Reshaping the Past
With the reduction to history, we initially experience our connectedness with the past as a limitation and burden. Our present and we ourselves seem to have resulted from a past that is not freely chosen—that has, in fact, the freakish, capricious consistency of "dreadful accident."[23] Yet its weight is overpowering. Especially in Thus Spoke Zarathustra , Nietzsche sought to envision redemption from the weight of "it was," the unwilled past.
That effort ultimately led Nietzsche in two innovative directions. The first, accenting the scope for will, creativity, and radical historical questioning, proved congruent with a radical historicism. But something about the experience bound up with that response led Nietzsche to push beyond, to what we might call a "posthistoricist" position, a mode of individual experience emptied of genuinely historical consciousness.
The past is heavy, not airy and weightless, precisely because it was a certain way and not some other; so it will not do simply to turn away from it, laugh at it, or play with it. Says Nietzsche's Zarathustra, "A new will I teach men: to will this way which man has walked blindly, and to affirm it, and no longer to sneak away from it like the sick and decaying."[24] So to dissolve the burden of "it was," we must come to terms with the particular way the world has been by inquiring into it and, on that basis, specifying an understanding of the past and its connection with us that we can affirm. Nietzsche wanted to be able to say "Yes to the point of justifying, of redeeming, even all of the past."[25] In a world of nothing but history, redemption would entail understanding the whole past, in all its contingency, as necessary to the resulting of our particular present—and saying that we would not have it otherwise.
At first glance, the lack of metaphysical grounding seemed to afford unlimited scope for creative human will to reshape the past to serve this present purpose.
[23] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra , in The Portable Nietzsche , 251, 253.
[24] Ibid., 144.
[25] Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo , trans. Walter Kaufmann (with On the Genealogy of Morals ), ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, Vintage, 1969), 308.
Says Nietzsche's Zarathustra, "All 'it was' is a fragment, a riddle, a dreadful accident—until the creative will says to it, 'But thus I willed it; thus shall I will it.'"[26] "As creator, guesser of riddles, and redeemer of accidents," Zarathustra goes on to say, "I taught them to work on the future and to redeem with their creation all that has been . To redeem what is past in man and to recreate all 'it was' until the will says, 'Thus I willed it! Thus I shall will it'—this I called redemption."[27] So in this mode Nietzschean affirmation entailed actively shaping all those accidental fragments back there, including even the meaning of past lives, so that they can be understood as leading to a willed present. This is the initial thrust of amor fati—Nietzsche's formula for affirming what I understand as necessary for my life and this moment to be as they are.[28]
Since students of Nietzsche have been quick to accent the antihistorical side of his thinking, it bears special emphasis that amor fati refers not to some isolable level of the self as opposed to the larger "public" world of history. Thus Alexander Nehamas's influential reading, though superb in many respects, is one-sided in framing Nietzsche's point as self-creation/discovery, based on encounter with one's own past, conceived in isolation.[29] Nehamas's account does not do justice to Nietzsche's sense that the distinction between self and history has broken down. As the passages quoted above make clear, individual actions are for keeps, immortal, bound up with the shaping or resulting of the public, historical world, not just a distinguishable self. Conversely, any individual is but a piece of that totality, with its finitude and fatality.[30] Thus what is to be shaped and affirmed is not simply a personal past but a particular totality, the world resulting from history.
Because everything is bound up together, Nietzsche noted repeatedly, I cannot condemn anything without condemning everything; in the same way, affirmation of any single moment entails affirmation of all of existence.[31] So amor fati is not just a matter of not wanting anything about myself to be different; because my life is bound up with this totality, the whole capricious history has been necessary for my personal experience to be as it is. What is to be affirmed is the whole interlocking chain of "accidents" necessary for this particular world to be as it is. Nietzsche envisioned not merely some generic affirmation
[26] Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra , 253. See also Nietzsche, Ecce Homo , 308–309.
[27] Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra , 310; see also pp. 249–254, for the pivotal section entitled "On Redemption."
[28] See The Gay Science , 223 (no. 276), for Nietzsche's first use of amor fati. See also Nietzsche, Will to Power , 536 (no. 1041); Nietzsche, Ecce Homo , 258, 324; and Nietzsche, Nietzsche contra Wagner , in The Portable Nietzsche , 680; which make it clear that the amor fati formula became entwined almost immediately with the idea of eternal recurrence, as I discuss below.
[29] Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), esp. pp. 157–159, 188–190.
[30] See, for example, Nietzsche, Will to Power , 536 (no. 1041).
[31] Ibid., 316 (no. 584), 165 (no. 293), 532–533 (no. 1032); Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra , 435.
of "life" but affirmation of this life, recognizing what the this-ness involves—and has involved.
The past weighs so heavily because the fragments from back there come to us already shaped; a historical interpretation we have not chosen, and that we nonetheless take to be definitive, initially surrounds our present experience. We take it as "true," so we are not even aware it is nothing but a historical interpretation—even a reinterpretation. For Nietzsche, however, it could be taken for granted that any historical account has been constructed—contingently, even arbitrarily—as part of the resulting of the particular world. Certain reinterpretations have proven powerful enough to win out and structure the world as it has become so far. To understand the world as nothing but history is to grasp the scope for deconstructing and redoing the account we have inherited, for giving the past new meaning in light of our ways of living the present. So to dissolve the weight of "it was," we must at once inquire into the past and self-consciously deconstruct the oppressive account we have inherited.
If what lies back there is nothing but a jerry-built history, historical questioning expands and deepens, cutting all the way to the bottomless bottom. By unearthing buried layers, showing up layer after layer as merely historical and contingent, we disassemble the unchosen past into "fragments," bits and pieces that we can then reassemble as we choose, in light of the way we choose to be at present.
In a Nietzschean mode, we understand that such deconstruction leads to nothing more than a redescription. As a historical inquirer, I am not establishing the truth once and for all but simply showing up some present understanding as itself historical and replacing it with one of my own. My way of framing my inquiry and shaping its results stems from my particular purposes, my particular will to power, which entails the "imposition of one's own forms."[32] The becoming of the particular world continues as what it has become, so far, is subjected to such ongoing reinterpretation, stemming from the will to power that resides in individuals.
For all Nietzsche's emphasis on fictions and lies, however, what I need to dissolve the weight of the past is a true account of the becoming of this particular world.[33] Nietzschean will to power entails an attempt to stamp one's particular rue interpretation on the world. Even though my particular redescription stems from my creative will, and even though no account is definitive or complete, I cannot say just anything about the past if I am to find redemption. I must genuinely confront the particular way "it was," including the particular way the past has come to weigh on me through our inherited historical account; otherwise, the scope for dissolving the weight of the past is lost. Despite Nietzsche's
[32] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil , 203.
[33] See, for example, The Antichrist , 612, where Nietzsche claims to be telling "the genuine history of Christianity" (emphasis in original).
assault on the "will to truth" and his emphasis on creative fictions, willful lying or fancy affords no redemption. And we do know the difference. Try it.
But though some of Nietzsche's accents presuppose a weak, radically historicist conception of truth, he was not in a position to explore the scope for such a dimension in a postmetaphysical culture. Preoccupied as he was with the assault on metaphysical truth, he did not make the distinctions necessary to explain what such a weaker truth might entail, why we can come up with it, how it stems from will yet differs from willful fiction or fantasy.
What Nietzsche did, however, was to carry out such radical historical questioning himself, especially in On the Genealogy of Morals , which seeks to understand how we in the West have become as we are, with our particular moral categories and the hangups that have resulted from them. In his own contingent way, he sought genuinely to understand the particular historical reality that has resulted from those buried contingencies. He focused on dimensions of the Western tradition that genuinely troubled him, that had real consequences for his life. And it was crucial that he come up with an account he could genuinely believe in, could take to be true. So his account was deeply serious, not fanciful or playful.
Such historical questioning is central to Beyond Good and Evil as well. In an important sense, in fact, Nietzsche's whole enterprise was an effort of historical excavation to dissolve the weight of "it was," the particular tradition that had imposed this particular mode of being on him—and us. And with the cultural reconstitution that has accompanied the eclipse of metaphysics, Nietzschean genealogy has seemed ever more central as an approach to the world as historical. It frees human creativity by showing the historical contingency of what had come to seem suprahistorical and natural.
Nietzsche's first way of positing redemption from the weight of "it was" thus entailed an active and apparently ongoing engagement with history, including a premium on historical questioning to serve creative world-making. But somehow this loosely historicist response elicited troubling concerns about responsibility and guilt, judgment and punishment. So Nietzsche's accents changed as his confrontation with the world as historical deepened.
What Nietzsche began to envision has proven extraordinarily difficult to characterize because he was explicitly seeking to avoid the customary dualisms of freedom-determinism, active-passive, and innovation-repetition. Willed creative response remained, but it was to be experienced and understood—in relation to the totality of things—in a new way. Nietzsche sought to make history, which had seemed to demand our endless active engagement, go limp, so that individuals would come to experience themselves as a piece of fate, flowing with the totality. This response may be characterized as posthistoricist because it presupposes the reduction to a merely particular history yet seeks to avoid the experience that Nietzsche's initial, generally historicist response seemed to entail. It was with his second response that Nietzsche reached the obscure
categories of his maturity—eternal recurrence and the innocence of becoming, which gave a deeper meaning to amor fati.