the ensuing narrative it becomes increasingly evident that head and heart are implacably opposed. When Zarathustra submits himself to the Idea, the particular to the universal, the anticipated synthesis of head and heart, of rational and non-rational will, continually eludes him. Instead of a movement of progression, the dialectic short-circuits, leaving only the labour of the negative:
I must be strife, and becoming, and purpose, and cross-purpose … Whatever I create, and however much I love it – soon must I be opposed to it, and to my love: so willeth my will. (1988, 4: 148)
Caught in the toils of its own violent self-critique, spirit turns bitter, sceptical, and sardonic:
I trust myself no longer since I sought out the height, and nobody trusteth me any longer … My contempt and my longing increaseth together; the higher I climb, the more I despise him who climbs. What doth he want on the height? How ashamed I am of my climbing and stumbling! How I jeer at my heavy breathing! How I hate him who flieth! How weary I am on the height! (1988, 4: 52)
In chapter after chapter of Zarathustra, the protagonist either directly or indirectly laments his failure to recover from the rigours of Untergang. Witness the frost of solitude and the inaccessible summit (1988, 4: 51–4); the humbling of pride and the quailing of courage before the inner demons that lurk in the caverns and forests of self-knowledge (1988, 4: 80–3); the sharpness of the knife with which spirit severs the umbilical cord to metaphysical comforts (1988, 4: 132–5); the blinding light of enlightenment and the resentful hunger of one who endlessly gives but never receives (1988, 4: 136–8); the residual remorse over the voluntary slaughter of one’s fondest illusions (1988, 4: 142–5); the nightmares of self-doubt and self-derision (1988, 4: 172–6); and the shame of knowing that one lacks the inner strength and the commanding voice required for the Übergang to the third and final metamorphosis of spirit (1988, 4: 187–90).
‘Much bitter dying must there be in your life’ (1988, 4: 111), warns Zarathustra in another circumlocution of the labour of the negative. But what he fails to disclose until the fourth and final part of Zarathustra, the part which Nietzsche privately circulated among friends and acquaintances, is the far more bitter resurrections. In the union of universal and particular, of head and heart, that which is resurrected or aufgehoben is the negated particulars, the inner demons that Zarathustra refers to as ‘seven devils’ (1988, 4: 82). Lying in the path of every aspiring creator and legislator, these devils must be vanquished before any Übergang can be effected, but in the final part of Zarathustra, they are seen to be indestructible. In the sequestered and imagined security of the erstwhile prophet’s mountain refuge, Zarathustra encounters in quick succession each of the seven devils he has repeatedly attempted but ultimately failed to destroy: his Schopenhauerian pessimism; his disgust and nauseous loathing of the rabble; his hypertrophic will to truth at the cost of life itself; his penitential spirit which, having plunged the knife into its own entrails, bleeds to death from intellectual integrity; his residual guilt and bad conscience, despite having slain his belief in God; his shame for having murdered God and for the inexorable suffering consequent upon such murder; and, lastly, his disgust with the rabble and his own rabble spirit for having refused his gift of wisdom (1988, 4: 300–37). 20
To reiterate, and as the Zarathustra narrative reiterates, spirit’s dialectically driven Untergang has led not to the longed-for Übergang but rather to a broken, disillusioned and disgruntled spirit which in part four of Zarathustra assumes the form of Zarathustra’s shadow:
With thee I strove towards everything forbidden, the worst and the furthest: and if there is anything of virtue in me, it is that before every forbidden I felt no fear. With thee I shattered whatever my heart revered … I pursued the most dangerous wishes – verily, beyond every crime I once went … Into the coldest water did I plunge myself, with head and heart. Ah, how oft did I stand there naked and on that account as red as a crab! … What remaineth still to me? A heart weary and impudent; an unsteady will; fluttering wings; a broken spine. (1988, 4: 339–40)
What Hegel refers to as ‘pure negativity or, when reduced to its pure abstraction, simple becoming’ (1977: 11), is in Zarathustra a ceaseless, restless, internecine dialectic which admits of no progression, no Übergang. Whereas in the Hegelian dialectic, ‘the positive elements in which [the] negative element disappears as something subordinate and vanquished’ (1953: 18) prevail as signifiers of a predetermined plan, in the Zarathustran dialectic, the negated elements reassert their dominance in a vicious cycle of eternal return. This is clearly prefigured in the rope-dancing episode at the start of Zarathustra (1988, 4: 21–2), where the bold attempt of the rope-dancer to advance towards the Übermensch is scotched by the grinning derision of a scoffing sceptic. What this allegorical vignette symbolizes is a self-defeating rather than self-overcoming dialectic between idealism and scepticism. Rather than the ‘self-consummating scepticism’ which for Hegel dialectically generates an ever-higher form of spirit, what Zarathustra experiences is a self-consuming scepticism that threatens to foreclose any further spiritual development. Thus, while Zarathustra’s ideal of the third and final metamorphosis – the innocence of becoming as a new beginning, as ‘an eternal self-fleeing and self-returning’ (1988, 4: 248) – rehearses the Hegelian process of ‘unfolded becoming’, of ‘unrest that is the self … that immediacy and simplicity of the beginning because it … has returned into itself’ (1977: 12), the existential reality is a relentless labour of the negative without the redeeming positive of progression.