Future Nostalgia: Nietzsche’s Expression of Will in the Ongoing Present
Critics often remark at the resemblance between Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the Christian New Testament, and in this respect, one is also…
Critics often remark at the resemblance between Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the Christian New Testament, and in this respect, one is also inclined to interpret Nietzsche’s opus as a didactic text, albeit unconventionally so. In a sense, the work anticipates his Revaluation of All Values in its attempts to reconstruct a moral directive from the ashes of the prevailing morality, whose destruction Nietzsche made complete in Dawn and The Gay Science only to discover an intellectual dead end, an ethical abyss, in its place. To regard Zarathustra as a simple manifesto, static and singular in its claims, ignores the dynamic nuances with which the author intends to elevate his narrative, and his consciousness, to a higher altitude than that to which its Biblical analog ascends. Nietzsche’s familiar goal in Zarathustra is the achievement of two mutually exclusive states: a fluidity of state and being through the eschewal of stasis, and a present-tense understanding thereof.
Freud once said of Nietzsche that he knew himself better “than any man who ever lived or was ever likely to live.” Whether or not the reader regards this hyperbolic assertion as true, he can hardly deny the nimble rigor with which the author conducts a thorough self-analysis throughout his canon. If Nietzsche’s principal commandment is to “Know Thyself,” however, he ultimately reaches a crisis in reckoning the magnitude of the task. Knowledge consists of that which remains fundamentally constant; to understand a series of ideas, or even the processes by which these ideas might change, one must rely on universal, foundational assumptions of truth. Nietzsche, however, rejects both this practice of assumption and the notion that such ultimate truth exists. He suspects that reality is so dynamic and groundless as to negate the presumption of universal constants or even an ordered framework within which perpetual shift can occur. This notion finds provisional validation in the existence of the human spirit, an aggregate of thoughts and thought processes in continual flux. If true knowledge is unattainable, then self-knowledge is doubly so, for in this case an individual’s act of analysis necessarily alters the object — his consciousness. Thus, the intellectual creature can never know himself as he is, but rather as he used to be. Only God can say “I am” with any authority and he, perhaps as a direct consequence of this stasis, is dead anyway.
Nietzsche works both from and directly against this premise in Zarathustra, first in the contextual implication of present self-knowledge as an asymptotic impossibility, and then in his tireless approaching of this forbidden bound. His objective is the transfer of consciousness from the past into the ongoing present, the only medium in which the will can flourish and create. In his chapter titled Of Redemption, he writes:
“It was: that is what the will’s teeth-gnashing and most lonely affliction is called. Powerless against that which has been done, the will is an angry spectator of all things past….All It was is a fragment, a riddle, a dreadful chance — until the creative will says to it: ‘But I willed it thus!’
“Until the creative will says to it: ‘But I will it thus! Thus shall I will it!’”[1]
Nietzsche pursues an inversion of the retrospective impulse that ordinarily characterizes the human condition: a sort of future nostalgia, not in the exercise of groundless speculation — for this would forecast the will into a temporal realm as inhibiting as the past — but rather as a function of the absolute utility of the will, enacted in the present. As the will of the individual gains strength so does the future gains the clarity of the past; one continually becomes a prophet of things to come, but only insofar as he is a hero in the current moment. The goal of the will to power, therefore, is the ultimate presence of mind — a continuity of tense in the present exercise of the will.
Recall Nietzsche’s allusion to this prerogative in On the Genealogy of Morals:
“To breed an animal with the right to make promises — is this not the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man? is it not the real problem regarding man?”[2]
The ultimate measure of the will is the promise which requires no qualification or condition, nor law, nor punishment. For Nietzsche, such a condition relies on man’s ability to forget his previous failures, and in doing so to achieve a state of “robust” mental health. He continues:
“This involves no mere passive inability to rid oneself of an impression, no mere indigestion through a once-pledged word with which one cannot “have done,” but an active desire not to rid oneself, a desire for the continuance of something desired once, a real memory of the will: so that between the original “I will,” “I shall do this” and the actual discharge of the will, its act…may be interposed without breaking this long chain of will.”[3]
Our inability to fathom our present selves derives precisely from our maintenance of notions of things past. Suppose that “I” naturally represents the ego in a fluid state, and in any given context represents only a variable point along a fluctuating continuum of being. To say “I am” implies the culmination of the past into a terminal present, an accumulation of prior events and values into a static ego. To say “I will,” however, requires no such summation of the ego. It extends the provisional ego of the current moment into the indefinite future and achieves continuity in the act. The realization of the present and the future coincide in the perfect exercise of the will, in the absence of the inhibiting past.
Accordingly, Zarathustra is an ongoing narrative of forgetfulness. One cannot point to the dynamism of the eponymous hero and prophet and claim that his shifting and contradictory platitudes represent a coherent line of thought or an evolving linear viewpoint. Throughout the text, Nietzsche implies that Zarathustra forgets what he has said as soon as he says it, using a catchy and deceptively simple epithet in repetition after each. Repeating “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” acts not to reiterate the identity of the speaker, but to shift the context of his words from the present into the past. Nietzsche encourages the reader to clear his mind, to readily allow this stream of ideas to pass in and through him, forgetting even the author’s doctrines in the process. The author confirms this intention in an anecdote from the chapter titled Of Poets, in which a disciple asks Zarathustra to clarify a previous point he made that “the poets lie too much.” Clearly unable even to remember saying this, Zarathustra responds:
“You ask why? I am not one of those who may be questioned about their Why. Do my experiences date from yesterday? It is a long time since I experienced the reasons for my opinions. Should I not have to be a barrel of memory, if I wanted to carry my reasons, too, about with me?”[4]
Zarathustra’s ambivalence to his own changing opinion provokes the disciple to anger, who sees in the prophet a philosophical messiah, a source of constant truth. “I believe in Zarathustra,” says the disciple, and thus betrays his utter misunderstanding of his teacher.
This event proves pivotal to Zarathustra’s journey into the present, as it illustrates a two-fold failure on his part. First, it shows that at this point he has failed to truly communicate, through word or practice, his message to his followers. Second, the exchange conjures a nostalgic sadness in the would-be prophet, who says:
“I am of today and the has-been (he said then); but there is something in me that is of tomorrow and of the day-after-tomorrow and of the shall-be.”[5]
This morose admission almost strikes a humorous tone with the juxtaposition of “I am,” which falsely assumes a stasis of ego, and the parenthetical “he said then,” meant to qualify — or redeem — his statement as the musing of an instantaneous and fleeting identity. This moment nonetheless represents Zarathustra’s momentary disconnection from his ideal. Even in saying that “there is something in me that is of tomorrow,” and so acknowledging the state of being that he advocates in principle, he commits an error in practice: for the repetition of is, even in reference to the future, contains the vestiges of the past, and nothing of the present or the will.
Zarathustra becomes encumbered by this memory of failure, as though failure were a state of permanence — which it threatens to become, for he cannot bear to relinquish his memory of it. He enters a depression, unable to move beyond an intellectual impasse, but uncertain why. “For what, then, is it — high time?”[6] he asks, feeling the necessity for a change, necessitated by the lack thereof. Only upon confrontation with his failure does Zarathustra break out of this cycle. This occurs in the chapter The Stillest Hour, in which a voiceless entity — perhaps the prophet’s subconscious — challenges Zarathustra’s absolute retrospective, saying “You know, Zarathustra, but you do not speak!”[7] Rather, he has always spoken, affirming the reality of past events but never exercising his will into the ongoing present. He refuses this liberating burden, deferring it to the prophesied Superman, an imminent event on the horizon: “I await one who is more worthy,” he says. The task of the prophet, in speaking, is to live his teaching, to become the Superman by overcoming his past. “You must yet become a child and without shame,” says the voiceless speaker; “The pride of youth is still in you, you have become young late: but he who wants to become a child must overcome even his youth.”[8] That Zarathustra clings to his past prevents him from yet becoming young. In profound anguish, he leaves his friends and returns to the mountain, overcoming his contented despair with a despondent action. He connects his present will with the future act, forgetting the weakness and denial of the spoken past. In doing so, he fulfills the dynamic promise inherent in his philosophy — not by satisfying its conditions, but by living them.
This expression of philosophy through life characterized Nietzsche himself, who sought to fulfill it through action until he suffered a complete mental collapse in 1890. Many have wondered to what extent the gravity of his ideas contributed to his mania; one also has to wonder, seeing Zarathustra’s fear, if Nietzsche anticipated his own madness as a consequence of the journey, of liberation — his overcoming. Considering the philosopher’s amor fati, one might be forgiven for suspecting that the narrative of Nietzsche had a happy ending.
[1] Zarathustra, pp. 161, 163
[2] On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 57
[3] Ibid. p. 58
[4] Zarathustra. p. 149
[5] Ibid. p. 150
[6] Ibid. p. 155
[7] Ibid. p. 167
[8] Ibid. p. 168–169