4.4—
Nietzsche, Becoming, Heraclitus

Whatever "becoming" is, for Nietzsche, it does not characterize some ineffable noumenal realm. Rather, it must describe something about the world we inhabit and know: the natural, physical world, the world of "appearance" (if this term can still function free of its discredited conceptual opposite).

To begin to answer our question, "What is Nietzsche's 'becoming'?" we must turn to our other question, "Who is Nietzsche's Heraclitus?"; for it is from Heraclitus that Nietzsche inherits the notion of becoming and to whom he often turns when discussing it. Moreover, while Nietzsche's infatuation with Schopenhauer and Kant was brief, his allegiance to Heraclitus is as evident in his first writings as in his last. Thus,

[37] Cf. TI "Reason" 6: "Any distinction between a 'true' and an 'apparent' world [ . . . ] is only a suggestion of decadence, a sign of decline of life. That the artist esteems appearance higher than reality is no objection to this proposition. For 'appearance' in this case means reality once again, only by way of selection, reinforcement, and correction. The tragic artist is no pessimist. [ . . . ]"

in one of his final statements—Ecce Homo 's discussion of The Birth of Tragedy —he writes:

I [ . . . ] understand myself as the first tragic philosopher, that is, the most extreme opposite and antipode of a pessimistic philosopher. Before me [ . . . ] tragic wisdom was lacking; I have looked in vain for signs of it even among the great Greeks in philosophy, those of the two centuries before Socrates. I retained some doubt in the case of Heraclitus, in whose proximity I feel warmer and better than anywhere else. The affirmation of passing away and destroying, which is the decisive feature of a Dionysian philosophy; saying yes to opposition and war; becoming, along with the repudiation of the very concept of being —all this is clearly more closely related to me than anything else thought to date. ("Books" BT:3)

And in another text from the same year, having criticized "the philosophers' [ . . . ] hatred of the very idea of becoming," "the senses," and "appearance" in favor of "being" and "what does not become," Nietzsche writes:

With the highest respect, I except the name of Heraclitus . When the rest of the philosophic folk rejected the testimony of the senses because they showed multiplicity and change, he rejected their testimony because they showed things as if they had permanence and unity. Heraclitus too did the senses an injustic. [ . . . ] ^[38] But Heraclitus will remain eternally right with his assertion that being is an empty fiction. (TI "Reason" 2)

These passages recapitulate the conclusions of Nietzsche's early work on Greek philosophy, where the justification for them is presented in much greater detail. For a characterization of Nietzsche's Heraclitus, we must turn to Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, a study of the Presocratics Nietzsche left unpublished but to which he returned throughout the 1870s.^[39] This text is significant for a number of reasons.

[38] On this passage, see p. 194n. 56 below.

[39] The text seems to have been left unpublished primarily because it was to be included in the "historical" half of a larger "historical-theoretical" study, Das Philosophenbuch (The Philosopher's Book ), the second half of which was never completed but which was to include "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense." (See Grossoktavausgabe, 2d ed., vol. 10, Nachgelassene Werke [Leipzig: Naumann, 1903], which collects together all the texts, fragments, and plans for the proposed Philosopher's Book .) Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks was written in 1873 and based on a series of lectures first delivered in 1872 and repeated, with revisions, in 1873 and 1876. A fair copy of the text was made the next year, and minor corrections and additions were incorporated in 1879. For a discussion of this and related texts, see Breazeale's "Introduction" to Philosophy and Truth . Breazeale writes that Nietzsche "devoted great care to the preparation of this course of lectures" (liii), which were "clearly his personal favorite" (xviii). Breazeale goes on to de-scribe Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks as a "polished text" (liii n 4), "a relatively finished historical survey of the development of ancient philosophy" (xxii. In his "Nachwort" to the first volume of the Kritische Studienausgabe, Giorgio Colli calls the text Nietzsche's "central work" of the period immediately following The Birth of Tragedy (p. 916).

It provides Nietzsche's most sustained treatment of Heraclitus, clearly the text's protagonist. Not surprisingly, then, it is also a text in which the notion of becoming figures centrally.^[40] Moreover, far from displaying the reverence toward Schopenhauer and Kant one is supposed to find in Nietzsche's early work, the text is highly critical of these philosophers, with Heraclitus playing Nietzsche against Anaximander and Parmenides, whose interpretations of becoming and being are glossed with quotations from Schopenhauer and Kant. Indeed, instead of revealing a juvenile Nietzsche, this text shows him advancing positions and views that are central to his later work: naturalism and antidualism; a repudiation of "being" in favor of an "innocent becoming"; the characterization of becoming as a perpetual "artist's agon " or dice game; the promotion of an aesthetic versus a moral interpretation of the world; praise of an aphoristic and esoteric philosophical style; an empiricist and nominalist critique of the notions of substance and essence, and so on.

The text begins with a discussion of Thales. But this is only a prologue to the main drama, which stages a contest among the interpretations of becoming and being proposed by Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Parmenides. The problem of becoming first appears in the discussion of Anaximander, "the first philosophical author of the ancients" (4, P. 45), for whom "all becoming [is] an illegitimate emancipation from eternal being, a wrong for which destruction is the only penance" (4, P. 46).^[41] "Enigmatic proclamation of a true pessimist," Nietzsche

[40] In his introductory lecture for the course, Nietzsche claims: "This is the true. distinguishing mark of the philosophical drive: wonder concerning what is lying in front of everyone's nose. The most ordinary phenomenon is becoming, and with it Ionian philosophy begins. The problem reappears in an infinitely intensified form in the Eleatics. [ . . . ] All subsequent philosophies struggle against Eleaticism" (cited in Breazeale's "Introduction" to Philosophy and Truth, xliii–xliv).

[41] Nietzsche's interpretation is based on the only extant fragment of Anaximander, which Kirk and Raven translate into English as follows: "And the source of coming-to-be for existing things is that into which destruction, too, happens, 'according to necessity; for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice according to the assessment of Time'" (The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts, ed. G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957], 117). Though they tell us much about the interpreter himself, Nietzsche's interpretations of the Presocratics are surely a matter for debate. Even so, his reading, particularly of Heraclitus, accords with such canonical accounts as that of W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 1, The Earlier Presocratics and Pythagoreans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962). It bears mentioning that Nietzsche's heir, Heidegger, alsorevisits the Presocratics in an attempt to reassess the foundations of European philosophy. Unlike Nietzsche's, however, Heidegger's analysis has less clearly defined protagonists and antagonists. See Heidegger's collection, Early Greek Thinking, trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984).

declares and immediately likens Anaximander's doctrine to that of "[t]he only serious moralist of our century" (4, P. 46), Schopenhauer, whose Parerga Nietzsche quotes in support. On the next page, Anaximander's distinctions between being and becoming, the indefinite and the definite, are presented as parallels to Kant's distinction between the thing in itself and appearance: "This ultimate unity of the 'indefinite,' the womb of all things, can, it is true, be designated by human speech only as a negative, as something to which the existent world of becoming can give no predicate. We may look upon it as the equal of the Kantian Ding an sich " (4, P. 47).^[42]

Those who view Kant as a sober epistemologist will have trouble making sense of this strange affiliation of Kant with Anaximander. Yet recall that Nietzsche does not read Kant this way. Rather—and not implausibly—he sees Kant as one for whom epistemology and metaphysics are means to an end. Nietzsche perceives that, at bottom, what motivates Kant, Schopenhauer, and Anaximander is a metaphysicalmoral interpretation of the world . Thus, with the names "Schopenhauer" and "Kant" still resonating, Nietzsche remarks that:

Anaximander was no longer dealing with the question of the origins of this world in a purely physical way. Rather [ . . . ] he grasped with bold fingers the tangle of the profoundest problem in ethics. [ . . . ] From this world of injustice [ . . . ] Anaximander flees into a metaphysical fortress from which he leans out, letting his gaze sweep the horizon. (4, P. 48)

Thus far, one might still read this text in the way that The Birth of Tragedy is often read: as supporting a Kantian dualism and a Schopenhauerian pessimism. Yet the entrance of Heraclitus quickly disconfirms this reading. For Heraclitus appears bearing a new world-interpretation with which Nietzsche is clearly in sympathy:

[Heraclitus] denied the duality of totally diverse worlds—a position which Anaximander had been compelled to assume. He no longer distinguished a physical world from a metaphysical one, a realm of definite qualities from an undefinable "indefinite." And after this first step, nothing could hold him back from a second, far bolder negation: he altogether denied being. For this one world which he retained [ . . . ] nowhere shows a tarrying, an indestruc-

[42] Note that, in this passage, becoming is contrasted with, rather than assimilated to, "the Kantian Ding an sich ."

tibility, a bulwark in the stream. Louder than Anaximander, Heraclitus proclaimed: "I see nothing other than becoming. Be not deceived. It is the fault of your short-sightedness, not of the essence of things, if you believe you see land somewhere in the ocean of becoming and passing-away. You use names for things as though they rigidly, persistently endured; yet even the stream into which you step a second time is not the one you stepped into before." (5, pp. 51–52)

This passage tells us much about Nietzsche's Heraclitus and the view of becoming these two philosophers share. Unlike Anaximander (and Kant and Schopenhauer), Nietzsche's Heraclitus is an antidualist and antimetaphysician for whom there is only "one world," a world of "becoming" that is entirely physical and evident to those who are not swayed by the conceptual and linguistic reifications that convince the "shortsighted" of being and persistence.

This antidualism and critique of the concept of being also leads Heraclitus to deny the distinctions between substance and accident, essence and appearance. Just as Nietzsche himself later proclaims that "a 'thing' is the sum of its effects [Wirkungen ]" (WP 551), Nietzsche's Heraclitus declares that "the whole nature of reality [Wirklichkeit ] lies simply in its acts [Wirken ] and [ . . . ] for it there exists no other sort of being" (5, P. 53); "[t]he many perceivable qualities are neither eternal substances [ewige Wesenheiten ] nor phantasms of our senses [ . . . ] neither rigid autonomous being nor fleeting semblance flitting through human minds" (6, p. 58). Rejecting these oppositions, Nietzsche asserts that there is only the empirically evident world of becoming, a vast and shifting assemblage of effects, forms, appearances, and perspectives.

Heraclitus' world of becoming and appearance is characterized by Nietzsche in a network of images and figures that recur throughout the Nietzschean corpus: the images of the agon and the game, the figures of the artist and the child.^[43]

Ordinary people think they see something rigid, complete and permanent; in truth, however, light and dark, bitter and sweet are attached to each other and interlocked at any given moment like wrestlers of whom sometimes one, sometimes the other is on top. [ . . . ] The strife of opposites gives birth to all

[43] Preference for these figures and images, and for figurative, imagistic, or "intuitive" language in general, is not the only stylistic trait Nietzsche inherits from Heraclitus. He also shares a penchant for the terse, dense, and provocative aphorism that offends common sense but strikes "those with ears to hear." For Nietzsche's own praise of Heraclitus's style, see PTA 7, PP. 64–65. For an analysis of Heraclitus's style and mode of thought that bears an uncanny resemblance to Nietzsche's discussion of these issues, see Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy, 1:437–39. Cf. PTA 5, PP. 52–53.

that becomes; the definite qualities which look permanent to us express the momentary ascendancy of one partner. But this by no means signifies the end of the war; the contest endures to all eternity. (5, PP. 54–55)

In this world only the play of artists and children exhibits becoming and passing away, building and destroying, without any moral additive, in forever equal innocence. And as artists and children play, so plays the ever-living fire, building up and destroying, in innocence. Such is the game that the aeon plays with itself. [ . . . I]t builds towers of sand like a child at the seashore, piling them up and trampling them down. From time to time it starts the game anew. A moment of satiety, and again it is seized by its need, as the artist is seized by the need to create. Not hybris but the ever-newly-awakened impulse to play calls new worlds into being. (7, P. 62)^[44]

Here, Nietzsche pauses to acknowledge that Schopenhauer, too, presents an image of becoming as an everlasting struggle. Yet, after quoting a representative passage from Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, he notes that "the basic tone of [Schopenhauer's] description is quite different from that which Heraclitus offers," because, for Schopenhauer, becoming is "a self-consuming, menacing and gloomy drive, a thoroughly frightful and by no means blessed phenomena" (5, P. 56).^[45] Here we find the crucial difference between the Anaximandrian-Kantian-Schopenhauerian and the Heraclitean—Nietzschean interpretations of becoming: the former is a moral interpretation that paints a "thoroughly gloomy" picture of guilt and penance, while the latter is an aesthetic interpretation that sees becoming as "blessed" and "innocent."^[46]

[44] This passage seems to allude to Heraclitus' fr. 52: "Time is a child playing a game of draughts; the kingship is in the hands of a child" (Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers, trans. Kathleen Freeman [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1948], 28). Yet it more closely approximates an epic simile in Homer that unites the figures of agon and game: "[The Trojans] streamed over / in massed formation, with Apollo in front of them holding / the tremendous aegis, and wrecked the bastions of the Achaians / easily, as when a little boy piles sand by the sea-shore / when in his innocent play he makes sand towers to amuse him / and then, still playing, with hands and feet ruins them and wrecks them" (The Iliad of Homer, trans. Richmond Lattimore [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951], 319). In "On the Pathos of Truth," an 1872 "preface to an unwritten book," Nietzsche calls upon Diogenes Laertius's description of Heraclitus "watching the games of noisy children [ . . . ] pondering something never before pondered by a mortal on such an occasion, viz., the play of the great world-child, Zeus, and the eternal game of destruction and origination" (in Breazeale, ed. and trans., Philosophy and Truth, 64). Cf. BGE 94 and WP 797.

[45] Recall the 1886 preface to The Birth of Tragedy, in which Nietzsche maintains that this book "tried laboriously to express by means of Schopenhauerian and Kantian formulas strange and new valuations which were basically at odds with Kant's and Schopenhauer's spirit and taste!" (BT SC:6).

[46] Cf. TI "Errors" 7: "there is in our eyes no more radical opposition than that of the theologians, who continue with the concept of a 'moral world-order' to infect the innocence of becoming by means of 'punishment' and 'guilt'."

"'It is a game,'" Nietzsche's Heraclitus says. "'Don't take it so pathetically, and—above all—don't make morality of it!'" (7, P. 64): "Becoming is not a moral but an aesthetic phenomenon" (19, P. 113).^[47]

With the entrance of Parmenides, the Heraclitean interpretation of becoming is provided an even starker contrast. In these sections, Nietzsche casts aside the mode of explication and adopts a stridently critical tone. Moreover, the language and content of this critique are nearly identical to those found in a text written fifteen years later—the section of Twilight of the Idols entitled "'Reason' in Philosophy," in which Nietzsche criticizes the basic traits that have hitherto dominated the philosophical disposition. Indeed, in Nietzsche's Parmenides, we find the archetype of the philosopher, a condensation of Plato, Descartes, and Kant. Here we discover the true origin of that philosophical "hatred of the very idea of becoming" (TI "Reason" 1); for Parmenides is the first to proclaim "the doctrine of Being," a position that Nietzsche deems "un-Greek as no other in the two centuries of the Tragic Age" (PTA 9, p. 69). With "purest absolutely bloodless abstraction, unclouded by any reality" (9, P. 69), Parmenides declares:

That which truly is must be eternally present; one cannot say of it that "it was," or "it will be." What has being cannot have become. [ . . . ] It is the same with passing-away. Passing-away is just as impossible as becoming, as is all change, all decrease, all increase. In fact the only valid proposition that can be stated is "Everything of which you can say 'it has been' or 'it will be' is not; of what has being you can never say 'it is not.'" (10, p. 78)^[48]

Along with this denial of becoming, Nietzsche's Parmenides rejects the testimony of the senses—which deceive us into believing in becoming—and draws a fateful distinction between the mind and the body:

"Whatever you do, do not be guided by your dull eyes," is [Parmenides'] imperative, "nor by your resounding ears, nor by your tongue, but test all things

[47] Nietzsche attributes this view to Anaxagoras, who, however, is seen as following Heraclitus. See PTA 19, 112–13

[48] Cf. TI "Reason" 1: "You ask me which of the philosophers' traits are really idiosyncrasies? For example, their lack of historical sense, their hatred of the very idea of becoming, their Egypticism. They think that they show their respect for a subject when they de-historicize it, sub specie aeterni —when they turn it into a mummy. All that philosophers have handled for thousands of years have been concept-mummies; nothing real escaped their grasp alive. When these honorable concept-idolators worship something, they kill it and stuff it; they threaten the life of everything they worship. Death, change, old age, as well as procreation and growth, are to their minds objections—even refutations. Whatever is does not become ; whatever becomes is not."

with the power of your thinking alone."^[49] Thus he accomplished the immensely significant first critique of man's apparatus for knowledge, a critique as yet inadequate but disastrous in its consequences. By wrenching apart the senses and the capacity for abstraction, in other words by splitting up reason as though it were composed of two quite separate capacities, he demolished the intellect itself, encouraging that wholly erroneous distinction between "mind" and "body" which, especially since Plato, lies upon philosophy like a curse. All sense perceptions, says Parmenides, yield but deceptions.[ . . . ] All the multiplicity and colorfulness of the world known to experience, the transformations of its qualities, the orderliness of its ups and downs, are mercilessly cast aside as mere semblance and delusion. (10, p. 79)^[50]

If Anaximander was criticized for "flee[ing] into a metaphysical fortress" (4, P. 48), Parmenides retreats even further and solicits from Nietzsche an even stronger reproach:

When one makes as total a judgment as does Parmenides about the whole of the world, one ceases to be a natural scientist [ein Naturforscher ], an investigator into any of the world's parts. One's sympathy toward phenomena atrophies; one even develops a hatred for phenomena including oneself, a hatred for being unable to get rid of the eternal deceitfulness of the senses. Henceforth truth shall live only in the palest, most abstracted generalities, in the empty husks of the most indefinite terms, as though in a house of cobwebs. And beside such "truth" now sits the philosopher, as bloodless as his abstractions, in the spun-out fabric of his formulas. A spider at least wants blood from his victims. The Parmenidean philosopher hates most of all the blood of his victims, the blood of empirical reality which was sacrificed and shed by him. (10, pp. 79–80)^[51]

Thus do we also find in Parmenides the origin of "the other idiosyncrasy of the philosophers," which "consists in confusing the last and the first": "They place that which comes at the end—unfortunately! for it ought not to come at all!—namely, the 'highest concepts,' which means

[49] See Parmenides, frr. 7–8.

[50] Cf. TI "Reason" 1: "Now [the philosophers] all believe, desperately even, in what has being. But since they never grasp it, they seek for reasons why it is kept from them. "There must be mere appearance, there must be some deception which prevents us from perceiving what has being: where is the deceiver?'—'We have found him,' they cry ecstatically; 'it is the senses! [ . . . ] Moral: let us free ourselves from the deception of the senses, from becoming, from history, from lies. [ . . . ] And above all, away with the body, this wretched idée fixe of the senses, disfigured by all the fallacies of logic, refuted, even impossible, although it is impudent enough to behave as if it were real!'"

[51] Cf. TI "Reason" 2: "Today we possess science precisely to the extent that we have decided to accept the testimony of the senses [ . . . ] The rest is miscarriage and not-yet-science. [ . . . ]"; also see n. 50, above.

the most general, the emptiest concepts, the last smoke of evaporating reality, in the beginning, as the beginning" (TI "Reason" 4). Nietzsche's Parmenides

flee[s] from an over-abundant reality [ . . . ] into the rigor mortis of the coldest, emptiest concept of all, the concept of being. [ . . . ] Instead of being corrected and tested against reality (considering that they are in fact derived from it) the concepts, on the contrary, are supposed to measure and direct reality and, in case reality contradicts logic, to condemn the former. (PTA II, pp. 80–81; 12, p. 87)^[52]

To the two presented in Twilight, we might add a third "idiosyncrasy" that Nietzsche exposes elsewhere: "the demand for certainty."^[53] According to Nietzsche, it, too, has its source in Parmenides:

What astonishes us is the degree of schematism and abstraction (in a Greek!), above all, the terrible energetic striving for certainty [Strebens nach Gewißheit] in an epoch which otherwise thought mythically and whose imagination was highly mobile and fluid. "Grant me, you gods, but one certainty," runs Parmenides' prayer, "even if it be but a log's breadth on which to lie, on which to ride upon the sea of uncertainty. Take away everything that becomes, everything lush, colorful, blossoming, deceptive, everything that charms and is alive. Take all these for yourselves and grant me but the one and only, poor empty certainty." [ . . . ] Experience nowhere offered him being as he imagined it, but he concluded its existence from the fact that he was able to think it. (II, pp. 81–82)

It is Descartes, not Schopenhauer, who is the fruit of this Parmenidean seed.^[54] And Nietzsche takes pains to distinguish this form of ascetic world-denial from the mystical, ecstatic form found among "the Hindu

[52] Nietzsche's struggle against the philosophical tendency "to confuse the last and the first" helps to explain some of the puzzling language of PTA 11 and TL, both written in the same year. In these texts, Nietzsche appears to lapse into the skeptical, metaphysicalrealist view that words and concepts can never "touch upon absolute truth," "that knowing and being are the most opposite of all spheres" (PTA 11, 83). This language is surely misleading. Yet I think that what motivates these claims is simply the point that words and concepts are only pragmatic simplifications and reifications of the rich, sensual, world of becoming and that—contra the rationalist—the former are derived from the latter rather than the reverse. Thus, too, we find Nietzsche, both early and late, supporting the claims of "intuition" over those of "reason," his somewhat idiosyncratic terms for "sensuality" and "conceptuality," respectively. Cf., e.g., WP 488: "All our categories of reason are of sensual origin: derived from the empirical world"; and TI "Reason" 2: "[The senses] do not lie at all. What we make of their testimony, that alone introduces lies. [ . . . ] 'Reason' is the cause of our falsification of the testimony of the senses."

[53] See GS 2, 347; BGE 10; and the discussion of these passages above, in §1.6.2.

[54] Cf. W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 2, The Presocratic Tradition from Parmenides to Democritus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 20.

philosophers" (11, p. 81) of whom Schopenhauer was a disciple. Yet, despite important differences among the Hindu, Buddhist, Platonic, Christian, Cartesian, Kantian, and Schopenhauerian world-interpretations, Nietzsche sees in them a basic similarity: they are all forms of what he would later call "the ascetic ideal," that "hatred of the human, and even more of the animal, and more still of the material, this horror of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and beauty, this longing to get away from all appearance, change, becoming, death, wishing, from longing itself" ( GM III:28). This "ascetic ideal," this "moral interpretation of the world" in its various guises, Nietzsche asserts, "has hitherto dominated " not only "all philosophy" (III:24) but all of "[humanity's] existence on earth" (III:28). "Apart from [it], man, the human animal, had no meaning so far" (III:28). Consequently, "the death of God," which signals the eclipse of this world-interpretation, leads to the profound crisis of "nihilism." As diagnostician and physician of this condition, Nietzsche heralds a new interpretation. All but alone, he draws strength and inspiration from that world-interpretation foreclosed by the Parmenidean-ascetic: the Heraclitean view that "becoming is not a moral but an aesthetic phenomenon" (PTA 19, p. 113).