Nietzsche's Legacy: "Ecce Homo" and "The Antichrist," Two Books on Nature and Politics

By Heinrich Meier

A reappraisal of Ecce Homo and The Antichrist within Nietzsche’s oeuvre.

Nietzsche's Legacy takes on the most challenging and misunderstood works in Nietzsche’s oeuvre to illuminate his view of what a philosopher is and what constitutes a philosophic life. Interpreting Ecce Homo and The Antichrist as twin books meant to replace the abandoned Will to Power project, Heinrich Meier recovers them from the stigma of Nietzsche’s late mental collapse, showing that these works are, above all, a lucid self-assessment. The carefully written pair contains both the highest affirmation—the Yes of the “revaluation of all values”—and the most resolute negation—the No to Christianity. How the Yes and the No go together, how the relation between nature and politics is to be determined, how Nietzsche’s intention is governing the political-philosophical double-face: this is the subject of Nietzsche’s Legacy, which opens up a new understanding of Nietzsche’s philosophy as a whole.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Mar 20, 2024
• ISBN: 9780226752020

Book preview

Cover Page for Nietzsche's Legacy

Nietzsche’s Legacy

Nietzsche’s Legacy

Ecce Homo and The Antichrist, Two Books on Nature and Politics

Heinrich Meier

Translated by Justin Gottschalk

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2024 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2024

Printed in the United States of America

33 32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24      1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-75197-9 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-75202-0 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226752020.001.0001

Jacket image: © 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Originally published as Nietzsches Vermächtnis: Ecce homo und Der Antichrist. Zwei Bücher über Natur und Politik, by Heinrich Meier, © Verlag C.H.Beck oHG, München 2019

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Meier, Heinrich, 1953– author. | Gottschalk, Justin, translator.

Title: Nietzsche’s legacy : Ecce homo and the Antichrist, two books on nature and politics / Heinrich Meier ; translated by Justin Gottschalk.

Other titles: Nietzsches Vermächtnis. English

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2024. | Translation of: Nietzsches Vermächtnis. München : C.H. Beck, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023029770 | ISBN 9780226751979 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226752020 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844–1900—Criticism and interpretation. | Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844–1900. Ecce homo. | Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844–1900. Antichrist.

Classification: LCC PT2440.N72 Z73313 2024 | DDC 838/.809—dc23/eng/20230817

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023029770

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Was ein Philosoph ist, das ist deshalb schlecht zu lernen, weil es nicht zu lehren ist.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Jenseits von Gut und Böse

Contents

Preface

Note on Citations

FIRST BOOK  Nature and Politics I

Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is

I  Life

II  Wisdom

III  Task

IV  Crisis

V  Knowledge

VI  Conflict

SECOND BOOK  Nature and Politics II

The Antichrist: Curse on Christianity

I  Friends

II  Enlightenment

III  History

IV  Faith

V  Rulership

VI  Enemies

APPENDIX  Twilight of the Idols, or, How One Philosophizes with the Hammer

The Philosopher among Nonphilosophers

Translator’s Notes

Index of Names

Footnotes

Preface

Revaluation of all values is Friedrich Nietzsche’s name for the new orientation of life toward a type that represents the highest affirmation, which he claims to bring about with Ecce Homo and The Antichrist. At the same time, however, the pair in which his œuvre concludes places itself in the service of the most resolute negation. It presents the sharpest critique to which a philosopher has subjected Christianity. The author appears with the gesture of a founder and lawgiver who breaks the history of mankind into two pieces. But in both books, he is primarily interested in the nature of the philosopher. How the Yes and the No go together, how nature and politics are determined more precisely, how Nietzsche’s intention governs the political-philosophical double-face, this is the subject of the present writing. Nietzsche’s Legacy comprehends the dyad of Ecce Homo and The Antichrist as the late major work that takes the place of the Will to Power, which Nietzsche rejected in full awareness and with good reason.

My confrontation with Ecce Homo and The Antichrist, which draws on Nietzsche’s œuvre as a whole, ties in with the interpretation of his major poetic work that I published in What Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra? This applies not only to the teachings of the Overman, the Will to Power, and the Eternal Return, but above all to the reading of Thus Spoke Zarathustra as an endeavor of self-understanding. The clarification and division that Nietzsche achieved with the Zarathustra experiment, from the critique of futurism to the overcoming of tragedy, from the rejection of redemption to the separation of the philosopher from the prophet, were presupposed in the revaluation of all values and found their expression in the presentation of the dyad.

On Nature and Politics not only continues the investigation of which What Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra? is a part. It is also the previously announced counterpart to the writing On the Happiness of the Philosophic Life, in which I confronted Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Les rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire. That both Rousseau and Nietzsche used their last books for a presentation of the philosophic life is a correspondence to which no attention has so far been paid. That the Rêveries and Ecce Homo have long remained the least understood writings of Rousseau and Nietzsche is not a mere historical coincidence. It is caused, on the one hand, by the rhetoric that the authors chose in each case for the special task. On the other, by the readers’ expectation that a serious philosophical work is proved by its doctrinal content, an expectation that applies all the more to a major work, which has to be a major systematic work. When Nietzsche decided not to add another system to the systems of which the history of metaphysics is not in need, he included in Twilight of the Idols, the book that immediately precedes the concluding dyad, this judgment about the will to power, under the heading Sayings and Arrows: The will to a system is a lack of integrity.

Nietzsche’s Legacy: Two Books on Nature and Politics was prepared in sixteen seminars on Nietzsche that I have given since 2001 at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. I taught Ecce Homo in Winter 2004–5 and in Winter 2015–16, the Antichrist in Winter 2005–6 and in Winter 2012–13. In the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago I made Ecce Homo and the Antichrist the subject of seminars in Spring 2009 and Spring 2013, respectively.

The first chapter of the First Book was the basis of a lecture I gave at the invitation of the Max Beckmann Society in February 2018 at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich. The title read: "Ecce Homo: Nietzsche on the Philosophic Life."

H. M.

Munich, April 8, 2019

Note on Citations

The acronyms KGW, KGB, and KSA designate the editions of Nietzsche edited or established by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari: Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Berlin–New York, 1967 ff.); Briefwechsel. Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Berlin–New York, 1975ff.); Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, 3rd ed. (Munich, 1999).

Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is and The Antichrist: Curse on Christianity are cited according to the Colli-Montinari edition (KSA 6) using the acronyms EH and AC. For Ecce Homo, the edition of Karl-Heinz Hahn and Mazzino Montinari, Ecce homo. Faksimile der Handschrift (Leipzig, 1985) (Faksimile), received constant consideration and is occasionally drawn on. Passages from this edition make use of angle brackets (< >) to indicate deletions from the manuscript made by Nietzsche himself.

The passages from Ecce Homo are given respectively by part (preface, chapter I, II, III, IV), number (section), and subsection, with the pages of the KSA in parentheses. The sections on Nietzsche’s ten books in Ecce Homo, chapter III are designated by the titles without italics: EH III, Thus Spoke Zarathustra 8, 3 (349).

The passages from The Antichrist are given by paragraph and subsection, with the pages of the KSA in parentheses.

The abbreviation P. for page and the term Footnote refer, respectively, to pages and footnotes within this book. The abbreviations p. and n. are used for citing other publications.

FIRST BOOK

Nature and Politics I:

Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is

I

Life

Ecce Homo and The Antichrist have the nature of the philosopher as their subject. The dyad deals with the closely related questions of what a philosopher is and what constitutes a philosophic life. Nietzsche does not use his last books for the presentation of a doctrinal system, which most readers associate with philosophy, but instead follows to its end the path that he chose with Beyond Good and Evil and then pursued through We Fearless Ones, On the Genealogy of Morals, and The Case of Wagner, up to Twilight of the Idols: He endeavors to determine the philosopher by way of critique and contrast and, step by step, to draw the conclusions of the self-understanding that he achieved with Thus Spoke Zarathustra.¹ In accordance with their primary subject, the two books have future philosophers as their addressee. Already in their prefaces Nietzsche leaves no doubt that he wrote the Antichrist and Ecce Homo for readers who are suited to leading a philosophic life. Yet at the same time, he turns toward nonphilosophers. Not in the sense in which the author of a carefully written philosophical work is conscious that, beyond the preeminent addressee, he will find other readers to whom he can speak and whom he in any case may not disregard. Rather, so emphatically that as a result the first addresseei seems to be forgotten. Nietzsche directs his speech to the public, to mankind, to man. It stands expressly in the service of a historical task: the revaluation of all values. Ecce Homo and The Antichrist are part of Nietzsche’s politics.

Revaluation of all values is Nietzsche’s name for the new orientation of life toward a type representing the highest affirmation, which he claims to bring about with Ecce Homo and The Antichrist. In Ecce Homo, the book known to us under the title The Antichrist also figures as the Revaluation of All Values [Umwerthung aller Werthe]. Nietzsche finished it—as he takes care to inform the public twice, in Twilight of the Idols and in Ecce Homo—on September 30, 1888. It was ready to be submitted for typesetting when Nietzsche began to write Ecce Homo two weeks later. But according to the will of the author it was not supposed to be published until one year after Ecce Homo—in wide circulation and in several languages simultaneously—so that the reader would first have the opportunity to engage with Ecce Homo before being presented with the book and having its true title unveiled to him. The program of the revaluation of all values, with which the revolutionary steps onto the world-historical stage, refers back to the revaluation that Christianity brought about and declared to be the turning point in time. The headings that Nietzsche chooses for the two books accentuate the oppositional stance toward Christianity more sharply and vividly than any philosopher did before. With the Antichrist, he obviously appropriates Christianity’s most extreme declaration of enmity. And with Ecce Homo, he requests that readers direct their gaze toward him instead of toward Christ and turn away from the model of the Passion, which is familiar to them from the Gospels, churches, or museums, in order to concern themselves with the account of the life that his writing contains. The polemical character of the two books must, and is supposed to, leap to Everyman’s eye. It has contributed significantly to the fact that for nearly a century, the philosophical enterprise that distinguishes them—not only among Nietzsche’s writings—has not received the attention it deserves.

Two other obstacles over which Nietzsche had no control—unlike in the rhetorical armamenting of his books—impeded access. Nietzsche’s sister ignored the author’s intention and disregarded his directions. Instead of publishing the eccentric masterwork that she held in her hands in the designated sequence and the form specified for printing, she occupied herself with a compilation of posthumous fragments that would be suitable for meeting the expectations, harbored by nonphilosophers, of a philosophical major work. The Antichrist was published in 1895. Ecce Homo did not precede it, but instead followed it in 1908, twenty years after Nietzsche had sent the manuscript to the publisher Naumann and seven years after the posthumous publication of The Will to Power, which Nietzsche rejected in 1888 for perfectly intelligible reasons. The dyad was torn apart.² Nietzsche’s illness did the rest to ensure that the two books’ philosophical rank remained unrecognized. As works of the collapse, they did not seem to deserve the engagement that Thus Spoke Zarathustra or Beyond Good and Evil obviously demand. Their offensive rhetoric, which was meant to shield the enterprise’s true offensiveness, was now regarded by moderate readers as a sign of the onset of madness. In the shadow cast by the sickness, the polemical headings The Antichrist and Ecce Homo were taken to be symptoms of the author’s megalomania or expressions of his hubris.

Philosophical natures are not to be deterred by the obstructed access, but rather stimulated to heighten their efforts and challenged to exert their abilities. Especially since the subtitle of the first book of Nietzsche’s double-work can put them on the right track. For How One Becomes What One Is, unlike the subtitle of the second book, Curse on Christianity, points to the center of the philosophical project. Appealing to Pindar’s wordii You shall become who you are, which Nietzsche makes his own as the call of conscience in the Gay Science, it conveys to the first addressee: Your cause is being discussed.³ Ecce Homo will not only explain how Nietzsche became who he is today, but show how he became what he is supposed to be. The book promises to answer the question of how Nietzsche, or someone of Nietzsche’s kind, becomes what he is according to his nature, i.e., what he can be in accordance with his highest possibilities. The answer outlined by Ecce Homo, reduced to a brief formula, is: Becoming-oneself requires the correct determination of the task. If the reader has become aware of the inner connection between the polemical orientation indicated by the main titles and the philosophical question contained in the subtitle of Ecce Homo, he can reasonably assume that the task of the revaluation of all values belongs essentially to the project of the author’s clarification, explanation, enlightenment. The offensive rhetoric will then not lead him astray. And if he has engaged with the two books and convinced himself of the lucidity of their structure, he will find that Nietzsche was lacking in neither perspicacity nor an overall view when he wrote them, and that the force of his thinking and the subtlety of his communication were far from exhibiting any diminution.⁴ Ecce Homo and The Antichrist are books in the most demanding sense, and their author is at the height of his ability.

Ecce Homo begins with a blast of fanfare: "Foreseeing that in a short time I will have to approach mankind with the heaviest demand that has ever been made of it, it seems to me indispensable to say who I am. In the first sentence Nietzsche signals that he will speak to the most comprehensive addressee and demand of it what is heaviest, something for which history provides no example. Also in the first sentence, it seems, he establishes the double-work’s inner order. The present book is supposed to prepare the one that is to follow in a short time," which he already announced in Twilight of the Idols.⁵ Ecce Homo apparently serves the Antichrist. Or expressed more pointedly, the dyad’s two parts are related to each other as means and end. To gain a hearing for his demand, Nietzsche must attest the authority with which he speaks. Indeed, he says of himself what Paul said of the Christian God, that he has not left himself without witness. Yet the works on whose basis one could know who he is, with what right and from what knowledge he makes the heaviest demand, are not sufficient to authorize him. For they are unknown to mankind. He is unknown to it. The disproportion between the greatness of his task and the smallness of his contemporaries, who have neither heard nor seen him, could not be more glaring. To close the gap, Nietzsche must enter the stage so loudly and compellingly, so winningly and shockingly, that it will no longer be possible not to hear or see him. From the greatness of the task—the Revaluation or the Antichrist—there arises the duty that justifies Ecce Homo: "Under these circumstances there is a duty against which my habit, even more the pride of my instincts, at bottom revolts—namely, to say: Hear me! for I am so and so. Above all do not mistake me for another!" With Ecce Homo, Nietzsche performs his duty of drawing the eye to himself: Behold this man. Before he confronts mankind with the heaviest demand, with commandments or prohibitions, he will show who he is, what he is. Unlike the God of Moses, he will not gather his being into one question mark and deliver it over to time or to the event that is yet to come. He will say to mankind: I am so and so. Which does not mean that he does not, on closer inspection, know how to say to the reader: I am so and so. Under no circumstances does he want to be mistaken for another. For the answer to the question: Who is speaking? will remain external to the understanding of Nietzsche’s speech neither for the first nor for the broadest addressee.⁶

To protect the intention of the demand announced by the first section, the character of the task that it introduces, and the appeal to duty that it has follow, against misunderstandings, Nietzsche devotes the second section to making sharp demarcations: He is no monster of morality, does not want to be regarded as a saint, and does not think of speaking out in favor of new idols. At the head he puts the separation from the morality that he will later call the morality of unselfing oneself: I am even of an opposite nature to the kind of man that has hitherto been revered as virtuous. Between us, it seems to me that precisely this is part of my pride. The revaluation is reflected in what is understood to be virtuous. It allows a new pride. But above all, it decides which kind of man is revered, most revered, most highly revered. It topples the old rank-order and erects a new one. The second demarcation gives Nietzsche the opportunity for the first time to determine his nature through a positive reference: I am a disciple of the philosopher Dionysos, I would rather even be a satyr than a saint. But one has only to read this writing. The first mention of the philosopher coincides with the first mention of a God. Who can be regarded as a saint, and what it means to call him such, depends on who is granted the highest rank, or, more precisely, on what is recognized to be the highest kind of all being.⁷ Nietzsche goes so far as to give the reader to consider that Ecce Homo could perhaps have no other meaning at all than to give expression to the opposition of satyr and saint, the distinction between the discipleship of the one God and the discipleship of the other, in a cheerful and philanthropic way. What the cheerfulness and philanthropy of Ecce Homo might be all about can be said only when we have reached the end. Nietzsche’s relationship to the God who is a philosopher will occupy us—this much may be anticipated—until the writing’s last line. After the author has brought his philanthropy into play, he hastens to trace out the third dividing line: "The last thing I would promise would be to ‘improve’ mankind. By me no new idols are erected. The thrust is clear. That Nietzsche does not want to improve mankind in the sense intended by the prevailing valuations, that he establishes a front against world-negating ideals and unfounded wishes, that he does not condescend to placing a motley brood upon clouds—all this is not surprising. It should also be noted that not promising something need not preclude attempting it. Nevertheless, the last demarcation does raise questions. Has Nietzsche not repeatedly appeared as an advocate of a new, noble ideal? Will the revaluation of all values actually manage without idols"? Can it dispense with the lie? Or does the task of whose greatness the preface speaks not aim at improving mankind after all, whether with quotation marks or without? Would the announced demand be the heaviest one precisely because it does not promise any such improvement? What if the rejection of every kind of futurism were to find its final and deepest expression in it? "Overthrowing idols (my word for ‘ideals’)—that belongs rather more to my craft. One has deprived reality of its value, its meaning, its truthfulness, to the degree that one has made up an ideal world . . ." The craft of which he is master is critique; the activity that suits him is philosophizing. Nietzsche had called attention to philosophizing a short time before, in the subtitle of Twilight of the Idols. When he overturns ideals, he is freeing up the view of reality, whose meaning is not to be sought over or behind it, and is in need neither of a founding of meaning in the past, nor of a giving of meaning by the future. When he attacks the ideal world, he is concerned with the knowledge of the world as it is. The turn against idealism becomes the emblem of the turn toward philosophy. But the turn toward philosophy cannot do without a political justification. Nietzsche must not get too far away from the tension that he has built up in the first section with the triad demand, task, duty. In the last sentence of the second section, he circles back to mankind. It has been corrupted down to its bottommost instincts by the "lie of the ideal, to the point of worshipping values the reverse of those which would alone guarantee it a flourishing, a future, the high right to a future." The reversal of the reversal, the revaluation of values that stands in the service of knowledge, will—thus runs Nietzsche’s promise to mankind—be the guarantor of its right to a future.⁸

In the center of the preface mankind does not appear. The center belongs entirely to philosophy. Or to the author and his first addressee.⁹ Nietzsche speaks of philosophy as he has never spoken of it before. Contrary to what the announcement of the heaviest demand might suggest, he does not focus on philosophy’s vocation for legislation, its power to create values, or its responsibility for the future of the species. He does not emphasize its ruling authority but instead stresses its fundamental subversiveness. With unparalleled clarity, he determines philosophy as a way of life. He underscores its solitary character and leaves no doubt that it cannot be Everyman’s cause. Just as this writing will provide the reader for whom it is written information on what the disciple of the philosopher Dionysos is all about, Nietzsche’s writings as a whole can serve as a test for the reader as to whether or not he is suited for philosophy: "Whoever knows how to breathe the air of my writings knows that it is an air of the heights, a strong air. One must be made for it, otherwise there is no small danger of catching cold in it. The ice is near, the solitude is tremendous. Nietzsche warns and lures at the same time: —but how placidly all things lie in the light! how freely one breathes! how many things one feels beneath oneself. The pathos of distance goes together with solitude, and between them the two encompass serenity and freedom. This is the place to call philosophy, to which his writings bear witness, by name: Philosophy, as I have hitherto understood and lived it, is the voluntary life in ice and high mountains—the seeking out of everything strange and questionable in existence, everything that has hitherto been banned by morality." Nietzsche introduces philosophy as a life, as a distinct form of life. The region to which he assigns it has in common with the sea and the desert—which he invokes elsewhere to metaphorically characterize the philosophic life, its beginning or its transformation—the inhospitability, the extreme conditions under which the life has to be led and to prove itself. One can range into ice and high mountains, just as one can go into the desert or set out onto the high seas. But one cannot stay there permanently, exclusively, without interruption. Ice and high mountains, the open sea, the barrenness of the desert, all indicate the alternation of ascent and descent, the necessary back and forth, the sequence of departure, return, and new departure. All three are characterized by the wide, unobstructed horizon, though the metaphor of ice and high mountains has over the other two the natural articulation of differences in height and the association with the free overlook. All three stand for turning away from common prudence, for leaving behind the realm of settled statutes, for taking one’s distance from opinion, belief, tradition, for breaking with convention. What determines philosophy as a distinct form of life is its orientation toward seeking and attempting, which does not let it stop before any authority because it cannot content itself with any answer that owes its authentication to an authority. Philosophy is the life that is based on radical questioning and knows itself to be grounded in radical questioning. Inherent in this is the tension in principles with morality, politics, religion. Nietzsche is not lacking in sharpness. If in the first move he has made philosophy visible to the reader as the voluntary life in ice and high mountains, in the second he characterizes it as wandering in the prohibited. Philosophy does not only seek out what is prohibited when it occupies itself with what has been outlawed and banned. As a distinct form of life that is in conflict with a prohibition, it is itself part of what is prohibited.¹⁰

The insight into the fundamental conflict has far-reaching consequences for the understanding of the philosophers of the past. On the basis of the experience that his "wandering in the prohibited gave him, the hidden history of the philosophers, the psychology of their great names, came to light for Nietzsche, as he relates, because he learned to see the causes hitherto of moralizing and idealizing differently than might be wished." Two readings are conceivable: (1) The great names of philosophy did not dare to venture far enough into the prohibited because they lacked courage for it or because they could not endure solitude. In this case they would not be philosophers in Nietzsche’s sense and their hidden history would essentially be the history of a deficiency. (2) Or else the great philosophers moralized and idealized because they were at home in the prohibited and had recognized very precisely the conflict in principles with politics, morality, religion. What would be reflected in the conventional history, then, would be the teachings, deeds, and institutions by means of which the famous names took the conflict into account. Whereas it would fall to the hidden history to shed light on the philosophers’ actions: their efforts to protect the philosophic life, to develop an educational effect, to influence the public, to serve the people. In the one reading as well as the other, the philosophers’ hidden history involves a truth that the philosopher owes to himself. Nietzsche does not say another word about the hidden history. Instead, following a dash that separates the central part’s middle subsection from its last, he introduces truth into the preface: "How much truth does a spirit endure, how much truth does it dare? more and more, this became the real measure of value for me. The revaluation of all values is obviously supposed to designate the capacity for truth, and not the usefulness to life, as the standard of rank-order. What is under discussion here is the truth to which one exposes oneself, not the truth one expects others to endure. It is a matter of knowing the truth, not of proclaiming it. Nietzsche addresses the reader who can dare and endure much truth, who is suited to knowledge, with an adhortative speech that might sound moralizing to the ears of those who are more remote or of future historians: Error (—the belief in the ideal—) is not blindness, error is cowardice . . . Every attainment, every step forward in knowledge, follows from courage, from hardness toward oneself, from cleanliness toward oneself." After the appeal to the virtues without which a philosophic life cannot be thought, Nietzsche demonstrates the allure of the prohibited with a grand gesture in which, by means of a word from Ovid’s Amores, he at the same time recalls the force that supports, spurs on, and maintains this life to the end: "Nitimur in vetitum: in this sign my philosophy will be victorious one day, for hitherto one has always in principle prohibited only the truth. Nietzsche is not the first corrupter of the young who knows how to lure with the forbidden fruit. But no one before him combined the striving for the prohibited with the proclamation: In hoc signo vincam. The trust Nietzsche puts in the strength of the force that Plato conceived of as eros and that he himself, after the great caesura in his life, calls the passion of knowledge—his trust, in particular, that it is not deterred but goaded on by prohibitions—speaks against the first reading of the hidden history." The Nitimur in vetitum can claim no less validity for the philosophers of the past than for the philosophers of the future. If hitherto one has, in Nietzsche’s equally hyperbolic and precise formulation, always in principle prohibited only the truth, the prohibition obviously concerns not this or that truth, but the truth that matters to the voluntary life in ice and high mountains. The truth that is the aim of unreserved questioning.¹¹

Yet what does Nietzsche promise when he expresses the confidence that his philosophy will someday be victorious? Does he expect the teachings that one associates with him, and with which he will go down in history as a great name, to gain universal acceptance? Does he assume that the future philosophers will make the doctrine of the Will to Power their own, or share the belief in the Eternal Return? Does he perhaps predict that the revaluation of all values will create institutions that seal nothing less than the end of philosophy as he has hitherto understood and lived it? Does the four-time usage of the qualifying hitherto indicate the hope for a fundamental change, the sublation of the tension with morality, politics, and religion? Will the victory of his philosophy in the future relieve philosophers of the necessity of wandering in the prohibited? Or will his presentation of philosophy win those suitable for it—because they have in common with him what is most important—over to philosophy as he understood, understands, and will understand it?

The third part of the preface provides the first clues. Nietzsche devotes it to Thus Spoke Zarathustra and repeats the movement, condensed and abridged in the extreme, from the general to the preeminent addressee, which he has accomplished in parts 1 and 2. About the Book for All and None—as reads the subtitle of Thus Spoke Zarathustra—he says that among his writings, it stands apart. With it I have given mankind the greatest gift it has hitherto been given. He calls it the highest and the deepest book. It speaks with a voice across millennia, and the whole fact of man lies "immensely far beneath it. Just as he brings mankind back into the preface only to immediately distance himself from it, he introduces his parody of the Bible only to separate it, in the same breath, from the likely understanding that it is the book of a new faith. Here no ‘prophet’ speaks, none of those gruesome hybrids of sickness and will to power whom one calls religion-founders. Not only has Nietzsche given the hero of his poem the name of a religion-founder from the Orient. There is no doubt that he also has him appear as a prophet and speak like a prophet, although not as a prophet who wants to understand himself out of the obedience of faith. By his own admission, Zarathustra suffers from a sickness: disgust accompanies him for at least as long as he seeks to teach mankind the overman as the meaning of the earth." And who could deny Zarathustra’s will to power? It is all the more remarkable that at the beginning of Ecce Homo, Nietzsche focuses entirely on what Zarathustra is supposed to become. Instead of emphasizing the will to power belonging to the prophet and to the philosopher, he emphasizes Zarathustra’s wisdom: "Above all one must rightly hear the tone that comes from this mouth, this halcyon tone, in order not to do pathetic injustice to the meaning of his wisdom."¹² The eleven verses that Nietzsche subsequently makes audible to the reader in order to draw his attention to the meaning of Zarathustra’s wisdom are taken from neither the famous prologue, in which Zarathustra addresses the people in the market, nor the book’s longest speech, On Old and New Tablets (III, 12), in which Zarathustra imagines speaking to absent brothers who, in an indeterminate future, are to carry tables of laws with him to the valley and into hearts of flesh. Rather, they are taken, in reverse chronological order, from three speeches Zarathustra addresses to his disciples: when he parts from them for the last time (The Stillest Hour), when he returns to them after having spent years in solitude (Upon the Blessed Isles), and when he leaves them for the first time (On the Gift-Giving Virtue). The three passages Nietzsche selects from Zarathustra do not deal with the overman and the last man. They also do not call for the creation of a new nobility. They are silent on doctrinal content. The first—a word Zarathustra’s soul whispers to itself in a conversation with itself—is connected in its own way to the loudly resounding opening of Ecce Homo: Thoughts that come on doves’ feet guide the world. The central passage praises the happiness of ripening. The third and by far longest finally points the man of knowledge toward himself and to a path that he must follow alone.

With regard to the heaviest demand that he has announced to mankind, Nietzsche’s explanation of the greatest gift mankind has hitherto been given may be astonishing: Not only no Holy Scripture, no call to decision, no promise of the great reversal. Also no stressing of hardness, seriousness, or going-under, but instead of goodness, cheerfulness, and happiness. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche asserts, there is no ‘preaching,’ "no belief is required: out of an infinite fullness of light and depth of happiness falls drop after drop, word after word—a tender slowness is the tempo of these speeches. But the reader must be made for them. Such things reach only the most select; it is a privilege without equal to be a listener here; no one is free to have ears for Zarathustra . . ." The gift for mankind proves to be a gift for the fewest. In his presentation of Zarathustra, Nietzsche has the first addressee in view from the beginning. This also remains the decisive aspect in the contrasting of Zarathustra with Jesus, for which he employs the third citation and with which the preface ends—"He not only speaks differently, he is different as well . . . Zarathustra urges his disciples not to follow him, to liberate themselves from the condition of reverence for him, and to break free of his authority. You say you believe in Zarathustra? But what does Zarathustra matter! You are my believers: but what do all believers matter! / You had not yet sought yourselves: then you found me. Thus do all believers; that is why all belief amounts to so little. / Now I bid you, lose me and find yourselves. The Zarathustra that Nietzsche sets against the world-redeemer" wants disciples to become philosophers. Or those who are kindred to him to become what they are.¹³

Nietzsche places his name beneath the preface, in which Zarathustra, with eight verses, spoke last. With the signature, he transfers to the first addressee the request to walk alone that Zarathustra directed at the disciples. The investigation of how one becomes what one is can begin. Yet the preface, which held several surprises ready, is followed by a new surprise. Between the Contents and the first chapter, Why I Am So Wise, the author interpolates a second preface, which has no heading and is also not mentioned in the table of contents. With an extraordinary preface, he prepares the reader for an extraordinary book. The preamble comprises five sentences and is unique in Nietzsche’s œuvre: On this perfect day, when everything is ripening and not only the grape is turning brown, a sun’s glance just fell on my life: I saw backward, I saw forward and outward, I never saw so many and such good things at once. Here obviously none of those gruesome hybrids of sickness and will to power is speaking, who would not know how to live if they were not also seers of what must first of all be created and if they did not imagine themselves to be in the advent of what is supposed to bring about the overturning of all need. The perfect day of which Nietzsche speaks is not the object of longing and hope. It is also not reserved for transfiguring memory. It belongs to the present. In it, Nietzsche’s contemplation and becoming-aware coalesce into the judgment of perfection. The judgment is the fruit of knowing the good in his life, which the sun’s glance strikes as a whole. Nietzsche looks backward and forward in time, and at the same time he looks outward from the course of becoming, pausing to contemplate what is—as it were vertically with respect to the action—in order to collect and divide what he is. "It was not in vain that I buried my forty-fourth year today, I was entitled to bury it—what was life in it is saved, is immortal." The perfect day is today. Nietzsche dates the inner preface to the forty-fourth recurrence of his birth. He links Ecce Homo to a natural date, and not, like the Antichrist, a historical one. Whereas mankind is to commit September 30, 1888, the day of the great victory Nietzsche achieved with the completion of the Revaluation, to memory as the inception of a new way of reckoning time, October 15, 1888, which for Nietzsche is a perfect day, is not to be marked on its calendar. Nietzsche was entitled to bury his forty-fourth year, he was authorized to do so in accordance with his own good, because he extracted from the span of time the best that he was capable of extracting from it. What was life in the emphatic sense in the year lived—for life demands that a distinction be made—the life that aims over and beyond itself, the life of the highest intensity and deepest immersion, is salvaged. It is saved in the experiences and insights that Nietzsche gathered and acquired in the course of becoming. It is immortal in the works in which he has preserved these experiences and insights for himself and for others.

"The Revaluation of All Values, the Dionysos-Dithyrambs and, for recuperation, the Twilight of the Idols—all gifts of this year, indeed of its last quarter!" The three works that Nietzsche names do not exhaust the list of books from his forty-fourth year (The Case of Wagner, written in the spring and published in September 1888, remains unnamed), nor does the sequence in which they are mentioned follow the chronology of their origin or their appearance (Twilight of the Idols was already at press, the Revaluation was supposed to follow Ecce Homo after one year, and there were no directions yet to print the Dionysos-Dithyrambs, parts of which date back to Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the time before).